If the last post was about stepping past the warning signs concerning the dangers of critical scholarship, this one is about what I found on the other side. As I hinted at last time, I had braced myself for a landscape stripped bare by skepticism, a place where faith would slowly starve. But what I found instead felt less like a wasteland and more like stumbling through a hidden gate into an ancient, crowded city I had lived beside my whole life without realizing it. I’ve discovered far too much there for any single post to contain, so what follows are only glimpses of a much larger landscape I hope to explore further down the road. But if there was one thread running through it all, it was this: that the world in which Christianity was born was almost nothing like the one I had imagined. It was “a whole new world” to me, you might say, only this time no one was riding a magic carpet (sorry, but it had to be done). Yet this realization led to somewhat of a paradox. Because the deeper I stepped into the world of early Christianity, the more familiar it began to feel there; but the more familiar it began to feel in its world, the less familiar it began to feel in mine. What emerged wasn’t the destruction of faith, but a disorienting yet compelling invitation to see old things with new eyes.

One of the sharpest illustrations of this disorienting new world came through a story that at first felt familiar.¹⛰ Side Trail: I’m indebted to Bart Ehrman for this story, as I first encountered it in his textbook The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. It remains one of the most widely used introductory New Testament textbooks in the United States, and I highly recommend it to anyone wanting a broad overview of how contemporary critical scholarship approaches the New Testament. It told of a man who traveled widely with devoted followers, taught with remarkable authority, foretold the future, healed the sick, cast out demons, and was even said to have once raised a young girl from the dead. He lived a life of discipline and purity, confronted powerful leaders without fear, and inspired both devotion and suspicion. Some said his power was divine, others accused him of sorcery. After his death, his followers claimed he appeared to them alive again, and decades later a detailed biography recorded his life, wisdom, and miracles, including an ascent into the divine realm. At first, I genuinely wondered whether I was encountering another ancient tradition about Jesus. But I wasn’t. I was reading about Apollonius of Tyana, a first-century philosopher known throughout the Greco-Roman world.²⛰ Side Trail: Apollonius of Tyana was a first-century philosopher and religious teacher from Asia Minor, often associated with Neo-Pythagoreanism. He was known as a wandering sage who practiced asceticism, taught wisdom, and was later credited with healings, exorcisms, and prophetic insight. Most of what we know comes from Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius, written in the third century and long after his death. The work portrays him as a wise, miracle-working philosopher engaging rulers and challenging corruption. While some stories about him sound superficially similar to accounts of Jesus, Apollonius reflects Greco-Roman philosophical ideals more than early Christian theology. That realization landed like a shockwave in the foundation of my assumptions. The point wasn’t that Christians copied his story, in fact scholars from across the spectrum reject that idea.³⛰ Side Trail: The idea that Christians simply copied Jesus’ story from Apollonius of Tyana is widely rejected by scholars across theological and critical perspectives alike. The sources for Jesus are earlier, rooted in first-century Jewish contexts, and shaped by Israel’s Scriptures and early Christian communities. By contrast, the major account of Apollonius’s life (Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius) was written in the third century, long after Jesus and after Christianity was already established. Similarities between famous ancient figures are not unusual, but most scholars do not see the Gospel narratives as borrowed from Apollonius or as evidence of direct literary dependence. Rather, the point was that the ancient world already had recognizable categories for such extraordinary figures.⁴⛰ Side Trail: The ancient Mediterranean world already had recognizable categories for extraordinary people: wandering philosophers, miracle workers, prophets, divine men, healers, and sages. Figures could be remembered as performing healings, casting out spirits, offering wisdom, confronting rulers, or possessing unusual divine favor. Jewish traditions had prophets like Elijah and Elisha, while Greco-Roman culture honored philosophers and holy men with remarkable reputations. This doesn’t mean every figure was understood the same way, but it does mean the world of the New Testament was not conceptually blank. Claims about remarkable deeds, spiritual authority, and divine purpose already existed within cultural frameworks people could recognize. Suddenly, Jesus no longer appeared in a historical vacuum, but within a far more complex spiritual world than I had ever expected. And that forced me to wrestle not only with who Jesus was, but with the wider ecosystem his earliest followers were trying to navigate and transform.

