Canon and Heresy

For roughly the first three centuries of Christianity there was no New Testament. There were letters, gospels, apocalypses, acts and manuals, circulating unevenly, valued differently in different cities, copied by hand and altered as they were copied. There was no agreed list, no agreed text, and no authority able to impose one.

The book that eventually resulted is not a discovery. It is a selection, made over centuries, in the course of vicious arguments, by people with institutional interests, and finalised in an era when the losing side could be exiled by the state. This chapter is about how that selection was made, what it excluded, and why the exclusions matter to everything downstream.

Marcion forces the question

The first person known to have produced a definite Christian canon was, by the standards that later prevailed, a heretic.

Around 144 CE, Marcion of Sinope (a wealthy shipowner, an important donor to the church at Rome until he was expelled and his money returned) concluded that the God of the Hebrew Bible and the Father of Jesus were not the same being. The first was the creator of this defective material world, legalistic and violent; the second was a previously unknown God of mercy who had sent Jesus to rescue people from the first one. Marcion therefore rejected the Old Testament entirely, and produced a scripture consisting of an edited Gospel of Luke and ten letters of Paul, purged of what he took to be Judaising interpolations.¹

Marcion's churches spread across the empire and lasted for centuries. And the mainstream response to him (Irenaeus, Tertullian and others insisting that the God of Israel is the Father, that the Hebrew scriptures are Christian scripture, and that there is a defined set of authentic writings) did much to produce the canon we have. A serious strand of scholarship argues that the orthodox canon exists in the form it does substantially because Marcion made one first.²

The Christianities that lost

Second- and third-century Christianity was a field of live options, not a single trunk with a few branches:

• The Ebionites and other Jewish Christians (chapter 4): Jesus as a human messiah, the Torah still binding, Paul an apostate.
• The Marcionites: two gods, no Old Testament, a Christ not really born of a woman.
• The Valentinians and other groups later lumped together as "gnostic": an elaborate cosmology in which the material world is the botched work of a lesser deity and salvation comes through gnosis, insight into one's true origin.
• The Montanists: continuing prophecy, ecstatic utterance, rigorous discipline, and (significantly) women as prophets and leaders. Tertullian, the most formidable Latin theologian of his generation, joined them.
• The Donatists (chapter 5): a North African majority church for a time, holding that clergy who had collaborated during persecution had forfeited their office.
• The Arians: the Son as the highest creature of God rather than co-eternal with him, a position held, at points in the fourth century, by most of the empire's bishops and by the emperor.

Calling these "deviations" is an anachronism. It presumes the orthodoxy they are supposed to have deviated from. Walter Bauer's classic argument (that in several major cities the form of Christianity that would later be called heretical arrived first and was for a long time the majority) has been refined and partly criticised, but the general picture of early diversity is now standard.³

Why we know: an accident in Egypt

We know what the losers believed in their own words for one substantial body of material, and only by luck. In December 1945, near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, farmers digging for fertiliser opened a sealed jar containing thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices, fifty-two texts in Coptic, buried around the late fourth century, quite possibly because possessing them had just become dangerous.⁴

The find included the complete Gospel of Thomas, a collection of 114 sayings with no nativity, no miracles, no passion and no resurrection, just sayings, many of them close variants of the ones in Matthew and Luke. It included the Gospel of Philip, the Apocryphon of John, and the Gospel of Truth. Before 1945, everything known about these texts came from the people who had written against them.

That is the methodological point of this chapter, and it applies to every later chapter in this chronicle. The record is not what happened. The record is what survived the people who won, and here we can measure the gap, because a jar in a cliff face preserved a sample of what was meant to be destroyed. Athanasius's festal letter of 367, the first document to list exactly our twenty-seven New Testament books, also instructs its readers to reject the apocryphal writings. Some monks at nearby Pachomian monasteries appear to have chosen to bury rather than burn.

How the list was actually made

Not by a council, and not at once.

By use. The primary mechanism was inertia: what got read aloud in the liturgy in the major sees. The four gospels and the main Pauline letters were functionally settled by the late second century simply because everyone was already using them.

