Usually I don’t have to argue this because it’s obvious. But there are a few who have attempted to contend that early Christians—say, before the fourth century—never took the Gospels as factually true reports of events but only as allegorical tales, fables conveying a point or deeper truth—essentially, as edifying fiction. Some have even strongly asserted there is no evidence of anyone in that time ever treating the Gospels as historical fact. This is so wildly false I am astonished and perplexed by anyone saying this, particularly when they are erudite, well-trained scholars. But every once in a while this happens: someone assertively insists well-established premises of a field I’m in are false, requiring me to do the work of culling enough of the rather obvious evidence we otherwise take for granted just to put such things to rest and demonstrate that, yes, this time, the premise is a correct assumption of the field, not a sectarian contrivance or modern conceit (and remember, I am always ready to admit when it is not).

To be clear, my argument to follow is not that ancient Christians were radical fundamentalists who rejected every allegorical interpretation of tales in their Bible. Every Christian accepted some things in their stories were edifying fictions, or that they were both literally true and allegorically meaningful (I give extensive evidence of this in On the Historicity of Jesus, Chapter 4, Element 14). But my point here on out is that all extant Christian literature from the first two centuries of the religion, every single text that conveys any position on the matter at all, consistently insists the Gospels are substantially records of historical facts. And they often even insist that anyone who denies this is a loathsome fool damned to hell. Even if those same Christians will give an allegorical meaning of a story here and there, that does not counter my point: that none say the Gospels are wholly allegory, or that anyone can be saved believing they are. Ironically, their shrill insistence on this proves other Christians existed who did think the Gospels were entirely a sacred fiction. But we don’t get to read anything those Christians wrote. They were the enemy, all but erased from history, by that other faction of Christianity that came to dominate the world.

The Bible Itself

Let’s start with the Bible itself. This is, after all, the earliest Christian literature we have, completed in more or less the form we have it between (roughly) 50 and 150 A.D. Set aside for now any contentions regarding interpolation, redaction, and editing. It’s not reasonably disputable that however much the texts were added to or altered over time, the text we have is pretty much what the ultimately dominant sect was promulgating by the year 200. So, for example, even if you want to insist, against most mainstream scholarship, that Luke’s preface was “added later,” it was certainly added before 200 A.D. Origen, a Christian teacher since at least 204 A.D. (and thus who would surely have been familiar by then with the text of Luke) cites the Lukan preface with confidence numerous times in his works composed between 212 and 254 A.D. (in his Commentaries, Homilies, and Scholia on Luke as well as his Commentary on John). And the New Testament as we have it more or less resembles (in all points relevant here) the one we find in the earliest codices of the early 300s. The same conclusion shakes out for any other passage we’ll hereafter mention.

So let’s assume we are looking at the New Testament as it probably was in the year 200 or thereabouts (and we’ll use the names of the authors of its books as would then have been claimed). It’s true that Mark never says anything he is writing is true, or a history or biography or anything the like, and his text is completely devoid of historical consciousness (e.g. he never references or discusses methods, sources, alternative accounts, or why we should believe anything he says), and in Mark 4:9-13 he even seems to covertly tell us his whole book is mere parable, represented as factual to “outsiders” but as symbolical and allegorical to “insiders” (one can argue that point, but it still appears to be so, and I even believe it’s so). So one can wonder at what Mark was on about. But as soon as his Gentile-aimed text gets redacted to support its opposition, a loyally Jewish Christianity, by Matthew, it starts getting “pimped out” with historicizing assertions, at this point with repeated declarations that what is being reported happened so as to “fulfill prophecy” (which entails the assertion that it must indeed have happened) and the inclusion of a historicizing apologetic for the empty tomb that Mark invented actually being real (the first instance of historical consciousness appearing in the Gospels).

This trend only grows thereafter. When Luke got a hold of these texts and composed an apologetic amalgam of them both—and even if by that we mean the final redactor of that effort before the end of the second century—he made these historicizing elements explicit, insisting that what he was writing is indeed what the first Christians themselves personally witnessed, and even purporting to historically date the events they related. Sure, he is conspicuously vague as to whether that’s what he is really doing. His words can be interpreted as affirming he only is preserving what he deems to be the orthodox stories, and that the only thing originally “witnessed” was the “Logos,” i.e. revelations of a celestial Jesus Lord. But the fact that Luke is being so deliberately obscure as to which he means evokes once again Mark’s winking revelation that the literal sense is meant for outsiders, and the real meaning for insiders. But even this entails Luke wants someone to mistake what he is saying as historical fact, and endeavors to dress his account up to look a lot like that.

By the time we get to John, all coyness and pretense is abandoned, and we are outright told what he is saying is literally true, and he “knows” it’s true because he (actually, they) consulted the diary of an eyewitness, and if you doubt that you’ll probably be damned. Thus the Gospels actually grow in historicization, becoming more historicized over time (which is indeed indicative of the Gospel tale beginning not in history but as myth, and only being converted into history slowly over time, as Mark 4 pretty much warned us). And by the end of this process, not only has what began as allegorical myth become insisted-upon history (with even fabricated evidence being cited to prove it), but it is now being suggested that anyone who tries to backslide into thinking its allegory and not historical fact is literally ‘a goddamned heretic’.

Then it gets even more explicit in the forgery of 2 Peter, as I have explained before (and again and again). Here is what someone attempted to fake a letter from the Apostle Peter saying (in 2 Peter 1:15-2:3):

For we did not follow cleverly contrived myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ; instead, we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he received honor and glory from God the Father when the voice came to him from the Majestic Glory, saying “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well-pleased!” We ourselves heard this voice when it came from heaven while we were with him on the holy mountain. … [But now] false teachers among you … will exploit you in their greed with made-up stories. Their condemnation, pronounced long ago, is not idle, and their destruction [assured].

