Carson's Thinking about the Study of the New Testament PDF

= Chapter One Thinking about the Study of the New Testament People have been reading and studying the New Testament for as long as its documents have been in existence. Even before all twenty-seven canonical New Testament books were written, some found the interpretation of the available document...

= Chapter One Thinking about the Study of the New Testament People have been reading and studying the New Testament for as long as its documents have been in existence. Even before all twenty-seven canonical New Testament books were written, some found the interpretation of the available documents more than a little challenging (see the comment of 2 Pet. 3:15–16 regarding Paul). A distance of two millennia, not to mention changes of language, culture, and history, have not made the task any easier. The torrential outpouring of commentaries, studies, and essays across the centuries, all designed to explain—or in some cases, explain away—the New Testament documents, makes the task both easier and harder. It is easier because there are many good and stimulating guides; it is harder because the sheer volume of the material, not to mention its thoroughly mixed nature and, frequently, its mutually contradictory content, is profoundly daunting to the student just beginning New Testament study. This chapter provides little more than a surface history of a selection of the people, movements, issues, and approaches that have shaped the study of the New Testament. The student setting out to come to terms with contemporary study of the New Testament must suddenly confront a bewildering array of new disciplines (e.g., text criticism, historical criticism, hermeneutics), the terminology of new tools (e.g., form criticism, redaction criticism, discourse analysis, postmodern readings), and key figures (e.g., F. C. Baur, J. B. Lightfoot, E. P. Sanders). Students with imagination will instantly grasp that they do not pick up New Testament scrolls as they were dropped from an apostolic hand; they pick up a bound sheaf of documents, printed, and probably in translation. Moreover, the text itself is something that believers and unbelievers alike have been studying and explaining for two millennia. The aim here, then, is to provide enough of a framework to make the rest of this textbook, and a lot of other books on the New Testament, a little easier to understand. 23 + = 24 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT PASSING ON THE TEXT At the beginning of his gospel, Luke comments that “many others” had already undertaken to write accounts of Jesus (Luke 1:1–4). Although some scholars have argued that there was a long period of oral tradition before anything substantial about Jesus or the early church was written down, the evidence is against such a stance: the world into which Jesus was born was highly literate.1 From such a perspective, the existence of the documents that make up the New Testament canon is scarcely surprising. These documents were originally hand-written on separate scrolls. There is very good evidence that the writing was in capital letters, without spaces, and with very little punctuation. Printing was still almost a millennium and a half away, so additional copies were made by hand. In theory, this could be done by professional copiers: in a scriptorium, one man would read at dictation speed, several scribes would take down his dictation, and another would check each copy against the original, often using ink of a different color to make the corrections. This kind of professional multiplying of copies was labor-intensive and therefore expensive. Most early Christian copies of the New Testament were doubtless done by laypeople eager to obtain another letter by Paul or a written account of the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. That brought the price down: Christians were investing their own time to make their own copies, and they were not having to pay large sums to professional scribes. On the other hand, the private copy made by an eager and well-meaning layperson was likely to include more transcriptional errors than copies made and checked in a scriptorium. How the New Testament canon came together is briefly discussed in the final chapter of this book. For the moment it is sufficient to observe that as the numbers of copies of New Testament documents multiplied, three formal changes were soon introduced. First, the scroll gave way to the codex, that is, to a book bound more or less like a modern book, which enabled readers to look up passages very quickly without having to roll down many feet of scroll. Second, increasingly (though certainly not exclusively) the capital letters (scholars call them “uncials”) gave way to cursive scripts that were messier but much more quickly written. And third, because the early church, even within the Roman Empire, was made up of highly diverse groups, it was not long before the New Testament, and in fact the whole Bible, was translated into other languages. These “versions” of the Bible (as translations are called) varied widely in quality.2 There were no copyright laws and no central publishing houses, so there were especially Alan Millard, Reading and Writing in the Time of Jesus (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000). 2The best survey is Bruce M. Metzger, The Early Versions of the New Testament: Their Origin, Transmission and Limitations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). 1See THINKING ABOUT THE STUDY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT soon numerous Latin versions, Syriac versions, and so forth, as individuals or local churches produced what seemed necessary for their own congregations. Today the printing press churns out thousands of identical copies. When each copy is written by hand, however, if the work is of substantial length, each copy will be a little different than all others because the accidental mistakes introduced by successive copying will not all congregate in the same place. The challenge of producing a copy that is perfectly true to the original soon multiplies. A slightly later Christian, making a copy of a copy, spots what he judges to be mistakes in the manuscript before him and corrects them in his fresh copy. Unfortunately, however, it is possible that some things he thought were mistakes were actually in the original. For instance, it is well known that there are many grammatical anomalies in the book of Revelation. The reason for this is disputed; there are three major theories and several minor ones. But a later copyist might well have thought that errors had been introduced by intervening copyists and “corrected” them to “proper” grammar—thereby introducing new errors. Two further “accidents” of history and geography have helped to determine just what material has come down to us. First, just as the Roman Empire divided between East and West (stemming from the decision of Emperor Constantine to establish an eastern capital in what came to be called Constantinople), so also did the church. In the West, because it was not only the official language of Rome but also tended in time to squeeze out Greek as the lingua franca, Latin soon predominated in the church. Initially, there were many Latin versions, but toward the end of the fourth century, Damasus, Bishop of Rome, commissioned Jerome to prepare an official Latin version that would be widely distributed and sometimes imposed throughout the