I do make minor mistakes occasionally but for the most part I'm right.
But never a doozey? How about this one?
In early Christianity there were two camps, the organized Church camp under a ruling hierarchy and the Gnostic (mystic) camp without a ruling hierarchy. The first camp stressed salvation through the hierarchy and the second camp stressed salvation through a personal relationship with God, mysticism.
Quite a lot is wrong with that. First, Christianity was not "organized" in it's early days. It was, as New Testament scholar F. F. Bruce described in the title of one of his books, "A Spreading Flame." It was expanding too fast to be organized. The apostles, notably Paul and John, were clearly standing against Gnosticism in their writings, but that's because Gnosticism was the first threat to the gospel message Peter preached at Pentecost. Keep in mind that when the thousands of new converts returned home after gathering in Jerusalem 50 days after Jesus' resurrection,
no hierarchy was controlling the message they took back home. So you cannot show any kind of organization of "ruling hierarchy" in the first generation of Christians.
Your doozey of a mistake continues in how you identify what you call the other "camp" in the early church. To repeat your words:
In early Christianity there were two camps, the organized Church camp under a ruling hierarchy and the Gnostic (mystic) camp without a ruling hierarchy. The first camp stressed salvation through the hierarchy and the second camp stressed salvation through a personal relationship with God, mysticism.
You clearly do not understand Christianity because early Christians were not "mystics." Mysticism is by definition has "ineffable" truths -- views which cannot be expressed but must be directly experienced and individualized so much that they cannot be explained to another.
To the contrary,
the New Testament is not a mystical document and does not teach mysticism. The foundational truths it teaches are that Jesus was God, lived in the flesh, died a real death, and thus identified with us in every way except he was without sin. These are certainly not mystical teachings. Besides the inaccuracies in your description, you have left out those who believed salvation comes to those who accept Jesus guiltless death as God's substitute for their own guilt, and his resurrection as the vindication of who he really was. No New Testament writer would consider those to be mystical truths.
The bottom line is that there is not a word in the New Testament about salvation through some kind of hierarchy. It teaches that we access God through Jesus, our prophet, priest and king. Nor is there a word in the New Testament about some kind of mystical salvation. It does not come through some sort of personal "enlightenment," but it comes through Jesus' death alone. That is why the Cross is critical to understanding Christianity. The Cross is a footnote (if even that) in both "camps" you talk about, the "hierarchy" and the "mystics."
Steve.
