The Heresy of Orthodoxy

How Contemporary Culture's Fascination with Diversity Has Reshaped Our Understanding of Early Christianity

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Contents

The Bauer-Ehrman Thesis

Its Origins and Influence

It is no exaggeration to say that the Bauer-Ehrman thesis is the prevailing paradigm with regard to the nature of early Christianity in popular American culture today. As mentioned in the Introduction, people who have never heard the name "Walter Bauer" have been impacted by this scholar's view of Jesus and the nature of early Christian beliefs. One main reason for Bauer's surprising impact is that his views have found a fertile soil in the contemporary cultural climate.

Specifically, in Bart Ehrman, Bauer has found a fervent and eloquent spokesman who has made Bauer's thesis his own and incorporated it in his populist campaign for a more inclusive, diverse brand of Christianity. It cannot be said too emphatically that the study of the Bauer thesis is not merely of antiquarian interest. Bauer's views have been adequately critiqued by others. What remains to be done here is to show that recent appropriations of Bauer's work by scholars such as Ehrman and the fellows of the Jesus Seminar can only be as viable as the validity of Bauer's original thesis itself.

In the present chapter, we set out to describe the Bauer-Ehrman thesis and to provide a representative survey of the reception of Bauer's work, both positive and negative, since its original publication in 1934 and the English translation of Bauer's volume in 1971. This will set the stage for our closer examination of the particulars of Bauer's thesis in chapter 2 and an investigation of the relevant New Testament data in chapter 3.

Walter Bauer and Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity

Walter Bauer, born in Königsberg, East Prussia, in 1877, was a German theologian, lexicographer, and scholar of early church history. He was raised in Marburg, where his father served as professor, and studied theology at the universities of Marburg, Strasburg, and Berlin. After a lengthy and impressive career at Breslau and Göttingen, he died in 1960. Although Bauer is best known for his magisterial Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, perhaps his most significant scholarly contribution came with his work Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity.

Prior to the publication of this volume, it was widely held that Christianity was rooted in the unified preaching of Jesus' apostles and that it was only later that this orthodoxy (right belief) was corrupted by various forms of heresy (or heterodoxy, "other" teaching that deviated from the orthodox standard or norm). Simply put, orthodoxy preceded heresy. In his seminal work, however, Bauer reversed this notion by proposing that heresy — that is, a variety of beliefs each of which could legitimately claim to be authentically "Christian" — preceded the notion of orthodoxy as a standard set of Christian doctrinal beliefs.

According to Bauer, the orthodoxy that eventually coalesced merely represented the consensus view of the ecclesiastical hierarchy that had the power to impose its view onto the rest of Christendom. Subsequently, this hierarchy, in particular the Roman church, rewrote the history of the church in keeping with its views, eradicating traces of earlier diversity. Thus what later became known as orthodoxy does not organically flow from the teaching of Jesus and the apostles but reflects the predominant viewpoint of the Roman church as it came into full bloom between the fourth and sixth centuries ad.

Although Bauer provided a historical reconstruction of early Christianity that differed radically from his scholarly predecessors, others had put the necessary historical and philosophical building blocks into place from which Bauer could construct his thesis. Not only had the Enlightenment weakened the notion of the supernatural origins of the Christian message, but the history-of-religions school had propagated a comparative religions approach to the study of early Christianity, and the eminent church historian Adolf von Harnack had engaged in a pioneering study of heresy in general and of the Gnostic movement in particular. Perhaps most importantly, F. C. Baur of the Tübingen School had postulated an initial conflict between Pauline and Petrine Christianity that subsequently merged into orthodoxy.

The "Bauer Thesis"

How, then, did Bauer form his provocative thesis that heresy preceded orthodoxy? In essence, Bauer's method was historical in nature, involving an examination of the beliefs attested at four major geographical centers of early Christianity: Asia Minor, Egypt, Edessa, and Rome. With regard to Asia Minor, Bauer pointed to the conflict in Antioch between Peter and Paul (shades of F. C. Baur) and the references to heresy in the Pastoral Epistles and the letters to the seven churches in the book of Revelation.

Bauer observed in Egypt the early presence of Gnostic Christians, contending that there was no representative of truly orthodox Christianity in this locale until Demetrius of Alexandria (ad 189–231). With regard to Edessa, a city located just north of modern Turkey and Syria, Bauer argued that the teaching of Marcion constituted the earliest form of Christianity and that orthodoxy did not prevail until the fourth or fifth century.

Rome, for its part, according to Bauer, sought to assert its authority as early as AD 95 when Clement, bishop of Rome, sought to compel Corinth to obey Roman doctrinal supremacy. In due course, Bauer contended, the Roman church imposed its version of orthodox Christian teaching onto the rest of Christendom. What is more, the Roman church rewrote history, expunging the record of deviant forms of belief, in order to further consolidate its ecclesiastical authority.

