Among the things I have been trying to figure out lately is just how the different branches of Christianity - principally the threesome of Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism - form a single integrated unit. It is now my belief that these three ecclesial domains of the Christian church - Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant - are the embodiment and reflective mirrors of the three members of the Holy Family, namely St. Joseph, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus Christ, respectively, in the common Christian era.
Just as Christ came into the world through the Holy Family in order to actualize the promise of salvation for His people Israel in the Holy Land while opening that same door to God the Father to the Gentiles, so has He also collaborated in the ensuing two millennia with St. Joseph and the Virgin Mary to establish a new Israel - His church - in the form of European Christendom, which itself would continue to ultimate completion the task of bringing all peoples of the earth under the Kingdom of Heaven as inaugurated through the acts of Christ and His Apostles in the Gospels and the New Testament.
Indeed, the earthly life of Jesus can be demonstrated as having five phases, each with their exact later parallels in the 2,000-year history of His body, the church:
1. Conception to Birth
2. Infancy
3. Childhood
4. Adulthood
5. Public Ministry
This first of a multi-part series will treat of the first three phases - Christ's conception through His infancy and childhood, which ended with His debate with the Jewish teachers of the Law in the Temple at the age of twelve; future parts will treat of His subsequent adulthood (including young adulthood, i.e. adolescence) and public ministry - and the parallel roles played by Joseph and Mary in His more mature years.
1. Conception to Birth
Jesus - Conception to birth:
Conceived in the womb of Mary in Nazareth of Galilee, Christ's very existence was hidden from the world for the first three months, as His mother kept it secret from Joseph, to whom she was already espoused but not yet consummated with. This initial period was spent at the home of Mary's cousin Elizabeth, to prepare for the birth of the latter's son, John the Baptist - the prophet who was to herald the arrival of the Messiah. Upon return to Nazareth, Joseph and Mary settled to prepare for her child's own birth, but just prior to her expected delivery they were forced to migrate to Bethlehem, near Jerusalem, in order to register properly for a Roman census (as Joseph was a member of the House of David from Bethlehem). When the moment came, Jesus entered the world in a manger next to a nomadic shepherd's field - far from the gaze of the high and mighty of the kingdom whose eternal throne He had come to claim.
Church - 30-33 AD:
Conceived on the shores of the Sea of Galilee with Christ's calling of the Twelve Apostles, the church was also very much hidden from the world in its first gestation, during which time it also toiled in proximity with John the Baptist, given that he was the template of the future ordained priesthood of the church (beginning with the Apostles themselves) - that is, the commissioned heralds of Christ in what would be a renewed people of God (Israel). As the hour approached for Christ's Passion and death, so too did the hour approach for the birth of His church into the world: the Paschal mystery of His Passion, death, and resurrection was promptly followed by the final labor pangs of His body, which was finally delivered of His mother Mary's watchful intercession on Pentecost day - the birthday of the church. Just as Christ Himself was born among lowly nomadic herders, so His church got its start among the scattered Jews from all over the ancient world who had gathered in Jerusalem for the preceding Passover observances.
2. Infancy
Jesus - Birth to 2-3 years old:
Shortly after being presented at the Temple in Jerusalem by his parents according to the Mosaic Law, the infant Jesus was targeted for execution by the fearful and jealous King Herod of the Jews, and the Holy Family had to flee into exile in Egypt - already the traditional destination for fugitives in the history of Israel. Thus was Simeon's prophecy to Mary begun: the Christ would cause a great reversal in Israel, whereby those of power and status among God's chosen race would reject him, whilst the lowliest of commoners and even those not part of Israel would accept him. Only after Herod's death two to three years later did Joseph see fit to take Mary and a still very young Jesus back to Israel, and even then they returned to Nazareth in order to be as far from Jerusalem as possible.
Church - 33-313 AD:
Upon establishing a foothold in the Greco-Roman world of the mid-first century AD, the fledgling church was targeted for systematic persecution by the Jews, who first drove the followers of their own Messiah out of Jerusalem and Israel and subsequently secured a Roman crackdown on Christians as an unlawful sect of Judaism throughout their empire - even after Jerusalem was itself destroyed along with the Second Temple in 70 AD. In the following two and a half centuries, the church grew and flourished as an underground society and institution throughout the Mediterranean world with ever less linkage to the hereditary Jews of Israel - to such an extent that the Emperor Constantine saw fit to legalize Christianity in the Roman empire in 313 AD. By then, the remaining Jews had also completely migrated out of the Holy Land, and thus for the first time the church was able to lay claim to the physical territory of Israel as a special place of pilgrimage; with this, the young body of Christ had truly become the new Israel, as the Gentiles had truly supplanted the Jews as foretold by Simeon.
Notably, although Constantine had been emperor of the Western Roman empire when he legitimized the church, he soon realized that the church was more mature both in terms of governance and also in doctrine not in the Latin-speaking Western empire, but in the Greek-speaking Eastern empire, based in the fast-growing city of Byzantium at the junction of Europe and Asia, to which he then moved the capital of his unified empire - hence it being renamed Constantinople later in the 4th century. Thus, Christendom was born in the West through the Western, Latin-rite Catholic Church, but its political center of gravity was in the East with its Eastern, Greek-rite Orthodox Church. The Pope in Rome, being the acknowledged successor to Peter, was titular head of the whole universal church - which at this time also included the other Eastern Apostolic Sees of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria - but in practice the Eastern churches were very autonomous, and over time the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople was seen to supplant not merely the other Eastern Sees but even the Pope himself in overall spiritual and temporal influence in the empire. Over the course of the remainder of the first millennium, this East-West duality came to effectively embody the disparate roles of the Virgin Mary (the West) and her husband Joseph (the East) in raising Christ (i.e. His body, the church): whilst the former continued to nurture the young Christ in the freer and more open sociopolitical climate of the West, the latter shouldered responsibility for protecting both Mary and Jesus with a strong centralized imperial authority - including military power - in the East.
