Motives of Credibility: Stability

In 1934 German theologian Walter Bauer published what would become an influential work of scholarship on early Christianity, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity. Bauer argues that there was no single, unified “orthodox” version of the faith in the first two centuries of Christianity but a variety of regional movements existing simultaneously. “Perhaps,” he wrote, “certain manifestations of Christian life…renounce[d] as heresies originally had not been such at all, but, at least here and there, were the only form of the new religion.”

In the following decades many scholars would expand on Bauer’s thesis, perhaps no one more successfully (and notoriously) than Bart D. Ehrman, an evangelical turned atheist. In Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (2003) Ehrman argues that there were many self-identifying Christian movements — Ebionites, Marcionites, Gnostics, and adoptionists, among others — that claimed apostolic authority. The “proto-orthodox” Christians, he says, were the forerunners of those who would become the most dominant of Christian groups, Catholics. “When this group later acquired more converts than any of the others and stifled its opposition,” he writes in The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (2nd ed., 2000), “it claimed that its views had always been the majority position and that its rivals were, and always had been, ‘heretics,’ who willfully ‘chose’ (the Greek root of the word ‘eresy’) to reject the ‘true belief’ (the literal meaning of ‘orthodoxy’).”

Ehrman and other scholars — including Rudolf Bultmann, James M. Robinson, Elaine Pagels, Karen L. King, and David Brakke — insist that various factors, such as episcopal succession, large urban churches, strong institutional networks, and broad geographic connections, enabled the “proto-orthodox” to eclipse the other groups. Perhaps most importantly, the “proto-orthodox” came to enjoy the political patronage of Roman emperors, giving them a decisive advantage over their competitors.

If true, this would profoundly undermine the claim of the Catholic Church to be, and always to have been, “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.” Sure, the detractors might say, the Catholic Church today is in a sense “one,” and she certainly professes to be apostolic, with succession lists of bishops purportedly going back to the earliest centuries, but all this is a result not of divine approbation or some historico-spiritual inevitability but a confluence of social and political factors that enabled one group to emerge victorious over the others. Why Catholicism is today the most populous and dominant version of Christianity, they might argue, is no different than why Sparta defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War, why Muslim armies expelled crusaders from the Levant, or why Britain lost its African colonies. There are political, economic, and military reasons these events happened, but there’s no reason to think they have anything to do with God.