Read The Da Vinci Code and you’re told that the heretics lost out to the orthodox. Because “the winners write history,” we’re asked to believe that Gnostic heresy has been wrongly left out of the picture for the past two millennia—that the true story of a very human Jesus has never been told.
But just who decides what is orthodox belief and what is heretical?
Since the early 20th century, how Christian belief developed has been understood in terms of German religious historian Adolf von Harnack’s idea that an orthodox church arose from within the New Testament, and that heresies came on the scene later to counter the established view. This perspective on the history of the church was accepted as true until Walter Bauer, Harnack’s fellow countryman, challenged it in the 1930s. In Bauer’s view there were many early orthodoxies—a heterodoxy. He said that different ideas developed over time in different geographical areas. Each idea was considered orthodox where it began and only became labeled as heresy as it came into conflict with other established ideas (or heresies, depending on your position). But Bauer’s concept never gained broad acceptance—that is, it never became orthodox.
In recent years, however, stimulated by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi texts, church historians have revisited Bauer’s proposal and given it greater credence. The Dead Sea Scrolls helped to demolish the concept of a single Jewish orthodoxy during the Second Temple period when Jesus lived. So, historians reasoned, perhaps the idea of an original Christian orthodoxy postulated by Harnack should be questioned as well.
Bauer’s lens provided a useful way to view the church in the first few centuries. But Harnack’s and Bauer’s approaches had a common problem. Each assumed that something called “orthodoxy” existed from the beginning.
Strange as it may seem, orthodoxy, as it is discussed in church history, was not a feature of the early church. It was foreign to the world of Jesus and His disciples, and of those who followed them. But how could that be?
ORTHODOXY VS “THE WAY”
Early church historian W.H.C. Frend (1916–2005) dated the beginning of church orthodoxy not before 135 C.E. The word orthodoxy comes from Greek and means literally “to have the right opinion,” indicating intellectual agreement. It demands that a person agree, not that he or she behave accordingly. For religion, the result was the development of creeds—authoritative statements to be memorized and used as strict standards of belief by which a certain uniformity could be established. Under this system, whether a person understood underlying concepts was immaterial. Because orthodoxy is a matter of thought and knowledge rather than behavior, it is primarily concerned with philosophy, and it relegates behavior to a secondary position.
In the Jewish world of Jesus and His disciples, on the other hand, identification with a group was normally established by behavior based on unity of belief.
What, then, defined the early followers of Jesus? They believed that Jesus was the Messiah, had been resurrected from the dead, and had called people to walk as He walked. When they did, they became followers of “the Way” of God. Part of the work of John the Baptizer was to “prepare the way of the Lord” (Luke 1:76; 3:4), a restatement of a prophecy written by Isaiah (Isaiah 40:3). “The Way” was a prescribed mode of living based on the laws and revelation of God that had been delivered through Moses and the prophets.
The concept of the Way was well established in the Jewish society of John’s time and remains so among many Jews to this day. When Jesus spoke about the broad way that leads to destruction and the narrow way that leads to life (Matthew 7:13–14), people knew what He meant. The term the Way is found in all the Gospel accounts, the book of Acts, and various epistles written by four different authors.
For the apostles and the first followers of Jesus, this Way became the identifying feature of the early church. They were followers of the Way, which was grounded in the existing Scriptures. In the book of Acts, Luke records details of a major gathering of the apostles and believers in Jerusalem to deal with the question of whether gentile followers had to be circumcised to become true followers of the Way. In summing up the conference, James made the statement that “Moses has had throughout many generations those who preach him in every city, being read in the synagogues every Sabbath” (Acts 15:21). James conveyed that gentiles could learn the basics of the Way in the synagogues scattered across the face of the Roman Empire. The early church had its origins in the synagogues of the Roman world and among the God-fearing gentiles who were present.
The apostle Paul taught that the Hebrew Scriptures define how to live. Writing to his helper Timothy, he said that those writings, coupled with faith in Jesus Christ, were the means by which people could have salvation (2 Timothy 3:15–16). While some scholars consider the letter a later work, written by a disciple of Paul perhaps some 30 years after the apostle’s execution, no scholar of any repute rejects the idea that the Scriptures referred to were the Hebrew and Aramaic writings generally called the Old Testament. In other words, the letter is in harmony with the rest of the New Testament in highlighting the dependence of the early followers of Jesus on those Scriptures. According to the conclusion of scholars, we have a scenario of a Pauline community at the end of the first century still using the Hebrew Scriptures as the basis of their teaching, belief and action.
