Jewish Roots
1
No man putteth new wine into old bottles; else the new wine will burst the bottles, and be spilled, and the bottles shall perish. But new wine must be put into new bottles; and both are preserved. No man also having drunk old wine straightway desireth new: for he saith, The old is better.
— Luke 5:37–39, KJV
The Canon Makers
It’s a very striking thought but perfectly true nonetheless: of the three men whose names are most directly associated with the making of the Bible’s “contents page,” two were citizens of the same city, Sinope of Pontus, an ancient anchorage on the Black Sea, founded, according to legend, by Jason and the Argonauts. These two lived in Sinope at the same time (the teens and twenties of the second century) and were, as young men, members of the same smallish Christian church, and they may very well have been friends. It seems relatively certain, at any rate, that they would at least have known each other socially, for both traveled in the same circles, had similar analytical minds, and were both asking (as becomes apparent from the study of their works) the same questions about their faith during a season of vast religious upheaval. And the third man, believe it or not — Justin of Neapolis — may eventually have had an opportunity to join the conversation in person, since he, too, was absorbed by the same questions during the same season and may even have crossed paths with the others at the Church of Rome during the decade of the 140s. “Destiny,” as the old phrase goes, “often turns on a trifle.” Here, destiny seems to have turned on a friendship — broken though it eventually became — for there are very few things indeed that have impacted the course of our civilization as greatly as the final decision about which books rightly go into the Christian Bible.
Aquila and Marcion were the pair from Sinope; they were Greek-speaking Christians of Gentile descent, living in what is today Turkey at a time when the memory of the Apostles was as fresh as our memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Sinope was a Roman colony, situated on a sharp peninsula jutting out into the sea, the quiet lee of which created an opportunity to establish one of the world’s perfect harbors. It’s still a center of boatbuilding, but in the second century Sinope was one of the major seaports of the East. Marcion’s family seems to have become rich in the shipping business; Aquila’s was linked by marriage to the imperial family in Rome, a fortuitous state of affairs that was, likewise, probably related to the lucrative shipping trade.11 Both young men were well off, then, and well connected — rich Christians in an age when Christianity wasn’t even supposed to be legal.
What was it like living as a Christian in such a place, at such an early date? Though Marcion and Aquila were both culturally and probably ethnically Greek (Aquila, in fact, is said to have converted directly from paganism), the Christian Church was only just becoming a majority-Gentile body during the age in which they lived. In Pontus, there is certain to have been a fairly balanced mix of Jews and Greeks, with the Jews having reached the Church by paths that led from every possible Jewish starting point. Probably, there were at least a few Palestinian Jews of pure Hebrew descent, mostly with roots in Pharisaism, like the Apostle Paul, first to evangelize this region. Undoubtedly, the largest group was that imported from Dispersed Judaism: circumcised, kosher, fully Jewish in the religious sense, but culturally Roman, with Greek names such as Artemus, Chloe, Olympia, and Timaeus. Likely there were some proselytes as well: out-and-out Gentiles who had converted to Judaism first before encountering the gospel of Christ. These, too, would have accepted the whole yoke of Moses’ Law at some point, including circumcision and all the various dietary restrictions. Beyond this were those Christians whose background was in semi-proselytism — “Near Jews” as they have been called: that large body of Gentile God-fearers that arose during the three hundred or more years since a Greek-language Bible first appeared (around 200 B.C.). These had been theological Israelites without being observant Jews, though they did keep many of the Hebrew holy days and some of the less strenuous cleanliness laws. And, as Justin tells us in his later writings, at least some of the people from all four groups felt the need — or at least the desire — to continue expressing their Jewish background even after becoming full-fledged Christian believers. These Jewish Christians, in fact, with their lifestyle still so similar to that depicted in the Bible stories being read at every gathering, appear to have been colorfully attractive to their Gentile brethren; so much so that the Gentiles experienced a continuous “tug” in their direction throughout the first two Christian centuries. We might compare it to the fad for “Jewish roots” services that recently swept through modern churches: Seder meals in the parish hall during Passover, the lighting of a menorah at Hanukkah, and so forth. A visit to Sinope, at any rate, circa 110, would have shown us not so much a mixed body, half Jew and half Gentile, as a continuum between the two groupings, with one class of believers passing gradually into the other.
How did Christians fare so well at Sinope as to become wealthy merchants and noblemen with connections at court? After all, Christianity was, as we noted a moment ago, still outlawed in the Roman Empire, a law put hastily on the books by Nero a lifetime earlier when the newly emerging sect had been scapegoated for the burning of Rome. Here as well, the answer likely rests in the still overwhelmingly Jewish character of the thing. Christianity was under the ban, yes, but Judaism was not, its members having been granted a special guarantee of civil rights within the empire long before this time. And our story takes place early enough for Christian belief to have remained, in most Roman eyes, simply another shade of Jewish opinion. True, the distinction between them might be pressed at times, as, for instance, when the synagogue itself urged the authorities to take action in helping to suppress their new Christian schism; but the canny Romans resented having to assist the Pharisees with enforcing their idea of orthodoxy and always stepped away again as soon as politically possible. Widespread, systematic persecution of Christians then, was rare and sporadic throughout the second century, allowing families such as those of Marcion and Aquila to thrive inside a legal blind spot, a temporary Jewish-Christian limbo that might very well be taken as symbolic of the whole state of the Church at this moment in her history.
Out of which Bible did these early Christians get their Bible stories? Which Scriptures would the young Marcion and Aquila have used? Well, as far as the Old Testament books are concerned, the answer is easy. Three of these four groups of Jewish émigrés — the Hellenized, the proselytes, and the God-fearers — used the Septuagint version almost exclusively, and they undoubtedly brought it with them into the Church. This fact is either reflected in the New Testament writings, or else the many citations within those writings were the cause of the Septuagint’s welcome; we aren’t really sure which. According to legend, seventy independent scholars, working two hundred years before Christ at the behest of King Ptolemy of Egypt, produced Greek translations of the original Hebrew books that agreed so completely with one another that this was taken as a sign of divine intervention. Whether there’s any truth to that story or not, the Dispersed Jews definitely believed it and treated the Septuagint (from the Latin septuagintina, “seventy”) as an inspired text, as did most of the early Christian Fathers. Philo, in fact, tells us that the Jews of Alexandria (where the Septuagint was made) held a yearly festival “to thank God for the good gift so old yet ever young.”12 Even Palestinian Pharisaism still smiled on the translation at this point, as having begun the work of bringing the word of God to the Gentiles, though they themselves relied exclusively upon various Hebrew versions. The question, however, of which Christian books were held sacred at Sinope — of what was the New Testament, in other words, during the A.D. 100s — is quite a bit more difficult to answer.
