The early Christian martyrs were not reading the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas or the hypothetical sayings source that scholars refer to as "Q." They were reading Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
There is now a new myth of Christian origins. It feeds, as do many myths, off the weaknesses of its supposed alternatives.
There were (and probably still are) two classic accounts of Christian origins:
In the Catholic version, Jesus taught true religion; the apostles (especially Peter) went on teaching it; and the task of the church thereafter was to stick close to Peter, hence to Jesus, hence to God. Occasional heresies shoot off into darkness, leaving the straight and narrow line of light and life.
In the Protestant version, Jesus, the apostles and the early church fathers taught true theology; the medieval church muddled it up with priestcraft, masses for the dead and other pagan mumbo jumbo; Luther and others rediscovered the biblical (and Patristic) truth. Not a straight line, perhaps, but quite a simple story: 500 good years, 1,000 bad years and then the Great Light.
The Protestant scheme was then modified. Some Enlightenment thinkers extended the “bad” period in both directions: Only the first generation got it right (including some, but not all, of the New Testament); the Reformation was a false dawn; and only with the Enlightenment did the true message of Jesus strike home. That gives us 100 good years, 1,600 bad ones, and now a different Great Light.
A crucial variation emerged from 19th-century Romanticism. What matters is the primal vision; the molten lava of original inspiration quickly flows into the cooling rock of institutions and formulas. The New Testament, though itself part of the cooling process, matters because it points back to that primal moment. Early is good, late is bad.
Out of this melee of agendas emerges the new myth, which I meet on the edge of every other conversation.1 It has five points.
(1) Jesus was not as the canonical Gospels describe him. He may have spoken of the Kingdom, but he didn’t mean what Jewish revolutionaries would have meant or what apocalyptists, with their vengeful end-of-the-world speculations, may have meant. Instead, he taught, and was himself a model of, a countercultural way of speaking and living, thumbing his nose (or cocking a snook, as we British say) at the unjust and oppressive Establishment. His spirituality may have had more in common with Buddhism than with orthodox Christianity. He didn’t think his death would save the world, and he certainly didn’t think he was divine.
(2) Jesus was not raised bodily from the dead. The new myth has produced a bewildering variety of Easter explanations, far harder to reconcile with each other than with the Gospel accounts. But the central point is agreed: Jesus’ tomb (assuming he had one) stayed full.
(3) The best sources for Jesus are not the canonical Gospels, which muddled and falsified the message of the earliest sources (note the Romantic subtext: early = inspired = good). Much better, according to the new myth, are Q (a hypothetical collection of Jesus’ sayings believed to have been a source for Matthew and Luke) and the Gospel of Thomas. (Remember that Q began as a 19th-century defense against extreme skepticism; if Matthew and Luke are partly based on Q, then we have a source that is early enough to be reliable.)
(4) Paul plays only a minimal role in the new myth. He is either the one who muddled up Christianity or the one who, misunderstood as a theologian and spiritual writer, was actually the true political interpreter of Jesus.2 Often he is simply bypassed.
(5) The biblical canon (both its writing and its collection) is seen as itself a symptom of the fall of the primitive, exciting and dynamic church into boring, stultifying and politically quiescent orthodoxy. It points the way to Constantine’s declaration of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire (which Americans, with their constitutional church-state split, learn to despise at an early age).
As with my analysis in a previous column (see “The Great Debate,”BR 15:04) of why America is currently fascinated by Jesus, I think I can see why this myth has caught on and spread so rapidly.
To begin with, it offers an alternative to fundamentalism. Some parts of America still seem to be anxious to escape—though from where I sit they look as if they escaped some time ago—from the conservative churches and communities in which they were brought up. But there are positive reasons, too, why the new myth is so popular. It appears to legitimate precisely the sort of religion that a large swathe of America yearns for: a free-for-all, do-it-yourself spirituality with a strong agenda of social protest against the powers that be and an I’m-OK-you’re-OK attitude on all matters religious and ethical. You can have any sort of spirituality you like (Zen, walking labyrinths on church floors, Tai Chi) as long as it isn’t orthodox Christianity.
The main problem with this new myth is that it is historically unwarranted. The New Testament never claims to represent all of early, or earliest, Christianity, nor does it hide early intra-Christian disagreement. ts authors wrote, arguably, to bring God’s order and passion to an early movement that, far from having a pure, primal vision, was in danger of chaos and coldness. But we have now so identified chaos with passion and order with coldness, that we have difficulty understanding the canonical writers.
If the canon was written, or read, to curry political favor, it was dramatically unsuccessful. Those who were thrown to the lions were not reading Thomas or Q. They were reading Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and the rest and being sustained thereby in a subversive mode of faith and life that, growing out of apocalyptic Judaism, posed a far greater threat to Roman imperial and pagan world views than Cynic philosophy or Gnostic spirituality ever could. And when Constantine, faced with half his empire turning Christian, decided to go with the tide,3 what was the church supposed to do? Protest that it would be more authentic to remain a beleaguered and persecuted minority? Let comfortable Western Christians think about what the persecution of Diocletian did—and what is being done to Christians in many parts of the world today—and ask themselves who has compromised and with what.
There is now a new myth of Christian origins. It feeds, as do many myths, off the weaknesses of its supposed alternatives.
There were (and probably still are) two classic accounts of Christian origins:
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Some, but certainly not all, of this composite and simplified view is held by my friends and colleagues Marcus J. Borg and J. Dominic Crossan. But I am not here trying to describe their positions, which deserve, and to which I am giving, more detailed attention elsewhere. The phenomenon of which I speak is what I meet at the more popular level.
2.
See the interesting work of Richard A. Horsley and Neil Asher Silberman, The Message and the Kingdom (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1997).
3.
See Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1996).
