The Making of the New Testament

CHAPTER I

INSPIRATION AND CANONIZATION

The New Testament presents the paradox of a literature born of protest against the tyranny of a canon, yet ultimately canonized itself through an increasing demand for external authority. This paradox is full of significance. We must examine it more closely.

The work of Jesus was a consistent effort to set religion free from the deadening system of the scribes. He was conscious of a direct, divine authority. The broken lights of former inspiration are lost in the full dawn of God's presence to His soul.

So with Paul. The key to Paul's thought is his revolt against legalism. It had been part of his servitude to persecute the sect which claimed to know another Way besides the "way"1 of the scribes. These Christians signalized their faith by the rite of baptism, and gloried in the sense of endowment with "the Spirit." Saul was profoundly conscious of the yoke; only he had not drammed that his own deliverance could come from such a quarter. But contact with victims of the type of Stephen, men "filled with the Spirit," conscious of the very "power from God" for lack of which his soul was fainting, could not but have some effect. It came suddenly, overwhelmingly. The real issue, as Saul saw it, both before and after his conversion, was Law versus Grace. In seeking "justification" by favour of Jesus these Christians were opening a new and living way to acceptance with God. Traitorous and apostate as the attempt must seem while the way of the Law still gave promise of success, to souls sinking like Saul's deeper and deeper into the despairing consciousness of "the weakness of the flesh" forgiveness in the name of Jesus might prove to be light and life from God. The despised sect of 'sinners' whom he had been persecuting expressed the essence of their faith in the doctrine that the gift of the Spirit of Jesus had made them sons and heirs of God. If the converted Paul in turn is uplifted – "energized," as he terms it – even beyond his fellow-Christians, by the sense of present inspiration, it is no more than we should expect.

Paul's conversion to the new faith – or at least his persistent satisfaction in it – will be inexplicable unless we appreciate the logic of his recognition in it of an inherent opposition to the growing demands of legalism. Jesus had, in truth, led a revolt against mere book-religion. His chief opponents were the scribes, the devotees and exponents of a sacred scripture, the Law. "Law" and "Prophets," the one prescribing the conditions of the expected transcendental Kingdom, the other illustrating their application and guaranteeing their promise, constituted the canon of the synagogue. Judaism had become a religion of written authority. Jesus set over against this a direct relation to the living Father in heaven, ever presently revealed to the filial spirit. The Sermon on the Mount makes the doing of this Father's will something quite other than servitude to written precepts interpreted by official authority and imposed under penalty. It is to be self-discipline in the Father's spirit of disinterested goodness, as revealed in everyday experience.

Even the reward of this self-discipline, the Kingdom, Jesus did not conceive quite as the scribes. To them obedience in this world procured a "share in the world to come." To Him the reward was more a matter of being than of getting. The Kingdom was an heir-apparency; and, therefore, present as well as future. It was "within" and "among" men as well as before them. They should seek to "be sons and daughters of the Highest," taking for granted that all other good things would be "added." So Jesus made religion live again. It became spiritual, inward, personal, actual.

After John the Baptist's ministry to what we should call the 'unchurched' masses, Jesus took up their cause. He became the "friend" and champion of the "little ones," the "publicans and sinners," the mixed 'people of the land' in populous, half-heathen, Galilee. The burdens imposed by the scribes in the name of 'Scripture' were accepted with alacrity by the typical Pharisee unaffected by Pauline misgivings of 'moral inability.' To "fulfil all righteousness" was to the Pharisee untainted by Hellenism a pride and delight. To the "lost sheep of Israel" whom Jesus addressed, remote from temple and synagogue, this "righteousness" had proved (equally as to Paul, though on very different grounds) "a yoke which neither we nor our fathers were able to bear." Jesus "had compassion on the multitude." To them he "spoke with authority"; and yet "not as the scribes" but as "a prophet." When challenged by the scribes for his authority he referred to "the baptism of John," and asked whether John's commission was "from heaven, or of men." They admitted that John was "a prophet." Those who give utterance after this manner to the simple, sincere conviction of the soul, voicing its instinctive aspiration toward "the things that be of God," are conscious that they speak not of themselves.

