Chapter Eight
CHAPTER EIGHT
WRITINGS OF THE NEW ERA
If the church of early days found the Hebrew scriptures in their Greek dress to be such an effective Bible, why (it may be asked) was it felt necessary to augment them with what later came to be called the New Testament writings?
THE LORD AND THE APOSTLES
Jesus wrote no book: he taught by word of mouth and personal example. But some of his followers taught in writing as well as orally. Often, indeed, their writing was a second-best substitute for the spoken word. In Galatians 4:20, for example, Paul wishes that he could be with his friends in Galatia and speak to them directly so that they could catch his tone of voice as well as his actual words but, as he could not visit them just then, a letter had to suffice. The letter to the Hebrews has many of the features of a synagogue homily, based on some of the scripture lessons prescribed for the season of Pentecost, and there are indications towards the end that the writer would have preferred to deliver it face to face had he been free to visit the recipients. We in our day may be glad, for our own sakes, that Galatians and Hebrews had to be sent in writing; but their authors were not thinking of us.
On the other hand, there was an occasion when Paul cancelled a planned visit to Corinth and sent a letter to the church of that city instead, because he judged that, in the circumstances, a written communication would be more effective than anything he could say (2 Cor. 1:23–2:4). And no doubt his judgment was right: his critics in the Corinthian church conceded that, while his bodily presence was unimpressive and his speech of no account, his letters were ‘weighty and powerful’ (2 Cor. 10:10). Some New Testament documents were evidently designed from the outset to be written compositions, not substitutes for the spoken word. But in the lifetime of the apostles and their colleagues their spoken words and their written words were equally authoritative. For later generations (including our own) the spoken words are lost; the written words alone remain (and by no means all of these), so that we have to be content with fragments of their teaching.
If Jesus wrote no book, what he said was treasured and repeated by those who heard him, and by their hearers in turn. To those who confessed him as Lord his words were at least as authoritative as those of Moses and the prophets. They were transmitted as a most important element in the ‘tradition’ of early Christianity, together with the record of his works, his death and resurrection. These were ‘delivered’ by the original witnesses and ‘received’ in turn by others not simply as an outline of historical events but as the church’s confession of faith and as the message which it was commissioned to spread abroad. It was by means of this ‘tradition’ that the Christians of the first two centuries were able to understand the Old Testament documents as the scriptures which bore witness to Christ.
But the perpetuation of the words and deeds of Jesus could not be entrusted indefinitely to oral tradition of this kind. Oral tradition might serve to preserve for many generations a body of teaching in rabbinical schools which were trained to receive and deliver it ‘without losing a drop’. But the Christian tradition was not meant to be scholastic property: it was to be imparted to a wider public, and (from the rise of the Gentile mission) to a public whose culture was thoroughly literate. It was both desirable and inevitable that the oral tradition should be committed to writing if it was not to be lost. So long as some slender contact with the eyewitnesses and their hearers was maintained, there were those, like Papias, bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia (c ad 125), who preferred oral tradition to written records. ‘I did not suppose’, said Papias, ‘that what I could get from the books would help me so much as what I could get from a living and abiding voice.’
In the absence of an adequate context for these words (quoted by Eusebius from a long-lost work of Papias), it is uncertain what Papias meant by ‘the books’ (ta biblia). He knew of at least two gospel writings, but when a Christian of his time spoke of ‘the books’, he usually meant the Old Testament. It is in any case a good thing that, by Papias’s time, written accounts of the deeds and words of Jesus were available, for, if the surviving fragments of Papias’s work give any guidance here, the oral tradition which he was able to gather amounted to little more than the last scrapings of the barrel.
The authority of Jesus was invoked for their teaching by the apostles—a designation which in the New Testament is not always confined to the twelve. Paul asserts his title to recognition as an apostle on the strength both of his Damascus-road commission and of his subsequent energetic and fruitful activity in preaching the gospel and planting churches; and he mentions other apostles over and above the twelve and himself. Those whose apostleship was recognized by fellow-Christians were acknowledged to be Christ’s agents, speaking by his authority. Their interpretation of the Old Testament writings was therefore, in practice, as binding as those writings themselves. Was their teaching as authoritative as that which came from the Lord’s own lips? Probably a difference was felt, except possibly when a prophet gave voice to an utterance in the Lord’s name. Paul can claim that Christ speaks in him (2 Cor. 13:3), but when answering the Corinthians’ detailed questions about marriage and divorce he makes a careful distinction between a ruling given by the Lord in person, which is binding without question, and his own judgment, which his converts may accept or not as they choose—he thinks they will be wise if they accept it, but he cannot impose it (1 Cor. 7:10f., 12–40). A ruling from the Lord is even more binding than an Old Testament commandment. Paul quotes Deuteronomy 25:4 (‘You shall not muzzle an ox when it is treading out the grain’) to demonstrate that the preacher of the gospel is entitled to get his living by the gospel, but his final argument for this principle is that the Lord himself has so commanded (1 Cor. 9:8–14).
