The Bauer-Ehrman thesis

You probably know the rudiments of the Bauer-Ehrman thesis, even if not the names of these two scholars.  In its simplest form, it is the argument that Christianity, far from an original unitary "Orthodox"  tradition that then fragmented and degenerated into various schisms and "heresies", was actually an originally diverse movement of equally legitimate conceptions.  These "equally legitimate" conceptions then eventually became suppressed by various political plays and arbitrary fiats of the powers that be, to create a rigid form of Christianity which came to be known as "orthodoxy."  This calcification and codification of a particular strand then reinforced its own pretensions to singularity by revising history.  Through the creation of a canon of literature which agreed with its views (and possibly even modification of accepted works), excommunication of dissidents, political coercion (through Constantine, etc...), and just as importantly the very creation of the categories of "orthodoxy" and "heresy," what we know today as Christianity emerged.  History, as they say, is written by the victors.

As I said, you most likely have heard this theory, or one of its various forms.  It plays particularly well to the pluralist sensibilities embedded in our culture and thus has had ample occasion to leave the stodgy halls of academia to show up at much livelier parties: from the DaVinci Code, to a small cottage industry of various History Channel specials, going on up the ladder of academia to popularized works by Bart Ehrman (who has the special honor of having his name on the latter half of this theory's hyphenation) to Elaine Pagel's work on the so-called Gnostic Gospels, to the Jesus Seminar, and beyond.

Without getting into the details (of which there are legion) I have two "philosophical" thoughts on the issue which I think need to be addressed.  These aren't home-run or knock-down arguments, and are hardly comprehensive of the debate.  I bring them up because I think they are helpful to think about, and because I rarely seem them discussed.  I just picked up The Heresy of Orthodoxy by Andreas Kostenberger and Michael Kruger on the whole debate over the Bauer-Ehrman thesis, so perhaps I will follow up with some posts citing specifics of the debate (dating, textual variations, manuscript traditions, and on and on...).  But for we will keep it broad.  Without further ado:

1.) Rhetoric: Favoring the Under Dog

Lets face it: most of us love the underdog.  Whether its the Karate Kid giving a giant wounded crane-kick in the big bully's stupid face, or a Jamaican bobsled team (Ive been watching older movies lately) we route for the impossible because its easy to identify with.  I remember in highschool we read Howard Zinn's wonderful A People's History of the United States, and the reason we all loved it so much was that it really was presenting a narrative from the margins of the previously forgotten.  If history was written by the victors, its about time we go back and try to search out the little people who lost out and write them back in.

And I fundamentally agree with this ethos.  The saying that we should learn history to avoid repeating its mistakes is certainly true, but not radical enough: often learning history is a deconstruction and questioning of the very people we are who could make mistakes or achieve success at all.  History is always messier than its representations and I think to avoid hubris or triumphalism it does us wonders to investigate it as thoroughly as possible.

Yet--and here is the crux--this fundamental favoring of the underdog has subtly come to be applied to this Bauer-Ehrman narrative, both in generalities and particulars.  The fundamental drive moving its awareness in the popular consciousness or imagination is the idea that with the discovery of things like the Gospel of Judas, and all other sorts of Gnostic literature, coupled with the Bauer-Ehrman thesis we finally have the ability to re-write the history written by the hegemonous and often tyrannically oppressive "orthodox" Christian church.  Now, let me be the first to say that Christianity has done a lot of bad things (an understatement).  But that is a different (albeit important) discussion for another time.  What is important here is how it does not apply to gnostic forms of Christianity.

The basic outline of the narrative is again a familiar one: these "lost" forms of Christianity eventually got bullied out of existence, excommunicated from participating in the greater Christian body, and their scriptures were torn out from cohabitation with what eventually became the standard canonical list. Banned, berated, and burned, the gnostics went the way of obscurity, disenfranchised by a church that would not accept them.  And so on.  This narrative is quite unstable, however.  It has a little fault line undermining it called being completely false.  Well, maybe not completely.  Certainly there were some similarities between Gnosticism and Christianity, and certainly it is true that Christians did not accept gnosticism into their canon.  

Yet it is a sort of perverse trick of historiography to paint a picture of the gnostics as the poor and oppressed spiritualists who, when Orthodoxy had to get all truthy and butt in with their own spiritual deal, went the way of the Dodo.  The actual truth of the matter is, first, that "Gnosticism" as a title is more of a heuristic label, used for convenience to organize a variety of diverse expressions which nonetheless harbor some of the same basic sensibilities.  That the church "excluded" these scriptures from their own may be true, but trivially so: the Gnostics (however much that term is accurate to collectivize them as a group) would want nothing to do with what became the "canonical" scriptures anyway.  Marcion of Sinope, for example (though he was not a full-fledged Gnostic) cut out the entire Old Testament and most of the New Testament, keeping only a few Pauline epistles and a revised Gospel of Luke.  Moreover their varieties excluded one another.  Gnosticism was more of a distinct form of speculation than a coherent orthodoxy of its own; and though it may frequently have taken up the garb of "Christian-ese" it was essentially more of a trans-religious theosophy, neither specifically Pagan, nor Jewish, nor Christian, but an eclectic and somewhat typical mixture of the mystery cults and the general spiritual longings of the age where release from the cruelty of the body--not Incarnation, not Resurrection--and transcending up the hierarchy of divine emanations was the preferred form of salvation.

