"The church in the wilderness” is defined as those believers who were/are outside of any of the orthodox or traditional churches, but were/are empowered from within by the Holy Ghost, with Christ as head of this church. Put another way, historically, “the church in the wilderness” was never composed of a large human hierarchy. Yes, at times it had some localized “groups of churches” with bishops, of sort, to minister to the pastors, but that is all.
The primary difference between “the church in the wilderness” and the mainstream orthodox/traditional churches is Christ's direct control of the believers, so that any human leaders served more as “mentors," rather than as rulers over the church. Here is the proof that this is the way it should be.
EPHESIANS 5:23 “For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.”
So Christ is the direct head of all true believers, not humans.
So John taught that no one is needed as a “teacher” per se, because that is the Holy Ghost's “job”.
2 THESSALONIANS 3:9 “Not because we have not power, but to make ourselves an ensample [mentor] unto you to follow us.”
1 PETER 5:3 “Neither as being lords over God's heritage, but being ensamples [mentor] to the flock.”
So Paul and Peter wrote that they had the power to be a ruler over the believers, but chose to be their mentors instead, which is in stark contrast with most all orthodox bodies, and even other big and powerful bodies of today, and even throughout history, that often "rule" the flock, rather than "pastor" the flock.
In summary, with respect to “the church in the wilderness”, while it can most certainly have “mentors”, each believer's leader and teacher is Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost, respectively.
What follows is a history that shows who were the non-orthodox and non-traditional “handlers” of the Word of God, who were used by God to preserve it until the time of the printing press, where the text of these “handlers” became the traditional Received Text Bibles of today, printed in 150+ languages of the world. More specifically, the true Received Text Bibles are composed from the majority of manuscripts, not the minority (known also as the "critical text").
The reputation of "the church in the wilderness” is of utmost importance, as it shows, because of their direct control by God Himself, they were able to propagate and preserve the true Word of God for about 1500 years, until the era of the printing press. They did not follow “the traditions of men”, but the direct teachings of God Himself. It is de facto, the work of God, not of men.
Introduction
“The church in the wilderness” links the apostolic beginnings of the church to the born-again believers of today. With it comes their propagation of the Word of God, with a careful dedication to its accurate preservation. They were the “handlers” who maintained it accurately, giving us today, the Word of God, just as it was given to first century believers, albeit in whatever language it was propagated in, including, but not limited to Koine Greek, 2nd century Latin (“old Latin”), Aramaic (Peshitta), Gaelic, Coptic, Italic, and many other languages as well.
“The church of the wilderness” is not a denominational body, but rather a body that Christ Himself maintained throughout 2,000 years, whether in small family circles, home churches, local church facilities, or whatever form, but always with the idea that the believers were “independent” of any denomination, and fully under the influence and direct oversight by Jesus Christ Himself. This does not exclude those today, or in the past, who are/were members of denominational bodies, but it does exclude those whose dependence on their denominational core beliefs exceed those of the authority of the Bible or Jesus Christ, as its direct head, or otherwise minimizes Christ and instead lifts itself up.
The story of “the church in the wilderness” is really the story of those who struggled against those orthodox and traditional churches that put “the traditions of men” (as Jesus put it) above the Bible. It is also the story of those who struggled to stay alive in the face of egregious and relentless persecution, often dying to protect their true faith and the true Word of God. They did not waiver, simply because God guided them, and knowing that God was giving them direct guidance, it made it that much harder to waiver, even if they wanted to.
In its core beliefs, “the church of the wilderness” had an unbending faith in their eternal salvation, where they knew from the day of their rebirth, their eternal life already started (John 5:24) and was guaranteed to continue on the day they left this life. They knew it because (1) salvation is a free gift (no amount of works obtains it) (2) Christ died on the cross for their sins, and naturally nothing could equal that, or even supplement it in this life by one's own effort, (3) because they were free from the law of “good works to obtain salvation” they now experienced being loved by God personally, and also knew how they could show their love to God, in tangible ways, freely, and without having to love God to obtain salvation, and (4) their decision to trust the Lord included coming to Christ in repentance and total surrender. This is in total contrast with the "bondage" that the orthodox and traditional church bodies placed/place on its members, with all sorts of requirements to obtain salvation, maintain salvation, or even lose it if not in direct obedience to the edicts of some church body.
The Birth
It goes without saying that the birth of “the church in the wilderness” started with the Apostles, with of course, Christ as their direct leader. Indeed, Christ's Jewish disciples maintained a fellowship outside the mainstream orthodox Jewish tradition. So in the very beginning, they started out as the first "church in the wilderness”.