This passage is indisputably rebutting the claims of what this author says are the false Christian teachers he is condemning—and not just condemning, but elaborately warning his readers to shun. Those teachers are “heretics” who rely on “made up stories” that amount to “even denying the Master who redeemed them.” In other words, these are Christians teaching that the Gospels are mere myths. So someone faked a letter from Peter insisting stories like the Transfiguration are not “cleverly devised myths” that “deny the Master” but were real historical events, “because I was there, we were there, this really happened!” Which is a lie—this author is not Peter, and wasn’t there, nor evidently knew anyone who was. But this proves there were Christians who insisted the Gospels were historically true and not allegories. It also proves there were Christians teaching they were allegories and not histories; but our Bible doesn’t come from them. We only get to read works approved by the historicizers. Like this faked letter.

We see this same trend toward insisting the Gospels are literally true and attested by eyewitnesses, and condemning other Christians treating them as myths and fables, elsewhere in the Bible, too, in 1 John 1, 1 Timothy 1, 2 Timothy 4—even 1 Timothy 6, if we take that faked testimony of Paul saying “Jesus witnessed the good confession before Pontius Pilate” as yet another affirmation that the Gospel tales are factual and not mythical.

Ignatius

And sure enough, shortly after or around the very same time John and 2 Peter and the Pastorals and Johannines are being composed or redacted to push this new literalist party line within the very Bible itself, we get it explicitly spelled out in the letters of Ignatius—which purport, in our extant version, to date to the 110s A.D. yet which many experts on them believe likely date as late as the 140s or even 160s—but nevertheless, before 200. As I pointed out before, Ignatius (or whoever is pretending to be him) is now outright declaring:

Stop your ears when anyone speaks to you at variance with the Jesus Christ who was descended from David, and came through Mary; who really was born and ate and drank; who really was persecuted under Pontius Pilate; who really was crucified and died in the sight of witnesses in heaven, and on earth, and even under the earth; who really was raised from the dead, too, His Father resurrecting Him, in the same way His Father will resurrect those of us, who believe in Him by Jesus Christ, apart from whom we do not truly have life.

Ignatius, Trallians 9

So not only is this “Ignatius” insisting the Gospels are relating historical facts, but he is declaring that any Christians who say otherwise are to be outright shunned. Which does mean there were Christians saying otherwise. But it also quite decisively proves that this other strain of Christianity—which we might call Ignatian, and which happens to be the one that in a couple of centuries would gain absolute political power over the whole of the West and control nearly all document preservation for a thousand years, eventually becoming today’s plethora of Christendom—was adamantly literalist. They were shunning, expelling, damning any fellow Christians who dare suggest the Gospels are but allegories and not to be taken as historically true.

Ignatius is undeniably explicit about this:

For I know that even after his resurrection he was in flesh, and I believe that he is so now. When, for instance, he came to those who were with Peter, he said to them, ‘Lay hold, handle me, and see that I am not a bodiless demon’. And immediately they touched him, and believed, being convinced both by his flesh and by the spirit. And this is why they thought nothing of dying, and were found to be above death. After his resurrection he even ate and drank with them, as one of flesh, although spiritually he was united to the Father.

Ignatius, Smyrnaeans 3

This is not allegory. Ignatius is saying this shit literally happened, and that his faith entirely depends on it having literally happened—that if it didn’t happen, his faith would be in vain. And whoever wrote this is definitely pushing that as now a Christian dogma—one that does entail there were Christians who didn’t agree with any of this; but my point is that by this point there unmistakably were literalist Christians, too, and they were the very ones who would get to actively suppress all other versions of Christianity, and evolve into all the Christianities we know today.

Indeed, this author had just repeated, in the two paragraphs before:

He really was born of a virgin, and baptized by John, in order that “all righteousness might be fulfilled” by him; and really was under Pontius Pilate and Herod the tetrarch nailed up for us in his flesh. … He suffered all these things for our sakes, that we might be saved. And he really did suffer, even as he also really did raise himself up—not like certain unfaithful ones say, “imagining” he suffers, [like] “imagining” themselves to exist. And as they believe, so shall it happen unto them, when they shall be divested of their bodies, and be mere evil spirits. Christ was possessed of a body after His resurrection.

Ignatius, Smyrnaeans 1-2

Ignatius is really angry and a little frightened at these other “faithless” Christians who deny Jesus “really did” any of those things. He is insistent that all these things the Gospels say really happened are literally true, and damns all those other Christians who think otherwise. He obscurely mocks them as claiming “to imagine” or “think” Jesus suffered. The usual translations of that line, saying Jesus “seemed” to suffer and they “seemed” to exist, are not likely a correct rendering of the actual Greek, though it makes little difference to the present point: either way he is in some sense musing that they only therefore “imagine themselves to exist” (or only “seem” to exist) thus equating their actually existing with Jesus doing what the Gospels say, by the negative device of implying to deny Jesus really did this stuff is as absurd as the denier denying that they themselves exist. And they’ll get damnation for it. Thus we have come all the way from Mark’s “only the damned will believe these stories are true” to Ignatius’s “anyone who doesn’t believe these stories are true is damned.”

