Canon Fodder

Exploring the origins of the New Testament canon and other biblical and theological issues

My New Book on the Second Century is Now Available!

As many of you know from prior posts (for example, see here), I have a forthcoming book on the second century entitled, Christianity at the Crossroads: How the Second Century Shaped the Future of the Church (SPCK, 2017).

I am excited to announce that it is now available! (technically July 20th).  Since the book is a joint publication between SPCK and IVP Academic, it releases in the UK now (under SPCK) and then will release in the USA in the Spring (under IVP Academic).

Not sure why there is such a big gap of time between the two releases, but there you have it.  Of course, you can still order from the USA Amazon here, and I am sure it will be available in the States through a variety of other channels.

I wrote this book for a number of reasons. [Read more…]

Five “Fake News” Stories That People Believe about Early Christianity

There’s been a lot of chatter about “fake news” in recent months.  Some stories, even though they have no basis in fact, are told so often, and with such conviction, that large numbers of people end up believing them anyway.

And some of these fake news stories even dupe legitimate political figures who repeat the story without realizing it is false.  And, of course, once a mainstream political figure repeats a story then it becomes even more entrenched in the national psyche.

While some of these fake news stories are rather harmless, others have become quite dangerous.  Most famous perhaps is the “Pizza Gate” incident in 2016 where a man shot up a pizza place thinking it was host to a child sex trafficking ring (thankfully, no one was hurt).

Given this rash of “fake news,” I thought it might be interesting to observe that an analogous phenomenon can be seen in the study of early Christianity.  There is quite a bit of “fake news” out there regarding the person of Jesus, the origins of the church, or the development of the Bible .  Even though such “news” has no factual basis, it is believed by an uncomfortably large number of people.

So, here is a sampling of some of the leading stories: [Read more…]

What Is So Important about the Second Century? A Preview of My New Book

Due out this Summer (hopefully by July) is my latest book: Christianity at the Crossroads: How the Second Century Shaped the Future of the Church (London: SPCK/IVP Academic, 2017).

For some, the rationale for a book on the second century is quite obvious.  But others may wonder, “What is so important about the second century anyway?”

So, just a few quick thoughts on why I wrote this book: [Read more…]

My New Testament Canon Interview with @BillMounce Is Now Available

Back in March of this year, I sat down with Bill Mounce for about three hours to discuss the origins and authority of the New Testament canon.

Of course, Bill is the author of numerous books, but is known most for his excellent Greek grammar, Basics of Biblical Greek, which we use here at RTS Charlotte.

We covered all sorts of topics like the definition of canon, canonical models, the self-authenticating nature of canon, and the development of the canon in early Christianity.

These interviews are now available on the Bill’s Biblical Training website here (or click picture below).

As a side note, Bill has gathered a tremendous group of scholars together on his website who speak on a variety of other topics.  Examples include Greg Beale, John Piper, Tom Schreiner, Craig Blomberg, Darrell Bock, and many others.  Makes sure to check it out!

Scripture in the Early Church: The 2017 Ligonier Winter Conference

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to join R.C. Sproul, Michael Haykin, and Stephen Nichols for the Ligonier 2017 Winter Conference.  The theme was “Scripture in the Early Church.”

There were a number of great sessions on a variety of topics related to early Christianity, such as “Preaching God’s Word in the Early Church,”  “Living God’s Word in the Early Church,” and “Heresy in the Early Church.”

My session was on “God’s Word in the Early Church,” where I explored the unique qualities of our four gospels over against apocryphal texts like the Gospel of  Thomas.  You can watch here: [Read more…]

What’s the Very First Time We See a NT Book Used as Scripture? My Article in the Festschrift for Stanley Porter

Few issues in the study of the NT canon have generated more discussion (and disagreement) than that of the canon’s date.  When were Christian writings first regarded as “Scripture”?  When was the first time we can see that happening?

For many modern scholars, the key time is the end of the second century.  Only then, largely due to the influence of Irenaeus, were these books first regarded as Scripture.

But, I think there is evidence that NT books were regarded as Scripture much earlier.  And some of this evidence is routinely overlooked.  A good example is the widely neglected text tucked away in 1 Tim 5:18:

For the Scripture says, “You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain,” and “The laborer deserves his wages.”

The first part of this quote comes from Deut 25:4, but where does the second part come from?  There is one text, and one text only, that matches these words, namely the statement of Jesus in Luke 10:7.

Could 1 Timothy be citing Luke’s Gospel as Scripture?

I explore this issue extensively in my recent article, “First Timothy 5:18 and Early Canon Consciousness: Reconsidering a Problematic Text,” which appears in the new festschrift for my friend Stan Porter: The Language and Literature of the New Testament: Essays in Honor of Stanley E. Porter’s 60th Birthday, eds. Lois K. Fuller Dow, Craig A. Evans, Andrew W. Pitts (Leiden, E.J. Brill: 2017): 680-700. [Read more…]

Five Myths About the Ancient Heresy of Gnosticism

In the world of biblical studies, at least among some critical scholars, Gnosticism has been the darling for sometime now.  Especially since the discovery of the so-called “Gnostic Gospels” at Nag Hammadi in 1945, scholars have sung the praises of this alternative version of Christianity.

Gnosticism  was a heretical version of Christianity that burst on the scene primarily in the second century and gave the orthodox Christians a run for their money.  And it seems that some scholars look back and wish that the Gnostics had prevailed.

After all, it is argued, traditional Christianity was narrow, dogmatic, intolerant, elitist, and mean-spirited, whereas Gnosticism was open-minded, all-welcoming, tolerant and loving.  Given this choice, which would you choose?

While this narrative about free-spirited Gnosticism being sorely oppressed by those mean and uptight orthodox Christians might sound rhetorically compelling, it simply isn’t borne out by the facts.  So, here are five claims often made about Gnosticism that prove to be more myth than reality: [Read more…]

Was Jesus Married to Mary Magdalene? Revisiting a Stubborn Conspiracy Theory

When I was a kid, I always used to enjoy the “whack a mole” game at the local arcade (yes, we had to go to an “arcade” to play games).  You had be quick to win that game.  Each time you hit a mole, another would pop up, taking its place.

Of course, that is what made the game both fun and frustrating at the same time.  No matter how hard you worked, it always seemed that the moles just wouldn’t go away.

Sometimes it’s like that in the world of biblical scholarship.  Theories pop up, are quickly refuted by the academy, and then, just when you think they have gone away, they pop again.  Some theories just keep coming back.

In 2003, Dan Brown’s best-selling fictional book The Da Vinci Code raised (again) the idea that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and that this fact had been cleverly suppressed by the church for thousands of years. Apparently it took a fictional author to uncover the “real” truth.

Brown was not the first to make such a claim, of course, but his book gave it new life.  At least for a while.  But, after a chorus of scholars showed the claim to be (again) without merit, the chatter about Mary Magdalene died down a bit.

But this particular mole will not go away.  Filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici wrote an article for the Huffington Post on this very topic entitled, “Jesus’ Marriage to Mary the Magdalene is Fact, not Fiction.” [Read more…]

An Essential Key to Understanding the Development of the NT Canon

How and when the early church recognized the 27 books in our New Testament has always been a fascinating topic for people.  There is innate curiosity within us about why these books were regarded as Scripture and not others.

Unfortunately, the high level of interest in the New Testament canon is often combined with a high number of misconceptions about the canon.  For anyone willing to search for it, the internet is packed with myths, mistakes, and misunderstandings about how the whole process really worked.

While there is no quick cure for such misconceptions, there is one essential key that really helps clear away the cobwebs.  And that key is understanding the different categories of books in early Christianity.

We tend to think there are only two categories, those books that are “in” and those books that are “out.”  But, early Christians were more nuanced than than this.  In fact, they divided up books into four categories.  And understanding these categories will clear up a good number of the misunderstandings of the way the canon developed.

We will take our cue from the four categories laid out by the well-known fourth century historian Eusebius in Hist. eccl. 3.25.1-7:

[Read more…]

Another Look at the Earliest Complete List of the Canon of the New Testament

Last year I posted an article entitled “What Is The Earliest Complete List of the Canon of the New Testament?”  In that post I argued, contrary to common opinion, that the earliest (nearly complete) list is not Athanasius’ Festal Letter in 367.  Instead, the earliest complete list occurs more than a century earlier in the writings of Origen (see picture).

My blog post was based off a fuller academic piece I wrote for the recent festschrift for Larry Hurtado, Mark Manuscripts and Monotheism (edited by Chris Keith and Dieter Roth; T&T Clark, 2015), entitled, “Origen’s List of New Testament Books in Homiliae on Josuam 7.1: A Fresh Look.”

Around 250 A.D., in his typical allegorical fashion, Origen used the story of Joshua to describe what seems to be the complete New Testament canon:

[Read more…]

The Likely Forger Behind the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife

It has been a while since the so-called Gospel of Jesus’ Wife has been in the headlines.  It was originally unveiled by Karen King at Harvard (here), but quickly exposed as a likely forgery. I have also written on the fragment (here and here).

While this document’s status as a forgery is relatively certain, what has been uncertain (until now) is the identity of the forger.  Who was the person who created this document and convinced King and others to promote it?

The forger must have had some Coptic abilities.  But, the abilities would have had limits–as demonstrated by the mistakes in the Coptic text.

What is remarkable is that King herself has not undertaken a rigorous investigation of the document’s origins and provenance. Who discovered this document? Who owned it? And how was it passed along?  If the authenticity of a document is in doubt, this is an important avenue to pursue.  But no one has wanted to pursue it.

But, now someone finally has.  A journalist named Ariel Sabar has just published a splendid piece in The Atlantic documenting the history of this forgery and tracing it back to the current owner, and likely forger, a rather shady German business man, and washed-out Coptic student, named Walter Fritz.

[Read more…]

New Book on Early Christian Apocrypha

Over the last number of years, scholarly (as well as popular) interest in Christian apocryphal works has continued to grow. Folks just can’t seem to get enough of “lost” Gospels and other books that did not make it into the New Testament.

My own interest in this area goes back to my thesis at the University of Edinburgh under Larry Hurtado on the apocryphal gospel fragment P.Oxy. 840.  That was published later as The Gospel of the Savior: An Analysis of P.Oxy. 840 and its Place in the Gospel Traditions of Early Christianity (Brill, 2005).

Because of my own interest in the subject, I was pleased that yesterday in the mail I received the new volume edited by Andrew Gregory and Christopher Tuckett, The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Apocrypha (Oxford, 2015). This volume includes a fine collection of scholars covering a wide range of topics related to apocryphal Christian works.

Here is the table of contents:

Part I: Introduction and overview

1. Introduction, Christopher Tuckett
2. Texts About Jesus: Non-canonical Gospels and Related Literature, Jörg Frey
3. Apocryphal Texts About Other Characters in the Canonical Gospels, Charlotte Touati and Claire Clivaz
4. Narratives About the Apostles: Non-canonical Acts and Related Literature, Richard Pervo
5. Non-canonical Epistles and Related Literature, Andrew Gregory
6. Non-canonical Apocalypses and Prophetic Works, Richard Bauckham

Part II: Key Issues and Themes

7. The Influence of Jewish Scriptures on Early Christian Apocrypha, Tobias Nicklas
8. Who Read Early Christian Apocrypha?, L. W. Hurtado
9. The Formation of the New Testament Canon and Early Christian Apocrypha, Jens Schröter
10. ‘Useful for the Soul’: Christian Apocrypha and Christian Spirituality, Francois Bovon
11. Christology and Soteriology in Apocryphal Gospels, Pheme Perkins
12. Christology and Soteriology in Apocryphal Acts and Apocalypses, Paul Foster
13. The Gospel of Thomas and the Historical Jesus, Stephen J. Patterson
14. Other Apocryphal Gospels and the Historical Jesus, Simon Gathercole
15. Christian Apocrypha and the Developing Role of Mary, J. K. Elliott
16. The Apocryphal Mary in Early Christian Art, Robin M. Jensen
17. The Role of the Apostles, Richard I. Pervo
18. Judaism and Anti-Judaism in Early Christian Apocrypha, Petri Luomanen
19. Eschatology and the Fate of the Dead in Early Christian Apocrypha, Outi Lehtipuu
20. Liturgy and Early Christian Apocrypha, Harald Buchinger
21. Roman Imperialism: The Political Context of Early Christian Apocrypha, Candida R. Moss
22. Encratism, Asceticism, and The Construction of Gender and Sexual Identity in Apocryphal Gospels, Judith Hartenstein
23. Encratism and the Apocryphal Acts, Yves Tissot
24. Early Christian Apocrypha in Popular Culture, Tony Burke
25. Early Christian Apocrypha in Contemporary Theological Discourse, Tony Burke

A New Book on Orthodoxy and Heresy in Early Christianity

1934 was a big year for Germany.  It was the year that Adolf Hitler became the Führer and complete head of the German nation and the Nazi party.  And, as we all know, it wasn’t long after that time, that Germany invaded Poland and began World War II.

But 1934 was a significant year for another reason.  Very quietly, behind the scenes, a book was published that would change the landscape of early Christian studies for years to come.  Walter Bauer published his now famous monograph, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity.   Compared to Hitler’s rise, this was not very newsworthy.  And Bauer’s book did not have much of an impact at first.  But, in 1971 it was translated into English and since that time things have radically changed in the academy of the English speaking world.

As is well known now, Bauer’s main thesis was that early Christianity was a bit of a mess.  It was a theological quagmire.  No one could get along; no one could agree.  There was in-fighting and competition between various competing factions, all warring it out about what really constituted “Christianity.”  Thus, for Bauer, there was no such thing as Christianity (singular) during this time, but only Christianities (plural).   And each of these Christianities, argues Bauer, had its own set of books.   Each had its own writings that it valued and thought were Scripture.   After the dust settled, one particular group, and their books, won the theological war.  But, why should we think these are the right books?   These are just the books of the theological winners.

Bauer’s thesis has seen a strong resurgence in recent years, particularly in the writings of scholars like Elaine Pagels, Bart Ehrman, and Helmut Koester.  And it is the basis for a very common misconception about the NT Canon, namely that there was very little agreement over the books that made it into the canon until the fourth or fifth century.  Before that, we are told, early Christianity was somewhat of a literary free for all.  No one could agree on much of anything.

Although Bauer’s thesis still dominates the academic landscape, scholars have begun to respond.  Andreas Köstenberger and I co-authored The Heresy of Orthodoxy (Crossway, 2010) to address the cogency of the Bauer thesis. And I am also pleased to see a new book that has just come out that is doing the same.  Paul Hartog has just published Orthodoxy and Heresy in Early Christian Contexts: Reconsidering the Bauer Thesis (Pickwick, 2015). Hartog, as the editor, has gathered together a number of scholars to interact with different aspects of Bauer’s thesis.  This is a great collection of essays and I recommend it to anyone interested in doing more reading on this subject.

Here is the description on the back cover:

Eighty years ago, Walter Bauer promulgated a bold and provocative thesis about early Christianity. He argued that many forms of Christianity started the race, but one competitor pushed aside the others, until this powerful ”orthodox” version won the day. The victors re-wrote history, marginalizing all other perspectives and silencing their voices, even though the alternatives possessed equal right to the title of normative Christianity. Bauer’s influence still casts a long shadow on early Christian scholarship. Were heretical movements the original forms of Christianity? Did the heretics outnumber the orthodox? Did orthodox heresiologists accurately portray their opponents? And more fundamentally, how can one make any objective distinction between ”heresy” and ”orthodoxy”? Is such labeling merely the product of socially situated power? Did numerous, valid forms of Christianity exist without any validating norms of Christianity? This collection of essays, each written by a relevant authority, tackles such questions with scholarly acumen and careful attention to historical, cultural-geographical, and socio-rhetorical detail. Although recognizing the importance of Bauer’s critical insights, innovative methodologies, and fruitful suggestions, the contributors expose numerous claims of the Bauer thesis (in both original and recent manifestations) that fall short of the historical evidence.

Here are the endorsements (including my own):

”Orthodoxy and Heresy in Early Christian Contexts brings up to date a long-existing debate about those other gospels and early Christianity. Covering issues tied to the Apostolic Fathers, Irenaeus, Gnosticism, and the rule of faith, here is a solid compendium of essays that issues a significant challenge to the thesis of Walter Bauer–that orthodoxy emerged late from a largely sociological battle over the origin of the Jesus movement. It shows how orthodoxy’s roots are far older than claims of other options from the second century and beyond. This is simply profitable reading.”
–Darrell L. Bock, Senior Research Professor of New Testament Studies, Dallas Theological Seminary, Dallas, TX

”With worthy contributions from both New Testament and patristic scholars, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Early Christian Contexts offers a timely reappraisal and rebuttal of the ‘Bauer thesis.’ The authors of this handy volume simultaneously sum up Bauer’s evidence and arguments, size up subsequent post-Bauer mutations of the thesis, and serve up a needed corrective from a variety of perspectives–a must-have for students of New Testament and early Christian studies.”
–Michael J. Svigel, Associate Professor of Theological Studies, Dallas Theological Seminary, Dallas, TX

”Modern scholars continue to be entranced by Walter Bauer’s thesis that earliest Christianity was wildly diverse with no clear orthodoxy or heresy. Indeed, it is Bauer’s thesis that has provided the foundation for many of the modern attacks on the integrity of the Bible. Thus, I am thankful for this outstanding collection of essays aimed at refuting Bauer’s thesis and setting the record straight about what earliest Christianity was really like. With clarity and thoroughness, these essays sweep away the cloud of doubt raised by Bauer and shine fresh light on how Christianity developed in the earliest centuries.”
–Michael J. Kruger, President, Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte, NC –Wipf and Stock Publishers

 

A Christmas Gift from the Mainstream Media: Newsweek Takes a Desperate Swipe at the Integrity of the Bible (Part 2)

On Christmas Eve, I wrote part one of my review of Kurt Eichenwald’s piece (see here), and highlighted not only the substantive and inexcusable litany of historical mistakes, but also the overly pejorative and one-sided portrait of Bible-believing Christians. The review was shared by a number of other evangelical sites and thinkers—including the Gospel Coalition, Tim Challies, Denny Burk, Michael Brown, and others—and ever since I have been digging out from under the pile of comments. I appreciate that even Kurt Eichenwald joined the discussion in the comments section.

