From Honest to Jesus Chapter 6. This is the history of how the new teastment was developed over 2 thousand years. It is of interest to anyone that is really wanting to know the truth about how the bible was handed down to us.
TESTAMENT
AN ORTHODOX BRIDGE TO THE PAST
THE NEW TESTAMENT AS BRIDGE
The collection of ancient documents we know as the New Testament privileges twenty-seven documents gospels, acts, letters, epistles, plus one apocalypse as the basis for defining what authentic Christianity is. Within that larger collection, the four canonical gospels were selected to undergird and propagate a standard-orthodox-picture of Jesus.
In contrast to the large number of sources that were available in antiquity, the New Testament itself provides a relatively narrow bridge to cross on the road to the origins of Christianity. The four narrative gospels of the New Testament can also deflect the search for the historical Jesus. The tendency has been, especially in the popular mind but also among scholars working within traditional guidelines, to look no further than the New Testament for information about Christian beginnings. Critical scholars of the Bible, on the other hand, have long since widened and modernized that canonical bridge. And I number myself among them. Since our interests extend beyond one orthodox version of Christianity, we have decided to take into account all the information from all the surviving ancient sources about Jesus of Nazareth and the events that produced the Christian movement. Indeed, our oaths of office as critical scholars and historians require that we investigate and weigh every document, every artifact, in reaching particular historical judgments. As historians, we are interested in the wide variety and complexity of the whole early Christian movement, rather than merely in one narrow, prescriptive account.
If canonical boundaries are meaningless from the perspective of the critical scholar, has the time not come to reopen the question of what books belong in the biblical canon? Is it not time to think of adopting a new New Testament?
The process of forming the first New Testament lasted for centuries. The uninformed tend to view that process as though it happened overnight. For them, the New Testament took shape around 1611, when the authorized edition was promulgated in England by James 1. Many people assume that the English Bible fell out of heaven complete. As a consequence, the King James Bible is erroneously regarded as in errant and infallible. The popular mind has simply invented a myth to confirm what it wishes were true. But the task of the serious scholar is to segregate fact from wishful thinking.
In reviewing the very complex process of forming the Bible, we must lay aside preconceived notions and gather the raw data. In order to limit the quantity of information to be considered, we will here confine our investigations to the New Testament.
BOOKS AND BOOKMAKING IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
The physical evidence for the books of the New Testament consists of manuscripts produced between the death of Jesus around 30C. E. and the sixteenth century, the effective end of manuscript production. (I cannot bring myself to write "handwritten manuscripts" since manuscript means "written by hand.") The discussion of the evidence to follow will be easier to comprehend if we preface those remarks with a modest primer of terms and categories. The three principal areas to consider are (1) types of writing materials, (2) writing styles, and (3) book formats.
Types of Writing Materials
Manuscripts of the New Testament are customarily classified in three broad categories based on the kind of writing material. There are three types of writing materials: papyrus, parchment or vellum, and paper.
PAPYRUS
The earliest manuscripts were written on papyrus. Papyrus was made from the Egyptian papyrus reed cut into strips laid adjoining each other on a flat surface to form sheets. A second layer of strips was superimposed on the first but at right angles, so that the fibers in the papyrus ran at right angles to each other on opposite sides of the page. The side with horizontal fibers is called the recto, the side with vertical fibers is termed the verso.
PARCHMENT
Parchment and vellum were also used as manuscript material. Both parchment and vellum were made of animal skins sheep, goats, or calves scraped clean of flesh and hair and then cured. Parchments, in other words, are leather sheets. Vellum is of a higher quality and is therefore a more expensive form of parchment.
PAPER
The earliest New Testament manuscript written on paper dates to the ninth century. The Chinese had actually produced paper as early as the first century C.E. However, paper was not introduced in the West until much later and was not widely used until the twelfth century. About 1,300 of the 5,487 surviving manuscripts of the New Testament, or portions of the New Testament, are written on paper. To be sure, the early types of paper imitated the look and feel of parchment, just as expensive papers today do (diplomas and awards are still printed on imitation parchment to indicate the antiquity of the traditions underlying them). 1
Writing Styles
Manuscripts are further classified by the types of handwriting. There were two types of hand, generally speaking: a book hand used for literary works and a cursive script employed for ordinary purposes such as contracts, bills of lading, deeds, receipts, and personal correspondence. Later a special cursive style was created for books as well.
THE UNCIAL BOOK HAND
In the book hand, letters are formed elegantly and discretely, each letter of approximately the same height and width. Letters are printed rather than written, in imitation of the style found on inscriptions, where letters consisted of straight lines and angles made by the stonemason's chisel. The book hand, which tended to round the more rigid style of the inscription, is customarily called uncial (meaning letters "one inch" high). In uncial manuscripts the text is written continuously, without word spacing or paragraph breaks and by filling up each line with letters without regard to word breaks. In early manuscripts there is virtually no punctuation. The uncial style was employed in the production of literary texts, including the Bible, for approximately fifteen hundred years, beginning in the fourth century B.C.E.
CURSIVE AND MINUSCULE
A more efficient form of writing, called cursive, was in general use for the creation of nonliterary texts of various kinds. In the cursive style, letters are frequently joined to one another without lifting the quill from the page. Combinations of letters were developed, called ligatures, to speed up writing and copying.
At the end of the eighth or the beginning of the ninth century C.E., a new book hand emerged; it was smaller than the uncial script and adopted the cursive style. The smaller size led to its being termed "minuscule," which is what biblical manuscripts written in this style are called. Minuscules were prepared on a variety of writing materials.
