Loading...If the early Christians decided they needed writings by apostles to provide them guidance in what it meant to follow Jesus – what to believe, how to act, what rituals to follow, how to understand them, etc. – how did they decide? Which writings were they going to include? And which exclude?
I continue here my reflections on how we got the 27 books of the New Testament, some preliminary thoughts as I consider how to write a book on the topic down the road.
How Decisions Were Made
Early church communities, leaders, and individuals accepted and appealed to a range texts written by apostolic authorities. Some Christians revered the Gospel of Thomas, which maintained that it was the secret teachings of Jesus, not his death, that could bring salvation. Other Christians accepted the divine revelation found in one of the Apocalypses of Peter (not the one I described earlier) in which Peter narrates his own most peculiar vision of the crucifixion. It is a puzzling scene that is difficult to imagine. The man Jesus and the divine Christ are imagined as separate beings who had been temporarily united during Jesus’ ministry. But at the crucifixion the divine Christ left the man Jesus to experience his excruciating pain alone; Peter sees Christ floating above the cross (that Jesus is hanging on) laughing at his enemies who think they can hurt him (a divine being!). Other Christians revered more clearly orthodox “apostolic” writings, such as the letter of Barnabas, which insisted that Jews had been misled by an evil angel to think that the law of Moses was to be followed literally, and so from the very beginning (the time of Moses) Jews had always practiced a false religion: only followers of Jesus knew what the Jewish Scriptures really meant.
There were lots of books widely available, attesting views that most modern readers would consider very odd indeed. But they seem odd only because
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I’m very much loving this thread and looking forward to the book!
I’m sure you’re aware that Michael Kruger advocates for an early, accepted unofficial canon, that arose organically as early Christians accepted as authoritative many of the books that were later canonized as orthodox. He dismisses, with the exception of Shepherd of Hermas, the other gospels as being seriously considered, or debated over, and that they were accepted as authoritative only by a fringe minority. I don’t recall what evidence he gives for that view, but I’m wondering what evidence there is that these other gospels were widespread?
Also, I remember in his book Canon Revisited , he dismisses Walter Baur’s thesis of early Christianities as having been thoroughly discredited, a point which I know you have addressed before on the blog and I am hoping-expecting you will be discussing Bauer’s work in your book.
Yes, our views are about as opposed as two guys can be.
Metzger talks about the “broader canon” of the Ethiopic New Testament. Do I understand correctly that this is some sort of scholarly reconstruction based on available manuscripts?
Interesting post !
Are we able to quantify the relative popularity of each of these early Christian belief systems or scriptures? For example, did the Sethian Gnostics or the Marcionites ever greatly outnumber the Christians who believed in the form of Christianity that eventually became orthodox? Or were most of these now all but forgotten sects marginal in popularity?
Oh boy we wish we could. What has been argued for a long time is that in *some* places non-orthodox forms of Chrsitianity appear to have been in teh majority from teh earliest periods in which we have records. That was the thesis of Walter Bauer’s book Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christainity, and even though the details of his presentation are not widely (ever?) accepted, the basic point of view is. In Egypt, e.g. you find a lot of Gnostic groups in teh second century, but wehre are the proto-orthodox?
Great stuff Bart! I learn so much here. Why was it necessary/important to be apostolic in origins ?
It God sent Christ to deliver his message, and Christ chose the apostles to deliver his message, you want apostles to tell you what’s what. They were they ones who knew.
Thanks Bart.
Going back to your ewe-lamb, the Apocalypse of Peter; this survives in an Ethiopic translation from the Greeek, but may we then infer that this was originally included in the Ethiopic New Testament?
Not necessarily. As you know, there are lots of documents translated into Ethiopic that were not considered parts of the canon. As it turns out, this Ethiopic translatino of the Apocalypse of Peter is embedded in a narrativre allegedly about Clement of Rome (a Pseudo-Clementine work, but not the more familiar Homilies or Recognitions), and the modern editor who published the narrative didn’t realize that the Apocalypse had been taken over an copied into it (repurposed for its new context). It was only when M. R. James read the work after it was published that he realized, “WHOA! That’s the Apocalypse of Peter.” He wrote an article on it a few days later (!) and argued (massively convincingly) that this EThiopic form of the text was based on a Greek form of the text that was *older* and *more original* than the Greek text that had been discovered in Akhmim a few decades earlier! Fascinating stuff. James was amazing. And was most famous (seriously) for his ghost stories.
