The first century of Christianity was often a raucous argument. Essential truths were constantly under threat, and confusion was common. Jimmy Akin joins us to discuss what the great arguments of the first century were about and what we can learn from them.
Cy Kellett:
Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers Podcast for living, understanding, and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. Last time we talked with Jimmy Akin, we talked about when did the early church know that Jesus was God? Now we continue with the early church theme to ask Jimmy about the controversies of the early church. What were the controversies of that first century group? What were the things that got argued about and who were the parties to those arguments? Jimmy Akin, of course, senior apologist here at Catholic Answers and the proprietor of Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World. Thank you for coming back, Jimmy.
Jimmy Akin:
My pleasure.
Cy Kellett:
In the early church, within the first century. I think maybe when I was a child, I thought like a child, and I thought what a golden era of no controversy when the apostles were around. It was just the devoted spreading of the gospel and without strife.
Jimmy Akin:
Then you read the New Testament.
Cy Kellett:
Then I read the letters to St. Paul in particular, and I was like, “Wait. What?” Controversy around Jesus starts the day Jesus says, “Repent and believe the good news.”
Jimmy Akin:
Basically, yes. There had already been controversy with John the Baptist who preached the same message, and now Jesus is making himself a target. There was a lot of confusion about Jesus even during his own ministry. The subject of our previous episode, when did the church know Jesus was God? Actually, you could say that was the earliest controversy in the Christian community because we see evidence of it in the gospels themselves. If you look and the most famous passages, Matthew 16. But it has parallels in, for example, Mark. But in this passage, Jesus is talking to the disciples and he says, “Who do men say that I am?” They say, “Well, some people are thinking you’re John the Baptist, returned from the dead or one of the prophets or Elijah or something like that.” Jesus says, “But who do you say I am?”
Peter responds on behalf of the disciples by saying, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” The question of Jesus’s identity was sort of the first controversy that even manifested during Jesus’s own ministry. People came to different conclusions about that among people who maintained some form of belief in Jesus. We’re not talking about his opponents. But among those who had some form of belief in Jesus, some thought he was a purely human messiah, which was an understanding that some people had of the Messiah. Some people thought he was God and only seemed to be a man. That position was known as Docetism based on the Greek word [foreign language 00:03:04], which means I seem. The Docetists were the seemers. They said, “Jesus only seemed to be human.” Then there were adoptionists who thought that Jesus was a normal human who then was adopted by God at his baptism. He became an adoptive son of God.
But none of those positions are what we see in the New Testament. If you look in the New Testament, St. Paul in his epistles has a very high Christology. He refers to Jesus as our Lord and God. He directly calls him God. We also see both in Paul and in the gospels, the idea Jesus pre-existed before his ministry. Then before his birth in Heaven. Then he came down from Heaven and he goes back to Heaven. That indicates he’s a heavenly being who took on human form, but he really did take on human form. He was born, he had flesh, he was crucified, he physically died. He was both God and man. That’s the balance that is struck by the New Testament authors who either were Jesus’s disciples or were close associates of Jesus’s disciples. That’s what the historical evidence points to as Jesus’s understanding as we discussed in the previous episode.
That’s the first controversy, but there were other controversies that were going on in the early church. One the first was who can be a Christian? If we understand the balance of who Jesus is without veering to the human or the divine, who gets to be a Christian? Now, it was obvious that Jewish people got to be Christians. They got to be baptized and be followers of Jesus. But it wasn’t obvious to everybody that could happen for Gentiles. Even though Jesus had said things about Gentiles during his ministry, as we can see from various passages in the gospels that display what I refer to as gentile interest, it’s clear that Jesus is interested and the gospel writers are interested in Gentiles and how this message is going to affect them. At the end of Matthew, Jesus says, “Go among all the nations.”
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
Okay, are all those nations Jewish?
Cy Kellett:
No.
Jimmy Akin:
No. You could also translate it from Greek is go among all the Gentiles and make disciples. There are definite passages of Gentile interest, but it wasn’t obvious to everyone that you didn’t need to become a Jew because Jews would make converts from Gentiles. Some Gentiles didn’t want to take the step of getting circumcised because ouch, but they would nevertheless worship God. They were referred to as God-fearers. But others would become full proselytes to Judaism. They would be circumcised if they were a man. They would accept the Mosaic Law and they would become Jewish. It wasn’t obvious that you can just stay a Gentile-
Cy Kellett:
And be a Christian.
