THE ULTIMATE HERESIES PAGE
by Yuri Kuchinsky
_An Introduction_
I have been studying biblical history for great many
years. For about three years I have been active on the
Internet in various biblical history discussion groups,
taking part in discussion of current issues in the field
with many professional scholars, many of them at the
top of their field. All this time, I've considered myself as
belonging to the liberal wing of the biblical studies
community.
Generally, our biblical scholarship professionals can be
broadly divided into the liberals and the conservatives.
The liberals, the broad mainstream of our academic
community, are secular scholars who take great pains to
stipulate that their scholarship and their faith, if any,
should be separate. While many of them _are_ Christian
believers of some sort or another, they nevertheless
accept that the historical scholarship should be
scientific, and should not suffer any interference from
personal faith, which, of course, cannot really be
understood as having much to do with science.
Perhaps the ultimate expression of the liberal wing of
biblical scholarship at this time is THE JESUS
SEMINAR, a group of prominent scholars who
investigate the problem of the Historical Jesus from the
standpoint of scientific objectivity.
(Click
here to go to THE JESUS SEMINAR site)
The mainstream liberal scholarship has broadly
accepted certain facts of biblical history, such as:
- the authors of our New Testament gospels are
unknown; their current names were given to the gospels
long after they were composed, and perhaps even
somewhat arbitrarily. Where the gospels were
composed is likewise unknown, although Syria is
strongly suspected as the place of composition for most
of them. The gospels themselves are composed over
time based on previous sources, such as the "Q gospel".
Certain parts of some gospels betray extensive editing
over time.
- the historical accounts of the New Testament are
not really historical as such, but rather they constitute,
for the most part, legitimations of Christian faith of the
later generations of believers -- the manuals of Christian
instruction. Or, to put it in other words, the biblical
histories can be considered by and large as "pious
fictions".
- our biblical narratives are often confusing and
contradictory. Historical critical method is necessary in
order to try to determine the real history of the Christian
movement. And often this can be done but imperfectly, as
our reliable sources are fragmentary and few.
The conservative wing of the biblical scholarship are of
course the confessional scholars. While they also, for
the most part, accept the necessity of scholarly
objectivity in their work, or at least claim to do so, their
work is much more about faith. Their writings are
apologetic in nature, i.e. they tend to defend the
traditional interpretations of Scripture handed down to
the believers by the Church, or by the founders of their
denominations. These are perhaps a minority in the
academic community.
It is curious how the general public is often unaware
that the biblical studies in our time are mostly the
preserve of liberals and agnostics. Indeed, the typical
biblical scholar that I know is a secular humanist, and is
not really interested in discussing the matters of faith too
much.
As I said, for many years I've considered myself as
belonging to the mainstream liberal-secular tradition, the
tradition of the Jesus Seminar, of Dominic Crossan,
Burton Mack, and such other prominent authors. I have
been rather sceptical about the conservative
traditionalists; these children of the dogma appeared to
me as rehashing endlessly the faith formulas that have
been rehashed for hundreds of years previously. Their
commitment to the historical study of the Bible, and to
the scientific method, if any, always seemed to me skin-deep.
While I still respect greatly the work of the liberal
scholars, I have now come to the conclusion that these
two camps, as I've perceived them, for the most part,
are really just one camp. I've come to the conclusion
that far from following the scientific method as they
profess to, the mainstream liberal scholarship has really
created for itself a new set of dogmas that, when looked
at closely, are quite comparable to the faith
commitments of the conservative scholars.
So what are these "ultimate biblical heresies" that I'm
talking about? Well, the main one, it seems to me, is the
myth of the "monolithic unity of our texts".
Almost all contemporary scholars, whether liberal or
conservative, accept broadly the principle of the
"monumental textual unity" of the books of the New
Testament. Yes, there are some exceptions, but these
are few and far in between.
Perhaps it is only with the Gospel of John that the situation
may be more nuanced. The view that it is of a more composite
nature is quite widespread. While our scholars accept
rather broadly that John betrays much editing and
interpolation, we're very far from any sort of a
consensus on how it was written over time. It is also
accepted that the endings of Mark (there are believed to
be perhaps three of them in various manuscripts) are
problematic. But this is about it. Otherwise, it is broadly
assumed that, for the most part, the texts of the gospels
as we have them are "monolithic unities". They were
composed all in one piece, and remained "textually
frozen" up to our time.
This assumption, I believe, is grievously wrong,
especially in the case of Mark's and Luke's Gospels.
And now, we get to the Pauline writings, a very
substantial part of the New Testament. The 14 Epistles
that the New Testament itself attributes to Paul can
generally be divided into three groups.