Yet, as that wider world came into view, I also began realizing that Jesus’ most immediate world was not simply the spiritually crowded landscape of the broader Mediterranean, but the intensely Jewish world of Second Temple Judaism, a world far stranger, more politically charged, and more theologically volatile than I had been taught.⁵⛰ Side Trail: Second Temple Judaism refers to the Jewish world from the rebuilding of the temple after the Babylonian exile (around 516 BCE) to its destruction by Rome in 70 CE. This was Jesus’ immediate world and a landscape shaped by Roman occupation, covenant identity, temple worship, Torah, purity debates, apocalyptic expectation, and longing for God’s kingdom. It included groups like Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots, and ordinary Jews all wrestling differently with Israel’s future. Far from a quiet religious backdrop, it was politically tense and theologically diverse. Understanding this world helps explain why themes like Messiah, kingdom, exile, resurrection, and temple carried such explosive meaning in Jesus’ life and message. I had often read Jesus through familiar Christian lenses, almost as though he had arrived speaking primarily into later theological categories detached from the urgent tensions of his own time. But the more I explored, the more I discovered that Jesus was born into Israel’s long and aching story, shaped by covenant, Torah, Temple, exile, foreign occupation, prophetic memory, and fierce longing for restoration.⁶⛰ Side Trail: Jesus was born not into a generic spiritual world, but into Israel’s long and deeply charged story. His world was shaped by covenant promises to Abraham that all nations would be blessed through his descendants (Genesis 12:1–3), Torah given through Moses calling Israel to wholehearted covenant faithfulness (Deuteronomy 6:4–9), and the temple as the symbolic center of God’s presence among his people (Psalm 122:1–9). It was also marked by the trauma of exile, when Jerusalem fell and Judah was carried to Babylon (2 Kings 25:1–21), followed by centuries under foreign powers. Prophets like Isaiah envisioned comfort, return, and God’s coming reign (Isaiah 40:1–11), while Jeremiah promised a new covenant written on the heart (Jeremiah 31:31–34). By Jesus’ day, many Jews still lived with the sense that Israel’s story was unfinished, longing for restoration, liberation, and God’s kingdom to fully arrive. This was not mainly a world of private spirituality or escaping earth for heaven, but one where faith, identity, history, and hope were deeply intertwined. Suddenly, Jesus’ words began sounding less like abstract religious truths floating above history and more like language rooted in the symbolic world of his people’s scriptures, struggles, and expectations. He was speaking from within his own people’s unfinished story. That was somewhat unsettling in its own way, because it forced me to confront how often I had unconsciously read Jesus less as a first century Jew and more as a figure already shaped by the assumptions of the later Christian world I knew. Yet once I began seeing Jesus more clearly within his own historical and Jewish context, I found myself looking differently not only at him, but also at the very texts that sought to explain who he was.

It was there that yet another dimension of this world came into view. For I had always assumed the Gospels offered a single, settled understanding of Jesus from the very beginning, one unified reality simply told through different voices. But that assumption too began to give way to something far more dynamic. The more closely I read through the lens of mainstream scholarship, the more I began to notice the possibility that early Christian understandings of Jesus’ identity may not have arrived all at once, fully formed and untouched by development, but may instead have deepened and expanded over time as different communities wrestled to express what they believed God had uniquely done in him.⁷⛰ Side Trail: One interesting example of this is how and when the Gospels portray Jesus’ divine identity. Mark, widely considered the earliest Gospel, begins with Jesus’ baptism and public mission (Mark 1:9–11), emphasizing divine sonship at the outset of his ministry as a middle-aged man. Matthew and Luke, written later and likely using Mark as a source, push that identity back into Jesus’ birth through infancy narratives shaped by prophecy, angels, and divine origins (Matt 1:18–23; Luke 1:30–35). John, our latest gospel, reaches further back still, describing Jesus as the preexistent Word through whom all things were created (John 1:1–14). Rather than a flat, unchanged portrait, many scholars see these as deepening reflections by different communities expanding their language as they wrestled with who Jesus was and what God had done through him. What I had once imagined as a static theological portrait began to look more like a living and unfolding process, as though I were not simply looking at one finished monument from multiple angles, but watching reflection itself grow larger, deeper, and more expansive in real time. That realization didn’t dismantle my faith, but it did profoundly unsettle some of my deepest assumptions, especially the belief that Christian truth had existed from the beginning in one settled and unchanging form. And once I began seeing that kind of development and movement within the New Testament itself, the broader diversity of early Christianity beyond its pages became even more difficult to ignore.

