If there is one established fact that both conservative and liberal scholars admit about Jesus, it is that Jesus died a death on a cross by means of Roman crucifixion. However, in Islam, such a belief about the fate of Jesus is rejected.
In the Quran, Surah 4:157, states that the Jews “killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them.” It was thought to be unbecoming for such a prophetic figure to die such a horrific death. But where did this belief denying the crucifixion of Jesus come from?
Perhaps the most likely source was associated with a Gnostic Christian teacher from Alexandria, Egypt, in the 2nd century, Basilides, who lived about the time of 117 to 161 C.E. According to Irenaeus, the 2nd century heresiologist who sought to expose the theological errors of Gnosticism, Basilides largely accepted the Gospel narratives about Jesus, but takes an unusual interpretive turn when it comes to the lead up to the crucifixion of Jesus.
Was Jesus really crucified on the cross? Or did someone trick the Romans with a switcheroo, and having Simon of Cyrene crucified instead? Many Muslims hold to the idea that something like this really happened, and that Jesus was never crucified, and that someone else was crucified in Jesus’ place. Where did this Islamic belief about Jesus really come from?
In Mark 15, Jesus is mocked by the Roman soldiers and then led out to be crucified. But at one point:
“21 …they compelled a passerby, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to carry his cross. 22 And they brought him to the place called Golgotha (which means Place of a Skull). 23 And they offered him wine mixed with myrrh, but he did not take it. 24 And they crucified him and divided his garments among them, casting lots for them, to decide what each should take. “
Evidently, Jesus was struggling to carry his cross, so another man, Simon of Cyrene, was pressed into service to carry Jesus’ cross for him. Nevertheless, the traditional historical reading is that Jesus was brought to the place called Golgotha where he was crucified.
But Basilides (pronounced “ba-SIL-ih-deez“) saw some ambiguity in verse 22 of Mark’s Gospel (or the corresponding passage in Luke 23). Who was the “him” brought to Golgotha? If Simon of Cyrene was swapped out to carry the cross, would it not have been Simon of Cyrene who was then crucified, and not Jesus?
According to Irenaeus’ story, Basilides believes that the physical features of Simon of Cyrene and Jesus were swapped, to make it look like Jesus was crucified, when it really was Simon. As Simon was crucified, it was Jesus who stood by, laughing and ridiculing what was going on.
However, in M. David Litwa’s Basilides: The Oldest Gnostic, Litwa makes the argument that Ireneaus has confused the record of Basilides’ teachings with another Gnostic-influenced text, the Second Treatise of the Great Seth. Litwa maintains that Basildes actually believed that Jesus was crucified, and there was no supernatural switcheroo between Jesus and Simon of Cyrene at the crucifixion.
To complicate matters, the Second Treatise of the Great Seth itself is ambiguous enough to suggest that Jesus was not swapped with Simon at the crucifixion, and that Jesus’ “laughing” was not at Simon’s expense, but rather at the ignorance of those who ended up crucifying Jesus. Did Irenaeus misinterpret something here?
In contrast, in Bart Ehrman’s Lost Scriptures, Ehrman holds to the view that Ireneaus did not distort the stories of Basilides or the Second Treatise of the Great Seth, reviewed elsewhere on the Veracity blog. Litwa’s work, however, argues that indeed Basilides still held to the orthodox view that Jesus was indeed crucified, while still acknowledging that Ireneaus was correct in describing a number of other Gnostic views of Christianity which conflicted with Ireneaus’ orthodox perspective on Christianity.
We have other sources outside of Irenaeus, where certain tangential Christian groups denied the crucifixion of Jesus, early on in the history of the church. The Apocryphal Acts of John, briefly examined before on the Veracity blog, holds to a docetic view of Jesus, one who is divine but only appears to be human. In these Acts of John, Jesus is incapable of suffering, which lends support to the idea that Jesus could not have been physically crucified. In the Acts of John, Jesus’ crucifixion on the cross was merely an illusion. The Second Council of Nicaea in the 8th century officially condemned these apocryphal Acts of John as being heretical.
Does Dr. Litwa successfully make his case, that the traditional story about Basilides handed down through the centuries was distorted by Irenaeus? Yes and no. When it comes to tracing back the claim that there was a switcheroo between Jesus and Simon of Cyrene when it came to the crucifixion, the evidence that Litwa presents is quite compelling. Basilides probably did accept the traditional story of Jesus’ crucifixion, without a switcheroo. In fact, when it comes to the canonical Gospels’ presentation about the life of Jesus, Basilides does sound quite orthodox. Perhaps Irenaeus’ critique of Basilides was overly harsh in certain places.
On the other hand, there is just enough crazy stuff in Basilides’ worldview that firmly plants him in a Gnostic mindset, enough to justify Irenaeus classifying Basilides as being a heretic, even without the Simon of Cyrene crucifixion switcheroo story. Aside from Irenaeus’ report, this is what we know:
Basilides believed that angels created this material world. Furthermore, he believed that there was a complex hierarchy of 365 heavens. For Basilides, salvation comes not through faith, as commonly understood, but through knowledge. For Basilides, faith is really a form of higher perception and thought, and not a conscious choice. Though Basilides claims to have received this teaching from Saint Matthias, who replaced Judas Iscariot among the Twelve Disciples following the resurrection, ideas like those that Basilides promoted became common features of Christian Gnosticism.
M. David Litwa’s Basilides: The Oldest Gnostic examines what we can know and what we do not know about perhaps the earliest Christian Gnostic, often associated by the church father Irenaeus, as the originator of the story that Jesus was never crucified. Litwa challenges the long held view that Irenaeus accurately described this teaching by Basilides.
Part of the problem with getting an accurate portrait of Basilides is that very little survives from what he wrote. Irenaeus in the late 2nd century gives us the most information, whom Litwa says was misinformed at key points. Litwa shows that about 36% of the claims made against Basilides by Irenaeus are contradicted by other source material. Much of what else we have come from fragments attributed to his son and true disciple, Isidore, preserved primarily from other orthodox sources like Clement of Alexandria. Basilides apparently drew on the same New Testament material that the orthodox community did, but Basilides had an expanded canon of authoritative teaching derived from Greek thought, such as Plato.
For example, Basilides accepted the concept of the transmigration of souls; that is, reincarnation, based on a particular interpretation of Deuteronomy 5:9:
“You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me” (ESV).
For Basilides, one could only receive punishment for one’s own sins, and not the sins of others. Therefore, Basilides understands Deuteronomy as assuming that a sinful person would receive punishment for their sins in a future “generation;” that is, in some future next life, indicating a reincarnation of the soul.
However, most scholars interpret Deuteronomy as not affirming reincarnation, and that the Old Testament rejection of the transmigration of souls made its way into and was preserved by orthodox Christian thought.
Litwa also shows that some 64% of the claims against Basilides made by Ireneaus are unconfirmed by other sources. But since Ireneaus got 34% wrong, he should not be relied upon as an accurate source. Perhaps Litwa is right on that, but still, without other source material to challenge Ireneaus’ other claims, it is difficult to say.
The Bauer historical project convinces a number of scholars today. However, Bauer’s thesis is problematic, a subject too involved to get into here, but addressed elsewhere on Veracity. Nevertheless, to his credit, M. David Litwa does well in correcting some misunderstandings of Gnostic teachers, giving us a broader history of the early Christian movement.
Dr. Litwa’s book Basilides: The Oldest Gnostic is a fairly short read, coming in at well under 200 pages. I listened to the Audible version of the book in less than a few hours.
In our New Testament, we have 27 books, which include 4 Gospels. However, from about the second century and onwards for a few hundred years, a number of other competing gospel texts emerged (along with other letters), seeking attention from Christians hungry to know more about the faith. But among these “lost scriptures,” were any of these writings legit?
In historically orthodox circles, there was unanimous agreement that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were the official gospel accounts, describing the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, dating back to the first century. Luke himself acknowledged that “many” (Luke 1:1) have sought to write gospel accounts about Jesus. So, what happened to these “many” alternative gospel accounts?
It is reasonable to say a number of these “many” accounts were probably lost, partly perhaps due to the turmoil caused by the Jewish Wars of the 66-70 CE, culminating in the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, and later during the Kito War impacting the Jewish community in Alexandria starting around 115 CE, as well as the Bar Kokhba Revolt in the 132 CE. Thousands and thousands of Jews died in these conflicts, which probably included a number of Jewish Christians. As the original Christian community of the first century was primarily Jewish, there is a good chance that a number of these “many” writings perished along with those who wrote or sought to preserve them.1
Sure, many Christians know that we have 66 books in the (Protestant) Bible, and in particular, the 27 which make up the New Testament. But what about those books from the early church era that did not make it into the New Testament? What were these books and what were they about?
What “Lost Gospels” Did Not Make the Final Cut Into the New Testament, and What Were They?
While none of these supposed “lost gospels” from the first century are known to us today, scholars nevertheless acknowledge that a number of other supposed gospel accounts can be dated back to as early as the 2nd century CE. However, for the most part, these writings have been lost for most of church history, except in cases where a church father quotes from such documents.
Nevertheless, there have also been spectacular re-discoveries of some of these documents that were thought to be lost, as with the 1945 recovery of the Nag Hammadi Gnostic Gospels recovered in Egypt, including the well-known Gospel of Thomas. It seems like every few years or so, a new discovery is made, as with the Gospel of Judas.
These gospel accounts which did not make it into the New Testament canon are generally called “apocryphal gospels,” where “apocryphal” describes something of questionable or unknown origin. Some apocryphal gospels have sought to tell a different version of Jesus’ story at variance from the four official accounts, which primarily explains why these texts were rejected by the historically orthodox of the early church, along with the late dating of such writings which put them out of reach of being written and/or authorized by the earliest Christian apostles, or anyone else in that apostolic circle.