churches of the West. This Latin version, revised several times, became the Vulgate, which held sway in the West for a millennium. By contrast, Greek dominated in the East, in what eventually became the Byzantine Empire. Inevitably, Greek manuscripts were used and copied much more often under this linguistic heritage than in the West, until Constantinople fell to the Muslim Turks in 1453. Many Eastern scholars then fled West, bringing their Greek manuscripts with them—a development that helped to fuel both the Reformation and the Renaissance. Second, the material on which ancient books were written (i.e., their equivalent of paper) decomposed more readily in some climates than in others. The most expensive books were made of parchment, treated animal skin. Higher quality parchment was called vellum. More commonly, books were made of papyrus, a plant that grew plentifully in the Nile Delta. Papyrus has the constituency of celery or rhubarb. Long strips could be peeled off, pounded, and glued together to make sheets. Although parchment is tougher than papyrus, both materials are organic and thus readily decompose, especially when there is moisture in the atmosphere. So it is not surprising that the best caches of really ancient manuscripts come from the hot, dry sands of Egypt. 25 + = 26 There are about five thousand manuscripts or parts of manuscripts (some of them mere fragments) of all or part of the Greek New Testament. AN INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT So just what textual evidence has come down to us? There are about five thousand manuscripts or parts of manuscripts (some of them mere fragments) of all or part of the Greek New Testament, and about eight thousand manuscripts or parts of manuscripts of versions. All of this evidence can be classified in various ways. For example, one can break it down according to writing material (parchment or papyrus). More importantly, uncial manuscripts of the Greek New Testament (i.e., those written in capital letters) number under three hundred, whereas there are almost three thousand miniscules (manuscripts not written in capitals). In addition, there are over two thousand lectionaries —church reading books that contain selections of the biblical text to be read on many days of the ecclesiastical year. Other sources include quotations of the Bible found in the early church fathers, and short portions of New Testament writings on ostraca (pieces of pottery often used by poor people as writing material) and amulets,3 ranging from the fourth to the thirteenth century. Similar breakdowns can be put forward for all the versional evidence. Although most of this material springs from the thousand-year period between A.D. 500 and 1500, the earliest fragments come from the first half of the second century. It is useful to observe that of all the works that have come down to us from the ancient world, the New Testament is the most amply attested in textual evidence. For example, for the first six books of the Annals, written by the famous Roman historian Tacitus, there is but a single manuscript, dating from the ninth century. The extant works of Euripides, the best-attested of the Greek tragedians, are preserved in 54 papyri and 276 parchment manuscripts, almost all of the latter deriving from the Byzantine period. The history of Rome by Velleius Paterculus came down to us in one incomplete manuscript, which was lost in the seventeenth century after a copy had been made. By comparison, the wealth and range of material supporting the Greek New Testament is staggering. The printing press made the hand-copying of manuscripts forever obsolete. The first printed edition of the Greek New Testament appeared on 10 January 1514. It was volume 5 of a polyglot Bible commissioned by the cardinal primate of Spain, Francisco Ximenes de Cisneros (1437–1517). Printed in the town of Alcalá, called Complutum in Latin, the work came to be known as the Complutensian Polyglot Bible. Volume 5 also contained the first printed Greek glossary, the progenitor of countless lexicons that have been published since then.4 3Amulets are charms, often worn around the neck to ward off assorted evils. Some amulets were simply “magic” stones or the like, but others were sayings or cherished quotations written on papyrus, vellum, potsherd, or wood. Where superstition overlaid Christian faith, inevitably some of these quotations were biblical. Obviously, neither ostraca nor amulets can provide evidence for extensive passages. 4For further reading, see John A. L. Lee, A History of New Testament Lexicography, SBG 8 (New York: Peter Lang, 2003). THINKING ABOUT THE STUDY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT But although the Complutensian Bible contained the first Greek New Testament ever printed, it was not the first one to be published (i.e., both printed and put on the market). That honor belongs to the edition prepared by Desiderius Erasmus (1469–1536), a Dutch scholar from Rotterdam. Erasmus managed to complete the edition and have it out by 1516. The volume contains hundreds of typographical errors and was based primarily on two inferior twelfth-century manuscripts kept in a monastery in Basle. Erasmus continued to prepare fresh editions that corrected many of the earlier typos, editions that were based on a few more Greek manuscripts. The best of these was a tenth-century miniscule. It was better than his other manuscripts, being a copy of an early uncial, but because it was rather different from the other manuscripts he had at hand, Erasmus did not rely on it very much. His definitive fourth edition (1527) was prepared after Erasmus had consulted the Complutensian. It boasts three columns: the Greek, the Vulgate, and Erasmus’s own Latin translation. His fifth edition (1535) abandoned the Vulgate, but so far as the Greek text is concerned, it was largely indistinguishable from his fourth edition. All the early editions of the Greek New Testament were copies or adaptations of the work of Erasmus. Robert Estienne (whose last name often appears in the Latinized form, Stephanus) published four such editions of the Greek New Testament, three in Paris (1546, 1549, and 1550) and the last one in Geneva (1551), where as a Protestant he spent his last years. His first two editions were a mix of the Erasmian and Complutensian editions; his third (1550) was much more like the fourth and fifth editions of Erasmus and included, for the first time, a critical apparatus, variant readings, printed on inner margins, of the fourteen Greek manuscripts that were his base, plus readings from the Complutensian Polyglot.5 This third edition was destined to exercise an astonishing influence. In 1553 it was reprinted by Jean Crispin in Geneva, who introduced only a halfdozen changes to the Greek text. Théodore de Bèze (Beza), successor to Calvin in Geneva, published nine editions of the Greek New Testament. These editions contain some new textual evidence collated by Beza himself, but they are very similar to the third and fourth editions of Stephanus. The King James translators (1611) depended heavily on Beza’s editions of 1588–89 and 1598. Then, in 1624, the brothers Bonaventure and Abraham Elzevir published in Leiden a compact edition of the Greek New Testament largely taken from Beza’s 1565 edition. The Elzevir brothers’ second edition, dated 1633, boasts (in what would today be called an advertising blurb) that the reader now has “the text which is now received by all, in which