There are the 7 epistles that are generally seen as
genuine writings of Paul; they are Rom, 1 Cor, 2 Cor,
Gal, 1 Thes, Phil, Phlm. At the other end of this
spectrum, there are the Pastoral Epistles (1 Tm, 2 Tm,
Ti) that very few, if any, commentators accept as
genuinely Pauline. These are certainly the work of
Paul's followers. (Of course, there are still some
conservative commentators who believe that all the 14
supposedly Pauline Epistles were in fact authored by
Paul, but these are very few indeed). And in the middle,
there's a bit of a grey area. Epistles to the Hebrews,
Colossians, and Ephesians, and the 2 Thes, are mostly
seen by scholars as deutero-Pauline (i.e. written by the
followers of Paul), but there are still some seemingly
competent scholars who refuse to consider them so.
Some good arguments can be made that parts of this
middle group may indeed contain certain authentic
passages borrowed from some genuine Pauline letters
that did not survive in their entirety.
In any case, at this time, in my experience, something
like 99% of biblical scholars, both conservative and
liberal, accept that the Historical Paul himself was the
author of these seven epistles: Rom, 1 Cor, 2 Cor, Gal,
1 Thes, Phil, Phlm. It is my view that in this area
especially the liberal consensus is completely off base.
The belief in the authenticity of the 7 "genuine letters of
Paul" _in their entirety_ is, it seems to me, as much an
item of faith as the belief in the Immaculate Conception.
And recently I have found on the Net quite a few
scholars who agree with me on this. Please visit their
site. This is the website that has some of the really
radical biblical criticism. It is so radical, few people even
know about it yet.
(Click here to go to The Journal of Higher Criticism site
at Drew University.)
So what -- some might say. Paul himself did not write
these Epistles, his followers did -- big deal. Well, it is a
big deal. In the study of early Christianity it is a very big
deal indeed. Because the Pauline literature is generally
supposed to be written in the early 50s of our era, and
thus it comprises the earliest Christian writings we
possess. (The Gospels, Mark the earliest among them,
are believed to have been written at least 20 years
later.)
And so, a very great deal hinges on when these Pauline
writing were really written. Pick up any book dealing with
early Christian history and see for yourself how much
hinges on the reliability of the information found in the
Pauline writings. If, as I propose, many of the passages
in these 7 letters were authored and interpolated in the
second century, long after Paul himself passed off from
the scene, much in our understanding of early
Christianity will need to be revised.
Anyone familiar with modern biblical New Testament
interpretations will know that all modern scholars, both
liberal and conservative alike, always quote Paul's
writings without any second thoughts in regards to whether or
not the passages quoted are really authentic. This is
what I mean by scholarship based on faith rather than
science.
The second item I would like to bring up for discussion
here is the true nature of the Gospel of Mark. Mark is
our earliest Christian gospel. It provided the foundation
for the writing of the other two Synoptic gospels,
Matthew and Luke. It is generally accepted by both the
conservative and the liberal scholars alike that Mark is a
textual unity (with the exception of the endings, on which
there are a few dissenting voices among scholars). The
liberal consensus seems to be that Mark was written all
in one piece sometime around 70 AD. This, I believe is
highly questionable. I believe that the earlier, and a
substantially different, version of Mark, what I call the
proto-Mark (pMark), circulated widely in early Christian
communities. At a later stage, this early version was
substantially reworked and expanded to result in our
present-day canonical Mark. How exactly, and why, this
process happened is a very complex matter, and I will
deal with this later. The answers in this area are
certainly not all clear. But I have no doubt in my mind
that this basically was what happened.
None of what I said above is _really_ new. Detailed
studies in this area are available. And yet none of those
belonging to the contemporary biblical world (I mean
something like 99.9%) have heard of any of this. Of this,
I'm pretty sure -- for one thing, my experience on the
Internet has given me a very good opportunity to gauge
academic opinions on a wide variety of subjects. All
these theories are so obscure that even the professional
scholars of the Pauline literature, and of Mark, people
who studied these matters all their lives, and wrote
books on this -- even these scholars wouldn't know what
I'm taking about right now. This is because the studies
that I referred to above have been done, to a large
extent, nearly a hundred years ago.
Yes, how easily we assume that the progress in
scholarship is always linear and direct... How easily are
we seduced by this evolutionary idea that today scholars
know more than they did yesterday, and that, likewise,
tomorrow they will know more than they know today. I
wish it were always so...
