3: Creeds, Cobbler, and Walter Bauer
For hundreds of years after the death of Jesus, groups adopted radically conflicting writings about the details of his life and the meaning of his ministry, and murdered those who disagreed. . . . There were no universally accepted manuscripts that set out what it meant to be a Christian, so most sects had their own gospels. . . . Christianity was in chaos in its early days, with some sects declaring the others heretics.
Until I began attending the class at church, I assumed that the word Christianity meant something . . . that there was a universal understanding of what Christians believe. I presumed that these beliefs were based on what Jesus taught and what his apostles recorded in the New Testament. And like most people, I assumed that the stream of Christianity I was raised in was the one that had gotten all the details right. It’s not like I thought everyone else was a heretic, but I felt a sense of pity for the Baptists who didn’t speak in tongues or raise their hands when they sang. I gave a little side-eye to the Presbyterians who baptized infants. Despite our disagreements over certain theological issues, I knew these other Christians were my brothers and sisters. How did I know this? We all believed the same core principles, whether or not we agreed on how physically enthusiastic our worship should be or how we were to baptize someone.
Now, however, I’d been blindsided by the discovery that people I worshiped with every week had vastly different views on what I assumed were nonnegotiables of the Christian faith. It was disorienting to learn that this didn’t really seem to bother them. Once during a choir rehearsal for a night of worship, one of my fellow classmates stood next to me on the riser and giggled. “It’s funny that we’re all singing these songs and none of us have any idea what we believe!” she said. I was a bit stunned by her assumption. I knew what I believed . . . but the precious confidence I’d always had in the gospel was being confronted and dismantled by the progressive pastor and my classmates. What she found oddly amusing, I found disconcerting.
A Faith Worth Dying For
After I decided to leave the class and my husband and I left the progressive church, I found myself trying to get back to the roots of my faith. I began to devour everything I could find about Christianity in its earliest form. I wanted to understand what those people who witnessed the life and death of Jesus actually believed. I had never really thought about the fact that the first Christians didn’t have an embossed leather Bible, including the New Testament, sitting in their laps when they gathered for worship like many of us do today. In fact, Paul’s letters weren’t even written until about twenty years or so after Jesus’ death and resurrection. So I wondered, How did people understand their faith and identify with one another? I learned that creeds became an important form of communication to keep those first-century believers on the same page. But these belief statements weren’t simply a list of doctrines Christians had to affirm to be “in.” These were the convictions they lived and died for.
When Christians today think of creeds, we tend to think of the Nicene or Apostles’ Creed, shared by Protestants and Catholics alike. But many Christians are unaware that our New Testament contains dozens of creeds that are hundreds of years older than their more famous counterparts. Some early Christians were literate, others were not. Creeds were an easy way to summarize and memorize their essential beliefs.
The earliest creed in the history of Christianity is probably the one found in 1 Corinthians 15:3-5. Most scholars, even liberal and skeptical ones, say that this creed first began circulating as early as two to seven years after Jesus’ resurrection.[1] At first I didn’t understand how certain parts of Paul’s early letters could be identified as early statements of belief when his first letters weren’t written until a couple of decades after Jesus’ life. Then I learned how ancient creeds worked, and it reminded me of my grandmother’s peach cobbler.
My grandmother, whom we affectionately called Nana, was an accomplished pie baker who lived in Bakersfield (no pun intended), California. This was about an hour and a half drive from my childhood home in the San Fernando Valley, a suburb of Los Angeles.
I always looked forward to trips to Nana’s house. As a young teen, I got to spend the night with her all by myself, which was a big deal when you grow up in a house with three siblings. At one of my sleepovers, I asked Nana to teach me how to make her famous peach cobbler. She said, “I’ll teach you the easy version. It’s my ‘cuppa cuppa cuppa’ recipe.” I expected her to turn to the drawer in her kitchen that held crocheted pot holders and handwritten recipe cards. Instead, she recited the ingredients off the top of her head. “It’s a cup of self-rising flour, a cup of sugar, and a cup of canned peaches with the juice.” That was it—except, of course, for the whole stick of butter that she cut up and put on top. The cobbler was then baked to perfection and served warm with ice cream. To this day I have never forgotten the recipe. Why? Because it was so simple and easy to commit to memory.
Imagine I decide to write a cookbook now. In it, I include the recipe Nana recited to me in 1989. My cookbook will have been written about three decades later, but the recipe contained within it will be the one I was given in 1989. In other words, the recipe will be written down over thirty years after it was first passed down. That’s exactly what we’re looking at with the creeds recorded in the New Testament—minus the ice cream.
