Biblical & Theological Issues

(First published in Areopagus Journal Vol. 12 No. 1 – Lost Christianities?)

by Robert W. Yarbrough –

Two Critical Questions
Two preliminary questions face us before we can really take up the query posed in this essay’s title. First, what do we mean by orthodoxy? Many churches around the world
recognize the importance of ancient creeds, or confessions of faith. They teach them as summaries of the faith to their children and to new converts. The church as a whole may repeat a creed as part of worship to encourage and reinforce saving faith and to glorify God together in a public way. Creeds give us one avenue for understanding “orthodoxy.” Ortho- in ancient Greek meant “straight” or “correct,” while dox- pertained to how things were or should be regarded.¹ “Orthodox” applied to statements of Christian conviction means they are regarded as correct or true.²

“Orthodoxy” is, accordingly, true Christian belief. Traditionally, this meant it was rooted in and conformed to what the Bible says. Perhaps the best-known ancient summary of orthodoxy in this sense is called the Apostles’ Creed:³

I believe in God, the Father Almighty,
the Maker of heaven and earth;
and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our
Lord: who was conceived by the Holy
Spirit, born of the virgin Mary, suffered
under Pontius Pilate, was crucified,
dead, and buried; He descended into
hell. The third day He arose again from
the dead; He ascended into heaven,
and sits on the right hand of God the
Father Almighty; from thence he shall
come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit; the holy
catholic church; the communion of
saints; the forgiveness of sins; the
resurrection of the body; and the life
everlasting. Amen.

The issue before us is this: did a set body of Christian conviction bearing significant resemblance to elements of the Apostles’ Creed come into dominance only centuries
after the New Testament era? And did this occur by devious or otherwise unscrupulous means, like political maneuvering or some form of strong-arm tactics? Or perhaps by the operation of a conspiracy that has remained obscured through the centuries?

Second, why should this even be a question? Doesn’t the Apostles’ Creed pretty much summarize what the Bible says?⁴ Why should anyone suppose that biblical faith of this general description did not arise and crystallize around the time of Jesus’ ministry and soon afterward as his earliest, Christ-appointed followers went forth spreading the message of salvation through faith in their crucified and risen Lord? Why in recent years has there been an increasing clamor charging that orthodox Christian conviction was an invention of later generations and not the basic belief-and-life system passed on “from the beginning”⁵ by Jesus and his hand-picked followers?

A recent book’s subtitle tells the story of what has happened in many circles in our times: “How contemporary culture’s fascination with diversity has reshaped our understanding of early Christianity.” The book itself is entitled The Heresy of Orthodoxy.⁶ The authors address the fact that through the writings of a long dead
German scholar named Walter Bauer (1877-1960), and through his ideological descendants like Bart Ehrman, many have been become convinced that Christianity
before the fourth century was just a jumbled mass of diverse and warring factions, with little to no doctrinal commonality that could claim historical continuity with Jesus and the apostles who went forth in his name. This outlook (which we will call “the Bauer thesis” below) has gained popularity and even media acclaim in recent years, but its impact in scholarship has been known and in some cases become a controlling force for decades.⁷

An example of the “Bauer” view of early Christian origins may aid in what it would look like to view a doctrinally-focused early Christianity as “an historical invention.” In this view, some generations after the first century

. . . one of the competing groups in
Christianity succeeded in overwhelming
all the others. The group gained more
converts than its opponents and
managed to relegate all its competitors
to the margins. . . . This group became
“orthodox,” and once it had sealed its
victory over all its opponents, it rewrote
the history of the engagement—
claiming that it had always been the
majority opinion of Christianity, that
its views had always been the views
of the apostolic churches and of the
apostles, that its creeds were rooted
directly in the teachings of Jesus. The
books that it accepted as Scripture
proved the point, for Matthew, Mark,
Luke and John all tell the story as the
proto-orthodox had grown accustomed
to hearing it.⁸

More recently this same author has published a book arguing that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are forgeries.⁹ This view may be necessitated in part by the author’s open admission that while he would like to believe,¹⁰ he has lost all faith in a God who in any way intervenes in this world,¹¹ and recognizes that “faith in the Judeo-Christian tradition has a God who intervenes.”¹² In other words, he does not believe in the God Christians confess and of whom Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote.
It therefore makes sense to regard ancient references to him as inventions and forgeries, historically speaking.