In a later letter in the Pauline collection this argument is repeated: the same Old Testament commandment is quoted and coupled this time with an express saying of Jesus: ‘for the scripture says, “You shall not muzzle an ox when it is treading out the grain”, and, “The labourer deserves his wages” ’ (1 Tim. 5:18). What is striking here is that a saying of Jesus known to us from Luke 10:7 is linked with an Old Testament text under the common rubric: ‘the scripture says.’ It has to be considered whether ‘the scripture’ refers strictly to the commandment from Deuteronomy, or also to a written collection of sayings of Jesus which may have served as a source for the Third Evangelist, or even to the Gospel of Luke itself. (Here the comparative dating of 1 Timothy and Luke would have to be taken into account.)
In what is usually regarded as the latest of the New Testament documents, reference is made to one of the writings of Paul, who is said to speak to the same effect ‘in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand [the writer goes on], which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures’ (2 Pet. 3:15f.). Here Paul’s letters seem to form a recognizable collection, and to be given the status of scripture, since they are associated with ‘the other scriptures’. If the date of 2 Peter were more certainly known, it would provide an important landmark in the history of the canonization of the New Testament documents. On the other hand, if the Pauline letters are here reckoned along with ‘the other scriptures’, this might in itself imply their addition to the Old Testament writings, perhaps in a kind of appendix, rather than the emergence of a new and distinct collection of ‘scriptures’.
Clement of Rome, in his letter to the Corinthian church (c ad 96), quotes the words of Jesus as being at least on a level of authority with those of the prophets. ‘The Holy Spirit says’, he states, introducing a conflated quotation from Jeremiah 9:23f. and 1 Samuel 2:10 (‘Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom nor the strong man in his strength nor the rich man in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in the Lord, to seek him out and to practise judgment and righteousness’), and then he goes on: ‘especially remembering the words of the Lord Jesus, “Be merciful, so that you may obtain mercy …” ’ (with further quotations from the Sermon on the Mount).
Ignatius, bishop of Antioch (c 110), refers to some people who refuse to believe anything that is not recorded ‘in the archives’ (or ‘in the charters’, meaning presumably the Old Testament scriptures), even if it is affirmed ‘in the gospel’. When Ignatius replies ‘It is written’ or ‘scripture says’ (presumably meaning a gospel writing), they retort, ‘That is the question’—in other words, ‘Is the gospel scripture?’ Ignatius responds with a rhetorical outburst, in which he affirms that his ultimate authority is Jesus Christ: whatever authority the ‘archives’ (or ‘charters’) have is summed up and brought to perfection in his passion and resurrection—in short, in the Christian faith,
Further references to the gospel writings as ‘scripture’ are made in the second-century homily conventionally called the Second Epistle of Clement. In one place Isaiah 54:1 (‘Rejoice, O barren one …’) is quoted and the author goes on: ‘And another scripture says, “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” ’ (cf Mt. 9:13). Later the dominical saying, ‘Whoever has confessed me before men, I will confess him before my Father’ (cf. Mt. 10:32), is followed by ‘And he says also in Isaiah, “This people honours me with their lips, but their heart is far from me” ’ (Is. 29:13), while in yet another place it is declared that ‘the books and the apostles say that the church is not of present-day origin but has existed from the beginning’. The apostles’ authority is evidently not less than that of ‘the books’ (the Old Testament writings); their Lord’s authority is a fortiori on a par with that of the law and the prophets.
Rather earlier than this homily is the Letter of Barnabas (perhaps the work of an Alexandrian Christian), which uses the clause ‘as it is written’ to introduce the quotation ‘Many are called, but few are chosen’—words found nowhere in the Bible apart from the gospel of Matthew (Mt 22:14). Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, writing to the church of Philippi between ad 110 and 120, reminds his readers, who (perhaps by their own testimony) were ‘well versed in the sacred letters’, that ‘it is said in these scriptures, “Be angry and sin not” and “Do not let the sun go down on your anger” ’. The former injunction comes from Psalm 4:4, but it is quoted in Ephesians 4:26, where it is followed by the second injunction. We cannot be completely sure of Polycarp’s wording, as this part of his letter is extant only in a Latin version of the Greek original, but he appears definitely to ascribe scriptural status to a New Testament writing.
