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Conclusion THE MANY

Conclusion

THE MANY
BEHIND THE ONE

ur survey of the early Christianities has indicated that the cherished image of a single early Church untainted by heresy, with everyone of one heart and soul worshipping one Christ, and eventually producing a harmonious canon of scripture speaking a single gospel with a single voice-is a myth. In every case, an earlier diversity has been unsuccessfully hidden away behind a screen of history as the finally dominant faction wished it had been. Even mainstream scholarship, while recognizing a significant degree of diversity and disunity both in the New Testament and among the range of early Christian sects, has been slow to depart from what Burton Mack calls "the Big Bang" model of Christian origins. That is, most scholars have gone on blithely assuming that there was a single Jesus of Nazareth, some sort of prophet and reformer, who was crucified, after which his followers experienced some sort of visions of Jesus as if risen from the dead. Only then, we are told, did the diversity begin, as various people interpreted and symbolized Jesus and his exaltation in terms appropriate to their own cultures.

And yet there were clues that there could have been no primordial zone of oneness even this far behind the scenes. For instance, the current crop of critical lives of Jesus present us with an embarrassment of riches. There are too many plausible portraits, each centering on a different selection of gospel data. None is particularly far-fetched, but neither are they easily compatible. Thus we have the same sort of range of evidence for Jesus that led F. C. Baur and Walter Bauer to deny a single, monochrome early Christianity. In some sense, then, we must reckon with several different Jesuses.

The gospels' Jesuses are each complex syntheses of various other, earlier, Jesus characters. Some of these may have been reflections of various messianic prophets and revolutionaries, others the fictive counterparts of itinerant charismatics, and still others historicizations of mythical Corn Kings and Gnostic Aions. I think it is an open question whether a historical Jesus had anything to do with any of these Jesuses, much less the Jesuses of the gospels. Each is the figurehead, the totem, of a particular kind of Jesus community or Christ cult, and we will never know whether and to what extent each community reflects a remembered Jesus opposed to a Jesus or Christ who is a concretization of its own beliefs and values.

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