Jimmy Akin:
… if you’re going to respond to the message of the Jewish Messiah. There were certain people connected, in particular with James the Just, who thought you need to become a Jew or you’re not going to be saved. You can accept Jesus, you can be baptized, and then you need to get circumcised. A lot of them would even want the other order. They would want you to get circumcised first and then-
Cy Kellett:
Then be baptized.
Jimmy Akin:
… you can be baptized. But that’s not the line the apostles took. Peter made it clear. It was made clear to Peter that Gentiles could be baptized without circumcision. We read about that in Acts chapters 10-11. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop the controversy. A few years later in AD 49, the apostles ended up holding a council in Jerusalem. As far as we know, this is the first church council. It’s often called the Council of Jerusalem. Peter, Paul, and John were all there, and James the Just. James, son of Zebedee, had already died by this point. But even James the Just who people were associated with him thought you needed to become a Jew. Even James the Just said, “Nah, you don’t. God’s already made this clear. You can be a gentile, and even if you’re not circumcised and you don’t keep the Mosaic Law, you can be a Christian and be saved.”
He did have some recommendations for how to smooth Jewish Gentile interactions in the church, but he acknowledged the fundamental principle that you didn’t have to become a Jew, which must have come as some surprise to some of the people who regarded themselves as his followers. Actually, some of them refused to believe it because there are later Christians who honored St. James who continued to say, “No, you need to become a Jew.” There were these hardcore Jewish Christian sects that continued even after the Jerusalem Council. They would look at St. Paul as an apostate and things like that, so that was one controversy.
Cy Kellett:
Is this particularly hard… It seems to me that this is particularly hard on people who are good faithful Jews who came to Christianity because they really have been taught to be a people apart, and that the marks of being that people apart are keeping of the law and circumcision. I don’t know if Gentiles had a problem say, “Well, we’re in community with Jews now,” but you can see how a Jew who has had 500 years or 1000 years of this being a people apart, this is a very radical change for them.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, it is. It’s also predicted by the prophets in the Old Testament. There are all kinds of statements about how Gentiles are going to come to worship the Lord. Isaiah even says that God’s going to take some of them as priests and Levites.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Right.
Jimmy Akin:
He’s like, “What the heck are you talking about? Priests and Levites?” You have to be a member of the tribe of Levi to be a Levite. You have to be a Levitical… Not only a Levite, but a member of the line Aaron if you want to be a priest. Isaiah’s statement that God is going to take Gentiles for priests is like, okay, that points to some change in the Mosaic Law. This Christian revolution that Jesus brought about is not unprecedented. It’s talked about in the prophets, but not everybody accepted it. I also should point out that this view, which we could call Jewish exclusivism, the idea that only Jewish-
Cy Kellett:
Only Jews can be-
Jimmy Akin:
… people are going to be saved. That’s something that is not a historic part of Judaism. It’s something that grew up in the period just before the time of Christ when the Jewish people were under Gentile domination, and so it was very easy for them to view Gentiles as persecuting oppressors, as evil people. The kind of people who wouldn’t be saved, but that’s not the historic view. If you go back into starting with the law of Moses, there’s no requirement that anyone become a Jew. This is God’s law for the Jewish people, for the Israelites, but other people aren’t required to do these things. You don’t have to not eat pork. That’s a rule for Jewish people.
You even find statements that now because of the way that the Old Testament writers talk about God, they want to make God sound like he commands everything, to portray him as a strong king in Heaven. They end up using this active language for God that is really stuff that God just allows, but they’ll make it sound like God commanded it. An example of that is there are passages that say things like, “God has not permitted you, the Israelites, to worship stars. That he has appointed for these other people.” It makes it sound like God is commanded that these other people are going to worship stars. Well, really, he doesn’t command anybody to do anything evil. That’s not literal. He’s really allowing other people to worship stars, but he’s not allowing you to do so, so don’t. But there’s nothing like, “Oh, and all those people are going to Hell.”
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, I see.
