Is there Evidence for Christianity before Constantine? (Or, Some Fundamentals of Doing History)

Is it necessary to have archaeological evidence to be reasonably confident that Christianity in some form existed prior to the fourth century? Some people think so, or at least they claim that the lack of archaeological evidence is reasonable grounds for doubting the existence of Christianity prior to Constantine. Let me explain why I believe that that view arises from a misunderstanding of the nature of evidence and how historical events are reconstructed by historians.

Now it is certainly true that there are clear cut cases where archaeological evidence does nullify written historical narratives. Archaeological evidence has demonstrated that the medieval stories of King Arthur, said to have performed his various exploits in late Roman times, are fictions. Similarly, archaeology has overthrown the historicity of the Genesis Patriarchs, the Exodus, the Israelite conquest of Canaan and the vast united kingdom of Israel under David and Solomon.

But what happens when we have no explicit archaeological evidence for a historical narrative? The archaeological evidence that specifically informs us about the conquests of Alexander the Great is virtually nonexistent. We have coins with Alexander’s bust stamped on them but they don’t tell us about his military adventures from Egypt to India. For that information we only have very late (Roman era) written accounts. Fortunately, however, the authors of those histories inform readers that they were drawing upon historical records composed by Alexander’s contemporaries. Further, given the widespread influence of Greek culture and Greek settlements throughout the Levant and Mesopotamia after Alexander’s time, we have good reason to believe that something dramatic happened to give rise to this new situation, and the surviving testimonies of historians who read writings of Alexander’s contemporaries are thus by and large made credible.

Again, we have no archaeological evidence from the fifth century BCE testifying to the historical existence of Plato. There are no surviving manuscripts of Plato’s works from his own time. But we do have scores of later manuscripts that are evidence for an activity of reasonably faithful copying of Plato’s dialogues. We can cross check these writings with manuscripts of copied works of other authors who were evidently contemporaries of Plato. So we again have reasonable grounds for believing in the historical existence and literary productivity of Plato.

But what is the difference between primary and secondary sources? It is on this question that I understand some doubts about pre-Constantinian Christianity arise.

Primary sources are those that clearly belong to the period being investigated. Secondary sources are from times later than the events or persons being studied. One biblical historian whom I have quoted in the past because he wrote at some length on this question is Niels Peter Lemche. Lemche takes readers ‘back to the basics’, in this case to the writings of the “father of modern history”, Leopold von Ranke.

When von Ranke and historians since his time are referring to an acknowledged contemporary source, they indicate first of all that kind of information which can be dated without problems. They also say that the source must physically belong to the period about which it is taken to be firsthand information. A slab of stone with an inscription found in situ, that is, where it was originally placed by the person who erected the stone to commemorate some event of his own day, is without doubt a primary and contemporary source. A description of the same item found in some ancient literary source is, however, not a contemporary source except in the case where it goes back to the same time as the stone inscription. Thus Livy’s description of the Second Punic War is not a contemporary source, as it is removed by about two hundred years from the days of Hannibal and Scipio. Suetonius’s life of August is not a primary source because it is about a hundred years later than the time of August. The Monumentum Ancyranum¹ can, however, be considered a firsthand piece of evidence from this period, since it relies on an official document from the days of August, and was placed on his temple in Ankara shortly after his death.

1. An inscription found on the Temple of August in Ankara, based on an official document authorized in the last year of August’s reign (C.E. 14), partly based, however, on an earlier source, the Res Gestae, and edited before it was published. The inscription has been known since 1555.

Lemche, Niels Peter. The Israelites in History and Tradition. London : Louisville, Ky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998. p. 22

A Digression on Leopold von Ranke and Positivist History

Now the mention of Ranke has the unfortunate side effect of causing some readers to roll their eyes in despair while complaining, “But von Ranke was a positivist and that kind of history went out of fashion by the middle of the twentieth century.” To those who react that way (and there are a good many biblical scholars who are guilty) I must point out that “positivism” is too often confused with a preoccupation with “getting the facts right”, or with a history that is “all about ‘the facts'”. No, that’s a misunderstanding of positivism.

