Resetting the Origins of Christianity: A New Theory of Sources and Beginnings by Markus Vinzent (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Resetting the Origins of Christianity: A New Theory of Sources and Beginnings by Markus Vinzent
• Michael Hollerich

Markus Vinzent
Resetting the Origins of Christianity: A New Theory of Sources and Beginnings
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023
Pp. xvi + 401. $39.99.

Markus Vinzent's new book applies the "retrospective" historical method that he has been developing ever since his controversial Christ's Resurrection in Early Christianity and the Making of the New Testament (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011) to examine what we think we know about how Christianity began. Those unfamiliar with his project should begin with the Epilogue, "Outlook: How Were Things Actually?" (325–33) and the Appendix on "Chronological and Anachronological Historiography" (334–54), in which three timelines illustrate the stifling conventionality still exerted by the historical writing of Eusebius of Caesarea.

We will never in fact know how Christianity began for two main reasons. First, we are unconsciously conditioned by centuries of previous historical writing. The book demonstrates this retrospectively by digging through layers of such sources, starting from the sixth century and culminating in a long chapter on the several collections of the letters of Ignatius of Antioch and of St. Paul. Second, we do not have self-identified "Christian" documentation until the 140s, after the Bar Kochba war. Here Vinzent unapologetically repeats his fundamental thesis from earlier books: that the canonical Gospels and the New Testament itself by that name owe their existence to the creative genius of Marcion of Sinope, who wrote the first gospel by putting oral traditions about Jesus of Nazareth into a geographical and biographical form. We cannot go back before Marcion. The new book builds on his earlier hypotheses, "even though they are not (yet) shared by the vast majority of my colleagues" (xiv).

Our time travel thus ends in a "black box of ignorance" (337). Vinzent holds a radical view of the common opinion that Christianity by that name did not exist as a religion that thought and acted separately from Jewish practice until the mid-second century. Our ignorance means that a "dogmatically closed beginning" (333) is literally unthinkable, an aporia that happily discredits divisive and absolutist religious ideologies.

I can speak most usefully on Vinzent's treatment of Eusebius in Chapter Two. Because Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History and, to a lesser degree, his Chronicle became the "quasi 'official' history" (116), Vinzent asks how differently we would regard the beginnings of Christianity if we could set aside the views that we inherit from Eusebius's configuration of the story. Eusebius's seductive power arises from the massive documentation that obscures the "circular thinking" involved (114). Eusebius as "puppeteer" sets his stage by selecting "almost exclusively orthodox ecclesiastical (and therefore trustworthy) sources to explain the emergence of the orthodox church to his supposed orthodox readership" (115). Now, it is certainly true that Eusebius carefully curated his sources. But modern scholarship has remorselessly exposed his partiality. It lost its conditioning power a long time ago.

Notable is Vinzent's startling assertion that the moments on the historical timeline when Eusebius introduces texts may also be when those texts actually [End Page 147] came into being. This is an argument from silence, a move for which he has been criticized in the past. He is impressed that in Book 1 of the Ecclesiastical History, Eusebius avoids citing what otherwise would be apposite New Testament texts, the Gospels above all, in favor of relying on Josephus and on the Syriac source on the conversion of King Abgar of Edessa. Similarly, in Book 2, Eusebius prefers Josephus again, along with Philo and non-canonical Christian writers like Julius Africanus and Clement of Alexandria. That is why, he suggests, "we may deduce that Eusebius still knew about the Gospels' being created around the mid-second century rather than during the first" (94), a conclusion that appears to be drawn out of thin air.

It is more plausible to argue that Eusebius's reticence regarding canonical texts reflects their sacrality and the sacrality of Christ's life rather than their marginality. It has also been proposed (historian David DeVore) that, in the apostolic period, it is the collective identity of the founders that mattered...