Jimmy Akin:
In fact, you would have righteous Gentiles who never became Jews like Naaman and the leper. Naaman is a non-Jew. He comes to a Jewish prophet, says, “I want to be healed.” He gets told, “Go bathe in the Jordan River seven times.” At first he scoffs at that, but one of his servants convinces him to do it. So he does, he bathes himself in the Jordan River and he’s healed of his leprosy. He goes back, he wants to give the prophet a reward. The prophet says, “Nope, I’m not going to take anything from you.” He says, “Okay, well then let me take two donkey loads of earth back to where I come from so that I can set up an altar to God, because I’m going to only worship the God who healed me now. I’m only going to worship Yahweh. Please, I hope Yahweh will understand if when my master, who is a pagan, he needs me to support him when he bows down to his idol, and I need to keep my head below his for social reasons. I hope God understands that.”
The prophet is like, “Yeah, don’t worry. God’s got you. He knows where your heart is. He knows you’re only going to worship him,” and so Naaman is regarded as a righteous gentile. He’s in good with God and he doesn’t become a Jew. He goes back to his own people. Incidentally, the prophet’s servant decides he wants to profit if you’ve got a generous Gentile here. He goes to Naaman and says, “My master just had a couple of visitors. Could he actually get some stuff from you anyway?”
Cy Kellett:
Can you Venmo me?
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. Naaman being a grateful and generous Gentile says, “Sure. Here, have this stuff,” and so the prophet’s servant has gotten it for himself. When he gets back, the prophet says, “So, you took the stuff, didn’t you?” He’s like, “How do you know about that?”
Cy Kellett:
Me?
Jimmy Akin:
It’s like, “I remote viewed you while you were gone.”
Cy Kellett:
I’m a prophet.
Jimmy Akin:
“My heart went with you,” so this is a remote viewing incident in the Bible.
Cy Kellett:
That’s such a great story.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. But he’s a righteous Gentile, and the same thing has been acknowledged by many other Jews in other contexts. In fact, I’m aware of during the Sassanid period of Persian history. This is in the Christian age. The temple has been destroyed. The Jewish people have been scattered. Some of them are living in the Sassanid Empire, and some of the Jewish sages get a request. Some of the Gentiles want to sacrifice to God, to the Jewish God, and so what are they going to do? The Jewish priests are not able to sacrifice anywhere but Jerusalem and the temple is destroyed, so they can’t offer a sacrifice to Yahweh at this point. But there’s no law against Gentiles offering sacrifices to Yahweh. The sages ruled, “Yeah, you can teach Gentiles how to do their own sacrifices to God that we can’t do. We can show them here’s how you sacrifice to Yahweh if you want to. We’re not allowed to do it because we can’t do it in Jerusalem right now, but there’s no restriction on them. They can worship God anywhere.”
Cy Kellett:
The Christian movement starts at a moment of crisis for Judaism, you completely separate… Judaism is heading towards a major conflict with the great Gentile power, and probably most people saw it coming. Some of this difficulty between the Judaizers and the more apostolic view, it comes in the context of all of that. That Judaism itself is in crisis, and the feelings towards Gentiles are probably raw already.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. Another controversy that emerges in the early Christian period is a controversy about the law. Because for a Jewish person, the law of Moses is what you need to adhere to. At least it was up until the time of Christ. But one of Paul’s emphases is that you don’t need to become a Jew, so you don’t need to keep the Mosaic Law. That led to confusion on the part of some of Paul’s converts. Well, then what do you need to keep? Because Jewish people would often refer to the Torah or the law of Moses as just the law. If you hear someone saying, “You don’t need to keep the law.” “So, I can go commit adultery and I can engage in pagan practices and other stuff like that.”
Particularly in his letters to the Corinthians, you see St. Paul trying to put the kibosh on this. He’s horrified at the libertinism that some of his readers have been engaging in. He talks to the Corinthians about how there is immorality among you that’s not even known among the pagans. A man has his father’s wife. Meaning somebody’s sleeping with his stepmother.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Ew.
Jimmy Akin:
Ew. Yeah. It’s not as bad as his biological mother, but it’s still bad. Even Gentiles don’t do that kind of thing.
Cy Kellett:
No.
Jimmy Akin:
There was a controversy about the role of the law. Paul’s opponents on among the Judaizers would say, “Paul is totally against the law. He’s this unrepentant libertine.” Some people thought Paul was a libertine and liked that idea. It’s like, “Hey, I can do whatever I want.” Paul is trying to maintain this balance of saying, “No, you don’t have to do the Mosaic Law, but you do have to do the moral law,” or what St. Paul sometimes calls the law of Christ, which actually includes a little bit more than the moral law. But that was another controversy, a controversy over the law occurred in the first century. Then there was a controversy, or many people believe there was a controversy, over what came to be known in modern times as Gnosticism.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, so this is a first century thing?
