If the church of early days found the Hebrew scriptures in their Greek dress to be such an effective Bible, why (it may be asked) was it felt necessary to augment them with what later came to be called the New Testament writings?
T H E L O R D A N D T H E A P O S T L E S
Jesus wrote no book: he taught by word of mouth and personal example. But some of his followers taught in writing as well as orally.
Often, indeed, their writing was a second-best substitute for the spoken word. In Galatians 4:20, for example, Paul wishes that he could be with his friends in Galatia and speak to them directly so that they could catch his tone of voice as well as his actual words but, as he could not visit them just then, a letter had to suffice. The letter to the Hebrews has many of the features of a synagogue homily, based on some of the scripture lessons prescribed for the season of Pentecost, ’ and there are indications towards the end that the writer would have preferred to deliver it face to face had he been free to visit the recipients.’ We in our day may be glad, for our own sakes, that
’ And possibly on one of the ‘proper psalms’ for the day (Ps. 110); see A. E.
Guilding, The Fourth GospelandJtwish Word+ (Oxford, 1960), pp.72, 100.
’ Cf.Heb. 13:18-23.
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W R I T I N G S O F T H E N E W E R A was therefore, in practice, as binding as those writings themselves.
Was their teaching as authoritative as that which came from the Lord’s own lips? Probably a difference was felt, except possibly when a prophet gave voice to an utterance in the Lord’s name. Paul can claim that Christ speaks in him (2 Cor. 13:3), but when answering the Corinthians’ detailed questions about marriage and divorce he makes a careful distinction between a ruling given by the Lord in person, which is binding without question, and his own judgment, which his converts may accept or not as they choose-he thinks they will be wise if they accept it, but he cannot impose it (1 Cor. 7: lOf., 12-40).
A ruling from the Lord is even more binding than an Old Testament commandment. Paul quotes Deuteronomy 25:4 (‘You shall not muzzle an ox when it is treading out the grain’) to demonstrate that the preacher of the gospel is entitled to get his living by the gospel, but his final argument for this principle is that the Lord himself has so commanded (1 Cor. 9:8- 14).
Old Testament writings, perhaps in a kind of appendix, rather than the emergence of a new and distinct collection of ‘scriptures’.
Clement of Rome, in his letter to the Corinthian church (c AD 96), quotes the words of Jesus as being at least on a level of authority with those of the prophets. ‘The Holy Spirit says’, he states, introducing a conflated quotation from Jeremiah 9:23f. and 1 Samuel 2: 10 (‘Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom nor the strong man in his strength nor the rich man in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in the Lord, to seek him out and to practise judgment and righteousness’), and then he goes on: ‘especially remembering the words of the Lord
J
esus, “Be merciful, so that you may obtain mercy. . .“’ (with further quotations from the Sermon on the Mount). loIn a later letter in the Pauline collection this argument is repeated:
the same Old Testament commandment is quoted and coupled this time with an express saying of Jesus: ‘for the scripture says, “You shall not muzzle an ox when it is treading out the grain”, and, “The labourer deserves his wages” ’(1 Tim. 5: 18). What is striking here is that a saying of Jesus known to us from Luke 10:7 is linked with an Old Testament text under the common rubric: ‘the scripture says.’ It has to be considered whether ‘the scripture’ refers strictly to the commandment from Deuteronomy, or also to a written collection of sayings of Jesus which may have served as a source for the Third Evangelist, or even to the Gospel of Luke itself. (Here the comparative dating of 1 Timothy and Luke would have to be taken into account. )
Ignatius, bishop of Antioch (c llO), refers to some people who refuse to believe anything that is not recorded ‘in the archives’ (or ‘in the charters’, meaning presumably the Old Testament scriptures), even if it is armed ‘in the gospel’. When Ignatius replies ‘It is written’ or ‘scripture says’ (presumably meaning a gospel writing), they retort, ‘That is the question’-in other words, ‘Is the gospel scripture?’ Ignatius responds with a rhetorical outburst, in which he affirms that his ultimate authority is Jesus Christ: whatever authority the ‘archives’ (or ‘charters’) have is summed up and brought to perfection in his passion and resurrection-in short, in the Christian faith. ’ ’
Further references to the gospel writings as ‘scripture’ are made in the second-century homily conventionally called the Second Epistle of Clement. In one place Isaiah 54: 1 (‘Rejoice, 0 barren one. . .‘) is quoted and the author goes on: ‘And another scripture says, “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners”’ (cf Mt. 9:13). ‘* Later the In what is usually regarded as the latest of the New Testament
documents, reference is made to one of the writings of Paul, who is said to speak to the same effect ‘in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand [the writer goes on), which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures’ (2 Pet. 3:lSf.). Here Paul’s letters seem to form a recognizable collection, and to be given the status of scripture, since they are associated with ‘the other scriptures’. If the date of 2 Peter were more certainly known, it would provide an important landmark in the history of the canonization of the New Testament documents.
