The Three Canons
9
Every word of God is pure.
— Proverbs 30:5, KJV
The Unnecessary Canon
As the interregnum between B.C. and A.D. comes to its end, we find that the clashes of our three canon makers have produced three distinct canons of Scripture and offered them to the world. Two of these three, curiously enough, were based on the exact same denial — denying, that is, the temporary nature of the Laws of Deuteronomy — and on the same exact conspiracy theory as well: the alleged apostolic plot to falsify Jesus’ teachings on this subject. And the third canon, that championed by Justin Martyr, was based on . . . something else. Now, as Church and synagogue come at last to the parting of the ways, the Hellenized Jews of the Dispersion, acting as jury, will listen to closing arguments for each of these three and then render a verdict.
Marcion is sometimes given credit for being Christianity’s first textual critic, but it’s an honor he definitely doesn’t deserve. As we’ve seen, there’s no record that Marcionites sent out biblical archaeologists to look for earlier, “more correct” manuscripts nor that they made any efforts to examine the provenance of the documents held by the Church. No, the changes Marcion favored were made by him alone, based on no real textual justification at all, inspired solely by his need to justify a preconceived dogma. Epiphanius cites more than forty passages from Marcion’s amended New Testament and in practically every instance, the changes are based on a transparent desire to rid the document of some favorable allusion to the Tanakh or to emphasize some perceived discontinuity with it. Jesus’ chiding of the Apostles on the road to Emmaus — “O foolish . . . and hard of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken” (Luke 24:25) — is altered into “O foolish and hard of heart to believe in all that I have told you”; and this, solely because the Hebrew prophets, according to Marcion, never spoke a word about Jesus at all. Our Lord’s rejoicing at the return of the seventy in Luke 10 — “I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth” — Marcion shortens to “I give thanks, Father, Lord of heaven”; a denial, of course, that the all-good Father of Christ created the earth. St. Paul’s letters were changed as well, sometimes with considerable ingenuity. Ephesians 3:9, for instance, where the Apostle writes of “the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things,” is transformed by the dropping of one tiny Greek preposition (the en before theo): “the mystery which from the beginning of the world has been hidden from the God who created all things.” These alterations have precisely the same character (and precisely the same value) as those made by the committee of Jehovah’s Witnesses who produced that group’s highly eccentric New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures. Also, Marcion continued to make changes as he went — for the rest of his life, in fact. Not surprisingly, the Catholics continued to find embarrassing passages he had missed, passages implying a positive judgment on some “primitive” Hebrew hero or an ongoing role for the Old Testament books in the life of the Church, all of which necessitated further alterations on the part of the heresiarch and all of which took place in the full light of public scrutiny.
The idea that Marcion created, or helped to create, the whole idea of a Christian canon of Scripture deserves, however, a bit more respect. “Although it was an exaggeration,” writes Jaroslav Pelikan,
When some historical scholars in the 19th century, on the basis of Marcion’s idea of a New Testament that would replace the Old Testament, attributed to him the actual invention of a Christian canon of Scripture as distinct from the Jewish canon, he did help to make such a development necessary and to provoke it. . . . The church’s rejection of Marcion’s teaching on these several doctrinal issues also served to confirm the growing concept of the one Bible that consisted of the two Testaments.174
Marcion’s list of “trustworthy” books, we must remind ourselves, was not culled from any comparable list published by some competing authority; his favorites were chosen, rather, from among the well-known (but heretofore loosely defined) body of works being read liturgically from the pulpits of the Catholic churches. Unlike the Ebionites he hated or the many quasi-Christian Gnostic sects that had begun to arise during the same era, Marcion added no books not already being used by the Church with which he wished to quarrel — which is quite a significant fact, when one stops to think of it. His whole program was a program of omission, beginning, of course, with the entirety of the Tanakh! Marcion simply excised what he did not like; but he made his choices, almost unconsciously, from a list of books selected by others, from a pre-existing collection that he hardly questioned. In this way, he paid the traditional collection of books his own kind of backhanded compliment.
In one sense, Justin and his school175 attacked Marcion’s canon by ignoring it — and quite rightly, too, given its minimal basis in fact. They destroyed Marcion’s canon by attacking the alleged necessity for it, by explaining not only the unity of God’s plan across both the Old and New Covenant eras but also the way in which that unity had allowed for discontinuity as well. The supposed crudities of the Old Testament narratives are the crudities of God’s hearers, not of God Himself, who spoke in the broad gestures of saga and myth while accommodating Himself to an ancient people steeped in such language. The limitations of the Mosaic Law were largely the limitations of Moses, rather than of Moses’ God — and those limited parts, brought on by the nation’s sins, have now fallen away to reveal an underlying Primordial Law purer than the codes of Aristotle or Marcus Aurelius. The discontinuities are those to be expected in a story of sin and redemption, of loss and gain, and of a New Covenant prophesied within the very pages of the Old. Justin and the others showed, as Michael Barber has put it, that “it is precisely the unity of God’s plan that explains the discontinuity within it.”176
In short, Marcion’s new canon was simply not necessary — much less Marcion’s new God! And displayed this way before the watching world, his bold new imaginings could begin to be seen for what they were: the ultimate in overkill — rather like the overkill shown by that new school of modern physics that, in order to escape the implications of a universe fine-tuned for life to an almost miraculous degree, has begun to posit not only a new heaven and a new earth, but an infinity of multiple universes, each only slightly different from the one next door!
Despite its inherent absurdity, Marcion’s heresy did linger quite a bit longer than one might imagine. The Golden Age of his great antichurch falls between the years 150 and 250; this was the period during which Marcionism posed a real and present danger, drawing — just as the Catholic Church did on a much larger scale — thousands of the Dispersed Jews into its fold. The movement continued in Western parts of the Empire for some two hundred years after this, a little longer in the East, but in both locales as a failing, much-diminished sect. The converted Emperor Constantine outlawed Marcionism in the 330s; Theodoret, writing about one hundred years later, speaks with pride about having gathered up one thousand wandering Marcionites in his home diocese of Cyrus and reconciling them to the Catholic faith.
Happily, the story of Marcion himself seems to end on a similar grace note. It is exceedingly rare in Church history to find a corresponding figure who came to anything but a sticky end. Arius, for instance, not only kept up his heresy to the last but perished miserably, to boot, in a gruesome story that many of his orthodox opponents told and retold with great relish, doing but little credit to their own reputations for sanctity along the way. Tertullian, however, writing about 207, tells us that, hope against hope, his own great adversary Marcion, sensing the approach of death, recanted his errors and asked for reconciliation with the apostolic Church. Probably the bishop himself was called for such a momentous task, the churchman who heard Marcion’s deathbed confession and offered him readmittance — on one condition: that he should spend all of his remaining strength in the effort to reclaim his many erring disciples as well. This Marcion swore to do, but he died before he could follow through on that promise, probably about the year 161.
No one knows why one such sinner repents while so many others pass into the darkness in what appears to be a state of hopeless impenitence. But if we were guessing, we might wonder whether Marcion had, in the end, been saved by the same disposition that kept him away from Ebionism and from sharing the fate of his friend Aquila — by the fact, that is, that he always was so zealous for the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ and so unwilling to give Him up.
