On Fri, 26 Jul 1996, Dennis D. Martin wrote:

> Unfortunately, we only know anything we know about ancient or medieval 
> history because of what the various reporters told us.  The question is 
> how reliable the reporters, witnesses, sources, are in any given case.
> 
> In the case of the Christian NT, the most important recent trends in NT 
> scholarship underscore earlier and earlier datings.  John A. T. Robinson, 
> about 20 years ago, argued that all the NT was finished by 70 AD; others 
> since him have argued for dates as early as the 30s and 40s for some of 
> the Gospels, others for the 40s and 50s.  The classic 19thc dating well 
> into the 2nd century is quite vulnerable because it depends on a 
> fundamental assumption that social organizations begin with simplicity 
> and move to complexity; where one sees more complexity, one assumes a 
> later dating.  But what if movements generally or this one in particular 
> began with complexity?  How does one prove that it did not have a highly 
> developed theology of Christ's divinity from the start?  

it's highly likely since a) just about every other religious movement 
starts out with relatively simple social organization and moves towards 
complexity, and b) theological concerns so obviously correspond to the 
social concerns of an emerging leadership.

> You cannot prove 
> that, you can only assume it.  

if by that you mean, conjecture based on other evidence. but in that 
case, it is hardly arbitrary.

> If one assumes the opposite, the whole 
> classic 19thc dating system begins to unravel.

it does. but that seems like an arbitrary assumption. to prove it even 
possible, you need to show some (just one) parallel cases. otherwise the 
opposite assumption seems as close to a safe axiom of historical 
reconstruction as you can come by.

> Or, if one wants to insist on movement from simplicity to complexity, one 
> can argue quite plausibly for a "high" Christology from the start that 
> was expressed very simply: Jesus is Lord, where "Lord" mean utterly 
> divine, transcendent Lord of Hosts from the Jewish faith; 

you cd, of course, but this wd leave you with no plausible historical
explanation of the passage from a Jewish Jesus to a Gentile Christ. unless
you want to argue the truth of the Incarnation.  in that case, i'm afraid,
it's no longer history but theology. 

> over three 
> centuries then this simple affirmation was explained in more complex 
> language, but belief in Jesus of Nazareth's divinity need not have come 
> into being only with a more complex explanation.  The complex theological 
> explanations could simply be elaborations of an early, unarticulated belief. 

> My point is that, by the normal canons of historical critical method, the 
> attestations for Christianity, the gap between events reported and their 
> reporting, the coherence of the testimony, the very early appearance of 
> written records etc. is far better than for a huge amount of ancient and 
> medieval historical events.  

and not for others. given the high literacy of the culture in which xnty 
appeared (both Jewish and Hellenistic), there is clearly a significant 
lag.  the fact that Jesus' words first come to us in translation is prima 
facie evidence of a cultural shift preceding the act of writing, however 
early you wish to push the writing.

> Sure, one can protray the evidence as 
> incoherent and confused and as tampered with by later generations, if one 
> wants, but I am suggesting that to do so one needs to introduce a number 
> of prejudgments and interpretive biases that, if one introduced them into 
> the study of the Thirty Years' War, for instance, one would be dismissed 
> with scorn by other scholars.

i'm not sure to what you refer here. the prejudgments and biases that 
inform the writing of the history of christianity are based on some 
fairly reasonable terms: treat all documents (ie from all sources, all 
religions) as historical and submit them all to the same analysis. if one 
has no documentation on a given stage in the process, look at what 
happens elsewhere in similar cases. if the pattern holds, the 
documentation (when it appears) will make sense. if it doesn't, it won't. 
in any case, under no circumstances can one argue a priori that one 
particular religious group was dramatically different from all others in 
its development without good evidence.  otherwise it's just special pleading.
 
