HOW DID THE EARLY CHURCH MANAGE to come out with a reasonably strong consensus on orthodox belief? The Gnostics and Judaizers lost out, after all, and notwithstanding the Arian controversy and suchlike subtle issues, the Christianity of the Apostle's Creed seems to have been universal by 300. In Professor Gary Anderson's review of Elaine Pagels' silly new book on gnosticism (in the Weekly Standard), he raises this good question, as well as politely knocking her out of the ring:

Although this anticlerical position will appeal to many modern readers, it is altogether anachronistic to cede such power and authority to the Church in antiquity. Though bishops frequently claimed great power, in reality they possessed little. As Harry Gamble notes, the earliest Church was composed of "numerous and far-flung Christian congregations, large and small, [that] nevertheless retained a sharp awareness of their collective identity as the ecclesia katholike and affirmed their mutual relations through frequent communication." The result was not a highly centralized power structure run by a tiny elite of bishops but rather "a highly reticulated system of local communities that spanned the Mediterranean world but preserved a strong sense of translocal unity and cultivated contacts with each other."

THE QUESTION PAGELS ought to pose, but never does, is why this far- flung, highly decentralized network found the teaching of figures like Irenaeus and Origen so compelling in the absence of a larger power structure to enforce it. The governance of the Christian movement in the second, third, and even fourth centuries cannot be characterized in simplistic top-down terms; much of what now has come to be characterized as "orthodox" emerged from the ground up.

In sum, what we have in Elaine Pagels's "Beyond Belief" is a well- written account of why one educated woman finds herself unable to recite the creeds today--and why the Gnostics, rather than the orthodox early Christians, seem to her closer to the typical feelings of a twenty- first-century college professor.

My own advice to the perspective reader would be to read a precis of the Gnostic myth and recite its cosmology six times before breakfast. If this sits well with you, then proceed deeper. Most, however, will find the challenge beyond belief.

[ http://php.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/w/03.08.01a.htm ]

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