Christianity was truly a multicentric faith in its first centuries, owing to its relative modesty of influence and its own emergence from another faith, this perspective shows. The primary control mechanism at play is the human instinct to adopt varying interpretations of existing theological movements.
This is interesting, because in a manner, our reading here suggests that where we might contend that the scriptures arose out of Christianity. At least, insofar as categorization is concerned, the followers who would adopt Christ's ideas in the century to follow his death were simply another sect of Judaism....
As Cross et al. cite in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, the gospels would be composed in roughly 100 AD, several generations from the death of Christ. (Cross et al., 134) it should be considered a valuable understanding of the ideological origins of Christianity to recognize the reciprocity between the ability of the people to identify themselves as Christians and the
construction of the literary tradition that would henceforth define the faith, also suggesting a primary control mechanism in the literature produced by the increasing centralization and unification of Christian ideology and
identity.
Works Cited
Barrett, D.B. et.al., eds. (2001). World Christian Encyclopedia. Oxford University Press.
Cross, E.L. & Livingstone, E.A. (1997). The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. Oxford University Press.