The Other New Testament
If Marcion’s sin was one of omission, then the problem with Aquila’s canon — and with the whole Jesus-rejecting alternative he helped Akiba create — was that it added to God’s word something that really ought not to be there. Trypho and his cheery band put up a good bluff during their dialogue with Justin, projecting a sense that all was well in Hebrew religion and that “ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things have continued as they were from the beginning” (see 2 Pet. 3:4). This bravado, however, became more and more impossible to maintain as the results of the calamitous revolt played out in the decades ahead. The determination to “stay the course with Moses” proved far more difficult to carry out than anyone had expected — proved impossible, in fact. Gradually, even the Jesus rejecters were driven to make changes to their ancient faith almost as thoroughgoing as those occurring among the Jesus welcomers. Rabbi Akiba had waved God’s New Covenant Scriptures away on nothing more than his own authority as master of Jamnia (a post he himself helped create), just as Marcion had waved away the Tanakh: “The Gospels and other heretical books do not defile the hands.” Yet now, even this most conservative of all Judaisms felt the need to produce what Pelikan has called “post-Scriptural Scriptures . . . Torah beyond Torah.”177 And this, really, is the supreme irony of our whole story: a movement rooted in unwillingness to relinquish the Second Law ended up writing a whole new law themselves — a “New Testament,” as it were, for Jesus rejecters — which superseded the Code of Deuteronomy nearly as completely as had the rulings of the apostolic council, but with nothing like the same prophetic justification.
The aftermath of the revolt swept the Jews from their Holy Land like a tidal wave and once they were out, they were out for good (or until 1947, at any rate!): “Despite easing the persecution of Jews following Hadrian’s death in 138, the Romans barred Jews from Jerusalem, except for attendance on Tisha B’Av. . . . Judea would not be a center of Jewish religious, cultural, or political life again until the modern era . . . remaining strong only in Galilee, Bet Shean, and the Golan.”178 Losing access to Jerusalem effectively turned all Jews into Diaspora Jews; and what had been impossible to the Dispersed because of distance and difficulty was now impossible to everyone. As we’ve seen, a large portion of the Deuteronomic Code revolves entirely around the temple, the tabernacle, the priesthood, and the altar — all of which were gone by this point. Gone, too, was the most important ritual of all: the yearly sacrifice of Yom Kippur, the Torah’s only antidote to sin. Here, once a year, the people had fasted rigorously outside the temple while the high priest offered two goats: the first, as a pure offering directly to Yahweh, the second as the scapegoat — which, bearing the people’s guilt vicariously, was driven outside the city and put to death. But now, since the ninth of Av, only the fasting was left. Whether they should have done so, in theory, or not, the “perpetual” and “everlasting” ordinances stopped in fact — and have remained stopped these nineteen centuries.
Just as it had for the Dispersed, the impossibility of carrying out these rituals now began to make at least some of the Jerusalemites wonder just how necessary they had really been in the first place. Yet all Bible students knew that the sacrifices had been the very heart of Moses’ system; and the Law without them became a law without its heart. Justin, for his part, attributed the banishment that caused the dilemma directly to God: “God does not allow the paschal lamb to be sacrificed in any other place than where His name is invoked [see Deut. 16:5–6] (that is, in the temple at Jerusalem), for He knew that there would come a time, after Christ’s Passion, when the place in Jerusalem (where you sacrificed the paschal lamb) would be taken from you by your enemies, and then simply all sacrifices would cease. . . . You also know very well that the offering of the two goats, which had to take place during the fast, could not take place anywhere else outside of Jerusalem” (40). Eusebius expressed the same idea even more fully:
And they have come to this impasse, even though Moses himself foresaw by the Holy Spirit that, when the new covenant was revived by Christ and preached to the nations, his own legislation would become superfluous; he rightly confined its influence to one place, so that if they were ever deprived of it, and shut out of their national freedom, it might not be possible for them to carry out the ordinances of his law in a foreign country, and as of necessity they would have to receive the new covenant announced by Christ. . . . Presently, not long after [the Gospel was first preached], Jerusalem was besieged, the holy place and the altar near it and the worship conducted according to Moses’ ordinances were destroyed, and the archetypal holiness of the pre-Mosaic men of God reappeared.179
Akiba’s foolish act of faith in the highly suspect Simon Bar Kokhba must have sprung from just this root. Unwilling as he was to see the situation from Justin’s perspective, the rabbi likely felt cornered and saw only two outs: either retake Jerusalem and rebuild the temple as quickly as possible or else confess that literal law-keeping had now become literally impossible — thus sawing off the limb upon which his whole movement stood. Not surprisingly, Akiba chose the former and pitched his lot with Simon; but now, in the wake of Antichrist’s fall, his successors were driven back upon the latter option. In fact, with Akiba himself a victim to false messianism, the rabbis turned so decisively away from such prophetic hopes that their entire movement has tended to allegorize and even avoid the whole idea of a coming Messiah ever since.180 They rejected Akiba’s choice, that is, but not his determination to stick by the observance of the Second Legislation no matter how obsolete it may have become.
What was needed at this point was some way to keep Moses’ Law — or to assure oneself that one was keeping it, despite all the evidence to the contrary — within the totally altered post-exilic conditions. “If Israel was not to be absorbed either by Christianity or by syncretism,” writes Marcel Simon, “she had only one remedy, the law. Already, in the course of the preceding centuries, the law had been the safeguard of Judaism’s spiritual autonomy. The only new thing was that it now appeared as the only means of salvation.”181 Here, the Immovable Rock of Deuteronomy felt the Irresistible Force of fact — and it was the Rock that gave, no matter what anyone might choose to say. The rabbis could find their necessary “out” only by learning to read between the lines of Torah. If the written rules seemed no longer to apply, then Yahweh must have concealed secret rules for these changed circumstances within the penumbra of the original text; one only needed some method for parsing them out. This is how Torah began to be replaced by “Oral Torah” — an ever expanding body of rabbinical Bible interpretation that soon took on a role analogous to that of the New Testament for Jesus welcomers; a new law that honored the old while downgrading it, in practice, to mostly historical significance.
There’s no reason to doubt that the rabbis did possess a good many unwritten traditions that were passed down through the centuries mainly by word of mouth, just as the Catholic Church has such traditions. It would be very odd if they hadn’t, since almost every human institution does (one thinks, for instance, of the president’s body of cabinet officers or the two-party system in American government, neither of which has any foundation in the written Constitution). So the only real questions about this “Oral Torah” were questions about authority: about how authoritative these traditions ought to be considered and about whose interpretation of them ought to be considered authoritative. Never one to shy away from an opportunity to increase the “unity of Israel” by aggrandizing the say-so of the Jamnia rabbis, it was, as a matter of historical fact, Akiba himself who first began the systemization of these unwritten halakah or rules for day-to-day living — the beginnings of what we now know as the rabbinical Mishnah. Despite his desperate messianic gambit, Akiba already sensed that the solution to the problem of continued law-keeping outside Judea must lie there if anywhere.
