Chapter Eleven
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE CATHOLIC RESPONSE
A CATHOLIC COLLECTION
Both Marcion and Valentinus presented a challenge to the catholic church—that is, to those Christians who adhered to what they believed to be the apostolic teaching. The communities to which many of those Christians belonged claimed to have been founded by apostles, and there had been no ascertainable shift in their teaching since the time of their foundation. The distinctive features of Marcionitism and Valentinianism had this at least in common—they were recognized as innovations. This, the leaders of the catholic church knew, was not what they had heard from the beginning. But their followers had to be shown where those new movements were wrong: if the teachings of Marcion and Valentinus were unsound, what was the sound teaching, and how could it be defended?
In the catholic response to this twofold challenge, what came to be called ‘the rule of faith’ played a crucial part. The ‘rule of faith’ was a summary of the tenets held in common by the churches of apostolic foundation: it is closely related to what is called ‘apostolic tradition’. R. P. C. Hanson describes it as ‘a graph of the interpretation of the Bible by the Church of the second and third centuries’. In the establishment and defence of the rule of faith the appeal to the Bible was basic. In debate with the Valentinians and others of similar outlook, the interpretation of the Bible was the point at issue; in debate with the Marcionites, the identity of the Bible had to be defined. Where the interpretation of the Bible was at issue, there was a tendency to maintain that only the catholic church had the right to interpret it, because the Bible was the church’s book; but in the Marcionite controversy an answer had to be given to the more fundamental question: What is the Bible?
Marcion had answered that fundamental question quite unambiguously. The Bible consisted of the Gospel and the Apostle which he promulgated. Was his answer right, or was it wrong? The leaders of the Roman church (and other churches that shared the same faith) had no doubt that his answer was wrong. What, then, was the right answer? If they had not given much thought to the limits of holy writ previously, they had to pay serious attention to the question now. And sooner rather than later they declared their mind on the matter.
We do not reject the Old Testament scriptures, as Marcion does, they said; we accept them, as did Jesus and the apostles (both the original apostles and Paul). As for the scriptures of the new order, we accept not one gospel writing only, but four (including the complete text of Marcion’s mutilated Gospel). We accept not only ten letters of Paul, but thirteen (that is, including the three addressed to Timothy and Titus). We accept not the letters of Paul only, but letters of other apostles too. And we accept the Acts of the Apostles, a work which links the gospels and the apostolic letters, providing the sequel to the former and the background to the latter. Tertullian argues that it was quite illogical for those who maintained the exclusive apostleship of Paul (like the Marcionites) to reject the one book which presented independent testimony to the genuineness of the apostolic claim which Paul repeatedly makes for himself. (The trouble was, especially for the Marcionites, that Acts presents independent testimony also to the genuine apostleship of those whom Marcion condemned as apostates.)
The scriptures acknowledged by the catholic church formed, appropriately, a catholic collection. They represented a variety of perspectives in the early church. Marcion’s list, on the other hand, was a sectarian one: it represented one viewpoint only—not so much Paul’s as Marcion’s own. As Marcion maintained the exclusive apostleship of Paul, there were other sectarians, at the opposite end of the spectrum, who regarded James of Jerusalem as the apostle par excellence, and deplored Paul as the ‘enemy’ of Jesus’ parable who sowed the tares of error among the good wheat of the gospel (Mt. 13:25, 28). But the catholic church, and the catholic scriptures, made room for both Paul and James and for other varieties as well. Ernst Käsemann can write of the New Testament canon as bearing witness to the disunity, not to the unity, of the first-century church; more properly, it bears witness to the more comprehensive unity which transcends all the diversities and proclaims the one who is simultaneously the Jesus of history and the exalted Lord. There was farseeing wisdom in the decision ‘to accept all that was thought to be truly apostolic, and to see it as mediating through human diversity, the one divine event’.
In this regard Acts played a crucial part: it is indeed the hinge of the New Testament collection, giving it its ‘organic structure’. It is a truly catholic work, the keystone of a truly catholic canon. Peter, Paul and James are all honoured in it, together with such leaders of the Hellenistic advance as Stephen and Philip. Such a work could not have been countenanced by those who rejected all strands of apostolic Christianity but one, but it was admirably suited to the purpose of catholic churchmen.
The same catholic spirit is evident in the fourfold gospel. To begin with, each gospel was doubtless the gospel in the communities in which it circulated, but they were all greatly enriched when to the witness of their own gospel there was added the witness of the others. Some scrupulous readers might feel that the inconcinnities of the four called for harmonizing activity, but others rejoiced in the plurality of testimony that was now available, recognizing with the compiler of the Muratorian list (an outstanding document of the catholic response) that the variation among the four writings ‘makes no difference to the faith of believers, since in all of them everything has been declared by one primary Spirit’. If only one of the four had received canonical status, if Marcion’s precedent (for example) had been generally followed, the path of the gospel critic might have been smoother, but we should all have been gravely impoverished. The four were not originally composed in order that readers might have a fourfold perspective on the ministry of Jesus, but in the event their collocation has provided just that.