In addition, yet another group of apocryphal gospels were written not to attack the official narratives, but rather to fill in the gaps perceived to be missing from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. One popular apocryphal gospel like this that did survive from about 2nd century is the Protoevangelium of James, otherwise known as the Gospel of James, examined briefly here before on Veracity, which goes into considerable detail about the life of the Virgin Mary, including elements which are not reported anywhere in the four canonical Gospels.
The Gospels in our New Testament primarily focus on the public ministry of Jesus, a period generally thought to have lasted three years when Jesus was an adult. Of that material, our Gospels spend the most amount of time on the last week of Jesus’ life, including his crucifixion and subsequent resurrection. John and Mark completely ignore anything about Jesus prior to his public ministry as an adult.
The Apocryphal Gospels, part of the Penguin Classic series, was written by Cambridge University (U.K) scholar Simon Gathercole. Gathercole translates a number of alternative gospel accounts from the early church era, that are not found in our New Testament.
Apocryphal Gospels and Lost Scriptures
After I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Simon Gathercole in Cambridge in January 2024, I picked up a Kindle copy of his The Apocryphal Gospels, a collection of many of these non-canonical gospel accounts. A devout evangelical Christian scholar, Gathercole assembled this book together for the publisher, Penguin, as an aid to study the differences found between the apocryphal gospels and Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Unfortunately, Gathercole’s work is not available as an audiobook, which is how I have been largely reading books, while on my commute to and from work.
Instead, University of North Carolina biblical scholar, Bart Ehrman, does have his collection of apocryphal gospels, Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament, available on audiobook, so I gave Ehrman’s work a listen. Ehrman does not include certain apocryphal gospel fragments which Gathercole does. But Ehrman does include other non-canonical apocryphal New Testament texts which are not gospels, such as various letters and narratives claiming to have been written by those like Peter and Paul, but which scholars generally acknowledge today as forgeries.
Both Ehrman’s Lost Scriptures and Gathercole’s The Apocryphal Gospels are collections of diverse material, and therefore are more useful as reference works. Nevertheless, I wanted to listen to Ehrman’s book, and occasionally compare Gathercole’s work along the way. Both Ehrman and Gathercole give their translations of the whole of the surviving documents, when such texts are fairly short, while in some cases only providing a sample or even just an outline of those certain texts which are quite lengthy.2
Lost Scriptures That Sound Strange in Places
Some things you find in these apocryphal New Testament texts are fairly benign, whereas some other things are quite strange, counter to what you find in the canonical New Testament. Take the Gospel of the Egyptians, dated to the 2nd century, for instance. What we have of this gospel only exists from quotations found in the writings of the early church father, Clement of Alexandria. The Gospel of the Egyptians evidently contained a narrative detailing a conversation Jesus had with Salome, one of the women who first witnessed the Resurrection of Jesus.
Ehrman gives us saying number one as follows (Ehrman, p. 19)
When Salome asked, “How long will death prevail?” the Lord replied, “For as long as you women bear children.” But he did not say this because life is evil or creation wicked; instead he was teaching the natural succession of things; for everything degenerates after coming into being. (Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies, 3, 45, 3)
That is not terribly strange. But here is Ehrman’s translation of saying number four (Ehrman, p. 19)
Why do those who adhere to everything except the gospel rule of truth not cite the following words spoken to Salome? For when she said, “Then I have done well not to bear children” (supposing that it was not suitable to give birth), the Lord responded, “Eat every herb, but not the one that is bitter.” (Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies, 3, 66, 1–2)
According to Simon Gathercole, statements like these in the Gospel of the Egyptians were used as rationale for denigrating sexual relations and the having and raising of children (Gathercole, p. 179-180).3
Then we have Ehrman’s translation of saying number 5, drawn from the writings of Clement of Alexandria:
This is why Cassian indicates that when Salome asked when the things she had asked about would become known, the Lord replied: “When you trample on the shameful garment and when the two become one and the male with the female is neither male nor female.” The first thing to note, then, is that we do not find this saying in the four Gospels handed down to us, but in the Gospel according to the Egyptians. (Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies, 3, 92, 2–93, 1)
Ehrman comments that the reference to the “shameful garment” to be trampled upon is a Gnostic idea that the human body itself is so utterly infiltrated with evil that it must be discarded before salvation can be realized (Ehrman, p. 18). Gathercole sees this also as a rejection of marriage (Gathercole, p. 179). Both of these ideas, the Gnostic despising of God’s good creation and the rejection of the institution of marriage are considered as heretical teachings by those within the tradition of historically orthodox Christianity.
Then there are texts like the Gospel of the Hebrews, for which only a few fragments have survived. Gathercole states that this was perhaps originally an edited version of the canonical Gospel of Matthew, with a few extra bits of narrative and sayings not found in Matthew. For example, the Gospel of the Hebrews includes the story of the woman caught in adultery, found only in most Bibles today in the canonical John 8.4
But there is some oddball stuff in the Gospel of the Hebrews, generally dated to the second century. For example, the Gospel of the Hebrews has Jesus saying that the “Holy Spirit” is his “Mother” (Ehrman, p. 16), which probably partly explains why the Christian church rejected its authenticity.
Gathercole quotes a fragment whereby Jesus questions his need for baptism, which raises other interesting questions:
The Lord’s mother and brothers said to him, ‘John the Baptist is baptizing, for the forgiveness of sins. Let’s go and get baptized by him.’
‘What sin have I committed,’ Jesus asked them, ‘to have to go and be baptized by him? That is, unless perhaps what I have just said was an unintentional sin! (Gathercole, p. 163-164).5
Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament, by University of North Carolina New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, offers a complement to Gathercole’s selection of New Testament apocryphal writings, including various letters, notably some associated with Gnostic Christianity. The photo on the cover of Ehrman’s books features texts from the Nag Hammadi library, a collection of Gnostic scriptures rediscovered in Egypt in the 1940s.
The Gospel of Peter, With Its Talking Cross….and The Gnostic Gospels
The Gospel of Peter stands out as one of the oddest “lost gospel” accounts, in that it features gigantic angelic figures and a talking cross. The Gospel of Peter also tries to portray Pontius Pilate, as representative of the Romans, as being a friend of Jesus, and places the blame for Jesus’ death squarely on the Jews, a theme that has sadly fed into antisemitic attitudes emerging at various times throughout church history, in otherwise Christian communities. This feature has led scholars to conclude that the Gospel of Peter was a second century document, corresponding to the period where the Jewish and Christian communities clearly came to a “parting of the ways,” when the number of Jewish adherents to following Jesus dropped off sharply. Like several of these other “lost gospels,” the Gospel of Peter was eventually rejected during the early church era, and largely forgotten, until a fragment of it was rediscovered in the 19th century, in the tomb of an Egyptian Christian monk.
But most of the non-canonical gospels are associated with the heresy of Gnosticism, many of which belong to the Nag Hammadi library. The Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Truth both contain esoteric sayings of Jesus, which promote the idea that one must be initiated into the secret knowledge of Jesus’ teachings, which the historically orthodox tradition of Christianity is accused of neglecting and suppressing. In Gnostic Christianity, the pivotal episode found in the canonical Gospels of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection is either downplayed or entirely neglected.
The Gospel of Mary, which was recovered in the late 19th century, has a strong Gnostic element as well, mixed with a proto-feminist message. In the Gospel of Mary, Mary Magdalene has received certain secret teachings from Jesus which were never imparted to Peter. Mary describes a vision she received from Jesus about the ascension of the soul. Peter listens but is not buying into the vision. One of the other male disciples of Jesus (Levi) then rebukes Peter for his macho-masculinity, making Mary the hero of the story and silencing Peter. While the feminist message is largely unique to this gospel, the dialogue displays a common feature of Gnosticism theology, in that the authority of the apostolic community, typically represented by the male twelve in Jesus’ inner circle, is rejected in favor of obtaining esoteric spiritual knowledge.6
Some of the more frustrating examples of “lost gospels” include forgeries written by “supposedly” historically orthodox Christians who wrote books trying to undermine heresies. I put “supposedly” in air quotes as it baffles me why some Christians would resort to writing forgeries in order to combat the writing of forgeries. For example, the Epistle of the Apostles was written probably in the 2nd century to refute certain well-known Gnostic Christian teachers of the late first and early second century, like Simon Magus and Cerinthus. It is just bizarre to think that some proto-orthodox Christian would take a tactic used by the Gnostics to then turn around and use it to refute those same Gnostics.
There are apparently several Apocalypses of Peter, one of them being the relatively popular work which it goes into explicit detail regarding the horrors of hell, which was even listed in the famous and orthodox Muratorian Fragment as being part of the accepted list of New Testament Scriptures, though this particular Apocalypse of Peter was ultimately rejected by the early church as being non-canonical. Bart Ehrman in his Lost Scriptures, in addition to this Apocalypse of Peter, includes yet another Petrine apocalypse, a Gnostic version known as the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter.
Ehrman also includes The Second Treatise of the Great Seth, which like the Gospel of Basilides (not included in Ehrman’s collection) emphasizes that Jesus of Nazareth was not crucified on the cross. Instead, Simon the Cyrene was mistakenly crucified in place of Jesus, while Jesus who escapes his execution laughs at the situation. This denial of the crucifixion of Jesus eventually made its way into the teaching of Islam. The idea behind the crucifixion “mix-up” claim is based on one particular Gnostic Christian belief that it would be impossible, even laughable, for God to have been crucified on a cross. The “Great Seth” is thought by some to be Jesus as the incarnate version of Adam and Eve’s third son, Seth.
