Introduction
About one hundred years after the founding of the Christian Church, a battle began for the Bible — a “custody battle,” so to speak, over its guardianship, its contents, its proper role in our lives, over its very right to be called a Christian book. The story of that conflict is one of the most interesting, most essential, and yet little remembered sagas in the chronicles of our holy faith. In fact, the questions at stake were so fundamental that it often takes a moment for modern readers to realize they were ever a matter of dispute. The outcome, too, was so foundational to our history that there is scarcely any part of our Christian lives that isn’t touched by the result daily. This being the case, I feel that it’s a story that ought to be better known. In fact, for an incorrigible bookworm like me, it will be a genuine pleasure to reintroduce the world to one of those rare, happy occasions when scholars and sages — even a mere lay “theology nerd” such as St. Justin — turned the course of future events as completely as any general or revolutionary might.
This great battle happened so early on, mind you, that “the Bible” still meant jars full of antique scrolls, some written in Hebrew and some in Greek, read aloud (in a world without printing) from all the pulpits of Christianity at every single worship service. The Bible, as most believers realize, did not fall from heaven complete on golden tablets; nor was it composed by any single prophet or holy man at any one time or place. The jars filled up slowly, over more than a millennium, with scrolls composed by scores of authors working within several distinct literary genres in widely varied historical circumstances. Aye, but there’s the rub: not every church in Christendom had exactly the same set of scrolls in its jars; nor, for that matter, did every Jewish synagogue — where the oral reading of Scripture had likewise always been part of the regular liturgy and from which the Church inherited the practice.1 The party of the Sadducees, for instance, accepted only the Torah, the five original books of Moses;2 the party of the Pharisees reckoned the prophets to have been inspired as well, along with a collection of wisdom literature they called the Ketuvim; while the large body of Greek-speaking Jews outside the Holy Land venerated the much longer Septuagint version and considered all of its contents to be Scripture, too — at least seven whole books more than in many modern Old Testaments, with additions to the standard books, to boot. Synagogues associated with the Pharisees, of course, rejected any Christian-made works outright; yet these Hellenized Jews of the Dispersion lingered over them longer — and, indeed, were still doing so at the time of our story. As a matter of fact, the Greek-language books that later became our familiar New Testament may have been composed with just this readership chiefly in mind; for of the nearly 350 Old Testament quotations included in them, at least 300 are taken directly from the Septuagint Bible so beloved by the Dispersed.
But as we mentioned a moment ago, even the Christians hadn’t yet decided which books really belonged in their jars and which didn’t. Many second-century churches still read aloud from debatable works. Early, orthodox writings such as The Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle of St. Clement to the Corinthians so straddled the line between truly sacred and merely profitable literature that even some of the greatest of the early Fathers (such as Irenaeus and Origen) considered them to be divinely inspired, and this at a time when the status of New Testament books such as Hebrews, Second Peter, James, and the book of Revelation was still warmly debated.
The Bible, in other words, was still being born in A.D. 150 — both for Christians and for Jews — and the issue of which books belong in our jars and how to decide still loomed very large. Yet this question about canonicity,3 vexing as it may sound to those encountering it for the first time, was only part of a much larger and even more primary debate; for the fact is that the Church herself was still being born at this early date and the unfinished quality in her Bible was merely reflective of the embryonic state of her own soul. No hard-and-fast line, for instance, between Christian and Jew could yet be drawn. The Christians were the Jews, for the most part, just as they had been when Jesus, Israel’s Messiah, chose a band of exclusively Israelite Apostles to be His chief evangelists.4 The Apostles continued, for instance, to worship at the temple in Jerusalem throughout the book of Acts; and Justin records that Christians in some locales were still keeping the whole Mosaic Law fully a century later. Hellenized Judaism, correspondingly, gives the impression of having been halfway Christian even before the coming of Christ! Vast numbers of the Dispersed were metuentes, “God-fearers,” as they were called, Roman citizens of Gentile ancestry attracted to the Hebrew faith by the reading of the Septuagint and by the moral witness of Judaism in their culture.5 These seem to have been so numerous, in fact, that they eventually overwhelmed even the synagogue’s most basic requirement: admission by circumcision. Many thousands, at any rate, were allowed to bypass that rite, so repellant to Gentiles, and were admitted to something like a permanent catechumenate by water baptism instead. And one of the most famous of these Greek-speaking Jews, the Alexandrian philosopher Philo, was — quite independently — fumbling his way toward something like St. John’s Logos theology (“In the beginning was the Word”) at a time when the Logos Himself, our Lord Jesus Christ, was still walking the hillsides of Galilee.