we give nothing changed or corrupted”: the words we have italicized reflect the Latin textus receptus, referring 5One of the fourteen was Codex Bezae, now recognized as the chief witness to the Western Text. 27 + = 28 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT to a commonly received text, and thus a standard text. This is the “received text” which, more or less, stands behind all English translations of the Bible until 1881. This textual tradition is grounded in what was at the time a mere handful of mostly late miniscule manuscripts. The following centuries uncovered the vast amount of textual evidence already briefly summarized. The work of the textual critic is to sift this evidence and look for patterns in the attempt to uncover what reading is closest to the original, which of course we do not have.6 Textual critics have organized this vast manuscript evidence into text types: patterns of readings thought to reflect the textual tradition of a particular locale. Inevitably, if a manuscript was transported to another locale and a further copy was made using both this transported manuscript and manuscripts from the local region, it was possible to generate a copy with “mixed types.” A small group of manuscripts with even stronger affinities, usually some evidence of direct borrowing, is sometimes called a family. As a discipline, textual criticism begins with the work of Richard Simon, a French priest studying and writing at the end of the seventeenth century. Then, in 1707, John Mill, an Anglican theologian, produced, two weeks before his death, a beautiful edition of the Greek Testament, the product of decades of work (the latter part of which was enriched by the writing of Richard Simon). It reproduced the “received text” unaltered, but the apparatus, which took up more space on each page than the text itself, included not only parallel passages but the readings of all available manuscripts, versions, and printed editions. This edition also included succinct summaries of all the known data regarding the origin and textual descent of each book of the New Testament canon, plus descriptions of all New Testament manuscripts then known to be extant, plus comments on all translations. In some ways, however, the crucial figure at the head of textual criticism is Johann Albrecht Bengel, a Swabian pietist. His edition of the Greek New Testament, published in 1734, offered not only a text that differs in countless passages from the “received text” (though most of the changes were unimportant), but also a substantial “critical apparatus.” Here Bengel presented the most important of the textual variants in five groups, depending on their importance 6A small minority of textual critics argue that the pursuit of the original is a vain exercise: e.g., D. C. Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). The manuscript tradition is so fluid, they say, that the attempt to uncover the original reading is pointless. Worse, it diverts attention from the study of what the diverse textual traditions tell us of what the church thought at various times and places. However, not only does Parker overemphasize the freedom of the textual tradition, but he also fails to reflect on the significance of the fact that for every book there was an original. That we cannot reproduce it with perfect certainty with respect to every word does not vitiate the fact that the pursuit is valuable and that its goal is, in no small measure, attainable. THINKING ABOUT THE STUDY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT (a practice not unlike that followed in some editions of the Greek Testament today). His evaluation of what was most likely original corresponds to a high degree with similar judgments made today. Bengel formulated rules or principles on which he based his decisions, and in large measure these have stood the test of time. For example, Bengel recognized that the number of manuscripts with a particular reading was a matter of little importance. After all, the many manuscripts might be largely late, or belong exclusively to one textual tradition. It is important to weigh when manuscripts were written, and how many text types support a reading (usually representing textual traditions in different parts of the world). Bengel understood that the most important question a text-critic can ask is this: Which reading is most likely to have generated all the others? Moreover, because on the whole scribes tended to eliminate perceived difficulties, Bengel formulated the rule, “The more difficult reading is to be preferred over the easier” (Proclivi scriptioni praestat ardua). Of course, none of these rules is absolute. For a start, one must try to distinguish between unintentional errors that copyists made, and intentional changes. Intentional changes were often motivated by the desire to “improve” the text, under the assumption that some earlier scribe had made a mistake. Under such an assumption, Bengel’s rule works very well: the more difficult reading is likely to be more original. But where there is an unintentional error— for instance, where a scribe became sloppy and accidentally inserted three words from a previous line and then carried on—then clearly the same rule does not work. The “more difficult reading” is the one with the unaccountable insertion, but even though it is more difficult, it is certainly not more original. The complexity of the text-critical task can be met only by scholars who spend an extraordinary amount of time in the manuscripts themselves, becoming deeply familiar with the writing, scribal corrections, and tendencies of individual manuscripts. The discipline is never merely mechanical. It calls for both vast knowledge and sound judgment.7 Intrinsic to these arguments, and progressively worked out during the next century, are two pairs of distinctions. First, one must distinguish between external evidence (i.e., what readings are supported by what manuscripts) and internal 7The best introductions to the subject are still those of Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), and Kurt Aland and Barbara Aland, The Text of the New Testament: An Introduction to the Critical Editions and to the Theory and Practice of Modern Textual Criticism, trans. Erroll F. Rhodes (Leiden: Brill; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987). Students have long relied on the reasoning displayed in entry after entry of Bruce Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (London/New York: United Bible Societies, 1994). 