On the other hand, if the Pauline letters are here reckoned along with
‘the other scriptures’, this might in itself imply their addition to the
” 1 Clem. 13: If. In 1 Clem. 46:7f. a plea for unity, fortified by various quotations, is concluded with ‘Remember the words of the Lord Jesus’, followed by a warning against leading Christ’s elect ones into sin, resembling such sayings as those of Mt.
26:24 and Luke 1712 (perhaps quoted from oral tradition rather than from a written text). Cf. Acts 20:35.
” Ignatius, To the PhifadeLpbians 8.2. Another possibility is that Ignatius’s ‘It is written’ refers to Old Testament texts which were invoked as ‘testimonies’ to Christ;
his opponents’ retort ‘That is the question’ (Gk. prokeitaz) would then mean: ‘Do these Old Testament texts in fact refer to Christ?’ See B. M. Metzger, The Canon o/the NEW Tutammf (Oxford, 1987), p.48.
‘* 2 Clem. 2: l-4. This homily has usually been dated in the mid-second cenrury, but acase for dating it DAD 100 has been argued by K. P. Donfried, ThrSrttingofSe~~ond Clrmnt in Early Christianity. NovT Sup 38 (Leiden, 1974).
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dominical saying, ‘Whoever has confessed me before men, I will confess him before my Father’ (cf. Mt. 10:32), is followed by ‘And he says also in Isaiah, “This people honours me with their lips, but their heart is far from me”’ (Is. 29:13),13 while in yet another place it is declared that ‘the books and the apostles say that the church is not of present-day origin but has existed fmm the beginning’. I4 The apostles’
authority is evidently not less than that of ‘the books’ (the Old Testament writings); their Lord’s authority is a fortiori on a par with that of the lawand the prophets.
Rather earlier than this homily is the Letter of Barnabas (perhaps the work of an Alexandrian Christian), which uses the clause ‘as it is written’ to introduce the quotation ‘Many are called, but few are chosen’- words found nowhere in the Bible apart from the gospel of Matthew (Mt 22: 14). ” Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, writing to the church of Philippi between AD 110 and 120, reminds his readers, who (perhaps by their own testimony) were ‘well versed in the sacred letters’, that ‘it is said in these scriptures, “Be angry and sin not” and
“Do not let the sun go down on your anger” ‘. I6 The former injunction comes from Psalm 4:4, but it is quoted in Ephesians 4:26, where it is followed by the second injunction. We cannot be completely sure of Polycarp’s wording, as this part of his letter is extant only in a Latin version of the Greek original, but he appears definitely to ascribe scriptural status to a New Testament writing.
So does the gnostic leader Basilides, a younger contemporary of Polycarp; he was well acquainted with several of the documents which came to be included in the New Testament. For example, he introduces a quotation from Romans 8: 19, 22 with the phrase ‘as it is written”’
and says that the events of our Lord’s life took place ‘as it is written in the gospels’. I8 He quotes 1 Corinthians 2: 13 as an expression used in
‘the scripture’. I9
Dionysius, bishop of Corinth about 170, complains that letters he has written have been falsified by omissions and interpolations; of those responsible for this misdemeanour he says, ‘the woe is laid up in store for them’ (having in mind perhaps the warning pronounced in Rev. 22: 18f. against any one who alters the words of the Apocalypse
” 2 Clem. 3:2-5. (Is. 29: 13 is quoted in Mk. 7:6.) I4 2 Clem. 14:2
‘* Barnabas 4: 14. ’ 6 Polycarp, To the Phdippians 12 : 1.
