HeyJaredDiscovering Early Christianity
A biweekly newsletter for people who are (or once were) interested in or attracted to the main messages of Jesus, but have been put off by the ways the religion he inspired has evolved over its 2000-year history.
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- Sep 20, 2026
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- Jul 21, 2026
Latest issues
My Man Marcion - redux (opens the original)
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Note: Thie is an edited and updated version of a post first published August 16, 2024One of the first religious thinkers to capture my attention as I began studying early Christianity was Marcion, a theologian, teacher, and preacher in the Second Century CE, who had a radically different conception of Christianity than many of his fellow believers. Marcion taught that Jesus’s appearance on earth revealed a god of love and forgiveness—an entirely new phenomenon in the history of humankind. This n
635 CE: When Christianity Went to China (opens the original)
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There are many tales from late antiquity about how the teachings of Jesus spread across the world. Some early Christian writers speculated that the Apostle Mark was sent to Egypt in the first century CE; others that the Apostle Paul had voyaged as far as Spain in his later years. Many similar stories were told in other places, but little about them can be proved historically. Most remain legends, likely created centuries afterward to confer authority through imagined lines of apostolic successio
Seven Spiritual Sayings from the Gospel of Thomas (opens the original)
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One of the most intriguing and thought-provoking texts of early Christianity is The Gospel of Thomas, part of a group of lost but recovered non-canonical gospels and sacred texts. The Gospel begins with a short prologue, announcing that “These are the hidden sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Judas Thomas the twin recorded.” One hundred and fourteen sayings follow, presented without background or commentary. Most are simply introduced by the phrase. “Jesus said,” and they start with a bang:
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