What we now think of as Christianity, in other words, had been perceived up to this point as a movement or awakening within the one, true Hebrew religion — not only by outsiders but in house, as well. Just as in St. Paul’s day, the Gentile element in the Church was largely thought of as “a wild olive shoot . . . grafted in” among the natural branches “to share the richness of the olive tree.” “If you boast,” the Apostle added, “remember it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you” (Rom. 11:18). True, Paul was, at that time, seeing mainly failure in the Church’s mission to the Jews. He had come to regard the natural branches of God’s family tree as “broken off” for the time being “because of their unbelief” and had reached the conclusion that “a hardening has come upon part of Israel” (Rom. 11:25). As a matter of fact, when turned decisively out of the synagogue in Pisida, Paul and Barnabas “spoke out boldly, saying, ‘It was necessary that the word of God should be spoken first to you. Since you thrust it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, behold, we turn to the Gentiles.’ ” (Acts 13:46). This passage and others like it appear to have left readers through the centuries with the impression of a quick and immediate “divorce” between Christians and Jews, a breakup so early that it became final even before the last of the scriptural ink was dry.6 The truth is much more complicated — and much more interesting.
Were we better able to avoid reading history backward, better able to refrain, that is, from taking for granted an outcome that we know in hindsight came to pass, we might better appreciate that interesting truth. Would Jewry as a whole come to accept the kingship of Jesus in time? Or would the Jesus rejecters remain the majority and succeed in permanently marginalizing Him and His disciples — as Christianity has marginalized Joseph Smith and his Book of Mormon? From the merely human point of view, either of these two outcomes was entirely possible. But even within our Christian framework — with Christ’s own promise that “the powers of death” would never prevail against a Church founded on the rock (Matt. 16:18) — the true scope of the crossroads at hand has become obscured. Our very words, evolved over twenty centuries of hindsight, fight against us as we struggle for an understanding. “Judaism,” for instance, did not exist in the modern sense during what we Christians call the Old Testament period. Judaism is a later word for what has happened to a portion of the Hebrew faith family since then. And the birth of Jesus Christ was not the starting gun for the creation of a new religion. “Christianity” (a word that appears nowhere in Scripture) was not born at Pentecost. Pentecost was the one great faith of Abraham being reborn. Think of it this way: the word “caterpillar” is not a scientific term; it’s simply the vernacular name for the larva of a moth or a butterfly. This indicates an important truth. There is no “bug” or invertebrate properly called a caterpillar. Though the external differences between them are profound, a caterpillar is simply a butterfly “B.C.,” as it were: one creature from the start, aiming all along at one final transfigured state. The biological process by which this change occurs is called metamorphosis (meaning, “to be transformed”) and the hard, obscuring shell in which the creature resides while the mysterious change is taking place is called the chrysalis, a term derived from the Greek word for “gold” (since many butterfly pupae have a striking metallic-gold coloration). By analogy, then, the arrival of Israel’s long-expected Messiah was the onset of metamorphosis in God’s family — a preordained transformation that had been written into her spiritual DNA from the beginning. And the Golden Chrysalis in which the change took place may be thought of as the period under discussion in these pages — the interregnum, so to speak, between B.C. and A.D.7
Those who, for whatever reasons, chose to reject the Kingship of Christ were of necessity compelled to offer a darker explanation: not a metamorphosis but a plot, a hostile takeover attempt by a clique of crafty innovators. The Pharisees pioneered this approach, we might say, in their response to the man born blind whom Jesus cures in John 9. Having grown weary of their repetitive questions about every detail of the encounter, the recipient of the miracle teased the elders by asking if their newfound fascination with Jesus was an indication that they themselves were now becoming His disciples. “And they reviled him, saying, ‘You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from’ ” (John 9:28–29). To explain this response by saying that these men were lifelong Jews who, naturally enough, chose to remain loyal to Judaism is to make oneself guilty of anachronism again. The Jesus rejecters were no more or less Jewish than Jesus and the Apostles were; this, as we must remind ourselves again, was an entirely Jewish story so far with an all-Jewish cast. Yet because Jesus had done this miracle on the Sabbath, in a manner that seemed to contravene Jewish traditions, an opening presented itself for those so inclined: “Some of the Pharisees said, ‘This man is not from God, for he does not keep the sabbath.’ But others said, ‘How can a man who is a sinner do such signs?’ There was a division among them’ ” (John 9:16). This division — between those who saw Jesus’ miracles and took them (correctly) as a sign of God’s approval and those who sought to explain them away because of perceived inconsistencies between Christ’s teaching and that of Moses — became the central crisis of the faith during the period of the interregnum. It explains why the attacks on Jesus during His time among us usually took the form of accusations about lawbreaking. It also explains why, during the period of our current story, the attack took the form of a battle over the Christian books and the message of “freedom from the law” that they contained.
