Christianity
The Patristic Age 3
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 6 June 2008
Christian Scripture
It was not until the second half of the second century that apostolic testimony to Christ began to supersede the authority of the Jewish scriptures. The continued Jewish rebellions in Palestine, often accompanied by fanatical Jewish messianism elsewhere in the empire, meant that Jews were unpopular with Romans, and innocent Jews were themselves often victimized for the intransigence of their co-religionists. Inasmuch as Christianity was seen as a Jewish religion, Christians had remained unpopular, not least because some Romans remembered they were followers of an earlier Jewish rebel themselves.
The desire to play down Christian origins, and the reliance on the Jewish scriptures, were undestandable. After the rebellion of Bar Kosiba, the movement against Judaism and the Jewishness of Christianity became irresistible as the gentile Church sought to break free of its Jewish roots. Some, such as Marcion, wanted a complete severance, but others in the Church saw the importance of depicting Christianity as the culmination of God's plan revealed over a long timescale.
The antagonism towards Christians as disciples of a minor and unsuccessful Jewish rebel was fading as more serious and successful ones hit the headlines, and the true events of the career of Jesus were denied and reinterpreted by the Christians. So, as the second century progressed, the Church decided to publish reinterpreted testimonies of some apostles. Most scholarly opinion is that these were already extant works, but their actual date of composition is unclear.
Mark is considered the earliest gospel, from about the time of the first Jewish War, and the others followed around the turn of the first century. Some scholars think the gospels are second century, and so too the epistles of Paul, though most put the epistles earlier than the gospels because Paul shows no sign of knowing any gospels. If Paul's epistles are really second century pseudepigraphs then the gospels are later still. And, if the gospels are compositions of the late first or early second century then they were kept secret for around half a century before they were published.
None of them were publicly available, so to most Romans Christianity was a mystery, and the bishops will have wanted it that way because they had the secret of Jesus as a Jewish rebel to be kept until catechumens had received enough “teaching” to prepare them for “the Truth”! Once they had been prepared and submitted to baptism and the eucharistic meal, they had “the Truth” revealed to them in the form of a gospel, doubtless Mark. So, Christianity began as a mystery religion, the awful secret to be revealed being that God had appeared on earth and been crucified as the king of the Jews. Knowing and accepting this, they were confirmed as Christians, and swore to keep it a secret.
Authority and Tradition
But the Catholics were engaged in a controversy with the Gnostics who themselves knew “the Truth”, and alleged that it was the Church that was keeping it hidden—a secret! Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria and Epiphanius all tell us that the Gnostics claimed a different, secret apostolic tradition. If it were the true tradition of the apostles, it was a secret all right—one the Church did not want revealing. These pages have demonstrated a major skeleton in the ecclesiastical cupboard—Jesus was indeed an anti-Roman rebel who had actually briefly taken command of Jerusalem by defeating a substantial division of a Roman cohort. The bishops had to keep this a secret to have a chance of winning over Roman converts, so had to accuse anyone who revealed it themselves of holding to a secret, and false, tradition.
It follows that the establishment of the authority of the Church was a key strategy, and it countered its detracters by emphasizing the authority of its own tradition as being that bestowed by Christ on it alone via the apostles. Irenaeus and Tertullian wrote of it vigorously. Tertullian (de praescr 6) sought to deter converts from considering Gnostic belief by telling them they could not pick and chose what they believed, the apostles solely having authority, and having passed it directly to the Church. Today, Christians pick and choose not only among the New Testament but also among the Mosaic law of the Jews, even though they simultaneously say Christ had abrogated the Jewish law. So, now, they ignore what Christ (God!) told them to do, but accept what He told them to ignore!
The tradition of the Church was doctrine Irenaeus considered it had received from the apostles agraphically, without written texts. Proof that there was an agraphical tradition was that the barbarians had received “this faith without letters”. As early as Irenaeus, the barbarians had been converted to Christiansity, but Christians then blame the fall of Rome and the dark ages on to the barbarians. Both were largely the responsibility of Christians on both sides. Anyway, it was, for Irenaeus, proof that the Church had a living tradition that kept it on the straight and narrow.
The Church, via its spokesmen like Irenaeus, said their tradition was open, but the Gnostic one was secret. What then could have been the point of gnosis if it was to be kept secret? It could have been no more secret than the Church's own mysteries—they must have been revealed to those who enquired and were willing to accept tuition. The advantage of the Church was that it kept a united front while the Gnostics were split. It was a propaganda advantage in distinguishing Catholicism from the broad category of gnosticism, even though it was, in fact, another Gnostic sect. Effectively, the Church depicted all its detracters as disunited, but itself as united. It is the same tactic as modern politicians use in claiming their party is united when the others are disunited. It holds good when one party succeeds in projecting an image of unity over the others, whether it is or not. Gnostics did not, and so could be depicted as having various false doctrines, which, as they were not commonly held, could be presented as mysteries or secrets to the others.