After Christ's crucifixion and resurrection, the book of Acts and the various letters that followed, show how indeed “the church in the wilderness” continued and expanded. Yes, there were some formal bodies, such as “the church at Galatia”, but all were free from denominational concerns for the most part. In fact, Paul spoke against divisions based solely on being a follower of one leader or another (1 Corinthians 1:10-13). Paul wanted all to be followers of Christ in a very direct sense, with leaders only as mentors, not rulers.
It is clear from scriptures that the central location for ministering to “the church in the wilderness” was out of Jerusalem, at least until the Romans destroyed the city, and chased Jews and Christians out of the city.
A place that was secondary in the ministering to various church bodies all over the region was Antioch. Indeed, it is where “the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch” (Acts 11:26). History records for us that this became the focal point for ministering to “the church in the wilderness” after the destruction of Jerusalem.
In due time, in the first few centuries, the church at Antioch continued the effort to evangelize outside of the regions first evangelized by the Apostles. This included, but was not limited to efforts in:
church planting
translating scriptures into the languages where the new churches were planted
following up on the newly planted churches to insure healthy spiritual growth.
In the beginning of these efforts, things were going quite well. Eventually, in a few centuries,“the traditions of men” began to creep in, however.
It is well documented how the Greek Orthodox church, the Catholic church, and other orthodox and traditional churches began. “The church in the wilderness” was not to be a part of this set of traditions. Unfortunately, in time, even the church at Antioch began to have orthodoxy and tradition take over for the living church, making it a body run my men, rather than by God.
Before troubles in Antioch reached a point of complete capitulation to the devil, the faithful were able to distribute the Word of God, without textual errors, to many regions of the world, within a 1000 miles or so, and in a relatively large number of copies.
So what happened to “the church in the wilderness”? Well, it continued to be just that, just not in Antioch and not in other places that had become orthodox or followers of “the traditions of men”.
The reasons for orthodoxy and “the traditions of men” are many, such as pride, endeavoring to make the church run in a neat package, disagreements in interpretation of the meanings in scripture, etc. However, one really important reason is what is called today, “easy-believerism”, where such believers had/have no relationship with God, were/are not truly born-again, and so Christ was/is not their leader, and so they sought/seek human leaders.
Easy-believerism is defined where someone provides a “formula” for induction into the “church”, simply believing and/or being baptized, for example, and so a person is said to be a “Christian”. Nothing could be further from the truth. Being baptized no more makes you a Christian, than walking through a car wash makes you an automobile. And simple "belief" does not constitute repentance and surrender to the Lordship of Christ.
To truly be born-again (a true Christian), one must (1) acknowledge they are a sinner, with no hope of salvation by their own efforts, (2) believe with all their heart and soul they Jesus died for all their sins, past and future, and that there is nothing they can do to add to that sacrifice on the cross to obtain or maintain salvation and (3) come to Christ in sincere repentance and total surrender and let Christ not only be Savior, but Lord and master of one's life. Indeed, the "traditions of men" often trample on the love of God, His mercy and grace, and replace obtaining the free gift of salvation with a works' based dogma.
Unfortunately, “easy-believerism” is among many of the reasons throughout history for denominational formation, because most “believers” in such circles are not born-again and thus are prone to "invent" and follow “the traditions of men”, including even changing God's Word to fit their denominational beliefs, something that Catholics and Mormons, for example, freely admit doing, but they are not the only ones !!!
It is well beyond the scope of this article to provide a 27-volume history of the church. However, a brief history can be provided, but with an emphasis on what is in retrospect, “the church in the wilderness”.
As mentioned earlier, the church had its beginnings in Jerusalem, then reached out to regions all around it, and eventually continued that outreach from Antioch, with the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans.
The church at Antioch is well-documented as being a teaching center by the 2nd century. In this center were many scholarly Christians who provided translations for the church planting missionaries all over the known world in that time frame, and even for a few centuries thereafter.
Now since Antioch was the churches' default teaching center in the first and second century and since it was not far-removed for its Apostolic roots, it provided very accurate translations into a dozen or more languages in the early going, because of their faithfulness to the Apostles, and of course, to God, at least for a few generations after. (Yes, in due time, even Antioch became afflicted with “the traditions of men”.)
The product of the distribution of translations out of Antioch, was that in due time the canon of the Bible was being formed, not so much as a part Antioch's long-term plans, but more because it was to provide the Word of God to those in need of the Word of God! Now since God had used certain writers to write His inspired Word, the Christians in Antioch, aware of this, provided amble assistance in the repeated copying of the inspired writers' texts.
Eventually, the Bible came to have its 27 New Testament books, not so much because of the will of men, but because of the will of God. This was tangibly witnessed throughout the Christian world, such that by overwhelming usage, the 27 books were picked as “official” text. In other words, it was not so much that any particular church body picked which books to include in the New Testament, as much as common usage prevailed. So, books that rarely were read in the churches, were simply rejected, and all those books believers wanted to read or have read to them frequently, were the 27 books we now have, with Hebrews and Revelation making it into these 27 books, somewhat less by common usage, and more by their special significance.
