26. Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity

Welcome to the New Testament Review, where every episode we discuss an influential work of New Testament scholarship, I'm Ian Mills, and I'm Ben Shepers. And today we're going to be discussing orthodoxy and heresy and earliest Christianity by Walter Bauer, published in 1934. This book is really fun for a number of reasons. We all read this book for the first time together, Ian Moira and I, in a seminar at UNC. In a seminar taught by Bart D. Erman. And some of you may have heard of, and whom we'll mention later on in the podcast. But it is an influential work of scholarship. There's really no way to talk about the development of Christianity beyond New Testament without talking about this book. We really cannot overstate how important Bauer has been for discussions of the second, particularly the second century church. Like we said in our Harnack episode, how one positions oneself relative to Harnack on lots of issues including Marcy and Bauer is for the second century. If you're talking about the development of orthodoxy, the development of canon, the development or history of different heresies, you are positioning yourself relative to Walter Bauer. The thesis of this book has come to be colloquially referred to as the Bauer thesis. And the Bauer thesis is a response to something we're going to call the UCBN model. And these are opposite ways of modeling or understanding the development of the earliest Christian churches. Bauer argues for the chronological priority and numerical dominance of "heresy" from the perspective of the 4th century Catholic Church, from later perspectives, we call "heresy" and we'll talk about that issue in a bit, everywhere outside of Rome. So if you are dropped into Syria in particular, or Alexandria or Asia Minor, the mainstream kind of Christians there, according to Bauer, are not the sort of Christians in the early 2nd century that, by the 4th century, would be called orthodox. Perhaps I repeat, perhaps, certain manifestations of Christian life that the authors of the Church renounced as "heresy" originally had not been such at all, but were, at least here and there, were the only form of the new religion. That is, for those regions, they were simply Christianity. The possibility also exists that they're adherent to constituted the majority and that they look down at featured and sworn on the orthodox, too, for them were the false believers. Right. This way of framing things is really an explicit rejection of what Bauer calls the UCBN model of Christian origins. UCBN is the adjectival form of UCBS, the famous 4th century Church historian who wrote the ecclesiastical history, and according to UCBS, as Bauer represents him, Jesus handed on orthodoxy to the 12 apostles, and the 12 apostles then distributed themselves across the globe, and from them grew up the orthodox Church, everywhere prior, everywhere primary, everywhere majority, and heresies then always and everywhere developed as secondary parasitical deviations from this initial pure Christianity. What Bauer claims is that this model that we find in receivious and a lot of other early sources around the time of the Council of Nigeria, around the time of Constantine, is actually taken up uncritically and perpetuated by historians of Christianity from that period up to the time of his own writing, which is in the 1930s. So he is not just arguing against UCBS or Origin, who also suggests a similar model. He is arguing that all the historians of his own day have taken this model and accepted it, and he is going to do a thorough criticism of this approach. One of the methodological insights that's going to run through this entire book and is really an essential thing to get from Bauer is that we cannot rely on heresiologists, we cannot rely on orthodox historians like UCBS to accurately and fairly represent their heretical opponents and predecessors. These Christians are committed to giving the quote-unquote UCbian account to giving a Christian retelling of the origins of the Church and to portray their opponents as always illegitimate and always heretical and always sort of parasitical secondary mutations of a original primary Christianity that for them must have gone back to Jesus. And perhaps even more important for some of the criticisms of Bauer that are still being published is the unrepresentativeness of what is preserved. And Bauer makes this point at the beginning in his methodological section, and then in a big way in his later chapters on the use of literature in the fight against heresy. If you go read some of these modern apologetic anti-bauer books, what you find is tabulations of orthodox authors and non-orthodox authors. And look, all the surviving literature is by orthodox people. Well, Bauer would say no duh, not only are radical books being suppressed actively, but the interests of later medieval orthodox scribes are guiding which books they're copying over and which ones they're not. One of the really interesting ways to look at it is even which texts are preserved by some of our earliest authors. Sotation is my favorite example. The only surviving work of Tation is his oration to the Greeks, a critique of pagans. But we know third century authors and others, origin and clement, are citing works of Tation that are discussing the powers in heaven and these plurality of aspects of God and things like that which no surprise don't survive. And Bauer says we need to pay attention to the suppressed voices, to the silences, and to the places where orthodox authors betray stuff about their radical opponents against their own agenda. "Each bit's mind, no duh, I'll story." So we're going to follow in this podcast basically the form of the book itself, the way that Bauer lays it out, which is to give case studies about particular locations. And each chapter he gives his argument as to how Pharisee might have or did proceed orthodoxy in any given location. What's important to understand for Bauer's doing is that he's attempting to totally overturn this UCVN model. We have UCVN model that says everywhere at all times