A fragment of the Gospel of Peter found at Akhmim, in 1886. This copy has been dated to about the 8th or 9th century, C.E. The Gospel of Peter was rejected as being apocryphal by the early church, and therefore not appropriate for inclusion in the New Testament. It is most known for a reference to a “talking cross,” following the resurrection of Jesus.
Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles
Simon Gathercole’s collection focuses solely on various “lost gospels,” whereas Ehrman’s collection goes beyond “lost gospels” to include various “Acts” of the Apostles, but not the stories contained in the New Testament Book of Acts. Ehrman includes texts like these:
The Acts of John: John the son of Zebedee is the main character here, but this is a Gnostic text, with some odd-ball stories in it, such as about a bed John is sleeping in, which is infested with bedbugs. The miracle stories presented in the Acts of John are generally way overdone, sensationalist, and some downright absurd. One story is about a man, assisted by an accomplice, who breaks into the tomb of a dead woman whom the man lusted after, intent on having sexual relations with the corpse. The intended rapist is killed by a serpent. John then resurrects both the woman and the man. Jesus is described in ways that suggest that he never had a flesh and bones physical body. I was quite happy to be done with the Acts of John when I finished!
The Acts of Paul: Ehrman has an extract detailing how Paul was beheaded by Nero in Rome. The second century church father Tertullian knew of the Acts of Paul, as having been forged by a presbyter living in what is now modern-day Turkey, who wrote this book “out of love for Paul.”
The Acts of Thecla: Thecla was thought to be a well-known female disciple of Paul, and the book was quite popular even into the Middle Ages. Thecla breaks off an engagement to be married in order to follow Paul, which causes all sorts of problems for her. The Acts of Thecla were often circulated together with the Acts of Paul. While it is difficult to establish the historicity of these accounts, there is good reason to believe that Thecla was a real person, featuring one of the few in-depth stories from the earliest Christians about the piety of a female follower of Jesus.
The Acts of Thomas: Thomas was a disciple of Jesus. but here there is more to the story. Jesus apparently has a twin brother, Thomas, who is one-in-the-same as Thomas the disciple. Thomas is sold into slavery by Jesus to work for the “King of India,” in which Thomas is then enabled to be a great missionary to India, performing many miracles. This book gave rise to the narrative that Thomas founded the Christian community in southern India. Thomas upholds an extreme ethic of asceticism, forbidding sexual relations even among those who are married, and urging against having children. Towards the end of the book, a woman raised from the dead describes some pretty graphic descriptions about the horrors of hell that anticipate what we find in Dante’s Inferno. Most scholars date the Acts of Thomas to the third century.
The Acts of Peter: The adventures of the Apostle Peter are set in contrast with the movements of Simon Magus, thought to be the first Christian heretic found in the canonical Book of Acts. Peter ultimately defeats Magus, when Peter journeys towards Rome. There in Rome, Peter is finally martyred, being crucified upside down. Part of the Acts of Peter serves as a backdrop narrative for the 1951 film, Quo Vadis (an excellent movie, by the way).
Scholars debate with one another as to how much historical material is actually being described in these books, as they are likely a mix of both fact and fiction. But where to draw the line between the two is difficult to pin down.
The Apocalypse of Peter has been dated back to the 2nd century C.E. Like the Gospel of Peter, it was rejected as apocryphal by the early church, and therefore inappropriate to place into the New Testament. It claims to have been written by Peter himself. Scholars universally recognize this as a classic example of pseudepigrapha (spurious writings). This fragment was discovered in Egypt (credit: Wikipedia)
Lost Letters That Failed the “Sniff” Test for the New Testament
Ehrman’s collection in his Lost Scriptures also includes additional letters attached to well-known persons in our New Testament. Scholars today recognize that these apocryphal letters were indeed of dubious origin.
Take Third Corinthians, for example. Third Corinthians is generally dated to the second century, long after Paul’s death. It was primarily written as a proto-orthodox critique of certain heterodox teachings, such as Gnosticism, which denied the humanity of Jesus and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Some Christians in the early church accepted Third Corinthians as genuine, such as the Armenian church, but even in the second century others recognized this letter as a forgery, despite its supposed good intentions. In more recent times, some Quakers who came to America during the colonial period had a copy of Third Corinthians with them.7
Ehrman includes other fascinating examples of such supposed lost correspondence, including:
Correspondence of Paul and Seneca: The likelihood that Paul ever had any contact with the contemporaneous and great Roman philosopher Seneca is extraordinarily slim. Nevertheless, some imaginative pseudepigraphical author drafted a series of letters between the two influential thinkers of the first century.
Paul’s Letter to the Laodiceans: The canonical New Testament letter to the Colossians mentions a separate letter to the Laodiceans by Paul which is now lost. But this did not prevent someone in the second century from writing a forgery in the name of Paul having the contents of this letter. Ehrman (p. 165) suggests that this may have been written by someone who sought to write a more proto-orthodox version of yet another letter to the Laodiceans found in the first attempt at a collection of New Testament writings, compiled by the notorious second century heretic, Marcion of Sinope.
The Epistle of Barnabas: Claimed to have been written by a companion of Paul, this “The Letter of Barnabas” is worthy of extended analysis, for perhaps another blog post. But in summary, this epistle enjoyed popularity during the early church era, even among certain historically orthodox believers, some considering it a candidate for the New Testament. But thankfully, it was dropped from consideration for good reason. It takes a very negative view of Judaism, ridiculing the Jews for having taken the teachings of the Law of Moses literally and missing the metaphorical meaning which the author believes that orthodox Christianity understood to be the correct way of interpreting the Old Testament. The letter probably helped to drive a deeper wedge between Jews and Christians, as Christianity made the transition from being primarily a Jewish movement to an almost exclusively Gentile movement.
Pseudo-Titus: A letter which dates back to about the 5th century, was obviously not written by Titus, though Titus is claimed to be the author. The work takes a very negative view of human sexuality, even calling for celibacy even among married couples, as a higher spiritual calling.
Ehrman includes selections from the Shepherd of Hermas, which like the Epistle of Barnabas, enjoyed great popularity among the early Christians, as some thought it to be fitting for the New Testament canon of Scripture. But aside from certain doubts of authorship, who according to some was supposedly the brother Pius, an early Roman bishop, the book was rejected from the canonical list, partly due to a tendency towards a works-righteousness mentality. The Shepherd of Hermas records a number of visions laden with allegorical messages, and is preoccupied with concerns about falling into sin after conversion. The Christian church is symbolically represented by a lady who often appears in these visions. Readers are told that those Christians who have fallen into such sin will have a second chance to repent, but only that second chance. After that, not even a later repentance of sin will allow for the salvation of the person.8
The Gospel of Mary, a facsimile on display at the Museum of the Bible, in Washington, D.C. The Gospel of Mary is often associated with Gnostic Christian collection of writings, dating back to the 2nd and 3rd centuries of the early Christian movement. The Gospel of Mary is of particular interest to modern feminists, as Mary Magdalene is featured as having received secret knowledge from Jesus.
A Super Gospel?
There was even an attempt to come up with a kind of “super” gospel, which attempted to merge all four of the well-acknowledged gospels into one text, in order to harmonize the differences found in our canonical gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Simon Gathercole includes an outline of this Diatessaron (not the whole text) in his collection of The Apocryphal Gospels, but introduces it with a quote from Theodoret (393-460 CE), an early church father who was disturbed by how popular this “super” gospel was among some churches, taking drastic action to clean up the mess:
“This Tatian composed a Gospel called the “Diatessaron”, cutting out the genealogies and whatever else shows that the Lord was born, physically speaking, from the line of David. It was not only those of Tatian’s own sect who made use of this Gospel, but also people who otherwise followed the apostolic teachings. They did not recognize the wickedness of the composition but treated it naively as a compendium of the Gospels. I managed to find more than two hundred copies of the book revered in our own churches, so I collected them all and removed them, replacing them with the Gospels of the four evangelists” (Gathercole, p. 71)
You would think that a studied attempt to produce a gospel harmony would have been well-received by church leaders, but apparently not. Presumably, Theodoret judged the Diatessaron to have “the wickedness of … composition” in that Christians had confused it with an original document going back to the apostles themselves. Gathercole dates Tatian’s Diatessaron to the mid to late second century. Part of the problem in reproducing the Diatessaron in its entirety is that there is no early copy of the text which has survived to the modern day, so only an outline of its contents can be reliably reproduced. Furthermore, scholars do not even know what the original language was for the Diatessaron. Gathercole’s outline is from a late Arabic copy (Gathercole, p. 71).
Ehrman’s collection towards the end of his volume includes various works which describe various stages of the development of the Christian canon. One of the first canonical lists in use by the proto-orthodox is the Muratorian Fragment, the oldest surviving list of books to make up our New Testament. The fragment is named after the Italian scholar who discovered the document in the early 18th century. The Muratorian Fragment is dated somewhere in the latter half of the second century.
The Muratorian Fragment lists all of the books of our current New Testament, except for Hebrews, James, 1 and 2 Peter, and 3 John. However, it also includes certain texts not found in our New Testament, like the Shepherd of Hermas and the Apocalypse of Peter, which could be read privately but not read in church. Other texts attributed to Marcion, like the supposed Pauline letters to Laodicea and Alexandria, and various Gnostic teachers are to be rejected completely. The Apocalypse of Peter is of interest in that it describes a journey through heaven and hell, a kind of literature which anticipates Dante’s Divine Comedy. The Apocalypse of Peter assumes a doctrine of eternal torment regarding hell in very vivid imagery, denying both universalism and annihilationism.
