Brent Walters has been collecting books on early Christianity for years. Now he shares his passion.
Photograph by Kathy De La Torre
Good News
Early Christianity buffs now have a resource library extraordinaire
By Mary Ann Cook
Photographs by Kathy De La Torre
The early years of Christianity are the least examined and one of the least understood of any historical period, yet they are among the most crucial, because that's when most of the world's religions were evolving. And that's also the period, 500 B.C.E. to 500 C.E., when the tenets of philosophy, science, medicine, literature, the arts--virtually all the academic subjects of the modern world--were being formulated. Many of the world's greatest thinkers were writing in those years --Plato, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Caesar, Philo the Jew, Tertulian, Origen.
This period so intrigues Los Gatos native Brent Walters that he's been collecting material on it since he was 15.
By the time Walters was 18 he had acquired 1,000 volumes. Now 45, his library numbers 85,000 pieces. This includes books, critiques, documents, articles and journals, some of which can only be found in elusive, exclusive libraries. In fact, Walters' collection has grown into a business, an archive available on the Internet. It's a long way from Walters' self-described early days as a "nerd doing research."
Now, besides masterminding his website, this enthusiastic scholar teaches in the comparative religion department at San Jose State University. He prefers the undergraduate classes on the Bible, church history and Western religion because he likes the idea of teaching in a secular school to a wide variety of students with different beliefs and faiths. For Walters, the idea of questioning one's faith is the key component to faith. After all, that's the route he took, as he gradually, eventually "backed into teaching."
He's a firm advocate in questioning to learn, not necessarily to challenge. "Belief is something you have to be convinced of, that you have evidence of," says Walters. "If you don't understand its foundations, how can you possibly understand what you believe in?"
Walter finds it incredible that 67 percent of Americans call themselves devout Christians, yet never set foot inside their church. Or are "C and E Christians." (Christmas and Easter churchgoers.) "If you don't participate in its ritual, how can you be a devout Christian?" His family, including 7-year-old Brittany and 3-year-old Brendon, prays nightly.
But even more important than ritual is getting to the source--his lifetime pursuit. As a youngster he wanted answers and kept delving until he found them. He grew up a member of a fundamentalist church in San Jose. But when he asked questions, he would be told, "You just have to have faith."
"But how can you have faith without knowledge, without having the confidence of knowing something that has been experienced?" Only then do you have faith, Walters says. He points out that the early meaning of faith was something based on evidence, something studied, researched and examined.
"We're too casual with the use of the word 'faith' today. We think of it as unreasoned, blind acceptance. This was not the case in early Christianity." In the days of dawning Christianity, faith was a belief arrived at after doubting and questioning. And that's the way the word faith should be considered today, says Walters. The first book he ever bought--the one that began that staggering collection-- was from the now-defunct Curious Book Shoppe on Main Street in Los Gatos. "I know every book and what I paid for it, but I may not know a family member's birthday," he says with a rueful grin.
At 15 he was a questioning adolescent who was sometimes told, "There are things you are not meant to know." This kind of response only fed the fire that became his obsession. "I wanted to know--and want others to know--why they think what they do," he says.
And knowing the roots of that system are crucial to an understanding. "I don't care what conclusions they reach, what fuels their faith. I just want to know they've explored it, thought it through for themselves," says Walters.
Photograph by Kathy De La Torre
Brent Walters teaches a class in the comparative religion department at San Jose State University.
After graduating from Westmont High School in 1974, Walters enrolled at a seminary in Santa Cruz, that was run by his church. But it taught "the party line dogma and I wanted to investigate the roots of religion without reprisal." He left after a year and continued his education at SJSU.
Along the way, he spent some time collecting books, in this country and overseas. He graduated in 1980, with an undergraduate degree in philosophy. "Mostly out of rebellion," he says about majoring in philosophy rather than religion. "I was fascinated by the ancient world and I wanted to study it."
He earned a master's degree in theology at Boston Theological Institute where half the courses could be taken at Boston University and half at Harvard. But he came back to this area because he didn't want to "become enmeshed in the academic ghetto of Boston, with its 100 colleges and universities."
For 15 years he worked in construction and would spend vacation time scouring different areas for early Christian writings, with England as an especially prolific source. He began teaching when a friend asked him to lead some classes at a Bible college in San Jose.
Walters eventually landed at SJSU. He started as a guest lecturer for a friend's class, where he met his wife, Lesa, a student in the class. They were married within a year and have been married 10 years.
