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December 2nd, 2015 
Awake Goy In my first installment of this series for Renegade Tribune, I focused on how Emperor Constantine usurped the Christian religion of Rome and mixed in local Pagan customs and holidays to shape a religion that would be acceptable to a larger population and it became so popular it was designated as the state religion of Rome. Many very devout Christians have pointed to these events as the decline and fall of the real Christianity.
The question remains, however, was there ever any authenticity to the Christian religion at all? In this installment, I want to explore the lives and teachings of the desert fathers, a loosely knit group of hermits and members of monasteries in the Egyptian desert, many existing prior to the Jesus events.
Pre-Jesus desert fathers wrote of deeply spiritual matters and had little to do with any kind of formal structure. Post-Jesus desert fathers also had little to do with formal religious structure but they adhered to a more formal theology that was passed on to them from the official Christian church of the time. What did not change in the transition was the devotion to that all important personal relationship with God. One begins to wonder at why these formal theologies were imposed on the monasteries when they had a more purely spiritual existence prior to that?
The Orthodox Church maintains a wiki page (http://orthodoxwiki.org/Sayings_of_the_Desert_Fathers) with numerous sayings and quotations associated with the more notable of the desert fathers. When one reads these sayings and then contrasts that spirituality with the modern spiritual of Catholics and Protestant Christians, the evolution from the personal spiritual life to the highly structured theology we are familiar with today is clearly evident.
For example, from this wiki page we get this: “Abba Ammonas was asked, ‘What is the “narrow and hard way?” (Mt. 7.14) He replied, ‘The “narrow and hard way” is this, to control your thoughts, and to strip yourself of your own will, for the sake of God. This is also the meaning of the sentence, “Lo, we have left everything and followed you.” (Mt. 19.27)” And this. “It was said of Abba John the Persian that when some evildoers came to him, he took a basin and wanted to wash their feet. But they were filled with confusion, and began to do penance.” (http://orthodoxwiki.org/Sayings_of_the_Desert_Fathers)
The so called Gospel of Thomas is full of just such sayings. The politics around why this Gospel associated with the Apostle Thomas, who lived among the desert fathers, was never included in the New Testament is often obscured and not well understood. This gospel more clearly enunciates the personal encounter with God and has little to do with the structure of any kind of organized religion. This gospel in fact is often more closely associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls, again predating the Jesus event by several generations, than any other the other New Testament documents.
Source Article from http://renegadetribune.com/desert-fathers-last-real-christians/
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