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I am reading (as I write these words, I'm about half way through) an interesting book about the earliest days of Christianity: Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew by Bart D. Ehrman, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill).

Raised in a Christian environment, inquiring by nature, having become familiar over the past three decades' travel along the spiritual path with the way disciples and followers relate to and speak of their spiritual teachers, and being a genuine fan of the Gospels Teacher, I have an active curiosity about how the early disciples and other followers behaved after the crucifixion, what happened to them, and how the New Testament as we know it today came into being (why and under what circumstances the books we know were included and many others excluded).

This book offers a well-researched and very readable consideration of a lot of that, and to those interested, I recommend it.

The same author has written Lost Scriptures - Books That Did Not Make It Into The New Testament, which is essentially a companion to the other. There, he includes some stuff I haven't seen before in other, similar collections.

What's interesting -- and given the nature of human beings, probably inevitable -- is that a number of very different, sometimes complementary and sometimes confrontational, Christian groups came into being in the early years and decades after the crucifixion, each with their own understanding of what the Teachings meant and what were the meaning and significance of the Teacher's life and death, and some had their own scripture.

Eventually, of course, one group, considering themselves orthodox (from the Greek for "right"), predominated and eliminated (often, not very pleasantly) the others and their teachings, labeling them heretics and heresy (from the Greek word for "choice").

Interestingly, Christianity once again consists of many diverse groups (Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Anglican, Episcopal, Baptist, Southern Baptist, Mormon, Seventh Day Adventist, Evangelical, and so on, not to mention the "New Age" churches like Unity, Divine Science, etc.), which, although they pretty much share the same bible, undoubtedly have different understandings of what the Teachings mean.

One of the most tellings stories I have come across (not in this book) about disciples and followers concerns an ashram in India where, after the teacher died, the disciples and followers literally fought over the body and how to dispose of it.

Humans are a curious species.

I find the story of how Christianity started very interesting too, and I thank you for suggesting this book. The Biblical professor I had was very biased against the group called the gnostics. What I have found interesting is that new research has lead to the belief for many that Jesus belonged to a special group of a Jewish religious sect called the Essense (sp?) and this group had a more esoteric approach much as the gnostic did...yet the gnostics were the group that were destroyed, just as the Essense were wiped out.

As far as the behavior of disciples when there teacher is gone, I think this also happened to St John of the Cross. His body was literally pulled into pieces after his death because so many wanted it. This will probably land this in the Sandbox now, but it brings up thoughts of what happened to Jesus' body after his death...

jenjulian, I appreciate your sensitivity to The Sand Box! Although the way you wrote it (“This will probably land this in the Sandbox now”) makes The Sand Box sound a little like a penalty box, which of course it isn’t. And I know that you know that. Anyway, I think we can leave this thread here for now, and we’ll watch how … if … it evolves.

To the subject: It seems that in all traditions, disciples and devotees start pouring concrete as soon as the original Teacher dies, and once the concrete has set, no deviations from it are permitted, even though the Teacher Himself or Herself was never so inflexible. One of my favorite examples of this kind of misunderstanding on the part of devotees is reported in the Gospels at Luke 9:52. Here, Jesus is reported as having sent advance men (James and John) to a village to prepare for his going there to give a talk. But the villagers had no interest in the program, and they told James and John to go away. Well, the two disciples took offense, and asked the Teacher if they could burn the village to the ground. Jesus, we are told, rebuked James and John. I cannot imagine that being rebuked by a Teacher is a pleasant experience.

Recently, I read somewhere – or perhaps I heard it on a television program – that Buddha specifically instructed his followers not to make any icons or statues or the like of him after his death, but instead simply to follow in his footsteps. Well, of course, that fell on deaf ears, and the world is full of such statues, and they are beautiful! I even have a picture of one at my desk which I scanned into TZF at Consider This!

What’s the name of the Unity teacher who coined a saying about this? He was minister at a church in New York City, I think. I don’t recall exactly how it goes, but it starts something like, “First, there is a man, then a monument, then a movement, then … “.

Like I said, what a species we are!

We are sort of like my dog. He looks at the finger that is pointing rather than looking to where it is pointing.

Earlier in this thread, I asked ...

What’s the name of the Unity teacher who coined a saying about this? He was minister at a church in New York City, I think. I don’t recall exactly how it goes, but it starts something like, “First, there is a man, then a monument, then a movement, then … “.

The name I was looking for is Eric Butterworth. He was pastor at the Unity Center in New York City.

I had it only partly right. Here are the 5 M's of Religion: The Man, The Message, The Movement, The Machine, The Monument.

And here is an excerpt from a talk Butterworth gave on the subject:

There is a professor of religion at the University of Southern California who cites what he calls the five M’s of religion. He says all religions begin with what Emerson would call a first hand and immediate experience of God. Somebody had an awareness. Somebody had suddenly the light over the head: “Ahh! I have it!” Somebody had that awareness, whether it was a flash, whether it was a progressive thing, whether it was a mystical experience or whether it was an intellectual growth or unfoldment or whatever. Anyway, the man develops a message. He puts it into words, he finds a way to articulate it, and he then, in small ways as Ernest Holmes did, as the Fillmores did, by starting classes and groups, began to teach people his message. In time, inadvertently, there is a movement created, usually by the followers, and it’s a lot of enterprising, eager, well organized people who say “Look, this fellow is great. He’s got great ideas. We must organize him. We must organize his followers. We must find the right structure for him”. So, they create a movement with the best of intentions. Then in time, the movement begins to gradually crystallize and become much more rigid; and especially after the man is no longer present, and he passes on into another experience.

Then, out of what is essentially fear, something very striking happens. That is, the movement very quickly goes through transformation into a machine. In other words, there are those who say “Let’s don’t rock the boat; let’s keep it going just exactly like it was”. Then, there is a tendency to codify the words of the man to create a doctrine and keep people coming into this particular movement and be indoctrinated with these words. So this machine moves on, and it can’t change. It has built within it a kind of inertia, and all the safeguards to keep it ever from getting out of that inertial pattern, and on and on and on it rolls until eventually we have nothing left but a monument. The monument to the man.

A seeker's responsibility, then, is to see past, to see through, all of the 5 M's, not to be dazzled by the Movement or distracted by the Monument, and focus instead on what we might call the 6th M -- the Moment. That's where the Truth lies, and will always lie, and the experience of the Man -- of the Teacher, of any True Teacher -- can be helpful to us as seekers, but only if, as jenjulian suggests, we can see past him or her to what she or he is pointing at. Thus, the Teachers tell us, "Don't look at me, look through me!"

A fun movie on this general tendency among humans to misunderstand what we are perceiving and unnecessarily confuse ourselves is Life of Brian put out by the Monty Python folks.