Catholic and serious researcher into early Christianity? (ChatGPT)

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In the previous post, we reviewed Geza Vermes' book, Christian Beginnings. Vermes writes as a Jewish scholar — not as a Christian — but I believe that John Dominic Crossan would substantially agree with Vermes' thesis.

Crossan continues to consider himself Catholic.

So for those Catholics who take seriously historical investigation into the Jesus movement, and the formation of the early Christian church, how is it possible to reconcile that research programme with being a current member of the Catholic Church? Let's ask ChatGPT.

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1. Faith Is Not Fundamentalism

Neither Crossan nor serious Catholics confuse faith with textual literalism.

Crossan does not believe that to be a Catholic one must assent to every metaphysical elaboration hammered out by the bishops of Nicaea, Constantinople, or Trent as if they were merely the procedural minutes of an ancient committee.

Instead, he sees Catholicism as a living tradition, a communal memory — a grand, broken, glorious, human attempt to live toward the mystery of God revealed, however imperfectly, in Jesus.

The tradition may have misunderstood Jesus, reinterpreted him, even betrayed aspects of him — but that does not annul the reality of the original encounter.

It means that two thousand years of Christianity is historical — evolving, flawed, adaptive — rather than a once-and-for-all doctrinal dogma from Heaven.

Faith, then, is trust in the meaning glimpsed through the cracks, not a blind loyalty to the specific, contingent architecture of doctrinal development.

2. Christianity Is the Result, Not the Betrayal

Another way to put it: Even if early Christianity transmuted the original message (as Vermes and Crossan agree it did), it did so out of a profound and desperate desire to keep the meaning of Jesus alive in radically changed circumstances.

The Kingdom of God did not arrive — at least not in the apocalyptic immediacy that Jesus appears to have envisaged — and yet the Christian communities continued to believe that something of it had happened and would happen. They adapted the form (myth, metaphysics, liturgy) to preserve the kernel (radical trust in God’s transforming love).

From this perspective, orthodoxy is not so much a betrayal as a creative, sometimes fumbling continuation.

You can love Catholicism because of this broken, striving humanity — not despite it.

3. The Mythos Is Truer Than the History

There is also the ancient idea that myth — in the proper sense — can convey truth deeper than bare fact.

The high Christology, the creeds, the liturgies, the soaring metaphysics — they are not "true" because they correspond to what Jesus of Nazareth literally claimed about himself; they are "true" because they continue to point to the transformative encounter with the sacred that his life, death, and resurrection (however understood) initiated.

Crossan accepts the mythology as metaphorical structure — a cathedral of meaning — even if he does not accept it as literal blueprint. Thus, he can recite the Creed and mean it poetically, even as his historian’s brain is saying, "Well, not exactly."

4. Humility About History

Finally, even Crossan and Vermes (though Vermes is more hard-edged) recognise that historical reconstruction is itself partial and fallible.

Truly, we peer through a glass, darkly.

The Jesus of the historians is a scholarly approximation, not a resurrection of the man himself. Thus, it is reasonable — and indeed intellectually humble — to say:

"I trust in this tradition not because it is flawless, but because it contains something luminous that cannot be fully captured by critical method alone."

Crossan can remain Catholic because Christian faith is not identical with historical literalism. You may believe, not in the seamless factuality of doctrine, but in the living, broken, evolving, Spirit-haunted community that still bears the mark of Jesus — even through all the distortions of empire, philosophy, politics, and time. Or even: you stay because even a Church built by committee, mistake, ambition, and hope is a better house for the Spirit than the cold flat of rational scepticism alone.

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Faith is not fidelity to the minutes of ancient councils, nor blind loyalty to imperial theology. It is the stubborn trust that beneath the compromises, betrayals, and metaphysical flights of Christianity, there remains the dangerous memory of a man who pointed to God and called it a kingdom.

To stay Catholic is not to deny the distortions, but to recognise that even broken vessels can carry living water — and that, sometimes, despite itself, the Church remembers what it cannot forget: a man who pointed to God and called it a kingdom.