The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction (20 page)

At the time of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther had the opportunity to reshape the canon simply by virtue of the fact that he was preparing the official German edition of the Bible for Protestants. It was up to him what would go into it. So he rejected the Old Testament Apocrypha, partly because not all survived in their original languages. Since he argued scripture was authoritative only in the original Hebrew and Greek, not in the Greek Septuagint or the hitherto-official Latin Vulgate, he couldn’t consider a book canonical that survived only in translation. Some, though, he disdained because of practical or theological matters. Still, he did not condemn them, and even the Puritans continued to read them for edification. The King James Bible included these books till 1823, when printers dropped them.

But Luther also reshuffled the New Testament canon, restricting Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation to an appendix. James he called an “epistle of straw,” while he said Revelation deserved to be taken out and thrown in the Elbe River! None of these books adequately conveyed the doctrine of salvation by grace through faith alone, Luther’s theological plumb line. Needless to say, Lutherans did not see fit to follow their master at this point. It was only in the nineteenth century that the question was reopened by Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher and later by Adolf von Harnack. Schleiermacher urged that theologians continue to sift the canonical from the apocryphal even within the bounds of the New Testament, while Harnack said it was now finally time to follow Marcion and cut loose the Old Testament. Perhaps the most astonishing Protestant remark on the canon question came from Willi Marxsen, a twentieth-century German theologian, who noted that Protestants have implicitly sawn off the branch they sat on when they rejected the tradition of the church as the norm for faith and practice in favor of “scripture alone.” How? Simply by ignoring the fact that the contents of the canon were purely a matter of church tradition, not of scripture! The Bible doesn’t tell us what ought to be in the Bible; tradition does, and it is this latter that Protestants claim to reject. Uh-oh.

MAKING THE CUT: CRITERIA

As a matter of tradition, the selection of the books for the canon was a gradual and to some degree haphazard process. It was the result of a piecemeal accumulation of local tradition and usage, and then a comparison of such local versions and usages by larger councils. Certain surviving remarks give us a good idea of what considerations guided the mostly anonymous Catholic bishops and theologians in the second, third, and fourth centuries. There were four criteria often or generally brought to bear. Some will sound familiar by now. I will discuss them in order of descending importance, noting how one has a tendency to collapse into another.

First,
catholicity
: Was a book known and used liturgically all over the empire? If it was not, it was dubious, since a real apostolic writing should have had time to circulate more widely. The fewer quarters of the church in which it was known, the greater the likelihood of its being a recent forgery. (“Why didn’t we hear about this ‘Gospel according to Wally’ till now? I smell a rat!”) Little 3 John had trouble on this score, but it made it in because it was evidently by the same author as the popular and renowned 1 John, so they figured it was its tiny size that caused it to be largely lost in the shuffle. In practice, the criterion of catholicity meant that the more widely known the book, whatever its contents, the better its chances were, because long familiarity and wide readership meant that there had been more opportunity for any “heretical” rough edges to have been worn away by theologians’ clever reinterpretations. But if it was unfamiliar, something that sounded heretical would jump right out. This is what happened to the Gospel of Peter. Bishop Serapion was asked to come to look over a copy of this gospel in rural Syria, where it was popular. He had never heard of it, so he took a look and saw no problem. But then someone advised a second look, and he picked out signs of Docetism, the belief that Jesus had only seemed to suffer on the cross while remaining divinely impassive. So the book was condemned. Had he grown up hearing it read every Sunday, in a familiar context, he would never have noticed any problem any more than the Syrian congregations who were familiar with it did. And the less widely known a book was, the easier politically it was to dump it, since it would have fewer partisans to be offended by its omission.

