<p>Wait a second. The Catholic Church is not almost 2000 years old. It claims to be the same church all along but that just isn’t true. The simplest example is that what is now the Orthodox Church split from what is now the Catholic Church with the “great schism” occurring in 1054. And that divide, which followed a series of disagreements, some major and some minor within the then existing “only” church, was over a huge issue, the role of Jesus, often noted as the “filioque”. There are entire libraries of books about this, but the gist is that the church we know as Catholic added the word “filioque” and thus the crucial idea that the Holy Spirit proceeds from Jesus as well as from God (or from the Son as well as the Father if you prefer). This phrase didn’t exist in the original Greek.</p>
<p>I mention this to point out that in the eyes of the eastern church the Catholic Church is a heretical branching of the original Church which they and only they maintain. They consider Catholicism to date back about 1000 years, not 2000. </p>
<p>As for the original Church, it didn’t really exist in a recognizable form until the creeds were formed at Ephesus and Nicaea. There were bishops, whatever that exactly meant from city to city, but no united church in the sense of control, of an agreed upon set of doctrines. For example, during the early centuries of Christianity the two largest groups were most likely those who believed in what would now be considered desperate heresies - of the kind which resulted in massive numbers of killings over the centuries. One view was that God and Jesus were one and the other was that God and Jesus were separate. The former view was essentially that Jesus was God, that Jesus was then an avatar or representation of God on earth and was not in fact human in the main ways. (This is a common heresy today; many people and a ton of Evangelical sects essentially deny the humanity of Jesus. I sometimes wonder if they’ve even heard of the Nicaean Creed.) The latter view is that Jesus was human and was, in essence, directed by God, even infused with God, but that he was not divine. </p>
<p>So to claim the Church actually goes all the way back ignores the rather obvious point that the creed - which is still the actual doctrine - is a compromise developed by a bunch of religious academics and priests over a long period of time. They united the two views and then vigorously stamped out - with extraordinary violence in the name of the Prince of Peace - all those who refused to go along. </p>
<p>It also ignores the other obvious point, that the original “church” was messianic in the sense of “this is the end of the world”, not sometime in the future but right now any day. We tend to ignore that part, perhaps because we find it hard to believe people actually believed that way. But it was a major recruitment tool for the early Christians: the world is going to end and if you convert to Christianity then you will have eternal life. It was a brilliant marketing move that made available to the common man what was formerly reserved for the most elite, for those “deified” by acts of the Senate or by holding the position of Emperor and so on. </p>
<p>And then, putting all that aside, one can’t really talk about a “church” until it became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Then you see the way Jesus was represented change into the figure we now see - and I’m not even going to talk about the iconoclast wars - as he became an imperial figure whose administration - with no irony - was run by Caesar. Thus the immense stories of imperial devotion, of hours spent in prayer - most nonsense made up by paid historians. And then we have to talk about imperial versus papal power, etc. but that takes days.</p>