The Pre-Nicene New Testament: Fifty-four Formative Texts

The Pre-Nicene New Testament

Fifty-four Formative Texts

Robert M. Price

Signature Books • Salt Lake City • 2006

For Professor David M. Scholer, who first sent me swim­ming in the ocean of church fathers, martyrs, heretics, and apocrypha. When he threw me a life preserver, it wasn’t his fault that I didn’t grab it!

Copyright 2006 Signature Books. All rights reserved. Signature Books is a registered trademark of Signature Books Publishing, LLC.

www.signaturebooks.com

Jacket design by Ron Stucki

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The pre-Nicene New Testament: fifty-four formative texts / by Robert M. Price.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 10: 1-56085-194-5

ISBN 13: 978-1-56085-194-3

1. Apocryphal books (New Testament) I. Price, Robert M., 1954- II. Bible. N.T. English. Price. 2006.

BS2832.P75 2006

229’.9205209—dc22

2006045036

Contents

Introduction to the Canon

I. Pre-Apostolic Writings

1. The Book of John the Baptizer

2. The Revelation of Dositheus

3. The Great Declaration of Simon Magus

4. The Sayings of Jesus

II. Matthean Cycle

5. The Gospel according to Mark

6. The Gospel according to Matthew

7. The Gospel according to the Hebrews

8. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas

9. The Generations of Jesus

III. Marcion’s Apostolicon

10. The Gospel of Marcion

11. The Epistle to the Galatians

12. The First Epistle to the Corinthians

13. The Second Epistle to the Corinthians

14. The Epistle to the Romans

15. The First Epistle to the Thessalonians

16. The Second Epistle to the Thessalonians

17. Laodiceans/Ephesians

18. Second Laodiceans

19. The Epistle to the Colossians

20. The Letter to Philemon

21. The Epistle to the Philippians

IV. To Theophilus

22. The Gospel according to Luke

23. The Acts of All the Apostles

24. The Epistle to Titus

25. The Second Epistle to Timothy

26. The First Epistle to Timothy

V. The Testament of John

27. The Gospel according to John

28. The Preaching of John

29. The Letter to Gaius

30. The Letter to Kuria

31. Concerning the Word of Life

32. The Revelation of John

33. Thunder: Perfect Mind

VI. The Petrine Corpus

34. The Gospel according to Peter

35. The Preaching of Peter

36. The First Epistle of Peter

37. The Second Epistle of Peter

38. The Third Epistle of Peter

39. The Fourth Epistle of Peter

40. The Apocalypse of Peter

VII. Heirs of Jesus

41. An Epistle on Works Righteousness

42. The Epistle of James

43. The Letter of Jesus to Abgarus

44. The Hymns of the Just

45. The Epistle to the Hebrews

46. Melchizedek

47. The Epistle of Jude

48. The Gospel according to Thomas

49. The Gospel of Mary Magdalene

VIII. The Pauline Circle

50. The Shepherd of Hermas

51. The Acts of Paul and Thecla

52. The Epistle of Barnabas

53. The Revelation of Paul

54. The Third Epistle to the Corinthians

Bibliographic Essay

Note on Text and Translation

Introduction to the Canon

History, Text, and Interpretation

Fruit as well as root

The question of the New Testament canon, which is to say the official list of writings or table of contents, is a vitally important one, as all recognize, and even more important than many realize. On the one hand, if one regards the Bible as inspired and authoritative scripture, it is obviously a vital matter to get clear about which writings are to wield authority over belief and conscience and which shall not. Believing in scripture in general means nothing: it is a matter of specific claims, commandments, doctrines, and rites, and some appear in some documents, others in other documents. For this reason, Protestants follow Martin Luther in rejecting both the book of 2 Mac­cabees and the practice of praying for the dead, which is endorsed in it. They are ready to believe in the bodily assumption of Elijah into heaven since this event is recounted in 2 Kings, but they scoff at the bodily ascension of the Virgin Mary since this very similar belief is recounted only in non-canonical writings such as The Falling Asleep of the Holy Moth­er of God. Similarly, bib­licists opposing abortion would have a much simpler case to make had the Epistle of Barnabas or the Apocalypse of Peter been admitted into the canon, as they explicitly condemn abortion, whereas the practice does not come up for mention in any document considered canonical.

