From
The March 2004 St John's Eagle
“Those First Three Centuries" - By John Harcourt"
We, Anglicans,
are likely to think of the "Church" as Jesus' own foundation.
We believe that the Eucharist, more or less as we know it, traces its
origin and essential form back to the Last Supper.
Bishops, priests, and deacons we assume to have provided the ecclesiastical
governmental structure from the very beginning. The Apostles' Creed
took us back, of course, to the original eye witnesses. The Bible has
been read and proclaimed in the form in which we know it from the earliest
days.
Yet, the
scholarship of the past forty of fifty years suggests revision of this
simple picture. No longer is it possible to think of "the Church"
as a unified world-wide organization. Before, say, BCE 300 , "the
Church meant the individual congregation — the church in Ephesus,
the church in Corinth, the church in Rome — each largely independent,
with its own presiding officer, usually called the bishop. Some communication,
of course, existed between various churches: their founders, like Paul,
maintained a lively interest in the local groups, mainly expressed through
letters (the Epistles). But independent congregations, meeting largely
in private homes, constituted the essential form of the Christian movement.
It is well
to think of what was lacking during this formative period:
- No
church controlled any other church; no church claimed primacy.
- There
was no creed in general acceptance. Individual congregations might
use quasi creedal formulations, especially for baptisms, but these
were local compositions. The Apostles' Creed, as we know it, seems
to have originated in France in the late sixth or early seventh
century; the Nicene Creed was adopted in 325.
- There
was no Bible. Even the Hebrew Scriptures were totally rejected by
the Marcionites, accepted down to the last detail by the Ebionites,
with every possible variation in between. Our version of the New
Testament dates from Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria in the fourth
century. But there were a large number of alternative books. Gospels,
epistles, books of acts continued to be written: the Gospel of Thomas,
the Gospel of Mary [Magdalen], the Gospel of Philip. Most of these
were eventually suppressed; many were lost for centuries. Fragments
of this vast literature were found in Egypt during the nineteenth
century. In 1945, a sealed jar was accidentally discovered at Nag
Hammadi. It contained twelve leather bound books, forty six documents,
that had lain hidden in the earth for fifteen hundred years. With
their translation and analysis (along with the Dead Sea Scrolls),
flashes of brilliant light were thrown upon our earliest centuries.
We can
now see those centuries as times of intense theological discussion and
controversy. Even though most of the innumerable books seem lost forever,
enough remains to dazzle and mystify us. Bart D. Ehrman has provided
an anthology of almost fifty texts used and defended by various groups
before Nicaea (see his Lost Scriptures: Books that did not make it
into the New Testament, Oxford, 2003). Most of these were swept
into oblivion when the emperor Constantine held out for one "orthodox"
form of Christianity, modeled on and sanctioned by the power of the
Roman Empire. Obviously, the ties between politics and religion were
strong.
Now that
some of the "heterodox" literature has been recovered, we
can see that the first three centuries were exciting indeed. Ehrman
remarks that this ferment of opposing opinions far exceeds anything
we know in the twenty first century. After all, most of us now accept
the canonical Bible, we recite the Apostles' and the Nicene Creeds.
The organizational structure (bishops, priests, and deacons) has long
been fixed for many churches. By the ending of the first millennium,
the church of Rome had asserted its primacy over all of Christendom.
Despite the Reformation, this claim still dominates the history of the
church in our time.
Reading
the "lost" scriptures, we can only rejoice that so many of
these wild speculations did not become mainstream, Yet, as the present
controversy over the gay bishop of New Hampshire indicates, we have
not completely accepted the right of individual congregations to worship
and believe as their conscience dictates, without attempting to coerce
others who may see things differently. The contemporary religious scene
still produces a remarkable of tyrannical bigots spoiling to suppress
whatever they can not agree with. Only the secular bias of the times
prevents them from doing serious damage to human dignity.
Is it not
sobering to realize that present day dissenters are prevented from outright
schism mainly because the official the Episcopal Church owns all the
real estate?
Note:
Good introductions to these discoveries can be found in the work of
Bart D. Ehrman (the anthology already cited and also Lost Christianities:
The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We never Knew. Oxford,
2003) and also in the writings of Elaine Pagels (especially The
Gnostic Gospels, Vintage, 1981).
Professor
Harourt is the Charles A. Dana Professor of
English Emeritus at Ithaca College.
