Peter Kirby wrote: ↑Wed Apr 21, 2021 9:57 pm
I'd say roughly 175 CE (pre-Irenaeus) is where "the great divergence" of theories begins. Before, pictures vary greatly. After, not so much. Irenaeus references so much that is so recognizable about Christianity ever since (e.g. four gospels), but the texts before Irenaeus have much greater variety. The text of Irenaeus itself is available in many places only in Latin, but there is a serendipitously ancient Greek fragment that attests to its antiquity.
In line with Peter’s observation, here is one possible approach—
1. The evidence we have for what “Christianity” was prior to about 175 CE is (a) poorly attested, (b) multifarious inasmuch as it is attested, and (c) taken on its own terms, gives little or no evidence of being a group of movements or traditions that were likely to converge and coalesce around a single “canonical” narrative about a unique figure, i.e. Jesus of Nazareth, Jewish messiah, exalted Lord, sender of apostolic witnesses to his earthly life, death, resurrection, and prophesied return at the Eschaton.
2. Therefore, the
least disputable and
most definitive event in the formation of “early Christianity” (i.e. a phenomenon that we are explicitly defining as the precursor and substantial cause of Christianity-as-world-religion (Nicea to the present), can only be
the publication of the first edition of the 27-text New Testament, as reflected in the manuscript tradition going back to the 4th century, and more or less as argued by David Trobisch (consistent ordering and grouping of the 4 Gospels and the other 23 texts; use of Nomina Sacra; editorial attribution of Apostolic & Subapostolic & Fraternal “authorship” of all NT texts; codex format; pairing with LXX under the novel OT/NT concept). Other moments in the genesis of Christianity both before and after this publication—such as the earliest collection of the Pauline epistles, or the composition of the earliest Gospel, or the imperial establishment (i.e. in physical Churches) and “canonization” (i.e. legal mandating of) of the Christian Bible by emperors and/or their bishops—are both less indubitable and less important. That is, Christianity could have turned out more or less as we have it without these events having occurred. But we cannot imagine it turning out in its present form unless this 27-book anthology had entered the historical record when it did.
3. Attempts to establish a chronology of events and/or persons prior to the great publication in the 3rd quarter of the 2nd century are bound to be speculative, theological, apologetic, anti-theological, anti-apologetic, or otherwise not soberly historical. A few reasons for this “great divergence” are that we have too much evidence of the wrong kind, too little evidence of the right kind (e.g. archeological), etc., and there is always and inevitably
entanglement of modern historical readings of the NT with modern theological readings of it.