So does the gnostic leader Basilides, a younger contemporary of Polycarp; he was well acquainted with several of the documents which came to be included in the New Testament. For example, he introduces a quotation from Romans 8:19, 22 with the phrase ‘as it is written’ and says that the events of our Lord’s life took place ‘as it is written in the gospels’. He quotes 1 Corinthians 2:13 as an expression used in ‘the scripture’.
Dionysius, bishop of Corinth about 170, complains that letters he has written have been falsified by omissions and interpolations; of those responsible for this misdemeanour he says, ‘the woe is laid up in store for them’ (having in mind perhaps the warning pronounced in Rev. 22:18f. against any one who alters the words of the Apocalypse by addition or subtraction). ‘Therefore it is not surprising’, he goes on, ‘that some have dared to falsify even the dominical scriptures, when they have plotted against writings so inferior to these.’ The ‘dominical scriptures’ could be gospels or other New Testament writings, but they might conceivably be the Old Testament writings, especially those passages which were used as ‘testimonies’ concerning Christ.
About the same time the Palestinian Christian Hegesippus could report after his journeys among the Mediterranean churches that ‘in every [episcopal] succession and in every city the preaching of the law and the prophets and of the Lord is faithfully followed’.
These quotations do not amount to evidence for a New Testament canon; they do show that the authority of the Lord and his apostles was reckoned to be not inferior to that of the law and the prophets. Authority precedes canonicity; had the words of the Lord and his apostles not been accorded supreme authority, the written record of their words would never have been canonized.
It has at times been suggested that the replacement of oral tradition in the church by a written collection is in some ways regrettable. The author of a volume entitled Is ‘Holy Scripture’ Christian? (a title which he concedes is ‘perhaps foolish’) quotes G. Widengren, a Swedish scholar, to the effect that ‘the reduction to writing of an oral tradition is always a sign of loss of nerve’ and mentions a remark ascribed by Oxford oral tradition to R. H. Lightfoot ‘that the writing of the gospels was an early manifestation of the operation of original sin in the church’. But, in a society like the Graeco-Roman world of the early Christian centuries, where writing was the regular means of preserving and transmitting material deemed worthy of remembrance, the idea of relying on oral tradition for the recording of the deeds and words of Jesus and the apostles would not have generally commended itself (whatever Papias and some others might think).
In the first half of the second century, then, collections of Christian writings which were due one day to be given canonical status were already taking shape—notably the fourfold gospel and the corpus of Pauline letters.
THE FOURFOLD GOSPEL
Before the term ‘gospel’ (Gk. euangelion) came to be given to any single one of the four gospels (or to one of the many other works of the same literary genre), it meant (1) the good news of the kingdom of God preached by Jesus, (2) the good news about Jesus preached by his followers after the first Easter and Pentecost, (3) the written record of the good news current in a particular locality, (4) the fourfold gospel.
When Ignatius used the term ‘gospel’, in which sense did he use it? In his letter to the church of Smyrna, he speaks of heretics who have thus far been persuaded ‘neither by the prophecies not by the law of Moses nor by the gospel’, and says that the best defence against false teaching is ‘to pay heed to the prophets and especially to the gospel, in which the passion has been revealed to us and the resurrection has been accomplished’. If he was referring to one written gospel, it was most probably Matthew’s. Roughly contemporary with Ignatius’s letters (or perhaps a decade or so earlier) is the manual of church order called the Didachē (superscribed ‘The Lord’s teaching to the Gentiles through the twelve apostles’), proceeding possibly from the neighbourhood of Antioch, where ‘the gospel’ is clearly the gospel of Matthew (the form of the Lord’s Prayer found in Mt. 6:9–13 is prescribed for regular use ‘as the Lord commanded in his gospel’).
Evidence of another kind comes from Papias. How many gospel writings Papias knew is uncertain: Eusebius preserves comments which he made on two, thinking that they contained information that was worth quoting. One of the comments Papias claims to have derived from someone whom he calls ‘the elder’: it relates to Mark’s record:
Mark became Peter’s interpreter and wrote down accurately all that he remembered, whether the sayings or the doings of the Lord, but not in order—for he had neither heard the Lord nor followed him, but followed Peter later on, as I said. Peter was accustomed to teach as occasion required, but not as though he were making a compilation of the dominical oracles. So Mark made no mistake in writing down certain things as he called them to mind; for he paid attention to one thing: to omit none of the things he had heard and to make no false statements in any of them.
Eusebius then quotes a sentence from Papias on Matthew:
Matthew compiled the oracles in the Hebrew speech, and each one interpreted them as best he could.
Papias says nothing (so far as is known) of a gospel collection; it is not even certain that the two pieces of information just quoted came from the same context in his work; their juxtaposition may be due to Eusebius.
