The Myth of the Early Church

Preachers love to give sermons that make the congregation feel pretty shabby compared to the shining example of the "early Church." "Oh to have been there, soaking up the waves of Pentecostal power! To have their love, their boldness, their sure grasp of apostolic truth!" Granted, today's churches are lukewarm, spiritually diffident, theologically confused. But was the early Church really all that different? Was there ever such a church as the early Church? Sooner or later you begin to suspect that what is true of Jesus is true of Christianity: If the historical Jesus has gotten lost behind the stained-glass curtain of the Christ of dogma, the early Church is equally mythical, equally a product of holy propaganda. The official histories of the Church (such as the Acts of the Apostles and Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History) are like those "authorized biographies" of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. "Authorized" means "sanitized," "whitewashed." They wouldn't call it that unless there was something to hide and they had managed to hide it. We have to take saying 6 of the Gospel of Thomas as our motto: "There is nothing hidden that will not be revealed." But keep in mind: It is likely to be no easier getting back to primitive Christianity than it has been excavating the historical Jesus.

If you have never thought about this question, I'm sure you are experiencing a sense of déjà vu anyway. In recent years Americans have been forced to face the fact of our society's wide ethnic and cultural diversity. Some find it hard to admit that our country is not a narrow patch of one breed of flowers, but rather a luxuriant garden of different and equally beautiful blossoms. Once we do admit it and come to appreciate all the exotic beauty, we realize that we are the ones who benefit. We see there was never anything to fear. The Christian religion has the same lesson to learn, but is slower in learning it. Here's what I mean: Anyone can see that the Ku Klux Klan is a bunch of bigots, because they insist that only one variety of Americans is good. But the church can somehow get away with saying that only one kind of Christianity is good: traditional orthodox Christianity. Oh sure, there are differences between Protestant, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox Churches, between Baptist, Lutheran, and Pentecostal. But then the KKK allows a bit of diversity, too, if you can call it that. You can be English, German, Irish, French, Dutch, Scandinavian, whatever, as long as you are white. The crime is being nonwhite. And for the respectable bigotry of mainstream Christianity the crime is being "unorthodox." How did Christianity come to look like a hate group? That's a long story.

 
Diversity and Denial

The story of how Christianity suppressed its early pluralism in favor of emergent catholic orthodoxy starts with another story, a parable found in Matt. 13:24-30. A farmer plants wheat in his field, looking forward to a fine crop at harvest time. But as soon as the stalks start to sprout, his farmhands bring him ominous news: Every other plant is not wheat but darnel weed! The farmer knows this is no accident. "An enemy has done this!" For centuries the official historians of Christianity have taken this parable to describe the way the church started out orthodox and then became infested with heresy. Christ had sown the field with the good seed of orthodox Christianity. But then he left the scene, returning to Heaven, leaving the farm in charge of the apostles and the bishops. But, to their horror, they soon discovered that Satan had slipped in and planted all sorts of false doctrines.

Since it is a question of farming, perhaps we need the advice of a couple of farmers. Two of the most important investigators of early Christianity were a pair of New Testament scholars, Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860) and Walter Bauer (1877-1960). (Both last names are German for "farmer.") F. C. Baur and Walter Bauer[1] pretty much threw the traditional jigsaw puzzle up in the air and then reassembled the pieces. The result could be described with another parable (though I'm afraid you won't find this one in any gospel): It is as if a man sowed his field with all kinds of seeds at random. "Let a hundred flowers bloom!" he said. Soon the plants began to sprout, each different from the others, until one plant with long tendrils choked out all the others and filled the field with its own seedlings, and none other was left.

