Were Later Versions of Christianity Radically Different than Earlier Ones? Reflecting on Recent Scholarly Claims
Written by Michael J. Kruger |
Friday, April 7, 2023
For those interested in the formation of the earliest Christian movement, After Jesus Before Christianity will be a fascinating read. It offers a number of provocative claims that will surely elicit reflection and curiosity in the reader. And it does make some helpful points that need to be made: e.g., early Christianity was more diverse than we typically think; women were valued in the early Christian movement. However, time and again, the authors seem to push well beyond what the evidence can bear.
I think it’s fair to say that the last decade has witnessed a bit of a resurgence of academic interest in early Christianity.
By “early Christianity,” I don’t mean the Christianity represented by the major figures in the fourth and fifth centuries when the church had risen to power—e.g., Athanasius, Constantine, Augustine. Rather, I am referring to the time period immediately after the apostles, mainly the second and third centuries, when Christianity was still in its infancy, struggling to find its way in a hostile Roman world.
Recent books covering this critical time period (and sometimes more periods) include Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity (2011), Larry Hurtado, Destroyer of the gods (2016), my own Christianity at the Crossroads (2017), Bart Ehrman, The Triumph of Christianity (2018), and James Edwards, From Christ to Christianity (2021).
So, why all the interest? I think scholars are realizing afresh something that we have always known, namely that the validity of the later (and fuller) version of Christianity is dependent, at least somewhat, upon whether its core features can be traced back to the earlier stages of Christianity.
And if this cannot be done, if it can be shown that there is a radical gap between the two, then we might conclude that the Christianity that arose to dominance is not the “real” Christianity after all. Rather, it is just a man-made construction—born of politics or power or just random chance—that is out of sync with the earlier (and more authentic) version.
Then we might conclude that this earlier (more authentic) version of the faith has been suppressed and forgotten for all these generations. And then we might wish there were scholars brave enough to recover that lost version of the faith for us, restoring it to its proper place.
Well, if someone has such a wish, it can be realized in the latest volume, After Jesus Before Christianity: A Historical Exploration of the First Two Centuries of Jesus Movements (HarperOne, 2021). It is authored by Erin Vearncombe, Brandon Scott, and Hal Taussig—all writing on behalf of the Westar Institute (effectively the umbrella organization for the well-known Jesus Seminar).
A Bold Thesis
If the foreword by Sue Monk Kidd is any indication, the thesis of this volume certainly does not lack in boldness: “You are about to read a book that possesses the potential to rewrite history, namely, the long-held ‘master-narrative’ of how Christianity came to be” (xi). And what is this “master narrative” the book intends to rewrite? It’s the belief that “‘Christianity’ acted as a unified, continuous early tradition in unbroken line representing a single truth” (3).
In other words, the book aims to show that there is a radical gap between the later version of Christianity and its earlier iterations. While the later version might look stable and unified, the early stage of Christianity was a diverse, vibrant “kaleidoscope” of different views—a mosaic of “many-shaped tiles”—that defy neat categorizations and traditional labels (3).
The authors put it bluntly, “In the first two centuries, what we think of as ‘Christianity’ did not exist” (4).
Walter Bauer Revisited
Of course, anyone familiar with 20th century scholarship on early Christianity will quickly recognize that this overall thesis is not new. Walter Bauer’s 1934 volume, Heresy and Orthodoxy in Earliest Christianity, essentially made these same claims about radical diversity in the earliest centuries, and how “orthodoxy” was merely the result of the stabilization of the church in the 4th/5th century. Indeed, much of modern critical scholarship on early Christianity has been built on the Bauer paradigm (in some form or another).
Now, while Bauer’s thesis has been roundly (and some would say decisively) critiqued, he did get some things right. For one, it is fair to say that these earliest centuries of the Christian faith had a lot more theological-doctrinal diversity than we typically recognize.
And the same is true of the present volume. At a number of points, it rightly recognizes that these early centuries were quite different than the later centuries, and we need to understand those differences better.
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Cheating in Sports and the Rest of Life
This phenomenon applies to sports as much as to marriage, to international economics as much as to personal finance, to lawmaking as much as to law keeping, to policing as much as to criminal activity. Technology may help us better detect cheating, but it won’t produce humans who won’t try. If we think otherwise, it’s because our worldview is cheating us.
Recently, five-time world chess champion Magnus Carlsen resigned a match with 19-year-old Hans Niemann and accused his opponent of cheating. His allegations have since been substantiated. In professional poker, a relative newcomer was accused of cheating in a game in which she won over $260,000. The CRLG, the world’s largest competitive Irish dancing organization, just launched a widespread investigation of cheating, which included offering sexual favors for presiding judges. And in a video gone viral, over 8 lbs. of lead weights were removed from the bellies of Ohio walleyes caught in a professional fishing tournament.
