The Birth of Christianity ｜ History of Christianity

What I want to do in this lesson is just start to talk about some of the challenges that we're going to face in the discussion of the history of Christianity and focus specifically on the birth of Christianity as a religious doctrine. So essentially this is where we're going to begin while looking at the idea of Christian tradition. We're still in the sort of introductory series of lessons because we're just again setting out the scope of the discourse that we're going to be engaging with and looking at the challenges that we are going to have to face when we engage with looking at Christianity from an historical perspective. So essentially we're going to talk about the nature of the study of the history of religion because the history of religion is a particularly difficult way in which we can study a particular kind of theology. So for example when we talk about Christianity in terms of doctrine or when we talk about Islam or Hinduism in terms of a certain type of doctrine there are certain challenges that are faced in doing so and there are certain ways in which we interpret different parts of, for example, religious texts such as the Bible or the Quran. But when we talk about these different ideas not from the theological or the religious perspective but rather from the historical perspective then this brings with it new challenges and these new challenges are interesting on one hand but they're also quite difficult on the other hand because it means that we have to rely, for example, on different sources, we have to rely on different interpretations and we also have to rely on different ways in which these things have developed. So what are the implications for the history of religion as well as the drawbacks and the issues with this idea of academic debate, debating about the history of Christianity, looking at Christianity from a historical perspective? So let's just think about the earliest ways in which we can understand Christianity. We know that in its most basic form Christianity began in around the first century common era out of Judaism. We know this from the last lesson and we know this from our understanding of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism anyway, we should do anyway. The idea is that it was an obscure sect or sub-sect within Judeo-Jewish thought and it began to develop around the first century CE and like I said in the previous lesson that it exists as a minor sect within the previously existing religious tradition of Judaism. And then since then and since this first century CE it has grown to become the largest and most encompassing of all the world religions. And so history is an interesting subject because what is really interesting when we look at history specifically through the context of the history of religion is because it's deeply debatable as to what history ought to do in the pursuance of its own goals. What should we be doing when we are doing history? And that can be a question that we can ask for a generic study of history. So if I wanted to do for example the history of the Second World War I could ask that same question. What should history do in the pursuance of its goals? What should it ought to be doing? And no more is this an interesting question than it is when we talk about the history of a religion like Christianity. When we study history are we just recounting a description of the past or are we potentially looking at how these events from the past shape the future? And there are lots of different ways in which we can look at this and we can take a very philosophical interpretation of history to come to some kind of conclusions. And like I said just a second ago all of these questions are just as important if not potentially more important when we look at the history of a particular religion such as the history of Christianity. So one of the things that we have to reconcile with is how do we know what is considered to be history and what is considered to not be history within a religious context. So for example was Jesus a real person who actually lived and who we can therefore study from the perspective of history? We could actually have a historical analysis and an in-depth historical study of the actual person who we would describe as Jesus. This is a debate known as the historical Jesus and we'll talk about the historical Jesus in more detail and there are varying debates that are had about whether or not Jesus was a real person. I think most people come to the conclusion that he was at least real within the context of some kind of movement that existed. So Jesus existed at some point within history and so there and we have some very varying sources we have a back a few fragments from different areas around the world in different time periods that give us some indication that if we were to apply a historical understanding a historical standard we would probably come to the conclusion that he at least existed as a real person. But from there there is a lot more to be debated about the actions of Jesus the crucifixion of Jesus for example and all these different things that takes place that we see within the biblical texts and how to what extent to the biblical text reliable from a historical perspective as well. So this is a question that we have to ask and this is a question that is often not faced with other areas of history. If I was for example doing the history of the French Revolution we have different challenges in coming up with conclusions about what happened during the French Revolution compared to what happens within development of Christianity because there is this interplay and there is this mixing of religion as a theological and as a mythological study a subject and then religion as an historical subject. These are two things that have to interplay with each other and we have to pick out the history from the mythology. So like I said here alternatively the question could be is that Jesus is a mythological character who represents the central moral and philosophical framework of the Christian doctrine. I mean ultimately that is true he does represent the moral and philosophical framework central moral and philosophical framework of Christian doctrine but does this therefore mean that he didn't exist or maybe that he existed as a multitude of different persons or maybe he was an idea rather than an