Second,
orthodoxy
: Did the writing conform to the rule of faith, the emerging creed? But again catholicity could overrule this, since any unorthodox element could be reinterpreted provided the book were widely enough beloved (which is why no one yelps at the numerous Gnostic, docetic, and adoptionistic verses in Paul’s letters!). But evidence of Docetism could sink a book, as with the Gospel of Peter or the Acts of John. But it might be something as simple as citation of other books no longer considered canonical. Barnabas cited 1 Enoch as scripture and didn’t make it, while Jude cited 1 Enoch and did squeeze in (though someone tried to replace it with 2 Peter, which incorporates most of Jude but cuts his references to the Assumption of Moses and 1 Enoch!). Or a book might be rejected not because it actually taught some heresy but because it risked letting the camel’s nose in under the tent flap. In this way, late apocalypses like the Shepherd of Hermas were dangerous because they were of later vintage, and if one could accept them, then there was no longer any clear reason not to accept the prophetic rantings of the Montanist prophetess Maximilla! Other books were finally rejected, not so much because of their content but because of guilt by association, that is, long or notorious use by heretical sects. The Gospel of Thomas was probably excluded mainly because Valentinians and Manicheans used it. Theirs were by no means the only ways to read the book, and had it been included in the canon, it would not sound heretical to anyone now. The familiar Gospel of John almost shared Thomas’s fate because it was so popular among Gnostics, one of whom, Heracleon, wrote the first known commentary on it. The anti-Montanist Gaius thought the Gospel of John must have been written by Gnostics, perhaps by Cerinthus himself! A whole group, dubbed by their enemies “the Alogoi” (a pun: opponents of the Logos gospel/ witless ones), opposed John’s canonization. And it
was
probably Gnostic in origin! As Bultmann shows throughout his commentary, it has been somewhat toned down by an “ecclesiastical redactor.”

Third was
apostolicity
—was it written by an apostle or the associate of an apostle? We have already seen how important this criterion was. But this was a wax nose easily twisted. If a book was widely known and deemed orthodox, then an apostolic byline could be created for it. In this way, to secure entrance into the canon, the anonymous Epistle to the Hebrews was ascribed, rather late, to Paul. Or if it was too late for that, some tenuous link might be forged between the ascribed authorship and some apostle, as when Irenaeus made Mark Peter’s secretary and Luke Paul’s. If a book sounded just too blatantly unorthodox, despite a clear apostolic authorship claim (like numerous books attributed to Thomas, Peter, Paul, Matthias, James, John, etc.), it could be dismissed as a forgery. Or a case of mistaken identity, as when Eusebius, who had once embraced the millenarian teaching of Revelation, first ascribed it to John son of Zebedee, but once he rejected the doctrine, he decided the Revelation must have been the work of another John—the Elder, not one of the apostles at all—and thus not to be taken so seriously!

Similarly, one is forced to wonder whether Matthew’s gospel received that “apostolic” ascription because it was by far the most popular of the gospels, while “Mark” and “Luke” were damned with the faint praise of noble but subapostolic names by those ecclesiastical editors who first titled them. They fell short of the “apostolic” Matthean standard and so merited lesser authoritative names/titles. By the time the drastically different John was added to the equation, Gaius, remember, suggested Cerinthus for its author as a way of condemning the Gnostic heresy he perceived it to contain. To go all the way to grant it a fully apostolic pedigree was an orthodox counterblast. Had no one gone all the way to the extreme of ascribing the book to Cerinthus, neither would anyone have gone to the opposite extreme of suggesting the Apostle John as its author. It is exactly parallel to the criticisms aimed at the erotic Song of Solomon in the first century among the rabbis. Shouldn’t such a piece of pornography be summarily ejected from the canon, that is, from public reading? No, came the reply; in fact, the book is especially holy, rendering the hands of anyone who touches it ritually unclean, that is, temporarily taboo from mundane contact. From one end of the pendulum swing to the other.

