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> "I don't think the early Christianity was monolithic enough to say a pice of text represents it's beliefs." It's clear from most early Christian writings tha

> "I don't think the early Christianity was monolithic enough to say a pice of text represents it's beliefs." It's clear from most early Christian writings that there were significant disagreements among different parts of Christianity, including its leadership. Even within canonical texts, there are several places where an author takes the time to criticize someone else's doctrine (for example, there's one famous passage where Paul says of those who require circumcision that they should "cut it all off".) So when I say that those early writings are representative of the beliefs, I don't mean it in the sense of being monolithic, but in the sense of showing what sort of issues were treated as uncontroversial or as background information versus what sort of issues were argued over using strong language. Most of the arguments are, not surprisingly, issues that any scholar of second temple Judaism would recognize. You can certainly pick up both on threads that were continued, and threads that did not persist. But the particular threads that are seen in writings like Judas and Mary aren't early Christian threads, they're late arrivals from some other tradition. They don't show up, even to be criticized, in any of the oldest writings (it's not until late second century that authors like Irenaeus start criticizing those particular beliefs.) They don't use Jewish literary structures in the way they're taught, but rather, distinctly Greek structures. They're disconnected from history and geography -- for example, the "Gospel of Judas" names only one physical place (the region of Judea) and no people other than Jesus, Judas, Adam, and Eve, and the other names it does use (for angels/spirits/heavenly realms) don't resemble Hebrew or Aramaic names. There are no quotations of Jewish scripture and no references to major issues of debate or concern at the time (such as the Roman occupation, the relationship of Jews to Samaritans, or arguments between Hillel and Shammai over issues like divorce.) In short, the gospels of Judas and Mary aren't first-century Jewish writings by members of a sect that split from Judaism because of the teachings of a Jewish rabbi; they're at best late second-century Greek/Egyptian-mixed writings that use a handful of Jewish names. If you want insight into that first-century Jewish-offshoot religion that we call "Christianity", look to the Biblical canon, plus the Didache, Barnabas, Clement, Shepherd of Hermas, Tacitus (discussed in detail at the ECW link above), the Signs Gospel, Polycarp, and Ignatius, and look at the sort of arguments they get into and the things they emphasize and the things they criticize. It's not monolithic, but there are obvious patterns.

Retric 10y ago
You are assuming all groups are communicating when it's more likely that only groups near each other are in regular communication.
- lotharbot 10y ago
  I'm not "assuming", I'm drawing conclusions from the evidence we have. Early-church writings include a significant number of letters between groups spread a great distance geographically. The disputes they talk about aren't just between groups in the same city, but between distant groups, and ideologically diverse groups. This didn't particularly change between the first century and the second century, either. It's not like e-mail was invented in between those times to speed up communication. When certain disputes start showing up in the writings, suddenly, at the end of the second century, it's reasonable to conclude that they were new disputes and not disputes that had already been hot-button issues for a century and a half. Also, don't skip over the rest of my post. It's actually fairly significant that the canonical gospels talk about people and places and name them correctly (archaeological digs show Simon was the #1 Jewish male name in first-century Palestine, and there are 9 different Simons named in the canonical gospels, each one carefully distinguished -- Simon Peter, Simon the tanner, Simon the Zealot, etc. The authors of the canonical gospels show a clear personal familiarity with first-century Palestine, as if they had actually been there.) Gnostic gospels generally don't name people and places outside of some tiny core group. This is a hallmark of being written from a distance, by a non-eyewitness, based on pre-existing characters. It's significant that the canonical writings and many other early-church writings reference issues like the Roman occupation, Samaritans, and divorce, and heavily quote from Jewish scripture, while writings like the gospel of Judas and the gospel of Mary do not. It's significant that the canonical and other early writings show specific hallmarks of different sects of Judaism (not just in what they argue for, but in what they argue against, or even in the vocabulary they use -- John and Hebrews, for example, both talk about the "logos" but use it subtly differently.) Likewise, it's significant that among the gnostic writings, there's a clear progression/development of thought from the Gospel of Thomas to the Sethian writings, and detectable influences from known historical characters like Valentinus. It's easy for someone who hasn't studied the topic to overlook these sorts of things, but there is actually a great deal of scholarship from both believers and non-believers about minute details in these writings. These aren't mysterious, unknown, could-subvert-our-understanding writings like the Da Vinci Code and similar works imply. Most of what comes out of scholarly analysis is fairly dry stuff, showing a clear development of gnosticism as a follow-on movement to Christianity.

Retric 10y ago

You are assuming all groups are communicating when it's more likely that only groups near each other are in regular communication.

lotharbot 10y ago
I'm not "assuming", I'm drawing conclusions from the evidence we have. Early-church writings include a significant number of letters between groups spread a great distance geographically. The disputes they talk about aren't just between groups in the same city, but between distant groups, and ideologically diverse groups. This didn't particularly change between the first century and the second century, either. It's not like e-mail was invented in between those times to speed up communication. When certain disputes start showing up in the writings, suddenly, at the end of the second century, it's reasonable to conclude that they were new disputes and not disputes that had already been hot-button issues for a century and a half. Also, don't skip over the rest of my post. It's actually fairly significant that the canonical gospels talk about people and places and name them correctly (archaeological digs show Simon was the #1 Jewish male name in first-century Palestine, and there are 9 different Simons named in the canonical gospels, each one carefully distinguished -- Simon Peter, Simon the tanner, Simon the Zealot, etc. The authors of the canonical gospels show a clear personal familiarity with first-century Palestine, as if they had actually been there.) Gnostic gospels generally don't name people and places outside of some tiny core group. This is a hallmark of being written from a distance, by a non-eyewitness, based on pre-existing characters. It's significant that the canonical writings and many other early-church writings reference issues like the Roman occupation, Samaritans, and divorce, and heavily quote from Jewish scripture, while writings like the gospel of Judas and the gospel of Mary do not. It's significant that the canonical and other early writings show specific hallmarks of different sects of Judaism (not just in what they argue for, but in what they argue against, or even in the vocabulary they use -- John and Hebrews, for example, both talk about the "logos" but use it subtly differently.) Likewise, it's significant that among the gnostic writings, there's a clear progression/development of thought from the Gospel of Thomas to the Sethian writings, and detectable influences from known historical characters like Valentinus. It's easy for someone who hasn't studied the topic to overlook these sorts of things, but there is actually a great deal of scholarship from both believers and non-believers about minute details in these writings. These aren't mysterious, unknown, could-subvert-our-understanding writings like the Da Vinci Code and similar works imply. Most of what comes out of scholarly analysis is fairly dry stuff, showing a clear development of gnosticism as a follow-on movement to Christianity.