The Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew

by Bart D. Ehrman

  Antidocetic Alterations

  Finally we might consider changes that appear to combat docetic interpretations of Jesus, such as those advocated by Marcion and some Gnostics, which stressed that Jesus was so completely divine he was not at all human. Proto-orthodox alterations of their sacred texts, as you might expect, would emphasize just the opposite, that Jesus really was a human, that he really did suffer, bleed, and die, that he really was a man of the flesh. There are a number of changes in our manuscripts of this kind. Here I'll cite just two that are particularly interesting.

  One of the most famous passages of the Gospel of Luke comes in the scene immediately before Jesus' arrest, where he is praying and begins to "sweat blood" (this is where the phrase comes from): "And an angel appeared to him from heaven, giving him strength; being in great agony, he began to pray more fervently, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling to the ground"

  (Luke 22:43-44). Here is a gripping scene of Jesus in agony, very human, terrified of his coming death. The problem, however, is that these verses are not found in our oldest and best witnesses to the Gospel of Luke (and they occur in no other Gospel). Did scribes take the verses out of the text because they found them strange, or did they add them because they found them necessary? There are good reasons for thinking that scribes added them, including the one I mentioned, that they are not found in our oldest and best manuscripts. It is particularly worth noting in this case how the verses were used in the earliest authors who cite them. In every instance, they occur in proto-orthodox heresiologists (Justin, Irenaeus, and Hippolytus) who quote the verses to show that contrary to some heretical teachers, Jesus really was a flesh-and-blood human being, who suffered very real human emotions, sweating blood in agony while waiting for his arrest. It appears then that Luke's betrayal-and-arrest scene was altered by proto-orthodox scribes wanting to stress Jesus' humanity in the face of docetic Christians who denied it.

  The second example comes two chapters later, when Jesus has been raised from the dead. The women who go to the tomb learn the wonderful news. When they report it to the disciples, however, they are ridiculed for telling silly tales. But their report is confirmed by the head apostle Peter, who runs to the tomb and sees for himself that it is empty of all but the linen burial cloths (Luke 24:12). Jesus then appears to the two people on the road to Emmaus and soon to all the disciples. But what about this business of Peter himself finding the empty tomb?

  In fact, the verse that reports it is not found in some of our important textual witnesses. And when one looks at the verse carefully, it contains a disproportionate number of words and grammatical characteristics not otherwise found in Luke's Gospel (or in Acts). Moreover, it looks very similar to an account found in John 20:3-10, almost like a summary or synopsis of that story. How does one account for all this? Probably the easiest explanation is that the verse was an addition to Luke's original account. In considering reasons for a scribe to have added it, we should not overlook how the verse could serve the proto-orthodox cause. Here Jesus is raised bodily from the dead; this is not some kind of spiritualized resurrection as some docetists would have it. The proof is in the linen cloths, hard evidence of the tangible nature of the resurrection. And who sees them? Not just women telling a silly tale, but Peter, the chief of the apostles, eventually the bishop of Rome, the head of the proto-orthodox church. This appears, then, to be a proto-orthodox change of the text, made to counter a docetic understanding of Jesus.

  We have seen a wide range of strategies used by the various combatants in the literary battles for dominance in early Christianity: polemical treatises with stereotyped but harsh attacks on the views of others, forged documents in the names of apostolic authorities heartily advocating one form of the religion or maligning another, and now falsification of literature already accepted as sacred by one or the other side in the disputes. There was, however, one more strategy that was used with particular effect by the winning side of these altercations. This was the collection of a group of texts into a canon of Scripture, which was invested, then, with sacred authority as having come from God. This final strategy had significant long-term effects, greater than any of the others we have considered to this point. For it gave us our New Testament, the twenty-seven books accepted by Christians since the fourth century down to the present day as canonical Scripture. The battle for this collection of writings, however, was long and hard. We will consider key aspects of this battle in the chapter that follows.

  Chapter Eleven: The Invention of Scripture: The Formation of the Proto-orthodox New Testament

  The victory of proto-orthodox Christianity in its quest for dominance left a number of indelible marks on the history of Western civilization. Of these, none has proved more significant than the formation of the New Testament as a canon of Scripture.

  To be sure, the development of a church hierarchy was important, but there are numerous denominations today, with a range of church structures. The formulation of the orthodox creeds was significant as well, but in some churches new creeds have replaced the old, and almost no one has weekly Creedal Studies to discuss how the Nicene affirmations can make a difference in their lives. The New Testament is another matter: It is accepted and read by millions of people around the world and is understood by most Christians to be the word of God, the inspired Scripture, the ultimate basis for faith and practice—even for Christians who stress "tradition" as well. In common Christian understanding, these are twenty-seven books given by God to his people to guide them in their lives and understanding.

