I don’t think any reasonable person could deny that it is important to consider the impact of socioeconomic factors and class struggle in history.  I would also certainly agree that there are lots of gaps in the historical record, which frequently included the now-lost voices of marginalized people.  I think it is also good that you are aware of your biases and openly acknowledge them.  My concern, though, is that it sounds like from what you say near the end of your post that you not only acknowledge your biases but also embrace them.  It is important to be aware of one’s biases; everyone has them, and it is impossible to fully rid oneself of them.  However, one should acknowledge one’s biases as part of an attempt to minimize them and adopt as objective a perspective as possible, even as absolute objectivity always eludes us.  Many things that are true, good, and beautiful are part of the establishment, the mainstream, and the popular, and are so precisely because they are true, good, and beautiful (The Harry Potter series is good; that is why it is popular).  On the other hand, many things that are true, good, and beautiful are unpopular and marginalized, in spite of their truth, goodness, and beauty.  One should not be biased in either direction.  

Marxism and the Early Church

It is not entirely clear to me how you think a Marxist view of history is supposed to apply to the history of early Christianity.  On the one hand, you suggest that the Christian movement was a catalyst for some kind of proletarian revolution against the rich.  On the other hand, you suggest that orthodox Christianity itself was a (rich? elitist?) movement that marginalized and silenced the (poor?) heretical Christian movements.  Perhaps you think that both are partially true at the same time, but it is hard for me to imagine how that could be so.  In any case, the latter historical interpretation seems to me extremely problematic.  The early Christian movement was a marginalized, persecuted community, mocked by the Romans as “a religion of women and slaves.”  Prior to the fourth century, it had no economic or political power.  So, the idea that early orthodox Christianity was part of some kind of elitist plot to subjugate the poor seems, frankly, absurd.  

Applying a Marxist interpretation of history in order to undermine the claims of early Christian orthodoxy flies in the face of all the evidence, given that the New Testament is saturated with the following teachings:

1. Generosity to the poor is of the utmost importance (Matt 5:42, 19:21, 25:31-46; Mark 10:21; Luke 6:30, 12:33-34, 14:12-14, 16:9, 18:22; 19:8-10; Acts 10:1-2; Gal 2:9-10; 1 Tim 6:17-19; James 2:14-17).
2. Riches are problematic and dangerous (Matt 13:22, 19:23-24; Mk 4:18-19, 10:23-25; Luke 12:15-21, 16:10-13, 18:24-25; 1 Tim 6:6-10).
3. Humility and servanthood are of the utmost importance (Matt 18:4, 23:12; Luke 18:14; Eph 4:1, Phil 2:3-9; Col 3:12; James 4:6, 10; 1 Pet 3:8, 5:5). This is the case even, or rather, especially, for those in positions of leadership (Matt 20:25-28, 23:8-12; Mark 9:33-35, 10:42-45; John 13:1-15).
4. The gospel is good news for the poor, and bad news for the rich (Matt 11:5; Luke 1:51-53, 4:18-21, 6:20, 7:22, 16:19-25; James 1:9-11, 2:5, 5:1-6).

On these topics, the Church Fathers continued seamlessly in line with the New Testament. For example, St. Basil the Great taught that “The money that you hide belongs to anyone in need.”  And we know from historical evidence that the early church did in fact (imperfectly, of course) visibly embody the way of life envisioned by these teachings.  

Christianity and Marxism are in agreement that capitalism is problematic; they just have radically different alternatives to capitalism that they propose.  Because Christians believe that love, not power, is what is most fundamental to reality, they repudiate the idea that the relationship between the rich and the poor must take the form of “class struggle.”  Instead, they envision reconciliation between rich and poor, between oppressor and oppressed.  In the church, the walls of hostility between socioeconomic classes are broken down (Gal 3:28), and everyone freely shares their wealth without considering their possessions their own (Acts 4:32-35).  Of course, some rich oppressors will refuse to repent and become part of the church; in that case, Christians will continue to love them and will refuse to use violence against them.  Call that last part “the opium of the people” if you want, but I think that Christianity offers far more beautiful and compelling moral vision than Marxism, and I think history has shown it to be overall more effective at actually helping the poor.

Early Christian Heresies

You are of course correct that one needs to demonstrate some reason why early heretical movements were wrong, rather than just assuming it, and such reasons do exist.  I will try to present them here as briefly as possible.

