A Question of Origins

We are intrigued by genealogies. One of the features of Post-Enlightenment thinking that dies hardest is the belief that if you can explain how something came to be you have explained the thing itself. If you can trace the development or the evolution perhaps, of your object of study, you can claim to have understood it. This of course was famously exemplified by Darwinian science; but we can see the same "quest for origins" paradigm in the theology of the nineteenth century. The "Quest for the Historical Jesus" and the developments of source and tradition criticism are examples of massive intellectual endeavours which aimed to illuminate the text of the Bible by reconstructing the "real" world behind it. The documents were sifted, segmented and reconstructed. However, as in dissecting a lab rat, putting the parts back together somehow leaves you with something not quite a rat, or in this case, a text.

There were - and are - two assumptions behind the process, of course: that the earlier stream in the text is more authoritative, and that the church of the first two centuries distorted that authoritative picture. The depictions of Jesus in the gospels, for example, serve the purposes of the communities for which they were written, and tell us more about them than about the historical Jesus. Secondarily, then, the history of the early church becomes a significant matter, because if you can unpick their additions and distortions - and add back in some of which they suppressed or overlooked – then you have a chance of glimpsing the face of the authentic Jesus, the real carpenter of Galilee himself. In particular, Paul is blamed with making Christianity into something that Jesus never intended it to be. (See AN Wilson, for one author who follows this tired strategy).

But the first years of the church are a valid object for historical study in their own right. This is because they, too, represent a miracle. How was it possible that, in the short space of a three centuries, the Christian faith could go from being a tiny Jewish cult to becoming the dominant religion of the Empire? Augustine of Hippo used to use the miracle of the survival and expansion of the church as a pillar of his apologetic method. Nineteenth Century German historian Adolf von Harnack, in his monumental The History of Dogma, sounds rather at a loss to explain this success: Christianity grew with "inconceivable rapidity"; there was "astonishing expansion." He wrote "Christianity must have reproduced itself by means of miracles, for the greatest miracle of all would have been the extraordinary extension of the religion apart from any miracles." Answering this question, the question of the success of the church, is foundational for understanding the development of Christendom and thus the whole culture – ethics, law, politics and art – of the Western world, as well as crucial to understanding the historical Jesus.