Is Bart Ehrman (and his views are by no means unique in the academic world) correct? Was Apostles’ Creed-type Christianity a contrivance, something invented in later
centuries and then projected back onto the New Testament age, perhaps using forged documents in support? I want to call attention to four major areas of study that permit us to answer that question with a confident “No.” Or to put it positively, I will argue that a collection of beliefs compatible with the Apostles’ Creed does not owe its existence to an invention of history. The best explanation for such a system (and Christian enclaves that sprang up beginning in the AD 30s and 40s who embraced and lived out such views) is rather divine truths and actions along the lines of what the New Testament writings present and what the Apostles’ Creed summarizes.

The Basis for Orthodoxy
It would be simplistic to propose one reason only for orthodoxy’s rise. In a sense, the basis for full-orbed Christian confession, like any phenomenon taking shape in history, is multifaceted. There are all sorts of human elements observable—religious, political, economic, psychological, philosophical, social, and more. If Christian confession is valid, there are divine elements also at work that are too rich and numerous to catalog, let alone explain. But Köstenberger and Kruger make a telling remark in their recent book examining the Bauer thesis, a hypothesis claiming that “heresy” (or heterodox convictions about Jesus) preceded “orthodoxy” in the first century and beyond: “Bauer and his followers. . .vastly underestimate the pivotal significance of Jesus.”¹³

Specifically, to argue successfully that orthodoxy is an historical invention, we need to discredit what is probably the central plank of apostolic preaching and subsequent
church teaching: the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The tomb was found empty. The risen Lord appeared—to individuals, to the twelve, to many.¹⁴ This, not an historical contrivance, accident, or conspiracy, was a primary basis for initial confession of Jesus as Lord, a conviction echoed and expanded in the “orthodox” Apostles’ Creed.

It is not the place of this essay to present empirical justification for the claim that Jesus rose from the dead, resulting within a short time span in creedal confession. But happily, that argument has been made in impressive fashion by two fairly recent books. One is by N. T. Wright.¹⁵ Over 800 pages in length, it has been termed “the most monumental defense of the Easter heritage in decades. . .” by Associated Press journalist Richard Ostling, who noted that Wright “marches through a clearly organized
case that confronts every major doubt about Easter, ancient and modern.”¹⁶ Even reviewers who reject the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection concede the book’s impressive stature. Wright argues for the historic Christian claim that the tomb was empty and that Jesus truly did rise from the dead.

More recent is the equally massive study by Michael Licona.¹⁷ Over 700 pages in length, it is perhaps the most exhaustive study ever on the formal methodology of “critical” study of Jesus’ resurrection. It also treats the historical evidence itself. Among Licona’s core findings:

My conclusions were both more
sanguine and restricted than I had
anticipated. I was surprised by the
actual strength of the resurrection
hypothesis. At the same time, I learned
that carefully defined method applied
to the question of Jesus’ resurrection
cannot ascertain the cause of Jesus’
resurrection with substantial certainty,
although a supernatural cause seems to
be the best candidate. Furthermore, the
presently available historical bedrock
cannot tell us anything about the nature
of Jesus’ resurrection state. However,
I have argued that there is superb
evidence that the earliest Christians
understood that Jesus’ corpse had
been raised and transformed, and that
is what Paul and the original disciples
believed they had seen (p. 621).

