Beeson podcast, Episode 323 https://www.beesondivinity.com/podcast/2018/Ancient-African-Christianity David Wilhite February 6, 2018 Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George. Timothy George: Welcome to today's Beeson podcast. My guest today is Dr. David Wilhite. He is a Professor of Christian Theology at Baylor University's Truett Theological Seminary. He's also a graduate of Beeson Divinity School and Samford University. He holds the Ph.D. from the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland, and he also taught for two years at Seattle Pacific University before going to Baylor. So, David, welcome to the Beeson Podcast today. David Wilhite: Thank you, Timothy. It's an honor to be with you. Timothy George: I've seen you once or twice this year at different conferences. On a couple occasions, we've had a chance to refer to some of your current academic work, and that's what we want to talk about, in particular, a brand new book that you have coming out on “Ancient African Christianity.” Maybe we could start by just saying ... tell us what that is and how you got interested in it. David Wilhite: Sure. Well, let me take the questions in reverse. If you're thinking of ancient African Christianity, I'm neither African, and despite what my kids think, I'm not all that ancient. I think I got into this over a pretty long period, several steps. I was interested in the early church and the writings known as the Church Fathers. I was especially drawn to some of the gaps in my own knowledge, like early Latin theology and where that came from, and the more and more I got into that material, the more I realized how many of those writers were coming from North Africa, and so I guess I just sort of, by accident, backed into the problem that very little work has been done to take seriously that African context of these writers. My doctoral thesis was on Tertullian, the first North African writer, he was the first Native Latin writer, and it was focusing on what does it mean for him to be African under Roman time. Timothy George: A fascinating figure, Tertullian. Tell us a little bit about him, those who may not be familiar with him. David Wilhite: Sure. Well, if you want to know about him, you'd look up a standard reference work, and it would tell you a lot of incorrect facts. It would tell you that he was a former lawyer, an ordained priest, the son of a Roman proconsular centurion, he later converted to Montanism and other sorts of things like that. Over the last 40 years or so though, scholarship on Tertullian has really just reversed every one of those things I've listed for you. Most of that information comes from Jerome, another later Latin writer. When you start to look into those things, for example the fact that his father was a Roman proconsular centurion, there wasn't even such a thing as a Roman proconsular centurion in Tertullian's day. And so when you start to sort of pull back those layers and figure out what do we actually know about him, he tells us himself he was not an ordained priest. He does talk about what we call the Montanist prophets, people like Montanus himself, Priscilla, but he never seats himself as a schismatic, as someone who left the first Christian Church of Carthage and joined the first Montanist church of Carthage. And so as a scholar, as I started to read denial of those misunderstandings, I was sort of left with the study of what else do we know about him. All we really know about him is he's writing from ancient Carthage. The idea of Carthage in Africa figure surprisingly prominently in his writings. My study was to start with him and see what can we learn about him given that context. Now this latest book has really been another ten years of study of expanding my work from Tertullian all the way through later writers like Augustine and even into the whole millennium of Christianity until the time of Islam. Timothy George: I think I told you, I took a doctoral seminar on Tertullian when I was a student many years ago under George Williams at Harvard. I remember reading him. That's really where I learned to read Latin was reading Tertullian. I remember his Latin is often called fiery. It's beautiful. In a way it's energetic Latin, but in a way he gave a stamp, didn't he, to that whole field of Latin Christianity. David Wilhite: He does. In fact, one of my hopes is that there will be sort of a rediscovery of Tertullian. He's been eclipsed by Augustine, and rightly so because Augustine is a genius and a giant, but Augustine is more heavily indebted to Tertullian than most people acknowledge. Tertullian being the first Christian to write in Latin has to veritably invent a Christian vocabulary. I mean, most of our sort of King James theological words like "justification", he's the first to use them and give them Christian meaning. Justificacio is the Latin word. Timothy George: Yeah. David Wilhite: It may not mean for him what we think of, but we're still indebted to the path that he set for Westerners. For example, the word "trinity" is not in our Bible. The Latin word Trinitatis is first used by Tertullian. Timothy George: How about that. You know, you've spoken of Cyprian and Augustine, and we want to come back to them a little bit later, perhaps in this podcast, but we speak of both of them as Saint Cyprian and Saint Augustine. We don't speak of Saint Tertullian. Why is that? David Wilhite: Because Saint Augustine did not. Again, Augustine only knows Tertullian through his writings, but also he reads his