In talking about fatherhood, Walters becomes as enthused and enraptured as when he is explaining a point in Judaism or early Christianity. "Being a dad is the coolest," says Walters. "The best thing I ever did. For children, every day is discovery."
Walters' family worships at Saratoga Federated Church, where he has been teaching Bible classes and early Christianity for the past six years. Why did this expert on the early church pick Saratoga Federated? "I like the people there," he says simply. He recently led 118 members of the Men's Fellowship group on a weekend retreat to Mission Springs.
Peter Smith, president of the group, says Walters is "such a stimulating man of faith. He quotes from the Greek and helps us to a broader understanding, with his ability to amplify. He can keep a group of any age interested, from teenagers to past retirement age.
"He challenges thinking so that you can restart your own beliefs," Smith says. "He narrated how first-century communion was held, translating a prayer written in 50 C.E. It was inspiring to hear that prayer, to feel a connection with those Christians so many centuries ago.
"We get so busy with work we don't take time to think about our presence with God. A retreat makes you stop and take stock, makes your life more meaningful," Smith says. "And its effect continues on afterward, when you reach out to others in your daily life--whether a neighbor or the homeless."
Walters also teaches religious classes at St. Andrews Episcopal Church. He is finishing up a three-session series there on Genesis I, II and III from a first-century Rabbinical perspective. "What did it mean to him?" he asks with wonderment in his voice. These hour long classes are after church service.
How to condense all that material--centuries of Judaic thinking--into three hours? Time constraints make it difficult, but organization is evidently Walters' forte. As witness the mountains of library materials he's organizing into the website. There are 11 different libraries therein, to say nothing of the subsections and illustrated nooks and crannies.
Walter's website is ChurchHistory.com, and that's also the name of his for-profit business. As a professional scholar and archivist, Walters shares his wealth of materials and earns a living at the same time. An abstract of these documents, in some cases the entire book, will eventually find their way onto the website.
Fifteen employees, many of whom are Walters' students and former students, keep the database humming, entering documents and articles under Walters' direction. The website opened on Christmas Day. Customers interested in Walters' religious tracts can download the information for a price.
Photograph by Kathy De La Torre
One of the 85,000 pieces in Brent Walters' collection of religious writings.
In a few months, customers will be able to buy materials online, in-house or in book stores from books printed and bound at the company headquarters in Santa Clara, near Highway 101 at Montague Expressway. A print shop is under construction now in the 16,000-square-foot building.
The ChurchHistory.com phone number spells out the word ARCHIVE. Walters calls his website one of the classiest around and one of the easiest to navigate. Graphic designer John Stanley of Castro Valley did the artwork. And Stanley's son, Cary, a former student of Walters, is the webmaster who wrote the code.
Robert Shatswell, once a pastor, is operations manager, and now devotes himself to digitizing Hebrew and Greek fonts. Fortunately for ChurchHistory.com, Shatswell can speak the language of modern graphic arts, as well as the ancient cadences of the Bible.
One of the investors in the business is Walters' mother, Marilyn Walters Thiessen of Los Gatos. A chief investor is Si Miller of Saratoga, a member of Saratoga Federated, who is fascinated by the subject and the project.
The project will help consumers with the Walters credo: "Know why you think what you do and the roots of that system."
For example, he says, "You should know that tithing wasn't established as church doctrine until late in the sixth century [C.E.]. Early Christians tithed because their numbers were rife with the disenfranchised, such as widows and children."
The first writings about women in the church weren't written until 500 years after Christ. An "understoried segment of church history," Walters calls it. Christians and Jews practiced an amalgam of both religions in some Near East countries in the early days of Christianity.
The first to write about the life of Jesus was Luke, who wrote 30 years after Jesus' death and was not a disciple. Those accounts were written in Greek, though Jesus and his followers spoke Arabaic. So not only were there different versions according to who was telling the story, but also the attendant problems of translating the gospel into a different language.
Gospel literally means good news. Most of the apostles were illiterate, but secretaries did the transcribing, even for the literate. That adds yet another source for interpretation--or misinterpretation.
To illustrate how much material there is to be found about the era, he cites the fact that there are more textual references about the New Testament than there are about Plato or any other thinker in the ancient world.
Those who work at ChurchHistory.com-- students, ex-pastors, Walters--putting it in understandable form for modern readers, are doing yeoman duty, often putting in 15-hour days. Imagine decoding the Greek renderings of that time when there was no punctuation. Talk about run-on sentences!
"We're trailblazers," says Walters with remarkable understatement.
Saratoga, California Since 1955
