The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction (19 page)

The emerging Catholic Church (that which would develop into the medieval church, which then subsequently split into Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy) was by this time employing the familiar authority structure of scripture and tradition. The scripture was the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures (including the so-called apocryphal or deutero-canonical books of the Maccabees, Judith, Tobit, Sirach/Ecclesiasticus, Wisdom, Baruch, the Epistle of Jeremiah, 1 Esdras, etc.). This simply was “scripture.” Tradition was, on the one hand, the growing body of sayings attributed to Jesus and stories about him and, on the other, the summaries of what was considered “apostolic” doctrine, represented in formulae such as the Apostles Creed. We find similar summaries in late second-century writers like Irenaeus and Tertullian. There were a number of early Christian writings of various kinds (gospels, epistles, apostolic acts, revelations, church manuals) that were written and circulated more or less widely, but these were at first more
expressions of
the faith than either the
source
or
criteria for
faith. That is not to say they were not important. Think of the writings of Calvin and Luther: They are very important to Calvinists and Lutherans who still study them, but no Calvinists or Lutherans would consider the wise writings of their founders to be scripture on the same level with the Bible. Admittedly, in practice the difference may evaporate, but that is just the technical distinction that is important here. The question that concerns us is precisely how the early Christian writings came to cross that line and join the category of scripture. The earliest Catholic Christians felt no need as yet for new scripture, since they found the Septuagint Bible adequate to their needs so long as they could use allegory and typology to read it as a Christian book, one about Jesus Christ and Christianity.

But this Marcion was not willing to do. He insisted on a literal, straightforward reading of the Jewish scriptures, refusing to treat them as a ventriloquist dummy and make them seem to speak with Christian accents. Theodore of Mopsuestia (350-428) had the same attitude, though he was no Marcionite. Read in a plain-sense fashion, Marcion recognized, the Jewish scriptures had nothing to do with Christianity. (Even lacking his belief in two different biblical Gods, one can see his point when one thinks of the strained arguments needed in order to make various Old Testament passages sound like predictions of Jesus. And it is still quite common today to hear Christians contrast the severe God of Israel with the tender Father of Jesus.) So Marcion repudiated the Jewish scriptures. It wasn’t that he disbelieved them; he didn’t. They were just the proper scriptures of somebody else’s religion that did not overlap with Christianity as he understood it. Nor was Marcion anti-Semitic or even anti-Judaic! For him, Judaism was a true religion on its own terms; it’s just that it wasn’t the religion of Jesus Christ or the Apostle Paul.

Anyway, without the Septuagint Bible as his scripture, Marcion felt the need to compile a new scripture that would teach Christian faith and morals authoritatively. So he collected the early Christian writings he felt served the purpose. These were paramountly the Pauline epistles, except for the Pastorals—1 and 2 Timothy and Titus—because these did not yet exist. They were written in reaction to Marcion and other “heretics” in the second century. As for the rest, Marcion had shorter, earlier versions of the texts than ours. Likewise, he had one gospel, corresponding to a shorter version of our Gospel of Luke, though he knew it simply as “the gospel.” Catholic writers decades later would claim that Marcion had edited and censored the texts, cutting out any material that served to link Christianity with its Jewish background. Marcion no doubt did do some small amount of editing, textual criticism, as it seemed to him, but it rather seems that Catholic apologists padded out the texts with their own added material, claiming that their own versions were original and should be adopted instead of the Marcionite text. Marcion called his scripture the
Apostolicon
(“the Book of the Apostle”).

THE FIRST COUNTER-REFORMATION

If Marcion had been merely some eccentric, people like Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian would not have bothered with him. But he rapidly became a force to be reckoned with, since Marcionite, Pauline Christianity spread far and wide. The relationship between Marcion and the Catholic leaders of his own day is strikingly paralleled in the uneasy relations between Paul and the Jerusalem apostles in Galatians and 2 Corinthians. The Catholic Church sought to co-opt Marcionism/Paulinism late in the second century by, as anticipated just above, adding material to the Pauline texts and Luke, harmonizing Pauline Christianity with Judaism in the manner still familiar today, insisting that Christianity was the rightful heir to God’s covenant promises with Israel and the Jewish people. Had Marcionism triumphed, I dare say we would have seen more peaceful Jewish-Christian relations, since neither side would have been perceived as coveting the heritage of the other.

