Evidence of and evidence for. . .

Another Elaine Pagels' book or another one from the pen of anyone of her like (Bart Ehrman for example) and pretty soon everything gets stirred up again.  It is the typical premise that orthodox Christianity was the result of a power play and those without power (Gnostics and other heretics) lost out and were suppressed.  Inevitably, someone will dredge up evidence of Gnostics (or others) whose writings were not immediately quashed and then use that as proof of their pet theory of Constantinian interference and a concocted orthodoxy that was the fruit of a dispute and conflict among the earliest witnesses to Christ.  It is a tiresome thing.  It is a foolish one, as well.

Heresies and heretics did not spontaneously develop into the false and pernicious doctrines they were but generally begin with a kernel of truth that becomes the thing by which all truth is judged.  They were not rejected instantaneously but as the errors were known and developed into a threat.  The threat was not against the powers that be but the Scriptures themselves.  They were rejected not because the people with standing did not like them but because they contradicted the apostolic witness.  Evidence of something is not evidence for it.  Certainly there is evidence of Gnosticism long before Christ and it continued after Christ and still lives (do heresies ever die?).  But evidence of something in existence is not evidence for it in support of it being tolerated or accepted or condoned.  That is a fool's detour.

Historians have a job to find out things.  Some of those are unpleasant to the truth and some of those are shocking according to their standards of the day.  But everything they find out is not automatically a finding in support of these beliefs or these practices.  Historians are not quite theologians.  It is a disservice to amplify the oddities that they discover to make them normative and it is an error to presume the normative was itself an oddity at one time.  This is certainly true of doctrinal orthodoxy but it is also true of many other things (things liturgical, for example).  Just because you can find evidence that some strange thing was tried or existed somewhere for a time does not give than strange thing standing as normative or orthodox.  It is what it is -- an oddity that sooner or later is stamped down and, we hope, out never to raise its ugly head of error again.  But as we all know, heresy and error seems impervious to the efforts of the orthodox to kill and so orthodoxy must be ever vigilant in pursuit of the truth.  Doctrine does not quite develop but in its confession and in its refutation of error, doctrine is sharpened -- like the point on a pencil.

Perhaps the worst error of all is the presumption that nothing is wrong until the people in power say it is.  That is behind all of these errors.  If orthodoxy is merely a power play by the powerful to defeat the weak, then it is not itself anything but what the powerful propose.  But if orthodoxy is itself a reflection of what Scriptures teach and have always taught and are judged not simply by the opinion of men but the rule and canon of Scripture, then orthodoxy is something unchanging over time.  Which, of course, finally leads us to the cornerstone on which all heresy stands or falls -- Scripture itself is nothing but a fabrication and choice of the powerful over the powerless.  In this foolish lie, there were no Scriptures at all until the Church (with the help of that terrible Constantine again) in the fourth century decided what the Scriptures were and made that definitive claim because they were the powers that be.  This is a foolish lie because it ignores all the evidence of books and early church fathers who listed them as canon with authority because they were catholic and apostolic long before the 300s.  The Church did not decide what Scripture was but awoke to what God had said and, in weeding out that which God did not say, affirmed what God had always said.  With a very few exceptions, this is true of every book in the New Testament (unless you read Elaine Pagels or Bart Ehrman).