A more crucial aspect still is that of the authority underlying the Bible. If the texts of scripture authorize everything else in Christian belief and practice, what is it that authenticates the biblical canon? It is not as if the Bible were delivered from the hand of an angel like the Book of Mormon or dictated by an angel like the Koran. The Bible, as everyone knows, is a compilation of many short writings, many of them the products of several writers, redactors, revisers, and scribes. In addition, there were books of the same type that did not finally make it into the canonical list. Who decided on the list and how did they decide? The Bible is not only the beginning of one theological process but is itself the end of another. It is worth looking back at how came the Bible, as Edgar J. Goodspeed used to say. When we have done that, we will be in a position to re-evaluate other books that were not canonized.

Marcionite invasion

The history of a distinctively Christian scriptural canon begins with Marcion of Pontus in Asia Minor. Traditionally dated about 140 AD/CE, Marcion actually may have begun his public ministry earlier, just after the turn of the century. One ancient tradition makes Mar­cion the amanuensis (secretary) of the evangelist John at the end of the first century. That is probably not historically true, but no one would have told the story if they had not assumed Marcion was living at that time. It was a general tendency of early Catholic apologists to late-date the so-called heretics to distance them from the apostolic period in the same way apologists today prefer the earliest possible date for the epistles and gospels.

Marcion was the first Paulinist we know of. It would later be a matter of some embarrassment to the church fathers that the earliest readers and devotees of the Pauline epistles were the Marcionites and the Val­entinian Gnostics. We know of no Paulinists before these second-­century Christians. The mid-first century existence of Pauline Christ­ian­ity is simply an inference, admittedly a natural one, from taking the authorship and implied dates of the Pauline epistles at face value as works representing a wing of first-century Christianity. But it is quite possible that the Pauline literature is the product of Mar­cion­ite and Gnostic movements in the late first and early second centuries. Even if most of the Pauline epistles are genuinely from the first century, the most likely candidate for the first collector of the corpus remains Mar­cion. No one else in the relevant time period would have had either the interest or the opportunity. No one was as interested in Paul as Marcion. Why?

It was because he shared with his theological cousins, the Gnostics, the belief that the true God and Father of Jesus Christ was not the same deity as the creator and law-giver God of Israel and of the Jewish scriptures. In this belief Marcion was perhaps influenced by Zoroastrian Zurvanism, a dualistic doctrine, as Jan Koester suggests. Mar­cion allowed that the creator God was righteous and just but also harsh and retributive. His seeming grace was but a function of his arbitrariness: Nero might render a verdict of thumbs-up or thumbs-­down as the whim moved him, and so with the God of Israel. Mar­cion deemed the Jewish scriptures historically true and expected messianic prophecies to be fulfilled by a Davidic king who would restore Jewish sovereignty. But Marcion deemed all of this strictly irrelevant to the new religion of Christianity. In his view, which he claimed to have derived from Paul’s epistles, Jesus Christ was the son and re­veal­er of an alien God who had not created the world, had not given the Torah to Moses, and would not judge mankind. The Father of Jesus Christ was a God of perfect love and righteousness who would punish no one. Through Jesus, and by extension Paul, the Christian God offered humans the opportunity to be adopted as his children. If they were gentiles, this meant a break with paganism. If they were Jews, it entailed a break from Judaism and the Torah. Marcion preached a strict morality. All sex was sinful. Begetting children only produced more souls to live in bondage to the creator. Marcion believed Jesus had no physical birth but had appeared out of heaven one day in a body that seemed to be that of a thirty-­year-old, complete with a misleading belly button, although not human at all: ra­ther a celestial being. Jesus taught and was later crucified. His twelve disciples were to spread his gospel of an alien God and his adoption of all who would come to him. But things went awry: the disciples, as thick-headed and prone to misunderstanding as they appear in the Gospel of Mark, underestimated the discontinuity of Jesus’ new revelation with their hereditary Judaism, thereby combining the two. This was the origin of the Judaiz­ing heresy with which Paul deals in Gala­tians and elsewhere.