We see the Ignatian view represented not much later in the forgery of the Pauline correspondence now called 3 Corinthians, which literally comes from an actual third century manuscript. So it is indisputably early. The letters, one from the Corinthians worriedly writing to Paul and Paul’s reply, are “produced” within an apocryphal Acts of Paul. All a forgery represented as real history. This document is clear evidence of a literalist faction trying to refute a mythicist faction by forging historical evidence and testimony. And this in the third, or likely even second century (as our earliest manuscript likely dates later than the composition of its text).

In this, we’re told of heretics upsetting the Corinthians with shocking teachings such as that “the resurrection is not of the flesh” and “the Lord did not come to the flesh, neither was born of Mary.” And “Paul” writes back to them insisting “I delivered unto you” from the start “the things which I received from the holy Apostles” (note: this is precisely what the real Paul never says, and even says the opposite of: OHJ, pp. 138, 515-16, 536, 538), thus establishing what he is about to say is historical fact, not allegory; and he is presenting evidence for that conclusion—the testimony of eyewitnesses he conferred with personally.

What does “Paul” thus assert? That “the holy apostles which were before me, who were at all times with Jesus Christ” affirmed to him “that our Lord Jesus Christ was born of Mary, of the seed of David according to the flesh” and “the Holy Ghost was sent forth from heaven from the Father unto her by the angel Gabriel,” and that Jesus did come down “into this world” so that his resurrection in the flesh in this world could provide an assurance of ours (that same Ignatian concern); and anyone who says otherwise is demonic and damned. “Paul” then says the same exact thing Ignatius does: because they don’t believe Jesus really rose on earth in the flesh, they will not do so either; but we will, because we do believe that really happened. Thus, again, historicization, literalism, is tied to a dogma, one necessary to assure the believers that what they have been promised will really happen. If it didn’t “really” happen in the past, this author (as with Ignatius) clearly believes, it won’t “really” happen for us.

Indeed, in a later Coptic translation we’re told these “heretics” said “Jesus Christ was not crucified, but it was only in appearance, and that he was not born of Mary, nor of the seed of David,” and here I suspect the original Greek said “it was only pretended” that these things happened, i.e. represented mythically. This Acts and these letters in it were fabricated to oppose that teaching. Thus, Christians existed who opposed that teaching. Literalists. We cannot deny this. The evidence is stone cold solid.

Quadratus, Aristides, and Justin

The early second century apologists Quadratus and Aristides were also both known for insisting the Gospel accounts were literally true. I suspect these are just made up people, their treatises invented and passed off as real. But regardless, someone nevertheless wanted to push their narrative already in the second century, which is the material point here.

Quadratus, we know, wrote that the evidence of Jesus’s miracles “were always present” among us, for:

They were real—those who had been healed of their diseases, those who had been raised from the dead—who were not only seen whilst they were being healed and raised up, but were continually present; they didn’t stick around only during the sojourn of the Saviour, but a considerable time after His departure; and, indeed, some of them have survived even down to our own times.

This is of course bullshit, like most hucksterism in that era. Quadratus is writing a hundred years after Jesus died; in those times, no one he healed or raised could still be living. But anyone could claim to be them, or claim to have met or “heard rumor of” someone who was, and thus gullibly (or deviously) claim it. It’s the same silliness found in the Talmud when we encounter Rabbis arguing over whether the scene of a mass resurrection in Ezekiel (the Valley of Dry Bones) is only a parable, or an actual historical event, and some Rabbis on the side of the latter try to prove their point by claiming to know and even be descendants of those raised from the dead in that event! Right. And I have some land in Florida to sell you. But the pertinent point for the moment is that this is a Christian text written, like all the others I’ve surveyed, specifically to insist the Gospels relate historical facts and not edifying fables. (I’ll revisit that Talmud story soon.)

Aristides likewise composed a treatise insisting the Gospel stories were literally true, not allegories, whereas pagan tales of their own gods are all fictions. Later that century the Muratorian Canon was composed to fabricate a historical authentication of the historical, eyewitness truth of the Gospel accounts, which evinces the same Christian tendency toward literalism and away from allegorism. And Justin Martyr repeatedly assumes the historical factuality of the Gospels in his apologetic works. In On the Resurrection he rests his case for the nature of our future resurrection (and he is firmly in the Ignatian camp on that point) on the factual truth of the specific details of the Gospel accounts of how Jesus rose from the dead himself. He does not say those stories only allegorically or fictionally portray how the future resurrection will be; he says those things happened, and that that is therefore proof of how it will happen.

For example, Justin argues:

Why did He rise in the flesh in which He suffered, unless to show the resurrection of the flesh? And wishing to confirm this, when His disciples did not know whether to believe He had truly risen in the body, and were looking upon Him and doubting, He said to them, “Ye have not yet faith, see that it is I,” and He let them handle Him, and showed them the prints of the nails in His hands. And when they were by every kind of proof persuaded that it was Himself, and in the body, they asked Him to eat with them, that they might thus still more accurately ascertain that He had in verity risen bodily; and He did eat honey-comb and fish. And when He had thus shown them that there is truly a resurrection of the flesh, wishing to show them this also, that it is not impossible for flesh to ascend into heaven (as He had said that our dwelling-place is in heaven), “He was taken up into heaven while they beheld,” as He was in the flesh. If, therefore, after all that has been said, any one demand demonstration of the resurrection, he is in no respect different from the Sadducees.

This is historicist literalism. “If you don’t believe this amazing historical evidence, you are just a stubborn, closed-minded Jew!” And here you might start to get a sense by now of why some Christians started historicizing these narratives—we already saw it in Ignatius, and we see it again here: edifying fictions that merely communicate a hope of a certain kind of resurrection don’t carry enough weight to persuade or hold on to converts; but insisting this stuff really happened? That brings assurance and confidence in the truth of the gospel, and is thus a far more effective sales strategy. Justin and Ignatius both speak of how worried and doubtful they’d be if the Gospel tales weren’t literally true. They need them to be true.