  It comes as a bit of a shock to most people to realize that the Church has not always had the New Testament. But the Christian Scriptures did not descend from heaven a few years after Jesus died. The books that eventually came to be collected into the sacred canon were written by a variety of authors over a period of sixty or seventy years, in different places for different audiences. Other books were written in the same period, some of them by the same authors. Soon thereafter the Church saw a flood of books also allegedly written by the earliest followers of Jesus, forgeries in the names of the apostles, produced for decades, centuries even, after the apostles themselves were long dead and buried. Virtually all of this other literature has been destroyed, forgotten, lost. Only a fraction of the early Christian writings came to be immortalized by inclusion in the sacred canon.

  But why were these twenty-seven books included, and not any others? Who decided which books to include? On what basis? And when? It is one thing for believers to affirm, on theological grounds, that the decisions about the canon, like the books themselves, were divinely inspired, but it is another thing to look at the actual history of the process and to ponder the long, drawn-out arguments over which books to include and which to reject. The process did not take a few months or years. It took centuries. And even then there was no unanimity.

  Starting at the End: The Canon after Three Hundred Years

  To begin our reflections on the formation of the New Testament canon, perhaps we would do well to set the context and then start at the end. Most of the books of the New Testament were written in the first century of the common era, from the earliest letters of Paul, written about 50 ce, some twenty years after Jesus' death, Peter, widely thought to be the final New Testament book to be written, around 120 ce. The controversies we have been examining date, for the most part, to the two hundred years that followed. But even at the end of this two-hundred-year period there was no fixed New Testament canon.

  The first Christian author of any kind to advocate a New Testament canon of our twenty-seven books and no others was Athanasius, the fourth-century bishop of Alexandria. This comes in a letter that Athanasius wrote in 367 ce— over three centuries after the writings of Paul, our earliest Christian author. As the Alexandrian bishop, Athanasius sent an annual letter to the churches in Egypt under his jurisdiction. The purpose of these letters was to set the date of Easter, which was not established well in advance, as in our modern calenda
rs, but was announced each year by the church authorities. Athanasius used these annual "Festal" letters to provide pastoral advice and counsel to his churches. In his famous thirty-ninth Festal letter of 367 ce he indicates, as part of his advice, the books that his churches were to accept as canonical Scripture. He first lists the books of the "Old Testament," including the Old Testament Apocrypha (which were to be read only as devotional literature, not as canonical authorities). Then he names exactly the twenty-seven books that we now have as the New Testament, indicating that "in these alone the teaching of godliness is proclaimed. Let no one add to these; let nothing be taken away from them."

  Numerous scholars have unreflectively claimed that this letter of Athanasius represents the "closing" of the canon, that from then on there were no disputes about which books to include. But there continued to be debates and differences of opinion, even in Athanasius's home church. For example, the famous teacher of the late-fourth-century Alexandria, Didymus the Blind, claimed that Peter was a "forgery" that was not to be included in the canon. Moreover, Didymus quoted other books, including the Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle of Barnabas, as scriptural authorities.

  Going somewhat further afield, in the early fifth century, the church in Syria finalized its New Testament canon and excluded from it Peter, John, Jude, and Revelation, making a canon of twenty-two books rather than twenty-seven. The church in Ethiopia eventually accepted the twenty-seven books named by Athanasius but added four others not otherwise widely known— Sinodos, the Book of Clement (which is not Clement), the Book of the Covenant, and the Didascalia—for a thirty-one book canon. Other churches had yet other canons. And so, when we talk about the "final" version of the New Testament, we are doing so in (mental) quotation marks, for there never has been complete agreement on the canon throughout the Christian world.

  There has been agreement, however, throughout most of the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant traditions. The twenty-seven books named by Athanasius are "the" New Testament. Even so, the process did not come to a definitive conclusion through an official ratification of Athanasius's canon, say, at a church council called for the purpose. There was no official, churchwide pronouncement on the matter until the Council of Trent in the mid-sixteenth century (which, as a Roman Catholic council, was binding only on Roman Catholics). But by then, the twenty-seven books were already "set" as Scripture.

  Thus, the canon of the New Testament was ratified by widespread consensus rather than by official proclamation. Still, by the beginning of the fifth century, most churches in the Christian world agreed on its contours.

  The Beginning of the Process

  How did the process begin? Why did it take so long to get resolved (if, in fact, we can consider it resolved)? How did Christian leaders decide which books to include? What were the motivating factors, the impetus?

  We have already seen something of what motivated the formation of the canon, at least in part. Given the nature of Christianity from the outset, as a religion that stressed proper belief and that required authorities on which to base that belief, literary texts very soon took on unusual importance for this religion. The apostles of Jesus, of course, were seen as authoritative sources of knowledge about what Jesus himself said and did. But apostles could not be present everywhere at once in the churches scattered throughout the empire. Apostolic writings therefore had to take the place of an apostolic presence, and so the written word became a matter of real importance.

  There was another motivation behind the formation of a sacred canon of Scripture, and it starts long before the Christian mission to establish churches. In some sense, the Christian movement had a canon of Scripture at its very beginning, prior even to the writing of any apostolic texts. Jesus and his earthly followers themselves had a collection of sacred writings. They were all Jews, and they fully accepted the authority of books that came to be included in what later Christians would call the "Old Testament."