Book Formats
Another way to classify manuscripts is by how the "book" is formed. There are two types: (1) the scroll or roll, which consisted of sheets of papyrus or leather glued together in a continuous strip and rolled up on a wooden, bone, or metal dowel, and (2) the codex, which consisted of sheets folded in two and fastened together on one side. The codex is the precursor of the modern bound book, Scrolls were normally written On one side, codices On both sides , of the sheet. As a consequences, we can tell whether even a tiny fragment is from a scroll or a codex by whether .there is writing on one or both sides of the sheet.
Dates
The earliest of the papyrus manuscripts of the New Testament can be dated to the second century the latest to the eighth. Papyrus manuscripts are almost always written in the uncial hand. The parchments in uncial script range in date from somewhere between the second and third to the eleventh centuries. The earliest of the parchment minuscules can be dated to the ninth century, the latest to the sixteenth. Handwritten minuscules continued to be produced even after the invention of the printing press around 1 454 C. E.
To judge by the surviving evidence, Jewish copies of the scriptures in ancient times were always produced on leather or parchment in scroll form. The codex was not used for Jewish literature until the eighth century. Pagan literary texts also retained the scroll form until the late third or early fourth centuries; the transition to the codex had virtually been completed by the beginning of the fifth century. In contrast Christian writers seem to hav e adopted the codex form almost from the beginning of Christian manuscript production in the late first or early second century. Scholars are uncertain why this happened. One explanation is that Christian writers wanted to distinguish their texts from both Jewish and pagan
authors. The real cause is more probably less ideological; Christians may have adopted the codex in order to accommodate longer texts or collections of texts under one cover. The collection of texts bound together was simply not possible in a scroll format.
Evaluation
Papyrus manuscripts of the New Testament are considered the most valuable of the three groups. Their value lies in the fact that they are thc closest thing we have to the original texts, called "autograph" copies (written or signed by the original authors), of the New Testament documents, none of which has survived. But they do not in themselves tell us much about the formation of the canon, Which was just getting under way in the early papyrus period.
Some of the early parchments in uncial script are also considered very valuable, not only for their textual evidence but also because they were formed into thicker codices and thus reveal which books were being included in larger collections of important, perhaps even sacred, documents.
Minuscules or cursives come relatively late in the development of the text and canon of the New Testament. As a result, they w e re thought by textual critics not to be as im p ortant and, as a consequence, have not been given the close attention the earlier manuscripts have received. That is a deficiency that eventually needs to be rectified for one simple reason: later manuscripts may actually be copies made from much earlier texts, to which they are therefore immediate, rather than intermediate, witnesses. The date of the manuscript does not always indicate the age of its text.
THE NEW TESTAMENT AS CANON
Formal Definitions of Canon
The New Testament is a canon of scripture. What does that mean? The term canon means "a critical standard or criterion." In the case of the New Testament, the canon includes those books accepted as genuine and inspired scripture by the community forming the canon. But that is a purely formal definition. What we will need subsequently is a historical definition, one that depicts how and when an authoritative collection of sacred writings was actually formed.
According to Bruce Metzger, an authority on the history of the canon, the term canonical designates documents that were produced while the apostolic tradition was still alive. 2 Such a definition is intentionally vague: apostolic tradition was "alive" well into the second century and is a suitable qualifier for many documents that were not included in the New Testament. If we were to use that definition as a guide, we would have a New Testament of seventy-five or a hundred books rather than the customary twenty-seven.
Another definition is this: canonical means accepted and used by the church or churches at large.' In the early centuries, what was considered "canonical" varied from region to region and was actually determined largely by regional ecclesiastical officials rather than by popular assent: most members of the Christian movement would not have possessed copies of any of the books, and manuscripts of a complete Bible did not yet exist. Consequently, they would not have been able to form independent judgments about the merit of individual books. In any case, this definition would exclude the Book of Revelation from the New Testament: it was never universally approved by the churches before being included in printed Bibles.
The canon comprises books that conform to the rule of faith, according to yet another definition . 4 It is not clear from this way of putting the matter whether documents included in the New Testament conform to some rule of faith previously established let's say, by one or the other of the creeds or whether the New Testament was meant to be the basis for establishing some new rule of faith. Churches differ widely in how they interpret this definition. Finally the New Testament can be understood as a list of books adopted or approved by some ecumenical or denominational ecclesiastical council. Modern defenders of the canon seem to prefer this definition. Yet if we adopt this definition, we can only say that the Roman Catholic Church did not officially close its canon until the Council of Trent meeting in 1545, and many Protestant bodies have never taken official action. And, as we shall see, the Eastern churches have established canons of scripture quite at variance with those of the Western churches.
The Canon as Historical Process
As preparation for addressing the canon question, we need to consider how and when the New Testament we now have was formed. I propose to consider that process under three rubrics: the canon as a physical collection of books; the canon as an authoritative list of books; and the canon as scriptures selected and arranged for public reading as a lectionary.
The notion most contemporary Bible users have is that of a physical collection of books assembled under one cover. Modern readers are accustomed to the codex book created out of a stack of sheets sewn or glued together on one side; they have very little practical acquaintance with the book as a scroll. The prevailing idea of what constitutes a Bible is therefore physical and palpable: the Bible is a bound book.
Prior to the invention of the printing press and the advent of the codex, a canon would have consisted of a list of books recommended for reading. The recommendation would have come from a bishop or other ecclesiastical leader. In the absence or unavailability of bound collections, the list would have served as a table of contents of a hypothetical book. A canon would be something like a bibliographic syllabus prepared by a college instructor for a course, say, in English literature or the French Revolution.