Jesus, it is true, was no iconoclast. He took pains to make clear that if he superseded what they of old time had taught as righteousness, it was in the interest of a higher, a "righteousness of God." If he disregarded fasts and sabbaths, it was to put substance for form, end for means. "Judgment, mercy, and good faith" should count more than tithes from "mint and anise and cummin." He echoed what John the Baptist had taught of repentance and forgiveness. Hope should no longer be based on birth, or prerogative, or ritual form, but on the mercy of a God who demands that we forgive if we would be forgiven. Such had been, however, the message not of John only, but of all the prophets before him: "I will have mercy, and not sacrifice." Jesus taught this higher, inward, righteousness; but not merely as John had done. John had said: Repent, for the wrath of God is at hand. Jesus said: Repent, for the forgiveness of God is open. The Father's heart yearns over the wayward sons. Jesus preached the nearness of the Kingdom as "glad tidings to the poor"; and among these "poor" were included even aliens who put "faith" in the God of Abraham.

The new Way started from the same Scripture as that of the scribes, but it tended in an opposite direction. Theirs had been gradually developing in definiteness and authority since the time of Ezra; yes, since Josiah had made formal covenant, after the discovery of "the book of the Law" in the temple, pledging himself and his people to obedience. As with many ancient peoples, the codification of the ancient law had been followed by its canonization, and as the national life had waned the religious significance of the Law had increased. It was now declared to express the complete will of God, for an ideal people of God, in a renovated universe, whose centre was to be a new and glorified Jerusalem. The Exile interrupted for a time the process of formal development; but in the ecclesiastical reconstruction which followed in Ezra's time "the book of the Law" had become all the more supreme; the scribe took the place of the civil officer, the synagogue became local sanctuary and court-house in one, the nation became a church, Israel became 'the people of the book.'

Legal requirement calls for the incentive of reward. We need not wonder, then, that the canon of the Law was soon supplemented by that of the writings of the Prophets, historical and hortatory. The former were considered to interpret the Law by showing its application in practice, the latter were valued for their predictive element. Law and Prophets were supplemented by Psalms, and elements from the later literature having application to the religious system. The most influential were the "apocalypses," or "revelations" of the transcendental Kingdom and of the conditions and mode of its coming. Scripture had thus become an embodiment of Israel's religion. It set forth the national law, civil, criminal, or religious; and the national hope, the Kingdom of God. Its custodian and interpreter was the 'scribe,' lawyer and cleric in one. The scribe held "the key of knowledge"; to him it was given to 'bind and loose,' 'open and shut.' Any preacher who presumed to prescribe a righteousness apart from 'the yoke of the Law,' or to promise forgiveness of sins on other authority, must reckon with the scribes. He would be regarded as seeking to 'take the Kingdom by violence.'

Jesus' martyrdom was effected through the priests, the temple authorities; but at the instigation of the scribes and Pharisees. His adherents were soon after driven out from orthodox Judaism and subjected to persecution. This persecution, however, soon found its natural leadership, not among the Sadducean temple-priesthood, but among the devotees of the Law. It was "in the synagogues." From having been quasi-political it became distinctly religious. This persecution by the Pharisees is on the whole less surprising than the fact that so many of the Jewish believers should have continued to regard themselves as consistent Pharisees, and even been so regarded by their fellow-Jews. In reality Jewish Christians as a rule could see no incompatibility between average synagogue religion and their acceptance of Jesus as the man supernaturally attested in the resurrection as destined to return bringing the glory of the Kingdom. Jesus' idea of 'righteousness' did not seem to them irreconcilable with the legalism of the scribes; still less had they felt the subtle difference between his promise "Ye shall be sons and daughters of the Highest" and the apocalyptic dreams which they shared with their fellow-Jews. Saul the persecutor and Paul the apostle were more logical. In Gal. ii. 15-21 we have Paul's own statement of the essential issue as it still appeared to his clear mind. Average synagogue religion still left room for a more fatherly relation of God to the individual, in spite of the gradual encroachment of the legalistic system of the scribes. Men not sensitive to inconsistency could find room within the synagogue for the 'paternal theism' of Jesus, even if this must more and more be placed under the head of 'uncovenanted mercies.' To Paul, however, the dilemma is absolute. One must trust either to "law" or "grace." Partial reliance on the one is to just that extent negation of faith in the other. The system of written precept permits no exception, tolerates no divided allegiance. If the canon of written law be the God-given condition of the messianic promise, then no man can aspire to share in the hope of Israel who does not submit unreservedly to its yoke. Conversely, faith is not faith if one seek to supplement it by the merit of "works of law."