But the problems in the original Newsweek article were so extensive that I could not cover them in a single post. So, now I offer a second (and hopefully final) installment.

False Claims about Christians Killing Christians

In an effort to portray early Christianity as divided and chaotic (not to mention morally corrupt), Eichenwald repeatedly claims that Christians went around murdering each other in droves. He states:

Those who believed in the Trinity butchered Christians who didn’t. Groups who believed Jesus was two entities—God and man—killed those who thought Jesus was merely flesh and blood…Indeed, for hundreds of years after the death of Jesus, groups adopted radically conflicting writings about the details of his life and the meaning of his ministry, and murdered those who disagreed. For many centuries, Christianity was first a battle of books and then a battle of blood.

Notice that Eichenwald offers no historical evidence about the mass killing of Christians by Christians within the first few centuries (we are talking about the pre-Constantine time period). And there is a reason he doesn’t offer any. There is none.

Sure, one can point to instances in the medieval period, such as the Inquisition, where Christians killed other Christians.  But, Eichenwald claims that Christianity began this way: “for hundreds of years after the death of Jesus.” This is another serious historical mistake that needs correcting.

When it comes to who-killed-who in the earliest centuries of the faith, it wasn’t Christians killing Christians.  It was the Roman government killing Christians.

Interestingly, the “heretical” groups like the Gnostics–whom Eichenwald presents as the victims–tended to avoid this government persecution. When the Roman officials looked to pour out their wrath on Christians, it was almost always those of the “orthodox” variety (although there were exceptions). Eichenwald either doesn’t know this, or just failed to mention it.

Portraying early Christians as mass murderers makes for great rhetoric. But it makes for lousy history.

Overstating the Popularity of “Other” Gospels

Continuing his portrayal of early Christianity as a movement in “chaos,” Eichenwald claims that other gospels were just as well-known as the canonical ones:

The reason, in large part, was that there were no universally accepted manuscripts that set out what it meant to be a Christian, so most sects had their own gospels. There was the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Simon Peter, the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Barnabas.

However, Eichenwald’s presentation here is enormously misleading. Apocryphal gospels were not nearly as popular, as wide-spread, or as well-established as the canonical ones. This can be demonstrated in a number of ways, but one simple way is just by observing how many manuscripts we possess of each gospel.

The physical remains of writings can give us an indication of their relative popularity. Such remains can tell us which books were used, read, and copied. When we examine the physical remains of the canonical gospels from the earliest centuries, we quickly discover that they were, far and away, the most popular.

For the gospel of John alone, we have approximately 18 Greek manuscripts from the second and third centuries. The most Greek manuscripts we have for any of the apocryphal gospels listed by Eichenwald is just two (Gospel of Mary). And the Gospel of Barnabas (a very late and notoriously unreliable “gospel”) has zero from this time period.

Blatant Exegetical Fallacies

Throughout the entire article, Eichenwald betrays his limited understanding of even the most basic interpretive and exegetical principles. He assumes that if the Bible really teaches a certain doctrine, then you will find chapter and verse stating that doctrine in a single passage. So, if the Bible really teaches the doctrine of the trinity, then we should find a verse using that word, or saying it succinctly.

He asks:

So where does the clear declaration of God and Jesus as part of a triumvirate appear in the Greek manuscripts? Nowhere.

It is clear that Eichenwald wants a single passage that either says the word “trinity” or describes God directly in a tri-fold manner. But, Eichenwald is committing two fundamental exegetical fallacies. First, he is confusing word and concept—one of the most common exegetical mistakes. If a text does not contain certain wording, he assumes it means it doesn’t contain certain concepts. But, this is demonstrably false. A verse can refer to a concept without mentioning certain key words.

Second, Eichenwald assumes that doctrines have to be demonstrable all in a single passage. But, this is a profound misunderstanding of the way doctrines are derived from Scripture. Some of our most fundamental doctrines are pieced together from a variety of texts, in a cumulative fashion. The doctrine of the trinity is one of these.

Even more than this, Eichenwald seems completely unaware of the texts that do speak of the persons of the Godhead in a three-fold fashion. Take the words of Jesus in the great commission that baptism should be done “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt 28:19). Scholars have noted that the Greek construction uses the singular “name” followed by the threefold Father-Son-Spirit. Sounds pretty close to Eichenwald’s demand for a “triumvirate.”

Peter does something very similar in his first letter when he describes the doctrine of election as coming from “the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for the obedience to Jesus Christ” (1 Pet 1:2). All of these activities and attributes (election, foreknowledge, sanctification, one to whom we owe obedience) do not belong to merely human figures, but necessitate a divine one. And Peter describes this divine figure in a threefold manner.

And more passages like this can be added.

Eichenwald neither acknowledges nor addresses any of these texts (maybe he doesn’t know about them), but instead glibly declares the trinity to be an unbiblical concept. The audacity of such a conclusion is stunning. It requires us to believe that Christians have just tricked themselves about the trinity for thousands of years until finally, in the modern day, a Newsweek journalist uncovers the truth.

Confused about Contradictions

No critique of the Bible would be complete without the standard appeal to a laundry list of supposed contradictions. Eichenwald’s article is no exception. Instead of picking one contradiction and really developing the exegetical and historical case for his interpretation, he chooses instead to overwhelm the reader with a catalog of complaints ranging from the creation account to differences in the birth accounts to differences in the resurrection accounts.

Such a strategy has a twofold benefit for Eichenwald. First, the long list allows him to rattle off a variety of claims without actually having to do the hard work of demonstrating those claims. Thus, his accusations require him to offer no supporting evidence. Second, he knows no single individual could possibly respond to each of these claims in any level of detail (allowing him to potentially claim that Christians are unable or unwilling to respond).

Even so, there are numerous problems with Eichenwald’s approach. For one, he demonstrates hardly any awareness of the numerous evangelical responses to these problems (nor does he cite a single one). The reader begins to wonder whether he has even tried to find solutions, or whether he is just content to repeat back the arguments of critical scholars because they fit better into the purpose of his article.

In addition, Eichenwald repeatedly employs the fallacious argument from silence. He assumes that if one of the gospel authors doesn’t mention something then he must disagree with it. For instance, he observes that in Mark’s gospel Pilate doesn’t declare Jesus to be innocent, but in Luke’s Pilate does. Thus, voilà! A contradiction! But, this assumes that Mark’s account is exhaustive. Just because he doesn’t mention this part of the story does not necessarily mean he rejects it.

This sort of tendentious historical analysis isn’t designed to solve difficulties but is designed to find contradictions—whether they are there or not. Eichenwald should know better.

To cap it all off, Eichenwald even trots out the tiresome and oft-repeated claim that Jesus taught he was coming back in the lifetime of his disciples. Referring to Mark 13:30, he states:

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus says of the Apocalypse, “This generation shall not pass, till all these things be done”—in other words, the people alive in his time would see the end of the world.

Eichenwald is happy to pluck this passage out of its context and interpret it for the reader: ”in other words, the people alive in his time would see the end of the world.” The problem is that his understanding of the text is directly in contradiction to the very passage he is citing from.

If Eichenwald had looked just one verse earlier, he would have realized that the “these things” the current generation would endure could not possibly refer to the second coming. Why? Because Jesus tells us the “these things” are what precedes the second coming! The prior verse states, “So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates” (Mark 13:29).  This verse makes it plain that the “these things” is something distinguishable from the second coming–a likely reference to the trials of the church age.

Such surface-level exegesis gives the reader the impression that Eichenwald is more concerned to score points against the Bible than he is with really understanding the meaning of the passage.

For a more thorough treatment of supposed contradictions, see my blog series “Does the Bible Ever Get it Wrong” (first installment here).

Homosexuality and Obedience

Up to this point, Eichenwald’s article has been an epitomized by imbalanced and straw-man accusations against the Bible. Unfortunately, in the section on homosexuality Eichenwald reaches a new low. At no point is it more obvious that he is driven by his own entrenched ideological commitments and not by an honest attempt to understand what evangelicals believe.

Eichenwald begins with an analysis of 1 Tim 1:10 that is so blatantly fallacious and so critically flawed that it should be used as a textbook example of how exegesis is not to be done. He states:

But the translation there is odd, in part because the word homosexual didn’t even exist until more than 1,800 years after when 1 Timothy was supposed to have been written. So how did it get into the New Testament? Simple: The editors of these modern Bibles just made it up.

The reader is mystified by this statement. Of course, the word “homosexual” did not exist when Timothy wrote. It is an English word! But, that doesn’t mean there were not equivalent words and phrases in Greek that clearly referred to homosexuals. Indeed, we have extensive examples in ancient Greek works that refer to homosexuality and to homosexuals. Eichenwald’s point here is utter nonsense.

Eichenwald continues:

But suppose for a moment that 1 Timothy was written by Paul, and that “defile themselves” does refer to homosexuality. In that case, evangelical Christians and biblical literalists still have a lot of trouble on their hands. Contrary to what so many fundamentalists believe, outside of the emphasis on the Ten Commandments, sins aren’t ranked. The New Testament doesn’t proclaim homosexuality the most heinous of all sins. No, every sin is equal in its significance to God. In 1 Timothy, Paul, or whoever wrote it, condemns the disobedient, liars and drunks.

Eichenwald is correct that homosexuality is not ranked by the Bible as the most heinous of all sins. And he is correct that other sins are also serious problems. But it is unclear how this helps his case. Regardless of where one ranks homosexuality, the key point is that the Bible still clearly affirms it to be a sin.  And just like other sins (whether greed, idolatry, or gossip), one needs to acknowledge it as a sin and repent of it.

And it is precisely here that the main debate over homosexuality lies. The homosexual community refuses to even admit it is a sin at all.  On the contrary, they want Christians to embrace and affirm homosexuality as something good and right.

Thus, Eichenwald finds himself in a dilemma.  He clearly wants to affirm the validity of many sins in the Bible (especially if he thinks they are committed by evangelicals). Is he willing to affirm that homosexuality is a sin? And if he is not, then he is the one who is “picking and choosing” what to follow in the Bible.  Indeed, if he does not, then he is carving out a special exception for homosexuality.  Isn’t that the same sort of thing that he condemned evangelicals for doing?

A Profound Misunderstanding of the Gospel

At the end of Eichenwald’s article, he deals what he believes is the fatal blow to evangelical Christianity:

Which raises one final problem for fundamentalists eager to condemn homosexuals or anyone else: If they accept the writings of Paul and believe all people are sinners, then salvation is found in belief in Christ and the Resurrection. For everyone. There are no exceptions in the Bible for sins that evangelicals really don’t like.

This is an outrageously misleading assessment of what Paul actually teaches. Indeed, after such a statement as this, one wonders whether Eichenwald has even read Paul (or Jesus).

Eichenwald makes it sound like evangelicals believe that homosexuals cannot be forgiven or that the gospel is not for them. That is simply not the case (and I notice that he cites no evangelicals that actually believe this). Evangelicals believe that even the most heinous sins can be forgiven.

But, here is the key. The gospel is for those who acknowledge their sins and turn away from them. Such an act is called “repentance.” And Jesus spoke of it often. Even in his very first sermon (Mark 1:15).

Of course, Eichenwald doesn’t mention this. It is much easier (and much more popular) to say that the gospel means you can live whatever lifestyle you want and still go to heaven. For Eichenwald, the main point of the gospel is that sins aren’t a big deal, no sin is worse than any other sin, and the main duty of a Christian is not to judge anyone else (which is why he ends his article with a monumental misunderstanding of Matt 7:1).

The truth is that Paul himself actually mentioned Eichenwald’s understanding of the gospel. And he condemned it. In Rom 6:1 he states, “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?”

The gospel is not for perfect people. But, it is for repentant people—people who hate their sins and strive to stop committing them. Repentance doesn’t somehow merit salvation; but it is a requirement of salvation because it is the corollary of faith. A person cannot embrace Christ by faith if they are still holding tightly to their sin.

So, for homosexuals who repent of their homosexuality, and for any sinner who truly repents of their sins, then forgiveness in Christ can be theirs.

Conclusion

By way of conclusion, it is hard to know what to say about an article like Eichenwald’s. In many ways, it embodies all the misrepresentations, caricatures, and misunderstandings of the average non-Christian in the world today. It is short on the facts, it has little understanding of interpretive principles, it assumes that it knows more about theology than it really does, and it pours out scorn and contempt on the average believer.

Nevertheless, in a paradoxical fashion, I am thankful for it. I am thankful because articles like this provide evangelicals with an opportunity to explain what Christians really believe, and what historical credentials the Bible really has. Eichenwald’s article is evidence that most people in the world understand neither of these things. With all the evangelical responses to this article, hopefully that is changing.

In the end, there is a rich irony to the title of Eichenwald’s piece: “The Bible: So Misunderstood It’s a Sin.”  While he intended this to refer to evangelicals, I think it applies best to his own article.

A Christmas Present from the Mainstream Media: Newsweek Takes a Desperate Swipe at the Integrity of the Bible (Part 1)

It is not unusual for Newsweek, and other major media magazines, to publish critical opinions of Christianity and the Bible during major Christian holidays. I have lost count of how many March/April issues of such magazines have cast doubt on the resurrection, just in time for Easter.

However, the recent Newsweek cover article by Kurt Eichenwald, entitled “The Bible: So Misunderstood It’s a Sin,” published intentionally (no doubt) on December 23rd, goes so far beyond the standard polemics, and is so egregiously mistaken about the Bible at so many places, that the magazine should seriously consider a public apology to Christians everywhere.

Of course, this is not the first media article critiquing the Bible that has been short on the facts. However, what is stunning about this particular article is that Kurt Eichenwald begins by scolding evangelical Christians for being unaware of the facts about the Bible, and the proceeds to demonstrate a jaw-dropping ignorance of the facts about the Bible.

Being ignorant of biblical facts is one thing. But being ignorant of biblical facts after chiding one’s opponent for that very thing is a serious breach of journalistic integrity. Saying Eichenwald’s article is an instance of “the pot calling the kettle black” just doesn’t seem to do it justice.

There are a variety of categories where Newsweek needs to give Eichenwald a serious slap on the journalistic wrist. Given the length of the article, I will have to deal with it in two parts. Here are some serious problems with part one:

Easy (and False) Caricatures

Eichenwald begins (not concludes, but begins!) his article by describing Christians:

They wave their Bibles at passersby, screaming their condemnations of homosexuals. They fall on their knees, worshipping at the base of granite monuments to the Ten Commandments while demanding prayer in school. They appeal to God to save America from their political opponents, mostly Democrats. They gather in football stadiums by the thousands to pray for the country’s salvation.

So, Eichenwald’s well-balanced journalistic understanding of the Christian religion is limited to street preachers who scream at people, those who demand the 10 commandments be posted in schools, and the tiresome trope that all Christians are part of the Jerry Falwell moral majority?

Anyone who has studied evangelical Christianity for more than 10 minutes, using more than internet articles from the Huffington Post, would know that the average believer in America is none of these things.

Such stock accusations and caricatures are just low-hanging fruit that are unworthy of serious journalism. Eichenwald should know better.

Irresponsible Accusations

But, Eichenwald isn’t done. He is not nearly finished expressing his moral outrage against Christianity:

When the illiteracy of self-proclaimed Biblical literalists leads parents to banish children from their homes, when it sets neighbor against neighbor, when it engenders hate and condemnation, when it impedes science and undermines intellectual advancement, the topic has become too important for Americans to ignore, whether they are deeply devout or tepidly faithful, believers or atheists.

Notice that Eichenwald (still in his introduction) just tosses out these (very serious) accusations and generalizations with absolutely no evidence whatsoever. One wonders whether we are reading a news article or the editorial page. Could a journalist ever get away with such evidence-less accusations if it were made against Islam?

Take for instance the charge that Christians are all about “banishing children.” Seriously? If Eichenwald had actually investigated which part of the population is leading the way in adopting children without homes the answer would have been readily available. Evangelicals. Not Muslims. And certainly not liberal media elites.

But, even more than just being factually wrong, Eichenwald seems completely unaware that he is engaging in his own moralistic diatribe—the very thing he accuses Christians of doing. Remember, he complains that Christians are like the “Pharisees” always going around telling people they are wrong. Yet now Eichenwald is doing exactly the same thing. Why, then, is he not guilty of the very charge he levelled against Christians, namely “hate and condemnation”?

