Andrew Welburn, The Beginnings of Christianity: Essene Mystery,
Gnostic Revelation and the Christian Vision. Edinburgh: Floris
Books, 1991.
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
Those readers who have been intrigued by Andrew
Welburn's previous articles on early Christian esotericism in Novum
Testamentum, Vigilae Christianae and elsewhere will have
had their appetites whetted to get a look at his larger synthesis,
provided in the present book. Welburn is well-read in the ancient
sources, many of them largely neglected in most treatments of
Christian origins, as well as in recent scholarship on those sources,
much of it neglected as well. Welburn has cast his net more widely and
in less-fished places because he is an adherent of the
Anthroposophical creed of Rudolf Steiner. This allegiance is the root
of both the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of the book. A
passing judgment Welburn renders on the Johannine commentaries of
Valentinians Heraclides and Ptolemaeus seems to apply equally to his
own book: "Their exegesis admittedly involves a certain amount of
special pleading for the specifically Valentinian [or Steinerian]
system" (p. 264) without detracting from their great value. The
Beginnings of Christianity reads too often like what it is:
apologetics for the clairvoyant "spiritual research" whereby Steiner
claimed to be able to read the past off the all-pervasive Akashic
Records. Again and again Welburn tells us how modern exegetical and
archaeological findings tend to confirm the prescient judgments of
Steiner on the character of earliest Christianity.
I
am frequently reminded of the efforts of apologists for Velikofsky in
a different field. In both cases, the approach is to borrow from
whatever scholarly theories and conclusions happen to approximate the
views of the Master and to treat just these hypotheses as "the"
results of scholarship, when they are no more secure than any of the
other myriad of disparate theories. The field of New Testament
scholarship is so vast that one will not look in vain for bits and
pieces of theories which chance to coincide with opinions held by a
sectarian seer on other grounds entirely. Welburn seems to wind up
judging certain exe-guesses superior, even compelling, insofar as they
tend or seem to corroborate the Akashic readings of Steiner: "Was the
[Stoic] logos-teaching the 'mystery' to which Paul referred in the
Letter to the Corinthians? The obvious possibility that it was is
rendered a certainty, I believe, by two things. One is the startling
exactness with which the doctrine matches Rudolf Steiner's account of
the esoteric conception behind the statements in the Corinthian
letters" (p. 225).
Too often the emerging shape of the esoteric Christianity Welburn
"discovers" in various canonical and extracanonical texts and
attributes alike to Jesus, Paul, and John (= Lazarus) seems to take
its broad outline from Anthroposophy and Steiner's theory of the
evolution of consciousness. From the massive ocean of early Essene,
Gnostic, Mandaean, Hermetic ideas, Welburn fishes out those with the
most salient relation to Steinerism and connects the dots in a way
suggested by the Anthroposophical paradigm. The most flagrant case
occurs in Chapter 8, "The Two Messiahs." Beginning with the Qumran
doctrine of the Levitical and Davidic messiahs, Welburn works things
around to the intriguing stories in the Gnostic Book of Baruch and the
Pistis Sophia in which the youth Jesus merges with an angelic entity,
a kind of spirit double. Welburn does not put his cards on the table,
but to anyone familiar with the esoteric system of Steiner, it is
apparent what he is getting at. Welburn is hinting at Steiner's
breath-takingly audacious harmonization of the Matthean and Lukan
nativity stories. In Steiner's The Gospel of St. Luke we learn
that the two nativity stories are those of two separate children named
Jesus, one the reincarnation of Zoroaster (hence the object of the
Persian Magi's veneration in Matthew), the other of Solomon! The
Zoroaster-Jesus then dies, freeing his spirit to enter into the body
of the Solomon-Jesus!
