UPCOMING MONTHLY SERVICE DATES ARE   12/26/21, 01/23/22, 02/27/22, 3/27/22 > REGISTER HERE

Interfaith. Interspiritual. Interspecies.

The next Compassion Consortium Spiritual Service will be held at 4:00 pm EDT on December 26. Each service includes immersive spiritual practices – such as musical reflection, meditation, prayer, and loving-kindness – as well as spiritual conversation with a special guest.
 
The special guest for our December spiritual conversation will be author Keith Akers. Please join us for a discussion of the historical Jesus, the roots of Christianity and the earliest Jewish followers of Jesus: the Essenes, Ebionites and Nazoreans. We also will explore with Keith the question of whether Jesus was a vegetarian, and why the answer to this question matters in today’s world. 

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Keith Akers is a writer and vegan activist. He is the author of three books: Disciples: How Jewish Christianity Shaped Jesus and Shattered the Church; The Lost Religion of Jesus: Simple Living and Nonviolence in Early Christianity; and A Vegetarian Sourcebook. For his current writing project, he is working on a book on the environmental crisis, tentatively titled Embracing Limits. 

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A book about the disciples of Jesus would typically start with Jesus himself: first there was Jesus, then he had disciples. In Disciples, Keith suggests a fundamentally different story: first there was a movement, then Jesus emerged as its leader. This movement was markedly different from both rabbinic Judaism and gentile Christianity. It became known to history as "Jewish Christianity" - Jews who followed both Jesus (as they understood him) and the Jewish law (as they understood it). Their interpretation of the teachings of Jesus was based on the principles of simple living, nonviolence, and vegetarianism, and the rejection of wealth, war, and animal sacrifices. Some two decades after Jesus was crucified, they split with their most famous missionary, Paul, in part over the issues of vegetarianism and eating meat from animal sacrifices. 

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These earliest followers of Jesus, who personally knew and understood Jesus better than any of the early gentile Christian groups, are the unacknowledged spiritual ancestors of modern Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox churches. In The Lost Religion of Jesus, Keith discusses the history of Jewish Christianity from its origins in the Essenes and John the Baptist, through the Ebionites and Nazoreans and their relationship with Jesus, until its disappearance into Islamic mysticism sometime in the seventh or eighth century.

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Akers argues that only by really understanding this mysterious and much misunderstood strand of early Christianity can we get to the heart of the radical message of Jesus of Nazareth.

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Please visit Compassionate Spirit | Simple living and veganism in a world of limits to learn more about Keith, his books and his activism.