The Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew

by Bart D. Ehrman

  Heresy was any deviation from this right belief, in evidence, for example, among those who would claim that instead of one God there were two, or

  According to this view, any falsified doctrine necessarily existed before its falsification, and any heretic who corrupted the truth must have had the truth itself available to corrupt. For this reason, orthodoxy was seen to be prior to heresy and true believers prior to false. By definition, then, orthodoxy was the original form of Christian belief, held by the majority of believers from the beginning, and heresy was a false perversion of it, created by willful individuals with small and pestiferous followings. Thus, in this view, orthodoxy really does mean what its etymology suggests: "right belief." Moreover, it implies both originality and majority opinion. Heresy, from the Greek word for "choice," refers to intentional decisions to depart from the right belief; it implies a corruption of faith, found only among a minority of people.

  Orthodoxy and Heresy: The Classical View

  These views of the relationship of orthodoxy and heresy dominated Christian scholarship for many centuries. Their classical expression can be found in the earliest written account of church history—including the history of internal Christian conflicts—written by the "father of church history," Eusebius of Caesarea. In ten volumes, Eusebius's Church History narrates the course of Christianity from its beginning up to his own time (the final edition was produced in 324/25).

  The account actually begins before Jesus' birth, with a statement concerning the twofold nature of Christ, both God and man, and a discussion of his preexistence. That is an unusual way to begin a historical narrative, and it serves to show the account's theological underpinnings. This is not a disinterested chronicle of names and dates. It is a history driven by a theological agenda from beginning to end, an agenda involving Eusebius's own understandings of God, Christ, the Scriptures, the church, Jews, pagans, and heretics. The orientation is clearly orthodox, with Eusebius opposing anyone who advocates an alternative understanding of the faith. This opposition determined both what Eusebius had to say and how he said it.

  A remarkably sanguine picture of Christianity's first three hundred years emerges in Eusebius's account, a picture all the more striking in view of the external hardships and internal tensions Christians actually had to endure in the period. But Eusebius could detect the hand of God behind the scene at every stage, directing the church's mission and destiny. Believers who were controlled and sustained by God's Spirit faced persecution fearlessly, so that the church grew despite opposition. And "heresy" was quickly and effectively overcome by the original and apostolic teaching of the church's vast majority, a teaching that, for Eusebius, was by definition orthodox.

  Like many of his predecessors among the heresiologists, Eusebius maintained that Christian heresy began with a shadowy figure mentioned in the New Testament book of Acts, Simon Magus. Acts, a canonical book for Eusebius, indicates that Simon was a great magician in the city of Samaria, who used his deft powers to convince the Samarians that he himself was "the Power of God that is called Great." But then, according to Acts 8, someone with real power arrived in town, the Christian evangelist Philip, who preached the gospel of God, leading many to convert and be baptized. This included Simon, who was astounded by Philip's miracles, which were truly divine, not manipulations of magic (Acts 8:9-13).

  When the apostles of Jerusalem learned that Samarians had converted to follow Christ and had been baptized, they sent two of their own, Peter and John, to provide the converts with the gift of the Spirit through the laying on of hands (8:14—17). We are not told how the Spirit's presence was manifest at this point, but if its first appearance on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2) is any indication, it must have been a spectacular moment. Simon in particular was impressed, but his wicked nature again took over. He tried to bribe the apostles to bring him into the inner circle and make their power available to him: "Give me also this power, that any one on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit" (8:19). Peter upbraided him for his insolence and sent him off with a reproach, urging him to repent of his wickedness. In humility, Simon asked that the apostles pray for him.

