The Bauer Thesis Examined: The Geography of Heresy in the Early Christian Church.

Written by Thomas A. Robinson Reviewed By Frederick W. Norris

The publication of Walter Bauer’s Rechtgäubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Christentum in 1934 stirred no wide interest but it did attract the attention of some significant scholars. Its thesis was that the classical theory of the development of orthodoxy and heresy, the priority and majority of orthodoxy, was incorrect; although heresies were forms of community and faith that later generations would reject, earliest Christianity in most regions was first and strongest heretical. Bauer basically skipped the New Testament as a field of study and worked on the literature at the end of or just after its era. He divided the evidence into geographical areas and made his case for each. Only Rome fits the description of having an orthodox majority from the beginning. (That was itself an unexpected claim from a staunch Protestant.)

The volume was republished with additional essays by others in 1964 and appeared in an English translation from the United States during 1971. Although the thesis is still held by some prominent historians of early Christianity, it has received rather scathing criticism in recent years. Some early reviews called it into question. H.E.W. Turner’s The Pattern of Christian Truth, the Bampton Lectures of 1954, attempted a serious refutation and a spate of articles and parts of studies since its translation have attacked various sections of Bauer’s study. Robinson’s effort is one of the first books since Turner’s to reconsider the topic.

The volume is organized in three parts, each more successful than the previous one. The first, concerned with the history leading to the debate, is introductory. Anyone aware of the problem will not find the observations here particularly trenchant, although the theological student will be brought into the discussion with some sense of its wider context.

The second part begins to show the power of Robinson’s effort and his sense of the inadequacy of Bauer’s thesis. Wisely he includes numerous comments from Helmut Koester’s Introduction to the New Testamentwhich in so many ways attempts to sharpen the focus of Bauer’s thesis both by accepting the premises that heresy often preceded orthodoxy and that investigation should be pursued on a geographical basis. Robinson questions that geographical method itself, and then argues that Edessa, Egypt, Corinth, Rome, Jerusalem and Antioch have far too little information about them to support any kind of hypothesis concerning the relationship of orthodoxy and heresy. The data is either ‘ambiguous’ or ‘mute’. Overall that well may be true. But on occasion, Robinson does not deal with some of the important information. When he deals with Egypt, Robinson neither mentions that the Western Text of Acts describes Apollos as an Alexandrian nor notices that Morton Smith studied an interesting fragment from Clement of Alexandria. He also does not treat certain parts of Ignatius’s epistles that contain information about the martyr’s concern for Christianity in Antioch. It is still obvious, however, that the caution and good judgment of a fine historian are at work.

The last three chapters focus on the information for Ephesus and Asia Minor. Here Robinson is at his best. He devastates Bauer’s thesis, showing clearly that its weakness is not portrayed by offering yet another speculative reconstruction of the silences. Precisely because this geographical area offers the most textual evidence of any region of early Christianity, it is the finest test case. And in many instances Bauer’s interpretation of the data which apparently support his thesis fails because of the misused paradigm or a misread text.

This volume by itself will not defeat what is an ever-weakening hypothesis. But no one can defend Bauer’s thesis without going directly through it. And one of its major aims, describing the best attested region of early Christianity (Ephesus and Asia Minor) as a stronghold of orthodoxy, is a bullseye.


Frederick W. Norris

Emmanuel School of Religion, Johnson City, TN, USA