The Gnostics

The beliefs of the various second and third century cults modern scholars refer to as “Gnosticism” differed drastically from New Testament Christianity in many important ways. For example, they believed that this physical world and its creator were evil and that salvation means the escape of the soul from this world to union with the true God, rather than salvation meaning the transformation of this world by the Creator God and the hope of bodily resurrection. If NT Christianity is true, then Gnostic claims are false, and vice versa.  We have discovered many Gnostic writings, and they all date from the second century onward, while (almost) all of the NT dates from the mid to late first century.  When later texts come along that directly contradict everything the earlier historical sources say, we should immediately be highly skeptical.  Even anti-Christian scholar Bart Ehrman has stated that it is simply a historical fact that the NT Gospels are our best sources for learning about the historical Jesus.  Virtually all scholars are agreed that early first-century Christianity was a form of Judaism; Gnostic beliefs show a radical development away from this, with, for example, their repudiation of the physical world and their defining of “Christ” as a spiritual being instead of its actual meaning: the Jewish Messiah.  It’s not just that we don’t have evidence for Gnosticism from the first century;¹I John does provide evidence that some people (John’s theological opponents) at that time were claiming that “Christ” did not refer to the human Jesus (4:1-3) and that Jesus’ baptism, rather than his death on the cross, was what was really important (5:6). However, it seems that John’s theological opponents were a kind of proto-Gnostic movement, rather than being full-blown Gnostics, and, in any case, most scholars date I John to the very late first century or even the early second century, so this actually fits perfectly with the theory that Gnosticism did not really appear until the beginning of the second century. it’s that the evidence that we do have contradicts it. 

The argument is just as sound today as when St. Irenaeus made it in the second century: all the churches founded by the apostles believed and taught the same thing, which was summarized in the “rule of faith”; Gnostic teachings directly contradicted this, and thus were false.  The Gnostics, who were parasitic upon orthodox Christianity, usually didn’t even try to argue that the NT was bogus; instead, they tried to argue that NT texts had hidden spiritual/allegorical meanings that supported their beliefs.  The Gnostics could not effectively deny that the catholic (universal) church held to the teachings of the apostles, so they claimed that, in addition to the teachings believed by the common herd of Christians, the apostles had also secretly handed down secret Gnostic teachings for the truly “spiritual.”  The idea that the apostles created all the teachings of orthodox Christianity and taught them to all the churches merely as a cover so they could also hand down in the church secret teachings that directly contradict NT Christianity in many ways is absurd.  Furthermore, in addition to contradicting catholic church teaching, the various Gnostic sects all contradicted each other.  Which one of them had the “correct” secret teachings?  The most reasonable belief, the one supported by the evidence, is that they were all wrong and orthodox Christianity was right.  

The Ebionites

The Ebionites were Jewish Christians who denied the Divine Identity of Jesus and believed in the continuing necessity of Torah observance for Christians.   It is likely that they were the direct descendants of the “circumcision party” that the apostle Paul vigorously butted heads with during his ministry.  We have some extant Ebionite texts from the second century, which claim that they were holding to the teachings of Peter, and that Paul was a corrupter of genuine Christianity.  However, according to the first-century book of Acts, the apostles were all agreed that Gentiles could be incorporated into the church without having to follow all the stipulations of the Torah (Acts 15), and it was Peter, not Paul, who first acted to bring Gentiles into the church, in spite of them being “unclean” by the standards of the Old Testament Law (Acts 10:1-11:18).  Now, some have argued that the book of Acts glosses over the differences between Paul and the other apostles, or even that the book of Acts itself was part of an (apparently, largely successful) attempt to reconcile these two originally conflicting forms of Christianity.  However, we don’t have to rely solely on the second-hand testimony of Acts; we also have Paul’s own testimony.  Paul himself tells us that he met with the Jerusalem apostles and that they gave their blessing on the gospel he was proclaiming to the Gentiles (Gal 2:1-10).  From what we know of Paul’s personality, I think we can be confident that if they had really fundamentally disagreed, Paul would have just said that they were wrong and he was right.  Now, Paul does say that there was an incident where he rebuked Peter for acting in a way that was not inclusive of Gentiles (Gal 2:11-14), but it is clear that Paul rebuked him for acting hypocritically, not because of a difference of belief.²Paul does say that Peter acted hypocritically because of the influence of “certain men from James” (Gal 2:12), but this does not indicate that James was an advocate of the circumcision party, only that these men had come from the Jerusalem church, where James was the leader, and that some (not all) of these Jerusalem Christians were part of the circumcision party.  The historical evidence contradicts the Ebionite narrative.  