By criteria, applied loosely. The stated tests were apostolic authorship, antiquity, orthodoxy of content, and wide acceptance. All four are circular in practice (orthodoxy of content means agreement with what the judges already believe), and the attributions were often wrong. Most critical scholars hold that the gospels were originally anonymous and were assigned their apostolic names in the second century, and that several letters bearing Paul's name were written by others after his death.⁵

By argument. Irenaeus insisted around 180 on four gospels, no more and no fewer, and gave the argument quoted at the head of this chapter, an argument from the number of winds. The Muratorian fragment, a damaged Latin list usually dated to around 170–200 (though a minority argues for the fourth century), includes most of our books, omits Hebrews and the Petrine letters, and casually includes an apocalypse of Peter that did not make it.⁶

By decree, at the end. Athanasius's letter of 367 gives the first list identical to ours; the North African councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) ratified it for the West. Even then the eastern churches disagreed for centuries about Revelation, and the Syriac and Ethiopian traditions retain different canons to this day. There has never been a single Christian Bible.

The text inside the list also moved

Choosing the books was only half of it. The books themselves were copied by hand for fourteen hundred years, and they changed. There are more textual variants among New Testament manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament, the overwhelming majority trivial, but not all.⁷ Three examples matter:

• The ending of Mark. The earliest and best manuscripts end at 16:8, with the women fleeing an empty tomb and telling no one. The twelve verses of resurrection appearances that follow in most Bibles (including the snake-handling and poison-drinking promises) are a later addition.
• The woman taken in adultery (John 7:53–8:11), one of the most quoted passages in the gospels, is absent from the earliest manuscripts and floats between locations in the ones that have it.
• The Johannine comma (1 John 5:7–8), the single clearest statement of the Trinity in the entire Bible, appears in no Greek manuscript before the fourteenth century. It entered the printed Bible through Erasmus and from there into the King James Version. It is a forgery, and it was for centuries the proof text of the doctrine.

Chalcedon, and the churches that walked out

The doctrinal settlements did not merely resolve arguments; they broke the church apart along lines that still exist. The Council of Ephesus in 431 split off the Church of the East, which went on to plant congregations as far as China. The Council of Chalcedon in 451, defining Christ as one person in two natures, was rejected by the Coptic, Syriac, Armenian and Ethiopian churches, producing a schism now more than fifteen centuries old.⁸

Notice which churches those are. Some of the oldest continuous Christian communities on earth (the Egyptian and Ethiopian churches among them) were defined as outside the imperial settlement in the fifth century, and were still being treated as defective Christians by European missionaries a thousand years later. Ethiopia had been Christian since the fourth century, longer than anywhere in northern Europe. That fact was of no interest whatever to the men in chapter 10 who arrived to bring Africa the gospel.

Why this matters here

Because the next chapter asks what is actually in the thing that was assembled, and because a text produced this way cannot bear the weight later placed on it. When a seventeenth-century planter opened his Bible to justify holding human beings as property, he was reading a compilation whose contents had been fixed by fourth-century bishops under imperial supervision, whose authors were in several cases not who the title said, and whose most quoted trinitarian verse had been inserted in the Middle Ages.

He found what he needed there. That is chapter 7.

Footnotes

1. Tertullian, Against Marcion, is the fullest hostile source. For a modern account, Judith M. Lieu, Marcion and the Making of a Heretic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). ↩
2. The strong form of the thesis is Adolf von Harnack's, Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott (Leipzig, 1921); for a critical assessment, John Barton, Holy Writings, Sacred Text (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997). ↩
3. Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971; German original 1934); Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities (Oxford, 2003). ↩
4. James M. Robinson (ed.), The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: Harper, 1988), introduction; Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979). ↩
5. On gospel anonymity, Armin D. Baum and others dispute the majority view; for the majority position see Bart D. Ehrman, Forged (New York: HarperOne, 2011), and Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1997). ↩
6. Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), pp. 191–201; for the late-dating minority, Albert C. Sundberg Jr., "Canon Muratori: A Fourth-Century List," Harvard Theological Review 66 (1973), pp. 1–41. ↩
7. Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005); for the counter-emphasis that most variants are inconsequential, Daniel B. Wallace (ed.), Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2011). ↩
8. John Anthony McGuckin, The Westminster Handbook to Patristic Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004), on Ephesus and Chalcedon and their institutional consequences. ↩