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

by Bart D. Ehrman

  The political history of the period, including church-state relations, is complicated, but for our purposes a brief sketch will suffice, starting with a word of background. Christians of all sorts had been subject to local persecution from the beginning of the religion (2 Cor. 11:23-25); but it was not until the mid-third century that there was any official, empire-wide attempt to eliminate the religion. From about 249 ce onwards, starting with the brief reign of the emperor Decius (249-51), there were periods of persecution, sporadically and inconsistently enforced, along with times of peace. For the most part, these persecutions, like the local ones in earlier periods, were occasioned not by antireligious sentiment but precisely by religious sentiment. Many pagans took their religions seriously. It was widely believed that the gods were kind and gracious, but when offended they could become angry and would need to be appeased. And nothing angered them more than the failure of people to worship them by performing the prescribed acts of sacrifice. Christians, of course, refused to sacrifice to the pagan gods, even the gods of the state. They were sometimes blamed, then, for disasters that occurred—famine, drought, disease, earthquake, political setbacks, economic difficulties—and the persecutions were designed to force them to recant and show due reverence to the gods who had long been honored by the state.

  In 303 ce, the pagan emperor of the eastern part of the empire, Diocletian, ordered a persecution of Christians, matched to some degree by a persecution in the western part of the empire by his colleague, the emperor Maximian. Several imperial edicts were issued that called for the burning of Christian books, the demolition of Christian churches, the removal of class privileges for Christians, and eventually the imprisonment of high-ranking Christian clergy. In 304, a further edict required all Roman subjects to perform sacrifices to the gods; noncompliance meant death or forced labor. This "Great Persecution," as it is called, lasted on and off for nearly a decade, well beyond the retirement of Diocletian and Maximian in 305 ce. But the persecution failed to force the majority of Christians to recant. For a variety of reasons, official toleration for Christians was pronounced in both the western and eastern parts of the empire by 313. Throughout the empire people were granted freedom of religious choice, and the property of the Christians was restored.

  The senior emperor at that time was Constantine. In 312 Constantine had begun to attribute his military and political ascendancy to the God of the Christians and to identify himself, as a result, as a Christian. Once his base of power was secure, Constantine became quite active in church affairs, dealing with various controversies in an attempt to keep the Church united. Some historians think that Constantine saw in the Christian church a way of bringing unity to the empire itself. In 325 ce Constantine called the Council of Nicaea, the first so-called Ecumenical Council of the church, that is, the first council at which bishops from around the world were brought together in order to establish a consensus on major points of faith and practice. All of these bishops agreed with the major theological positions hammered out by their proto-orthodox forebears; as I have noted, the forms of "lost Christianity" we have been discussing had by this time already been displaced, suppressed, reformed, or destroyed. Thus it was the surviving form of Christianity—by now we might call it orthodoxy—that Constantine knew and supported.

  As a result of the favors Constantine poured out upon the church, conversion to the Christian faith soon became "popular." At the beginning of the fourth century, Christians may have comprised something like 5 to 7 percent of the population; but with the conversion of Constantine the church grew in leaps and bounds. By the end of the century it appears to have been the religion of choice of fully half the empire. After Constantine, every emperor except one was Christian. Theodosius I (emperor 379-95 ce) made Christianity (specifically Roman Christianity, with the bishop of Rome having ultimate religious authority) the official religion of the state. He opposed the surviving pagan religions and eventually banned pagan sacrificial practices. More conversions naturally followed, until Christianity became the religion to be handed down to the Middle Ages and onwards.

  None of this would have happened without Constantine's "conversion." And now the question of relevance to our study. If any other form of early Christianity had established itself as dominant within the religion, would Constantine have embraced it? Would he have been willing to adopt a Jewish form of Christianity, which would have required him and his fellow converts to become Jewish, undergo circumcision, keep kosher food laws, and observe other traditions of the Jewish Law? Or would he have been inclined to accept a Marcionite form of Christianity, which could claim no "ancient" roots, since it abandoned the ancient traditions of Judaism? Would he have been likely to adopt any of the Gnostic forms of Christianity, which maintained that only a spiritual elite could truly understand the revelation of God, that the majority of believers misunderstood the true teachings of Jesus?

  It is difficult to see how any of these alternatives could have been attractive to the emperor or would have served to unite the empire. If one of them had become dominant, would Constantine have converted to this faith and promoted it throughout his domain? If he had not, would Christianity have become the "official" religion of the empire some decades later under the emperor Theodosius? If not, would it ever have been anything but another minor religion in an empire filled with religions? To put the question bluntly: Would Christianity have become the religion of the empire? Of the Middle Ages? Of the modern West? And if not, wouldn't those who eventually confessed Christianity—the vast majority of people around the northern and southern Mediterranean, medieval Europe, and on into the new world—wouldn't they, or rather we, have remained pagan? Wouldn't most people today still worship many gods through periodic offerings of animal sacrifice?

  All things considered, it is difficult to imagine a more significant event than the victory of proto-orthodox Christianity.

