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The Quest for Early Church Historiography: From Ferdinand C. Baur to Bart D. Ehrman and Beyond
The Quest for Early Church Historiography explores how early church historiography underwent a significant shift beginning with the thought of Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860), a shift that eventually culminated in the current extreme historiographies of such scholars as Bart D. Ehrman (1955–). Through the tracing of this historiographical trajectory, this work argues that, rather than seeing these current historiographies as having suddenly appeared in the scholarly scene, a better approach is to see them as the fruit of this long trajectory. Of course, as the work has sought to demonstrate, this trajectory is itself full of turns and twists. But the careful reader will, hopefully, be able to see the intrinsic connections that are demonstrably evident.
248 pages, Paperback
Published September 9, 2022
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February 7, 2023
I stepped out my comfort zone to read The Quest of Early Church Historiography by Jeremiah Mutie. Frankly I’m stepping out my comfort zone to simply say, Historiography and risk being mocked because I can’t pronounce it properly.
Well let’s start at the basics for this review because that is where I needed to start and thankfully Jeremiah helps the reader with this information in his introduction. Yes Cory and Patrick, you know who you are and I read the introduction on this one.
Historiography is simply one’s interpretation of history. Everyone as a historiography. You have one even if you don’t know. It is how interpret how the world came to be the planet you now inhabit. Historiography is how historians write about and view history.
The Quest for Early Church Historiography is about how church historians interpret and understand the history of the early church.
An example – In Destroyer of the gods – Larry Hurtado presented the early church as a religion of the book. It was a reading faith and not a ritual faith. The rituals of Rome didn’t come in for a few hundreds and they looked more like pagan rituals than what one would find in the NT. A catholic scholar may interpret church history as always being based on the rituals and not the reading.
They are both looking at the same facts of history but in different lights.
Now Mutia takes us on a journey to examine early church historiography from the perspective of what have been called liberal theologians starting with Ferdinand Baur up to our modern day with Bart Ehrman and his contemporaries.
It’s an intriguing journey even if it doesn’t hold the same twists and turns as a Dan Brown novel or an Indiana Jones movie. But in the end Jeremiah makes a strong case that if one want to understand the early church, especially to determine orthodoxy and heresy, there is only one place to go – the New Testament which establishes church orthodoxy at the very beginning.
Now when this book says the Early Church History. Don’t think of Augustine and Jerome and Cyprian. We are talking early, early church as in Paul and Peter touching on some of the earliest writers such as Justin Martyr and Irenaeus and Tertullian. But the bulk of it is on the time of church history when the letters of Paul and the Gospels were being written.
So what Mutia does in this book is track through a view started by Ferdinand Baur that early in church history there was not a definitive line of orthodoxy. Classical Historiography would teach that starting with the apostles – the majority of the church held to the early confessions, the earliest being those in the NT such as I Cor 15:1-8 and Paul’s presentation of the Gospel. Or the hymns of Christology such as Philippians 2:6-11. So there was this line of orthodoxy from the beginning.
But heretical teachers snuck in throughout and regularly needed to be rooted out by those who followed the teachings of the Apostles.
Baur and those who followed him instead saw the early church has a mosaic of diversity of views. Mutia pointing out that our current obsession with diversity may lead more credence to this theory. But there was no orthodox church. There were various views of Christianity all mixed and jumbled together for hundreds of years.
The gnostic Gospels and gnostic views of Christianity were just as valid in the larger community as the letters of Paul and the Gospel of Matthew. It wasn’t until later that the concept of orthodoxy was introduced and those who held to the orthodoxy in Rome won out, the gnostics and others went from a legitimate branch of Christianity to heretics.
And to victory goes the spoil, and hence the birth of Classical Christianity 400 years after Christ.
That was obviously a simplistic overview since I was trying to cram close to 100 pages in a few paragraphs but part Mutia’s goal is to show that there is relatively clear line of sight from Baur to Ehrman’s while there are wrinkles from person to person and various people add different logic or reasons to their theory, it’s one major passed from person to person over a few hundreds years.
I think that is definitely true.
So what was good in the book. I think Jeremiah did a great summarize what were at times very complex theories. I think he did fine work connecting the dots from theologian to theologian. It felt like one whole narrative.
The biggest positive I can draw from liberal theologians such as Harnack or Walter Bauer is that at times I think we do tend to forget that false teachers were in the church right from the beginning. Paul wrote his letters often because there were heretics mixed in the church from the very beginning at times they were Legalizers at others an early form of Gnosticism or Dualism. I do think we need to remember that as soon as the Holy Spirit stopped inspiring the books of the NT, every writing to follow will have some error mixed in and some church fathers should be expected to be downright awful because we see Paul rebuking some terrible teachers in his first letters.
This does not mean the liberals are correct. It means we always constantly need to go back to the NT itself and not lean on the early figures in church history.
Jeremiah’s strongest chapter was the last. I flew through the last section where he presented the orthodoxy found in the NT, that from the very beginning there were certain things one must believe to be in the church. Fundamentals of Jesus as God’s Son, His death, resurrection, return, and the necessity of faith in Christ for salvation.
I think he made a strong case that the only way to embrace the Historiography someone like Walter Bauer or Bart Ehrman is to throw out sections of the Bible. To assume that letters like the pastoral epistles can’t be written by Paul because you assume Paul would never write that. They must be forgeries.
My only complaint and this relatively small, I would make more use of Galatians 1 when arguing for early orthodoxy than Jeremiah did. I think that chapter is just so important and I would have given it an entire section in the last chapter, but what was there was good.
