Dr. Kenneth Calvert, who delivers Lecture Six in Hillsdale's ten-week "Western Heritage 101" course, is Associate Professor of Ancient History at Hillsdale, and Headmaster of Hillsdale Academy. He was also named Hillsdale's "Professor of the Year" in 2000, for which I offer him my belated congratulations; but which award makes me wonder about the competition he faced, because based solely on this lecture, Dr. Calvert wouldn't get my vote.
It's true, of course, that as with all the Hillsdale lectures, there's only so much light anyone can shed, in forty minutes, on such a large topic. Professor Calvert gamely divides "Early Christianity" into four parts: Jesus and Rome,1 Expansion and Persecution, Heresy and Theology, and The Cost of Success--giving him approximately ten minutes for each sub-phase of the lecture. He also subtitles his lecture "In the World But Not of the World," a catchy phrase taken from the Gospel of John, but one which Professor Calvert does absolutely nothing to explain; an omission that, as it turns out, sets the tone for what follows.
"Jesus and Rome": Professor Calvert tells us that the four Christian gospels give us more information about Jesus than we have about practically any figure in ancient history. He fails, however, to tell us anything about when the gospels were written (decades after Jesus' death), or by whom the gospels were written (believing Christians who had never themselves set eyes on Jesus), or why the gospels were written (to promote the faith), all of which factor into assessing the documents' reliability. Nor does Dr. Calvert say a word about the gospels' various contradictions and inconsistencies, or about the existence of other, non-canonical gospels and texts that paint surprisingly different portraits of Jesus (e.g. he was married; he was a magician; he didn't really die on the cross); none of which necessarily refute the New Testament's authenticity but which surely need to be acknowledged by an historian, as do questions raised by modern researchers about the very historicity of Jesus and the state of our knowledge about him.
In any case, it seems Dr. Calvert has decided to present the gospel version of Jesus as if it were, well, gospel truth: so be it. He explains that Jesus' "core message" was the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven, which sounds just peachy except that the professor doesn't offer any thoughts about either (a) what that means or what it was understood to mean at the time, or (b) whether there is any historical evidence that said Kingdom actually did arrive, or (c) did later generations of Christians have to revise their expectations accordingly, and if so, how? Instead, Dr. Calvert merely cites Jesus' resurrection as the "core event" that shows him to have been the true messiah, only not the one anyone had in mind. Again, historical evidence is neither presented nor discussed, which isn't to say such evidence doesn't exist (gospels, again, and the Acts of the Apostles, and Paul's testimony2) but only that there has always been a certain amount of skepticism about it, a fact which some professors of history might find worth mentioning.
Having been established in a backwater province of the Roman Empire, Christianity (more accurately, "Christianities," but our lecturer avoids that snare) caught on quite fast. Why? you might ask. Dr. Calvert will tell you why: Christianity spread because (a) Christians were good and loyal citizens (except for the business of swearing oaths, offering sacrifices, and serving in the military, complications ignored by the professor); (b) Christians took care of the poor and the weak;3 and Christians evangelized like their lives, or their souls, depended on it. That last part is indisputably and almost self-evidently true; it would have been interesting, though, to hear Dr. Calvert speculate a bit regarding what exactly in the Christian message was most attractive and persuasive to listeners--but forty minutes is a brief window for speculation. Calvert does take time to emphasize that Christianity was inclusive: it appealed to rich and poor, male and female, Jew and Gentile, slave and free, just as Paul said it should, making no distinctions around class or other categories.4 No doubt that was part of its charm, and also part of what aroused suspicion about it.