But why, you might ask, would the “circumcision party” continue to insist on the necessity of Torah observance if such a position had really been rejected by all the apostles at the Jerusalem Council?  In the modern period, we have seen some very conservative Roman Catholics reject changes to centuries-old traditions brought about by the Second Vatican Council and even schism from the Church because of them, in spite of these changes being proclaimed by the Magisterium of the Church, the Pope, and an Ecumenical Council.  It is not unreasonable to think that, in the same way, some very conservative Jewish Christians would balk at abandoning the necessity of Torah observance as a necessary mark of God’s covenant people, in spite of a Council of the apostles declaring this change.  Remember, early first century Christianity was not a “new religion,” but a form of Judaism.  Torah observance had been central to Jewish identity for centuries.  It makes sense that some Jewish Christians would resist giving up its necessity, and would continue to cling to its necessity even after the Jewish and Christian communities decisively parted ways in the late first century.  Later, in order to validate their Ebionite form of Christianity, they made up the claim that they were the true heirs of the apostle Peter’s teachings.³In saying this, I don’t necessarily mean to claim that these Ebionites were perversely deliberately making up lies that they knew very well were not true; they may have sincerely believed that, in spite of evidence and claims to the contrary, Peter, as a good Jew and respected leader, would never have abandoned the necessity of Torah observance. They may then have constructed, based on this sincere belief, an account of what they believed Peter must have really said and done.

So much for Torah observance.  What about Christology?  It is common for people to claim that early Christology was “low” and that later Christology became “high.”  The problem with this is that we see in the apostle Paul’s writings a very high Christology that is both very Jewish and very early (Phil 2:5-11).  Thus, some instead claim that most early Jewish Christology was low, although Paul was the exception to this.  The argument for this is that Q (a hypothetical source used by both Matthew and Luke to compose their Gospels) supposedly has a low Christology.  The problem with this is that, if Q did exist, we don’t know what parts of Q Matthew and Luke used and what parts they left out.  Even if we had enough information to reconstruct the entire text of Q, the lack of explicitly high Christological statements in this one text would not prove that the author or his community had a low Christology.  Even if it did, I do not see any reason to prioritize the hypothetical text Q over the Gospel of Mark, which has a high Christology, for telling us about early Jewish Christology.  We may not have very early historical evidence that absolutely proves that all the apostles believed exactly what Paul believed about the Divine identity of Jesus, but, given that Paul and the Jerusalem apostles were in basic agreement about the gospel, I think it is reasonable to suppose that they had at least roughly similar Christological beliefs, and the historical evidence is consistent with this.

The Marcionites

The second-century heretic Marcion believed that only Paul rightly understood the gospel; he accepted the Pauline epistles and then accepted the gospel of Luke only after editing out all the parts that he didn’t like.  Since the foundation of Marcion’s beliefs was his interpretation of Paul’s writings, which are part of the New Testament, we have direct access to all of the information we need to evaluate the reasonableness of Marcion’s beliefs; there is not even a possibility that crucial historical evidence that could support Marcion’s case has been lost.  Marcion believed that the Old Testament god, the creator god, was a god of justice and wrath, and that Jesus revealed a completely different God, a God of love and mercy.  I am confident in stating that not one single Pauline scholar today would agree with Marcion’s interpretation of Paul.  It is abundantly clear from Paul’s writings that Paul believed that there was one true God, the creator God, the God of Israel; that this God, who was both wrathful and loving, had revealed Himself most fully in Jesus; that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah who had brought salvation to God’s covenant people, Israel; and that now, through Jesus, Gentiles could become part of God’s covenant people.  Marcion was wrong, and we know with certainty that he was wrong.

Other Heresies

I could go on to discuss the Arians, Nestorians, Monophysites, Monothelites, and other heretical groups that date from the fourth century onward, but I will not at this point, because this would not really be relevant to the historical issues we are discussing here.  By the time we reach the Arian controversy and forward, there was no question about what the apostles had said or what the correct Scriptures were; all parties were agreed on that.  The question was an exegetical one: how to interpret what the New Testament said about God and Jesus.  As with Marcionism, since we have direct access to all of the information we need to answer this question, it is really beside the point to speculate about what historical data from these debates might have been lost to history.  

Finally, if it is the burden of the historian to demonstrate some reason that early Christian heresies were wrong, then it is also the burden of the historian to demonstrate some reason that early Christian orthodoxy was wrong, rather than just throwing historical skepticism and the hermeneutic of suspicion at it. That is my challenge.

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