Misquoting Jesus (5 page)

Nor was it just Jesus's teachings that were being considered scriptural by these second-or third-generation Christians. So too were the writings of his apostles. Evidence comes in the final book of the New Testament to be written, 2 Peter, a book that most critical scholars believe was not actually written by Peter but by one of his followers, pseudonymously. In 2 Peter 3 the author makes reference to false teachers who twist the meaning of Paul's letters to make them say what they want them to say, “just as they do with the rest of the scriptures” (2 Pet. 3:16). It appears that Paul's letters are here being understood as scripture.

Soon after the New Testament period, certain Christian writings were being quoted as authoritative texts for the life and beliefs of the church. An outstanding example is a letter written by Polycarp, the previously mentioned bishop of Smyrna, in the early second century. Polycarp was asked by the church at Philippi to advise them, particularly with respect to a case involving one of the leaders who had evidently engaged in some form of financial mismanagement within the church (possibly embezzling church funds). Polycarp's letter to the
Philippians, which still survives, is intriguing for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its propensity to quote earlier writings of the Christians. In just fourteen brief chapters, Polycarp quotes more than a hundred passages known from these earlier writings, asserting their authority for the situation the Philippians were facing (in contrast to just a dozen quotations from the Jewish scriptures); in one place he appears to call Paul's letter to the Ephesians scripture. More commonly, he simply quotes or alludes to earlier writings, assuming their authoritative status for the community.
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The Role of Christian Liturgy in the Formation of the Canon

Some time before the letter of Polycarp, we know that Christians were hearing the Jewish scriptures read during their worship services. The author of 1 Timothy, for example, urges that the letter's recipient “pay close attention to [public] reading, to exhortation, and to teaching” (4:13). As we saw in the case of the letter to the Colossians, it appears that letters by Christians were being read to the gathered community as well. And we know that by the middle of the second century, a good portion of the Christian worship services involved the public reading of scripture. In a much discussed passage from the writings of the Christian intellectual and apologist Justin Martyr, for example, we get a glimpse of what a church service involved in his home city of Rome:

It seems likely that the liturgical use of some Christian texts—for example, “the memoirs of the apostles,” which are usually understood to be the Gospels—elevated their status for most Christians so that they, as much as the Jewish scriptures (“the writings of the prophets”), were considered to be authoritative.

The Role of Marcion in the Formation of the Canon

We can trace the formation of the Christian canon of scripture a bit more closely still, from the surviving evidence. At the same time that Justin was writing in the mid second century, another prominent Christian was also active in Rome, the philosopher-teacher Marcion, later declared a heretic.
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Marcion is an intriguing figure in many ways. He had come to Rome from Asia Minor, having already made a fortune in what was evidently a shipbuilding business. Upon arriving in the Rome, he made an enormous donation to the Roman church, probably, in part, to get in its good favor. For five years he stayed in Rome, spending much of his time teaching his understanding of the Christian faith and working out its details in several writings. Arguably his most influential literary production was not something he wrote but something he edited. Marcion was the first Christian that we know of who produced an actual “canon” of scripture—that is, a collection of books that, he argued, constituted the sacred texts of the faith.

To make sense of this initial attempt to establish the canon, we need to know a bit about Marcion's distinctive teaching. Marcion was completely absorbed by the life and teachings of the apostle Paul, whom he considered to be the one “true” apostle from the early days of the church. In some of his letters, such as Romans and Galatians, Paul had taught that a right standing before God came only by faith in Christ, not by doing any of the works prescribed by the Jewish law. Marcion took this differentiation between the law of the Jews and faith in Christ to what he saw as its logical conclusion, that there was an absolute distinction between the law on the one hand and the gospel on the other. So distinct were the law and the gospel, in fact, that both could not possibly have come from the same God. Marcion concluded that the God of Jesus (and Paul) was not, therefore, the God of the Old Testament. There were, in fact, two different Gods: the God of the Jews, who created the world, called Israel to be his
people, and gave them his harsh law; and the God of Jesus, who sent Christ into the world to save people from the wrathful vengeance of the Jewish creator God.

Marcion believed this understanding of Jesus was taught by Paul himself, and so, naturally, his canon included the ten letters of Paul available to him (all those in the New Testament apart from the pastoral Epistles of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus); and since Paul sometimes referred to his “Gospel,” Marcion included a Gospel in his canon, a form of what is now the Gospel of Luke. And that was all. Marcion's canon consisted of eleven books: there was no Old Testament, only one Gospel, and ten Epistles. But not only that: Marcion had come to believe that false believers, who did not have his understanding of the faith, had transmitted these eleven books by copying them, and by adding bits and pieces here and there in order to accommodate their own beliefs, including the “false” notion that the God of the Old Testament was also the God of Jesus. And so Marcion “corrected” the eleven books of his canon by editing out references to the Old Testament God, or to the creation as the work of the true God, or to the Law as something that should be followed.

As we will see, Marcion's attempt to make his sacred texts conform more closely to his teaching by actually changing them was not unprecedented. Both before and after him, copyists of the early Christian literature occasionally changed their texts to make them say what they were already thought to mean.