The condition of the Halakah, that is, of religious praxis, and indeed of Judaism in general, was a very precarious one at the turn of the first Christian century. The lack of any systematized collection of the accumulated Halakot rendered impossible any presentation of them in a form suitable for practical purposes. . . . Akiba made the accumulated treasure of the oral law — which until his time was only a subject of knowledge, and not a science — an inexhaustible mine from which, by the means he provided, new treasures might be continually extracted.182
Akiba shared with Justin (as well as with Philo and the rest of the Alexandrian school) the idea that nothing is superfluous in Scripture, that many important truths might be deduced from the smallest detail. But as the case of Barnabas so vividly illustrates, this highly subjective form of exegesis was subject to any amount of eccentricity and abuse. And as Akiba passed from the scene and other interpreters took his place — men under even more extreme pressure to discover new forms of law-keeping more suited to the second and third centuries — the finding of such previously “hidden” principles became paramount to their whole effort. This is how Akiba’s method allowed his disciples (in the words of one of them) “to discover things that were even unknown to Moses.”183
The trouble with all this was, in the eyes of the watching Dispersed, that these supposed “oral laws from the days of Moses” seemed to proliferate faster than hamsters — and seldom, if ever, contradicted the known preferences of the Jamnia rabbis. Notable as well was the fact that this ostensible Oral Law seemed notably MIA within the Bible. Oral as they may have been, there ought to be some evidence, at least, in the Tanakh of the existence of these unwritten codes during previous centuries, but just the opposite seemed to be the case. Moses, for instance, asks God several questions that would later be answered in the halakah of the Midrash; and no one in Scripture ever seems to be guilty of violating any of these oral precepts.184 Yet, by the early third century, the obligations upon an observant Jew had been codified into 613 distinct mitzvot or divine commands — including whatever remained practicable from the pre-exilic codes, plus dozens upon dozens of others, derived “by logic and exegesis” from out of the Oral Torah.185 Any unbiased observers decided simply that even more “law had been added” — and added, once again, “by an intermediary because of hardness of heart.” This, in fact, may be the reason that the Didiscalia employs the Greek term deuterosis even for the secondary codes contained within Scripture. Mishnah and deuterosis are the same word in two languages — meaning “additional or secondary laws,” with the distinct implication that both sets shared the same flawed, man-made origins.186 This identification became complete as the third- and fourth-century rabbis began attributing divine inspiration to the Talmud (which includes the Mishnah) as well as the Torah.187 As Pelikan summarizes: “The authority of the Torah in postbiblical Judaism was in many ways functionally the authority of the Talmud, so that it is even possible to put the Talmud and the New Testament side by side as the two major alternative systems — mutually exclusive in one sense, but also, in another sense, interdependent — for reading the Tanakh.”188
Thus, the rabbinical New Testament; and, as we’ve seen already, the new Jesus-rejecting Old Testament canon was provided by Akiba as well. The first order of business there had been to adopt a single normative Hebrew text from among the many Jewish Bibles in circulation at the time of Christ. “Akiba no doubt perceived that the intellectual bond uniting the Jews — far from being allowed to disappear with the destruction of the Jewish state — must be made to draw them closer together than before. He pondered also the nature of that bond. The Bible could never again fill the place alone; for the Christians also regarded it as a divine revelation.” In order to sever this common ground, writes Simon, “Akiba [became] the creator of a rabbinical Bible version elaborated with the aid of his pupil, Aquila, and designed to become the common property of all Jews; thus Judaizing the Bible, as it were, in opposition to the Christians. . . . Under Akiba’s guidance he gave the Greek-speaking Jews a rabbinical Bible.”189
Aquila’s was the first Bible to leave out the so-called Apocrypha “on purpose,” so to speak — and also many other Septuagint passages widely seen as favorable to Christianity. We know this not because we know the contents of his version (which has been lost)190 but because it was produced under the discipleship of Akiba — first to officially declare that the Deuterocanonical books lack that sacred quality that would “defile the hands.” “Akiba was the one who definitely fixed the canon of the Old Testament books,” according to Jewish Encyclopedia, and “he protested strongly against the canonicity of certain of the Apocrypha, Ecclesiasticus, for instance.”191 This rejection doesn’t seem to have been driven by any theological objections to the contents of the Deuterocanon, for the book of Ecclesiasticus (also known as Ben Sira — the only one Akiba mentions by name) does not contain anything particularly preferential to the Christian position. Books such as Esther and the Song of Songs, on the other hand, about which there had been serious debate within Judaism based on content, Akiba welcomed without hesitation. “To the same motive underlying his antagonism to the Apocrypha,” writes Simon, “namely, the desire to disarm Christians — especially Jewish Christians — who drew their ‘proofs’ from the Apocrypha, must also be attributed his wish to emancipate the Jews of the Dispersion from the domination of the Septuagint, the errors and inaccuracies in which frequently distorted the true meaning of Scripture, and were even used as arguments against the Jews by the Christians.”192 Akiba, in other words, banned them solely because a plausible case could be made for doing so — and because of their close association with the Greek Bible he despised.
Afterward, Akiba and the other Jamnia rabbis began the long process that culminated in the creation of what is known today as the Masoretic Text.193 Aquila, as we’ve noted, appears to have used some unknown combination of “not the Septuagint” texts for the creation of his Greek version, as did other early Jewish translators such as Theodotion and Symmachus the Ebionite.194 One of these texts seems to have become the skeleton around which the Masoretes (a group of later Hebrew scholars working during the early medieval period) developed the single authoritative Hebrew text for Rabbinic Judaism.195 The Dead Sea Scrolls (dating, once again, from the last two centuries B.C. and the first century A.D.) fully demonstrate the fact that early Hebrew Bibles showed far less uniformity of text than Rabbi Akiba preferred. Once the Jamnia rabbis exerted their hegemony, however, the push was on to create a single, “perfect” text sanctified down to the very letter. The final result, for the movement that became, by the late 200s or so, simply “Judaism,” is the Masoretic Text — the basis not only for the Leningrad Codex we cited earlier but, incidentally, for the beloved King James Bible of English Protestantism.
Many of the early apologists believed that Jewish Bible custodians had done nefarious things to the Scriptures during their custodianship. Justin himself, for instance, charges them not only with altering the “virgin/young woman” prophecy in Isaiah 7, but also with expunging other important messianic prophecies from the books of Jeremiah, Ezra, and the Psalms. “Not all of these,” as Gary Michuta notes, “have been borne out by scholarship.” A key to understanding this problem occurs in the following passage from the Trypho dialogue: “I certainly do not trust your teachers,” writes Justin, “when they refuse to admit that the translation of the Scriptures made by the seventy elders at the court of King Ptolemy of Egypt is a correct one, but attempt to make their own translation . . . for whenever there arises in the Scriptures an evident contradiction of their silly and conceited doctrine, your teachers boldy affirm that it was not so written in the original text.” That phrase “attempt to make their own translation” is almost certainly a reference to the recently debuted work of Aquila that, as a matter of fact, really did represent an effort to call the accuracy of the Septuagint into question, but which was not, however, simply a fabrication. One of Justin’s charges in particular is very illuminating in this regard: “Furthermore, from a verse of the ninety-fifth Psalm of David they have left out the short phrase, from the tree. For they have changed the verse, Say to the Gentiles: The Lord has reigned from the tree, to Say to the Gentiles: The Lord has reigned” (73). While even Trypho himself cannot account for this difference, it turns out that the main Coptic (or Egyptian) version of the Septuagint (along with two early Greek manuscripts) with which neither he nor Justin was familiar had contained “from the tree” all along — simply another textual variation, in other words.