 
Many Lords, Many Faiths, Many Baptisms

F. C. Baur was the first to notice how much of the New Testament only made sense once you realized there was a major conflict between two rival Christianities: one Jewish in orientation, led by Simon Peter; the other Gentile, led by Paul. The first kept the Jewish Law and saw Jesus as a nationalistic Messiah. The second saw the Law as passé and understood Jesus in an internationalized, "spiritualized" way. Most of the New Testament writings lined up on either side of this great divide, and the rest were part of a later effort to paper over the differences once the two factions had buried the hatchet and merged into catholic orthodoxy. Baur recognized, for instance, that Matthew's gospel directs its readers to observe strictly every last regulation of the Torah (Matt. 5:17-19) and condemns those ostensible Christians who don't (Matt. 7:21-23: "Depart from me, you who practice lawlessness!"). Paul and his followers must be in view here. The Epistle of James has Paul in its sights, too ("You fool! Do you want to be shown that faith apart from works is dead?" James 2:20, after which follows a refutation of Rom. 3:27-4:1-5 ff.) On the other hand, in Galatians and 2 Corinthians, Paul lambastes certain "super-apostles" who require Gentile, Pauline converts to "judaize" (2 Cor. 11:4-5, 13-15; Gal. 1:6-9; 2:14). Paul claims that they represent a false gospel message designed by Satan. Mark's gospel sides with Paul in affirming that Jesus swept away all kosher laws (Mark 7:19), an editorial comment that Law-loving Matthew clipped when he appropriated that section of Mark into his own later gospel (compare Matt. 15:17). Jewish Torah-Christians like Matthew venerated Peter and the Twelve, who obviously stood for the twelve tribes of Israel. Paul, as we have seen, had little regard for these men. Mark parallels Paul in this, too, portraying the disciples of Jesus as blithering idiots every chance he gets.[2] Baur placed Revelation, with its reverence for "the twelve apostles of the Lamb" (Rev. 21:14) and for the twelve "tribes of the sons of Israel" (Rev. 7:4-8; 21:12), in the column with Matthew and James, while the Gospel and Epistles of John, together with Hebrews, belonged more or less in the Pauline camp.

Representing the later stage of reconciliation were Luke's gospel and its sequel, the Acts of the Apostles, as well as 1 and 2 Peter. Acts parallels Peter and Paul, having each apostle preach the same message and perform identical miracles: miraculous jailbreaks (Acts 12:1-11; 16:23-26); healing by shadows or clothing (Acts 5:14-16; 19:11-12); raising the dead (Acts 9:36-42; 20:7-12); restoring the lame (Acts 3:1-8; 14:8-10); and squaring off with magicians (Acts 8:9-24; 13:6-11). The Twelve are honored, but so is Paul. And though Luke seems to put the Twelve on a slightly higher level, he spends most of his narrative on the perils of Paul. No fan of either figurehead, Peter or Paul, could read Luke's Acts and come away with his hostility to the other left intact. Likewise the pseudepigraphical Epistles of Peter present a Peter who in 1 Peter sounds like Paul (so much so, in fact, that many scholars today think the writer of 1 Peter copied from the Pauline Epistle to the Ephesians!), and in 2 Peter mentions Paul by name, calling him "blessed," so long as one doesn't interpret his writings in a heretical fashion (2 Pet. 3:15-16). Thus Luke-Acts and 1 and 2 Peter, Baur said, are "catholicizing" in their tendency, just as are the later church legends that make Peter and Paul a kind of dynamic duo, working together to found the church at Rome. Ditto for the whole notion that the Twelve fanned out across the known world preaching the gospel. Paul's letters make it pretty clear that he, not they, was the one and only apostle to the Gentiles (Gal. 2:7-9; Rom. 1:5, 14; 15:15-20). Later legend remodeled the Twelve, originally the governors of Jewish Christians in Palestine (Matt. 19:28: "You shall sit on twelve thrones, governing the twelve tribes of Israel"), in the image of the jet-setting Paul.

I believe much, even most, of Baur's reconstruction is still persuasive, as far as it went. There was, however, more to say, and Walter Bauer said a lot of it. He jumped up into the second century. By reexamining just about every scrap of evidence surviving from the period, Bauer uncovered a remarkable fact: It turned out that in several major segments of the Mediterranean world, the first kind of Christianity to set up shop and hang out the shingle was not what we know as catholic orthodoxy at all, but rather one or another variety of so-called heresy. On this or that frontier of Christian expansion, "Christianity" simply meant Marcionism, Ebionism, Encratism, Gnosticism. The resultant picture, of course, was antipodal to the traditional version of Eusebius, Constantine's apologist and pet theologian, whereby "heresy" had appeared only after the apostles had planted catholic orthodoxy all over the Roman Empire. Eusebius had it that the apostles had passed on the doctrine of Jesus to their handpicked successors, the bishops, who handed it on to their own successors, and so on into Eusebius' own time. The "heretics" he libeled as eccentrics and troublemakers who cooked up perverse and baseless views, leavening the lump of orthodoxy for want of anything better to do.

