Outskirts Press, INC.

How the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth were transformed into an entirely different religion…

Written by two respectable religious scholars, this groundbreaking new book challenges some of our long-held beliefs about Christianity as we know it, detailing the origins of a great divide between Jesus of Nazareth’s teachings and Christianity during its formative stages. With comprehensive historical research, authors Cragun and Kessler use the analysis of power and class struggle to reexamine Church history and the teachings of the theologians. They outline how the so-called “Fathers of the Church” took over the community of Jesus, destroyed its foundations, and built their own church edifice, which they then passed down to us. Though much of modern scholarship blames Constantine for the corruption of the Church, Christianity: Endangered or Extinct? shows how the corruption was a gradual process in which Platonic philosophy, power, and prestige gradually entombed the message Jesus actually gave us. This religion was carefully honed to be acceptable to emperors, rulers, and the elite, replacing Christ’s original message of love, egalitarianism, communalism, pacifism, and servant leadership—concepts that are essential for the survival of humanity in the 21st century. This is a true People’s History of Christianity in the tradition of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States and one that will have you seeing Christianity in a brand-new light.

The “laboratory of power,” as Foucault calls it, has placed some in high positions of respect according to their often-perverted ideals and value systems. Those who exist as underlings in those systems become “docile bodies,” according to Foucault. At the same time, others do not fit and even dare to resist the mold, which those in the power positions establish as the norm, and they are denigrated and even destroyed. So this work is going to sort through the lives of the Christians who lived before us. We do so in order to ground ourselves, establish a situs in re, “a position in reality,” that enables us to model as best as we can the life and words of Jesus. At the same time, we hope to restore justice to many Christians of merit who were denigrated and/or forced into oblivion, and establish that they indeed had been part of the Jesus Movement. If the Christian religion is to have meaning in today’s world, it is necessary that it be grounded solidly on reality. Our intention, as we write, is not merely a negative one. We do not merely want to knock down the established order, but we do want to do the grounding. We feel that it is necessary to critically evaluate the spurious value systems that have become set in ecclesiastical stone, and also the lives of some of the established “saints.” We also feel that we must elevate others who have been sorely abused.