Free Forged by Bart D. Ehrman Page B

is the so-called Gospel of Peter. I say that it has been rediscovered, because we actually knew of its existence for centuries, before it turned up in an archaeological dig near the end of the nineteenth century. Our earlier source of information was Eusebius. Eusebius is often called the “father of church history,” since his ten-volume book, The Church History, was the first narrative account of the early Christian church. In this account Eusebius traces the spread of the Christian movement from the time of Jesus down to his own day, the early fourth century. Eusebius is an invaluable source of information for Christianity’s first three hundred years. For many of his narratives, his Church History is the only source we have. It is true, as scholars have increasingly recognized, that Eusebius very much puts his ownslant on his accounts, that he has personal views, theological perspectives, and hidden agendas that dictate how he tells his narrative. He often needs to be taken with a pound of salt. But he is especially valuable when he quotes verbatim from the earlier sources that were available to him. In those cases we get primary sources preserved for us from authors living before his time, direct access to earlier Christian authors whose writings have otherwise been lost.
    In Book 6 of his Church History Eusebius tells the story of an important bishop of the large church in Antioch, Syria, near the end of the second century, a man named Serapion. The story concerns a Gospel of Peter, and luckily this is one of those instances in which Eusebius actually quotes a primary source, a writing of Serapion himself. 7 As bishop of one of the largest communities in Christendom, Serapion had under his jurisdiction the churches in the villages and towns of the surrounding area, including the church in the town of Rhossus. Serapion indicates that while making the rounds of his churches, he visited Rhossus and found there was a division in the congregation. He attributed the division to petty squabbling and learned that it may have had its roots in the Gospel that was being used in the church. It was not Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John (Gospels that he doesn’t mention), but a Gospel of Peter. Serapion’s response was that Peter, of course, was a disciple of Jesus; any Gospel that he wrote must be perfectly acceptable. On these grounds he allowed the parishioners in Rhossus to continue using it.
    But he did so without reading the book himself. When he returned to Antioch, he learned from several informers that the Gospel in fact was a problem—it contained heretical teachings. In particular, it was used by a group of Christians known as docetists. Docetists (from the Greek word dokeo, “to seem” or “to appear”) maintained that since Christ was fully divine, he could not have been fully human and could not have really suffered (people suffer, God doesn’t suffer). Why then did Christ “seem” to be human? For docetists, it was all an appearance. Christ didn’t have a real flesh-and-blood body and didn’t really suffer and die. He only seemed to do so.
    Docetists maintained that Christ was not a real human being in two different ways. Some docetists claimed that Christ’s body only seemed to be human, because it was, in fact, phantasmal (like Casper the Friendly Ghost). The other docetic view is a bit more complicated. It maintained that there was a real man Jesus (flesh and blood like the rest of us), but there was also a different being known as the Christ. The Christ was a divine being who descended from heaven and came into Jesus at his baptism (the dove that descended on him and went into him), empowering him to perform miracles and deliver his divine teachings. Then, before Jesus died, the Christ left him to return to its heavenly home. So some people might have mistakenly thought that the Christ was a human who really died; but that was only Jesus. The Christ was