Marcion had noticed an oddity most Christians never notice as they read the New Testament: if Jesus had named the Twelve to succeed him and seemed satisfied with them, why was there a need for Paul at all? And why should he come to eclipse the others in importance? The Twelve are, for the most part, merely a list of names. By contrast, Paul wrote letters that formed the basis of much of the church’s theology. Marcion saw a simple answer: the risen Jesus saw how far off the track his disciples would go and decided to recruit another who would get the message straight. This was Paul. To invoke a recurrent pattern in Christian history, think of Martin Luther, Alexander Campbell, John Nelson Darby, Joseph Smith, Charles Taze Russell, Victor Paul Wierwille, and others. All these believed that original, apostolic Christianity was corrupted by an admixture of human tradition, and they believed they had a new vision of the outlines of the original, true Christianity and could restore it. This is what Mar­ci­on thought already in the early second century. It should not sound that strange to us. Like these later men, Marcion would succeed very well in launching a new church, one that would spread like wildfire all over and even beyond the Roman Empire. Most noteworthy is the fact that the New Testament was his idea.

The emerging Catholic Church, which would develop into the medieval church, which then subsequently split into Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, was by this time employing the familiar authority structure of scripture and tradition. By scripture was meant the Septuagint, the Greek translation of Jewish scriptures, including the so-called apocryphal or deutero-canonical books of the Mac­ca­bees, Judith, Tobit, Sirach/Ecclesiasticus, Wisdom, Baruch, the Epistle of Jeremiah, 1 Esdras, and so on. This was scripture. Tradition, on the other hand, was a growing body of sayings attributed to Jesus and stories about him, as well as the summaries of apostolic doctrine represented in such formulae as the Apostles Creed and similar summaries in the late second century by writers like Irenaeus and Ter­tul­lian, to name two. There were a number of early Christian writings of various kinds (gospels, epistles, apostolic acts, revelations, church manuals) that were written and circulated more or less widely, but these were at first more expressions of the faith than either the source or criteria for faith. That is not to say they were not important. Think of the writings of Calvin and Luther: they are important to Calvinists and Lutherans who still study them, but Calvinists and Lutherans would not consider the wise writings of their founders to be scripture on the same level with the Bible. Admittedly, the difference in actual practice may evaporate, but that is just the technical distinction that is important here. The question that concerns us is precisely how the early Christian writings came to cross that line and join the category of scripture. The earliest Catholic Christians felt no need as yet for new scripture since they found the Septuagint Bible adequate to their needs as long as they could use allegory and typology to see in it a book about Jesus Christ and Christianity.

This reinterpretation of Jewish scripture was not something Mar­ci­on was willing to undertake. He insisted on a literal, straightforward reading of the Septuagint, refusing to treat it as a ventriloquist dummy and make it seem to speak with Christian accents. Theodore of Mop­suestia (350-428) had the same attitude, though he was no Marcionite. Read in a plain-sense fashion, the Jewish scriptures, Mar­cion realized, had nothing to do with Christianity. Even lacking his belief in two different biblical Gods, one can see his point when one thinks of the strained arguments needed in order to make various Old Testament passages sound like predictions of Jesus. And it is still com­mon today to hear Christians contrast the severe God of Israel with the tender Father of Jesus. So Marcion repudiated the Jewish scriptures. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe them, because he did. He simply felt they were the scriptures of someone else’s religion and didn’t over­lap with Christianity as he understood it. Nor was he anti-Semitic or even anti-Judaic. For him, Judaism was true on its own terms, just not the religion of Jesus Christ or of the apostle Paul.

Without the Septuagint as his scripture, Marcion felt the need to compile a new canon that would teach Christian faith and morals authoritatively. He accordingly collected the early Christian writings he felt served this purpose. These were paramountly the Pauline epistles except for the Pastorals, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus, because these did not exist yet, still waiting to be written in reaction to Marcion and other heretics in the mid-second century. Marcion had short­er, earlier versions of the texts than ours. Likewise, he had a book he knew simply as the gospel corresponding to a shorter version of our Gospel of Luke. Catholic writers decades later would claim he had edited and censored the texts, cutting out material that served to link Christianity with its Jewish background. Marcion no doubt did do some editing, textual criticism as it seemed to him, but it seems that Catholic apologists did much more in the way of padding the texts with their own added material, claiming their own versions were original and should be adopted instead of the Marcionite text. Marcion called his scripture the Apos­tol­icon (Book of the Apostle). In his and his opponents’ claims and counter claims, we begin to see the inevitable relation of the twin issues of text and canon—which versions of which writings are authoritative?