Walter Bauer began his demonstration of the artificiality of this scenario by focusing on Edessa, a major center of early Christianity in eastern Syria. He showed how the Chronicle of Edessa records as events of note the births or arrivals of Marcion, Bardesanes, and Mani before it ever gets around to mentioning the establishment of a church building by the first representative of orthodoxy. Eusebius himself has nothing to say of any early orthodox Christianity in the area, though he cannot help mentioning the early ministry of Bardesanes and the circulation there of the Diatessaron of Tatian (a compilation of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and a bit of Thomas into a single narrative), which Eusebius considered heretical. Justin Martyr and heresiologists tell us the embarrassing fact that the name "Christian" in Edessa was the exclusive property of the Marcionites, and that the apparently late-arriving orthodox had to be satisfied with being called "Palutians" after the first orthodox bishop Palut. In fact, this remained the state of affairs until the Muslim conquest! A note from contemporary Greater Armenia makes clear that "heresy" was in the vast majority in the region. In light of these facts, Bauer deduced that the famous apocryphal correspondence between King Abgarus of Edessa and Jesus (in which the king, having heard of Jewish plots on Jesus' life, invites him to take refuge in Edessa) must have originated as a spurious pedigree for apostolic orthodoxy in Edessa dating back already to the time of Jesus and his apostle Addai (Thaddaeus), whom he sent to Abgarus with his "Thanks, but no thanks" reply.

Helmut Koester has supplemented Bauer's argument here by locating the Thomas tradition (the Gospel of Thomas, Acts of Thomas, Book of Thomas the Contender, and so on) in eastern Syria. This means that the "heretical" tendencies in the region go back very early indeed, perhaps even to the apostle Thomas himself, who tradition says missionized the region.

In western Syria, Antioch especially, we see a similar picture. Antioch is already pictured as a major center of Christian mission activity in Acts and Galatians. Paul, Peter, and Matthew are all associated with Antioch. Whether they were representatives of what would later be known as catholic orthodoxy depends on how one interprets their writings (as well as which writings attributed to them one thinks are authentic!). The first postbiblical missions we know of in western Syria were those of the Gnostics Satornilus/Saturninus, Cerdo, and Menander. It is in this region also that we find the orthodox bishop Serapion in 190 C.E., condemning the widespread usage of the local favorite Gospel of Peter, which he deemed docetic and heretical. When we get to the Letters of Ignatius, which Bauer considered authentic (at least the seven so received today), we must infer that Ignatius' desperate pleading for the firm control by, and absolute obedience to, the bishop in each church denotes a power struggle against a flood of "heresies" (docetic and judaizing) which only an ironhanded authoritarianism could hope to quash. Similarly, the Epistle of Polycarp (which, again, Bauer considered authentic) laments that "the great majority" embrace Docetism. Ignatius writes to Polycarp, and not to all his brother bishops, but rather only to those who take his side in the struggle, implying a real diversity of views. In all this we need not infer a falling away from an early orthodoxy. It may just as well imply a first serious attempt of orthodoxy to establish the dominance that it would eventually secure.

In Asia Minor we need only look at some late New Testament writings to discover an early, pervasive presence of "heresy." The Book of Revelation (Apocalypse of John) depicts a struggle between two parties, neither of which would qualify as orthodox by later standards. John the Revelator represents a type of ascetical Christianity (it is only 144,000 "virgins who have not defiled themselves with women" who will be saved; Rev. 14:4), and his bitter enemies, to be found throughout the seven churches under John's jurisdiction, are the Gnostic sect of the Nicolaitans.

In Acts and the Pastoral Epistles (quite likely all the work of one author) we have the strategic admission made pseudonymously through the lips of "Paul" that "All Asia has turned against me" (2 Tim. 1:15) and that "after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock" of the Ephesian church (Acts 20:29). In other words, these catholicizing sources make the best of the fact that Paul's ministry in Asia Minor was not succeeded by catholic orthodoxy. Of course the assumption is that Paul must have taught orthodox views, so Luke can only understand the state of things in his day (the second century) as the result of an apostasy from an imagined Pauline purity.

Egypt presents us with the same picture yet again. The first attested workers for Christ there were the Gnostics Valentinus, Basilides, Apelles, Carpocrates, and his son Isidore. Phlegon preserves a letter attributed to Hadrian noting that all Christian priests in Egypt worshipped Serapis, too! The leading gospels in Egypt, the Gospels according to the Hebrews and according to the Egyptians, as far as we can tell from their extant fragments, were Gnostic or heretical in color. Bauer could detect no trace of orthodoxy in Egypt until the third-century bishop Demetrius. But does not tradition make the gospel-writer Mark the first bishop of Egypt? Indeed it does, but like the Letters of Jesus and Abgarus, this legend seems to be but another spurious retroactive pedigree meant to fabricate an "orthodox" origin for Egyptian Christianity (assuming Mark and his gospel could themselves be judged orthodox!).