> > The Early Church, in reacting to various "heresies" chose the opinion 
> > that Christ was true God and true Man.  It could have gone the other 
> > way:  that Christ was only true God;  or maybe that He was only true 
> > Man.  Either way would have made an immense change in the way in 
> > which the Scriptures would have presented Christ.

> What if the heresies were simply part of the process of articulating more 
> complexly the early, simple "Jesus is Lord" belief.  Some articulations 
> were judged inadquate because they violated or fell short with regard to 
> one or another wing of the original "Jesus is Lord" (where Jesus means an 
> empirically observable and observed human character in time and place, 
> attested by a credible chain of witnesses; and "Lord" means the totally 
> transcendent Lord of Hosts of the Jewish faith).  If a strong enough, 
> early, foundational consensus regarding full-humanity and full-divinity 
> existed, it could have served as the "Rule of Faith" mentioned in many 
> of the early Christian Fathers that functioned as a standard against 
> which to measure various more articulated formulations.

recommend a reading of S.J. Gould's *Wonderful Life*. your approach 
shares much with what he calls the "shoehorn" method.

> > What, for instance, would our perception have been if the "Gospel 
> > According to Thomas" had been accepted by the Early Church as part of 
> > the Canon of Scripture?  What, on the other hand, if the "Gospel 
> > According to John" had not? 
> 
> But what if the reasons one was accepted and the other was not is that an 
> early intrepretive consensus that Jesus was fully divine and fully human 
> existed among his "Christian" disciples; that Gnostic denials of his 
> humanity were simply, by consensus, rejected as aberrations?   The Walter 
> Bauer thesis that Christianity was originally Gnostic or otherwise 
> heretical in some parts of the Eastern Mediterranean has been effectively 
> challenged, by, among others, Colin Roberts with regard to Egypt.

reference, please. and Bauer's argument is not that Christianity was
originally gnostic or otherwise heretical (precisely the approach he
wishes to get away from) but a blooming buzzing confusion... much like the
Burgess Shale creatures that Gould deals with. 

> > And so this question about Christ's humanity is unsolvable because we 
> > only know what we are told.  The rest is speculation, but speculation 
> > by its very nature can lead us anywhere.

it's comments like this (and Michael's about ducks) that give 
speculation a bad name. speculation is a disciplined art.

> Any question is insolvable, by this criterion, for we only ever know what 
> we have been told--except for the infinitesimal amount of data each of us 
> is able to observe with his or her own eyes, hands, tongue etc.  But even 
> then, how we interpret what we see with our own eyes depends on what we 
> have been told by our parents, teachers, friends, historical sources etc.
> There's a lot less speculation involved in the transmission of historical 
> data about early Christianity than there is in many well-known figures of 
> history.  

???? who do you have in mind, other than the Buddha? anything from late 
antiquity onwards?

> Like it or not, we are dependent on each other for most of what 
> we know and believe.  It's a shame, but we are animals of the polis, 
> fundamentally interdependent creatures.

sounds good to me.

> What I don't understand is why 
> we are expected to be so suspicious about our interdependence when it 
> comes to texts and early development of Christianity but then easily 
> accept as textbook-truth much less secure texts and interpretations about 
> the Ostrogoths or Anglo-Saxons or Bogomils.

obviously because alot more is at stake today in terms of Christian
origins than Ostrogothic or Anglo-Saxon origins. (this is, by the way,
despite all the flack it directs at christianity, an immense compliment.)

the dependency on christian texts to tell us about christian origins,
especially when they clearly deal with a major, and traumatic-to-this-day
break (excuse my german) btw Judaism and Christianity.  you cannot
possibly want to do the history of the origins of Christianity and not
address this in terms that go beyond the "blind synagogue" discourse of
most of our sources. 

but you're right to complain about the lack of parity here. there is
surely some equally juicy tale that lies behind the emergence of a
literate, clerical voice telling us about its pagan ancestors. let's be
sceptical all around. i doubt (but love) my sources, therefore i am an 
historian. 

rlandes


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