Apparently only Christian moralizing is “hate” whereas Eichenwald’s own moralizing is just fine.

Overplaying Transmission Problems

Eichenwald attempts to discredit the Bible by pointing out problems in its transmission. However, the real problem is not with the Bible but with Eichenwald’s misinformed accusations. For instance, he claims:

About 400 years passed between the writing of the first Christian manuscripts and their compilation into the New Testament.

This is patently false. Collections of New Testament writings were functioning as Scripture as early as the second century (and, to some extent, even in the first). For evidence of this, see my book, Canon Revisited.

Eichenwald tries again:

While there were professional scribes whose lives were dedicated to this grueling work [of copying manuscripts], they did not start copying the letters and testaments about Jesus’s time until centuries after they were written. Prior to that, amateurs handled the job.

Again, this is false. There is no evidence that the earliest Christian scribes were amatuers (whatever that means). On the contrary, the earliest evidence suggest Christian scribes were multi-functional scribes who were used to copying all sorts of literature from letters to literary texts and beyond (see chapter 7 of my book The Heresy of Orthodoxy).

Eichenwald is misinformed another time:

Not all of the amateur copyists spoke the language or were even fully literate. Some copied the script without understanding the words.

This is an egregious claim about earliest Christian scribes. There is no evidence that the earliest Christian copyists could be, in any way, characterized as illiterate. Eichenwald may be referring to a reference in the Shepherd of Hermas, a popular second-century text, where an individual was asked to copy a book who could not read. However, there is no indication that this individual was a scribe, nor that this was typical for scribes!

Again, another mistake:

But in the past 100 years or so, tens of thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament have been discovered, dating back centuries.

This is absolutely false. The number of NT manuscripts is a little more than 5,500 (and still growing), but not 10,000. In addition, Eichenwald mentions the high number of manuscripts as if it were a negative! Truth is that the more manuscripts we possess, the more certain we can be about the integrity of the NT text.

Moreover, Eichenwald never mentions (or perhaps doesn’t know) that the NT is in a class by itself when it comes to the number of manuscripts. Most other ancient texts from the first century (or thereabouts) are preserved in around 10-20 manuscripts (and some only in a single manuscript). Thus, the 5,500 NT manuscripts of the NT is impressive indeed.

Overplaying Textual Variations

In an effort to shock the reader, Eichenwald appeals to two significant textual variations in the NT, namely the long ending of Mark (16:9-20) and the pericope of the adulterous woman (John 7:53-8:11). These are the same ones that Ehrman highlights in his book Misquoting Jesus—which is evidently a big influence on Eichenwald.

But, Eichenwald only tells part of the story. First, he doesn’t tell the reader that these are the only two significant variations in the entire New Testament. He presents them like they are typical when they are not. Second, he doesn’t explain how text-critical methodologies allow scholars to identify these changes as later additions. And if they can be identified as later additions, then they do not threaten our ability to know the original text.

Even more, Eichenwald continues to make factual errors about these changes. He states:

Unfortunately, John didn’t write it. Scribes made it up sometime in the Middle Ages. It does not appear in any of the three other Gospels or in any of the early Greek versions of John. Even if the Gospel of John is an infallible telling of the history of Jesus’s ministry, the event simply never happened.

This statement is riddled with errors. For one, scribes probably didn’t make the story of the adulterous woman up—it probably circulated as oral tradition. Second, it was not added in the “Middle Ages” as he claims, but probably sometime between the second and fourth century. Third, we don’t know that “the event simply never happened.” On the contrary, scholars have argued it may be an authentic event that circulated in the early church for generations.

Overplaying Translational Issues

Eichenwald next hones in on the issue of translations, claiming that English translations are utterly unreliable and written simply to reinforce traditional Christian beliefs that, otherwise, have no support. He states:

And so each time προσκυνέω appeared in the Greek manuscript regarding Jesus, in these newer Bibles he is worshipped, but when applied to someone else, the exact same word is translated as “bow” or something similar. By translating the same word different ways, these modern Bibles are adding a bit of linguistic support to the idea that the people who knew Jesus understood him. In other words, with a little translational trickery, a fundamental tenet of Christianity—that Jesus is God—was reinforced in the Bible, even in places where it directly contradicts the rest of the verse.

This paragraph reveals a stunning misunderstanding of the way translations and texts really work. The fact that translators use different English words at different points is not due to some diabolical plot to trick people into believing in the divinity of Jesus, but is simply due to the fact that words mean different things in different contexts.

Moreover, Eichenwald is unaware that even the more progressive English translations do exactly the same thing! For instance, the NRSV of Matt 14:33 reads: “And those in the boat worshiped (προσκυνέω) him, saying, ‘Truly you are the Son of God.’”

Overplaying Diversity in the Early Church

No critique of early Christianity would be complete without trotting out the standard claims that early Christians couldn’t agree on much of anything and everyone was busy fighting over early Christian doctrines. At this point, apocryphal gospels (such as Thomas and Peter) are often highlighted as evidence that Christianity was confused about what it really believed.

Eichenwald executes this part of the refute-Christianity-playbook perfectly. After repeating the standard trope about how “Christianity was in chaos in its early days,” he even offers the claim that Constantine (diabolical fiend that he was) really created modern Christianity as we know it:

And then, in the early 300s, Emperor Constantine of Rome declared he had become follower of Jesus, ended his empire’s persecution of Christians and set out to reconcile the disputes among the sects. Constantine was a brutal sociopath who murdered his eldest son, decapitated his brother-in-law and killed his wife by boiling her alive, and that was after he proclaimed that he hadconverted from worshipping the sun god to being a Christian. Yet he also changed the course of Christian history, ultimately influencing which books made it into the New Testament.

Eichenwald seems utterly unaware that this whole course of argument is incorrect and drawn directly from internet chat rooms and books like the Da Vinci Code. The truth is that Constantine had nothing to do with which books were placed into the New Testament, nor did the council of Nicea for that matter.

But, undaunted, Eichenwald digs his hole even deeper:

To understand how what we call the Bible was made, you must see how the beliefs that became part of Christian orthodoxy were pushed into it by the Holy Roman Empire. By the fifth century, the political and theological councils voted on which of the many Gospels in circulation were to make up the New Testament. With the power of Rome behind them, the practitioners of this proclaimed orthodoxy wiped out other sects and tried to destroy every copy of their Gospels and other writings.

Yet again, Eichenwald is flat out wrong. There was no fifth century “vote” about which Gospels would make it into the NT. On the contrary, the four gospels had been well-established in the church since the second century.

In sum, the first part of Eichenwald’s article is an unmitigated disaster. Its factual errors are legion, its bias against Christianity is palpable, it makes serious and yet unsubstantiated moral accusations against followers of Jesus, and, all the while, offers zero historical evidence backing up its claims.

This is not journalism. This is Eichenwald’s personal diatribe. Newsweek should really offer a formal apology.

Update: For part two of my review, see here.

Is the Church over the Bible or is the Bible over the Church?

It is well known that misconceptions and misunderstandings regarding the origins of the NT (and OT) canon abound on the internet. Da Vinci Code style claims are in plenteous supply–ranging from the claim that the Council of Nicea established the NT canon to the claim that apocryphal gospels were as popular (if not more so) than the canonical gospels.

Of course, if one were to respond to each and every erroneous claim on the internet there would be time for little else. But every now and then, an article combines so many misconceptions about the canon is a single place, that a response is warranted. This is the case with the recent article, “There is No ‘Bible’ in the Bible,” by Fr. Stephen Freeman.

Freeman, part of the Orthodox Church in America, has made what is essentially a Roman Catholic argument for the canon (but missing some key portions, as we shall see).  His basic claim is that the Bible–as something that is an authority over the church–is a modern, post-Reformation invention.  In reality, he claims, the church is the highest authority and the Bible is merely one of many tools used by the church.

Perhaps the best way to respond to Freeman’s article is just to quote it line by line (in italics below), offering a response to each statement as we go. For space reasons, we will not be able to cover every one of his claims, but we will cover the major ones.

1. The word “Bible” simply means “book.” Thus, it is a name that means “the Book.” It is a particularly late notion if for no other reason than that books are a rather late invention.

Freeman makes the claim here that the “Bible” must be late, because books are a late invention. This is stunning to say the least given that Israel had been using books as Scripture for more than a thousand years before Christ was even born.  Moreover, early Christianity was a very “bookish” culture right from the start, with a keen interest in reading, producing, and copying books.  For more on this point see my article here. Thus, books were not at all a foreign idea to the early Christian faith.

2. There are examples of bound folios of the New Testament dating to around the 4th century, but they may very well have been some of the earliest examples of such productions.

By the term “bound folios” I assume Freeman is referring to early Christian codices that contained multiple books in the same volume. If so, then the “earliest examples” do not derive from the fourth century, but much earlier.  At the end of the second century/early third century we have all four gospels in a single volume (P4-64-67, P45), and most, if not all, of Paul’s epistles in a single volume (P46). These codices demonstrate a book consciousness very early in the life of the church.

But, perhaps Freeman mentions the fourth century because he is referring to codices that contain all 27 NT books. He is correct that the fourth century is the first instance of all 27 books bound together (e.g. Codex Sinaiticus; see photo above) But, one does not need all 27 books in a single volume in order to establish that the early church had a canon of Scripture. Books don’t need to be physically bound together in order to viewed as part of a scriptural collection.  Indeed, this was precisely the case with the OT books. Individual OT books were often kept in separate rolls, even though they were clearly viewed as part of a larger biblical corpus.

3. The “Bible,” a single book with the whole of the Scriptures included, is indeed modern. It is a by-product of the printing press, fostered by the doctrines of Protestantism.

The discussion above has already refuted the notion that a complete NT canon does not come around until the printing press.  In addition, Freeman does not mention the fact that we can determine the extent of the church’s canon in other ways besides the physical book. Early Christians drew up lists of their books from quite an early time. For instance, Origen lists all 27 books in a single list in the third century (see article here). Would Freeman suggest that Origen’s NT canon is simply the “by-product of the printing press fostered by the doctrines of Protestantism”?

4. There was no authoritative notion of a canon of the Old Testament. There were the Books of Moses and the Prophets (cf. Luke 24:27) and there were other writings (the Psalms, Proverbs, etc.). But writers of the New Testament seem to have had no clear guide for what is authoritative and what is not. The book of Jude makes use of the Assumption of Moses as well as the Book of Enoch, without so much as a blush. There are other examples of so-called “non-canonical” works in the New Testament.

This statement may be one of the most misleading in Freeman’s entire article.  To suggest that first century Jews had no idea of what books are Scripture is patently false.  For one, the frequent debates between Jesus and the Jewish leaders over various OT texts becomes unintelligible on Freeman’s view. How could they disagree over the meaning of Scripture, if they had no idea of what books were Scripture?  Moreover, Jesus regularly holds his audience accountable for the teachings of the Scriptures–how could he do this if there was no understanding what was in the Scriptures?  Even more than this, when Jesus and the Jewish leaders debate over the meaning of a scriptural text, it is always of a text from books in our current Old Testament (and not from books like 1 Maccabees or Tobit).

Jesus and the Jewish leaders debated many, many things. But one thing they never debated was which books were Scripture.  This is certainly unexpected if the canon was as unclear as Freeman maintains.

Freeman’s observation that Jude refers to the Assumption of Moses and the Book of Enoch is also not as a decisive as he makes it seem.  He leaves out a critical fact, namely that Jude never refers to these books as Scripture.  Indeed, nowhere in the entire NT is a book referred to as Scripture that is not in our current Old Testaments. That fact needs to be given its due weight. Using a book, and using a book as Scripture are not the same thing. So, Freeman’s reference to examples of other “non-canonical” works mentioned in the NT is irrelevant.

For a lengthier account of the development of the OT canon, see the standard volume by Roger Beckwith.

5. The Scriptures as a place for creating and proving formal doctrine is something of a fiction. 2Timothy 3:16-17 is the primary verse trotted out in defense of Scriptural authority:

All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.  (2Ti 3:16-17 NKJ)

But this is a very troublesome and questionable translation. In Protestant usage, the key phrase is “all Scripture is given by inspiration of God.” But, in fact, the phrase “given by inspiration of God” is a single word (θεόπνευστος), just as accurately translated, “all Scripture that is inspired of God,” thus being a limiting phrase and not one that serves as an authoritative licensing of something later described as “the Bible.”

Freeman’s analysis of 2 Tim 3:16 is confusing to say the least.  He rightly acknowledges the single Greek word (θεόπνευστος), but fails to address its implications.  The term literally means “breathed out by God” or “God-breathed.”  It is a way of saying that Scripture is the very breath of God himself.  This suggests the absolute highest authority for Scripture, the authority of the divine voice.  How can he conclude, therefore, that the Scripture lacks “authoritative licensing”?

In addition, it is actually Freeman who mistranslates this verse.  Notice that he adds a relative pronoun to the construction: “all Scripture that is inspired of God.” He uses this to limit the extent of inspiration (implying that some Scripture may not be inspired).  However, that relative pronoun is not in the text.  And virtually all major English translations acknowledge this fact, using the verb “is” instead: “All Scripture is inspired by God.”   Thus, it is clear that inspiration is not limited after all.

6.  What we actually have in 2 Timothy is a very homely, parenetic expression in which the author suggests that reading the Scriptures is a good thing. It is not, despite its use as such, a foundational proclamation of the Bible as sole authority. For it is the Church that is described as the “Pillar and Ground of Truth.” (1 Tim. 3:15). . . The only “thing” approaching a “Bible” in the sense that has commonly been used in modern parlance, is the Church.

Here is where we come to the real issue with Freeman.  One might wonder:  Why is Freeman so intent on lowering the authority of Scripture?  Every argument in his article, whether historical or theological, has one simple end in mind, namely to convince the reader that the Bible is a problematic construction with less authority than people think. So, why would Freeman, an Orthodox priest, do this?

The answer is simple. He wants to lower the authority of the Bible so that he can replace it with the authority of the church.  He wants to convince Christians the Bible has problems, so that they will rely on the church instead.

But is the church a better option?  If the Bible is problematic, then is the church problem-free?  Freeman has jumped out of the biblical frying pan and into the ecclesiastical fire.  Unless he wants to advocate for an inspired/infallible church as Roman Catholics do (something he is unprepared to do, I assume, since he is Orthodox), then he is asking Christians to trust a very fallible authority.  He is asking Christians to put their trust in men, rather than in the word of God.

Yes, the church is the “pillar and ground of truth” (1 Tim 3:15), and has real authority.  Freeman caricatures the protestant position by describing it as a belief in the Bible as the sole authority.  But that is not (nor ever has been) the protestant position.  Since the time of the Reformation, protestants have argued simply that the Bible is the highest authority (not the sole authority).  And the church is one of the other authorities that we should follow. But that is not a declaration that the church is an authority over the Bible.  On the contrary, the proper posture of God’s people (the church) is always one of submission to God’s word.  There is no higher authority than God himself.

In the end, Freeman has lifted up the authority of the church at the expense of the authority of the Scriptures. And there is a sad irony in this. For one, such a position is vulnerable to the very critique that Jesus gave to the scribes and Pharisees: “You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men” (Mark 7:8).  Second, in order for Freeman to make his case, he is forced to make arguments against the authority of the Bible that are not all that different from the kind of arguments made by liberal critical scholars such as Bart Ehrman.  Even though Freeman reaches very different conclusions than Ehrman, their methodology is the same:  downgrade the authority of the Bible and replace it with something else.  Ehrman has replaced it with agnosticism.  Freeman has replaced it with the church.  But, both have replaced it.

Roman Catholicism and the NT Canon: Today on the Dividing Line with James White

My new book, The Question of Canon, is designed to challenge a particular approach to the New Testament canon that is prevalent in the modern academy.  It is the approach that suggests that in the earliest stages of Christianity the canon was in disarray; the canonical process was a wide-open affair where no one agreed on much of anything and no one was able to distinguish canonical books from apocryphal ones.

What is ironic about this critical approach is that it has an unexpected ally: Roman Catholicism.  The Catholic claim is remarkably similar to the one of critical scholars (at least in its premise).  Both claim that the canonical situation in early Christianity was in disarray and that there was no way to distinguish canonical books from apocryphal books.  It’s just that modern scholars use this as a justification to reject the canon altogether, whereas Catholics use this as a justification for why we need an infallible church to tell us which books are in the canon. But, both groups share the same premise.

In my interactions with Catholics over the years, I have raised this issue. I have pointed out that many of the Roman Catholic apologists are essentially making the same argument as Bart Ehrman.  They are trying to show that the canon was a mess so that they can argue the only solution is to lean on papal authority (of course, Ehrman doesn’t take this second step).  Admittedly, this has been a bit discouraging.  I would have hoped that Protestants and Catholics could at least team up to respond to the criticisms of scholars like Ehrman.

In order to address the difference between Protestant and Roman Catholic views of canon, I will be joining James White on his Dividing Line program today at 1PM EST. It is a live program, so tune in if you are able!

 

 

 

Bible Secrets Revealed?: A Response to the New History Channel Series (Part 4)

This is the fourth installment of a new series reviewing the History Channel series entitled Bible Secrets Revealed (for others, see here, here and here).  The newest episode is entitled, “The Real Jesus,” and addresses the question of what we can know about the historical Jesus.