On Mark’s record Papias speaks somewhat defensively, as though he knew of criticisms that had been voiced against it, especially on the ground that its order was defective. To this Papias replies that Mark did not set out to write an orderly account: his aim was to record in writing whatever Peter had to tell of the works and words of Jesus; and Peter simply mentioned from time to time those things which the circumstances of the moment required. In what he wrote down Mark made no mistake: in order, as in matter, he adhered to what Peter said. (In fact, Papias does less than justice to the literary unity of Mark’s gospel: whatever Mark’s sources were, he wove them into the fabric of his work with the skill of an independent author.)
But if Mark was criticized for his defective order, it is implied that the critics had in mind some other record which served as a standard from which Mark deviated. This record might have been Matthew’s: when Papias says that Mark did not make a compilation of the dominical oracles, he indicates that Mark was not concerned to do what Matthew (according to his account) actually did. Certainly in the earlier part of Mark’s record his order differs from Matthew’s. But another possibility is that the standard from which Mark allegedly deviated was the gospel of John, which was produced in Papias’s own province of Asia. Certainly the differences in order between John’s gospel and the three synoptic accounts taken together are plain enough. Although no express evidence survives of Papias’s acquaintance with John’s gospel, Eusebius’s statement that he used ‘testimonies’ from John’s first epistle suggests that he must have known his gospel too. But so far as references to John in Papias’s surviving fragments go, we should gather that he was more interested in ascertaining what John said than in reading what he wrote.
Papias’s account of Mark was derived from someone whom he calls ‘the elder’ or ‘the presbyter’—presumably someone who in his earlier life had known one or more of the apostles. It is not clear that his account of Matthew was derived from such an authority. The ‘oracles’ which Matthew compiled are doubtless the oracles of the Lord, on which Papias himself wrote his Exegesis or explanation in five volumes (scrolls). His statement that Matthew compiled them ‘in the Hebrew speech’ has been taken to show that the reference is not to our Gospel of Matthew, which bears all the signs of being an original Greek composition. But Papias, or any informant on whom he relied here, may not have been able to recognize translation-Greek or distinguish it from untranslated Greek.
A generation after Papias, Justin Martyr, a native of Palestine who had become a Christian while resident in the province of Asia but was now living in Rome, shows his knowledge of a gospel collection. If Justin’s work Against Marcion (known to Irenaeus and Eusebius) had survived, it would probably have told us more about the status of the New Testament documents in Justin’s circle than his works which do survive—his Dialogue with Trypho and his two Apologies, defences of Christianity addressed respectively to the Emperor Antoninus Pius (138–161) and to the Roman senate (between 144 and 160). In his Dialogue Justin speaks of the ‘memoirs’ (memorabilia) of Peter (possibly the gospel of Mark) and in his First Apology he refers to the ‘memoirs of the apostles’. These memoirs, he says, are called gospels, and they are read in church along with the ‘compositions of the prophets’.
We are on firmer ground when we come to Justin’s disciple Tatian. After Justin’s martyrdom (ad 165), Tatian went back to his native Assyria, and there introduced what was to be for centuries a very influential edition of the gospels, his Diatessaron. This word is a musical term meaning ‘harmony of four’; it indicates clearly what this edition was. It was a continuous gospel narrative, produced by unstitching the units of the four individual gospels and restitching them together in what was taken to be their chronological order. The gospel of John provided the framework into which material from the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke was fitted. The Diatessaron began with John 1:1–5, after which, instead of John 1:6 (‘There was a man sent from God, whose name was John’), it reproduced Luke’s account of the birth of John (Luke 1:5–80). But John’s order was not followed slavishly: the cleansing of the temple, for example, was located in Holy Week, where the synoptic account places it (Mark 11:15–17 and parallels), and not at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, where it appears in John 2:13–22.
Tatian was an Encratite, member of an ascetic group which believed that vegetarianism was an essential element in the gospel: it was perhaps on this account that the Diatessaron changed John the Baptist’s diet from ‘locusts and wild honey’ (Mark 1:6 and parallels) to ‘milk and honey’. It is possible that here and there he amplified his narrative with information from a fifth ‘gospel’; his reference to a Light which shone around at Jesus’ baptism, for example, may have been taken from the Gospel according to the Hebrews. But this does not affect the fact that the Diatessaron is essentially an integrated edition of the four gospels which we know as canonical. These four evidently shared a status on their own, not only in Tatian’s idiosyncratic mind but in the circles to which he belonged, both in Rome and in Northern Mesopotamia.
