Bad Religion: How We Became A Nation of Heretics by Ross Douthat

Author:Ross Douthat [Douthat, Ross]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781439178348
Google: AMINYColockC
Amazon: 143917833X
Barnesnoble: 143917833X
Goodreads: 13260706
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

In other words, in an age that lacked the tools of modern historical scholarship and textual analysis, the canon makers did their best to be faithful to the actual historical record of their faith. All things considered, they did a remarkably impressive job: every surviving Christian text that has a strong claim to having been written within fifty years of Jesus’ crucifixion is in the New Testament, and almost everything from later eras—including “lost gospels” that were perfectly proto-orthodox, it should be noted, as well as those that leaned toward heresy—was successfully screened out.

“Through the course of our study,” Ehrman writes in the introduction to Lost Christianities, “I will be asking the question: What if it had been otherwise? What if some other form of Christianity had become dominant, instead of the one that did?”36 Relying on Ehrman’s own work, we can venture at least one conclusion. If it had been otherwise, the Christian story would have much less historical credibility than the narrative that was actually handed down to us.

What’s more, even if you accept the theological premises of accommodationist Christianity—that Christian belief needs to modernize and secularize to survive, that tolerance needs to trump dogmatism and the sins of the Christian past need to be repudiated, and so on—it isn’t clear that the early Christian heresies have as much to recommend them as their popularizers often imply. Pagels, for instance, spends an entire book (1996’s The Origin of Satan) deploring orthodox Christianity’s literal demonization of its opponents—pagan, Jewish, and heretical alike. There is much to deplore, certainly, in the uses to which the New Testament has been turned over the centuries. But are we really supposed to believe that opening more theological space for Pagels’s Gnosticism, with its rejection of the entire Old Testament as the work of a malignant demigod, would have made Christianity better disposed to the Jews?

So too with gender politics. The early Christian community does seem to have taken a gradually more patriarchal line on female participation and leadership as its influence in the Roman world increased, accommodating itself to existing social structures rather than transforming them entirely. But the heretical roads not taken hardly seem likely to have led to a more female-friendly faith. As in Greek and Roman paganism, their gestures toward a sacred feminine often coexisted with barely concealed misogyny. To take only the most famous example, some later versions of the Gospel of Thomas include the following passage, which has no parallel whatsoever in the canonical New Testament:

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