Roll Away The Stone

[Tord Svenson]

--- Forwarded from mailing list. Reply to uu...@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu ---

Last week the PBS TV show "FRONTLINE" broadcast their "From Jesus to
Christ" -- a four hour examination of the life and times of Jesus and the
early Christian Church. I downloaded the web-site information accompanying
this show. It runs to hundreds of pages. If anyone on the list intends to
use this TV series and the web materials for an adult RE course, please let
us know what your thinking is about organizing such a course. There appears
to be just about something for everyone --and I wonder about how to make
sense of such a huge volume of stuff.

Interestingly, FRONTLINE apparently had little or nothing to say about the
effects of early Christianity on what was later to become our Greek based
culture of science, politics and laws. The emphasis was on the repression
of early Christianity. Nothing specific I recall was said about the Unity
versus Trinity debate that resulted in the earliest Unitarian movement. One
fascinating aspect of what was covered concerns the repression of the
Gnostic form of Christianity which was represented as a version that we
modern UUs feel some kinship with -- "know thy self" versus "believe in
Jesus as the Christ".

There is a fair amount about the role of women --and the presentation of
the Nag Hammadi alternative versions of some gospels is very powerful. If
the statements attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas,for example,
made it into the Bible as we know it, we would have had a very different
Christianity. There is also good stuff on paganism and early Christianity.

Many pages of somewhat fractious email debate are included in this
material. Given our heated UUL debate environment, our list members should
enjoy reading some of that.

Being raised a UU with a detached view of Jesus and Christianity makes all
of this much less threatening than it obviously is to more fundamental
Christians :-) Our culture owes a lot more to Plato than it does to Christ
-- so, referring to the huge boulder of monolithic Christian myths
surrounding Jesus and the early church -- we can join with PBS, put our
well worn shoulders to the wheel -- and "roll away the stone."
Tord
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"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth
will destroy you." Jesus -The Gospel of Thomas --found in 1945 at Nag
Hammadi, Egypt
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