Likewise, in Dialogue with Trypho 8.4, this same Justin depicts his imagined Jewish opponent Trypho saying, “after receiving groundless hearsay, you invent a Christ for yourselves, and because of him you’re heading to a pointless destruction,” to which Justin responds, “we have not believed empty fables,” and the word here is indeed myths, “or stories without any proof, but stories filled with the Spirit of God, and bursting with power, and flourishing with grace!” (Ibid. 9.1). Justin of course offers no evidence any of that is true, or even epistemically relevant. But the point is…we’ve heard this before: just as with Ignatius and 2 Peter, Justin responds to what Trypho said by insisting his beliefs are not based on myths but true stories. Which means Justin meant Trypho’s remark to be accusing Christians of believing untrue myths. So here we have a Christian who knew there were some who suspected Jesus was mythical, that the Gospels are just made-up stories…and who was keen to “rebut” that accusation by simply forcefully gainsaying it. Justin is a literalist. He does not regard the Gospels as mere myths, and is deeply offended anyone would even suggest they are.

Indeed, Justin spends most of that dialogue arguing Jesus must be the messiah because the things the Gospels report of him fulfilled prophecy (e.g. Ibid. 78)—which entails he believed those things really happened. The only way this argument could proceed, after all, is if they did. He even makes this unquestionably clear in his letter of defense to the Roman emperor, in which he insists the fact that “Jesus Christ was born” in the city prophecy foretold, thus proving his authentic status as messiah, “you can ascertain also from the registers of the taxing made under Quirinius, your first procurator in Judea,” a reference to the Gospel of Luke’s claim that Jesus was then born there (Apology 1.34-35). He also not only says “it was predicted that our Christ should heal all diseases and raise the dead,” but “that he did those things you can learn from the Acts of Pontius Pilate,” a bogus Christian forgery Justin clearly mistook as authentic (Ibid. 1.48). Justin thus not only thinks the Gospels are reporting historical facts, but that the Emperor of Rome could confirm it in state records. That’s how confident Justin was that the Gospels are historical records, not mere parables. Needless to say, no one ever did find any of those records Justin was sure existed. But that’s beside the present point. It’s clear Justin needed the Gospels to be telling historical truths in order to prove his messiah was real and thus his faith true, and had convinced himself they were so surely true that even state records should confirm it.

It’s pretty clear. The insistent use of historicized myth, converting what began as pedagogical allegories into ontological realities the believer had to affirm or be damned, all in order to settle and anchor doctrine and constrain apostasy and heresy, is similarly evident in 2 Peter, 1 John, the canonical editions of the Gospels of Luke and John, 3 Corinthians and the Acts of Paul, the apologetics of Aristides and Quadratus, even the Muratorian Canon. All mid-second to early-third century; indeed, outside the Bible, these are among earliest Christian documents we have. And we’ll see this phenomenon again in Tertullian. And beyond.

Tertullian and Beyond

Like Justin, Tertullian claims government documents exist proving the accounts in the Gospels historically true. In Apology 5, written to the Roman authorities to convince them Christians were not deserving of their wrath, Tertullian offers as evidence of this fact that Emperor Tiberius “in whose days the Christian name made its entry into the world” had “received intelligence from Palestine of events which had clearly shown the truth of Christ’s divinity” and accordingly “brought the matter before the senate, with his own decision in favor of Christ” being admitted to the pantheon. But, Tertullian says, “The senate, because it had not given the approval itself, rejected his proposal.”

Tertullian not only thinks this really happened (it didn’t; this is that Christian historicizing myth of an Acts of Pilate I just mentioned), but he even thinks his audience can somehow confirm it happened in state records. Which further entails Tertullian believed that Tiberius himself had received the same reports recorded in the Gospels and was even convinced by them, thereby verifying the Gospels as historical facts, attested to as such by reliable authorities. Tertullian is trying to give reliable historical evidence supporting the literal truth of the Gospels. That his “evidence” is bullshit some other Christian made up, which Tertullian gullibly bought, hook-line-and-sinker, is, again, beside the point. It is inarguable that Tertullian thinks the Gospels are reliable historical records, not allegorical myths, and even thinks he can prove it (albeit with the methodology of a modern internet conspiracy theorist).

Later in the same appeal Tertullian likewise insists the Jews are condemned by the fact that they didn’t believe despite all the miracles the Gospels show Jesus performed in front of them (Apology 21-22), which is as historicizing a remark as you can find. Tertullian’s entire apologetic career is based on assuming, even counting on the fact, that the Gospels are historical records, not symbolic myths. We see this throughout On the Flesh of Christ. And the entire point of Tertullian’s Prescription against Heresies is that the Gospels preserve the eyewitness testimony of the Apostles who witnessed everything they record, and any attempt to read what they wrote as instead (rather than additionally) meant allegorically can only produce damnable heresy. This is why he is so insistent that we trust only those presently-vouchsafed Gospels that can be historically linked to those original witnesses (Ibid. 36). And Tertullian extensively relies on the historical truth of the tales in the Gospels to ground and prove his doctrine true (e.g. Ibid. 22, 26). Thus illustrating why historicism was such an inevitable trend: it was the only way to control doctrine, and thus forestall schism and dissent (or so it clearly felt to them; it didn’t really have such effect of course).

