PBS SPecial and from Jesus to Christ and early christianity

The thesis of this essay is that we actually know so little of the days of earliest Christianity (until the "conversion" of Constantine in 313) that early Christian scholarship consists basically of a theory or a philosophy (described in the previous essay) which is buttressed by so few facts that one is almost embarrassed to point out this reality. In fact, what we know of the life of the earliest Christians up to 313 is like having about 5 photographs from the 160 year history of my home town (Salem, OR) and trying to write a "history" of the town. Though you might be able to describe the pictures with some skill, you really are deceiving yourself if you think you are coming close to describing the realities of life in that town over time.

Getting to Particulars

Let us take one of the facts presented very skillfully by at least a trio of interviewees tonight: the execution of some Christians under the authority of Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia in Asia Minor under the Emperor Trajan (ca. 112). President Holland Hendrix of the Union Theological Seminary in NYC, a former student of Helmut Koester (one of the other commentators), casually pointed out the legal dangers in which Christians found themselves around this time. But, in fact, we don't really know what the "legal position" of Christianity was at this time. In order to do so, we must know the sources of Roman law at the time, the universality of the law in the Empire, the enforcement of the law, the modes by which enforcement was put into place, the nature of accusations made, the modes of trial, the possibility of appeal, the attitudes of the Christian communities in general toward the empire, and many other things. We need to know, for example, whether Pliny was being overreaching or merely following the letter of the law. Questions could be multiplied for Roman law in all other areas of the Empire and for all the decades of the 2nd and 3rd century. But, in fact, I think we know next to nothing about the way that the status of Christian was considered by Roman authorities in 90, 100, 110, 120, 130, 140, 150 and so forth. In other words, we have the one "photograph" of the correspondence between Pliny and Trajan, and we would like to ask 100s of questions of the correspondence, but for every fact we know, we don't know 100s of others.

You might respond, "Well, that is the nature of knowledge. One fact or discovery leads to many, many questions." True, but this misses the point. The point is that we repair to this correspondence continually because it is about THE ONLY thing we have from Bithynia in a 30-year period on the question of the relation of Christians to the Empire. It is like having to be content with describing the Grand Canyon by night with a small flashlight that only works intermittently.

How Did Christianity Grow?

Because we know that Christianity started at a historical point and that it triumphed at a historical point, and we can draw a line between those points, the natural question to ask is "How did Christianity triumph?" But factual data to answer this question is stunningly lacking, and thus scholars are thrown back to philosophical explanations which have some plausibility to them, but are based on such fragments that it is like trying to identify the subject of a jigsaw puzzle from one edge piece. Christianity may have triumphed because it had an attractive philosophy (God accepts all, even slaves) or because it had an organized system of charity or because its people practiced more virtue--all of which were theories put out by one or more of the scholars. But we just don't have enough to go on. But why seek such "Protestant-type" explanations? Why not look at it as possibly the change in birth rate (Christians had more kids) or a sense that Roman culture had so many powerful images from the past that it simply couldn't escape the power of those images, and became overborn and weary? Lack of historical information invites theological explanation.

How Did the Christians Live?

So, let's just take a practical question. How many Christians were there in Ephesus in 150-160? How many congregations were there? What was the population of the town? How did the typical Christian family live? Did they pay taxes? (How were they taxed?) Did their kids attend school? What were the names of, say, 100 of these Christians? Do we know how they spent their days? What was the nature of the church life? What was the liturgy like? The nature of congregational life? Were there committees? Did kids get bored in church? Who were the hymn writers? These are just the first questions that come to mind as I try to understand this movement. I ask questions of whom we are talking about and how those people lived. But, I think that if we went through one after another of the cities in the Roman Empire for a period of 200 years, the amount of information we would have about the Christian movement would be almost negligible. We have a few texts, a few connections between the Christians and the Roman establishment, a few artistic representations.

Conclusion

You don't, however, get promoted by saying that you know nothing, though it would have been refreshing had we heard some ruminations about how spotty our records were, how inadquate the sources were, how little we really know. But, I think that the fact that scholars can spin out attractive and articulate narratives about the nature of earliest Christianity shows the power of the human imagination. The imagination wants to fill in the gaps as well as give flesh and bones to the cold words in the text. It wants to breath into the dust the breath of life so that the texts and images become living things. But early Christian scholarship is, in its essence, a dream. We have a few pieces of data. We have one powerful root metaphor (if you are in the "mainstream"). We have the scantiest data. All that is needed is some imagination and a lot of dreaming, and you have a field. And, the PBS special took us into that dream world tonight.

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