Thus the author of the Gospel of Mary differs from Irenaeus about how to distinguish genuine visions. For when Irenaeus confronted a prophet he mistrusted, like Marcus, he might well have said what Peter and Andrew said to Mary, accusing those who claimed to have received visions of having “strange ideas” or of “making them up.”
Irenaeus may have realized as he wrestled with this problem that it was nothing new; some of Israel’s ancient prophets had asked—and been asked—the same questions. When Jeremiah, for example, predicted that war with Babylonia (c. 580 B.C.E.) would end in Israel’s defeat, prophets who had predicted victory accused him of false prophecy. Jeremiah protested that he spoke only what came “from the mouth of the Lord” and accused his opponents of speaking lies that came “from their own mouths.” So, he wrote, The Lord himself said to me, “I have heard what the prophets have said . . . who say, ‘I have dreamed, I have dreamed.’ See, I am against the prophets, says the Lord, who use their own tongues, and say, ‘Says the Lord.’ See, I am against the prophets, says the Lord, who use their own tongues and prophesy lying dreams, says the Lord, and who tell them, and who lead my people astray by their lies and wickedness, when I did not send them, nor did I command them or speak to them. They are prophesying to you a lying vision, worthless divination, and the deceit of their own minds.”87
Thus Jeremiah dismisses as worthless whatever comes from the prophets’ ”own mouths,” “their own dreams,” and “their own minds.” Irenaeus, who has Marcus in mind, agrees, and adds what he learned from his anonymous Christian mentor, whom he calls “that divine elder and preacher of the truth”—false prophecy, especially Marcus’s, comes from Satan.
Irenaeus adopted from Israel’s prophetic tradition a second way of distinguishing which prophecies come from God: the conviction that the truth of oracles is revealed by events that bear them out. When Babylonian armies defeated Israel, Jeremiah’s followers, convinced that this event proved his divine inspiration, collected his prophecies—having discarded those of his opponents—and added them to the sacred collection that would become the Hebrew Bible.
Followers of Jesus of Nazareth had made similar claims, as Irenaeus well knew. The author of the Gospel of Matthew, for example, insists that David, Isaiah, and Jeremiah had predicted specific events that happened at the time of Jesus, five hundred to a thousand years after the prophecies were written; thus these events demonstrate a divine plan. Many scholars today, however, suggest that the correspondence between prophecy and event that Matthew describes shows that he sometimes tailored his narrative to fit the prophecies. Matthew found, for example, the following oracle in the writings of the prophet Zechariah:
Rejoice greatly . . . O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he; humble, and riding on a donkey, [and] on a colt, the foal of a donkey.88
Matthew read this passage as a prediction of how Jesus entered Jerusalem at Passover, but apparently he did not notice that Zechariah repeated the final phrases only for poetic effect. Consequently he wrote in his gospel that, when Jesus was preparing to enter Jerusalem, he ordered his disciples to bring him both a donkey and a colt. So, Matthew wrote, “the disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; they brought the donkey and the colt, and put their clothes on them, and he sat on them.”89 (The gospels of Mark and Luke, by contrast, agree that Jesus entered Jerusalem riding not on two animals but on a single colt.) Matthew did not intend to mislead his readers; what probably motivated him to correlate prophecy with event in this way was his conviction that, since Jesus was the messiah, his coming must have fulfilled the ancient prophecies.