  There is no doubt that during his public ministry Jesus accepted, followed, interpreted, and taught the Hebrew Scriptures to his disciples. This is not to say that the Hebrew canon of Scripture had already reached its final form in Jesus' day. It appears, on the contrary, that the twenty-two book canon now accepted by Jews was itself in the process of development, not to be completed until the early third century of the common era. Even so, virtually all Jews of Jesus' day accepted the sacred authority of the first five books of what is now the Hebrew Bible, known as the Torah or the Law of Moses and sometimes called the Pentateuch (which means "five scrolls"). Many Jews, Jesus included, also accepted the sacred authority of the Hebrew prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the others) along with some of the other writings, such as the Psalms.

  Jesus was well versed in these books of Scripture, and his teachings are, in large measure, an interpretation of them. In early traditions he is called a "rabbi" (meaning "teacher" of Scripture). He enters into disputes with his opponents, the Pharisees, over the proper interpretation of the laws of Scripture, such as what it means to honor the sabbath. When someone asks him how to have eternal life, he replies that he must keep the commandments—and then lists some of the Ten Commandments to illustrate the point (see Matt. 19:17-19). When asked about the key commandments of the Law, he responds by quoting Deuteronomy 6:4, that "you should love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength," and Leviticus 19:18, that "you should love your neighbor as yourself (see Matt. 22:34-40). These are not commandments that Jesus himself invented; he was quoting Scripture. Even when he appears to abrogate the Law of Moses in some of the so-called Antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount, he does so in order to bring out what is, in his judgment, their true meaning and intent: The Law says not to murder, Jesus says not to be angry; the Law says not to commit adultery, Jesus says not to lust; the Law says take an eye for an eye, Jesus says turn the other cheek (Matt 5:21-48). The deep intentions of these laws, for Jesus, are to be followed, not simply their surface meaning. Jesus saw the Law as a direction from God about how to live and worship.

  His earliest followers did as well. Like him they were law-observant Jews, already possessing a collection of Scripture at the beginning. This is also true of later Christian authors whose books eventually came to be included in the New Testament: Paul, Matthew, Luke, the author of Hebrews, and most of the rest quote the Jewish Scriptures as authoritative texts for the life and worship of the Christian communities they were addressing. These authors quote the Scriptures in their Greek translation (called the Septuagint) because their readers spoke Greek. For most early Christians this translation had as much authority as the original Hebrew. Moreover, these Christians saw Jesus not as the founder of a new religion that cast aside the old, but as the fulfillment of the old, who brought something new to an understanding of God that was already anticipated in the Hebrew Bible.

  Most Jews, of course, rejected the notion that Jesus was the fulfillment of ancient prophecies concerning the Messiah, and so they rejected the Christian message. This itself provided some motivation for early Christians to devise their own sacred authorities: to separate themselves from Jews, who refused to accept the "authoritative" interpretations of Jewish Scripture pronounced by Christians.

  The movement toward establishing a distinctively Christian set of authorities can be seen already in the writings of the New Testament. Jesus himself, of course, presented his interpretations of Scripture as authoritative, meaning that they were to be accepted as normative for his followers, who thought of them not only as right and true but as divinely inspired. After Jesus' death, his teachings— not just his interpretations of Scripture per se, but everything he taught—were granted sacred authority by his followers. In fact, it was not long at all before Jesus' teachings were widely thought to be as authoritative as the Jewish Scriptures themselves. We see this movement already in the writings of Paul, who on several (though rare) occasions quotes Jesus' teachings to resolve ethical issues in his churches:

  To those who are m
arried I give charge, not I but the Lord, that the wife should not separate from her husband . . . and that the husband should not divorce his wife. (1 Cor. 7:10-11)

  Jesus taught that married couples should not divorce, despite the fact that the Law of Moses allowed for it. But Jesus maintained that Moses had made this allowance because of "the hardness of your heart" (Mark 10:2-11). For the Christians, Jesus' teaching could trump the provisions of the Law.

  Even more, by the end of the first century, Jesus' words were being construed by Christian authors as "Scripture." In a striking passage in Tim. 5:18, the author (claiming to be Paul) urges his readers to pay double honor to the presbyters in the church, and he quotes two passages of "Scripture" to support his view. The first is Deut. 25:4 ("Do not muzzle an ox that is treading the grain"), but the other is a saying of Jesus, now found in Matt. 10:10 ("The worker is worthy of his hire"). Here Jesus' own words are equated with Scripture.

  In some circles, the teachings of Jesus were not simply on a par with Scripture; they far surpassed it. We have seen this already in the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus, the correct interpretation of which is said to bring eternal life. In proto-orthodox circles, however, it was not Jesus' secret teachings but those found in apostolic authorities that were seen as authoritative. And just as important as his teachings were the events of his life. Accounts of Jesus' life—his words and deeds, his death and resurrection—were eventually placed in circulation and accepted as sacred Scripture, at least as authoritative for most proto-orthodox Christians as the texts of the Jewish Bible.