The Invention of Christianity: The First 500 Years by Tom Lee

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Catholica Special Series: The Invention of Christianity: The First 500 Years by Tom Lee

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Tom Lee...

To recap for newer readers of Catholica. this manuscript by actor, writer and broadcaster, Tom Lee, might be described as one man's long quest to better understand what he was brought up to believe. It took him nearly three decades to write it. Today we begin a lengthy part of his exploration in which Tom seeks to understand the origin of the Sacred Texts upon which Christianity is based.

Which Gospels to Choose?
Part 8.1
by Tom Lee

The first Gospel…

The Church at Rome, in assuming the mantle previously worn by the Jerusalem Mother Church, had to establish a valid title to secure acceptance from other churches. It was this circumstance that brought forth the first Gospel, attributed to Mark, in which the name and fame of Peter was welded to the originality of Paul. Eusebius, in his Ecclesiastical History tells us: "Papius, Bishop of Hierapolis (c. 130) wrote that Mark's gospel was a record of Peter's Roman preaching."

The Gospel of Mark is now acknowledged by most Christians as being the first, and the foundation upon which all subsequent Gospels were based. As we shall see in a later chapter, it was an instructional and liturgical document, replacing or supplementing the scriptural readings of the Jewish liturgical year, some of which had become an embarrassment, especially among Gentile converts, following the destruction of Jerusalem.

The authority of the Nazorean council had derived from personal knowledge and experience of what Jesus had said and done. Paul, on the other hand, had claimed to be the recipient of the direct guidance of the Christ in heaven through the Holy Spirit. The church at Rome, building on the Pauline foundation, made guidance by the Holy Spirit the chief source of Christian authority for the future.

Today few laymen read the New Testament with critical attention, and most of us imagine that all we know, or could know, of the early life of Jesus, of his mother Mary, and the origins of the Christian Church, comes from the texts of the four evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. We forget that these biblical writings had their origins in widely separated areas of the ancient world, and stem not from the Jewish and monotheistic world that Jesus knew but from the primitive Christian communities of a later time, each of which had a related but by no means identical version of the Christian story as it was handed down to them through a number of generations, mostly by word of mouth alone.

Holy Scripture...

The Communities of Christians differed widely among themselves on points of belief. A New Testament, in the sense of a corpus of writings generally accepted as canonical and inviolable did not exist. The primacy of the Pope at Rome was not established. Christian fancy, within certain limits, was free. Even the Old Testament as we know it was not established and codified. The documents were finally put together and recognized as the Holy Scriptures by a convention of rabbis held at Jabneh at the end of the first century CE. Their work was brought to completion with the acceptance of the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Esther within the Canon. The Jabneh academy also determined which of the variant Hebrew texts of the Bible in circulation at the time was to be deemed authoritative, and thereby established what in all essentials constitutes the consonantal text of the Hebrew Bible of today.

The composition of the Christian Bible, which documents to include and which to drop, was not decided until a council of the Church held at Carthage in North Africa, in the fourth century. Several books that had formerly been read in the churches, such as the Shepherd by Hermas, the Gospel of Peter and the marvelous Gospel of Thomas were then excluded. The canon as we have it today is neither a total nor a random collection of early Christian texts. It is both deliberate and selective and it excludes just as surely as it includes. As the biblical textual scholar John Dominic Crossan has pointed out: "You cannot understand what is included … unless you understand what was excluded from it."

All the books now used in the Synagogue are derived from the Seder Rab Amram (order of Jewish service), composed in a Jewish school at Sura in Babylonia. What we know of the worship of synagogues in the first Christian century is largely derived from the New Testament. The most notable difference between the early Christian church meeting and what came to be the classical form of the Jewish Synagogue service is that the Christian began with lessons, testimonies and preaching and proceeded to prayers, while the Jewish begins with blessings and prayer. One reason for the Christian order was evidently to allow inquirers and hearers, not yet admitted to membership of the Church, or to any formal preparation for it, to listen to lessons, testimonies and preaching before they were ready to join in the prayers of the faithful.

The Apocryphal Gospels…

The Gospel of Matthew briefly relates the Flight into Egypt to escape the murderous wrath of Herod. From this event until the twelve-year-old Jesus questions the elders in the Temple, there is complete silence in the canonical Gospels. To fill the void, many legends grew up, most of which can be found in the Apocryphal Gospels or Pseudepigrapha. The Protoevangelion, originally alleged to have been written by James, the brother of Jesus, is the oldest, probably as early as 200 CE. It includes material about the Nativity not found in the New Testament, and ends with the Massacre of the Innocents. It is the first fanciful document we know of that explains Mary's miraculous pregnancy by making Joseph a chaste old man with children from a previous marriage.

The so-called Gospel of the Infancy of Jesus Christ covers the time from the Nativity through his childhood at Nazareth. These works provided the iconography for events depicted in medieval pictures, particularly Nativity Scenes, which do not appear in the Bible. Midwives arrive and Salome's withered hand is miraculously healed when she touches the newborn Child. Many of these writings are nonsensical but, like all legendary material of great age, the Apocryphal Gospels deserve attention if only for their artistic legacy.

The Gospel of Philip, which some regard as a heretical text, states clearly that Jesus' parents were normal humans, Mary and Joseph. Only when he was born of the spirit did Jesus become the son of the Heavenly Father and the Holy Spirit. In Syriac and Hebrew the spirit is spoken of in feminine forms, so metaphorically you can speak of her as a divine mother. It appears that there were some Christians who accepted a virgin birth, but didn't take it literally.

“We forget that these biblical writings had their origins in widely separated areas of the ancient world, and stem not from the Jewish and monotheistic world that Jesus knew but from the primitive Christian communities of a later time.” …Tom Lee

PHOTO CREDIT: The image used in the headline has been sourced from the OnLine Sacred Gallery of the British Library: www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/sacred/downloads.html

Tom Lee is an Australian, now semi-retired in Phoenix, Arizona, who has had an illustrious international career as an actor, writer, and broadcast commentator. He does not claim to be a professional theologian, nor an historian, but he undertook this study because, like many of the people who are attracted to what we're doing here at Catholica Australia, he was simply inquisitive about the history of Christianity and trying to better understand what he had been brought up to believe. In a sense, his book is a one-man journey seeking to better understand who Jesus was and what his own faith was about.

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[Index of this series]

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