The string of cheating scandals points to a reality of the human condition after the Fall, a reality that spans time and place and cultures and even sports, ranging from the popular to the less than popular. At the Olympic Games of 388 B.C., the 98th Olympic games, a boxer named Eupolus of Thessaly bribed three opponents to throw the match. In response, the Greeks raised statues of Zeus along the route to the competition, with lightning bolts raised to punish those who would bribe or cheat their way to victory. The irony, of course, is that Zeus, “the Oath Giver” was a notorious oath breaker, cheating again and again on his wife Hera. And lest we pick on professional fishing, we should remember NFL’s “Deflategate” and the Houston Astros’ sign-stealing scandal.
What is odd about our time and place is the outrage over lead weights in dead fish and yet our simultaneous shrugs over affairs, open marriages, and no-fault divorce. A recent YouGov poll found that roughly a quarter of Americans were interested in an open relationship. According to Gallup polling, though the divorce rate has actually dipped in recent years, the social acceptability of divorce is at an all-time high.
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The Indelible Conscience and a Month of “Pride”
If you need the worlds of sports, entertainment, education, media, and government to celebrate your sexuality in order to feel proud, maybe your conscience is trying to tell you something. Might it be that deep down—behind the torrent of rainbow flags and the blitz of billionaire sponsors—God is speaking to us a different word?
In case you haven’t heard, June 1 no longer marks the end of the school year or the unofficial beginning of summer. It’s the start of Pride Month. Initially conceived in 1970 to commemorate the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots, Pride Month has become a government-promoted, corporate-sponsored, 30-day celebration of LGBTQ acceptance and achievements. When rioters threw bricks and tried to burn down the Stonewall Inn in New York City’s Greenwich Village with police officers barricaded inside, even the most optimistic gay liberation proponent could not have dreamed that an illegally operated, Mafia-owned gay bar would eventually join the Statue of Liberty and the Grand Canyon on the select list of protected national monuments.
Pride Month is at once a brilliant marketing strategy and a striking reminder that the conscience is a terrible thing to waste.
By linking gay liberation to “pride,” LGBTQ advocates—and it’s worth mentioning, that the five letters only fit together in an uneasy alliance—hit upon an ethical and strategic coup. The rallying cry of “pride” transformed their quest for culturewide moral legitimacy (a daunting task) into a personal plea for therapeutic well-being (a much easier goal). The debate would not be a head-on, rational discussion about whether the sexual revolution was acceptable by the standards of God’s Word, natural law, or Western tradition. The debate would not be about what was good for children, good for the public, or even good for those drawn to LGBTQ behavior. Instead, “pride” made the debate about feelings of personal acceptance. Changing the culture is hard work and takes a long time (about 50 years, it turns out). Convincing people to stop making other people feel bad is a much easier sell.
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The Imago Dei Under Attack
Tracing our lineage back to Adam gives the racist a proverbial punch in the face because, in a very real sense, we all have the same ancestors. Though we may look different, speak different, and act different, in the end we are no different. We are humans made in the image of God, and that is more than enough.
The doctrine of the imago Dei—the image of God—is foundational to the Christian faith. We believe all people—man, woman, the unborn—have inherent value, worth, and dignity because they’re created by God (Genesis 1:27). Humanity is sacred because of the imago Dei. We have more value and worth than the cockroach because it wasn’t created after God’s likeness—we were (Genesis 1:26).
The imago Dei is one of many doctrines of our faith that is under attack. And one of the more prevalent ways it is under attack is through racism. Racism is the torch that many people use to light the imago Dei on fire.
“To the extent that racism is rooted in the twisted belief that one segment of the population is superior to another,” Don Morgan wrote, “it’s not hard to see how race-based discrimination is a direct assault on the sanctity and dignity of human life.”
Whether you want to use the word race or ethnicity, Morgan is correct. Race- or ethnicity-based discrimination is a direct assault on the sanctity of human life.
What is racism, anyway? The Oxford Dictionary defines racism as “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior.” To be racist is to be prejudiced against another person simply because of different skin color. To be racist, in the end, is to blatantly ignore the imago Dei.
With that said, what are some ways in which racism is an attack on the image of God? And, more importantly, how should Christians respond?
Less than Human
We saw it back during the time of slavery, and, to an extent, we see it today. Those who are racist treat others as less than human. They treat them as though they weren’t created by God. This attack on the image of God is prevalent throughout our society in many ways:
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