From this point of view the Jew who seeks forgiveness of sins by baptism "into the name of Jesus" must be considered an apostate from the Law. He acknowledges thereby that he is following another Way, a way of "grace," a short-cut, as it were, to a share in Israel's messianic inheritance by the "favour" of a pretended Messiah. The same Paul who after his conversion maintains (Gal. ii. 21) that to seek "justification" through the Law makes the grace of God of none effect, must conversely have held before conversion that to seek it by "grace" of Jesus made the Law of none effect. Even at the time of writing the axiom still held: No resistance to the yoke of the Law, no persecution (Gal. v. 11).

It is true, then, that the legalistic system of prescription and reward had developed – could develop – only at the expense of the less mechanical, more fatherly, religion of a Hosea or an Isaiah. Even scribes had admitted that the law of love was "much more than all whole burnt-offering and sacrifice." And the movement of the Baptist and of Jesus had really been of the nature of a reaction toward this older, simpler faith. The sudden revolt in Paul's own mind against the scribal system might not have occurred in the mind of a Pharisee unfamiliar with Greek ideas. But to some extent Paul's experience of the conflict of flesh and spirit, a 'moral inability' to meet the Law's demands was a typical Christian experience, as Paul felt it to be. To him it became the basis of an independent gospel. To him the Cross and the Spirit imparted from the risen Messiah were tokens from God that the dispensation of Law is ended and a dispensation of Grace and Son ship begun. Without this Pauline gospel about Jesus Christianity could never have become more than a sect of reformed Judaism.

The teaching and martyrdom of Jesus had thus served to bring out a deep and real antithesis. Only, men who had not passed like Paul from the extreme of trust in legalism to a corresponding extremity of despair might be pardoned for some insensibility to this inconsistency. We can appreciate that James and Peter might honestly hold themselves still under obligation of the written law, even while we admit Paul's logic that any man who had once "sought to be justified in Christ" could not turn back in any degree to legal observance without being "self-condemned."

Christianity may be said to have attained self-consciousness as a new religion in the great argument directed by Paul along the lines of his own gospel against Peter and the older apostles. Its victory as a universal religion of 'grace' over the limitations of Judaism was due to the common doctrine of 'the Spirit.' This was the one point of agreement, the one hope of ultimate concord among the contending parties. All were agreed that endowment with 'the Spirit' marks the Christian. It was in truth the great inheritance from Jesus shared by all in common. And Peter and James admitted that to deny that uncircumcized Gentiles had received the Spirit was to "contend against God."

