Misquoting Jesus (4 page)

Jesus's life, as we have seen, was interpreted by Paul and others in light of the Jewish scriptures. These books too—both the Pentateuch and other Jewish writings, such as the Prophets and Psalms—were in wide use among Christians, who explored them to see what they could reveal about God's will, especially as it had been fulfilled in Christ. Copies of the Jewish Bible, usually in Greek translation (the so-called Septuagint), were widely available, then, in early Christian communities as sources for study and reflection.

Early Acts of the Apostles

Not just the life of Jesus, but also the lives of his earliest followers were of interest to the growing Christian communities of the first and second centuries. It is no surprise, then, to see that accounts of the apostles—their adventures and missionary exploits, especially after the death and resurrection of Jesus—came to occupy an important place for Christians interested in knowing more about their religion.
One such account, the Acts of the Apostles, eventually made it into the New Testament. But many other accounts were written, mainly about individual apostles, such as those found in the
Acts of Paul,
the
Acts of Peter,
and the
Acts of Thomas.
Other Acts have survived only in fragments, or have been lost altogether.

Christian Apocalypses

As I have indicated, Paul (along with other apostles) taught that Jesus was soon to return from heaven in judgment on the earth. The coming end of all things was a source of continuous fascination for early Christians, who by and large expected that God would soon intervene in the affairs of the world to overthrow the forces of evil and establish his good kingdom, with Jesus at its head, here on earth. Some Christian authors produced prophetic accounts of what would happen at this cataclysmic end of the world as we know it. There were Jewish precedents for this kind of “apocalyptic” literature, for example, in the book of Daniel in the Jewish Bible, or the book of 1 Enoch in the Jewish Apocrypha. Of the Christian apocalypses, one eventually came to be included in the New Testament: the Apocalypse of John. Others, including the
Apocalypse of Peter
and
The Shepherd
of Hermas, were also popular reading in a number of Christian communities in the early centuries of the church.

Church Orders

The early Christian communities multiplied and grew, starting in Paul's day and continuing in the generations after him. Originally the Christian churches, at least those established by Paul himself, were what we might call charismatic communities. They believed that each member of the community had been given a “gift” (Greek:
charisma
) of the Spirit to assist the community in its ongoing life: for example, there were gifts of teaching, administration, almsgiving, healing, and prophecy. Eventually, however, as the expectation of an imminent end of the world began to fade, it became clear that there needed to be a more rigid church structure, especially if the church was to be around
for the long haul (cf. 1 Corinthians 11; Matthew 16, 18). Churches around the Mediterranean, including those founded by Paul, started appointing leaders who would be in charge and make decisions (rather than having every member as “equally” endowed with the Spirit); rules began to be formulated concerning how the community was to live together, practice its sacred rites (e.g., baptism and eucharist), train new members, and so on. Soon documents started being produced that indicated how the churches were to be ordered and structured. These so-called church orders became increasingly important in the second and third Christian centuries, but already by about 100
C
.
E
. the first (to our knowledge) had been written and widely disseminated, a book called
The Didache
[Teaching]
of the Twelve Apostles.
Soon it had numerous successors.

Christian Apologies

As the Christian communities became established, they sometimes faced opposition from Jews and pagans who saw this new faith as a threat and suspected its adherents of engaging in immoral and socially destructive practices (just as new religious movements today are often regarded with suspicion). This opposition sometimes led to local persecutions of Christians; eventually the persecutions became “official,” as Roman administrators intervened to arrest Christians and try to force them to return to the old ways of paganism. As Christianity grew, it eventually converted intellectuals to the faith, who were well equipped to discuss and dismiss the charges typically raised against the Christians. The writings of these intellectuals are sometimes called apologies, from the Greek word for “defense” (
apologia
). The apologists wrote intellectual defenses of the new faith, trying to show that far from being a threat to the social structure of the empire, it was a religion that preached moral behavior; and far from being a dangerous superstition, it represented the ultimate truth in its worship of the one true God. These apologies were important for early Christian readers, as they provided them with the arguments they needed when
themselves faced with persecution. Already this kind of defense was found in the New Testament period, for example, in the book of 1 Peter (3:15: “always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you to give an account of the hope that is in you”) and in the book of Acts, where Paul and other apostles defend themselves against charges leveled at them. By the second half of the second century, apologies had become a popular form of Christian writing.

Christian Martyrologies

At about the same time that apologies began to be written, Christians started producing accounts of their persecutions and the martyrdoms that happened as a result of them. There is some portrayal of both matters already in the New Testament book of Acts, where opposition to the Christian movement, the arrest of Christian leaders, and the execution of at least one of them (Stephen) form a significant part of the narrative (see Acts 7). Later, in the second century, martyrologies (accounts of the martyrs) began to appear. The first of them is the
Martyrdom of Polycarp,
who was an important Christian leader who served as bishop of the church of Smyrna, in Asia Minor, for almost the entire first half of the second century. The account of Polycarp's death is found in a letter produced by members of his church, written to another community. Soon afterward, accounts of other martyrs began to appear. These too were popular among Christians, as they provided encouragement to those who were also persecuted for the faith, and guidance about how to face the ultimate threats of arrest, torture, and death.