actual individual and that he is personified within the biblical texts as an individual rather than as this idea that could exist. All of these things are questions that we're going to have to unpack. So essentially Christianity is also difficult in the sense that when we look at it from a historical perspective there are a lot of evidentiary problems that we have to find and piece together. So in the sense that a lot of evidence when it comes to the history of Christianity is difficult to a. find and then b. piece together and then c. detach from like I've just mentioned the mythology and the theology rather than just the history. So for example the study of the history of Christianity just like the study of any other kinds of history means looking at both eyewitness sources as well as fragments of written records and trying to make determinations as to their validity. Now unfortunately for us as historians in this particular series of lessons the most authoritative document in Christianity is the Bible as you can probably imagine and the problem with this is that it is not particularly very useful for an historian studying the religion because a lot of the content is considered to be unreliable in terms of accounting for what actually happened. There are a lot of inconsistencies within the Bible. There are a lot of inconsistencies within the time period in which certain events may or may not have happened. Of course there are inconsistencies with the physical possibility of things being able to happen. We're not going to get into the theology of things like miracles and some of the older biblical stories from the Old Testament but all of these things are going to present further challenges to our understanding of Christianity as a historical tradition rather than a theological tradition. So essentially all of these issues that we have, the lack of sources and the detaching of mythology from history and into theology, these are all going to be problems. They're going to plague the early Christian development and our study of the early Christian development in a lot of different ways. So luckily as time goes on and as the religion increases in its popularity we find greater detailed reliable sources and we can really piece together much more historical interpretations. So for example we know a lot more about the period when Thomas Aquinas lived for example or we know a lot more about the Council of Nicaea than we do about the historical Jesus. So these are different things that these problems start to become less of a problem as time goes on. As we start to go into the earlier periods into the medieval periods and then into the early modern periods things become easier in terms of historical sources. But for the earliest periods we are stuck with a number of issues relating to the lack of detail. The lack of detail about what is and what begins as a very obscure sect of Judaism and so therefore as it being a quite small tradition within the broader context of Judaism, as you can imagine, it is not as well sourced as what would have been the case if it was a major religion at the beginning. So the final thing I want to mention is the idea of the historical sources and the way in which they are distributed across the time period in which we are studying. So like I said we're going to be studying Christianity from the earliest sources, so from around the 1st century CE all the way up to around the 1600s. So that's a very long period of time and the distribution of historical sources across that is not even. There is not an even distribution of historical sources across all of those different periods. So for example when we look at the earliest of periods the first 200 or so years of Christian doctrine, the historical record is very very limited and so there is a lot less sourcing that we can actually rely on in this earlier period compared to, for example, the beginnings of the Reformation when things are a lot more detailed and there's a lot more evidence of things that we can actually find. So what this does is it presents the issue of making sure we don't place too much of an emphasis on one particular source over another due to the lack of authority within a particular period. So if there is, for example, only two sources in the first 200 years of a particular historical development and there are multiple sources in the latter part of a historical development, it is important that we don't place too much emphasis on the reliability of these earlier sources just on the basis that that's all we have. So we have to be reticent of the fact that when we're placing emphasis on different sources in terms of their reliability we are not doing so because we have no other sources to even refer to. We have to be able to essentially come to the conclusion that when it comes to certain questions that we can ask the answer might just be we know we don't know and we potentially will never know. So questions about the historical Jesus are obviously going to be questions that we will not know the answer to in any time soon unless some miracle source arrives out of a particular area in the future. So essentially it means that we have to acknowledge that the lack of historical sourcing in certain periods is something that is a reality and that is something that we essentially are limited by. We are not able to be able to come up with the same kind of detail as to what happened in earlier periods as in later periods and this is just generally this is just a problem that will plague any ancient history any study of ancient history compared to for example the history of the second world war we know more about that than we do about ancient history because of the just the lack of sources and the relatively vast time distinction between the two periods and the same can be said for the history of Christianity. So from that we're going to start to talk about now the context in which Christianity develops. We know this relatively well we know that it came out of Judaism it comes out of different mythologies that existed within ancient Mesopotamia and Babylonian mythology as well as ancient Greek and ancient Roman theories and ideas of mythology as well. So we're going to start to talk about the different contexts the different contexts in which this starts to develop in the next few lessons before we then get into the actual history of this particular religion.