Probably the most striking feature of the account is that it gives a narrative of the resurrection. The four Gospels of the New Testament indicate that Jesus was buried and on the third day the women find the tomb empty, but there is no account of Jesus coming out of the tomb. This Gospel does narrate the event, however—and quite an amazing account it is. In the middle of the night two angels descend from heaven and the stone is seen to roll away from the tomb of its own accord. The angels enter and then come out with their heads reaching up to the sky, supporting a third figure. It is obviously Jesus, whose head reaches above the sky. Behind them the cross emerges from the tomb. A voice comes from heaven asking if the Gospel has been preached to those “who are asleep” (the dead). And the cross replies, “Yes!”
A giant Jesus and a walking, talking cross. It’s hard to believe that this Gospel was ever lost. Is it the one known to Serapion? Most scholars have concluded that it is. It is a Gospel allegedly by Peter. It is for the most part theologically acceptable, in protoorthodox terms, but there are some passages that could be interpreted in a docetic way. The body of Jesus does not seem like a real human body at the resurrection, for example, and we are told that earlier, while Jesus was being crucified, “he was silent as if he felt no pain.” Maybe he really didn’t feel pain. Maybe this is docetic. Even if it is not docetic, it is at least possible to see how someone might interpret it as docetic, which is what Serapion seems to imply. My hunch is that this is a fragmentary copy of the text available to Serapion at the end of the second century.
What is most important for our purposes here is how Serapion decided whether or not the book was acceptable for use in the church—whether it should be considered an authoritative book of Scripture. Since, for Serapion, the book was susceptible to a docetic interpretation, it was potentially heretical. And because it was potentially heretical, it could not have been written by Peter, who naturally would not advance any theological view that ran counter to the protoorthodox position. Since it was not by Peter, it could not be considered Scripture. For Serapion, a book could be Scripture only if it taught orthodox doctrine and was written by an apostle.
These two criteria were the most important among the protoorthodox leaders who decided which books should make up the canon of the New Testament.
An Early Attempt at the Canon: The Muratorian Canon
The decision about which books should make up the canon was not made overnight. Not until the end of the fourth century—some three hundred years after most of the books of the New Testament had been written—did anyone of record indicate that he thought the New Testament consisted of the twenty-seven books we have today, and only those books.
By then debates had been going on for a very long time. The very first attempt that we know of to set down a list of books that the author, who was anonymous, believed formed the Christian Scriptures comes from about the time of Serapion. This fragmentary list is called the Muratorian Canon, named after L. A. Muratori, the eighteenth-century Italian scholar who discovered it in the city of Milan.
The fragment is a simple list of books with occasional comments by the author about the books he lists. It is written in truly awful Latin, which most scholars have taken to be a wretched attempt to translate the text from Greek. The fragment itself dates from the eighth century, but it is usually thought that the list originated at the end of the second century, probably near Rome.12 The first part of the list is missing. After a few words from the end of a sentence describing one of the Gospels, the author continues by speaking of Luke as “the third book of the Gospel.” He continues by naming John as the “fourth,” and goes from there. It is almost certain, since Luke and John are the third and fourth Gospels, that the list began with Matthew and Mark.
The unknown author includes twenty-two of our twenty-seven books as canonical—all except Hebrews, James, 1 and 2 Peter, and 3 John. But he also includes the Wisdom of Solomon and the protoorthodox Apocalypse of Peter. He indicates that the apocalypse known as The Shepherd of Hermas is acceptable for reading but not as part of the church’s sacred Scriptures. He goes on to reject two letters allegedly from Paul, those to the Alexandrians and the Laodiceans, which he indicates are forgeries made by the followers of Marcion. He then mentions other forgeries written by other heretics, including some Gnostics.
The Muratorian Canon is especially valuable if it really does come from the second century,13 because this would indicate that at least one protoorthodox author was interested in knowing which books could be accepted as canonical Scripture; it shows that there was a concern to eliminate from Scripture any forgeries or heretical documents; and it shows that there was already the acceptance in some circles of books that eventually were to become canonical, although a couple of other books were included as well.
But the matter continued to be debated for centuries. We know this in part from manuscripts we have of the New Testament. Once we get into the sixth and seventh centuries, manuscripts containing books that were considered parts of the New Testament usually do not include anything besides canonical books, but this is not true of earlier periods. The Codex Alexandrinus, a famous manuscript of the fifth century, includes as part of the New Testament the books of 1 and 2 Clement, allegedly written by the man Peter had appointed to be the bishop of Rome. And the Codex Sinaiticus, from the fourth century, includes both the letter of Barnabas and The Shepherd of Hermas. Earlier still is our first copy of the books of 1 and 2 Peter and Jude, found in a manuscript called P72, since it was the seventy-second papyrus manuscript of the New Testament to be catalogued. In addition to these three books, the manuscript contains numerous others, including a Gospel allegedly written by Jesus’ brother James, “The Nativity of Mary,” more frequently known as the Proto-Gospel of James; 3 Corinthians; and a homily by the church father Melito on the Passover.
