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

by Bart D. Ehrman

  Along with these authoritative accounts of Jesus' life were the authoritative writings of his apostles, which were being granted sacred status before the end of the New Testament period. The final book of the New Testament to be written was probably Peter, a book almost universally recognized by critical scholars to be pseudonymous, not actually written by Simon Peter but one of many Petrine forgeries from the second century (cf. the Gospel of Peter, the Apocalypse of Peter, the letter from Peter to James, etc.). One of the striking features of this letter is that it discusses the writings of the apostle Paul and considers them, already, as scriptural authorities. In attacking those who misconstrue Paul's writings, twisting their meaning for their own purposes (some kinds of proto-Gnostics?), the author says:

  Our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given to him, saying such things as he does in all his letters. Some things in them are hard to understand, which the foolish and unstable pervert, leading to their own destruction, as they do with the rest of the Scriptures. (2 Pet. 3:16)

  By grouping Paul's writings with "the rest of the Scriptures," this author has made a significant move. Apostolic writings are already being revered and placed into a collection as books of Scripture.

  And so, by the end of the New Testament period, we have a movement toward a bipartite New Testament canon, consisting of the words (or accounts) of Jesus and the writings of the apostles. In speaking of this as a "movement" we should guard against being overly anachronistic. It is not that Christians at this time were all in agreement on the matter, as we have seen time and again, and it is not that anyone thought they were in a "movement" that was heading somewhere else. These authors understood that there were certain authorities that were of equal weight to the teachings of (Jewish) Scripture. They had no idea that there would eventually be a twenty-seven book canon. But looking back on the matter from the distance afforded by the passage of time, we can see that their claims had a profound effect on the development of proto-orthodox Christianity, as eventually some of these written authorities came to be included in a canon of Scripture.

  Authors and Authorities

  Probably every Christian group of the second and third centuries ascribed authority to written texts, and each group came to locate that "authority" in the status of the "author" of the text. These authors were thought to be closely connected to the ultimate authority, Jesus himself, who was understood to represent God. Different groups tied their views to apostolic authorities in different ways: The Ebionites, for example, claimed to present the views advocated by Peter, Jesus' closest disciple, and by James, his brother; the Marcionites claimed to present the views of Paul, which he received via special revelation from Jesus; the Valentinian Gnostics also claimed to represent Paul's teachings, as handed down to his disciple Theudas, the teacher of Valentinus.

  The proto-orthodox claimed all of these apostles as authorities—Peter, James, Paul, and many others. But not all of the books used by the proto-orthodox churches were written by apostles—or in some cases even claimed to be. The four Gospels that eventually made it into the New Testament, for example, are all anonymous, written in the third person about Jesus and his companions. None of them contains a first-person narrative ("One day, when Jesus and I went into Capernaum .. ."), or claims to be written by an eyewitness or companion of an eyewitness. Why then do we call them Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? Because sometime in the second century, when proto-orthodox Christians recognized the need for apostolic authorities, they attributed these books to apostles (Matthew and John) and close companions of apostles (Mark, the secretary of Peter; and Luke, the traveling companion of Paul). Most scholars today have abandoned these identifications," and recognize that the books were written by otherwise unknown but relatively well-educated Greek-speaking (and writing) Christians during the second half of the first century.

  Other books that came to be accepted as authoritative were not anonymous but homonymous, that is, written by someone who had the same name as a person well known in Christian circles. Whoever wrote the New Testament book of James, for example, gives no indication that he is James, the brother of Jesus. Quite the contrary, he says nothing at all about a personal tie to Jesus. Moreover, the name James was very common in the first century—as many as seven men named James are found just within the New Testament. In any event, the book of James was later accepted as apostolic on the grounds that the author was the brother of Jesus, although he never claimed to be.