Canon can also refer to the reproduction of selected texts intended for public reading on some liturgical schedule. Compendia made for this purpose are called lectionaries. A lectionary is a kind of anthology designed for use in worship, study, and meditation. Of the 5,487 manuscripts in the inventory at the Institute for New Testament Textual Research (Munster, Germany), 2,280 are lectionaries. We will return to their significance subsequently.
Scholarly Myopia
As a residue of habit, modern scholars tend to view the history of the canon from the perspective of the finished product. Since physical copies of codices containing a large number of sacred books did not exist before the fourth century, considering the Bible, or the New Testament, as a physical book was not an option. Scholars have depended, consequently, on lists of books quoted by early Christian authors or compiled by ecclesiastical officials. In addition, scholars have searched for fragments of earlier evidence to support decisions actually made at a later time, rather than looking for clues about how the process took place. In other words, they have made decisions taken in the sixteenth century or later retroactive. As a Consequence, the data we have in the scholarly literature are often not complete or reliable. We learn in inventories whether a given manuscript contains fewer than the standard number of books, but when It contains more than the usual number, that fact may not be noted. It will take some time to expand our database so that we have full and accurate information about the contents of the surviving codices and scrolls.
It was not until the printing press was invented that the modern book could readily accommodate the volume of pages required to reproduce the entire New Testament or the whole Bible. Even though it was phys i cally possible to create huge codices containing man books, it was not often done for the simple reason that it was very expensive. A relatively small codex required the hides of fifty to sixty sheep or goats; the hides of more than 360 animals were needed to create a codex the length of Slnaiticus, the famous fourth-century copy of the Bible. Only kings and those Who could afford a king's ransom could fund bookmaking of this magnitude.
An extensive collection of books the length of the New Testament, copied onto a single scroll, was not physically possible. Papyrus Harris 1, a chronicle of the reign of Ramses II, is 143 feet in length. Other hieroglyphic burial scrolls ran to fifty feet or more, but these were monumental documents not meant for ordinary use.' The Isaiah scroll found at Qumran is twenty-eight feet, but this too is an unusually long roll. The Qumran temple scroll is slightly longer than the Isaiah scroll at twenty'-nine feet. The maximum length of a usable scroll was said to be about thirty-five feet. However, most Greek rolls were shorter and contained a single book or segment of a book.
The division of ancient works into "books" suggests that divisions of works corresponded to the average length of the scrolls on which they were written. The
Antiquities of Josephus in twenty books meant that this work would have occupied twenty scrolls. Philostratus' life of Apollonius of Tyana occupied eight books or scrolls. Homer's
Iliad is a work that required twenty-four scrolls.
The Greek name for Bible
is to biblia, "the books" or "the writings." Modern usage prefers the singular "book" in contradiction to the Greek plural "books." The difference undoubtedly reflects whether a work consisted of plural "books" or whether a work consisted of a single "book." "The scriptures," which could be translated literally as "the writings," is perhaps a better English equivalent of to
biblia. A "bible" in the first century C.E. would have consisted of a storage jar containing a number of scrolls. The Latin name for a scroll is
volumen, each volume carried a tag, called
a syllabus, that identified the content of that roll.
The books found at Qumran, dated between approximately 200 B.C.E. and 68 C. E., are all in scroll rather than codex form. In contrast, the four t h-century C.E. Nag Hammadi library was entirely in a codex format. Most Christian codices of the second and early third centuries were one document books. That may be due to the fact that early Christian writers at first created books only of single-scroll length. Initially it seems that the codex was made in a single-quire format: a stack of the required number of sheets was folded once in the middle to form the entire book. As a consequence, when the codex was trimmed, the inside pages were much shorter than the outside pages. This practice mitigated against forming large codices. With some important exceptions (P 46 , P45) , it was not until the fourth century that codices were made of smaller quires or signatures (sets of sheets folded in the middle) and then assembled into one codex by sewing them along the spine, as shown in Figure 3 (p. 140). Because huge codices were expensive and because the scroll format continued to be used for both pagan and Jewish publications, the list of sacred writings played an important role in the formation of the biblical canon.
Books of the New Testament first circulated individually; they were later collected into related groups. In the second century C.E. we begin to see two-document codices. Multi document codices begin to appear in the third century. It is only in the fourth century C.E. that the first great parchment or vellum codices appear. At Nag Hammadi, in the fourth century C.E. , fifty tractates (or "books") were collected into twelve codices. Comprehensive codices containing many books continue to be rare for the next millennium to such an extent that Bruce Metzger concludes that very few Christians could ever have owned, or even seen, a copy of a complete New Testament, judging by the small number of surviving copies. 6
The more than two centuries from the invention of the printing press to the beginning of the Enlightenment were tumultuous. Johann Gutenberg is believed to have printed the first Latin Bible, Jerome's Vulgate, sometime between 1452 and 1456. The Greek New Testament did not appear in print until between 1514 and 1517. Martin Luther tacked his ninety-five theses to the door of the church at Wittenberg on 31 October 1517. The Council of Trent acted on the canonical question on 8 April 1545 for the Roman church, in reaction to the reformation inaugurated by Luther. The reaction in part was to Luther's low regard for the Book of Revelation and the Epistle of James in the New Testament. The first edition of the King James Bible appeared in 1611, complete with the extra books that appear in Catholic but not Protestant Bibles. Galileo was warned of his heresy in 1616 and condemned in 1632. John Locke published his
Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690, which signaled the beginning of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment broke out in full force in the following century.
Those were momentous times. And those were the times in which the formation of the canonical New Testament entered its final stage. Those events mark the watershed that separates the Middle Ages from the
TABLE 1
PAPYRUS MANUSCRIPTS OF THE SECOND CENTURY C.E.