The Diatessaron circulated at an early date not only in Syriac (the language of Tatian’s native territory) but also in Greek: our earliest surviving relic of it is a vellum fragment in Greek from the third century, found among the ruins of a Roman fort at Dura-Europos on the Euphrates. It was in its Syriac form that it really took root: it was the preferred edition of the gospels in many Syriac-speaking churches for over two hundred years, and they were most reluctant to give it up in the early fifth century, under episcopal pressure, for a new version of the ‘separated’ gospels (part of the Peshiṭta). Ephrem, one of the greatest of the Syriac fathers (c 306–373), wrote a commentary on the Diatessaron, which is still extant.
Of the four gospels, John’s took longer to win universal acceptance among catholic Christians than the others because (almost from its first publication) some gnostic schools treated it as though it supported their positions. The earliest known quotation from John comes in the gnostic writer Basilides (c 130); the earliest known commentary on John was written by the gnostic Heracleon (c 180). But those, like Justin Martyr, who read it more carefully found that it supplied more effective anti-gnostic ammunition than any other New Testament book.
The popularization of the codex form of book among Christians of the period covered in this chapter made it practicable to bind all four gospel writings together. The nearly simultaneous popularization of the codex and publication of the fourfold gospel may have been purely coincidental: on the other hand, one of the two processes may have had some influence on the other. The fragment of John 18 in the Rylands collection, Manchester (52), dated c ad 130, came from a codex, but it is naturally impossible to say whether it was a codex of John’s gospel only or of the fourfold gospel. The manuscript 75 in the Bodmer collection, from the late second or early third century, was probably, when complete, a codex of the fourfold gospel rather than a codex of Luke and John only. The earliest surviving codex which still contains portions of all four gospels is 45 in the Chester Beatty collection, from the early third century. It contains Acts as well as the fourfold gospel—an exceptional collocation, for in the early textual history of the New Testament Acts was more often included in a codex with the catholic epistles.
THE PAULINE CORPUS
We do not know by whom or in what place the first edition of Paul’s collected letters was produced. C. F. D. Moule has suggested that it was Luke’s doing: ‘it is entirely in keeping with his historian’s temperament to collect them.’ As for the place, Ephesus, Corinth and Alexandria have been suggested. The suggestion of Alexandria has been supported by the consideration that the editorial care devoted to the forming and publishing of the collection is entirely in line with the traditions of Alexandrian scholarship; on the other hand, Alexandria lay right outside the sphere of Pauline Christianity.
What is important is this: from the early second century onward Paul’s letters circulated not singly, but as a collection. It was as a collection that Christians of the second century and later knew them, both orthodox and heterodox. The codex into which the letters were copied by their first editor constituted a master-copy on which all subsequent copies of the letters were based. There are relatively few variant readings in the textual tradition of Paul’s letters which may go back to a time earlier than the formation of the Pauline corpus—the time when the letters still circulated singly.
The oldest surviving copy of the Pauline corpus is the Chester Beatty manuscript 46, written about ad 200. Of this codex 86 folios are extant out of an original 104. It evidently did not include the three Pastoral Epistles (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus); on the other hand, it did include Hebrews, which comes second in its sequence of letters, between Romans and 1 Corinthians. The sequence was probably based on descending order of length (like the present sequence of the Pauline letters): although 1 Corinthians is longer than Hebrews, it may have been placed after it to avoid its separation from 2 Corinthians.
The Chester Beatty codex of Paul’s letters, with P45 and the other biblical papyri in the same collection, seems to have formed part of the Bible of a Greek-speaking country church in Egypt. A Pauline codex of the same date emanating from Rome would not have included Hebrews (the Roman church did not recognize Hebrews as Pauline until the fourth century). Marcion’s edition of Paul’s letters (his Apostle), published about 144, was most probably based on a Pauline codex known to him, which (like Marcion’s own edition) included neither Hebrews nor the Pastoral Epistles. The most natural inference from such evidence as we have suggests that the original edition of the Pauline corpus contained ten letters only.
Before the production of this collected edition, a beginning had already been made with gathering some of Paul’s letters together. He himself encouraged the churches of Colossae and Laodicea, two neighbouring cities in the Lycus valley of Phrygia, to exchange letters which they had received from him (Col. 4:16). His letter to the churches of Galatia was evidently sent in one copy, with the final paragraph written in his own hand (Gal. 6:11); this copy would have been taken from one church to another, but some churches may have made a transcript of it before passing if on (others may have been eager to get rid of it and forget its contents as soon as possible). There are indications that the letter to the Romans circulated in a shorter form among other churches than Rome, for which it was primarily written; this could even have been done on Paul’s own initiative. The letter to the Ephesians bears some marks which indicate that it was designed as an encyclical, not directed to one particular church (one ingenious, but not very convincing, theory is that it was composed as an introduction to the first collected edition of Paul’s letters).