  Remnants of What Was Lost

  This is not to say, however, that proto-orthodox Christians were absolutely successful in producing a consensus on every important point of faith and practice. Indeed, as soon as the major theological issues of the second and third centuries were more or less resolved, others appeared to take their place. The battles fought in later centuries were no less harsh, and the polemic against "false teachers" was no less vitriolic. Quite the contrary, as the options narrowed, the debates intensified.

  To take one example: Once proto-orthodoxy had established that Christ was both human and divine, the relationship between his humanity and divinity still needed to be resolved. How could Christ be both a man and God? Was it that Christ had a human body but that his human soul was replaced by a soul that was divine? If so, then how was he "fully" human? Or was it that the incarnate Christ was two separate persons, one divine and one human? If that were the case, would that not mean he was half divine and half human, rather than fully both? Or was it that he was one solitary person, but that within that person he had two natures, one fully divine and one fully human? Or does he have just one nature, that is at one and the same time both fully divine and fully human? All of these options were proposed and hotly debated over the course of the fourth and fifth centuries.

  The intensity of the disputes, if nothing else, shows that there will always be diverse beliefs so long as there are diverse believers. This diversity shows itself as well in the circumstance that the proto-orthodox victory never did stamp out heretical perspectives completely, despite their every attempt to do so. Heretical views continued to live on, even if only in small pockets of believers in out-of-the-way places. Some of the beliefs and practices that I have described as "lost," in fact, have recurred in modern Christianity where, for instance, there are various groups of "messianic Jews" who insist, somewhat like their Ebionite forebears, on maintaining Jewish customs such as keeping the sabbath, following kosher food laws, and observing Passover, while believing in the death of Jesus for salvation. So, too, there are a number of "Gnostic" churches still (or rather, again) i
n the world today, especially in California.

  What is less obvious but possibly more historically significant is that views of the various proscribed and lost groups of Christians lived on even within orthodox Christianity. In some instances these are views that were "common ground" among various Christian communities; in other instances, however, they are views that the orthodox Christianity took over from "aberrant" groups that had been otherwise reformed or suppressed. Sometimes it is not possible to know which is which, that is, whether a view was "shared" or "borrowed." In either event, the survival of these views shows, to some extent, the capacity of proto-orthodox Christianity not only to attack but also to incorporate disparate understandings of the faith.

  Thus, for example, orthodox Christianity shared with (or borrowed from) the Ebionites a profound reverence for the traditions of Israel; they accepted the sacred texts of the Hebrew Bible, emphasized the oneness of God, and stressed the humanity of Jesus. All of these continue to be features of Christianity today. On the other hand, orthodox Christianity shared with (or borrowed from) the Marcionites the sense of the newness of God's revelation in Christ; they accepted the idea of a closed canon of Scripture, the primacy of the literal interpretation of the text, and an emphasis on Jesus' divinity. At the same time, they shared with (or inherited from) the Marcionites a disdain for and distrust of all things Jewish, along with the notion, still found among Christians today, that the Old Testament God is a God of wrath, whereas the New Testament God is a God of love and mercy. So, too, orthodox Christianity agreed with (or borrowed from) some groups of Gnostics the idea that there is a spiritual elite within the Christian church at large, who have special insights into the nature of God; possibly they also inherited the stress on figurative ways of interpreting texts, and a sense that the material world is to be rejected in favor of the spiritual, leading to a concomitant rationale for ascetic behavior that punishes the material self by depriving the body of its desires and even needs.

  Some of these "common grounds" or "borrowings," whichever they were, obviously stood in tension with one another, and several unique aspects of proto-orthodoxy were the result. For example, while affirming the authority of the Jewish Scriptures (with the Ebionites but against the Marcionites), the proto-orthodox rejected historical Judaism (with the Marcionites against the Ebionites); while affirming the divinity of Jesus (with the Marcionites against the Ebionites), they also affirmed his humanity (with the Ebionites against the Marcionites). While insisting that the one true God is the creator of this world (against Marcion and Gnostics) they often denigrated this world and strove to escape its material trappings through ascetic practices (with Marcion and Gnostics).

  The Winners as Losers

  And so, as a result of these common grounds or borrowings, not to mention the persistence of various "alternative" forms of Christianity through the years, the proto-orthodox victory cannot be seen as complete. In another sense, however, from a strictly proto-orthodox point of view, the victory was altogether too complete. For as it happened, the victors themselves came to be vanquished when the exclusivistic rhetoric they used in countering the views of their opponents was eventually turned on themselves. That is to say, as orthodox Christianity moved on to refine its theological views to a level unanticipated by its forebears, the views of proto-orthodoxy became not just surpassed but proscribed. In one sense, proto-orthodoxy itself became a lost Christianity.