While Gnosticism was not an intentionally subversive movement of orthodox Christianity, they were nonetheless bound to certain affirmations that the Orthodox were fundamentally bound to reject: that this material world is completely evil, that the God of the Jews was an evil demiurge, while Jesus Christ was the messenger of a different, Higher God and so on.  In fact the basic nature of what Gnosticism was would have separated it from any extended overlap with early Christianity.  Gnosticism (which stems from the Greek word for "knowledge") based itself (whatever the pluriformity of its manifestations, whether in Simonian, Valentinian, Basilidean or other flavors) on the idea that it, not "orthodox" Christianity, carried the true secret wisdom of God passed down from Christ.  Even pagan observers of the day could tell the difference: Plotinus and Porphyry each attacked gnosticism, but not as a species of Christianity (which they also found ridiculous) but as a system of thought in its own right.  All of this without even mentioning the very pertinent fact that nearly all scholars now accept much later dates for gnostic scriptures anyway.  Whereas earlier scholars like Harnack and Bultmann could theorize that gnosticism was quite early so that in some sense orthodox Christianity borrowed from it, most scholarship now posits the reverse: gnosticism was a sensibility that borrowed images from Christianity for its own purposes.

2.) The Assumption of Untruth

All of that aside, lets for a minute assume the Bauer-Ehrman thesis is true, just for the sake of argument.  Which means,  to refresh, that we are assuming a variety of early Christianities that then became a more homogenous Christianity.  An interesting observation would be that for any other area of inquiry--history, science, philosophy et al--this picture of plurality-into-a-relative-homogeneity could be spun as a good thing.  Why?  Because, while the truth of postmodern philosophy certainly has taught us that perspective means a lot, nonetheless in the sense that any of us are still committed to truth, increasing precision is usually viewed as a generally agreeable thing.  If the B-E thesis is true (which I do not think it is, but again for the sake of argument) then theoretically it is plausible to argue that the reason for the emergent (relative) homogeneity was due to an increasing precision in awareness of its religious commitment, that is, of a greater realization of what is or is not implied by faith in Jesus Christ.  That it is not seen as such, is, I argue, because of the utilization of the assumption that there can be no single legitimate expression of religious belief.  It is only by this assumption that the picture as a whole (as opposed to specific case studies) can be represented as an arbitrary suppression of legitimate forms.  I am wholly open (though obviously skeptical) to the possibility that my beliefs are wrong.  What must be recognized however is that the B-E thesis is often represented as based on the best "empirical" studies of early Christianity.  Yet one of its major principles and working assumptions is the thoroughly non-empirical (for better or worse) assumption of the equal legitimacy of all forms of Christian expression, or, worded in a weaker form, the equal legitimacy of an indefinite array of religious beliefs loosely connected to the figure of Christ.

Here again we see that the narrative representation of the B-E thesis turns on some questionable rhetorical maneuvers which are in one way or another playing on current sensibilities of pluralism.  The description of the emergence into a single Christianity is by, e.g. an arbitrary act of power (Constantine) or by a rigid dogmatization.  Yet if one substitutes these pejoratives with: the emergence of a single Christianity was by an increase in precision, or the elimination of extraneous hypothesis, then we can see a lot of the sexiness of the B-E thesis turns, not on logic, but on rhetoric.  The only reason "precision" would be objected to is a.) if underhanded means were used to achieve it (which yes, did happen, so insofar as that is a complaint it must be noted) or b.) there is the assumption up front that there really can be no increase of religious precision (because it is ultimately subjective, or cultural, or whatever).  Ergo any movement towards singularity will always by a matter of necessity be an act of coercion, and never precision (because precision implies the possibility of an increased acuity in understanding the true nature of an object).  

Indeed a keyword of the B-E thesis is that there existed a host of legitimate expressions of Christianity that then became excluded.  But what criteria is the B-E thesis, and those like it, using to judge how these expressions approximate a legitimate "adequacy" to their object?  Given the very real and irreconcilable differences between Orthodox Christianity and Gnosticism, that these were all possibly legitimate expressions of Christianity either strains the analytic usefulness of "Christianity" as a term that could pick out any particular phenomena while excluding others and/or (and what I take it to be) it is the assumption of the "truth" of pluralism in the sense that none of these individual expressions could encapsulate any fuller the truth of their content than any competitor, thus the any exclusions on the part of any parties could only be an arbitrary act of power.  Even if there was pluralism de facto, this does not translate into the legitimacy of pluralism (i.e. de jure pluralism) it merely points to the fact of pluralism (if indeed it is even a fact, which again I think the B-E thesis has radically overplayed its hand here).

Obviously these two points I have made in no way exhaust the philosophy (and certainly not the empirical claims) of the B-E thesis.  Yet I think they are nonetheless quite important in the sense that they reveal how much presupposition can play in the debate.  This is important too because Christian scholarship in this area is often demonized because the scholars at its command are also believers--thus it is supposed their research is blemished by the taint of belief and presupposition.  Certainly this can be true.  Yet it is equally true on the part of the opposition.  Just because they are not "religious" in the same sense, does not mean they do not have their own "faiths" which guide their research.

Hopefully in the next weeks or so I will have time to get into the more nitty-gritty empirical discussions on actual texts and geography and transmission history, etc...