orthodoxy was first and heresy always was a corruption of orthodoxy. And Bauer is attempting to make the opposite arguments. In every place except for Rome of course, as we'll see, heresy was the first version of Christianity and orthodoxy was secondary. We think Bauer's arguments are important even if we don't agree with them in every case because the type of arguments he's trying to make is really an absolute argument that if we can defeat refutation of the so-called UCVN argument, whereas by the end of the episode we'll come to some confusion that are a bit more nuanced than the arguments that we're going to summarize. Right. Ben and I both think Bauer probably overstates his case. But to really appreciate what Bauer is doing and the positive reception of Bauer, you really only need to go read some anti-bauer books. And you could discover why in spite of our marked disagreements with Bauer's particular analyses, we think Bauer is so foundational for the study of the second century. Absurd. Okay, case study number one, Odessa, the heart of Syriac Christianity. If you dropped into not the second century but the fourth, fifth or sixth century Syria and asked a church leader how Christianity came to Syria, they would tell you a story about how the king of Syria sent a letter to Jesus, inviting Jesus to travel to Syria to escape the Judeans and live there. And Jesus wrote back and said, "I'm not coming now because I have to die, but I will send you one of my disciples later." And then following Jesus' death, the disciple Thadius, transcribed into Syriac as "add-eye," journeyed to Odessa and established the church there. Now, Bauer is going to give not only an extensive critique of the plausibility of this story, which most people who study this period don't find even remotely plausible, but an argument that if we look closely at the origins of the church in Odessa and in Syria, we find that it was a very different group or set of groups that dominated the Christian scene. Bauer begins his closer study with a text called the Chronicle of Odessa. And the Chronicle of Odessa is basically a list, a chronicle, of important events for Odessa. And it has things like when the kings started to reign, when certain natural disasters happened in Odessa. And it catalogues the birth of Jesus, which, of course, didn't happen in Odessa, but it's important because there are Christians. And then the next event that's relevant for Christianity is the apostasy of Martian. And that's followed by the birth of Bardyson. And these are notable because Marcien, if you listen to our Harnock episode, and Bardyson, we're going to talk about it a bit, are both notable, famous, heretics. So why are these two events important to catalog in the Chronicle of Odessa? Well, maybe because they reflect something important about the population of Odessa. And it's also notable for Bauer that both events happen before the first church is founded at the beginning of the fourth century. In the same entry, the Chronicle of Odessa starts to note the succession of Orthodox, as he's defining them, bishops. So we have noted in this local chronicle the advent of two important, quote unquote, heretical figures before we have a succession of Orthodox bishops beginning. Ephraim, who is a Syriac writer of the fourth century, mentions that earlier in the history of Odessa, that the Orthodox Christians were named Taludians, and that there was another group that called themselves Christians. Now they're called Taludians because they were followers of Talud, who was presumably, or as far as we know, one of the first or the first significant Orthodox leader in the city of Odessa. And what makes us really interesting is because if you read the early Christian Orthodox literature, you see very quickly that there's a pattern of Syritics and schismatics being named by their founder. So Valentinians being the followers of the Antinus, Marcy and I, the followers of Marcy. So the seem to be a strategy in early Christianity of identifying a Syritic by the name of their leader. And so what this indicates is that there was a group in Odessa at a certain point who called themselves Christians and who guarded the Orthodox as Syritics because they identified them as Taludians. It's worth noting that in those other sources, the heres theological sources that refer to groups by their founder as Valentinians, as Marcy and I, that Irenaeus, for instance, says that these people usually just call themselves Christians. So everybody seems to call them self-Christian and other people by the name of their founder. Ephraim is upset that his group gets referred to colloquially as Paludians, not Christians. And if we want to find out who seemed to be recognized as Christians generally and not Paludians in early Syriac Christianity, we can turn to the narrative of the conversion of Maraba, in which the author steps in and says that according to local custom, Christian, the word Christian, referred specifically to Marcy andites, not his group, what we would call proto-orthodox or the group with which Ephraim identified. And this, of course, matches what we find in other sources. Justin Martyr, a contemporary of Marcy and says that Marcy andites, the followers of Marcy and know themselves just as Christians as well. So what's really interesting is that even an orthodox author has to concede the term Christian here, according to local custom to Marcy andites, and defines himself, although he thinks he is a true Christian, he recognizes that according to the conventional usage of that term in that region, Christian does not refer to him, Christian refers to Marcy andites. So Ephraim, again, who is an orthodox witness in the Syriac edition, considers Bardezian to be, he is great opponent, to be the arch-charitic of the Syriac sphere. You know, one of the interesting things that we have recorded in your CVS actually is that when Bardezian writes, he quantifies and writes against Marcy andites, but not against any orthodox. And again, this is important to you CVS, an orthodox writer, which seems to indicate that Bardezian seemed to think it was important