So the Ethiopian scholars who translated the Clement narrative, most likely did not recognise the Apocalypse of Peter within it, and so this text would not have come to be considered canonical in the Ethiopic tradition by virtue of supposed Petrine authorship. Although, since other Clementine works would eventually be included in the Ethiopic canon, we cannot be certain how the early Ethiopic tradition evaluated this particular text. Is that right?
Albeit that at the time that Ethiopian scholarship embarked on their spectacular (and voracious) enterprise in translating Greek Christian texts into Ge’ez – in the mid 4th century – the concept of a fixed canon of New Testament works had yet to be fully formalised. Even though the Axumite emperor had dispatched his chaplain to Athanasius in Alexandria for episcopal consecration, the Greek texts that were subsequently seized on for translation included several that Athanasius would explicitly exclude from his subsequent canon list; and some he would reject as heretical (and which have otherwise perished).
What a debt we all now owe to those scholars!
All we know is what Ethiopian sources say and what Ethiopian translations of the NT contain, and none of them suggests that ApocPet was understood asa part of the canon. (The Pseudo-Clementine texts that *were* considered canonical do not include this particular text that the AP was embedded in.)
Bart,
in your book ” Jesus, Interrupted” there’s a long chapter ” How we got the Bible” ( p181-223). You explain that Rome’s Christianity won over the numerous early versions on account of its size and centrality at the heart of the empire.
Did Paul’s Romans have anything to do with it or is such assumption anachronistic?
Another point I wonder about is the zeal to win converts. Whilst this zeal was the initial thrust, the Christian missionary passion remained. Is this because of inertia – it simply continued as tradition and backbone of the faith- or does it go back to Jesus’ exhortations, once he ( understandably) gave up on ” the lost sheep of Israel” in favor of preaching to the gentiles, a task that would never end, as the world is populated by gentiles?
Another possibility is that Christians genuinely believe that non-Christians are condemned, which renders the proselytising a true act of charity. If I didn’t think as badly about the Inquisition as I do, I could contemplate the possibility that for some of the Inquisitors the concern for damnation of their subjects could be avoided by an Auto da Fe.
I don’t think Paul’s letter to the Romans facilitated the importance of the Roman church for early Christianity, but in some ways it presupposes it. It’s the one church Paul was interested in convincing that his views were on the up and up; true, it’s because it was well-located as a base of his operation further west, but given teh apparent size (just from the greetings in his letter, of all the people he knew there even though he had never visited) and the importance he attaches to them understanding his views, it does sugges its central imporance.
As to zeal: yes I think it definitely was a matter of charity and concern for the lost. The Christian ethic from the outset was to care for the well-being of others, and if others were about to be condemned by God, that was a motivation to convert them. My sense of the Inquisition is that it was at least in theory driven by a similar concern, but really, in that case, it was more about Power.
We would have been much better off without Revelation in the Bible. A lot of stupid speculation and predictions were made based on this book, without the understanding of its context.
Dr. Erman, you mentioned a laodicean letter, could that be the one referenced in colossians 4:16? also where can we find this read? Google search maybe 🙂
It is not the letter mentioned in Colossians, but it may well have been a forgery made because someone knew that Colossians *mentioned* a letter to the Laodiceans. I mention it in my book Forged and give an extended discussion in Forgery and Counterforgery. Yes, it should be easy to find online or in a collection of ealry Christian apocrypha (such as J. K. Elliot, NT Apocrypha)
Thank you! On Britannica.com I was looking at polycarp of Smyrna, it said the pastorial letters possess a 2nd-century vocabulary and style that are characteristic of Polycarp? [1/2]
I’d say that’s a bit of a simplification.
[2/2] And that he [polycarp] may have composed or directly influenced them. Britannica says that some scholars hold this view. So I thought I would ask a scholar the truth of this claim in the article.
No, that’s highly unlikely. I don’t know anyone (or of anyone) who holds that view.
Dr. Ehrman,
What about the councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) in North Africa? Wasn’t the canon officially accepted/closed at that time?
No, it was never officiall closed at any time, if by that you mean a vote at a major council, until the Council of Trent in the 15th century. Hippo and Carthage were not ecumentical councils but local synods expressing opinions of the bishops who happened to be present, but even after that there were debates about some of the books.