It might be expected that local collections of letters would be made at as an early stage—the letters to the churches of Macedonia (Thessalonica and Philippi), for example, or those to Christians in the Lycus valley (Colossians, Philemon and Ephesians).
When Clement of Rome sent his ‘godly admonition’ to the church of Corinth about ad 96, he plainly had access to a copy of 1 Corinthians, and probably to copies of some other Pauline letters. He was able to remind the Corinthian Christians of Paul’s warning against party-spirit, addressed to their church forty years back (1 Cor. 1:11; 11:18). (He also had access to a copy of Hebrews, which is not surprising if that letter was originally sent to a house-church in Rome.) It has even been surmised that Clement’s letter, with its evident interest in Paul’s correspondence, stimulated members of the Corinthian church to seek out and collect scattered pieces of that correspondence which were still to be found in their archives. Such informal copying, circulating and collecting of Paul’s letters preceded the publication of a definitive collection.
At what time the Pastoral Epistles were first included in the Pauline corpus is uncertain. In the absence of specific evidence it may be thought that their inclusion was part of the catholic church’s response to the promulgation of Marcion’s ‘canon’ (which is the subject of the following chapters). But, as P46 shows, in some places the Pauline collection continued to be copied without the Pastorals, even where (as in Egypt) it was amplified by the inclusion of Hebrews.
FROM TWO COLLECTIONS TO ONE
The gospel collection was authoritative because it preserved the words of Jesus, than whom the church knew no higher authority. The Pauline collection was authoritative because it preserved the teaching or one whose authority as the apostle of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles was acknowledged (except by those who refused to recognize his commission) as second only to the Lord’s. The bringing together of these two collections into something approximating the New Testament as we know it was facilitated by another document which linked the one to the other. This document was the Acts of the Apostles, which had been severed from its natural companion, the Gospel of Luke, when that gospel was incorporated in the fourfold collection. Acts had thereafter to play a part of its own, and an important part it proved to be. ‘A canon which comprised only the four Gospels and the Pauline Epistles’, said Harnack, ‘would have been at best an edifice of two wings without the central structure, and therefore incomplete and uninhabitable.’
And possibly on one of the ‘proper psalms’ for the day (Ps. 110); see A. E. Guilding, The Fourth Gospel and Jewish Worship (Oxford, 1960), pp. 72, 100.
Cf Heb. 13:18–23.
Cf the use of the verbs ‘deliver’ and ‘receive’ in 1 Cor. 11:23 and 15:3.
Eliezer ben Hyrkanos, an eminent rabbi about the end of the first century ad, was commended by his teacher as ‘a well-cemented cistern that never loses a drop’ (Pirqê Abôt 2.8); but Eliezer was later so intransigent, so incapable of adapting his mind to changing conditions, that he had to be excommunicated (TB Baba Meṣiac 59a, b).
Quoted by Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 3.39.4. Writing perhaps in his later years (c. ad 125/130), Papias describes his procedure in earlier days thus: ‘If ever any one came who had been a companion of the elders, I would inquire about the elders’ words. “What”, I would ask, “did Andrew or Peter say, or Philip or Thomas or James, or John or Matthew or any other of the Lord’s disciples?” “And what do Aristion and John the elder, the Lord’s disciples, say?” ’ The ‘elders’ appear to have been disciples of the apostles. Aristion and John the elder (the latter being specifically so called, perhaps, to distinguish him from the John mentioned previously) were ‘elders’ who were old enough to have heard the Lord himself and survived into Papias’s lifetime.
Papias’s Exegesis of the Dominical Oracles.
One can still study with profit the two chapters on Papias in J. B. Lightfoot’s Essays on the Work entitled ‘Supernatural Religion’ (London, 1889), pp. 142–216.
E.g. in 1 Cor. 9:1f.; 2 Cor. 3:1–3.
E.g. in Rom. 16:7; 1 Cor. 15:7; Gal. 1:19.
1 Clem. 13:1f. In 1 Clem. 46:7f. a plea for unity, fortified by various quotations, is concluded with ‘Remember the words of the Lord Jesus’, followed by a warning against leading Christ’s elect ones into sin, resembling such sayings as those of Mt. 26:24 and Luke 17:2 (perhaps quoted from oral tradition rather than from a written text). Cf. Acts 20:35.
Ignatius, To the Philadelphians 8.2. Another possibility is that Ignatius’s ‘It is written’ refers to Old Testament texts which were invoked as ‘testimonies’ to Christ; his opponents’ retort ‘That is the question’ (Gk. prokeitai) would then mean: ‘Do these Old Testament text in fact refer to Christ?’ See B. M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament (Oxford, 1987), p. 48.
