On “Early Christianity in Alexandria” by David Litwa ****

We don't know much about Christianity in Alexandria before about 180, when folks like Dionysius, Pantaenus, and most especially Clement and Origen show up on the scene. Or at least, that's the usual story. Litwa claims that we actually know quite a bit about Christianity before these folks arise, if only we stop overlooking the obvious. Christianity in Alexandria was not what we have come to think of as orthodox. It predates all that and nourished quite different views of Jesus than those that have come to be adopted by the church centuries later.

A major point in this claim comes in the form of the Jewish community itself, which was highly Hellinized, at least among some of the intellectual class. Our source for that sort of info is, of course, Philo, the Jewish philosopher who resided in the city around the time of Jesus who adopted Platonic thinking to Jewish scripture. Jewish Christians simply fell in line with such Jewish thinking. Case in point for Litwa is Apollos. I'm not convinced that Apollos was a thinker in line with Philo and with Christian thinkers who would later be termed gnostics, but Litwa tries to make a case for it from Paul's writings about Apollos and about false teachers in his letters to the Corinthians. (For me, the two simply don't fit well together. Paul doesn't seem one for subtlety when it comes to people he disliked, so I don't see him writing positive things about Apollos in one place (although Litwa reads Paul, even in such passages, as actually placing himself above Apollos, thus snubbing him) and then writing such sarcastic and denigrating things about “ministers” more generally, while actually meaning Apollos among them.

But after those early chapters, as Litwa notes, Jewish people were essentially for a few decades removed from Alexandria, around 117. This left primarily non-Jewish Christians, who did their best to use the Jewish scriptures but read them in allegorical ways, like Philo, finding in them valuable lessons even while giving up the Jewish rites connected with them. Mix those ideas with others from Greek philosophy and from Greek and Egyptian mythology, and you end up with a unique form of Christianity, one that most would come to see as not Christian at all: These would be the followers of people like Basilides and Valentinus. Such teachers, however, at the time were no less Christian than those who would eventually win the doctrinal debate going on among early Christians. Transmigration, the idea that Jesus was never really human or that the god of the Jews was some other, lower god who was not the real one—many of these things found space in the theologies of the Alexandrian Christians, until, of course, they didn't, because other Christians won out. But truly, as Litwa notes, even Origen and Clement dabbled in such ideas, even if those men eventually got adopted into what become the Catholic Church.

Litwa's book is a good corrective to the manner in which we often think about early Christianity. Although I'd argue that such thinking was not that which reflected the early apostles, at least as preserved in our New Testament, it's clear that other Christianities existed from early on. Those, however, were not the ones that eventually came to be the Christianity we know. (Even so, such ideas subtly changed much of what Christians have come to believe in the millennia since the New Testament was put together.)