The gist of the argument was simple: the dissimilarity between the apostolic writings and the ancient Tanakh (as the Old Testament books were then called)8 is simply too great to countenance any belief that both sources of revelation had been inspired by the same Divine Author. The Nazarene, after all, claimed to be not the founder of a new religion but the scion and chief prophet of the old one — King David’s heir and Moses’ successor. Jesus, in fact, quoted the ancient books constantly and affirmed their inspiration in the strongest possible terms: “Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven” (see Matt. 5:19). And yet the new Christ-affirming sort of Jews seemed to be setting aside not only the least of Moses’ commands but practically all of them, distinguishing between those few rules that still applied and those that had been “fulfilled” by means of some mysterious algebra of their own. Who had been so bold as to “edit” or pare down God’s revealed will — when the Scriptures themselves referred to these statutes as “perpetual” and “everlasting” nearly a hundred times? How could these newly minted “Jews for Jesus” simultaneously uphold the inspiration of the ancient Torah and yet discount so much of its content? How could their still-gestating New Testament be considered another word from God when it seemed to contradict so much that was written in the Old? The Jews had been awaiting a Deliverer, to be sure — but these Christians seemed to think that the main thing from which their Messiah delivered the world was the Jewish religion itself!
The Hebraic Jews of Palestine, at any rate, dominated by the Pharisees, appear to have made their minds up early on. As far as they were concerned, “believers” who would not keep the Law of Moses forfeited all rights to the books of Moses. They began to take exclusive ownership of the Tanakh and initiated steps to exclude officially any Jesus-friendly writings from their meetinghouses. The Christian Jews, too, were thoroughly persuaded from the start. The authority to settle the issues surrounding the scriptural canon had been conferred by Christ upon His Apostles — one of the foremost of those Apostles, St. Paul, asserted the Church’s continued claim to the Old Testament books early on: “Whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope” (Rom. 15:4). In fact, when witnessing Jesus to the holdouts, Christians found themselves using the Hebrew Scriptures to make their case! “This was,” according to Jewish historian of religion Marcel Simon,
the clearest sign of all of the connection between Judaism and the Church, the fact that the Church laid claim to the Jewish Bible and sought to apply all its teaching to itself. . . . But having taken this stand, the Church found that formidable difficulties were involved in maintaining it. . . . [After all], the tangible sign of the covenant that God had established between Himself and His people was the law, and the Bible codified the law, or rather, the Bible was the law.
How well the Church explained these difficulties, how successfully her apologists overcame the strong prima facie case for the permanence of Moses’ Law and the necessity of keeping it, would determine the issue for those who hadn’t made up their minds: that enormous body of “God-fearers” and Greecified Jews looking on from the sidelines. Were the Jesus followers the true heirs of the Hebrew Bible — with its many prophecies of a Christ to come? Or were the Jesus rejecters God’s true “people of the book” — clinging tenaciously to every jot and tittle of the laws contained therein? This was the group chosen by fate to settle the Great Debate simply by virtue of sheer numbers, for the Hellenized Jews and their semi-proselyte neighbors outnumbered Palestinian Jewry (whether Christian or non-Christian) by a factor of something like five to one — and these were seeded throughout European and Near Eastern civilization.
But if this still sounds like nothing more than a story about how we got two Bibles — one for Christians and one for Jews — then I haven’t yet made the complexities of the situation vivid enough. First of all, Hebrew Bibles began to appear that omitted many important pre-Christian books that had always been widely welcomed before. Early in the mid-second century, in fact, new, amended editions of the Tanakh that almost seemed to have been “surgically altered” — markedly lacking some of the more telling passages used in Christian apologetics — began to be offered to synagogues. The dispute about law-keeping began to spill over onto the pro-Jesus side of the divide as well, enormously complicating the effort to recognize the correct list of New Testament books. If many Jews looked at the butterfly and couldn’t accept that she had once been their beloved caterpillar, so there began to be Gentile converts to Christ who looked at the caterpillar and started denying that their graceful butterfly could ever have been so backward or primitive.