to write against orthodox and thought writing against the Marcy andites was the most pressing thing he could do. And then Bardezan, who would come to be considered a heretic, who had a sort of complex view of God's relationship to creation and had, you know, a, from the later perspectives, an overstated role for astrology, he would, and from later perspectives, be understood as sort of a quasi-Valentinean, Bardezan then comes to represent a major leader in the Syriac church against Marcy andites. So we have this text, "The Life of Ebericus," where the protagonist travels to Syria and is greeted by a procession of Christians headed by none other than Bardezan. So this author seems to think that Bardezan is the leader of the non-Marcy andites sect in this area. And we have other evidence for the prominence of Bardezan there. A church of Bardezan survived prominently and was destroyed in the 5th century. Ephrem is said to have written his hymns in Bardezan's tunes, because the latter Bardezans were so popular that Ephrem had to try to displace them by imitating their tunes. These two groups, it seems, represented the majority of early Syriac Christians, and Christians seem to be a little bit upset by the fact that the Orthodox groups represented a minority. Heulatively, what we have here is evidence that, first of all, Orthodox Christianity in Adesa is late and in the minority, whereas the majority of the earliest Christians in Adesa were of some variety of heretic potentially Marcy andites. It's important to note for the misreception of Bauer that to affirm Bauer is not to say that Jesus was in fact a Marcy andite. It's just that in this region, at this time, it seems that non-Orthodox forms of Christianity represented mainstream Christianity. And it seems to me that is all that Bauer is trying to accomplish. So Bauer's next chapter is on the city of Alexandria in Egypt. What he finds is that, first of all, that there's very little evidence for Christianity in Alexandria prior to the second century. We just don't have material that can be reliably traced back to Alexandria until the second century when we have people like experiment of Alexandria. There are texts like Hebrew's or the aches of the Barnabas that are often theorized as being from Alexandria. And as we see in a second, Bauer does actually think that this is from Alexandria. But we just don't have a lot of really through evidence of materials from Alexandria that represent Christianity. Bauer goes on to argue that there's little evidence for Orthodox Christianity prior to the third century, which is where we find the Bishop de Nutrius, the erstwhile friend of origin. And Bauer considers the Bishop de Nutrius to be really the beginning of Orthodox or total Orthodox Christianity in Alexandria. So he traced in the couple different lines of evidence for this. He talks about the Epistle Barnabas. He says that this is an Alexandria in documents and he points to the mention of the Greek word genosis and its derivatives. As evidence that this is a gnostic or gnosticly influenced document. Okay, the epistle of Barnabas is a probably second century document that is attributed to Barnabas, the traveling companion of Paul. It is present in our oldest, complete New Testament, Codex Cineaticus, along with the other books of the New Testament. And it is mostly a diatribe against how, quote unquote, the Jews read scripture. And it is a sustained argument for exclusively allegorical readings of the Old Testament. And because of this, because of the association of allegorical readings with Alexandria and maybe some geographical notes and the fact that it appears first in Alexandria and authors, a lot of people attribute this to Alexandria. And I think this is perfectly plausible. The problem, as we're going to talk about at the end of our episode, is it really, there's no reason to think this is a gnostic text. That were also points to a large number of early heretics who were explicitly identified with Alexandria or said to have originated in Alexandria. Among them being facilities and his son, on the east of the door, Valentine's and. And Apelius, who is known as one of the foremost disciples of Marcian and one of our best sources for the development of Marcian's theological system. So basically, we have a lot of really early references, and there are more references, there's a bit more of a sphere. But we have a bunch of early references to know the heretics in Alexandria, and the much fewer references to what we would call Orthodox Christians in Alexandria in the early second century or prior. We do have acts talks about Apollo's being called Alexandria, but we can see is in need of some kind of correction from Paul. So the evidence seems to indicate that the earliest most well-known, at least most well-known, Christians in Alexandria were heretics. So then Bauer goes into a description of two gospels, which he claims are specifically connected with Alexandria or Egyptian Christianity, by virtue of the fact that they are referenced significantly in checks that we know originate in Alexandria. And these two gospels are the gospels of the Hebrews and the gospel of the Egyptians. And his claim is that these two gospels are the first gospels in Egypt, and we know from Orthodox writers that neither of these gospels are quite regarded as Orthodox. They may be cited by clinics for origin, but on the whole, these aren't in any way equivalent to these four Orthodox gospels. Which is a grouping we're going to problematize in a second anyways. Even the name gospel of the Egyptians suggests that this isn't the title that the Egyptians gave it, but a title looking in from the outside and saying, OK, this is a gospel that Egyptian people use. Bauer divides the work of clinics of Alexandria into two phases, what he calls an earlier, more nothic phase, and a later, more orthodox phase. The earlier phase being clinics outlines, and then the later phase being his miscellaneous. And by doing so, he presents kind of a trajectory where you go from the early planet to his more nothic, to the late planet to his more orthodox, to origin, to