This was essentially the program set forth by Plato in The Republic: myths must be tightly controlled by an organized priesthood, and sworn to be true; and anyone who attempts to change them or question their truth, outlawed. Just read Ibid. 3.414b-415d, where Plato has Socrates tell us that the guardians of society must “induce men to believe” well-crafted tales that nevertheless “have not happened and perhaps would not be likely to,” hence myths thereby dubbed “useful lies,” because only believing such myths true will make the people “more inclined to care for the state and one another.” Plato basically invented the Vatican.

After Tertullian we have the same literalism from Clement of Alexandria, who in book 6 of his Stromata reveals he believed the saints being raised from the dead at Christ’s death, as related by Matthew, was a historical event; and at one point in the first book of the Stromata he declares “our Lord was born in the twenty-eighth year” from the accession of Caesar Augustus, “when first the census was ordered to be taken in the reign of Augustus” (Clement mistakenly places that census in 3 B.C.; in fact it was closer to 6 A.D.; see my article on “dating” the nativity of Jesus in Hitler Homer Bible Christ). “And to prove that this is true,” Clement says, “it is written in the Gospel by Luke as follows: ‘And in the fifteenth year in the reign of Tiberius Caesar, the word of the Lord came to John, the son of Zacharias’; and again in the same book: ‘And Jesus was coming to His baptism, being about thirty years old’, and so on” (he even goes on to add, “there are those who have determined not only the year of our Lord’s birth, but also the day”). Thus Clement believes Luke is writing a history and is reporting datable historical facts, and is therefore citable as historical evidence for Clement’s chronology. This is not someone who is simply reading the Gospels as allegory.

Irenaeus, likewise, argues with heretics over the actual historical length of Jesus’s ministry and how many times he visited Jerusalem, clearly regarding this as a question of fact and not a mere quibble over the format of a myth, and yet his repeated cited source of historical evidence for resolving this dispute? Numerous passages in the Gospels (Against All Heresies 2.22.3). Irenaeus is thus predominately a literalist. He likewise thinks the fictions in the Gospel of John about its authorship are historical facts: “John,” he says, “the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon His breast, did himself publish a Gospel” of his own, referencing the Gospel of John’s claim that its content is based on the eyewitness testimony of “the disciple who leaned upon his breast” (Ibid. 3.1.1), although Irenaeus is ignoring here the fact that that Gospel says some other people wrote it, some nameless committee, a “we” who say they consulted something else written by that disciple…who is never in fact named (John or otherwise) in extant versions, but was probably originally in fact intended to be Lazarus (see OHJ, Ch. 10.7), a manifest fiction. In fact throughout his Against All Heresies Irenaeus repeatedly argues against heretical allegorical readings of Gospel stories like the baptism and nativity by insisting those stories are literally true, and circularly citing the Gospels as evidence of the fact.

Origen

Even when we look at the early third century writings of Origen, the most fond of allegorical readings of the Gospels of any extant author from the first two centuries of the faith, we find that even he insists upon a significant degree of literalism. Origen extensively relates allegorical meanings for the Gospel stories and content, and is often vague as to whether he thinks they are also true. But we have many examples demonstrating he did think that the Gospels were, indeed, substantively historical, which means he believed they were so in addition to conveying allegorical lessons.

In his Commentary on John Origen does indeed argue that many things in the Gospels have only symbolical meaning, although he does so apologetically—he needs to argue his audience into agreeing with that, which entails they did not already so agree. Moreover, in the course of even that argument he struggles greatly to affirm that the Gospels are nevertheless mostly historically true records, most definitely of things that really happened and were really witnessed. He repeatedly conveys disappointment when he can’t get some detail in the Gospels to be historically true; resorting to an allegorical explanation is, for him, only a consolation, an escape from evident cognitive dissonance. In fact, one can only resort to a purely allegorical reading, Origen says, when a literal harmonization of what the Gospels say can’t be contrived (this would be essentially the position of Augustine two centuries later).

As Origen puts it there:

I do not condemn [the authors of the Gospels] if they sometimes dealt freely with things which to the eye of history happened differently, and changed them so as to subserve the mystical aims they had in view; so as to speak of a thing which happened in a certain place, as if it had happened in another, or of what took place at a certain time, as if it had taken place at another time, and to introduce into what was spoken in a certain way some changes of their own. They proposed to speak the truth where it was possible both materially and spiritually, and where this was not possible it was their intention to prefer the spiritual to the material. The spiritual truth was often preserved, as one might say, in the material falsehood

This entails Origen believed most of the Gospels was historical, and only ever additionally allegorical, or very occasionally solely so, but even then, only by slightly deviating from historical facts (like “where” an event occurred; not that it occurred at all, which Origen never doubts). Indeed, again and again Origen reveals he is more vehemently a literalist. As even in that commentary he proceeds to defend historical harmonizations and rationalizations of their discrepancies. At no point does he say the Gospels are simply nowhere really talking about history, that they are entirely pedagogical, allegorical myth. To the contrary, in all his Gospel commentaries Origen refers to the Gospels as “histories” (in various places as κατὰ τὸ εὐαγγέλιον ἱστορίᾳ or τῆς εὐαγγελικῆς ἱστορίας or the like) and throughout his writings he repeatedly defends them as literally true.

