Christianity, Inc.

                   Codices from the discoveries at Nag-Hammadi

Things I learned while reading L. Michael White’s From Jesus to Christianity:  no ancient sources are available from Jesus’ time that concern him or his teachings;   furthermore, there are no contemporary court records or even casual reports about Jesus or his teaching with the single exception of a brief remark by the Roman historian Tacitus.  White concludes:  “Jesus himself wrote nothing and left no direct archeological evidence on the landscape of Judea.  It is as if no one really cared to keep a record at the time, but later, after the movement had stated to take off, people began to reflect on Jesus’s life, what happened to him, and why” (96).

Later on in the first century, the stories originally told by Jesus’ comrades began to coalesce under the powerful tutelage of teachers such as Paul (in the eastern reaches of the Roman Empire) and Jesus’ brother James (who led the Jewish branch of the movement in Jerusalem).  White resumes:  “the ‘why’ [of Jesus' life and teaching] was increasingly the object of apologetic interest and theological interpretation.”  Sources composed during the first century (thirty to seventy years after Jesus lived), including the present gospels, “reflect ideas and issues that were not at work in Jesus’s own day or at the time of his death.”  Furthermore, study of the relevant ancient documents demonstrates that they have been “tampered with,” in White’s words, in order to reflect “certain ideas” (97).

In other words, when Jesus was no longer alive (or active, if you believe those who think he didn’t actually die on the cross), his ministry was taken over by people who relied on their memories of him and his instruction.  As the Jesus movement gained adherents, the apostles couldn’t be everywhere, so their memories were repeated second- and third-hand (which probably accounts for the stuff about miracles).

At the same time, believers gathered to hear these stories in someone’s home (perhaps some of them were people addressed by name in Paul’s epistles), and before long, these homes were converted to something like churches, no longer occupied by their owners but now the home base of a group’s leader.  These leaders were called “bishops” (from Greek episkopos, overseer).  Usually there was one bishop in the smaller towns, but in the larger cities more than one church and one bishop emerged.  All the while more and different stories proliferated (archeologists have discovered at least a dozen gospels from the early second century, among them the large cache at Nag-Hammadi).

Soon enough a few of the movement’s followers (now called “Christians” (from Greek “Christos” or a corruption of Hebrew “Messiah” meaning roughly “savior”) realized that it wouldn’t do for there to be two, or three, or sixteen, different narratives about Jesus’ life floating around.  So the concept of heresy emerged (ironically, from a Greek word meaning “choice”).  As early as the late second century, bishops had acquired sufficient authority to pronounce which gospels were to be believed, and so they began to find heresy (in the sense now of “departure from the truth”) everywhere.  During the third century, they excommunicated so-called heretics, who were, after all, only continuing the composing habits that had created the so-called “authoritative” gospels in the first place.  It took a few more centuries before bishops felt sure enough of their authority to burn heretics alive.

And that’s how the church became a corporation during late second and into the third centuries.  The tendency to insist on a single version of the Jesus stories and their associated theology was exacerbated in the fourth century when Constantine finally granted state support to Christianity, and when a bishop of Rome named Damasus succeeded in getting himself recognized as the successor to Peter (you know, the “on this rock” stuff) even though there is no evidence whatever that Jesus intended anything of the kind.  The tendency toward centralization of authority culminated, at last, in the nineteenth century when Pius IX managed to coerce the college of cardinals into voting for his infallibility.

These are rather shocking conclusions to someone who was raised on the Baltimore Catechism.  When I was very young, the New Testament was taught to me as though the truths it asserted had–well–biblical status.  And now that I am advanced in age, well past the point when it might have been helpful to me to know that the gospels were not the work of anybody who actually knew Jesus, I learn that they were instead written to fill a quasi-corporate need.  I could have done, for example, without all that bushwa about the female sex being the source of all evil, etc.

White’s revelations were so unsettling, in fact, that my scholarly training kicked in while I was reading his book.  I looked up his background to ascertain whether he has the bona fides to make such assertions.  Sure enough:  he holds degrees from Yale and Yale Divinity, has done research in Palestine, has lots of scholarly publications in early Christian history, edits or sits on the editorial boards of journals in biblical archaeology, and has held teaching posts at a number of respected universities.  Plus, the narrative he spins lines up very well with those of other historians of the period whose work I have read so far.

One must ask, then:  if Jesus didn’t bother to write anything down, what was it about his life and teaching that attracted a sufficient number of people so that some later adherents would go to the trouble of composing a gospel?  (This is probably roughly equivalent to asking “how did Justin Bieber become more famous than X”?  The answer probably is:  “he had better agents.”)  Did any other Jewish teacher attract this sort of attention?  (The answer here is “yes.”  Again, though, the difference probably is that other teachers didn’t attract the likes of the former Saul of Tarsus, who was apparently an extremely charismatic preacher).

My preferred answer is that Jesus’ message of love was extremely attractive to people who were ground down every day by ancient cultural practices–primarily women and slaves.  If we can trust biblical accounts of his ministry, what Jesus had to say about love was startingly new.  There is nothing like it in the Old Testament or in ancient classical philosophy.  Which renders even sadder the facts about what happened to his message when it was taken up by men who saw how it could be used to bring them a level of power enjoyed, until the church emerged, only by emperors and kings.

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