In particular, I discovered that what became orthodox Christianity wasn’t the only version of the faith in the earliest centuries.⁸⛰ Side Trail: The first few generations of Christians included a wide range of communities wrestling with Jesus’ identity, authority, and meaning. Paul’s letters already reveal disagreements over law, Gentile inclusion, resurrection, and practice (Galatians 2:11–14; 1 Corinthians 15). Jewish-Christian groups, proto-orthodox believers, Marcionites, Gnostics, and others all read Jesus differently. Texts like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, and other early writings show that the movement was more diverse than I had imagined. Over time, certain beliefs were formalized through creeds, councils, and debates, but early Christianity was not a single, settled stream – it was a contested and developing landscape. I’d imagined heresy as something obviously false, arriving from outside the boundaries of true belief like a corruption of an already settled tradition. But history proved far more complex than that. Early Christianity wasn’t a single unified movement, but a diverse and contested landscape filled with sincere believers trying to make sense of Jesus in profoundly different ways. Some groups emphasized his humanity in ways later orthodoxy would reject.⁹⛰ Side Trail: Certain Jewish-Christian communities, often associated with groups like the Ebionites, viewed Jesus primarily as a human prophet, teacher, or Messiah especially chosen by God rather than as preexistent or fully divine. In some forms of adoptionism, Jesus was understood as a righteous man whom God uniquely “adopted” or empowered at baptism (Mark 1:9–11 has sometimes been read this way). These perspectives took Jesus’ humanity seriously but did not align with later creedal claims about his eternal divine nature. Over time, church councils and theological debates increasingly defined orthodoxy around Jesus as fully human and fully divine, narrowing which interpretations would remain acceptable. Others elevated his divinity so strongly that his humanity seemed diminished or even unreal.¹⁰⛰ Side Trail: Some forms of Docetism (from the Greek dokein, “to seem”) taught that Jesus only appeared human, suggesting his suffering or physical body was not fully real. Certain Gnostic traditions likewise stressed a heavenly Christ who merely passed through the material world. These views often arose from discomfort with the idea that the divine could truly suffer, hunger, bleed, or die. In response, later Christian orthodoxy strongly defended Jesus’ full humanity alongside his divinity (John 1:14; 1 John 4:2–3), insisting that incarnation meant God truly entered human life rather than only seeming to. Some were mystical, others philosophical, others intensely apocalyptic.¹¹⛰ Side Trail: Some groups remained intensely apocalyptic, expecting Christ’s imminent return and God’s dramatic intervention, as reflected in texts like the Didache or Shepherd of Hermas. Others, such as Justin Martyr in the second century, began expressing faith in more philosophical terms, describing Jesus through concepts like Logos and divine reason. Still other communities, reflected in writings later associated with Thomasine or proto-Gnostic traditions, emphasized secret teachings, spiritual insight, or mystical knowledge. These early movements show that even before later councils, Christians were already interpreting Jesus through multiple frameworks. The more I read, the harder it became to see these groups as simple villains or obvious distorters of truth. More often, they looked like earnest followers wrestling with the same central figure through different theological lenses. Even Paul’s letters reveal competing camps, suggesting that theological disagreement was present from the beginning.¹²⛰ Side Trail: In Galatians, Paul openly recounts confronting Peter over table fellowship and Gentile inclusion (Galatians 2:11–14). In 1 Corinthians, he describes factions forming around different leaders: “I follow Paul,” “I follow Apollos,” “I follow Cephas” (1 Corinthians 1:10–12). He argues fiercely with some who denied resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:12–19), while other letters battle over circumcision, law, food, spiritual gifts, and authority (Galatians 5:2–6; Romans 14:1–6; 1 Corinthians 12–14). These weren’t later distortions of a once-unified faith. From the start, early Christianity was marked by passionate internal debate over what faithfulness to Jesus actually meant. This itself raised some difficult questions too. Namely, if the church was wrestling this much from the beginning, what did it really mean to say God was guiding it? Maybe God was. Maybe discernment genuinely unfolded over time. But I found myself rethinking that too, especially given the history of Christianity ever since – always fragmented, always divided, always full of competing claims about truth.

