The statements of Papias and limited levels of literacy notwithstanding, early Christians came to ascribe enormous authority to the written word. Of course, the attitudes of early Christians toward the written word are complex. On the one hand, from the very beginnings, the uneducated were welcomed and even praised. Among the earliest apostles, Peter and John were allegedly uneducated (Acts 4: 13). Traditionally, scholars have argued that early Christianity was a movement among the underprivileged and uneducated lower classes, but more recent studies have suggested that the socio-economic demographics of early Christianity were far more diverse (Meeks 1983: 51-3). Opponents of Christianity, such as Celsus, certainly criticize the movement for being composed of the ignorant and uneducated (Origen, C. Cels. 3. 44). Despite such claims, however, early in the development of Christianity, texts came to have a particular importance.
While Christianity was rooted first in the oral teachings of Jesus, the ‘‘words of the Lord’’ and ‘‘testimony of the apostles’’ became formulated as a fulfillment of the Jewish written Scriptures (Gamble 1985: 37). To be sure, we have from the outset a sense of a ‘‘scriptural consciousness’’ (Kraft 1996: 201) embedded in Christians’ appeal to the Septuagint, the subsequent elevation of the gospels and Pauline letters to scriptural status, and the appeal to Scripture as authority from the second-century patristic writers onward. Moreover, if we consider the role that texts played in both the synagogues and house churches of earliest Christianity, as well as the more formal homiletic occasions in later Christianity, we see again the intersection of the oral and the written, the reading of Scriptures and their oral explication.
Alongside this ‘‘public’’ engagement with texts, the writings of commentators and heresiologists probably reached fewer but demonstrate no less significantly the authority attributed to written texts. Consider, for example, the earliest commentary on a New Testament book, the commentary of Heracleon on the gospel of John, written in the late second century. What is most striking about the commentary (and its refutation by Origen in the third century) is how the very words of Scripture, in addition to the theological claims drawn from them, are contested by different writers. The work of heresiologists such as Tertullian, Hipploytus, and Irenaeus was invariably rooted in arguments based on the very words of Scripture. It is, in fact, during the second century that the christological disputes come to play such an important role in the articulation of Christian identity. While some argued that Jesus was a man and not God (Adoptionists), others argued that Jesus was God and not a flesh-and-blood human being (Docetists) (Ehrman 1993: 4-11). Perhaps the most widely known ‘‘heretic’’ of the second century is Marcion, who acquired a substantial following. What is striking for our purposes is that Marcion appears to have derived his theology from a reading of particular texts - namely, the Pauline epistles and the gospel of Luke. He claimed, for example, that Paul clearly distinguished in Galatians between the gospel and Jewish law, and set the former over and against the latter. Marcion concluded that there must be two Gods: the God of the Old Testament, who created the universe, and the God proclaimed by Jesus as loving and merciful. Marcion rejected the Old Testament and any references to it in the Gospels and Pauline epistles. Moreover, he claimed that only a truncated version of Luke and the Pauline epistles were to be considered authoritative. The danger of Marcion for the church Fathers ‘‘can be inferred from the vigor with which they set about the refutation of [his] teaching’’ (Blackman 1948: 3). Tertullian alone wrote five volumes refuting the Marcionite ‘‘heresy.’’ What is most striking for our purpose is the role played by texts in such disputes: authority (for both Marcion and Tertullian) derived from their interpretation of texts. In addition, Marcion’s claims in relation to the canon of Scripture were to have an enormous impact on the response of other church Fathers.
The development of the Christian canon was prolonged. It was fueled and often directed by the doctrinal disputes of the second and third centuries. The first to respond to Marcion’s ‘‘canon’’ was Irenaeus, who claimed that ‘‘it is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are’’ (Adv. Haer. 3. 11. 8). It is striking that this strong statement in favor of the four-gospel canon comes at precisely the time when Marcionism is flourishing (Campenhausen 1972: 203; Skeat 1992: 194-9). In the face of an ‘‘arch-heretic,’’ then, Irenaeus has taken the first steps toward establishing ‘‘orthodoxy’’ in terms of texts that are to be considered authoritative; and, it is worth emphasizing, authoritativeness does not rest so much in the written nature of the gospels, but in the ‘‘orthodox’’ oral interpretation of them.
Contemporary with the writings of Irenaeus at the end of the second century are the first of our canonical lists. The Muratorian Canon (written possibly as early as
AD 190), appears to include the four gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), the Acts of the Apostles, thirteen Pauline epistles, Jude, two Johannine epistles, the Wisdom of Solomon, and the Apocalypses of John and of Peter (‘‘though some of us are not willing that the latter be read in church’’) (Metzger 1987: 194-201; Hahneman 1992). Eusebius, writing in the early fourth century, gives the list supported by Origen in his Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew (Hist. eccl. 6. 25) as well as his own list, which he divides into three categories: those that are universally accepted, those that are disputed, and those considered spurious (Hist. eccl. 3. 25). The first list that is identical to the one eventually adopted within the Christian church is found in Athanasius’ Thirty-Ninth Festal letter, written in ad 367. Yet, while there was some degree of unanimity on the status of certain books by the early fifth century (namely, those on Athanasius’ list), it was not until the sixteenth century that an official and binding pronouncement was made by the Roman Church (Gamble 1985: 45). Decisions about individual texts were made on the basis of claims about their apostolicity, their widespread use, their style, and, above all, their orthodoxy. All our evidence points, moreover, to a small minority of literate and highly educated patristic writers working to circumscribe the texts to be considered authoritative by the majority of Christians.
Debates over the canon of Scripture illuminate one of the central concerns of this chapter: the increasing importance attributed to texts - here to the question of which texts - over the course of Late Antiquity. Such debates were inextricably linked to debates over heresy and orthodoxy, which similarly engaged the small percentage of literate scholars and clergy, especially bishops, who worked to define ‘‘orthodoxy’’ in the face of‘‘heresy.’’ In such a situation, the power of literacy to define ‘‘right belief’’ for the majority of lay persons becomes apparent. The act of producing lists of authoritative written texts was a powerful instrument, involving ‘‘the domination of the non-literate segment of the population by the literate one, or even the less literate by the more’’ (Goody 1987: xv). To put it another way, an elite few collected and worked to canonize Scripture according to their ideal of ‘‘orthodoxy,’’ and it was this collection of sacred writings that came to define the Church. The self-definition of the Church and its members was in part due to the formalization of a canon with restricted boundaries and ecclesiastical endorsement. This process has led Harry Gamble to argue that the movement toward creating a canon, which developed in the second century and persisted until the fifth century, ‘‘resulted in the articulation of Christian orthodoxy and the disenfranchisement of deviant interpretations’’ (Gamble 1985: 47).
But Gamble identifies only one side of the dialectic: just as the canon shaped ‘‘orthodoxy,’’ so too ‘‘orthodoxy’’ shaped the canon. The arguments relating to the canon presented by church Fathers from the second to the fourth century illustrate only one of the ways in which texts had become a resource of power and authority. Like the canon, the formulation of credal statements sheds light both on the debates about interpretation, belief, and practice and on the ways in which those debates took shape within various ‘‘textual communities’’ in late antique Christianity. One should keep in mind that, until the early fourth century, those arguments were to a large extent arbitrary and decentralized: without the institutional support provided by Constantine’s conversion, there could be no centralized mechanism for creating a uniform and universal Church. That has not prevented some scholars, however, from making claims about a centralized seat of power as early as the second century. Such arguments have depended in part on the physical form of early Christian books and it is to that subject that I now turn.
World History