Antiheretical Tractates

The problems Christians faced were not confined to external threats of persecution. From the earliest times, Christians were aware that a variety of interpretations of the “truth” of the religion existed within their own ranks. Already the apostle Paul rails against “false teachers”—for example, in his letter to the Galatians. Reading the surviving
accounts, we can see clearly that these opponents were not outsiders. They were Christians who understood the religion in fundamentally different ways. To deal with this problem, Christian leaders began to write tractates that opposed “heretics” (those who chose the wrong way to understand the faith); in a sense, some of Paul's letters are the earliest representations of this kind of tractate. Eventually, though, Christians of all persuasions became involved in trying to establish the “true teaching” (the literal meaning of “orthodoxy”) and to oppose those who advocated false teaching. These antiheretical tractates became an important feature of the landscape of early Christian literature. What is interesting is that even groups of “false teachers” wrote tractates against “false teachers,” so that the group that established once and for all what Christians were to believe (those responsible, for example, for the creeds that have come down to us today) are sometimes polemicized against by Christians who take the positions eventually decreed as false. This we have learned by relatively recent discoveries of “heretical” literature, in which the so-called heretics maintain that their views are correct and those of the “orthodox” church leaders are false.
⁸

Early Christian Commentaries

A good deal of the debate over right belief and false belief involved the interpretation of Christian texts, including the “Old Testament,” which Christians claimed as part of their own Bible. This shows yet again how central texts were to the life of the early Christian communities. Eventually, Christian authors began to write interpretations of these texts, not necessarily with the direct purpose of refuting false interpretations (although that was often in view as well), but sometimes simply to unpack the meaning of these texts and to show their relevance to Christian life and practice. It is interesting that the first Christian commentary on any text of scripture that we know about came from a so-called heretic, a second-century Gnostic named Heracleon, who wrote a commentary on the Gospel of John.
⁹
Eventually
commentaries, interpretive glosses, practical expositions, and homilies on texts became common among the Christian communities of the third and fourth centuries.

 

I have been summarizing the different kinds of writings that were important to the lives of the early Christian churches. As I hope can be seen, the phenomenon of writing was of uppermost importance to these churches and the Christians within them. Books were at the very heart of the Christian religion—unlike other religions of the empire—from the very beginning. Books recounted the stories of Jesus and his apostles that Christians told and retold; books provided Christians with instruction in what to believe and how to live their lives; books bound together geographically separated communities into one universal church; books supported Christians in their times of persecution and gave them models of faithfulness to emulate in the face of torture and death; books provided not just good advice but correct doctrine, warning against the false teachings of others and urging the acceptance of orthodox beliefs; books allowed Christians to know the true meaning of other writings, giving guidance in what to think, how to worship, how to behave. Books were completely central to the life of the early Christians.

T
HE
F
ORMATION OF THE
C
HRISTIAN
C
ANON

Eventually, some of these Christian books came to be seen not only as worthy of reading but as absolutely authoritative for the beliefs and practices of Christians. They became Scripture.

The Beginnings of a Christian Canon

The formation of the Christian canon of scripture was a long, involved process, and I do not need to go into all the details here.
¹⁰
As I have already indicated, in some sense Christians
started
with a canon
in that the founder of their religion was himself a Jewish teacher who accepted the Torah as authoritative scripture from God, and who taught his followers his interpretation of it. The earliest Christians were followers of Jesus who accepted the books of the Jewish Bible (which was not yet set as a “canon,” once and for all) as their own scripture. For the writers of the New Testament, including our earliest author, Paul, the “scriptures” referred to the Jewish Bible, the collection of books that God had given his people and that predicted the coming of the Messiah, Jesus.

It was not long, however, before Christians began accepting other writings as standing on a par with the Jewish scriptures. This acceptance may have had its roots in the authoritative teaching of Jesus himself, as his followers took his
interpretation
of scripture to be equal in authority to the words of scripture itself. Jesus may have encouraged this understanding by the way he phrased some of his teachings. In the Sermon on the Mount, for example, Jesus is recorded as stating laws given by God to Moses, and then giving his own more radical interpretation of them, indicating that his interpretation is authoritative. This is found in the so-called Antitheses recorded in Matthew, chapter 5. Jesus says, “You have heard it said, ‘You shall not commit murder' [one of the Ten Commandments], but
I
say to you, ‘whoever is even angry with a brother or sister is liable to judgment.'” What Jesus says, in his interpretation of the Law, appears to be as authoritative as the Law itself. Or Jesus says, “You have heard it said, ‘You shall not commit adultery' [another of the Ten Commandments]. But
I
say to you, ‘whoever looks at a woman to lust after her in his heart has already committed adultery with her.'”

On some occasions these authoritative interpretations of scripture appear, in effect, to countermand the laws of scripture themselves. For example, Jesus says, “You have heard it said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife should give her a certificate of divorce' [a command found in Deut. 24:1], but
I
say to you that everyone who divorces his wife for reason other than sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and
whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.” It is hard to see how one can follow Moses' command to give a certificate of divorce, if in fact divorce is not an option.

In any event, Jesus's teachings were soon seen to be as authoritative as the pronouncements of Moses—that is, those of the Torah itself. This becomes even more clear later in the New Testament period, in the book of 1 Timothy, allegedly by Paul but frequently taken by scholars to have been written in his name by a later follower. In 1 Tim. 5:18 the author is urging his readers to pay those who minister among them, and supports his exhortation by quoting “the scripture.” What is interesting is that he then quotes two passages, one found in the Torah (“Do not muzzle an ox that is treading,” Deut. 25:4) and the other found on the lips of Jesus (“A workman is worthy of his hire”; see Luke 10:7). It appears that for this author, Jesus's words are already on a par with scripture.