It is noteworthy too that Matthew’s contribution, which became pre-eminently the church’s gospel and stood at the head of the fourfold collection, is self-evidently a catholic work. Even if the other synoptic gospels were not available for comparison with it, it would be possible to discern a variety of strands in its record of Jesus’ teaching—the particularist strand, ‘Go nowhere among the Gentiles’ (Mt. 10:5), and the more comprehensive strand, ‘many will come from east and west …’ (Mt. 8:11), transcended in the post-resurrection commission to ‘make disciples of all the nations’ (Mt. 28:19). The fact that this catholic work stands at the head of the New Testament points to the catholicity of the canon as a whole and not only of the gospel collection.
In the apostolic generation separate spheres of public ministry were carefully demarcated, as is amply attested from Paul’s letters (see Gal. 2:7–9; Rom. 15:20). But in the post-apostolic age the necessity of recognizing such separate spheres disappeared. While sectarian tendencies manifested themselves, the church as a whole paid heed to Paul’s exhortation to recognize that all the apostles and teachers whom the Lord had sent, ‘whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas’ (1 Cor. 3:22), belonged to them all. It would be difficult to envisage, in the apostolic age, one and the same church claiming Peter and Paul together as joint-founders. It was historically ludicrous for Dionysius, bishop of Corinth about ad 170, to make this claim for his own church—Paul might have turned in his grave at the thought of Peter’s sharing in what was so totally his own foundation (1 Cor. 3:10–15)—but there was a certain theological fitness in the claim, in so far as it expressed a resolve to appropriate the entire apostolic heritage. It is this resolve that is expressed in the New Testament canon, where every document that could reasonably be claimed as apostolic in origin and teaching found its place in due course.
THE SO-CALLED ANTI-MARCIONITE PROLOGUES
One expression of the catholic response to Marcion’s Gospel has been recognized in some gospel prologues which appear in certain Latin codices. At one time it was maintained by leading scholars that these belonged to a set of four gospel prologues drawn up in opposition to Marcionism shortly before Irenaeus began his literary career (c ad 180). The tide has more recently turned against this opinion, but two of the prologues, those to Luke and John, whether they originally belonged together or not, reflect an anti-Marcionite reaction.
The prologue to Luke (which is also extant in its Greek original in two codices of the tenth and eleventh centuries respectively) ends with a note on the authorship of Acts and of the Johannine apocalypse and gospel:
Luke was a native of Syrian Antioch, a physician by profession, a disciple of the apostles. Later he accompanied Paul until the latter’s martyrdom, serving the Lord without distraction, for he had neither wife nor children. He died in Boeotia at the age of eighty-four, full of the Holy Spirit. So then, after two gospels had already been written—Matthew’s in Judaea and Mark’s in Italy—Luke wrote this gospel in the region of Achaia, by inspiration of the Holy Spirit. At its outset, he indicated that other gospels had been written before his own, but that the obligation lay on him to set forth for the believers among the Gentiles a complete account in the course of his narrative, and to do so as accurately as possible. The object of this was that they might not be captivated on the one hand by a love for Jewish fables, not on the other hand be deceived by heretical and vain imaginations and thus wander from the truth. So, right at the beginning, Luke has delivered to us the story of the birth of John [the Baptist], as most essential [to the gospel]; for John marks the beginning of the gospel, since he was our Lord’s forerunner and associate both in the preparation for the gospel and in the administration of baptism and communication of the Spirit. This ministry [of John’s] was foretold by one of the twelve prophets. Later on, the same Luke wrote the Acts of the Apostles. Later still, the apostle John, one of the twelve, wrote the Apocalypse on the island of Patmos, and then the gospel in Asia.
The anti-Marcionite tendency of this prologue appears in the emphasis with which it affirms the integrity of the first chapters of Luke with the gospel as a whole and the essential character of John the Baptist’s ministry in preparing the way for the ministry of Jesus. Marcion’s Gospel lacked the first two chapters of Luke and the account of John’s ministry in Luke 3:2–22; it refused to recognize any link between Jesus and what went before him, whether the ministry of John or the predictions of Old Testament prophets.
When the author of the prologue says that Luke’s gospel was written in Achaia, he may have wished to associate one gospel with the churches of the Greek mainland, as Matthew allegedly originated in Judaea, Mark in Italy and John in the province of Asia.
More intriguing is the so-called anti-Marcionite prologue to John, which survives in Latin only, although its original language was plainly Greek. It suffered some textual corruption in the transmission both of the Greek text and of the Latin translation, but the necessary emendations are fairly obvious. As the Latin wording stands, it may be rendered thus:
The gospel of John was published and given to the churches by John while he was still in the body, as Papias of Hierapolis, John’s dear disciple, has related in his five exoteric, that is his last, books. He wrote down the gospel accurately at John’s dictation. But the heretic Marcion was rejected by John, having been condemned by him for his contrary views. Marcion had carried writings or letters to him from the brothers in Pontus.
