New Testament Christianity was not the only form of early Christianity. In the second and third centuries, there were other Christian groups–the Gnostics, the Ebionites, the Marcionites–which were regarded as heretics by orthodox Christians. Antichristian skeptics often argue that the existence of these various early forms of Christianity means that we cannot know what the original form of Christianity was, and that what Christians today call orthodox Christianity was just the form of Christianity that happened to eventually win out. If we examine the historical evidence, however, we will see that there are very good reasons to believe that orthodox New Testament Christianity, rather than these other heretical forms of Christianity, was the original form of Christianity.
The Gnostics
The beliefs of the various second and third century cults modern scholars refer to as “Gnosticism” differed drastically from New Testament Christianity in many important ways. For example, they believed that this physical world and its creator were evil and that salvation means the escape of the soul from this world to union with the true God, rather than salvation meaning the transformation of this world by the Creator God and the hope of bodily resurrection. Numerous Gnostic writings have been discovered by archaeologists, and they all date from the second century onward, while all of the New Testament dates from the mid to late first century. When later texts come along that directly contradict everything the earlier historical sources say, we should immediately be highly skeptical.
Virtually all scholars agree that early first-century Christianity was a form of Judaism. Gnostic beliefs show a radical development away from this. For example, they denigrate and repudiate the physical world and define “Christ” as some kind of spiritual being rather than according to its actual meaning: the Jewish Messiah. It is very clear, then, that the very Jewish Christianity of the New Testament is more original than Gnosticism, which mixes Christianity with elements of Hellenistic philosophy to create something very different.
The argument is just as sound today as when St. Irenaeus made it in the second century: all the churches founded by the apostles believed and taught the same thing, which was summarized in the “rule of faith”; Gnostic teachings directly contradicted this, and thus were false. The Gnostics, who were parasitic upon orthodox Christianity, did not even try to argue that the New Testament was bogus; instead, they tried to argue that New Testament texts had hidden spiritual/allegorical meanings that supported their beliefs. The Gnostics could not effectively deny that the catholic (universal) church held to the teachings of the apostles, so they claimed that, in addition to the teachings believed by the common herd of Christians, the apostles had also secretly handed down secret Gnostic teachings for the truly “spiritual.” The idea that the apostles created all the teachings of orthodox Christianity and taught them to all the churches merely as a cover so they could also hand down in the church secret teachings that directly contradict New Testament Christianity in many ways is utterly absurd. Furthermore, in addition to contradicting catholic church teaching, the various Gnostic sects all contradicted each other. Which one of them had the “correct” secret teachings? The most reasonable belief, the one supported by the evidence, is that they were all wrong and orthodox Christianity was right.
The Ebionites
The Ebionites were Jewish Christians who denied the Divine Identity of Jesus and believed in the continuing necessity of Torah observance for Christians. It is likely that they were the direct descendants of the “circumcision party” that the apostle Paul vigorously butted heads with during his ministry. We have some extant Ebionite texts from the second century which claim that they were holding to the teachings of Peter, and that Paul was a corrupter of genuine Christianity. However, according to the first-century book of Acts, the apostles all agreed that Gentiles could be incorporated into the church without having to follow all the stipulations of the Torah (Acts 15), and it was Peter, not Paul, who first acted to bring Gentiles into the church, in spite of them being “unclean” by the standards of the Old Testament Law (Acts 10:1-11:18).
Now, some have argued that the book of Acts glosses over the differences between Paul and the other apostles, or even that the book of Acts itself was part of an (apparently, largely successful) attempt to reconcile these two originally conflicting forms of Christianity. However, we don’t have to rely solely on the second-hand testimony of Acts; we also have Paul’s own testimony. Paul himself tells us that he met with the Jerusalem apostles and that they gave their blessing on the gospel he was proclaiming to the Gentiles (Gal 2:1-10). From what we know of Paul’s personality, we can be confident that if they had really fundamentally disagreed, Paul would have just said that they were wrong and he was right. Now, Paul does say that there was an incident where he rebuked Peter for acting in a way that was not inclusive of Gentiles (Gal 2:11-14), but it is clear that Paul rebuked him for acting hypocritically, not because of a difference of belief. All of the historical evidence we have from the first century clearly contradicts the Ebionite narrative.
But why, one might ask, would the “circumcision party” continue to insist on the necessity of Torah observance if such a position had really been rejected by all the apostles at the Jerusalem Council? Well, in the modern period, we have seen some very conservative Roman Catholics reject changes to centuries-old traditions brought about by the Second Vatican Council and even schism from the Church because of them, in spite of these changes being proclaimed by the Magisterium of the Church, the Pope, and an Ecumenical Council. It is not unreasonable to think that, in the same way, some very conservative Jewish Christians would balk at abandoning the necessity of Torah observance as a necessary mark of God’s covenant people, in spite of a Council of the apostles declaring this change. We must remember that early first century Christianity was not a “new religion,” but a form of Judaism. Torah observance had been central to Jewish identity for centuries. It makes sense that some Jewish Christians would resist giving up its necessity, and would continue to cling to its necessity even after the Jewish and Christian communities decisively parted ways in the late first century. Later, in order to validate their Ebionite form of Christianity, they made up the claim that they were the true heirs of the apostle Peter’s teachings.
In my last post, I have already made the case for why we should believe the earliest Christians believed Jesus was God. In both their insistence upon Torah observance and their denial of the Divinity of Jesus, then, the Ebionites were clearly out of step with the teachings of Jesus’s apostles.
The Marcionites
The second-century heretic Marcion believed that only Paul rightly understood the gospel. He rejected the Old Testament and most of the New Testament, accepting only the Pauline epistles and an edited version of the Gospel of Luke, from which he removed all the parts he did not like. Since the foundation of Marcion’s beliefs was his interpretation of Paul’s writings, which are part of the New Testament, we have direct access to all of the information we need to evaluate the reasonableness of Marcion’s beliefs. Marcion believed that the Old Testament god, the creator god, was a god of justice and wrath, and that Jesus revealed a completely different God, a God of love and mercy. It can be confidently stated that not one single Pauline scholar today would agree with Marcion’s interpretation of Paul. It is abundantly clear from Paul’s writings that Paul believed that there was one true God, the creator God, the God of Israel; that this God, who was both wrathful and loving, had revealed Himself most fully in Jesus; that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah who had brought salvation to God’s covenant people, Israel; and that now, through Jesus, Gentiles could become part of God’s covenant people. Marcion was wrong, and we know with certainty that he was wrong.
Conclusion
We can know with certainty from the historical evidence that New Testament Christianity was the original form of Christianity and that Gnosticism, Ebionitism, and Marcionism are false. By the fourth century, orthodox Christianity had largely triumphed over these heresies. This was not because of random historical accident; it was because orthodox Christianity was true and these heresies were false.