My period is actually a bit later, when Christianity became official and the church nearly tore itself apart due to doctrinal and political disputes.
Of course not. The question is more nuanced than this. The question isn’t just whether we have enough evidence to conclude that a person named Jesus lived in a backwater province, but whether we apply the same standards for the historicity of Jesus that we do to any other equally well-documented person in the same period. Jesus brings out the opinions of all sorts of people who never have to evaluate the evidence for anyone else in antiquity, both theist and atheist. People are so used to the idea that personal data is captured comprehensively everywhere that they don’t realize that there is more ancient evidence for the historicity of Jesus than there is for an ordinary person in at least the 18th century.
Ancients struggled with the christology of John so much that it nearly wrecked the church. It took a thousand years of doctrine to get to where we are now. It should come as no surprise that we have a hard time supporting contemporary view of Jesus, informed by a lot of hindsight, with an ancient tradition that had barely worked out the basics. People believed all sorts of crazy things about Jesus two hundred years after his death. In some ways we are probably better informed now than a Christian would have been in AD 300.
That’s a deep well. Some the best attested alternatives were the gnostics. A large cache of their texts was found in Nag Hammadi in Egypt. Perhaps the most important are the Gospel of Thomas and the Book of Thomas the Contender.
There is an awful lot to summarize. These are some of the best-documented traditions that orthodoxy eventually destroyed, but they are not the only ones.
This is a truly enormous subject. It’s especially complicated because the theological and doctrinal controversies were so enmeshed in contemporary politics. It is hard to imagine people rioting over whether the Son and the Father are “like substance” or “the same substance,” but sure enough, they did. It’s also hard to imagine the Bishop of Alexandria commandeering the entire grain fleet of Egypt and dropping off thousands of monks in Constantinople to intimidate an ecclesiastical council, but sure enough, he did.
There were essentially two species of controversy in the early church, over organization and doctrine. In many ways the organizational controversies were more dangerous at the time, but the doctrinal ones cast a longer shadow.
The organizational (sometimes called praxis) heresies turned on how to treat Christians who backed off their faith during the persecution of the emperor Decius and later, the Great Persecution of Diocletian. The issue was whether bishops, who were ordained via apostolic succession, could regain their sees and ordain more bishops if they had turned in their scriptures during the persecutions. Rigorist sects claimed that accommodating bishops voided their sees and any bishop whom they ordained had no ecclesiastical authority. In effect they created an entire shadow church hierarchy that existed parallel to the orthodox church in Africa for decades. Especially prominent were the Donatists and the Meletians.
Doctrinal disputes were something else altogether. Major controversies turned on beliefs about the nature of Christ and the relationship between the Son and the Father. In retrospect we can call some of them heresies, but they were enormously popular in their time, were openly supported by emperors, and took centuries to die. Other differences in belief conjoined with political concerns drove the Egyptian church and the Church of the East to separate themselves from the mainstream. To this day the Alexandrian and Nestorian churches have not reconciled these differences of faith with orthodoxy.
The controversies were pressed at major ecclesiastical councils. Bishops from all over Christendom (though predominantly the Eastern Mediterranean) gathered at these moots to settle issues of doctrine, succession, and ecclesiastical organization. The First Council of Nicaea was called to settle the Arian heresy, but despite the emperor’s best efforts, this just kicked the can down the road. There were several important councils in Nicaea’s wake, especially the Council of Chalcedon, probably the single best documented political event in all of antiquity.
I won’t even try to summarize the doctrinal issues at stake. Breaking Bad is on tonight. But you can see some of the implications in the Coptic Church of Egypt and the Nestorian Church of the East.
That is quite a bit later than what I’m studying. I’m looking at the first and second centuries and it’s impossible to apply a collective “the church” to the various Jesus movements at that timeframe, as they were at such odds in beliefs and very passionate about calling each other anti-Christs and enemies.
Agreed, and probably the biggest problem is that almost everyone has an agenda. Another board I participate on has some militant atheists who want to prove that Jesus never existed as a person or that Paul believed X, Y and Z because that would further their cause more. Naturally, many theists want to equate any evidence of the historicity as divinity.
I’m studying now about the Donatists. Really interesting stuff.
I went from being what is not called a Young Earth Creationist, to a militant atheist to now looking it this all from simply a historical perspective.
In my former church, we were taught that a particular scripture would have a certain meaning, but as you said, that was imposing a modern believe system on something had a completely different message for the people who originally wrote and read it.
Fascinating stuff! Thanks Maeglin. If it were up to me, I’d trash your TV and spoil Braking Bad for you so as to force you to keep talking about this stuff… but in a good way!
But there wasn’t very much written down and there was no doctrine to speak of. I honestly don’t know how people try to recover the oral traditions of 1st and 2nd centuries. I’m a text guy by training and interest, so to me, most of what we really know about Christianity in the 2nd century comes from Pliny’s letters. Things open up later when educated people become Christians and start writing things down. I can’t see people caring too much then whether the Son is subordinate to the Father. But when Christianity becomes Hellenized and thinkers with Neoplatonic backgrounds start converting, serious thinking about doctrine began to matter.
Not much you can really do about that. The argument about Paul is easiest to deal with. Paul probably didn’t know what beliefs would further his cause best. He was thoroughly Hellenized and he knew how to appeal to people, but it’s pretty easy to say knowing that Paul succeeded that he intended it all along. With hindsight we know that it worked, but Paul couldn’t have known this at the time. He was just doing the best he could.
As far as the other arguments, there is not much to say to people who are arguing to first principles instead of from them.
Too bad all we really know about them is from their enemies. At least Augustine is pretty much always worth reading.
Maybe. It depends. There is a tradition of biblical exegesis that goes back very, very far. As long as modern interpreters bother to read ancient and medieval interpretations, they can get pretty close to what contemporaries actually thought. It’s easy to think that the ancient and medieval interpretations that survived were somehow authorized or approved, but that would be false. These were very controversial subjects back then, too. We only have one or two sides of a story sometimes by accident or because of intentional suppression later in history. It does not mean that everyone got behind one interpretation.
Thanks. As much as this is my passion in life, it is still work. I have to watch TV every now and again. If you have any questions, I am happy to try my hand and suggest some good resources.
One of my favorite stories is from one of the fathers of the Orthodox church, I think Gregory Nazianzus (though I could certainly be wrong, this is not really my area). He was a great theologian, bishop of Constantinople, and controversarian. In a personal letter he complained that he couldn’t go take a bath or pick up his laundry without having one of the attendants give him an earful on the nature of the Trinity. John Chrysostom would give theological lectures to audiences of thousands. This stuff was serious business back then.
I have to watch TV every now and again. If you have any questions, I am happy to try my hand and suggest some good resources.