Our best witness is, once again, Justin of Neapolis, whose writings are foremost among the surviving Christian works from this period. Justin was from Samaria, but he appears to have moved, not long before his conversion, to Ephesus — also a part of Asia Minor, today’s Turkey, just like Sinope. Justin includes numerous (albeit not quite exact) quotes in his writings from the three synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) and strongly alludes to events recorded only in John’s, so it seems safe to conclude that these four were in use at Ephesus, if not at Sinope.13 The same is true for many of the fourteen Pauline epistles. Justin also appears to be familiar with the First Letter of Peter and (surprisingly) the book of Revelation — a work that wasn’t widely accepted in the East until centuries later. This still leaves at least half of the final list in doubt, including important books such as the Acts of the Apostles and most of the general epistles. As for books that failed to make the cut later, Justin may or may not show some dependence on the apocryphal Gospel of Peter; though his explicit mention of “the memoirs of Peter” is likely a reference to St. Mark’s Gospel, which Papias, another contemporary witness, describes as “delivered” by the Apostle to a younger disciple “when Mark became Peter’s interpreter.”14
How did the Christian books first get to Ephesus — or to Sinope? Essentially, the New Testament documents were “encyclicals” to begin with (from the Greek egkyklios, kyklos meaning a circle) — books that “made the rounds” of the churches and were copied for local use wherever they went. They were venerated by Christians because of their origin: books, that is, connected in some way to one or more of Christ’s chosen ambassadors, the Apostles — or believed to be so, at any rate. Why was this link considered so vital? It was because a book written by one of the Apostles (or by some other apostolic man operating under their aegis) was regarded as a tangible link to Jesus. As Christ said to the Twelve as He commissioned them: “He who hears you hears me, and he who rejects you rejects me, and he who rejects me rejects him who sent me” (Luke 10:16). This promise of protection was the basis of the Church’s confidence in the New Testament documents. Indeed, the Apostles themselves were aware of this principle while they ministered. This can be gathered from the fact that Peter speaks of his fellow Apostle Paul’s writings as “Scripture” while they were yet being written — employing a Greek word that Paul himself used previously while referring to the Torah (2 Pet. 3:16)! Clement of Rome, mentioned in the Bible as another of Paul’s coworkers, spells out this rule more clearly, in a letter dating from around 96 (just about the time Marcion and Aquila were born): “The Apostles preached to us the Gospel received from Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ was God’s Ambassador. Christ, in other words, comes with a message from God, and the Apostles with a message from Christ. Both these orderly arrangements, therefore, originate from the will of God.”15 To put it shortly, a word from the Apostles was a word from God Himself, nothing less. This, then, is the sense in which the early Christians believed the New Testament books to be “God’s Holy Word” — not because the documents themselves fell down from heaven on golden tablets (they didn’t) but because of who composed or authorized them.
As it happens, Marcion’s father was one of the successors of those Apostles, bishop of the church at Sinope; and the congregation he led was likely one of the oldest Christian churches.16 The book of Acts tells us that inhabitants of Pontus were among those converted on Pentecost, and these almost certainly would have returned home to found churches in that region. Also familiar from Acts, Paul’s friends Priscilla and Aquila (not to be confused with our own Aquila in these pages) happen to have been natives of Pontus as well — with, significantly, a Jewish background. Most interesting of all, that First Epistle of Peter we mentioned a moment ago is addressed to “God’s elect” in Pontus, among others, providing us with some direct insight into the history of Marcion’s home diocese. One section of that letter is especially interesting for our purposes here, since it deals directly with Scripture and, specifically, with the Church’s relationship to the books of the Old Testament.
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!” writes Peter, greeting the Christians of Pontus and the rest of Asia Minor. “By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. . . . As the outcome of your faith you obtain the salvation of your souls” (1 Pet. 1:3, 9). Looking backward, to the “prehistory” of this blessed hope, Peter sees that inklings and prefigurings of God’s ultimate plan were present in Israel’s history all along: “The prophets who prophesied of the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired about this salvation; they inquired what person or time was indicated by the Spirit of Christ within them when predicting the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glory” (1 Pet. 1:10–11). Echoing Jesus, who once contrasted the unbelief of the Pharisees with the faith of the “many prophets and righteous men [who] longed to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it,” Peter continues: “It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things which have now been announced to you by those who preached the good news to you through the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look” (Matt. 13:17; 1 Pet. 1:12). The prophets, in other words, were inspired by the same Holy Spirit who was now strengthening those sent to announce the fulfillment of their prophecies: the Apostles of Christ. Since both sets of books were ultimately authored by the same guiding Spirit, believers can rest assured that a divinely inspired unity exists between the Old and the New Testaments, a unity that runs much deeper than their many apparent contrasts. And the job of Christ’s ambassadors now, as Paul expresses it in a similar passage elsewhere, was “to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to make all men see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things” (Eph. 3:9).
What prompted Peter to shore up this connection for the Pontic Christians? Why emphasize this trans-testamental unity at this particular time, for these particular people? The fact is that Peter’s letter is addressed to the churches of both Pontus and its neighboring province of Galatia, and it seems likely that both districts were either still experiencing or had recently experienced the same troubles that prompted Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians. That letter, too, turns almost entirely upon the underlying continuity of the two Testaments, difficult to discern though it sometimes is. And the problems at Galatia were very serious indeed. Paul’s letter to the Galatians, in fact, is the only one of his epistles that contains not a single word of praise for the congregation to whom it is addressed, nothing but concern and dismay: “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and turning to a different gospel — not that there is another gospel, but there are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ” (1:6–7).
Though both letters were many decades old by the time of Marcion and Aquila, there is, nevertheless, good reason to think that the problems Peter and Paul were tackling still flared up from time to time in ancient Turkey — just “something in the drinking water,” apparently. Aquila certainly ran aground on exactly the same rocky theological shoals against which Paul had warned the Galatians. Marcion took the same book of Galatians — an expurgated version of which he caused to become known as “the charter of Marcionism” — and made it the cornerstone of his entire system of theology in the years to come. Sadly, he misunderstood it completely, twisting the message of Galatians into an argument for a position that would have caused its apostolic author to rend his garments. And Justin refuted both men on behalf of the Church by fleshing out and advancing the interpretive “trajectory” pioneered by St. Paul in (you guessed it) his Epistle to the Galatians. All this being the case, it seems worthwhile to take a closer look at that pivotal book and spend a few pages examining the circumstances that prompted it.