his even more orthodox, to Demetrius, who again, Bauer argues, is the real representative of true orthodox Christianity in Egypt. And Bauer suggests that if you trace this trajectory backwards, that you end up with a holy or mostly nothic Christianity in Alexandria, and equipment is really kind of the first person to start moving this in an orthodox direction, which eventually culminates with Demetrius. As evidence for his fame, that narcissism proceeded orthodoxy and co-existed with it, at least until the time of Demetrius, he poses a story, actually, again, by Eusebius, about how an origin was done man. He was forced to take a residence in the house of a particular patroness who accepted him as a guest. But this woman was also the patron of a very famous heretic. And so you see in the story origin, who is at least for Eusebius, orthodox, and heresy, kind of literally towards just being in the same household. And he thinks that this did not change, that orthodoxy did not gain prominence until the time of the Bishop Demetrius. Ben and I are using the term "nostic" following Bauer. And we're going to continue to use that term, because Bauer does. We are, of course, aware of the problematic nature of this term as a label for a specific religious movement. I have an episode lined up with another guest to do on Michael Williams' "Rethinking Nosticism" and Karen King's "What is Nosticism" that hopefully will come out shortly after this one. So you can look forward to that. For now, we're going to continue to use it as sort of a typological way of grouping, platenizing forms of Christianity, the way that Bauer does. So much of the terminology has changed and evolved. We'll touch on this again a little later. But-- So what do we have here in Syria and Alexandria? Are two case studies where it looks like heresy has preceded orthodoxy. And then when orthodoxy comes onto the scene, it represents a minority group there. Robinson and others are going to criticize that Bauer has started with two places where we have relatively little literature. There is not a whole lot of second century Syriac literature. And all we have, by the way, is from Bardy Son. But Bauer, of course, knows this. One of Bauer's key points is that part of the reason we have no literature from second century Syria and second century-- early second century Alexandria-- is because all the literature that was written then are heretical books. And people didn't save Bardy Son's many books or the works of facilities who had some 20-some volume work on the Gospels that people are still according to the fifth century. We've lost all of these works, all of the early literature of Syria and Alexandria. Because according to Bauer, it was heretical. And so to say, you can't use these as your prime case study because so little literature survives is to use one of Bauer's own arguments against him and to sort of miss the point of the selective transmission of early Christian literature. That is, the suppression and just gradual loss of quote unquote heretical works. That's a really good point. The way that we know that these works existed is from Orthodox writers themselves to either explicitly name them or show their existence by virtue of quoting them. From here, we move to regions that are better attested. Because in these regions, we have early proto-Orthodox authors, which are medieval scribes, are preserving, and Orthodox authors are quoting and praising. So we begin with Ignatius and Polycarp. Hey, Ben, do you know anything about Ignatius? Just a little bit. Part of the reason I really wanted to do this episode with Ben is because Ben is their triangle's resident expert on Ignatius. Ignatius of Antioch is a second century martyr bishop who wrote seven letters to churches in Asia Minor. And so when we talk about Ignatius and Polycarp, we're talking about early Orthodox Christians or proto-Orthodox Christians in the Roman province of Asia, which is the western side of Asia Minor modern day Turkey, for reasons that are unclear to us in terms of why he's in this position. Ignatius is being taken from his home, Antioch, in Syria, to Rome, to face trial and execution. As he's being exported across his Asia Minor, he's writing letters to churches in this area. And he writes seven letters to six different cities. And then he writes one to Polycarp, who is the bishop of Smyrna. So he writes, ends up writing two letters to Smyrna. Ignatius in these letters is not only attacking heresy, but pushing his flagship issue. The one thing that Ignatius really likes to hammer home is the Mano Episcopacy. That is, each city has one bishop. And if you are not in accordance with your bishop, you are in the wrong. And Bauer is going to try to tie all this stuff together to argue that in these cities, it looks like heresy is running the show. And Ignatius is sort of weaponizing the bishopric to advance his Orthodox agenda. - One of the fundamental issues here is the question of whether this Mano Episcopacy, whether the institution of one bishop ruling over every city who then has atmospheric below him and begins below them, is already present in these Asian cities. Or if it's something that Ignatius is to self attempting to institute. Bauer is really going to come down part on the second option. That this is something that Ignatius is actively trying to promote and create establishables across Asia Minor and kind of dashes off these letters to these various churches in different cities. The way that Bauer tries to explain Ignatius is really insistence and fervent attempt to get these churches to follow the bishop, to do nothing without the bishop, to have the bishop at the center of their communal life, is he actually thinks that Ignatius has been in the minority in this situation. He presents this scenario where you have leadership by different elected representatives, which presumably in this case would be prisoners. And a situation in which the majority can be represented by these different groups. But there's a certain faction that can't gain traction within this governing body. And so this particular faction decides to establish