This illustrates that the chaos created by the failed and bloody revolts made it difficult, if not impossible, for the early Christians to ascertain precisely what constituted normative rabbinical Scripture and what did not. In other words, they knew that a change had occurred, but they were not sure what precisely had changed. This may also explain the repeated attempts by Christians to construct lists of what the Jews accept as Scripture, as well as the fact that Christians continued to cite the Deuterocanon against the Jews for hundreds of years after the Second Revolt.196
These rabbinical changes, in other words, were a good deal less sinister than many suspected — though they certainly do reflect Jamnia’s usual preference for shorter texts less traditionally associated with Christianity and the Diaspora.
This brings up a final, very important point about this second new canon, the canon of Akiba and Aquila: the fact, specifically, that theirs was not really “the Jewish canon” or even the canon of “most Jews” in the years to come. The truth is far less straightforward. Akiba was not speaking for all Jews, not even in his own day; and he offered his canon in competition to many other canons, equally Jewish. The Sadducees, the Essenes, and the Jews of the Diaspora — as well as their Semitic cousins, the Samaritans — all used different Bible texts before the revolts; and the Falashas (or Ethiopian Jews) still use a canon containing the Deuterocanonical books to this very day. Most of the Christians (at least for the first hundred years or so) were fully Jewish as well; and their loose, unofficial canon contained not only the Deuterocanonicals but at least twenty already agreed-upon New Testament books as well — all of which had been written by Jews. No, the Jamnia movement was a self-appointed “Committee of Public Safety” that arose during a military crisis and began claiming to speak for all Jews. In reality, they spoke only for a remnant of the Palestinian Pharisees, through the mouthpiece of a demonstrably false prophet, and for those Jews most obstinately opposed to Jesus.
In charity, it seems important to pause and make ourselves even clearer here. The curses that Jesus prophesied against Jerusalem were not curses against the Jewish people — upon mere Semitic ancestry — for then they would have fallen upon the Twelve Apostles as well, upon the Diaspora, and upon the predominant portion of early Christianity. Nor were they curses, except in a manner of speaking, upon the Hebrew nation — for Jesus is, eternally, the King and Head of that nation, to which eternal promises have been made. Much less did our loving Savior (the Hebrew Messiah, mind you) wish to call down destruction upon the ordinary Jewish people of our day; most of whom are, we may assume, following the traditional ways of their families in good faith, without ever having been seriously confronted with the claims of Christ. To all of these, our attitude as Christians must be that of St. Paul:
My conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen by race. They are Israelites, and to them belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ. God who is over all be blessed forever. Amen. (Rom. 9:1–5)
No, these were curses upon a particular party within the nation, upon a mind-set; curses, that is, upon the attempt to choose Barabbas permanently and to create a new, custom version of the old faith modified to suit his needs. It was an attempt to keep a regent on the throne after the real king has returned. Like Prince John in the Robin Hood legends, the Pharisees sat on the Lionheart’s throne, became accustomed to its privileges, and wished never to give it up. As we’ve seen, this new system was not even faithful to its previous, pre-Jesus forebears. Second-century Christianity wasn’t competing against first-century Judaism; it was competing against a second-century takeover of Judaism — which differs from first-century Hebrew religion nearly as much as Christianity does. In fact, both Christianity and Talmudism are new during the interregnum period; and neither can be simply identified with the older form of Hebrew faith and practice.197 When the Jewish Christians and the many millions of Dispersed who joined them made their appeal to non-Christian Israel, it was an appeal “not to be converted to an alien worship, but to come to a correct view of their own religion, of their own history and mission.”198
The Canon of St. Justin Martyr
Suspicions about a Great Apostasy die pretty hard.
A group, for instance, calling themselves the Red Letter Christians has sprung up in our time, probably in reaction to the bedlam of religious voices clamoring for attention via social media and such in today’s intensely pluralistic culture. These bewildered souls, grown so profoundly cynical as to desire nourishment, as the old restaurant signs used to brag, “untouched by human hands,” have declared themselves willing to read only the actual words of Christ (those printed in red ink in certain modern editions of the New Testament) and not the opinions of any merely human commentators such as the Apostles. And while this urge does express a touching unconscious fidelity to certain Catholic dogmas concerning the infalliblity of Jesus, it comes up pretty short as a piece of coherent thought. There were, after all, no tape recorders or video cameras present during our Savior’s earthly ministry; no independent method, that is, for knowing what Jesus said and what He didn’t say. The same authors who wrote the words now printed in red wrote the rest of the Gospels as well; and if we can’t trust the Apostles not to lie elsewhere in the New Testament, we can’t trust them to tell us the truth about what the Savior said either. The entire package is apostolic, in other words, and believed, whether we like it or not, on the authority of the Apostles alone. Since Jesus wrote no books of His own, there is simply no other way to receive His doctrine but by means of the ambassadors He chose. Thus, if the Apostles are untrustworthy, none of us can know the saving message and we are still in our sins.
As we’ve seen, the systems of both Marcion and the Judaizers were hopelessly dependent on such nonsense. “The Apostles went wrong, their tradition is worthless” became almost their first principle. The necessity of resorting to such a desperate expedient demonstrates, in its own way, where the power of canon making really resides and by what channel God chose to reveal it. “If the Lord Jesus Christ sent the Apostles to preach,” writes Tertullian, “no others ought to be received except those appointed by Christ: ‘For no one knows the Father except the Son, and him to whom the Son gives a revelation’ [Matt. 11:27]. Nor does it seem that the Son has given revelation to any others than the Apostles, whom He sent forth to preach what He had revealed to them.”199 And the “contents page” of the Christian Bible — both Old and New Testaments — is a part, as we shall see, of that tradition that comes down from the Apostles.
That tradition was, however, in Justin’s day, still a little out of focus. As we noted at the beginning of this inquiry, even the jars in some Catholic churches still contained books that most of today’s believers wouldn’t recognize and lacked others that we now know to have been divinely inspired. This condition reflects the fact that the jars hadn’t really been filled deliberately, as a conscious effort to produce modern Bibles; the books had, rather, accumulated almost unconsciously in a worldwide network of churches still relying mainly, at this early date, on the spoken word rather than the written.