29 + = 30 The overwhelming majority of the text of the Greek New Testament is firmly established. Where uncertainties remain, in no case is any doctrinal matter at issue. AN INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT evidence (i.e., what arguments from the text itself can be advanced in defense of this or that reading). Second, with respect to the internal evidence, textual critics came to distinguish between intrinsic probability (i.e., what the author is likely to have written, as judged by his observed proclivities) and transcriptional probability (i.e., what copyists were likely to have put down, whether in an intentional or an unintentional change). This brief account of the rise of textual criticism does not begin to do justice to the countless scholars who toiled diligently on specific texts, still less to a handful of luminaries—for example, Brian Walton (1600–61), Richard Bentley (1662–1742), Johann Jakob Wettstein (1693–1754), Edward Harwood (1729–94), Johann Jakob Griesbach (1745–1812), Lobegott Friedrich Constantin von Tischendorf (1815–74), and the combined work of Brooke Foss Westcott (1825–1901) and Fenton John Anthony Hort (1828–92). Today the most important center for textual criticism of the New Testament, both for the comprehensiveness of its holdings and for the astonishingly high percentage of texts now digitized, is the Institut für Textforschung in Münster. The overwhelming majority of contemporary textual critics adopt a position labeled eclecticism. That simply means that they choose (the Greek for the verb “to choose” is eklegomai) the reading on the basis of what they perceive to be the best fit once all the evidence, internal and external, is carefully evaluated. But there are two minority groups. One continues to support the “received text,” if not in the form published by the Elzevir brothers, then at least the “majority text,” that is, readings that are supported by the greatest number of manuscripts.8 The other minority group promotes thoroughgoing eclecticism. Its members discount the external evidence (i.e., they do not think that any consideration should be given to arguments regarding which manuscripts or groups of manuscripts support any reading); all of their focus is on the internal evidence.9 the best defense of this view is Wilbur N. Pickering, The Identity of the New Testament Text II, 3rd ed. (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2003). The best succinct treatment of this position from the stance of mainstream eclecticism is probably that of Kurt Aland, “The Text of the Church?” TrinJ 8 (1987): 131–44. For popular treatments, see D. A. Carson, The King James Version Debate: A Plea for Realism (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979); James R. White, The King James Only Controversy (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1995); Doug Kutilek, J. Frank Norris and His Heirs: The Bible Translation Controversy (Pasadena: Pilgrim, 1999). 9In some ways this movement is rather a sustained critique of the weak spots in eclecticism. It is best represented by the work of J. K. Elliott and his best students (and earlier by the text-critical essays of G. D. Kilpatrick). See, for instance, J. K. Elliott, ed., The Principles and Practice of New Testament Textual Criticism: Collected Essays of G. D. Kilpatrick, BETL 96 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1990); idem, Essays and Studies in New Testament Textual Criticism, EFN 3 (Córdoba: Ediciones el Almendro, 1992); Kent D. Clarke, Textual Optimism: A Critique of the United Bible Societies’ Greek 8Perhaps THINKING ABOUT THE STUDY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT Whatever the ongoing scholarly disputes, serious Christian readers today are equipped with astonishingly accurate and detailed information in their printed Greek New Testaments. The overwhelming majority of the text of the Greek New Testament is firmly established. Where uncertainties remain, it is important to recognize that in no case is any doctrinal matter at issue. Of course, textual variants may raise the question as to whether a particular doctrinal stance or historical datum is or is not supported in this or that passage, but inevitably one can appeal to parallel passages where the text is secure to address the larger doctrinal or historical issues. In terms of the availability and range of textual evidence, owing to the large number of manuscript discoveries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we are incomparably better off than Christians have been for almost nineteen hundred years.10 Perhaps too, it is worth speculating that, in God’s providence, we are better off without the originals, for we would almost certainly have treated them with idolatrous reverence focused more on the mere artifact than on what the manuscript actually said. LONGSTANDING INTERPRETIVE TRADITIONS A perennial danger among contemporary students of the New Testament is to overlook the two-thousand-year history of debate and interpretation generated by these twenty-seven books. The pressure to be up-to-date with the voluminous contemporary literature, combined with the penchant endemic to twentyfirst-century Western culture to revere the innovative, even the faddish, and be suspicious of the traditional, conspires to blind us to our connections with twenty centuries of Christian readers. Moreover, both conservative and liberal scholars are inclined, for different reasons, to focus on the most recent centuries. On the conservative side, many (not least evangelicals) are sometimes tempted to think that serious theological reflection began with the Reformation and that, provided one does careful exegesis, there is not much to be learned from historical theology anyway. On the liberal side, many treat the period before the Enlightenment as a swamp of superstitious and unscientific interpretation now safely abandoned by our much greater learning.11 New Testament, JSNTSup 138 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997). The best response to thoroughgoing eclecticism as a movement (though not necessarily to each particular criticism the movement offers) is the description of the goals and methods of mainstream textual criticism offered in the sort of standard texts listed in n. 7 above. 10The stance of Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels —that textual criticism is not concerned with getting as close as possible to the original text but is simply an exercise in hermeneutics—is frankly baffling. See the penetrating review by Moisés Silva in WTJ 62 (2000): 295–302. 11E.g., W. G. Kümmel, The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of Its Problems (Nashville: Abingdon, 1972), 13: “It is impossible to speak of a scientific view 31 + = 32 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT Obviously, one short section of one chapter of a book cannot pretend to do justice to this long tradition. What follows is not a comprehensive catalog of interpretive developments across a millennium and a half, but a highly selective summary of a handful of important people and movements that proved influential in the interpretation of the New Testament and some small indication of the impact of the New Testament documents in history. 1. One of the most important developments was the collection of the New Testament documents into groups (Did the Pauline writings, or some of them, ever circulate together? Cf. 2 Pet. 3:15–16) and into the canon of the New Testament itself. Some of the steps in that process are sketched in the last chapter of this book and need not be probed here. But it is worth mentioning that debates during the first centuries of the church as to what should be included in the canon dealt with issues that are still addressed in any competent contemporary introduction to the New Testament. For instance, the church fathers refused to admit to the canon any book they judged pseudonymous (i.e., ostensibly written by someone such as Paul, when in fact it was not), and that refusal embroiled them in issues of authorship. In short, not only interpretive issues but also technical matters of “introduction” occupied the interest of the church from the beginning. 