Moving along to "Heresy and Theology," Dr. Calvert points out that early Christians differed in their appreciation, or lack thereof, for secular philosophy. While Tertullian asked, rhetorically, "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem," the likes of Justin Martyr, Clement, and Origen5 tried to show that Christianity was compatible with the insights of Greek philosophy and metaphysics found, particularly, in Plato and Aristotle. Eventually, in the fifth century, Augustine suggested that Christians should just go ahead and appropriate the wisdom of other traditions and claim it for their own, much as the ancient Hebrews had grabbed for themselves all the treasure they could while fleeing Egypt, thus providing the template for a sort of intellectual looting in which even Socrates would be posthumously labled "a Christian before Christ". What Socrates would have thought of that, no one knows.
From the earliest times, says Dr. Calvert, Christians developed their own creeds--brief statements of belief which started out as communal affirmations but were later used as measures of orthodoxy. The failure to abide by the approved beliefs (and to conform to the precise wording) would, and frequently did, lead to excommunication and worse. This may seem to some an unwelcome development; but Dr. Calvert presents it as a simple matter of fact, offering no opinion of his own. That may be because he was in a hurry, at that point in his lecture, to conclude with "The Cost of Success," a brief description of Constantine's ascent to power, the Milvatian bridge, the Edict of Milan, and the Council of Nicea. Professor Calvert allows that the Church, having been legalized at last by Constantine after over 250 years without such official recognition, had a "not always positive relationship" with either the Pontifex Maximus himself or with subsequent emperors, kings, and monarchs of various kinds; it might even be said, suggests Dr. Calvert, that the Church in those days made something of a Faustian bargain (my words, not his) with secular power. The professor omits any reference to Augustine's splendid CITY OF GOD, written to wrestle with that very issue, among others; instead, Dr. Calvert leaves us believing that, for better or for worse, the die of Church-state complicity had been cast.
I want to cite admiringly Dr. Calvert's mention of how the Christian bishops, having been summoned by Constantine, entered the Council of Nicea accompanied by pomp, pageantry, and Roman soldiers; it's a striking image, and the implicit comparison with Jesus' lonely and tortured path to Calvary, and to the cross, is telling, to put it mildly. The professor describes Nicea as a "triumphant moment" for the Church, but he also seems well aware that another, less sanguine interpretation could be made.
My overall evaluation of "Early Christianity" is not, you may have already guessed, terribly positive. Too much of importance was lacking; too much of what was presented lacked depth,nuance, or qualification. I would have liked more discussion of how the early church (loosely-related local groups gathering in houses) became a world-wide Church, complete with an episcopal structure, an ordered hierarchy, and a canon of approved texts. I would have liked some acknowledgment of historical controversies about the person of Jesus and the events related in the gospels. Truth be told: I would have liked Rodney Stark (to name just one possibility) to have been brought in as guest lecturer. I'm not saying that Dr. Calvert didn't do a good job; I'm just saying, I wish Hillsdale had assigned the task to someone else.
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1 Seems like a good place to start.
2 Speaking of Paul, Dr. Calvert pulls off the incredible and probably unprecedented trick of discussing early Christianity without dragging Paul into it (outside of, I believe, one quote from Galatians). To his credit, he makes no mention of Winston Churchill, either.
3 Including babies--early Christians saved babies that had been left to die of exposure; yes, says Dr. Calvert, from the very beginning Christians were "pro-life". He doesn't say if they raided, burned, or bombed Roman abortion clinics, but you just know they at least lobbied to defund Rome's version of Planned Parenthood.
4 Hillsdale's former "Professor of the Year" does not even allude to, much less elucidate, the controversies in the early church about the need for converts to follow Jewish law; nor does he inform his students that a part of the early Christian community, based in Jerusalem, chose to remain faithful to Jewish law rather than to follow Paul in dismissing it as unnecessary. Paul, of course, got his revenge: not just by his success at proselytizing but also by writing a screed against the law, which he equated with sin and death while contrasting it with Christian freedom and life. That'll teach those stubborn Jerusalemites to insist on circumcision!
5 Professor Calvert doesn't mention Origen, which seems odd given Origen's stature as an early Christian "father" whose philosophical inclinations eventually led to his being declared a heretic.
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