After Jesus, Before Christianity, by Erin Vearncombe, Brandon Scott, and Hal Taussig – Westar Christianity Seminar (HarperOne, 2021)
“History is written by the winners.” No one knows who came up with this oft-repeated truism.
And because we don’t know, one might guess that he or she was a loser.
Were they right because they won, or did they win because they were right? That was my question in church history class at seminary, studying the theological debates of early Christianity. I recall asking what earthly or heavenly difference it would have made had the homoousians prevailed over the homoians. (A quibble so trivial I can’t bear to explain it here.) I came to the conclusion that much of “orthodoxy” consisted of doctrines declared to be winners at spearpoint, as the faith became the Roman Empire’s official religion. And that little of this “orthodoxy” was essential for followers of Jesus’ “otherdoxy” – his Way of compassion for others.
New Burklo ident
It turns out that the very concept of “early Christianity” is inessential, as well. It wasn’t an “it”, but rather more of a “they”. That’s the argument of “After Jesus, Before Christianity”, a new book by scholars of the Westar Institute, home of the Jesus Seminar. They begin with a critique of the habit of imposing our present categories on phenomena that predated our constructs – a form of history being written by the winners. What we define as Christianity now – regardless of the branch of the faith to which we belong – did not define the disparate groups and movements of Jesus-followers in the first two centuries of the Common Era.
One of our campus ministers at the University of Southern California, a sweet and earnest young pastor, told me a few years ago that his group consisted of “first century Christians”. In order to do my job, which is to enable all our religious clubs to flourish, I cannot respond critically to such utterances. But I was stunned by his statement. I did not ask, but wished I could: “Oh, so you believe that the planets rotate on crystal spheres that rub against each other and make music?” Fundamentalist Christians like himself have no clue that first century Christians assumed that to be the case. And I wished I could have pressed further: “Oh, so you believe that people see because light comes out of their eyes and illuminates the world and interacts with the light in the world and goes back into the eye?” He would have had no idea what I was talking about. But everybody in the first century, including Jesus, believed that to be the case. Which is why Jesus said that the eye is the lamp of the body.
I suppose I could offer that young pastor a copy of the book – but doing so would not advance the mission of my office at the university.
The Westar scholars expose much about the milieu of the Greco-Roman world that helps contextualize the early Jesus movement. The authors parse out ways in which the Jesus communities reflected the wider culture in many ways and countered it in others. I had never before appreciated the degree to which the Roman system displaced and disoriented huge numbers of its subjects – a demographic churning that resulted in people forming associations and surrogate families to replace networks of kin and ethnicity. This helps make sense of St Paul’s words to the Galatians that “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Lots of civic associations welcomed people of varied ethnic backgrounds, and included slaves and free citizens alike. As did some of the early Jesus-following communities, there were other civic groups that afforded a measure of equality to women and men. The ritual we now call “baptism” emerged in an era when “baptism” meant “bathing”, whether in public baths or in various kinds of bathing rituals. What we now know as the eucharist or communion emerged among Jesus-followers in a time when similar ritual meals were celebrated by a variety of groups and associations. Even martyrdom, which in current Christian retrospect might seem to be a unique characteristic of the faith’s first centuries, fit into the Greco-Roman cultural context: facing death willingly and bravely was highly esteemed at the time. Gnosticism was not a category known to the large percentage of early Jesus-followers who were later tagged as Gnostics.
Useful as it is, the book overstates its case. The authors go to absurd lengths to claim that Christianity as a category didn’t really exist in its first few centuries. It’s almost as if their clever title for the book bewitched them into thinking they had to prove it literally true. But the writers acknowledge a few references to the term in antiquity, and given the relative paucity of sources about the religion outside of the religion itself, those few usages are enough to establish that the category of “Christian” had some currency at the time. I wish the authors had stuck to their knitting and rested their case on the fact that what we think Christianity is today – no matter where we stand on its theological spectrum – is substantially different than its heterodox complexity before it became dominated by the Roman church.
There are no first century Christians today. Nor second century Christians. Nor were there any then, for that matter, by our present manner of reckoning what Christianity is. And that’s a good thing, because it invites us into creative encounter with our living, breathing, ever-evolving faith tradition.