Early Xtians and the failed coming of Christ

[TheAnachronism]

For people who have studied the history of Christianity and the Bible, particularly the New Testament, it should be no surprise that most (all?) of the earliest Christians believed that the Second Coming of Christ would occur very soon -- in their very lifetimes, in fact.

This is clear in the [authentic] epistles of Paul of Tarsus, and manifests itself in the way in which he formed his churches and how he instructed them. The Gospel of Mark, the first gospel written, is also clear on these views. Interestingly, Matthew and Luke, who used Mark as a source, edited these views in their later gospels, when it became clear that the Second Coming was being postponed a bit.

I am obviously simplifying this part of history, because my main question is this (to whomever is able to answer): how did the early Christians react to the fact that the Second Coming was...well, not coming? As time passed by, surely they must have been increasingly aware that the Second Coming might not happen soon at all. Did people leave the churches? Did they reform their views, and how?

I have not yet found a source that really talks about this, so I'd be most grateful if anyone would be able to supply me with some of this information.

[MG1962]

I think there is next to no chance of you getting the answers to the questions you ask. Not because of some secret agenda, but simply the day to day activites of the Church that far back is not well known.

To extrapolate your thoughts though, there was a lot of reaction to the comming of 1000AD and subsquently 1033AD - It had been assumed that 1000AD was a nice even number for a second comming, when it didn't happen, it was assumed it would be a 1000 years from Christs death.

Those years saw unprecident church building and church activity particularly in England. People genuinely believed they lived in the end times

[Apathia]

Look to more recent history.
The 19th Century Millerite Movement expected Christ to return in 1844.
When October 22nd passed without the return, the movement split up into different factions that eventually became sects.

Many, including William Miller himself, simply admitted they had been totally wrong in trying to calculate when Jesus would return and were absorbed back into mainstream churches. (Miller became a Baptist Pastor)

Others went on to posit new "corrected" dates: 1867, 1914, 1976.
many of these consolidated into what are now the Jehovah's Witnesses.

Some maintained we were in the latter days, but that there was no fixed date when Jesus would return. Many of these were attracted to the Latter Day Saints.

Then there are the Seventh-Day Adventists.
They decided Miller's date was correct, but that it didn't mark the return of Christ to Earth, but the beginning of the Judgment.

And of course there were disillusioned people who had nothing more to do with religion after that.

People fudge. They find a way to cope with, if not deny, the hard cold facts.

[HansMustermann]

You haven't been playing many Blizzard games, have you, TA? There can be years between when those guys announce a game or expansion pack and when it gets released. E.g., they're currently, what, two years late with Starcraft 2? :p

I expect the same applies to Earth II. God is still busy fixing the last bugs, and the balance still needs a _lot_ of tweaking, and the marketing department and the publisher are probably riding his butt as it is ;)

[Dancing David]

There are a number of issues here but i will start with what I consider to be the most imporatnt.

We don't really know what the forms and variation of the original church was like. What we do have was written down a generation later and then heavily censored and edited. Most of it suppressed by later churches.

[Dancing David]

You haven't been playing many Blizzard games, have you, TA? There can be years between when those guys announce a game or expansion pack and when it gets released. E.g., they're currently, what, two years late with Starcraft 2? :p

I expect the same applies to Earth II. God is still busy fixing the last bugs, and the balance still needs a _lot_ of tweaking, and the marketing department and the publisher are probably riding his butt as it is ;)

What about that new Diablo?

I think god just promoted the sequel as a way of keeping the fanbase interested.

"Really it is New and Improved with 30% less Angry Wrathful God."

[Ducky]

EDIT.


Apathia covered what I was going to say.

[Ian Osborne]

In the recent past, remember all the prophecies about the Year 2000? How the world was going to end, or at least change forever. Yet the year came and went, and we're all still here.

[Safe-Keeper]

http://forums.randi.org/helloworld2/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?p=4816702#post4816702) You haven't been playing many Blizzard games, have you, TA? There can be years between when those guys announce a game or expansion pack and when it gets released. E.g., they're currently, what, two years late with Starcraft 2? :xtongue

I expect the same applies to Earth II. God is still busy fixing the last bugs, and the balance still needs a _lot_ of tweaking, and the marketing department and the publisher are probably riding his butt as it is :wink:
I hear they plan to release the Second Coming as a bundled release with Duke Nukem Forever.

