Second Feature

Most Christians today, whether Protestant, Roman Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox, believe that the central doctrines of the Church—those embodied, for instance, in the Nicene Creed—can be traced backward through the apostles to Jesus. That is, while most are not naïve enough to suppose that Jesus and the apostles taught a full-blown Nicene Trinity or a finely nuanced doctrine of the hypostatic union, all would accept that the seeds of such doctrines are to be found in the teaching of Jesus and his apostles as found in the New Testament. This has been the opinion of Christians since the early days of the church. This, however, is not the opinion of a number of contemporary NT scholars.

The Revisionist Account of the Rise of “Orthodoxy”

These scholars propose that the view of Christianity presented in the NT and codified in the great ecumenical councils of the fourth and fifth centuries—what we would call orthodoxy—was only one of several competing forms of “Christianity” in the earliest church. They argue that virtually everything in the early church was up for grabs, whether monotheism, the deity of Christ, the authority of the OT, or the goodness of creation. Various sects, representing a spectrum of beliefs and all claiming apostolic support, contested for the supremacy of their views. What we take to be “orthodox” only became such because it “won” these rhetorical and political battles and so was able successfully to silence, suppress, and eventually extinguish the alternatives, which it branded “heresy.” These “proto-orthodox” winners wrote the histories and constructed the canon that legitimated their brand of Christianity alone.

Two scholars in particular have been instrumental in conveying this “revisionist” account to a popular audience. Elaine Pagels, currently Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University, first brought these ideas to public attention in 1979 through her book The Gnostic Gospels,¹ in which, among other things, she questioned the authority of the NT writings over against the Gnostic documents cherished by so-called heretics. Other writings, such as The Gnostic Paul,² furthered her revision of the orthodox account and have culminated in Beyond Belief,³ which, besides propounding the revisionist thesis, offers a passionate appeal for religious tolerance and a virtual confession of Gnosticism. An even more determined popularizer than Pagels, however, has been Bart Ehrman, James A. Gray Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ehrman shares a concern with Pagels to “relativize” orthodox Christianity in the interest of religious tolerance, and he has published several books with that concern in mind. Chief among these are The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, and Misquoting Jesus,⁴ in which Ehrman attempts to undermine the orthodox appeal to Scripture by claiming to show how the proto-orthodox played fast and loose with Jesus tradition and “apostolic” texts in order to further their theological agenda, and Lost Christianities,⁵ in which he introduces the various sorts of “Christian” sects and sectarian “scriptures” vying for supremacy in the second and third centuries, and purports to give an account of the rhetorical tactics used by the proto-orthodox to become dominant.

What are we to make of the claims of the revisionists? Their work has received significant attention in the popular media and their books reach audiences far beyond the halls of academia—perhaps even to some in the pews of your church. Is it really true that Nicene orthodoxy has no more claim to represent the teaching of Jesus than the heterodox versions of Christianity? Is it really true that orthodoxy owes its success more to the skill at which its early proponents played “the Scripture wars” than to its continuity with the apostles? We will consider these questions in what follows, and to begin to do so, let us look more closely at the revisionist case.

Though not primarily concerned with presenting an argument for the revisionist account, in Lost Christianities Ehrman identifies three key questions upon which the revisionist case rests: (1) Did Jesus and the apostles teach a form of orthodoxy? (2) Does Acts give a reliable account of the early apostolic church as relatively unified around this core orthodoxy as it spread through the Roman world? (3) Does Eusebius (whose Ecclesiastical History, published ca. AD 325, is the oldest surviving history of the early church)⁶ give a reliable account of the sub-apostolic and ante-Nicene church as originally and in the majority orthodox in all locales, with heresies forming secondary and minority positions? Each question is answered in the negative, leading Ehrman to the conclusion that, since orthodoxy neither goes back to the apostles nor to Jesus, nor was it always and everywhere in the majority, it is therefore not the only valid form of Christianity. The only reason orthodoxy came to dominate all other forms of devotion to Jesus was that it slurred its opponents’ morals more effectively, criticized its opponents’ views more effectively, appealed to its own apostolicity more effectively, interpreted the OT more effectively, and forged and corrupted its supporting texts more effectively.

Response to the Revisionist Argument

Ehrman’s argument can be challenged at several points. To begin, let us consider his second and third questions together: Are the pictures in Acts and Eusebius of a consistent and widespread orthodoxy in the early church reliable?

Are Acts and Eusebius Reliable?

Part of the revisionist account rests on the demonstrable diversity of opinion regarding the person and significance of Jesus of Nazareth among early “Christian” groups. This diversity can be demonstrated even by a casual reading of the NT, in most books of which one encounters polemics against false teachers and doctrines, and by similar rhetoric in the Apostolic Fathers (the group of church leaders in the first post-apostolic generation whose writings we possess) and in the writings of those church leaders who followed them.⁷ This picture has been considerably supplemented by the numerous actual heterodox texts that have been discovered in the past century, particularly the fifty-two primarily Gnostic tractates found near Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945.⁸ It is supposed by the revisionists that this diversity tells a very different tale than that found in Acts and Eusebius. Contrary to the traditional view of an apostolic orthodoxy spreading from Jerusalem to all parts of the Roman Empire from which deviated various heretical groups, in actuality Christianity was characterized by numerous conflicting sects from the very beginning.

With regard to Acts, Ehrman agrees with the conclusions of research flowing from F.C. Baur (d.1860) and the Tübingen school that suggest the author of Acts sought to mask the vehement disagreement between Paul and at least some of the leadership of the Jerusalem church in favor of a myth of irenic apostolic unity in the first century. For example, when the “Paul” of Acts is compared to the Paul of the letters we find irreconcilable differences both in chronology and in theology. The “Paul” of Acts is said to be very deferential to the Jerusalem church and to Jewish customs, while the Paul of the letters disdains the Jerusalem leadership and Jewish customs. It becomes clear, then, in the revisionist thinking, that Acts is a falsified “history” attempting to privilege the proto-orthodox perspective. With regard to Eusebius, Ehrman relies on work that began with the investigations of Walter Bauer (d.1960) into second century Christianity. Bauer attempted to show through assessment of early sources related to the Church in various regions of the Roman Empire that orthodoxy was neither the earliest nor the majority view in every region. Rather, Bauer argues, it was only strong in Rome, where it used its money and power to coerce other churches to toe the proto-orthodox line. Eusebius’ idyllic picture of a primarily orthodox early church is thus, in his opinion, false.