Not surprisingly, the tenor of this latest episode is the same as the other episodes, namely that the accounts of the Bible (in this case, the Gospels) cannot be trusted.  This documentary catalogs a number of places where (it claims) the Gospels are simply mistaken.  Let’s run through some issues that are raised.

1. The Virgin Birth.  Almost from the start, the documentary brings up the issue of Jesus’ birth and whether he was really born of a virgin.  In particular it makes the observation that the virgin birth was only recorded in Matthew and Luke’s gospel.  If it really happened, wouldn’t it have been included in the other gospels?

But, this whole line of reasoning is fallacious.  First, there are all kinds of events that some gospels record and others do not.  That is the nature of historical records–they are inevitably limited and selective.  So, the lack of mention by Mark and John means nothing.

But, more than this, the documentary fails to mention that Mark and John don’t even have birth accounts!  They just don’t tell that part of Jesus’ story.  Thus, it is hardly surprising they wouldn’t mention the fact that his birth was of a virgin, when they don’t really mention his birth at all.

2. The Gnostic Gospels.  The narrator mentions the discovery of the so-called “Gnostic Gospels” at Nag Hammadi, Egypt (the most famous of which is Thomas).  In an effort to present these gospels are more historically credible than the canonical gospels, he then claims that these manuscripts are older than the oldest copies of the New Testament.

The problem with this claim is that it is patently false.  These manuscripts, written in Coptic, date mostly to the fourth and fifth centuries, whereas we have NT manuscripts from as early as the second century. Once again, one wonders about the historical accuracy of the Historical Channel when mistakes like this are made–mistakes that just happen to be in favor of the more radical version of the historical Jesus.

3. Teachings of Jesus.  At one point the narrator says that we cannot be sure of much regarding Jesus, but we can be sure that he taught ” a profound religious philosophy,” namely he taught about the “divine nature of mankind.”

What?

Anyone who has read the canonical gospels knows that Jesus did not in fact teach the humans were divine or that they had the divine inside of them.  On the contrary, Jesus often made such claims about himself as the unique, divine son of God.

If one wants to find a gospel that teaches that we are all divine, then the Gospel of Thomas is the place to turn.  Unfortunately, the documentary is once again profoundly mistaken about the nature of the canonical gospels.

The documentary also works very hard to portray Jesus as a just a spiritual leader working toward the goal of social equality.  Jesus is more Martin Luther King than he is son of God.  However, no real attention is given to Jesus’ own claims about himself throughout the gospels; claims which simply do not fit with someone only interested in social reform.

4. Mary Magdalene.  Once again, the documentary makes the suggestion that Jesus had a special relationship with Mary and was probably even married to him.

The problem of course, is that that historical evidence for this claim is so very thin, that even Bart Ehrman argues against it in the documentary.  This reveals how very tendentious this claim actually is.  When Ehrman is taking the more conservative position, then you know the evidence for the other view must really be lacking.

5. The Resurrection.  Not surprisingly, this episode ends by casting doubt on the resurrection itself.  However, I was disappointed by the trite (even flippant) alternative explanations given for the empty tomb. They are just not sufficient to explain the early Christian belief in the resurrection.

For example, James Tabor argues that the tomb was empty on Sunday morning because Jesus’ followers had simply moved his body to a more permanent location.  In other words, the resurrection is explained as just a big misunderstanding.

But, Tabor leaves a number of important factors unexplained.  For one, which of the followers of Jesus would have moved the body? The disciples were hiding, fearing for their lives. The women were coming to anoint him and the body was already gone when they arrived. If Joseph of Arimathea had moved the body, this is surely not something he would have hidden from the disciples.  Moreover, how does this account for the resurrection appearances? This explanation simply fails to convince.

Ehrman argues that the followers of Jesus just began to think they saw him alive and this explains the rapid spread of the resurrection idea.  But, this implies the disciples were prone or inclined to see Jesus alive after his death.  All evidence is to the contrary.  His followers were so crushed by his death that they didn’t recognize him when he was standing right in front of them (e.g., disciples on the road to Emmaus, Mary at the tomb).

In sum, this episode once again is a mixed bag.  It raises a number of intriguing and important questions about Jesus as a historical figure.  But, unfortunately, all the “answers” are given with the same objective in mind, namely to undermine the validity of the canonical gospels regarding the person of Jesus.

“The Question of Canon” Now Available

I was just informed by IVP-Academic that my book, The Question of Canon: Challenging the Status Quo in the New Testament Debate, is now out and available for purchase (see here).  This was a bit of a surprise because I haven’t received my own copy yet!  But, I am glad to know it is out.

Here is the description of the book:

Unlike many books on the New Testament canon, this book does not seek to explain why these books and no others. It asks the questions: Why is there a NT at all? Was the notion of a canon of literature out of sync with the earliest Christian movement? Michael Kruger challenges commonly held views on the emergence of the NT canon.

And the very kind endorsements:

“In this important book, Michael Kruger effectively challenges the common but unjustified conclusion that the canon was the late creation of the church, imposed on it by external forces. Kruger repeatedly points out the mistaken assumptions that underlie that conclusion, while on the positive side providing a more satisfactory understanding of the emergence of the canon within the church from virtually the beginning. The discussion is carried on in dialogue with the latest and best scholarship and reflects balanced and judicious wisdom throughout. If you are interested in the formation of the New Testament canon, you cannot afford to neglect this book.”

—Donald A. Hagner, George Eldon Ladd Professor Emeritus of New Testament, Fuller Theological Seminary

“With an impressive familiarity with primary data and scholarly studies, and in a patient and generous tone toward other positions, Kruger makes a solid (to my mind, persuasive) case that the formation of a New Testament canon was a historical process with roots at least as early as the circulation and use of certain texts as scripture in the early second century. Offering what he calls an ‘intrinsic model’ as complement to the emphasis on the final stages of canon formation in much current scholarship, he presents a nuanced and cogent picture that more adequately captures the historical complexity that led to the New Testament.”

—Larry W. Hurtado, emeritus professor, University of Edinburgh

“For decades the debate surrounding the NT’s canonical status has been waged on a stage set with all-too-familiar props and lights. An emerging expert on issues of canon, Michael Kruger brings fresh direction to a well-known script by questioning old assumptive props and setting the main actors under a new light. This is exactly the kind of fresh scholarship we need to go forward.”

—Nicholas Perrin, Franklin S. Dyrness Chair of Biblical Studies, Wheaton College Graduate School

“Already the author of one important book on the formation of the New Testament canon, Kruger here tackles the five most prevalent objections to the classic, Christian understanding of a quickly emerging, self-authenticating collection of authoritative counterparts to the Hebrew Scriptures. Not only does he directly address these objections, he provides powerful rebuttals and further support for the classic view. All who insist on maintaining the (more liberal) scholarly consensus will have to refute Kruger if they are to maintain any credibility on this topic!”

—Craig L. Blomberg, Distinguished Professor of New Testament, Denver Seminary

“The regnant view of NT canon formation in academic circles holds that the canon is a late ecclesiastical creation, and one that is far removed from the mindset of Jesus, his apostles and even the church for at least the first century and a half of its existence. Kruger takes five major planks on which this view is built, subjects them to historical scrutiny, and, where there are any solid splinters of truth left after inspection, shows how they may be incorporated into a better empirical foundation for canon studies. This important study argues that an ‘intrinsic’ model for canon, which recognizes the canon as the product of internal forces evolving out of the historical essence of Christianity, is superior to the ‘extrinsic’ model that has dominated canon studies for too long. May this book find many readers.”

—Charles E. Hill, professor of New Testament, Reformed Theological Seminary Orlando, and coauthor of The Early Text of the New Testament

Why You Can Rely on the Canon

I want to thank Matt Smethurst over at The Gospel Coalition for posting my interview on the NT Canon with Mark Mellinger.   I gave this interview back in April when I was at the TGC national conference participating on a panel discussion on the authority of Scripture (for that discussion, see here).

Mark and I had a fun and lively discussion on why the NT canon is reliable. Here it is:

Ten Basic Facts about the NT Canon that Every Christian Should Memorize: #9: “Christians Did Disagree about the Canonicity of Some NT Books”

Note: for the full series, see here.

When it comes to basic facts that all Christians should know about the canon, it is important that we recognize that the development of the canon was not always neat and tidy.  It was not a pristine, problem-free process where everyone agreed on everything right from the outset.

On the contrary, the history of the canon is, at points, quite tumultuous.  Some Christians received books that were later rejected and regarded as apocryphal (this was discussed in an earlier post).  More than this, there was disagreement at times even over some canonical books.

For instance, Origen mentions that books like 2 Peter, 2-3 John, and James were doubted and disputed by some in his own day.  Also, Dionysius of Alexandria tells us that some thought that Revelation was not written by the apostle John and should therefore be rejected.

It is important that we be reminded of such disputes and debates lest we conceive of the history of the canon in an overly-sanitized fashion.   The canon was not given to us on golden tablets by an angel from heaven (as claimed for the Book of Mormon).  God, for his own providential reasons, chose to deliver the canon through normal historical circumstances.  And historical circumstances are not always smooth.

What is unfortunate, however, is that these disagreements amongst Christians are sometimes used as an argument against the validity of the 27-book canon we know today.  Critics claim that such disagreements call into question the entire canonical enterprise.  Why should we trust the outcome, it is argued, if some Christians disagreed?

Several factors should be considered in response.   First, we shouldn’t overlook the fact that these disputes only affected a handful of books.   Critics often present the history of the canon as if every book were equally in dispute.  That is simply not the case.  As we saw in a prior post, the vast majority of these books were in place by the end of the second century.

Second, we should not overestimate the extent of these disputes.  Origen, for example, simply tells us that these books were disputed by some. But, in the case of 2 Peter, Origen is quite clear that he himself accepts it.  Thus, there are no reasons to think that most Christians during this time period rejected these books.  On the contrary, it seems that church fathers like Origen were simply acknowledging the minority report.

Third, we should also remember that the church eventually reached a broad, deep, and long-lasting consensus over these books that some disputed.  After the dust had settled on all these canonical discussions, the church was quite unified regarding these writings.  Of course, critics will suggest this is an irrelevant fact and should be given no weight. For them, the decisive issue is that Christians disagreed.  But, why should we think that disagreements amongst Christians are significant, while unity amongst Christians is insignificant? The latter should be given the same consideration as the former.

But, even after offering these three responses, we should recognize that there is still a deeper issue in play for those who think disagreements amongst Christians invalidate the truth of the canon.  Beneath this objection is a key (and unspoken) assumption, namely that if God were to give his church a canon he would not have done it this way.

Put differently, there is an assumption that we can only believe that we have the writings God intended if there are very few (if any) dissenters and if there is virtually immediate and universal agreement on all 27 books.  But, where does this assumption come from?  And why should we think it is true? 

Indeed, there are many reasons to think it is false.  For one, how does the critic know how God would give canonical books?  This is a theological claim about how God works and what he would do (or wouldn’t do).  But, how does the critic know what God would or wouldn’t do?  To what source is he appealing?  Surely, not the New Testament for that is the very source being criticized!

But, even more than this, we have good reasons to think that some dispute amongst Christians would be inevitable.  Just the practical reality of giving books in real time and space, in real historical circumstances, spread out over different authors, on different continents, and at different times, would naturally create dispute in some places.

Whenever someone shows angst over these early canonical disagreements, I often ask a simple question: “What did you expect the process would be like?”  It is at this point, that people often realize they have an overly-pristine expectation about how God would deliver his books—an expectation that is entirely their own and not derived from Scripture or from history.

All of this reminds us that God sometimes uses normal historical processes to accomplish his ends.  And those historical processes are not always neat and tidy.  But, this should not detract from the reality that the ends are still God’s.  

Ten Basic Facts about the NT Canon that Every Christian Should Memorize: #7: “Early Christians Often Used Non-Canonical Writings.”

Full blog series can be found here.

For Christians struggling to understand the development of the New Testament canon, one of the most confusing (and perhaps concerning) facts is that early Christian writers often cited from and used non-canonical writings.   In other words, early Christians did not just use books from our current New Testament, but also read books like the Shepherd of Hermas, the Gospel of Peter, and the Epistle of Barnabas.

Usually Christians discover this fact as they read a book or article that is highly critical of the New Testament canon, and this fact is used as a reason to think that our New Testament writings are nothing special.  The literary preferences of the earliest Christians were wide open, we are told.  Or, as one critic put it, early Christians read a “boundless, living mass of heterogenous” texts.[1]     

Because this fact is used to criticize the integrity of the New Testament canon, then all Christians should be keen to learn it.   While the fact itself is true—early Christians did read and use many writings not in the canon—the conclusions often drawn from this fact are often not.

When scholars mention the Christian use of non-canonical writings, two facts are often left out:

1.       The manner of citation.  It is important to note that while Christians often cited and used non-canonical literature, they only rarely cited them as Scripture.  For the most part, Christians were simply using these books as helpful, illuminating, or edifying writings.  This is not all that different than practices in our modern day.  A preacher may quote from CS Lewis in a sermon, but that does not mean he puts Lewis’s authority on par with Scripture itself.

A good example of this phenomenon is the use of the Gospel of Peter by the church at Rhossus at the end of the second century.  Scholars often appeal to this story as evidence that early Christians had no established gospel canon.  However, there is no evidence that the church there used the book as Scripture. 

When we ask the question about which books early Christians cited most often as Scripture, then the answer is overwhelmingly in favor of the books that eventually made it into the New Testament canon.

2.       Frequency of citation.  Another often overlooked factor is the relative degree of frequency between citations of New Testament books and citations of non-canonical books.   For example, scholars often appeal to Clement of Alexandria as the standard example of an early Christian that used non-canonical literature equally with canonical literature.   But, when it comes to frequency of citation, this is far from true. 

J.A. Brooks, for instance, has observed that Clement cites the canonical books “about sixteen times more often than apocryphal and patristic writings.”[2]  When it comes to gospels, the evidence is even better.  Clement cites apocryphal gospels only 16 times, whereas, he cites just the gospel of Matthew 757 times.[3]

In sum, Christians need to memorize this simple fact about the New Testament canon: early Christians used many other books besides those that made it into our Bibles.  But, this should not surprise us.  For, indeed, we still do the very same thing today even though we have a New Testament that has been settled for over 1600 years.

 

[1] Dungan, Constantine’s Bible, 52.

[2] Brooks, “Clement of Alexandria,” 48.

[3] Bernard Mutschler, Irenäus als johanneischer Theologe (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 101.

Ten Basic Facts about the NT Canon that Every Christian Should Memorize: #6: “At the End of the Second Century, the Muratorian Fragment lists 22 of our 27 NT books”

Note: See the full blog series here.

This series is designed to introduce lay Christians to the basic facts of how the New Testament canon developed.  One of the key data points in any discussion of canon is something called the Muratorian fragment (also known as the Muratorian canon).  This fragment, named after its discoverer Ludovico Antonio Muratori, contains our earliest list of the books in the New Testament.  While the fragment itself dates from the 7th or 8th century, the list it contains was originally written in Greek and dates back to the end of the second century (c.180).

Some have argued that the list should be dated to the fourth century (e.g., Sundberg and Hahneman), but the consensus of scholars today still places the list in the second century. Joseph Verheyden sums up the modern debate, “None of the arguments put forward by Sundberg and Hahneman in favour of a fourth-century, eastern origin of the Fragment are convincing.”[1]

What is noteworthy for our purposes here is that the Muratorian fragment affirms 22 of the 27 books of the New Testament.  These include the four Gospels, Acts, all 13 epistles of Paul, Jude, 1 John, 2 John (and possibly 3rd John), and Revelation.  This means that at a remarkably early point (end of the second century), the central core of the New Testament canon was already established and in place.

Of course, it should be acknowledged that the Muratorian canon also seems to affirm the Apocalypse of Peter.  However, the author of the fragment immediately expresses that some have hesitations about this book.  Those hesitations eventually won out, and the Apocalypse of  Peter was never widely affirmed by the early church, and never earned a final spot in the canon.

The fact that there was some disagreement during this time period over a few of the “peripheral” books should not surprise us.  It took some time for the issue of the canon to be settled.  This occasional disagreement, however, should not keep us from observing the larger and broader unity that early Christians shared regarding the “core” New Testament books.

If there was a core canon from an early time period, then there are two significant implications we can draw from this.  First, this means that most of the debates and disagreements about canonical books in early Christianity only concerned a handful of books.  Books like 3 John, James, 2 Peter and so on.  Early Christianity was not a wide open literary free for all, where there was no agreement on much of anything.  Instead there was an agreed-upon core that no one really disputed. 

Second, if there was a core collection of New Testament books, then the theological trajectory of early Christianity had already been determined prior to the debates about the peripheral books being resolved.  So, regardless of the outcome of discussion over books like 2 Peter or James, Christianity’s core doctrines of the person of Christ, the work of Christ, the means of salvation, etc., were already in place and already established.  The acceptance or rejection of books like 2 Peter would not change that fact.

Thus, the Muratorian fragment stands as a reminder of two important facts.  First, Christians did disagree over books from time to time. That was an inevitability, particularly in the early stages.  But this list also reminds us of a second (and more fundamental) fact, namely that there was widespread agreement over the core from a very early time.

 

[1] Verheyden, “Canon Muratori,” 556.