Simply reading through some of various texts that were not included in the New Testament does not fully explain the whole process as to why these texts were finally not accepted into the canon of Scripture, a topic for another time. However, it does give you a look into what these texts say, how they substantially differ with the New Testament, in certain cases, while in some sense differing only somewhat in other cases.
A 9th or 10th century copy of the Gospel of Nicodemus, sometimes called the Acts of Pilate, in Latin.
What To Do With Lost Scriptures and Apocryphal Gospels?
The “lost gospels” and other “New Testament-ish” apocryphal texts covered by Bart Ehrman’s Lost Scriptures and Simon Gathercole’s The Apocryphal Gospels have enjoyed varying degrees of popularity throughout Christian history, among certain communities. But particularly since the Protestant Reformation, these texts were mostly forgotten, except when archaeological discoveries, particularly in the 19th century and the 20th century recovery of the Nag Hammadi Library unearthed these forgotten books. Every few years or so, a new discovery is announced of some “lost scripture,” fodder for a lot of conversation as to why we possess the New Testament canon that we currently have.
Back in the 1990’s, progressive Christian scholar Elaine Pagels published several books, which on a popular level discussed the so-called “Gnostic Gospels,” rediscovered in 1945 in Egypt in the Nag Hammadi library. I read those books with great interest as Pagels uncovered a look at Christianity which I never heard about in my evangelical church circles. I must admit that learning about these books helps to explain why some Christians over the centuries have sought to find answers to questions that the New Testament does not fully address. But make no mistake about it, Gnostic Christianity bears very little resemblance to historic orthodox Christian faith.
Many Christians are completely unaware of the existence of such apocryphal texts, whereas certain skeptics of Christianity look upon the designation of such texts as “apocryphal,” or even certain ones as “heretical,” as examples of the institutional Christian church supposedly hiding “the truth” from people, as a means of maintaining a grip and control on the minds of Christians and preserving power and privilege. Such a mindset takes on the character of either cynicism or even a kind of spiritual elitism, which suggests that the reader of these apocryphal texts can gain some kind of “inside scoop” that other, more historically orthodox Christians fail to possess.
The more traditional view, one that I accept, is less cynical and does not rely on the logic of conspiracies. Instead, there were always a few loose cannons in the early Christian movement who gave themselves over to quirky, at best, or downright distorting versions of the story of Jesus and the rest of the New Testament. Some of these texts would best be characterized as “fan fiction,” while others were polemical in nature. Some were motivated by good intentions, while others were motivated by the idea of inventing their own version of Christianity to suit some agenda at odds with the genuine narrative handed down from the original apostolic followers of Jesus.9
One thing is certain in that by the second century, there was a lot of diversity within the Christian movement, which led to efforts by historically orthodox Christians to push back against alternative voices. Ironically, many of the same alternative voices have managed to make a comeback in our own day, in the 21st century.
While Bart Ehrman’s Lost Scriptures contains more apocryphal material, and is therefore, more complete, Simon Gathercole’s The Apocryphal Gospels, while including certain texts which Ehrman omits, is on the whole a slightly more suitable collection, if you could only pick one of the two books. Largely this is the case as Gathercole’s evangelical commitments poke through enough in his introductions to the texts, without being overly dismissive of skeptical viewpoints. Ehrman’s work, on the other hand, is comparably more skeptical, but thankfully without being overly dismissive of historically orthodox viewpoints. Both works overlap with shared material, but both emphasize different aspects of apocryphal New Testament era works. In fairness, I have not read all the way through Gathercole’s book, but I have read enough to get the sense of how he approaches the apocryphal texts he is studying. Nevertheless, both Ehrman’s Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It Into the New Testament and Gathercole’s The Apocryphal Gospels (Penguin Classics) are important contributions to the scholarship of early Christianity and are worthy of study.10
We should be thankful that Jesus made his incarnate appearance in human history 2,000 years ago and not today in our social media age with its proliferation of “fake news” and the “like” button. Since the 19th century, scholars have been able to unearth a number of these lost texts. The situation of the early church was not as confused and contrived as Dan Brown’s popular The DaVinci Code portrays it. However, the story is complex enough. The history does show the need for a type of vetting process that the early church deployed to try to weed out both well-meaning yet sincerely misguided texts, along with deliberate misrepresentations of the early apostolic record, while preserving what was good and true.
It is important recognize that the development of the New Testament canon was an organic process. There were no set of meetings where bishops took any votes on which books were “in” and which books were “out.” Instead, there was a sense developed over many decades that these 27 books we have in our New Testament had the ring of truth in them.
It makes one appreciate the fact that we have had thoughtful and influential early church fathers who sought to keep the Christian movement on track. While the study of such apocryphal texts can help give us a fuller understanding of what early Christianity looked like, one must be careful not to immediately come to cynical conclusions which impute bad motives on behalf of historic orthodox Christianity. Instead, it is worth considering a better alternative; that is, that the early church in its historically orthodox form got the essential story of Christianity right to begin with.
Simon J. Gathercole. United Kingdom New Testament scholar, Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity, and Director of Studies at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. I met Dr. Gathercole on a visit to Cambridge, at his church, in January, 2024.
For a very good lecture which covers the topic of “apocryphal gospels,” which cites Gathercole’s book, which explains the differences between the “apocryphal gospels” and what we have in the New Testament, I would recommend the following from Dr. Peter Gurry. Dr. Gurry has co-written with John D. Meade Scribes and Scriptures: The Amazing Story of How We Got the Bible, which is on my reading list, and covers much of what he discusses in this lecture. Enjoy!!
Notes:
1. Dan Brown’s blockbuster 2004 novel, The DaVinci Code, popularized the idea that there were “lost gospels” which the Christian church across the centuries wrongly suppressed. The misinformation that Dan Brown and others spread twenty years ago has led to a renewed interest in learning about various New Testament apocryphal gospels and other controversial writings. However, scholars have known about such apocryphal works for decades, if not centuries. The problem is that many of these apocryphal works have been lost, and we only possess fragments of them, preserved by heresiologists like Irenaeus. Nevertheless, recent discoveries, like the Gospel of Judas, continue to perk interest into the question of how the New Testament canon was formed. Baylor University historian Philip Jenkins has written about these so-called “lost gospels.” The bottom line is that such “lost gospels” are generally dated too late to be considered for serious inclusion into the Christian New Testament canon. Jenkins has written several other articles of interest on the topic of “lost gospels,” and other “lost scriptures.” Here is a late August, 2025 installment of Philip Jenkins’ series on this topic. Another installment in early September.↩
2. One more word about comparing Ehrman’s Lost Scriptures to Gathercole’s The Apocryphal Gospels. Ehrman is a skeptic and not a Christian, whereas Gathercole is an evangelical Christian. Both are world-class scholars. Nevertheless, cognitive bias is something that no scholar can completely avoid. Yet in these two volumes both scholars are relatively restrained in keeping their biases in check. The focus of these two volumes is primarily on offering accurate translations of these apocryphal texts, and comparatively, the translations offered by Ehrman and Gathercole are remarkably close. Because I spent more time reading through Ehrman’s work, most of this review will focus on Ehrman’s Lost Scriptures↩
3. Frankly, the most bizarre and disturbing apocryphal gospel described between Ehrman’s and Gathercole’s book is the Greater Questions of Mary, found in Gathercole’s collection (p. 176-177). While we have no surviving copy to the Greater Questions of Mary, the early church father Epiphanius of Salamis (about 310/320 – 403 CE) describes the work, in Gathercole’s words with: “Here Jesus is said to have revealed to Mary the obscene rituals which Epiphanius’ pornographic account has attributed to the Gnostics, rituals which Jesus himself allegedly initiated. This is perhaps the most surprising of all apocryphal Gospel fragments.” I am less inclined to quote the text from Epiphanius as the obscenity is very, very disturbing.↩
4. Dallas Seminary evangelical Bible scholar, Daniel Wallace, has stated that the story of the woman caught in adultery was his favorite story of Jesus not found in the Bible. The story of this interesting portion still found in most printed Bibles today is worthy of a separate blog post, which I hope to get to in the future.↩
5. Some do wonder why Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, if indeed Jesus was sinless. But if we carefully think through the doctrine of the Incarnation, a good answer can be be given to this question: For if indeed Jesus took our sin upon himself, not simply through his death on the cross, but also by the very fact of becoming God incarnate, the act of baptism by Jesus enacts for us the washing away of sins on our behalf. Jesus does not need to undergo baptism for any supposed sin on his part, but he does undergo baptism for the sake of our sins. 2 Corinthians 5:21 puts it well: “ For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” I would recommend Thomas F. Torrance’s The Meditation of Christ, which looks at how the incarnation of God in Christ is intrinsically related to the doctrine of the atonement culminating with the death of Jesus on the cross. Red Pen Logic offers a different explanation for addressing the question about Jesus’ baptism. However, an even better answer draws on a studied understanding of Leviticus (see the three part Veracity blog post series). The “sin offering” instructions found in Leviticus 4 are not exactly clear in terms of application. Some scholars suggest that the translation of “sin offering” is actually misleading, and that it should be a “decontamination offering” instead. This would include both an offering for “unintentional sin” as most Christians generally understand it. However, it would also include an offering related to “ritual impurity,” a condition where someone was designated as unclean, but that there was no “sin” involved. In the Leviticus, ritual impurity, which is not sinful, is different from moral impurity, which is sinful. It is possible that there are cases where a “sin offering” would be appropriate to deal with ritual impurity, which is not sinful, such as when a woman gives birth to a child, she is designated as ritual impure for a period time, where a “sin offering” is required, though clearly giving birth to a child is not sinful (see Leviticus 12:1-8). It might be that Jesus underwent baptism as a purification rite, which was not due to sin, but rather to ritual impurity. Since ritual impurity is not sinful, there is no conflict with becoming ritually impure and the concept of a sinless savior. ↩
7. See Veracity blog post series on Matthew Thiessen’s A Jewish Paul. Thiessen argues that many second century Christians came to accept the idea that Paul believed in the “resurrection of the flesh,” which was in contrast with Paul’s genuine thought that “flesh and blood” can not inherit the Kingdom of God, see 1 Corinthians 15:50. Paul believed that the resurrected body for believers would not be corruptible, as opposed to our current, fleshly bodies, which are indeed corruptible and susceptible to decay and death. It would be more accurate to say that our current fleshly bodies will be transformed in the general resurrection to become “spiritual bodies,” as described by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15. I argue that the pseudonymous author of Third Corinthians never fully grasped that nuanced distinction. Whether or not early Christians who ultimately read and dismissed Third Corinthians as a forgery picked up on that problem is unclear.↩
10. Bart Ehrman has a companion book to Lost Scriptures, aptly titled Lost Christianities, which from my understanding from various reviews has a somewhat more polemical tone, where he analyzes these “lost scriptures” to suggest that early Christianity, even into the first century, was inherently diverse, a theme articulated by the early 20th century German scholar, Walter Bauer. Alternatively, a more historically orthodox approach challenges the Bauer thesis, suggesting that aside from the conflict between Jewish and Gentile Christians, there was less theological controversy in the first century of the Christian movement. ↩
I would normally ignore stuff like this, as it keeps happening over and over again. All of the hundreds of attempts over the centuries to try to calculate the exact timing of the Second Coming of Jesus, or related events, have a 100% failure record…. which is pretty terrible. But what struck me this time is how “date setters” have managed to find a way around the New Testament warning AGAINST date setting.
