Q: When did Christianity stop being about the teachings of Jesus?
A: Ever since there was a Christian church
The metta sutta teaches that a person wishing to reach the state of Nirvana should have “no greed for supporters.” It would be amazing what brilliant minds over two millennia before our time anticipated, if people really were any different then than now. It may have been different technology, but it was still the same monkey.
Progress? What progress?
But hey, that’s great news, really. When I was about 13, in 1980, I remember thinking that any library book written before 1970 was too ancient to be relevant or worth my time. My mom thought this was hilarious. She knew better. (Yes, I said it.) Even though everything has changed, nothing has. Old ideas still have “new” relevance, the same relevance they always had. And still they are just as poorly understood and misinterpreted, but also as powerful and revolutionary as ever.
I tried to enter American Catholicism after having learned Buddhism. There were lots of reasons it didn’t work, but what really put an end to it was having time in the summer—after six months of RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults) classes—to read Matthew, Mark, Luke, and the beginnings of John (the Gospels of the New Testament).
What Jesus taught was radical, revolutionary, and easy. Despite being grounded in a different tradition (Judaism) than Buddhism, what Jesus is shown teaching in Matthew, Mark, and Luke (but not John) was not so far off from the main ideas of Buddhism. (I didn’t say all of them. The main ones.)
The tl;dr (too long, didn’t read) message of both: You will be blessed when you stop focusing on your “self,” forget your self, and thus become free to truly love others.
This message that Jesus delivered in his lifetime takes a sudden turn in John, a book less about describing Jesus’s life and teachings than about justifying the newly formed church and making claims that forgiveness and salvation can only come through the church.
This was not Jesus’s teaching. He taught that humans could have, do have, a direct relationship with the Divine that is always available to them. (You must call no man father.) No need for an intermediary priest. He specifically said that where two people gather in his name, he is there. No institutional church. He said that the disciples were not to accept payment for their teaching (what they had freely received they should freely give). No paid clergy. His criticisms of the Pharisees were not criticisms of Jews, but of “churchgoers” who do superficially the right things, but with the wrong motivations (“Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full”). And he even specifically told his disciples that they were not to make judgements about who was good and who should be expelled. No excommunication; that is God’s job alone (well, with the angels). And that unrepentant sinners were still to be welcomed. (“Treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector,” which churches interpret to mean “expel them,” but which for Jesus meant “keep letting them come and listen.”)
The idea of paid clergy, and leaders running churches, was an innovation by Paul, it appears.
So as I read Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the contrasts between Jesus’s teachings and Catholic doctrine became clear. In defense of the Catholic Church, it is always clear that it is based both on Jesus’s teachings and Sacred Tradition. That last part is every development in the history of the Catholic Church since Jesus’s time. Often, as I outlined above, the Tradition of the church conflicts with the teachings of Jesus. But that’s O.K., because the teachings of Jesus were so long ago as to be irrelevant when compared to the more modern modifications of his message. (sarcasm) Basically this: when Jesus’s teachings and “Sacred Tradition” are in conflict, tradition wins. Which is why there is a Pope, a Church, Fathers, and excommunication, and why one’s forgiveness and salvation depend not on God alone, but on intermediaries Jesus never intended, and even deliberately spoke against.
And just to take this too far, Christians who choose to believe the whole Bible, and not just what Jesus himself taught, also misunderstand his message, for almost all of the same reasons I mentioned before.
Jesus himself spoke of a direct connection between each human and a loving God, one always patient, always ready to welcome someone who, in their heart, strove to love all others*, and to obey (from this day forward, even if not before) some rather basic commandments. And that was it. No priests or ministers. No church. No earthly judgment. Just you learning from God to be loving to all. Period. The end.
* “If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”