[Apathia]

EDIT.


Apathia covered what I was going to say.

Sorry about that. :)

And here's another upstage before anyone else mentions it:
The classic study, When Prophecy Fails
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails

[Apathia]

I hear they plan to release the Second Coming as a bundled release with Duke Nukem Forever.

Excelent! You beat me to Duke Nukum.

[cj.23]

Ug, I'm working at the moment but it's a good question, and I'll have a go tonight at addressing it. Part of the debate is over what was understood by "end of the World/End of the Age", and for that we have to look to 1st century Jewish Eschatological beliefs, which makes it all kind of complex. I'll dig out Dunn, Sanders and check Vermes, but I am sure i have quite a bit I have wriotten in teh past on this. Also there are a few issues with When Prophecy Fails - I'll talk through those as well, and modern examples. Intersting question! As to Early Church structures, yep, absolutely. :)

cj x

[Safe-Keeper]

Ug, I'm working at the moment but it's a good question, and I'll have a go tonight at addressing it. Part of the debate is over what was understood by "end of the World/End of the Age", and for that we have to look to 1st century Jewish Eschatological beliefs, which makes it all kind of complex. I'll dig out Dunn, Sanders and check Vermes, but I am sure i have quite a bit I have wriotten in teh past on this. Also there are a few issues with When Prophecy Fails - I'll talk through those as well, and modern examples. Intersting question! As to Early Church structures, yep, absolutely. :)You are too kind:). Thanks a lot, cj!

[Bikewer]

Bart Ehrman goes into this fairly extensively in his writings. He paints Jesus as an Apocalyptic, who felt that the "End" was literally near and that the "Son Of Man" would be coming down from Heaven to set things right.

This was, as you point out, something that was imminent. He maintains that JC would not have been this figure, he was supposed to literally become King Of The Jews, and the apostles each placed at the head of one of the reformed 12 tribes.

When none of that happened, it took several hundred years for the idea of the End Is Near to morph into the idea of We'll Get Our Reward In Heaven.

As pointed out above, early Christianity was fractured; there were many different sects and Jesus cults who all had wildly different ideas about Christianity.

[Ian Osborne]

Didn't Jesus say, "there are those that are living who will not see death"? Pretty conclusive proof he felt the second coming would happen soon, whatever the post hoc reinterpretations say.

[HansMustermann]

Well, that or he was hinting at immortals living among us. Haven't you seen Highlander? ;)

[Sun Countess]

"Daddy just went to get cigarettes and he'll be right back." How many days, months, years does Daddy need to be gone before his kid realizes that he ain't never coming back? Or a better question: Why does his momma never tell him the truth that daddy is gone for good?

I can't help but see that scenario when I think of the long-awaited second coming. How many "kids" just don't understand that their daddy isn't coming in this lifetime, and how so many "parents" keep telling them that they just have to wait a little longer.

[ExMinister]

Ehrman also says that when the return of the kingdom failed to happen within the expected time frame, the apocalyptic vision was basically changed. Since it's so well said and I can't paraphrase it and do it justice, here is a quote from Jesus, Interrupted:

"When the end does not come, people who want to remain faithful to the original vision of Jesus and his disciples have to grapple seriously with the fact that an essential element of that vision appears to have been wrong. Of course, the faithful would not claim that Jesus was wrong. More likely, he was misunderstood. And so there begins a long and significant process of reinterpretation, in which the original message comes to be transformed into a less tactile, less tangible, less easily disconfirmed view. Specifically, the teaching of a future resurrection of the body, in which the righteous will be rewarded and the wicked punished here on earth, gets transmuted into a message of heaven and hell, where judgment comes not at the end of the age but at the end of one's life. Your soul goes to one place or the other."