How did the Catholic Church respond to the Marcionite Sputnik of a specifically Christian scripture? Where Marcion relegated the Jewish scriptures to the Jewish religion and replaced them with a distinctly Christian scripture, the Catholic bishops decided to retain the Jewish Bible (reinterpreted in a Christian manner) and to add a new set of writings onto it. They certainly had no objection to having a set of books that would speak overtly of Christian faith and practice. Remember, they already had them. It was just a question of making it official, making them part of the Bible. So they took over the Pauline letters, adding the Pastorals and interpolating the others to bring them into closer accord with Catholic teaching. Marcion’s gospel became our Gospel of Luke (adding chapters 1-3, the Nazareth synagogue sermon, the Prodigal Son, the Tower of Siloam and Pilate’s massacre of the Galileans, the “Wisdom saith” speech, the Triumphal Entry, the Wicked Tenants, the resurrection debate with the Sadducees, the prediction of Spirit baptism, and the ascension). To balance and dilute Luke, Catholics added Matthew, Mark, and John (already written, of course, though John had to be extensively reshuffled and interpolated, as Bultmann showed, before it could pass as sufficiently orthodox).

Wanting to restore the clout of the Twelve, Catholics made a late and lame attempt to represent them in the canon alongside Paul. The Acts of the Apostles sought to co-opt Paul and make Peter his twin (so as to bring both sides together, one devotees of Paul’s memory, the other of Peter’s), as well as to imply that the Twelve in general played some important role. If they ever had, their labors were among Jewish Christians in Palestine, and their work was largely forgotten after 70 CE and the destruction of Jerusalem. A group of three anonymous epistles from “the Elder,” a master of traveling missionaries late in the first century, was ascribed gratuitously to John son of Zebedee. Two spurious Petrine writings (1 and 2 Peter, by different pseudonymous authors) were chosen out of the much larger bin of Petrine apocrypha surviving today (the two Apocalypses of Peter, the Gospel of Peter, the Journeys of Peter, the Acts of Peter, the Preaching of Peter, the Letter of Peter to Philip, etc.), as was a letter by someone named James (the Brother of the Lord? Son of Zebedee? Son of Alphaeus? Or any other James?) and another by one Jude. This gave us the core of the Catholic canon, though its exact outlines would take some centuries to be settled.

THE A LIST

For Irenaeus (115-202), bishop of Lyons and major opponent of Gnosticism, the Christian Testament included the four gospels, the Pauline epistles, and Acts. He used, but seems not yet to have regarded as scripture, 1 Peter, 1 John, either 2 or 3 John (he does not say which, but he mentions another Johannine epistle), Jude, and Revelation. He makes no mention of Hebrews, 2 Peter, or James. Twenty years later, Tertullian (160-mid-third century), a follower of Irenaeus, had the same list, but for him, all of these books were part of scripture. Tertullian also used Hebrews and the Epistle of Barnabas, though we cannot tell if he regarded them as canonical. And he thought 1 Enoch ought to be included in the Old Testament. (The first Christian we know of who referred to the Jewish scriptures as the Old Testament was Melito of Sardis in the last third of the second century. And Clement of Alexandria [160-215] was the first to call the Christian scriptures the New Testament.)

While Irenaeus considered the books just listed to be authoritative and canonical, he does not seem to have predicated that authority upon any divine inspiration. As he saw it, their authority stemmed from their privileged historical position, their character as foundational documents of the apostolic age. Again, Tertullian has carried things a significant step further, locating the authority of the New Testament books specifically in their apostolic authorship. They did not simply come from the dawn age of the church; they had to carry the authorization of having been composed by Jesus’s apostles or their delegates. Here he is thinking of Mark and Luke, who for this very purpose were imagined to have been disciples or assistants of Peter and Paul, respectively. (Irenaeus has his predecessor, Papias, bishop of Hierapolis about 130, already linking Mark to Peter in this way, but he is probably fudging it. “Papias” seems to have functioned as an all-purpose source of convenient “traditions,” licenses to make this or that “apostolic” as needed.)

