Apologetics 8 – A New Story About Christian Origins

We live in a world in which the name ‘Jesus’ is not entirely unfamiliar. The Western world was born out of the ruins of the Roman empire and this world, from the time of Constantine onward, was a fusion of imperial power and the Christian religion. With this as the historical backdrop of our culture, we will never quite be able to shake loose from at least passing interest in Jesus and the church that bears his name.

Yet the majority of contemporary Westerners have rarely read the gospels and know very little about the historical Jesus. So we have a world in which Jesus is at least somewhat familiar but where most people have only a faint knowledge of what the Bible actually says about him and even less of an understanding of the history of the church. The same could be said for large segments of the Christian church itself. So there is strong interest in Jesus because of his historical influence. There is also a strong appetite for speculative theories (see a recent Maclean’s article for a regrettably obvious example) that undercut received wisdom and challenge the authority of the institutional church (of whatever variety).

So a new story (what N.T. Wright calls the ‘new myth of Christian origins‘) about how Christianity developed has emerged in recent inquiry into the historical Jesus. It goes something like this: the first four centuries of the history of the church were a battleground over what Christianity would look like. This is very much the picture presented in popular depictions of this time period (the classic example being Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code). The church was struggling to define itself and there is not much distinction made between something that happened in the first century or something that happened in the fourth. It’s almost as if these 400 years are treated as a self-contained period where everyone was asking the question: Who gets to decide what the picture of Jesus is going to look like? Who gets to decide what kind of religion Christianity is going to become?

A variety of texts were in circulation, all of which made claims as to what would be the accepted picture of Jesus. The writings that made it into our NT were chosen by the church in order to reinforce its power and to suppress ‘minority reports’. Jesus was ‘divinized’ by the church through its selection of certain gospels and ignoring others (Gospel of Thomas, Peter, Mary, Judas etc.). So the first four centuries saw a kind of Darwinian struggle for survival among rival texts (or, perhaps, ‘memes’), all of which sought to present a certain authoritative picture of Jesus that would carry the day for the fledging Christian church.

The problem is that the history didn’t really unfold this way. It’s not as if a council of bishops had 60-80 equally valid presentations of Jesus and simply selected the ones that reinforced their own power and suppressed the role of women in the early church. The four canonical gospels are nearly unanimously affirmed as being written in the latter half of the first century (so within a generation or two of Jesus’ life and death). The so–called ‘lost gospels’ are mostly from the second and third century (although Thomas is still hotly debated).

The most obvious reason for evaluating these gospels as being later than the canonical gospels is that they look very Gnostic in terms of their theology. Gnosticism is a mingling of Greek philosophy with early Christianity that occurred as the early church moved from being primarily Jewish to becoming primarily Gentile in its composition. The Jesus that emerges from many of these later gospels looks a lot more like a neo-Platonist than a Jewish prophet and it seems safe to say that the historical development would have been away from Jesus as a Jewish prophet announcing the kingdom of God and toward a kind of wise sage offering secret knowledge as the pathway to salvation.

The historical origins of the New Testament is a fascinating topic in and of itself but it seems to me that most of the more speculative theories about who Jesus really was and what the church ought to have looked like are based on a fairly suspicious reading of the motives of the early church that tends to import twenty-first century ideals back to a time in which they would appeared as foreign as that time appears to us.