Bauer lived to see his portrait of Egyptian Christianity amply confirmed by the discovery in 1945 of the Nag Hammadi library, [3] a cache mainly of Gnostic gospels, epistles, tracts, and revelations, which revealed an astonishing diversity of Christian beliefs and origins the breadth of which not even Bauer had dared suspect! Who would have guessed that Sethian Gnostics had become Christians on the assumption that Jesus was the reincarnation of Seth or of Melchizedek? Or that Jesus was believed in some quarters to have been the reincarnation of "the Illuminator" Zoroaster? What makes this discovery all the more astonishing is that associated documents show the collection of leather-bound volumes to have been taken from the monastic library of the Brotherhood of Saint Pachomius, the first known Christian monastery. Apparently when the monks received the Easter Letter from Athanasius in 367 c.e., which contains the first known listing of the canonical twenty-seven New Testament books, warning the faithful to read no others, the brethren must have decided to hide their cherished "heretical" gospels, lest they fall into the hands of the ecclesiastical book burners. We may perhaps take that monastery as a cameo, a microcosm of Egyptian Christianity in the fourth century, diverse in doctrine, though soon to suffocate beneath the smothering veil of catholic orthodoxy.

How did catholic orthodoxy manage to dominate? Bauer saw Rome as central to this development. There is striking evidence for an early diversity of belief in the Roman church, including the traditions of Marcion and Valentinus being influential leaders there for a time (something absolutely impossible if Rome had then shared the same view of these archheretics as later orthodoxy would). The Shepherd of Hermas, a work once widely considered to be authoritative scripture, was the work of Hermas, the brother of Bishop Pius of Rome (died 154 c.e.), and it contains teachings scarcely characteristic of later catholic orthodoxy, especially as regards Jesus Christ. In it, Jesus is portrayed as an archangel, and the Holy Spirit is the first Son of God who intercedes with his Father to resurrect Jesus, his faithful host body, as the second Son of God! But eventually catholic orthodoxy prevailed in Rome, and thanks to the emerging myth of apostolic succession, the bishops of Rome, with their spurious pedigree of joint Petrine-Pauline foundation, pulled rank. Catholic orthodoxy spread next to Corinth via the circulation of 1 and 2 Corinthians and 1 Clement (and if Harnack was right, 2 Clement, too, possibly written by the Roman bishop Soter). These letters invoked the authority of Paul to combat factionalism and Gnostic heresy in Corinth. The Corinthian bishop Dionysius was in Rome's pocket and began writing his own anti-heretical epistles to other churches. Roman influence soon extended to Hierapolis in Asia Minor (next door to the New Testament cities of Colosse and Laodicea), though it was by no means secure there. (I suspect that another major tool of Roman propaganda was the Epistles of Ignatius, which, like the earlier Tübingen School but unlike Walter Bauer, I regard as spurious: They depict the Syrian bishop being "extradited" to Rome for execution for no apparent reason, against a rival tradition that he was killed at home in Syria. The real point, I think, was to account for the fact that the Ignatian epistles were first received from Rome, not because Ignatius had been taken there and their delivery delayed, but rather because they were written there in a later generation.)

The strategy of the orthodox apologists was to defame instead of refute. Their mudslinging against the Arians and the Montanists, for example, is both comical and grotesque. They simply assumed theirs was the old, original faith, despite the fact that the Gnostics had their own claims to apostolic succession. Valentinus, for example, claimed to have received the teaching of Paul at the hands of the latter's disciple Theodas, while Basilides credited his teaching to Glaukias, the disciple of Simon Peter. Were orthodox claims necessarily better grounded than these latter? Both are equally likely fictitious. Eusebius and other heresiologists late-dated Marcion and other heretics and forged a "heretical succession" whereby it would appear that they all inherited their errors from one another along a narrow channel. The point of this was to make unorthodox ideas appear to be a late growth as well as the property of a few related eccentrics instead of the widespread credos of whole sections of Christendom. Likewise, Eusebius refers to a vast corpus of anti-heretical literature dating back to the second century, but he actually cites very little, implying he has falsely generalized from a very few specimens known to him (his method at many other points as well).