Back to 1 Corinthians 15:3-5. In this passage, Paul, an educated Jew, writes,
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.
While scholars can spot creeds in the New Testament writings by analyzing syntax, linguistics, and other hints in the text, the easiest way to detect one is when the writer himself tells you what he’s doing. In Jewish culture, phrases like “delivered to you” and “having received” were ancient slang for “Hey . . . I’m about to tell you something I didn’t think up myself. I got it from someone else who got it from someone else.”[2] This was a common way for teachers to pass traditions down to their students, just as Paul did in the passage above.
Paul begins this passage by emphasizing that he is writing to the Corinthians about what is of first importance. He is basically saying, “Buckle up, guys. Pay attention. There’s nothing more important for your faith than what I’m about to say.”
Skeptical New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman writes that this creed “encapsulated the Christian faith, putting it all in a nutshell.”[3]
What did the earliest Christians believe? Let’s break it down.
- They believed that Jesus died for their sins. Within two or three years of Jesus’ death, Christians were affirming the Atonement. At the core, they believed Jesus had died to save them from their sins—that he died in their place. He wasn’t simply killed by an angry mob for speaking truth to power. Since the Atonement is one of the foundational beliefs of Christianity, we must think about what we mean when we say, “Jesus died for my sins.” To get this question wrong is to get Christianity wrong. We’ll dive deeper into this in chapter 11.
- They believed that Jesus was buried and raised from the dead. Without the resurrection of Jesus, you don’t have Christianity. It’s that simple. Paul says it plainly later in the same chapter, when he connects the Resurrection with the Atonement. He writes, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17). In other words, if the Resurrection is not an actual event in history—if Jesus is still in the tomb—then it doesn’t matter whether he died for your sins. Christianity is false. Might as well pack it up and call it a day. And since Jesus predicted his resurrection, it would make him a liar if it didn’t happen, and not the sinless Messiah Christians have long believed in.
- They believed that Jesus’ atoning death, burial, and resurrection were inseparable from the Scriptures. Essential to early Christianity was a belief that the Jewish Scriptures were the Word of God. It’s popular in some circles to say that the first Christians didn’t have a Bible, but this is simply not true. They had what we now call the Old Testament, and their core beliefs were supported by and affirmed in those writings.[4] They also had the “the apostles’ teaching” (Acts 2:42), which provided the very insights that would eventually be written down in our New Testament. Interestingly, this creed mentions “in accordance with the Scriptures” twice—once in support of Jesus’ atoning death and once more in support of his resurrection.
- They believed that their core belief in the Resurrection could be verified by evidence. This wasn’t some kind of “What does Jesus mean to you?” mushy oatmeal faith. It wasn’t based on a guru sitting under a tree, receiving some cosmic revelation, and then convincing a bunch of people to buy in. It centered on history and the evidence of eyewitnesses to an event—the Resurrection. The creed mentions twelve of these eyewitnesses, and in the very next verse, Paul refers to hundreds more: “Then [Jesus] appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me” (1 Corinthians 15:6-8). Get this—Paul wrote this when most of those witnesses were still living. They were alive and kicking with the opportunity to say, “Hey, you’re making that up. I saw no such thing.” But they didn’t say that. We have no record of any of the five hundred witnesses ever challenging that testimony. Finally, Paul added himself to the list of those who’d seen the resurrected Jesus (see Acts 9:3-7).
Historian and philosopher Gary Habermas notes that several other early creeds affirm the deity of Jesus.[5] Think about that. The people who saw Jesus walk this earth, heard him speak, and followed him on those dusty Roman roads in Israel also thought it was essential to confess that Jesus was God. Even ancient non-Christian history falls in line with this. A Roman magistrate and influential lawyer named Pliny the Younger who lived at the turn of the first century wrote that Christians sang hymns to Christ “as to a god.”[6] In fact, Jesus actually claimed to be God himself on more than one occasion, according to the Gospels.
The most striking example is in John 8, when Jesus gets into a heated argument with some Judeans. After accusing him of being demon-possessed, they brashly ask, “Who do you think you are?”[7] Jesus is happy to answer: “Before Abraham was, I AM.”[8] To modern ears, this may sound like no big deal. “I am” . . . what exactly? But to the Jews who remembered the story of their ancestor Moses meeting God—who happened to go by the name “I AM”[9]—in a burning bush, this statement was heresy. In essence, Jesus was saying, “Remember Moses? Yeah, that was me in that bush.” They knew he was claiming to be God. That was blasphemy, and according to Jewish law, they could execute him for it. And they picked up stones to do just that.