Now all this missionary work and distribution of scriptures went relatively smoothly for about three hundred years after Christ's resurrection. Then things began to change.
It was soon after the Roman Emperor Constantine declared Christianity legal in Rome in 313 AD, that the Church at Rome, already changing doctrine to suit its needs, felt especially empowered with the government to back it up. (Historical records confirm this.) At first this did not amount to much persecution of other believers who did not profess their allegiance to "the church" at Rome. But as time passed, that changed too and persecution began.
Now, about the end of the 4th century, the Church at Rome finished its New Latin Vulgate, which it declared by them as the only true scriptures. However, it contained blatant changes to the text, especially the New Testament, which it freely admits it did because various popes over three hundred years claimed they received new revelation and inspiration from God to make the changes to these scriptures. (This all widely documented.)
Furthermore, Rome felt it was the authority over all the churches in the world, because Peter was said to be the "first pope". The church at Rome was the “true church”, based on a badly interpreted statement that Jesus would build His church on Peter, when in fact, He really said that Peter was only a small stone, thus He could only build His church on large rock, and that large rock was Himself. (One sees this to be the case in the Greek, but, conveniently, not in the Latin of Rome by the end of the 4th century.)
Nonetheless, the so-called “true church” at Rome gained power, backed by the government of Rome. The history of its persecution is long, deep, and gory. Most scholars today agree that because the church at Rome either directly persecuted those outside of the “true church”, or got involved in political power struggles, caused the death of over 45 million people, over about a 1000 year period. Some say this number was as high as 60 million. True, very seldom did an official member of the clergy of the church of Rome ever kill anyone, but instead it left the killing up to government soldiers, though it was a party to the murdering. (BTW, the Catholic Church has acknowledged this recently and said "we are sorry.")
How they accomplished all this was to publish for various rulers that backed the Roman church, in today's terminology, an “enemies” list. While the usual political reasons were given, and wars ensued, very often large numbers of Christians who lived in various areas in the world, and who refused to come under the teachings of the church at Rome, were attacked and murdered by government soldiers at the urging of the Roman church.
Now while there were various methods used to persuade rulers to murder all the people in whole villages, and even large regions, the most common reason was to tell the rulers that there were people who needed to be eradicated because they were “enemies of the church and thus enemies of God” and since God “ordained the king”, anyone who opposed “the church” opposed God, and thus opposed the king.
Some of the most notably persecuted people were those called the Waldensians, who lived in mountainous regions in northern Italy, southern Spain, France, Austria, Germany and what is now called Switzerland. However, there were still many thousands of others over the thousand or so years of persecution by the Roman church, who survived and thus preserved God's Word. (Their 1000-year history is far too much to document here, but is well-documented in many books on the subject.)
Preservation of the true faith is not something “the church in the wilderness” set out to do, or even maintain. Rather, as God sought to bring to Himself believers who were in the “true faith”, where He, Himself, insured the formation and maintenance of bodies of believers all over the world, that only by coincidence today came to be called “the church in the wilderness”. In other words, it is a phrase that someone in recent times invented to describe the work that God did for about the first 1500 years in maintaining bodies of believers outside of unfaithful churches throughout history, and especially the church at Rome.
Indeed,
Jesus warned the seven churches mentioned in Revelation of their
wayward ways. But this is only seven. Today, there are over 40,000
Christian denominations in the world. It might not be possible, or
even desirable to determine which of these maintains “the true
faith”. But because this number is so large, it is very evident
“the traditions of men” formed the vast majority of these
denominations, most likely without God's explicit approval. If God
was behind them all, there would only be one “denomination”, not
over 40,000 !
One of the earmarks of preservation of the truth, is the attacks on the truth. In politics, we see this all the time, with propaganda, in sports, with illegal drug use, in education, with one-sided social agendas, and so on.
And with respect to Christianity, throughout its history, it has been attacked relentlessly. Some of the time it has been only personal attacks or political persecution, but at other times “believers” have been murdered for their beliefs.
God's preservation of the true faith started with what is called today “the church in the wilderness” and was maintained over the centuries by Him.
In the thousand or so years that those who opposed the church at Rome were murdered, there walked with the Lord many groups of believers in all the regions under Roman church control that both survived and thrived without allegiance to Rome, and in doing so maintained the scriptures handed down to them from out of Antioch.
Of course, as copies worn out from significant use, more copies had to be made. The histories handed down to us about many of these bodies of believers leads one to accept that they were faithful to the Lord, and thus sought to make only faithful copies of scriptures in each of their respective languages. (There is additional proof of this, shortly.)