2. From its inception, Christianity inevitably defined itself, at least in part, against the background of the various forms of Judaism prevalent in the first century. Just as the worldwide movement we refer to today as “Christianity” has a wide diversity of forms and commitments, many of which would be considered only marginally Christian by some others in the movement, so also firstcentury Judaism was highly diverse, and some of its forms were zealously condemned by other branches as apostate. Full discussion of the relations between the early Christians and Judaism is therefore necessarily complex. Most of the first Christians, of course, were themselves Jews. As rising numbers of Gentiles were added to the church, and as the earliest Christians reflected on what God had accomplished by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, various tensions inevitably developed among those who grappled with such issues (see Acts 15 and Gal. 2:11–14). The New Testament documents chronicle some of the early developments, as Christians came to recognize that if Jesus is the exclusively sufficient ground of salvation, then certain features of the New Testament until the New Testament became the object of investigation as an independent body of literature with historical interest, as a collection of writings that could be considered apart from the Old Testament and without dogmatic or creedal bias. Since such a view began to prevail only during the course of the eighteenth century, earlier discussion of the New Testament can only be referred to as the prehistory of New Testament scholarship.” It is doubtful if anyone informed by postmodern awareness of the unavoidable fact that all interpreters bring their biases to the text could make quite the same remark today. THINKING ABOUT THE STUDY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT intrinsic to Judaism, such as circumcision, or features widely observed in Judaism, such as kosher food restrictions, could not be mandated of all believers. Moreover, if Jesus’ sacrifice dealt with our sin, then the role of the temple sacrifices could not go unchallenged. Christians were thus driven to think through their own relationship with the Mosaic covenant. If the Lord Jesus had inaugurated a new covenant in his blood (Luke 22:20; 1 Cor. 11:25; cf. 2 Cor. 3:6; Jer. 31:31–34), then the Mosaic covenant must be thought of as the old covenant (cf. 2 Cor. 3:6; Heb. 8:13). Such reflections as these, already glimpsed in the pages of the New Testament, bred ongoing discussions between Jews and Christians in the second century. The most eloquent of these discussions comes from the pen of Justin Martyr (c. 100–165) in the book Dialogue with Trypho. It tells of Justin’s conversation with a learned Jew, Trypho, and some of his friends. It not only shows Justin’s desire to win Jews as well as Gentiles to Christ but also how a secondcentury Christian apologist interpreted the Old Testament in the light of the New to construct a whole-Bible theology.12 3. At the same time, the first Christians were soon winning Gentiles to Christ. The book of Acts reports the expansion, identifying Antioch as the city with the first strong church of mixed race of which we know anything substantial (Acts 11:19–30; 13:1–3; 15:1–35). Paul understood his role to be apostle to the Gentiles (Gal. 2:7–10). He was capable of evangelizing Jews and others who attended local synagogues (see especially the report of his evangelism in the synagogue in Pisidian Antioch, Acts 13:16–43), but he was called primarily to evangelize Gentile pagans, whether ordinary folk in small towns (Acts 14:8–18), sophisticated urbanites (Acts 19), or intellectuals (Acts 17:16– 34). In such contexts he inevitably confronted various “philosophies”: the Epicureans and the Stoics are mentioned in Acts 17:18, but there were many others. At the time, the word philosophy did not call to mind an esoteric discipline in which students are taught substantial doses of skepticism and not much constructive content. In the ancient world, philosophy meant something like what we mean by “worldview.” Various teachers taught competing worldviews, and Christians earnestly sought to evangelize men and women who held these diverse pagan worldviews. 12Dialogue with Trypho almost certainly represents a later report of actual discussions Justin Martyr had with Jews. Its level and tone are remarkably elevated and fairminded, unlike some later treatises. Almost every major Christian writer of the first five centuries either wrote a treatise against Judaism or incorporated substantial arguments of that sort within other works, but most scholars conclude that this became a literary conceit usefully deployed to defend the uniqueness of Christ and of Christianity. See especially Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 1:15–16. 33 + = 34 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT In one sense, the Roman world of the first three centuries of the Christian era was highly pluralistic. To keep the peace, the Romans made it a capital offense to desecrate a temple—any temple. But the plurality of religions and worldviews was monolithic in at least one regard: these diverse religions agreed that there was no one way to god. On this there was strong agreement, for it was “an axiom of Greek culture that the cosmos was total (including the gods), perfect and changeless. Its harmony was endlessly repeated. Human error could be corrected by education.”13 In consequence, most Greeks thought that Christianity was notoriously bigoted and narrow. Thus, the pagan Celsus insisted on the equal validity of diverse ancient customs and beliefs, over against Origen’s insistence on the unique superiority of Christianity. Porphyry argued, “No teaching has yet been established which offers a universal way for the liberation of the soul.”14 One scholar puts it this way: All the ancient critics of Christianity were united in affirming that there is no one way to the divine. . . . It was not the kaleidoscope of religious practices and feelings that was the occasion for the discussion of religious pluralism in ancient Rome; it was the success of Christianity, as well as its assertions about Christ and about Israel. . . . By appealing to a particular history as the source of knowledge of God, Christian thinkers transgressed the conventions that governed civilized theological discourse in antiquity.15 Thus, from the beginning Christians worked out their theology and interpreted their most sacred and authoritative documents within the context of disagreement, mission, cross-cultural communication, and competing claims. 4. Moreover, even within the fledgling movement itself, various aberrant positions soon arose, forcing Christian leaders to decide which were minor variations and which had to be condemned as thoroughly outside the Christian camp, regardless of what their proponents claimed. Thus, in one of the earliest of the New Testament documents, Paul warns about “a different gospel” that is really no gospel at all and pronounces his “anathema” on all who teach it (Gal. 1:6–9); while in one of the latest of the New Testament documents, John can describe the departure of a certain group that had once belonged to the church but that had departed over certain doctrinal and ethical issues as proving, by their departure, that they had never really belonged to Christ’s people—for if they had, they would not have left (1 John 2:19). The early church was prepared to excommunicate not only those who refused to turn from gross moral turpitude (1 Cor. 5:1–13), but also those judged to be blasphemers (1 Tim. 1:20). A. Judge, “Ancient Contradictions in the Australian Soul,” ISCAST Bulletin 33 (Winter 2001): 8. 