Exactly. Until Constantine the whole Christian church was ‘underground’, and the Bible was not in canon until the end of the 4th century, St. Paul particularly spoke of holding fast to traditions both written and oral, and many ‘works’ were out there that could be gnostic, or could be spiritual reading but not inspired Scripture. Also the Faith spread from Jerusalem out to, in those 400years, India, the farthest reaches of the Roman Empire including Gaul and Britain, Saharan Africa, etc., and not only did things just seem to become ‘secure’ at the end of the 4th century such that people could start to establish ‘brick and mortar’ churches and go to them without fear, but then almost immediately the whole Arian mess started up for the next couple of generations, to be followed almost immediately by the invasions of the Huns, Goths, Vandals, the establishment of the Eastern Church which then almost immediately was attacked with the heresy of iconiclassicism and other extremist practices while the West struggled with the breakup and reintegration of Western civilization,
And on TOP of that libraries were burned (and in fact the reason we still have a lot of books from the Greeks and Romans is due to the fact that they were copied by the monks in Ireland in the 7th-10th centuries), dozens of different cultures which had been more or less homogenized by the Roman Empire tried to assert themselves. . .
And don’t forget the Muslims came around in the 7th century and fought Christians for people and land. . .
And there was always the threat of disease. Poor crops. Early death from causes that are easily treatable today.
And yet, when the majority of the earliest 4 centuries of Christian history are so fragmented we are supposed to accept that we ‘know for a fact’ the way that ‘authentic Christians worshipped’ and that we ‘know for a fact’ that it was intended to be celebrated in amber in the very same way forever and ever while everything else in the world changed? How come we aren’t segregated by sex? How come we aren’t limited to jobs that were held by people in the first 4 centuries only? How come we don’t all wear robes and sandals and recline at table in our home churches, with the women fixing food and eating last of course? How come we don’t use candles only? How come we aren’t singing Gregorian chant style melodies —the early Christians didn’t have guitars and four-hymn sandwiches.
Yep, ‘false antiquarianism’. We don’t want real homespun and robes, we want tie dye and jeans because, “people back then just had work clothes that were ‘poor’. We don’t want real services in Aramaic, Greek, or Latin even though all of those were used in the first four centuries, well before English as a language existed, because we THINK it was all about ‘vernacular’, when the evidence that a true liturgical language, a sacred language, was used from the get-go. We don’t want segregation of sexes and we wail to heaven about the oppression of women. We demand the Church change THAT but then claim that the “Old Mass’ changed all the ‘real ‘teachings’ and that the current one ‘just changed back to the real stuff’.
Pfui.