The world of that day could not be reached through the medium of letters. Since the invention of printing, and the general diffusion of literature, ideas may be rapidly spread by the press; but the message of Christ was given to man before such means existed for the communication of thought. Moreover, the message of Christ was for the poor and the illiterate, as well as for the savant; for busy toilers who had not time nor philosophical depth to draw the Message from the written instrument. . . . Men of those days received the doctrine of Christ not from books, but by the living word of preaching; they handed it down to others in the same manner in which they had received it. But yet there is evidence that when one of the Books of the New Testament did come into existence, it was recognized as the word of God. Those who received it did not make an analysis of the concept of inspiration to canonize it. It came from the men who had brought them the message of peace; it embodied what they had received from those who preached Christ to them, and this was its perfect warrant. Thus the Books of the New Law first came into the churches as individual instruments; then as groups; and, lastly, a complete list was formed by communication between the churches.200
This process was greatly accelerated by the appearance of the rival canons of Aquila and Marcion, both of which had been deliberately created to undermine and cast doubt upon the loose collection venerated in the Church. What became all too apparent once these false canons were published was the need to mount some final effort to draw up the true list: to open all of the Church’s jars, evaluate their contents, compare the differences across geographical boundaries, then collate the results into one universal set of books that could be publicly sanctioned by her officers. And who was better placed to begin this process than Justin of Neapolis? Whose curiosity on the subject had been more piqued? Who had tangled longer with the poisonous pair from Pontus? And who better to become a canon maker himself — under the guidance and oversight of the successors of the Apostles — than the man who had so carefully exposed the common error that motivated the misdeeds of the other two?
Though they have perhaps been little noticed thus far, there are good reasons to believe that canon making in this sense — of helping the universal Church to better know her own mind on the subject — was another important factor behind Justin’s move from Ephesus to Rome. While the Ephesian church was, as we have seen, second to very few others in the apostolic tradition department, she was, in the mind of the early Christians, second to at least this one. “Come now,” writes Tertullian, a few decades later,
If you would indulge a better curiosity in the business of your salvation, run through the apostolic Churches in which the very thrones of the Apostles remain still in place; in which their own authentic writings are read, giving sound to the voice and recalling the faces of each. Achaia is near you, so you have Corinth. If you are not far from Macedonia, you have Philippi. If you can cross into Asia, you have Ephesus. But if you are near to Italy, you have Rome, whence also our authority derives.201
Irenaeus spells out the principle even more explicitly:
Since it would be too long to enumerate in such a volume as this the successions of all the Churches, we shall confound all those who, in whatever manner, whether through self-satisfaction or vainglory, or through blindness and wicked opinion, assemble other than where it is proper, by pointing out here the successions of the bishops of the greatest and most ancient Church known to all, founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious Apostles, Peter and Paul, that Church which has the tradition and the faith which comes down to us after having been announced to men by the Apostles. For with this Church, because of its superior origin, all Churches must agree, that is, all the faithful in the whole world; and it is in her that the faithful everywhere have maintained the Apostolic tradition.202
Though biographical details are mighty sparse, Justin really can be shown to have taken an interest in textual and canon-related questions during his twenty-odd years at Rome. Both of his surviving works, for instance, show attempts on his part to account for and to harmonize the wording of parallel Gospel sayings that are phrased differently in each of the three Synoptics. Several scholars believe these efforts led Justin to create some kind of concordance that eventually grew into his pupil Tatian’s famous Diatessaron.203 Fascinating, too, is a factoid preserved by the seventh-century scholar Sophronius, to the effect that Justin paid particular attention to St. John’s Apocalypse, or the book of Revelation — to such an extent that he actually undertook a “translation” or critical edition of it himself, an unfinished project that retained enough interest after his death to have been brought to completion by Irenaeus.204 (This is an important topic for which we will have a special need to return in just a moment). Justin is also our earliest witness to the fact that both Testaments were in use at Rome in the mid-second century A.D.; his First Apology (ca. 155) records the fact that lectors read aloud from both “the memoirs of the Apostles” and “the writings of the Prophets” at every Eucharistic celebration. This solemn liturgical linkage, of course, is the best possible proof that the Roman church saw no insurmountable incompatibility between the pre-existing Hebrew Bible and the new evangelical writings then being collected. It also shows how intimately these two topics are bound together: in and of itself, acceptance of the Catholic canon implies acceptance of her teaching about the cessation of the Second Law — which is also why the two most prominent deniers of that teaching were makers of faulty canons as well. The Roman canon is correct because it is apostolic and because it rests in the apostolic understanding of trans-testamental unity.
It hardly seems necessary to say at this point that the Old Testament that Justin found in use at Rome was the Septuagint version. Like all of the ante-Nicene Fathers — indeed, like the New Testament writers themselves — Justin’s many Old Testament quotes come almost exclusively from the Greek translation made centuries earlier by the Seventy. Also noteworthy: Polycarp, Hermas, Ignatius, and Irenaeus all quote from its Deuterocanonical books without making any distinctions — indeed, these quotes are often surrounded on all sides with passages from Isaiah, Paul, and Peter. Tertullian, Hippolytus, and Clement of Alexandria all explicitly refer to these books as “Scripture” and sometimes introduce quotations from them with the solemn formula “It is written . . .” That this usage was not only widespread in the Church but definitely that of the second-century church at Rome is proved out in a uniquely unequivocal way. St. Clement of Rome was bishop of that city around the turn of that century, only the third in succession to St. Peter. No better witness to accepted practices there could possibly be found. And Clement not only employs Septuagint language throughout his Epistle to the Corinthians; he also quotes from the Deuterocanonical books at least three times and uses the longer Septuagint version of Esther as well.205
There is no trace in writing or tradition of any formal decision rendered by Jesus Christ or his Apostles concerning the Canon of the Old Testament. However, their use of the Alexandrian text of Scripture is equivalent to an express decree. It were incompatible with the character of the teachers of mankind and organizers of the Church, to make use of a collection of Scripture in which profane and inspired books were commingled. . . . The [Latin] translation known as the Vetus Itala, which dates back to the second century of the Christian era, had all the deuterocanonical works, and this was certainly made from the Alexandrian collection. The great codices of the Vatican and Mt. Sinai, going back probably to the fourth century, contain these works. The early Fathers were as conversant with the deuterocanonical works as with the rest of Holy Scripture. The subjects of the art of the Catacombs are largely taken from the deuterocanonical works. Such early and universal approbation could not be effected, had not these books been delivered to the Christian Church by the Old Covenant through the medium of the Greek. . . . St. Irenaeus’ authority is explicit in favor of our thesis. “The Apostles, being older than all these, [Aquila and the other Greek interpreters] are in accord with the aforesaid translation, and the translation corresponds with the tradition of the Apostles. For Peter and John and Matthew and Paul and the others and their followers announced the prophetic things according to the Septuagint.”206
As for the New Testament books Justin found in use at Rome . . . well, we’re in luck there as well. The oldest surviving list of Christian books in use at any church happens to be the famous Muratorian Fragment, discovered at the Ambrosian Library in Milan by the eighteenth-century historian Ludovico Muratori. Dating, probably, from the decade following Justin’s death (it describes the pontificate of Pius I — who died in 157 — as a recent event) the document enumerates the list of New Testament books read at Rome during the very period we are describing. The beginning of the fragment is missing. It opens with the last few words of a brief description of the Second Gospel, continuing on to short notices of the third and fourth as well, and in the traditional “Mark, Luke, and John” order — leaving us little doubt that Matthew’s Gospel was first on the list in the complete document.207 The Acts of the Apostles comes next, followed by thirteen of St. Paul’s epistles (minus, that is, the Epistle to the Hebrews). The compiler pauses briefly to reject two pseudo-Pauline letters circulating at the time (ostensibly addressed to the Alexandrians and the Laodiceans), noting that he considers them to have been “forged in Paul’s name to [further] the heresy of Marcion.” The Epistle of Jude, however, is “counted in the Catholic Church,” along with two epistles “bearing the name of John” (most scholars believe 2 and 3 John were grouped together here as one), which John the fragment definitely identifies as the author of the fourth Gospel. The book of Revelation is included as well, along with a strong implication that it, too, was written by St. John the Apostle. The Muratorian Fragment, then, contains all the books of the modern Christian New Testament except the Epistle of St. James, the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the two epistles of St. Peter — none of which are mentioned. Three books that are, oddly, mentioned instead are the book of Wisdom (approved of here, even though it’s part of the Old Testament), the second-century Shepherd of Hermas, and The Apocalypse of Peter. These last two were being used in Rome, according to the Muratorian chronicler, but had not been accepted for liturgical reading during the Eucharistic service.