Things eventually became even more personal when these questions pushed me beyond how Christians throughout history had understood Jesus then to asking how I was supposed to understand him now. If portraits of Jesus developed over time and if different communities interpreted him in strikingly different ways, then what did it actually mean to follow Jesus? That was when the distinction scholars often draw between the “Jesus of History” and the “Christ of Faith” finally hit me.¹³⛰ Side Trail: The “Jesus of History” refers to the Jewish teacher from first-century Galilee that historians try to understand through critical methods: his context, actions, teachings, and likely historical contours. The “Christ of Faith” refers to how early Christian communities came to proclaim Jesus as risen Lord, Messiah, Son of God, and cosmic savior (Acts 2:36; Philippians 2:9–11; John 20:28). This distinction doesn’t mean two different people, but two lenses: one historical, one theological. It highlights the difference between reconstructing Jesus’ life and understanding how believers interpreted his significance. At first, the distinction felt vaguely threatening, as though scholarship were trying to dissect faith itself. But over time, I began to see the deeper question underneath it: how do history and theology actually relate? After all, the Gospels are not detached journalistic accounts. They are ancient theological biographies shaped by communities and written through the lens of resurrection faith.¹⁴⛰ Side Trail: Most modern scholars do not approach the Gospels as detached journalistic records in the modern sense. They are usually understood as ancient biographies (bioi), a genre focused less on exhaustive chronology or neutral reporting and more on revealing a subject’s significance, character, and meaning. Written roughly between 70–100 CE (decades after Jesus’ death), the Gospels emerged from communities already shaped by oral tradition, worship, mission, and belief in the resurrection (Luke 1:1–4; John 20:30–31). Their authors selected, arranged, and interpreted material to address theological concerns and communal needs. Mark emphasizes suffering and discipleship, Matthew fulfillment and teaching, Luke salvation history, and John cosmic identity. In this view, the Gospels preserve historical memory, but always through the interpretive lens of resurrection faith. Once I began to grasp that, my questions started to shift. I still cared deeply about what actually happened, but I also found myself asking more carefully how history and theology interacted within the biblical portraits themselves. In particular, how much reflected the words and actions of the historical Jesus as he moved through first century Judea, and how much echoed the growing reflection of communities trying to express what he eventually came to mean to them? If I wanted not only to worship the Christ proclaimed through later tradition, but also to understand the Jesus who actually lived, then I had to wrestle with that distinction and with what following that Jesus might have looked like in the context of his own time.