the rule of one single leader, and the term that valor uses is dictatorship, in order to establish the primacy of their own party. Interestingly, this is being written in 1934 in Germany, so there's definitely certain order for the poor residents that are now influencing Valor's position on this. However, what this means is that the reason that Ignatius is so insistent on establishing one ruler rather than a collective is that this is the best way to establish his faction over others. What this means is Ignatius is actually in the minority, and it is the heritage around them who actually have the upper hand in terms of the majority, in terms of leadership in Asia Minor. In every letter, Ignatius is always very quick in beginning of his letters to talk about how unified these churches are and how they're all bound together under the bishop, but then he chooses to be talking out of both sides of his mouth, because then he goes on in other places and say, you know, when he writes two episodes, he says, you know, why are not all of you prudent? Why are we persisting in foolishness? In Smyrna, he talks about someone who by virtue of his high position is opposing the bishop, and the word he uses for position here is the same word he uses to refer to the bishop of Smyrna, Paulicite, right? So this is how Valor comes to the conclusion that in Smyrna, actually, there is what he calls a "nostic anti-bishop," there is someone who has set himself up in opposition to Paulicite, and that you have at least two people vying for control over the fissions in the city by claiming the title of bishop. And we also need to bring in here Paulicite's letter. So from Paulicite himself, we have one letter, what's really interesting is the way the Pope identifies himself is that he identifies himself in the letter as Paulicite and the presiders with him. And what Valor points out is what it has to indicate is that there are certain presviders who are with Paulicite and certain presiders who are not. So even Paulicite's own bleeding, and the fact that Paulicite in this letter never designates himself as a bishop, he never actually claims his title, means that his division as bishop is actually contested, that whatever position he's playing for himself in Smyrna is contested, and that there are other groups in the city, potentially a majority of other Christians in the city, who oppose it. He also talks about the infillipide, the Hoi Palloy, a phrase we know, kind of "Palloy in English," but Richard Greek indicates there are great masses in Sylipide. He says that these people are dozedic Christians, or what Valor identifies as saidic Nostics. So even in the church he's writing to in Sylipide, he identifies the majority there as non-Orphanost Christians. I am not particularly sympathetic to Valor's construal of a lot of these passages. And the history of scholarship on Ignatius and Paulicarp has not been overwhelmingly positive on Valor's construal of these authors and these passages. The first half that Ignatius is trying to institute the monopiscopacy, not reflecting and established practice, is I think probably accepted by most scholars, but the latter half that these things like Paulicarp and the Presbyter's with him reflect some minority position necessarily is probably an overreading of those passages. Valor's next chapter actually also uses Ignatius and Paulicarp, again, in perhaps his most famous argument, which is his arguments from silence. He shows that the cities that come under the most critique in the revelation of John, the Apocalypse, the Last Book of New Testament, Pergamum, Fleiratia, Leodicea, and Sardis, we find no mention of in Ignatius and Paulicarp. And Bauer thinks this silence is meaningful. We have, at the end of the first century, some pretty harsh critiques of these cities, and then in Ignatius maybe 20 years later or so, we have utter silence about cities in the same region to which and through which Ignatius is writing and passing respectively. Similar things have to be said about if Colossians, Tyropolis, and Thessaloniki. These are cities which Ignatius, some of these cities, Ignatius must have passed through on his route, and yet we have no mention of them from him. He writes no letter to their bishop, and this suggests to Bauer that either the church there has died or more likely that heresy has taken over from the perspective of Ignatius. Likewise, we have, as with Alexandria, references to early heretics coming from Isha Minor. Serenthus, Menander, Saturninus, these are very murky figures in the early history of the church because none of their writings are preserved, but they too came from the same region and are remembered as opponents of the proto-Orthodox church. So one overlaps between Paul, Revelation, and Ignatius is the city of Ephesus, and so Bauer goes and does an elaborate recreation to try and work out what happened to the Pauling community at Ephesus. It involves Jewish Christian emigrates coming from Palestine after the Jewish War and the replacement of Pauling Christianity with the type of Jewish Christianity, and then by claiming a very late date for the pastorals, the argues then that we're dealing with narcissism and Ephesus. It's very complex and a little shaky. I don't remember that argument very well. I don't remember. Yeah, that. And then we come to Rome, the bastion of orthodoxy for Bauer. And in Rome, we see how orthodoxy came to conquer the Mediterranean by the fourth century. And the first piece of evidence we have of this four-bauer is first clement. So first clement is a letter that is part of the collection known as the Episolic Fathers, which are regarded as some of the earliest Christian documents we have after the time of New Testament. And it's a letter that is from a leader in Rome to the city of Corinth. It talks about a particular political struggle in Corinth where certain leaders have been posed, and Rome is weighing in on the situation and coming in against useful up-and-comers and their zeal. And so what Bauer sees in this letter is a kind of political opportunism that by the end of the first century, which is when