Thus the united vopice of the Church, for Irenaeus, showed that its “tradition”, its oral teaching, now distinguished from scripture, was what was public, as the “canon of the truth”. It seems to have been what scholars call the “kerygma”, a concise set of fixed beliefs expressed fluidly. Irenaeus also used as proof, the succession of bishops right back to the apostles—the Apostolic Succession—safeguarded by the Holy Ghost. For Irenaeus, it made them all into spiritual men endowed by the Holy Ghost with a carisma vertitatis certum, an infallible gift of truth. So, in those days, everyone in the apostolic succession was infallible, not just the pope, another source of the Christian conviction that it is impossible for them to lie.
Irenaeus used the same standard for written works—they had to have been by apostles, or those in the apostolic succession. It meant that anything not approved by the Church was deemed unreliable if not wrong, and the Church stuck to this, insisting on approving all pious writing, and censoring whatever it disapproved of, all based on its own assertion that it alone owned the apostolic tradition. It is plainly true that it owned the traditions that it invented, but these fictions are not true—they are not history, but mainly a deliberate obscuring and mystification of it. The Church is doubtless right that it has the key to the interpretation of its own inventions, but no one should be fooled into thinking even scriptures are unspoiled history. Far from it. Effectively, Irenaeus claimed scripture was the ultimate authority, but the authority for that was the tradition of the Church guarded by the Holy Ghost! And vice versa!
Tertullian's view was similar. Tradition was the faith of the apostles, and was enshrined in scripture, which is necessarily true, but, if scripture were to be set aside, the Church could proclaim correct doctrine. So, the unwritten tradition of the Church was identical with “the rule of faith”, and indeed he preferred this regula fidei in his disputes with heretics for it could show whether anyone was a Christian or not, and guided exegesis of scripture. Only the Church possessed this canon or rule of faith, and so it was necessarily always right.
The point is laboured here to emphasize the utter circularity of Christian reasoning, and that the dosctrine that came through the filter of the Church's rule of faith is what all Christians, Catholic or otherwise, have today. Typically, Tertullian accused the Gnostics of saying whatever they liked because they did not have a rule of faith, ignoring that the Church was free to say whatever it liked because it had one. He thought it useless arguing with gnostics from scripture because they were so good at finding what they wanted in it by cunning exegesis—just like modern fundamentalist pastors and apologists. It follows he thought that the Church was the ultimate authority.
By the fourth century AD, when the Gnostics were no longer rivals to the Church, scripture was instituted as the central authority, it being the testimony of the apostles of Christ's revelations, but even earlier, Origen had no qualms about citing scripture as his authority. The parallel tradition of the Church still remained, and worthies of the Church like Clement of Alexandria and Origen himself now admitted to a secret tradition, even calling it gnosis! Only the highest ranks of the Church knew it.
Otherwise, for Origen, tradition was the “ecclesiastical preaching”, the kerygma, which was independent of the bible, and, indeed, included the principles of biblical interpretation. Ultimately, it became the magisterial authority of the Catholic Church, expressed through the growing number of synods and councils that were being called, the best known of which was held at Nicaea in 325 AD. Eusebius submitted the creed that was accepted at Nicaea, explaining that it was based on the teaching of the bishops, the instructions given to catechumens, and the bible. Again, the Church claimed a succession of authorities to back up its claims, Hegesippus, Irenaeus, and so on, whereas their opponents, the Arians, had no witnesses to their doctrines.
The claim was that the Nicene Council had ratified the teaching bestowed on to the Church by Christ and proclaimed by the apostles, and we can be sure that had the Arians won the vote, they would have made the same claim. Anyone who demured was not a Christian. The decision of the Nicene Council was unimpeachable. Even so the construction of new theological concepts was justified by reference to scripture, though it need only to have been “implied”, and, of course, that is entirely a matter of interpretation, a function only the Church was equipped to do, it said. What Tertullian had seen as a problem in debating with the Gnostics was now an advantage. The Church could justify anything by reference to the scriptures.
By the fifth century, the leading Fathers of the past were being cited as having inherited and preserved the faith of the apostles. Anyone who deviated from their teachings were enemies of the truth—so said Theodoret of Antioch. Vincent of Lérins explained that correct understanding would come sufficiently well from scripture, but being subject to such a variety of interpretation, tradition—“what has been believed everywhere, always and by everyone”—was needed to distinguish what was correct from what was false.
