The Case for an Indo-European Christianity in Bullet Points

• Pauline-Christianity was modified by Constantinian-Germanic Christianity. From that point on there were basically two Christian traditions: the Pauline-monastic tradition and the Germanic-warrior tradition.

• In the introduction of the book The Human Faces of God, author Thom Stark playfully twists the opening of the Gospel of John to present the Bible as a self-contradictory conversation rather than a single unified voice. Stark opens the text by writing: "In the beginning was the Argument, and the Argument was with God, and the Argument was: God. ..." In other words, there never was an original unified voice or opinion of all church members. Sola Scriptura is a 16th century Protestant Reformation invention; before that "the church" was the living body of believers and the hierarchy of Bishops who like the leaders in the New Testament continued having arguments about "God" and modified ideas in guiding the Church. 

• The fact is that Peter, James and John (who promoted Torah-observance) disagreed with the Apostle Paul regarding what is the gospel and what it means to follow Christ. The Gospel of Matthew for example is strongly Torah-oriented. Yet these groups basically functioned side by side and tolerated each other in the first century. So despite the attempt to unify all the Christian traditions as one, the fact is that there are different Christianities in the New Testament itself; for example, the writer of the Epistle of James disagrees with the authentic Pauline letters on grace; and John of Patmos promoted Torah-observance, which was at odds with the Pauline movement. 

• The authentic or Undisputed Letters of Paul were often updated and corrected by the Disputed Letters of Paul. For example, while the actual Apostle Paul advocated celibacy the pseudonymous-Paul (or Deutero-Paul) in the Disputed Letters of Paul says Bishops should marry and for all husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church.

• Paul emphasizes a kind of leaderless free flowing charasmatic spirit-possession movement with Overseers simply managing unrestrained random prophesying and glossonalia. The later pseudonymous-Paul in The Pastoral Epistles (especially First Epistle to Timothy and Epistle to Titus) emphasizes instead church offices, bishops, elders, and household order. Today, Christian Pentecostals tend to model the earlier Pauline movement, whereas mainstream Protestants rely more on the pseudonymous Pastoral Epistles to form a more rank ordered Christian Church.

• The Undisputed Pauline corpus and the Markan Gospel promotes pacifism but the Gospel of Luke promotes buying a sword, i.e. self-defense and Christians entering military service. Later Christian theologians (as the expanded Body of Christ) developed Just War positions and the Church defended Christians from harm during the Crusades. 

• The gospel of Mark (written in 70 AD) is full of demon-possession and exorcisms, but overtime these ideas become antiquated in some Christian groups. For example, around 90 AD the Gospel of John is written and never mentions individuals possessed by demons nor needing an exorcism. 

• Friedrich Nietzsche viewed the Gospel of John as fundamentally distinct from the Synoptic Gospels, as "a thoroughly Greek product": stemming from the same psychological and spiritual roots as ancient Greek mystery cults. He viewed it as a masterpiece of absolute mysticism and a radical departure from the teachings found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. He saw a "Dionysian" element in its heavy reliance on intuition, inner rebirth, and unity of being rather than a strict moral code; Nietzsche associated the mystical nature of John's gospel with the spirit of Dionysus—the Greek god of ecstasy, emotion, and life-affirmation. He saw it emphasizing "Life": with the overarching theme of John's gospel as not merely rules or doctrines, but life (e.g., "I am the way, the truth, and the life"). This emphasis on vibrant, present existence rather than future rewards resonated with his own philosophy of life-affirmation, even if he rejected the theological context. Nietzsche found deep value in John 18:38, where Pontius Pilate questions Jesus. He admired this moment as a profound critique of the dogmatic assertion of absolute truth. Despite his later ferocious hostility toward Christianity where he targets Paul and institutional religion, Nietzsche’s earlier writings treated John's Gospel as the "most beautiful fruit" of Christian love and compassion, admiring its artistic and psychological profundity. 

• In his book, The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic, John Spong argues that the 4th-century church creeds misinterpreted John by reading it as literal history. He contends that John actually wrote the text to warn readers against literalism, mocking characters like Nicodemus who fail to grasp spiritual truths beyond their physical, religious boundaries. He argues that the miracles in John are not historic events, but literary creations (or "signs") designed as parables. Each "sign" (like the bread of life or the raising of Lazarus) acts as a medium to convey deeper, first-century Jewish mystical truth. Spong suggests that John presents Jesus not as a supernatural being who rescued humanity from sin via a blood sacrifice, but as a profoundly human individual who achieved a state of heightened consciousness. Jesus embodies what it looks like to live with a fully immanent "present moment" awareness of God. In Spong's view, the highest point of the fourth gospel is not the physical resurrection, but the crucifixion. The cross symbolizes Jesus’ ultimate capacity to selflessly give his life and love away for others, which Spong identifies as the true essence of God. Spong posits that the Johanine Jesus leads his followers beyond the confines of traditional Judaism into a boundless, universal God-consciousness. He argues that contemporary Christians must similarly let go of ancient dogma and embrace this mystical "oneness" if the faith is to survive in the modern world.

• Scolar M. David Litwa points out that the Gospel of Thomas in turn presented a different version of the "Gospel" than the Gospel of John.

• Pauline Christianity versus Catholic Christianity: The historical Paul expected: 

an imminent end of the age

no political power, pacifist-suffering to imitate Christ,

celibacy as an ideal state

voluntary poverty 

missionary communities

By contrast, after the conversion of Constantine the Great, Christianity became:

legally protected 

institutionally organized 

politically influential 

concerned with governing societies 

concerned with military defense 

concerned with marriage, inheritance, and family stability

Many historians have noted that an apocalyptic sect had to transform once it became the religion of an empire.

 

• Books like The Germanization of Medieval Christianity by James C. Russel, show how a post-Constantine "Muscular Christianity" culturally developed as the New Testament versions of Jesus were modified in the 19th century Heliand version of the Gospel: which reimagined Jesus as a heroic warrior Chieftain, which was commissioned by the Church to convert the Anglo-Saxons using a gospel narrative reformatted in a way that was familiar to the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon Warrior cultures. The ideal Christian in the Pauline letters is:

- celibate
- itinerant and pacifist
- detached from kinship
- awaiting the Kingdom

The ideal Christian in medieval Europe becomes:

- husband
- father
- landholder
- knight
- defender of community

Those are dramatically different social ideals. A medieval knight would have seemed quite foreign to many first-century Christians. This new pro-family Knightly-Christianity was subconsciously laid over the often antifamilial tendencies of the New Testament and earlier Pauline Corpus; so that overtime the new version of Christianity took root, so that that modern Christians today simply pass over the monastic pacifistic pro-celibacy verses and it does not register in their minds because of the post-Knighthood Christian philosophy is overriding their subconscious interpretation of the words of the New Testament; as the Pauline monastic tradition was transformed and reolaced with the warrior knight tradition.

•  The first canon law established by the Catholic Church (at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD) formally banned voluntary castration (which had become popular due to literal readings of 1st Corinthians 7 and Matthew 19:12). In the 400s AD, Augustine then argued against the suicidal martyrdoms motivated by Pauline suffering-mysticism. 

As we can see, post-Constantine Germanized Christianity had culturally evolved in many ways away from a Pauline monkish-pacifist version of Christianity, to a more pro-family kinship Kin-dom, with warrior knights defending Anglo-Saxon King and Country and then "American Christianity."