By the fourth century, the orthodox victory was assured. However, according to Bauer, true, open-minded historical investigation shows that in each of the four major urban centers of early Christianity, heresy preceded orthodoxy. Diverse beliefs were both geographically widespread and earlier than orthodox Christian teaching. Thus the notion that orthodoxy continued the unified teaching of Jesus and of the apostles was a myth not borne out by serious, responsible historical research.

The Reception of Bauer's Work

Although Bauer's thesis was initially slow to impact scholarship, in part because of the cultural isolation of Germany during the rise of Nazi Germany and World War II, in due course it produced a considerable number of reactions. Two major types of response emerged. One group of scholars appropriated Bauer's thesis and used it as a basis for reexamining the origins of Christianity in light of his theory. Another group lodged a series of powerful critiques against the Bauer thesis. In the remainder of this chapter, we will trace these varying responses to Bauer in an effort to gauge the scholarly reception of the Bauer thesis and to lay the foundation for an appraisal of the merits of his work for contemporary investigations of the origins of early Christianity.

Scholarly Appropriations of Bauer

One of the foremost proponents of the Bauer thesis in the twentieth century was Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), longtime professor of New Testament studies at the University of Marburg (1921–1951). Bultmann made Bauer's thesis the substructure of his New Testament theology that had a large impact on generations of scholars. Divorcing faith from history in keeping with his anti-supernatural, historical-critical methodology, Bultmann believed historical events such as the resurrection were inferior in importance to one's existential faith in Jesus. It followed that, for Bultmann, historical orthodoxy was largely irrelevant. Marshaling Bauer's thesis to support this claim, he stated baldly:

The diversity of theological interests and ideas is at first great. A norm or an authoritative court of appeal for doctrine is still lacking, and the proponents of directions of thought which were later rejected as heretical consider themselves completely Christian — such as Christian Gnosticism. In the beginning, faith is the term which distinguishes the Christian Congregation from the Jews and the heathen, not – orthodoxy (right doctrine).

Later on in the same volume, Bultmann offered an entire excursus on Bauer's thesis, a testament to its influence on Bultmann. The following quote shows that Bultmann followed Bauer completely in his assessment of the origins of early Christianity:

W. Bauer has shown that that doctrine which in the end won out in the ancient Church as the "right" or "orthodox" doctrine stands at the end of a development or, rather, is the result of a conflict among various shades of doctrine, and that heresy was not, as the ecclesiastical tradition holds, an apostasy, a degeneration, but was already present at the beginning — or, rather, that by the triumph of a certain teaching as the "right doctrine" divergent teachings were condemned as heresy. Bauer also showed it to be probably that in this conflict the Roman congregation played a decisive role.

Bauer's thesis also provided the matrix for Arnold Ehrhardt (1903–1963), lecturer in ecclesiastical history at the University of Manchester, to examine the Apostles' Creed in relation to the creedal formulas of the early church (e.g., 1 Cor. 15:3–4). Ehrhardt applied Bauer's understanding of diversity in the early church to a study of the formation of the Apostles' Creed. He concluded that the contents of the Apostles' Creed and the New Testament's creedal formulas differed, arguing that the diversity of early Christianity supported this contention. Ehrhardt acknowledged that Bauer made his exploration of this topic possible.

In 1965, Helmut Koester, professor of ecclesiastical history at Harvard University and one of Bultmann's students, applied Bauer's thesis to the apostolic period. In 1971, Koester, joined by James M. Robinson, professor of religion at Claremont University and another of Bultmann's students, expanded his article into a book, Trajectories through Early Christianity. In this influential appropriation of Bauer's thesis, Koester and Robinson argued that "obsolete" categories within New Testament scholarship, such as "canonical" or "noncanonical," "orthodox" or "heretical," were inadequate. According to these authors, such categories were too rigid to accommodate the early church's prevailing diversity.

As an alternative, Koester and Robinson proposed the term "trajectory." Rather than conceiving of early church history in terms of heresy and orthodoxy, these scholars preferred to speak of early trajectories that eventually led to the formation of the notions of orthodoxy and heresy, notions that were not yet present during the early stages of the history of the church. Koester's and Robinson's argument, of course, assumed that earliest Christianity did not espouse orthodox beliefs from which later heresies diverged. In this belief these authors concurred entirely with Bauer, who had likewise argued that earliest Christianity was characterized by diversity and that the phenomenon of orthodoxy emerged only later.

