Abstract
What did the earliest followers of Jesus really care about? Not belief in God, not the nature of Jesus Christ, not miraculous births, saving deaths or eternal salvation, says Stephen Patterson’s The Forgotten Creed. They cared about human solidarity. Christians once had a “utopian vision” about identity: “there is no us, no them. We are all one. We are all children of God” (5). Believers were unified. Their hierarchical distinctions of ethnicity, class, and gender were replaced by a sense of oneness, Patterson argues. The well-known baptismal formula of Galatians 3:26–28 is the key to unlocking this lost world.
The early strata of the formula, Patterson suggests, is perhaps the “first Christian creed” (5). Patterson comes to this conclusion by a redaction criticism of sorts. Beginning with Paul’s biographical history, Chapter 1 situates the formula within the context of Galatians, outlines Paul’s argument, and shows how Paul adapted the original creed for his own purposes. Once the Pauline elements are stripped away, what is left is this original credo, which Patterson reconstructs as this: “For you are all children (sons) of God in the Spirit. There is no Jew or Greek, there is no slave or free, there is no male and female; For you are all one in the Spirit” (29). That statement of faith, Patterson reckons, was about “taking on race, class and gender.”
Chapter 2 divides the creed into its three constituent pairs, or dyads, and shows some of the ancient comparanda—Greek philosophy, preserved by Diogenes Laertius; the Jewish Tosephta; and the Talmud—that similarly carved up the world into “othering” categories like the foreigner, the slave, and the woman. Patterson then takes each category in turn and, using Greco-Roman sources, describes the historical background of ethnic, class, and gender distinctions. For Patterson, the comparative exercise helps explain why there were three such dyads in the creed. More importantly, the dyads all involve differentials of power (49), and the followers of Jesus who created the “elegant credo” (5) were trying to overcome them. They were “trying to see themselves and others in a new way” (50) says Patterson—namely as children of God.
This is the topic of Chapter 3. Patterson here surveys “children of God” or “sons of god” in early Christian literature—from the Q gospel, the canonical gospels, Johannine literature and the Gospel of Thomas—and the various ways that early followers of Jesus understood their identity as “children of god.” The crucial realization of this identity, the moment of becoming or being children of God, Patterson asserts, was originally through the ritual of baptism (64). To be known as “children of god” was to be one, to be united as humans, in spite of differences normally used to mark and measure communities. But this solidarity, this one with another, was not simply a utopian fantasy, says Patterson. There was a moment in time, however brief, when people tried to build communities in which race, class, and gender would not be used to exclude.
That moment was very early in the apostle Paul’s career (Chapter 4). The apostle to the gentiles had apparently founded “mixed Jewish–Gentile Christ communities” (74) in Galatia, communities in which the bar was lowered for Gentiles: they were accepted among the covenant community of Jews without circumcision (74). This happened in Antioch, too. Even Peter joined in. Yet, the fateful “Antioch Affair” that Paul himself details in Galatians 2:11–14 disrupted the short-lived solidarity between Jews and Gentiles. Patterson then outlines the hostile history of Jews and Greeks in the Roman East and in Antioch itself. With that history in mind, a new Paul comes into view, a Paul who reached “across fiercely guarded ethnic boundaries.” The common ground among Jews and Greeks soon shifted to form a deep rift (90), only widened by Marcion in the following century who, as a Greek, had little interest in being part of a Jewish community (91). Even the book of Acts, says Patterson, played a key part in the decisive break from Christianity’s Jewish past. The unfortunate result is that Paul’s experiment with mixed communities of Jews and Greeks was forgotten. And the “creed first introduced to him by fellow Jews” (96) came to naught. “‘Being in Christ’ never again meant ‘there is no us and them.’”
Chapter 5 takes up the creed’s second dyad. It describes the Roman practice of slavery (97–101), Jesus’s view of slavery as known from the gospels (102–105), and what the “real Paul” said about slavery—not much (105–113). But there are hints in Ignatius’s letter to Polycarp that there “were Christians who took seriously, and literally, the notion that in Christ there were to be no slaves, only free” (114). Patterson finds a similar clue in Pliny’s famous letter to Trajan. The ministra whom Pliny interrogates and whom he calls slaves (ancillae) seem to have had power and authority in church politics (115). And even in one of the parables of the Shepherd of Hermas (5.2.7), Patterson suggests that those who followed Hermas could see a future of human freedom and dignity (117). These ideas in the various sources are “flickers,” lasting maybe “a hundred years” (118). Even though everyone in antiquity held slaves—it was the “basic class distinction”—Patterson credits “[o]ur little credo” for registering “a tiny protest against that tradition” (118).
Chapter 6, the longest of the book, takes up the third dyad of the creed. Patterson first describes the “phallic obsession” (121) in Roman art as a way to convey the sense of male power in antiquity. Then he briefly recounts the stories of Hermaphroditus in Greco-Roman sources as a segue into the myth of the primordial androgyne, which he sees as informing the third dyad of the early baptismal creed (125). Many Jews, explains Patterson, would have had a distinct understanding of what “no longer male and female” meant. It meant reuniting the male and female—returning to Adam’s original, androgynous form. This could be accomplished through the “Bridal Chamber” ritual in which Christian men and women took a vow of chastity; through the ritual of baptism; or through celibate, “spiritual marriages.” Patterson finds evidence for these in a rich sampling of texts: the Gospel of the Egyptians, Genesis Rabbah, the Gospel of Philip, the Acts of Judas Thomas, and in the “praying androgynes of Corinth” (1 Cor. 11:2–16). They enacted “gender-bending” (132) and “transvesting practices” (134) based on a Hellenistic Jewish reading of Genesis and the myth of the original androgyne. For Patterson, the mythic-ritual references to an original androgyne in early Christian literature further attest that the third dyad of the creed was enacted by early Christians to challenge the regime of male dominance (134–135). The challenge was carried out by many women who did indeed have male power among the early followers of Jesus, explains Patterson. One was Mary Magdalene, known from the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary. Another was Phoebe, Paul’s “boss” (142) in Romans 16. Another was Thecla. But ultimately Christian men, notably the author(s) behind the Pastoral Epistles, quashed the leadership roles of women in churches. The result was a “male-dominated patriarchy” (153), which for the most part remains in the church today, Patterson says.