Back in 2017, a prediction associated with the Second Coming of Jesus was made by date setters connected to the constellation Virgo. Foreboding a fulfillment of the Book of Revelation? Nope. Nothing happened like that in 2017….. The same will prove true for the September 23-24 prediction in 2025.
The standard response any informed Christian should give to “date setting” speculations can be found in texts like Matthew 24:36, where Jesus himself says:
“But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only.“
In other words, Jesus as the Son does not even know the time of the Second Coming. For if Jesus does not even know, why would we think that anyone else living on planet earth would be able know any better?
You would think that should settle the matter. But apparently, some have come up with a very clever response to get around these words of Jesus.
The September 23-24, 2025 current speculation for the “rapture” has a certain twist to it. Rosh Hashanah is the time of the Jewish New Year, which will occur sometime during this period, for 2025, over these couple of days. Rosh Hashanah is also known as the Feast of Trumpets, the timing of which is determined by the sighting of the first sliver of the New Moon.
But what if certain atmospheric or other conditions interfere with an accurate sighting of the New Moon? For example, what if the evening is cloudy? Here is where the latest escape hatch for justifying “date setting” comes into play.
The claim is made that when Jesus says that the “day and hour no one knows,” this is a reference to the fact that it is not always clear as to when the New Moon could be actually sighted. Could it be September 23rd? September 24rd? At what hour? We are not sure, but it should be somewhere within this time frame.
The problem here is that there is no evidence which indicates that the “day and hour no one knows” is indeed such a common Hebrew idiom. You would think that if there was indeed such a Hebrew idiom, that a source can be cited to demonstrate this.
Unfortunately, for purveyors of the “day and hour no one knows” Hebrew idiom claim, there is no such evidence. But since the idea appears to fit, advocates for this hypothesis are not bothered by the lack of evidence.
In other words, for the date-setters, it is apparently okay for someone to claim something is true without evidence to support it, simply because you want it to be true: It is okay to simply make things up in order to justify your interpretation of the Bible.
This is really a bad way to try to interpret the Bible.1
I am no prophet, but I am willing the make a firm prediction here: While it is true that Jesus could indeed return at any time, September 23-24, 2025 will come and go and nothing will happen. As this has happened time and time again, purveyors of this type of thinking will go back and rethink their date setting, and some may suggest a new date, based on more supposedly accurate data to work with. Or they will find some other sophisticated way to wiggle out of their original predictions. If someone is foolish enough to buy into the prediction and sell their house and all of their belongings before September 23-24, they will probably be severely disappointed.
But worst of all, such another repeated failed prophecy prediction will invite more skepticism against the integrity of the Christian faith.
Folks, we can do better than this.
Notes:
1. As apologist Mike Winger shows from his videos regarding the September 2025 rapture speculations, there are other ways of mistreating the Bible which are also bad. For example, 1 Thessalonians 5 is the famous passage on the “rapture,” as verse 2 lays out what Paul is writing to his readers: “For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.” Paul is indeed warning the Thessalonians of the first century that the return of Jesus will come at any time. That Jesus is returning is sure, but the timing is unexpected. But at least one popular purveyor of the September 2025 rapture hype claims that in 1 Thess 5:4 , Paul shifts his audience to address people living much, much later (like September 2025???): “But you are not in darkness, brothers, for that day to surprise you like a thief“. In other words, Christians today will not be surprised as to when Jesus comes back, as they will no longer be in darkness about the timing of the “rapture.” Not surprisingly (pun intended), this popular purveyor of the September 2025 prediction gives no supporting evidence for the claim that the “you” of verse 2 shifts to a different “you” in verse 4, the later “you” being Christians living 2,000 years later. This is just making stuff up to make the Bible say what you want it to say. What is missing is the intervening verse 3: “While people are saying, ‘There is peace and security,’ then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.” Verse 3 here explains the meaning of verse 4, in that there will be some in Thessalonika who will be completely surprised at the coming of the Lord, when/if it comes in that day. But the coming of the Lord will not be a surprise for the Christian believers who understand the truth that the Lord will indeed return. In other words, while the coming of the Lord Jesus will not be a “surprise” for those who expect it, we still will not know when it will come; that is, the exact timing of his coming, NOT the fact that Jesus is coming. Since what Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, regarding the Second Coming, did not happen in his lifetime, there is nevertheless still a message for us living today. If only such prophecy “teachers” could read the Bible in context, and stop reading things into the text which simply are not there!! ↩
In 2025, Christians can celebrate 1700 years of the most influential and famous summary of Christian belief, the Nicene Creed. I grew up in a church where we recited the Nicene Creed once a month during worship services. Sadly, a lot of evangelical churches today rarely, if ever, recite the Nicene Creed in public worship, despite the fact that for hundreds of years Christians have historically recited the Nicene Creed (or a shortened version of it, the Apostles Creed) on a regular basis, to remind them of basic Christian truths.
The Nicene Creed has served as a summary of what Christians connected to historically orthodox Christianity have believed and confessed through much of the long history of the Christian movement. It really strikes me as odd that so many conservative evangelical churches, who claim to be concerned with upholding centuries-long-held truths, tend to downplay the creed. Thankfully, with the 1700th anniversary of the first version of the creed, there are a bunch of good books available now that go into detail about the history behind the creed, and what it means for us today.1
I decided to pick up a copy of a book written by a pair of Roman Catholic scholars, who write for an ecumenical audience, from a C.S. Lewis-type “Mere Christianity” perspective. Jared Ortiz and Daniel A. Keating, the authors of The Nicene Creed: A Scriptural, Historical & Theological Commentary, have written a relatively accessible introduction to the creed, making an argument for its importance. Ortiz even teaches at a Protestant evangelical Christian college, Hope College, in Michigan. As Ortiz and Keating put it:
Because we live in an age that doubts the very reality of truth, and because we are trained to go our own way and encouraged to craft our “own truth,” we need more than ever an anchor of Truth—given, tested, and secure—not just as individuals but together as the Church. To our culture, the creeds implicitly say, “These things are true and real. Here is the genuine narrative of our world. And this is true for everyone.” (Ortiz & Keating, The Nicene Creed, Introduction)
There is a lot of misinformation out there regarding the history and purpose of the Nicene Creed. One of the most popular misinformed stories is that the Emperor Constantine essentially bullied a group of Christian bishops, to get together and declare Jesus to be God, as part of a political tactic to exert his control as emperor over the Christian church.
A second popular misinformed story also makes Constantine into being the “bad guy,” by suggesting that he helped to pressure these bishops to come up with a list of books which would make up the New Testament, accepting books that he and certain bishops liked, and throwing out the rest. In other words, Constantine is “blamed” for trying to put all of the bishops together in a headlock, and forcing them to “fix” the New Testament. This second story is wildly wrong, in that the topic of the canon of the New Testament never once made it into any discussion at Nicaea. It would be several decades before a final list of books of the New Testament would be recognized, and the process was more organic and less autocratic, as purveyors of this story want to believe.
Then there is the medieval legend that Saint Nicholas, whose cultural memory over the centuries gave us Santa Claus, stood up and punched Arius in the face for all of his heresies. That probably did not happen, but it is still a fun story to think about, old St. Nick throwing a right hook against a reviled heretic across the cheek. Ha! Ha!
Nevertheless, all of this misinformation about Nicaea does leave the question: What was the Nicene Creed really all about, anyway?
An Overview of The Council of Nicaea
The Nicene Creed in 325 initially addressed the controversy over the deity of Christ, describing the precise relationship between the Father and the Son. But the Creed was expanded at the 381 Council of Constantinople in order to flesh out the doctrine of the Trinity, to include more detail about the role of the Holy Spirit, within the divine Godhead. In other words, most Christians, who even know about the Nicene Creed, do not realize that what was agreed upon in 325 is not the exact creed many Christians recite today. It really took about 55 years for the exact formulation of the Nicene Creed to reach its fullest form, common to both the Western and Eastern churches.