P 52 ca. 125 a tiny fragment of the Gospel of John
P 66 ca. 200 the Gospel of John
P 46 ca. 200 the letters of Paul
P9 ca. 175 a fragment of the Gospel of John
P 98 2nd cent. a fragment of Acts
P64, 67 ca. 200 fragments of the Gospel of Matthew
NOTE: P 4 , a fragment of Luke, may belong to the same codex as P64, 67 .
modern period. In the midst of that maelstrom, publishers were the ones, for the most part, who settled which books belonged to the Bible; for the first time they printed Bibles by the score for distribution to everyone who could read and had the price of a book. It was the invention of the printing press and the modern multi signature book that finally settled matters. Even so, these developments did not settle the status of the so called deuterocanonical books, also known as the Old Testament apocrypha the intertestamental books such as Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, and 1 and 2 Maccabees. New editions of the Bible often include that disputed group of books, although other, more conservative editions continue to omit them. The final resolution of their inclusion or exclusion is still pending.
We cannot imagine, from the distance of the twentieth century, how earthshaking the events were that took place between 1450 and 1700. Nor can we imagine how unsettled the Bible as a collection of books was prior to the printing press. But we can discipline our imaginations by gathering some minimal facts about the Bible as a physical book, about lists, and about lectionaries.
THE BIBLE AS BOOK (CODEX)
Papyri
Very few papyrus manuscripts of the canonical books can be dated to the second century. The six that qualify are listed in Table 1. In scholarly treatises and inventories, papyrus manuscripts are preceded by a "I"' to indicate the kind of writing material; the "P" is followed by an inventory number assigned to each manuscript or fragment indicating the order in which they were discovered.
If we examine the physical evidence provided by the New Testament papyrus manuscripts, mostly fragmentary, that survive from the period
TABLE 2
CONTENTS OF THE LONGER EARLY PAPYRUS CODICES
|
P,3 |
3rd/4th cent. |
Hebrews |
|
P45 |
3rd cent. |
Four gospels and Acts |
|
P46 |
ca. 200 |
The letters of Paul |
|
P47 |
3rd cent. |
Revelation |
|
P66 |
ca. 200 |
John |
|
P |
3rd/4th cent. |
1 and 2 Peter, Jude |
|
P75 |
3rd cent. |
Luke, John |
NOTE: The inventory numbers indicate the order in which the papyri were discovered, not their age.
prior to Nicea (325C. E. ), we learn that the preponderance of fragments are from single-document codices. Among the papyrus manuscripts known to scholars from the entire papyrus period (second to eighth century), only nine contain ten or more folios and thus about forty pages (a folio is a sheet folded in two to make four pages, counting both sides of each resulting page). The contents of seven of these nine early codices are summarized in Table 2.
As Table 2 indicates, from prior to 325C. E. there have survived only four papyrus manuscripts that contain more than one biblical document-none of the whole New Testament, none of the entire Bible. The discovery of the Chester Beatty Papyri in the 1930s produced the two most extensive documents in the list above, P 45 and P46, both of which can be dated to the end of the second or beginning of the third century.
There are now ninety-eight known papyrus manuscripts of New Testament books. They span the period from the second to the eighth centuries C.E. A catalogue of the contents of all the surviving papyrus manuscripts, many of which, it will be recalled, contain only a few words or verses, reveals that most of them contained only a single book, so far as we can tell. Such a catalogue also indicates the popularity of various books, if we may judge by the number of surviving copies. The catalogue is provided in Table 3.
Among the twenty-seven books in the standard New Testament, 1 and 2 Timothy are not represented among the papyrus fragments.
In general, most papyrus manuscripts were copies of single books. Eventually books were arranged in larger groups as the capacity of the codex was expanded. The earliest compendia consisted of books that had something in common: the gospels were grouped together, as we r e the Pauline letters. Acts, the story of the early church, tended to be linked to the so-called catholic epistles, like Hebrews and James, which were presumably addressed to the church at large rather than to a particular
TABLE 3
CONTENTS OF ALL PAPYRUS CODICES
|
CODICES OF SINGLE |
BOOKS |
CODICES OF TWO BOOKS |
|
John |
16 |
Luke, John |
2 |
|
Matthew |
14 |
Matthew, John |
1 |
|
Acts |
10 |
Mark, John |
1 |
|
Luke |
7 |
Matthew, Acts |
1 |
|
Romans |
6 |
John, James |
1 |
|
Hebrews |
5 |
1 and 2 Corinthians |
1 |
|
Revelation |
5 |
1 and 2 Thessalonians |
1 |
|
1 Corinthians |
4 |
Ephesians and |
|
|
James |
3 |
2 Thessalonians |
1 |
|
Mark |
1 |
|
|
|
1 John |
1 |
|
|
|
Philippians |
1 |
|
|
|
1 Thessalonians |
1 |
|
|
|
Titus |
1 |
|
|
|
Ephesians |
1 |
|
|
|
Galatians |
1 |
|
|
|
Philemon |
1 |
|
|
|
1 Peter |
1 |
|
|
|
Jude |
1 |
|
|
CODICES CONTAINING THREE OR MORE BOOKS
|
P45 |
3rd cent. |
Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts |
|
P46 |
ca. 200 |
Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, |
|
|
|
Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, |
|
|
|
1 Thessalonians, Hebrews |
|
P61 |
ca. 700 |
Romans, 1 Corinthians, Philippians, Colossians, |
|
|
|
1 Thessalonians, Titus, Philemon |
|
P72 |
3rd/4th cent. |
1 and 2 Peter, Jude |
|
P74 |
7th cent. |
Acts, James, 1 and 2 Peter, 1, 2 and 3 John, Jude |
congregation. Revelation remained in a class by itself as the only independent apocalypse in the New Testament. It was rare for more than one of these clusters to be included in a single papyrus codex (P 45 , which contains the four gospels and Acts, is the sole surviving exception).