Class Notes
“Has anyone read some of the gnostic writings? I really like the Gospel of Thomas,” someone mentioned in class one day.
Excuse me . . . the gospel of who?, my inner monologue blared as the class began to discuss all the edgy and cool ideas they’d found in these noncanonical Gospels about Jesus. (As the months went by, I would have many angsty internal conversations like this with myself while everyone else blissfully—and recklessly?—discussed all the new, fun, provocative, exciting, and interesting ideas they had about the flaws of Christianity.)
Until that moment, I didn’t know other Gospel accounts of the life of Jesus existed. “Gnostic Jesus” certainly wasn’t someone my teachers made flannelgraphs about in Sunday school. I’d been a Christian my entire life . . . why was this news to me? When I got home that evening, the first thing I did was google “gnostic Gospels,” and I discovered that I could read them all for free online. I started with the Gospel of Thomas. Even without having any formal apologetics or theological training, I immediately recognized a very different Jesus from the one I had gotten to know in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This man said a few things that resembled the Jesus I knew, but much of what he said made him sound more like a capricious snake-oil salesman quoting Deepak Chopra than the sovereign King of creation. For example, the Gospel of Thomas describes a Jesus who says that it’s a sin to fast, pray, and give to charity. He claims people are saved by discovering knowledge, and that the only way a woman could get to heaven is by transforming herself into a male spirit.[10] Not only was this a different Jesus, but this counterfeit Messiah was preaching a divergent gospel from the one Jesus of Nazareth taught in the New Testament accounts.
As I began to look into these “other” Gospels, I learned that many people think early Christianity was actually quite diverse—that there were many different sects that held contradictory beliefs about who Jesus was, as well as the meaning of salvation and other important Christian doctrines. In other words, they argue that there is no such thing as “historic Christianity.” Instead, there were many versions of Christianity all competing for the honor of being regarded as the real thing. According to this theory, what we now call the New Testament is simply a compilation of the books that were picked by the theological “winners.” As the definers of orthodoxy, they labeled all the other groups as heretics and called it a day.
For someone like me who had based her entire life on the Bible, this idea was incredibly troubling. I had to get to the truth behind it.
While studying apologetics a few years later, I learned that a German theologian named Dr. Walter Bauer first proposed this idea in a book he wrote in 1934. His theory didn’t gain much momentum until the book was translated into English in 1971 as Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity. This created quite a paradigm shift in the academic world and has become popularized in more recent times by Dr. Bart Ehrman.[11] One day while trying to discover more about Bauer’s hypothesis, I came across the book The Heresy of Orthodoxy: How Contemporary Culture’s Fascination with Diversity Has Reshaped Our Understanding of Early Christianity, cowritten by New Testament scholars Michael Kruger and Andreas Köstenberger. This book offers a thorough rebuttal of the “Bauer hypothesis.”
I’ll give you my best (nonscholar) summation. Bauer argued that we can’t claim the New Testament contains the right books because all of these competing sects of Christianity would have had their own books that simply didn’t make the cut. But his argument falls apart once you study the process of how we ended up with the books we call the New Testament today. In my quest to discover historic Christianity, this is a subject I spent countless hours researching and investigating because my life had been built upon this book. Contrary to popular belief (often repeated since The Da Vinci Code), the books of the New Testament weren’t simply “chosen” in the fourth or fifth century. The councils that met to formalize the canon were doing just that—they affirmed the books that had always been recognized as undisputed: the four Gospels, Acts, and the letters of Paul. They then settled disputes over books like James, Jude, 2 Peter, and 2 and 3 John.
In fact, Kruger and Köstenberger demonstrate that the core canon was established as Scripture among Christians by the end of the first century.[12] This is such a powerful point because these supposed “other” Gospels weren’t written until the second and third centuries.[13] How could the later books compete with the four Gospels if those other books didn’t even exist yet?
A couple of years after I started studying apologetics, I was listening to the CrossExamined radio show with Frank Turek while washing dishes one day. He was interviewing a guest who caught my attention because he was not your typical apologist. J. Warner Wallace is a highly respected Los Angeles County detective who’s been featured several times on NBC’s Dateline because of his success in solving cold cases. As a detective he knows a thing or two about evidence. So when he began talking about evidence for Christianity, I set the soapy plate I was holding back in the sink and turned off the faucet so I could listen closely. I learned that he was once an ardent atheist before realizing he had rejected Christianity without even evaluating the evidence for or against it. Using the tools and methods that made him so successful in solving crimes, he decided to treat Christianity like one of his cold cases.