The concept of a “Christian” community today existing without the New Testament is incomprehensible, but that was the reality for the early church. The Old Testament provided the basis of their conduct and behavior toward God and His Son, Jesus Christ, and toward each other. The church was defined by its behavior, and its behavior demonstrated its underlying beliefs—all of which were firmly established in the Old Testament.
Yet as we read the writers and apologists throughout church history, we find increasing reinterpretation and, as a result, a decreasing reliance on the Old Testament. The Hebrew Scriptures were rerendered to present the progressively more gentile church as the Israel of God. This is known as Replacement Theology or Supersessionism: promoting the gentile church and leaving the descendants of Jacob, or Israel, out of the picture.
That the Scriptures (Old and New Testaments) relate to both Israelites and gentiles—a feature of Hebraic thinking—was beyond the understanding of Hellenistic society, which tended to see the world in terms of either-or. Because they saw much of the Old Testament as relating to the history of the Israelite and Jewish peoples, it held little interest for them. Certainly the parts that spoke about the coming Messiah could be used as proof texts, but otherwise there was little reason to use the Hebrew Scriptures. They focused their study on the New Testament, with the result that appreciation of the interrelationship of the “Old” and the “New” became more and more limited. Thus orthodoxy came to be defined in terms of the New Testament. Paradoxically, though perhaps predictably, even the Jewish context of those who wrote its books was ignored.
HERESY GOES BAD
If the concept of orthodoxy was foreign to the writers of the New Testament, then what about heresy?
The Jews themselves defined their various sects as heresies (Greek hairesis). In the first century, this was not a negative term. First-century Jewish historian Josephus refers to the Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes as the heresies of the Jews (Antiquities of the Jews, 13.171). Luke, writing in the book of Acts, shows that the followers of Christ were viewed as yet another heresy, known at that time as "the sect of the Nazarenes" (Greek Nazaoraios) (Acts 24:5). Thus, in the first century, the term heresy defined the teaching of a particular school. The word had been used this way in the Greek-speaking world since the time of Plato.
In the New Testament, the followers of Christ clearly fit within the Jewish milieu of the first century. This is not to say that everyone agreed with them. Obviously the apostles had opponents who sought to subvert their teachings. This was a challenge they had to face and is a feature of their writings in the Epistles. But within their first-century Jewish context, the followers of Jesus were seen as establishing yet another teaching or “heresy.”
But if we fast-forward to the late second century, we find the term heresy taking on a new meaning. Now it has acquired the sense of false teaching and is used to characterize those who teach contrary to the emerging “orthodox” understanding.
So, the concept of heresy as we use the term today, is—like orthodoxy—largely a second-century development.
The concept of Christian orthodoxy did not become fully established, however, until after the Council of Nicea in 325. Convened by Constantine to resolve differences within the church, it failed to accomplish that goal simply because, with very few exceptions, the clergy from the Eastern empire were the only ones who attended. The council’s decisions therefore did not represent the whole community, and they were contested for many years before a sense of intellectual conformity that could be termed orthodoxy began to prevail. What is clear from Constantine’s statement to those gathered for the council is that, at least in part, the motivation for establishing orthodoxy was a desire to secure an identity independent of the Jews.
Anglican scholar Rowan Williams, presently Archbishop of Canterbury, acknowledges the validity of this overview. He writes, “Heresy is the necessary precondition for orthodoxy, yet orthodoxy may be as much a metamorphosis (or pseudomorphosis) of the foundational religious idea as heresy” (The Making of Orthodoxy,1989).
Karen L. King describes the historical development of Christianity by reminding us of the children’s story of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”—too much, too little, and just right. Jewish Christianity was too Jewish; Gnostic Christianity wasn’t Jewish enough; orthodox Christianity was just right (The Gospel of Mary of Magdala, 2003).