Jimmy Akin:
People will say it is.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
The Gnostics were a pseudo Christian religious movement that existed primarily in the second and third and a little bit into the fourth century, but primarily the second and third. They mixed non-Christian elements with Christian thought. They’re basically like the New Age movement is today. They didn’t believe in reincarnation mostly, but they didn’t have the New Age beliefs in crystals and all that. But they basically like the New Ages fused Christian and non-Christian ideas. There were different kinds of Gnostics. Some of them were much more loopy than others. The term Gnosticism is a modern term. It was invented by modern scholars as a catchall term to cover these different groups. But they had common ideas, and one of their ideas was that our world is evil and broken. It was not made good by a good God. It’s a broken evil world that was made by a broken God.
They had this idea that there’s a supreme deity who has issued these… They called them aeon. But he’s issued these emanations that became other divine beings, and one of them went bad and made our world. Jesus is also one of these eon who’s come down from the celestial sphere to help redeem us out of this world. If you have this special knowledge that Gnostics preach, then you can be redeemed. You can recover the inner divine spark and end up working your way back to the supreme being. You will sometimes hear people describe Gnosticism as the belief… Because the Greek word gnosis means knowledge. You’ll sometimes have people say, “Gnostics believed you were saved by knowledge.” No, Gnostics believe that’s everybody. Everybody who believes in salvation thinks you need to know something in order to act on it and do it and be saved. By that standard, we would be Gnostics too. You need to know about Jesus and believe in him.
The Gnostics, number one, didn’t use that term for themselves. That’s a modern term. But number two, they didn’t think knowledge would save you. They thought a certain kind of knowledge that you could act on would save you. They just had a different gospel, but they incorporated these Christian elements into their belief. They talk about Jesus and things like that. This was a controversy. It primarily occurred in the second and third centuries, but there are hints that it may have started in the first century. There are various passages in the New Testament that refer to things people have taken as references, either Gnosticism or to proto-Gnosticism. At one point, Paul’s talking about how certain foolish people delight in the worship of angels. Maybe that’s like the aeons who are not the supreme being, but are under the supreme being. He also, in the pastoral letters, warns about the falsely so-called gnosis, the falsely so-called knowledge.
But he doesn’t really elaborate on what he’s talking about, what the content of this falsely so-called knowledge is. Although he does various passages have some hints about it can involve asceticism, forbidding to eat certain foods, and forbidding marriage because a lot of the Gnostics didn’t like marriage because this world is broken and evil. Also, there are some stories in the second century that say things like, “After Simon Magus’s encounter with St. Peter in Samaria, which we read about in Acts 8. He went off to Rome and he founded the sect of Gnostics there, and so they’ll portray Simon Magus as the founder of Gnosticism. These are colorful stories. It’s hard to put a lot of historical credence in them, but they’ve got to prove his spiritual authority. It’s got Simon Magus flying in Rome. Then St. Peter prays and Simon Magus crashes to the ground and stuff. There are also stories about the author of the Johannine epistles, St. John, having a conflict with a Gnostic named Cerinthus, or it also gets pronounced Cerinthus.
According to one of the stories, St. John once went into a bathhouse because people didn’t have private bathrooms, so you’d go to the bathhouse to take a bath. It was like going to the spa today. There was a lot you could do there besides bathe. They had books you could read. You could get a massage. You could do exercise. You could do a bunch of stuff. St. John goes into a public bathhouse and he sees Cerinthus there and runs out immediately yelling that the bathhouse is going to fall in because that evil heretic Cerinthus is there. You have some of these second century or third century stories, it’s hard to know how historically reliable they are. What we can say with confidence is Gnosticism really took off in the second and third centuries. It may have been present in a kind of incipient way as proto-Gnosticism in the first century. That’s possible, but I wouldn’t exaggerate the evidence because there are other ways of reading the same texts in a non-Gnostic sense. I can’t say with confidence-
Cy Kellett:
I see what you mean.
Jimmy Akin:
… that that was a first century controversy. Some people have proposed it as a first century controversy, but I think the evidence is a little thin for us to say that with any confidence.