Yet from the first century to the present, “arguments from prophecy” have persuaded many people; apparently including Irenaeus’s mentor, The philosopher Justin Martyr, who wrote that, as a young student seeking truth (c. 140 C.E.), he had become disillusioned with one philosophy teacher after another—first a Stoic, then a Peripatetic, a Pythagorean teacher, and a disciple of Plato. Finally he concluded that the human mind by itself was incapable of finding truth and asked in dismay, “Should anyone, then, employ a teacher? For how could anyone be helped, if there is no truth even in them?” Justin writes that one day, as he was walking along the shore and thinking about these questions, he met an old man who told him about the Hebrew prophets, and how their ancient oracles had been proven true by events that had happened when Jesus came. The old man explained that there existed, long before now, certain men more ancient than all those who are regarded as philosophers—men both righteous and beloved by God who spoke by the divine spirit, and foretold events which would take place, and are now taking place. They are called prophets. These alone both saw and proclaimed the truth . . . being filled with the holy spirit. They did not use [logical] demonstration in their writings, since they were witnesses to truth beyond such demonstration . . . and those events which have happened and are happening now, compel you to assent to what they say.90
“After he had said these things,” Justin said, “he went away . . . and I have not seen him since. But immediately a fire was kindled in my soul, and a love of the prophets, and of those people who are friends of Christ, possessed me.”91
Justin met with a group of these people, and eventually received baptism in the name of the “holy spirit, who through the prophets foretold everything about Jesus,” and who, he later wrote, illuminated his mind. Then, having become a “Christian philosopher,” he offered to prove to a Jewish philosopher named Trypho that “we have not believed empty fables, or words without any foundation, but words filled with the spirit of God, and great with power, and flourishing with grace.”92 Although he says that Trypho’s companions “laughed and shouted rudely” when they heard this, Justin offered what he believed was incontrovertible proof. He explained to Trypho, for example, that the prophet Isaiah had foretold that “a virgin shall conceive and bear a son”93—a miracle that Matthew says occurred nearly five hundred years later, when Mary gave birth to Jesus. Justin adds that other prophets, including David, Isaiah, and Zechariah, had predicted in detail Jesus’ birth, his final entry into Jerusalem, the betrayal by Judas, and his crucifixion. Justin says that when he engaged Trypho in public debate, he carefully set forth correlations between specific prophecies and the events that he believed fulfilled them—correlations impossible to explain, he argued, apart from divinely inspired prophecy, and God’s intervention in human history.
But those who criticize such “proof from prophecy” suggest that Christians like Justin argue fallaciously—for example, by mistaking a misleading translation for a miracle. The author of the Gospel of Matthew, for example, apparently reading Isaiah’s prophecy in Greek translation, took it to mean that “a virgin [parthenos in Greek] shall conceive.” Justin himself acknowledges that Jewish interpreters, arguing with Jesus’ followers, pointed out that what the prophet had actually written in the original Hebrew was simply that “a young woman [almah] shall conceive and bear a son”—apparently predicting immediate events expected in the royal succession.94
Yet Justin and Irenaeus, like many Christians to this day, remained unconvinced by such arguments, and believed instead that ancient prophecies predicted Jesus’ birth, death, and resurrection, and that their divine inspiration has been proven by actual events. Unbelievers often find these proofs far-fetched, but for believers they demonstrate God’s “history of salvation.” Justin staked his life on this conviction, and believed that he had given up philosophical speculation for truth as empirically verifiable as that of the scientist whose experiments turn out as predicted.
Since Irenaeus saw the proof from prophecy as one way to resolve the problem of how to tell which prophecies—and which revelations—come from God, he added certain writings of “the apostles” to those of “the prophets,” since he, like Justin, believed that together these constitute indispensable witnesses to truth. Like other Christians of their time, Justin and Irenaeus, when they spoke of “the Scriptures,” had
in mind primarily the Hebrew Bible: what we call the New Testament had not yet been assembled. Their conviction that God’s truth is revealed in the events of salvation history provides the essential link between the Hebrew Bible and what Justin called “the apostles’ memoirs,” which we know as the gospels of the New Testament.