Yes, sad to say, there’s a tragic irony at the center of our story. For the truth is that two of our three leading characters pointed the way toward the correct list of biblical books mainly by finding dead ends for us, blind alleys leading only to a harvest of bad fruit. Their shipwreck, we might even say, created the landmark that has shown the way ever since. Yet though their lives serve chiefly as a warning to the Church these days, make no mistake: Marcion and Aquila really were, along with Justin, the canon makers. Aquila helped create the first official canon for Jews and produced a valuable new translation of the Hebrew Scriptures so scrupulously literal in its renderings that it was difficult to read, even for a genius like Origen. Aquila was also the first, however, to create a Bible with the deliberate purpose of discrediting Christianity: the first Bible cut and tailored expressly for the use of Jesus rejecters. Marcion’s impact on the final contents page was even more profound. “It was to him,” writes historian Kenneth Scott Latourette, “that we owe the terms Old Testament and New Testament . . . [and] his suggested emendation of the New Testament constituted the earliest textual criticism of the Bible.” Adolf von Harnack goes even farther: “[Marcion] deserves the credit for the first grasping and carrying out of a canonical collection of Christian writings, the New Testament.”17 And yet this first Christian canon of Scripture was forged as a weapon against the apostolic Church. Marcion used it to establish the first great Christian counterchurch, a development so alarming that it finally spurred the real Church to hurry up and identify the canon herself. “The chief importance of Marcion in the second century,” according to Evangelical scholar F. F. Bruce, “lies in the reaction which he provoked among the leaders of the Apostolic Churches. Just as Marcion’s canon stimulated the more precise defining of the New Testament canon by the Catholic Church, not to supersede but to supplement the canon of the Old Testament, so, more generally, Marcion’s teaching led the Catholic Church to define its faith more carefully, in terms calculated to exclude a Marcionite interpretation.”18 And it all began with the central issue addressed in the book of Galatians: the appearance of discontinuity between the Old and New Covenants as recorded in the Scriptures — and how to account for it.
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Cornelius?
These troubles first came to the fore in apostolic times, when Marcion’s, Aquila’s, and Justin’s grandparents were young. Things were getting along just fine, with hundreds of Judean Jews embracing Christ as their long-awaited Messiah practically every week, when God dropped a puzzler in the laps of us Christians: a man whose desire to come into the Church rocked the boat so badly that things have never been the same since.
The tale is recorded in Acts 10 and 11: “At Caesarea there was a man named Cornelius, a centurion of what was known as the Italian Cohort, a devout man who feared God with all his household, gave alms liberally to the people, and prayed constantly to God” (10:1–2). A Roman officer without, as far as we know, a drop of Israelite blood in his veins, Cornelius was, nevertheless, something like an honorary Jew in the eyes of many Hebrews by reason of his obvious devotion to the God of the Old Testament. Genuine, ethnic Jews considered themselves part of God’s family on account of their cultural background and because of the circumcision they received as infants. Cornelius, on the other hand, was a “Near Jew,” a quasi-Jewish God-fearer who, though he excelled in charitable works and prayer, lacked most of the more distinctive marks of Judaism as seen from the outside. Admirable, then, as he might have been in other respects, Cornelius was still an example of the ritually impure goyim in the eyes of the Law, a man with whom “real Jews” could not even share a meal without violating several important Jewish cleanliness precepts.
“About the ninth hour of the day,” as the story continues, “he saw clearly in a vision an angel of God coming in and saying to him, ‘Cornelius.’ And he stared at him in terror, and said, ‘What is it, Lord?’ And he said to him, ‘Your prayers and your alms have ascended as a memorial before God’ ” (10:3–4). Uncircumcised as he was, Cornelius’s good works had caught God’s eye, so to speak, meriting the same kind of heavenly visitation that had once been granted to Abraham, to Jacob, and to Moses. His story, in other words, already presents a challenge to customary ideas about Judaism. “Send to Joppa and bring Simon called Peter,” the angel continued, and “he will declare to you a message by which you will be saved, you and all your household” (11:13, 14).
Simon who is called Peter was, of course, the Apostle Peter, first among the Twelve and chief of the apostolic band. God knew that Cornelius’s case was special, so he couldn’t be received by just anyone at this stage of history, but only by the Vicar of Christ on earth. Yet even Jesus hadn’t converted out-and-out Gentiles during his time among us. In fact, he rebuffed Gentile inquirers on more than one occasion, implying that the time for such things had not yet come. The Canaanite woman of Matthew 15, for instance, was told bluntly, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. . . . It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs” (vv. 24, 26). The natural children of the covenant, it seems — Abraham’s descendants in the flesh — must be given first dibs. Nevertheless, the woman’s request for a miracle was granted. Her afflicted daughter was healed by Jesus — a portent of things to come. It’s important, once again, to recollect that Peter was still a strictly observant Jew at this time, as were the other Apostles. And though Christ commanded them that “repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem” (Luke 24:47), the Apostles had not yet gone “to the ends of the earth.” They were, rather, still in the “Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria” phase (see Acts 1:8), having addressed themselves only to the circumcised thus far. The angel, accordingly, seems to have sent Cornelius to Peter as a test case, in order to set a new precedent; almost the way a modern lawyer finds and sponsors one unique client whose case seems likely to rise to higher courts, testing the constitutionality of some prevailing legal principle.
When Peter entered, Cornelius met him and fell down at his feet and worshiped him. But Peter lifted him up, saying, “Stand up; I too am a man.” And as he talked with him, he went in and found many persons gathered [Cornelius’s friends and relatives]; and he said to them, “You yourselves know how unlawful it is for a Jew to associate with or to visit any one of another nation; but God has shown me that I should not call any man common or unclean. So when I was sent for, I came without objection. I ask then why you sent for me.” (Acts 10:25–29)
Cornelius recounted his story about the angel, whereupon Peter said: “Truly I perceive that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him” (Acts 10:34–35). This announcement might seem like a truism in today’s egalitarian atmosphere, but to the Hebrews (Apostles included!) it was nothing less than an earthquake. Henceforth, God would be showing no favoritism to one people over another. Members of all nations alike would now be equal candidates for the divine sonship that had been offered, originally, only to the children of Israel.