However, the acceptance of the Nicene Creed in the church was not immediate. It took some time before the recitation of the Nicene Creed became a normalized part of Christian worship. Scholars say Paul’s letters in the New Testament included a variety of ancient creeds which preceded the Nicene Creed.
Contrary to what I had always thought, the Apostles Creed did not date back to the earliest apostles. Instead, it was derived from the Old Roman Creed, which Augustine used as late as the early 5th century to prepare catechumens for baptism. It was not until the seventh century (the 600s) when the Nicene Creed became a standard part of a Christian worship service.
Ortiz and Keating say with Saint Augustine that there are three basic concepts which undergird the Trinitarian theology of the Nicene Creed: (Ortiz & Keating, Introduction)
There is only one God.
The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God.
The Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Father, and the Holy Spirit is neither the Father nor the Son
Ortiz and Keating go through the major parts of the Nicene Creed, namely about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, giving a Scriptural exposition regarding where each of these components of the Nicene Creed come from the Bible. Along the way, the authors have helpful sidebars with digressions that fill out the bigger story behind the Nicene Creed, such as various witnesses to the tradition, like Irenaeus and Augustine, and contemporary issues touching on the Nicene Creed, such as “Why is God called ‘Father’ and Not ‘Mother’.” An appendix displays a comparison between the original 325 creed at Nicaea, the finalized Nicene Creed ratified at the Council of Constantinople in 381, and the 7th century Apostles Creed, an abbreviated version of the longer Nicene Creed. A glossary helps the reader to navigate terms essential to the Nicaea debate, such as homoousios (“one in being”) and homoiousios (“like in being”).
Addressing The Arian Heresy
The primary issue at stake with the Nicene Creed was the controversy over the teachings of Arius, a presbyter from Alexandria in Egypt, probably the second largest city in the Roman Empire with one of the most vibrant Christian communities in the ancient world. While Christians worshiped Jesus as the Son of God, by the early 4th century, they had not clearly worked out how the Son of God related to the Father. Arius was not the first one with a commitment to monotheism, who suggested that while Jesus was divine in some sense, the Father was uniquely divine in a different way than the Son.
What stirred up controversy that precipitated the Council of Nicaea was Arius’ particular teaching that Jesus as the Son of God was a creature, whereas the Father was not. Or to put it succinctly, there was a time when the Son was not, according to Arius.
Arius appealed to bible passages like Proverbs 8:25, where divine Wisdom, by which God created the world, speaks and says, “Before the mountains were established, and before all the hills, he begot me.” Because Paul describes Jesus Christ as “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor.1:24), Arius like many others saw Jesus as the Son of God described as the Wisdom of God in Proverbs 8, in that Christ was “begotten” by God. However, in that same passage, Wisdom is described in the Greek Septuagint translation as being “created” by God (Proverbs 8:22). As Ortiz and Keating put it, a great “exegetical contest” took place in the 4th century church to resolve the question: Is the divine Wisdom created by God or begotten from God? (Ortiz and Keating, p. 98).
There were some who were at least initially sympathetic towards Arius in saying that while the Father is “truly God,” the Son is also divine, but in a derived and subordinate way. The Fathers who championed Nicaea pushed back on this idea by insisting that the Son is “begotten, not made,” appealing to verses like Jude 25, that the Son existed before every and any age. They also crafted the language that the Son is indeed “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God,” to emphasize the full divinity of the Son. An appeal was made from texts like “the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1), Thomas’ confession of Jesus as “My Lord and My God” (John 20:28), Hebrews 1:3, Hebrews 1:8, Revelation 5:12–14, along with others.2
Using a Non-Biblical Word to Express a Biblical Concept
If Arius was indeed wrong, as the Council of Nicaea concluded, how then should Christians think of the relationship between the Father and the Son? The debate preoccupied the church for about 55 years, until the Council of Constantinople, where the Nicene Creed was reaffirmed and expanded to resolve ongoing disputes. For example, the 325 version of the creed said that the Son is “consubstantial with the Father.” But what does “consubstantial” actually mean here, which the Book of Common Prayer traditionally renders this as “being of one substance with the Father?”
It all came down to a single Greek word: homoousios.
The 325 version used the Greek word homoousios to mean “same substance” or “same essence,” though the word homoousios itself was not found in the Bible. Two Greek words make up the compound word: “homo” for “same,” and “ousia” for “substance” or “essence.” However, some critics argued that the concept of “same substance” did not adequately recognize a real distinction between the Father and the Son, a feature of modalism, the heretical notion the Son’s identity is not permanent, that at some point in the future the Son will “merge back into the Father.” (Ortiz & Keating, p. 107).
These critics, commonly called the “Homoeans,” proposed another word, homoiousios, meaning “like substance,” to reinforce the distinction between the Father and the Son. Nevertheless, those like Athanasius, the most vocal bishop and advocate for the original Nicene formulation, insisted on keeping the language of homoousios. Athanasius was concerned that homoiousios would pave the way back towards the heresy of Arius. The 380 version of the creed kept the word homoousios, as a result. The one letter, a little “i”, made all the difference.
How then should the distinction between the Father and the Son be made (along with the Holy Spirit)? The Greek word hypostasis was selected by some to designate the different persons of the Godhead: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Along with the Greek word ousia, meaning “essence” or “being,” the church at the time of the Council of Constantinople in 380/381 adopted the language of “one ousia and three hypostases” to describe the Triune Godhead (Ortiz & Keating, pp.110-111).
However, this brought some confusion as some considered the word hypostasis to be synonymous with the concept of “substance,” which emphasized the oneness of God. The concern was that it made the Christian Godhead into a union of three separate Gods, which was entirely misleading. Another word, prosōpon, was introduced instead, which is best rendered in English as “person.” However, the Greek prosōpon actually meant “face,” which to others seemed not to adequately signal the distinction between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It was not until the Council of Chalcedon in 451 that the common language to describe the Trinity as “one God in three persons” was finally settled as the most suitable way to speak of the Godhead, the language most Christians use today (Ortiz & Keating, pp.110-111).
Despite the efforts at Nicaea to deal with the heresy of Arius, subsequent controversies led to more material being inserted into the creed at the second ecumenical council at Constantinople in 380/381. Marcellus of Ancyra, one of the bishops who attended the Nicene council and opposed Arius, was ultimately condemned at Constantinople for his own teachings. While Marcellus agreed that Son was divine and yet not created, as Arius claimed, Marcellus also championed an idiosyncratic interpretation of Paul’s writings in 1 Corinthians 15:24–28.
When Paul writes that at “the end , when he [the Son] delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power,” Marcellus believed that this indicated that the distinction between the Son and the Father should only be understood as a temporary condition. For Marcellus, Paul was teaching that at the end of the age, after the return of Christ, the Son will merge back into the Father. In other words, the Triune nature of God ceases to exist once Christ’s work is complete. At least this is how Marcellus interpreted Paul: “When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all.”
At Constantinople, a phrase at the end of the second stanza regarding the doctrine of the Son was added: “and his kingdom will have no end.” I had always thought this was a throwaway line added into the creed without much of a reason. Now I know that was because the fathers at Constantinople were condemning the heresy of Marcellus by including this insertion, thus affirming the eternal distinct identity of the Son from the Father (Ortiz and Keating, p. 140).
The Holy Spirit at the Second Ecumenical Council in Constantinople
At the 325 council meeting at Nicaea, only one line in the creed mentioned anything about the Holy Spirit: “We believe in the Holy Spirit.” However, in the years immediately prior to the council meeting at Constantinople, some of those who affirmed the full divinity of the Son, standing against Arius, were saying that the Holy Spirit was but a creature, and not fully divine in the same sense as the Son and the Father.
This group, known as the “Macedonians,”named after a former bishop of Constantinople, Macedonius, brought thirty bishops to the 380 council. They believed that the Holy Spirit was a kind of created “super-angel,” serving the purposes of the Father and the Son. But when Gregory of Nazianzus, a well-known orthodox bishop, preached in favor of the full divinity of the Holy Spirit, the Macedonian group left the council meeting. In their absence, the council of Constantinople drafted what would become the stanza that Christians recite today, including such statements affirming that the Holy Spirit is “the Lord, the giver of life” (Ortiz and Keating, p. 165-167).
No exposition of the Nicene Creed would be complete without commenting on the controversy that arose long after the final draft of the creed in 380/381, the so-called filioque controversy, whereby “filioque” is Latin for the phrase “and the Son.” Around the 6th century, various Latin churches altered the Nicene Creed, which describes the Holy Spirit as one “who proceeds from the Father [and the Son],” where the final phrase was added. Notably, it is commonly accepted that the 589 Third Council of Toledo codified the insertion of “and the Son” into the Nicene Creed, in an effort to try to stamp out another variation of the Arian heresy, which had persisted in some areas of the Christian West.
The practice in the Latin churches soon became uniform, but the alteration was made without any consultation with the Eastern church. The addition of the filioque eventually was cited as one of the major reasons for the split between the Eastern and Western churches during the Great Schism in 1054, when Greek-speaking and Latin-speaking Christians officially began anathematizing one another. The original phrasing found in the Nicene-Constantinople version of the creed was drawn from one of the few texts which discuss the origin of the Holy Spirit, John 15:26.
Ortiz and Keating explain the controversy this way: While the final draft of the creed was written at Constantinople in 380/381, it was not broadly known in the West until the Council of Chalcedon in 451, some 70 years later. By that time, the West was developing an understanding of the Holy Spirit’s procession being from both the Father and the Son (or through the Son). It was only a matter of time before the Latin Christians of the West would formally incorporate that theology into the Nicene Creed.