2 Clem. 2:1–4. This homily has usually been dated in the mid-second century, but a case for dating it c ad 100 has been argued by K. P. Donfried, The Setting of Second Clement in Early Christianity, NovT Sup 38 (Leiden, 1974).
2 Clem. 3:2–5. (Is. 29:13 is quoted in Mk. 7:6.)
2 Clem. 14:2.
Barnabas 4:14.
Polycarp, To the Philippians 12:1.
Quoted by Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies, 7.25.2.
Quoted by Hippolytus, Refutation, 7.27.8.
Quoted by Hippolytus, Refutation, 7.26.3.
Quoted by Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 4.23.12.
Quoted by Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 4.22.3.
C. F. Evans, Is ‘Holy Scripture’ Christian? (London, 1971), pp. 6f. The Widengren quotation (not specifically referring to the New Testament) comes from ‘Literary and Psychological Aspects of the Hebrew Prophets’, Uppsala Universitets Årsskrift, 1948, No. 10, p. 9; Widengren speaks of a ‘crisis of credit’ and acknowledges indebtedness to H. S. Nyberg. This title of Evans’s book is borrowed from the title of one of his essays reproduced as a chapter in it; it is at the end of this essay that he speaks of ‘the chapter’s perhaps foolish title’ (p. 36).
To the Smyrnaeans 5:1.
To the Smyrnaeans 7:2.
Didachē 8.2. So too the baptismal formula prescribed (‘into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’) is that of Mt. 28:19 (Didachē 7.1.).
Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 3.39.15.,
Eusebius, Hist. Eccl., 3.39.16.
See F. F. Bruce, ‘The date and character of Mark’, in Jesus and the Politics of his Day, ed. E. Bammel and C. F. D. Moule (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 69–89.
Eusebius, Hist. Eccl., 3.39.17. See J. B. Lightfoot, Essays on ‘Supernatural Religion’, pp. 186–207; R. M. Grant, The Formation of the New Testament (London, 1965), pp. 69–72.
In view of Eusebius’s poor estimate of Papias’s intelligence (Hist. Eccl., 3.39.13), T. W. Manson argued that he would not have troubled to record Papias’s private opinion on a matter of this importance: ‘we are justified in supposing that Eusebius regarded this fragment as a piece of earlier tradition preserved by Papias’ (Studies in the Gospels and Epistles [Manchester, 1962], p. 70. Manson went on to argue that the ‘oracles’ said to have been compiled by Matthew were utterances of Jesus, no less authoritative in the eyes of the church than the oracles of the Hebrew prophets.
‘Hebrew’ might mean ‘Aramaic’, as sometimes in the New Testament (e.g. Jn. 19:13, 17).
Cf Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 4.6.2, where an extract from this work of Justin shows the latter’s knowledge of, and dependence on, the Gospel of John; also Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 4.11.8f.
Dialogue, 106.3; cf 100.4, etc., for the ‘memoirs of the apostles’. Justin uses the Greek word apomnēmoneumata, familiar in classical literature, as in Xenophon’s Memorabilia of Socrates.
First Apology, 66.3; 67.3. R. G. Heard suggests that Justin took over Papias’s phraseology (‘The apomnēmoneumata in Papias, Justin and Irenaeus’, NTS 1 [1954–55], pp. 122–129).
On Tatian and the Diatessaron see R. M. Grant, The Earliest Lives of Jesus (London, 1961), pp. 22–28; B. M. Metzger, The Early Versions of the New Testament (Oxford, 1977), pp. 10–36.
From Gk. enkratēs, ‘continent’; the Encratites may have taken their designation from the one occurrence of this adjective in the New Testament: Tit. 1:8 (av/kjv ‘temperate’, rsv ‘self-controlled’). Tatian is said to have rejected some Pauline epistles, but to have accepted Titus (Jerome, Commentary on Titus, preface).
See G. Quispel, Tatian and the Gospel of Thomas (Leiden, 1975).
First edited by C. H. Kraeling, A Greek Fragment of Tatian’s Diatessaron from Dura = Studies and Documents, 3 (London, 1935). The fragment combines Mt. 27:56f. with the parallel passages in the other three gospels (Mk. 15:40f.; Lk. 23:49–51; Jn. 19:38).
Ephrem’s commentary is extant in its entirety in an Armenian translation, published in 1836 by the Mechitarists in Venice; a Latin version of the Armenian, completed in 1841 by J.-B. Aucher, was published at Venice in 1876. But in 1957 a considerable portion (about two-thirds) of Ephrem’s Syriac original was identified in a parchment manuscript of the Chester Beatty collection: this was edited and translated into Latin by L. Leloir, O.S.B., in the series Chester Beatty Monographs, 8 (Dublin, 1963).