Often, the church at Rome sought not only to destroy those Christians who would not swear allegiance to the “true church”, but also sought to destroy the non-Latin texts and particularly those not conforming to uniquely Catholic teachings, doctrine, and the Latin Vulgate itself. And very often their crusades did manage to burn many a Bible text.
Despite the relentlessness attacks on non-Catholics, the Word of God survived. Not only did it survive, but it survived in many languages, as well.
This determination to propagate the real church and the real scriptures outside of the reach of the church at Rome, or even other orthodox churches, and some others as well, is how these bodies of believers got their name “the church in the wilderness”.
Those in “the church in the wilderness” simply took their “orders” directly from God, and not from Rome, not Constantinople, and not from other mainstream major denominations either. Of course this is conjecture, but for the following.
When the printing press was invented, it was not too long before many wished the Bible be committed to paper, and formed as a book.
About this same time, a learned Catholic named Erasmus, who was much like Luther in his rejection of much of the Catholic teachings, took it upon himself to produce a translation, not from the Latin Vulgate, but from available Greek texts. Not too long after, Stephanus improved on the work of Erasmus, resulting in the Stephanus Greek New Testament of 1550. Eventually the Bishops' Bible (in English) was produced, not to mention Bibles in several other languages as well. This was also the era of the King James Bible.
What was amazing to Stephanus, who not only examined the available Greek texts, but also texts in the Old Latin (from 157 AD), the Peshitta (also from 157 AD), the Gaelic, the Italic (157 AD too), the Coptic (125 AD) and several other languages, was the virtual agreement in all the texts !!! It also seemed miraculous, because all the various sources had clearly propagated down through dozens of centuries, in different geographical regions, with different sets of governments and languages, and many different church bodies, all mostly unaffiliated. Yet the Bible texts from all these diversities, were virtually identical. It was if the hand of God had insured their accurate preservation!
Some might argue, that through the centuries there were those that worked on "harmonization" of these different language texts, so that is why they are so alike, yet there is simply no evidence of that. To the contrary, evidence supports independent maintenance of these scriptures in various languages, primarily because the persecution by the Roman church was so relentless.
Therefore, “handlers” of these texts simply did not work to harmonize the texts from about 500 AD until about 1500 AD, because it meant possibly exposing ones' self to public knowledge, and in doing so, possibly being discovered by the Catholic church, and that meant a certain death. Hence, maintenance of these texts was done “privately” and independently, and especially away from the knowledge of the church of Rome. So efforts at harmonization were very likely rare, if ever, during this era of persecution.
This theory of harmonization also does not even include the obvious evidence of the difficulty of safely transporting texts, having amble translators to compare different language versions, and the amount of effort needed to change the texts, and no doubt, arguments over which version was right, even if only minor differences, and the expense of all of this was not justifiable. Thus harmonization simply did not take place.
Thus when Stephanus and others saw how much alike so many different texts were, and knowing of the unlikelihood of any harmonization efforts, due to the relentless persecution of the Roman church, they were then made that much more aware of the hand of God working to preserve His word !!!
Ironically, the relentless effort by the Roman church to destroy all the other Bible texts, in whatever language, is what, in human terms, worked (ironically) to provide the preservation of the Word of God, and not only that, but to provide the evidence for Stephanus and others how accurately the Word of God was preserved, since the majority of texts agreed with each other so well, without any efforts of harmonization.
Today, we have many more manuscripts than the days of Stephanus, and most all these new manuscripts have reinforced the evidence that the great many New Testament texts were well preserved, independently from one another, since we now say that 95% of the Greek texts agree, virtually 100%, and we have a great many Aramaic, Old Latin, Coptic and Italic texts that are in agreement also, as well as several other language manuscripts from the early years of Christianity, including about 10,000 texts with New Testament quotations, so many in fact, the New Testament could be reconstructed from the external writings alone!
In fact, the number of external writings from the first few centuries contain over 86,000 citations of early “church fathers”, thus proving the reliability and accuracy of the Greek New Testament of Stephanus.
1 Corinthians 1:27-28 “But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are:”
What Paul is saying is that God does not choose the “high and mighty” to fulfill His wishes, but lowly, faithful persons. So with respect to the preservation of His Word, He did not select, or would not select any of the so-called “wise” of the orthodox and even traditional church bodies throughout history to maintain/preserve His Word. Instead, he chose those who were weak and despised by the world or the wise of the so-called church. Coincidentally (or maybe on purpose, as a part of God's will), those that were so relentlessly persecuted by the Roman church, for even a thousand years, add credibility to the lack of attempts at harmonization in thousands of texts, and yet today, we have virtually identical texts in thousands of manuscripts, despite so many diversities of languages, geographies, and other histories and cultures.
Today, the name
“the church in the wilderness” has its name by its own nature, that
is, lowly, and persecuted groups of believers, outside the mainstream
churches from about the first few centuries, at least until the era
of the printing press.