Other books furnishing grounds for positive assessment of the New Testament’s resurrection claims could be mentioned. There are the older but still telling transcripts of debates and discussion between the leading (and now late) atheist Antony Flew ¹⁸ and Gary Habermas, the latter joined in this book by
Christian colleagues Terry Miethe and David Beck.¹⁹ More recently, we may point to a forum on the topic, centering on debate between N. T. Wright and John Dominic Crossan, with several arguing for Jesus’ resurrection.²⁰ There is the erudite and refreshingly frank discussion by Craig Keener, who places (study
of) Jesus’ resurrection in the larger context of scholarship on his whole life.²¹ In addition to chapter 22 “The Resurrection,” of special interest is “Appendix 8: What Really Happened at the Tomb,” where Keener recounts his own shift from atheism to Christian faith including resurrection belief. Or one might point to a
recent scholarly investigation of a dozen key events in Jesus’ life, the pinnacle of which was his resurrection, to which a chapter (by Grant Osborne) is devoted in this book.²²

The point here is simply that there is no reason to speak of historical invention of something for which there is ample (some would say compelling) historical evidence. “Orthodoxy” may be reasonably defined as “correct teaching regarding the person and work of Jesus Christ, including the way of salvation, in contrast to teaching regarding Jesus that deviates from standard norms of Christian doctrine.”²³ While the foundations for this teaching can be broken down into
various components, Jesus’ bodily resurrection is surely a primary basis.²⁴ Wide-ranging and voluminous scholarship advances the proposition that people believed that Jesus rose because he did rise, not because centuries later there would be an event or events that permitted conniving (or just superstitious) church leaders to make up resurrection tales, forge documents to substantiate those tales, and then build a vast institutional church to lord these tales over gullible masses.

The Historical Necessity of Orthodoxy

From an historian’s viewpoint, one challenge posed by orthodoxy is: how did it arise? How did the distinct claims of Apostles’ Creed conviction come to be formulated and affirmed across wide expanses of the first-century Roman empire in just a generation? We are dealing here with one of the historian’s primary concerns: change.²⁵ How did the convictions we now call “orthodoxy” arise and spread where previously the confession of these particulars as a whole did not exist? The author of the most comprehensive study on the rise and spread of Christian faith to be written in over a hundred years,²⁶ Eckhard Schnabel, puts the question this way: “How was it possible that the religious convictions inseparably linked with the Jewish faith came to be accepted by increasing numbers of non-Jews?”²⁷ The question is pertinent for our purposes in that most clauses in the Apostles’ Creed have roots in Old Testament teaching, history, and prophecy. The New Covenant is the fulfillment of the Old Covenant, with numerous lines of continuity, not a brand-spanking new religion or set of beliefs. For example, the Apostles’ Creed’s first article of belief in God, “creator of heaven and earth,” is a clear restatement of the opening verses of Genesis. The second article of the Creed calls Jesus the “only Son” of this same God. Schnabel cites nine reasons that have been advanced, but that are clearly inadequate, to explain the rise and spread of Christian conviction:²⁸ (1) the disfavor into which polytheism had fallen in the popular Greco-Roman mind during the New Testament era; (2) the weakening of the Greek city-state (polis); (3) religious syncretism (but syncretism can hardly account for the consistent monotheism of New Testament writers); (4) the Hellenistic ruler cult (but that can hardly explain faith in a crucified Jew); (5) decline in pagan religiosity;(6) social status inconsistency leaving women, Jews, and others open to conversion to another group and “status” in the church; (7) spiritual hunger and anxiety resulting in a longing for salvation in many pagan circles; (8) Christian exclusiveness which attracted many to a new and distinct communal life; and (9) the barren anonymity and isolation of urban life in the Roman world. Scholars have proposed all of these as factors for an “historical” explanation of the rise of Christianity. But as Schnabel points out, while there may be some truth to any or all of them in a given locale or decade, none suffices to give an adequate account for the rise of Christian faith or the “orthodoxy” that comprised its confessional identity.

Schnabel lists six additional explanations that have been offered, all containing some truth but none sufficient in itself to explain either the way orthodoxy arose or the peculiar forms it assumed:²⁹ (1) miracles and exorcisms (these were paralleled in pagan and Jewish circles, and moreover as the Gospels make clear, observed miracles do not necessarily result in saving faith in Jesus by observers); (2) the courage of martyrs; (3) the impression made by Christians’ exercise of love for others and charitable acts; (4) the Christian view of life after death; (5) the historical bases for the Christian faith (but these could be and were discounted by many); and (6) Christian inclusiveness that transcended many social barriers (while this ideal is applauded in the modern West, evidence is lacking that pagans converted to the faith for this reason).