Clement of Alexandria had no closed canon. He made frequent reference not only to our four conventional gospels but also to the Gospel according to the Hebrews and the Gospel according to the Egyptians, to apocryphal as well as to canonical Acts, to the Epistles of Clement and Barnabas, the Preaching of Peter, the Shepherd of Hermas, and others. And (if Morton Smith is to be believed) he used a secret edition of Mark. So far, the New Testament books were considered authoritative because apostolic. It was Clement of Alexandria’s successor Origen (185-251) who first considered them inspired writings as opposed to writings of inspired or authoritative writers, an important distinction even in twentieth-century scripture debates. Origen reasoned that, since a book either was or was not inspired, then it behooved the church to decide which ones, and no others, belonged in the Bible. But he himself did not make the judgment call. He only saw the need.

Eusebius, the great church historian and propagandist for Constantinian Christianity, makes it clear that precise canonical boundaries were still a matter of dispute in his day (mid-fourth century). He tells us how, in the discussions of contemporary theologians, the available writings fell into four categories. First, there were what he regarded as
genuine apostolic
books: the four conventional gospels, the Pauline epistles, with some disputing Hebrews, 1 John, 1 Peter, and Acts. Some include Revelation in the category (Eusebius was no fan of it, though!). Second, there were generally
disputed
books: 2 and 3 John, Jude, James, 2 Peter, some say Hebrews. (The Pauline authorship of it was still up for grabs—Origen had admitted “God alone knows” who wrote Hebrews.) Third were the “
spurious
,” that is, possibly pseudonymous in authorship, but still acceptable and usable: the Gospel according to the Hebrews, the Acts of Paul, Shepherd of Hermas, Apocalypse of Peter, the Didache (Teaching of the Twelve Apostles to the Nations), Barnabas, and some say the Revelation of John. (Eusebius thought one “John the Elder,” not John the son of Zebedee, wrote it.) Fourth were outright
heretical forgeries
: Acts of John, of Andrew, Peter, Thomas, and so on and the Gospels of Peter, Thomas, and Matthias. It is evident that the canon question was still wide open.

The Muratorian Canon, a fragmentary writing from Rome, has generally been placed in the second century, but some now argue it dates to the fourth, and it lists all our New Testament books except for Hebrews, James, 1 and 2 Peter, while adding the Apocalypse of Peter and the Wisdom of Solomon (!). It mentions and rejects the Shepherd of Hermas.

BONFIRE OF THE HERESIES

The first known list of our twenty-seven New Testament writings appears in the Paschal (Easter) Letter of Athanasius to his diocese in 367 CE. He lists them and warns his flock to use these and no others. One immediate result of this encyclical was to prompt the brethren of the Monastery of Saint Pachomius in Egypt (the very first known Christian monastery) to hide away their copies of books banned from the list. These they buried in a cave in leather satchels, where they rested in oblivion till 1945 when accidentally discovered by a peasant farmer. The monks knew the inquisitors would be coming around again to see if the encyclical had been obeyed, and they did not want to hand over their precious copies of the Gospels of Thomas, Philip, Peter, the Egyptians, Mary Magdalene; their Revelations of Zostrianos, James, Melchizedek, Seth, Shem, Dositheus, and others; their Epistles of Peter and James; their Apocrypha of John and James; and so forth to be burned. Their library attests an astonishing range of Christian scripture still in use at the time. We have only these and a very few other copies of the excluded books because the Constantinian authorities carried out a systematic purge of the writings deemed heretical as per Athanasius’s encyclical. (Others, like the Shepherd of Hermas, survived outside the canon since they were not considered dangerous, just not official.)

The list of Athanasius, he who championed
Homoousias
Christology at Nicea, was officially adopted (“received”) by the local Synod of Hippo in 393 and again by the Synod of Carthage in 397. But this hardly meant that from there on in everyone used our New Testament list. Surviving manuscript codices of the New Testament (and there are a great many) from the next few centuries continue to include other (less heretical) books and/or to lack some of the ones on the list. Scribes apparently did not feel particularly bound to conform to the Athanasian norm. Why should they? No ecumenical council ruled on the matter until the Counter-Reformation Council of Trent! In general, though, it would be fair to say that by about 400 CE, the Western Mediterranean churches used the Athanasian canon, remaining grudgingly reluctant about Hebrews. It took another two centuries until the Eastern churches were ready to accept Revelation as canonical. Even today, in the Monophysite churches of Armenia and Ethiopia, the New Testament canon contains books like 3 Corinthians, Clement, Barnabas, and so on.