The inescapable conclusion is that today we use the second-century inherited terms heresy and orthodoxy because of groups who centuries ago sought to distance themselves from the Old Testament.
Interviewed recently for the New York Times, Jacob Neusner, a prolific author on Judaism, noted that Christians must eventually come to terms with that faith. He said, “If Christians take the Hebrew Scriptures to their height, they will find that Judaism embodies those imperatives, the commandments of the Old Testament, in a way Christianity does not.”
Neusner makes a valid point. What we have today, because of the development of orthodoxy, is a worldwide church with which the apostles would not identify and in which they would not feel at home. In reality, that orthodoxy is yet another heresy.
PETER NATHAN
SELECTED REFERENCES:
1 W.H.C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (1985).
2 Ernst Haenchen, The Acts of the Apostles: A Commentary (1965, 1971).
3 Jaroslav Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600), Vol. 1 in The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (1971).
4 Kendall R. Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology (1996).
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What’s in a Name?
The world uses the terms Christian and Christianity with little thought to origins. Where did the terms come from and what did they mean? Did the followers of Christ choose them for themselves, or were they imposed by others?
The New Testament uses the term Christian only three times. It is recorded in relation to the disciples at Antioch, Syria. “And the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch” (Acts 11:26). Most people who consider themselves Christian take this to be a name the disciples called themselves. Yet a careful study of the usage and grammar shows the opposite to be the case. It was a name used by outsiders to label the followers of Jesus and probably with pejorative intent.
In his commentary on Acts, Ernst Haenchen examines the meaning of the term, considering how Philo, Josephus and the apostle Paul used similar expressions. He concludes, “The disciples were first called ‘Christians’, ‘Christ-people’, in Antioch, and that by the Gentile population, because it was here for the first time that they clearly stood out as a separate sect from the Jews.” He comments, “The Gentile judgement implicit in this sobriquet anticipates an insight which the Christians themselves were to reach only later and reluctantly” (The Acts of the Apostles: A Commentary, 1971).
King Agrippa used the term Christian in an exchange with the apostle Paul. The monarch told Paul that he had almost persuaded him to become a Christian. Not only can this be read ironically—“Soon you will convince me to play the Christian”—but again, it is not Paul’s way of describing himself.
The only other usage is by the apostle Peter when he writes, “Yet if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in this matter” (1 Peter 4:16). Here Peter is encouraging people on how to react to persecution for their beliefs and way of life. Once again the implication is that it is those outside the Church who are using the name.
The term Christian is well attested in the writings of the Roman historians, but we have to wait until the second century before we find people such as Ignatius of Antioch taking the name as a self-description.
PN
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Jewish Orthodoxy?
Why is the word orthodox applied to a group within Judaism today? It turns out that it is a somewhat modern misnomer. The term was first used in France in the early 19th century to describe traditional Judaism. In 1806, Napoleon convened the Assembly of Jewish Notables to examine ways of helping Jews leave the European city ghettos in which they had been forced to live and bringing them into the mainstream of European life. Abraham Furtado, an assembly member, is reputed to have used the word orthodox of his fellow Jews. Others, who were creating the Reform movement within Judaism, quickly made use of the term as a means of differentiating themselves from those Jews who held to traditional teachings.
Judaism as a religion has always been defined by “having the right practice” rather than “having the right belief” (orthopraxy versus orthodoxy). Uniformity of practice is the criterion. Disputes and differences over practice separated the various Jewish religious groups in the time of Jesus, whether Sadducee, Pharisee or Essene. This explains why He took issue with their practice of God’s law. To Jesus, they were missing the point in that they weren’t practicing it correctly.
Echoing the words of the eighth-century B.C.E. prophet Micah (Micah 6:8), Jesus emphasized that their practice ought to result in enhancing relations with fellow man rather than selfishly improving one’s own lot. He emphasized the need to love one’s neighbor as oneself (Matthew 22:39; Leviticus 19:18). In fact, every time the Scriptures record Jesus or the apostles discussing the law, it is about how it should be applied. The validity of the law is never in question; its application in everyday life is the focus. The anti-law position taken up by later “Christian” thinkers, whose aim was orthodoxy, would have been intolerable to the writers of the New Testament.
PN
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