These gaps and curiosities in the Roman list bring us back to that process of “formation by communication between the churches.” Yes, Rome’s list was authoritative, once finally published; but Rome, at this point, had not yet spoken. What we see here was not yet enjoined upon the faithful as the de fide voice of the universal Church. Notice, for instance, that the chronicler does not explicitly rule out James, Hebrews, and 1 and 2 Peter — nor does he explicitly canonize The Shepherd or The Apocalypse of Peter. His list has great traditionary value as evidence for the ancient customs of Rome, but the final canon was still a work in progress. This preliminary, exploratory quality is illustrated by one of those very curiosities on the list: namely, the fact that Hermas’s Shepherd gets a provisional nod in the Fragment, while the great Epistle of St. James (cited eight times in The Shepherd!) is still standing by the door.
James and Hebrews enjoyed a higher standing in the East, while The Shepherd and the book of Revelation were there looked on askance. So while the judgment of Rome was already recognized as decisive, Rome drew up her final judgment only after making those geographical comparisons we mentioned. If the whole counsel of the Church was to be considered, if all of the Twelve had, as we believe, deposited traditions in the churches they founded, then all of the apostolic churches needed to make their voices heard on this matter — which would have taken some time in those days, involving difficult surveys not much different from an archaeological expedition. And though, as the Pontifical Biblical Commission puts it, “we are lacking information on the procedure adopted and the reasons given for the inclusion of this [book] or that . . . it is possible, nevertheless, to trace in a general way the evolution of the canon in the Church, both in the East and in the West.”208 The Epistle to the Hebrews, for example, turned up in the ancient Peshitta, the aforementioned Bible in Syriac which may have originated at Antioch, St. Peter’s original see. Origen will soon be discovered quoting The Epistle of St. James as Scripture in Alexandria of Egypt. Irenaeus, an Eastern Father working as a missionary in the West, likes The Shepherd and considers it to be Scripture. Codex Vaticanus, on the other hand, is missing the book of Revelation, while Codex Alexandrinus includes it.
St. Augustine illuminates the process of comparing such contradictory witnesses in this passage from his City of God:
Now, in regard to the canonical Scriptures, [the interpreter of sacred writings] must follow the judgment of the greater number of catholic churches; and among these, of course, a high place must be given to such as have been thought worthy to be the seat of an apostle and to receive epistles. Accordingly, among the canonical Scriptures he will judge according to the following standard: to prefer those that are received by all the catholic churches to those which some do not receive. Among those, again, which are not received by all, he will prefer such as have the sanction of the greater number and those of greater authority, to such as are held by the smaller number and those of less authority. If, however, he shall find that some books are held by the greater number of churches, and others by the churches of greater authority (though this is not a very likely thing to happen), I think that in such a case the authority on the two sides is to be looked upon as equal.209
This, too, is where Justin’s nearly overlooked edition of the book of Revelation comes in. For a man who had been so often challenged by heretics over the Scriptures he accepted, Justin’s special interest in this much contested book would appear to indicate an inquiry on his part into its canonical status. Revelation is somewhat similar in literary form to The Shepherd of Hermas, but also to a great many other, much shakier pieces of early Christian apocalypse. The biblical book seems to have picked up a little “guilt by association” on account of this, since so many of these others were associated with wildly heretical “End Times” groups of various stripes. The fact that Justin’s edition of Revelation was thought valuable enough to be completed by another Father after his death may signal a positive verdict for the book on their combined parts — a judgment that may well have helped clarify the issue for the Roman leadership.
It certainly does seem a little odd to us today that the Church could have gotten along for so many years (one-sixth of all Church history!) with just an approximate canon — a canon more or less correct, an unofficial canon up to that point. It helps to remember, however, that the Church was much less book-dependent all around in those days. This was, after all, a period when literacy — the ability to read any book, in any language — was a skill reserved almost entirely to the highly educated.
Nevertheless, this period of uncertainty did finally come to an end. By the late fourth century, when Constantine had at last made the empire safe for Christianity, conditions became stable enough to bring the worldwide survey of churches to completion. A series of Church councils began to make rulings on the issue, the first two of which — the Councils of Hippo and of Carthage — subpoenaed St. Augustine himself as their chief witness. “At the beginning of the fifth century, councils adopted his position in drawing up the Old Testament canon. Although these councils were regional, the unanimity expressed in their lists represents Church usage in the West.”210 The sixth-century Gelasian Decree is thought to contain the rulings of these North African Councils as they were promulgated by Pope Damasus I (bishop of Rome from 366 to 384):
Now indeed we must treat of the divine Scriptures, what the universal Catholic Church accepts and what she ought to shun. The order of the Old Testament begins here: Genesis, one book; Exodus, one book; Leviticus, one book; Numbers, one book; Deuteronomy, one book; Joshua Nave, one book; Judges, one book; Ruth, one book; Kings, four books [i.e., 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings]; Paralipomenon [Chronicles], two books;211 Psalms, one book; Solomon, three books: Proverbs, one book; Ecclesiastes, one book; Canticle of Canticles, one book; likewise Wisdom, one book; Ecclesiasticus [Sirach], one book. Likewise is the order of the Prophets: Isaias one book, Jeremias one book . . . Lamentations, Ezechiel one book, Daniel one book, Osee . . . Nahum . . . Habacuc . . . Sophonias . . . Aggeus . . . Zacharias . . . Malachias. . . . Likewise the order of the historical [books]: Job, one book; Tobit, one book; Esdras, two books; Esther, one book; Judith, one book; Maccabees, two books.” The Council of Carthage ruled on the books of the Christian covenant as well: “Of the New Testament: four books of the Gospels, one book of the Acts of the Apostles, thirteen Epistles of the Apostle Paul, one epistle of the same [writer] to the Hebrews, two Epistles of the Apostle Peter, three of John, one of James, one of Jude, one book of the Apocalypse of John.”
Both of these lists are identical to the contents of our Catholic Bibles today — the first such list in history.