Making good on this offer right away, Peter began to preach “the message by which you will be saved.” This small group of God-fearers now heard for the first time the blessed name of Jesus, of the one who “commanded us . . . to testify that he is the one ordained by God to be judge of the living and the dead. To him all the prophets bear witness that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name” (Acts 10:42–43). Peter’s evangelistic sermon, however, was never completed. God himself crashed the party in the person of the Holy Spirit, who suddenly “fell on all who heard the word” (10:44). Straight-up heathens just moments before, Cornelius and his group now began to demonstrate exactly the same miraculous gifts of prophecy and exhortation granted to the Apostles on Pentecost! “And the believers from among the circumcised who came with Peter were amazed, because the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles” (10:45).
What to do next? The question was crucial, a genuine turning point in salvation history. “Then Peter declared, ‘Can anyone forbid water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?’ ” (10:47). Well, to be honest, at least some of the Christians present might have wished to answer yes — or to counsel caution, at any rate. Wouldn’t this mean skipping a step? Up to now, God had made Christians out of Jews — out of people, that is, already seeking salvation by means of a covenant relationship with Abraham’s God. And without a doubt, a person entered into that covenant through circumcision — or had always done so, anyway. After all, how else could one expect to be saved by the Hebrew Messiah, Deliverer of Israel except by becoming an Israelite? How could the Apostle offer salvation on any other terms? By way of analogy, we might imagine a Catholic priest offering Confirmation and First Communion directly to unbaptized catechumens.
Peter’s proposal to baptize Gentiles directly, without stopping to make them “children of the promise” first, must have struck a very similar note. Nevertheless, he charged right ahead — “he commanded them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ” (10:48). No one, after all, could deny the Pentecostal miracle they had just witnessed. It offered evidence that the Holy Spirit, at least, had been willing simply to stride right over these scruples. Still, many of those present probably foresaw trouble ahead on account of Peter’s unilateral action — and in this they were, of course, all too right.
The Rest of the Story
“Now the apostles and the brethren who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles also had received the word of God. So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcision party criticized him, saying, ‘Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?’ ” (Acts 11:1–3). Notice that “circumcision” is already a party in the church at Jerusalem. The story of Cornelius’s reception has raced ahead of Peter and that story alone has been enough to stir up schism. Peter was ready for these accusations, however, having brought with him from Caesarea what radio commentator Paul Harvey used to call “the rest of the story” — his account of an incident that took place before he ever heard of Cornelius:
I was in the city of Joppa praying; and in a trance I saw a vision, something descending, like a great sheet, let down from heaven by four corners; and it came down to me. Looking at it closely I observed animals and beasts of prey and reptiles and birds of the air. And I heard a voice saying to me, “Rise, Peter; kill and eat.” But I said, “No, Lord; for nothing common or unclean has ever entered my mouth.” But the voice answered a second time from heaven, “What God has cleansed you must not call common.” This happened three times, and all was drawn up again into heaven. At that very moment three men arrived at the house in which we were, sent to me from Caesarea. And the Spirit told me to go with them, making no distinction. These six brethren also accompanied me, and we entered [Cornelius’s] house. (11:5–12)
Sharing his own reaction to the supernatural signs that had accompanied the Gentile conversions, Peter added this: “I remembered the word of the Lord, how he said, ‘John baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit [see Acts 1:5]. If then God gave the same gift to them as he gave to us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could withstand God?’ When [his critics] heard this they were silenced. And they glorified God, saying, ‘Then to the Gentiles also God has granted repentance unto life’ ” (Acts 11:16–18).
His critics were silenced — but not, alas, for very long. Too many troublesome questions sprang to mind, especially as Peter’s precedent took hold and other Christian leaders such as Barnabas and the new Apostle, Paul, began bringing in the goyim under similar terms. Yes, the Gentiles had been “granted repentance unto life”; fine and good. What was going to be their position with respect to the Law? Would they now be asked to keep all the various dietary regulations and so forth? But they weren’t even circumcised — and not even the strictest Pharisee had ever thought to impose Moses’ Law on non-Jews. So it was all a self-evident absurdity. If, on the other hand, the new Gentile Christians were allowed to go on ignoring the Law, as they always had, how could the Jewish majority hold fellowship with them — when Jews had always been told to avoid such persons for fear of legal defilement? A communal meal, after all, was the very center of the Church’s life as a family, climaxing as it did in the indispensable Eucharistic sacrifice. And yet the Law of Moses clearly forbade the children of Israel from fraternizing with the uncircumcised; indeed, the nation had been severely chastised in the past for mixing with the goyim in just this prohibited way. Were we now to have two parallel churches, operating side by side, one keeping Moses’ Law and the other spurning it, separate but equal? Or would Jewish Christians, God forbid, now be asked to live like heathens? — free to sin against Moses as much as they liked, a suggestion that the majority would have found not just theologically unthinkable but viscerally repellent.
Clearly, the situation was fraught with danger — and, in fact, it eventually brought about the first Church council, the Apostolic Council of Jerusalem recorded in Acts 15. The angel’s test case, in other words, did indeed wind up going all the way to (the Church’s) Supreme Court.
The Apostolic Council
The apostles and the elders were gathered together to consider this matter. And after there had been much debate, Peter rose and said to them, “Brethren, you know that in the early days God made choice among you, that by my mouth the Gentiles should hear the word of the gospel and believe. And God who knows the heart bore witness to them, giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us; and he made no distinction between us and them, but cleansed their hearts by faith. Now therefore why do you make trial of God by putting a yoke upon the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? But we believe that we shall be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.” (Acts 15:6–11)
With these words, the Apostle Peter, speaking at the council in his official capacity as chief teacher of the Church on earth, settled the doctrinal issue raised by the circumcision party once and for all. Physical circumcision is no longer necessary for salvation, either for Jews or Gentiles — nor is the “yoke of our fathers,” which the Apostle declares to have been a failure, at least as a method for making individual believers fit for heaven. Christians place their hope, through faith, solely on the grace of Jesus Christ.
Having established this dogma firmly, the council was then free to address the pastoral aspects of the crisis at hand. St. James, bishop of the local congregation at Jerusalem, took the floor and suggested a set of disciplinary measures designed to ease ethnic rubs during the transition. The council approved his plan and published it by means of an encyclical letter: “For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from unchastity. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well” (Acts 15:28–29). The practices thus prohibited were cultural expressions of paganism particularly abhorrent to Jews, likely to exacerbate the cross-cultural divisions.