Positivism in history is an attempt to treat history as a science, as an effort to discover laws of historical processes, as summed up in an earlier reference if mine to Collingwood. The facts are still bedrock.

We have heard of “history wars” in recent times. Historians continue today to research to find “the actual facts” that lie behind various controversial questions. Was there a culpable genocide of Australian aborigines by white settlers throughout the nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries? Facts and evidence lie at the very heart of that debate. Focus on “the facts” is still of first importance. Hewing to facts is not committing the sin of positivism.

But there is another way of understanding “positivist history” and in this second sense Ranke is sometimes upheld as an exemplar. The idea that history can be an objective reconstruction of what “exactly” happened in the past — a fact-based, “objective and true” portrayal of events, especially political events — is another form of history that is no longer practised, generally speaking. Nobody can escape bias of some kind; everybody necessarily perceives events through a particular point of view. Nor are political and military events the totality of human experience: history has branched out into investigating economic, social, cultural, family and personal events.

As for being “completely objective”, the American Civil War is viewed by some historians as a conflict over states rights; by other historians as a conflict over slavery. That does not mean that there is no absolute truth to the question but it does remind us that all events are perceived through our preconceptions and biases. The historian ideally will be aware of their biases and make allowances for them in their research and presentation of their narrative. To support one point of view against another a historian will seek to present more factual evidence on which their point of view rests.

As for Ranke, he is perhaps best known for his famous phrase . . .

To history has been given the function of judging the past, of instructing men for the profit of future years. The present attempt does not aspire to such a lofty undertaking. It merely wants to show how it essentially was (wie es eigentlich gewesen).

From Preface to the First Edition of Histories of the Latin and Germanic Peoples (October 1824), in: Ranke, Leopold von. The Theory and Practice of History. New York, N.Y: Irvington Publishers, 1983. p. 86

Some critics translate the phrase as “how it actually was” and thus present a more “positivist” view of Ranke than others would necessarily warrant.

Today historians are more aware of the inevitable bias or subjectivity of a “point of view” when examining events, and of the impossibility of fully objectively recreating a wholly true account of a past event, but searching out and understanding “the facts” is still paramount in most cases.

In high school I was introduced to history by a couple of teachers who were pioneering a new kind of history-teaching, J. H. Allsopp and H. R. Cowie, authors of the two-volume text Challenge and Response. Students were immersed in a questioning-and-research approach to each historical period, beginning with the French Revolution. The springboard question was derived from the famous historian Arnold Toynbee’s thesis that historical change follows a “law” of civilizations responding to specific challenges. As students we were challenged by a positivist thesis (not that we knew anything about the term ‘positivism’ in those high school years) and taught to question. That was anything but a dry fact-based study of history. When we came to studying Marxism we were introduced to another positivist form of history, a grossly simplified form of Hegel’s theory that a thesis produces an antithesis and out of the ensuing clash of these opposites emerges a synthesis . . . . which in turn becomes a new thesis, and so on. (Hence the theory that the owners of production produce a working class and the resulting clash leads to a classless society.) Especially since the later 1960s historical studies in universities have moved away from the idea that through history historians can discover laws of human behaviour. Historical positivism is “past history” now.

The point is this: Ranke’s fundamental principle is that the facts must first and foremost be determined by sources known to be from the actual time and place of the events being investigated:

But from what sources could this be newly investigated? The foundations of the present writing, the origins of its subject matter, are memoirs, diaries, letters, reports from embassies, and original narratives of eyewitnesses. Other writings were considered only when they seemed either to have been immediately deduced from the former or to equal them through some kind of original information.

Ranke, Leopold von. The Theory and Practice of History. New York, N.Y: Irvington Publishers, 1983. p. 86

That principle is still the foundation of most historical research today. (I am bypassing here discussions relating to postmodernist theories about knowledge and adhering to the same general principles as are applicable in common everyday discourse and courts of law with respect to the value we ascribe to testimonies of various kinds — hearsay, recorded, witnessed, etc.)

