As another cycle of DVC mail continues to pour in, I find myself answering the same old same old once again.

Today’s topic is….No, it’s not a murky muddle

This comes up a lot. People are under the impression that the evidence available to us about the nature of early Christianity is a)too meager to tell us anything, b) too “biased” to be useful and/or c) left by the “winners” in that Great Power Struggle that was Who Gets To Be Arrested By The Roman Governor And Fed To the Beasts?

Well, it’s really not so bad.

Yes, the evidence is sparse, as is all evidence for ancient history, but when you get down to it, the evidence for what we know about the early Christian movement is a) no more scarce, b)no more “biased” and/or c)no more exclusivist of other viewpoints than any other evidence about any other aspect of the ancient world.

In fact, the argument could be made that in context, the evidence for the nature of the early Christian movement is actually a bit more useful, for many reasons, than texts we have related to other areas of life.

So anyway, what letter writers are saying to me is that…how can you argue from the Bible, when the Bible is a document of faith, etc…

What they’re missing is what I’m arguing. In my little book, I don’t argue for or against the divinity of Christ (which is what the letter writers are talking about.) In fact, I explicitly say that this isn’t the issue.

The issue is what novelist Dan Brown says about the nature of early Christianity – that it was a movement centered on the teachings of the mortal teacher Jesus, and it wasn’t until Constantine came on the scene and decided it would be pretty cool to unite the empire under, among other things, the worship of the Son of God, that Christianity started espousing the divinity of Jesus (which happened at the Council of Nicaea, in case you didn’t know. All those bishops, who had, I suppose, heretofore been leading eucharistic liturgies centered on the mortal wisdom teacher Jesus were told by Constantine to start worshipping same Jesus and said…”Uh…okay.” Do you see why this book is so aggravating, by the way? It so illogical and dumb, that those of us who are trying to refute it are just astonished that we even have to…but, as the letters show…we do.)

Anyway. So that’s the issue – not whether or not Jesus was divine, but what the early Christian movement believed about him. Of course, our most reliable sources for that information would be the sources closest to the events in question which would be, no matter how you value them otherwise, the books of the New Testament, as well as other non-canonical writings. None of which Dan Brown ever bothers to cite. Of course not. Where would he be if he did pull in Philippians 2 or Colossians 1:15-23? Sunk, is where.

No, this belief wasn’t precisely and philosophically articulated, but let’s just say that a reading of these sources tells us fairly clearly that Jesus was viewed as more than just a nice, wise and very dead teacher. Just a bit.