The “Orthodox” Canon after Marcion

Many scholars are convinced that it was precisely in opposition to Marcion that other Christians became more concerned to establish the contours of what was to become the New Testament canon. It is interesting that in Marcion's own day, Justin could speak rather vaguely about the “memoirs of the apostles” without indicating which of these books (presumably Gospels) were accepted in the churches or why, whereas some thirty years later another Christian writer, who equally
opposed Marcion, took a far more authoritative stand. This was the bishop of Lyons in Gaul (modern France), Irenaeus, who wrote a five-volume work against heretics such as Marcion and the Gnostics, and who had very clear ideas about which books should be considered among the canonical Gospels.

In a frequently cited passage from his work
Against Heresies,
Irenaeus says that not just Marcion, but also other “heretics,” had mistakenly assumed that only one or another of the Gospels was to be accepted as scripture: Jewish Christians who held to the ongoing validity of the Law used only Matthew; certain groups who argued that Jesus was not really the Christ accepted only the Gospel of Mark; Marcion and his followers accepted only (a form of ) Luke; and a group of Gnostics called the Valentinians accepted only John. All these groups were in error, however, because

In other words, four corners of the earth, four winds, four pillars—and necessarily, then, four Gospels.

And so, near the end of the second century there were Christians who were insisting that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were
the
Gospels; there were neither more nor fewer.

Debates about the contours of the canon continued for several centuries. It appears that Christians by and large were concerned to know which books to accept as authoritative so that they would (1) know which books should be read in their services of worship and, relatedly, (2) know which books could be trusted as reliable guides for what to believe and how to behave. The decisions about which books should finally be considered canonical were not automatic or problem-free; the
debates were long and drawn out, and sometimes harsh. Many Christians today may think that the canon of the New Testament simply appeared on the scene one day, soon after the death of Jesus, but nothing could be farther from the truth. As it turns out, we are able to pinpoint the first time that any Christian of record listed the twenty-seven books of our New Testament as
the
books of the New Testament—neither more nor fewer. Surprising as it may seem, this Christian was writing in the second half of the fourth century, nearly three hundred years after the books of the New Testament had themselves been written. The author was the powerful bishop of Alexandria named Athanasius. In the year 367
C
.
E
., Athanasius wrote his annual pastoral letter to the Egyptian churches under his jurisdiction, and in it he included advice concerning which books should be read as scripture in the churches. He lists our twenty-seven books, excluding all others. This is the first surviving instance of anyone affirming our set of books as the New Testament. And even Athanasius did not settle the matter. Debates continued for decades, even centuries. The books we call the New Testament were not gathered together into one canon and considered scripture, finally and ultimately, until hundreds of years after the books themselves had first been produced.

T
HE
R
EADERS OF
C
HRISTIAN
W
RITINGS

In the preceding section our discussion focused on the canonization of scripture. As we saw earlier, however, many kinds of books were being written and read by Christians in the early centuries, not just the books that made it into the New Testament. There were other gospels, acts, epistles, and apocalypses; there were records of persecution, accounts of martyrdom, apologies for the faith, church orders, attacks on heretics, letters of exhortation and instruction, expositions of scripture—an entire range of literature that helped define Christianity and make it the religion it came to be. It would be helpful at
this stage of our discussion to ask a basic question about all this literature. Who, actually, was reading it?

In the modern world, this would seem to be a rather bizarre question. If authors are writing books for Christians, then the people reading the books would presumably be Christians. When asked about the ancient world, however, the question has special poignancy because, in the ancient world, most people could not read.

Literacy is a way of life for those of us in the modern West. We read all the time, every day. We read newspapers and magazines and books of all kinds—biographies, novels, how-to books, self-help books, diet books, religious books, philosophical books, histories, memoirs, and on and on. But our facility with written language today has little to do with reading practices and realities in antiquity.

Studies of literacy have shown that what we might think of as mass literacy is a modern phenomenon, one that appeared only with the advent of the Industrial Revolution.
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It was only when nations could see an economic benefit in having virtually everyone able to read that they were willing to devote the massive resources—especially time, money, and human resources—needed to ensure that everyone had a basic education in literacy. In nonindustrial societies, the resources were desperately needed for other things, and literacy would not have helped either the economy or the well-being of society as a whole. As a result, until the modern period, almost all societies contained only a small minority of people who could read and write.

This applies even to ancient societies that we might associate with reading and writing—for example, Rome during the early Christian centuries, or even Greece during the classical period. The best and most influential study of literacy in ancient times, by Columbia University professor William Harris, indicates that at the very best of times and places—for example, Athens at the height of the classical period in the fifth century
B
.
C
.
E
.—literacy rates were rarely higher than 10–15 percent of the population. To reverse the numbers, this means that under the best of conditions, 85–90 percent of the population
could not read or write. In the first Christian century, throughout the Roman Empire, the literacy rates may well have been lower.
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As it turns out, even defining what it means to read and write is a very complicated business. Many people can read but are unable to compose a sentence, for example. And what does it mean to read? Are people literate if they can manage to make sense of the comic strips but not the editorial page? Can people be said to be able to write if they can sign their name but cannot copy a page of text?