Parchments (Uncials)
Two hundred ninety-nine parchment manuscripts of the New Testament have survived from antiquity. Of that number, only four originally contained major portions of the entire Bible, both Old and New Testaments. Yet two of these codices, Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus, have New Testaments with twenty-nine books rather than the customary twenty-seven. The two additional books in Sinaiticus are the Shepherd of Hermas and Barnabas, two works included among the so-called Apostolic Fathers -a collection of books written by authors who lived in the "apostolic age," roughly prior to 150 e. E. The two additional items in Alexandrinus are the two Epistles of Clement. Codex Ephraemi Syri Rescriptus, the third great codex, is defective in that 2 Thessalonians and 2 John are missing, although it may originally have included them.
The fourth parchment manuscript, Vaticanus, now lodged in the Vatican library as its name indicates, is defective from Hebrews 9:14 on. Professor Kurt Aland maintains that Vaticanus probably also contained some documents from what we now know as the Apostolic Fathers . 7 If Aland is correct, then we have four codices containing the twenty-seven books of the later New Testament, plus additional writings of the Apostolic Fathers.
The other 295 uncials lack one or more books. However, the data given in most lists preclude determining whether additional documents were once a part of any of these uncials. The earliest of these uncials are 0189, a fragment of Acts dated to the second or third century, and 0212, a third-century fragment of Tatian's Diatessaron (a harmony of the four canonical gospels). The latest of the uncials is dated to the eleventh century
None of the papyrus or uncial codices contains precisely the contents of what was eventually to become the New Testament. Two of the codices have twenty-nine books in their New Testaments, and two are defective. The New Testament as a physical book had not yet been born.
Mlinuscules
The minuscules continue the saga of the papyri and uncials. The Surviving minuscules date from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries. Aland claims that fifty-six of about 2,800 minuscules contain the whole of the New Testament.' It is difficult to know how much of this generalization is based on firm empirical evidence. The minuscules have yet to be adequately examined for their contribution to textual criticism and to the formation of the canon. However, the twenty-seven books that came to be part of the New Testament were being increasingly collected into single codices, judging by the scattered evidence presently available to us. But even by the sixteenth century, the limits of the New Testament had by no means been finally fixed.
THE NEW TESTAMENT AS LIST
Because early evidence for the New Testament as a physical book was lacking or incomplete, scholars have depended on lists of authoritative or recommended books as a guide to what was considered a part of the New Testament canon.
Lists have been understood in two senses. In the first sense the reference is to a separate list of documents, such as a bishop might provide for his parishioners. In the second sense, "list" can be under stood to be an index of scriptural quotations and allusions found in a particular author's work. Quotations and allusions are customarily taken as an author's approval of the books being cited, unless the author specifies the contrary. The two kinds of lists should be kept distinct. In what follows, I will explore the first kind of list and refer to the second type only in passing.
What do we learn from the lists? We can do no more than sample the possibilities.
Marcion
Marcion, a wealthy ship owner who organized his own Christian sect, gathered into his Bible only those scriptures that supported his theological position. After coming to Rome from Pontus in Asia Minor (ca. 140-150), Marcion promulgated a collection of "scriptures" consisting of the Gospel of Luke and ten letters of Paul, all heavily edited. The lesson was not lost on the later church. Both Marcion and the church excluded books if they were deemed to deviate from desirable doctrine or practice. The Puritans and Presbyterians adopted this strategy in forcing the publishers of the King James Version in the seventeenth century to drop the Old Testament apocrypha from their editions. The British and Foreign Bible Society added its weight to exclusion in the nineteenth century by refusing to print and circulate Bibles with the Old Testament apocrypha in them.
Marcion is also known to have taken scissors and paste to the documents he chose. He cut out parts of Luke and the Pauline letters that he didn't like. We do not know how often that same approach was used prior to the fixing of the text in the fourth and fifth centuries. Many scholars now believe canonical Mark is an edited text in its own right. Mark was certainly edited by Matthew and Luke in the process of creating their own gospels; they also edited Q, to judge by the results. And there is good reason to believe that Thomas went through more than one edition.
Exclusion and editing constituted one strategy. Expansion and combination formed another. We know the Pauline corpus was expanded by letters and epistles written in the name of the apostle. Marcion probably did not know the Pastoral epistles (I and 2 Timothy, Titus); in fact, the pastorals may not have been composed by Marcion's time. The epistles of Peter and Jude are also pseudographs writings incorrectly attributed to those authors that made it into official lists, although not without difficulty.
Irenaeus
It is well known that Irenaeus, a heresy hunter who flourished towards the close of the second century in Gaul, insisted on the fourfold gospel. His argument that since there were four winds and four cardinal directions there should be four gospels was specious, of course. Yet the principle he was enunciating proved to be important: the narrative gospels, he reasoned, should not be reduced to a single witness, as Marcion had done. Irenaeus believed, probably for the fanciful reasons he adduced, that multiple witnesses were essential to the health of the tradition. Tatian (second century C.E.), a scholar of the Syriac church, made another attempt to reduce the four witnesses to one; he combined the four gospels into one harmonized version in the Diatessaron. The Western church eventually rejected his work. It was apparently considered illegitimate to conflate the four gospels into one harmonized account. The production of harmonies, suspended in antiquity, was resumed in modern times when scholars began to create the first critical study instruments. Today the synopsis or gospel parallels is the standard format: the gospels are arranged in parallel columns for ready comparison, often with matched lines. Modern scholars have decided that "harmonizing" the gospels produces an arbitrary sequence of events that obscures the lack of real chronological information in the texts themselves.