14Cited by Augustine, City of God 10.32. 15R. L. Wilken, “Religious Pluralism and Early Christian Thought,” in Remembering the Christian Past (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 42–43. 13E. THINKING ABOUT THE STUDY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT But although doctrinal and ethical disputes helped the church clarify its thinking from the beginning, it was soon beset by Gnosticism, a movement that was so large and so culturally supported that it proved to be a serious threat. Early voices of the movement (some scholars label them “proto-gnostic”) constitute part of the background to some of the later New Testament documents,16 but the movement crested in the second and third centuries. The most substantial cache of gnostic documents conveniently available in English translation is from Nag Hammadi.17 An hour or two of quiet reading of these works discloses a very different world from that of the New Testament. The gnostic documents display ideas about human origins far removed from those in the New Testament or in the entire Bible. Usually matter is seen to be intrinsically bad; salvation is secured, not by the substitutionary death of a sacrifice, but by knowledge of one’s true identity; and secret rites abound. In all these domains, then, Christian apologists in the second and third centuries were called upon to understand their times and to use the Christian Scriptures to refute what were, from an orthodox perspective, insupportable and dangerous heresies. Perhaps the best known of the apologists is Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, who devoted five volumes to the detection and overthrow of various forms of gnosticism. Though he wrote toward the end of the second century, in his youth he had listened to Polycarp, who had in turn been a disciple of John. But for our purposes, the importance of the subject is found not only in its intrinsic interest but in two related matters. The first is that, under the influence of Walter Bauer,18 a substantial body of contemporary opinion argues that in the earliest church there was no real distinction between orthodoxy and heresy. Fledgling Christianity was sufficiently robust and inclusive to avoid such distinctions, which were later and rather nasty developments, owing more to the fact that “orthodoxy” gained the ear of the Emperor Constantine than to any intrinsic superiority in its arguments. This argument has been refuted many times. Bauer himself examined only the texts from the second century on. Not only was he mistaken with respect to the second century, but he displayed more than a little cheek by referring to the second century as earliest Christianity19 — 16See chapter 23 on the Johannine Epistles. 17James A. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 3rd ed. (San Fran- cisco: Harper, 1990). 18Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971 [orig. 1934]). 19So I. Howard Marshall, whose title amusingly draws attention to the point: “Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earlier Christianity,” Themelios 2/1 (1976): 5–14. Other useful works on this subject include Daniel J. Harrington, “The Reception of Walter Bauer’s Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity During the Last Decade,” HTR 77 (1980): 289–99; Harold O. J. Brown, Heresies: The Image of Christ in the Mirror of Heresy and Orthodoxy from the Apostles to the Present (Garden City: Doubleday, 1984); 35 + = 36 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT and the evidence already briefly scanned demonstrates that even in the earliest books of the New Testament, Christians were willing and able to distinguish between true and false teaching. The second matter of some importance is the influence of The Jesus Seminar, whose work, discussed elsewhere in this book (see especially the next chapter), has been disseminated in the mass media. Most of the scholars connected with The Jesus Seminar not only accept the Bauer thesis but go farther and argue that the earliest strata of Christian teaching actually support gnosticism and often present Jesus as rather more akin to a traveling Cynic preacher than anything else. The historian Philip Jenkins has it right: The problem with these reconstructions is the suggestion that both orthodoxy and Gnosticism are equally ancient and valid statements of the earliest Christianity, which they are not. What became the orthodox view has very clear roots in the first century, and indeed in the earliest discernible strands of the Jesus movement; in contrast, all the available sources for the Gnostic view are much later, and that movement emerges as a deliberate reaction to that orthodoxy.20 5. Sometimes contemporary scholars give the impression that genuinely “critical” thought on the New Testament is of relatively recent provenance. It would be truer to say that the framework out of which “critical” thought has been undertaken has shifted again and again during the last twenty centuries, largely depending on the epistemological and cultural givens of the time. Christians did not have to wait until the eighteenth century, for example, before pondering the relationships among the gospels. Already in the second century Tatian (c. 110–72) produced his Diatessaron, essentially a harmony of the four canonical gospels. His work was used in the Syrian church as a guide for its liturgy until the fifth century. 6. It would be tedious to chart the interpretation of the New Testament espoused by every important patristic theologian or movement. This is not, after all, a volume of church history. Nevertheless, it is important for today’s students of the New Testament to have some awareness of others who have studied the New Testament before them, to feel a part of an ongoing stream of New Testament interpretation and to know something of its continuities, its disputes, and its connections with certain events and interpretive approaches. Graham N. Stanton and Guy G. Strousma, eds., Tolerance and Intolerance in Early Judaism and Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Craig L. Blomberg, “The New Testament Definition of Heresy (or When Do Jesus and the Apostles Really Get Mad?),” JETS 45 (2002): 59–72, which, despite the racy title, is penetrating. 20Philip Jenkins, Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 115–16. THINKING ABOUT THE STUDY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT By the end of the third century, the two most influential approaches to the study of the Bible were centered on Alexandria and Antioch respectively. The Alexandrian school warmly embraced philosophy as a weapon in the arsenal of Christian apologetics, especially philosophy descended from Plato. Often resorting to allegorical method in their exegesis, the Alexandrians sometimes flirted with a view of the Trinity that bordered on tri-theism (belief in three Gods). By contrast, the Antiochene school favored a more literal, rational, and historical exegesis. As a result, they insisted that some parts of Scripture have more doctrinal and spiritual value than others and felt no need to extract such value from the less fecund parts by resorting to allegory. In general, they approached the subject of Christology by beginning with Christ’s true humanity. The more radical fringe of the Antiochenes tended to see Christ, not as the God-man, but as a man indwelt by God. The patristic period cast up more than its share of theologians and other Christian thinkers who