Before Jesus came on the scene, religious activity always followed the temple model. In a nut shell, the temple model is having one or more holy places, 
where the holy writs are kept, and holy men stay. These holy men interpret the holy writs and deliver to the faithful decrees about how they will live and behave and what sacrifices their god demands. If these holy men feel a follower is not living up to their decrees, that follower can be punished or killed in accordance to their writ.
Judaism followed the temple model from the time Moses (Holy man) received the Ten Commandments (Holy writs) and the built a portable temple where the nation of Israel would worship as they traveled to the Holy Land, and where more Holy writs were issued to address the lives of that congregation.
By the time Jesus came on the scene, the temple in Jerusalem was the Holy place, the Pharisees were the Holy men and the Tora was their Holy writ. These men devoted their entire lives to learning and interpreting the Tora. However, these men were also quite powerful and they used that power to enrich themselves. Jesus once accused the Pharisees of burdening the people with rules from which they exempted themselves.
Jesus taught something completely different from the temple model. He said, “Where two or three (of the faithful) gather together, God is there. No longer did believers need to congregate en mass to address God. Nor did they need to go through a Holy man with their petitions and praise for God.
The Apostles traveled the region teaching the gospel of Jesus and planting “churches”. But this word translated as “church” does not mean a building. Ecclesia, (Greek Ekklēsia), means “gathering of those summoned”. Most places that you see “church” in the New Testament you could rightly replace it with “congregation”. “Church” comes from a German word that translators stuck in there instead of going with the original meaning.
In fact, William Tyndale an early English translator of the bible was executed for believing that Christians could receive forgiveness directly from God, and for changing the word church to congregation in his translation efforts. But I’ll get to that in a moment.
The movement known as The Way was set up to follow Jesus’ instructions and was informal. The Apostles served as teachers and provided guidance but there was no hierarchical command structure. As the size of these local ecclesias grew, they built a meeting house rather than meeting in private homes. They also organized, electing leadership. It is interesting to note that the word Deacon, which today refers to a church officer, is the Anglicized form of the Greek word diaconos, meaning a “runner”, “messenger”, “servant.” The Apostles originally appointed “the seven” to serve as the first deacons by taking food to the needy, not to rule the church (Acts 6:1-6).
Even during the lives of the Apostles, disruptive forces infiltrated these fledgling congregations and began teaching false doctrines. It got to where Paul was being forbidden to visit the churches he himself planted because the false teachers did not want him “straightening out” the congregation! Paul had to work through letters written to faithful persons within each church – these letters became the epistles section of the New Testament.
The emperor Constantine I converted to Christianity in 312 AD and, together with his eastern counterpart Licinius, issued the Edict of Milan, which granted religious toleration and freedom for persecuted Christians. The Edict of Thessalonica (also known as Cunctos populos), issued on 27 February 380 AD by reigning Roman Emperors Theodosius I, Gratian, and Valentinian II, ordered all subjects of the Roman Empire to profess the faith of the bishops of Rome and of Alexandria, making Nicene Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire. Christianity was now to be the universal religion, thus was born the Roman Catholic (catholic means “universal”) Church. Now, church leaders wielded political power as well. The temple model in all its glory.
Before printing presses were invented all books were copied by hand. The Roman Catholic Church maintained that the scarcity of the early bible (Vulgate) was due to the fact that it took two monks four years to hand write one new copy of the Bible. Others charge that the Church wanted to maintain control of dispensing the Gospel by keeping it from the masses, thus preserving the temple model.
William Tyndale, an English scholar born in 1494 made it his life’s work to correct this situation. Tyndale’s translation was the first English Bible to draw directly from Hebrew and Greek texts, the first English Bible to take advantage of the printing press, and first of the new English Bibles of the Reformation. It was taken to be a direct challenge to the hegemony of both the Roman Catholic Church and the laws of England maintaining the church’s position.
In 1535, Tyndale was arrested and jailed in the castle of Vilvoorde (Filford) outside Brussels for over a year. In 1536, he was convicted of heresy and executed by strangulation, after which his body was burnt at the stake. His dying prayer was that the King of England’s eyes would be opened; this prayer found its fulfillment just two years later with Henry’s authorization of the Great Bible for the Church of England, which was largely Tyndale’s own work. In 1611, the 54 scholars who produced the King James Bible drew significantly from Tyndale, as well as from translations that descended from his.
Now God’s word was available to the masses who could study it for themselves and discern it’s meaning and instructions. You would think this would serve to topple the temple model set up by the Catholic church. But instead, the church began splitting up and forming their own denominations based on differing beliefs of what the Bible says. But each denomination followed the temple model with Holy men dispensing their interpretation of the Holy writs to their followers. It remains so today.
Christian denominations snipe at one another and demand that theirs is the only true faith, the others are hell-bound. I attended a church once that was so narrow-minded that they believed even other churches within their denomination were doomed: only their own individual congregation would go to heaven!
This is not what Jesus taught. He even told John, as recorded in Mark 9:38-41, and Luke 9:49-50 that the disciples were not to forbid others from teaching and working miracles in the name of Jesus, he said, “40 For he who is not against us is on our side.” Basically Jesus is forbidding sectarianism. However he also says that anyone not gathering with Jesus scatters (Matt 12:30, Luke 11:23)
The model that Jesus taught and that the Apostles followed was, in essence, socialism at its best: everyone pulling together for the good of the whole. All being like-minded as to their goals and means (1 Peter 3:8, Philippians 2:2 ). No one holding themselves up as being more important than any other (Romans 12:16).
Unfortunately human beings do not do socialism well. We as a species are saddled with greed, which leads to ambition, which becomes a lust for power, and power corrupts. Does this mean that humanity is incapable of living up to the standards Jesus gave us? No. It only means that we cannot do it when we rely on our own abilities and wisdom.
Those who pursue their human urges and follow the world’s pattern, adding the tag of “Christian” as an accessory to their moral wardrobe, will fail. They may be successful by the worlds standards, but they will not achieve the goal of acceptance by Jesus.
To achieve His acceptance, one’s life must focus on Jesus. This is not to say that we cannot hold a job, or own a home, or have a family. We most certainly can and should. But these things need to be molded to our belief in and devotion to Jesus. Jesus is at the center of it all, these other things are the accessories, and thus they are done in accordance with the will of Jesus, and Jesus will show through these things in our lives to those around us.
To do that, we need to study the Bible. We can and should gather together to worship and to encourage one another, but we must guard against our ecclesia becoming a temple where we worship our religion, not our Savior. Do not look exclusively to Holy men (or women) to decipher the Holy writs for you … learn from others, but test their teachings against the Word of God before you accept it.