“There remains then one means, and one means only, to teach man not only the truths of Scripture, but also the Scripture of truths. This means is the voice of God through the Church.”212 The Carthage decrees were an important milestone, to be sure — but not to be misunderstood. Pope Damasus announced the conclusion of an inquiry, not the product of an act of creation. No man, not even the successor of Peter, can make a merely human book into the Word of God, any more than any man can rob a book of divine inspiration that it received while being written. What the Church really did was to identify which books had received such inspiration and which books had not — and she did it by uncovering the hidden, sometimes overgrown historical roots of those books that made the final cut. In one very important sense, Damasus was simply rubber-stamping the pre-existing canon he inherited at the diocese of which he was ordained bishop — which just happens to have been “the greatest and most ancient Church known to all, founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious Apostles, Peter and Paul, that Church which has the tradition and the faith which comes down to us after having been announced to men by the Apostles.” As such, it became, upon the word of Damasus, the canon of the Catholic Church — a biblical contents page, rooted in Sacred Tradition, which can be relied upon, for the first time, to be as fully infallible as the rest of the Sacred Volume in which it is printed.
In a very real sense, this third canon might also be called the canon of St. Justin the Martyr. His battle for the Bible, circa A.D. 150, was a battle for Sacred Tradition in general — but more specifically, for the Church’s earliest traditions about the end of the Second Mosaic Legislation. Had Peter been right to call both Moses and Paul the authors of “Scripture”? Or had the apostolic council of A.D. 49 taught error on this score and allowed the truth as it is in Christ Jesus to be lost? When Justin became a conduit for the interpretive traditions of both Ephesus and Rome, he concentrated them into a weapon against the two most dangerous heresies of his era — both of which had exactly the same practical upshot: a ban on the emerging two-Testament Christian Bible. His, in other words, was the steadying hand on the tiller at just the right historical moment, guiding the Barque of Peter safely between the rocky shoals that had wrecked Aquila, on the one side, and Marcion on the other. When the boat passed through at last to open water, the Christian Bible had been born.
It’s true that Justin’s central role in this drama has not been as widely recognized as one might expect. But then this entire patristic tradition concerning the cessation of the deuterosis has been similarly eclipsed. In addition to the second-century Fathers we’ve cited repeatedly, Origen, Eusebius, Augustine, Athanasius, Basil, Gregory Nazinazus, Chrysostom, Theodoret, Aphrahat, Ephrem, and Gregory the Great all recapitulate at least some aspect of Justin’s anti-deuterosis apologetic. “What remains a mystery,” writes Barber, “is how this explanation of the ceremonial laws, so widely attested in Christian tradition, has become obscure in our own day.”213 Whatever it was that wiped away this near-consensus in early theology seems to have eroded the memory of Justin’s decisive contribution as well.214 These other Fathers knew better. They treat him as a kind of patriarch in his era, by far the most important Christian of his century. And above and beyond any of the speculations we have explored together here, there remains the unquestioned fact that Justin was the first Christian writer outside the pages of the New Testament to address trans-testamental continuity issues — period. Even the bare-bones explanation most laymen carry around today — that Moses’ Law has been “fulfilled” somehow by Christ, but that the Ten Commandments are still valid enough to put on a yard sign anyway — is but a radically truncated trace of Justin’s ancient understanding. For this work alone, he rates his credit for having won the Scripture wars.
What of the jury’s verdict? What did the Hellenized Jews of the Dispersion finally decide? More and more, even very reluctant historians are beginning to concede that they decided, almost en masse, for Christ and the canon of St. Justin. In assessing, for instance, the state of Judaism after Bar Kokhba, Marcel Simon laments, “We lack any Hellenistic writings, for all trace of them disappears after the second century.” “Archaeological evidence,” according to (then agnostic) sociologist Rodney Stark, “shows that the early Christian churches outside Palestine were concentrated in Jewish sections of the cities. . . . Moreover, the diasporan Jews were in the right places to provide the needed supply of converts — in the cities, and especially in the cities of Asia Minor and North Africa. For it is here that we find not only the first churches, but, during the first four centuries, the most vigorous Christian communities.”
“The process of disengagement,” Simon continues,
after which Judaism no longer counted as a rival to the Church, was not completed all at once. Between the moment when the first signs of the movement became evident, and the moment when it might be considered complete, there was a period of time, a transition period, which saw the passing of Hellenistic Judaism and the establishment of Talmudic rabbinism. . . . Judaism for its part, survived, though with a changed character. Judaism of the Alexandrian type, with its Hellenistic and universalistic leanings, disappears, and it is round the Talmud that the regrouping of the spiritual forces of Israel takes place. . . . [By the beginning of the third century,] Pharisaism and Judaism were practically synonymous.215
The Pharisees had literally stopped their ears against the preaching of St. Stephen (Acts 7:57). Why were these Diasporan Jews so ready to give Christianity the fair hearing that other Jews had refused? One vital factor, surely, must have been the fact that the Apostles and company came with the Septuagint Bible in hand — the Bible they loved and which they had created, and which they would not have been willing to overthrow on the word of one unreconstructed Pharisee, the self-styled Nasi of Jamnia.
We’ve called Justin an egghead and a theology nerd, which may have given some readers the impression that he could have been an idle dilettante with lots of time on his hands for the building of castles in the air. If so, it’s an impression that needs correcting posthaste. Justin proved the quality of his faith at last by sacrifice on the battlefield. When a new persecution of Christians broke out around 161 — that, ironically, of the “Good Emperors,” the Antonines — Justin made a fearless appeal to Marcus Aurelius, which is preserved for us to this day in the works known as his First and Second Apologies. It was to no avail. Justin and most of his students were arrested and haled before the bar of Marcus’s justice. There, where the prefect Rusticus demanded a short summary of their beliefs, Justin took one last opportunity to stand up for the whole Bible, whose two Testaments together teach us salvation:
We worship the God of the Christians, whom we reckon to be one from the beginning, the maker and fashioner of the whole creation, visible and invisible; and the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who had also been preached beforehand by the prophets as about to be present with the race of men, the herald of salvation and teacher of good disciples. And I, being a man, think that what I can say is insignificant in comparison with His boundless divinity, acknowledging a certain prophetic power, since it was prophesied concerning Him of whom now I say that He is the Son of God. For I know that of old the prophets foretold His appearance among men.216
Finally, the saint who, more than any other, saved philosophy for the Church, was killed, along with his companions, by one of the most famous and revered philosophers of all time — one of the bitterest ironies of history. At last, Justin Martyr had earned his unofficial surname — and also “the crown of life which God has promised to those who love him” (James 1:12).
The great Golden Chrysalis opened at about the same time; the husk of it fell away and was no more. The years of Our Lord were upon the world. The days of vengeance were now passed, the gate of the Gentiles fully open, the time of decision for Israel as a whole came to a (for the most part happy!) conclusion. Covenants based on ethnicity were passed away forever, not the victory of uncircumcision over circumcision (“Both of these,” as Ignatius of Antioch puts it, “unless they speak of Jesus Christ, are to me tombstones and sepulchers of the dead”217) but the victory of God’s grace over all human hearts. The test results came back from the lab and were published abroad with rejoicing: yes, undoubtedly, this New Thing, this Katholike Ekklesia, this universal Home for humanity, had been a butterfly all along, even while she was a caterpillar.
174 Jaroslav Pelikan, Whose Bible Is It?: A History of the Scriptures through the Ages (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 93.