In addition, Ortiz and Keating contend that certain well-respected Eastern church leaders, namely Cyril of Alexandria, Maximus the Confessor, and John of Damascus, had written in favor of the Holy Spirit’s procession from both the Father and the Son (Ortiz and Keating, pp. 174ff). I am not aware of how Eastern Orthodox theologians would respond to these historical claims.3
Other Takeaways From The Nicene Creed
There are a number of other nugget-sized takeaways from The Nicene Creed that are worth noting:
– Saint Augustine is sometimes thought of in negative terms as emphasizing the wrath of God. Those who reject the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement point to this as a flaw in Augustine’s thought, depicting God as an uncontrollable, angry deity, bent on punishing his human creatures. But Augustine has a rationale for why we see anthropomorphic language about God in the Bible:
“so those men through whom the Holy Spirit has spoken have not hesitated to employ in those books, as the occasion best demands, names of even those passions which our soul experiences and which the man who knows better already understands to be completely foreign to God. For example, because it is very difficult for a man to avenge something without experiencing anger, the authors of Scripture have decided to use the name wrath for God’s vengeance, although God’s vengeance is exercised with absolutely no such emotion.”4
– While the main controversy at Nicaea was over Arius’ failure to affirm the full divinity of the uncreated Son, there were those who failed to affirm the full humanity of the Son Incarnate as Jesus, such as Apollinaris of Laodicea, an eager opponent of Arius, but who unfortunately upheld the divinity of Jesus at the expense of the full humanity of Jesus, a doctrine which Gregory of Nazianzus strenuously opposed:
“For Apollinaris, the Christ we meet in the pages of the Gospels is a kind of ‘product’ of two parts: he is part Word (who runs things from the center) and part human (with the intellectual soul removed). As Gregory of Nazianzus famously stated in rejecting this model, ‘The unassumed is the unhealed.’If Christ did not assume a full human nature, including a human soul, then we have not been saved” (Ortiz and Keating, p. 131).5
Offering Some Pushback
Granted, both Ortiz and Keating are Roman Catholic scholars, a feature that will probably bother some readers. Various Roman Catholic distinctive doctrines are mentioned, including purgatory. At the very least, this might cause some confusion.
For example, take the word “catholic” from the creed. In the final version approved at the Council of Constantinople (380 CE), the Nicene Creed says that Christians believe “In one holy catholic and apostolic Church.” That word “catholic” has often been taken out of its historical context.
In the early church era there was only one church, the “catholic” church, as “catholic” simply meant the universal, one and only Christian church. The authors generally use the term “catholic” as an alternative to the Gnostics and other groups deemed heretical and out of step with the main body of historically orthodox Christians. Only occasionally do the authors conflate the term “Catholic” with the Roman Catholic tradition specifically (with an uppercase “C”). But since Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and evangelical Protestants all accept the Nicene Creed as biblically grounded and theologically true, the focus on the Nicene Creed itself will prove beneficial to anyone who wants to learn more about it.
There is at least one spot where Ortiz and Keating make a controversial claim that should be challenged, regarding how the doctrine of creation out of nothing developed in run-up to Nicaea. On page 79, the authors write:
“By the time of the Nicene Creed, “maker of heaven and earth” was firmly understood to mean that God created all things, without exception, from nothing. But, surprising to many of us, creatio ex nihilo was not a doctrine held by the earliest Christians nor by the Jews who preceded them. Indeed, along with many of their pagan neighbors, they held that God created all things from preexistent matter. The question of the origin of matter—and its implications for God’s being and power—did not arise in a clear way until the second century.”
This startling claim, while having some substance, is ultimately misleading. Admittedly, the authors go on and affirm the Nicene Creed’s teaching concerning God’s creation out of nothing; i.e. creation ex nihilo. However, to say that creation ex nihilo was not held by the earliest Christians and the Jews before them is not wholly accurate.
It is better to say that there was a diversity of views concerning creation ex nihilo in the first century among Christians and Jews. Some Scriptural passages suggested a creation ex nihilo interpretation, whereas others were more ambiguous, lending themselves towards other interpretations. Like concerns about the deity of Christ, and what that actually meant, the early church had to wrestle with what creation actually meant regarding the eternal existence of matter. By the time of the Nicaea era, the issue was resolved in that historical orthodox Christians accepted the idea that the material world had a specific beginning, where the existence of God came prior to that of the material world.6
Even the controversy regarding creation ex nihilo recognizes the need for accurate bible interpretation, in that simply having possession of the Scriptures does not necessarily guarantee that the Scriptures will be interpreted properly. Any controversial ambiguity within the biblical text concerning important doctrines needs to have creeds, such as the Nicene Creed, to act as guardrails, to prevent readers from taking certain passages of Scripture and going in the wrong direction with them.
Thankfully, even with some of the pushback offered, Jared Ortiz and Daniel Keating’s The Nicene Creed gives a high quality introduction to the creed, emphasizing its importance, and presenting the concepts articulated in the creed which remains accessible to the novice reader. Christians should take the opportunity of the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed to study this formative summary of Christian belief.
So, why is it that so many Bible-believing, evangelical Christians tend to either ignore or downplay the Nicene Creed? Now, that is an intriguing question. Perhaps it is due to the uniquely American tradition of “No Creed But the Bible,” a slogan popularized during the Second Great Awakening of the 19th century. Frankly, the tragic lack of emphasis on the great creeds of the Christian church, as with the Nicene Creed, within many evangelical circles is something that those Protestants, who know little about the creeds, could learn a thing or two from our friends in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions. At least, I hope so. The 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed may spark some interest!
1. Dr. Philip Cary wrote The Nicene Creed: An Introduction, in 2023, which offers a fairly easy read, explaining the creed line by line. Cary, a teacher in philosophy at Eastern University in Philadelphia, is an excellent teacher, someone I actually met and had dinner with at a wedding reception a few years ago, and that I have read and followed for years, so I would highly recommend him. From a Reformed Protestant perspective, Kevin DeYoung, a pastor and popular contributor at The Gospel Coalition, recently wrote The Nicene Creed: What You Need to Know about the Most Important Creed Ever Written. I heard an interview with DeYoung giving an overview of the book, and that sounds very promising. Those are just a couple of recommendations, from a list of several available. Later in the year, I will offer a review of a great academic book, The Cambridge Companion to the Council of Nicea, edited by Young Richard Kim, which takes a deep dive into the story of Nicea, with essays by several historians, covering a wide variety of topics, focused more on the history behind the council. The Ortiz and Keating book, being reviewed in this blog post, is more of a general introduction to the theology of the Nicene Creed, looking at each phrase of the creed to see how the church worked through the controversies to arrive at the most important theological statement and summary of Christian belief. In summary, if you are Protestant and would prefer not to wade through some of the finer points of Roman Catholic theology, stick with either the Philip Cary or Kevin DeYoung book on the Nicene Creed. Linked below are some lectures/interviews with Cary and DeYoung that might spur your interest in their books. But if you want a quick introduction, watch the first video below produced by Gospel Simplicity.↩
2. The concept of the eternal subordination of the Son, which stirred up tremendous online controversy in the middle of the second decade of the 21st century (about 10 years ago), harkens back to certain elements of the 4th century debate surrounding the Council of Nicaea. See earlier Veracity blog post regarding the doctrine of the Trinity from an author who vigorously opposes the idea of the eternal subordination of the Son. Defenders of the eternal subordination of the Son say that the Son is functionally subordinate to the Father, in eternity, while still being ontologically equal to the Father. I find the doctrine of the eternal subordination of the Son to be wholly unconvincing, though one critic who commented claims that I misrepresents his view. For another conservative critique of the “eternal subordination of the Son” doctrine, see this First Things article by Craig Carter. Readers should do their own research and draw their own conclusions. A helpful overview of the “eternal subordination of the the Son” controversy, and its relationship to the Nicene Creed, is covered by the following discussion on the White Horse Inn “Sola Media” podcast below. This is my biggest beef with Wayne Grudem’s theology affirming the “eternal subordination of the Son” . ↩
4. Augustine, Eighty-Three Different Questions, no. 52, trans. David L. Mosher, FOTC 70 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1982), 88–89., found in Ortiz and Keating, chapter. 2. See Veracity blog posts on the atonement for more (Michael Heiser on Leviticus, Stephen De Young on the atonement.↩
5. For a technical history but excellent theological reflection on the doctrine of the Trinity, see the work of the late Scottish theologian, Thomas Torrance. I read Torrance when I was in seminary in the 1990s. He goes pretty deep, but the reading investment is very rewarding. You can start with The Trinitarian Faith, but then go for his masterpiece, Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons.↩
6. Ortiz and Keating cite Gerhard May’s Creatio Ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of “Creation out of Nothing” in Early Christian Thought, trans.A.S. Worrall (London: T&T Clark, 2004) as evidence for their claim. Even some progressive Christian scholars, like Nazarene scholar Thomas Jay Oord, argue that the Bible does not teach creation ex nihilo. However, William Lane Craig and Paul Copan’s Creation out of nothing : a biblical, philosophical, and scientific exploration (Michigan: Baker Academic, 2004) refutes May’s argument that no one accepted the doctrine of creation ex nihilo until the second century. Copan has an online essay which summarizes the themes of his book.↩
As the summer of 2025 has been drawing to a close, I ran across some old photos of a summer trip to the Midwest, about twelve years ago, that I would like to share. My wife’s family is from Evansville, Indiana, which is not far from Interstate 64, taking one highway west from where we live in Williamsburg, Virginia to get there. Just a little over halfway to Indiana, about an hour northeast of Lexington, Kentucky, is a little spot off the road called “Cane Ridge,” not too far from the small town of Paris, Kentucky, in horse country.