During his initial investigation, he saw a book at a local bookstore called The Lost Books of the Bible. As a good detective wanting to analyze every bit of evidence he could get his hands on, he was curious and bought the book. In a recent blog post, he wrote,
I was disappointed to discover that the book should have been titled, The Well Known, Late Lies About Jesus That Were Ignored By Christians Who Knew Better. These texts were never part of the New Testament canon. They were written late in history and rejected by everyone who knew the truth about Jesus of Nazareth.[14]
The Bible itself demonstrates that the earliest Christians knew the difference between books that were considered Scripture and books that were not. Even though the gnostic Gospels didn’t even exist yet, almost as soon as the New Testament Gospels and the letters of Paul were written, early Christians put them on the same level as the Old Testament Scriptures. I was absolutely astonished when I learned that within the New Testament itself we find Paul quoting Luke’s Gospel and calling it “Scripture” (1 Timothy 5:18). Likewise, Peter refers to “all [of Paul’s] letters” as Scripture (2 Peter 3:15-16).[15] That’s as early as it gets, folks.
The best evidence points to these “lost books” being the late inventions of people who weren’t even alive during Jesus’ ministry. On the contrary, the New Testament documents were written by actual eyewitnesses (or careful historians who interviewed the eyewitnesses) who walked with Jesus, talked with Jesus, and were commissioned by Jesus to write Christian Scripture. More on this in chapter 8.
Historic Christianity
As my deep-seated beliefs were regularly being challenged by the progressive pastor and my classmates, I found myself trying to get back to the roots of our faith—to what I call historic Christianity. Why did I choose the word historic rather than traditional or conservative? It’s probably because those words carry too much baggage. They can mean very different things to different people. I call it “historic” because that’s exactly what it is. Between the pre–New Testament creeds and the New Testament documents themselves, we have the original beliefs that defined Christianity and made it unique in the world. Sure, things went haywire from there. Even in the first century, heresies and false versions of Christianity began finding their way into the communities of believers who claimed the name of Christ. But if we look at church history as a whole, every reformation was an attempt to get back to the earliest, most biblical, and most authentic version of Christianity. I think it’s time for another reformation. Not a reformation that progresses beyond historic Christianity. Not one that looks down on these early believers as less enlightened and more primitive in their understanding of God, but one that rediscovers the very definition of Christianity.
Have these core teachings been abused at some point in history? Of course.
Have they been twisted and used for evil instead of good? Absolutely.
Have they ever been traded for political power and personal gain? Yes and yes.
But as the saying goes, you can’t judge a belief system by its abuses. Historically, Christians have believed that the Bible is the Word of God and that Jesus is God incarnate who died for our sins and was raised to life for our salvation. There is one thing we can be certain of: The earliest Christians—the ones who knew Jesus personally, who saw him with their own eyes and touched him with their own hands—believed the teachings laid out in the earliest creeds and New Testament writings. These aren’t just modern opinions or the privileged musings of an enlightened Western civilization.
There is so much more that defines Christianity, but this is where it starts. It’s so much more than this—but it can’t be any less. Now that I had identified the foundation of historic Christianity, I at least had a starting point. In my view, it should be up to Jesus and the apostles to define what Christianity is.
Interestingly, many progressive Christians use liturgies and recite the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds out of respect for tradition, but often they are reinterpreting what some of the doctrines and words mean. For instance, Nadia Bolz-Weber, founding pastor of the House for All Sinners and Saints, writes about how her church employs liturgy, Scripture reading, the Eucharist, baptism, and hymns in worship.[16] Yet in an interview with the Houston Chronicle, she said that even though she believes in the Trinity, the Incarnation, and miracles, she’s not interested in “whether every single bit of it is a fact or not.”[17] At our progressive church, we regularly recited the creeds even though our pastor and many of my classmates admitted they didn’t believe everything in them.
Furthermore, I had begun to notice that when members of my class at church critiqued Christianity’s core beliefs, they often spent less time poring over the Scriptures to discuss the finer points of theology and doctrine and more time reflecting on their disillusionment over unanswered prayers or their personal experiences growing up in legalistic churches. At times, I related with them. Yet I couldn’t help but wonder if their angst wasn’t directed at the wrong target—much like the faultless peach that once received the full impact of my nephew’s rage.