The Heresy of Orthodoxy (Foreword by I. Howard Marshall)

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

Andreas J. Köstenberger, Michael J. Kruger

• Verlag: Crossway
• Jahr: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781433521799
• Thema: Théologie et religion
• Thema: Théologie chrétienne

Beginning with Walter Bauer in 1934, the denial of clear orthodoxy in early Christianity has shaped and largely defined modern New Testament criticism, recently given new life through the work of spokesmen like Bart Ehrman. Spreading from academia into mainstream media, the suggestion that diversity of doctrine in the early church led to many competing orthodoxies is indicative of today's postmodern relativism. Authors Köstenberger and Kruger engage Ehrman and others in this polemic against a dogged adherence to popular ideals of diversity.

Köstenberger and Kruger's accessible and careful scholarship not only counters the "Bauer Thesis" using its own terms, but also engages overlooked evidence from the New Testament. Their conclusions are drawn from analysis of the evidence of unity in the New Testament, the formation and closing of the canon, and the methodology and integrity of the recording and distribution of religious texts within the early church.

PART 1

THE HERESY
OF ORTHODOXY


Pluralism and the Origins of the New Testament

1

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.¹

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.²

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.³ 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.⁴

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.⁵

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.⁶ 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.⁷ Another group lodged a series of powerful critiques against the Bauer thesis.⁸ 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).⁹ 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.¹⁰ 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).¹¹

Later on in the same volume, Bultmann offered an entire excursus on Bauer’s thesis, a testament to its influence on Bultmann.¹² 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.¹³

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).¹⁴ 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.¹⁵

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.¹⁶ 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 “non-canonical,” “orthodox” or “heretical,” were inadequate.¹⁷ 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.”¹⁸ 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 ...