took their primary cue from their reading of the Bible. Some of the contributions of Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Jerome have already been mentioned. The most stalwart defender of orthodox Christology was Athanasius (c. 296–373), an Egyptian by birth but Greek by education. He produced both theological apologetics, not least in defense of the full deity of Christ, and many commentaries on biblical books. The Council of Nicea (325) gave us the Nicene Creed, which stood against the teaching of Arius to the effect that the Logos (“Word” in John 1:1) was “made,” insisting rather that Christ is of the same “being” as his Father. John Chrysostom (c. 344–407), bishop of Constantinople, was renowned for his expository preaching, which then multiplied his influence in published form—hundreds of his sermons have been preserved, along with practical and devotional writings and 236 letters. We are not so fortunate with the literary remains of Origen (c. 185–254), Alexandrian theologian extraordinaire. Most of his works have not come down to us, but we are aware of major commentaries from his pen, plus apologetic works, text-critical work (some have called him, not Bengel, the father of New Testament text criticism), and one of the first systematic theologies. Though elements of his theology were later condemned by some synods (e.g., the Synod of Constantinople of 543), and certainly his Alexandrian deployment of allegory seems forced by Antiochene standards (let alone by later standards), there is a fresh vitality in his writing that still bears pondering.21 Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 265–339) has been 21Although relatively little of his enormous oeuvre survives, some of his extant work is accessible to those who read only modern English translations. Origen’s massive commentary on Romans, written in Greek, is lost, but it was translated into Latin and somewhat condensed by Rufinus (345–410), and has only recently been translated from the Latin into English by Thomas P. Scheck: Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, 2 vols. (Washington: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 2001–2). 37 + = 38 Christians were a profoundly textual people from the beginning: their access to the unique history and unique Person by whom they were saved was above all textual. AN INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT called “The Father of Church History.” Owing to his extensive quotations of sources, sometimes the only access we have to important earlier documents is his Historia Ecclesiastica. In addition to his history, he wrote numerous apologetic books. And what shall we make of Augustine of Hippo in North Africa (354–430), the single most influential figure of the first four centuries after the apostles? His expositions of the Psalms and of John’s Gospel can still be read with profit, and his Confessions —simultaneously a highly personal document and a mature theology—is still among the classic Christian works of all time. When the Roman Empire began to fall apart after the sack of Rome in A.D. 410, Augustine’s The City of God was simultaneously a refutation of the pagan accusations that Christians were ultimately responsible for the disaster and an interpretation of Roman and Christian history to show that there are two “cities,” an earthly, human city with all of its own loves and aims, and the city of God, which alone endures forever. This eschatological reading of both Testaments and of the contemporary history proved a hugely stabilizing factor for Christians as the foundations of order were progressively swept away. The point of this summary is to drive home the fact that Christians were a profoundly textual people from the beginning: their access to the unique history and unique Person by whom they were saved was above all textual. The Old Testament pointed to Christ; the New Testament told of him. Christian teachers and pastors therefore gave themselves to the study of these documents, wrote commentaries on them, and sought to commend them and defend them. This does not always mean that these church fathers were in perfect agreement; still less does it mean that each one was always right. But this is the early part of the heritage that any student of the New Testament assumes when he or she begins the task of studying, interpreting, and teaching these twenty-seven documents. 7. One historical “hinge” that must be noted is the role played by Constantine, the first (nominally) Christian Roman emperor. During its first three centuries, the church multiplied by the power of the Spirit, manifested in its preaching and in the quality of the life of its members. The church enjoyed no governmental advantages or support; frequently it suffered grievously under imperial persecution. For the Christians, this marked not defeat but victory, for they were the followers of One who died an ignominious death on a cross and yet was vindicated in the resurrection. Moreover, they remembered that he himself had taught, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” (Mark 12:17; cf. Matt. 22:21; Luke 20:25). Before that time, the authority of religion and the authority of the state were more tightly linked, often identified. Ancient Israel was, at least in theory, a theocracy. But Jesus established a kingdom which, when fully consummated, would embrace everything in heaven and earth, but which, until then, would be contested. His people on earth would be called forth from every language and tribe and nation THINKING ABOUT THE STUDY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT but would not constitute a nation with geographical borders here on earth. Christians would find themselves living as citizens of two kingdoms, and they would owe allegiance to both: to Caesar, they should give what is his due; and to God, what is his due. Of course, if Caesar overstepped the mark and claimed more allegiance than was his due, Christians would be called to obey God rather than any human being. Nevertheless, the principle was put in place by the Master himself: we are citizens of two realms, we live in two cities, and the tensions are to be borne, even unto death, until the kingdom of God is consummated. But shortly after he emerged victorious by defeating Maxentius in 312 at the battle of Milvian Bridge north of Rome, Constantine decreed full legal toleration for Christians. The church began to enjoy imperial favor. Previously confiscated property was restored, there were various exemptions for the clergy, financial aid flowed to Christians, and some bishops began to enjoy civil jurisdiction. The bishop of Rome, already preeminent among the bishops, could only gain in authority by these arrangements. The tension between the civil and the ecclesiastical authority never disappeared, of course, and it kept changing its shape for more than a millennium, as individual monarchs and popes proved peculiarly able or influential. Nevertheless, the fundamental tension between the claims of Caesar and the claims of God, developed by Paul to help Roman Christians see that the authority of the state is God-ordained (especially Rom. 13:1–7) and by John to help Christians see that the state can wrongly claim idolatrous allegiance (so Revelation), remained in place and led, in due course, to a variety of theories of the distinction between church and state.22 These developments have materially shaped, in various ways, not only the religious but also the political heritage of many countries that have long enjoyed a substantial number of Christians. The political and religious realities in which we work out our discipleship can often be traced back, in convoluted ways, to distinctions made in the New Testament itself. 