The most evident emendation here is the reference to Papias’s ‘five exoteric, that is his last, book’. This should be corrected to his ‘five exegetical books’—that is, the five books of Papias’s Exegesis of the Dominical Oracles. In this work, it appears, Papias had given some account of the origin of John’s gospel. Did he claim that he himself ‘wrote down the gospel accurately at John’s dictation’? Perhaps he did: chronologically, at least, it is not impossible. Papias was contemporary with Polycarp, who was born not later than ad 70. Irenaeus confirms that Papias was indeed one of John’s disciples; even Eusebius, who disapproved of Papias’s views on eschatology, admits this reluctantly. But more probably Papias said that ‘they wrote down the gospel’—‘they’ being ‘the churches’, or possibly John’s associates who added the words ‘we know that his testimony is true’ in John 21:24—and Papias’s ‘they wrote down’ was misread as ‘I wrote down’ (a mistake quite easily made in Greek).
But was Marcion condemned and rejected by John? This is wholly improbable, unless the meaning is that John’s gospel provides a refutation of Marcion’s teaching (which is not a natural interpretation of what the prologue says). The probability is that it was Papias himself who rejected Marcion. If Marcion (whose father is said to have been a church leader at Sinope in Pontus), served as a messenger from the Christians in Pontus to the church of Hierapolis, he may have shared his unconventional thoughts with Papias and met with a negative response. Perhaps on the same tour he approached Polycarp in Smyrna, and found him equally unforthcoming.
This expressly anti-Marcionite prologue to John is clearly dependent on Papias’s account; it is unfortunate that corruption in the course of transmission and ambiguity in the language make it so difficult to deduce from it what Papias actually said.
Happily, we can turn to a more substantial document of the catholic response to Marcionism and other ‘Christian deviations’ of the second century.
Cf 1 John 2:24, ‘Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you.’
Tradition in the Early Church (London, 1962), p. 127.
This is the thesis of Tertullian’s work On the Prescription of Heretics (in which Praescriptio is a legal term meaning an ‘objection’ by the opposing party to the use of scripture by heretics).
Nowadays this assessment of the importance of Acts in the New Testament would be contested by those who see it as departing from the perspective of Paul and the gospels alike and as providing a foundation for catholicism (not merely for catholicity). See also pp. 132f.
Prescription, 22f.
Clementine Recognitions, 1.70; Epistle of Peter in James, 2. Those who took this line were Ebionites and other representatives of that Jewish-Christian tradition which finds expression in the third-century Clementine Recognitions and Homilies.
‘The Canon of the New Testament and the Unity of the Church’, E.T. in Essays on New Testament Themes (London, 1964), pp. 95–107; see p. 272 below.
C. F. D. Moule, The Birth of the New Testament (London, 31981), p. 255.
A. von Harnack, The Origin of the New Testament, E.T. (London, 1925), P. 67. See pp. 132f. above.
See pp. 159, 160.
Cf Harnack, The Date of the Acts and of the Synoptic Gospels, E.T. (London, 1911), pp. 133–135.
In Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 2.25.8. Dionysius also treats the church of Rome as the joint foundation of Peter and Paul—an honour which Paul would have firmly declined.
E.g. D. de Bruyne, ‘Les plus anciens prologues latins des Éangiles’, Revue Bénédictine 40 (1928), pp. 193–214; A. von Harnack, Die ältesten Evangelien-Prologe und die Bildung des Neuen Testaments (Berlin, 1928). On their hypothesis of a set of four such prologues, that to Matthew was lost, as also was that to Mark apart from the closing words: ‘… was asserted by Mark, who was named “stump-fingered” (colobodactylus) because his fingers were shorter in relation to the rest of his bodily proportions. He was Peter’s interpreter. After Peter’s departure he wrote down this gospel in the parts of Italy.’
Especially in J. Regul, Die antimarcionitischen Evangelienprologe (Freiburg, 1969).
The region of Greece around Thebes.
Gk. pneumatos koinōnia. The Latin text reads passionis socius, ‘a sharer in his suffering’, which presupposes a Greek reading pathēmatos instead of pneumatos.
Mal. 3:1; 4:5 (cf Mark 1:2; 9:11–13).
The Greek adjective exēgētikois was evidently corrupted to exōterikois (‘external’), which was taken over into the Latin version (exotericis) and explained by the Latin adjective externis; externis was then corrupted in the Latin transmission to extremis (‘last’).
In Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 3.39.1.
Hist. Eccl. 3.39.7.
If Papias wrote apegraphon (imperfect tense), this could be either first person singular of third person plural. If he wrote apegrapsan (third person plural, aorist tense), this, in certain positions, could have been written apegrapsā, which then, by the obscuring of the stroke above the final letter, was misread apegrapsa (first person singular). See J. B. Lightfoot, Essays on the Work entitled ‘Supernatural Religion’ (London, 1889), PP. 210–214.
Cf Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ, 3, apostrophizing Marcion. ‘If you had not deliberately rejected or corrupted the scriptures which disagree with your opinion, the Gospel of John would have confounded you.’
See P. 135.
The expression is borrowed from the title of Horton Davies, Christian Deviations (London, 1953).