How did the Church at large respond to the council’s work? Acts 15:31 tells us that her members “rejoiced at the exhortation.” Still, the council fathers, as far as we know, never publicly spelled out the interpretive principle they used to reach Peter’s conclusion. It’s clear, for instance, elsewhere in the New Testament, that Christians are not to consider themselves free from the moral principles of the Decalogue (Matt. 19:18–19; James 2:10–12; Rev. 14:12). Yet first-century Jews (including Peter, no doubt) were accustomed to treat the entire Mosaic Law as one unit: as simply Torah, an expression of the very mind of God and of His will for His people. So the question is, as scholar Michael Barber recently put it, “What enabled Peter to identify a subset of laws — a ‘yoke . . . which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear’ — from which believers could be dispensed?”19 The rather sparse report included in Acts does not explain.
Some of us may already have jumped to the hasty conclusion that the New Covenant inaugurated by Christ neatly clarifies everything. After all, new covenant, new set of rules; it all seems natural enough. Even James, speaking at the council, justified his decrees on the basis of prophecies about this long-expected New Covenant. Yet this is very far from a complete answer. For one thing, the Jews were already quite familiar with these prophecies and were themselves expecting the establishment of a New Covenant. There had, in fact, been several new ones already: covenants with Noah, with Abraham, with Jacob, and with Moses. The pattern so far, however, had always meant more specificity, not less — more laws, from the Jewish perspective, never fewer. Each new expression of Israel’s covenant with Yahweh included everything that had been present in the previous expression. There was continuity, in other words, not innovation. Later Jews, in fact, responded to Christian talk about Peter’s “yoke” by doubling down on their love of the Law. More law means more means of grace! Rather than looking at them as a burdensome load, the rabbis taught, we ought to welcome additional rituals and ceremonials as fuller revelations of God’s will. But this Jerusalem Council, on the contrary, abrogated laws — disparaged them, it would seem, and wiped them off the books on the mere word of a fisherman from Galilee. To at least a few, the council’s act seemed to call the very wisdom of God into question. As medieval exegete Robert Grosseteste expressed it: “How could God be pleased with new sacrifices when the old ones have been rejected? For nothing is able to be corrected, unless it is shown to have been wrongly done in the first place. For what is done rightly the first time should in no way be changed, especially since such a change could charge God with inconstancy.”20
Peter’s breathtaking declaration, moreover, that “the yoke of our fathers” had proved literally unbearable — not able to be borne — well, this might even be understood as an attack on the word of God itself. If the laws contained in the Old Testament were as futile as all that, why had they been promulgated to begin with? And why did they take up so much space in those holy pages? Why should Israel have been punished so severely through the centuries for disobeying them? Was the squeamishness of a few Roman inquirers now to be held so significant that the entire Old Testament must be reread as a failure in order to make accommodations for them?
It was with thoughts like these in mind — and feeling the tug we spoke of earlier, the richness of Jewish culture and the great antiquity of its traditions — that the circumcision party began to rise again. Surely, they reasoned, Peter must have been remiss to introduce so radical a break between the Old Covenant and the New. He had thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Keep in mind, these were Christians raising these doubts, not Jesus rejecters; that is the essence of the whole thing. They were not, as the Pharisees had, declaring themselves to be followers of Moses rather than Christ. What these wanted was to reconcile the two in some more obvious way — to keep Jesus and His gospel without introducing such a perceived rebuke to Moses. The Apostles and other Catholic authorities had simply gone too far, sanctioning too much dropping of the Old Testament Law. The circumcision party (later to become known as the Judaizers) began recommending, on the other hand, mandatory circumcision for all new Christians, a return to Old Covenant dietary laws, and careful observance of the Jewish Sabbath every Saturday.
Conservative as they hoped to sound, however, those making these recommendations implied an unspoken conspiracy theory about the founding of the Church, a theory that strikes at the very root of all Christianity: Peter and the council had got it wrong. Those who listened to the Apostles on this topic heard not Christ, nor the One who sent Him, but only some guy’s mistaken idea of theology, supported by a group of his personal sycophants. Peter’s critics may not have been willing to say so yet, in so many words — in fact, they began by advocating Christian observance of the Law as a counsel of perfection, not as a matter of necessity — but this was the logical upshot. The new Judaizing heresy was, in other words, nothing but another Great Apostasy theory; perhaps the very first in the long, sad history of such theories through the ages, with the Twelve Apostles themselves as the apostates! Talk about the Church going astray early on! No wonder Paul opened his letter against the Judaizers with harsh words: “As we have said before, so now I say again, If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to that which you received, let him be accursed. . . . For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not man’s gospel. For I did not receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ” (Gal. 1:9, 11–12). The council’s decision had, in other words, “seemed good,” as St. James had put it, both “to the Holy Spirit and to us.”
Judaizers in Galatia
Most scholars agree that Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians must have been written within three years of the close of the council (ca. 49–52), so these disorders had spread to Asia Minor pretty quickly.
Like most Church synods since then, the period immediately following the Jerusalem Council included a fair amount of confusion at first, even on the part of enthusiastic supporters, regarding how best to implement the decisions. Some of this uncertainty played a role at Galatia. Though Paul, taking young Timothy with him, departed from Jerusalem immediately on something like a promotional tour on behalf of the council’s decrees (“As they traveled from town to town, they delivered the decisions reached by the apostles and elders in Jerusalem for the people to obey” [Acts 16:4, NIV]), Peter’s conduct afterward was more confusing. At first, he began practicing what he preached, openly sharing the Agape meal with uncircumcised Christians at Antioch. Later, however, when a group of influential Jewish believers visited from Jerusalem (likely converts from Pharisaism) Peter waffled, he and his associates, and they separated themselves from the Gentiles again — at least for the duration of the visit. They “acted insincerely,” as Paul later describes it, “fearing the circumcision party” (Gal. 2:12). Since Peter is conspicuous for bold, evangelical courage throughout the book of Acts, it seems unlikely that this fear had anything to with his own safety. His worry, rather, must have been for the unity of the Church, fear of what the Judaizers might be willing to do in the way of mutiny and schism. Paul, however, a former Pharisee himself, saw right away that mere delay or appeasement would do nothing to resolve the issue; he was perfectly right to conclude, in this instance, that Peter and his companions “were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel” (see Gal. 2:13–14).