Tag Team with Michael Horton on “A New New Testament”

Over the last month, I have offered an extended review of Hal Taussig’s A New New Testament (see here for the final post with all the links). Taussig tries to add 10 apocryphal books to the existing NT canon.

Over at the White Horse Inn Blog, Mike Horton and I have offered a tag team review of this book. Mike offered his own review yesterday (April 30), and then he has posted my review today (May 1).   He tackles the book more from a theological perspective and I examine it more from a historical perspective.

Since my portion was already posted here on my own website, let me give a portion of Mike’s excellent review:

Only in America do scholars imagine that they can invent a new kind of Christianity by casting votes. Talk about a conspiracy of elites ignoring the voices of millions of believers from every continent and language! Contrast this with the reception of the biblical canon—early and geographically widespread—by the whole church.

It’s a simple point, but I think it goes to the heart of this whole genre of “Re-Imagining Christianity” as if early Christianity were an extended Oprah show. The point is this: certain canons give rise to certain communities. Representing the wider church (long before the rise of the Roman papacy), church councils met not to select texts for inclusion in the canon but to discern which texts were already canonical. As church historians like Eusebius recount, the church’s act was discernment and submission, not creativity and decision. There’s a reason you’ve heard of the 27 New Testament books we have.
…

If the church created rather than recognized the canonical Word as the voice of its Great Shepherd, then two problems arise. First, we must discount the way in which the earliest Christian writers appealed to Scripture, imposing the anachronism of a later (medieval) development. Second, we have little to say when writers like Hal Taussig, Elaine Pagels, Karen King, John Dominic Crossan, Bart Ehrman, and others claim that the only reason we have these 27 books is the arbitrary will of a circle of leaders claiming the mantle of the apostles.

Read the whole thing here.

The Formation of the Biblical Canon: My Review of Lee McDonald’s Latest Book

Note: The review below was just published in the latest issue of Themelios.

I have enjoyed reading Lee McDonald’s many works on the NT canon. He has established himself as one of the leading voices in this area through his numerous books and articles. So I was pleased to see this latest volume, Formation of the Bible: The Story of the Church’s Canon (Hendrickson, 2012), which is intended to be a lay-level introduction to the origins of the Bible. There are very few introductory works on this subject matter (a point McDonald makes in the preface), so it is good to see something written for the person in the pew.

After an introductory chapter on “What is the Bible?”, McDonald divides the volume into approximately two halves with three chapters covering the story of the OT and three the NT. Throughout these chapters, he lays out all the standard historical facts about the development of these books, along with many charts, maps, and pictures. And he is quite thorough. Despite the fact that this volume is intended for a lay audience, it is thick with the relevant historical data.

As McDonald discusses the historical details, he is quite willing to lay (aspects of) his theological views on the table. He openly acknowledges the Bible as “word of God” (p. xi) and that it is “sacred and authoritative Scripture” (p. 17). He also offers a bit of an apologetic motive for his book when he says, “Given the current skepticism of many contemporary scholars about the origin of the Bible and its faith claims, it is important to answer recent challenges to the Bible and to aid those who recognize the Bible as a sacred book, but who do not regularly deal with its origins” (p. xi). So, on the one hand, it seems that McDonald is out to defend the authority of the Bible to the layman who may not be aware of the complex scholarly issues. I appreciate this dimension of his book and find it commendable.

However, on the other hand, it seems that the book runs into a number of problems when McDonald actually starts sifting through the historical evidence. Although most of the evidence McDonald reviews is fairly routine, there are a number of areas where the historical analysis proves to be problematic. Most of these issues arise in two main areas:

1. The Significance of Biblical Citations for Establishing the Canon. One of the main ways that we know whether an ancient author considered a book to be canonical is the manner in which he cited the book. If an ancient author explicitly referred to a writing as “Scripture” or used a standard introductory formula (e.g., “it is written”), then we have good grounds for thinking that the author regarded the book as having divine authority. However, it is important to recognize that ancient authors frequently used, cited, and appealed to books that were not necessarily part of their scriptural collection. In other words, mere use does not establish a book’s canonicity.

McDonald rightly recognizes this principle and goes out of his way to make it plain (p. 27). The problem, however, is that this principle does not seem to be consistently followed throughout the volume. For instance, in the discussion of the canon of the Qumran community, McDonald observes that many non-biblical texts were also found in the caves by the Dead Sea. Then, he argues, “The presence of many non-biblical books at Qumran, some of which may date from the late fourth century BC, suggests that the matter of the scope of the Jewish Scriptures was not settled in the time of Jesus” (p. 43). But how does the mere “presence” of other books in the Qumran library prove this? Sure, the presence of these books shows that they were used by the Qumran community. But as just discussed, mere use does not demonstrate that they possessed scriptural authority. Indeed, if one were to find a modern theological library buried in the sand a thousand years from now, it would contain more than just biblical books, but many other kinds of books as well. But this cannot be used as evidence that these books were all considered canonical.

This same issue comes up again when McDonald examines which books Jesus and his disciples considered scriptural (as witnessed in the NT writings). In an effort to show that there was no fixed canon during this time, he mentions, “Some of Jesus’ teachings have parallels in certain non-biblical books” (p. 56). McDonald makes the same argument when it comes to Jesus’ disciples. He argues there was no fixed canon because Jesus’ disciples “often cite other religious texts not in the Hebrew Bible” (p. 56). But again, how do these instances prove that there was no fixed canon? McDonald passes over the fact that Jesus and his disciples never refer to any of these non-biblical books as Scripture (Jude notwithstanding). Mere use of a book does not demonstrate that it has canonical status.

2. The Nature of Early Christian Book Production. I appreciate that McDonald spends a significant amount of time on the NT manuscripts themselves and what they can tell us about the origins of the canon-an area often overlooked in prior studies. However, there are also a number of concerns about the presentation of the data in this section.

First, McDonald regularly presents the earliest manuscripts as “poor in quality with many mistakes in them” (p. 122) and presents the scribes as “amateur copiers and not professional” (pp. 122-23). However, this is not quite an accurate presentation of the literary culture of early Christianity. While we would certainly agree that some Christian scribes were amateurs who produced a low-quality product, there are no reasons to think all Christian scribes were this way. In fact, when we look at the earliest NT manuscripts, a significant number of them have a high quality scribal hand, typical of those who have been trained to write and copy books. In fact, in Graham Stanton’s recent study on this question, he has shown that we have numerous early papyri written with professional book hands and “made with great skill and at some expense” (Jesus and Gospel [Cambridge University Press, 2004], pp. 192-206). Thus, it would be more accurate to characterize the quality of early Christian scribes as mixed-some were low quality, some average quality, and some high quality.

Second, McDonald addresses the special scribal abbreviations called the nomina sacra. While most scholars have considered these abbreviations as indicative of impressive scribal cooperation and organization, McDonald, surprisingly, sees them as indicative of the opposite, namely, that the scribes were unprofessional and “not conscious of copying literary, sacred texts” (p. 123). On what basis does McDonald make this claim? He does so on the basis that “abbreviations were not generally made in standard books or scrolls of a literary quality” (p. 123). But to compare the nomina sacra to standard scribal abbreviations is to seriously miss what the nomina sacra are. They were not created to save space but to show honor to the name of God and Christ. In other words, the nomina sacra were more about religious devotion than about punctuation. In this way, they were quite similar to the Tetragrammaton-the special writing of the divine name in the OT books. Surely, McDonald would not suggest that the existence of the Tetragrammaton is an indication of low scribal quality and a belief that those books were not Scripture. For these reasons, John Barton has made the opposite point of McDonald and has argued, “the existence of the nomina sacra indicates that for Christians as for Jews there were features of the text as a physical object that were used to express its sacredness” (The Spirit and the Letter: Studies in the Biblical Canon [SPCK, 1997], p. 123).

Third, when McDonald addresses the state of the earliest Christian papyri, there are additional problems in the presentation of the evidence. He indicates, “there are only two known manuscripts of the New Testament from the second century” (p. 137). But again, this is not the whole story. Manuscripts are often given dates in a range (usually about fifty years), and McDonald has chosen only the upper portion of that range. If one considers the whole range, then numerous manuscripts could fall into the second century (e.g., P104, P4-64-67, P77, P103, P75, P66, P46, P52, P90). In addition, when talking about the NT papyri, McDonald argues, “some contain New Testament books alongside the non-biblical books” (pp. 125-26). It seems that he raises this point to show that there was canonical diversity amongst early Christians. As an example, he mentions P72 where 1 and 2 Peter occur alongside some extrabiblical books. But he never mentions that this is the only example of this phenomenon amongst the papyri! There are not “some” papyri that do this, but only one. P72 is not the norm, but the exception.

In sum, this volume has a number of positive features as it covers a variety of complex historical topics for the layman, but it also runs into some difficulties as it evaluates some of the historical evidence. The repeated theme of the book, to which McDonald regularly returns, is that of canonical diversity. He seems intent to show that there was no fixed canon at an early point and that there was significant disagreement over these books. While this is partially true, the arguments of the book could be more nuanced and rounded out in the ways that I indicate above.

Nevertheless, McDonald has provided a positive contribution to the field of canonical studies and a helpful introduction for a lay audience. And I particularly appreciate the way he ends the book. Regardless of all the complexities of the canonical process, argues McDonald, we still must ask the most important question of whether we are willing to follow the canon: “We do not have a biblical canon unless we are willing to follow its guidelines for ordering our lives” (p. 161). Thus, McDonald rightly reminds us that the most important issue regarding the canon is not academic, but practical. The canon is not just something to investigate but something to obey.

Man-Made Religion at Its Best: Review of a “New New Testament”: Part 3

Note:  The previous posts in this series can be found here, here, and here.

This will be the last installment of my extended review of Hal Taussig’s A New New Testament (Houghton Mifflin, 2013) which attempts to create a new canon, with 10 “new” apocryphal books added to the traditional 27-book corpus.

In prior posts, I have examined the overall purpose of the project, the promotional language on the cover flap, and the apologetic offered in the introduction.  In this final post, I will make some observations about the last part of the book entitled, “A Companion to A New New Testament.”

The problems in this section are no less abundant than in other sections, so we will only be able touch on them briefly.  We can divide our discussion into three sections: (1) historical problems, (2) methodological problems, and (3) theological /philosophical issues.

Historical Problems

There are many historical/factual statements throughout this section that are highly questionable.  Let me just mention three.

1. On p.484, Taussig claims that we have fragments of the Gospel of Thomas “from the first hundred years after Jesus died.”  In other words, prior to c.130.  Curiously, he never mentions which fragment he has in mind.  The only options are P.Oxy. 1, 654, and 655, but these are all third century.   To suggest there is a Thomas fragment from the early second century is shockingly inaccurate.

2. On p.501, Taussig claims that Clement of Alexandria rejected the gospels of Mark and Luke and “accepted only Matthew and John.”  But, this simply isn’t true.  Clement affirmed four and only four gospels as authentic.  At one point he dismisses a passage in the Gospel of the Egyptians on the grounds that “We do not have this saying in the four gospels that have been handed down to us.”[1] Eusebius agrees and says that Clement affirmed all four gospels.[2]

3. On p.506, Taussig argues that there was no New Testament in “the first five hundred years of ‘Christianity’” because “the technology of book production was such that combining all twenty-seven texts into one was more or less impossible.”  I find this statement to be incredible.  The technology for large codices was in place long before the year 530 (five hundred years after Christ).  Not only do we have full NT and OT codices in the 300’s (e.g., codex Sinaiticus and Vaticanus), but we have multi-quire codices all the way back in the second century (e.g., P66), suggesting that the technology for larger books was in place quite early.

Methodological Problems

When it comes to choosing the books for this “new” canon, it is clear that Taussig is using a particular methodology.  Let me just mention one aspect of this issue.

When describing how these new books were chosen, Taussig says they were “selected in a manner similar to the way historical Christianity made many of its crucial choices: by a collective decision-making process” (512).  But, this modern “council” does not function at all like the ancient ones.  Taussig gives the impression that ancient councils actually chose books and decided the canon.  But that is a misleading way of describing the process.  The ancient councils did not just “pick” books they happened to like, but affirmed the books they believed had functioned as foundational documents for the Christian faith.  In other words, these councils were declaring the way things had been, not the way they wanted them to be.

In contrast, this modern New Orleans council, is simply picking the books they prefer, not the books that have historically functioned as foundational to the Christian faith.  For example, this new council included a bizarre and esoteric poem entitled The Thunder: The Perfect Mind.  Was this a foundational document for early Christianity?  Not at all.  For one, it is not necessarily even a Christian document, never mentioning the name of Christ or any distinctively Christian doctrine.  Moreover, as Taussig himself admits, “There is no mention of Thunder in any other known piece of ancient literature”(179).   Is this a foundational document?  Hardly.

Theological Issues

Finally, it should be noted that Taussig, in this final section, reveals a little of the theological motivation for this book.  There is nothing wrong with having a theological motivation, but it is still worth pointing out.

Taussig offers a reason for adding these documents, namely that they “can make a real difference in the spiritual lives of ordinary people” (489).  What kind of difference?  “[The Gospel of Mary] inspired women to think of themselves as real leaders in conventionally male-dominated situations. The Gospel of Thomas proclaims the radical availability of God inside people, and The Thunder: Perfect Mind reframes what it means to be men and women” (489).

It is here that we come to the heart of this book’s theological aims.  In fact, Taussig even admits, “These kinds of significant meanings in the lives of real people are at heart of what the New Orleans Council…wanted for the public” (489).

Thus, this book is not about history but theology.  Not about the past, but the present. It is a book designed to change our conceptions of gender and to make it more egalitarian.  And it is a book designed to give us a Gnostic version of God, a God found inside of us.

In sum, Taussig has produced a new set of Scriptures to accommodate his new theology.  And thus he has reversed the normal order of things.  While theology usually comes from Scripture, Taussig has used his theology to create a new Scripture.  It’s man-made religion at its best.

 

[1] Strom. 3.13.

[2] Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6.14.5-7.

 

Review of a “New New Testament”: Part 2

I have been working through an extended review of the new book by Hal Taussig called A New New Testament (Houghton Mifflin, 2013) which adds 10 “new” apocryphal books to the existing 27 books of the New Testament.  In my prior post, I examined the promotional language on the inside cover flap.  In this post, I will focus on the introduction to the book (xxxiii-xxvii) where Taussig offers his apologetic for this ambitious project.

1. Taussig opens his defense with the following statement:

This New New Testament is not simply the produce of one author.  The ten added books have been chosen by a council of wise and nationally known spiritual leaders (xxiii).

One gets the sense that Taussig is well aware that creating a new scriptural canon will seem a bit audacious to the reader.  But his attempt to alleviate this concern is stunning.  Does he really think 19 hand-picked “spiritual leaders” are in a position to do such a thing?  Really?  Moreover, Taussig is even bold enough to call this a “council.”  No doubt, the use of this term is an intentional effort invoke memories of prior church councils that discussed the canon (e.g., Hippo and Carthage).

The problem, of course, is that this “council” is nothing like those in the early church.  For one, it is not a council called by the church.  Indeed, it even includes members who are not even Christians (it includes two rabbis).  In addition, where are the representatives from the evangelical and Roman Catholic communities?  These do not make up an insignificant part of global Christianity today.  Taussig calls his council “eclectic” (xxiii), but it is nothing of the kind.  It should be called a “council of liberal, progressive folks unhappy with the current make-up of the canon.”

2.  When Taussig addresses the question about the origins of these books, and their respective dates, a bit of terminological sleight of hand becomes immediately evident.  Despite the fact that all of these books are second century or later (see here for more on this topic), he repeatedly refers to them as books from “the first centuries” of Christianity (xxiii) or “from the beginnings of Christianity.”  At first glance, such phrasing makes it sound like these books are from the “first century” (singular) or from the “beginning” (singular), when in fact they are not.

The necessity for such elusive language is obvious.  If he just came out and told the reader that all  these “new” books are later productions, not written by apostles, then the reader would see little need to add these books to the canon.

3. Taussig then states,

There is no reason, then, to think that the Gospel of Thomas, which is not in the traditional New Testament, was ready any less in the first and second centuries than the Gospel of John (xxvi).

But, this statement is loaded with problems.  First, Taussig implies that the Gospel of Thomas was read in the first century.  But, this is simply not the case.  Thomas was not a first century gospel.  Second, the popularity of a book is not a determiner of canonical status.  The Shepherd of Hermas was widely popular in early Christianity, certainly more than some canonical books, but it never had any real chance of making it into the canon, and was expressly rejected by the Muratorian fragment.  Third, and most importantly, it is patently false to say that Thomas was as popular as John’s gospel.  Since I have already dealt with this issue elsewhere, I point you to my article here.

4.  In an effort to portray apocryphal and canonical books as equal to one another, Taussig states:

The New Testament did not exist for at least the first three hundred, if not five hundred, years after Jesus (xxvi).

But, again, this is substantially misleading.  It depends entirely upon what one means by the term “New Testament.”  If one insists that we cannot use the term until there is a final consensus, even on the peripheral books, then we don’t have a canon until the fourth century.  But, left out of such usage is the fact that there was a “core” canon of New Testament books in place even during the second century.  When one considers just Irenaeus and the Muratorian fragment, it is clear that the four gospels, Paul’s letters, and a handful of other books were widely received as “Scripture.”  For more on this point, see here.