What were the power dynamics involved with deciding which books should be in and which out? To make fuller sense of the development of the canon, we need to know more about how the protoorthodox Christians emerged victorious in their struggles for dominance over other groups within the early church. This takes us straight into the relationship between orthodoxy and heresy.
ORTHODOXY AND HERESY IN THE EARLY CHURCH
From the very beginning, when the competition for converts began, there were different Christian groups claiming to represent “the truth” as told by Jesus and his apostles. Our very earliest Christian author, Paul, talks at length about Christian missionaries who preached “another gospel,” which of course for him was a false Gospel (Galatians 1:6–9). Naturally, his opponents thought that they were right and that he was the one who had gotten it wrong. They believed their views were those of Jesus and his original disciples. And they no doubt had writings to prove it. But these writings have all been lost to posterity. Only Paul’s letters opposing their views survive.
What was the relationship among the various groups of Christians from Paul’s day down through the second and third Christian centuries? For most of Christian history, the relationship was understood through the lens of the fourth-century orthodox church father Eusebius, whose ten-volume work, The Church History, contains a good deal of information about the progress of Christianity from its inception to the time of Constantine.
Eusebius’s View of Orthodoxy and Heresy
Since Eusebius’s Church History is our only source of information about much of what happened in the second and third Christian centuries, it is no surprise that Eusebius’s perspective shaped how Christian scholars through the ages understood the relationship of orthodoxy and heresy in the period. As a member of the Christian group that won out over the others, Eusebius maintained that the views he and like-minded Christian leaders of the fourth century held were not only right (orthodox) but also that they were the same views Jesus and his apostles had promoted from day one.
To be sure, there were occasional dissenters, as willful heretics tried to pervert the original message of Jesus. To Eusebius,
anyone promoting one of these alternative perspectives (including the Ebionites, Marcion, the various Gnostics) was inspired by wicked demons and represented only a fringe movement in the great forward progress of orthodoxy. For Eusebius, certain beliefs were and always had been orthodox: the belief that there was only one God, the creator of all; that the material world was created good; that Jesus, God’s son, was both human and divine. These were the original beliefs of the church and had always been the majority view.
Heresies, then, were seen to be offshoots of orthodoxy that came along as the demons tried to work their nefarious purposes in the church and pervert the truth. Heresy was always secondary (coming after orthodoxy), derivative (altering the views of orthodoxy), and perverted. But God was ultimately triumphant, and the truth suppressed these heretical movements, until the orthodox Christian religion became a powerful force near the time of the emperor Constantine.
Walter Bauer’s Bombshell
This was the view that virtually every scholar of the church accepted until the early twentieth century. All that changed with the publication of one of the most important books to be written about early Christianity in modern times, Walter Bauer’s Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (1934; originally published in German). Bauer took issue with Eusebius on a number of key points and reconceptualized what had happened in the struggle for theological dominance in the early church.
Bauer looked at our earliest evidence for Christianity in a range of geographical regions throughout early Christendom—for example, in Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, and Rome.14 He found that if the sources are studied in minute detail, they tell a very different story from the one told by Eusebius. In many places of early Christianity, forms of Christian belief that were later labeled heretical were the original form of Christianity, and in some parts of the church so-called heretics outnumbered those who agreed with the orthodox form of the faith. In some places Marcionite Christianity was dominant; in other places, one or another of the Gnostic systems prevailed.
Moreover, a number of Christian groups saw no sharp divisions between what would later be called heresy and what would be called orthodoxy. The clear theological distinctions of Eusebius’s day were not original to the faith, but were created later when the battle lines were drawn up. Some people who were later considered heretics would have been seen, and were seen, as completely orthodox in their own day.
The way Bauer saw it, the church of the second and third centuries was not made up of one massive and dominant movement known as orthodoxy, with heretical groups at the fringes. Early on there were all sorts of groups with all sorts of views in lots of different places. Of course, all of these groups believed that their views were right, that their beliefs were orthodox.
But in the struggle to win converts, only one group eventually won out; this was the group that was particularly well represented in the city of Rome. The Roman Christians asserted their influence on other churches; as the church in Rome, the center of the empire, this community was larger, wealthier, and better organized than other Christian groups.
This Roman group acquired more converts than any of the others, eventually stamped out all of its competition, declared itself orthodox, argued that its views really were those of Jesus and the apostles, claimed that it had always been the majority view, and then—as a final coup de grâce—rewrote the history of the conflict. What emerged was a Christianity characteristic of the Roman church. It was Roman Christianity—Roman catholic (meaning universal) Christianity.
Eusebius stands at the end of this process. It was his rewriting of history that made all later historians think that his group had always been the majority opinion. But it did not really happen that way.