” Quoted by Hippolytus, Refutation ofAIi Heresies, 7.25.2.
‘* Quoted by Hippolytus, Refutation, 7.27.8.
Iv Quoted by Hippolytus, Refutation, 7.26.3.
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by addition or subtraction). ‘Therefore it is not surprising’, he goes on, ‘that some have dared to falsify even the dominical scriptures, when they have plotted against writings so inferior to these.‘*’ The
‘dominical scriptures’ could be gospels or other New Testament writings, but they might conceivably be the Old Testament writings, especially those passages which were used as ‘testimonies’ concerning Christ.
About the same time the Palestinian Christian Hegesippus could report after his journeys among the Mediterranean churches that ‘in
every [episcopal) succession and in every city the preaching of the law and the prophets and of the Lord is faithfully followed’. *’
These quotations do not amount to evidence for a New Testament canon; they do show that the authority of the Lord and his apostles was reckoned to be not inferior to that of the law and the prophets.
Authority precedes canonicity; had the words of the Lord and his apostles not been accorded supreme authority, the written record of their words would never have been canonized.
It has at times been suggested that the replacement of oral tradition in the church by a written collection is in some ways regrettable. The author of a volume entitled Is ‘Holy Scripture’ Christian? (a title which he concedes is ‘perhaps foolish’) quotes G. Widengren, a Swedish scholar, to the effect that ‘the reduction to writing of an oral tradition is always a sign of loss of nerve’ and mentions a remark ascribed by Oxford oral tradition to R. H. Lightfoot ‘that the writing of the gospels was an early manifestation of the operation of original sin in the church’. 22 But, in a society like the Graeco-Roman world of the early Christian centuries, where writing was the regular means of preserving and transmitting material deemed worthy of remembrance, the idea of relying on oral tradition for the recording of the deeds and words of Jesus and the apostles would not have generally commended itself (whatever Papias and some others might think).
In the first half of the second century, then, collections of Christian LO Quoted by Eusebius, Hisf. Ed. 4.23.12.
” Quoted by Eusebius, Hist. Errs’. 4.22.3.
” C. F. Evans, Is ‘Holy S@btrue’ Christian? (London, 197 l), pp.bf. The Widengren quotation (not specifically referring to the New Testament) comes from ‘Literary and Psychological Aspects of the Hebrew Prophets’, Uppsalcr Uniwrsitefs A rsskr$t, 1948, No. 10, p.9; Widengren speaks of a ‘crisis of credit’ and acknowledges indebtedness to H. S. Nyberg. This title of Evans’s book is borrowed from the title of one of his essays reproduced as a chapter in it; it is at the end of this essay that he speaks of ‘the chapter’s perhaps foolish title’ (p.36).
T H E C A N O N O F S C R I P T U R E
writings which were due one day to be given canonical status were already taking shape- notably the fourfold gospel and the corpus of Pauline letters.
T H E F O U R F O L D G O S P E L
Before the term ‘gospel’ (Gk. euangelion) came to be given to any single one of the four gospels (or to one of the many other works of the same literary genre), it meant (1) the good news of the kingdom of God preached by Jesus, (2) the good news about Jesus preached by his followers after the first Easter and Pentecost, (3) the written record of the good news current in a particular locality, (4) the fourfold gospel.
When Ignatius used the term ‘gospel’, in which sense did he use it?
In his letter to the church of Smyrna, he speaks of heretics who have thus far been persuaded ‘neither by the prophecies not by the law of Moses nor by the gospel’,23 and says that the best defence against false teaching is ‘to pay heed to the prophets and especially to the gospel, in which the passion has been revealed to us and the resurrection has been accomplished’. 24 If he was referring to one written gospel, it was most probably Matthew’s. Roughly contemporary with Ignatius’s letters (or perhaps a decade or so earlier) is the manual of church order called the Didach (superscribed ‘The Lord’s teaching to the Gentiles through the twelve apostles’), proceeding possibly from the neighbourhood of Antioch, where ‘the gospel’ is clearly the gospel of Matthew (the form of the Lord’s Prayer found in Mt. 6:9-- 13 is prescribed for regular use
‘as the Lord commanded in his gospel’).”
