Early Christianity: How Much Do We Really Know?

There's the question of the historical Jesus, enthusiastically discussed by more and ever more laymen, and left undiscussed by Biblical scholars and Christian theologians scholars who still almost unanimously insist that the matter has been thoroughly investigated (When? Where?) and that it's certain Jesus existed, and Shut up!

Then there's the entire excitement surrounding Constantine the Great, the inaccuracies about him which are so popular: It's still so often said that he made Christianity Rome's official religion -- he did not. It's said that he (often: he and the Pope) wrote or re-wrote or edited the New Testament at the Council of Nicea. Nope: the Pope wasn't there; the Pope and Constantine had many more reasons to be enemies than to be allies; nobody altered the Bible or discussed what should or shouldn't be in it at Nicea; and there's no evidence that Constantine gave a rat's ass one way or the other about what was in it.

Here's a question which might deserve much more study than it has generally received so far: would Constantine have involved himself with Christianity at all if his mother, the empress Helena, had not been a Christian? I put it to you: which seems more plausible: that a Roman Emperor who, all who have studied his life agree, was a particularly savvy politician, that this Emperor gave some support to Christianity because, at a crucial battle in his struggle to solidify his control of the Empire, he saw a cross in the sky along with words telling him that with this sign he would conquer -- or that he gave some support to Christianity because his mother was a Christian and had a lot of influence on him?

The story of the cross and the words in the sky, and a lot of other nonsense, comes from Eusebius, who unfortunately is our most important single surviving source of the history of Christianity up until Constantine in general, and of biographical information about Constantine in particular. I say unfortunately because Eusebius' pants were on fire. I say unfortunately because the truth was not in him.

Some apologists and conservative historians will attack me for doubting the veracity of Eusebius, but that's okay. I'm in very, very good company: Edward Gibbon's multi-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire



has been praised as a groundbreaking work of genius, still unsurpassed in many ways two and a half centuries after its first publication -- because that's exactly what it is. It has also been vehemently condemned from the time it first appeared uo until the present day -- because Gibbon was clearly (although not quite explicitly) an atheist, and because he dared to question the accuracy of the historical accounts given by people like Eusebius.

A century after Gibbon, Jacob Burckhardt, another historian of great genius, enjoying the greater freedom of expression given to us all by courageous pioneers of freethinking like Hobbes and Spinoza and Hume and Gibbon and Voltaire, found no reason to hide his great annoyance with Eusebius, who had so thoroughly hidden and blurred the history which he, Burckhardt, was working so hard to find. Burckhardt came right out and called Eusebius a liar. and of course, the same people who disliked Gibbon also attacked Burckhardt, for the same reasons.

But lo and behold great wonders, O ye nations: as time passes, Gibbon and Burckhardt look more and more reasonable, as Eusebius, whose veracity was even attacked by other Christian historians as early as the 5th century, looks more and more like a teller of tall tales and less and less like the historian he called himself, and for which he was mostly taken from his time to Gibbon's.

And this man, Eusebius, is pretty much the founder of Christian historicism, the foundation upon which much of the history written over the course of the next millenium in Christendom, was based. Gibbon and Burckhardt and anyone else who cared about investigating history properly were quite right to be annoyed. Such a shaky foundation has produced a lot of spectacularly shaky results, and continues to do so today, although, as I said, Eusebius' falsehoods are finally beginning to be exposed and undone.

So I would say, to those who dislike Christianity and its continued omnipresence and power: don't blame Constantine above all others. If it hadn't been for his mother, he might never have given any support to Christianity. He might have continued Diocletian's persecution of it, and you and I might never have heard of Christianity. But far more, blame Eusebius, who took Constantine's support of Christianity and said that it was a conversion to Christianity, although Constantine never withdrew his support for the pagan religions. Blame Eusebius for intensifying the Christian disregard for reality and reason. Blame Eusebius for spreading the idea that Christianity had conquered Rome, decades before it actually did. Reality and reason and historical accuracy were defeated first, and then the Empire followed.

Most Documentary TV Shows On Ancient Topics (Biblical Studies And Early Christianty, Mostly) Really, Really Suck

A recent program about the fragments of the True Cross did a fairly good job of presenting the viewer with a story about the activities of the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine the Great and a devout Christian, who according to that story pretty much invented what we now know as Christian veneration of relics. The program tells us that Helena went to Jerusalem, found a piece of wood and declared that it was the Cross on which Jesus was put to death, cut it up into little pieces and distributed these pieces to churches all across the Roman Empire. This is the traditional story about how Helena began the belief that all of those pieces of wood in churches are pieces of True Cross. There are very good reasons to doubt whether Helena ever interested herself in relics at all. If these reasons were presented during this program, I must have blinked or zoned out at the time.

The same program did a particularly bad job of presenting the information it had on some recent scientific evaluation on the authenticity of the True Cross: a piece of wood considered since the 11th century to be piece of the True Cross was carbon-14 dated, and found to have come from a tree which lived in the 11th century. Not even close to the supposed time of Jesus, not even close to Helena's discovery in the 4th century of what she called the True Cross.

The carbon-14 dating was presented to the viewer in the very last several minutes of the 1-hour show. Why not at the very beginning of the show? Why not inform the viewer right at the start that any preoccupation with the Cross or any other relics on Helena's part is not solidly demonstrated by any historical evidence?

Perhaps the show's producers were afraid that if they did that sort of thing -- made sense -- it would be hard to keep viewers' attention for the rest of the hour. Perhaps they were exactly right about that. In any case, their handling of the material was pretty typical of such shows purporting to present the latest scholarly knowledge about ancient religious things: present a mix of comments by serious scholars with obfuscating narration, as if what the producers actually want is mainly to keep the viewer confused. The scholars will discuss "the tradition," that is, what the most conservative of believers regard as history, although almost no-one else who's studied the subject matter still does. The shows do not make plain what is meant by "tradition," they don't make plain that the experts are not relating what they consider to be fact. To make things worse, often crackpots who DO regard the traditional fables as factual are interviewed along with the experts.

Is there any rational reason at all to believe that Helena would have had any means at all of determining that what she had discovered was the True Cross? (IF, for the sake of argument, she actually looked for the Cross at all?) I doubt it very much, but my point is that the question was not discussed on air. The people most well-qualified in the world to discuss such matters, and quite willing to share their expertise, were interviewed, and we got a recitation of a bunch of fairy tales and precious little evaluation of what history, if any, is contained in them.

I have to wonder just exactly how much edifying information is routinely edited out of such interviews. I wonder whether one can hold out some hope that the raw footage of the entire interviews tends to be preserved, and will someday be edited into something much better than most of what goes on the air these days.

Thank goodness, these scholars write books, books with which the producers for half-assed "Secrets Revealed" shows on the so-called "History Channels" and NatGeo and the Smithsonian Channel, etc, have nothing to do. If you watch some of these shows and are intrigued by what is said by people like Professors Ehrman, Pagels and Chilton, you might find it quite interesting to read their books and see how badly the TV shows present what they have to say.

And then you'll walk around angrily muttering to yourself all the time about how TV jerks us around, just like I do. Just like me, you'll shout, "Why don't the experts insist on better shows being made? Is it just money, simple as that? Are the experts afraid that if they rock the boat they'll kill the golden goose? Et tu, Bart?!" Yes, you'll be angry, but I'll be a little bit less alone.