After Paul's death ecclesiastical development took mostly the road of the synagogue. The sense of the presence and authority of 'the Spirit' grew weaker, the authority of the letter stronger. From the outset even the Pauline churches, in ritual, order, observance, had followed instinctively this pattern. All continued, as a matter of course, to use the synagogue's sacred writings. Paul himself, spite of his protest against "the letter," could make no headway against his opponents, save by argument from 'Scripture.' He had found in it anticipations and predictions of his own Christian faith; but by an exegesis often only little less forced and fantastic than that of the rabbinic schools in which he had been trained. This was a necessity of the times. The reasoning, fallacious as it seems to-day, had appealed to and strengthened Paul's own faith, and was probably effective with others, even if the faith really rested on other grounds than the reasoning by which it was defended. The results of this biblicism were not all salutary. The claims of written authority were loosened rather than broken. Paul himself had found room enough within these defences for the religion of the Spirit; but a generation was coming with less of the sense of present inspiration. Dependence on past authority would be increased in this new generation in direct proportion to its sense of the superior 'inspiration' of the generation which had gone before. Paul is unhampered by even "the scriptures of the prophets" because in his view these take all their authority and meaning from "the Lord, the Spirit." Hence "where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." Only the remembered "word of the Lord" has authority for Paul beyond his own, even when he thinks that he also has the Spirit. With that exception past revelation is for Paul subordinate to present. But Paul's immediate disciple, the author of Hebrews, is already on a lower plane. This writer looks back to a threefold source of authority: God had spoken in former ages "by the prophets" and to the present "by a Son," but he looks also to an apostolic authority higher than his own: The word "was confirmed unto us by them that heard, God also bearing witness with them, both by signs and wonders, and by manifold powers, and by gifts of the Holy Ghost." Similarly the author of the Pastoral Epistles (90-100?) holds the "pattern of sound words" heard from Paul as a "sacred deposit," which is "guarded," rather than revealed, "by the Holy Spirit." The "sound words" in question are defined to be "the words of our Lord Jesus Christ." These, taken together with "the doctrine which is according to godliness," fix the standard of orthodoxy. To "Jude" (100-110?) the faith is something "once for all delivered to the saints." His message is: "Remember, beloved, the words spoken before by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ." Authority increases, the sense of the revealing Spirit decreases.

It is long before the sense of present inspiration, both in word and work is lost; still longer before the recorded precepts of Jesus, the exhortations and directions of apostles, the visions of "prophets," come to take their place alongside the Bible of the synagogue as "writings of the new covenant." Melito of Sardis (c. 170) is the first to use this expression, and even in his case it does not bear the sense of a canon with definite limits. Tertullian (200-210) is the first to place a definite "New Testament" over against the Old. We must glance at some of the intermediate steps to appreciate this gradual process of canonization.

At first there is no other 'Scripture' than the synagogue's. Clement of Rome (95) still uses only the Law and the Prophets (including certain apocrypha now lost) as his Bible. He refers to the precepts of Jesus (quoted as in Acts xx. 35 from oral tradition), with the same sense as Paul of their paramount authority, and bids the Corinthians whom he addresses give heed to what the blessed Apostle Paul had written to them "in the beginning of the gospel service," to warn them against factiousness. Nor has Clement yet lost the sense of direct inspiration; for he attaches to his own epistle, written in behalf of the church at Rome, the same superhuman authority claimed in Acts xv. 28 for the letter sent by the church at Jerusalem. If the Corinthians disregard the "words spoken by God through us" they will "incur no slight transgression and danger," for these warnings of a sister church are uttered in the name and by inspiration of the Holy Ghost. Still, Clement does not dream of comparing his authority, even when he writes as agent of the church, with that of "the oracles of the teaching of God," the "sacred Scriptures," the "Scriptures which are true, which were given through the Holy Ghost, wherein is written nothing unrighteous or counterfeit." He does not even rank his own authority with that of "the good apostles, Peter and Paul."

Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, transported to Rome for martyrdom in 110-117, employs a brief stay among the churches of Asia to exhort them to resist the encroachments of heresy by consolidation of church organization, discipline, strict obedience to the bishop. Ignatius, too, still feels the afflatus. His message, he declares with emphasis, was revealed to him, together with the occasion for it, directly from heaven. It was "the voice of God and not only of a man" when he cried out among the Philadelphians: "Give heed to the bishop, and the presbytery and deacons." Yet Ignatius cannot enjoin the Romans as Peter and Paul did. They were "apostles." He is "a convict." His inspiration, however undoubted, is of a lower order.

Hermas, a 'prophet' of the same Roman church as Clement, though a generation later, is still so conscious of the superhuman character of his "Visions," "Parables," and "Mandates" that he gives them out for circulation as inspired messages of the Spirit; and this not for Rome alone. Clement, then apparently still living, and "the one to whom this duty is committed," is to send them "to foreign cities." In point of fact the Shepherd of Hermas long held a place for many churches as part of the New Testament canon. Yet less than a generation after Hermas, the claim to exercise the gift of prophecy in the church was looked upon as dangerous if not heretical.