It may be, indeed, that 1 Jn. took issue with people who were perverting the teaching of the Fourth Gospel in this way.
According to Hippolytus, Basilides quoted Jn. 1:9 (Refutation, 7.22) and Jn. 2:4, ‘my hour has not yet come’ (Refutation, 7.27).
Heracleon’s work is copiously quoted in Origen’s Commentary on John.
Justin’s identification of Christ with the logos (‘Word’) is probably dependent on Jn. 1:1–14, although Justin develops it along lines of his own (First Apology, 46.1–6); again, the words, ‘Christ also said, “Unless you are born again, you will not enter into the kingdom of heaven” ’ (First Apology, 61.4), can scarcely be anything other than a quotation from memory of John 3:3, 5. See also p. 175, n. 32.
Justin says nothing about the authorship of the Fourth Gospel. He names the apostle John as author of the Apocalypse (Dialogue, 81.4). The first known writer to call the evangelist John is Theophilus, bishop of Antioch c ad 180 (To Autolycus, 2.22). See more generally M. F. Wiles, The Spiritual Gospel (Cambridge, 1960).
See the negative conclusions on such influence drawn by C. H. Roberts and T. C. Skeat, The Birth of the Codex (London, 1983), pp. 62–66.
Rylands Library papyrus fragment of John 18
Bodmer papyrus codex of Luke and John
Chester Beatty papyrus codex of Gospels and Acts
C. F. D. Moule, The Birth of the New Testament (London, 31981), p. 264.
Ephesus by E. J. Goodspeed, The Meaning of Ephesians (Chicago, 1933); J. Knox, Marcion and the New Testament (Chicago, 1942), pp. 174f.; C. L. Mitton, The Formation of the Pauline Corpus of Letters (London, 1955), pp. 45–49; Corinth by A. Harnack, Die Briefsammlung des Apostels Paulus (Leipzig, 1926), pp. 8f.; W. Schmithals, Paul and the Gnostics, E. T. (Nashville/New York, 1972), p. 263; Alexandria by G. Zuntz, The Text of the Epistles (London, 1954), p. 278.
The earliest reference to a collection of his letters is in 2 Pet. 3:15f. See p. 120.
See G. Zuntz, The Text of the Epistles, pp. 14–17, 269–283; also, more generally, L. Mowry, ‘The Early Circulation of Paul’s Letters’, JBL 63 (1944), pp. 73–86.
Chester Beatty papyrus codex of Pauline epistles and Hebrews
In most present-day editions of the New Testament Paul’s letters to churches appear in descending order of length (except that Galatians is actually rather shorter than Ephesians); his letters to individuals follow, also in descending order of length.
See W. H. P. Hatch, ‘The Position of Hebrews in the Canon of the New Testament’, HTR 29 (1936) pp. 133–135; C. P. Anderson, ‘The Epistle to the Hebrews and the Pauline Letter Collection’, HTR 59 (1966), pp. 429–438.
Under the influence of Athanasius; see p. 221.
See p. 138.
See T. W. Manson, ‘St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans—and Others’, BJRL 31 (1948), pp. 224–240, reprinted in his Studies in the Gospels and Epistles (Manchester, 1962), pp. 225–241, and in The Romans Debate, ed. K. P. Donfried (Minneapolis, 1977), pp. 1–16; also H. Gamble, The Textual History of the Letter to the Romans = Studies and Documents, 42 (Grand Rapids, 1977).
See E. J. Goodspeed, The Formation of the New Testament (Chicago, 1926), p. 28; The Meaning of Ephesians (Chicago, 1933); The Key to Ephesians (Chicago, 1956); J. Knox, Philemon Among the Letters of Paul (London, 21960), pp. 85–92 (Knox elaborates Goodspeed’s thesis by supposing that the first collector of Paul’s letters and the author of Ephesians was Paul’s convert Onesimus, known to Ignatius as bishop of Ephesus). G. Zuntz shows good reason to conclude that ‘whoever wrote Ephesians, it was not the editor of the corpus’ (The Text of the Epistles, pp. 276f.). In the original text of Ephesians, no destination is specified; the words ‘at Ephesus’ (Eph. 1:1) are a later editorial addition. (See p. 139, n. 15.)
1 Clem. 47:1–4.
1 Clem. 17:1; 70:1–6, etc. Clement gives no title to the epistle nor does he drop any hint about its authorship (which he may very well have known).
See p. 151.
See pp. 151f.
A Harnack, History of Dogma, E.T., II (London, 1896), p. 48, n. 2.