Sinaitic Palimpsest again

I must thank Richard Pickvance (The Friend 29 October) once more for his correction. 

Oh dear. David Lockyer’s letter (15 October) contains an endlessly repeated factoid. Constantine I did not establish Christianity as the official religion of the Roman empire. He simply stopped the persecution of Christians.

Christianity progressed (not without some setbacks) and several more emperors came and went before Theodosius I made Nicene Christianity the state religion. It is the difference between the Edict of Milan in 313 and the Edict of Thessalonica in 380.

Richard Pickvance

Mea culpa: I over simplified and repeated a 'factoid'* (as he termed it) in place of a much more complicated truth. However, Constantine did give the religion a degree of prominence and privilege in the Empire and was instrumental in encouraging the definition of an emerging Christian orthodoxy, even on occasions enforcing it; a version of Christianity that Rendel Harris referred to as containing 'an ecclesiastical Christ' who was very much a product of that later age.

The edifice of theology constructed by the emerging 'state' church of the Empire was what Rendel Harris felt had obscured the inspiring clarity of the original message: a clarity that spoke to one's inward condition as a guiding light. Prominent among those theological layerings obscuring the light was the concept of the incarnate divinity of Christ.

In Origin of the Doctrine of the Trinity he suggested that the divinity actually rested on the identification of Christ with the Divine Wisdom who was with God in the creation, not, as the Church taught, as a physical incarnation. That is why Rendel Harris was not perturbed by the discovery that the Sinaitic Palimpsest version of St Mark lacked both the resurrection and ascension. For Rendel Harris those omissions confirmed the gap that had grown between the 'ecclesiastical Christ' and the original.

*An item of unreliable information that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact. (Oxford Languages)

D.Lockyer

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Irene Pickard, whose archive is the basis of Jung, The Quakers and Hitler, was Rendel Harris' personal secretary and would have typed the texts of all of his later works, including the Origins; an experience which readied her for engaging with Jung's ideas about the evolution of religions as projections of developments deep within the collective psyche.