In the nature of the case it was really impossible that the original sense of endowment with "the Spirit" should survive. Not only did the rapidly growing reverence for the apostles and the Lord open a chasm separating "the word of wisdom and the word of power" given to that age, from the slighter contemporary claims of miracle and revelation; the very growth and wide dissemination of the gospel message made standardization imperative. Before the middle of the second century Gnostic schism had swept nearly half the church into the vortex of speculative heresy. Marcion at Rome (c. 140) carried Pauline anti-legalism to the extreme of an entire rejection of the Old Testament. Judaism and all its works and ways were to be repudiated. The very God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was declared other than, and ignorant of, the "heavenly Father" of Jesus. Against such vagaries there must be some historic standard. Even Marcion himself looked to the past, however recent, as the source of light, and since some written standard must be found, it was he, the heretic, who gave to Christianity its first canon of Christian writings. The Marcionite churches did away with the public reading of the Law and the Prophets, and could only put in their place "Gospel" and "Apostle." Not that Epistles, Gospels, and even 'Revelations' were not also in use among the orthodox; but they are not yet referred to as 'Scripture.' Even gospels are treated merely as aids to the memory in transmitting the teaching of the Lord. This teaching itself is but the authoritative interpretation of Law and Prophets, and is in turn interpreted by the writings of the apostles.

Marcion's 'Gospel' consisted of our Luke, expurgated according to his own ideas. His 'Apostle' contained the Epistles of Paul minus the Pastoral Epistles and a series of passages cancelled out from the rest as Jewish interpolations. This was the first Christian Bible distinct from 'the Scriptures' of the synagogue.

Indirectly the growth of Gnostic heresy contributed still more to the increasing authority of apostolic and quasi-apostolic writings. One of its earliest and most obnoxious forms was called 'Doketism,' from its exaggeration of Paulinism into a complete repudiation of the historic Jesus, whose earthly career was stigmatized as mere 'phantasm' (dokesis). Doketism is known to us not only through description by orthodox opponents, but by a few writings of its own. It is the type of heresy antagonized in the Johannine Epistles (c. 100) and in those of Ignatius (110-117). Now Ignatius, as we have seen, relied mainly on church organization and discipline. The Pastoral Epistles (90-100), while they emphasize also "the form of healthful words, even the words of our Lord Jesus" take, on the whole, a similar direction. But 1st John, which relies far less than the Pastoral Epistles or Ignatius on mere church organization, is also driven back upon the life and teaching of Jesus as the historic standard. It does, therefore, make formal appeal to the sacred tradition in both its elements, but with a difference characteristic of the Pauline spirit. The redeeming life and death of Jesus are viewed as a manifestation of "the life, even the eternal life (of the Logos) which was with the Father and was manifested unto us" (the historic body of believers). Again Jesus' one "new commandment," the law of love, is the epitome of all righteousness.

In his doctrine of Scripture as in many other respects the Johannine writer shows a breadth and catholicity of mind which almost anticipates the development of later ages. His task was in fact the adjustment of the developed Pauline gospel to a type of Christianity more nearly akin to synagogue tradition. This type had grown up under the name of Peter. On the question of the standard of written authority 'John'2 leaves room for the freedom of the Spirit so splendidly set forth in the teaching and example of Jesus and Paul, while he resists the erratic licence of "those that would lead you astray." The result is a doctrine of historic authority in general, and of that of the Scriptures in particular, sharply differentiated from the Jewish, and deserving in every respect to be treated as the basis of the Christian. In a great chapter of his Gospel (John v.), wherein Jesus debates with the scribes the question of His own authority, the dialogue closes with a denunciation of them because they search the Scriptures with the idea that in them they have eternal life, that is, they treat them as a code of precepts, obedience to which will be thus rewarded. On the contrary, says Jesus, the Scriptures only "bear witness" to the life that is present in Himself as the incarnate, eternal, Word; "but ye will not come unto me that ye might have life."