Fourth,
numerology
. Irenaeus was desperate to include Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and equally zealous to crowd out the Valentinian Gospel of Truth. So he reasoned that there can be only four canonical gospels, because there are four winds, four compass directions, four Argus-eyed chaemeras in the heavenly throne room in Revelation. And the perfect number seven (the number of the planets known to the ancients, each worshiped on one day of the week) was reflected in collections of epistles. Paul’s were first organized by the hebdomad of recipient churches: Rome, Corinth, Galatia, Philippi, Thessalonika, Colossae, and Ephesus. But this arrangement threatened to leave little Philemon out in the cold, to say nothing of the Pastorals. But once these (ostensibly addressed to individuals) were added, one counted epistles, not recipients, and this brought the total up to thirteen (with two each, of course, to Corinth and Thessalonika).

Hence the “need” to make Hebrews a fourteenth Pauline epistle, resulting in two sevens. (If not for the number business, one could as easily have ascribed it to Apollos or Clement or Barnabas, as some did, since these were Pauline proxies, like Luke.) There was a version of the Ignatian epistles containing seven of them, and the Revelation is prefaced by seven epistles. And this is no doubt why there are seven letters in the “Catholic/General Epistles” grab bag (James; 1 and 2 Peter; 1, 2, and 3 John; Jude).

SCRIPTURE AS TRADITION

In retrospect what we see is a process, first, of
expansion
of the canon in reaction to Marcion, and then a
contraction
of the canon to exclude the books of Montanists, Gnostics, and others. Every religion has had debates over the contents of its canon. Different sects, or subdivisions of religions, have different canons, even if it is only a matter of which individual books they put the major emphasis on. But it is well to ask just what is the point of delimiting a canon. The point is to restrict the number of possible sources of divination or doctrine, to limit the number of available voices one may consult and must obey. If you don’t want the flock considering certain doctrines, you’d best omit any scriptural texts that might be understood as teaching them.

By the same token, hand in hand with the defining of the canon, comes the governing of interpretation by an authoritative elite. Until the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s, the Roman Catholic Church discouraged Bible reading by the laypeople, lest it unleash sectarian fanaticism, every Bible reader becoming his own pope. To the extent that Protestants have avoided this danger it is because individual Protestants have been content to stay within the limits set by the interpretive tradition of their pastor or denomination. Notice how the late 2 Peter both knows a Pauline canon/collection
as scripture
(3:15-16) and admonishes the reader never to presume to engage in personal interpretation of scripture (1:20), since it is a perilous task that has already led many into soul-blasting heresy (3:16)? Tertullian set forth his Prescription against Heretics, where he advised fellow Catholics never to get embroiled in scripture arguments with heretics, since the heretics might well win! What one had to do instead was to deny the heretics’ right to appeal to scripture in the first place. Scripture is authoritative only when interpreted through the filter of apostolic tradition!

Today’s biblicists are, then, caught in a double, and doubly fatal, irony. First, the contents of the Bible whose infallibility they idolize have been set by fallible mortals like themselves, not by some miracle of revelation. They are dependent for their Bible’s table of contents on the unquestioned traditions of men, which in principle they claim to disregard. Second, they continue to quote the Bible as if it were their sole authority when in fact they control the reading of the texts by their own traditions of orthodoxy, condemning as heretical any who venture a different interpretation. In fact their notorious terror at the prospect of the higher criticism of the Bible amounts to an unwillingness to allow the Bible to speak with new voices. Teabing is basically right about this one: The supposedly divine Word has human fingerprints all over it.

NOTES

1
Dan Brown,
The Da Vinci Code
(New York: Doubleday, 2003), p. 231.

2
Dewey M. Beegle,
The Inspiration of Scripture
(Philadelphia: Westminster: 1963), pp. 17-40.

3
Brown,
Da Vinci Code
, p. 234.

4
Frank Kermode, “Institutional Control of Interpretation,” in Kermode,
The Art of Telling: Essays on Fiction
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 168-84.

5
Brown,
Da Vinci Code
, p. 231.

6
Ibid., p. 234.