Restless Pilgrim

Mormons, Muslims, and most Protestant groups all have the same fundamental contention. While the details change depending upon the group, they all believe that the Early Church got things wrong, and pretty dramatically wrong at that…

I would suggest that’s a very problematic position to hold. One has to contend that the Apostles were terrible teachers and failed in their mission. Jesus effectively abandoned His Church until either Muhammad, Luther, Calvin, Joseph Smith, or some other figure came along to set things right centuries later.

As an aside, Atheism is a bold position for someone to hold as it necessarily asserts that everyone throughout history who claimed any kind of religious experience was fundamentally mistaken. I would suggest that many groups make a similarly bold claim, that most Christians throughout history have been fundamentally mistaken on core doctrines.

If one claims the Early Church was in deep error, cherry-picking inevitably results. For example, Baptismal Regeneration is universally believed in the Early Church. Yet, many Protestants reject this entirely, but basing this on the New Testament canon discerned by those who held to Baptismal Regeneration! They reject Apostolic Succession, but accept the Trinitarian doctrine which was developed by those who led the Church through Apostolic succession! Many other examples could be given.

Responses

I said this in a recent discussion online and my friend said:

“Yeah, it seems to me that heresies developed fairly quickly…”

Unfortunately, this is just another way to say that Jesus and the Apostles failed, that the long-awaited Messiah’s message was radically corrupted even within the lifetime of the Apostles, and long before the canon of the Bible was settled. Contrary to Biblical prophecy and the words of Jesus, the Kingdom doesn’t even get out of the gate. My friend went on to say:

“That’s an argument from silence, at best.” 

Actually,  *his* position is the argument from silence, positing that the Church was completely usurped without any “true believer” offering the slightest resistance. 

Mormons claim the Early Church were Mormon, yet we find no proto-Mormons in the Early Church and nobody in the “official” Church wrote against a heresy which looked anything like Mormonism. The same is true for Islam. In contrast, we know about Docetism, Gnosticism, Modalism etc. because they offered a significant enough challenge to the Church that Her apologists wrote works against them. Do we find anyone in the Early Church writing against how you understand the Faith? If not, why not?

> “But I don’t say they weren’t “real Christians.” They may have simply been “confused real Christians.” After all, they had a lot of theology to sort out. There was a lot of confusion.””

This seems rather like having your cake and eating it. According to you, the earliest Christians seem to have completely misunderstood even the basic mechanics of salvation. So, either these are grave heresies, or not a big deal. Which is it?

I think 1 + 1 +1 = 1 is the most common comment you’ll see from Muslims on Christian videos about the Trinity. David Wood responds…

Funnily enough, I recently gave a similar example in a YouTube comment:

1 Allah + 1 Jibril + 1 Muhammad + 1 Scribe = 1 Qur’an.

During the formation of the Qur’an, the following men had Qur’ans which had a different number of chapters than found in today’s Qur’an:

• Ubayy ibn Ka’b
• Abdullah ibn Masud

That Hadith are unreliable—that any given matn cannot be taken at face value as an accurate datum from the 1st Islamic Century, and that any given ʾisnād cannot be taken at face value as an accurate record of a matn’s provenance—cannot be seriously contested, for multiple reasons.

Firstly, there is an overwhelming prior probability based upon the ubiquity of fabrication and pseudepigraphy in Late Antique and Mediaeval religio-historical (pagan, Jewish, and Christian) ascriptions.

Secondly, there is the high frequency of contradictions within the Hadith corpus, which necessitates the occurrence of a huge amount of fabrication, interpolation, and/or mutation and, therefore, skepticism towards any given hadith.

Thirdly, there is the ubiquity of fabrication and interpolation—both reported and demonstrable — in the Hadith corpus, which again casts doubt upon the rest of the corpus.

Fourthly, there is the rapid, extreme mutation and growth of reports that evidently took place over the course of a century or more of oral transmission, which means that any given matn—regardless of the ʾisnād—is likely at best heavily distorted and at worst obliterated beyond its original form.

Fifthly, there is the belated emergence of Hadith as a genre and corpus, largely during the 8th and 9th Centuries CE, which straightforwardly precludes the authenticity of most ascriptions to the 7th Century CE.

Dr. Joshua Little, PhD Thesis

It is available from his own site, or from here: