Not Losing Sight of the Big Picture

I was once asked by this post’s regular readers why it is that publish so much material? Why not focus on, let’s say – the issue of whether the Mar Saba document is genuine, for example?

There are a number of ways to answer this question – for one I get bored easily. But I think there is a much more fundamental reason to justify my approach. I think that almost everything we know about Christianity is wrong. As such there is so much work to do. It is like discovering a lost continent like Atlantis really.

I think that what scholars take to be ‘Christian orthodoxy’ really started to look complete in the middle of the third century. Constantine further refined the formula. However, by 250 CE there was a Christian orthodoxy headquartered in Rome which would have been instantly recognized by today’s believers.

I also think that the BEGINNINGS of this orthodoxy were already being worked out in the three previous generations from the Imperial court of Commodus and the later Severine Emperors. I also believe that one can ultimately draw a line from the Christians in Commodus’ court (Eclectus, Marcia) to those who surrounded Constantine (Hosius, Eusebius).

I think that line would also intersect with Aurelian’s efforts to establish Christmas on December 25th.

It is THIS organically developing tradition that gave us the four faced gospel, the Acts of the Apostles, the Apocalypse, the canon of letters of Paul, John, Peter and the rest as we now know them.

If I were party to the debate which rages on the internet about whether Christianity is ‘absolutely, infallibly true’ or the ‘biggest lie’ – I would focus my attention on this period (175 – 250 CE) and throw my lot with the atheists, but this isn’t the purpose of my labors.
I am interest in something far nobler than this – the manner in which Christianity developed out the Hebrew (Jewish and Samaritan) milieu in ancient Alexandria.

I used to think that it was pretty much a straight line from the beginnings of this Alexandrian Church to the time of Clement. However my interpretation of the Mar Saba document has caused me to revise my original understanding.

Life is – as we all know – a whole lot more complicated than ‘straight lines.’

I still think that there really was a ‘Mark’ who came to Alexandria shortly after the historical Passion. Yes, I do believe that there is some historical basis to the ideas in the gospel – another point which distinguishes me from the ‘historical Jesus’ crowd.

I think that the messianic tradition that Mark developed in Alexandria was – as Eusebius suggests – a development of the Therapeutae. I think this explains Clement’s interest not only in the Book of Jubilees and ‘jubilees’ generally but the importance of the number ‘eight’ in the Alexandrian tradition.

I believe that the development of the sacredness of Sunday developed from the Jubilee calendar of the Therapeutae. As Philo reports on the day after seven Sabbaths, the Therapeutae gathered together and behaved like early Christians. This is what Eusebius reports. He cites Josephus but doesn’t say who was the first witness to identify this community as specifically ‘Christian.’

Whatever the case we can see in the Coptic tradition that survives in Ethiopia a connection to this ‘missing link.’ The Ethiopians not only preserve the Book of Jubilees but preserve the sacredness of both Saturdays an Sundays.

We get rumblings of Christians who continued to venerate both days and calculate the date AND DETERMINED THE CHARACTER of Easter from some sort of Jewish calendar. While I have learned to stop trying to make every ‘neat and tidy’ in my reconstruction of the development of the early Alexandrian Church, these basic truths undoubtedly stood firm until the third century and beyond.

I can’t help but see a connection between LGM 1 (the baptism of the neaniskos as the seventh day ‘went out’ into the eighth) and this general Alexandrian interest in the ‘ogdoad.’ Yet as I have noted time and time again, the same ideas ARE ALSO PRESENT in the Gospel of Peter.
The point then is that I think that BOTH the Gospel of Peter and (the Alexandrian) ur-Mark reflect the general Alexandrian interest in the number eight because both texts were sacred to that community.

Now of course there stands before us the reconciliation of WHY the Alexandrians chose to develop a twofold gospel system (i.e. the Gospel of Peter as the exoteric revelation and the Gospel of Mark as the esoteric revelation to the sarkic and pneumatic members of the Church respectively).

This is the million dollar question and I can’t say that I have all the answers. Of course I think that the LATER Alexandrians could point to the use of TWO TORAHS among the Therapeutae (and undoubtedly other related Jewish sects such as those/the one at Qumran). Yet I can’t help think that this reconciliation came later in the history of the Alexandrian Church.

Look at the author of the text which goes by the name ‘the Testimony of Truth’ from Nag Hammadi (I think Birger Pearson rightly suspected that its actual name was ‘the True Account’ but that is another matter.

