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.

Over-Optimistic Tolerant Christians, Today And In Earlier Eras

There was a time in Europe when homosexuality was considered neither a sin nor a crime nor a perversion nor a shame. Top politicians, including some Roman Emperors, indulged in it without feeling any need to hide it for fear of scandal. The most popular philosopher in ancient Europeeven asserted that every man should engage in it, and people didn't condemn him for it, they barely batted an eye. (He's still the most popular philosopher in Europe, and in the Western Hemisphere, too, but back then more people actually read his works, and his views on sexuality were better known and less liable to startle anyone.)

Then all that changed: Christians took over, and among many other sweeping changes made homosexuality a sin and a shame and a perversion. Gay life, along with many other perfectly normal things, went underground.

Then beginning in the 12th century there was a big thaw in European prohibitions of love -- in Europe itself that is, because many of the Europeans who took Christianity most seriously were in the Middle East, giving grief to other people, and the gay -- by gay I mean happy, but they were happy because of the increase in freedom -- the gay courtiers had a heyday, the "shocking" troubadours sang their songs and even dared to write some of them down, so that we today can read them. It must've seemed to some Europeans as if all of that stern intolerant Christianity was over. Not that any of the goyim dared to go so far as to declare that he was no longer a Christian at all. Not on paper, anyway.

But no, of course, the grim sternness was not gone for good. Around the end of the 13th century the Crusades fizzled out, the Crusaders returned home, gay court life and troubadour songs declined and the Inquisition began. Suddenly, many parties were over in a very big way. But the forces of tolerance and freedom -- of LIFE, as Nietzsche nicely puts it --fought back again in the Renaissance. Not only were some tendencies asserting themselves in culture which were quite un-Christian in their sensuality and openness of philosophical speculation: such tendencies were promoted, even embodied, by many churchmen -- even by some Popes. The Popes who in later eras have commonly been referred to as the "bad" Popes.

Then came the Reformation, a period of great confusion which shows that the confusion of SBNR is nothing new. Luther, the greatest of the Protestants, was protesting against the un-Christian character of Rome and the Vatican in that era, which Nietzsche and I admire so much. But some people thought at the time, and for a long time afterward, and apparently many still do today, that Luther, rather than objecting that certain traditional Christian rules seemed not to be applied any more, was himself overturning all of society's rules. Somehow they mistook, and even now mistake this grim authoritarian fundy who insisted on stricter Bible interpretation -- his own interpretation and not the Vatican's, and that was the whole essence of his conflict with the Vatican -- who saw ghosts and witches and told noblemen to put down rebelling peasants with the greatest possible severity, peasants who thought they'd been following him -- somehow people mistook and mistake this Bible-thumper for Leon Trotsky.

But things happen they way they do and not always in a way which makes sense, and so some freedoms Luther never wanted to say were achieved in his name, while on the other hand we got things which were more his speed, such as Puritanism.

And the Catholics, unfortunately, instead of strengthening the un-Christian tendencies to which Luther objected, and which many overly-optimistic Renaissance artists and philosophers must've thought were here to stay, went 180 degrees the other way and attempted to out-Christian him with the Counter-Reformation.

And now many progressive Christians are celebrating their recent turn toward tolerance and pro-gay-rights positions and are acting as if they think these changes are somehow guaranteed to be permanent, and that there's no cognitive dissonance involved in being a progressive Christian. They've been so pleased with themselves and the way that they've pruned a few branches of intolerance off of some of Christianity that they're giving no thought to the roots from which that intolerance grows, again and again. If the core intolerance is not dealt with -- and ignoring or denying the history of Christian intolerance is not dealing with it -- then it has not been eradicated.