The first counter-reformation

If Marcion had been merely some eccentric scribe, people like Just­in Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian would not have bothered with him. In fact, he became a force to be reckoned with as his Pauline Christianity spread far and wide. The relationship between Marcion and the Catholic leaders of his own day is strikingly paralleled in the uneasy relations between Paul and the Jerusalem apostles in Gala­tians and 2 Corinthians. There were initial attempts at ecumenical cooperation, but it did not work. The Catholic Church sought to co-opt Marcionism late in the second century by, as anticipated above, adding material to the Pauline texts and to Luke, harmonizing Pauline Christianity with Judaism in the manner still familiar today, insisting that Christianity was the rightful heir to God’s covenant promises with Israel and the Jewish people. Had Marcionism triumphed, I dare say we would have seen more peaceful Jewish-Christian relations since neither side would have been perceived as a threat to the other.

How did the Catholic Church respond to the Marcionite Sputnik of a specifically Christian scripture? Where Marcion relinquished the Jewish scriptures to the Jewish religion and replaced them with distinctly Christian writings, the Catholic bishops decided to retain the Jewish Bible, reinterpreted in a Christian manner, and to add a new set of scriptures onto it. They had no objection to having a set of books that would speak overtly of Christian faith and practice. Remember that they already had them and it was just a question of making them officially part of the Bible. So they took over the Pauline corpus, adding the Pastorals and interpolating the others to bring them into accord with Catholic teaching. Marcion’s gospel became our Gospel of Luke by adding chapters 1-3, the Nazareth synagogue sermon, the prodigal son, the tower of Siloam and Pilate’s massacre of the Galile­ans, the wisdom saith speech, the triumphal entry, the wicked tenants, the prediction of spirit baptism, and the ascension. To balance and dilute Luke, they added Matthew, Mark, and John, though John had to be extensively reshuffled and interpolated, as Bultmann showed, before it could pass as orthodox. It may attest the relative unimportance of the Twelve that no one made any attempt to even ascribe apostolic names to Mark’s and Luke’s narratives. The gospels are all anonymous, not pseudonymous, the four names being editorial conventions added once people began to use a collection of gospels, creating the need to differentiate them: Let’s read from the Gospel … according to Matthew this time. Perhaps at one point the characters Mark and Luke were held in equal esteem with John and Matthew as important leaders, though only guesswork identifies them with New Testament personalities of those names. It is interesting that the two most common male names in the Roman Empire happened to be Mark and Luke.

Wanting to restore the clout of the Twelve, the compilers of the New Testament made a late attempt to represent them in the canon alongside Paul. The Acts of the Apostles sought to co-opt Paul and make Peter his twin, bringing both sides together, devotees of Paul’s memory and devotees of Peter’s, as well as to imply that the Twelve had played some prominent role. If they ever had, their labors were among Jewish Christians in Palestine and largely forgotten after 70 AD/CE and the destruction of Jerusalem. A group of three anonymous epistles from the Elder, a master of traveling missionaries late in the first century, were ascribed gratuitously to John, son of Zebe­dee. Two spurious Petrine writings (1 and 2 Peter, by different pseudonymous authors) were chosen out of the much larger bin of Petrine apocrypha surviving today, including the two Apocalypses of Peter, the Gospel of Peter, the Journeys of Peter, the Acts of Peter, the Preach­ing of Peter, the Letter of Peter to Philip, the Letter of Peter to James, and so on. The two favored epistles were added, as was a letter by someone named James and another by one Jude. Was James the broth­er of the Lord? Son of Zebedee? Son of Alphaeus? Some other James? No one knows. In any case, these documents gave us the core of the Catholic canon, though its exact outlines would take some centuries to be delimited.

Loose canon

For Irenaeus (115-202), bishop of Lyons and major opponent of Gnosticism, the Christian Testament included the four gospels, the Paul­ine Epistles, and Acts. He also used 1 Peter, 1 John, either 2 or 3 John (he does not say which, but he mentions another Johannine epistle), Jude, and Revelation but seemed not yet to regard these as scripture. No mention of Hebrews, 2 Peter, or James. Twenty years later, Tertullian (mid-second to mid-third century), a follower of Ir­en­ae­us, had the same list but considered them all scripture. Tertul­lian used Hebrews and the Epistle of Barnabas without saying specifically that he regarded them as canonical. He thought 1 Enoch ought to be included in the Old Testament. The first Christian we know of who referred to the Jewish scriptures as the Old Testament was Mel­ito of Sardis in the last third of the second century. Clement of Alexandria (160-215) was the first to call the Christian scriptures the New Testament.

