You know what's funny wgw? Greek had no capital letters so the only way to indicate when they were speaking about the Almighty was to use the definite article "ho" (the). "God" (theos) in Greek means a "mighty one" or "powerful one" and can be used even with regard to humans. It isn't used exclusively for God or Christ. So your reference texts are not saying in Greek what your English Bible says at all. The NWT has not altered a thing. There is only one "ho theos" in that verse and he wasn't the Word. Look it up in an Interlinear.
John 1:18 simply says...."no man has ever seen God". So how is it that the churches teach than men have?
John 14:9, "He who has seen me has seen the Father."
What John 1:18 refers to according to Orthodox doctrine is that God in his Essence is unknowable, He can be perceived only according to His Energies. This differs from the Roman Catholic doctrine of Absolute Divine Aimplicity introduced by the Scholastics. Thus, the appearance of God through Jesus Christ in His Divine Nature is like the Rays of the Sun, the Sun itself remaining invisible.
Christianity does not have a nationality or a location. It isn't Greek or Russian or Eastern or Serbian or any other label you want to put on it.
Christianity is global and its sticks to the scriptures as closely as Jesus did.
It doesn't make the son equal to his superior Father nor does it make Mary into God's mother. It doesn't use idols and images in its worship and it doesn't make friends with the world by supporting its corrupt politics and bloodshed.
The Orthodox Church agrees that Orthodox Christianity is not specifically Eastern or Russian, Greek, Serbian, Finnish, Japanese or particular to any other nation with a national Orthodox Church, which includes countries ranging from India to Egypt to the United States. Orthodoxy is universal. The Eastern bit exists due to the schism with the Roman Catholic Church in 1054, nothing else. The Orthodox Church is the second largest denomination worldwide, consisting of two communions, the Eastern or Byzantine, and the smaller Oriental Orthodox. The national and regional churches are members of these communions. Collectively, the Russian Orthodox accounted for the most martyrs of the 20th century under Communism, the Armenians, Assyrians and Pontic Greeks by the Turks faced near extinction in 1915, and now the remaining Orthodox in Syria and Iraq are once again facing a genocide, thousands having died and hundreds of thousands made refugees. Countries like Serbia, Russia and Greece were fortunate not to fall under Roman jurisdiction after the great schism, but since that time the Roman church has improved considerable, albeit alas not after causing the radical Redormation of which your church is ultimately a product. Indeed your doctrines on the Atonement, although you refuse to acknowledge as much, are heavily influenced by Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin; they were unknown to,the early Church and are alien to Orthodoxy.
Neither Jesus nor his apostles commanded that the disciples parade idols through the streets or burn incense or recite liturgy in ritualistic worship.
There is nothing Christian in Christendom. All its practices are adopted from outside of original Christianity.
The command to burn incense is found in the Old Testament, which were the Scriptures Paul and others instructed us to follow.
It is entirely untrue what you are saying because it would mean that every single successor of the Apostles: Clement, Ignatius the Martyr, Polycarp, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, most of whom died unpleasant deaths for their faith, got it wrong, and no one got it right until the founder of your religion in the 19th century, a religion which has been widely criticized for abusive practices and alleged by some to be a cult, and a religion that enjoys a much less favorable public image than the Mormons for example, who readily admit the contradictions in their faith, are good natured rather than belligerent, and do good charitable works. Show me a Jehovah's Witness Hospital. Oh snap, I guess the ban on blood transfusions would make such a facility rather difficult. In fact if it weren't for the invention of the Resting Heart system and comparable surgical blood recycling technologies, cardiac bypass surgery would still be impossible for you.
The Orthodox Church interprets Acts 15 correctly, as not eating the blood of an animal specifically or the flesh of anyrhing strangled or killed "in the blood of its soul". This is based on ancient Jewish purity laws later adopted also by Islam and indeed common to many Semitic religions; there was an ancient belief endorsed by some fathers that the blood is representative of the soul and should not properly be devoured along with the flesh of an animal. Thus the Orthodox abstain from Black Pudding, Polish "blood sausages" and related dishes, which I daresay as someone who enjoys tucking into a full English required some sacrifice from my part, until I realized that actually, black pudding tastes nasty anyways and its one of those British foods like Haggis and Bubble and Squeak we like to make pretend are edible. It would also be a violation of the Council of Jerusalem to engage in the rites of vampirism, but only the most absurdly literal translation of that verse would preclude blood transfusion, as the context was eating, not medical care. Your religion has caused preventable death with its absurd, arbitrary, unprecedented and unorthodox interpretation of Acts 15; when one considers the dame done by such Bible Scholarship one can sympathize with those Catholic theologians who argued the uneducated masses should not be allowed free access to the Bible in the vernacular, but that only those prepared to approach it through a course of proper study should be admitted.
This was interestingly always the case in the early church simply because Bibles were so scarce that only the wealthy could afford them and only the educated could read them. And they were not complete integral books usually, but rather individual manuscripts of specific books, lectionaries, Gospel books, and so on, and a distinction must be made between manuscripts prepared for private use and manuscripts arranged for liturgical service. There was not a situation comparable to that of today where the majority of people can read, can easily get a Bible, but are otherwise uneducated by classical standards.
Lastly, to be frank, who are you to know excrement from shinola when it comes to "original Christianity."? You reject all the testimony of those who knew the Apostles and were their immediate successors, you refuse to study ancient and relevant texts like the Didache, you ignore the work of academic scholarship into the Bible, philology, early Christianity, Patristics, the history of Christian dogma in general, and instead limit yourself to the intentionally mistranslated bible of your religion, and related propaganda.