Here is a mere sample:

• In his Commentary on Matthew Origen says of the Transfiguration (the very scene from the Gospels that 2 Peter was forged to insist was a historical fact and not a myth) “let it be granted,” before he also gives an allegorical meaning, “that this took place long ago, and according to the letter.” In other words, it has allegorical significations. But it also literally, historically happened.
• In Against Celsus 1.38, Origen says “taking the history, contained in the Gospel according to Matthew, of our Lord’s descent into Egypt, Celsus refuses to believe the miraculous circumstances attending it,” neither “that the angel gave the divine intimation” nor “that our Lord’s quitting Judea and residing in Egypt was an event of any significance.” This entire response entails Origen believed these were historical facts. He does not correct Celsus by explaining these are allegories, but defends them as having actually happened and scoffs at how Celsus could deny it.
• In fact Origen goes on to insist the nativity narratives are historically true in almost every particular; there really were magi, they really did visit Jesus, and following what “we consider to have been a new star,” and Herod really did try to kill him, and his family really did flee to Egypt, and so on (Ibid. 1.58-60). Likewise, that the betrayal and suicide of Judas must be true (2.11). At every occasion Origen scoffs at and mocks Celsus’s assertions that these are fables and falsehoods, mere “myths.” He only ever introduces allegory when he needs to “correct” Celsus’s misreporting which facts were claimed to be historical in the Gospels.
• Likewise when Celsus attacks the story of the divine dove descending on Jesus at his baptism by “alleging that the narrative is a fiction,” as Origen says in Against Celsus 1.39, he does not defend his faith by explaining this was indeed only a symbolic fiction with ulterior meaning (a possibility he is well aware of, even describing this kind of interpretation as something a reader “will accept figuratively,” and admitting the Gospels do contain such things). Nope. Origen instead responds in 1.42-44 by defending this event’s historical factuality! “We have to remark.” Origen says, “that the endeavor to show, with regard to almost any history, however true, that it actually occurred” is almost impossible, but he endeavors to argue that this was a real vision Jesus had and that the Disciples thus learned about it from him—or that the authors of the Gospels might even have learned it from the Holy Spirit—and that, either way, it’s truth has even more factual probability than the Trojan War. Origen even presents a historical argument for it really having happened: “I think the wonders wrought by Jesus are a proof of the Holy Spirit’s having then appeared in the form of a dove.” You can’t get more explicitly literalist than that.
• Indeed, in Against Celsus 1.45 Origen relates an actual conversation he had with a Jew in which he said the Gospel stories should be accounted as historically true as the histories of Moses, because “testimony is borne” regarding Jesus’s activities on earth “by the disciples in the Gospels,” so why won’t they believe that? Then Origen even outright tells us that Christians “accept as true the miraculous circumstances related of [Jesus] by his disciples,” thus affirming that Christianity as a whole, so far as Origen was concerned, was historically literalist with regard to the Gospels. Figurative meaning was only a layer atop it—in addition, not instead.
• Origen then goes on to argue we can know the Gospel stories actually happened because they fulfilled prophecies in the Jewish scriptures (Against Celsus 1.46-55), which as I already noted entails literalism.
• Origen even deploys the “disciples must be telling the truth because they were willing to die for it” and “these stories would be too embarrassing to invent” arguments (Ibid. 2.10), both of which were as bogus then as now (on the former, see Did the Apostles Die for a Lie?; on the latter, see Proving History, index, “criterion of embarrassment”). Nevertheless, these are arguments only a literalist would make.

And that’s just halfway through book 2 of an eight volume work that continues in the same vein throughout. Even if we supposed Origen is pretending to hold these views (and as we’ll see shortly, he might have been), this is a treatise Origen wrote to a fellow Christian, Ambrosius, who was disturbed and worried by Celsus’s critique and wanted Origen to compose and publish a reply for his own and the religion’s benefit. Origen is thus writing to and for fellow Christians. Which entails his fellow Christians were Gospel literalists. By which, again, I don’t mean Christians who rejected allegorical readings, but who rejected any notion that what the Gospels say was not also historically true (except when they had no choice but to concede it wasn’t).

To illustrate why this matters, I’ll draw on what I wrote on this point in 2005. In Origen’s Homilies on Jeremiah 18.4.2 he says, “Each person according to his capacity understands the Scriptures,” such that “One takes the sense from them more superficially, as if from the surface level of a spring. Another draws up more deeply as from a well.” And in Against Celsus 3.45-46 Origen reiterates the Markan methodology: that the uneducated “outsiders” are to take stories literally in order to be saved, as they can’t spare the time to acquire the education and study needed to understand those stories allegorically as “insiders” are instructed to do.

As Origen there puts it:

If you come to the books written after the time of Jesus [e.g. the Gospels], you will find that those crowds of believers who heard the parables happened to be, as it were, “outside,” and worthy only of the “external” meaning, while the disciples learned in private the [real] explanation. For, “In private, to his personal disciples,” Jesus “unraveled everything,” placing first above the crowds those who claimed a right to know His wisdom.

Thus, as Paul himself said, there is a gospel for the simpleton, whom he calls “babies” (1 Corinthians 3:1; cf. 2:13-16 and 2:1-5), and a gospel for “grown ups” (2:6-7). Origen then explains that the latter is concealed from the simpleton because it might turn him away from the faith and thus away from salvation, while only a very few people fully grasp the real truth.

This “doctrine of double truth,” wherein the “literal” is for the simple believer and the “allegorical” for the advanced, sophisticated believer, and the former must not be told this openly lest they lose their faith, has been studied by several scholars, most prominently by Gunnar Hällström (in Fides Simpliciorum according to Origen of Alexandria) and Joseph Trigg (in “Divine Deception and the Truthfulness of Scripture” in Origen of Alexandria: His World and His Legacy). Trigg concludes Origen argues that it was better for the simpleton to believe literally in what the Bible says even when the literal meaning isn’t true. Thus, for example:

When Origen expressly denies that he holds an opinion and never indicates otherwise, we must take him at his word. Nevertheless, we must pay close attention to what Origen actually says, and follow carefully the logic of his arguments and the implications of the analogies he draws and the scriptural texts he cites. He does leave hints of his real position while suggesting another to edify the simple or to avert their suspicions.