Back to the Question: Evidence for Pre-Constantinian Christianity

One proponent of the view that Christianity as we understand the term was a fourth century invention has proposed that historical evidence can be divided into two types:

1. Primary evidence — which means archaeological evidence, or “real knowledge” from the time in question;
2. Secondary evidence — which survives only in manuscripts physically dated long after Constantine’s time and is therefore “hypothetical” knowledge”.

Here is where I believe we are getting confused with terminology.

To begin with, notice that in the preceding section we saw that evidence is divided into two kinds:

1. that which can be dated without problems to the time or event under investigatio
2. that which is dated after that event.

It is not true that the ONLY kind of evidence that can be dated “without problems to the time or event under investigation” is archaeological evidence. As we saw above, some manuscripts dated long after the time of Alexander the Great or Plato contain information that can be dated “without problems” to the times of Alexander the Great and Plato. Our manuscript evidence is testimony to multiple efforts to copy those texts through the ages.

To contradict this point and argue that the texts were invented in late antiquity or the early middle ages is to meet the “conspiracy theory” fallacy.

Yes, it is theoretically possible that all witnesses, and all knowing associates of such witnesses, who were in any way involved in a cover-up or falsification of the historical record, such as (let’s say) the moon landing, conspired to maintain the public fiction. But life experience leads me to think that such a coherently successful accomplishment among diverse witnesses (or “non-witnesses”) is unlikely. Unless evidence can be produced that suggests that such a widespread agreement across time to falsify the historical record, or data/sources upon which the historical account is produced can be shown to have been fraudulently manipulated, then I think it is reasonable to believe in the existence of Plato as an author of dialogs and in the conquering actions of Alexander the Great.

So where does that leave the evidence for the existence of pre-fourth century Christianity?

Let’s take the Gospel of Mark. We first discover an explicit reference to this work in the writings of Irenaeus, a late second century “church father”. Those who propose a post Constantine origin for this gospel also propose a post Constantine date for the writings attributed to Irenaeus. If we were to accept such an argument we would need to be mindful of all the writings of Irenaeus and imagine a situation where they would be manufactured for nefarious purposes to belong to a time much earlier than that in which they were really written. When one looks at the totality of those writings one would surely conclude that an awful lot of effort was spent on producing such a fraud. But let’s keep it simple and confine ourselves to the Gospel of Mark.

A literary analysis of the Gospel of Mark indicates that it fits well with the first and second Jewish wars (66-70 and 135 CE). Its “little apocalypse” chapter has been dated to either war. Its theological outlook is inconsistent with the Christology of later periods. The same gospel denigrates Peter and the twelve disciples as faithless failures; it presents a Jesus who appears to have become a “son of God” at the moment of his baptism. It is unlikely in the extreme that a fourth century forger who believed in the exaltation of the Twelve Apostles and the pre-existence and inherent divinity of Christ would have written such a gospel. Other gospels followed that evidently sought to “correct” Mark’s flaws.

I think it is safe to conclude that the widely varying presentations of Jesus and the apostles (including Paul) would not have been produced by a single-minded program to make Christianity appear older (back into the second or first centuries) than it actually was. Is it really likely that such a program produced gospels that contradicted the later orthodox christology and the revered place of the apostles and then followed up by composing other gospels that found different ways to correct those evidently earlier efforts?

Dating ancient texts

Now it is certainly not valid to assume that a historical narrative that we read in a text is “true”. We all know the difference between historical fiction and real history and we look for signs that enable us to distinguish the two.

However, to continue with our Gospel of Mark example, we find in this gospel prominent allusions to false christs, crucifixion, destruction of the temple, and so forth — all of which can be found to match the events of the Jewish war from the late first century and right through the time of Trajan and Jewish messianic rebellions and on to the events of the final rebellion under Bar Kochba in the 130s CE. One may well imagine a later author fabricating a text to appear as if it were written in that period, but how could one imagine the same author presenting a view of both Jesus and the apostles that was contradicted by the established church of a much later time?