It is clear that Steiner was himself something of a Gnostic mystagogue,
a spinner of myths and creator of imaginary worlds. One reason his
speculations and revelations so often coincide with bits and snippets
from the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi codices is that Steiner
was familiar with scholarship on the Essenes and Gnostics based on
what was already known of them in his day. He wasn't working in a
vacuum. Another reason is that he was simply thinking like the ancient
esotericists, about the same issues, and with the same biblical raw
materials. In the same way the Reverend Sun Myung Moon and William
Marrion Branham managed to rediscover mythemes in the biblical texts
that ancient sectarians had found there, without knowing of these
exegetical predecessors. Ioan Couliano, in his The Tree of Gnosis,
argues that there need have been no genealogical link between ancient
Gnostics and the medieval Cathari and Bogomils; they were just playing
the same game with the same pieces.
But then this means that the paradigm of Steiner is after all
potentially quite valuable in any quest to understand the way the
early Christian sectarians and occultists may have viewed matters. As
Welburn says early on, Steiner had an imaginative knack for
envisioning the kind of living emotional, social and ritual realities
that are presupposed by our ancient texts. Too often scholars are
content to treat these texts as mosaic pieces to fit into a flat mural
of the history of ideas, something like a picturesque but grotesque
Dispensational chart. Welburn follows Steiner's lead in filling in the
outlines of living people and their experiences. And here it is the
mystic, the occultist, the enthusiast who may have the advantage,
since it "takes one to know one."
To put this another way, Welburn has carried the paradigm of Walter
Bauer (Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity) a
significant step further. Bauer was working his way toward the
reconstruction of ancient polymorphous Christianity from an
essentially orthodox mindset. He was venturing into alien territory,
finding ways to detect realities that according to his own theological
sensibilities should not have been there. Thus the greatness of his
achievement. But now that we know how diverse the early Christianities
were, it is helpful for someone like Welburn to scrutinize the
evidence afresh and, unlike Bauer, from a "heretical" viewpoint. One
often feels that more orthodox establishment scholars just cannot
break with their theological pedigrees to take seriously that the
Gospel of Philip may have to be taken as seriously as the Gospel of
Mark in reconstructing earliest Christianity. If it occasionally
surprises the reader of Welburn to see his simply assuming that the
Gospels of Thomas and Philip actually stem from the disciples of those
apostles, it should make the reader pause to ask how arbitrary it may
be to accept traditional ascriptions of authorship (or at least
slippery claims of "apostolicity") for canonical books.
Another factor, seriously considered by Welburn but neglected to the
point of invisibility in contemporary scholarship, is the likely
influence of Zoroastrianism on Gnosticism, Essenism, and the canonical
New Testament books. It seems to me that mainstream scholars are far
less quick to consider the extent and significance of Zoroastrian
influence on the New Testament than on the Old, and that this
reluctance stems from their theological presuppositions about the Old
Testament as mere preparation for the New. The former they will allow
to have suffered the intincture of pagan influence, while the latter
they are inclined to view as pristine revelation pure and simple.
Possible Buddhist influence on early Christianity, an intriguing
question once taken seriously by scholars, but long since fallen from
the table, is another such case.
One of the major arguments against the theory of F.C. Baur (as well as
the most futile) was that his assigning of the various New Testament
writings (and parts of writings) to the Petrine thesis, the Pauline
antithesis, and the Catholicizing synthesis was merely a function of
his dogmatic Hegelianism and represented the forcing of the data into
alien molds. Insofar as Baur was a Hegelian, the most one might say is
that he was thereby predisposed to be on the lookout for cases of
thesis-antithesis-synthesis, a type of phenomenon common enough to
have suggested to Hegel his schema in the first place. Do the New
Testament writings seem to manifest Judaic, Pauline, and Catholicizing
features? It seems hard to deny that they do, though post-Baur
research has shown much more going on besides. But I mention this
criticism of Baur to introduce a like caveat about Welburn's paradigm.
It seems to me that here we are witnessing a case of isolated data
being appropriated in the interest of a complex alien conceptual
framework, Steiner's philosophy of the history of consciousness. Did
Steiner really derive his theory from a historical induction from the
early Christian textual evidence? No, obviously he had other equally
significant sources. Trying to derive his system from early Christian
texts as Welburn does strikes me as a burden fully as onerous as that
which would be borne by a Roman Catholic who felt obliged to justify
the traditions of his church by an appeal solely to the Bible, as if
much or most of it had not instead derived from tradition and
ecclesiastical imagination.