Evidence of another kind comes from Pap&. How many gospel writings Papias knew is uncertain: Eusebius preserves comments which he made on two, thinking that they contained information that was worth quoting. One of the comments Papias claims to have derived from someone whom he calls ‘the elder’: it relates to Mark’s record:
Mark became Peter’s interpreter and wrote down accurately all that he remembered, whether the sayings or the doings of the Lord, but not in order-for he had neither heard the Lord nor followed him, but followed Peter later on, as I said. Peter was L ’ 7.0 the sll/yuI‘Lwm 5 : I LJ To rhr Slllyrrirrrdn.! 7 : 2.
” I>nLl~h? 8.2. So too the baptismal formula prescribed (‘into the name of the Father and
of
the Son and of the Holy Spirit’) is that of Mt. 28: 19 (Dzdcrch? 7. 1).accustomed to teach as occasion required, but not as though he were making a compilation of the dominical oracles. So Mark made no mistake in writing down certain things as he called them to mind; for he paid attention to one thing: to omit none of the things he had heard and to make no false statements in any of them. 26
Eusebius then quotes a sentence from Pap& on Matthew:
Matthew compiled the oracles in the Hebrew speech, and each one interpreted them as best he could.”
Papias says nothing (so far as is known) of a gospel collection; it is not even certain that the two pieces of information just quoted came from the same context in his work; their juxtaposition may be due to Eusebius.
On Mark’s record Papias speaks somewhat defensively, as though he knew of criticisms that had been voiced against it, especially on the ground that its order was defective. To this Papias replies that Mark did not set out to write an orderly account: his aim was to record in writing whatever Peter had to tell of the works and words ofJesus; and Peter simply mentioned from time to time those things which the circumstances of the moment required. In what he wrote down Mark made no mistake: in order, as in matter, he adhered to what Peter said.
(In fact, Papias does less than justice to the literary unity of Mark’s gospel: whatever Mark’s sources were, he wove them into the fabric of his work with the skill of an independent author.)28
But if Mark was criticized for his defective order, it is implied that the critics had in mind some other record which served as a standard from which Mark deviated. This record might have been Matthew’s:
when Papias says that Mark did not make a compilation of the dominical oracles, he indicates that Mark was not concerned to do what Matthew (according to his account) actually did. Certainly in the earlier part of Mark’s record his order differs from Matthew’s. But another possibility is that the standard from which Mark allegedly deviated was the gospel of John, which was produced in Papias’s own province of Asia. Certainly the differences in order between John’s
” Eusebius, Hirt. Ed. 3.39.15.) ” Eusebius, Hut. E~rf., 3.39. 16.
‘” See F. F. Bruce, ‘The date and character of Mark’, injrsw rrnJ the Polirz~x /J/ hiJ DUJ. ed. E. Bammel and C. F. D. Moule (Cambridge, 1984). pp.69-89.
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gospel and the three synoptic accounts taken together are plain enough. Although no express evidence survives of Papias’s acquain- tance with John’s gospel, Eusebius’s statement that he used
‘testimonies’ from John’s first epistle suggests that he must have known his gospel too.*’ But so far as references to John in Papias’s surviving fragments go, we should gather that he was more interested in ascertaining what John said than in reading what he wrote.
Papias’s account of Mark was derived from someone whom he calls
‘the elder’ or ‘the presbyter’-presumably someone who in his earlier life had known one or more of the apostles. It is not clear that his account of Matthew was derived from such an authority.” The
‘oracles’ which Matthew compiled are doubtless the oracles of the Lord, on which Papias himself wrote his Exegesis or explanation in five volumes (scrolls). His statement that Matthew compiled them ‘in the Hebrew speech”’ has been taken to show that the reference is not to our Gospel of Matthew, which bears all the signs of being an original Greek composition. But Papias, or any informant on whom he relied here, may not have been able to recognize translation-Greek or distinguish it from untranslated Greek.