5.  In order to defend the inclusion of new books into the canon, Taussig is forced to argue that there is no qualitative distinction between canonical books and apocryphal books.  He states,

The common assumption holds that the books that became the New Testament must have been in some way more true, more divinely inspired, or more historically accurate than the ones that weren’t.  One goal of A New New Testament is to rethink that misconception.  The Gospel of Truth contains poetry about Jesus that is as beautiful as anything found in the traditional New Testament (xxvii).

There are a number of problems with this statement, but I will focus on just one.  If it is true that there is nothing qualitatively distinctive about the books we include in the New Testament, then the whole concept of a New Testament evaporates.  The whole idea of a “canon” is that some books are in, and some books are out, and that there is a reason for such distinctions.  But, Taussig is basically arguing there are no differences between books.  But, if there are no differences, then why bother having a canon at all?

For that matter, why limit the “new” books to the canon to just the ten in this volume?  Why not add Martin Luther King’s, “Letter from Birmingham Jail”?  Is it not just as inspiring, if not more so, than some of Paul’s letters?   Indeed, why doesn’t Taussig even add his own writings to the canon?  On what grounds could he exclude them?

All of this highlights the absurdity of this entire volume.  The title proposes to create a “New New Testament” when that is not at all what is happening.  Instead, this volume is designed to do away with the concept of a New Testament altogether.  A canon is not being constructed.  A canon is being deconstructed.  The canon, we are being told, is whatever we want it to be.

Review of a “New New Testament”: Part 1

There has been much chatter recently about the new book by Hal Taussig called A New New Testament (Houghton Mifflin, 2013).  It intends to combine the traditional 27 books of the New Testament along with 10 apocryphal writings from early Christianity.  As I observed in a prior post, there is nothing particularly “new” about this sort of project—it has been tried again and again since the time of Marcion.

This post is the first installment of my review of this book, with many more to come.  We will focus here just on the promotional description on the inside cover flap.  This is an unusual place to begin a book review, I know, but it is warranted by the imprecise and sometimes false statements contained there.  And these statements serve to frame the entire book.

The inside flap begins with the following:

Over the past century, numerous lost scriptures have been discovered, authenticated, translated, debated, celebrated.

Notice that right from the beginning these apocryphal writings are described as “lost scriptures.”  Thus, it is already assumed from the outset that these books are scripture, but somehow they have been left out of the canon (no doubt by those pesky, narrow orthodox folks).

The problem with this language, of course, is that the scriptural status of these books is precisely what is in dispute.  If one is writing a volume about why apocryphal literature should be regarded as scriptural, it is hardly appropriate (or persuasive) to just assume your conclusion before you even begin.

Next we read the following:

Many of these documents were as important to shaping early-Christian communities and beliefs as what we have come to call the New Testament;

Again, this is misleading.  Although some communities no doubt where influenced by some of these books, they were not nearly as influential as the books of the New Testament.  I have argued elsewhere (see here), that apocryphal writings are not nearly as popular within early Christianity as often claimed.  Thus, there is little reason to say they are “as important” as the canonical books.

The next sentence reads:

These were not the work of shunned sects or rebel apostles, not alternative histories or doctrines, but part of the vibrant conversations that sparked the rise of Christianity.

Again, this is simply not true.  None of these “new” documents were written in the first century.  None have any claim to be original or early.  And none were written by apostles.   And yes they were shunned.  The Gospel of Thomas, for example, was widely and broadly condemned by early Christian leaders and never made it into any NT lists, nor is it ever found in manuscripts alongside any other New Testament writings. Thus, one could hardly say the Gospel of Thomas was one of the books that “sparked the rise of Christianity.”

Finally, we read:

Why should these books be set aside? Why should they continue to be lost to most of us? And don’t we have a great deal to gain by placing them back into contact with the twenty-seven books of the traditional New Testament—by hearing, finally, a full range of voices that formed the early chorus of Christians?

Here we finally come to the plea for inclusiveness—a plea that will no doubt ring true in many postmodern ears.   These apocryphal writings are presented to us as the unfortunate victims of exclusion and oppression, and now finally in the modern day we have the opportunity to right the wrongs of the past and let these writings have their rightful place.

Notice that such language entirely skips the issue of the historical merits of these books.  What matters is not so much the books themselves, but the principle that no books should be privileged over any other.  This is 21st century relativism at its best.

In the end, the promotional description of the book actually reveals a lot about this project.  While this book has the guise of neutral scholarship, it is, at its core, a book with a clear religious commitment.  To be sure, it is not the religious commitment of historical Christianity. Instead it is the religious commitment of postmodernity.  But it is a religious commitment nonetheless.

Now, there is nothing wrong with writing a book that has a religious commitment.  But it should at least be acknowledged when it is done.

 

A New ‘New Testament’ is an Old, Old Idea

My email inbox has been flooded over the last day or so with queries about the recent book by Hal Taussig called A New New Testament (Houghton Mifflin, 2013).  I have to admit, I love the title.  When it comes to sensationalistic claims about the New Testament canon, modern publishers know what sells.  This volume has bypassed the normal catchwords found in the titles of such books—words like “lost”, “forgotten”, “secret”, or “banned”—and has set a new standard for marketing apocryphal writings.

This volume also sets itself apart by the grandiosity of its claims.  Here is the promo for the book:

To create this New New Testament, Hal Taussig called together a council of scholars and spiritual leaders to discuss and reconsider which books belong in the New Testament. They talked about these recently found documents, the lessons therein, and how they inform the previously bound books. They voted on which should be added, choosing ten new books to include in a New New Testament.

It’s one thing to suggest apocryphal books are early, or that they contain some true historical nuggets, but it is quite another to pick an entirely new canon on the basis of some arbitrarily chosen council of modern “scholars and spiritual leaders.”  Do we really think these 19 people are in a position to decide such things?  Is that the way we know which books are Scripture and which are not?

But while such grandiose claims about the New Testament canon may seem entirely new, it is in fact a very, very old idea.  For one, there are other modern examples of such activity.  The book The Five Gospels (Harper One, 1996), effectively rewrote the 4-Gospel canon by adding a fifth gospel, The Gospel of Thomas.  Moreover, the book included the results of the votes of members of the “Jesus Seminar” about which sayings/stories of Jesus were authentic and which were not.

In the end, we were left not with a New Testament, but with the Jesus Seminar’s personal, private New Testament.  And that is something entirely different.

But, the idea of rewriting the canon according to one’s personal preferences goes back even further.  In fact, this was a challenge faced by the very earliest Christians.   In the 140’s, a wealthy ship-owner named Marcion decided that the canon of the church was not the one he preferred and proceeded to offer his own—a truncated canon composed of only Luke and 10 epistles of Paul.  But, Marcion went even further.  In addition to selecting his own books, he took out the scalpel and edited these books, attempting to take out as much of the “Jewish” aspects as he could.

Marcion’s actions were widely condemned by the early church.  He was condemned not only for his heretical views, but for his willingness to reshape and rewrite the New Testament canon according to his own personal preferences.   The canon is just not something that one person (or 19!) can create.

Thus, despite the claims of this modern book to be doing something new and original, it is nothing of the sort.  The idea of a New New Testament, is an old, old idea.   One that has already been tried, and already been rejected.

Over the next few months, I will offer an extended review of Taussig’s new book, spread over a number of different blog posts.  And I want to assure my friend Michael Bird that I will take a “nice deep breath” before I do so!

The Complete Series: Ten Basic Facts About the NT Canon that Every Christian Should Memorize

For the last month or so, I have been working through a new series on the NT canon designed to help Christians understand ten basic facts about its origins.  This series is designed for a lay-level audience and hopefully could prove helpful in a conversation one might have with a skeptical friend.

Given that there are already four installments in this series, I thought would be helpful to have them listed all in one spot.  Thus, I will list the current installments below, and plan to update this list as the series progresses.  Also, note that the bottom left of my website has a link to all my blog series.

#1: “The New Testament Books are the Earliest Christian Writings We Possess”

#2: “Apocryphal Writings are All Written in the Second Century or Later”

#3: “The New Testament Books Are Unique Because They Are Apostolic Books”

#4: “Some NT Writers Quote Other NT Writers as Scripture”

#5: “The Four Gospels are Well Established by the End of the Second Century”

#6: “At the End of the Second Century, the Muratorian Fragment lists 22 of our 27 NT books”

#7: “Early Christians Often Used Non-Canonical Writings”

#8: “The NT Canon Was Not Decided at Nicea—Nor Any Other Church Council”

#9: “Christians Did Disagree about the Canonicity of Some NT Books”

#10 “Early Christians Believed that Canonical Books were Self-Authenticating.”

Ten Basic Facts about the NT Canon that Every Christian Should Memorize: #3: “The New Testament Books Are Unique Because They Are Apostolic Books”

Note: This is the third installment of a new blog series announced here.

One of the most basic facts about the New Testament canon that all Christians should understand is that the canon is intimately connected to the activities of the apostles.

Jesus had commissioned his apostles “so that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach and have authority” (Mark 3:14–15).  When Jesus sent out the twelve, he reminds them that “For it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you” (Matt 10:20).  Thus, he is able to give a warning to those who reject the apostles’ authority: “If anyone will not receive you or listen to your words…it will be more bearable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town” (Matt 10:14).

In sum, the apostles had the very authority of Christ himself.  They were his mouthpiece.  As such, their teachings, along with the prophets, were the very foundation of the church.  Paul describes the church as “built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets” (Eph 2:20). If the church wanted to know the true Christian message, they would always need to look back to the teaching of the apostles.

But, the apostles didn’t just teach about Jesus orally.  At some point—a very early point—the apostolic message was written down.  Often it was written down by the apostles themselves.  At other points it was written down by companions of apostles who were recording their message.  Either way, the authoritative apostolic message found its way into books.

For obvious reasons, the church would value apostolic books over and above other type of books. And this is exactly what happened.  The books that the church regarded as apostolic were the books that were read, copied, and used most often in early Christian worship.  These are the books that eventually became the New Testament canon.  The canon is the byproduct of the ministry of the apostles.

In fact, the church’s overt dependence on apostolic writings is precisely why we see a proliferation of “apocryphal” books in the second century (and later) that were named after apostles.  We have the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, the Acts of John, and even the Gospel of the Twelve!  Rather than raising doubts about the apostolic nature of the New Testament, these apocryphal writings actually serve to confirm it.  They show that the early church valued apostolic books so much that forgers had to try and mimic the genuine ones in order to get a hearing.  For more on the late date of these apocryphal writings, see prior post here.

Of course, some modern scholars dispute the apostolic authorship of some of the New Testament books, claiming they were written by later authors only pretending to be the apostles.  However, these claims are by no means proven, and many other scholars dispute them.  Moreover, it should not be forgotten that the early church was in a better position to ascertain the authorship and origins of these books than are modern scholars two thousand years later.

In the end, the New Testament canon exists because of an early Christian belief that the apostles spoke for Christ.  That belief led Christians to value apostolic books.  And those apostolic books eventually formed the New Testament that we know today.

Witherington Reviews “The Early Text of the New Testament”

My recent book (c0-edited with my friend Chuck Hill) is The Early Text of the New Testament (Oxford, 2012).   That volume is a collection of essays designed to address the state of the NT text at the earliest observable stages.  Unfortunately, one might have to mortgage their home to purchase it at $140 (ouch).  Sorry, seminary students.

As a result of the high price, I am particularly grateful when someone takes the time to get a copy and review it.  Ben Witherington has recently reviewed the book over at his website and I am appreciative of his kind remarks.  Here are some excerpts:

Technical monographs are important, not least because they are usually repositories of detailed information that you can’t very easily get elsewhere, or would have to get from a variety of sources. The new volume just published by Oxford U. Press entitled The Early Text of the New Testament (eds. C.E. Hill and M.J. Krueger, 2012) is such a work. What we have in this important work is a detailed study of the manuscript evidence for all the books of the NT up to and including the period of the great codexes (Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, etc.). The evidence presented is up to date (the authors take into account the latest edition of Nestle-Aland, and recent papyri finds) and generally speaking the assessments of the evidence is fair and balanced.

…

While pp. 81-413 provide us with a series of chapters on the state of the text of all the NT books followed by the citation of said books in other early Christian literature (e.g. the apocryphal Gospels or Barnabas etc.) for me the most helpful portions of the book are found in the first 80 pages where we have excellent essays by Harry Gamble, Larry Hurtado, and Michael Kruger.

Gamble’s essay entitled ‘The Book Trade in the Roman Empire’ reviews briefly the usual evidence for said trade in Rome (see the previous reviews of the works of William Johnson on this blog), and then he goes on to discuss the Christian book trade…Even so, as Gamble goes on to point out, there are remarks both about copying and sharing the documents, and also about not altering the documents (see Rev. 22.18-19). Despite all this, Gamble admits that there is clear evidence that these documents were widely disseminated within Christian circles.

…

Hurtado hypothesizes, perhaps rightly, that the codex form was chosen in part because even literate non-elite persons (e.g. educated slaves) would be expected to read these texts, at least to the other members of their Christian household. Hurtado in fact produces startling evidence of the ubiquity of the codex in Christian circles— of 41 Christian mss. from the second century, 77% are codexes only 23% rolls (which is about the opposite of the case with pagan documents). While Christian documents make up only about 2% of all second century documents, they make up 27% of all the codices and in the third century 38% of all the codices. Hurtado is able to show as well that Christians used the codex for their scriptures, but were o.k. with using rolls for for non-scriptural Christian texts. Further, he points out how Christian documents do not reflect a professional hand, by and large. A fair copy yes, a calligraphic one, not so much. There was much more concern about the content being clear than the form being aesthetically pleasing. The use of abbreviations of sacred names for Jesus and God (the nomina sacra) show as well that these are insider documents, documents not meant for the world in general, but for those within the Christian circles who would know what the abbreviations stood for.

There is much more of this sort of fascinating data in this book, and it is a great pity that you would need to take out a bank loan to buy it (on sale at Amazon, it’s $140 large). Nevertheless, this book is yet further proof that while real education is expensive, ignorance is even more so.

You can read the whole review here.

Ten Basic Facts about the NT Canon that Every Christian Should Memorize: #2: “Apocryphal Writings are All Written in the Second Century or Later”

Note: This is the second installment of a new blog series announced here.

In the prior post, we discussed the first basic fact about the New Testament canon, namely that the New Testament writings are the earliest Christian texts we possess.  We were careful to make clear that the early date of these books does not make them canonical, but the early date does show that these books were written during a time period when eyewitnesses of Jesus were still alive.

In this current post, we address the issue of “apocryphal” New Testament writings.  These are writings that were not included in the New Testament, but have a similar genre (gospels, acts, letters, apocalypses, etc.).   And these writings are often attributed to famous individuals; e.g., the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Thomas, the Acts of John.

While we cannot go into extensive detail about these various apocryphal writings, we can at least note one basic fact that is often overlooked: all of these apocryphal writings are dated to the second century or later.   Thus, this post is the corollary of the prior one.  Not only are all New Testament writings from the first century, but all apocryphal writings (at least the ones that are extant) are from the second century or later.  And many are from the third or fourth century.

What is particularly noteworthy about this fact is that even critical scholars agree.  While there is dispute over the dating of some New Testament books (e.g., 2 Peter, the Pastoral Epistles), there is virtual unanimity over the late date of apocryphal books.  There are, of course, fringe attempts to place some apocryphal writings into the first century—e.g., Crossan argues that a “cross gospel” embedded in the Gospel of Peter is from the first century—but these suggestions have not been widely received.

The observation of this simple fact quickly calls into question sensationalistic claims about how these “lost” books contain the “real” version of Christianity.

Of course, one might argue that later texts can still preserve authentic first-century Christian tradition.  After all, a text doesn’t have to be written in the first century to contain material from the first century.  True.  But, we would still need to have a compelling reason to accept these later texts over our earlier ones.  And when it comes to these apocryphal writings, compelling reasons are in short supply.

For one, we know that many of these apocryphal writings are outright forgeries, pretending to be written by someone who was clearly not the author.  That fact alone raises serious questions about the reliability of their content.   Second, many of these apocryphal writings contain obvious embellishments and legendary additions.  For example, in the Gospel of Peter, Jesus emerges from the tomb as a giant whose head reaches the clouds, and he is followed by the cross itself which then speaks (!).  And third, many of these apocryphal writings contain a Gnostic-style theology that did not even emerge until the second century, and therefore could not represent authentic first-century Christianity (e.g., Gospel of Philip).

To be clear, this does not suggest that it is impossible, in principle, for an apocryphal writing to be first century (it’s just that we have not found one yet).  Nor does this suggest that apocryphal writings could not (or did not) ever contain reliable Jesus tradition.  We know that early Christians sometimes appealed to apocryphal gospels as containing some true material (more on this in a later post).  But, and this is the key point, the scraps of apocryphal literature that may be reliable do not present a version of Christianity that is out of sync with what we find in the New Testament books, and are certainly not in a position to supersede what we find in the New Testament books.

In the end, apocryphal writings constitute an interesting and fascinating source for the study of early Christianity.  But, largely due to their late date, they do not offer a more compelling version of Christianity than the New Testament writings themselves.