While Irenaeus considered the books just listed above to be authoritative and canonical, he did not predicate that authority upon divine inspiration. As he saw it, their authority stemmed from their place as the foundational documents of the apostolic age. Again, Tertullian carried things a significant step farther, locating the authority of these books specifically in apostolic authorship rather than just the early period of Christianity. To be considered authoritative, they had to have been com­posed by Jesus’ apostles and their delegates, by which he meant Mark and Luke because they were said to have been assistants to Peter and Paul respectively. Irenaeus has his predecessor, Papi­as, bish­op of Hierapolis, linking Mark to Peter in this way in about 130 AD/CE. However, ascribing statements to Papias functioned as convenient hadith—licenses to make this or that item authoritative as need­ed—as in Islam where the claim of access to left-over Koranic verses or ancient oral traditions was a way of circumventing scripture.

Clement of Alexandria had no closed canon and made frequent reference not only to our four conventional gospels but also to the Gospel according to the Hebrews and the Gospel according to the Egyptians, to apocryphal as well as canonical Acts, to the Epistles of Clement and Barnabas, the Preaching of Peter, and the Shepherd of Hermas. If Morton Smith is to be believed, Clement also possessed a Secret Mark. Thus far, the New Testament books were authoritative because they were apostolic. It was Clement’s successor, Origen (185-­251), who first pronounced them inspired writings, as opposed to writ­ings of inspired or authoritative writers, which was an important distinction that continues to be drawn even in the twenty-first century. Origen reasoned that since a book either was inspired or was not, it behooved the church to decide which ones belonged in the Bible, but he himself did not make that judgment. He only saw the need.

Eusebius, the great church historian and propagandist for Con­stan­tinian Christianity, makes it clear that precise canonical boundaries were still a matter in dispute in the mid-fourth century. He tells us how, in the discussions of contemporary theologians, the available writings in effect fell into four categories. First, there were the books regarded as genuinely apostolic: the four conventional gospels and the Pauline epistles, with some disputing of Hebrews, 1 John, 1 Peter, and Acts. Some of the church fathers included Revelation in the apostolic category, though Eusebius himself was no fan of it. Second, there were generally disputed books: 2 and 3 John, Jude, James, and 2 ­Peter, while some accepted Hebrews; Origen admitted that God alone knows who wrote Hebrews. Third were the spurious works (mean­ing they were possibly pseudonymous), which were nevertheless acceptable and usable: the Gospel according to the Hebrews, the Acts of Paul, Shepherd of Hermas, Apocalypse of Peter, the Did­ache (Teach­ing of the Twelve Apostles to the Nations), Barnabas, and for some the Revelation of John. Eusebius thought it was a John the ­Elder rather than the son of Zebedee who wrote the Revelation. Fourth were outright heretical forgeries: the Acts of John, of Andrew, Peter, Thomas, and others, and the Gospels of Peter, Tho­mas, and Matthias. The question of a definitive list was still open, at least for a while. But Eusebius tells us how Constantine had fifty deluxe vellum copies of the New Testament manufactured and sent to prelates all over the empire, this of course implying a fixed text. We cannot help thinking of the Islamic tradition that, to stifle theological debates in which opponents appealed to different texts of the Koran, the Caliph Uthman called in all known variant copies, had his scholars standardize an official text, and burned the earlier ones. The distribution of a New Testament codex from the home office by Con­stan­tine must have had the same effect of establishing an official list. However, the Constantine Bible may not have quite matched our familiar list of twenty-­seven books. Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vati­canus, which date from this period and are possibly examples of the Constantinian pulpit Bibles, include such books as Barnabas and 1 Clement.

The Muratorian Canon, a fragmentary document from Rome dis­covered by Muratori, has generally been placed in the second century, but some now argue it dates to the fourth century. It lists all of our New Testament books except for Hebrews, James, and 1 and 2 Peter, while including the Apocalypse of Peter and the Wisdom of Solomon. It mentions but rejects the Shepherd of Hermas.

