Jesus didn’t start a religion?

  • Thread starter Thread starter DictatorCzar
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
D

DictatorCzar

Guest
I see people saying that Jesus didn’t start a religion. Get out and follow the Bible. The thing is, where do they get the first part? That’s just funny. Another person said Christianity is a false religion and it’s church should be Holy. I don’t get the Jesus didn’t start a religion part. Anyone inform me?
 
They are probably one of those “I don’t have a religion, I have a relationship (with Jesus)” folks who, more often than not, completely misunderstand the purpose of religion.
 
Jesus didnt start a religion. He came to save us from being separated from The Father.

Religion can be about any god.
 
The word religion is used several times in English versions of the Bible, and never once is it used negatively. Christianity is a religion, I don’t have time to get into the etymology, but the word religion basically means to bind, and if you’re a Christian you are bound to the teachings of Christ.
 
He started a Church. He wants all people to believe in Him, as the Son of God. So, can there be a church and a specified belief, without a religion? It seems to me that, of course it’s going to be considered a religion.
 
Don’t listen to them. Its funny how people don’t want to accept what Jesus did, they want to create a false narrative to avoid responsibility or inconvenience. They want to control the image of Jesus instead of submitting to Jesus. That’s why we need to learn our faith because it is easily disprovable, the hard part is getting them to listen.

Even Christ himself said that many false prophets will come in his name. Once again, Jesus called it right. You should ask them this “hypothetical” question: If the Catholic faith was the true faith would you convert?

Any answer other than yes means they have ulterior motives for not being part of a religion. You can ask this of Atheists, Agnostics, Hindus, the list goes on. This will give you an opening to evangelize.
 
Last edited:
Language is a funny thing. A single word can have many different meanings. When people say “Jesus didn’t start a religion”, usually they are defining “religion” to mean something like this:
You see, Christianity was never meant to be a religion. Religion weighs people down by making them think they need to follow a bunch of rules and rituals to try to please God. It teaches that you have to earn your way into God’s good books, which is actually impossible. None of us could ever be good enough to earn a place in heaven, which is why religion is so exhausting, frustrating, and hopeless.
The truth is, Jesus didn’t come to start another religion. He came to end all religion.
He made that clear in Matthew 11:28–30 . . .
Jesus came to free us from the futility of religion and offer us something so much better—a real relationship with God. Through that relationship, we can rest. We can learn what grace really is. We can live freely and lightly.
Click to expand...
(“Jesus Came to End Religion”)

Or this
I started to read the Bible again, trying to find religion in it. Many things stood out to me about Jesus’ life and message, and it was becoming clear: Jesus did things very differently than we do, as merely religious people. In some ways now, I think Jesus was perfect religion, but in our culture, religion has an organizational and institutional vibe to it; and this, Jesus did not. In fact, some of those organizational and institutional powers, those false religious men, were the ones who ended up killing Him. What started to jump off the page to me was how differently Jesus ministered. And I started to realize how little I actually knew Him, even though I had known Him some 20 years of my life.
Click to expand...
(" Jesus Did Not Start a Religion")

The point is basically that one should not assume that belonging to a religious institution or organization or following religious rules is the same as belonging to Christ and being a Christian. Jesus wants to make us new creations, he wants to teach us how to live and how to love like him. This requires us to know and experience God personally and to be conformed to Christ’s image personally.

Most of these people are not denying the existence or necessity of belonging to a local church.
 
Last edited:
Jesus didn’t start a religion, He Founded His Church to teach in His name throughout the ages until the end of time. Christianity is a continuation of Judaism; all the apostles and all the first Christians were Jews. Jesus Himself was a Jew.
 
Last edited:
Matthew 16:18: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church.” How is this not establishing a religion?
 
Jesus did not start a religion or a Church. He was a Jew and came to bring the Jewish religion to perfection; and his death was the last and fullest covenant.

The first people who followed him were Jews, and in the earliest days after Jesus ascended into Heaven, they went to the synagogues on Saturday and celebrated the Breaking of the Bread on the next day, Sunday.

Eventually they were kicked out of synagogues, and expanded their preaching of the kerygma to the Gentiles as well as Jews who would listen, and gradually they separated from the Jewish religion.

Thus is is not for no reason that John Paul 2 referred to the current day Jews as “our elder brothers”.

One could argue whether Christ “intended” to found the Catholic Church, hopefully with a 6 pack of good IPA’s to share with the others, as it makes good fodder for a lot of “what if’s”. Christ never condemned the Jews, but he had a whole bunch to say about the Pharisees and Saducees who were stubborn in their blindness to what Christ was teaching. And not all were; Joseph of Arimathea was a “respected member of the council”, as was Nicodemus and both were involved with burying Christ…

And if the argument devolves into the Sacraments not being anything the Jews could identify with, I would suggest reading Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist by Brant Pitre.
 
Last edited:
DictatorCzar said:
I see people saying that Jesus didn’t start a religion. Get out and follow the Bible.
Click to expand...
The interesting thing about this idea is that it completely ignores the life of Jesus. Jesus was a Jew who observed Jewish law and ceremonies. He was circumcised and presented at the Temple. He ate kosher. He observed the Sabbath. He went to synagogue. He observed the Jewish festivals such as Passover and the Feast of Dedication. He loved God with his whole heart, mind, soul and strength, an explicit command in Deuteronomy, and loved his neighbor as himself, an explicit command in Leviticus 19. He was baptized and established the Lord’s Supper. He told his disciples to baptize in his name, and to teach others to obey all that he had commanded them. Clearly Jesus did not eschew religion as a means of teaching, preaching, and confessing what we believe.

It was God who established the cycle of the Old Testament festivals for the purpose of reminding his people of the history of God’s salvation and grace in keeping his people. He established the sacrificial system to point to the one sacrifice for all time that his Son would make on our behalf.

