“Christianity” Is Not The Religion of Jesus

Christianity is not the religion of Jesus. This may sound like a radical statement, but hear me out: What we call “Christianity” today bears little resemblance to what Jesus of Nazareth actually taught and practiced.

As the great theologian Howard Thurman pointed out, we must distinguish between the “religion about Jesus” — what Christianity has become — and the “religion of Jesus” — the religion Jesus himself actually lived and taught. (1)

The religion about Jesus, which emerged in the centuries after his death, focuses on believing the right things about Jesus: that he was divine, born of a virgin, died for our sins, and rose from the dead. It’s about correct doctrine and proper beliefs. Follow these teachings, accept these truths, and you’ll receive eternal rewards in heaven.

But this wasn’t Jesus’s religion at all. The historical Jesus — the poor, Palestinian Jewish prophet who lived 2,000 years ago — practiced and preached something radically different.

His religion — the religion of Jesus — is about transforming yourself and the world through relationship with God and ethical living. At its core was a simple yet profound commandment: love God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.

Jesus Preached Action Over Belief

The Greatest Commandment was the absolute core of Jesus’s message. It appears in the three earliest-written Gospels. (2) When asked what was most important, Jesus didn’t say “believe that I am God incarnate” or “accept that I will die for your sins.” He said: Love God and love your neighbors. Everything else hangs on these two commands.

It is through following this commandment that we bring about the Kingdom of God, which Jesus proclaimed was near. (3) It wasn’t about escaping to heaven or avoiding hell — concepts that barely appear in Jesus’s own teachings. (4) It was about transforming the world by transforming ourselves through love.

Look at how Jesus actually lived. He shared meals with outcasts and those labeled as “sinners,” challenging the religious authorities who placed doctrine over compassion. He healed the sick without questioning their beliefs or backgrounds. He uplifted the poor while criticizing the wealthy and powerful. Women were welcomed as disciples in his movement, defying the patriarchal norms of his time. He demonstrated nonviolent resistance to oppression and showed compassion even to foreigners and enemies.

Jesus never demanded that people believe specific things about him. Instead, he invited them to follow his way of living — a way centered on love, justice, and radical inclusion.

The corruption of this core message began with a so-called apostle who did not know or meet Jesus before he died. Paul, in the decades after Jesus’s death, began to emphasize correct belief over correct action, putting him at odds with Jesus’s original followers, including Jesus’s brother James who led the Jerusalem church. (5)

The “Christianity” Paul pushed was just one of many interpretations of Jesus that spread in the decades and centuries after Jesus’s death. As Christianity spread, the ruling class recognized the anesthetizing potential of a religion that promised other-worldly reward for this-worldly obedience.

By the time this version of Christianity — Pauline Christianity — became Rome’s official religion in the 4th century, it had morphed into something Jesus himself would barely recognize: a religion focused more on correct beliefs about Jesus than actually following his way of life. (6)

The shift from the religion of Jesus to the religion about Jesus had profound consequences. The love of enemies he preached became crusades against infidels. His care for the poor was twisted into a prosperity gospel. His radical inclusion transformed into rigid exclusion. His vision of transforming this world devolved into an obsession with escaping to “heaven.” Following the way of Jesus became merely worshiping Jesus as God.

But: It’s Not Too Late To Go Back.

We desperately need to rediscover the religion of Jesus. Our world is crying out for his message of transformative love. We see the failures of the religion about Jesus all around us in white Christian nationalism, in prosperity gospel mega-churches, and in conservative “Christians” who worship Jesus while ignoring everything he taught.

The good news is that we can choose a different path. We can return to the simple yet profound religion that Jesus actually lived and taught. We can center our lives on loving God and loving our neighbors. We can work to create God’s Kingdom — a world of justice, peace, and radical love — here and now.

This isn’t about rejecting Christianity wholesale. It’s about stripping away centuries of accumulated doctrine and institutionalization to rediscover the revolutionary heart of Jesus’s message. It’s about moving from believing things about Jesus to actually living like Jesus.

The religion of Jesus offers exactly what our broken world needs. It provides a call to radical love in a world of hatred, a vision of inclusion in a world of division, a path of peace in a world of violence. It offers a commitment to justice in a world of oppression and a way of transformation in a world desperate for change.

The choice is ours. The world doesn’t need more people who believe the right things about Jesus. It needs more people who actually live like Jesus lived and love like Jesus loved. That’s what the religion of Jesus was always meant to be.

Let’s reclaim it together.

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Footnotes:

1. This idea is laid out in Thurman’s classic, Jesus and the Disinherited (Nashville, TN: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1942).
2. The Greatest Commandment appears in the Synoptic Gospels: Matthew 22:36–40, Mark 12:28–31, Luke 10:25–28. Scholars believe these Gospels were written many decades before the Gospel of John, which reflects much later thinking about Jesus.
3. This is an idea laid out more fully by Leo Tolstoy in What I Believe, whose writings would influence Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
4. As biblical scholar Bart Ehrman explains in Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), our modern concepts of heaven and hell cannot be found in Jesus’s teachings or the Old Testament. Ehrman writes: “None of these visions [of the afterlife] can be found in the Bible, because they do not, in fact, represent the earliest Christian views of the afterlife. The ideas of a glorious hereafter for some souls and torment for others, to come at the point of death, cannot be found in either the Old Testament or in the teachings of the historical Jesus. To put it succinctly: the founder of Christianity did not believe that the soul of a person who died would go to heaven or hell” (p. 16). Rather, Jesus preached about a coming Kingdom of God on earth.
5. The conflict between Paul and the Jerusalem church led by James is well documented in both Paul’s own letters and the book of Acts. As scholar Reza Aslan explains in Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (New York: Random House, 2013), “Paul seems totally unconcerned with anything ‘Jesus-in-the-flesh’ may or may not have said. In fact, Paul shows no interest at all in the historical Jesus. There is almost no trace of Jesus of Nazareth in any of his letters. With the exception of the crucifixion and the Last Supper, which he transforms from a narrative into a liturgical formula, Paul does not narrate a single event from Jesus’ life. Nor does Paul ever actually quote Jesus’s words” (p. 187). Paul’s views were so extreme that around 57 CE, “James and the apostles demand that Paul come to Jerusalem and answer for his deviant teachings” (p. 190). This theological divide between Paul’s emphasis on belief and James’s emphasis on action would profoundly shape Christianity’s development.
6. This shift was formalized at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, where Emperor Constantine convened bishops to establish official doctrine about Jesus’s divine nature — a subject Jesus himself never addressed. The focus on correct belief (orthodoxy) over correct action (orthopraxy) was further crystallized when Emperor Theodosius I made Christianity the Roman Empire’s official religion in 380 CE through the Edict of Thessalonica. As Reza Aslan notes in Zealot, this meant that “the same empire that had executed Jesus as a state criminal now hailed him as a state god.”