The usual way of doing history is to start with the ancient sources and move forwards. So for Christian origins we might start with the canonical gospels, sift out what is not plausible (e.g. rising from the dead), massage a little what seems plausible for the times of the story setting (e.g. a would-be messiah was crucified by the Romans and hallucinations about a dead person reappearing), add the epistles of Paul and Book of Acts to tell us that preachers went out preaching the gospel to the world, and bingo! Christianity is born. Today we have the gospels and letters from within a generation of Jesus and his apostles and we can study them to work out how things started out to explain what we have today.

But here’s another way of doing history.

Start with what we think we know, what we’ve learned, about the Gospels and Epistles of Paul. Start with our common understanding that these were among the earliest documents of Christianity. Start with our knowledge that the gospels were competing (or complementary) accounts of the historical Jesus, mixed with a bit of mythical embellishment. Start also with our notion of the common knowledge that Paul wrote letters to his early churches.

Then work back.

Okay, we are clear about what our beliefs about the sources are. Now let’s work back and see what others thought about these gospels and letters. Why do we think the things we do about them? Did we inherit our views from earlier writers? What did those earlier writers say? We can leapfrog over generations and go back to late antiquity and learn that the Church Fathers definitely assured their readers that the four gospels were “true” accounts of Jesus; and that Paul’s letters, as we know them, were indeed written by a first century Paul.

Okay, but let’s keep moving back in time though our mental time-machine.

We read now that Church Fathers protested that there were many letters of Paul doing the rounds and that many of these were outright forgeries! We further learn that some sects had shortened forms of the letters and that the only true letters were the larger, more wordy texts.

We learn that there were many gospels doing the rounds. But only four of these were genuine.

Let’s keep working backwards:

Let’s say the year is 140 CE. Some figure in Rome is declaring that he has a gospel and ten letters by Paul. That one gospel is anti-Jewish and the letters reject the idea that the Jewish Scriptures are authoritative. At the same time opponents to this figure are saying they have other gospels that are pro-Jewish and more than ten letters of Paul, and that all the letters of Paul respect the Jewish Scriptures.

So we have claims and counterclaims about authentic and false gospels and epistles. How is anyone to decide which is which?

Keep rolling back in time:

Nothing. Blank.

So how do we get further back in time? We can, if we want, return to the first option above. We can begin with what we think we know about the gospels and the letters.

We re-read the gospels and see that their story is set in the mid first century CE. The letters have Paul’s name on them so obviously they are written by the same Paul we read about in Acts. Let’s re-start there. Our beliefs, the traditions, must have come from somewhere. They must have had some basis in fact, yes?

To get back further in time, then, we assume that what the second century texts wanted us to believe about the origins of Christianity were true. Instead of asking, Why did the authors of these texts we read about in the second century want us to believe the gospel narratives were true, we ask, So given that we know these gospel stories have some basis in truth…..

They might have been “true” just as some factions in the second century believed. That’s where our beliefs come from, after all. But …..

How can we tell?

Should we do history forwards? Or backwards? Should we first examine our inherited beliefs about the sources? What happens if we set apart our beliefs and re-frame them as hypotheses to be tested?

Indebted to Markus Vinzent for the notion of “doing history backwards”.

• Vinzent, Markus. Writing the History of Early Christianity: From Reception to Retrospection. Cambridge University Press, 2019.

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