• Christianity, as a religion, is more flexible and capacious than a philosophical system. The main difference is showing better leveraging on narratives, symbolism, communities and rituals.
• Christianity is centered around Jesus, a very elusive figure who didn’t offer systematic teaching nor founded a framework or institution to pass on his message.
  • Jesus’ essential teaching is to love as he does, with perfect generosity.
  • Older gospels and his contemporaries seem to consider Jesus a mere human who initiated an egalitarian movement. Stories about his divine nature come from the era after his death, when followers understood him in terms of fulfilled prophecies.
  • These are the main interpretations of the figure of Jesus
    1. A mere human. It’s the interpretation of his Jewish contemporaries and of modern historical scholarship
    2. A human exalted by God. This fits the Jewish contemporary expectation for a messiah’s arrival
    3. A divine being, inspirer of divinity in others
    4. The unique God-man. It’s the orthodox view, Jesus as truly God and as truly human, even if the biblical depiction of Jesus falls way closer to an all-knowing super entity than to a human.
• Gospels (early Christianity genre, translation of the Greek evangelion, meaning good news), are texts exalting the figure of Jesus. The ones included in the Bible are considered canonical; the rest are apocryphal.
  • Contradictions occur even between canonical gospels
    • What is canonical and what is not could potentially be redefined
  • One of the gospel’s main concern appears to be to demonstrate fulfilled Jew prophecies in Jesus’ life
    • Sounds like a meditated effort to convince Jews; if Jesus’ life is read as a fulfillment of the Jewish.

• Jesus plays the role of savior because he transcends humanity, which on its own implies corruption. This inevitable sinful aspect of our humanity sounds critical in understanding the conception of the self and of live proposed by Christianity.
  • The practical philosophical implication of this is that humans cannot save themselves, as they are flawed beings incapable of stopping their sinful nature. There is a need for external salvation.
  • The church relays on this, and presents itself as a route to salvation. Mainly through sacraments.

• Early Christianity was marketed towards a growing middle class. The strategy was to simplify joining for new members, and provide greater opportunities for leadership, community and welfare.
  • This and a rudimentary rule system to define leaders and succession come together as the basis of the church, called catholic (universal) and orthodox (right belief).
  • What this earlier approach requested from new members was basically a more rigorous morale, and to be their only form of worship.
  • Roman imperial patronage is the main key to understand Christianity success.
  • Only Islam seriously contend Christianity outside of the eastern world, where its expansion was inhibited by Hinduism, Confucianism and Buddhism, all established there before Christianity started.
  • Later Christianity (post middle ages) expansion was first bound up with Spain and Portugal, which expanded their empires into America and Eastern Asia. After that, expansion is always very political (new countries aligning with religion in order to unify a territory and its people) and happens in disorganized fashion.