Forced by these circumstances to censure his fellow Apostle publicly, Paul, alas, involuntarily created an opening for a new line of Judaizing attack — namely, by giving the impression that the Apostles themselves were divided over the council’s teachings. If, after all, the two great pillars, Peter and Paul, could differ about this matter, then surely both opinions were, at the very least, “within the pale.” Divisions over the topic must be reasonable. In reality, Peter’s conduct represented a personal failing, an act of dissimulation in pursuit of an illusory peace, not a difference in doctrine. But for those already puzzled by the many perfectly legitimate questions surrounding this tremendous watershed, the damage was already done.21 We know for a fact that this was the case in Asia Minor, since Paul takes time at the start of his Galatian epistle to sort the matter out thoroughly and to correct any impression that he might be “on the outs” somehow with the original Twelve. It was, at any rate, in the wake of Peter’s unfortunate misstep at Antioch that Paul first received word of significant Judaizing unrest in the church at Galatia.
This strife had appeared only since his last visit a few years earlier, at which time the Apostle left the Galatian church in a prosperous, thriving condition. As is common in such cases, the troubles appear to have begun as the personal bugbear of one man, someone with whom the council’s decision went down so hard that he resolved to set himself up in opposition to it, perhaps as the “traditionalist” voice of reason. Paul, in any event, writes in terms of an unnamed Judaizing ringleader at Galatia, “he who is troubling you . . . whoever he is” (Gal. 5:10). Several passages in the epistle allow us to infer that this shadowy agitator was pressuring new Gentile converts to observe some or all of the Jewish Law — or risk losing any hope of heaven.
It’s only honest to concede that in proposing to pen a defense of so far-reaching a decision, the Apostle’s task wasn’t easy. Then again, neither was the case against the council as strong as it might appear. It was Jesus Himself, after all, who set this ball rolling. When His enemies, for instance, became aware of His strong teachings against divorce, they perceived discontinuity with Moses.
And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce, and to put her away” [see Deut. 24:1–4]. But Jesus said to them, “For your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female’ [see Gen. 1:27]. ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’ [Gen. 2:24]. So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.” (Mark 10:2–9)
Three vital ideas are contained in this passage, germane to the issues at hand. Notice first that, while discontinuity certainly is present when we compare Jesus’ word to that of Moses, Jesus is not the one introducing it. “Israel’s scriptures are themselves in tension with one another since Deuteronomy’s accommodation for divorce is discontinuous with . . . Genesis.”22 Christ simply points out the contradiction. Secondly, Jesus is clearly claiming to restore the earlier conditions; He is resolving the existing discontinuity by repealing Moses’ concession. And finally, Jesus identifies the original reason for that concession: “hardness of heart” on the part of Moses’ hearers. This law, in other words, was not an expression of God’s perfect will but was given as a stopgap measure, in recognition of Israel’s willfulness. It was Christ, then, who established the idea that certain Old Covenant laws were not given because they are inherently necessary to make men good, but only for a season, based on prevailing circumstances.
Paul’s Letter to the Galatians takes up this train of thought and extends it to cover the current situation. First, the Apostle frankly admits helping to “tear down the wall” between Jews and Gentiles (see Gal. 2:18). But since the wall he refers to is nothing less than the Torah (or some portion of it, at any rate), Paul does seem to concur that the act requires extraordinary justification. Speaking then, on behalf of those who did the dismantling, he restates the radical Christian gospel to which they all bear witness: “We ourselves [the Apostles] who are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners, yet . . . know that a man is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. . . . We have believed in Christ Jesus in order to be saved by faith in Christ, and not by works of the law, because by works of the law shall no flesh be justified” (Gal. 2:15–16). There was, in other words, no real way to finesse it: the Jewish Messiah has arrived, with full authority to establish an entirely revitalized economy of salvation; and in preaching the change the Apostles are acting in his name. “But if I build up again those things which I tore down,” as Peter seemed to do by his prevaricating after the council and as the Judaizing leader at Galatia was tempting Christians to do, “then I prove myself a transgressor. For I through the law died to the law, that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not nullify the grace of God; for if justification were through the law, then Christ died to no purpose” (Gal. 2:18–21). To continue keeping Moses’ Law, in other words, implies that Moses’ Law had been sufficient to remove sin all along — and consequently, that faith in Christ is little more than a bonus. Yet, for Paul, it is life itself.
The Apostle’s most important thought, however, comes in chapter 3. Using Abraham, father of the Hebrew race, as his example, Paul demonstrates the primacy of faith completely apart from law-keeping. Abraham, for instance, “believed God,” long before being circumcised, “and it was reckoned to him as righteousness” (see Gen. 15:6). There already had been, in other words, a time when circumcision was not necessary. Why, then, should it be impossible to imagine a future age when this might be true once again? “And the Scripture,” Paul writes, “foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘In you shall all the nations be blessed’ [see Gen. 12:3, LXX; 18:18]. So then, those who are men of faith are blessed with Abraham who had faith” (Gal. 3:8–9). The Law, contrariwise, did not “rest on faith,” but on action; “he who does them [works] shall live by them” (Gal. 3:12). And as Paul had reminded his readers a verse or two earlier: “All who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, ‘Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them ” (Gal. 3:10). This last citation (Deut. 27:26) is the final and climactic “covenant curse” to which the Hebrews had agreed at the founding of the Mosaic dispensation, some fourteen hundred years earlier. It required perfect, perpetual observance of each and every Mosaic command as long as the covenant should last — or else damnation! No wonder Peter called it a “yoke.”
But why, as we wondered earlier, would God bother to give so hopeless a task? “It was added because of transgressions,” Paul explains, “till the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made; and it was ordained by angels through an intermediary” (Gal. 3:19). This has to be one of the more mysterious verses in the New Testament, but its meaning would, perhaps, have been more immediately clear to the Galatians than it is to us. The “offspring of Abraham” that Paul writes about here is Jesus Christ: the Apostle himself specifies this a few verses earlier (Gal. 3:16). So that little word “till” would seem to be very important indeed. This implies that the “law that was added” had a temporary lifespan built into it from the beginning and that its expiration date was tied to the coming of Christ. Now, notice why this extra law was added: “because of transgressions.” Do we hear echoes of Jesus’ words in this phrase? “For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.” Finally, we have to ask the most basic question of all: What does Paul mean by “added”? Added to what? The Law of Moses doesn’t seem to have been “added” to anything. His was the first set of actual laws ever revealed to the Israelites — yet it can only be Moses of whom the Apostle writes. Moses definitely mediates between God and the people all throughout the story of the Exodus; and an old Jewish tradition, based on the Greek version of Deuteronomy 33:2, holds that he received the Torah from the hands of angels rather than from God Himself (see Acts 7:53; Heb. 2:2). The Hellenized Jews now following Christ at Galatia knew the Septuagint backward and forward, and they would have recognized this allusion to it immediately. But why are these extra details so significant for Paul at this point in his argument?