this letter is usually dated, Rome is already starting to surface-lead around and weigh in on the problems in other churches. Or in a bit of problematic argumentation, reconstructs a heresy in Corinth against which clement is writing. And this is not well received in scholarship, so we're going to kind of skim over it. What's important here is we see Rome interjecting into the internal affairs of another church in favor of one party rather than another. And this, according to Bauer, is a pattern. Bauer says that Rome too taught others. That is, Ignatius recognizes Rome as sort of the central teacher of the kind of Christianity he views as orthodox. And Bauer looks for further evidence. Dionysius of Corinth refers to gifts sent out by the Church of Rome. And there's early evidence of salaried bishops in Rome, our earliest evidence of that. And so we see perhaps financial resources being put into action in favor of orthodox parties. And Bauer hypothesizes, perhaps, along with this letter, came a gift of money to favor the party which clement viewed as orthodox. There's no explicit evidence of that, of course. But we have to imagine this letter being carried by a human being and an advocate of orthodoxy to Corinth. And we see in this letter, and in later Roman literature, particularly the catalogues of bishops mentioned by Euroneus, a later heuriciologist, the development of the notion of apostolic succession. That is, first clement claims continuity with Peter and Paul, and Euroneus claims direct succession of bishops from the apostles. And we see this model, perhaps, being enforced on other churches, on Antioch, and eventually for instance, in this succession of bishops from Thaddeus, as we talked about in Syria, this model of apostolic succession being used, being weaponized against heretics. Of course, Bauer notes the heretics, too, claimed apostolic succession, facilities claimed to be a hearer of one of Peter's disciples, as did Valentinus, a hearer of one of Paul's, and so on. When we talk about first clement, I think it's not appropriate to talk about apostolic succession unless we're very clear what we mean. So if you take absolute succession in the really strict sense of the truths of the faith being handed down from Jesus to the apostles, to the followers. First fun that doesn't really say anything like that. In order to get something like that, you have to go to Irenaeus to writing in the 180s. And the first fun that what you have is a description of church leadership that the apostles appointed certain people to lead after they were gone, which can be described as adversarial succession. But I think some people will fudge the very important station there, but this is not describing the passing down of the true faith, certainly not in Rome at the end of the first century. Rome and the Orthodox party also wielded literature against heresy. That is the books we come to call the new and the Old Testament became tools in their fight against other groups of Christians. Again, I can't help but first refer to some of these anti-bauer books who claim that Bauer is neglecting the New Testament. Bauer spends a whole chapter just on the New Testament. I'm not sure how thoroughly these people are reading Bauer. Bauer's point is that the New Testament is selected on the basis of later fights over orthodoxy that these groups in the second century don't agree on what is or isn't in the New Testament already. My favorite example of that by the way is Ephraim says that the students of Bardyson reject third Corinthians because Paul so clearly refutes their heresy in third Corinthians. Ironic in light of the fact that probably in this case third Corinthians is a later addition brought on by the Orthodox and Bardyson here preserves a slightly older version of Paul the Pauline pistols. And we can probably say the same thing about the pastorials being added to the canon. Marcientation P47 doesn't have the pastorials. These seem to be engaging second century controversies and the church fathers not only selecting these works but also editing these works to better record with their conception of orthodoxy. And finally one of my favorite little sections from Bauer is his treatment of Jewish Christianity and pointing out that orthodoxy moves and leaves behind Jewish Christians. They were not one's heretics and became heretics as the boundaries of orthodoxy is shifted. So consider the compromise reported in Acts that the Jewish Christians could be law observant as long as they didn't force the Gentiles to be. This seems to be the position that Paul settles on and then we move a little later and Justin says it is a matter of great controversy whether or not any law observant Christians are in fact Christians and we move on a little bit later. And we have church fathers saying that anyone who observes Sabbaths is a heretic. We have here New Testament orthodoxy being left behind. And if you've listened to our episodes on, you know, Stanton on the Gospel of Matthew or Martin on Galatians, it is not at all clear that the books that ended up in the New Testament in fact support 4th century orthodoxy. It looks to me for sure that Matthew is the party against which Paul is writing in Galatians or maybe not the exact party but something very close represents a law observant form of Christianity which Paul would not certainly get along with. And we talked about in our Revelation episode how there are some pretty clear statements in the revelation of John against the positions for which Paul advocates that is some anti-Paulian elements in Revelation. So what we have is a diversity of Christianity that are together being that are being collected together and read in light of each other and in light of a view of orthodoxy and weaponized against heretics. And the heretics of course claimed these books and other forms of these books as their own. So we've already cast a little bit of doubt on some of Harnax scholarship as a regards Marcian but he really was a voluminous writer, he is prolific and he obviously had a lot of good things to say. And the names of works that are mentioned that date