writings after reading Jerome. And, once Jerome has said that Tertullian broke with the Catholic church and joined the Montanist church, well then he's suspect. And that tradition really follows him, plagues him, throughout the rest of Christian history. It's not my job to really defend Tertullian. He's got problems, but I don't think he was fairly represented. To think of him as a Montanist, again, I'm not the only one saying this. Most scholars today who look heavily at this realize that reading him as a Montanist doesn't help you understand him at all. Everything you would say about him in his Montanist period, you can already find in his pre-Montanist period. So he's not so much a heretic, but as you said earlier, a very passionate, very fiery, ruthless rhetorician who can argue his case very well. Sometimes he attacks other Christians in the meantime to make his case. Timothy George: Yeah, and I guess we should remember when we think about a figure like Tertullian and the whole experience of African Christianity as you've written about it, that much of this took place in the context of persecution and descent, and people were being martyred in the time of Tertullian. Right? David Wilhite: Exactly. That's one of the odd things about Tertullian not being received as a Saint is even Augustine, even people like Eusebius of Caesarea, and even Jerome will admit that when Tertullian is writing his apologetic works and when he's explaining Christians to outsiders, defending Christians in the face of persecution, I mean he's one of our greatest spokespersons. It's just again his reputation was tarnished later. Timothy George: Yeah. Now, we've talked a little bit about Tertullian and his context in Carthage, this great Metropolitan center of Roman civilization in Northern Africa, how did Christianity first reach that part of the world? Do we know that? David Wilhite: We don't know that for sure. There's no one source that documents what happened. We have solid evidence for Christianity around 180 in North Africa. By 180, you already have it showing up in multiple places, even far, far inland, further than what you would expect. That suggests to scholars that Christianity shows up earlier in the second century, perhaps even ties to the first century, but again that becomes speculation because we have no hard evidence for that. So how it arrived, it's interesting because all the early Christian sources from North Africa are using Latin. It was once assumed that it was just simply a daughter church of Rome. But again, historians quickly realized that there is something very distinct and unique about the North African sources, and so they started looking for other possibilities. In the mid-twentieth century it was very popular to think of close ties between North African Christianity and ancient Judaism. And that would be true for most of ancient Christianity, but the thought was maybe that these are communities that were first Jewish and, much like the pattern you see in Acts, they were then Christianized. However, that theory is not quite as popular today. There's just not as much evidence as we first thought. So the real short answer is we don't know. It looks like there is something unique about these sources that don't tie them to Rome and Italy, that don't tie them directly to Greece and other Greek speaking places. We probably are best assuming there was a variety of Christian voices coming into North Africa from various places. We just don't have one single point that we can touch on to say, "here's the origin." Timothy George: Yeah. We usually think of the Bible being translated into Latin by Saint Jerome, but already there was this earlier Latin, I guess, version of the scriptures, Italic as sometimes we call it. Would this have been what Tertullian and North African Christians would've used, or do we know? David Wilhite: Well, that's right. You'll often, if you look in the commentaries, you'll see references to the Vetus Latina, the Old Latin, the version that must've been around before Jerome. That's really a construct. What you mean is when you read these Latin writers before Jerome, they have different translations than what Jerome gave. The vast majority of the writers used to reconstruct the Vetus Latina are these North African writers. So we don't know for certain that there was a Latin translation that was being used. There must've been some versions around. Writers like Tertullian, you can see translate directly from Greek, but he also knows that his audience has a Latin version translated for them that he can refer to. Again, there probably wasn't just one. There was probably several of these floating around. Timothy George: What are some things that Christians today can learn from the Africanness of this kind of Christianity? We know that today there are not very many Christians who live in that part of the world. It's largely a Muslim part of the world today. David Wilhite: That's right, especially when I talk about Africa, back to kind of tie this to your first question, we don't necessarily mean in the ancient times what we look at on the map, the continent of Africa. In the Roman period, the provinces West of Egypt, but North of the Sahara were called Africa. Generally, there was a specific province called Africa Proconsularis. So that's right, you could go to places like Egypt today, Ethiopia today, and there is still a surviving remnant of Christianity that can trace its roots back to Roman times, not so with North Africa. We can get