Andrei Desnitsky is a Doctor of Philology and the author of scholarly articles and monographs on biblical studies. In 2024 he presented his own translation of the New Testament, freed from outdated syntax; according to the reviewer, the translation caused a wide public resonance. A year later his book The Bible: What Was “Really” There? was published, devoted to the historicity of the Old Testament. The new work continues this line but focuses on the part of the biblical text whose acceptance, as the review states, makes a person a Christian.
As Korolev notes, the book’s title may seem not entirely apt: it deals primarily not with what the first Christians were like as people, but with the formation of the canon of their teaching. This choice allows going beyond the New Testament—in early Christianity there existed many ideas, practices, and texts that were subsequently not included in the canon.
Who Wrote the Sacred Texts
Addressing the non-specialist, Desnitsky explains what sources scholars use, whom the authors of the apostolic epistles argued with, how relations between Christians and the Roman authorities, Jews, and pagans were built, and whether the historical Jesus can be discerned behind the Gospel image of Christ. The author introduces the reader to various positions in biblical studies, including the radical view of Bart Ehrman: if the Gospels were not written by Jesus’s disciples, these “books should be called forged.”
Desnitsky acknowledges that the question of the specific creator of the Gospels and several epistles is extremely tangled, but draws attention to the variability of ideas about authorship in the ancient world. Texts signed by a teacher could be written by his disciples in the conviction that he would have approved. According to Desnitsky, such a practice of pseudepigraphy hardly fits the definition of conscious “forgery.”
The concept of “kerygma” by the German theologian Rudolf Bultmann, who proposed separating the existential side of the doctrine from the myth that shapes it, is examined separately. From the reliable testimonies about Jesus, according to the reviewer, little remains: “Jesus is a real historical figure, a Jew who lived in Galilee in the early 1st century, preached to his disciples and other listeners, and was then crucified in Jerusalem.”
Power and the “Hidden Transcript”
The reviewer asks whether Paul’s words “there is no authority except from God” should be understood literally. Desnitsky explains that the Epistle to the Romans was written in a situation where open discontent with imperial power would have been suicidal for Christians, and recalls the concept of the “hidden transcript” by anthropologist James Scott—disobedience concealed behind a display of loyalty.
Already ancient authors suspected that converts to Christianity hid a spiritual defiance behind their law-abidingness. The anonymous author of the Epistle to Diognetus, written around 200 AD, believed that Christians “live in their own country, but as foreigners; they participate in everything as citizens, and endure everything as strangers; every foreign land is their homeland and every homeland a foreign land; <…> they have flesh, but do not live according to the flesh; they dwell on earth, but their fatherland is in heaven; they obey the established laws and by their own lives surpass the laws.”
Whether the Apostle Paul put a double message into his text and whether his contemporaries were capable of recognizing such a message, we, according to the reviewer, will never know.
Heresy and the “Great Disappointment”
The generally accepted church position, as Desnitsky explains, is that orthodox teaching appeared first, and heresies subsequently branched off from it. This view, in his assessment, is tendentious and naive: initially there existed many versions of Christianity, some of which merged into orthodoxy, while others were labeled “heresies.” Among the examples are the collection of hymns Odes of Solomon in Syriac and the Didache, which describes a practice without the figure of a community leader and rigid hierarchy.
Christians of the first centuries did not live to see the Second Coming; Desnitsky calls their state after this experience the “Great Disappointment.” In such conditions they sought peaceful coexistence with the authorities in order to save themselves and the teaching from destruction. In the end the empire accepted the religion of the persecuted but demanded the creation of a rigid canon for it, which became theology in the version of the Apostle Paul.
“Could the church after Constantine, after recognition by the empire, have become other than it became—more free, multicultural, and diverse? Probably it could have, if it had remained aloof from state power. But could it have remained aloof from it and at the same time survived?” Desnitsky writes, and admits that he does not know.
The historian’s goal, according to the reviewer, is to tell about the processes that accompanied the formation of Christianity in the version that we perceive as orthodoxy. Whether to perceive this version as immutable truth or as a fatal error is a matter of personal taste, political sympathies, and personal faith.
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