DeConick A.D

291
THE PI OF POLITICS
Catholic Alignment
In the case of second-century Christianity, Gnostic transgressions showed
up the assumptions of the more centrally organized Apostolic Catholics.
As we have seen, these Christians were positioned to exploit social power
more advantageously than the less centralized, esoteric Gnostic groups.
What the Apostolic Catholics had to do now was convince other people,
both Christian and non-Christian, that their assumptions and norms were
natural, reasonable, and commonsense. They had to defend their order
of things against Gnostics who said otherwise. Because the values of the
Apostolic Catholics were more aligned with the norms of the Roman
society, whereas the values of Gnostics were countercultural, convincing
people of the rightness and naturalness of the Apostolic Catholic positions
was made that much easier.
With protracted reasoning, supported by constant reference to scriptural
passages and their “natural” interpretation, the Apostolic Catholics
set out to prove the rightness of their assumptions and the wrongness of
Gnostic beliefs and behaviors, and to publish them widely. The foundation
of this enterprise is grounded in their constant appeal to the historical
continuity between Judaism and Christianity. By maintaining this Jewish
connection, Christians like Irenaeus made reasonable the claim that the
Christian scriptures are harmonious with the Jewish scriptures, that the
one ought to support rather than oppose the other. It was self-evident,
then, that the Christian scriptures, like the Jewish scriptures, must be
acknowledging one God, the world creator, rather than two oppositional
deities (Irenaeus, Against the Heresies 3.1.1–2).
Their high regard for their connection with Judaism and its supersession
by Christianity also enabled the Apostolic Catholics to establish
certain conventional Jewish assumptions as “the way things are.” This
began with the institutionalization of the worship of YHWH, the God
of the Jews. The connection with Judaism enabled them to establish as
common sense the belief that YHWH the Creator is the supreme God of
Christian worship, that he is neither a defective creature nor an apostate
(2.pref.1, 2.2.5).
Similarly, they were able to naturalize for Christians the traditional Jewish
assumption that because humans were created by YHWH, they are
lesser in status than YHWH and are his servile people (2.22–28, 2.26.1,