Frankly if you are speaking with someone who is arguing that letters like I and II Timothy must have come later or the Gospel of John or His epistles weren’t genuine, you should probably get this book and at least read the last chapter to know how to speak with those people. And if you want to know where they are coming from – their lens from interpreting church history, Mutia does an excellent job presenting their view.
This book is probably more important in our current church than most Christians would assume. So while it probably won’t get a wide reading, pastors, especially in liberal areas and who are in fellowship with others ministers who cast aside sections of the Bible – they would be wise to read this.
You can watch a video of this review on YouTube. Search for Rev Reads on YouTube to find my channel.
Well let’s start at the basics for this review because that is where I needed to start and thankfully Jeremiah helps the reader with this information in his introduction. Yes Cory and Patrick, you know who you are and I read the introduction on this one.
Historiography is simply one’s interpretation of history. Everyone as a historiography. You have one even if you don’t know. It is how interpret how the world came to be the planet you now inhabit. Historiography is how historians write about and view history.
The Quest for Early Church Historiography is about how church historians interpret and understand the history of the early church.
An example – In Destroyer of the gods – Larry Hurtado presented the early church as a religion of the book. It was a reading faith and not a ritual faith. The rituals of Rome didn’t come in for a few hundreds and they looked more like pagan rituals than what one would find in the NT. A catholic scholar may interpret church history as always being based on the rituals and not the reading.
They are both looking at the same facts of history but in different lights.
Now Mutia takes us on a journey to examine early church historiography from the perspective of what have been called liberal theologians starting with Ferdinand Baur up to our modern day with Bart Ehrman and his contemporaries.
It’s an intriguing journey even if it doesn’t hold the same twists and turns as a Dan Brown novel or an Indiana Jones movie. But in the end Jeremiah makes a strong case that if one want to understand the early church, especially to determine orthodoxy and heresy, there is only one place to go – the New Testament which establishes church orthodoxy at the very beginning.
Now when this book says the Early Church History. Don’t think of Augustine and Jerome and Cyprian. We are talking early, early church as in Paul and Peter touching on some of the earliest writers such as Justin Martyr and Irenaeus and Tertullian. But the bulk of it is on the time of church history when the letters of Paul and the Gospels were being written.
So what Mutia does in this book is track through a view started by Ferdinand Baur that early in church history there was not a definitive line of orthodoxy. Classical Historiography would teach that starting with the apostles – the majority of the church held to the early confessions, the earliest being those in the NT such as I Cor 15:1-8 and Paul’s presentation of the Gospel. Or the hymns of Christology such as Philippians 2:6-11. So there was this line of orthodoxy from the beginning.
But heretical teachers snuck in throughout and regularly needed to be rooted out by those who followed the teachings of the Apostles.
Baur and those who followed him instead saw the early church has a mosaic of diversity of views. Mutia pointing out that our current obsession with diversity may lead more credence to this theory. But there was no orthodox church. There were various views of Christianity all mixed and jumbled together for hundreds of years.
The gnostic Gospels and gnostic views of Christianity were just as valid in the larger community as the letters of Paul and the Gospel of Matthew. It wasn’t until later that the concept of orthodoxy was introduced and those who held to the orthodoxy in Rome won out, the gnostics and others went from a legitimate branch of Christianity to heretics.
And to victory goes the spoil, and hence the birth of Classical Christianity 400 years after Christ.
That was obviously a simplistic overview since I was trying to cram close to 100 pages in a few paragraphs but part Mutia’s goal is to show that there is relatively clear line of sight from Baur to Ehrman’s while there are wrinkles from person to person and various people add different logic or reasons to their theory, it’s one major passed from person to person over a few hundreds years.
I think that is definitely true.
So what was good in the book. I think Jeremiah did a great summarize what were at times very complex theories. I think he did fine work connecting the dots from theologian to theologian. It felt like one whole narrative.
The biggest positive I can draw from liberal theologians such as Harnack or Walter Bauer is that at times I think we do tend to forget that false teachers were in the church right from the beginning. Paul wrote his letters often because there were heretics mixed in the church from the very beginning at times they were Legalizers at others an early form of Gnosticism or Dualism. I do think we need to remember that as soon as the Holy Spirit stopped inspiring the books of the NT, every writing to follow will have some error mixed in and some church fathers should be expected to be downright awful because we see Paul rebuking some terrible teachers in his first letters.
This does not mean the liberals are correct. It means we always constantly need to go back to the NT itself and not lean on the early figures in church history.
Jeremiah’s strongest chapter was the last. I flew through the last section where he presented the orthodoxy found in the NT, that from the very beginning there were certain things one must believe to be in the church. Fundamentals of Jesus as God’s Son, His death, resurrection, return, and the necessity of faith in Christ for salvation.
I think he made a strong case that the only way to embrace the Historiography someone like Walter Bauer or Bart Ehrman is to throw out sections of the Bible. To assume that letters like the pastoral epistles can’t be written by Paul because you assume Paul would never write that. They must be forgeries.
My only complaint and this relatively small, I would make more use of Galatians 1 when arguing for early orthodoxy than Jeremiah did. I think that chapter is just so important and I would have given it an entire section in the last chapter, but what was there was good.
Frankly if you are speaking with someone who is arguing that letters like I and II Timothy must have come later or the Gospel of John or His epistles weren’t genuine, you should probably get this book and at least read the last chapter to know how to speak with those people. And if you want to know where they are coming from – their lens from interpreting church history, Mutia does an excellent job presenting their view.
This book is probably more important in our current church than most Christians would assume. So while it probably won’t get a wide reading, pastors, especially in liberal areas and who are in fellowship with others ministers who cast aside sections of the Bible – they would be wise to read this.
You can watch a video of this review on YouTube. Search for Rev Reads on YouTube to find my channel.
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