Describing the leaders of the "BIG 3" religions.

so one of the reasons why people like learning about politics is because people like learning about leaders kings and queens and presidents and prime ministers and dictators and all of those fun characters but when people who like politics try to study religion a problem that they fast encounter is that a lot of religions don't really have leaders I mean there are obviously leaders of individual churches or temples and there may be powerful figures within a religious community but it is getting rarer and rarer to find a religion where there is a single all-powerful guy at the top a guy who you can point to and say yes he is the boss of the entire thing well other than God so let us talk about why this is why the big religions of our world do not have a single unified leader anymore and which ones still do this video is brought to you by the great courses plus a fantastic website that gives you access to untold hours of high-quality academic lectures on a whole host of topics I am stoked to have them as a new sponsor and we will talk more about them in a bit all right so let us start with Judaism why do they not have a single leader well they did at one time Jews believe that God originally appointed Moses and then Joshua as their leaders as part of his covenant with his chosen people but then in the final chapter of the book of Joshua in the Old Testament we see Joshua give his powers to the elders of Israel and their heads and their judges and their officers and ever since then Jewish spiritual leadership has been decidedly non hierarchical now for a time when the Jews were mostly concentrated in Judea we could say that their spiritual Authority was mostly concentrated in the hands of the priests who ran the Temple of Jerusalem but even then this power was shared with a large and diverse council of elders known as the great Sanhedrin to this day the great Sanhedrin is still a very sentimentalized part of Jewish history and a testament to the Jewish tradition of deliberative rather than a hierarchical decision-making my friend Sam has made some great videos about this on his channel all about Jewish history but in any case the Great Temple of Jerusalem was ultimately destroyed by foreigners first temporarily in 586 BC and then permanently in 70 AD and this destruction of the second temple destroyed hierarchical control of the Jewish faith even further we now live in what is called the era of post temple rabbinical Judaism in which individual Jewish synagogues behave as self-governing institutions under the leadership of their individual rabbis rabbis might identify with different faith traditions like reformed or Orthodox or ultra-orthodox but there is no one single universally recognized person who is at the head of any of these movements there has been a long tradition of powerful rabbis in certain geographic regions however there was a chief rabbi of the Ottoman Empire for instance and even today there is a chief rabbi of Britain and two chief rabbis in Israel but ever since the Jews first started to leave the Middle East and spread and scatter all over the world centuries ago no one Jewish leader or council has ever been able to assert universal control over the Jewish faith now that said a big part of traditional Jewish belief is faith that one day God will in fact send someone to serve as the leader of all Judaism a Jewish Messiah who will rebuild the temple rule as a king and herald the beginning of some new divine World Order and over the years some sects of fundamentalist Jews have rallied around a person who they are convinced is this Messiah the most famous example would be the so called Lubavitcher z-- who said that a New York rabbi named Menachem Mendel Schneerson was the Messiah rabbi Schneerson was a pretty major figure in the world of ultra Orthodox Judaism in the 1980s and 90s and was the center of a pretty extensive personality cult among fundamentalist Jews Oliver in the world he died childless in 1994 but many of his fundamentalist followers believe that this was only temporary and he will be back soon enough the rabbi is going to rise up in his grave and come back to life absolutely a physical resurrection when he's going to come back in his full glory imminently and redeemed the entire world in fundamentalist Jewish communities in America and Israel you often see big pictures of him all over the place and portraits of him in homes I remember when I was in Israel before I learned about all of this I figured that he must be a politician or something because of how often you would see posters of him on buildings or along the side of the road now the Christians of course believe that their Messiah has already come and their first churches were initially based on a notion of inherited authority from Christ himself during his life Jesus hand-picked twelve apostles they all outlived him and after his death several of them would go on to spread Christianity across the Roman Empire the first major Christian churches in ancient cities like Alexandria and Antioch were part of what we would now call Eastern Orthodox Christianity and the man who would proceed to head those churches would be called the patriarchs who would claim to be the successor to whatever apostle started that church today of course there are Eastern Orthodox churches in countries all over the place but all trace their spiritual authority back to one of the original churches started by one of the Apostles the different geographic branches of Orthodox Christianity which are known as autocephalous are all independent from one another and within and autocephaly all bishops are technically regarded as being equal with the bishop who serves as patriarch merely being recognized as a symbolic first among equals though in practice patriarch power does vary from place to place I hear the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church is quite a big deal the patriarch of the tiny Orthodox Church of Istanbul excuse me Constantinople is likewise supposed to be considered the first among equals among all of the patriarchs this is because of Constantinople historic status as the capital of the Christianized phase of the Roman Empire but again it is mostly a symbolic thing now one of the other ancient