Criterion of Embarrassment

The question is often posed by defenders of Jesus Christ’s historicity:
Why would Christ’s Apostles allow unflattering characterizations of themselves to permeate in the Gospels?

Throughout the Gospels, the Apostles are portrayed as dimwits, unable or unwilling to follow Jesus’s commands to the letter. Jesus even tells Peter to get behind him, and then refers to him as Satan! (Mk 8:33).

In my view, the answer to this question is quite disastrous to not only Jesus’s historicity, but also to the Apostles.

Let us consider some plausible reasons why the heroic Apostles would be characterized in a way as to paint them in an unflattering light:

1. Exposure of weaknesses set the stage for later epiphanies.
Most heroes must go through personal growth in order to become heroes. Personal growth implies prior imperfection
2. Exposing failings of his disciples juxtaposes Jesus and them.
Such juxtaposition creates the sort of differentiation which highlights Jesus. The Apostles were little more than supporting cast members
3. It was virtuous to have moral failings
Such virtue survives into modern Christianity. We often hear “I am born sick/a sinner/fallen”. Such failings create a bridge between the reader and Jesus via the Apostles

In my mind these solutions are the most intuitive.

However, during these past years of accumulating information about early Christianity, I have come to suspect the real solution is more insidious than what these solutions imply.

For background, I would ask the reader to consider some background facts:

1. The Gospels were not written in Hebrew or Aramaic. They were written in Greek, a fact which implies the authors might not have been from Judea (and indeed probably were not)
2. Mark, the least Jewish of the Synoptic Gospels, and perhaps the least knowledgeable of Judean geography and culture, was the first Gospel written.
3. Later writers, more familiar with Jewish culture, redacted Mark to correct obvious errors.
4. Consumers of traditions in Mark’s Gospel, namely the Basilideans, were adoptionists, believing that the Spirit moves from person to person
5. These adoptionistic themes are found throughout Mark

Adoptionism means that the Spirit is up for grabs. There is contention over it. Different players in the communities want it, claim it, and do not want to give it up. As evidenced in Acts 8:9–24, the key players, namely Peter and John, will not even give up the Spirit for money! Paul’s eyelid maintenance technician, Ananias, died in Acts 5:1-11 for attempting to withhold money from these same Apostles, which means that money was not entirely unimportant within these groups.  The fact that Ananias had to die for withholding earnings from the church smacks of a not-so-subtle attack (by proxy) of the Apostle Paul (given the relationship Ananias played in Paul’s epiphany).

According to the Basilideans, the Spirit did not move to the proximily close Apostles after Jesus died; rather, it was to the previously unknown Simon, the heroic cross-bearer who had the unhappy task of bearing Jesus Christ’s cross while he was marched to his death to fulfill a prophesy to save humanity.

As I have proposed for quite some time now, I suspect that the anomalous demon-caster in Mark 9:38-40, who had his own version of the Spirit and had the ability to cast out demons without Jesus’s explicit authority (which was in contrast to the Apostles’ authority in Mark 3:15), was a foreshadowing of this Simon, and subsequently, the unexpected later recipient of the Spirit.

Incidentally, Mark’s redactors explicitly went out of their way to have Jesus subjugate this demon caster. Matthew 7:22-23 makes it clear what its authors thought of this demon-caster:

Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’

Matthew, whose adoptionistic roots are as detectable as Mark’s (although later versions included a rethinking of this theology via the virgin birth), had different ideas about who the Spirit recipient was. I will spare the reader any guessing and put forward that Matthew’s users believed Peter was the next Spirit-holder.

This forces us to consider who the earliest Gospel writers had in mind, in terms of the contention over the next generation’s Spirit wielder. If it is not obvious at this point, consider a passage from one of Paul’s letters (Gal 2:11-13)

When Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray.

This remarkable insight into the very earliest Christian in-fighting, which frankly is never resolved by Paul (although efforts are made in Acts of the Apostles), confirms to us exactly who stood in contrast to Cephas/Peter. It was Paul!

Paul’s alter-ego, at least to some Ebionites, was Simon. Therefore, the Simon Magus encounter in Acts 8 is little more than the alternative perspective of the Antioch incident Paul describes in Galatians.

In this context, let us revisit the initial question in this post:

Why would Christ’s Apostles allow unflattering characterizations of themselves to permeate in the Gospels?

What I have implied here is that the earliest Gospel authors wrote the Apostles in a negative light because they were hostile to the Apostles and they believed that Paul was the true revealer of Christian Gnosis. The personal shortcomings of the Apostles were designed to demonstrate their inferiority to Paul. To the earliest authors, Paul was the rightful owner of the Spirit. He was the Paraclete.

Which author fits this profile? Who loves Paul but is somewhere on the spectrum between hostile and ambivalent towards the Jerusalem Apostles?

In my mind, the answer could not be more obvious: it was the Marcionites!

The Marcionite canon included 10 of Paul’s letters, along with a scaled down Synoptic Gospel. We can also plausibly put the Marcionites’ activity at the time when these Gospels were authored.

The next question in this line is: why do later Gospels repeat Mark’s characterization of the Apostles? In my mind, this is explained by the fact that the proto-Mark was already very popular – too popular to withstand too drastic of a reworking without Orthodoxical authority behind it. The cat was out of the bag, and frankly, such a drastic reworking was unnecessary and untenable.

Reworking of the Apostles would instead be done in various Acts literature by communities focused on emphasizing historicity and writing the ancient equivalent of fan fiction.

The implication here is that much of the intellectual property developed by the earliest Christian practitioners was hijacked and repurposed by a later Orthodoxy.