Cy Kellett:
If I may then, with that one in particular, there seems to be a modern movement to say, “Look, in the first century, there were lots of different types of Christianity. Among them were these Gnostic Christianities. How we ended up with what we would call the Orthodox Christian teaching is it just won basically. It just dominated the others and won.”
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. There’s an element of truth to that, but there’s also elements that are false.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
The element of the of truth is there were different understandings of the Christian faith. You read the letters of St. Paul and that’s clear. You’ve got the Judaizers on one side, you’ve got the Libertines on another side. You’ve got different understandings of the Christian message. What the element of falsehood is in that claim is the implication that they’re all equally legitimate in the first century. That’s not true. Jesus obviously taught something, and-
Cy Kellett:
Okay. I see.
Jimmy Akin:
Whatever Jesus taught is normative or binding for the Christian community. What’s the best evidence we have about what Jesus taught? Well, it’s found in the New Testament because those documents were written either by apostles of Jesus or by the associates of apostles of Jesus. They agreed on this common message, and so that’s the normative evidence is the New Testament stuff. You even can show that there was a kind of normativity that was recognized for the New Testament even by people in other groups. Now, not every group, but let’s take Gnostics as an example. In the second and third centuries, they start writing their own gospels or their own books at least.
Today they’re called the Gnostic Gospels. They don’t all fit the design of what we would think of as a gospel. We think of a gospel as a biography of Jesus that covers much of his life, maybe all of his life, and that focuses on his passion and crucifixion. Well, the thing is books were fantastically expensive in the ancient world because not only did you have to hire a scribe to write them by hand for you, every piece of paper they were written on had to be made by hand. They didn’t have paper manufacturing plants. Between the material costs and the labor costs, a single copy of the Gospel of Matthew would cost around $2,200. More than $2,000 just for Matthew.
Cy Kellett:
But could you get free delivery on Amazon though [inaudible 00:28:48]?
Jimmy Akin:
No, you couldn’t.
Cy Kellett:
I’ll pay the 2200, but I need free delivery.
Jimmy Akin:
Any delivery you had, you would pay for that too. You wouldn’t get it in two days.
Cy Kellett:
Right, right, right.
Jimmy Akin:
So, there’s price pressure to not write long books. Most books were this length of a typical scroll. That’s why Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are all the size they are. They’re approximately as long as a single scroll would be. The longest of them is Luke. The shortest is Mark. But they’re all in that same range. Now, so suppose you’re Gnostic and you want to write a book promoting your Gnostic ideas. Are you going to require your readers to spend the equivalent of thousands of dollars to hear the story of Jesus all over again, or are you just going to assume they can get that from the gospels that are already there-
Cy Kellett:
I never thought of that.
Jimmy Akin:
… and you’re just going to write something that supplements that? That’s what they did. When you read the so-called Gnostic Gospels, they don’t tell the story of Jesus. They assume you already know that. What they do instead is they zero in on specific incidents in Jesus’s life and dig down into that and typically have a big conversation. They’ll say, “During the 40 days between his resurrection and his ascension, Jesus met with this disciple and told them this.” Then you’ll have this big description of one supposed conversation that occurred at this one point in Jesus’s career. They don’t give you a survey of his whole career because they assume you’ve already got that from Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and John. The Gnostic Gospels actually presuppose the canonical gospels as documents that are normative and authoritative for the Christian community. They’re just trying to tack onto those. But even that recognizes those original gospels, those are authoritative.
Cy Kellett:
How interesting. Okay, I see. There is a certain way in which sometimes I think whatever’s going on in the modern world, we read it back into the first century, and we look for allies in the first century. Sometimes I do think there’s a New Age tendency to try to make Gnostics the friend of the New Age version of Jesus. Anytime we do that, that’s unfair to read back into history like that. Orthodox Christians do it as well where we exaggerate sometimes the things that are in the… Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
That’s why it’s important to be cautious and use evidence carefully and critical thinking and not just leap to one’s preferred narrative.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Because the things that concerned them are not necessarily the same things that concern us. The do you have to be a Jew or not controversy, it does not exist in our world. It may in some peripheral community somewhere, but that’s not… Anything we might want to read back into that, we’re imposing on a real struggle that people had, but that does not exist in our time.
Jimmy Akin:
No, certainly that struggle has been settled.
