The Audit

The Audit

Here is the whole argument on one page.

Each line is something you were probably taught was ancient, or eternal, or simply the faith. Each one has a date and, usually, a name.

Cover the dates and see how many you can place.

What I actually taught — all of it in about three years, in Galilee and Judea, around AD 28 to 30:

• Forgive debts.
• Eat with anybody.
• Do not screen the poor.
• Give it away.
• Put the weapon away.
• Ask people what they want.
• Do it quietly.
• Say out loud who is causing the harm. (This part I inherited from the prophets, 8th century BC onward.)

What was added

Every entry in that table was added by somebody, in a year, for a reason.

Not one of them is in the list above it.

A Simple Timeline

Read down the left column only, if that is easier. The dates are there so you can check them.

Before me

• about 1000 BC — the kingdom of David. The high point everybody remembered afterward.
• 8th–6th centuries BC — the prophets. Amos, Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah. The angry men of Unit One, Lesson 5.
• 587 BC — Jerusalem destroyed; the people taken away.
• 167–142 BC — a successful revolt against a foreign king. The last time it worked.
• 63 BC — Rome takes Jerusalem. The occupation begins.

My life

• about 4 BC — born, in a small village in Galilee.
• about AD 28 — John baptizes me in the Jordan. Shortly after, he is executed.
• about AD 30 — I am crucified in Jerusalem by the Roman governor.

The first three centuries

• AD 50s — Paul writes the earliest documents in your New Testament. He never met me.
• about AD 62 — my brother James is killed in Jerusalem.
• about AD 70 — Mark, the earliest gospel, is written. Jerusalem is destroyed the same decade.
• 80s–90s — Matthew and Luke. 90s–110s — John.
• late 1st–early 2nd century — letters written in Paul’s name by other people.
• to 313 — Christianity illegal, sporadically persecuted.

The empire takes it

• 312 — a general wins a battle under a Christian sign.
• 313 — toleration.
• 325 — an emperor convenes and funds the council that defines me.
• 380 — the faith is made compulsory by law.
• 385 — the first executions of Christians by Christians over belief.
• 779 — the tithe becomes a legally enforced tax.
• the 780s — refusing baptism becomes a capital offense; 4,500 prisoners beheaded at Verden in 782.

The middle centuries

• 1095 — the first crusade is preached.
• about 1098 — Anselm writes the payment theory of forgiveness.
• about 1173 — Valdes of Lyon gives away his property and starts preaching.
• 1179 / 1184 — his poverty is approved, his preaching is not, and he is condemned for preaching anyway.
• 1204 — crusaders sack Constantinople.
• about 1206 — Francis gives everything away, and asks permission first.
• 1209 — Béziers destroyed.
• 1215 — annual confession made compulsory.
• 1309–1417 — the papacy at Avignon, then two popes, then three.
• 1343 — the treasury of merit.
• 1384 / 1415 — Wycliffe dies; Hus burned.
• about 1450 — the printing press.
• 1452 / 1493 — written authorization for enslavement and for the division of the world.
• 1476 — indulgences for the dead.
• 1484 / 1486 — the witch hunts begin in earnest.

The split and after

• 1517 — Luther’s objections.
• 1525 — the Twelve Articles; about 100,000 peasants killed.
• 1572 / 1618–1648 — massacre in Paris; thirty years of war in Germany.
• 1649 — the Diggers plant on the common.
• 1688 — four Quakers protest slavery. Their meeting acts in 1776.
• 1774 — Woolman’s journal; Wesley’s Thoughts Upon Slavery.
• 1791–1804 — the Haitian revolution.
• 1807 — the Bible with Exodus 1–18 removed.
• 1831–1834 — Samuel Sharpe; abolition, with compensation to owners.
• 1830s — Darby assembles the rapture.
• 1845 — a denomination founded over slaveholding. It apologizes in 1995.