The conclusion at which Schnabel arrives is perhaps unexpected coming from a scholar who writes nearly 2,000 pages on early Christian mission. We might anticipate
a clear and definite answer to the question of what caused Christianity’s rise and spread! Instead, Schnabel observes that none of the factors listed above “sufficiently explains the astonishing spread of Christianity” in the judgment of historians of recent generations. He concludes, accordingly, “It may be more than Christian bias if we see the growth of the church as the work of divine providence.”³⁰

In other words, there is a mysterious quality to the rapid rise, spread, tenacity, and relative consistency of what Jude 3 calls “the faith that was once for all delivered to the
saints.” Jude does not refer, of course, to the Apostles’ Creed specifically. But the theological convictions present in Jude (along with other New Testament documents) are consistent with what this Creed affirms. From an “historical” standpoint, Schnabel helps us see that there is no neat, definite, “historical” explanation for what early Christians believed, preached and taught; disseminated across the Roman world; and in some cases died for. “Orthodoxy” seen as an affirmation of what the Triune God has done to save the lost is an historical necessity central to accounting for the indubitable rise and existence of early Christian confession and communities. Christianity could hardly have spread as it did without broad-based agreement among its followers about the content of its doctrinal core. To speak of “historical invention” here has a shaky basis in the full constellation of sources, facts, and artifacts that give us access into the opening generations of Jesus’ disciples, prophets, preachers, and worshipers and the expanding communities their mission work helped spawn.

The Empirical Evidence for Orthodoxy

Tied up closely with the question of orthodoxy are questions regarding the New Testament canon. When were New Testament books written? When were they accepted as
“Scripture” by early Christians? Who decided which writings would be in the fledgling “Bible” (Old Testament plus emerging New Testament writings) and which would be left out? Orthodoxy and canon are intertwined, because the former purported to be based on the latter—ancient church leaders did not propound doctrines from their own imagination but attempted to articulate what they believed constituted “the faith” given to God’s people by God through inspired writings. For this reason, orthodoxy questions eventually lead back to issues related to canon.

This is why the validity of the New Testament canonization process has been questioned and from some quarters attacked in the modern era. In various ways and to various degrees, certain scholars have alleged that in the early generations and even centuries of the church, there were no authoritative writings, just as the Bauer thesis (see above) claims that in the early era there was no “orthodoxy.” In the Bauer model, divergent groups generated competing writings (none of them “true,” strictly speaking, since they were all merely human religious creations), and it was only centuries later than a group we now call “orthodox” managed to achieve hegemony,
marginalize the competition, and make it look like the “orthodox” had been “right” from the beginning.

If it can be shown, however, that core New Testament books bearing the essential gospel message were written and widely accepted early—say, by the closing decades
of the first century, when eyewitnesses would still be alive—then the case is strengthened for the existence of established and widespread “orthodox” faith growing out of
those commonly-affirmed writings.

A significant book appeared in 2010 that shows that the canonical Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—were widely affirmed and used by believers in far flung locales by the end of the first century. Who Chose the Gospels?, authored by C. E. Hill,³¹ confronts the charge that the “canon” as our Bibles reflect it never existed until centuries after the New Testament began to emerge. Those who deny that a canon (and orthodoxy) stretched back to the first century argue that long after that time, there was some event, movement, person, or group who imposed their arbitrary selection of documents on the whole church (and excluded documents of equal or superior value). Sometimes this occurrence is linked with the Roman emperor Constantine,³² or with a church council.³³ Who chose the Gospels? The skeptical answer is:
some power-grabbing bishop or movement long after the first century had become a distant memory.