Paul, likewise had no qualms with religious observance. He used the synagogues to proclaim God’s word. He taught about baptism and Holy Communion, urging us to do these things. He gave us writings in 1 Corinthians, 1 Timothy, and elsewhere to provide us guidance for orderly worship.

Likewise John urges us to keep Christ’s commands.

The idea that religion is bad is a poor understanding of the gifts that God has established for us that we might be reminded of all Christ has done for us, and how we are called to respond to justification by observing God’s law for the benefit of our neighbor.

We should not think religion is bad, we should only be concerned that our religious practices are in step with God’s revelation of his will.
 
ColoradoCatholic said:
Matthew 16:18: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church.” How is this not establishing a religion?
Click to expand...
Catholicism is the flowering and fulfillment of Judaism. “Church” is English for Ekklesia, which is Greek for the Hebrew Cahal, which means “the people of God”.“Catholic” means universal
The task of the apostles was and is to teach everything Jesus commanded. Thus in Matt. 28 we read:

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
 
I understand your argument, but it just comes down to semantics, because even If you want to say that Christ’s Church is the “Universal people of God” than we have to define what that means. You can make arguments all day about whether the definition of a religion fits the Catholic Church but at the end of the day what does it mean to be a part of that people? On a serious note, is it possible to be separated from that group of people?

Because if you want to say that this church is a continuation of the Jewish faith than I would agree with you. However what do you have to do to maintain your status as part of the “Universal people of God” or the Catholic Church? The Old Testament certainly says that there are things that will separate you from the people of God.

What this all means effectively is this: If there are hundreds if not thousands of different denominations today, then which of those denominations have separated themselves from the Catholic Church? This is the crux of the whole situation, because those denominations have a very large amount of different believes between them and a vast amount of interpretations of Sacred Scripture.
 
Last edited:
The Greek word ekklesia is used only twice in the Gospels; the second time is in Matt 18:17 and can be translated as “community”.

And in John 1:11 we have "He came to what was his own, but his own people did not accept him.

He did not come to start a new religion; he came to the Jews, seeking to fulfill the Scriptures. And “the Jews” is a phrase which has been the source of a phenomenal amount of prejudice against Jewish people centuries after;, and those who have been the source of that trouble all failed to understand that Jews did accept him, though certainly not all.

I am inclined to agree with the commentary by Brant Pitre in The Case For Jesus that Matthew was likely written before AD 62, and likely ;not with a couple of years after the Ascension, so by then it was fairly clear the the Jews as a whole were not going to convert, and inroads had already been made well into Gentile populations - all of which could have colored how Matthew wrote.

I don’t intend to get into a rabbit hole like the Jesus Seminar in trying to say exactly what Christ said,word for word. But John 1 is clear that Christ came to fulfill the Scriptures, and he came to the Jews, some of whom accepted what he said and did. Fulfilling the Scriptures is a tad bit different than Christ coming to stop Judaism and start a new religion. There is a tad bit of difference between stopping one thing and starting something new, and fulfilling something which is replete with references of what “was to come”.

The ekklesia - the community - which Christ founded was Jewish through and through. Reading John says he came to take the whole ekklesia - Jewish community - into the fulfillment of Scripture, and only part of it joined a much more limited subset of the larger community; they converted other Jews (Acts 2:5-41) and eventually moved out to the Diaspora; in the process (as noted concerning Paul, Barnabus and others) they then moved on to include Gentiles; in fact the Council of Jerusalem is a fairly decisive point that those joining the community/ekklesia were not bound by some of the Jewish laws (e.g. circumcision) and moves the community/ekklesia further away from the large Jewish community/ekklesia.

And the question was not “Jesus didn’t start a Church?”, it was “Jesus didn’t start a religion?” and I would submit Christ did not come to do away with Judaism but to fulfill it, and the early ekklesia were Jews, and eventually expanding to Gentiles until the ratio of Gentiles to Jews as part of the ekklesia skewed to Gentiles as the great majority. He came to fulfill Scripture, including the Sacraments as foreshadowed in the Old Testament.

We use the word “church” and Church" to mean the community Christ gathered together out of those Jews who would accept him as the Messiah, the Anointed One - but he was not starting a religion’; he was taking the existing religion and fulfilling it.
 
ColoradoCatholic said:
If there are hundreds if not thousands of different denominations today, then which of those denominations have separated themselves from the Catholic Church? This is the crux of the whole situation, because those denominations have a very large amount of different believes between them and a vast amount of interpretations of Sacred Scripture.
Click to expand...
The Church is not a denomination; it is the Body of Christ. One becomes a member through Baptism. Catholics who become heretics and schismatic and separate themselves from the Church are responsible for their actions, and Scripture warns against them. Some people through no fault of their own are not born into the Catholic Church, thus to those to whom much is given, much more will be required. Catholics have been given everything; all the tools and treasures for sanctification as well as the responsibility that those who know much will have to give an account for.
 
The point is, even if it’s not a “religion,” using that terminology hurts what the Catholic Church is trying to do, which is inform people that the things we believe are not only going to help you receive graces from God, but its always been the Fullness of Truth from the beginning and has been believed since Jesus instated the priesthood at the Last Supper.

To use a timely metaphor say there is a disease (sin/death) and the people need a free vaccine so they don’t die(hell). Would you rather have the name brand vaccine (Catholicism) or an off brand one (Other Denominations) that might not work as well. You still have to choose to take the vaccine (living according to the faith) but saying that you can be cured (get to heaven) by just getting any vaccine may or may not be true. Wouldn’t you rather have the name brand one, the most assured way of getting to heaven? Just saying that the cure is “all of the vaccines in total” isn’t the most effective way of telling someone how to be cured.
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top