It will likely take the remainder of this book to fill in the gaps completely. Mysterious, however, as much of it now remains, the gist of Paul’s argument to the Galatians may be easily summarized. It contains, in fact, the same three points we noted in Jesus’ case against the “bill of divorce” introduced by Moses. We notice the following in both arguments:
1. Some portion of the Law came first, while other (even contradictory!) precepts were “added” later.
2. This addition wasn’t necessarily a good thing. It may, in fact, have been due to changed conditions brought about by human sin.
3. The coming of Christ has repealed or annulled these additions in some dramatic way.
There existed, in other words, a law before the Law, and it is this law that is eternal and unchanging. Other biblical laws lack this everlasting quality, having been instituted only to cope with some temporal crisis; like marching orders during a war, issued, as it were, “for the duration.” And Jesus Christ is the Divine Messenger who comes with the good news: “Merry Christmas! War is over.”
This, at any rate, was the disturbance at Galatia and the oil that St. Paul sought to pour upon the troubled waters there. And it was a treatment that does seem, if tradition serves, to have done the trick — at least for a season. We have no further record of Judaizing difficulties in Asia Minor during the remainder of the first century. Alas, “Christian Judaism” just seems to be a challenge that crops up spontaneously throughout the Church from time to time, even without tainted drinking water — as we were reminded earlier by those menorahs and Christian Seder meals.23 More than likely, it reappears simply because of our constant exposure to the Old Testament, the veneration we (quite properly) accord to it at every Mass, and the complexity of the arguments against law-keeping. This, of course, brings us back to the early second century and to Marcion and Aquila at last.
The Siren Song
An old Jewish legend tells us that the young Aquila took advantage of his proximity to Sinope’s bustling seaport to travel extensively in the empire, undertaking “commercial journeys abroad, not so much for the sake of profit as in order to see men and countries.”24 The same source implies that at least one of these sea voyages was to the Holy Land and that Aquila was deeply impressed by his experiences there. Since Marcion’s family dominated the shipping business in Pontus, it’s not unreasonable to wonder whether these two members of the same Christian church might not have hitched these adventurous rides together; for, once again, their later intellectual movements compare and contrast in such interesting ways as to suggest an early formative relationship. Both men, at any rate, emerged from youth with a fascination for Jewish and Christian issues that would dominate their thoughts for the rest of their lives.
It may have been merely a Judeophile mood at first, a hobbyist’s appreciation for all things Jewish and a sense that the Israelite element in Christianity was the most interesting and authentic part. Aquila, recall, was a convert from paganism, a belief system that, with its puerile myths and its debauched morality, he may have abandoned with a disgust rooted in firsthand experience. His later work, certainly, evinces a familiarity with the major Greek poets and thinkers, with all that implies for good and for ill. Perhaps counterintuitively, Christians who converted directly from paganism seem to have been more susceptible to Judaizing errors at this time than the former God-fearers. Those “Near Jews,” as Evangelical scholar Thomas A. Robinson guesses,
had already considered Judaism and had stopped short of full acceptance. Their turning to Christianity, in most cases, must have represented an even more pronounced refusal to proceed fully into Torah observance. . . . Pagans [on the other hand] would have been exposed, perhaps for the first time, to aspects of Judaism from within their new Christian environment, and some would have become attracted to features of Judaism beyond what the Christian community had retained. . . . In some cases, converts to Christianity were likely to have found their curiosity about Judaism sparked, especially when, in the first three centuries, Judaism stood out impressively against the ragtag Christian movement.
Some of these, certainly, “must have experienced [difficulty] in maintaining their distance from Judaism, particularly as the church retained some elements of Judaism and rejected others — and not always consistently or uniformly.”25 At any rate, both Aquila and Marcion would — as rich young rulers — have had plenty of leisure time in which to indulge in theological speculation. Marcion, in fact, soon took ecclesiastical orders and was set on a path, it seems, to become his father’s successor one day as bishop. Aquila found time to learn the Hebrew language and to study it deeply — this, during a period when very few Jews could understand it anymore, Hebrew having fallen out of popular usage during the Babylonian Exile and been replaced by Aramaic.
The memory of St. Paul’s intervention in Asia Minor (some sixty years earlier) must surely have lingered strongly at Sinope. The temptation, therefore, to begin asking the questions once raised there by the Judaizers would have been forbidden fruit indeed — of exactly the type most relished by hasty young men feeling their oats. Who knows? Perhaps the church at Sinope had now become lax even by the later Christian standards, as the churches at Laodicea and Corinth had done while the Apostles were still alive to rebuke them. This was also the period (100–120) during which the churches of the East became majority-Gentile for the first time. Together, these two circumstances could have given someone such as Aquila the impression that the old Roman paganism he had left behind was following him even into the Church herself. Mightn’t Aquila have begun to discover — however reluctantly at first — a sneaking suspicion that the Jerusalem Council’s decision had just been a piece of politics, nothing but a rationale for the reduced demand that would open the Church’s floodgates to the God-fearers and other goyim lingering outside? Was it possible that the circumcision party had been right all along — that the system promoted by Peter and the others is really just a liberalized abridgement of the original Hebrew faith, cut down to suit the sensibilities of far less serious folk? And surprising as it might sound to those already familiar with his later heresy, there’s no reason to believe that Marcion didn’t parallel his churchmate’s thinking step for step at this stage. In fact — for reasons that will become clearer as we go — it looks as if this train of thought was, like the sea voyage to Judea, a journey Marcion and Aquila may well have taken together.