through the 2nd century and when you collect the titles of all these works there are more heretical books than orthodox books recorded and this is again from orthodox sources. Of course almost none of these survive because as we keep saying Christians preserve orthodox books not non-orthodox books and what does survive from this early period are things we recover usually from dig sites not from medieval libraries with the few exceptions. The point power here is making is the selectivity of the earliest works of Christian literature to form the New Testament and then of course to form the collection we call the Apostolic Fathers. But this notion of a continuous literary tradition of proto-orthodox reaching without interruption back into the 1st century which is so often appealed to an anti-bauer books is very much an artifact of who and what theology later champions of orthodoxy decided to preserve. So as we've seen each of these funeral case studies is arguing that either in a particular place, Pharisee is the first version of Christianity and the original version of Christianity to arrive on the scene and that orthodox Christianity comes later or a secondary. So we have seen that without argues that a certain place in white Rome, Orthodoxy was dominating the beginning and had an active role in turning other communities from political positions to orthodox ones. Before Bauer to be right I want to reiterate is not to say that Paul was anostic. He has been read that way by some of his opponents and some of his opponents but for Bauer to be right we just have to imagine that there were people who were born lived and died who understood themselves as Christians and as nothing other than Christians who believed things that would later come to be heretical. And that such groups represented a serious rival in certain places and at certain times often quite early to the kinds of Christianity that came to be understood as orthodox. A lot of the particulars as we've noted of Bauer's construction have been deeply privatized. Barnabas is not in fact anostic, allegorical interpretation, pervades, proto-orthodox as well as non-orthodox approaches to the Old Testament. There really is no evidence that Clement is writing against nostics and yes his arguments from silence perhaps are a bit too optimistic. I'm not persuaded that Colossians was overwhelmingly nostic by the fact that Ignatius passed through there and failed to mention an orthodox bishop there. It's possible but it seems like we would need more evidence to support that construction of things. So a lot of scholars have recognized the power of Bauer's thesis even if in certain situations he goes also on the wrong track. There's a family bloc who's a French scholar who's worked as, unfortunately especially for us as students, yet to be translated from French and English that has made a really influential argument about serency and orthodoxy in terms of discourse rather than talking about discrete roots. It was important for thinking about the topic literature that we have and knowing that this is what we have is almost overwhelmingly orthodox in orientation state by the orthodox and theoretical or destroyed, but we can't always take these texts to faith value and that we have to recognize that these are presenting us with discourses or different strategies of interpretation. And what we have in the second and into the third centuries are different strategies of reading, different strategies of polemic and apologetic that are being utilized both by orthodox and those who are going to be regarded as purists. And that even a category of piracy is not something that is static, that it is a fundamental assumption, assumption that I would say the UCVN model and some anti-Bauer scholars beg the question that they beg is that piracy is simply a static concept rather than something that can be attributed to any system by anyone. Again, going back to a desa and the plucians, the plucians are identified as if they were heretics by people who re now consider heretics. So the definition of what is orthodoxy, what is true Christianity and heresy is a matter of who's talking and what kind of strategy they use to talk about other people and other groups. Bart Airman. who, as we mentioned before, is one of our teachers, has definitely popularized the term "proto-orthodoxy." That is, we shouldn't talk about orthodox groups before the 4th century, back when the debate over who was and wasn't mainstream Christianity was hardly contested. And he's sometimes been criticized for discussing the development of theology teleologically, that is describing Justin who, in some ways, has certain distinct continuities with the 4th and 5th century orthodoxy, but also differs in significant ways, for instance, Christology, describing Justin in terms determined by 5th century categories. And while I'm sympathetic to this critique, we certainly don't want to talk about history as if its development was inevitable, as if orthodoxy couldn't have but one. I don't think anyone who's Red Airman could actually say that's what he's doing. Yeah. That's pretty clear, that is not his agenda and not his analysis. I would argue that an acronym is part of doing history. There's good reason to, when you're looking back and discussing a, you know, a foot race, to discuss what the eventual winner did, the choices they made that resulted in their victory over and against other runners. That isn't to say that is the only way things could have ever turned out. But it's useful as a historian recounting events sometimes to use an acronym to categories. In fact, I would say it's inevitable that we use an acronym to category. So I want to give validity to these sorts of criticisms, but also say that proto-orthodoxy remains useful for picking out certain continuities, as long as we don't let this self-conscious and acronym blur our understanding of history in other ways, or become sort of tealological historians that is seeing what we now understand to be orthodoxy as inevitable and sort of co-hate in the second century. I think it's also important to distinguish when we're trying