  That is the end of the story in Acts. But it came to be expanded considerably in later Christian tradition. By the mid-second century Christians told legends about Simon that indicated he never did repent but continued in his sinful ways, focusing on supernatural power and on convincing others that he had it. According to Justin Martyr, living in mid-second-century Rome, Simon became entirely persuasive in his claims that he was a divine being. Justin notes that the Romans set up a statue to Simon on the Tiber island, with a Latin dedicatory inscription that read, "Simoni Deo Sancto," meaning "To Simon, the Holy God" (Apology 1.26). Unfortunately, Justin appears to have gotten things muddled. As it turns out, the inscription was discovered many centuries later, in 1574. It actually read, "Semoni Sanco Sancto Deo." What a difference a word makes. Semo Sancus was in fact a pagan deity worshiped by the Sabines in Rome, and this was a statue dedicated to him. Justin mistook the inscription as referring to the Holy Simon.

  The early Christian heresiologists narrated yet more extensive accounts of Simon after his brusque dismissal by the apostles. According to Irenaeus and his successors, Simon was the original Gnostic, who taught that he was personally the divine redeemer sent from the heavenly realm to reveal the truths necessary for salvation. Moreover, he had brought his "Primal Thought" with him, the first aeon that emanated from the one true God. This Primal Thought came embodied as a woman named Helen, whom, the heresiologists tell us, Simon had acquired at a local brothel. For these heresiologists, who delight in stressing the point. Gnostics have prostituted themselves in more ways than one.

  A Roman inscription to Semo Sancis, a Sabine diety worshiped in Rome. This inscription was mistakenly taken to refer to "the holy Simon (Magus)" by Justin Martyr. (Vatican)

  Eusebius takes these stories found in Acts, Justin, and Irenaeus and develops them even further, establishing a precedent for the portrayal of heretical teachers throughout his ten-volume account. According to Eusebius, Simon was a demonically inspired opponent of the apostles who appeared in the course of the early Christian mission, performing black magic and misleading others to believe that he was divine. Not only did Simon advocate blasphemous and false doctrines; he also led a profligate life, openly consorting with the prostitute Helen and engaging in secret and vile rituals. Those he misled accepted his heretical teachings and, like him, indulged in scandalous practices: "For whatever could be imagined more disgusting than the foulest crime known has been outstripped by the utterly revolting heresy of these men, who make sport of wretched women, burdened indeed with vices of every kind" (Church History 2.13.8).

  Eusebius indicates, however, that God had an answer for this scurrilous heretic and raised up the apostle Peter to encounter him in Judea,

  extinguishing the flames of the Evil One before they could spread. . . . Consequently neither Simon nor any of his contemporaries managed to form an organized body in those apostolic days, for every attempt was defeated and overpowered by the light of the truth and by the divine Word Himself who had so recently shone from God on humans, active in the world and immanent in His own apostles. (Church History 2.14.2-3)

  Defeated in Judea, Simon then fled to Rome, where he achieved no little success, until Peter again appeared on the scene and once and for all dispensed with this henchman of Satan through a radiant and powerful proclamation of the truth.

  There is more vitriol than substance in Eusebius's account of Simon. The account nonetheless presents a schematic framing of the nature of Christian heresy, a framework that would prevail among church historians from late antiquity, down into the Middle Ages, and on up to the modern period. This is the "classical" view of internal doctrinal conflicts discussed above, in which orthodoxy is the "right opinion" taught by Jesus and his apostles and held by the majority of believers ever since, and heresy is "false belief created by willful persons who have
perverted the truth and convinced a minority of equally willful persons of their lies. In many of these accounts the corruptions of truth occur under the pressure of other, non-Christian influences, either Jewish traditions or, more commonly, pagan philosophy.