Irenaeus did not propose a formal list of approved writings beyond his list of the four narrative gospels. He cites a number of other documents, however, that he may have regarded as authoritative. We cannot be sure. In any case, Irenaeus refers to twenty-one or twenty-two books as though they were "scripture." However, within this group, the letters of Paul had not yet attained the same status for him as the gospels; he also includes the Shepherd of Hermas in his "canon."
Muratorian Canon
The so-called Muratorian Canon, an annotated list of authoritative books, was first published in 1740 on the basis of an eighth-century manuscript. Some scholars think it may have originated as early as 200C. E. The language is Latin, although it may have existed at one time in Greek. The text is fragmentary and must have begun originally with Matthew. It now begins with Mark, who is identified as probably not an eyewitness; the author of the Gospel of Luke was certainly not an eyewitness, according to this canon. The Gospel of John, on the other hand, was taken to be based on the testimony of all twelve apostles. The anonymous author of this unusual document obviously regarded the Fourth Gospel as the most valuable of the four.
The fragment alleges that the epistle to the "Laodiceans," which may be a reference to the epistle now known as Ephesians, and the epistle to the Alexandrians, an unknown work, were falsely attributed to Paul and should not be regarded as authoritative. The fragment includes the Wisdom of Solomon among authoritative books, along with both the Book of Revelation and the Apocalypse of Peter.
The approved books in the Muratorian list include the four canonical gospels, the thirteen letters of Paul (including the Pastoral epistles), Jude and two epistles of John (we don't know which), together with the Wisdom of Solomon, and the Book of Revelation and the Apocalypse of Peter. The Muratorian Canon rejects the Shepherd of Hermas, Paul's letter to the Laodiceans and to the Alexandrians. Hebrews, 1 and 2 Peter, and James are not mentioned.
Montanism
A certain Montanus, like Marcion before him, began a movement in the late second century C.E. that produced a strong adverse reaction on the part of orthodox theologians. That reaction has had consequences for the formation of the New Testament canon.
Montanism was an apocalyptic movement that originated in Asia Minor but spread rapidly throughout the empire. Two women, Prisca and Maximilla, were closely associated with Montanus. According to the story, Montanus fell into a trance after his conversion and began to speak in tongues, which he took to be the fulfillment of the promise made by Jesus to his disciples in the Gospel of John that he would send the Paraclete (the Spirit). He and his associates believed the world would soon come to an end. In response to this conviction, the Montanists developed a rigorous ascetic discipline.
The orthodox reaction to the Montanist movement was to distrust apocalypticism and to reject Pentecostalism (new outpourings of the spirit). The apocalypse of John, already under suspicion, became a steady target of rejection in the Eastern wing of the church as a part of this reaction. The Montanists themselves also rejected the Epistle to the Hebrews because it asserts that a second repentance is impossible. Even the Gospel of John came under fire by orthodox leaders because of its association with the Montanists.
Montanism indicates that a definitive collection of Christian texts had not yet been determined at the end of the second and the beginning of the third centuries. But the backlash created by Montanism contributed to a hardening of the orthodox position and gave new impetus to the creation of a theologically orthodox collection of scriptures.
9
Athanasius
Athanasius (296-373) was the bishop of Alexandria beginning in 328 C.E. His festal letter of 367 C. E. is frequently cited as the first unalloyed list of the twenty-seven books that eventually became the New Testament of the Western church. In that letter he lists the books he commends to his parishioners for their edification. Athanasius was an untiring opponent of Arianism, the view that Christ was not coeternal and coequal with God; he stoutly defended the full deity of the second person of the Trinity.
The fact that his letter is so frequently cited as evidence for the early determination of the New Testament canon calls attention to the reverse perspective from which canonical issues are often viewed: With a bow to Marcion, scholars look, as it were, for data to confirm what is taken to be the final decision, rather than assembling the widest possible collection of data to illuminate the historical process, which took place over a long period of time and was disjointed and uneven at best.
Eusebius
Eusebius was the bishop of Caesarea and a principal participant in the Council of Nicea. In Eusebius' time (260-340 C. E.), sacred books were still being divided into three categories: accepted, disputed, and rejected. That should hardly surprise us. But we would give a lot to know which books Eusebius, who wrote the first surviving history of the church after Luke, actually included in the fifty copies of "the Bible" Constantine ordered him to produce. His lists have survived; in them the accepted books include the four gospels, Acts, the letters of Paul (number not specified), I John, I Peter, and the Apocalypse of John, which is also listed in the second category. Among the disputed books he lists James, Jude, I Peter, 2 and 3 John, the Acts of Paul, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Apocalypse of Peter, Barnabas, the Didache, and the Gospel of the Hebrews. The disputed list indicates which books belonging to the authoritative list were still being debated in the fourth century. As heretical books, Eusebius names the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Matthias, along with other gospels, the Acts of Andrew, and the Acts of John.
THE NEW TESTAMENT AS LECTIONARY
Lectionaries (anthologies of selected texts arranged for liturgical use) are in a class by themselves. There are about 2,280 of them extant, although the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament cites only five of them in J
indicating variant readings in the New Testament. The Byzantine lectionary system did not arise until the seventh or eighth century. One generalization can be made immediately: The Book of Revelation was never included in the Byzantine lectionary. Furthermore, regional churches developed their own lectionary systems in the early period. There is great variety in the surviving lectionary manuscripts.
