MXVA

Make Christians Vegan Again

Be Fruitful. Multiply Greatly.

Before MAGA. Before MAHA. We went all the way back to "in the beginning...”

Page one. Chapter one. Verse twenty-nine.

The creation narrative builds like a symphony — light, sky, water, land, creatures — each day a crescendo — until it arrives at its final, defining note. The climax of the first chapter of the first book of the most printed, read, and influential text on the face of the earth — the Bible. God steps back, surveys everything he has made, and delivers the mandate:

"I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth, and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food." — Genesis 1:29

A mandated plant-based paradise.

Called very good.

Those same verses — Genesis 1:26-29, the ones everyone cites for the "dominion" argument — contain the entire original blueprint in three movements: stewardship over animals, a plant-based food mandate, and the instruction to be fruitful and multiply. Not dominate. Not consume. Steward. Multiply. Bear fruit.

The plant-based mandate isn't buried in footnotes. It's the headline of the whole story. Everything that came after — the blood, the altars, the sacrifice — was the deviation. We're going back to the source.

First, know who we're talking about.

The movement Jesus launched didn't call itself Christianity. The spiritual path was called The Way — referenced throughout Acts as ha-derekh, a living tradition of practice, not just belief. The people who walked it were the Nazarenes — or in their earliest Aramaic form, Nasaraeans — documented before Rome even had a name for them. Their congregation was the Ebionim — meaning the poor ones, those who chose covenant over empire. The name Christians came later, coined by outsiders in Antioch, and it stuck. But the roots go deeper than that name.

James — the brother of Jesus, who knew him better than any bishop or pope ever would — led the Nazarene movement from Jerusalem. And what the Nazarenes believed, lived, and ate matters enormously. Because we actually know.

Don't take our word for it. Take theirs.

Epiphanius of Salamis, the 4th-century bishop who documented early Christian sects firsthand, records in Panarion 18 that the Nasaraeans "do not offer sacrifice and do not eat flesh, holding it unlawful." Not a preference. Not a cultural habit. Unlawful. This is the movement James led. This is the root of the tree.

Hegesippus, the 2nd-century church historian, records James himself:

"He was holy from his mother's womb. He drank no wine or strong drink, nor did he eat flesh." (In Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 2.23.5)

Eusebius confirms it in Proof of the Gospel 3.5 — the apostles "gave up their crafts and their means of livelihood... abstaining from the flesh of animals."

And then there's the first secular eyewitness. Before the outside world called them anything, they were The Way. But by 112 CE, a Roman governor named Pliny the Younger — writing to Emperor Trajan — had a name for them: Christiani. The Latin word for Christian. Its first recorded use in history. Pliny describes these Christiani gathering before dawn, singing hymns to Christ, taking oaths against fraud and theft, shutting down the animal sacrifice temples — and eating "innocent and harmless food." (Letters X.96)

Innocent. Harmless. The first Christians by name — on record — eating without blood on their hands.

But Trajan's response reveals something darker. He instructs Pliny to command the Christiani to supplicate the gods — Roman code for animal sacrifice and the consumption of sacrificial flesh. Those who refused faced torture and death. The temples that had gone quiet from lack of demand — the animals unbought, the altars cold — were now doing business again, because people were being forced to choose between their convictions and their lives.

The original Christians didn't just eat differently. They were killed for it.

Which is exactly why they needed a secret...

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This symbol goes back further than the cross.

Before the cross was ever worn around anyone's neck, the early followers used a fish. Not as decoration — as a lifeline. Under Roman persecution, identifying yourself as Christiani meant risking everything. So they developed a silent handshake drawn in the dirt: one person traces a single arc with their sandal. If the other completes it into a fish — you're safe. You're family. You're The Way.

The symbol was ICHTHYS — the Greek word for fish, and an acronym hiding in plain sight: Iesous Christos Theou Yios Soter. Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior. Five words. One fish. The most dangerous piece of graffiti in the Roman Empire.

But the fish wasn't just a code. It was woven into the gospels as the central metaphor for the entire mission. Jesus didn't call fishermen to keep fishing. He called them to stop. "Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men." (Matthew 4:19) The nets they dropped — the catch they walked away from — became the symbol of a movement that would spread faster than Rome could stop it. You weren't catching fish for a fry. You were fishing for people. Multiplying the mission.

And for the Pythagoreans — whose mathematics deeply shaped early Christian thought, as both Philo and Josephus document — the fish carried an even deeper resonance. In John 21, the disciples haul in exactly 153 fish. Not a round number. A very specific one. To a Pythagorean, 153 is a triangular number — the sum of every integer from 1 to 17 — embedded in the sacred geometry of the vesica piscis, the overlapping circles that generate the fish shape itself. The ratio of its width to height: 265 to 153. An approximation of the square root of 3. The mathematics of life, proportion, and divine multiplication — hidden inside the number of fish in a net, in the pages of a gospel, waiting for someone to notice...