  Although Eusebius was chiefly responsible for popularizing this view, by no stretch of the imagination was he the first to express it. In fact, as I have intimated, a similar perspective may be found already in the New Testament book of Acts, which portrays the true faith as based on the eyewitness testimony of the apostles, who spread this faith throughout the world by the power of the Holy Spirit. The churches they establish—all of them, necessarily, apostolic churches—stand in complete harmony with one another in every important point of doctrine and practice; even relative latecomers such as Paul agree with Jesus' original followers in all the essentials of the faith. To be sure, internal problems arise on occasion. But for Acts, in almost every instance these problems derive from the greed and avarice of individual Christians (such as the infamous Ananias and Sapphira; 5:1-11) or from the thirst for power of outsiders who have come to infiltrate the church (such as Simon Magus; 8:4-25). Most converts are said to remain true to the apostolic message. And theological issues are readily resolved by an appeal to apostolic authority, which, even after serious debate and reflection, reveals the most remarkable of all unities. According to Acts, disunities in the church can be attributed to the false teachings of degenerate individuals, portrayed as ravenous wolves who infiltrate the flock of Christ's sheep to do great damage but who cannot, ultimately, overcome a church unified behind the original apostolic teaching (10:28-31).

  This view, afforded canonical status by Acts, became standard among proto-orthodox Christians of the second and third centuries, who, as we have seen, developed the notion f apostolic succession into a powerful weapon with which to fight their battles for truth.

  Assaults on the Classical View

  The "classical" understanding of the relationship of orthodoxy and heresy remained unchallenged, for the most part, until the modern period. Rather than present an exhaustive history of scholarship, I have decided to focus on three key moments in the history of its demise, each involving a fundamental question: Did Jesus and his disciples teach an orthodoxy that was transmitted to the churches of the second and third centuries? Does Acts provide a reliable account of the internal conflicts of the earliest Christian church? And does Eusebius give a trustworthy sketch of the disputes raging in the post-apostolic Christian communities? The answer to all three questions, as now known, is probably No. Scholars who first propounded these answers engaged in daring, even risky, historical work. But their conclusions are now so widely held as to be virtually commonplace.

  The first question involves the teachings of Jesus and his apostles and the reliability of the New Testament documents that convey them. Serious concerns about the historical accuracy of the Bible began to appear during the Enlightenment, when supernatural doctrines of divine revelation that guaranteed the truth of Scripture became matters of scholarly debate. Doubts that surfaced affected not only the increasingly secular discourses of science but also internal Christian reflections on the nature of Truth, the value of history, and the importance of human reason. The skepticism about church doctrine that came to a fevered pitch among western intellectuals in the eighteenth century found its way into the ranks of biblical and ecclesiastical scholarship, not just among those who saw themselves as standing outside the Christian tradition but especially among those within.

  In some ways the beginning can be traced to a remarkable book published in German in a series of seven installments in 1774-78. These so-called Fragments totaled around four thousand pages and were only part of a larger work written by an erudite German scholar named Hermann Reimarus (1694-1768). Reimarus had the good professional sense not to publish the Fragments himself.'' It was only after his death that the philosopher G. E. Lessing uncovered them and made them available to the public. He did so not because he agreed with their perspective but because they raised arguments that he believed needed to be addressed.

  Reimarus, the son of a Lutheran pastor in Hamburg, had been trained in philosophy, theology, and philology, and had spent the last forty years of his life as a professor of Hebrew and Oriental languages at the Hamburg Gymnasium (comparable to an advanced high school). The position afforded him time to write, and he produced several important works in a range of academic fields. But nothing proved so influential as these posthumous fragments on religion, the Bible, and the history of early Christianity. And among the fragments, none proved so controversial as the last, "The Intention of Jesus and His Disciples."

  Early in his academic life Reimarus had traveled to England, where he became intrigued by the ideas propounded by English Deists. With them, he came to affirm the supremacy of human reason over a purported divine revelation. He rejected the existence of miracles and insisted that contradictions in historical narratives even when in the Bible compromise their reliability. These principles were rigorously applied in his discussions of the New Testament in the Fragments, leading to a complete rejection of the historical reliability of the Gospel accounts of Jesus' resurrection (which, when compared carefully with one another, appear to be filled with discrepancies) and of the apostles' claims that Jesus was a supernatural being.

