Here and imbedded links (he hasn't really yet thought through it):
"Engels had something like a love for the early Christians, and he imagines talking to them as fellow-sufferers who came from exactly the [same] kind of setting."
Attacked in the comments at one point, he responds:
". . . the early Christian movement was very diverse in its theologies. By the way, one common explanation for the ebionites was that they were the remnants of the original Jewish followers of Jesus, including the bulk of the Jerusalem church, who never accepted Paul's innovations."
Keep it up Phil! You are on the right track! Too bad you didn't train in philology . . . it wouldn't have taken you this long to figure out that Pauline Christianity is a double-edged sword leaving us with two forms of materialism which now war for our imaginations, even though you'll probably become bored and get side-tracked away from this also.
Jewish Christians renounced the material, as did Jesus, believing the kingdom of God was coming down to earth from God, right quick like, as they say in the holler. Paul's Gospel by contrast baptized entrepreneurialism and made free-enterprise and Judaism safe for the world. Hence the tithers of today, and the spread of the congregation on the synagogue model.
Historians would be better engaged figuring out what went wrong there with Paul. Albert Schweitzer figured out what went wrong with Jesus.