Cy Kellett:
So, I want to ask you about two of those-
Jimmy Akin:
At least for most people.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, right. Sure. Everything gets unsettled somewhere. Somebody will bring it up again. But I want to ask you about two, one of which I think is silly, one of which I think is the most important debate in the modern world. The silly one is basically what happened is that the Catholic Church formed and suppressed the real early Christianity. I’m giving you the Dan Brown story now. First of all, Jesus married Mary Magdalene, and what it is is a suppression of the divine feminine. That’s what really happened in the first century. Any evidence for that?
Jimmy Akin:
No. There are a handful of passages in some of the Gnostic writings that could be consistent with that hypothesis. But even scholars of Gnosticism warn these writings do not have historical value. They’re too late. They’re valuable to us not because they tell us about Jesus and what he did, they’re valuable to us because they tell us what later people believed about Jesus, but they don’t have historical value themselves. They’re not going to tell us about the historical Jesus.
Furthermore, there is evidence against the idea that Jesus married Mary Magdalene or anybody else in the New Testament itself. Now, it never directly says this, but there were people who would be into first century Judaism who would be unmarried for religious reasons, who were religiously celibate. We know about multiple people like that. It appears that Jesus is one of them because one of the major metaphors that gets used in the New Testament in not only the Pauline writings, but also the Johannine writings, so John is in on this too, is the metaphor of the church as the bride of Christ. It’s all over St. Paul.
Cy Kellett:
Sure.
Jimmy Akin:
It’s also in the book of Revelation, which is by John, where John sees the new Jerusalem coming down out of Heaven, and it’s hailed as the wife of the lamb, and the wedding ceremony of the lamb has come and things like that. You have this metaphor of the church is the bride of Christ. How did that get started? Well, it wouldn’t have got started if there was a Mrs. Jesus somewhere.
Cy Kellett:
If Christ had a bride.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. Let’s say her name is Babs.
Cy Kellett:
Babs, yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
Jesus gets crucified, Babs does not. Babs would’ve been a figure in the early church and she would’ve attracted attention. Just like, for example, Joseph Smith’s wife did after he was killed. His first wife became a prominent person in the Mormon community who was carrying on or trying to carry on her husband’s legacy until, well, Brigham Young got involved. But this is standard and it happens in religious group after religious group, if the founder’s married and when the founder dies… Because groups tend to be founded by men, and men don’t live as long as women. Usually, the founder’s wife survives the founder and is then an influential figure in the movement. Well, we would never have this metaphor of the church as the bride of Christ if there had been a Mrs. Jesus, if Babs was real and continued to exist in the church after the crucifixion and resurrection.
Cy Kellett:
Babs.
Jimmy Akin:
Also, when Jesus is asked about divorce, he teaches a celibacy ethic. He says, “It’s not for everybody, but it’s better if you can accept it.” If this is your gift, to use St. Paul’s term, then you should accept celibacy for the sake of the kingdom. He holds up celibacy for the sake of the kingdom as a spiritual ideal. Was he not practicing it?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Right.
Jimmy Akin:
Is he being a hypocrite or something? Is he holding this up? He’s portrayed and the New Testament authors regard him as the pinnacle of spirituality. If he’s the pinnacle of spirituality and he’s saying the pinnacle of spirituality is celibacy, then celibacy for the sake of the kingdom is what Jesus would’ve practiced. The got married to Mary Magdalene or anybody else, we’ve actually got strong evidence against that.
Cy Kellett:
The other one is not silly at all. As a matter of fact, the entire history of the modern world is marked by the division within Christianity that begins with the Reformation.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, I was going to say which one? Which division?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Well, that’s right. Sure. There’s plenty of them.
Jimmy Akin:
There’s a great scene in Monty Python in the Life of Brian where people are chasing after Brian, who does not want to be a Messiah, but people are thinking of him that way. He is stumbling along and he tries to hide behind a gourd he finds in the marketplace. Then he has to abandon that, and he loses one of his sandals. As soon as he escapes from them, the people who’ve been chasing him to follow him as Messiah immediately fracture into multiple different groups over he has given us the gourd. Follow the gourd. No, he has shown us his shoe. Follow the shoe. Immediate [inaudible 00:37:50].
Cy Kellett:
Right. I have to say, I do think the Christian interaction with the movie Life of Brian has been unfortunate. Because it should be engaged as an actual work of art that has something to say even though… It has its excesses, I’m not denying that. But we missed an opportunity.