Why did Rome prevail? Why did Roman propaganda succeed? The orthodox had tighter organization. Among the heretics, the two movements who did organize into congregations, the second-century Marcionites and the third-century Manichean Gnostics, flourished all over the empire and beyond until they were exterminated within Rome's boundaries and died away slowly elsewhere. Most Gnostics, by contrast, existed as secretive cells within larger catholic congregations and were forced to leave or keep quiet. Gnostics in general were fissiparous and freethinking. They were not the type to forge and enforce a single orthodoxy. Encouraging individual spiritual exploration, they were not great institution-builders. Many banded together on the model of the ancient philosophical schools, circles of disciples gathered around a teacher. Such is not the stuff of mass movements. Also, catholic orthodoxy represented the lowest common denominator, stripped of both the subtleties and the drastic asceticism of the heresies. This meant it was easier for most people to grasp. Bauer might have appreciated the analogies provided today by the victory of fundamentalism in world Protestantism: Simple-minded dogmatism is always more popular (as Dean Kelly showed in his Why Conservative Churches Are Growing).

The theoretical constructions of Baur and Bauer, as wide-ranging and illuminating as they are, are each but pieces of a larger picture. Walter Bauer showed how catholic orthodoxy triumphed over rivals no younger than itself, while F. C. Baur had tried to explain the origin of catholic Christianity as the fusion of two prior factions (Judaizing, Petrine Christianity and Gentile, Pauline Christianity). The Pauline-Petrine compromise would then have become the victor over other Christian parties, like Gnostics and Encratites with whom Baur had been little concerned. Both Baur and Bauer seem to have underestimated the continuing importance of Jewish Christianity. It remained for other scholars, particularly Helmut Koester, James M. Robinson, and Burton L. Mack, to fill out the picture Baur and Bauer had painted in sure but broad strokes. We will shortly see how they did so, and then we will try to sharpen the focus even further.

 
Another Jesus, a Different Gospel

You can imagine the sort of reactions the research of both Baur and Bauer called forth. There was, to put it mildly, near-universal hostility. Most simply stopped up their ears at the blasphemy (Acts 7:57). But, like the farmer in the gospel parable of the sower (Mark 4:2-9), Baur and Bauer found that the seed they had planted did occasionally take root and sprout. Inspired by the work of Walter Bauer, two contemporary scholars of the New Testament and Early Christianity, Helmut Koester at Harvard and James M. Robinson at Claremont, put together a collection of their research called Trajectories Through Early Christianity. [4] In it, they followed the hunch that the diversity Bauer had revealed in second-century Christianity must have grown out of a similar diversity in first-century Christianity. That idea by itself was not particularly new. After all, F. C. Baur had already traced out some of the fault-lines in New Testament-era Christianity. But there was more to the map, and a great amount of new evidence had been discovered not only since Baur's time, but since Bauer's as well. To appreciate the reconstructions of Koester and Robinson, we must briefly survey the known types of second-century Christianity; then we will be able to appreciate the links Koester and Robinson traced from the second back into the first century.

Marcionism was a church founded by Marcion of Sinope in the early second century. Though Baur understood Paul to be the great spearhead of Gentile Christianity in the first century, I believe that we look in vain for any first-century Paulinism. The first Paulinist movement in early Christianity, in other words, the only one that a time-traveling Protestant might recognize some kinship with, was Marcionism. Marcionites believed that Paul was the only true apostle and interpreted him to mean that the Old Testament God was not the Father of Jesus Christ. The loving Father had not created human beings but later sent Jesus to adopt them as his children. Marcionites were radically ascetic and required celibacy of all baptized Christians. Marcion was very likely the first to collect the Pauline Epistles, and he made them the basis of the first known "New Testament," which he called the Apostolicon, adding a single gospel, an earlier, shorter version of Luke. He rejected the Old Testament as the scripture of Judaism. It was not that Marcion was anti-Semitic, or even anti-Jewish (charges often leveled at him by scholars today). Rather, he simply recognized that Judaism and Christianity were different, separate religions. Marcion went so far as to grant that the Old Testament was an accurate account of the dealings of the Hebrew God with his people. The prophecies of that scripture were reliable and true, even those predicting the Jewish Messiah, a Davidic king. It was just that, as Marcion read them, these prophecies had no reference to Jesus of Nazareth. One day the Messiah of Jewish expectation would come to liberate his people. But his people were not Christians, and he would not be Jesus. Marcion granted the righteousness of the Old Testament God, but he saw it as the rough justice of an oriental despot, ruthless and inexorable. Jesus' divine father, on the other hand, would judge no one. Christians served him not out of fear but from love and gratitude. [5] It is plain that had Marcion's views prevailed as official Christian doctrine, the history of the relations between Christians and Jews might have been considerably different. Christians would not have had to pretend that Jewish scriptures were really teaching Christianity, not Judaism. Christians would not have felt compelled to covet and contest the role of Jews as the elect children of the Hebrew God.