apostille founded Christian churches the one in Rome has always been special it was started by the Apostle Peter many believe was the most important one as a result followers of the Church of Rome have always believed that their church was given a unique godly Authority and of course this kicked off what we now know to be the Roman Catholic Church Catholic in this sense meaning like universal the head of the Catholic Church is the Pope who claims to be the modern-day successor to Peter to this day Catholics will talk about Pope Francis sitting on the throne of st. Peter and unlike Orthodox Christianity which as we've said has a relatively loose organization and weak hierarchy the Catholic Church has an extremely rigid hierarchy today all Catholics all over the world all recognize the Pope as the supreme leader of their faith both in terms of his ability to decide official Church doctrine and his ability to appoint all of the highest-ranking church officials who in turn appoint the lower ranking ones and so on you will always see a big photo of the Pope in a Catholic Church and it is not unusual for individual Catholics to own little things with pictures of his face on them to like lockets and candles and statues and that sort of thing after several centuries of power struggles between the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox churches by the ninth century the Catholic Church had unquestionably emerged as the most powerful Christian denomination in the entire world and the Pope had become one of the most powerful people on the planet but eventually there came a severe backlash the so-called Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century triggered a new Christian tradition that very much continues to this day which is people setting up new independent Christian churches that completely reject the Pope's Authority indeed many of these new Protestant churches now explicitly hold the rejection of any sort of overly strict church hierarchy to be one of the central doctrines of their faith today many of the major Protestant denominations like the Baptist the Methodists the Pentecostals and the Presbyterians only have very loose leaderless organizations tying their various churches together instead the individual churches largely just practice their particular flavor of Christianity in the way that they feel is right now there are a couple of examples of non Catholic Christian churches that have gone way in a different direction and in fact embraced a very very rigid hierarchy the first would be the Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day saints better known as the Mormon the Mormons believe that an American man named Joseph Smith was summoned by God to establish and run a new Christian Church in the mid 19th century Joseph was thus recognized by the early Mormons as being both the president of their church and a prophet of God and since his death the Mormons believe that God has always provided them with a new prophet to also serve as church president the current president / prophet is this guy Russell M Nelson it is a very unique position and you notice that even in the way that Mormons talk about it they always refer to the head of their church as the prophet in the abstract but when they mention him by name it is always president Nelson knowing and caring about the Prophet is considered very important in Mormon culture and Mormon families will often have a picture of him in their home somewhere when I was in Utah a few years ago I bought this little bookmark which you can see has a chronology of all of the prophets from President Smith to President Monson who was still in charge at the time the Prophet is an extremely powerful man who not only appoints the top people in the LDS Church but the Mormons believe also has the capacity to receive brand-new Christian revelation directly from God and unlike the Pope who is elected by the top Catholic clergy the Mormon prophet just inherits the job automatically when the old prophet dies based on his seniority in the church hierarchy the other example of an ultra hierarchical Christian Church would be the Jehovah's Witnesses although their case is quite unique as well the Jehovah's Witnesses were founded by a guy called Charles taze Russell in the mid 19th century he didn't consider himself a literal prophet but he did believe that he had cracked the code of the Bible in such a way as to give him unique access to God's intentions and particularly God's prophecies for the future Russell founded a magazine called watchtower that the Jehovah's Witnesses believe to this day communicates God's instructions after Russell died the Jehovah's Witnesses or more specifically the watchtower publishing society had two very powerful presidents that anyone would have recognized as being the head of their particular faith but around the 1970s the Jehovah's Witnesses significantly reformed their internal operations and greatly lessened the powers of their president in favor of a more collective leadership system today supreme authority over the drove his witnesses including the writing and publishing of the watchtower is held by a Council of eight men known as the governing body part of this has to do with the fact that the java's witnesses are very puritanical and dislike anything that is seen as being too worldly or idolatrous so caring too much about the church leadership or forming any sort of personality cult around the church president is something to be discouraged you can't even find individual photographs or biographies of the members of the governing body on the Jehovah's Witnesses official website all right now are we ready for Islam the founder of Islam the Prophet Muhammed lived quite a productive life as far as founders of religion go he not only lived long enough to see his religion spread quite substantially across the region where he lived but was also able to become ruler of his own religious state located here in modern-day Saudi Arabia when Muhammad died in 632 ad some of his followers got together and appointed a guy named Abu Baker to replace him he was given the title of caliph which literally means successor Abu Baker was then followed by Umar who was followed by Ruth Minh who was followed by Ali but Ali was a very divisive leader