8. One of the crucial developments that took place during the first few centuries was the rise of “monarchical bishops.” Within the period when the New Testament documents were written, the labels “pastor” (which simply means 22We say “variety of theories” because how church and state relate to each other varies widely. Separation of church and state does not mean the same thing in, say, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. But all Christian experience and heritage on this subject, as complex and as variegated as it is, remains profoundly different from, for example, the Muslim heritage. Once Muhammad gained power at Medina, the religious and civil authorities were one. The first three centuries of Islam witnessed rapid growth by military conquest. There is nothing in Islam quite like the seminal utterance found on the lips of Jesus, “Give back to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” By the same token, Islam has never conceived of the nation-state quite the way the West has, nor has it ever had a “clergy” closely analogous to Christian clergy. 39 + = 40 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT “shepherd”), “elder,” and “bishop” (sometimes “overseer” in modern English versions) all referred to the same people, that is, those primarily responsible for the leadership of local congregations. As early as the beginning of the second century, however (and there are hints of this trend even earlier), some bishops or pastors came to have a measure of authority over other local congregations. Those who gained such oversight came to be called bishops, while those who did not retained the labels elder and pastor only. The reasons for the rise of monarchical bishops are doubtless complex, but some of them sprang from good motives, even if the result was rather more dubious. The number of Christians was growing so rapidly, and churches were being planted so frequently, that the level of training of many local Christian leaders was not very high. Partly to accommodate the need for teaching, a class of traveling Christian preachers arose who went from church to church.23 But who was to authorize such travelers? Inevitably, some shysters arose, fluent in God-talk, who found this was an agreeable way to earn a living, even though they were woefully unqualified. Others were doubtless sincere and thought they were helping churches, but their vision of their own competence outstripped the reality. Some were frankly heretical. And worse, in many instances local church leaders were insufficiently knowledgeable and mature to distinguish those who could genuinely help from those who were incompetent or even dangerous. So it is not surprising that a secondcentury document gives instructions as to which traveling preachers or “prophets” were to be accepted as genuine and which were to be dismissed. The genuine ones did not stay too long, did not ask for money, and taught faithful Christian doctrine (cf. Didache xi). Inevitably, under these circumstances some local pastors turned on occasion to the most knowledgeable bishop/elder/pastor in the vicinity, who then began to have a veto power over who was licensed to teach and preach in an entire area instead of in his congregation alone. Although they provided a valuable safeguard, eventually such bishops gained distinctive roles and authority unknown in the New Testament. The reason why this is important for our purposes is that it is difficult to understand how the early church came in time to settle its disputes over what the apostles actually taught, without grasping the rising roles of bishops and occasionally of other noted teachers. The most serious disputes called together bishops from every region of the Empire in crucial “ecumenical councils” made up primarily of bishops from the whole (Roman) world, the oikoumeneμ. The seven 23Doubtless this system developed in part because traveling preachers/lecturers were common in the Roman world. The best of them could make a good living. They gained disciples who would pay for the privilege of attaching themselves to the teacher. Occasionally one of these traveling preachers would stop traveling and settle somewhere, opening a small academy. There were no institutions akin to modern universities. THINKING ABOUT THE STUDY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT councils that most Christians recognize to be truly “ecumenical,” with their dates and the subjects with which they primarily wrestled are: Nicea I (325), Arianism; Constantinople (381), Apollinarianism; Ephesus (431), Nestorianism; Chalcedon (451), Eutychianism; Constantinople II (553), Three Chapters Controversy; Constantinople III (680–81), Monothelitism; and Nicea II (787), Iconoclasm.24 9. These councils on doctrinal issues understood themselves to be deciding what the truth of some issue really was. When the Council of Nicea (325) decided on appropriate terms to talk about the deity of Christ, or the Council of Chalcedon (451) deployed certain terms that have become standard in discussion of the Trinity, the participants did not think of themselves as inventing new theology or even as discovering new truth in the Bible that no one had ever seen before. Rather, they were adjudicating conflicting interpretations of the Christian message and trying to formulate biblical truth in a way that made ambiguity or outright error in that domain much more difficult. Similarly, when in the sixteenth century the Reformers worked hard to articulate a doctrine of justification that they felt was rigorously in line with Paul and with the rest of the Bible, it is not that no one had believed in justification before or had failed to see how important it was. The theme constantly recurs during the patristic period.25 But it took the disputes at the time of the Reformation to call forth a lot of detailed work. The reasons that generate doctrinal controversy may be ugly and painful, but God not infrequently uses such controversies to bring renewed theological strength and clarity of vision and understanding to his people. Such controversies therefore become part of the web of the history of the interpretation of the New Testament, indeed, of the whole Bible. 10. After the Roman Empire fell, standards of literacy declined sharply in the West. Latin, long dominant, virtually snuffed out remaining vestiges of what was once a deep knowledge of Greek and Hebrew. As the Middle Ages progressed, many local clergy were abysmally trained; countless rulers, even powerful ones, were illiterate or semi-literate. Perhaps the greatest centers of learning were the monasteries, although the quality of the work done in them varied a great deal. Nevertheless, for hundreds of years these were the centers where manuscripts were copied (even when they were poorly understood), where hymns were created, where commentaries and theological treatises were written.26 24The nature of these controversies can be quickly discovered in any good dictionary of church history, e.g., F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 25See Thomas C. Oden, The Justification Reader (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002). 26For an interesting if overstated description of the role of monasteri