As we will see in the pages ahead, some Christians started trying to resolve the apparent discontinuity between the Old and New Testaments by wishing away the Old one — and whatever portions of the New were deemed too friendly to it. Other Christians appeared who wanted only the Old Testament — and whatever Christian teaching might affirm the scrupulous keeping of all its many cleanliness laws and ceremonies. In these cases, Bible canons that drastically pared down the commonly received New Testament list were proposed, advocating the omission of any book that affirmed Christian freedom from the law too unequivocally. Worst of all, some of the Christian jars began to accumulate problematical scrolls that deliberately undercut the message of the received books. Already, the law-keepers among us had turned up with additional gospel narratives, alternative apocalypses attributed to St. James and St. Peter, and even “lost” letters from St. Paul supposedly proving that the orthodox Church had erred in “abandoning” Moses. From the other end of the spectrum came the Epistle of Barnabas, widely accepted (even by great authorities such as Origen and Clement of Alexandria) as having been composed by the missionary companion of St. Paul — a book that seems to err in the opposite direction, suggesting that even the Hebrews themselves had never been meant to take the Mosaic codes as literal laws to be obeyed but only as figures and types indicating the Christ to come. This, then, is the sense in which the issue of the correct canon of Scripture and the issue of the Old Testament’s relationship to the New are one and the same — why, as scholar Michael Barber has put it, “creed and canon developed simultaneously in the early Church.”9 To explain that relationship — to interpret correctly what happened inside the Golden Chrysalis — is to acquire the master key to the whole problem.
Where does St. Justin come into all this? Those who may have read my earlier book Four Witnesses: The Early Church in Her Own Words will perhaps recall that Justin Martyr, zealous disciple of Plato now converted to God’s true philosophy in Christ, gave his life for Christ in the year 155 — very close to the climax of this period I’ve called the Chrysalis, the interregnum between Old Covenant and New. Justin was active and influential in the city of Rome, the setting, as it happens, for much of the story to come and the place where, ultimately, these issues came to a head. Two great heresies about Moses’ Law had arisen by that time. When these reached the Eternal City, Justin (layman though he was) became the rock on which they wrecked themselves — the point at which both terrible contagions boiled away into the sands of history and were no more. This will perhaps come as a surprise to some of my readers; Justin’s centrality in this story hasn’t been widely recognized of late. Whether I’ve succeeded in correcting a historical injustice there — whether what I think are neglected facts in his biography really prove what I think they prove — will be up to you readers, part of the enjoyment of the story ahead.
Just how dramatic can that story really be — a tale in which, as I have already confessed, all of the heroes (and villains!) are not much more than a bunch theological eggheads? Perhaps the best way to suggest just how cataclysmic a corner really was turned during this interregnum is to take a sneak peek at the end of our story: at the closing decades of the second century A.D., when Justin’s battle for the Bible was complete. By the time of Irenaeus — our next great witness after Justin, writing from about A.D. 180 — the landscape I’ve laid out in this introduction is hardly recognizable anymore. Not only were Jerusalem and its temple gone with the wind, but the entire age-old system of expiatory sacrifices surrounding them — God’s only normative method for forgiving sin under the Old Covenant — had been abandoned. And it remains so to this day. Hellenized Judaism, as well, had simply gone extinct — much the larger part of world Jewry. The entire phenomenon simply vanished off the face of the earth. Gone, too, were the Zealots, the Sadducces, and the Essenes. What we call Judaism today — rabbinical Talmudism10 — descends from the only one of Israel’s major denominations to have survived the second century A.D.; that is, the party of the Pharisees. Their movement had, by Irenaeus’s day, gathered up into one new system everything that was left of Jesus-free Hebrew religion and was carrying it forward into the future. Most significant of all in terms of our story: both sides were now using new, distinctive Bibles of their own, with which neither group (nor even earlier members of the same group!) would have been familiar before the crisis began. Both groups had now introduced their earliest attempts at one approved list of inspired books for all believers — and since both groups had also added new, supplementary testaments of distinctively Christian or distinctively anti-Christian material, acceptance of the one necessarily denoted rejection of the other. Both halves of God’s household, in other words, found that they would have to reinvent themselves in some way before all this was over. And that’s just what happened. How this gigantic transformation occurred — and why it happened just when it did, in the middle of the second century A.D. — is the theme of our story.