into why that is and the differences, but yes, this is a tradition that largely died off. And so, even though there's not a living Christian witness come straight from that ancient tradition in North Africa there today, I mean the truth is that the Western Christians, any of us who come from the Roman Catholic and later Protestant traditions of Medieval Latin Europe, we are all indebted to these ancient African Christians. We just normally don't think of them as African because they are Latin writers. As far as what we can learn from them, we are already indebted to them. I mean, I think the question, the way I would put it is how can we better understand them if we see them as Africans. Timothy George: Yeah, that's good. David Wilhite: My book is largely, I mean 400 pages devoted to trying to begin that exploration, I think the short answer is we need a lot more study to figure that out. But if you would compare an ancient writer like Tertullian or Augustine to someone like the Apostle Paul, it seems like an obvious thing to us today that even though Paul claimed to be a Roman citizen, even though he was writing in Greek, and he sees his calling as the Apostle to the Gentiles, it's still obvious that he is Jewish. He claims to be a Hebrew of Hebrews. We would not properly understand Paul if we did not understand his Hebraic background. Right? So when he says words like "law", whatever we're going to think about natural law and moral law, we should also, for Paul, we should think Torah, very concretely that Hebrew background. So I would argue that we've probably lost something when we don't listen to Tertullian, Cyprian and Augustine and hear in their words and in their teachings the remnant of that African heritage. Timothy George: Now, you're a specialist in this period of church history and ancient Christianity, but this book is not written only for specialist scholars. It's intended to be an introduction, as you say in the subtitle, to a unique context and tradition, ancient African Christianity. How would you like folks to learn about this tradition in a way? David Wilhite: Good question. Because these writers were, as we've already said Latin writers lumped in with the Latin Western tradition, and in a sense that's correct, what's happened is there's no one source you can go to to really get the whole story of ancient African Christianity. There's been a good book by a French writer, Francois Ducray, that's now been translated. It's a lot shorter than I would like. It skips over some things. There's a few things I disagree with it on. So aside from that one book, the most recent ones before that were all in French from the early 20th century. One of them was a seven volume work and it was incomplete. So there's not a good place to start. So, that's why I decided to write this book, and as you say write it at an introductory level. I felt like trying to trace from Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine, and after Augustine into the Vandal period and the Byzantine, and then ultimately the Arabic, Islamic period, this is all one story. It needs to be told in one place. The writers like Augustine and the Donatists of his day, they believed that they're being true to Cyprian, who believed he was being true to Tertullian. The writers who come after Augustine believe they're being true to this one, I think we can call it a school of thought. To put it all in one place was just long overdue. Timothy George: That's great. Now, you're a prolific scholar and writer. I want to mention a couple of your other books. Maybe you can give us a one or two sentence description of them. We've already talked about “Tertullian the African,” which was your first book really I guess out of your doctoral work. David Wilhite: That's right. Timothy George: Then you have a book called the “Doctrine of the Church.” What's that about? David Wilhite: Yeah, that's a book I was asked to co-write with a friend of mine named Matt Robert Jensen, not the Robert Jensen we suddenly lost, but I like to tell people I wrote a book with Robert Jensen, just not that one. Matt Jensen is a systematic theologian, and he was asked to write this book for a T&T Clark series. They wanted the book to be ... They described it as an upper level introduction to the doctrine of ecclesiology. So this is upper level in the sense that we assume you already know what ecclesiology is, the doctrine of the church, we assume you already know who the Holy Spirit is, basic Christian fundamentals, but if you wanted to get up to speed on how should we talk about ecclesiology today, what are trends in scholarship, Matt represented the systematic side of that and I represented historical theology for that. And so we tried to put the conversation that the church has been having as far as trying to understand what do we mean when we say "we are the church". That conversation has been going on for 2,000 years and it's still a very lively conversation. Timothy George: Yeah. David Wilhite: Again, we tried to bring to light some of what we think are the most important voices from the past and the present. Timothy George: Now here's a book with a title that will grab you: “The Gospel According to Heretics.” What could that be about? David Wilhite: Yeah, well it's not just a cliché title. It actually is about the Gospel and how really the doctrine of Christology, who do we understand Jesus Christ to be, how that intersects with our salvation, so the Good News of Jesus Christ. Now when it's according to the