Template:ApostasyScholars

Scholarly quotes on the historical evidence for apostasy

Scholarly quotes on the historical evidence for apostasy

This broad selection of quotations provides clear support for the idea that the doctrines and practice of the Early Church of the apostles had been altered dramatically within a few centuries at most:

• Will Durant, "Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it. The Greek mind, dying, came to a transmigrated [new] life in the theology and liturgy of the Church."

• Stuart Hall: “Fourth century orthodoxy is not the same as what Peter and Paul believed, any more than modern Roman Catholicism or Anglicanism is..."

• Thomas Jefferson, though surely not a cleric, was a great student of Christianity. Even he acknowledged the loss of the original gospel and said that he looked forward to "the prospect of a restoration of primitive Christianity. I must leave to younger athletes to encounter and lop off the false branches which have been engrafted into it by the mythologies of the middle and modern ages"

• Philip Smith: "The sad truth is that as soon as Christianity was generally diffused, it began to absorb corruptions from all the lands in which it was planted, and to reflect the complexion of all their systems of religion and philosophy."

• J.W.C. Wand (former Anglican Bishop of London) “[t]he new Christian church was frankly national. The people were converted en bloc; the temples were turned into churches and the priests were ordained into the Christian ministry.”

• Robert Wilken, professor of the history of Christianity at the University of Virginia, wrote “only a few enterprising intellectuals, and only after more than one hundred years of Christian history, had begun to take the risk of expressing Christian beliefs within the philosophical ideas current in the Greco Roman world. Most Christians were against to such attempts. As late as the third century, after the apologetic movement had introduced Greek ideas into Christian thinking, Christian preachers complained that the rank and file opposed such ideas.”

Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, Volume 3: Caesar and Christ, (1944), 595.

Stuart Hall, Doctrine and Practice in the Early Church, (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge; New edition, 2005), 36. ISBN 0281055092. ISBN 978-0281055098.

Thomas Jefferson, cited in Norman Cousins, In God We Trust (Harper & Brothers, 1958), 162.

Phillip Smith, History of the Christian Church during the first ten centuries (Kessinger Publishing, LLC, 2007[1886]), 1:49.

.W.C. Wand, A History of the Early Church to A.D. 500 (Methuen & Co Ltd, 1945), 244.

Robert Louis Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (Yale University Press, 2003), 79. ISBN 0300098391. ISBN 978-0300098396.