Bonfire of the heresies

The first known list of our twenty-seven New Testament writings appears in the paschal (Easter) letter of Athanasius to his diocese in 367 AD/CE. Athanasius lists them and warns his flock to use these and no others. One immediate result of this encyclical was to prompt the brethren of the Monastery of Saint Pachomius in Egypt, the very first known Christian monastery, to hide away their copies of the banned books. They buried them in a cave in leather satchels, where they rested in oblivion till 1945 when they were accidentally discovered by a shepherd boy at Nag Hammadi. The monks knew the inquisitors would be coming around again to see if the encyclical had been obeyed, and they did not want to hand over their precious copies of the Gospels of Tho­mas, Philip, Peter, the Egyptians, and Mary Mag­da­lene; their Rev­ela­tions of Zostrianos, James, Melchizedek, Seth, Shem, and Dositheus; their Epistles of Peter and James; or their Apocrypha of John and James to be burned. Their library attests to an astonishing range of Christian scriptures still in use at the time. We have only these and a very few other copies of the excluded books because the Constantinian authorities carried out a systematic purge of the writings deemed heretical per Athana­sius’ encyclical. Others, like the Shepherd of Hermas, survived outside the canon since they were not considered dangerous, just not official. The importance of this fact is still vastly underestimated today. It means that the New Testament as we read it is as much a document of the fourth century as of the first. The canonical deck was cleared, so to speak, to leave us with a highly misleading impression of what early Christianity was like. Even so, the scholar F. C. Baur was able in the nineteenth century to discern the split in early Christianity along pro- and anti-Torah, Pe­trine vs. Pauline, lines, with Gnosticism lurking some­where down the road. Some decades later Walter Bauer (Orthodoxy and Heresy in Ear­liest Christianity) demonstrated that the Christian movement was much more diverse than even Baur had thought, that emerging Catholicism had managed to rewrite history in such a way as to cast itself as the original Christianity, caricaturing all other varieties as unimportant cranks and fringe groups. Shortly after Bauer’s book appeared, the 1945 discovery of the Nag Hammadi library made it clear that early Christianity must have been an even more lush theological jungle than any scholar had conceived of. Here, for the first time, were multiple primary sources attesting to many completely different families of early Christian belief, of which we had hitherto only the slightest, if any, hint. Who would have imagined there were whole wings of Christianity that thought Jesus was the reincarnation of Seth, of Mel­chizedek, or of Zoroaster? Elaine Pagels (The Gnostic Gospels) was about the only scholar who seemed to realize the full significance of the Gnostic texts discovered at Nag Ham­madi, that they were not some sort of ancient science fiction novels but rather the cherished scriptures of people’s living faith. She did a good job of putting some flesh on the bones. For instance, if we wonder about the identity of the single ones held up as a model in the Gospel according to Thomas, we need only remind ourselves that the Greek word is monachos (monk) and that the document was found at a monastery. As in Buddhism still today, there was then no one canon. Different species of Christians used different sacred books. This was about to change.

The canon list of Athanasius, who championed homoousias christ­ology (Christ is of the same nature as the Father) at Nicea, was officially adopted by the local Synod of Hippo in 393 and again by the Synod of Carthage in 397. This hardly meant that from then on everyone agreed on what should constitute the New Testament. Surviving manuscript codices (and there are a great many) from the next few centuries continue to include some of the less heretical books or lack some of the more orthodox ones. Scribes apparently did not feel particularly bound to conform to the Athanasian norm. Why should they? No ecumenical council would rule on the matter until the Counter-­Reformation Council of Trent in 1551! In general, though, it would be fair to say that by about 400 AD/CE, the western Mediterranean churches used the Athanasian canon, while remaining grudg­ingly reluctant about Hebrews. It took another two centuries until the eastern churches were ready to accept Revelation as canonical. Even today in the Mono­phy­site churches of Armenia and Ethiopia, the New Testament canon contains such books as Barnabas, Clement, and 3 Corinthians.

During the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther was able to reshape the canon simply by virtue of the fact that he was preparing the official German edition of the Bible. It was up to him what would be included. He rejected the Old Testament Apocrypha, mainly because it had not survived in its original languages. He felt scripture could be considered authoritative in its original Hebrew or Greek, that one could not rely on the Septuagint or the Latin Vulgate; therefore a book that existed only in translation could not be canonized. He rejected the theological content of some of the Apocrypha, as well, but fell short of condemning it. Even the Puritans would read from the Apocrypha for edification, and it was included in the King James Bible until 1823 when its printers finally decided to remove it.