A generation after Papias, Justin Martyr, a native of Palestine who had become a Christian while resident in the province of Asia but was now living in Rome, shows his knowledge of a gospel collection. If Justin’s work Against Marcion (known to Irenaeus and Eusebius)‘* had survived, it would probably have told us more about the status of the New Testament documents in Justin’s circle than his works which do survive- his Dialogue with Ttypbo and his two Apologies, defences of
” Eusebius, Hist. Eccl., 3.39.17. See J. B. Lightfoot, Essays on *Supernatural Rr/i@on’, pp. 186-207; R. M. Grant, The Formation of the New Testament (London,
1965), pp.69-72.
” In view of Eusebius’s poor estimate of Papias’s intelligence (ffist. EccI., 3.39.13),
T. W. Manson argued that he would not have troubled to record Papias’s private opinion on a matter of this importance: ‘we are justified in supposing that Eusebius regarded this fragment as a piece of earlier tradition preserved by Pap&’ (Studies in the Gospels and Epistles {Manchester, 19621, p.70. Manson went on to argue that the
‘oracles’ said to have been compiled by Matthew were utterances of Jesus, no less authoritative in the eyes of the church than the oracles of the Hebrew prophets.
” ‘Hebrew’ might mean ‘Aramaic’, as sometimes in the New Testament (e.g. Jn.
19:13, 17).
‘* C/Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 4.6.2, where an extract from this work of Justin shows the latter’s knowledge of, and dependence on, the Gospel of John; also Eusebius, Hut. Ecc-I. 4. 11.8f.
Christianity addressed respectively to the Emperor Antoninus Pius (138- 161) and to the Roman senate (between I44 and 160). In his Dialogue Justin speaks of the ‘memoirs’ (memorabilia) of Peter (possibly the gospel of Mark)” and in his First Apology he refers to the ‘memoirs of the apostles’. These memoirs, he says, are called gospels, and they are read in church along with the ‘compositions of the prophets’. 34
We are on firmer ground when we come to Justin’s disciple Tatian.
After Justin’s martyrdom (AD I65), Tatian went back to his native Assyria, and there introduced what was to be for centuries a very influential edition of the gospels, his Diatessaron. This word is a musical term, meaning ‘harmony of four’; it indicates clearly what this edition was. It was a continuous gospel narrative, produced by unstitching the units of the four individual gospels and restitching them together in what was taken to be their chronological order. The gospel of John provided the framework into which material from the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke was fitted. The Diatessaron began with John 1: l-5, after which, instead of John 1:6 (‘There was a man sent from God, whose name was John’), it reproduced Luke’s account of the birth of John (Luke 1: 5 -80). But John’s order was not followed slavishly: the cleansing of the temple, for example, was located in Holy Week, where the synoptic account places it (Mark 11:15-17 and parallels), and not at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, where it appears in John 2:13-22.”
Tatian was an Encratite,36 member of an ascetic group which believed that vegetarianism was an essential element in the gospel: it was perhaps on this account that the Diatessaron changed John the Baptist’s diet from ‘locusts and wild honey’ (Mark 1:6 and parallels) to
‘milk and honey’. It is possible that here and there he amplified his
33 Dialogue, 106.3; #100.4, etc., for the ‘memoirs of the apostles’. Justin uses the Greek word apotnn~moneumata, familiar in classical literature, as in Xenophon’s Memorabilia of Socrates.
” FirIt Apology, 66.3; 67.3. R. G. Heard suggests that Justin took over Papias’s phraseology (‘The upor~~nrtt~onrt~~~~ata in Papias, Justin and Irenaeus’, NTS 1 [ 1954- 551, pp. 122-129).
‘s On Tatian and the Diateuaron see R. M. Grant, The EarlirJt L&J ~~J~JILJ (London, 1961), pp.22-28; B. M. Metzger, The Early Versions ofthe Neu Testament (Oxford, 1977), pp. 10-36.
” From Gk. mbrat~~. ‘continent’; the Encratites may have taken their designation from the one occurrence of this adjective in the New Testament: Tit. I:8 (AV/KJV
‘temperate’, RSV ‘self-controlled’). Tatian is said to have rejected some Pauline epistles, but to have accepted Titus (Jerome, Comr~/rntq on ‘Fltm. preface).