It was Irenaeus, so far as we can tell, who became the principal architect of what we call the four gospel canon, the framework that includes in the New Testament collection the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. First Irenaeus denounces various Christian groups that settle on only one gospel, like the Ebionite Christians, who, he says, use only Matthew, or followers of Marcion, who use only Luke. Equally mistaken, Irenaeus continues, are those who invoke many gospels. Certain Christians, he says, declared that certain Christians “boast that they have more gospels than there really are . . . but really, they have no gospel which is not full of blasphemy.”95 Irenaeus resolved to hack down the forest of “apocryphal and illegitimate” writings—writings like the Secret Book of James and the Gospel of Mary—and leave only four “pillars” standing.96 He boldly declared that “the gospel,” which contains all truth, can be supported by only these four “pillars”—namely, the gospels attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. To defend his choice, he declared that “it is not possible that there can be either more or fewer than four,” for “just as there are four regions of the universe, and four principal winds,” the church itself requires “only four pillars.”97 Furthermore, just as the prophet Ezekiel envisioned God’s throne borne up by four living creatures, so the divine Word of God is supported by this “four formed gospel.” (Following his lead, Christians in later generations took the faces of these four “living creatures”—the lion, the bull, the eagle, and the man—as symbols of the four evangelists.) What makes these gospels trustworthy, he claimed, is that their authors, who he believed included Jesus’ disciples Matthew and John, actually witnessed the events they related; similarly, he added, Mark and Luke, being followers of Peter and Paul, wrote down only what they had heard from the apostles themselves.
Few New Testament scholars today would agree with Irenaeus; we do not know who actually wrote these gospels, any more than we know who wrote the gospels of Thomas or Mary; all we know is that all of these “gospels” are attributed to disciples of Jesus. Nevertheless, as the next chapters will show, Irenaeus not only welded the Gospel of John to the far more widely quoted gospels of Matthew and Luke but praised John as the greatest gospel. For Irenaeus, John was not the fourth gospel, as Christians call it today, but the first and foremost of the gospels, because he believed that John alone understood who Jesus really is—God in human form. What God revealed in that extraordinary moment when he “became flesh” trumped any revelations received by mere human beings—even prophets and apostles, let alone the rest of us.
Irenaeus could not, of course, stop people from seeking revelation of divine truth—nor, as we have seen, did he intend to do so. After all, religious traditions survive through time only as their adherents relive and reimagine them and, in the process, continually transform them. But, from his own time to the present, Irenaeus and his successors among church leaders did strive to compel all believers to subject themselves to the “fourfold gospel” and to what he called apostolic tradition. Henceforth all “revelations” endorsed by Christian leaders would have to agree with the gospels set forth in what would become the New Testament. Throughout the centuries, of course, these gospels have given rise to an extraordinary range of Christian art, music, poetry, theology, and legend. But even the church’s most gifted saints, like Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, would be careful not to transgress—much less transcend—these boundaries. To this day, many traditionally minded Christians continue to believe that whatever trespasses canonical guidelines must be “lies and wickedness” that come either from the evil of the human heart or from the devil.
Yet Irenaeus recognized that even banishing all “secret writings” and creating a canon of four gospel accounts could not, by itself, safeguard the Christian movement. What if some who read the “right” gospels read them in the wrong way—or in many wrong ways? What if Christians interpreted these same gospels to inspire—or, as the bishop might say, to spawn—new “heresies”? This is what happened in Irenaeus’s congregation—and, as we shall see, he responded by working to construct what he called orthodox (literally, “straight-thinking”) Christianity.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE CANON OF TRUTH AND THE TRIUMPH OF JOHN
People engaged in spiritual exploration often are especially attracted to the Gospel of John; for, although written with great simplicity—and, apparently, to advocate faith—this gospel shines with paradox, mystery, and hints of deeper meaning. Thus T. S. Eliot, moved by its opening lines, wrote these in response:
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the center of the silent Word.1
Some four centuries before Eliot, another poet, the son of converted Jews, an intense young Spanish monk who would become a saint and mystic, chose John’s name as his own, calling himself John of the Cross. Now, largely because of the Nag Hammadi discoveries, we can see that, nearly two thousand years ago, many of John’s earliest readers also responded to this gospel in surprising and imaginative ways.