heretics, what I did in that book was I went through the early Christological heresies, all the really major heresies about Jesus and devote a chapter to each one. There's one on Marcion, one on the Ebionites, one on the Gnostics, and so on right up until the 8th century. I try to really take seriously what's happened in recent scholarship, is what most people would call revisionist history where in this way of thinking we don't just trust the traditional sources. We already talked about this with Tertullian. If Jerome tells you Tertullian was a heretic, we look for ourselves to see if the evidence stacks up. Well, this has even been done for notorious people like Arius and I mentioned Marcion already. In this way of thinking, the heretics are not really evil, wicked people as they are sincere Christians who for whatever reason had a different view of Christ. We would say deviant. We would today say as practicing Christians heretical, but in their own time they didn't see themselves as intentionally breaking from orthodoxy. So what I tried to do, that's already been done by other scholars, to my knowledge though, no one had tried to say from that, "Well, if we did take the heretics seriously and we tried to understand why they said what they said about Jesus, what would we learn from that, and especially what would we learn about our own orthodoxy since our orthodoxy was forged in the fires of debates with heretics?" Timothy George: Yeah. David Wilhite: Yeah, so I don't want to give away the ending, but I think I'm still orthodox, and I believe that anyone who reads this book actually ends up finding the right answers, what we call the orthodox answers, but it's through an interesting route. We do it through the eyes of the heretic. Timothy George: And one of the things I've been very interested in and involved in is looking at the history of exegesis, how Scripture was received, the reception of the Bible in the history of the church. You yourself, along with Dr. Todd Still, who is the Dean of Truett, are editing, co-editing I guess, a five-volume series on the reception of Paul in the early church. Now that sounds like a pretty massive project. David Wilhite: Yes, it has been a big project. I've really enjoyed getting to work on this because this is a project where we ask other scholars to contribute essays. That gives me an excuse to talk to some of the best and brightest in our field, and really both New Testament studies, or I guess Biblical studies in general, had a real growing interest in how were these texts received in later centuries. Coming from the other direction, people like myself who are more historical theology or historians, they're interested in how did patristic exegesis develop. How were early Christians reading the Bible? And so what we've done is we've taken scholars from New Testament and scholars from early Christian history and patristics and put them in conversation with each other, focusing on Paul in particular. How was Paul read by different authors at different times? Timothy George: Well, you're involved in lots of other projects we don't have time to talk about, but I remember you as a student at Beeson, how bright you were, how engaged you were. It's just wonderful to see that you've gone on and developed that interest in such a wonderful way that's serving the academy and serving the church, and your students there at Truett as you're teaching church history. We just got a second left. If you could reflect on your time at Beeson, how would you look back on that and how do you think about it? David Wilhite: Well, I had a wonderful experience at Beeson. I'm always thankful for my time there. I think it was very formative for me, not just intellectually, but morally and as a person, and spiritually as a practicing Christian. I'm not sure if your question was really going in this direction, but over the conversation that we've been having about all of my research in historical theology, I do think I can give credit at least partly to Beeson because I think while at Beeson, I was given a real picture of the whole church. I came from a pretty narrow Southern Baptist background, and I was not exposed to other denominations much at all. Then at Beeson where it was intentionally interdenominational and yet evangelical place, that gave me a safe space to explore other traditions and really the whole Christian tradition at once. And so, I think that also developed in me a humility that if we believe that the body of Christ has many members, then we should be willing to see the gifts in all those different members, even those from the past. You couple that with I had some really great mentors and great examples of people who cared for the life of the academy and the life of the church, again that just made for an all-around great experience for me while I was at Beeson. Timothy George: God bless you and your good work at Truett. Keep it up. Look forward to seeing you the next time we're together. David Wilhite: Thank you, Timothy. It's been a pleasure talking to you. Blessings on you and on the school. Timothy George: Thank you, David. Announcer: You've been listening to the Beeson Podcast with host Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson Podcast at our website, beesondivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational evangelical divinity school, training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aide and encourage your work, and we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson Podcast.