The book’s Conclusion—a section that should not be neglected by readers—offers some important discussion (155–157) about the problems with sameness and difference, and the limits of diversity and tolerance in the ancient texts.
Patterson’s book should be commended. It is far too easy to read early Christian texts and overlook the othering, the latent ethnocentrism, classism, or sexism—all issues that are still pressing today. Patterson’s book helps remind us of that. It is also an easy read. The prose is lucid and warm. The book is written for a wider audience. It covers a lot of material. It is relatively short. But specialists might find the book’s analysis of sensitive issues a bit glib. Early on, for example, Patterson declares: “Gender is a construct; class is a conceit; race it not real” (24). The weight of that statement, I would think, demands an immediate, thorough, and careful explication, but there is none. And Chapter 6, perhaps the most interesting of the book, risks confusing categories. Patterson implies that androgyny (thought to be behind the creed’s “no male and female”) is a lens for examining women who had “male power” in early Christianity (135). In one sense, that could be true. But one might counter that the “androgyny” category is more about the conception of genders, the male–female composite, than it is about the “real world of men and women.” It is also debatable whether the third dyad of the creed was alluding to androgyny at all, and if it was, whether it was emancipatory or egalitarian. There is no evidence from antiquity that androgyny implied equality between male and female anyway. And according to the spectral hierarchy of ancient human bodies, Galatians 3:28 could actually mean becoming male. Patterson seems either to be unaware of these more recent scholarly discussions or does not wish to introduce the multiple interpretations that are possible (e.g., transgender, asexual, queer). 1
The deeper strands of the book also at times seem to idealize a purer origin of Christianity. It is as if the “credo itself” (102)—by the mere fact of its apparent existence—attests that Christians “originally” had a morally upright vision, though too soon “after the credo” they backpedaled, preferring the status quo for their real lives (118). This is when all the -isms set in. So Patterson longs to return to a prelapsarian equity before that first Christian creed was forgotten. Each chapter ends with a regret of sorts, a “What if?” A “would-that-it-were-not-so.” A Trump-induced lamentation about how Christianity turned out. As a refrain to close each chapter, the sense of remorse can also feel unproductive.
Moreover, having read, and overall enjoyed, Patterson’s book I still do not know much about this “original” creed and what it may have meant, much less that it was ever operative as a persuasive, practiced, worldview among believers in Christ. The key comparanda for the creed receive only a page of reference (31–32) and there is little contextualizing. I wanted more about how and why those similar formulations of difference appeared in the specific Greek and Jewish texts that Patterson cites. Without it, the “little creed,” as Patterson calls it, becomes a cipher for “Christianity” as a whole, or Christianity in the earliest form. By pointing to the creed as representative of Christianity, Patterson can then plead for what Christianity is meant to be about, or “should” be about today (107, 119). But that is a different kind of argument than the historical legwork of each chapter would suggest. What each chapter does succeed in showing are the diverse ways that early Christians thought about human distinctions regarding ethnicity, class, and gender. Some of these diverse ways do seem to be more egalitarian than others, even if they fall short of the full-blown utopia “of solidarity, of oneness, of universal kinship” (160).
Another challenge to the book is that it portrays the Roman Empire as a “caste system” in which “native, freeborn men had all the advantages, all the power” (158). Thus, the creed was ultimately about “denying that caste system.” There were gaping inequalities in the Roman Empire, to be sure. Yet, I doubt that “caste” is an appropriate descriptor for the imperial period, in which society became ever more nuanced. “Native” was a tiny, almost illusory segment of the population (Trajan himself was from Spain); countless people in the Empire were “freeborn,” but whose parents were slaves or freedpersons; and there is an impressive record of Greek and Roman women who had public leadership roles, and who regularly had more power than men. 2 The meaning of the “original” creed, therefore, may not have been so much about repudiation or solidarity over and against the Empire.
The creed may, in fact, have reproduced some of the hierarchies of the Empire. Patterson hypothesizes that the critical moment when the creed’s meaning was forgotten was when baptism became, for Christians, the signal rite of initiation. Marking Christian from non-Christian, or one kind of Christian over all others, made a new boundary that spawned a new “us and them” (159). It is difficult to envision an alternative outcome, however. To make an identity claim, it seems to me, is to inevitably draw some kind of line in the sand. So perhaps the real issue is that, originally, the baptismal creed did not really mean “an end to otherness and othering, estrangement, and contempt of difference” (159). It could be that “no Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male and female” did indeed signify a common kinship in the primordial Adam, as Patterson explains, but nonetheless still privileged believers (insiders) over others (outsiders).
The book is a helpful source nonetheless. I can see it fitting in well with specialty topics courses on the New Testament and/or early Christian literature. The book gives manageable overviews of content and poses stimulating questions about an array of early Christian texts—many of which casual readers would otherwise not know about. Above all, the book’s enduring contribution will be the hard, necessary questions it raises about diversity and tolerance, whether in antiquity or today.