Christ founded 1 form of Christianity and it did just fine for over 1,600 years....then along came the protestants and decided to form 20,000 or so "denominations"...just what He needed...millions have been lost due to Luther, Zwingley, Calvin, Wesley, Henry VIII....you just can't make up the rules as you go along,,,,would be nice if you could, but you can't!!
“Christ founded 1 form of Christianity and it did just fine for over 1,600 years....”
Well... He founded a verbal tradition for Christianity with very simple rules to follow, and an air of austerity around it, instructed His disciples not to seek payment for their works, warned us to beware false prophets and told existing scholars at the time that they were being a bit too anal-retentive with the Working On The Sabbath and Stoning The Adulterers stuff. Which was then disseminated to 11 apostles who all went in different directions and resulted in different early interpretations of the Christian faith.
“The false doctrine” is a bit of a thorny issue because we can’t define the extent to which any doctrine is “false”. You can go back to the Councils of Nicea and call those some of the biggest edits of the New Testament in the entire history of the Christian faith. This was done for the right reasons - to consolidate the Paulian interpretation and assist in the spread of Christendom without it fracturing, but does that mean it takes precedence over actual accounts of the life of the Messiah that were inconvenient from an ecumenical point of view?
Jesus NEVER contradicted himself. The disciples contradicted each other all the time, and they argued. There’s a simple explanation for that. They were human. He was divine. They weren’t perfect. Simon Peter waved a sword about, and Jesus told him to put it away. Instead of the Church ensuring no schisms by meddling with the Bible, it only ensured there’d be schisms. Human fallibility’s a bitch.
But maybe that’s a good thing. We need to get away from the idea that anyone BUT Jesus was infallible, which means getting rid of all the preconceptions that the Nicene Creed deliberately set out to create.
There’s probably not even one >200 year old Christian sect full of pomp and judgement, that’s been filling its pockets and creating heirarchies of Man and perpetrating political and ideological witchhunts, which hasn’t strayed from Jesus’ teachings quite a bit.
So IMO, everything in the New Testament that we already know was politically motivated should be relegated to apocrypha. While all accounts of Jesus or lives of the apostles should be regarded with equal weight, with those in the apocrypha brought into the New Testament, even if the Church thinks those accounts undermine their own teachings.
When asked by the rules makers of His day, what did Jesus tell them was ‘the work’ that God requires for salvation? ... And if you know the answer to that one, upon Whom is the guarantee based, Who is the author and finisher of that salvation?