to talk about an actual historical social group and what they believe in a tradition and a pattern of discourse that's persisted over several centuries and was eventually finalized. You know, when we talked about the proto-orthodox literature, we're talking about the literature that survived, the literature that was preserved. So, and that literature was preserved for a reason. And so we can talk about commonalities in that literature. It's only started describing the historical situation of the theory and the terminology in terms of importance, but I don't think any one of those kind of questions about terminology can discredit anyone's work on this topic. And one more note on reception. The most recent anti-bower book that presents itself as historical scholarship makes a big point of the absence of bishops in descriptions of early heretical groups. This author says that it is notable that there are no bishops for Marcianate churches and that suggests that Marcianate churches were never a major rival. This kind of argument, I think, fails on so many levels. First of all, it is not at all surprising that Uranus in giving a succession of orthodox bishops going back to Peter and Paul fails to do the same thing for his heretical opponents. That would be rather silly. I think what we have here is a modern historian again following Uranus' ten-dentious misrepresentation of history and taking it at face value. So one of Bower's primary insights here is being neglected. Also, it's worth noting that this just fails to account for some primary evidence. The fact of the dialogue about Adamantius does, in fact, mention countless bishops of the Marcianate church. And of course, as we discussed in our Marcianate episode, we have Theodore talking about entire Marcianate villages and him warning them against wandering into Marcianate churches because they're indistinguishable from proto-orthodox churches. There is, in fact, good evidence that some of these early varieties of Christianity represented major rivals in certain regions and at certain times to the kinds of Christianity we would come to recognize as orthodox. One of the really significant contributions that Bower has made, that influences, I think, all of the testament of Christianity scholarship, is that we need to pay attention to the way Christianity developed in certain places, in certain cities if we have enough data to talk about that, talk about geographical specificities. And that is now huge part of the field. You have works like Theodore Nantes, from Paul de Valentinius. She's been in the church of Rome in the first two centuries, which are incredible works of scholarship. People talking about Alexandria, about Antioch, and each of these studies is giving us a more precise insight into what Christianity looked like over time at each of these places. And so, I think that is one of the enduring blessings of Bower's work that everyone, I think, is going to have to acknowledge. So, a major scene in Bower, which we flagged and which no doubt noticed throughout this podcast, is the way that we've questioned our sources and interrogated them, maybe in some respects. And this is regarded by a lot of people as being a kind of hermeneutic of suspicion, right. And this is regarded in a negative way, a very prominent New Testament scholar suggested that instead of worship test with a hermeneutic of love, and I think in a lot of ways, your approach to these texts is going to reflect the situation that you're in, institutionally, maybe even your own personal admissions. But I just think talking about this as reading against the brain, or especially a hermeneutic of suspicion, really isn't actually charitable enough to what we're doing. I think what we're doing is trying to read these texts as real people who are situated in real historical situations and have to deal with real historical problems. And if you view this problem of heresy and orthodoxy as incredibly important, and then they have to do whatever it takes to combat these issues, right. And so, it shouldn't surprise us. It shouldn't be regarded as overly cynical when we question someone like Irenaeus or Eusebius to ask whether they're really giving us the whole story. I think this is really just acknowledging their humanity and the fact that they feel like they're in a position where they have to use every tool or their disposal to combat something that is for them, you know, a life and death issue. And so, again, I think, you know, some of our listeners will really resonate with the approach that that hour takes, some of them will really kind of react against it. But I just want to give kind of a positive apology for what the kind of work that Ian and I do in that, you know, this is not about being ultra cynical. It's not about questioning everything. It's about really addressing these writers on human levels and trying to figure out what are they saying in the context that they're in. Absolutely. And when we are so lucky to recover works from the hands of groups that would later become heretical when we recover an occasional work of from the School of Bartison or quotation from the School of Marcien, we read their characterizations of the Pro-Orthodox Church with the same kinds of skepticism. Marcien accuses the mainstream church of corrupting scripture the same way that the mainstream church accuses Marcien of corrupting scripture to Tulian points out. Neither Ben nor I think we should accept Marcien at face value and reject to Tulian or vice versa. Like Ben said, we are just trying to read these as historically situated humans, dealing with issues of grave significance to them. Thanks Ben, so much for joining me. Yeah, thanks for having me back. This is our inaugural show interview episode. Yeah, if the other quality is a bit different, it's because Ben is calling from North Carolina while I sit in Southern Minnesota. And if the sound quality is a little less than desirable right now, you'll have to be patient with us as we figure out how to improve that situation. I don't mind. Okay, I trust you. I trust you. No, it's the next reaction, that's right. Yeah.