Luther reshuffled the books of the New Testament, restricting He­brews, James, Jude, and Revelation to an appendix. He referred to James contemptuously as the epistle of straw, while he said the Book of Revelation deserved to be thrown into the Elbe River. None of these books adequately conveyed the doctrine of salvation by grace through faith alone, which was his plumbline. Needless to say, Lutherans would not choose to follow their leader on this point. In the nineteenth century, Protestant theologians would revisit the question, Schlei­er­macher urging colleagues to sift the canonical from the apo­c­ryphal within the New Testament, while Harnack said it was time to follow Marcion and cut loose the Old Testament. Perhaps the most astonishing Protestant remark on canonical questions came from Willi Marxsen, a twentieth-century German who noted that Protestants had implicitly sawed off the branch they sat on when they rejected church tradition as the norm for faith in favor of scripture alone. How did they come to this predicament? By ignoring that the canon itself was purely a matter of church tradition, not of a decree from God. The Bible doesn’t tell us what ought to be in the Bible, tradition does, and the latter is what Protestants claimed to reject. Uh-­oh.

Making the cut: criteria

As a matter of tradition, the selection of the books for the canon was gradual and to some degree haphazard. It was the result of a grad­ual accumulation of local usage and then a comparison of such local versions and usages by larger councils. It still remained a matter of local habit and custom until the mostly anonymous Catholic bishops and theologians in the second, third, and fourth centuries began applying certain criteria to determine the degree to which a book should be revered. Some of these criteria will sound familiar by now, but I will nevertheless discuss them in order of descending importance, noting how each argument has a tendency to collapse into ­another.

First, catholicity: Was a book known in and used liturgically all over the empire? If it was not, it was dubious since a real apostolic writing (see just below) would have had time to circulate more wide­ly. The fewer quarters of the church it was known in, the greater the likelihood it might be a recent forgery. Why didn’t we hear about this Gospel of Wally until now? I smell a rat! is how the logic went. The little book of 3 John had trouble passing muster on this score, but it made it in because it was evidently by the same author as the popular and renowned 1 John, so it was reasoned that its short length had caused it to be largely overlooked. In practice, catholicity meant more widely known, whatever its contents, because long familiarity and wide readership meant there had been more opportunity for the rough edges to be worn away through harmonizing exegesis. But if it was unfamiliar, the foreign ring to the prose jumped right out. This is what happened to the Gospel of Peter. Bishop Serapion was asked to look at a copy in rural Syria where it was popular. The bishop had never heard of it, so he took a look but saw no problem. Then someone advised a second look, and he picked out signs of docetism, the belief that Jesus had only seemed (Greek: dokeo) to suffer while remaining divinely impassive. So the book was condemned. Had the concerned reader grown up hearing it read every Sunday in a familiar context, he would not have noticed a problem any more than the Syrian congregations had. In addition, the less widely known a book was, the easier it was to exclude it out of political considerations since it had fewer partisans to defend it.

Second, orthodoxy. Did the contents promote the rule of faith, which was the emerging creed? Again, catholicity might overrule this since unorthodox elements could be harmonized if the book were held in high esteem. For instance, no one complains about the numerous Gnostic, docetic, and adoptionistic verses in Paul’s letters. Even so, evidence of docetism could prejudice the decision, as with the Gos­pel of Peter or the Acts of John. A book might also be spurned over something as simple as citing other books no longer considered canonical. Barnabas cited 1 Enoch as scripture and was not canonized; but Jude cited 1 Enoch and was accepted, though someone tried to replace it with 2 Peter, a book which incorporates most of Jude and cuts references to the Assumption of Moses and 1 Enoch. A book might also be rejected not because of outright heresy but because it risked letting the camel’s nose under the tent flap. In this way, late apocalypses like the Shepherd of Hermas were considered dangerous because they were of later vintage, and if one could accept them, there would no longer be any clear reason not to accept the prophetic rant­ings of the Montanist prophetess Maxi­milla. Other books were rejected not so much because of their content but because of guilt by association due to long or notorious use by heretical sects. The Gospel of Thomas was probably excluded because Valentinians and Manicheans used it. Their interpretations were by no means the only way to read the book, and had it been included in the canon it would not sound heretical to anyone today. The familiar Gospel of John came near to sharing Thomas’s fate because it was popular among the Gnos­tics, one of whom, Heracleon, wrote the first known commentary on it. The anti-Montanist Gaius thought it might have been written by the Gnostic Cerinthus himself! A whole group, dubbed by their enemies the alogoi (a pun: opponents of the Logos/witless ones), opposed John. And in fact, John probably was Gnostic. As Bult­mann showed, it was toned down by an ecclesiastical redactor to make it suitable to orthodox ears.