We might also note, in passing, that this tale from out of the Golden Chrysalis also includes the first Great Tribulation, complete with Antichrist and False Prophet.
Here’s hoping you’re as ready to begin as I am eager to explain!
1 “Not only is the use of the word canon as a designation for an authoritative list of sacred books a rather late phenomenon within the history of the Jewish community, but even the idea of a fixed and final list came about only after a long evolution.” Jaroslav Pelikan, Whose Bible Is It? (New York: Viking Penguin, 2005), 44.
2 These five, usually called the Pentateuch in Christian circles, are Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
3 “What is a canon? The word comes from the Greek, a term originally referring to a ‘reed’ or measuring stick. A canon is used to measure things or, if you will, provides a rule by which people must abide. The word is used twice in the New Testament and by the early Fathers in a generic sense, like the ‘canon of the faith’ or the ‘canon of doctrine’ or the ‘canon of tradition,’ but it was not been applied to the contents of Scripture until the period now under consideration.” Gary G. Michuta, Why Catholic Bibles Are Bigger, 2nd ed. (El Cajon, CA: Catholic Answers Press, 2017), 117–118.
4 This truth has perhaps been obscured by the use of the term “the Jews” in the Gospels, which tends today to give the anachronistic impression that Christ and His Apostles were already “the Christians” being opposed by them. In reality, Ἰουδαῖοι should be taken as “Judean” rather than “Jew” in any of its usual modern usages. In that sense, Jesus and the Twelve are not “Jews” because they are Galileans, residents of the district immediately to the north of Judea; thus, in John 7:1: “Jesus went about in Galilee; he would not go about in Judea, because the Jews sought to kill him.” As Jewish scholar Shaye J. D. Cohen expresses the idea: “All occurrences of ioudaios before the middle or end of the second century BCE should be translated not as ‘Jew’, a religious term, but as ‘Judaean’, an ethnic-geographic term.” Shayne J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999 ), 70.
5 Josephus records that Jews were “constantly attracting to their religious ceremonies multitudes of Greeks, and these had in some measure incorporated with themselves.” Josephus, War of the Jews 7, 44–45, quoted in Attitudes to Gentiles in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, ed. David C. Sim and James S. McLaren (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 115.
6 Great as he was, the Apostle to the Gentiles seems to have spoken too soon. By 150 it had become clear that this “hardened part” was mainly the temple cult centered in the city of Jerusalem and the Palestinian Jewry dominated by the party of the Pharisees. When Christian missionaries penetrated the Roman Empire in a more permanent way, they found that it was precisely those “Greecified” Jews outside the Holy Land who were most receptive to their message.
7 Perhaps we aren’t accustomed to thinking in such terms — of a pause or a hiatus during which the Old Testament economy gradually (rather than instantaneously) gave way to the New — but such an interregnum did take place notwithstanding, as Scripture makes clear. St. John the Baptist, last of the Messianic forerunners, pictures the advent of Christ as the beginning of one last chance to “flee from the wrath to come” (Matt. 3:7). St. Peter continues to offer this opportunity even to those who have just crucified their Savior: “Repent and be baptized. . . . Save yourselves from this crooked generation” (Acts 2:38, 40). Jesus spoke of an era during which “this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world” (a term that probably meant the whole civilized world, the Roman world at that time) before the onset of “the days of vengeance” when Jerusalem will be surrounded by armies, and “the desolating sacrilege” stands in the holy place, bringing the age to a close (Matt. 24:14; Luke 21:22; Mark 13:14). The interregnum, then, is the period between Christ’s many prophecies about the fall of the Holy City and their fulfillment; an era during which all of the Temple’s noble stones still stood firmly atop one another, when Christians and Jews could still meet there and offer afternoon prayer together as we see Peter and John doing in Acts 3:1–2.
8 TaNaKh is an acronym of the first letter in each of the Hebrew Bible’s three traditional subdivisions: Torah (“The Teaching,” also known as the Five Books of Moses), Nevi’im (“The Prophets”) and Ketuvim (“The Writings”).
9 Michael Barber, “Why Christians Do Not Keep All of the Old Testament’s Laws,” John Paul the Great Catholic University, San Diego, CA.
10 The Talmud (Instruction) is a collection of Hebrew law traditions and scholarly commentary upon them. It was written primarily during the period A.D. 200–500.