In this case we find the evidence strongest for a time and place that did not highly esteem the apostles and did not place a strong emphasis on the pre-existent “sonship” of Jesus or the importance of his resurrection appearances. (The latter are absent in the Gospel of Mark.)

The Gospel of Mark is evidently a product of pre-fourth century conditions when Jesus could be made a son of God at his baptism and when the disciples could be depicted as failures. It now belongs to the orthodox canon but it is made safe for orthodoxy by being placed alongside other gospels that “corrected” Mark’s apparent failings.

Real versus Theoretical Knowledge?

I have heard it said that archaeology is “real” evidence and later texts are “theoretical” evidence — implying that evidence derived from stones is superior to that derived from texts found on much later surviving manuscripts.

This is a false dichotomy.

A stone inscription speaking of a person’s exploits tells me nothing unless I first interpret it. Is the person described really a historical person or are they a false image of someone else pretending to be greater than they in fact were? Are the inscribed exploits true or a lie or something in between? Is the inscription a fictional propaganda employing contemporary literary tropes? Note how even a stone inscription must be first “interpreted” before it can be understood:

As with the Hammurapi, Sargon and Idrimi monuments, it is more than style and form that establish the Active qualities of Mesha’s inscription. Literary metaphor also lies behind the use of the name Omri itself. Omri ‘dwelling in Moab’ is not a person doing anything in Transjordan, but an eponym, a literary personification of Israel’s political power and presence. It is clear that the reference to Omri in the Mesha stele is literary, not historical.

Thompson, Thomas L. The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel. New York: Basic Books, 1999. p. 13

You may disagree with Thompson’s interpretation but whatever your view you will need to justify your alternative reading – as Thompson does his. Either way, it should be clear that a stone inscription does not automatically give us “pure historical fact”: stone inscriptions need to be interpreted as much as does the text of a manuscript. We cannot say that the former source gives us “real” knowledge while the latter gives us “theoretical” knowledge. Both kinds of data need to be tested for provenance and original meaning.

The information gleaned from a stone inscription is just as much a product of interpretation as is the information we glean from a late surviving manuscript.

Both must be subject to analysis and interpretation before we think we know what they have to tell us.

It is a fallacy to say that we have no “real” knowledge about Christianity prior to the fourth century because we have no pre-fourth century archaeological evidence for Christianity while all our text-based knowledge is “only theoretical”.

What we have, most fundamentally, is raw data. Raw data must be interpreted. It tells us nothing apart from our interpretation of it. Raw data can come from stone monuments and manuscripts alike, whatever their date. (I could cover all of this argument in many pages of text but am hoping for now that the above context makes my point clear.)

Conclusion

In fact I believe we do have archaeological evidence for Christianity before Constantine but in this post I am addressing the claim that manuscript evidence is somehow less “real” than archaeological evidence.

My argument is that all “historical knowledge” is at some level “theoretical” but that fact does not make it any less “real” or “valid” at the same time. I could argue on philosophical and epistemological grounds that newspaper reports and diaries from relevant persons in the last century do not “prove” that Australian aborigines were displaced wholesale, but that would not change the reality of the interpreted evidence from a layman’s — or courtroom juror’s — perspective.

The claim that all of our evidence for Christianity physically post dates the time of Constantine and was actually the creation of scribes from that era and later falls for the same reason other conspiracy theories fall. Yes, of course Christian scribes were “biased” and yes, we do have some evidence that they doctored manuscripts. At the same time, we also have evidence that they preserved and copied texts that were not doctrinally consistent with fourth century orthodoxy. They found ways to preserve “unorthodox” writings without denying their own faith.

Archaeological evidence, when tested, can be securely dated to a particular time in question but the “truth” or otherwise of its inscriptions is just as “real” as are the “truths or otherwise” of text written in ink on manuscripts. All data needs to be tested for authenticity, provenance, context and interpreted. The absence of archaeological evidence from the fifth century BCE testifying to the existence a dialog-writing Plato does not mean our knowledge of Plato is “theoretical” as distinct from “real”, and the same applies to the existence of gospels, epistles and other Christian literature prior to the time of Constantine.

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