Most people have never heard of Cane Ridge, Kentucky. The ridge was named by the explorer Daniel Boone, during the early decades of the American republic. But if you are a student of American church history, you should probably know about it, because Cane Ridge, Kentucky was the site of one of the most remarkable events of Christian history.
Sinners gathering on the “anxious bench,” during the American Second Great Awakening, in the early 19th century. The “anxious bench” was the forerunner to the modern “altar call.” This portrait envisions what the camp meeting at the Cane Ridge Revival might have looked like.
The Woodstock of the 19th Century
In 1801, a group of ministers were hoping to host a camp revival meeting in what was then the frontier of the young nation of the United States. The two most prominent figures in the movement were originally a Presbyterian minister, Barton Stone, and later on, a Scottish minister, Alexander Campbell. During the heat of the summer, there was not that much to do while your crops were growing on the frontier before the fall harvest, so the idea of traveling to a camp meeting was a great way to accomplish spiritual and social goals for folks spread out in sparsely populated areas of the Midwest.
What was unique about the Cane Ridge Revival was the sheer size of the event, for that moment in history, out on the American frontier. Stone and his fellow ministers behind the revival had advertisements for the camp meeting posted in numerous newspapers across the country. Historians estimate that in August, 1801, somewhere between 10,000 to 20,000 people descended upon Cane Ridge. It was the 19th century cultural equivalent of the 1969 music festival, Woodstock, held in New York state, a defining moment for the counterculture movement of the 1960s.
So many people came to the camp meeting that the house used by the little Presbyterian church, which hosted the event, could not be used. Makeshift platforms were made across the various fields surrounding the church building, where singers sang, and most importantly, preachers preached. In front of some of these platforms there was an “anxious bench,” where various sinners could sit when the message being preached pricked their hearts, urging them on to repentance. The “anxious bench” was the forerunner to the “altar calls” held by 20th century preachers, like Billy Graham.
When I met up with the local historian who was on-site, he told me that there were reported manifestations of healings, speaking in tongues, and being “slain in the spirit.” He even told me that some additional, really bizarre stuff was reported, too, like people barking like dogs.
Barton Stone, who led the little Presbyterian church at Cane Ridge, reported on the meeting like this: “Many, very many fell down, as men slain in battle, and continued for hours together in an apparently breathless and motionless state — sometimes for a few moments reviving, and exhibiting symptoms of life by a deep groan, or piercing shriek, or by a prayer for mercy most fervently uttered.” Eventually, their condition would change, giving way first to smiles of hope and then of joy, they would finally rise “shouting deliverance” and would address the surrounding crowd “in language truly eloquent and impressive.” “With astonishment,” Stone exclaimed, “did I hear men, women and children declaring the wonderful works of God, and the glorious mysteries of the gospel.”
The original Cane Ridge meeting house, the Presbyterian church which hosted the 1801 revival. This photo was taken sometime in the early 20th century. I saw it as part of the Cane Ridge museum exhibit.
Not Presbyterian, Not Baptist, Not Methodist….. Just “Christian”
Cane Ridge was a remarkably interdenominational event, where Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists all joined together, for the cause of calling people to give their lives to Jesus. At the end of the week-long or so meeting, those remaining at the camp all shared in the Lord’s Supper together. It was a potent experience of Christian unity and spiritual energy. In many ways, the Cane Ridge Revival ended up spinning off numerous other camp meetings across the Eastern United States for decades, prior to the advent of the American Civil War.
Barton Stone and subsequently Alexander Campbell became the leaders synonymous with the movement, which often is called by historians as the “Restoration” movement. The idea was that Stone and Campbell believed that these various camp meetings, starting with Cane Ridge, were about restoring the Christian church to its original New Testament foundations.
During the early 19th century, groups like the Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists were all defined by their various creeds and confessions. Visionaries like Stone and Campbell believed that these creeds and confessions just got in the way of sticking with what “the Bible says,” and calling people to faith and repentance, and following Jesus.
This Restoration movement was often associated with the popular slogan: “No Creed But the Bible.”
However, despite its “non-denominational,” or perhaps “inter-denominational” focus, the Stone-Campbell Restoration movement ended up spawning several prominent American denominations:
Churches of Christ
Disciples of Christ
The Christian Church
… and several others
As the original Cane Ridge church building was starting to fall in disrepair, an effort was made to preserve the wooden structure, by building another stone structure around it, in 1930. If you can imagine that inside the stone building behind me, stands the preserved wooden church building (see prior photo) safe from the elements, then that is what you would see if you visit Cane Ridge, Kentucky. The wooden building inside is one of the oldest structures standing in Kentucky.
After Cane Ridge
Barton Stone himself left the Presbyterian church, there at Cane Ridge, just a few years after the Cane Ridge Revival meeting. Stone was not content to sign off on the Westminster Confession of Faith championed by the Presbyterians any more. Instead, Stone merely called his group “Christians.” Alexander Campbell’s father, Thomas, was originally a minister enthusiastic about the Restoration movement, during that period of the Cane Ridge Revival. But it was the son, Alexander Campbell, who became a prominent minister himself among the “Disciples of Christ,” in the decades following the Cane Ridge Revival.
Several features were common to all of these groups. They all acknowledged the importance of water baptism for believing adults and celebrating the Lord’s Supper on a weekly basis.
However, there were notable differences, too, among these various groups, fault lines spreading out in various directions. For example, some groups emphasized that baptism was not simply a sign of one’s profession of faith, but it was also essential to one’s salvation. Some in the Churches of Christ refused to have musical instruments in their worship services.
I asked the on-site historian about what was behind the dispute about musical instruments. At first he told me that different Stone-Campbell groups would cite their own Scripture passages, for and against musical instruments in church. But he then conceded that the primary issue was economical. Most of these small churches, mostly scattered across the Midwest, were poor. By the time a church grew large enough to afford something like a piano or an organ, the community was often faced with a crisis: Do you spend your limited church funds on something like an expensive piano or organ, or do you increase the pay of your minister, or even better yet, fund some missionaries to go out and start some new churches?
While idealistic in many ways, the Restoration movement pioneered by ministers like Barton W. Stone and Alexander Campbell got involved in various controversies. Stone, for one, became outspoken in his opposition to slavery. Stone sought publicly to free several slaves that his wife had inherited from her parents. Kentucky law prohibited Stone from doing that in that state, as the slaves were legally connected to an estate. So, Stone moved his family to Illinois, where it was legal to free slaves connected to an estate.
However, at the same time, Stone became convinced that the classic doctrine of the Trinity was not biblical. Interestingly, he did not claim to be a unitarian, though he accepted a kind of subordinationism with respect to Jesus as the Son being subject to the Father.
Alexander Campbell was perhaps the more intellectually inclined of the two, emphasizing that Christian ministers should be college educated. Campbell founded the first institution of higher learning, Bethany College, in what is now West Virginia. In his earlier years, Campbell would engage in various debates, particularly in opposition to infant baptism. Yet he also engaged in a debate once where he defended the institution of slavery as being biblical (contra Stone).
Campbell’s relationship with the Mormons was complicated, as a number of Stone-Campbell movement adherents left the movement to become Mormons. Campbell wrote a critical review of the Book of Mormon, saying that the Mormons had added extra supposed Scripture to the Bible without warrant.
Today, the descendants of the Stone-Campbell are a very diverse lot. There are still conservative elements of those groups that still uphold many of the ideals that came out of the Cane Ridge Revival. However, the largest denomination, the United Churches of Christ (UCC), grew out of several Restorationist and other churches to form what has become one of the most prominent liberal mainline Protestant church bodies. The UCC at the denominational leadership level has been known for its support for abortion rights as well as support for same-sex marriage.
A Reflection on the Stone-Campbell Movement
Today’s adherents to the original principles of the Stone-Campbell Restoration movement often have a mixed view of creeds and confessions. On the one hand, the revivalist heritage of the Cane Ridge Revival put a rightful focus on the importance of conversion and having a personal encounter with Jesus Christ.
Nevertheless, while the famous adage “No Creed But the Bible“ may sound great at first, it belies a problem that has surfaced throughout the history of the Restoration movement, and other similar attempts to transcend denominational differences. In an effort to get rid of the objectionable creeds, many Restoration groups ended up re-engaging the same debates that led to the historical creeds in the first place.
The fact that an effort to promote a “non-denominational” form of Christianity ended up spawning a whole host of denominations, anyway, should tell you something. Particularly in areas of the American Midwest, just about in any town, you are within a stone’s throw of hitting a “Christian Church, “Disciples of Christ Church,” or a “Church of Christ.” Furthermore, in a number of cases, particularly in the post World War 2 era, the “No Creed But the Bible” mantra has become a cloak for hiding a tendency towards embracing “progressive Christianity.”
While there are many the positive elements that sprang from the Cane Ridge Revival, and the subsequent Stone-Campbell Restoration movement, having an aversion to creeds does not bode well for the future of the church. True, some creeds and confessions can get really deep into the weeds, making too many demands on the conscience of the believer. But in the world of Protestant evangelicalism which I have immersed myself now for decades, the lack of any creed, or downplaying such a creed, can be a recipe for theological crisis, ironically leading to more church splits, and not less.
The fact is “No Creed But the Bible” is a creed, in and of itself. Unfortunately, it is not a very good one.
Barton Stone Memorial obelisk, marking Stone’s grave at Cane Ridge, Kentucky. Though Stone died in 1844, his remains were interred at Cane Ridge in 1847. My wife and I stopped by and visited Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in August, 2013, the same time of year the Cane Ridge Revival was held in the summer of 1801.
Veracity 