Origen was not alone. Eusebius, for example, appears to have endorsed similar reasoning (see Note 6 in my summary of The Formation of the New Testament Canon). This suggests a spectrum of ways to view the Gospels existed: they probably begin as allegories (e.g. Mark), then are sold as simultaneously literally true and allegorically meaningful (e.g. Justin), and then to some that literal truth is demoted to a convenient lie to promote but not really adopt (e.g. Origen), while to others even the mere suggestion that the literal truth is false is outright damnation-worthy (e.g. Ignatius). Allegory, for them, could be accepted only without denying the literal truth of the factual events signifying it (for an example, see Augustine’s Sermons on the New Testament and Harmony of the Gospels). At this point it is worth pointing out: Origen was subsequently declared a heretic and his writings (more or less) damned.

This Is Not Just a Christian Thing

It is worth noting how that Talmudic text I referenced earlier reflects the very divide I am describing among Christians, as being already standard among Jews. In that text (b. Sanhedrin 92b) we see Rabbis trying to argue a fact about the future resurrection by using the Ezekiel passage as historical reality, and we see them met by Rabbis insisting that that story cannot be used that way (unlike we see Ignatius and everyone else above doing with the Gospels for Jesus) because it is merely “a parable,” not something that really happened. And against them stand Rabbis who argue just like all Ignatian-style Christians did:

Not only was it not a parable, the dead that Ezekiel revived ascended to Eretz Yisrael and married wives and fathered sons and daughters. Rabbi Yehuda ben Beteira stood on his feet and said: I am a descendant of their sons, and these are phylacteries that my father’s father left me from them.

It is evident that they needed the story to be historically true and not myth, in order to maintain the dogma they rested on it. And so they fabricated a historicizing myth (“my dad told me we descended from those resurrected dudes and showed me this box he says they used to own, so it totes happened!”). That’s all made up. But it’s made up as history. This is clear evidence many people treated myths as history. And this is exactly what we see happening in Christianity.

Even from earliest times, from the pre-Christian Philo, through Josephus, to the Mishnah and Talmud, we can find many examples like this of Jews disputing whether some story in the Bible is true or merely an edifying, symbolic, allegorical myth. And always we see some Jews are adamantly for the latter—and some are adamantly against them. And sometimes the same Jew can be on either side of this dispute depending on which passage is being discussed. This is the same thing we see in early Christianity: there are many who agree the stories are myth; and there are many who insist they are historically true. The difference is that in Judaism both traditions were preserved together; whereas literalist Christianity came to power and suppressed mythicist Christianity, deeply distorting the surviving textual record, with rampant forgery, interpolation, and destruction of texts (and that’s not a conjecture; we have extensive evidence of that activity being the norm: see OHJ, Chapter 5, Element 44; Bart Erhman’s Forged; and example after example after example after example after example of known interpolations—and that’s just for starters).

This same divide existed among the pagans. The geographer Strabo explains (in Geography 1.2.8) that most people, particularly the uneducated, believe myths literally, as “children” do, whereas “adults” know they are false and only figuratively true (a contrast between “children” and “adults” we just saw Christians had even codified within their own ranks). He frames this fact in the cloak of his prejudiced elitism thus:

At the beginning we must needs make use of such bait for children, but as the child advances in years we must guide him to the knowledge of facts, when once his intelligence has become strong and no longer needs to be coaxed. Now every illiterate and uneducated man is, in a sense, a child, and, like a child, he is fond of stories; and for that matter, so is the half-educated man, for his reasoning faculty has not been fully developed, and, besides, the mental habits of his childhood persist in him.

He goes on to explain that the masses need their belief in the factual truth of myths in order to keep them virtuous, because they need to believe tales of heroism, reward, and punishment really happened, so they will believe the same will continue to really happen for them. Ironically (or perhaps not, when you consider Strabo expected his fellow citizens to hear his words read), Strabo goes on to insist the works of Homer are mostly a historical record of factual events, merely adorned here and there with edifying falsehoods, its additional “mythic” content (Ibid. §9), and proceeds to give an elaborate, rationalizing historical interpretation of famous Homeric tales.

In much the same fashion, in On Isis and Osiris, Plutarch repeatedly explains that the ignorant public, and many among the uninitiated, still treat myths literally; only well-educated insiders understood them to be allegorical. And he gives many examples of people taking myths literally in the course of the text. And yet the entire argument of On Isis and Osiris, which was written for the approval of a leading priestess of Osiris cult and thus representing a mainstream elite position, is that those who try to read myths wholly as allegories are well nigh condemnable as atheists; that myths instead encode cosmic realities, ontological truths we must believe in. Thus, Plutarch holds, Osiris is not a metaphor for nature or wisdom or any such abstraction (as, he notes, some try to maintain); rather, Osirus is a real superhero who really does live in outer space and really does descend below the moon every year to assume a mortal body to die in and rise back from the dead from. Yes, Plutarch says, the “myths” placing him and all this in earth history are false, mere allegories, but they are nevertheless allegories for real gods doing real things, just in another location. This same sentiment is echoed in Plutarch’s treatise On Superstition, where he argues at length against both those who are excessively fearful their myths are true and those who don’t believe those myths are factual at all.