The author of that text is clearly Alexandrian and has it in for the followers of Basilides, his son Isidore and Valentinus. We don’t know when exactly this text was written which becomes problematic for our development of the pre-history to the Alexandrian Church (i.e. before the time of Clement). Nevertheless I can’t help but think that Clement himself gives us precious clues that the role of the Gospel of Peter has something to do with reconciling the Basilideans in the greater Church.

Clement goes out of his way to say that Basilides was a hearer of Peter through an otherwise unknown figure named Glaucius. There has to be a historical grain of truth to this understanding. As Basilides came from Alexandria we would have to expect that a fellow Alexandrian like Clement would have more accurate information about this figure than Irenaeus and those who depend on Irenaeus’ writings.

Clement references Basilides’ works in a way that make it certain that his information about his influences were accurate.

As such it is impossible for us to doubt that there must be something true about the identification of Basilides as a ‘Petrine’ Christian. The fact that Irenaeus connects Basilides to Simon Magus is worthless as I have already demonstrated. One other mitigating factor – Peter’s real name was also ‘Simon.’

What I am not beginning to see is that perhaps the Alexandrian Church learned to/had to consolidate its ‘Markan’ and ‘Petrine’ factions. By the looks of it, it was the Markan Church which accommodated itself to the followers of Basilides. How and why this occurred is impossible to say but it might well have something to do with Imperial persecutions in the age of Marcus Aurelius or even earlier.

The upshot of all of this is that we might imagine that there was indeed a pure Markan/Marcionite Church (the name ‘Marqione’ means ‘those of Mark’) which existed from the beginning of Christianity in Egypt down through to the time of this consolidation. One must imagine that in a former age, these ‘pure Marcionites’ were hostile to the followers of Peter (the Basilideans) and saw them as sectarians.

There also must have been a claim among the Petrine tradition that Mark ‘stole’ their gospel in the same way that we hear the Apostle (wrongly identified as ‘Paul’ in the Catholic tradition) Mark declare that the followers of Peter corrupted his gospel. This war of words manifests itself in the surviving Clementine literature as a diatribe of Peter against ‘Simon Magus’ (who I think again is a boogeyman disguising ‘Mark’).

I think at some point the Markan community decided to attempt to reconcile itself with its sectarian Petrine cousins and developed the story that Mark wrote the Gospel of Peter for Peter. Later in Alexandrian lore, Mark becomes Peter’s cousin (if you talk to a Copt they will tell you this fable with an absolutely straight face all the while accusing the ‘Petrine tradition’ of diminishing and subordinating Mark to Peter!).

I can’t help but believe that there were still Marcionite ‘purists’ who did not accept this accommodation between the two traditions. They would have been isolated from their Episcopal See and developed into the caricature of the heretics as a feeble, pathetic group of sectarians in Tertullian’s Prescription Against the Heresies.

The point is that when Irenaeus set about to construct a four faced gospel he did so ‘out of the rib’ of this Alexandrian consolidation of the Petrine and Markan communities. I would actually go so far as to propose that there was no connection between Rome and St. Peter until the time of Irenaeus. The Acts of the Apostles remember paves the way for Antioch being the See of Peter.

I think Irenaeus saw that there was an uneasy reconciliation between these two factions. The ‘real Peter’ of history had long been obscured. Irenaeus could then take this figure ‘home with him’ to Rome and rebaptize him as the spokesman for all the things he was claiming about the early Church.

After all he had seen his master Polycarp do the same thing with ‘John’ only a generation or two earlier (I will develop this point in a subsequent post).

Of course the TEN MILLION DOLLAR question now is why did Irenaeus have to abandon his master’s ‘John’ in order to find an ancient mouthpiece for his new ideas? I think I have the answer to this question – Gaius of Rome.

I think that Polycarp was a very controversial figure, a lightning rod who prevented his Johannine canon from becoming ‘universal’ in the Church. Irenaeus needed to reshape the canon yet again (from Polycarp’s initial ‘creativity’) and do so by making Peter rather than John the foundation of his tradition.

Again, THE REASON Peter was chosen was because he represented the ignored and even debased ‘other side’ of the Alexandrian tradition. Irenaeus was in effect ‘rescuing’ Peter and his gospel – the canonical gospel of Mark – in the same way as his master Polycarp had ‘rescued’ the legacy of John (also called Mark?) … that is, he did it dishonestly!