Season 2 · Episode 24
Full episode description
Part Three of The Hidden Arc, and the close of Season 2. Everything the church has used to settle an argument ever since was invented in that gap, by people improvising with no precedent to follow. Four gospels. A collection of letters. An office. One of the three was the work of a single person whose name is lost.
This episode walks:
- why a movement that had gone forty years without writing a life of Jesus suddenly produced four
- Mark, written closest to the wreckage, relocating Temple, sacrifice, court and leadership into one person
- Matthew, fighting a rival claimant for the inheritance of Israel and building a replacement for what was lost
- Luke, writing legitimacy for a Gentile church two generations out from Jerusalem
- John, expelled from the synagogue, answering that the institutions were never the point
- what is solid in all of this and what is inference, said plainly rather than smoothed over
- the anonymous act, around the end of the first century, that turned Paul’s occasional letters into scripture
- Ignatius of Antioch campaigning for a single bishop, failing in his own lifetime, and being dug up eighty years later to prove the case
- the mother church of Jerusalem, which survived the war of 70 and died in 135, and was condemned as heretical by its own children
The most consequential editorial decision in Christian history was made by a person whose name is lost.
Not from tradition. From evidence.