Hill’s book takes up this issue in dialogue with influential writings like those of Elaine Pagels and Bart Ehrman. In examining the evidence of the second-century papyri, Hill shows that some scholars as well as National Geographic have made erroneous claims about the prevalence of apocryphal “gospels” in the second century.³⁴ Relevant
papyri are not abundant, but what there are show that both the numbers of Christian texts discovered so far and the formats in which they were written. . .attest to the
prominence of at least the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John in Egyptian Christianity from the earliest time from which we have evidence (the second half of the second century CE). This, obviously, is long before the emperor Constantine and long before any of the church councils of the fourth and fifth centuries.³⁵

This foundational chapter in Hill’s study sets the stage for the remainder of the book, in which he describes the use of the Gospels (along with the Old Testament and other
New Testament writings) in the writings of second century figures in places besides Egypt. Authors explored include Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, and many others. From Alexandria to Rome to Antioch, by the late second century the four Gospels “were well established among churches throughout the Roman empire.”³⁶ By the end of the book, Hill has pushed the date for our evidence of many of our canonical writings (and particularly the Gospels) being regarded as such back to the first century.³⁷ At the same time, he shows that apocryphal writings like Gospel of Thomas show up later (in some cases several centuries later), long after canonical Gospel usage and in fact hegemony can be documented. A major conclusion of Hill’s book is that in the question of “who chose the Gospels?,” “second-century Christian leaders would have said that neither individuals nor churches had the authority to ‘choose’ which of the many Gospels they liked, but to receive the ones given by God and handed down by Christ through his apostles.”³⁸

We may say something similar about orthodoxy and whether it is an historical invention. The Gospel (and other) writings in our New Testament were not foisted on church and world at some date centuries removed from the New Testament era. And the central message of the Gospel writings—“orthodoxy” along the lines sketched in the Apostles’ Creed—was not contrived and eventually smuggled into a dominant place by either haphazard or devious means.

Rather, the most logical and reasonable construal of the empirical evidence is that the core and scaffolding of orthodoxy, as provided by our four Gospels with their laser focus on Jesus as God incarnate, who died for sins and rose and ascended into heaven, were early on the scene, while rival gospels with their divergent teachings, claims, and visions are by comparison later and derivative. This may be out of step with popular conspiracy theories and the tone of “secret gospel” books that seem to reproduce like mice in the religion section of trendy bookstores. But if facts count for anything, we are bound to admit that no one invented or even “chose” the canon in ways commonly insinuated. Similarly, the true doctrines—the “orthodoxy”—that emerged in the early generations after the New Testament era were not “invented” but rather took shape as biblical writings were read, preached, copied, spread, and lived out. Little to nothing found in the Apostles’ Creed is not already present in the New Testament writings.

Church Historical Pointers toward Orthodoxy
Mark Noll has rightly stated that church history “is never just the grand sweep through great eons of magisterial Doctrines. . .but is rather the cumulative result of the often blurred thoughts, often hesitant actions, and often unforeseen consequences experienced by people more or less like ourselves.”³⁹ While fundamental planks in Apostles’ Creed-type “orthodoxy” are affirmed already in the New Testament (and in some cases Old Testament) documents, scriptural teaching underwent development as the early church was founded and spread. This process is visible already in the New Testament. For example, Acts 15 (ca. AD 49) describes a dispute over the extent to which Old Testament and Jewish beliefs and practices should be retained in Jesus-enclaves that had emerged across the Roman empire by that time, particularly as Gentiles were
becoming part of the mix. Salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone was the verdict. Acts 19 describes followers of Jesus who had not yet received the Holy Spirit. Believers at Rome and Corinth are reminded of the acute relevance of Old Testament writings and history for their own present circumstances (Rom. 15:4; 1 Cor. 10:11).

Disputes and processes of (re)definition continued into the generations and centuries that followed. Yet it may be a false dichotomy to assert, “The church did not begin in orthodoxy; rather orthodoxy progressively emerged in the first five centuries.”⁴⁰ The matter is not either/ or. The process of emergence, in the sense of working out details and applying biblical teaching to new and changing circumstances, is undeniable. But to say “the church did not begin in orthodoxy” is unduly skeptical, or perhaps understands “orthodoxy” as it would have existed at first in too sophisticated away. True, Jesus and the apostles did not distribute polished creeds for corporate recital⁴¹ in houses of worship each Sunday; it took time for the church to move from streamsides (see Acts 16:13) and households (see Philm. 2) into buildings dedicated to Christian assemblage. It took time for Sunday rather than Saturday worship to become universal.