And that’s where I stumbled across another surprising discovery, even if perhaps a bit uncomfortable: the social and political nature of his vision. Because as it turns out, titles like “Lord,” “Savior,” and “Son of God” weren’t floating abstractions in a religious vacuum. They existed in a world where Caesar also claimed those exact same titles, such that to proclaim that Jesus was Lord was to effectively proclaim that Caesar was not.¹⁵⛰ Side Trail: In the first-century Roman world, titles like “Lord,” “Savior,” and “Son of God” carried political weight as well as religious meaning. Roman emperors, especially Augustus and his successors, were praised with titles such as divi filius (“son of a god”), soter (“savior”), and kyrios (“lord”), presenting Caesar as the bringer of peace, order, and good news through imperial power. Inscriptions and imperial propaganda used this language publicly across the empire. Against that backdrop, early Christian claims that “Jesus is Lord” (Romans 10:9; Philippians 2:11), that he was “Son of God” (Mark 1:1), or that his birth was “good news” (Luke 2:10–11) were not spiritually neutral. They placed Jesus, not Caesar, at the center of ultimate allegiance. I came to see that the early Christian movement wasn’t centered primarily on abstract doctrinal systems, private morality, or escaping to heaven after death. It was a radically inclusive and disruptive community that sought to fundamentally reshuffle power, belonging, and allegiance. It was profoundly revolutionary, yet for an understandable but also unsettling reason. Because underneath so much of its vision was an urgent expectation that God was about to bring the present age to its end in ways that, by most historical accounts at least, didn’t unfold the way Jesus or his earliest followers expected.¹⁶⛰ Side Trail: A significant number of scholars have argued that Jesus’ message was deeply shaped by urgent apocalyptic expectation, the belief that God was about to act decisively to judge evil, restore Israel, and transform the present age. Jesus speaks repeatedly of God’s kingdom as near (Mark 1:14–15), warns of coming upheaval (Mark 13:1–37), and tells some listeners they would not die before seeing God’s kingdom arrive in power (Mark 9:1; Matthew 10:23). Paul’s earliest letters also reflect expectation of Christ’s imminent return (1 Thessalonians 4:15–17). Yet history unfolded differently than many seem to have anticipated. The final cosmic transformation did not arrive in the immediate way some texts suggest, leading later Christian communities to reinterpret, expand, or spiritualize aspects of that expectation. I still wrestle with that tension.¹⁷⛰ Side Trail: Modern scholarship has long noted that early Christian texts carry a strong sense of imminent expectation regarding God’s decisive action in history, but scholars disagree on how to interpret it. Albert Schweitzer famously argued that Jesus should be understood within a thoroughgoing apocalyptic framework, where both Jesus and Paul expected an imminent end that did not arrive as anticipated. By contrast, C. H. Dodd proposed that the New Testament reorients expectation into “realized eschatology,” in which the decisive end-time reality is already present in Jesus’ ministry rather than still future. More recent voices, such as N. T. Wright, argue that the language of imminence reflects prophetic and covenantal symbolism rather than failed prediction, reconfiguring “end” language around the fall of Jerusalem and the vindication of Jesus. Others continue to emphasize unresolved tension between urgent expectation in certain texts and the lived delay experienced by later Christian communities. But whatever one makes of it, what lingered with me most was this: the early church began to look less like a community preserving a static system of ideas and more like a people wrestling with their faith and adapting it to changing circumstances in real time. It was part of that same ancient, crowded city I had wandered into beyond the warning signs, noisy with argument, alive with conviction, and far more human than I had ever been taught to expect.

I wish I could keep unpacking more of what I’ve discovered there so far, and I hope to soon. But hopefully these brief glimpses are enough for now to show how critical scholarship opened a world far wilder than I’d expected. It wasn’t the barren wasteland I’d been warned to fear. It was disorienting, certainly, and at times unsettling, but also a world where certain patterns still endured beneath the noise. Because despite all of its diversity, early Christians genuinely seemed gripped by the conviction that something world altering had happened in Jesus. That central thread, however tangled, never disappeared.¹⁸⛰ Side Trail: Despite the extraordinary diversity of early Christianity – different theologies, competing communities, varied Christologies, and unresolved debates – a striking common thread runs through the earliest sources: Jesus mattered in a world-altering way. Paul’s letters, among our earliest Christian writings, already proclaim Jesus’ death and resurrection as decisive for history (1 Corinthians 15:3–8; Philippians 2:5–11). The Gospels differ in portrait and emphasis, yet all center Jesus as uniquely significant. Acts presents communities reorganizing life around that conviction (Acts 2:36–47). Even groups that disagreed sharply about Jesus’ nature still treated him as central. However tangled the threads became, the persistent core was that something profound had happened in and through Jesus that demanded reinterpretation of everything. In the end, what I lost beyond those warning signs wasn’t faith itself, but the illusion of simplicity. And though I didn’t emerge with the neatness I once prized, I did emerge with something else: a deeper awe at how vast, complicated, and astonishing the search for truth, and perhaps even God, could actually be. 

Alongside that fresh wonder, however, awakened a new tension. For even as I was drawn more deeply into this vast and exhilarating new world, part of me still found myself aching for the smaller, simpler, and more familiar one I had once called home. So it is to that ache, that strange pull between discovery and familiarity, that I want to turn next.

Until then, thanks again for reading and – as always – stay curious, seek truth, and love well.