A Little About Me

Welcome to originalchristianity.net. My name is Mark, and I am the guy behind this site. I am looking for people with an interest in Christianity, especially what it was like at the time of the original apostles.

I became interested in this a long time ago, having been raised in a house with a Catholic father and a Protestant mother. At that time, there were rules were for Catholics who married non-Catholics, so I had to be raised as a Catholic and go to Catholic schools. But there have been problems with that for as long as I can remember.

You see, my grandfather (mom’s side) was a strict itinerant preacher. Raised in a godless house, he was a whiskey-drinking, ball-playing, whirling dervish of a young man when he heard the call. He gave it all up: no more drinking, swearing, or even dancing or going to the movies. As intensely as he was at playing baseball, dancing, swearing, and drinking, he was the same with Christianity. There was no half-speed for Sam Leddon. He went from one intense world to another.

Holiness was bigger then than now, and Sam wanted to be holy. Sam wanted his family to be holy. So my mom said she couldn’t even go out as a kid, let alone think about anything as unholy as dancing, movies, and the like. Still, she believed in the Lord, just not as radically as Grandpa Leddon.

Catholic school religion mainly involved learning the catechism and rote memorization of questions and answers that most kids didn’t understand. It wasn’t that there was an attempt to explain things, but you had to use precise and approved wording. On the other hand, while I wasn’t supposed to talk with my Protestant family about God, I did. The way they talked about things made more sense. They talked about salvation and quoted bible verses to explain it. They talked about a lot of things that were just plain exciting.

So, one day, when I was about seven, I realized that I believed that God raised Jesus from the dead, and I decided to make him Lord in my life. Great, right? I thought so. However, I made a mistake and decided to talk with my Catholic teachers about it. Whoa, you would have thought that I had stolen their lunch. Next thing I knew a priest was talking to me and he was mad.  What was I doing suddenly believing that God had raised Jesus from the dead? Of course, I believed it they said, I was born into “the” church, the Catholic Church. I was told to stop talking about these things with my Protestant family. I was told all kinds of things that just didn’t make sense, not the least of which was that I wasn’t going to see my Mom’s side of the family in heaven because, you see, Protestants are inferior and go to an inferior heaven than Catholics.

That was the beginning of my curiosity about true, original Christianity. It wasn’t that I didn’t see people following Christ in the Catholic Church, the Methodist Church, or the Disciples of Christ. It was that having all these denominations preaching things opposed to each other while all claiming to be inspired by God caused too much confusion and, as a result, doubt as to what is true Christianity.

I feel a burden, a call, if you will, to investigate this and present what I find.

God Bless you and enjoy.

© copyright 2007-2024, Mark William Smith, all rights reserved. last edited 8/30/2024

4 thoughts on “A Little About Me”

  1. You’re right. The site name is OriginalChristianity.Net, not .com. Sorry about that. I corrected the post.

  2. Hi Mark. I have spent days trying to find information on the original beliefs of the early Christians. Can you recommend a book that has the info in it and how to practice?
    Are you going to make a book of your site?
    I am just exhausted, I’ve been through so much junk in this search. your site seems to be the based in truth.
    Lib

  3. Hi Libby,

    Thank you for your kind comments.

    While there are numerous books that give bits of information I haven’t found any book that does what I am trying to do on this site which is give an all encompassing view of what the early church believed and was involved in, and then trace how the church developed from its original form to today’s multiple denominations with all of its divisions over multiple doctrines.

    When you look at the books that are out these, you have to be careful to see if the writer is writing history or rewriting history to reflect current beliefs.

    To look at the what the early church fathers wrote do a google search on antenicene fathers.

    Here are a few books you might want to start looking at:

    A CRITICAL HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN LITERATURE AND DOCTRINE: FROM THE DEATH OF THE APOSTLES TO THE NICENE COUNCIL, James Donaldson, Macmillin & Co, London, 1964

    A DICTIONARY OF EARLY CHRISTIAN BELIEFS, David W. Bercot, Editor, Hendrickson Publishers, Peabody, MA, 7th Printing, March 2008, ISBN 978-1-56563-357-5 (has excerpts from the antenicene fathers categorized to topic)

    A History of Early Christian Doctrine Before the Council of Nicaea, Vol. I: The Theology of Jewish Christianity, Jean Danielou, Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1964,

    EUSEBIUS The Church History, Translation by Paul Maier, Kregel, Grand Rapids, 2007

    Again, I am not endorsing all the interpretations that are in these books, but they help gain perspective.

    I hope this helps,

    Mark

Comments are closed.

Scroll to Top