Yet creeds (like the Shema) were recited in the synagogue. Owing to its deep Old Testament and Jewish roots, early church practice would have been conditioned to make corporate confession of fundamental beliefs from early on. If the New Testament is true, there were many such beliefs to choose from. Oskar Skarsaune argues strongly for the Jewish roots of the Old Roman Creed, the forerunner of the Apostles’ Creed.⁴² Just because scholars in our era (perhaps following the theory of Adolf Harnack that early Christianity was charismatic and not doctrinal) do not associate Christian faith with definite distinct beliefs does not mean that early Christians didn’t. Just because evangelical Christians often do not recite creeds does not mean that most Christians throughout history haven’t made regular use of them. The creedal impulse
is primordial, strong, and pervasive, and to exercise it requires a set of convictions to confess.

Most New Testament teachings underwent refinement during and following apostolic times. Still, there was always a center. We can speak early on of “mainstream Christian leaders”⁴³ and “the mainstream church”⁴⁴ in terms of its fundamental beliefs about God, Jesus, and his work to redeem the lost. Even the enemy of Christianity Celsus (ca. AD 170) attacked Christian belief by using the four Gospels—our canonical Gospels— and speaking of “the Great Church” that he recognized as the dominant form of Christian presence in his time.⁴⁵ While we may agree that “church life in its first five hundred years was a river of change as the church developed and clarified its boundaries,” it is likewise true that early church writings “point back to the original gospel as well as on from the original gospel.”⁴⁶ There are change and shifting boundaries, but from the beginning there was a gospel core which anchored subsequent doctrinal exploration. Already in 2 John 7 there is warning against the errant soul who “innovates and does not abide in the teaching of Christ.”⁴⁷ There is likewise in the same verse blessing on offer: “Whoever abides in the teaching has both the Father
and the Son.” “Orthodoxy” takes the shapes finally crystallized in the early creeds through processes of both reformulation/application/ extension and abiding in/retaining/confessing “that which was from the beginning” (1 John1:1).

A major finding of a well-known sociological account of Christianity’s rise by Rodney Stark⁴⁸ amounts to an endorsement of the notion that orthodoxy, understood as widespread, shared, central doctrines that tended to produce similar behavior in varied geographical settings, was a key feature in Christianity’s founding, survival,
and spread. Stark writes that “doctrines were often of immense importance. Surely doctrine was central to nursing the sick during times of plague, to the rejection of abortion and infanticide, to fertility, and to organizational vigor.”⁴⁹ Stark devotes chapters to each of these domains of Christian conviction and action. At the end, his major finding is: “Central doctrines of Christianity prompted and sustained attractive, liberating, and effective social relations and organizations.”⁵⁰ Stark focuses
on early Christian belief in and practice of love for each other and for all humans, rooted in the character of God himself. “This was revolutionary stuff. Indeed, it was the
cultural basis for the revitalization of a Roman world groaning under a host of miseries.”⁵¹ Transformative shared beliefs about God, and about Christ sacrificing for others that they should believe and do likewise, established “orthodoxy” in a Roman world that was vast and generally hostile to it. That is simply an observation available to any and all willing to see what the evidence confronts us with.

Summary and Postscript

“Orthodoxy” was not an historical invention. This essay has defined the term and shown why this has become an issue today. We have explored four reasons for answering this essay’s title in the negative.

First, a primary basis for orthodoxy is the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. Neither that event nor reports attesting to it are an “invention.”

Second, of the dozens of “historical” reasons given, none is sufficient to explain the rise and spread of early Christianity. Some form and amount of divine causation must be posited. The work of God in sending Jesus is far from some contrived “invention.”

