This is intended to be a very brief article. I leave it to you the reader to do your own foot work so that after having read atleast some of what the early christian fathers have said you can make a decision as to whether the early Christians or the modern christians are the real christians. A good place to start looking for what early Christians believed would be the Barry Bickmore link posted here on this website.

We really need to address the Hellenized Christianity issue. What modern Orthodox Christians need to understand is that their theological beliefs come from Hellenized Christianity (greek thinking added about 300 a.d. +/-). Hellenization means that Greek philosophies were infused into Christian theology and doctrines. This was done to make Christianity have more appeal to the masses, especially the Greeks. An example of this is the de-corpealization of God. The early Christians (charter members of the original primitive church during and just after the life time of the Apostles) did not beleive that God was only a spirit with a physically body bound son. This does not square with modern fundamentalist Christian theology anymore than it did with christian members after the third century a.d.

The bottom line is that the early Christians would not be considered Christians by todays fundamentalist christian theologians if they were held to the beliefs that were expressed in their writings. That's right, the early Christians are heretics by TODAYS standards. So what you have to decide now is this. Do we today understand Christian doctrines better than the original primitive church members and thier leaders did? If so, then the fundamentalist Christians today are the real Christians and the first Christians were nothing more than heretics. Before you make that judgment too quickly I should tell you that the some of the early christian fathers were actually students of the Apostles or students of those who learned directly from the Apostles.