 In fact, the figure we call “Jesus” actually had a name during his own life that was pronounced “Yeshua.”  Even the changing of his name became established and passed on.
       Much of the conflict within Christianity in the following centuries centered around the authority of the church institution and the pope, and the religion ultimately fragmented, opening the doors for further additions of beliefs.  In 1054 C.E., “The Great Schism” formally split Western and Eastern European Christendom into Catholicism in the West and Eastern Orthodox in the East.  In the 1500s, Luther, Calvin, and Henry VIII led Protestant movements which split away from Catholicism.  The Protestant movement divided into many factions, with Calvinist groups coming to the United States (Although Catholicism reached America first).  Entirely new denominations were formed in America in the 1800s.  Finally, in the United States the Christian belief system was added onto again.  John Nelson Darby of the Plymouth Brethren Puritan group introduced Millenial Dispensationalist thinking and rapture theology, which became viewed as truth by some of the new American denominations.  The New Testament book Revelation, written in 96 C.E. by John of Patmos, was a symbolic message to the believers in those times for spiritually facing Roman oppression.  Rapture theology ignored the writer’s intent in this apocalyptic literature, lifting it out of context to support a new belief system about a coming end of the world when certain people will be selected to be transported to a heavenly realm, leaving the rest behind for war and violence, followed by a millennium of peace.  The historical contexts of writings in the books of Isaiah and Daniel are also disregarded for the use of these texts in supporting the theology.  Many American congregations today teach in depth these beliefs.  Chapter 13 in the gospel of Mark and Chapter 24 in the gospel of Matthew seem to support rapture theology, but that would be a strictly literal reading.  The future Christian trend, for groups who do not do so yet, will be to move more and more toward acceptance that Jesus’ method of teaching was utterly dominated by parables, metaphor, and generally a creative sense of illustrating his points.  We were not meant to remove our eyeballs and cut off our hands as he says a couple of times in Matthew:  Should Christians be dismembering themselves around the world?  Obviously, no.  Even if it seems futile trying to interpret his words, they were nonetheless not literal much of the time.
       Contextual consideration also reveals that there is no definitive evidence for Jesus’ having taught that people have souls to be literally either sent to heaven or condemned to hell.  During the times of Jesus’ life, Greek thought posed an eternal soul which lives apart from the body, and the Persian Zoroastrian religion introduced the notions of both heaven and hell.  “It was Paul and his successors who developed the idea of a literal hell as the destiny of the unrighteous…” (Laughlin 166). 