3. Childhood
Jesus - 3 to 12 years old:
In Nazareth, the child Jesus was reared by Joseph and Mary to obey both the Law of God and the authority of man (starting with themselves); despite the standard strict Hebrew upbringing in the commandments of Moses and the lineage of the Prophets, the child Jesus, being Grace and Truth Himself, inevitably introduced an entirely new dimension of divine life into the word and liturgy of the Second Temple Judaism that His family practiced, and this pointed to His future mission of likewise introducing the unprecedented fulfillment of all the promises of the Law and the Prophets of old. As would have been customary for a Jewish family of ancient Palestine, Jesus' father Joseph was responsible for his pedagogical training and instruction in the Torah and in learning and following the rites and customs of both the local synagogue and the Temple in Jerusalem - to which the family would have gone with extended relatives on an annual Passover pilgrimage - whereas His mother Mary was primarily responsible for nurturing His life of private prayer and devotion in the home and the finer instincts of tenderness, compassion, and mercy associated with such piety.
Christ's childhood effectively came to an end in his thirteenth year - that which would have been His bar-mitzvah as a boy coming of age in the Hebrew tradition. During the spring Passover pilgrimage that year, twelve-year-old Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem to debate with the teachers of the Law in the Temple - without His parents' knowledge. Other than the revolutionary nature of an adolescent talking on equal terms with learned scholars multiple times His age, there was a deeper and more substantive tension in play: this brush with the Temple hierarchy was the opening skirmish between the Old Law of Moses which the Pharisees and other sects of late Second Temple Judaism were twisting to ever greater degrees of complexity and rigidity on the one hand, and the radical New Law of Grace which Jesus was bringing to Israel and the world at large in His own Person.
Church - 313 to circa 1100 AD:
After its legalization by Rome in the fourth century, the church grew in doctrinal and organizational stature for most of the remainder of the first millennium - through a constant stream of internal struggles that typically took the form of theological errors mushrooming into widespread heresies which then had to be stamped out. Over time, an ossification developed between the Latin-rite Western Catholic Church led by the Roman Pope and the Greek-rite Eastern Orthodox Church led by the Patriarch of Constantinople: the latter still recognized the universal ecclesial headship of the former on the throne of Peter, but the fact that its own spiritual authority was still merged with the temporal power of the Roman empire - which survived in the East in the form of the Byzantine empire for centuries after it fell in the West in 476 AD - meant that in practical terms it could often be taken as the more senior body. More significantly, the decentralized state structure of feudal Western Europe gave the Catholic Church more leeway for liturgical and devotional flexibility in its evolving practices and traditions - notably in the highly dynamic monastic realm - as compared to the Orthodox Church alongside the centralized structure of imperial Byzantium. By the ninth and tenth centuries, this dichotomy became increasingly untenable for East-West unity, as the relatively rigidly conformist East found itself less and less willing to acknowledge the titular primacy of the more loosely disciplined West: the two churches finally officially split in the Great Schism of 1054, by which point both had reached essential maturity in their integration with the sociopolitical domains under their purview.
Thus, whereas the Eastern Orthodox Church came to embody the conservatism and discipline of the Law, be it though the Law of Christ through the sacraments, the Roman Catholic Church came to embody the evangelical fluidity of Christian grace and humanism - anchored though it still was in the same aforementioned governance of the sacraments. In cultural and linguistic terms, this meant that the great classics of Hellenic philosophy of classic antiquity, despite being of Greek origin, would ultimately be augmented and modernized by the great Latin writers of the middle ages. By the eleventh century, Christendom as a whole had truly become thus bifurcated: its Western Catholic wing corresponding to the Virgin Mary, nurturing as it did the Mystical Body of Christ the Child in Western Europe into an adolescent that would grow eventually into the adulthood of modern Western civilization; and its Eastern Orthodox wing to St. Joseph, protecting as it did its Western kin from the threat of Islamic and other Asiatic invaders from deeper within the Orient.
At this juncture, however, the religion of the God of Israel had once more reverted to the rigidity of legalism in its original home territory of the Holy Land: the Muslims had occupied it from the receding Byzantine empire and had banned Christian pilgrims from entering; they were also at this point in history relatively tolerant towards the Jews, who themselves had emerged with a deeper identity rooted in the Mosaic covenant based on the Diaspora-inspired Talmud, and found themselves more at home in Islamic lands in the Mediterranean rim than in Christendom. As such, the latter took deep affront in the closure of Jerusalem to its pilgrims by peoples who were perceived to belong to a retrograde, graceless version of the revealed Truth. And so, with the swagger and excitement that the young Jesus had taken on the scholars of the Law in the Temple, the increasingly confident, even brash Mystical Body of Christ - the Western church - set out at the close of the 11th century to retake the Holy Land and the Holy City from the reactionary infidels who would not acknowledge the Grace and Truth which superseded the Law.
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