The apostolic witnesses

It is interesting to note that the noun "witness" is singular in the term "apostolic witness". This lack of a plural assumes that there was just one witness, that the apostles presented a unified front, that they expressed a monolithic theology from the very onset of Christianity that served as the wellspring of modern Christianity. In fact, this is not the case. On the contrary, we know that there were at least two apostolic theologies in existence during the very first few decades after Jesus died. We know this because we have a polemic by one apostle against another one.

Consider what Paul writes against Peter in the aftermath of the Jerusalem Council, in Galatians 2. Paul accuses Peter of being "self-condemned", and of being guilty of "hypocrisy", because of Peter's views on a vitally important question of Christian belief and practice of the day, which differed sharply from Paul's own views.

Unfortunately, we only get one side of this dispute. Peter was presumably an illiterate Galilean peasant at a time in history when the overwhelming majority of people were illiterate. So Peter left no writings behind, thus leaving us without his own version of events. It would have been interesting to know what kinds of invective he might have delivered against Paul. Alas, Peter's side of the story is lost to us forever. Then again, perhaps he didn't have Paul's rhetorical skills anyway. What we are left with in a he-said, he-said dispute is only the word of someone who never knew Jesus when he was alive, while the apostle who did know him gets no chance to present his case. The author of Luke-Acts, meanwhile, which was written a few decades after Paul's account in Galatians, completely whitewashes this dispute after the Jerusalem Council altogether; in Acts 15, which discusses events from the same period of time, no mention is made of this quarrel in Antioch between Paul and Peter, which is probably because it would not have suited his purposes to mention such things. Luke was, of course, a secondary source for these events; the one primary source that we have comes from one of the parties in the dispute, namely Paul.

Peter's version of Christianity seems closer to that of the Ebionites, who were of course later declared to be heretics. (Bart Ehrman's book Lost Christianities discusses the Ebionites in some detail, for those who are interested.) In any case, the dispute between Antioch and Jerusalem was resolved in favor of Antioch when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans. The winners get to write history, while the losers are consigned to heresy.

The idea of a single, monolithic "witness" from the apostles is a useful myth that serves the interests of orthodoxy. But it is a lie. The apostles who knew Jesus wrote nothing down. The only "witness" we have about Jesus is from people who never knew him--Paul, who got to put his own spin on things, and the gospel writers, who wrote anywhere from 40-70 years after Jesus died, and who increasingly had certain agendas at stake in what they wrote.

A religion's source tradition is a matrix from which multiple, often competing, movements and sub-traditions can and do emerge. The need for each of these sub-traditions to claim that it, and it alone, is the sole inheritor of the original tradition, is very strong. We see this not just in sub-traditions, but in sub-sub-traditions. Modern Quakers, for example, all descend from the original Christian movement founded by George Fox. They have argued with one another frequently through the years over who is the "real" Quaker. It would be hard to recognize that the conservative programmed Quaker church and the liberal unprogrammed Quaker meeting all come from the same religious tradition. And yet they do. And at the same time each accuses the other of violating the original principles of Quakerism. If you consider how it is possible that these diverse, contradictory theologies and worship styles can simultaneously claim to be the legitimate heirs of early Quakerism while at the same time they also can accuse the others of violating that very legacy, you will come a long way towards understanding how diversity and dogma come into play in religious movements.

After the founder of a major movement dies, his or her legacy is always fraught with ambiguity and unresolved issues that can serve as the germ of distinct, competing movements that all claim to be heirs of the same original source tradition, and yet which move in diverse and even contradictory ways. Competition among brother sects or movements within a faith tradition often produces an intense rivalry that is far stronger than what happens between traditions. The most heated arguments often happen with those with whom you share some kinship. In the wake of this competition, the need to claim legitimacy for one's own movement at the expense of others is most intense.

Those later Christians who enshrined the Trinity in the Nicene Creed claimed that they were the sole legitimate inheritors of the so-called "apostolic witness", while those "heretics" were not. Yet those selfsame Trinitarians could legitimately be accused by the "heretics" of redefining God into something completely unrecognizable by the faithful apostles or by Jesus himself. So who is the real inheritor of this supposed witness? Had events gone just slightly differently in the fourth century AD, it would now be the ones we call "orthodox" who would be painted as "heretics" by the non-Trinitarian Christians.

It is time, once and for all, to put to rest this idea of an "apostolic witness" from which orthodoxy springs. Christian orthodoxy has no more claim to legitimacy than any of the "heresies" that it violently suppressed. Just because you have the power to suppress dissenting opinions, that does not make you right. Christianity is a source tradition from which movements have always sprung, over the last 2000 years, despite continued efforts by orthodoxy to crush them. Such is the power of this source tradition that it cannot be bottled up so easily.