Marcion's natural opponents were Jewish believers in Jesus as the True Prophet and Messiah. In their opinion, Jesus had come not to abolish the Law of Moses but only to purify it of forged interpolations. Jeremiah had long ago charged the "lying pen of the scribes" with falsifying the Torah (Jer. 8:8), adding spurious laws mandating bloody animal sacrifice, a thing God had never thought of when he gave the Ten Commandments on Sinai (Jer. 7:21-26). One faction of Jewish Jesus believers, the Ebionites ("the poor"), believed Jesus and Moses had founded different covenants of equal validity. [6] Many rejected the virgin birth of Jesus as a piece of pagan mythology, believing instead in "Adoptionism," that Jesus became the son of God at his baptism or his resurrection. They claimed the Twelve Apostles (whose number implies a close connection to the tribes of Israel) and the Heirs (surviving relatives) of Jesus as their greatest leaders. Paul they repudiated with a vengeance, cursing him as a false apostle and an antichrist because of his teaching that Jews need no longer keep the commandments of Moses. Their scriptures were the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels according to the Ebionites, to the Hebrews, and to the Nazarenes. All these were variant versions of a basic gospel more or less identical with our Matthew (though ours may be merely one among many versions, not necessarily the original from which the others stemmed, as is usually thought).

It is proper to regard Matthew's gospel as a community product, because, even though it appears to be, in large measure, one writer's rewrite of another's work (the Gospel of Mark), it is clear that often Matthew employed earlier materials from his community, some of which do not quite fit either his basic outline or his own theology. The community from which the Gospel of Matthew emerged has been much studied in recent years. Most scholars agree that the evidence points plainly to a rather conservative Jewish Jesus-community which was composed of Jews and Gentiles, proselytes to Judaism or at least to Jesus-Judaism. They felt obliged to keep the whole Torah, even to the least commandment of it (Matt. 5:17-19), but at the same time, they took a liberal interpretation of several controversial questions, such as sabbath observance and hand washing, while taking care to keep dietary laws. Like many later rabbis, they disdained the common "minimum requirements" version of religion and instead stressed a "higher righteousness," exalting the attitude of holiness that causes the truly pious to shrink in horror from sin and to nip it in the bud by strictly monitoring every thought and impulse (Matt. 5:20-48). While it was possible to do so, before 70 c.e., the Mattheans, or Disciples of the Kingdom of Heaven, [7] practiced sacrifice at the Jerusalem temple. But they resisted the increasing rabbinization of Judaism, repudiated the use of "rabbi" as an honorific title, and vilified the Pharisee sect, their more successful rival. After an initial indifference to Gentiles and Samaritans (Mart. 10:5) the community undertook a mission to the nations (Matt. 28:19-20), though whether Gentiles were in view or Diaspora Jews, we do not know.

These "Jewish Christians" would not have called themselves "Christians." That was a product of Gentile Jesus worship. Instead they would simply have attracted faction labels to themselves, some ascribed to them by Jews who did not accept their faith. These included Ebionites ("the Poor," a title appearing in Gal. 2:10 and often in the Dead Sea Scrolls), the Elchasites (named after the baptizing prophet Elchasai), and the Nazarenes/Nazoreans. Patristic sources tell us that the Nazarenes agreed with emerging Hellenistic-catholic Christianity in most respects, except that they believed that they as Jews still needed to keep the Torah, though Gentile Christians needn't trouble themselves. My guess is that these Nazarenes represented a compromise with Gentile Christianity, as F. C. Baur had once suggested, a kind of theological assimilationism.

Cutting across the lines of several other groups, Encratites ("self-controllers, or "the sexually continent") shared the belief that sin was at bottom sexual, and that salvation required celibacy, so as to undo the sin of Adam and Eve. [8] Baptism restored the primordial oneness of Adam before Eve was separated from him. With conventional gender roles canceled, the Encratites had women apostles and prophets, rejected traditional social and family structures, and embraced pacifism, vegetarianism, and egalitarianism. They eagerly awaited the Second Coming of Christ to destroy the fallen world order. In all these respects they were much like the American sect of the Shakers.

