Where did the Christians in Acts 4 get the idea to sell all possessions?
There is no verse that says they sold all of their possessions.
Acts 4:32 explains the motivation for the sharing of material goods among Christians: They believed the Gospel, were bound in heart to one another, and so agreed to have everything in common. No one had commanded them to do so, but, I suspect, moved toward each other by the Spirit dwelling in each of them, they decided to live in a fully communal way.
Do you know what is never stated in this passage? The command to all believers to do likewise. All we have in
Acts 4:32-34 is a
description of events, not a
prescription for Christian conduct. The passage says only what new believers did, not that all believers, in all times and places, MUST do the same. Taking a description of an event in Scripture and attempting to make it prescriptive is called the Is-Ought Fallacy. There are all sorts of things described in Scripture that no Christian should ever do. It is important, then, not take a mere description of something in the Bible and declare it prescriptive when no explicit prescription actually exists.
How is “Everyman for themselves” interpretation even better?
This a false dichotomy. It isn't centralized interpretive authority or every man for him/herself. There are all sorts of hermeneutic rules and principles, widely recognized among Bible scholars, by which a proper interpretation of Scripture is secured. Basic rules of logic and principles of reason also come into play in understanding the Bible. So, the alternative to centralized interpretive authority isn't interpretive chaos, every person just making up their own ideas about the Bible is post-modern frenzy, but a well-reasoned, careful scrutiny of the text and attendant cultural, literary and historical features by which a Christian may understand God's word.
Besides, most Christians today are reliant on the Catholic authority structure, and don’t typically question the 66 books of the Bible. However, who’s to say all of these books are the word of God?
The canon of the New Testament was formally-acknowledged, not selected, in the process that established the official canon of the New Testament. The Church community through a natural consensus of use had a long-adopted canon already in place by the time any council convened upon the matter. In AD 367 Athanasius produced a list of the 27 books of the New Testament and was quickly followed by Jerome and Augustine. At the councils of Hippo Regius in 393, and Carthage in 397, the church in the west as a body approved the 27 documents alone as Scripture. It took a bit longer for eastern churches to follow suit, but by around AD 508 the 27 books of the New Testament were universally accepted as canon.
It isn't, then, that any single person or elite group of people has procured the canon of the New Testament for the Church but that the Church very organically selected the canon for itself which was then formally recognized.
There’s a guy on TikTok, named Christopher Enoch, who’s preaching that Paul perverted the Bible. But this guy is not an atheist, but a Christian who believes that Jesus taught salvation through obedience to the law. If I understood him correctly. Who’s to say that is not true Christianity?
2000 years of careful consideration, and argument, and deliberation by the Church defies Enoch's view. His view is not new but has asked and well-answered already centuries ago.
On the other spectrum, there are gay Christians, practicing homosexuals, who believe that Jesus was never against homosexuality and those verses that seem to teach against it, were applicable to different people in a different time and place.
As Jesus himself said, not every one who says "Lord, Lord" is one of his. Homosexuality is explicitly condemned in both Old and New Testaments. And since it fundamental, orthodox Christian belief that God is the Ultimate Author of all of Scripture, it is wrong to say only what we read of Jesus saying in the Gospels is what he taught. As God incarnate, Jesus was the ultimate Author of all of the Bible - including those bits that condemn homosexuality. And when Jesus did speak of sexual unions between human beings, the only union he confirmed was that of a man to a woman for life within marriage. The idea, then, that the Bible allows for homosexuality is quite false.
Occam's Razor seems to me to come into play here, too. In defense of "Christian homosexuality" the multiplication of explanations for such a view, and the incredible convolutions necessary in these explanations, strongly suggest to me a denial of the obvious.
I don't take a post-modern approach to the Bible, assuming the reader has the right to shape the Bible's contents to their subjective preferences and prejudices. For this reason, the "Who says?" question seems rather...childish to me. I believe the Bible offers an objective, authoritative revelation of God and His truth to which the reader must conform, not vice versa, that has been long established and exhaustively defended for two millenia. Against such a history of development, "Who says?" just seems petulant and ignorant.
I could actually take
Matthew 25, and come up with a theology that would not require faith to be saved. After all, the sheep and the goats were judged by works. Belief wasn’t even mentioned there.
So? You could take anything, pretty much, and twist it around to say almost anything you'd like. This isn't a testament to the legitimacy of such twisting, however, but to the profound capacity for falsehood and self-deception of which humans are capable.
Marx came much later. First Century Communists believed in God.
You've missed my point, which had nothing to do with where on the timeline of human history Marx appeared. The idea of a "communist," in our common use of the term today, arises almost entirely from Marx's writing. And his writing couldn't be farther in its fundamental worldview from Christianity if Marx had purposely set out to make it so. To apply "communist" to New Testament Christians, then, is a sort of reverse-anachronism, seeing them through the lens of modern ideas totally alien to their time and belief.
I disagree. Jesus taught that his disciples were to make disciples by teaching them to observe everything he taught them, which would include teachings on giving up possessions.
Asked and answered.
Jesus was actually pretty clear on this. One rich young ruler was explicitly told that if he wanted to enter life, he had to sell everything and give to the poor.
Did Jesus then say to everyone else that they had to do likewise? No. He spoke of the difficulty of gaining heaven when rich in material things, but he didn't tell the watching crowds that they all should sell everything they possessed and follow him. In fact, Christ only made material wealth an issue with the Young Ruler because he knew that the young man loved his wealth more than God.
If Jesus didn’t want his followers to give up any of their possessions, why did he never say so? And why did he say the opposite, on many occasions?
Well, now you've shifted the goalposts.
Some of Christ's followers - the Twelve, in particular - did have to live as their Master lived, without home or an established means of income. And those things in the lives of any who would follow Jesus had to be placed under their fidelity to, and love of, him. In so doing, for some, it might have been necessary to get rid of certain things - as in the case of the Young Ruler - but not for everyone. Which is why we see many Christians throughout the NT having homes and even businesses and being commanded to work gainfully to supply for their material needs.
If God ordered that Stalin exterminate 60 million people because of their sin, which could be disobedience to authority and to Gods law, etc, he would have been a saint for following through on that order, yes?
What does this question achieve, exactly? Would God make such an order under the circumstances you describe? Nothing I'm aware of within the Christian faith leads me to think so. The only time God issued orders even remotely like what you hypothesize about was within the theocracy He'd established with the Israelites, His Chosen People. The nation was uniquely representative of Jehovah and as such exercising His judgment upon those who'd made Him their enemy by attacking His people and by committing heinous evil. Even then, the Israelites were temperate in their execution of God's commands, the Bible describing their wars upon enemy pagan nations with the hyperbolic language typical of such narratives of the time, giving the impression to modern readers of wholesale genocide when in fact no such thing had occurred.
People who hate God unwittingly act in accord with His will all the time. But they will stand one day before Him to be judged and punished, nonetheless. It is not, then, mere obedience to a divine command that makes one a saint, but who one knows as their Savior and Lord.
