What If Christianity Had Turned Out Differently? (Bonus)

Season 2 · Episode 31

Full episode description

Season 2 closes with a bonus episode that runs the counterfactuals. Christianity inherited a particular shape. It is one shape. There were others available, and at several moments those other shapes very nearly became the future.

This episode asks:

• what if Marcion’s canon had won, and the Hebrew Bible had been left out of Christian scripture
• what if the Jerusalem community had held authority over Paul’s gentile mission, and circumcision had remained required
• what if Pauline Christianity had been overrun by the apocalyptic Christianity of the Book of Revelation, and accommodation with Rome had remained an heresy
• what if the Gnostic schools had won the second century, and salvation through knowledge had become the dominant frame
• what if Constantine had picked a different religion, or none, and Christianity had remained one cult among many
• what if Arius had won at Nicaea, and the eternal divinity of Christ had not become orthodoxy
• what if the eastern and western churches had not eventually split, and the Reformation had not eventually followed
• what the world inherited because the actual sequence of contingencies happened to run the way it did

The point is not nostalgia for a lost Christianity. The point is to see, clearly and historically, that the religion we have was assembled by a particular sequence of fights, and that the assembly was not preordained. A tradition that has trained itself to read its own arrival as inevitable can lose the ability to see what it cost.

This is the close of Season 2. Season 3 will follow what the winners did with the victory.

Not from tradition. From evidence.