Gnostic Christians cherished secret, mystical teachings they believed had been passed on by Jesus to selected disciples. [9] Gnostics ("those in the know") believed themselves to be members of a higher race possessing a spark of divine nature, unlike the mass of humanity. They spun fantastically elaborate myths of the creation in which some lower godling had created the material world by mistake, kidnapping divine spirits from the realm of light to populate the earth and provide some semblance of order amid the chaos. Jesus had appeared in a phantom likeness of a human body in order to awaken the Gnostics to the secret of their true origin and destiny. They viewed their own role as seeking to redeem the unspiritual ones, much like the long-suffering Bodhisattvas of Mahayana Buddhism.

What happened to all this diversity?

It seems like Encratism was domesticated by catholic Christianity and segregated off to the side in the form of the celibate orders of priests and nuns. But it wasn't for everybody. Ebionites and other "Jesus-Judaisms" lasted for several centuries [10] (contrary to F. C. Baur, who thought they were all swallowed up in a compromise with Paulinism). But as Judaism and Christianity grew further and further apart, each increasingly defining itself in opposition to the other, Jesus-Jews found themselves without a market share. Gentiles preferred Law-free Pauline or catholic Christianity, while Jews wanted nothing to do with the notorious name of Jesus, the new pagan idol. With Gnostics and Marcionites it was quite a different story. Once the Emperor Constantine chose catholic orthodoxy as the true Christianity, it was soon open season on the "heretics." ("Heresy," by the way, simply means "choice." It came to mean "thoughtcrime," implying it was blasphemy to presume to choose your own belief instead of swallowing what the bishops spoonfed you.) They got to work exterminating their rivals with fire and sword, burning their scriptures and their flesh alike.

 
This Treasure in Earthen Vessels

In 1945, just a year before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Egyptian shepherds accidentally unearthed the Nag Hammadi Gnostic texts. Remember, these had most likely been the library of the monastery of Saint Pachomius, deep-sixed once the monks read Saint Athanasius Easter Encyclical of 367 c.e., requiring all true Christians to read only our present list of twenty-seven New Testament books and no others. Knowing the inquisitors would soon be making their rounds, the brethren buried leather satchels containing the manuscripts. Better buried than cremated!

The documents included all sorts of fascinating new gospels, revelations, epistles, treatises, you name it. They threw a whole new light on Gnosticism, even as they confirmed much of what the church heresy hunters had told us and much more that scholars had surmised. Reitzenstein had traced Gnosticism to Iranian origins; lo and behold, here was an apocalypse called Zostrianos (=Zoroaster, Zarathustra). [11] Did Gnosticism seem to many a radical form of Platonism? Here was a fragment of Plato's Republic. Was Gnosticism, at least in some of its branches, an outgrowth of Judaism? Nag Hammadi contained various revelations from or to ancient biblical figures such as Seth, Adam, and Melchizedek. Did Gnosticism have pre-Christian pagan roots akin to Hermeticism? Up popped Asclepius and On the Eighth and the Ninth, pure Hermetic tracts. Had the sect founder Dositheus, rival of Simon Magus, been, like him, a proto-Gnostic? There was a Revelation of Dositheus. It appeared that many of the theories had been correct at the same time. Gnosticism was not just a "many-headed heresy" as the church fathers called it; it was a doctrine with many roots as well.

But Koester and Robinson saw something else, equally important. Like paleontologists puzzling over newly unearthed fossils, they realized these strange-seeming gospels and epistles must somehow fit into an evolutionary sequence. Suppose gospels like the Dialogue of the Savior, the Gospel of Philip, and the Sophia of Jesus Christ were not wild mutations from our more familiar gospels, but rather earlier transitional forms on the way to our gospels. [12] And Koester and Robinson realized something else: These gospels must have been written according to the beliefs and the religious needs of real people. With a bit of educated guesswork, they might be able to reconstruct just what kind of Christian groups had written and used these texts as well as how they eventually developed into the kinds of Christianity that produced and preserved the canonical gospels.

 
The Quotes of the Historical Jesus

Koester and Robinson decided there must have been three different pregospel types which, in different combinations, eventually evolved into the kind of gospels we have in the New Testament canon. Each type had its own distinctive theological slant and appealed to a different group. One pregospel type was the Sayings Collection. They were like the Book of Proverbs, the Wisdom of Solomon, and the Wisdom of Jesus ben-Sirach. The only surviving gospel of this type is the Nag Hammadi Gospel of Thomas. But Matthew and Luke must have had access to another which scholars today call "Q" (for Quelle, "source," denoting the sayings source of Matthew and Luke). Still another may lie behind the linked set of sayings in Mark 9:33-50.