THE NEW TESTAMENT IN OTHER TRADITIONS
We have been speaking as though the Greek tradition has exclusive claim to the attention of scholars interested in the question of scripture. In fact, much of what has been said derives from the Latin church. The shift to Latin in the West had already begun with Tertullian, an early African Christian theologian, around 200C. E. and was more or less complete by 250 C.E. But we have failed to notice what was going on in the East.
Syrian Church
The Peshitta version of the Christian scriptures contained only twenty-two writings. The Peshitta was the Bible of the Syriac-speaking church. It is believed to have originated in the fifth century C.E. The five books that would have brought the number of the New Testament books to twenty-seven include 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and the Apocalypse of John. The Peshitta effectively closed the canon for the Syrian church since it separated itself from the rest of the church at the Council of Ephesus in 431 C. E.
Ethiopian Church
The Ethiopian church, which legitimately claims that its tradition dates to the fourth century C.E., has a canon of eighty-one books, of which thirty-five comprise the New Testament. The notion of what is canonical is regarded more loosely here than in other church traditions. In addition to the twenty-seven known to us, the Ethiopian canon includes the Synodos (a church order), the book of Clement, The Book of the Covenant (a church order followed by a resurrection gospel known as the Testament of the Lord), and the Didascalia.10 The authorities of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church have never claimed that their Bible was complete.
The Syrian and Ethiopian canons are enough to remind us that the tradition in the West is not the only tradition.
American Churches
A final word must be reserved for the canon in the American tradition.
The contents of the New Testament and the entire Bible were not fixed for the Roman Catholic tradition until 8 April 1545, when the Council of Trent took action as a part of the Counter-Reformation. But that Roman Catholic decision had the Latin version of the Bible, known as the Latin Vulgate, as its object; the Vulgate included the Old Testament apocrypha. Luther's translation of the Bible into German was printed in 1522. Because Luther did not regard four books highly (Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation), he placed them in an appendix. For English-speaking Protestants, on the other hand, the preeminent act was the publication of the King James Version in 1611, first with, and then later without, the apocrypha. That event was so decisive that the Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church included this statement as a result of an action taken on 24 December 1784, at Baltimore, Maryland: "All the books of the New Testament as they are commonly received, we do receive and account canonical." By this date it was no longer necessary to list the twenty-seven books. It should be noted, however, that this resolution on the part of the Methodist Church does not constitute an independent act and scarcely reflects a considered reevaluation of the possible contents of the New Testament."
A number of movements in the United States have expanded the canon with additional revelations set down in writing. Prominent among them are the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints with the
Book of Mormon. The Christian Science movement recognizes Mary Baker Glover Eddy's
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures as part of its authoritative canon. Similar remarks could be made of the Seventh-Day Adventists and other groups claiming the Christian appellation but expanding the base of their received revelations.
A NEW NEW TESTAMENT?
So far as we know, none of the original followers of Jesus wrote books. Those ascribed to the first disciples or to relatives of Jesus are actually pseudographs documents written by unknown authors but attributed to known persons. The genuine letters of Paul of Tarsus, penned in the fifties of the first century C.E., have the strongest claim to antiquity, to apostolic authority (on the basis of his Damascus road vision), and to originality. In addition, Paul was the founder of a great part of the Greek speaking church and is perhaps the one most responsible for the shape Christianity eventually assumed. It is difficult to conceive a collection of basic Christian writings that would not include most or all of what Paul wrote (Romans, I and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, 1 Thessalonians, Philippians, Philemon).
The Pauline school wrote and circulated letters in the name of Paul. Most scholars have concluded that the Pastorals (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) belong to a generation or two subsequent to Paul and therefore were not written by him. Ephesians is almost certainly not from the hand of Paul; it may have functioned as an introduction to the first collection of Paul's letters. Many scholars regard Colossians and 2 Thessalonians as letters composed by Paul's successors and attributed to him. In a revision of the New Testament canon, it will be necessary to reconsider the status of each of the letters attributed to Paul but not written by him.
The same may be said of the so-called catholic epistles, presumed to have been addressed to the church at large, the catholic church (with a lowercase "c"). The catholic letters are Hebrews; James; 1 and 2 Peter; Jude; and 1, 2, and 3 John.
The letter of Clement, allegedly bishop of Rome, to the church at Corinth is dated by most scholars to about 95 C.E. It was written in response to a disturbance in the church at Corinth and rehearses the basic tenets of the Christian faith as though heresy were at issue. It deserves consideration along with other early letters. The seven letters of Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, who was probably martyred in Rome in the second decade of the second century, are worthy of close consideration. Since Ignatius knew he was on his way to his execution, he wrote letters to seven churches with whom he had had contact; they are, in fact, his last will and testament. He sums up the gospel as he had come to know it through the letters of Paul. The letter of Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, addressed to the Philippians, was written later than Ignatius' letters. Polycarp provides insights into the situation in Greece in the middle of the second century.
Gospels constitute a basic ingredient in any collection of documents that purports to represent the beginnings of Christianity. The gospels recognize the pivotal role of Jesus of Nazareth, who is usually assumed to be the founder of the Christian faith. The gospels have preserved a body of teaching and a record of deeds that can, after careful sorting, be traced back to Jesus himself. The earliest of these records are the Sayings Gospel Q and some hypothetical early version of the Gospel of Thomas. In a revised collection of gospels, the narrative gospels should be preceded by a reconstructed Q and a selection of parallel materials from the Gospel of Thomas. A selection of what are considered the authentic aphorisms and parables of Jesus could conceivably form a preface to Q and Thomas. Most scholars agree that the first of the narrative gospels is Mark; Mark ought, therefore, to come first in the sequence of the four narrative gospels. Mark should be followed by Matthew and Luke, who based their narratives on Mark; they supplemented their stories with materials from Q and with stories of the appearance of the risen Jesus to select disciples, along with accounts of Jesus' miraculous birth and childhood.