Jimmy Akin:
Always look on the bright side of life.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. All right. If you haven’t seen the movie, then… Well, I won’t recommend the movie, but you won’t get that joke.
Jimmy Akin:
Certainly the division scene really rings true.
Cy Kellett:
It really does, yeah. As does the divisions within the Marxist groups of the People’s Liberation Group and the-
Jimmy Akin:
Oh, the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. It’s brilliant. But this is what I want to ask you about-
Jimmy Akin:
And the Romans go home scene is also where… Especially if you’ve ever taken Latin. “People called Romanes they go the house?” He corrects his grammar and makes him write it 100 times.
Cy Kellett:
I know. Yeah. Well, anyways, I want to get back to Life of Brian though to ask you about this though. The tendency to read this modern controversy, which you might say is between liturgical and non-liturgical Christianity or faith and works debate, back into St. Paul. Because you talked about St. Paul’s opposition to the law or his writing against and preaching against the law. To what degree is the modern controversy present in the first century, and to what degree have we impose that on the first century in order to justify our current battles?
Jimmy Akin:
At the time of the Reformation, the Protestant reformers were very critical of certain ideas that the Catholic Church taught. They wanted to find biblical reasons to oppose those ideas, and so they would read the letters of St. Paul in particular, especially Romans and Galatians, and they would take passages that talked about the law as referring to something other than the Mosaic Law. Luther, for example, divided scripture into two things, two principles that he referred to as law and gospel. Law was any requirements, and gospel was any promise of grace. That became very influential in Lutheranism. Outside of Lutheranism, nobody uses those categories. You cannot divide all of scripture into law and gospel in that way, in a way that’s sensitive to the text and how the text is using these concepts. You will still… Because it’s a tradition in Lutheranism, you’ll still have some Lutheran scholars who analyze things in terms of law and gospel because it’s part of their theological tradition.
But nobody outside of Lutheranism does that because if you make a careful study of the text, the text just does not operate in that way. There also more broadly in the Protestant community was an attempt to take Paul’s discussion of works and use it as a critique of Catholic teaching. But when you study carefully what St. Paul means by works, he’s talking about things like circumcision and food laws and what days you keep holy. He’s talking about works of the Mosaic Law. In the mid-20th century in Protestant circles, there started to be a reappraisal. It’s called the New Pauline movement or things like that. The scholars who were Protestant in that area began relooking at the text of St. Paul and trying to be sensitive to the nuances of what he’s saying. They said, “It looks like there’s been a misreading of Paul.” That this faith versus works thing that we have today is being imposed on the Pauline text rather than a rising out of the Pauline text.
When you study not just the text of St Paul, but also the writings of other early Christians in the Patristic age, the early church fathers, their views are actually coinciding with a Catholic understanding of this. There has in recent decades been something of a reconciliation between various Protestant and Catholic scholars about how St. Paul is correctly understood on these matters. Now, there’s still loads of people who are maintaining the traditional Protestant view on these matters. Not all scholars are on board with this new consensus, but the ones who have carefully studied it and are open-minded, I think broadly have embraced it. It has trickled down into some groups in the Protestant community, but not all at this point. My suspicion is that this will continue to develop in the future and continue to trickle down and gain more influence. But you know what they say? Science proceeds one funeral at a time. The same thing is true of theology.
Cy Kellett:
Right. Right. Yes, exactly. It may bear some fruit in our ongoing ecumenical efforts, it may help.
Jimmy Akin:
It has already.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Very, very good. Well, Jimmy, I appreciate you reviewing the first Century controversies with us. The one over the gourd and the shoe was not actually a first century [inaudible 00:43:36]. That’s a 20th century invention, but happy to be reminded of it because Monty Python can be viciously correct sometimes. Viciously on target where you go, “Oh, man. That hurts how close they got.” Again, thanks, Jimmy. I really appreciate it.
Jimmy Akin:
My pleasure.
Cy Kellett:
Thanks very much to our listeners. Hey, we love it when you communicate with us. You can do so by sending us an email focus@catholic.com is our email address. If you can support us financially, we appreciate it. You can do that by going to givecatholic.com. Wherever you are listening, if you give us that five stars and write a review, that helps to grow the podcast, get the word out. It helps us. We’d appreciate it. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. Thanks very much. We’ll see you next time, God willing, right here on Catholic Answers Focus.