How did those Christians whom Irenaeus calls “evil interpreters” read John and the other Scriptures—and why did he oppose what they found there? Irenaeus warns that these people “have cast truth aside”;2 they introduce lies that entice and delude naÏve believers, but to many people their obvious fictions actually seem true. Irenaeus says that the Christian poet and teacher Valentinus, his disciple Ptolemy, and others like them have invented all kinds of myths about what happened “in the beginning,” and even before the beginning of the world, and how the unknown Source of all being, which these Christians sometimes call the primal Father and other times call Silence—since there are no words to describe this Source—first poured forth streams of divine energies, both masculine and feminine, whose dynamic interaction brought forth the universe. Some followers of Ptolemy go on to say that divine Wisdom came forth “in the beginning” and participated with God to bring forth the universe, as described in Genesis 1 through 3.
Irenaeus may not have known that such questions were widely discussed in certain Jewish circles among teachers and their disciples, who apparently influenced the questions that teachers like Valentinus and Ptolemy asked, as well as their interpretation of passages from Israel’s Scriptures—especially Genesis, the Psalms, and the oracles of Isaiah and Proverbs.
We know little of Valentinus himself, since only a few fragments of his writing survive,3 but he, too, wrote a poem reflecting on the mystery of how the visible universe emerges from the invisible Source, as Genesis 1:2 says, after “the spirit moved above the depth”:
All things I see suspended through spirit;
All things borne along through spirit;
Flesh depending on soul,
Soul bound to air,
Air depending on ether,
From the depth, fruit brought forth,
From the mother’s womb, a child.4
At the same time, Valentinus and his disciples were among the first, perhaps a hundred years before the New Testament canon was established, to place these newer “apostolic” writings along with Genesis and the prophets, and to revere the authority of Jesus’ sayings as equal to or even above that of Israel’s Scriptures.5 Ptolemy even wrote in a letter to Flora, an aristocratic Roman woman who studied with him, that Jesus’ sayings offer “the only unerring way to comprehend reality.”6 In discussing divine mysteries, Irenaeus says that Ptolemy and members of his circle often cited passages from Paul’s letters and the “sayings of the Lord” known to us from Matthew and Luke; but what they quoted repeatedly, “making the fullest possible use”7 of it, was the Gospel of John—which was, in fact, their
favorite. When Irenaeus decided to arm himself against these teachers by reading their commentaries and confronting their authors, he may have known that Heracleon, whom he calls Valentinus’s “most respected” disciple, had written a famous Commentary on John—which is, so far as we know, the earliest commentary written on any New Testament book.8
When I first heard about Heracleon’s commentary, I wondered: Why would anyone bother to write a commentary on a gospel written so clearly? And what would attract a heretic to a gospel that was to become the touchstone of orthodoxy? Later, after studying the newly discovered sources, I saw that, by putting my questions this way, I had unconsciously adopted Irenaeus’s terminology and incorporated his viewpoint. For what he did, with remarkable success, was convince Christians that his reading of John’s gospel—or any gospel, for that matter—was the only correct reading, and that his approach was the “canonical” scriptural interpretation. Irenaeus, as we shall see, insisted on what he called the “canon of truth” and rejected the kind of exegesis which he said was “current among Greek philosophers,”9 such as certain Stoics who read Homer’s poems allegorically, taking gods like Zeus and Hera to represent elements of the natural universe, and such as followers of Plato, who claimed to find in Homer’s poems allusions to teachings such as the transmigration of the soul.10 Irenaeus, alarmed by what Valentinus’s disciples were doing, warns believers to beware of approaching their own sacred texts in such ways. On the contrary, he declares that, wherever possible, one must discern the obvious meaning; and whenever a certain passage seems ambiguous or difficult, one’s understanding should be guided by those passages whose meaning seems clear.11
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