A new New Testament, however, should consider other early gospels. In
Ancient Christian Gospels, Helmut Koester has written:
For the description of the history and development of gospel literature in the earliest period of Christianity, the epithets "heretical" and "orthodox" are meaningless. Only dogmatic prejudice can assert that the canonical writings have an exclusive claim to apostolic origin and thus to historical priority. 12
TABLE 4
PHYSICAL EVIDENCE FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOSPELS
100-150
C.E.
Gospel of John P52
Egerton Gospel PEgerton 2
150-225 C.E.
Gospel of Matthew P64, 67, 77
Gospel of John P66, 90
Gospel of Thomas POxy 1
Gospel of Peter POxy 2949, 4009
THIRD CENTURY
Gospel of Mark P45
Gospel of Matthew P1, 45, 53,70
Gospel of Luke P4, 45, 69, 75
Gospel of John P5, 22, 28, 39, 45, 75, 80, 95
Gospel of Thomas POxy 654, 655
Infancy Gospel of James PBodmer V
Gospel Oxyrhynchus POxy 1224
Gospel of Mary PRylands 463; POxy 3525
The physical evidence for the existence of gospels as old as those that were eventually included in the New Testament is impressive (Table 4). And the content of several of these documents makes them worthy of review. The Gospel of Thomas is not the only candidate. The time has come to end the orthodox bias that has caused these documents to be ignored.
The Gospel of Peter offers an alternative version of the trial and execution of Jesus and for that reason should probably be evaluated for inclusion in any new canon. Unfortunately, Peter is fragmentary. In addition, we now have part of the text of the Gospel of Mary, which ought to be seriously considered for inclusion if only because it is unique among early Christian documents in giving a central place to a woman close to Jesus. This century has brought to light fragments of three other previously unknown gospels Egerton, and gospels 840 and 1224 found at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. The fragmentary story about a woman accused of adultery, usually attached to the Gospel of John but almost certainly a piece of another unknown gospel, deserves review along with the other fragments.
If an apocalypse (a revelation, usually in a dream, of events connected with the end of history) is to be included, we should consider adding at least one more to the Apocalypse of John. The Apocalypse of Peter might be a suitable candidate. There are over a hundred other apocalypses to choose from, so popular was this particular literary genre.
If other types of literature are desirable, NAT might think of the Didache (Teachings of the Twelve Apostles), which is an early Christian church order or discipline. And there are still other documents that belong to the formative years of Christianity that might be evaluated for inclusion.
If it is desirable to expand the boundaries of the New Testament, we should develop a list old viable candidates among treatises of the post apostolic. age (roughly 150-300C. E.), subject them to extensive review, and then decide whether they contribute materially to the history, variety, and definition of Christianity.
In any case, by any of the criteria used to isolate "sacred" Christian scriptures in antiquity, the present canonical limits of the New Testament call for review and reassessment. Scholarly practice ignores canonical boundaries, yet critical scholars do not accord every early Christian writing the same weight among the plethora of sources available.
Uppermost in any review of the canon must be the practical limits of what a literate person might be expected to read and understand. If we include too many documents, readers will be put off by excessive demands. If we embrace too few, we may slight one or another of the strands of early Christian dev el opment. Practical limitations preclude what many scholars would prefer; a New Testament that includes all the surviving documents from the first two or three centuries. While such a New Testament might be no larger than the Old Testament , it would still present formidable dimensions to the average student of the Bible. Julian Hills, in private correspondence, has suggested that the selection should be as large as possible but no larger; that it should be as small as possible but no smaller." Another way of putting it is to say that the canon should have both inside and outside limits. That is sage advice.
The reconsideration of the canon ought to be an ecumenical enterprise. It should not be driven by the same motives that marked canonical decisions in the early church. The canon of the New Testament was developed, along with the creeds, as a way of excluding political enemies, so regarded because they deviated from institutional opinion or practice; the primary interest was to build a fence around right doctrine and hierarchic privilege. This also had the effect of consolidating ecclesiastical power. The scholars of the Bible in the twentieth century at least those who call themselves critical scholars should have as their aim the desire to lay bare that process. The power we seek is the power of information that we can share with a literate readership. We should endeavor to include rather than exclude. We might, for example, want to defend rather than condemn Arius, who, in defense of monotheism, argued that the Christ was not truly God. In any case, our canonical boundaries ought to be flexible, limited only by the requirements of literacy and the ability to master a body of literature. It is just possible that we should return to the time-hallowed practice of publishing the Bible in pieces.
Whatever else we do, we must move beyond the traditional canonical limits in the construction of databases, research tools, and study instruments. The perpetuation of artificial canonical boundaries still cripples our endeavors in textual criticism, papyrus and parchment inventories, concordances, and similar instruments. Above all we need a handy compendium of original-language texts that explodes the boundaries of the standard Greek New Testament. The horizons of biblical scholarship have expanded far beyond the limits of the canonical sources.
A new New Testament will be promulgated not by the church or churches but by some publisher or publishers. I believe we will find it necessary to continue the use of the terms
New Testament and
Bible, with or without qualifiers, if we are to achieve that goal. Publishers and Bible societies established the terms for the current canon, Bible publishing is a special domain in the publishing world. But new publishers and seminars can reset the terms for a new stage in the history of the canon.
If we have taken these steps, we will have made the major moves. However, there remains another herculean task: we will need to explain to interested parties what a revised canon means. That task may turn out to be the most difficult of all.
Edited by - william penwell on 7 December 2002 13:38:38