10 Misconceptions about the NT Canon: #9: “The Canonical Gospels Were Certainly Not Written by the Individuals Named in Their Titles”

Note: this is the ninth installment of a blog series announced here.  The full series can be found here.

One of the most commonly made claims regarding the canonical gospels is that they were not written by the individuals named in their titles.  Instead, we are told that these gospels were written later in the first century by anonymous individuals outside of Palestine who were not eyewitnesses of any of the events that they record.  After all, the text of the gospels themselves offers no indication of their authorship.   And the gospel titles, it is argued, were added at a later point—probably the middle of the second century—in order to bolster the credibility of these anonymous texts.

Now it should be noted from the outset that we have too little space here to offer a full scale investigation into the authorship of these four gospels.  Moreover, the authorship of ancient books is a tricky matter and not always easy to ascertain.  So, we will narrow our focus here on the issue of the gospel titles themselves. Although the titles themselves don’t guarantee the authorship of a book, they are key piece of historical evidence about who early Christians understood the authors to be. So, were the titles added late in the second century as some scholars maintain?  We shall argue here that there are good reasons to think the titles were included at a very early point

1.  The manuscript evidence.  Although we possess a limited number of gospel manuscripts from the second and third centuries that preserve the title pages, the ones we do possess have the title present. In other words, we do not find “title-less” gospel manuscripts from this time period.  Examples of early gospels manuscripts with titles are P66 (John), P4-64-67 (Matthew and Luke) and P75 (Luke and John).  Put simply, as far back as we can see in the manuscript tradition the titles are present.

2. The uniformity of the titles.  Perhaps one the most compelling reasons to think the titles were added early is the fact that there is such uniformity in these titles within the early centuries of the faith.  If the titles were added late, we would have expected a substantial amount of diversity to have developed.  After all, the users of these gospels had to have called them something (especially if they had more than one gospel), and since they were anonymous it is reasonable to think they would have called these gospels by different names.  In fact, when the ancient writer Galen published his works without a title, he acknowledges that “everyone gave them a different title.” But, incredibly, the titles of these four gospels are consistent—Mark is always called “Mark,” Luke is always called “Luke,” etc.   Such uniformity cannot pop into existence over night.  It suggests these titles had been there a while.

3. The inclusion of Mark and Luke.  If the titles were added in the late second century, as some suppose, then it is difficult to imagine that Mark and Luke’s names would have been included.  If names were arbitrarily chosen, we would hardly expect these two.  If one wanted to get quick credibility for a gospel, it would have been named after an apostle—indeed, this is what happened with so many of our apocryphal gospels (e.g., Thomas and Peter).  Yet, here we have two gospels named after non-apostles.  It would have been especially easy to name Mark’s gospel after Peter, given the historical connections between the two men, but the early church resisted. This, I would suggest, is a sign of authenticity.

All of these factors suggest that the titles were added very early—if not from the very beginning.  If so, then we have very good reasons to think these titles reflect the actual authorship of these books.

But, this still leaves the question of why the gospel writers didn’t just include their names in the actual gospels accounts themselves.  Why write a gospel that is formally anonymous?  For one, this did happen from time to time with Greco-Roman biographies.  We do have examples of formally anonymous biographies, so this would not have been unheard of (e.g., Lucian’s Life of Demonax, Secundus the Silent Philosopher, Lives of the Prophets, Arrian’s Anabasis, and Sulpicious Severus’ Life of St. Martin ).  But, Armin Baum has suggested another, and even more fundamental reason.  Baum has argued that the Gospels were intentionally written as anonymous works in order to reflect the practice of the Old Testament historical books which were themselves anonymous (as opposed to other Old Testament writings, like the prophets, which included the identity of the author).[1]  Such a stylistic device allowed the authors of the gospels “to disappear” and to give “highest priority to their subject matter.”[2]  Thus, the anonymity of the Gospels, far from diminishing their scriptural authority, actually served to increase it by consciously placing the Gospels “in the tradition of Old Testament historiography.”[3]

In the end, we have little reason to doubt the titles of these gospels and thus little reason to doubt the authorship of these books. The evidence still suggests that the most likely authors are Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

 

[1] Armin D. Baum, “The Anonymity of the New Testament History Books: A Stylistic Device in the Context of Greco-Roman and Ancient Near Eastern Literature,” NT 50 (2008): 120-142.

[2] Baum, “Anonymity,” 139.

[3] Baum, “Anonymity,” 139.

Review of “The Early Text of the New Testament”

This past year, Charles Hill and I edited a volume for Oxford University Press entitled, The Early Text of the New Testament.  This is a compilation of essays from scholars around the world exploring the state of the NT text at its earliest (accessible) stages.  Although the book was released in the UK in June, it was not available in the US until around Sept 1st.  So, there has been no time for any reviews to be published.

However, my friend Tommy Wasserman has pointed out that there has been an online review over at Rick Brannon’s website, ricoblog.  Thanks to Rick for this very positive review!  Here is an excerpt:

I can’t say it enough: This book really is awesome; I only hope the publisher is able to release a more affordable paperback copy so more folks can use the book. It is that useful if you’re working through the text of a passage and want to take significant variants from early manuscripts (pre 5th century) into account…

For this task, Part II, “The Manuscript Tradition” is really the gem within the book…  While each article approaches the task differently, what you end up with is basically a focused discussion of the variations found in early manuscripts (mostly papyri) for a given NT book. If you are working with the text of the NT, this really is essential material to consult. If there are significant issues with the early witnesses for a section of text you’re working with, it will likely be discussed in this book…

Given the technical nature of this book (not to mention the $150 price tag!), I expect reviews to be few and far between.  So, I appreciate Rick taking the time to read it through carefully.

 

World Magazine and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife

I just noticed that the most recent print edition of World Magazine had a write up on the recent “discovery” of the so-called Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, a purportedly fourth-century Coptic gospel where Jesus refers to “my wife.”  The online link can be found here.

The World Magazine article referred to my original discussion of this fragment published on the TGC website here.   The article picked up on one of the most critical points I was trying to make in my original discussion: “of all the known ‘gospels’ of Christ, ‘only Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are dated to the first century.'”

This is a rather simple, but often overlooked fact.  And if it were remembered more often, then sensationalistic claims about early gospels would be regarded as, well, less sensational.  And that would be a refreshing change.

What About the Back of the So-Called Gospel of Jesus’s Wife?

There has been a lot of chatter over the last week about the new Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, originally announced here.  So much so, that it is quite difficult to keep up with the rapidly changing discussion about this text.  Scholars all over the globe have chimed in, most questioning the authenticity of the fragment (see my original assessment here).  Most recently, Francis Watson of Durham University has offered two short articles (here and here) which strongly suggest this fragment was a modern fake.

But in all of this discussion, I have noticed that far too little attention has been given to a very important piece of evidence: the back side of the fragment.  Now it is certainly possible that this has been a major topic of conversation and that I have simply missed it (who can possibly keep up with all the internet articles?).   But, my cursory perusal of the discussion suggests this topic has not been front and center.

What is notable about the back side of this fragment (known as the “verso”), is that it contains a faded Coptic script.  This faded script has been mentioned as a sign of authenticity because it would be quite difficult to fake.  However, this is only a sign of authenticity if the script on the verso is the same as the script on the recto.  If they are not the same, then this lends credence to the possibility that the script on the recto about Jesus’s wife was added at a later point to an ancient fragment with faded writing on only one side.

In King’s original paper, she indicated that the scribal hand on the front and back were the same.  I do not have access to high resolution photos by which I could render an opinion on this.  So, she may well be correct.  However, there is something about the back that, in my mind, is problematic.  When we examine the verso more closely, it seems clear that the spacing between the lines is greater than the spacing on the recto.  Notice the pictures of the recto and verso side by side:

Papyrus fragment: front. Karen L. King 2012Papyrus fragment: back. Karen L. King 2012

According to King’s reconstruction, there are 9 lines of the front and 7 on the back.   That may not seem like a big difference at first, but it must be remembered that this difference occurs over the space of only 4cm.  We don’t know how big the original page of this fragment might have been, but if it was as long as the Coptic Gospel of Thomas (approx 27 cm. in length), then the difference in the number of lines between the front and back would have been more considerable.

But, more than this, even a casual glance at the photographs shows the lines are much more condensed on the recto than the verso. It is clear that the first 6 lines of the recto cover the same amount of space as the first 4 lines on the verso.  In percentage terms, the front has 50% more lines than the back over this same portion of space.

Of course, it is difficult to know what we can conclude from this.  It is well known that scribes were not always consistent in the number of lines they put on each page.  They might begin a page with more space between lines and then become cramped as they move toward the end of the page. So, this disparity between the recto and the verso could just be due to the sloppy and inconsistent habits of our scribe. It is noteworthy, however, that the disparity of line spacing in this fragment takes place in the same portion of the page.  So, it is not the same as comparing the line spacing at the bottom of a page with the line spacing at the top of the same page.   We are talking about a notable difference in spacing in the same area of the page, front and back.

While the difference in line spacing between the front and back does not prove that this fragment is a modern forgery, it is certainly consistent with that hypothesis. If this story is the result of a modern forger who crafted his story onto an ancient piece of papyrus with faded writing already on the back, then this would account for the difference in line spacing between the two sides. Given the many other problems with this fragment, already noted by Watson and others, the disparity in line spacing must be a factor that is considered.  [1]

If Watson is correct that this is a forgery, then I think we may have a possible scenario for how (and why) this story was composed.  On the back of this fragment, in faded ink, one can make out the Coptic word for “mother.”  Could it be that this word inspired someone to create a story of Jesus on the other side of the fragment that dealt with the rest of his family, namely his “wife”?   Perhaps.

[1] Of course, there is another explanation for the disparity in line spacing. This story of Jesus’s wife could be the result of a fourth-century author who reused a fragment that already had unrelated writing on the back (and it so happens that the side about Jesus’s wife is left unfaded).

 

The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife—Authentic or Not?

Yesterday, during the break for my Gospels class (and ironically just prior to my lectures on apocryphal gospels), I received the big news about the discovery of a new apocryphal gospel fragment.  This fragment—aptly named The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife—contains a story where Jesus refers to “My wife” and is dated to the fourth century.  No doubt this will reignite the firestorm felt during the release of The Da Vinci Code many years ago, and the major media outlets will be asking again about whether Jesus was married.

Since yesterday’s announcement, I have been inundated with emails and phone calls asking for my assessment of this new fragment.  So, I have written my initial assessment which will be posted on The Gospel Coalition website sometime tonight.  So keep an eye out for it. UPDATE: Here is the link to my article.

In the meantime, you can read more on the issue of apocryphal gospels and heresy and orthodoxy in earliest Christianity in some of my recent posts here, here, and here.

My Interview on the NT Canon with Apologetics 315

A couple of weeks ago I did an interview with Brian Auten over at Apologetics 315 ministries.  We discussed early Christianity, canon formation, apocryphal gospels, heresy and orthodoxy, and a number of other important matters related to the origins of the New Testament. Much of the discussion centered on my recent book, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books.

You can check out the interview here.

Apocryphal Gospels and the Mainstream Media

One thing that I have observed over the years is that major media outlets love apocryphal gospels.  Whenever the person of Jesus is discussed–usually at Easter and Christmas–there is always a discussion about how the real story of Jesus has been suppressed and can only now be found in these lost gospels.   Sweeping claims are then made about how there was no agreement on much of anything in the first four centuries of the faith and that other stories of Jesus circulated by the thousands. Only after Constantine came along does the church decide which books to accept (and then subsequently denies all other books admission to the club).

When you think about it, this sort of historical reconstruction makes for an attractive magazine article or newspaper story for our modern media.   The public loves a good conspiracy theory.  People want to believe that there are “secret,” “hidden,” “lost,” or “forgotten” (the four most common words used in such stories) accounts of Jesus that will finally reveal the truth once and for all.   And, of course, everyone likes to believe that the Church is just like all institutions–corrupt, authoritarian, and concerned only about preserving its own power.

In a recent blog article, Phillip Jenkins has pointed out that a major media outlet (the UK Daily Telegraph) has followed the apocryphal gospel playbook step by step.  The Telegraph, when discussing the death of NT Professor Marvin Meyer, gives this assessment of gospels in early Christianity:

What we know as the New Testament – the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles, and the Book of Revelation – was actually born of thousands of texts and gospels circulated among the early Christians. Members of the new faith were subject to persecution, and the Church fathers felt that for the faith to survive, there had to be a unified belief system. Some time around AD 180, Bishop Irenaeus of Lyon denounced all gospels but Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as heretical. Later, about 50 years after Constantine’s conversion early in the fourth century, the New Testament became Christianity’s official text.

This sort of assessment is packed with misconceptions, many of which I dealt with in an article here.  There were not “thousands” of gospels in early Christianity.  Irenaeus was not responsible for oppressing these other gospels and choosing the canonical four.  And the fourth century was not the time when Christianity first considered the New Testament books to be their Scriptures.  Jenkins also provides a response:

Contrary to the Telegraph account – and good grief, this is a conservative paper – the reason early church leaders privileged those particular four gospels was that they were so evidently the earliest and most authoritative texts, without serious competition. No body of cranky patriarchs sat around and said, “Well, we have to vote out Mary because it’s, um, a tad sexual. John can stay because it spiritualizes everything, and that’ll be useful in a century or so when we get political power.” If you read the actual church debates over which texts should be canonized or excluded, you will be deeply impressed by the historical logic and good sense they demonstrate, and their powerful sense of history and chronology.

The bottom line is that the earliest Christians didn’t really have to “choose” the four gospels from among all the others.  Rather the four canonical gospels were simply the ones that had been there from the very beginning.  The early church didn’t pick the gospels, but inherited them.

When it comes to these sorts of questions, I like to remind my students of a very simple (but often overlooked) fact:  of all the gospels in early Christianity, only Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are dated to the first century.   Sure, there are minority attempts to put books like the Gospel of Thomas in the first century–but such attempts have not been well received by biblical scholars.  Thus,  if we really want to know what Jesus was like, our best bet is to rely on books that were at least written during the time period when eyewitnesses were still alive.   And there are only four gospels that meet that standard.

When this fact is kept in mind, the early church’s reception of just these four gospels doesn’t seem so arbitrary.  Indeed, it seems to make perfect sense.

 

Baur vs. Bauer: Is the New Testament Really Filled with Contradictory Theologies?

Perhaps no book in the history of the world has received as much scrutiny and criticism as the Bible.  For generations, scholars have picked apart every aspect of this book: its history, its transmission, its veracity, its theology, its morality, etc.  It has been criticized, ridiculed, mocked and condemned.  However, in their haste to heap criticism on the Bible, occasionally critics offer arguments that actually prove to be inconsistent with one another.  They make accusations against the Scripture that are mutually exclusive—they cannot all be true.  Of course, such inconsistencies are rarely noticed.  If a scholar is intent to find contradictions in the Bible, he will rarely find contradictions in his own arguments.

When it comes to the New Testament, there are two criticisms that have been used for years, and often at the same time.  The problem, however, is that upon closer examination they prove to be largely incompatible with one another.  Let us examine each in turn.

1. “The New Testament is filled with competing theologies that contradict one another.”

Ernst Käsemann, in his famous essay “The New Testament Canon and the Unity of the Church,” argued that, “This variability [of doctrine] is already so wide in the New Testament that we are compelled to admit the existence not merely of significant tensions, but, not infrequently, of irreconcilable theological contradictions.”[1]  Käsemann was simply building on the claims of F.C. Baur (and others) that the New Testament was filled with disparate theologies and that each New Testament book was constructed as a “party document” and motivated by a particular theological agenda, or Tendenz.  Some books were Jewish-Christian (Matthew, James), some were Gentile-Christian (Pauline epistles), and some were a synthesis (Acts, Hebrews, John).[2]  Put simply, the New Testament is filled with theological diversity.  Robinson and Koester refer to this phenomenon as “trajectories” within the New Testament.[3]

2. “The New Testament canon was formed by the ‘winners’ of the theological battles within early Christianity and therefore is filled with their preferred books.”

Walter Bauer’s book Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity made the argument that the canon as we know it cannot be trusted because it is simply the canon of one particular group—the proto-Orthodox.  This group was just one theological faction among many in early Christianity and happened to be the one faction that prevailed in the theological battles and thus was able to determine the content of the canon.  But, asks Bauer, why should we take this particular group of books as normative? The books (or “canons”) of other theological groups should be given equal weight.  In fact, Ehrman raises the provocative question, “What if some other form of Christianity had become dominant, instead of the one that did?”[4]   The answer is that we would likely have “an entirely different set of books.”[5]  Our current canon therefore represents a loss of “the great diversity of the early centuries of Christianity.”[6]  Put simply, our current canon consists of the books of just the theological group that won.

These two criticisms of the New Testament—that of F.C. Baur and that of Walter Bauer—are widespread and often held together.  But, this is where the problem lies.  Both of these criticisms cannot both be true. If F.C. Baur is correct and the New Testament representing competing and contradictory theologies, then how can Walter Bauer be correct when he argues that the New Testament represents the preferred books of the theological victors?  In other words, how can the New Testament be representative of great theological diversity (Baur), and then, at the same time, be representative of a great loss of diversity (Bauer)? Which one is it?

