The climactic point in the grand narrative of the myth is stated by Bart Ehrman:

In brief, one of the competing groups in Christianity succeeded in overwhelming all the others. This 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 of 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

Scholars like Ehrman cite in this regard the well-worn adage: “It’s the winners who write the histories.” That is, those who get to write the histories are those who have already won the cultural battle. Thus they write history in a way that favors their own party, and puts any rivals in a bad light. The winners who wrote the histories were biased, often so biased, they couldn’t even see their own bias. So, when we read early orthodox writers today, we need to adopt a “hermeneutic of suspicion,” and “read against the grain.”

This is what the history books are telling us today. But then, isn’t history always written by the winners? And aren’t the winners often so enmeshed in the reigning cultural narrative that they can’t see their own bias? Which is why we ought to read today’s historians with the same sort of critical suspicion as they recommend we apply when reading the ancient writers.

If it is true that the books of the New Testament were chosen and assembled under deep political pressure, only after one version of Christianity had achieved victory over its many rivals, what then? Clearly there are many who see this story as a crippling embarrassment to Christians and as another tool by which to marginalize Christianity today. (The marginalization of Christianity would, by the way, qualify as a “political” end.) But is this necessarily so? Embarrassing as it may be, it would not defeat or delegitimize Christianity. If the books of the New Testament were assembled “by hook and by crook,” the books were still assembled, and God, according to Christian theology, was not left out of the process. In fact, as the biblical patriarch Joseph told his brothers, his brothers who had sold him into slavery and abandoned him, “You meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today” (Gen. 50:20). If this culturally useful narrative about the formation of the Bible turns out to be accurate, the Christian can still look gratefully and joyfully at the saving message preserved in the New Testament and say, “Constantine and his army may have meant it for evil, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should hear the life-giving voice of Jesus in the books that made it into the New Testament.”

The ultimate issue with the political approach, then, is not that it poses some insuperable theological problem for Christianity (as some surely think). The issue is, is it true?

B. Power Plays and Conspiracies

Seeing things through the prism of politics and power, our new cultural myth constructs the story of the Bible’s formation as a series of epic struggles over what books would be included in the “canon” (the group or list of books functioning authoritatively as Scripture in Christian churches).⁹ These struggles over books mirrored the larger battle for dominance among the many Christian sects. Examples of how such political maneuvering took place are believed to be plentiful. The great German scholar Walter Bauer found one in the letter known as 1 Clement, written in the last decade of the first century, through which “Rome succeeded in imposing its will on Corinth.”¹⁰ An example that concerns books involves Irenaeus of Lyons, a man surely not known for his celebration of theological diversity, who wrote in the late second century. Elaine Pagels states categorically that Irenaeus “confronted the challenge” of rival groups “by demanding that believers destroy all those ‘innumerable secret and illegitimate writings’ that his opponents were always invoking.”¹¹ Again she alludes to Irenaeus’ “instructions to congregations about which revelations to destroy and which to keep.”¹² It would be a fascinating exercise if we were to list here every passage in which Irenaeus gave instructions about destroying false Gospels and other secret revelations and then examine them closely. That is, if we could find those instructions, which we can’t, because they don’t exist.¹³

The last example is one in which power struggles supposedly ended in the exclusion of certain books. But power plays that brought new books in were going on as well. A favorite one of mine is an early deal, believed by scholars such as Raymond Brown and others to have been struck sometime in the second century between the “Great Church” in Rome and a small, bickering band of renegade churches in Asia Minor. This deal involved adoption of those disputatious churches into the larger fold, and the acceptance of their Gospel, the Gospel of John, a Gospel which these scholars interpret as being itself a political document through and through.¹⁴ Like Irenaeus’ campaign of literary destruction, this agreement, though historically certain in the minds of many scholars today, is nowhere found in the annals of recorded history.

Now, knowing what we all know of human affairs, even those in the church, it would seem dangerous to deny that “political” factors were ever in play in the process of canon formation. And because the stakes were high, it would not be entirely surprising if “truth” sometimes became a casualty, on every side. Even the “good guys”—however one perceives who they were—were not immune to human foibles. The problem is, first of all, that instances where books were “included” or “excluded” to enhance someone’s power base are terribly hard to find and substantiate historically. In fact, one could make the case that one reason it took so long to achieve consensus among the churches was precisely because of the deference paid to individual churches to maintain their own local traditions, even in the face of a desire for “catholic” unity. Second, scholars who see things through the prism of politics and power struggles¹⁵ sometimes outrun the evidence and imagine things to have occurred in the way they “know” they must have occurred. And one could be forgiven for wondering whether there are not often “political” motives afoot here as well.

Moreover, this approach seems prone to a conspiracy mentality. As we have seen, the assessment of many today is that the orthodox, once they had won the battle, rewrote history, making it look like their views had always been the majority views in the church. Not only did they rewrite history but they must have colluded to wipe out traces of the actual history. For, given that Christianity before the fourth century is supposed to have been a lively assortment of diverse factions with no mainstream, if one questions why it is that the vast majority of Christian writings surviving from the second and third centuries seem to embody this one, “proto-orthodox” stream, rather than Marcionite, Valentinian, Ophite, etc., the answer is simple. The once-plentiful literature of the many rival groups was suppressed and eliminated by the one victorious party. What Pagels accuses Irenaeus of doing to his rivals’ holy books on a small scale, later Christian leaders of the fourth and fifth centuries are thought to have done on a more massive scale. One could account for most of the lack of evidence in a less conspiratorial way, simply by recognizing that the great bulk of heretical literature simply died away through attrition (as did the bulk of orthodox literature) and was not replaced. Naturally, it is the literature useful to “the victors” which was most likely to be preserved and recopied over the centuries, once orthodox Christianity and its scholars held a tolerated and then a favored position with the state. But many are not satisfied with such innocent explanations.¹⁶