  According to Reimarus, Jesus did proclaim the coming Kingdom of God. But for Jesus, as for all Jews living at the time, this was to be a political entity, a real "kingdom" here on earth. Jesus maintained that there would be a victorious uprising by the Jews against the oppressive Romans leading to a new political state in Israel. Jesus himself would be at its head as the Messiah. This would happen in the near future, when the Jewish masses rallied around Jesus in support of their own liberation. Unfortunately, when the Roman authorities learned of Jesus' revolutionary preaching, they ruthlessly and effectively removed him from public view, crucifying him as a political incendiary.

  The disciples, however, had grown accustomed to their itinerant lives as followers of Jesus. Intent on perpetuating the cause, they decided to found a religion in Jesus' name. And so they invented the idea that Jesus was the Messiah—not the political Messiah that everyone expected, but a spiritual Messiah who had died for sin and been raised from the dead. To prevent the refutation of their claims, they stole Jesus' body from the tomb, as hinted at still in the Gospel accounts (Matt. 28:13). Thus, for Reimarus, the disciples started the Christian religion. And this was not at all what Jesus intended. Jesus, then, was clearly not the Messiah in either the physical or spiritual sense—let alone the preexistent son of God or, as later theologians would have it, God himself, of the "same substance as the Father." Jesus was a Jew who preached a revolutionary message that placed him on the wrong side of the law and that led to his violent death. And that was the end of his story.

  No scholar today agrees with this reconstruction of the historical Jesus." But as Albert Schweitzer noted in his classic 1906 study, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, more than anyone else Reimarus began the critical quest to establish what really happened in Jesus' life, based on the premise that the Gospel narratives are not accurate reports but later accounts written by believers with a vested interest in their claims.

  The basic evidence for this point of view involves some of the major points that Reimarus himself made: There are differences among the Gospel accounts that cannot be reconciled. Some of these differences are minor discrepancies in details: Did Jesus die the afternoon before the Passover meal was eaten, as in John(see 19:14), or the morning afterwards, as in Mark (see 14:12,22; 15:25)? Did Joseph and Mary flee to Egypt after Jesus' birth as in Matthew (2:13-23), or did they return to Nazareth as in Luke (2:39)? Was Jairus's daughter sick and dying when he came to ask Jesus for help as in Mark (6:23,35), or had she already died, as in Matthew (9:18)? After Jesus' resurrection, did the disciples stay in Jerusalem until he had ascended into heaven, as in Luke (24:1-52), or did they straightaway go to Galile
e, as in Matthew (28:1-20)? Discrepancies like these (many of which seem minor, but which often end up being significant when examined closely) permeate the Gospel traditions.

  Some of the differences are much larger, involving the purpose of Jesus' mission and the understanding of his character. What all the differences show, great and small, is that each Gospel writer has an agenda—a point of view he wants to get across, an understanding of Jesus he wants his readers to share. And he has told his stories in such a way as to convey that agenda.

  But once we begin to suspect the historical accuracy of our Gospel sources, and find evidence that corroborates our suspicions, where does that lead us? With regard to our questions about the nature of orthodoxy and heresy in early Christianity, it leads us away from the classical notion that orthodoxy is rooted in the apostles' teaching as accurately preserved in the New Testament Gospels and to the realization that the doctrines of orthodox Christianity must have developed at a time later than the historical Jesus and his apostles, later even than our earliest Christian writings. These views are generally held by scholars today, based on in-depth analyses of the Gospel traditions since the days of Reimarus.

  The scholarly interest unleashed on the New Testament during the Enlightenment focused not just on Jesus and the Gospels but also on the historical reliability of the rest of the Christian Scripture. Of particular relevance to the traditional understanding of orthodoxy and heresy, questions arose concerning the accuracy of the description of the earliest Christian community in Acts. Another key moment in the history of scholarship came some six decades after the publication of Reimarus's Fragments, in the work of another German scholar, F. C. Baur (1792-1860).