In the wake of Easter season, another moment in a year rekindles an annual propaganda campaign to push the edges of history further in a particular direction. A number of theories get passed around, but no other holiday gets as much ridicule, criticism or scrutiny as such. Though, the debate rages around the many specific traditions associated with Easter, the alleged connections, historically, between Easter and the ancient occult religions, and the cultural vestiges bare little resemblance to anything the ancient pagan world of Europe or Mesopotamia would recognize. On the contrary the only historical foundations of the day of the celebration itself are held in their entirety points to the records of the risen Jesus as a historical fact to the devoted faithful orthodox community of believing Christians.
They claim a spiritual heritage, across a variety of traditions, a specific victory of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as it has been passed down in and through History. In a haze of stories going back millennia, spanning contents, as the world’s largest religion, it’s core issue is the scandal of all scandals, to answer the question about a man who had allegedly died and been raised to life again on the third day after his burial. Regardless of their differences, all of the language of their accounts spell out the same details. A jewish man taught in Galilee, was crucified in Jerusalem at the hands of Pontius Pilate. A detail of history that is regarded with the greatest amount of certitude among those considered experts on the history surrounding the account.
One feature of these questions that come up is a span of history that gets very little focus across the attention span spectrum of the supposed modern digital age. It’s an era spanning the years between the Roman Catholic persecution of the Cathars, Abiginsians, the Waldenses, Jews and other groups. The violent malevolence of the age of the crusades and the Inquisitions is a sin reckoned against the Mother Church that cause her many accusers to reach back to other moments in her history that many call an ancient war of the Orthodox Catholic tradition and her Gnostic counterparts.
When we zone in on the record of what we have surrounding the medieval contentions of these “proto-Protestants”, the waters get fairly muddied, to the point that there are many who wonder whether or not such groups ever existed in the first place. As such, the locality of those communities and their beliefs seem to like the widespread proliferation we would see if the case was that these groups had maintained a consistent presence stretching back to the origins of Christianity as a whole. That being the case, this article stands to determine if such a thread can be coherently discerned from the anals of history as they exist.
In order to establish any amount of clarity on the case, attention should first turn to a very dynamic, and contentious millennia, beginning with Constantine and pouring foward to the Great Catholic schism of East and West in 1054. It was on the heels of that debacle which brought forth the first crusade, and the foundational elements of the Norman conquest, as well as the first inquisitions against the Waldenses in the west, while the eastern Church found herself isolated, under the stewardship of Mohammed’s Islamic banner, which levied tax against the believers. This tension would push the seat of the throne of Orthodoxy further to the north in Russia’s New Rome, Moscow. However the central balance between East and West orbiting around the question of Christianity Nationalism and Constantine. Yet, while with most things historical, we see that time was never stagnant. The sliding scale of events and their causes are never as cut and dry to be pinpointed to any single moment, while still there are some moments more defining than others, and there are few others which more concretely certify the dissolution of Eastern and Western hemispheres of worldview and influence. Such a chasm will cost the Eastern empire its stability, and the West, it’s sanity. How much our present is tied to those events is, while virtually incalculable, necessary for attempting to outline what parallels there may be between then and now.
It was in this first thousand years of Christendom that so much becomes established, yet now in hind sight, were truly formative years where really very little was ascertained. After the historical marker which had magnetized the world’s power, as the southern pole contra to the Roman State as that Northern force, so much had to be scrutinized, and put to the test, to the point that earlier issues, after having been debated and articulated ad nauseum in various councils and synods, from town to town, region to region, parish to parish. While those issues may have been settled in those councils for those with whome the struggle contended, the matters would rear their heads up at opportune times as those with a particular bone to pick look for cracks in the armor so as to find any compromise.
In truth, so much conspiracy and prejudice stack against the sort of mythical status that weighs down the orthodox tradition that so much of the weight of their arguments go entirely unattended. So much effort is put in to the contractors, that it gets packaged as thought their couldn’t possibly be any soundness to the arguments to the contrary. Because of this, much disservice has been done to so many on the perspective of the Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions which has cost those with untrusting views of suspicion, in the way of actually receiving the answers to the questions they so forcefully hold to demanding the answers for.
The suspicions arising out of fear of befalling the same fate as those enemies of an imperial Papist power, sent to scour the lands for heretics, in to the hopes of incinerating every one. Fearfully however, the impression of such an image truly is the exception, and not the rule. In reality, such campaigns were not actualized until the 12th century. Only one instance of such pursuit that occurred before that time, and it was a doctor of the Church, St. Ambrose, who levied against the state exercising such indescretion as a theoretical arm of the church, and interfering with what were perceived as ecclesial matters, in the case of Priscillian (see this thread for more about Priscillian and the first heretic to face execution, and the developments from then - https://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/19368/who-was-the-first-church-father-to-argue-for-executing-heretics).