  We have seen this several times throughout the study. From a historical point of view, it appears that the Ebionites did indeed teach an understanding of the faith that would have been close to that of Jesus' original disciples— Aramaic-speaking Jews who remained faithful to the Jewish Law and who kept Jewish customs even after coming to believe that Jesus was the Messiah. But the Ebionites came to be declared heretical by the proto-orthodox. So, too, the Roman adoptionists, followers of Theodotus the Cobbler, may well have proclaimed a christological view similar to that of Jesus' earthly followers, that he was completely human (and not divine) but was adopted by God to fulfill his mission of dying for the sake of others. They, too, were branded as heretics and excommunicated.

  As time went on and proto-orthodox Christians came to believe that Christ was both divine and human, they needed to explain how that was possible. Near the end of the second century, one of the common solutions was that Christ was himself God the Father, come to earth in human form. This view was widespread among the proto-orthodox in Rome, and it was the view advocated by the Roman bishop himself at the beginning of the third century. But it came to be mocked as "patripassianist" (a view that made the "Father suffer"), castigated as false, and deemed heretical.

  Tertullian was one of the chief opponents of the patripassianists and one of the leading spokespersons of proto-orthodoxy in his day. But since he joined the prophetic movement of the Montanists, in later times his own reputation came to be sullied by association, as the idea that direct revelation from God could take precedence over the written Scriptures led to the condemnation of the Montanist movement.

  A worse fate lay in store for the greatest proto-orthodox thinker of the first three Christian centuries, Origen, whose creative attempts to explore the relationship of God and Christ based on a full understanding of scriptural revelation led him to conclude that Christ was a created being who was ultimately subordinate to God the Father, even if in substance he was the Word and Wisdom of God because of his intimate connection with and infusion by the Father in eternity past. But Origen's subordinationist Christology, along with his notion of the preexistence of human souls and of the ultimate salvation of all beings, including the devil, led eventually to his condemnation as a heretic.

  Other examples could well be chosen, in which the early proponents of the faith, attempting to uncover its mysteries in ways that laid the foundation for later reflection, were themselves condemned by their own successors, who refined their understanding to such a point that the partially developed, imprecise, or allegedly wrongheaded claims of their predecessors were necessarily seen not simply as inadequate but as heretical and so not to be tolerated. Even though proto-orthodoxy led to orthodoxy, it did not simply become orthodoxy without remainder. In some senses, the intolerance that brought about the victory of proto-orthodoxy led to its own demise.

  Tolerance and Intolerance in the Struggles for Dominance

  This intolerance was not something proto-orthodox Christianity derived from its broader Roman milieu. In point of fact, the polytheistic religions of the Roman Empire were famously tolerant of one another. None of these religions insisted that if it was right, the others must all be wrong. These religions affirmed the existence of numerous gods and acknowledged the importance of worshiping the gods. For pagans in the empire, since there were so many gods in the world, and these gods deserved worship, it was perfectly legitimate— and even common sense—that they should be worshiped.

  Some people today may think that the Romans must have been intolerant of other religions, since they are known to have persecuted the Christians. As we have seen, however, the problem posed by the Christians was not that they worshiped their own God, or that they considered Jesus a god, or that they had their own prescribed rituals and practices. The problem was that the Christians refused to worship the other gods, especially the gods of the state. If the state gods had made the state great, then surely they deserved to be acknowledged through acts of worship. Why would anyone refuse? Moreover, since the gods sometimes punished individuals or communities that failed to acknowledge them, Christians could be seen as being at fault when disasters struck. As Tertullian famously exclaimed:

  They [the pagans] think the Christians the cause of every public disaster, of every affliction with which the people are visited. If the Tiber rises as high as the city walls, if the Nile does not send its waters up over the fields, if the heavens give no rain, if there is an earthquake, if there is famine or pestilence, straightway the cry is, "Away with the Christians to the lion!" (Apology 40)
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  Jews were not blamed for such disasters, even though they, too, did not worship the gods, because Jews were following ancestral traditions that forbade them to engage in such worship. Since the antiquity of religious tradition was so important in the ancient world, and since Jews could justify their practices through ancient tradition, they were normally not compelled to abandon their religious commitments to participate in civic cult. Christians were a different matter altogether. They also believed that the Jewish God was the only true God. But they did not follow the ancestral customs of the Jews, and so they were not regarded as having a legitimate excuse for failing to worship the state gods—leading to their occasional persecution.

  Even so, as I have pointed out, these persecutions were sporadic and isolated, and almost always local affairs, until the persecutions in the second half of the third century. For most of the second and third centuries, in most places throughout the empire, even Christians were left to themselves, tolerated by the state apparatus and by the majority of people at large.

  This attitude of tolerance, however, was not shared by the proto-orthodox— at least not by the proto-orthodox authors who have left us any writings. For one thing, these Christians were exclusivistic in their views. They believed that the one and only true God had given one way of salvation, and that the only way to be right with this God was through this way he had provided—the death and resurrection of Jesus. This exclusivity, as we have seen, bred an intolerance toward religious diversity. Since there was only one way of salvation, all other religions were in error. And being in error carried eternal consequences. Those who did not accept the one true God by believing in the death and resurrection of his Son for salvation would be condemned to the flames of hell for all eternity.