and when he was killed in 661 the dream of an Islam led by a single universally agreed-upon leader died with him after Ali's death a powerful Muslim military leader named moo-ha-ha who had battled against Ali during his life proclaimed himself to be the new Khalif and from then on as the Muslim Empire expanded the office of Khalif became a kind of hereditary monarchy type position that held varying amounts of power at various times kind of like the emperor of japan if you know that history in 1517 a differ Muslim Empire which had risen in the North led by the Turks conquered the remnants of this Empire the emperors of the Turkish Empire then claimed the title of caliph for themselves and then in 1924 when the Turkish monarchy was abolished so was the position of Khalil but by this time it wasn't considered that important over the centuries the fact that the title of caliph was usually held by a political rather than a spiritual leader saw the office degrade in stature and many Muslims just stopped looking to them for spiritual leadership in fact today it is quite common for Muslims to believe in the doctrine of what they call the four rightly guided caliphs which posits that only Muhammad's first four successors were truly holy men while every other self-proclaimed caliph was pretty dubious but let us now just rewind a bit as I said Ali was a divisive figure but that went both ways while the military leader moo-ha-ha established one caliphate people loyal to Ali established another based on his bloodline Ali was related to Muhammad so the logic went that every future Khalif should in turn be related to Ali Muslims of this tradition became known as Ali eventually just shortened to Shia while all the other Muslims were known as a Sunnis which translates to mean something like traditional so anyway the Shia Muslims established their own hereditary tract of leaders of Islam in opposition to the Sunni one and they used the religious term Imam to describe their leader in order to emphasize the idea that their person was a more spiritually based leader compared to the more politicized Sunni khalif's the Shia Imams did not establish an empire and their line didn't even last for very long today most Shia Muslims believe that the Ali bloodline stopped producing Imams sometime in the late 9th century clique only 12 in total Shiites often have art and posters and things depicting them all together Hey look at this guy he's got no face what's the deal this is because Moshe believed that the reason why the line ended was because the 12th Imam who was very mysterious disappeared from view sometime in the ninth century and they believe he will someday return again to trigger the end times returning people being a big theme in religion but the point is the majority of Shiites who are often called members of the 12er faction believe that there should not be a Khalif living with us on earth right now but there are a few breakaway factions from this set who believe the opposite there is a small faction of Shia known as the zaydis who believe that the twelvers got the order of succession wrong sometime in the third generation and a guy named zyi was wrongfully denied the Imam ship accordingly they reject the whole theory of the missing 12th Imam and believe that the Ali bloodline continued going for centuries and eventually evolved into the royal family of Yemen with the king of Yemen being the rightful Imam but then the Yemeni monarchy was abolished in 1962 and based on their particular theology these ATS do not believe that there has been a legitimate Imam since Yemen's final king though one may arise someday and lastly we have the Nizari Ismaili x' they think there is an imam walkin around with us right now this guy who is known as Prince agakhan the fourth they also believe that the 12 verse got the order of succession wrong at some point and have thus followed a different hereditary line that has never ended today these Ismaili Muslims who claim to number somewhere between 10 and 15 million are the most hierarchical of all Muslims the AG economy through Aegis guidance and instruction and they all really look up to him if you spend any time around his miley's you will see that they often have pictures of him in their places of worship and homes and businesses and iPhone lock screens all right so that was a lot of religious history took be a fair bit of research and you know who helped me with that research today's video sponsored the great courses plus the great courses plus is a fantastic website that gives you access to literally thousands of hours of recorded video lectures by some of the world's top academics including professors from Ivy League universities and experts from places like National Geographic if you are at all interested in religious history I hi highly recommend you give this website a look just given the sheer amount of lectures they have on this topic alone during the course of my research for this video I literally spent hours on the great courses watching videos on topics like the life of Muhammad the rise of Christianity the careers of the Pope's the history of the Ottoman Empire the roots of the various schools of Judaism you name it it actually made me realize at some level how much I miss being in college and how when you want to learn something there is often no substitute for just having an expert explain it to you anyhow the great courses plus has a special deal for viewers of this channel if you go to this URL or click on the link in the thing below you can get a free trial and have unlimited access to everything the site has to offer a literal world of knowledge at your fingertips and a great way to spend the hours during these trying times so anyway I hope you enjoyed this video I know religion isn't usually something I talk much about on this channel but I have been thinking about getting into it a little bit more let me know if you have any ideas and I will see you all next week [Music]

Channel: J.J. McCullough

Views: 485,023

Rating: 4.7979198 out of 5

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Id: 4rkpgemw7UU

Length: 19min 0sec (1140 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 11 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/vk059]

He should of talked about the Dalai Lama