Many Different "Christianities"

 

بِسۡمِ اللّٰہِ الرَّحۡمٰنِ الرَّحِیۡمِ

In the Name of Allah, the Rahman, the Merciful

الصلاة والسلام عليك يا سيدي يا رسول الله

وعلى آلك واصحابك يا سيدي يا نور الله

The Holy Prophet Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم said:

‌وَافْتَرَقَتِ ‌النَّصَارَى ‌عَلَى ‌ثِنْتَيْنِ ‌وَسَبْعِينَ ‌فِرْقَةً فَإِحْدَى وَسَبْعُونَ فِي النَّارِ وَوَاحِدَةٌ فِي الْجَنَّةِ

The Christians split into seventy-two sects. Seventy-one are in the Fire and one is in Paradise (Sunan Ibn Majah)

In Arabic idiom, the number seventy simply indicates a multitude and not necessarily the number seventy literally. That the Muslim Ummah was destined to split into seventy-three sects would therefore mean that it would have slightly more division in its ranks than the number of divisions Christendom experienced, whose division into seventy-two sects means it in turn experienced slightly more fragmentation than the Jews who split into seventy-one factions. Like the Jews, there was a single sect of the Christians which was upon the truth, in its time, and is therefore given the glad tidings of Paradise. From our Islamic perspective, these would have been the early followers of Jesus, especially the Disciples and Apostles, who were pure unitarians, which unlike most other Christian churches, did not deify the Christ.

But the divergences within early Christianity were so fundamental that a modern day scholar on the subject, Bart Ehrman, uses the plural of Christianity, namely, “Christianities” to more accurately describe the situation: “The wide diversity of early Christianity may be seen above all in the theological beliefs embraced by people who understood themselves to be followers of Jesus. In the second and third centuries there were, of course, Christians who believed in one God. But there were others who insisted that there were two. Some said there were thirty. Others claimed there were 365. In the second and third centuries there were Christians who believed that God had created the world. But others believed that this world had been created by a subordinate, ignorant divinity. (Why else would the world be filled with such misery and hardship?) Yet other Christians thought it was worse than that, that this world was a cosmic mistake created by a malevolent divinity as a place of imprisonment, to trap humans and subject them to pain and suffering. In the second and third centuries there were Christians who believed that the Jewish Scripture (the Christian “Old Testament”) was inspired by the one true God. Others believed it was inspired by the God of the Jews, who was not the one true God. Others believed it was inspired by an evil deity. Others believed it was not inspired. In the second and third centuries there were Christians who believed that Jesus was both divine and human, God and man. There were other Christians who argued that he was completely divine and not human at all. (For them, divinity and humanity were incommensurate entities: God can no more be a man than a man can be a rock.) There were others who insisted that Jesus was a full flesh-and-blood human, adopted by God to be his son but not himself divine. There were yet other Christians who claimed that Jesus Christ was two things: a full flesh-and-blood human, Jesus, and a fully divine being, Christ, who had temporarily inhabited Jesus’ body during his ministry and left him prior to his death, inspiring his teachings and miracles but avoiding the suffering in its aftermath. In the second and third centuries there were Christians who believed that Jesus’ death brought about the salvation of the world. There were other Christians who thought that Jesus’ death had nothing to do with the salvation of the world. There were yet other Christians who said that Jesus never died.” (Ehrman, Bart D. Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, p.2)

The shocking disagreement of early Christians on the number of gods is a reference to the likes of Marcion and his followers, the Marcionites, who made a distinction between the benevolent God of the Gospel and the malevolent “god” of the Hebrew Bible. Basilides of Alexandria, and his followers known as the Basilidians, believed that the Jewish God was inferior to the 365 “Archons”, each ruling over a separate heaven.