Interestingly, he says the idea of a bodiless existence of the soul was not part of the teachings of Jesus or Paul or the earliest Christian writings. For the earliest writers, and apparently Jesus himself, eternal life was to take place in the physical body, not above in some heaven but down here on earth. At any rate, time passes and the apocalyptic idea of the resurrection of the body becomes the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, which becomes a standard Christian teaching.

[godless dave]

Interestingly, he says the idea of a bodiless existence of the soul was not part of the teachings of Jesus or Paul or the earliest Christian writings.

That makes sense, since it wasn't part of Judaism at the time.

[HansMustermann]

Well, to be also fair, the Council Of Nicaea shoved greek philosophy (e.g., Stoicism), Mysteries Of Mythras, etc, so hard up Christianity's back side, it's been walking funny ever since ;) If you have to look at how did an addition happen, well, it's not a bad starting point.

The stoics especially did believe in, well, free floating souls, and it was a very popular philosophy at the time. Even a couple of emperors were stoics. It's not hard to see how free floating souls would make their way into Christianity sooner or later.

Other additions, well, I'm not sure it was just 100% because of doomsday being vapourware. Mind you, some influence it probably had anyway.

E.g., limbo didn't make its way in there just as a buffer, but because people still thought they should be allowed to pray for their dead grandma. You know, ask for forgiveness for her and all that. So fairly early the doctrine was made official that, yes, you can pray for your dead friends and relatives, god listens, etc. And the judgment got delayed enough to give an ample time window for that.

It wasn't just pagan practices either. It was just common sense for a judgment to include time for an investigation, and time to bring in your own witnesses to speak for you. (In this case, via prayer.) So even with an omniscient God as a judge, well, that allowance was introduced anyway.

E.g., for many people it did seem just as arbitrary and injust that God would judge you just by your brown-nosing Junior, instead of by your good and bad deeds, as it seems to us skeptics on this board. So the catholic dogma gradually emphasized the latter more than the former. (And then blew it all by selling indulgences.)

The culmination of that road can be seen in the recent "anonymous christian" doctrine. Basically the whole idea that you need Jesus got thrown out the window completely. Yes, you can get into Heavens even if you're a pagan that lived virtuously and did good deeds.

E.g., the ideas of heavens and hell shifted constantly too. At one point Hell was not a permanent punishment at all, but just a place where you serve a number of years as punishment, then you've paid your debt and get released. Again, it seems to me like some secular justice ideas must have gotten involved there.

[geni]

Since there wasn't a fixed date for the end it's quite posible the switchover took place as the first generation who went for the end is going to happen very soon died and were replaced by the second generation who had mostly accepted it would not. Of the many problems the eary chuch faced the failer of the world to end may not have rated too highly.

[TimCallahan]

Though the epistles 1 and 2 Peter purport to be witten by the disciple Simon Peter, they seem in fact to have been written early in the second century. 2 Peter in particular deals with the fact that the generation that knew Jesus has died off without the world ending (2 Peter 3:3, 4):

First of all, you must understand this, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, followig their own passions and saying, "Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers [the first generation of Chritians] fell asleep [i.e. died], all things have continued as they were from the beginning of creation."

The epistle writer's rationalization of the failure of the world to have already ended is that a thousand years is, in God's sight, like a day and that the world would eventually end in fulfillment of the prophecies (2 Peter 3:8 - 10):

But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow about his promise as some count slowness, but is forebearing toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentence. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and the works that are upon it will be burned up.

The common rationalization for Jesus saying (Mark 9:1), " . . . there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power," is that it's a prophecy of the miracle of Pentacost. Of course, this interpretation ignores the fact that Jesus has referred in the previous verse (Mark 8:38) to the Son of man coming "in the glory of his Father with the holy angels." It also ignores Matthew's elaboration on Mark (Mt. 16:27, 28):

For the Son of man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay every man for what he has done. Truly I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.

Repaying every man for what he has done - which sounds like the last judgment - doesn't fit Pentacost, and the miracle supposedly taking place in Acts 2 involved the Holy Spirit descending upon the apostles, not Jesus coming into his kingdom.

Essentially, what we're dealing with here is the human capacity for rationalization in defense of a cherished belief system, one in which the believer has considerable psychological investment. This process usually involves a considerable amount of special pleading.