When Did That Start?
How the Age of a Teaching Tells You Who Put It There
What You Always Assumed Was Old
Ask most folks how old the things are that they believe, and they will tell you these teachings go all the way back. Back to the apostles. Back to Jesus himself. We assume that what we heard in church is ancient, passed hand to hand down a long, unbroken line from the upper room to our pew. And a great deal of it is exactly that old.
But not all of it. Some of the things we are most sure about, the ideas we would argue with a stranger over, are younger than the pews we sit in. Younger than the hymnbook. Some of them are barely older than your grandmother, and a few got invented inside a single lifetime and then dressed up to look two thousand years old.
That is not a reason to panic. It is a reason to learn one more move. When a teaching lands on you as the ancient faith, ask a simple question. When did this start? Because if you can find out when an idea first showed up in history, you have learned something important about who put it there, and why, and what they wanted.
The prophet Jeremiah told a people who had lost their way to go stand at the crossroads and ask for the ancient paths, the good way, and walk in it. Good advice. But you cannot ask for the ancient path if you cannot tell the ancient one from the brand new one somebody painted to look old. So let me show you three teachings, and let us put a date on each.
What the Text Actually Says
Start with the rapture. The idea that Jesus will snatch believers off the earth in secret before a great tribulation, the whole scene behind a shelf of bestselling novels and movies. A lot of people hold it, sincerely, as the plain teaching of the Bible. So put a date on it. The systematic version most folks know was popularized in the 1830s by a preacher named John Nelson Darby and a movement called the Plymouth Brethren. Before that, you do not find it laid out as a clear doctrine in the church fathers, the medieval scholars, or the Reformers. The Brethren themselves were rather proud that some of their teachings were brand new.
Then watch how it spread, because this is the part that should make every reader in this series sit up. In 1909 a man named Cyrus Scofield put out a study Bible with his notes printed right there on the same page as the Scripture. It became one of the bestselling books Oxford University Press has ever published. Preachers carried it all across America, and here is the trouble. Many of them stopped telling the difference between the words of God at the top of the page and the words of Scofield at the bottom. The footnote and the verse blurred into one. A man's notes got preached as the Word for generations.
Now hear me carefully, because this is not me telling you the rapture is false. Honest, serious believers hold that view, and some scholars argue you can find hints of the idea in writers before Darby. Hold that debate loosely. The point is not the verdict. The point is the date. A teaching that most of the church had never systematically taught for eighteen hundred years, that went mainstream through footnotes barely a century ago, is a teaching you are allowed to examine instead of swallow whole. Knowing when it started gives you permission to ask where it came from.
Try a gentler one. Grape juice in the little communion cup. For a lot of us that juice simply is communion, the way it has always been. Except it has not always been. For roughly eighteen hundred years the church used wine at the table. Then in 1869 a Methodist dentist named Thomas Welch, who did not drink and worried about those who did, worked out how to pasteurize grape juice so it would not ferment. He called it Dr. Welch's Unfermented Wine and sold it to churches. The temperance movement loved it, and within about fifty years grape juice was the rule in many denominations.
There is no villain in that story. Welch was a good man with a real concern about drunkenness, and a church is free to put juice or wine in the cup. But notice what dating it does for you. It takes a practice you assumed was ancient and shows you it came from a particular man, in a particular moment, for a particular reason, and rode in on a particular product. That is not a scandal. It is just the truth, and the truth is always better footing than an assumption.
Now a sharper one. You have heard a preacher explain that the eye of the needle, the one Jesus said a camel could not pass through more easily than a rich man enters the kingdom, was actually a low gate in Jerusalem. A camel could squeeze through, the story goes, if you unloaded its baggage and got it down on its knees. Humble yourself, drop your stuff, and you can make it. Comforting. The only problem is there is no evidence any such gate ever existed. That explanation shows up in the Middle Ages, more than a thousand years after Jesus, with nothing behind it but a wish to soften a hard saying.
And it was a hard saying on purpose. The disciples heard it and were stunned. Who then can be saved, they asked. If the line were really about a kneeling camel and a tight squeeze, they would not have panicked. They understood Jesus to mean the impossible. And Jesus did not walk it back. He said with man it is impossible, but with God all things are possible. The gate story, invented a thousand years later, quietly took an impossibility meant to drive you to God and turned it into a self-help tip. Date it, and you can see the hand.