Third, early church writers and leaders going back to Clement of Rome (AD 95), Papias of Hierapolis (ca. AD 100), and many others reflect the existence and growing appropriation of not only Old Testament but also New Testament and especially Gospel documents. The early and growing attestation of our canonical writings (and general shunning of “apocryphal” ones52) is an undeniable feature of the patristic literary corpus—as is the burgeoning faith, the “orthodoxy,” that eventually formalizes the teaching of those writings.

Fourth, church historical considerations are reasonably understood as supporting the early affirmation of creedal Christianity rather than some late and marginal emergence of it.

Parties today may not welcome the news that historical and empirical sources deliver: orthodoxy in nascent form is grounded in biblical revelation and the communities, both Old and New Testament, who received and passed it along. Evidence is simply lacking to speak of Apostles’ Creed-type Christian faith as an “historical invention.” On the other hand, many pieces of evidence fall into place when we recognize the reality of the persons, events, convictions, and Scriptures that gave rise to and first defined that faith.

As a postscript, it may be pointed out that while intellectual circles in the West persist in skepticism toward the clear biblical and early church testimony to the saving Christian message, that message has swept across the populace of other continents and continues to do so. While smug Western intellectuals use sophisticated arguments with fascinating roots going back to the Enlightenment and beyond to discredit this world’s only hope of peace and redemption, tens of thousands each day opt to embrace orthodoxy and its fruits.⁵³ It is entirely possible that there are currently more martyrs month by month than there are new ordinands in Western denominations that uphold sub- and anti-Christian beliefs by historic standards. If the Lord tarries, and a tempered-by-fire church continues to take root internationally, future generations of scholars may look back and see that it is not orthodoxy that was an historical invention but the post- Christian Western cynicism that made disbelief rather than robust affirmation of revealed truth so chic for so many for so long.⁵⁴

Robert W. Yarbrough is chair of the New Testament Department and associate professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. Among his many scholarly works, Dr. Yarbrough is the author of I John 1-3 in the Baker Exegetical Commentary Series (2008), and The Kregal Pictorial Guide to the New Testament (2008).

Notes
1 See H. G. Liddell and R. Scott with H. S. Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 444. New Testament Greek students may think in terms of the word doxa, “glory,” here, but as the lexicon entry shows, that is another semantic field of the dox- lexeme.
2 Cf. ibid., 1248, where the noun orthodoxia is glossed as “right opinion” and the adjective orthodoxos, -on, as “orthodox in religion” (italics in original).
3 Adapted from http://www.reformed.org/documents/index.html?mainframe=http://www.reformed.org/documents/apostles_creed.html. For a summary of the history and pre-history of this Creed, see F. L. Cross, The Early Christian Fathers (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1960), 88-93. Cross joins Harnack in tracing the Apostles’ Creed back to the Old Roman Creed which can be dated to ca. AD 100. He adds that the Old Roman Creed is rooted in statements found in the Pauline Epistles
(ibid., 91, 92).
4Probably the most controversial clause contained in the Creed is “He descended into hell.” For classic statements pro and con, see Wayne Grudem, “He Did Not Descend into Hell: A Plea for Following Scripture Instead of the Apostles’ Creed,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 34/1 (1991) 103-113; David Scaer, “He Did Descend to Hell: In Defense of the Apostles’ Creed,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 35/1 (1992) 91-99.
5 See, e.g., 1 John 1:1-3.
6 Andreas J. Köstenberger and Michael J. Kruger, The Heresy of Orthodoxy (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010).
7 See, e.g., already the study from over 30 years ago by Daniel Harrington, “The Reception of Walter Bauer’s Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity during the Last Decade,” Harvard Theological Review 73 (1980) 289-98.