In any case, this is the period of his life during which, according to the Jewish traditions in which he plays so prominent a part, Aquila began to Judaize. He asked, privately at least, the questions that have always accompanied this recurring outbreak in the life of the Church. How is it that a Christian can safely disregard explicit biblical commands that came originally with dreadful curses attached? If these commands were nothing but a yoke and a failure, how is it that the psalmist can write so rapturously:
Oh, how I love thy law! It is my meditation all the day. . . . I do not turn aside from thy ordinances, for thou hast taught me. . . . How sweet are thy words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth! . . . The wicked have laid a snare for me, but I do not stray from thy precepts. . . . Thou dost spurn all who go astray from thy statutes; yea, their cunning is in vain. . . . Therefore I love thy commandments above gold, above fine gold. (Ps. 119:97, 102, 103, 110, 118, 127)
And perhaps most importantly for the subject at hand, Aquila asked why we Christians shouldn’t simply remove these books of the Law from our Bibles now, since Peter and the Apostles appear, as he saw it, to have declared them a dead letter — a mere appendix, at this point, to their own more important compositions.
It was in the midst of this process that Aquila — still a Christian, but definitely wavering — received a fateful message from his kinsman, the emperor. Hadrian had heard, perhaps, of Aquila’s familiarity with the ways of the Jews and of his facility with what was still (in official matters at least) their national language. He conceived the idea of sending him to Jerusalem to assist in the reorganization of the occupying Roman government there.26 Whether eagerly or with hesitation we don’t know, but Aquila accepted the post; Epiphanius, one of the fourth-century Fathers, says that he became “overseer of the work of building the city.” Since there’s nothing in his surviving resumé to suggest that Aquila was any kind of an architect or a construction engineer, this phrase should probably be taken in the most general way, i.e., that Aquila was assigned general responsibility for seeing that the project was completed. Youthful though he may have been, his ties to the imperial household would allow him stand over the project as a visible sign of the emperor’s governance. One source tells us that Hadrian sent him a canny word of parting advice as he set out on his journey: that Aquila should, during his Palestinian stay, invest in anything whose value happened to be temporarily depreciated, as in all probability it would rise again.
Aquila took his leave of Marcion and Sinope and was soon sailing west through the Bosporus, then southward down the east end of the Mediterranean to Joppa, ancient seaport of Jerusalem. There were, of course, no literal mermaids on the rocks along the way — those deadly sirens that had tried to lure Jason and his Argonauts to their doom along the same route — but the siren song of Judaism had left Aquila of Sinope very ill-prepared to process what he found in Israel when he arrived.
11 One of Emperor Hadrian’s daughters was likely married off to some wealthy magnate in Aquila’s family.
12 Philo, Moses 2, no. 41, Loeb Classical Library, https://www.loebclassics.com/view/philo_judaeus-moses_i_ii/1935/pb_LCL289.469.xml.
13 Twenty or so years after Justin’s day, Irenaeus lists our four familiar Gospels by name and testifies to their exclusive and universal acceptance: “It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are. . . . The pillar and ground of the Church is the Gospel . . . and the Gospel is quadriform.” Against Heresies, 3, 11, 8. Also: it seems to your author that we needn’t make too much of Justin’s inexact Gospel quotations since his many citations from the Greek Pentateuch are equally free and liberal. As the Catholic Encyclopedia puts it, “It was not yet the age of explicit quotations” (s.v. “Canon of the New Testament”).
14 “All early tradition connects the Second Gospel with two names, those of St. Mark and St. Peter, Mark being held to have written what Peter had preached. Papias wrote not later than about A.D. 130 . . . [which] brings us back to the first century. . . . St. Justin Martyr, writing in the middle of the second century, refers [to this tradition] when he says that Christ gave the title of ‘Boanerges’ to the sons of Zebedee (a fact mentioned in the New Testament only in Mark 3:17), and that this is written in the ‘memoirs’ of Peter. . . . St. Justin does not name Mark as the writer of the memoirs, [but] the fact that his disciple Tatian used our present Mark, including even the last twelve verses, in the composition of the ‘Diatessaron’, makes it practically certain that St. Justin knew our present Second Gospel, and like the other Fathers connected it with St. Peter.” Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Gospel of St. Mark,” http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09674b.htm. Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen all affirm the same tradition: that St. Mark wrote his Gospel based on St. Peter’s preaching.
15 Clement of Rome, Epistle to the Corinthians 41.
16 Clerical celibacy has been esteemed as the ideal since St. Paul wrote 1 Corinthians: “He who marries his betrothed does well; and he who refrains from marriage will do better” (7:38), but it has not always been mandated. In these early decades, an unmarried bishop would not have been allowed to take a wife, but a man already married was sometimes made into a priest or a bishop.
17 Adolf von Harnack, Marcion, das Evangelium vom fremden Gott, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs Verlag, 1924), 114–115.
18 F. F. Bruce, The Spreading Flame (Exeter, NH: Paternoster Press, 1964), 252.
19 Michael Patrick Barber, “The Yoke of Servitude,” in Letter and Spirit 7 (Steubenville, OH: St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology Press, 2011), 68.
20 Robert Grosseteste, On the Cessation of the Laws, trans. Stephen M. Hildebrand (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press), 32.
21 “It is precisely Peter’s authority and influence in the Church that made in necessary for Paul to correct him in public.” Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, ed. Scott Hahn and Curtis Mitch (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017), note on Gal. 2:14.
22 Barber, “Yoke of Servitude,” 70.
23 We are not making an accusation of Judaizing here, but there are serious concerns about some of these practices. The Mass, after all, is the Christian Seder, and any solemn celebration of a Christ-less Mass in a church would be clearly problematical.
24 Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906 ed., s.v. “Aquila,” by Crawford Howell Toy, F. C. Burkitt, and Louis Ginzberg, http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/1674-aquila-akvlac-foreignchars-v02p034001-jpg-foreignchars.
25 Thomas A. Robinson, Ignatius of Antioch and the Parting of the Ways (Peabody, MA; Hendrickson Publishers, 2009), 60.
26 Though many authors have written casually about the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, the city itself wasn’t actually destroyed at that time but only devastated. The temple had been destroyed, to be sure, and the rest of the city put to the torch as well; but Epiphanius records that Jerusalem was still occupied as of A.D. 131, still full of Jews, with seven synagogues in operation along with the central Christian church. Epiphanius of Salamis, Weights and Measures 14, Tertullian Project, http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/epiphanius_weights_03_text.htm. There may even have been scattered groups of Levites struggling to offer the daily sacrifices mandated by the Law, for it was stipulated therein that these should be offered in Jerusalem only, but not necessarily only within the temple. Christ’s promise, in other words, that all “these great buildings” would be destroyed without one stone left atop another (Mark 13:2), and of God’s chosen scattered to the four winds, was a prophecy as yet only partially fulfilled.