175 Other anti-Marcion writers whose dependence on Justin can be demonstrated include Tatian, Rhodon, and Hippolytus of Rome.
176 Barber, “The Yoke of Servitude,” 90.
177 Pelikan, Whose Bible Is It?, 69.
178 Michael Avi-Yonah, The Jews under Roman and Byzantine Rule (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1984), 143.
179 Eusebius, Proof of the Gospel, trans. W. J. Ferrar (New York: Macmillan, 1920), 35.
180 “After 135 it was clear the apocalyptic had had its day. The day of the visionaries was over; their place was taken by the rabbis, who from now on were to fill the office of spiritual guide. . . . Jewish messianism was abstracted and spiritualized, and rabbinical political thought became deeply cautious and conservative.” Simon, Verus Israel, 36. “The deeply ambivalent rabbinical position regarding Messianism, as expressed most famously in Maimonides’ ‘Epistle to Yemen,’ would seem to have its origins in the attempt to deal with the trauma of a failed Messianic uprising.” Abraham S. Halkin, notes on Maimonides’ Epistle to Yemen, trans. Boaz Cohen (New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1952).
181 Simon, Verus Israel, 374.
182 Jewish Encyclopedia, s.v. “Akiba ben Joseph.”
183 Ibid.
184 It might also be mentioned that these supposedly Mosaic oral laws have left no trace at all within the many hundreds of Dead Sea Scrolls dating from before the exile.
185 Several of these amount to little more than nullifications of the written Torah, the very thing against which the whole Jamnia movement was supposedly reacting. Some examples: the Midrash overruled the Torah on the necessity of limiting social intercourse with menstruating women, simply because it “contradicts” the spirit of the Torah — the dignity of all Jews. Eating with Samaritans was now allowed as well, along with intermarriage between Jews and Samaritans. Many of the rules of Kil’ayim (mixing of agricultural products) were overthrown also.
186 This appearance became so glaring in later years that many shaky theories were put forward to shore it up. Some rabbis began teaching that not only the Torah but the complete Talmud had been revealed to Moses at Sinai and that he only concealed it “so that Israel would continue to be necessary as a conduit of tradition” (Simon, Verus Israel, 188).
187 “Interestingly, the use of this word [deuterosis] seems directed at undermining not only the ceremonial laws of Scripture but also the halakah, that is, the rulings of rabbinic tradition. According to Epiphanius, the word deuterōseis was used by the Jews to refer to the “traditions of the elders.” . . . Furthermore, the nominal form, deuterōtai, appears related to Tannaim, which just so happens to be the precise term used for the rabbis whose teachings are found in the Mishnah. . . . Thus the use of deuterosis for the laws added because of Israel’s sin Didascalia is therefore likely an attempt to signal the non-binding nature of the teaching of the rabbis upon Christians, though clearly in the work its meaning is primarily the ceremonial precepts given to Israel as recorded in Scripture.” Barber, “The Yoke of Servitude,” 28.
188 Pelikan, Whose Bible Is It?, 184.
189 Jewish Encyclopedia, s.v. “Akiba ben Joseph.”
190 “Actual specimens [of Aquila’s translation] exist only in (a) quotations by other ancient writers, (b) marginal notes in a handful of manuscripts, and (c) a very few fragments of copies of the Hexapla.” Jobes and Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint, 142.
191 Jewish Encyclopedia, s.v. “Akiba ben Joseph.”
192 Ibid.
193 Even the rabbinical rejection of the Deuteros does not seem to have been accomplished without much debate and hesitation. The Talmud itself, for instance, includes Sirach amongst the Ketuvim in a passage dating from the fourth century, explicitly identifying it as Scripture.
194 Not entirely independent, however — Aquila’s Bible does reflect some input from the LXX, or perhaps its underlying text.
195 The majority of the scrolls at Qumran show strong similarities to the Masoretic Text, but only very recently has an exact match been found. New computer-assisted radiography techniques have shown that the Ein-Gedi Scroll — a previously unreadable copy of the book of Leviticus dating from about A.D. 300 — matches the Masoretic Text word for word.
196 Gary Michuta, Why Catholic Bibles Are Bigger (Port Huron, MI: Grotto Press, 2007), 73.
197 We might note here that both terms — “Judaism” and “Christianity” — were recent inventions at the time of our story. The word “Judaism” appears to have been coined during the age of the Maccabees (first century B.C.); while the letters of Ignatius contain the earliest surviving use of “Christianity,” dating from about A.D. 107.
198 Simon, Verus Israel, 146.
199 Tertullian, Prescription against the Heretics 21.
200 Andrew Edward Breen, A General and Critical Introduction to the Study of Holy Scripture (Rochester, NY: John H. Smith, 1897), 282, 287.
201 Tertullian, Prescription against the Heretics 20, 4–7, in The Faith of the Early Fathers 1:120.
202 Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3, 3.
203 St. Jerome expresses the opinion that the earliest work on the Diatessaron was done by Justin and that Tatian merely brought it to completion after his master was martyred.
204 Sophronius, Explanation of the Holy Gospel according to John (House Springs, MO: Chrysostom Press, 2007), 2–3. Sophronius calls Justin’s edition a “translation,” which is very odd, since St. John’s Apocalypse was written in quite ordinary Greek — probably Justin’s native language. This may mean that the version Justin encountered at Rome was an early Latin rendering produced in the East — an import, in other words — of a book still little known in Western parts.
205 “There are over 30 instances where the NT quotes LXX over and against a different reading in the MT. Several of these quotations contains differences that are theologically important or form an integral part of the author’s argument.” Michuta, The Case for the Deuterocanon, 93.
206 Breen, General and Critical Introduction, 28.
207 “Most of the non-canonical Gospels are based on the Four Gospels. They ‘fill in’ supposedly missing material. Thus they can be shown to be later than (because dependent on) the Four Gospels.” Jimmy Akin, A Daily Defense (San Diego, CA: Catholic Answers), 138.
208 Pontifical Biblical Commission, The Jewish People and their Scriptures in the Christian Bible.
209 Augustine, City of God 2, 8, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st series, vol. 2, City of God, Christian Doctrine, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. Marcus Dods (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature, 1887), 194.
210 Pontifical Biblical Commission, The Jewish People and their Scriptures in the Christian Bible.
211 These unfamiliar Greek names for otherwise familiar books are another legacy from the Septuagint version.
212 Breen, General and Critical Introduction, 44.
213 Barber, “The Yoke of Servitude,” 67.
214 The scarcity of his literary remains may be the chief factor here. Eusebius lists not only the three authentic Justin documents we know today, but at least eight others as well (with titles such as “On the Divine Monarchy,” “The Psalmist,” and “A Discourse to the Greeks”) — yet also records the fact that several of these had been lost already by the early fourth century.
215 Simon, Verus Israel, 284.
216 The Martyrdom of St. Justin, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, 1:276.
217 Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Philadelphians 6, 1; 9, 1, in Ancient Christian Writers, vol. 1, The Epistles of St. Clement of Rome and St. Ignatius of Antioch, trans. James A. Kleist (New York: Paulist Press, 1996), 87.