There are many more examples of this, as I mention in my book The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire. A mere sample:

• Philo describes the approach of not taking a text “literally” but instead as “allegory” as a “way” of doing things that pagan scientists “love” (On the Descendants of Cain 7; cf. On Abraham 99). Philo agrees this is an acceptable way to read the Bible but primarily only when some contradiction or implausibility in the Bible appears unresolvable (just the thing we see Origen and Augustine advocating). Philo frequently mentions there being Jews who believed literally what Philo himself thought wasn’t; and Philo himself affirms literal truth in the Bible from time to time, even despite being a great fan of allegorizing.
• Porphyry, speaking of both Jews and Christians, says “some” resort to figurative and allegorical interpretations of the Bible when it will remove a difficulty (Eusebius, History of the Church 6.19, quoting Porphyry, Against the Christians 3). Which entails “many” treated Bible passages literally, as history, in accord “with the words as written.”
• In his pious pagan novel, Heliodorus remarks that allegorical interpretations of myths, which eliminate their factual truth, experts and priests “skilled in nature’s secrets, do not reveal to the profane but in the form of a fable only instruct them” (Aethiopica 9.9.5), echoing the same sentiment we saw in Strabo and Plutarch.
• The historian Diodorus similarly said (his example being a particular earthquake) that “natural scientists make it their endeavor to attribute responsibility in such cases not to divine providence, but to certain natural circumstances determined by necessary causes, whereas those who are disposed to venerate the divine power assign certain plausible reasons for the occurrence, alleging that the disaster was occasioned by the anger of the gods at those who had committed sacrilege” (Historical Library 15.48.4). This tracks the same sentiment: some reduced myths about the gods and their interventions in the world to mere allegories; others took them literally.

Evidence pagans took much of their myths as factual, particularly the uneducated masses (less so the more educated elite, although even they had their “believers”) is extensively collected in Dodds’ The Greeks and the Irrational, Whitmarsh’s Battling the Gods, and Cameron’s Greek Mythography in the Roman World (see also Meggitt’s “Popular Mythology”). Even educated elites couldn’t give this up entire, a great many of them instead attempting to rationalize their myths—instead of declare them all parable and allegory, they try to reconstruct what they think must be the real historical truths that have been exaggerated around them—perhaps to color history with allegory and parable, but not replace it with such.

So literalism was everywhere. The notion that everyone was a total allegorist is simply false. It isn’t true of pagans. It isn’t true of Jews. It isn’t true of ancient Christians either. Allegorists and allegorism abided, to be sure. But it lived alongside literalism, even occasionally warred with it—or united with it, in the way Origen attempts to have it both ways with his theory of “double truth,” much as Plutarch says of the priests of Osiris cult.

Conclusion

It cannot be doubted that there were pagans, Jews, and Christians who treated their myths as history, and would even get angry at any of their peers who scoffed at doing so. Yes, you can find allegorists, who de-historicize their myths. But you can also find historicists, who try to insist their myths are historical facts, or substantially based on historical facts. The whole Euhemerization trend reflects this tendency. It’s what Plutarch does to Romulus in his Life of Romulus, presented as a straightforward historical biography, even discussing and debating in it which things in the Romulus myth are historically true, and which mere subsequent legend (when in fact we know it’s entirely mythical—built in the fourth century B.C. from unrelated Greek mythology). Josephus does the same with the Old Testament. Many more examples abound.

And they didn’t start this. Already before the first century, for example, Cicero mentions people in his day trying to “prove” the Romulus myth historical by astronomically dating the solar eclipse that it says occurred at his death (On the Republic 1.16)—just as Julius Africanus tried to do with the supposed “solar eclipse” that mythically occurred at Jesus’s death, which is yet another example of a Christian regarding the Gospels as history. In the early third century, this Julius argued that the Gospel-recorded darkness at Christ’s death wasn’t myth or symbolism or allegory; it was an actual, literal historical event, Julius argues, and historical and scientific data further prove, he insists, that it can’t have been a natural eclipse but must have been a bona fide miracle, and its being so proves the reality of Jesus being the one true messiah and savior. This is a literalist.

Lest you question my interpretation, here are his actual words, which show Julius believed the Gospels to be substantially historical records of real events, and he says we know this because (he believes) it was confirmed by eyewitnesses:

This event [of the sun going dark] followed each of [Jesus’s] deeds, and healings of body and soul, and knowledge of hidden things, and his resurrection from the dead, all sufficiently proven to the disciples before us and to his apostles: after the most dreadful darkness fell over the whole world, the rocks were torn apart by an earthquake and much of Judea and the rest of the land was torn down …

What is commonplace about an earthquake, an eclipse, rocks torn apart, a rising of the dead, and such a huge cosmic movement? At the very least, over a long period, no conjunction this great is remembered. But it was a god-sent darkness, because the Lord happened to suffer, and the Bible, in Daniel, supports that seventy spans of seven years would come together up to this time.

It is beyond dispute Julius believes the Gospels’ tales are literally true, uses this fact to argue for the truth of his faith, and even attempts to date Gospel events and confirm they match and thus fulfill prophecy.

So let it not be said that there were “no” Christians in the first three centuries who regarded the Gospels as historical records, and not as mere fables, allegorical myths containing lessons or abstract meanings. Lots of Christians did this; indeed, all of modern Christianity descends from those very Christians who did that. We can therefore never say “early Christians simply did not regard the Gospels as historical records.” Put that claim to rest. The evidence against it is vast and unassailable. It simply is not true.