In the Aftermath of Bauer
Needless to say, Bauer’s book created quite a storm, and the winds of controversy have not died down yet. Many scholars, especially those who considered themselves heirs of the Christian orthodoxy embraced by Eusebius, rejected Bauer wholesale. But other scholars were convinced, and continue to be convinced.15
Among critical scholars today the majority opinion seems to be that in many, many details of his analysis Bauer is wrong, or at least that he has overplayed his hand. He sometimes makes dubious arguments and in places attacks the surviving sources with inappropriate inquisitorial zeal. And Rome may not have been as central to the process as he would have it.
But Bauer’s basic portrayal of Christianity’s early centuries appears to be correct. There were lots of early Christian groups. They all claimed to be right. They all had books to back up their claims, books allegedly written by the apostles and therefore representing the views of Jesus and his first disciples. The group that won out did not represent the teachings of Jesus or of his apostles. For example, none of the apostles claimed that Jesus was “fully God and fully man,” or that he was “begotten not made, of one substance with the Father,” as the fourth-century Nicene Creed maintained. The victorious group called itself orthodox. But it was not the original form of Christianity, and it won its victory only after many hard-fought battles.
This view of things has been confirmed by almost every archaeological discovery made since Bauer’s time. To be sure, most of these finds come from Egypt, but that is just an accident of climate: Egypt’s dry sands allow documents to survive almost permanently. The finds come from different parts of Egypt, and there is no guarantee that a document found in Egypt originated there, given what we know about the extensive travel and interchange of books that occurred throughout the empire.
Amazingly, virtually every time a new document is found, it is “heretical” rather than “protoorthodox.”16 These include such nonorthodox works as the Nag Hammadi treatises discovered in 1945; a book called the Gospel of the Savior (found in Egypt), uncovered in a museum in Berlin in the 1990s; and the most recent discovery, the Gnostic Gospel of Judas, found in the late 1970s and first published in 2006.17 Why don’t protoorthodox (noncanonical) texts ever appear? Were the heretics the only ones doing any writing? Or was heresy much more widely spread and significant than Eusebius knows or lets on?
It appears that alternative views of Christianity were dominant during certain time periods and in some locations, most demonstrably in Egypt, but probably in lots of other places as well. Eventually these views were stamped out. How did it happen? What were the weapons that the protoorthodox used in their quest to gain converts and displace their opponents, leading to the emergence of their doctrines as orthodoxy?
THE WEAPONS OF THE CONFLICT
When one reads through the ancient discussions of orthodoxy and heresy, it becomes clear that the protoorthodox had three major weapons that it used to combat Christian views that it considered aberrant: the clergy, the creed, and the canon.
The Clergy
Unlike some other Christian groups, the protoorthodox Christians insisted that there should be a rigid hierarchy in the churches, in which one leader, the bishop, was given authority over the congregation. The bishop had groups of leaders under him: elders (called presbyters), who evidently were most directly involved with the spiritual needs of a congregation, and deacons (literally, “ministers”), who may have been more involved with the congregation’s physical needs, such as alms giving and the like. Already by the early second century, a protoorthodox author such as Ignatius of Antioch could argue quite vociferously that church members were to “regard the bishop as the Lord himself” (Ignatius, To the Ephesians, 6.1).
Anyone with that much power could obviously shape things in his church the way he wanted. Other Christian groups, such as many of the Gnostics, were not as interested in centralized power. Gnostics believed that everyone in the true church had a spark of the divine within and could receive the secret knowledge that brings salvation. As a result, many Gnostics were egalitarian. But not the protoorthodox. Taking their lead from what was already a movement in this direction in the Pastoral Epistles, they insisted on having clearly designated leaders who could make decision
s. Having the right person in power made a difference. The protoorthodox used their influence wherever possible to make sure that the bishop toed the line theologically, and insisted that the bishop exercise his control over the thinking of the church. An example of this is Serapion’s exercise of power over the church at Rhossus described earlier.
The Creed
Protoorthodox Christians began to insist that there was only one true faith, the one they subscribed to. Some of their views began to take on a paradoxical cast, as they insisted, for example, that Jesus was fully divine (against the Ebionites) and fully human (against the Marcionites) but only one person, not two (against the Gnostics). They insisted that there was only one God. But Jesus himself was also God. They insisted that the true God had created this world, even though sin had corrupted the world.
I will be dealing more with the development of several important theological views in the next chapter. For now I want to emphasize that over time the protoorthodox developed a set of beliefs that it insisted were standard and had to be accepted by everyone in the church. We find early traces of this development in the writings of late-second-and early-third-century church fathers, such as Irenaeus and Tertullian, who argued that a “rule of faith” came down from the apostles, which was to be accepted by all Christians. This rule included important ideas that became the backbone of orthodoxy and negated other views: there is only one God; he is the creator; Christ is human but also divine.
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