Now I suppose one could respond by arguing that even a collection of books representing a single theological camp could still contradict themselves at a minor level.  But, such a response is shifting the terms of the debate. F.C. Baur, and most modern critics, are not arguing that the New Testament just possesses some minor theological variations here and there, but instead are arguing that it possesses entirely different theological systems that fundamentally contradict one another.  Indeed, it is the existence of these different systems within the NT that is regularly used as evidence that early Christianity was so diverse (cf. Dunn). Thus, one would still have to abandon F.C. Baur’s main thesis (at least in any recognizable form) if one wants to hold Walter Bauer’s main thesis.

In the end, I think this an example of scholars wanting to have their critical cake and eat it too.  Critiques of the New Testament are so easily and so frequently offered that no one really is too concerned about whether the critiques themselves are compatible with one another.

Of course, even if some critics were willing to throw F.C. Baur overboard and argue that the New Testament is theologically unified, this does not thereby prove Walter Bauer’s theory.  There is another explanation for the canon’s theological unity that does not entail appeals to early church conspiracies, namely that these books all have the same ultimate, divine author. But, it is unlikely that modern enlightenment scholarship will ever let that idea on the table.

 

[1] Ernst Käsemann, “The Canon of the New Testament and the Unity of the Church,” in Essays on New Testament Themes (London: SCM, 1964), 100.  See also Ernst Käsemann, “The Problem of a New Testament Theology,” NTS 19 (1973): 235-245.

[2]  F.C. Baur, Paul, the Apostle of Jesus Christ, His Life and Work, His Epistles and Teachings (London: Williams and Norgate, 1873-1875), 1:113-116.

[3] James M. Robinson and Helmut Koester, Trajectories Through Early Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971).

[4] Ehrman, Lost Christianities, 5.

[5] Ehrman, Lost Christianities, 6.

[6] Ehrman, Lost Christianities, 4.

10 Misconceptions about the NT Canon: #6: “In the Early Stages, Apocryphal Books Were as Popular as the Canonical Books”

This is the sixth installment of a blog series announced here.

One of the most common claims by some critics of the NT canon is that apocryphal writings, particularly gospels, were as common and as widely-used as the NT writings.  Helmut Koester is a good example of this trend.  He laments the fact that the terms “apocryphal” and “canonical” are even used by modern scholars because they reflect, according to him, “prejudices of long standing” against the authenticity of these apocryphal texts.[1]  Koester then argues, “If one considers the earliest period of the tradition, several apocryphal gospels are as well attested as those which later received canonical status.”[2] William Petersen offers a similar approach when he says that apocryphal gospels were so popular that they “were breeding like rabbits.”[3]

But, is it really true that apocryphal gospels were as popular and widespread as the canonical gospels?  Were they really on equal footing?  Three pieces of evidence suggest otherwise:

1. Extant manuscripts.   The physical remains of writings can give us an indication of their relative popularity.  Such remains can tell us which books were used, read, and copied. When we examine the physical remains of Christian texts from the earliest centuries (second and third), we quickly discover that the New Testament writings were, far and away, the most popular.  Currently we have over sixty extant manuscripts (in whole or in part) of the New Testament from this time period, with most of our copies coming from Matthew, John, Luke, Acts, Romans, Hebrews, and Revelation.  The gospel of John proves to be the most popular of all with eighteen manuscripts, a number of which derive from the second century (e.g., P52, P90, P66, P75). Matthew is not far behind with twelve manuscripts; and some of these also have been dated to the second century (e.g., P64-67, P77, P103, P104).

During the same time period, the second and third centuries, we possess approximately seventeen manuscripts of apocryphal writings such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Peter, the Protevangelium of James, and more. The Gospel of Thomas has the most manuscripts of all, with just three.

The implications of this numerical disparity has not been missed by modern scholars. Hurtado argues that the low number of apocryphal manuscripts “do not justify any notion that these writings were particularly favored” and that whatever circles used these writings “were likely a clear minority among Christians of the second and third centuries.”[4]  Similarly, C.H. Roberts observes, “Once the evidence of the papyri is available, indisputably Gnostic texts are conspicuous by their rarity.”[5]  Charlesworth agrees, “If the ‘heterodox’ were in the majority for so long, the non-canonical gospels should have been preserved in greater numbers in Egypt.”[6]

2. Frequency of Citation.  While scholars typically focus on whether apocryphal books are cited, they have not paid sufficient attention to how often they are cited in comparison to the canonical writings.  When that data is considered, the disparity between apocryphal and canonical writings becomes even more evident.

Take, for example, Clement of Alexandria, who is often mentioned as an early church father who prefers canonical and apocryphal writings equally.  However, when the frequency of citations are considered, this claim proves to be unfounded—Clement vastly prefers the New Testament books, over and above the apocryphal literature or other Christian writings.  J.A. Brooks has observed that Clement cites the canonical books “about sixteen times more often than apocryphal and patristic writings.”[7] This disparity is thrown into sharper relief when we consider just the four Gospels. According to the work of Bernard Mutschler, Clement references Matthew 757 times, Luke 402 times, John 331 times, and Mark 182 times.[8]  Comparatively, Clement cites apocryphal gospels only 16 times.[9]  Apparently, Clement was not in doubt about which books he regarded as canonical.

3. The Manner of Citation.  If indeed apocryphal writings were valued equally with canonical writings, we would expect such a fact to be reflected in the way these books are cited.  Do the early church fathers cite apocryphal writings as Scripture?  Only very rarely.   In a few instances, it seems that books like the Shepherd of Hermas or the Epistle of Barnabas were regarded as having a scriptural status.  But, this was quite the minority view.  When we examine which books early Christians were not simply using (see prior post on this issue here), but books they actually regarded as Scripture, then the canonical books are far and away the most popular.   This is confirmed by the fact that there was a “core” canon of books in place by the middle of the second century (for more on that issue, see here).

In addition, it should be noted that a number of these apocryphal writings were expressly condemned by the earliest Christians.  Take, for example, the oft-discussed Gospel of Thomas. This gospel is never mentioned in any early canonical list, is not found in any of our New Testament manuscript collections, never figured prominently in canonical discussions, and often was condemned outright by a variety of church fathers.[10] Thus, if Thomas was a widely-read and widely-received gospel account, then it has left very little historical evidence of that fact.

Everybody loves a good conspiracy theory.  It would certainly be far more interesting and entertaining if one could show that apocryphal books were really the Scripture of the early church and that they have been suppressed by the political machinations of the later church (i.e., Constantine).   But, the truth is far less sensational.  While apocryphal books were given some scriptural status from time to time, the overwhelming majority of early Christians preferred the books that are now in our New Testament canon.   Thus, we are reminded again that the canon was not something that was arbitrarily “created” by the church in the 4th or 5th century.  Rather the affirmations of the later church simply reflected what had already been the case for many, many years.

 

[1] H. Koester, “Apocryphal and Canonical Gospels,” Harvard Theological Review 73 (1980): 106.

[2] Koester, “Apocryphal and Canonical Gospels,” 107.

[3] W.L. Petersen, “The Diatesseron and the Fourfold Gospel,” in The Earliest Gospels (ed. C. Horton; London and New York: T&T Clark International, 2004), 51.

[4] Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts, 21-22.

[5] Roberts, Manuscript, Society and Belief, 52.

[6] Scott Charlesworth, “Indicators of “Catholicity” in Early Gospel Manuscripts,” in The Early Text of the New Testament (ed. C.E. Hill and M.J. Kruger; Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

[7] Brooks, “Clement of Alexandria,” 48.

[8] Bernard Mutschler, Irenäus als johanneischer Theologe (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 101.

[9]  Brooks, “Clement of Alexandria,” 44.

[10] E.g., Hippolytus, Ref. 5.7.20; Origen, Hom. Luc. 1; Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.25.6.

Apocryphal Books in Early Christian Codices: Evidence for their Canonical Status?

A favorite topic of modern critical scholars is the role of apocryphal books in early Christianity.  How often were these books used?  And did Christians regard them as Scripture?   Bart Ehrman’s book Lost Christianities is typical in this regard. Ehrman explores a number of books that did not make it into the canon and argues that Christians originally regarded these books as part of God’s word.

One critical piece of evidence for Ehrman is that the Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle of Barnabas were both included in one of our earliest complete NT manuscripts, the fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus (p.245).  He also appeals to the fact that 1&2 Clement were included in the fifth century Codex Alexandrinus (p.142).

Now, to be sure, the inclusion of these apocryphal books in Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus is interesting.  And it certainly attests to the popularity of these books.  But is it necessarily evidence of their scriptural status?   One key fact that Ehrman does not mention in his discussion is the location of these apocryphal books within the codices.  They all occur at the end of the codex, even after Revelation.  This is certainly noteworthy since Revelation is uniformly regarded as the final book in the NT corpus.

Moreover, if a book like 1 Clement or the Epistle of Barnabas were regarded as scriptural, then surely it would have been placed among the other General/Catholic epistles, which contain letters from a variety of different authors.   Even Hebrews, with its disputed authorship, is not placed after Revelation, but was included (in these codices) amongst Paul’s letters.

But, if these books are not regarded as Scripture, then why are the included in these codices at all?  One possible explanation, suggested by William Horbury, is that early canonical lists would include all the received books first and then, at the end, it would name “disputed” books and/or books that were deemed useful or edifying but not necessarily canonical.[1]  This pattern is visible in the Muratorian fragment which includes the Apocalypse of Peter and the Shepherd at the end.  Whereas the former is regarded as disputed, the latter is rejected outright and is mentioned only because it can still be read in the church (for edification, not as Scripture).

Athanasius’ Festal Letter (c.367) also lists both Old and New Testament books and then, at the end, lists the books which are not canonical but nevertheless useful, such as the Wisdom of Solomon and the Shepherd amongst others. Likewise, Eusebius,[2] Codex Claromontanus, and Epiphanius,[3] exhibit a similar structure in their canonical “lists.”[4]

Thus, it seems that Codex Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus are simply following the standard structure of canonical lists in their time period.  Given the location of these apocryphal books in these codices, they are best understood not as Scripture, but as helpful/edifying books that can be read in the church.

[1] W. Horbury, “The Wisdom of Solomon in the Muratorian Fragment,” JTS 45 (1994): 149-159.

[2] Hist. eccl. 5.8.8, also joins the Wisdom of Solomon and the Shepherd together.

[3] Pan. 76.5.

[4] Horbury, “The Wisdom of Solomon,” 152-156.

10 Misconceptions about the NT Canon: #5: “Early Christians Disagreed Widely over the Books Which Made It into the Canon”

This is the fifth installment of a blog series announced here.

1934 was a big year for Germany.  It was the year that Adolf Hitler became the Führer and complete head of the German nation and the Nazi party.  And, as we all know, it wasn’t long after that time, that Germany invaded Poland and began World War II.

But 1934 was a significant year for another reason.  Very quietly, behind the scenes, a book was published that would change the landscape of early Christian studies for years to come.  Walter Bauer published his now famous monograph, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity.   Compared to Hitler’s rise, this was not very newsworthy.  And Bauer’s book did not have much of an impact at first.  But, in 1971 it was translated into English and since that time things have radically changed in the academy of the English speaking world.

As is well known now, Bauer’s main thesis was that early Christianity was a bit of a mess.  It was a theological quagmire.  No one could get along; no one could agree.  There was in-fighting and competition between various competing factions, all warring it out about what really constituted “Christianity.”  Thus, for Bauer, there was no such thing as Christianity (singular) during this time, but only Christianities (plural).   And each of these Christianities, argues Bauer, had its own set of books.   Each had its own writings that it valued and thought were Scripture.   After the dust settled, one particular group, and their books, won the theological war.  But, why should we think these are the right books?   These are just the books of the theological winners.

Bauer’s thesis has seen a strong resurgence in recent years, particularly in the writings of scholars like Elaine Pagels, Bart Ehrman, and Helmut Koester.  And it is the basis for a very common misconception about the NT Canon, namely that there was very little agreement over the books that made it into the canon until the fourth or fifth century.  Before that, we are told, early Christianity was somewhat of a literary free for all.  No one could agree on much of anything.

But was that really the case?  Several considerations:

1.  A core NT canon existed very early.   As I noted in my prior blog post in this series (see here), there was a core canon of NT books that was well-established by the early to middle second century.  These would have included the four gospels, the epistles of Paul (at least 10, if not 13), and a handful of other books.  Although discussions about some of the smaller books would continue on for a while, the core books were not really ever seriously disputed. John Barton comments, “Astonishingly early, the great central core of the present New Testament was already being treated as the main authoritative source for Christians.  There is little to suggest that there were any serious controversies about the Synoptics, John, or the major Pauline epistles.”[1]

 If so, then the idea that Christians disagreed widely over canonical books simply isn’t accurate.  At most, this occurred for just a handful of books.

2. Use of apocryphal books is not evidence of widespread disagreement.  One of the most popular tactics in modern scholarship is to demonstrate that early church fathers used apocryphal books and then, on this basis, declare that there was no agreement about the canonical books.  For instance, Geoffrey Hahneman rightly observes that “Christian writers of the second century refer to many other gospels beside the canonical four.”[2]  However, Hahnemen then draws an unexpected conclusion from this fact: “This would seem unlikely if the Fourfold Gospel canon had already been established.”[3]  But, how does this follow? Hahneman never explains how the mere use of non-canonical Jesus tradition is evidence that the fourfold gospel was not established. Why are the two mutually exclusive?  Apparently Hahneman is operating under the assumption that the adoption of certain books as canonical (say the four gospels) somehow means that you can never again use material that falls outside these books.   But, it is unclear where this assumption comes from and Hahneman never offers an argument for it.

When we examine the Church Fathers more closely it is clear that some of them were quite willing to use apocryphal gospels, but, at the same time, they were very clear that only our four gospels were to be received as canonical.  Clement of Alexandria is a perfect example of this practice.  He is comfortable using apocryphal gospels, but is always clear that they are not on par with the canonical four.

3. Instances of disagreement over canonical books are not necessarily evidence that such disagreement is widespread.   A second kind of argument used by some scholars is to appeal to particular instances of canonical dissent or disagreement and use those instances as evidence that there is no broader unity about the canon.  Indeed, one gets the impression that it would require an extremely high (if not unanimous) amount of agreement about a book before these scholars would regard its canonical status as decided.  For instance, Hahneman rejects the existence of the fourfold gospel canon by appealing to the third-century orthodox theologian Gaius of Rome who supposedly rejected the gospel of John as a work of Cerinthus.  But, does the broad acknowledgement of a fourfold gospel require zero disagreement?   Does the existence of some objections to John’s gospel override the evidence that it was widely received elsewhere?  With this sort of standard in place, then we would never be able to say that we have a canon, even in the modern day.  There will always be some disagreement.

Another example of a place where disagreements are overplayed is Origen’s comments on 2&3 John where he acknowledges that “not all say that these are genuine.”[4]  Although Hahneman uses this comment to point out that universal agreement on these epistles has not yet been achieved, he entirely overlooks the implications of Origen’s comments in the other direction, namely that apparently most Christians do consider them genuine—including Origen himself.   The phrase “not all say” indicates that Origen is simply noting that there are exceptions to a more broadly established trend.   Thus, it is misleading to use this passage as evidence that John’s letters were not regarded as canonical.  That is more than this language can bear. At most it reveals that in certain quarters of the church some disagreements over these books continued to occur (which is hardly surprising).

In sum, there is impressive evidence for widespread agreement over the core canonical books from a very early time.  Most of the disagreements dealt with only a handful of books—2 Peter, 2-3 John, Jude, Revelation. But even these disagreements should not be overplayed.  We should not be too quick to assume that disagreements over a book are due to the fact that its canonical status is undecided.   On the contrary, sometimes disagreements are not so much over what should be included in the canon, but are over which books are already in the canon.  As David Trobisch observes, “The critical remarks of the church fathers can be better interpreted as a historical critical reaction to an existing publication.”[5]

 

[1] Barton, Spirit and the Letter, 18.

[2] Hahneman, The Muratorian Fragment, 94.

[3] Hahneman, The Muratorian Fragment, 94.

[4] Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6.25.10.

[5] Trobisch, The First Edition of the New Testament, 35 (emphasis mine).

Canon Papers for ETS 2012

A number of years ago, Stan Porter and I founded a new study group at the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS): New Testament Canon, Textual Criticism, and Apocryphal Literature.  Although issues related to text and canon were quite prevalent at the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), and other related academic societies, we realized that ETS did not have a centralized place where these issues could be explored.  Since the group began we have had five years of excellent papers on a variety of topics.  And the coming 2012 ETS meeting in Chicago is no different.   The theme this year for the invited session is “Implications of Canonical Formation on Interpretation.”  Here is the lineup:

Details: 11/15/2012, 8:30 AM-11:40 AM, Frontier Airlines Center : 203 D

Armin Baum,  Freien Theologischen Hochschule, Geissen, Germany
Does the Pericope Adulterae (John 7:53-8:11) have Canonical Authority? An Interdenominational Approach

Tomas Bokedal, University of Aberdeen
Implications of Canonical Date for Scriptural Interpretation

David I. Yoon, McMaster Divinity College
Canonical Criteria: A Diachronic Analysis of the Early Church’s Recognition of the New Testament Canon

Panel Discussion

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About

I am President and Samuel C. Patterson Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte, NC. In addition, I am an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and serve as an Associate Pastor (part-time, of course) at my home church, Uptown PCA.

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