Whatever the case may be, I have good reasons to
believe that in biblical studies a substantial "foray
into the wilderness" has taken place in the last couple or
so of the scholarly generations. And our mainstream biblical
scholarship is still out there, chasing up on those fleeting
visions and the mirages of the desert...
(Of course, another example of such a "wrong track" of
academic scholarship can be provided by my research in
the area of transoceanic cultural contacts in ancient times
-- the other major parts of my two websites. You
don't have to take my word for it, go to those files and
see for yourself, if interested. It is well known that the
academic scholarship of only 30 years ago or so was
much more receptive to these ideas, compared to the
climate prevailing in this field today.)
[Later addition to this article (April, 2000) -- It seems like in the
last year or so, the ice started to crack in American archaeology. An
awful lot of new research in this area has now begun to appear. See my
webpage for details.]
I have come to this conclusion about contemporary
liberal biblical scholarship after I discovered the work of
the great French biblical scholar Alfred Loisy. How this
discovery took place is perhaps traceable in the
Crosstalk exchanges available on this webpage.
Everything started with the discussion of the earliest
versions of the eucharist (the Lord's Supper) in the New
Testament. For some time, I've inclined to the view that
the "Jewish type of the eucharist", found in the Didache,
an early Christian manual of instruction, is very early.
This eucharistic liturgy, or at least the parts of it that can
be considered as the most ancient, talks about the
sharing of the Communion in a way that is quite
different from what we find in the canonicals.
Eating the Host, in this version, stands for the future
hope of humanity, for the regathering of the humanity in
a better and happier Heavenly world. This version of the
eucharist does not mention the rather morbid idea of
celebrating the death of the Lord, and of consuming his
flesh. I knew all this before, but I have never pursued
the matter beyond this until recently.
My Crosstalk discussions in the Fall of 1997 moved me to
examine in detail the various versions of the eucharist
found in the New Testament, and to review the scholarly
debates in this area. What I discovered was that there
are two basic types of eucharist in the New Testament,
the Markan (this one being quite close to the Didache
eucharist), and the Lukan. And then there's the version
of the eucharist in Paul's 1 Cor 11. On closer inspection,
this one was amazingly close to the Lukan version. Was
it possible that the writer of Luke copied his eucharist from
Paul? But the scholars believe it very unlikely that Luke
knew the writings of Paul! Or was it Paul who copied his
eucharist version from Luke? But it is generally believed
that Luke was written much later than Paul... So we
have a conundrum here.
One answer to this is to suppose that the 1 Cor 11
eucharist passage was really not authored by Paul.
Could this passage be a later liturgical formula, possibly
borrowed from Luke (or from a common source), that
some later editor inserted into the 1 Cor, an authentic
Pauline Epistle? This was an answer that soon
suggested itself to me. Seemed like a logical idea. So I
went to the library to look up the standard commentaries
on this Epistle. Surely someone should have suggested
this idea before? Was I the first one to think of this? I
somehow doubted it, since the idea seemed pretty
obvious to me...
But to my serious surprise, my initial investigations drew
a blank. None of the standard commentaries that I
consulted seemed to be aware of such a possibility.
Mystified, I delved deeper into more commentaries. And
this is where I came across the work of Alfred Loisy on
the eucharist. His name came up in a footnote, and he
indeed suggested the possibility that the 1 Cor 11:24,25
verses were interpolated. Eureka!
This, for me, was the beginning of a new journey
indeed. I was aware of this scholar previously; his name
still comes up in footnotes now and then, but only in a
very cursory fashion. There was some big controversy
with the Vatican. He got into some hot water way back
when, almost a 100 years ago. That's as far I was aware
of the existence of Alfred Loisy. And now it seemed like
Loisy, back in the 20s and 30s, managed to figure out
these troublesome textual relationships quite well, and
explained all these things rather adequately. Of course I
started to read more of Loisy at that point. And the more
I read him, the more I liked him.
And so, the idea for my new big research project was
born...
In this Introduction to my latest research, I only outline in
the briefest way the process that led me to this new
course in my biblical research. Much more needs to be
said about Loisy, his life, and all his many theories. In
his time, he wrote and published dozens of books.
Some of the most important ones were translated into
English, but they are all out of print at this time. (Only
two of his books are in print currently, and these are not
the ones where you would find much about his theories
on the Pauline writings, or on the Gospel of Mark.)
Something about his theories can be found in these
Crosstalk postings. But my main work of bringing his
research back to light, and of making his ideas available
to modern readers, is still ongoing. I will be uploading
my writings here by and by.
I hope my book, when it is ready, will find a good
publisher. But in any case, much of my research will be
made available on my webpage.
Best wishes to all,
Yuri.
Click here to go one level up in the directory.