8 Bart Ehrman, “Christianity Turned on Its Head: The Alternative Vision of the Gospel of Judas,” in The Gospel of Judas: From Codex Tchacos (ed. R. Kasser, M. Meyer, and G. Wurst; Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2006), 118. For confirmation that this view is not original to Ehrman but is conveyed already in Bauer’s Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, see the review of Bauer by Walther Völker that appeared in 1935 and has now been translated: Thomas Scheck, “Walter Bauer’s Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Christentum,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 14/4 (2006) 399-405.
9 Bart Ehrman, Forged: Writing in the Name of God-Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are (New York: HarperOne, 2011).
10 Hershel Shanks, “Losing Faith: Who Did and Who Didn’t. How Scholarship Affects Scholars,” Biblical Archaeology Review (33/2 [Mar/Apr 2007]) 57.
11 Ibid., 52, 57.
12 Ibid., 57.
13 Köstenberger and Kruger, The Heresy of Orthodoxy,100.
14 See 1 Corinthians 15:1-8.
15 The Resurrection of the Son of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God 3; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003).
16 Ibid., 1.
17 The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Academic/Nottingham, UK: Apollos, 2010).
18 For notes on Flew’s conviction late in life that there might be a God, though not one like the God of Christianity or Islam, see the obituary by William Grimes that appeared in The New York Times on April 17, 2010.
19 Gary Habermas and Antony Flew, Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? The Resurrection Debate (ed. Terry Miethe; San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987).
20 Robert B. Stewart, ed., The Resurrection of Jesus: John Dominic Crossan and N. T. Wright in Dialogue (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006).
21 Craig Keener, The Historical Jesus of the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009).
22 Darrell L. Bock and Robert L. Webb, ed., Key Events in the Life of the Historical Jesus: A Collaborative Exploration of Context and Coherence (WUNT 247;
Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009).
23 Köstenberger and Kruger, The Heresy of Orthodoxy, 70-71.
24 Note, e.g., Romans 1:4.
25 Cf. Paul Barnett, Jesus and the Rise of Early Christianity (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1999), 14.
26 I. e., Eckhard Schnabel, Early Christian Mission (2 vols.; Downers Grove: InterVarsity/Leicester, UK: Apollos, 2004).
27 Schnabel, “Mission, Early Non-Pauline,” in Dictionary of the Later New Testament and Its Developments (ed. R. P. Martin and P. H. Davids; Downers Grove: InterVarsity/Leicester, UK: Apollos, 1997), 752.
28 See ibid., 772-773.
29 Ibid., 773.
30 Schnabel, “Mission, Early Non-Pauline,” in Dictionary of the Later New Testament and Its Developments, 773.
31 Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
32 As in Dan Brown’s popular book The Da Vinci Code.
33 Stephen Prothero suggests the Council of Laodicea (ca. AD 363); see American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), 7-8.
34 Hill, Who Chose the Gospels?, chapter 1.
35 Ibid., 32-33.
36 Ibid., 121.
37 For work with comparable findings see by David Trobisch
38 Ibid., 246.
39 Mark Noll, Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity (Grand Rapids: Baker/Leicester, UK: Inter-Varsity, 1997), 14.
40 Laurie Guy, Introducing Christianity: A Topical Survey of Its Life, Beliefs and Practices (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2004), 248.
41 New Testament scholars have noted, however, passages that may have served as early, repeated creedal statements (e.g., portions of 1 Corinthians 15; 1 Timothy 3:16; Colossians 1:15-20; Philippians 2:6-11.
42 In the Shadow of the Temple: Jewish Influences on Early Christianity (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2002), 312-317.
43 Guy, Introducing Early Christianity, 254.
44 Ibid., 266.
45 Hill, Whose Chose the Gospels?, 157.
46 Guy, Introducing Early Christianity, 295.
47 My translation.
48 I.e., The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries
(San Francisco: Harper SanFrancisco, 1997).
49 Ibid., 209.
50 Ibid., 210 (Stark’s emphasis).
51 Ibid., 212.
52 Polycarp (writing ca. AD 110) clearly delineates between his own writing to the church and the letters of Paul (Polycarp to the Philippians 3:2). How much more would he have distinguished between Paul’s writings and spurious ones?
53 Cf. Philip Jenkins, The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
54 I wish to thank Mike Honeycutt, Jonathan Pennington, and Luke Yarbrough for their critical comments on an earlier draft of this essay.