Whoever produced writings like these was interested in the teaching of Jesus, not so much his fate or his identity. These would, hypothetically, be the sort of people whose faith eventually developed into Gnosticism as they scrutinized the sayings ever more closely until they began to see secret truths within them. "These are the secret sayings which the Living Jesus spoke.... Whoever finds their meaning will not taste death." Much has been written about the Q Document, and I will explore the matter further in chapter 5.

 
Gnostic News Conference

A second pregospel type was the revelation discourse/dialogue. We see this form most clearly in Gnostic works like the Pisris Sophia, the Dialogue of the Savior, the Book of Thomas the Contender and the Sophia of Jesus Christ, as well as catholic works like the Epistle of the Apostles. These writings are something like news conferences in which the Risen Jesus answers questions from the disciples, revealing great mysteries fit only for Gnostic ears. As Robinson pointed out, revelation dialogues are structured on a basic division between the pre-Easter time of ignorance and parable, and the post-Easter time of open revelation. These books are nonetheless quite diverse, because the line between ignorance and revelation could be moved, like the marker on a scale, to the left or the right. [13] Some such books have pushed the line way over to the right, like the Pistis Sophia, in which Jesus is shown still teaching only in cryptic parables for eleven years after the resurrection, after which he ascends into Heaven, then descends again in glory to impart open revelations in plain speech. This helps us to recognize what is going on in Acts 1:6, where the scene is Jerusalem forty days after the resurrection, and Jesus is teaching, but the disciples seem fully as obtuse as ever. "Lord, is it at this time you will restore independence to Israel?" Shaking his head in bemusement, Jesus tells them they will have to wait till the Holy Spirit arrives (at Pentecost) before all will become clear. Here, the ignorance/revelation line has moved from Easter over to Pentecost.

On the other hand, the canonical gospels tend to move the line back to the left. They move the line back into the earthly life and ministry of Jesus, along with his Messiahship, originally something else that had to wait till his resurrection. The most obvious case of this would be the Farewell Discourse of Jesus in John chapters 13-17. We are ostensibly listening to the pre-Easter Jesus as he tells the disciples that he cannot yet reveal the whole truth, since they are not up to receiving it. Soon the mysterious Paraclete will come to fill in the blanks. But it is really as the post-Easter revealer that this author pictures Jesus. This is why the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel sounds so little like the Jesus of the first three gospels. The reader is to take the hint from the author's wink in John 16:12-15:"I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak.... He will take of mine and declare it unto you." So the setting in the earthly life of Jesus is really just a dramatic framework for the author to present the deeper teaching he believes he has received from the Paraclete. Here the line has been moved back to before the resurrection.

Darrell J. Doughty [14] suggests that Mark's gospel, which has so many mysterious features, would make a lot more sense if we read it as having a circular structure -- if it started with the resurrection! That's why the book seems to end so abruptly at Mark 16:8, with the women fleeing from the tomb after a young man tells them Jesus will rejoin his disciples in Galilee. Mark wants the reader to look next at the only place there is left to look: the beginning. There we find the episode of Jesus' calling the disciples at the lakeside and the mysteriously immediate response: The disciples drop what they are doing and follow him. Doughty noticed how much sense this scene makes if we assume the disciples know him already. Think of how similar the scene is both to Luke's version in Luke 5:1-11 and to that in John 21:1-11, where it is explicitly a resurrection story! This is the reunion Mark's young man was talking about (Mark 16:7)! So once the Risen Jesus regains his disciples at the Sea of Galilee, the post-resurrection teachings begin. They continue throughout the Gospel of Mark.

Yes, this would mean that the whole of Mark's gospel, like John's, is really a frame for later teachings that have been placed in the mouth of the Jesus character. Again, the line has been pushed all the way over to the left, to the very beginning of the ostensible story of the earthly Jesus. No wonder scholars keep saying this or that saying sounds suspicious as a saying of the historical Jesus, more like a later saying from the early Christians. So even Mark can be understood as a revelation dialogue like Thomas the Contender, the whole thing backlit by Easter.

 
Righteous Résumé

A very different third type of pregospel was the aretalogy, a wonder-laden religious hero biography or saint's life. Literally, it means a list of "virtues" (areté) or great deeds. In the ancient Hellenistic world we find these written about Moses, Alexander the Great, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Apollonius of Tyana, and others. Most of these names are familiar; others are not. But in their day, many of them were held in much the same esteem in which Jesus is held today. Like Jesus, many of these others were believed to be the sons of God, miraculously conceived, their births announced by gods or angels.