  The name John was common as well. Even though the Gospel and Epistles of John do not claim to be written by someone of that name, the book of Revelation does (see Rev. 1:9). But the author does not claim to be John the son of Zebedee, one of Jesus' apostles. In fact, in one scene "John" has a vision of the throne of God surrounded by twenty-four elders who worship him forever (Rev. 4:4, 9-10). These twenty-four elders are usually taken to refer to the twelve patriarchs of Israel and the twelve apostles. But the author gives no indication that he is seeing himself. Probably, then, this was not the apostle. And so, the book is homonymous, later accepted by Christians as canonical because they believed the author was, in fact, Jesus' earthly disciple.

  Yet other books are pseudonymous—forgeries by people who explicitly claim to be someone else. Included in this group is almost certainly Peter, probably the pastoral Epistles of Timothy and Titus, quite likely the deutero-Pauline Epistles of Thessalonians, Colossians, and Ephesians, and possibly Peter and Jude. But why would someone claim to be a famous person from the past? As we have seen, it was principally in order to get a hearing for his views.

  And these authors' views were not merely heard; they were accepted, respected, granted authority, and included in sacred Scripture.

  Were any of the books that made it into the New Testament actually written by apostles of Jesus? As we have seen, critical scholars are fairly unified today in thinking that Matthew did not write the First Gospel or John the Fourth, that Peter did not write Peter and possibly not Peter. No other book of the New Testament claims to be written by one of Jesus' earthly disciples. There are books by the apostle Paul, of course. Thirteen go by his name in the New Testament, at least seven of which are accepted by nearly all scholars as authentic. If, then, by "apostolic" book we mean "book actually written by an apostle," most of the books that came to be included in the New Testament are not apostolic. But if the term is taken in a broader sense to mean "book that contains apostolic teaching as defined by the emerging proto-orthodox church," then all twenty-seven pass muster.

  Uncertain Steps Toward a Canon

  We return now to the question of how, when, and why the twenty-seven books of our New Testament became part of the canon. As we have seen, the process was already in motion by the end of the New Testament period, but it did not come to any kind of closure until the final part of the fourth century, nearly three hundred years later, at the earliest. Why did it take so long, and what drove the process?

  It may seem odd that Christians of earlier times, while recognizing the need for authoritative texts to provide guidance for what to believe and how to live, did not see the need to have a fixed number of apostolic writings, a closed canon. But there is no evidence of any concerted effort anywhere in proto-orthodox Christianity (or anywhere else, for that matter) to fix a canon of Scripture in the early second century, when Christian texts were being circulated and ascribed authority. In fact, there was a range of attitudes toward sacred texts among the proto-orthodox Christians of this early period.

  I can illustrate the point by considering views found in three proto-orthodox authors from about the second quarter of the second century. It is difficult to assign dates to these writings with any precision, but it appears that the Letter of Polycarp to the Philippians was written by 130 ce, the Shepherd of Hermas between 110 and 140 ce, and the sermon known as Clement sometime around 150 ce. All three are proto-orthodox productions. The latter two, in fact, were occasionally accepted as canonical Scripture by orthodox Christians of
later times (both are included in early manuscripts of the New Testament). But they represent widely disparate understandings of sacred textual authorities.

  Polycarp's letter is a virtual pastiche of citations and allusions drawn from the writings that eventually came to be included in the New Testament: nearly a hundred such quotations in a letter of fourteen relatively brief chapters, in contrast to only about a dozen from the Old Testament. On one occasion Polycarp may actually refer to the book of Ephesians as "Scripture," but the interpretation of the passage is debated. And sometimes he will refer to an explicit authority (e.g. "Remember what the Lord taught..."). In most instances, however, Polycarp simply uses lines and phrases familiar from New Testament writings without attribution, especially from the works of Paul, Hebrews, I Peter, and the Synoptic Gospels. Were his letter the only proto-orthodox text available to us from the period, we might think that here we could detect the steady movement toward ascribing authority to earlier writings—those that came to be included in the New Testament.

