Founding the Fathers. Elizabeth A. Clark
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lack of historicity, Baur (like many Protestants of his time) called it “the purest expression of that higher form of the Christian consciousness.”100 Thus for Baur the “higher form” is far from the earliest and cannot be claimed as historical. Origins do not imply value.
Baur also challenged the reliability of the book of Acts as a historical source, except insofar as it shows the developing conflict between Jewish and Gentile versions of Christianity, signaled by the account of Stephen.101 Baur explained why the author of Acts passed over the split in parties after the Jerusalem Council: he could not reconcile the opposition between Peter and Paul with the harmonizing tendency that suffuses his book.102
Reconciliation of these opposed parties came gradually, in Baur’s view. Pauline universalism at length overcame Jewish “particularism.” The first practice to give way in “the absolute power of Judaism” was circumcision, replaced by baptism. Baur paralleled the tendency toward universalism that developed in the Roman Empire with Christianity’s attempt to overcome “all religious particularism.” Not only external factors, such as Roman transportation routes, “prepared” for Christianity. There were more “intimate” connections: in the Empire, “the barriers raised by national sentiment had been broken down” both inwardly and outwardly. The universalism of Christianity enabled it to be considered (in Hegelian parlance) the “Absolute Religion,” “elevated above the defects and limitations, the one-sidedness and finiteness, which constitute the particularism of other forms of religion.”103
Christianity, Baur noted, had neither the many gods of pagan polytheism, nor the “outward rites and ordinances” to which both paganism and Judaism gave great attention. Nor did Christianity “identify itself with the positive authority of a purely traditional religion,” namely, Judaism. (Judaism’s role in the larger scheme of things, Baur bluntly stated, was to “fill up an interval.”) Although all religions seek communion with the supernatural, Christianity differs in its “spirituality,” its freedom from “everything merely external, sensuous, or material.” Nevertheless, it was important for Christianity’s historical development, in Baur’s view, that its “spiritual contents” were “clothed in the concrete form” of Jewish Messianic ideas.104 Baur’s scheme emphasizes the all-important role of Judaism in primitive Christianity, but holds that the true, spiritual, essence of Christianity transcends all Jewish particularity. Christianity could become the “absolute,” universal religion when the Pauline “tendency” overcame some features of Jewish Christianity, and both were raised in a higher synthesis of the Catholic Church.
Biblical books that appear neutral in the struggle between Jewish and Gentile factions (such as the Gospels of Mark and John, and the letters of Ignatius) must, in Baur’s view, be dated late in the second century, because no such conciliatory stance was possible until then.105 The stages of reconciliation are shown in Hebrews and James (which represent a freer, more spiritual form of Jewish Christianity), while Ephesians and Colossians exhibit modifications from the Pauline side.106 Conciliation in the form of Catholicism’s development, Baur claimed, came only when the church faced dangers from outside.107
Baur on Early Christian Literature Outside the New Testament. The Pseudo-Clementine literature served as a centerpiece for Baur’s argument that in the second century, opposition still raged between Petrine (“Jewish”) and Pauline (“Gentile”) Christianity.108 Baur claimed that the Clementine Homilies, written by an Ebionite author about 170 c.e., stood as an attack on the Pauline party, Paul being represented by the figure of Simon the Magician.109
In addition, Baur maintained that the letters of Ignatius were later second-century productions, since they contain no traces of party conflict. Baur entered the dispute over the longer and shorter Greek and the Syriac recensions of the Ignatian letters.110 His book, Die ignatianischen Briefe (1848), argued that the historical data in the Ignatian letters did not represent circumstances at the turn to the second century. Among other points suggesting late authorship, in Baur’s view, are the letters’ seeming knowledge of Valentinian Gnosticism and their references to the episcopate, an institution that Baur believed developed only in the mid-second century. The three Ignatian letters found in Syriac (those to Polycarp, the Ephesians, and the Romans) that some scholars alleged were the only “genuine” ones were, in Baur’s opinion, just as “ungenuine” as the other four.111
The second-century Quartodeciman controversy, another area of debate, centered on the Gospels’ discrepant dating of the Last Supper in relation to Passover,112 and the proper timing for the celebration of Easter. Should other Christians, with the Quartodecimans, calculate the date of Easter in relation to the 14th of Nissan (Passover), regardless of the day of the week on which it might fall; or should Easter always be celebrated on a Sunday, the day of resurrection, without regard to the timing of Passover? For Baur, the Fourth Gospel’s silence regarding the Last Supper as a Passover meal was an implicit repudiation of Quartodeciman practice. Baur’s conclusion: the Gospel of John was not composed by Jesus’ disciple, but was a late second-century production.113
In other second-century literature as well, Baur argued, the Jewish-Christian and Gentile-Christian divisions play out, with the Epistle of Barnabas and the (pseudo-) Ignatian epistles representing the Jewish-Christian side, and I Clement and the Epistle of Polycarp, the Gentile-Christian. Mediating such divisions are the Shepherd of Hermas and Justin Martyr.114 With Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement, and Origen the mediation seems complete. Rome now claims both Peter and Paul as its own: to the church at Rome, Baur argued, belongs the merit for first having made good “the essential condition of Catholicism,” namely, the representation of Peter and Paul in brotherly unity.115
Now, those who stubbornly clung to an older Jewish Christianity were branded “Ebionites,” heretics. Now, the Catholic Church stood poised to mediate between the extremes of a more “universalistic” Gnosticism and a more “Jewish” Montanism.116 The development of the episcopate, Baur claimed, alone rendered possible “the historical development of Christianity and prepared its way to a world-historical future.”117
The American Professors and Baur. The American professors protested many of Baur’s theses: that Jewish Christianity was the original form of the religion; that conflict was the motor driving early Christianity; that arguments from silence were admissible; that writings could be dated by ascertaining what signs of struggle (or lack of it) between Jewish and Gentile “tendencies” they exhibited. Moreover, Baur’s scheme implied that early Christian belief and practice remained highly unsettled until much later than these professors were prepared to accept.
In addition, the American professors sharply rejected Baur’s dating of many New Testament texts to the second century: they dated all New Testament books to the first century. For them, the Pastoral Epistles show the harmonious development of the church out of primitive Christianity. Moreover, their interest in (and alarm over) issues posed by the Clementine Homilies, the Ignatian letters, and the Quartodeciman controversy—about which they wrote in more detail and passion than we might expect—appear to have been fueled by Baur.
Despite their many criticisms, the Americans garnered two important points from Baur. The first, quite simply, was an appreciation for development in early Christianity—although in their eyes, Baur had let development run riot. Baur forced historians of early Christianity to ask, “How did it happen?”, a question that had been asked before, but with preconceived ideas that prevented its implications from being clearly understood.118 The Americans, as we shall see in Chapter 5, admitted development in church history from the second century onward—but only as guided by the providential hand of God.
Second, Baur’s praise for the alleged universalism and spirituality that developed in Catholic Christianity (despite his assertion of the Judaizing character of the primitive movement) was one to which the evangelical Americans could warm. To be sure, German Protestantism since the time of Luther had often stressed the inwardness and spirituality of true Christianity, as contrasted with the “externalism”