James D. G. Dunn, professor of divinity at the University of Durham, embarked on a highly influential appropriation of the Bauer thesis in his 1977 work Unity and Diversity in the New Testament. Whereas Bauer (despite the title of his work!) primarily focused on the second-century situation; while Ehrhardt compared the Apostles' Creed to selected New Testament passages; and while Koester and Robinson explored extrabiblical trajectories, Dunn applied Bauer's thesis squarely to the New Testament itself. Dunn's conclusion was that, in line with Bauer's findings, diversity in the New Testament trumped unity. At the same time, Dunn suggested that the New Testament contained a general unifying theme, a belief in Jesus as the exalted Lord. According to Dunn:

That unifying element was the unity between the historical Jesus and the exalted Christ, that is to say, the conviction that the wandering charismatic preacher from Nazareth had ministered, died and been raised from the dead to bring God and man finally together, the recognition that the divine power through which they now worshipped and were encountered and accepted by God was one and the same person, Jesus, the man, the Christ, the Son of God, the Lord, the life-giving Spirit.

At first glance, Dunn's proposed unifying theme runs counter to Bauer's thesis that there was no underlying doctrinal unity in earliest Christianity. However, as Daniel Harrington stated, "the expression of this unifying strand is radically diverse — so diverse that one must admit that there was no single normative form of Christianity in the first century." What is more, Dunn believed that this unifying theme resulted from a struggle between differing viewpoints, with the winners claiming their version of this belief as orthodox. Dunn, then, was the first to provide a thorough assessment of the New Testament data against the backdrop of Bauer's thesis and to affirm the thesis's accuracy when held up to the New Testament evidence.

The Bauer Thesis Goes Mainstream

While Bauer, Ehrhardt, Koester, Robinson, and Dunn wrote primarily for their academic peers, Elaine Pagels, professor of religion at Princeton University, and Bart Ehrman, professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, chose to extend the discussion to a popular audience. In her 1979 work The Gnostic Gospels, Pagels popularized Bauer's thesis by applying it to the Nag Hammadi documents, which were not discovered until 1945 and thus had not been available to Bauer. Pagels contended that these Gnostic writings further supported the notion of an early, variegated Christianity that was homogenized only at a later point.

In 2003, Pagels reengaged the Bauer thesis in Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, another work directed toward a popular readership. In this latter work, Pagels examined the Gospel of Thomas, a Nag Hammadi document, and claimed that modern Christians should move beyond belief in rigid dogmas to a healthy plurality of religious views since the early Christians were likewise not dogmatic but extremely diverse. As the first century gave way to the second, Pagels argued, Christians became increasingly narrow in their doctrinal views. This narrowing, so Pagels, caused divisions between groups that had previously been theologically diverse. The group espousing "orthodoxy" arose in the context of this theological narrowing and subsequently came to outnumber and conquer the Gnostics and other "heretics."

Bart Ehrman, even more than Pagels, popularized the Bauer thesis in numerous publications and public appearances, calling it "the most important book on the history of early Christianity to appear in the twentieth century." Besides being a prolific scholar, having published more than twenty books (some making it onto bestseller lists) and contributing frequently to scholarly journals, Ehrman promotes the Bauer thesis in the mainstream media in an unprecedented way. Ehrman's work has been featured in publications such as Time, The New Yorker, and the Washington Post, and he has appeared on Dateline NBC, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, CNN, The History Channel, National Geographic, the Discovery Channel, the BBC, NPR, and other major media outlets.

Part Two of Ehrman's book Lost Christianities, "Winners and Losers," demonstrates his commitment to, and popularization of, the Bauer thesis. Ehrman argues that the earliest proponents of what later became orthodox Christians (called "proto-orthodox" by Ehrman) triumphed over all other legitimate representations of Christianity (chap. 8). This victory came about through conflicts that are attested in polemical treatises, personal slurs, forgeries, and falsifications (chaps. 9–10). The final victors were the proto-orthodox who got the "last laugh" by sealing the victory, finalizing the New Testament, and choosing the documents that best suited their purposes and theology (chap. 11). In essence, Ehrman claims that the "winners" (i.e., orthodox Christians) forced their beliefs onto others by deciding which books to include in or exclude from Christian Scripture. Posterity is aware of these "losers" (i.e., "heretics") only by their sparsely available written remains that the "winners" excluded from the Bible, such as The Gospel of Peter or The Gospel of Mary and other exemplars of "the faiths we never knew."

Summary

Scholars favorable to the Bauer thesis have appropriated his theory in a variety of ways. They have made it the central plank in their overall conception of New Testament Christianity (Bultmann); have used it to revision early church history (Ehrhardt); have taken it as the point of departure to suggest alternate terminology for discussions of the nature of early Christianity (Koester and Robinson); and employed it in order to reassess the unity and diversity of New Testament theology (Dunn).