  But that there was not a steady movement in this direction is suggested by the Shepherd of Hermas, which probably reached its final form after Polycarp's letter. This is a much larger book, longer than any book that made it into the New Testament. And so one might expect a correspondingly greater number of quotations and allusions. On the contrary, even though the book is filled with authoritative teachings and ethical exhortations, there is only one explicit quotation of any textual authority to be found. And that, as it turns out, is of a now-lost and unknown Jewish apocalypse called the Book of Eldad and Modat. Some readers have suspected that Hermas knew and was influenced by the book of James, and possibly by Matthew and Ephesians, but the arguments are rather tenuous. In contrast to Polycarp, Hermas does not appear to have any investment at all in sacred textual authorities or an emerging canon of Scripture.

  With the third example we find yet another situation, neither Polycarp's feast nor Hermas's famine. The mid-second-century sermon known as Clement makes several statements that have verbal similarities to some of the New Testament Epistles (e.g., 1 Corinthians and Ephesians), but it does not quote these books as authorities. With relatively greater frequency it quotes the words of Jesus ("the Lord said"), but it does so without attributing these words to any of our written Gospels. What is possibly most remarkable is that of the eleven quotations of Jesus' teachings, five do not occur in the canonical Gospels. One of the most interesting we have already considered:

  For the Lord said, "You will be like sheep in the midst of wolves." But Peter replied to him, "What if the wolves rip apart the sheep?" Jesus said to Peter, "After they are dead, the sheep should fear the wolves no longer. So too you: do not fear those who kill you and then can do nothing more to you; but fear the one who, after you die, has the power to cast your body and soul into the hell of fire." (2 Clem. 5:2-1)

  The source for this odd dialogue is unknown, although it may derive from the Gospel of Peter. Even more noteworthy for our purposes is the saying found in Clement 12:2:

  For when the Lord himself was asked by someone when his kingdom would come, he said, "When the two are one, and the outside like the inside, and the male with the female is neither male nor female."

  This is very much like a saying found not in a canonical Gospel but in the Coptic Gospel of Thomas (Saying 22):

  They said to him, "Shall we then, as children, enter the kingdom?" Jesus said to them, "When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female . . . then will you enter the kingdom."

  Far from supporting Polycarp in showing a reliance exclusively on books that were to become part of the canon, then, and from supporting Hermas in overlooking earlier textual authorities, Clement appears to accept a wide range of authorities, especially sayings of Jesus—even some that were not finally sanctioned by being included within the canon of Scripture.

  And so, by the mid-second century, the questions of the canon were still unresolved in proto-orthodox circles. This conclusion coincides nicely with other findings of our study: Christians in Rhossus accept the Gospel of Peter, as does at first their bishop Serapion, only to reject it later; some Christians accept the Apocalypse of Peter or Paul's letter of Corinthians as Scripture, others do not; some see the Epistle of Barnabas or of Clement as canonical, others do not; Revelation and the Epistle to the Hebrews are matters of constant debate.

  Motivations for Establishing the Canon

  There can be little doubt that events of the second half of the second century created a demand for a proto-orthodox canon of Scripture. Chief among the motivating factors were prophetic movements such as Montanism from within proto-orthodox circles and opposition to heretical forces outside these circles.

  The effect of Montanism we have already seen. So long as proto-orthodox Christians like Montanus and his two female companions could claim to have direct revelations from God, there were no visible constraints to prevent heretical Christians from making comparable claims. Thus, even though the Montanists— Tertullian chief among them—were orthodox in their theology, their activities had to be proscribed. And so, the recognition of possible abuses (exacerbated, no doubt, by the failure of the Montanist prophecies of an imminent end of all things) led Christian leaders to more certain authorities. These were written authorities, solid and fixed, rather than inspired prophecies in the Spirit, fluctuating and impermanent. They were authorities grounded in the truth, transmitted from Jesus to his own apostles, and they were writings with permanent validity, not just for the moment.

  More than anything, however, the interactions with heretical forms of Christianity forced the issue of canon. In this, no one was more important than Marcion, to our knowledge the first Christian of any kind to promote a fixed canon of Scripture, in his publication of modified versions of Luke and ten Pauline Epistles. It is possible to evaluate Marcion's effect by considering the views of two of his proto-orthodox opponents, one writing just as he was beginning to make a large impact and one writing soon afterwards.

