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Was Mythicism or Historicism More Dominant In the Early History and Development of the Christian Church?

By Goodreads Author Eli Kittim

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Preface

There are certain things in the Bible that we all take for granted today, such as the historicity of Jesus, his execution by Pontius Pilate, and the like. We think that these “facts” were written in stone and have been known since Christianity’s inception. How can anyone seriously challenge them?

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Christian Origins

But early Christianity was not monolithic. It was diverse. There were many different sects that held very different views both about Jesus and the interpretation of the New Testament. Orthodoxy eventually won the day but that doesn’t mean that they necessarily represented the sect that held the hermeneutically-correct and valid Bible interpretations or that they had the correct view about Jesus. Far from it. There were, in fact, diametrically opposed views that ranged from one extreme to another, from a completely human Jesus to a phantom or a ghost that never really existed. But, as we will see, there is a middle ground where mythicism and historicism meet.

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Gnosticism

The New Testament is a literary creation. So it’s difficult to probe its historical antecedents. What were some of the opposing views to “Orthodoxy”? One of the most vocal of these Christian sects was centred in Alexandria, Egypt: the Gnostics. They were the first advocates of the “you-don’t-need-religion, you-need-a-relationship-with-Jesus” pitch. Although there were many splinter groups, they all emphasised a personal “gnosis” (knowledge) and acquaintance with spiritual realities rather than a preoccupation with dry religious discourses and traditions. They originated in the first century C.E. and flourished until the second century, during which the Patristic Fathers denounced them as heretics. But were they? According to Bart Ehrman and Elaine Pagels, they were the genuine Christians of that early period whom the Orthodox Church tried to suppress!

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To be sure, their theology was influenced by Greek thought, but the focal point of their doctrine and practice was not based on rhetoric or dogma but rather on personal existential experience. And based on their own inimitable style, one can infer that they had better insights into the divine than their orthodox counterparts who did little more than debate the issues.

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Docetism

Then there were the Docetists, who held the “heterodox” (i.e. “at variance with orthodoxy”) doctrine that what appeared to be a historical Jesus was nothing more than an apparition or a phantom, and that his phenomenological bodily existence was not real. This is actually more in line with Scripture, which repeatedly talks of visions and apparitions in one form or another (cf. Lk 24.23–24; Gal. 1.11-12). These are the first mythicists who believed that Jesus never existed! There’s a great deal of Biblical evidence that supports this view. This early Christian view called “Docetism” (derived from the Greek term “Dokesis,” meaning “to seem”)——which held that Christ did not really exist in human form, an idea that was later picked up by Islam——attracted some of the greatest Biblical thinkers of Antiquity:

“According to Photius [a 9th century Byzantine Patriarch], Clement of Alexandria held at least a quasi-docetic belief regarding the nature of Christ, namely that the Word/Logos did not became flesh, but only ‘appeared to be in flesh,’ an interpretation which directly denied the reality of the incarnation” (Ashwin-Siejkowski, Piotr. “Clement of Alexandria on Trial: The Evidence of ‘Heresy’ from Photius’ Bibliotheca.” [Leiden: Brill, 2010], p. 95).

As would be expected, Docetism was eventually rejected as a heretical doctrine at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 C.E. But this verdict was issued in the 4th century. And there is a very good reason why mythicism had thitherto been on the upswing. In fact, despite this setback, the hermeneutical doctrine that gave rise to Docetism continued to hold sway over most of the church until the Reformation.

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The Monophysite Christian church

According to tradition, the Coptic Church of Egypt was founded by Mark the evangelist in the first century CE. Due to a Christological dispute, this “Monophysite” Christian church was condemned as heretical by the Council of Chalcedon in 451 CE. Instead of accepting the doctrine that Christ was fully human and fully divine, the Coptic church asserted that Christ had only one nature, and that nature was divine. In other words, just like the Docetists they denied the incarnation and therefore they can be technically defined as mythicists! A similar monophysite explanation of how the divine and human relate within the person of Jesus is Eutychianism. Eutychians were often classified as Phantasiasts by their opponents because they reduced Jesus’ incarnation to a phantasm or an illusion of some kind. Their Christology was along the lines of Docetism in that they, too, denied the full reality of Jesus’ humanity. Thus, we find that there were quite a number of sects that denied the historicity of Jesus during the early period of the church. Things started to change with the onset of the first ecumenical councils!

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The Alexandrian School

The early Christian church held to an allegorical (theological) Interpretation of the Bible, not a historical one. Philo’s essential approach to Biblical interpretation influenced the Christian School of hermeneutics, which also developed in the city of Alexandria, Egypt. One of its principal leaders was the Great Bible scholar, Clement of Alexandria (150-215 CE), who while acknowledging that the Bible contained various levels of meaning also realized that the non-literal (i.e. the allegorical/mystical) interpretations contained the ideal spiritual insights. Alexandrian hermeneutics were so popular that they eventually became the dominant force in Biblical interpretation up until the time of the Protestant Reformation. So, the allegorical/theological Biblical interpretation that gave rise to such views as Docetism was the mainstay of early Biblical scholarship. This method was obviously more inclined towards the spiritual, the metaphorical, and the metaphysical, dare I say the Gnostic!

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The School of Antioch

Sometime towards the end of the 3rd century CE, the School of Antioch was founded. It was the first Seminary, so to speak, founded in Syria that overemphasized the literal interpretation of the Bible and the humanity of Christ. This so-called “exegetical school” interpreted Scripture primarily according to its historical and grammatical sense. In an attempt to offset the earlier excesses of Biblical interpretation that could lead to various questionable doctrines, such as those of Docetism, the Antioch school became increasingly dogmatic and heavily involved in overemphasizing the literal interpretation of the Bible and the full humanity of Jesus. This led to the so-called “Nestorian Heresy,” namely that Jesus possessed two hypostases, one human and one divine! As a result of the condemnation of Nestorius (386 – 450 CE) at the First Council of Ephesus in 431, the Antioch school’s influence declined considerably and never really recovered. Many followers abandoned the school and it eventually moved to another location further East in Persia. Even though the Antiochian school’s tenets had lost traction, they were eventually taken up again by Martin Luther and John Calvin, who restored them to their former glory.

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Conclusion

So, the earlier Alexandrian School of allegorical interpretation at least allowed the possibility of mythicism to be considered as a viable option, whereas the later Antiochian school of literal interpretation——which influenced not only “the dogma of Christ” in the early ecumenical councils, but also modern Bible scholarship——eventually became the dominant school of hermeneutics that held to a rigid form of literalism and overemphasized the historicity of Jesus. In other words, the early church was not as adamant about the historicity of Jesus as the later Church! Thus, up until the end of the third century (the Ante-Nicene Era), and just prior to the onset of the first ecumenical council, the allegorical/metaphorical Jesus dominated the Biblical landscape. It was not until much later that the literal, historical interpretation of Jesus became the prevalent view that it is today!

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