So how do you put a date on a teaching yourself? You do not need a history degree. When an idea lands on you as the ancient faith, ask three things. Did the early church teach this, or does it show up later? Is it the verse, or is it a footnote and a tradition built on the verse? And what was going on when it appeared, what movement or product or fear was riding along with it? A free encyclopedia entry, a study Bible's introduction, an honest history of the doctrine, and you can usually trace a teaching back to where it first stood up. The age of an idea will not tell you it is wrong. But it will tell you whether you are holding the ancient path or something painted to look like it.
What This Means for Where You Are
The age of an idea will not tell you it is true. But it will tell you whether you are holding the ancient path or something painted to look old.
Most of the people who handed you these teachings believed they were handing you the faith of the ages. The preacher with the Scofield Bible was not trying to swap his words for God's. He trusted his Bible, footnotes and all, the same way you trust yours. The Sunday school teacher who told you about the gate heard it from a teacher who heard it from a teacher, all the way back to some medieval guess. Good people, passing on what they received. The breakdown was not the heart. It was that nobody in the line ever stopped to ask when it started.
And asking when it started does not weaken your faith. It cleans it. When you find out the rapture went mainstream through footnotes, or the juice came from a dentist in 1869, or the gate was a medieval invention, you are not losing the Bible. You are separating the Bible from the things that got stacked on top of it. The Word underneath is older and stronger than any of that. Dating the additions is how you find your way back to the ancient path Jeremiah pointed to, the one that was there the whole time, under the newer paint.
This protects you, too. A person who cannot tell an ancient teaching from a recent one will defend a footnote as fiercely as a commandment, and will be shaken when somebody shows them the date. The believer who already knows when things started does not flinch. You can hold the new thing loosely and the old thing tightly, because you know which is which.
So the next time a teaching comes to you wearing the robes of the ancient faith, do not just receive it. Ask it for its birthday. Find out when it first stood up in history, and what was walking beside it when it did. Some of what you find will be as old as the apostles, and you can hold it with both hands. Some of it will be far younger than you were told. Either way, you will be standing on the truth instead of an assumption, and that is always the better place to stand.
Reflect & Respond
What is a teaching you have always assumed was ancient? Have you ever tried to find out when it actually started?
Why do you think a teaching feels more true to us when we believe it is old? What does that do to our willingness to question it?
The preachers with the Scofield Bible could not always tell the footnote from the verse. Where might you be doing the same thing without knowing it?
What is one belief you would be willing to trace back this week, just to see where and when it first appeared?
Sources
[1] Albert Mohler, "J.N. Darby, the Father of Dispensationalism ... A Conversation with Historian Crawford Gribben," on the 1830s rapture, the Brethren as a broad church, and the Scofield Reference Bible. https://albertmohler.com/2024/07/10/crawford-gribben-2/
[2] "John Nelson Darby," Wikipedia, on the pre-tribulation rapture popularized in the 1830s and spread by the Scofield Reference Bible (1909). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Nelson_Darby
[3] "Communion and Welch's Grape Juice," The United Methodist Church, on Thomas Welch, 1869, and the temperance movement. https://www.umc.org/en/content/communion-and-welchs-grape-juice
[4] Jennifer Woodruff Tait, "Raise a Juice Box to the Temperance Movement," Christianity Today, on the 1800s shift from wine to grape juice. https://www.christianitytoday.com/2017/04/welch-grape-juice-history-temperance-movement/
[5] "The Eye of a Needle Is Not a Gate in the City Wall," Reformed Reader, summarizing Craig A. Evans and Mark L. Strauss on the gate theory as a medieval idea with no evidence. https://reformedreader.wordpress.com/2023/07/05/the-eye-of-a-needleis-not-a-gate-in-the-city-wall/
[6] The Holy Bible, New International Version (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), Jeremiah 6:16; Matthew 19:24-26; Mark 10:25; 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17. https://www.biblegateway.com
Do not stop trusting the Bible. Trust it enough to move the hand. Somebody is almost always reaching in. A translator. A custom you never learned. A person with something to gain. Sometimes the hand means well. Sometimes it does not. Either way, it is not the text.
Read the Word in the time and the people it was written to. Notice where a hand, and not God, changed what you read. Then pray for the meaning the Lord put there, not the one you were handed. That is faithful wrestling with the Word.
Leaning on the Rock • Wrestling with the Word
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