  Justin Martyr was one of the most productive proto-orthodox authors of the second century. Still preserved are two "apologies" that he wrote, intellectual defenses of the faith against its pagan detractors, and a work called the "Dialogue with Trypho," in which he tries to show the superiority of Christianity over Judaism, largely by appealing to a Christian interpretation of the Jewish Scriptures. His other writings were lost, however, including an attack on heresies of his day that was later used as a source by Irenaeus.

  Despite his frequent appeals to authoritative texts, Justin shows no inclination toward a fixed canon of New Testament Scripture in his surviving writings. He does quote the Gospels over a dozen times, but he typically refers to them as "Memoirs of the Apostles." He does not name the authors of these books as authorities; the books appear to derive their authority from the fact— to Justin it is a fact—that they accurately recall the words and deeds of Jesus. Moreover, it is not altogether clear whether these quotations derive from the separate Gospels as we have them or from some kind of Gospel harmony that Justin, or someone else in Rome, had created by splicing the available Gospels together into one long narrative. His quotations often use a phrase from Matthew and a phrase from Luke, combining them in a way not found in any surviving Gospel manuscript.

  Even more noteworthy than his loose use of the Gospels as authorities is the circumstance that Justin never quotes the apostle Paul. Is it because Marcion, who was active in Rome while Justin was there, used Paul almost exclusively, so that Justin associated him with the heretic?

  Even though Justin speaks of Marcion's influence already extending throughout the world (Apology 1.26), his real impact did not come until later. And so it is interesting to contrast Justin's relatively casual use of written authorities with what one finds in Irenaeus, another well known proto-orthodox aut
hor who also opposed heresies by quoting authoritative texts. But now some thirty years after Justin there is a clear notion of a canon, at least so far as a canon of sacred Gospels is concerned. In a famous passage, Irenaeus laments the fact that heretics not only fabricate their own Gospels but rely on just one or the other of those in the canon to justify their aberrant views. Thus, he says, the Ebionites use only the Gospel of Matthew, those who "separate Jesus from the Christ" (i.e., most Gnostics) use only Mark, the Marcionites use only Luke, and the Valentinian Gnostics use only John. For Irenaeus, however, this curtailment of the Gospel is as bad as the forgery of false texts:

  It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are. For, since there are four zones of the world in which we live, and four principal winds, while the Church is scattered throughout all the world, and the pillar and ground of the Church is the Gospel and the spirit of life; it is fitting that she should have four pillars, breathing out immortality on every side. (Against Heresies 3.11.7)

  And so, just as there are four corners of earth and four winds, there must be four Gospels, neither more nor fewer.

  What is worth observing here is that whereas Justin had a very loose notion of sacred authority, rooted in unnamed, unspecified, and unenumerated "Memoirs" produced by Jesus' apostles, in Irenaeus, writing thirty years later, we have a fixed set of named, specified, and enumerated Gospels. What separates Irenaeus and Justin? One thing that separates them is thirty years of Marcionite Christianity, thirty years of a brand of Christianity proposing a canon of just eleven edited books.

  It is also worth noting that whereas Justin never quotes Paul, Irenaeus does so extensively. Some scholars have thought that this was an attempt on Irenaeus's part to reclaim Paul from the heretics, as he was a favorite not only of Marcion but also of Gnostics. If this view is right, it might make sense that the proto-orthodox canon included Timothy and Titus along with the ten letters known to Marcion, for nowhere in the New Testament is there a more proto-orthodox Paul than in these Pastoral Epistles, with their stress on the election of worthy men as bishops and deacons and their opposition to false "gnosis" and baseless "mythological speculation" (cf. 1 Tim. 1:4,6:20). Here is a forged Paul for a proto-orthodoxy forging ahead, seeking to overcome all heretical opposition.