Bauer via Ehrman on Early Christian Orthodoxy

This is from Bart D. Ehrman's book, "Jesus Interrupted". Ehrman is discussing how the Orthodox Christan scriptural canon came into being, and references Walter Bauer's 1934 book "Orthodox and Heresy in Earliest Christianity".

"Bauer looked at our earliest evidence for Christianity in a range of geographical regions throughout early Christendom - For example, in Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor and Rome. He found that if the sources are studied in minute detail, they tell a very different story from the one told by Eusebius. In many places of early Christianity, forms of Christian belief that were later labeled heretical were the original form of Christianity, and in some parts of the church so-called heretics outnumbered those who agreed with the orthodox form of the faith. In some places Marcionite Christianity was dominant; in other places, one or another of the Gnostic systems prevailed.

Moreover, a number of Christian groups saw no sharp divisions between what would later be called heresy and what would be called orthodoxy. The clear theological distinctions of Eusebius's day were not original to the faith, but were created later when the battle lines were drawn up. Some people who were later considered heretics would have been seen, and were seen, as completely orthodox in their own day.

The way Bauer saw it, the church of the second and third centuries was not made up of one massive and dominant movement known as orthodoxy, with heretical groups at the fringes. Early on there were all sorts of groups with all sorts of views in lots of different places. Of course, all of these groups believed that their views were right, that their beliefs were orthodox.

But in the struggle to win converts, only one group eventually won out; this was the group that was particularly well represented in the city of Rome. The Roman Christians asserted their influence on other churches; as the church in Rome, the center of the empire, this community was larger, wealthier, and better organized than other Christian groups.

This Roman group acquired more converts than any of the others, eventually stamped out all of its competition, declared itself orthodox, argued that its views really were those of Jesus and the apostles, claimed that it had always been the majority view, and then - as a final coup de grace - rewrote the history of the conflict. What emerged was a Christianity characteristic of the Roman church. It was Roman Christianity - Roman catholic (meaning universal) Christianity.

Eusebius stands at the end of this process. It was his rewriting of history that made all later historians think that his group had always been the majority opinion. But it did not really happen that way."

Nice quote from Ehrman

I'm reading Bart D. Ehrman's book, "Jesus Interrupted." There are a lot of things in this book that should make fundamentalists very uncomfortable, but I particularly like this passage from the beginning of Chapter 4.

"Students taking a college-level Bible course for the first time often find it surprising that we don't know who wrote most of the books of the New Testament. How could that be? Don't these books all have the authors' names attached to them? Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, the letters of Paul, 1 and 2 Peter, and 1, 2 and 3 John? How could the wrong names be attached to books of Scripture? Isn't this the Word of God? If someone wrote a book claiming to be Paul while knowing full well that he wasn't Paul -- isn't that lying? Can Scripture contain lies?

When I arrived at seminary I was fully armed and ready for the onslaught on my faith by liberal scholars who were going to insist on such crazy ideas. Having been trained in conservative circles, I knew that these views were standard fare at places like Princeton Theological Seminary. But what did they know? Bunch of liberals.

What came as a shock to me over time was just how little actual evidence there is for the traditional ascriptions of authorship that I had always taken for granted, and how much real evidence there was that many of these ascriptions are wrong. It turned out the liberals actually had something to say and had evidence to back it up; they weren't simply involved in destructive wishful thinking. There were some books, such as the Gospels, that had been written anonymously, only later to be ascribed to certain authors, who probably did not write them (apostles and friends of the apostles). Other books were written by authors who flat out claimed to be someone they weren't."

I like this phrase: "It turned out the liberals actually had something to say, and had evidence to back it up." To how many areas of public discourse could that apply? Evolution? Global warming? Weapons of mass destruction? Health care reform? The list could go on and on. Because that's the real difference between liberals and conservatives: liberals value evidence, conservatives value belief. Liberals will change their views if evidence proves them wrong. Conservatives will stubbornly stick to their guns even in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence. And liberals have a lot of evidence on their side. Look back through history, and you'll find that nearly every instance of social progress -- separating church and state, freeing the slaves, women's rights, desegregation, social security, medicare, clean air and water legislation, the list goes on and on -- was promoted by liberals and opposed by conservatives. And now, looking back, we celebrate those liberal accomplishments as milestones of a free society, and the conservatives who opposed them are at best forgotten, or at worst recognized for the narrow-minded zealots that they were.

Liberalism has a good track record. Conservatism, not so much. And liberals need to keep pointing that out. Like Frank Schaeffer said, we can't accommodate the village idiot. We have to let them stand on the mountain waiting for Armageddon while the rest of us get on with the business of making the world a better place.