Two thousand years may be a long span of time to cover, it seems to be the task at hand while so many today claim to live in the very present reality of whatever ideas may have been retained after so many eons. While much might be missing from the record of those first centuries of the Messianic Jesus movement in 1st century Judea, and the Galilee, it is really quite striking just how much there really is available to be accessed if one knows where and how to look. While there’s much to bely in the way of trust with regard to such ancient days, one of the things that isn’t rightly missing from the record any longer, since the surfacing of the Dead Sea scrolls, under which such a large body of work may be checked against, as well as the Nag Hamadi library with regard to more spurious publications, still many other finds going back to such early centuries, that what is maintained as modern iterations of such text, the certitude of their contents is at such a myopic level, that really only momentary qualms about grammar are nearly all that is contested between works. There are manuscript documents dating as far back to the 3rd, 4th, and some even as back as the 1st centuries A.D., though mainly only in fragments. While critics might take their razors of scrutiny to peel these fragments from the original sources, one thing has been maintained: namely the recurring, repeated refrain from several main characters of a Judean Rabbi teaching in Galilee being crucified as a criminal under the authority of Pontius Pilate, a Roman Governor, at the best of the Jewish religious establishment. After being confirmed dead, and buried in a borrowed tomb, the man was seen alive again on the third day after his death, and burial. It is at this point where the world of the academy has put some small amounts of energy in to piecing together the fullest picture via other finds that have emerged from the dust and dirt of the holy lands, i.e. the modern state of Israel, Judea, and Samaria.
Presently there is an explosion in the waves of archeological publications pouring over data that’s been collected over the past 120 years in the area. From the time of the fall of the Ottoman Empire, to the Gazan/Palestinian wars that have broken out, the issues of land rights, claims, and the search for artifacts to corroborate narratives has left a haze of confusion over what the story is that can really be told in the stones and bones that are uncovered, and re-covered, from how many times a city has been destroyed and rebuilt and destroyed and rebuilt again.
One would suspect nothing left to be found but ash and stubble. Unfortunately for the Ottoman Islamic world, and those who extol the goldenhood of that era, the evidence continues to mount up in weights and measures against their angle, if looking at things from a purely propagandistic view. The timeline that comes together in the wake of those digs just doesn’t line up with the history they wish to present. The Islamic caliphate had conquered the area a thousand years ago, and that’s the point to anchor to.
While there’s a lot of ground yet to cover, what needs to be seen as that usually the thinking surrounding any clear cut distinctions that serve to support one particular political or conspiracy theory over and against another, is really not so elegant as we would like. There is a lot more information that can be asserted that typically just doesn’t get the attention, because it’s just not alluring enough to get the focus. Like most news stories, nobody wants to tell the story of things just being normally fine like they normally are. They want to danger, and the shock and awe that comes from potentially destroying someone’s particular worldview, in this case namely, that of the ancient orthodox position on the nature of debate, and their approach to the facts pertaining to the Jesus narrative of 1st century Roman Judea.
So called, gnostic departures from the Gospel narrative occur very early, and those early heretical discussions receive a great deal of attention, and the Christian apologists to whom we owe for the insight in to those ideas, having captured them in their works, center around some very explicit spiritual concepts that do in fact face some very important problems when seeking to answer very specific questions about the details of the whole of the Gospel narrative. One thing they are very clearly not eager to address is that their motivating factor is not in the authority of their sources, but in the authority of an array of sophisticated philosophical and revelatory nomenclature in order to claim a special and secret knowledge intended only for an initiated elect, over and above the layperson, of simple intellectual stature. A much different motivation than the accessible message for the contrite heart of childlike faith.
Regardless of the details of these differences, there’s certainly no avoiding the prejudice with which the Roman apparatus persecuted its campaign to route out heretics. It would not be until Pope Innocent III in 1199 A.D. that heresy would be declared as treason against God, and therefore a capital offense. What remains to be seen is how effective the orthodox catholic powers were in their ambitions to quell heresy, and in particular, Gnosticism. While they clearly did not do nothing, how the Christian Roman State approached the issue had very little to do with the Christian Spiritual heritage, and more to do with the imposition of Roman prowess across an empire in an attempt to fortify a coherent unified culture, the way that Caesars had done since the dawn of the Roman age. Such a balance regularly weilded the full weight of the law in order to achieve those ends.
What the Roman Caesars could never have anitcipated was just how in congruent the Christian message was at maintaining that level of hegemonic imperial power, in order to sustain and maintain its strength on the world stage. The tactics required, Machievelli would explain in the rennaisance, definitely lie outside of the operating standards of the Gospel message. So while Theodosius the Great and others may have attempted to mold an image of a Christian ruler acting as God’s just viceroy on earth, the work of the Christian message would eventually undermine those ambitions, culminating in the republics of Italy, and then, eventually, the American Revolution.
While the west may have been chasing heretics, the Eastern world would find themselves the chased, only able to find refuge in the arms of the frozen north of Kiev, Moscow and all Rus, following the collapse of Constantinople. The Eastern church would face the sword against the barbarians from Atilla the hun, the Islamic Caliphate and Genghis Khan. As the power of Caesar and the Senate would diminish, Eastern Christianity would turn toward their mystics and sages to sustain the faith throughout the centuries, while the thirst for heretic hunting wouldn’t carry the same weight as in the Papal West. One thing is clear between the two, it is an over statement to attribute prejudicial violence to the demise of the Gnostic spiritual communities that emerged in the earliest centuries of the Christian theological world. While it is true, the Gnostic communities did face legal penalties for their contradictory views on theology, they did so as a result of their altogether unconvincing arguments on the issues. The exclusive nature of their cults strangled the reach of their influence, being altogether incapable of permeating the orthodox Christian communities with any level of consequence. The reason being the fervor with which the bishops and their congregations clung to the Apostolic succession of the narrative. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were the bedrock of the teaching because those were the texts which could be most assuredly attributed in their authorship to the Apostles and those closest to them. Something which the extent, so called, “spurious” Gospels would be severely lacking.