Living memory

• 1883–1996 — the government-funded residential school system in Canada, most schools run by churches.
• 1909 — the Scofield Reference Bible.
• 1933 — Dorothy Day’s penny newspaper.
• 1939–1940 — a German church institute publishes a de-Judaized New Testament.
• 9 April 1945 — Bonhoeffer hanged.
• 1970 / 1995–2007 — the rapture becomes a bestseller, then a franchise.
• 1980 — Romero shot at the altar.
• 1974 — a South African church publishes its scriptural case for racial separation.
• 1982 — apartheid declared a heresy by other churches.
• 1989 — six Jesuits, Elba Ramos and her daughter Celina killed in San Salvador.
• 1994 — Rwanda.
• 1996 — the last residential school closes.

Who’s Who

The names in this book are all in one place. If you have forgotten anyone, look here.

In my own story

Amos — a shepherd, 8th century BC. The bluntest of the prophets about money.

Isaiah — prophet. The passage I read aloud in my hometown is his.

John the Baptist — the man in the river. Executed by Herod Antipas.

Herod Antipas — Rome’s client ruler of Galilee. Built Sepphoris and Tiberias with taxes from villages like mine.

Pontius Pilate — the Roman governor who had me crucified.

James — my brother. Led the movement in Jerusalem after my death. Killed about AD 62. Later called a heretic by people who never met either of us.

Mary Magdalene — one of the women who stayed at the execution when the men had gone, and one of the first at the tomb.

Afterward

Paul — a Greek-speaking Jew from Tarsus who never met me. Wrote the earliest documents in your New Testament and reframed the movement for non-Jews.

Constantine — the emperor of 312, 313 and 325.

Theodosius — the emperor who made the faith compulsory in 380.

Anselm of Canterbury — about 1098. Wrote the theory that God required a payment.

Charlemagne — the Frankish king of the 779 tithe law and the 785 baptism law.

The people who read it right

Valdes of Lyon — about 1173. A rich merchant and moneylender who gave everything away, paid for a translation of the gospels into ordinary speech, and preached in the street. Condemned in 1184 — for preaching without a license, not for a wrong belief. His church still exists.

Francis of Assisi — about 1206. Gave away everything he owned. Did nearly what Valdes did, thirty years later, and asked permission first. He was made a saint.

The Beguines — women in the Low Countries living in common, with no vows and no man over them. Condemned 1311. Lasted six hundred more years.

John Wycliffe (d. 1384) and Jan Hus (burned 1415) — said the church should not own property and that people should read the Bible for themselves.

The Peasants of Swabia — 1525. Wrote twelve requests with the scripture references attached.

The Diggers — 1649. Planted crops on common land and said the earth was a treasury for all.

Antonio de Montesinos — a Dominican friar who preached against the enslavement of the native peoples at Santo Domingo at Christmas 1511, with Las Casas in the congregation.

Bartolomé de las Casas — a Spanish colonist and slaveholder who changed his mind, fought the conquest for fifty years, and publicly condemned his own worst idea.

John Woolman — a Quaker tailor who walked from house to house for years, one conversation at a time.

John Wesley — founder of Methodism. Spent his last letter on abolition.

Samuel Sharpe — a Baptist deacon in Jamaica who read his own Bible and organized a strike. Hanged 1832.

Harriet Tubman — escaped, then went back about thirteen times.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer — German pastor. Came home from safety, joined the resistance, hanged 9 April 1945, aged thirty-nine.

Dorothy Day — started a penny newspaper in 1933 and houses where anybody could eat, and lived in them.

Óscar Romero — archbishop in El Salvador. Read the names of the dead on the radio. Shot at the altar, 24 March 1980.

Elba Ramos and Celina Ramos — a housekeeper and her sixteen-year-old daughter, killed with six priests in San Salvador in 1989. Usually recorded as “and two others.”

The ones who made things I said mean other things

Martin Luther — right about indulgences, right to translate the Bible. Then told the princes to kill the peasants (1525), demoted the letter of James, and wrote a book against the Jews (1543) that was reprinted in Germany in the 1930s.

Cyrus Scofield — put his notes on the same page as scripture, 1909.

John Nelson Darby — assembled the rapture in the 1830s.