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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
‘We have learned from the Scriptures …’
To speak with authority in the early Church was to speak from the Scriptures. While early Christianity may not have been a ‘religion of the book’ in the same way it is today, it was unquestionably a religion of text, and the refrain ‘we have learned from the holy Scriptures’ is a chorus in the early Christian witness. Here stood the authority of divine fulfilment. To confess merely Christ might be to proclaim a man, perhaps a prophet, perhaps a deity; but to confess ‘the scriptural Christ’ was to proclaim the Messiah foretold in divine writ, the revealed Saviour, and to find in that revelation the character and substance of the confession newly made. Nonetheless, while the text of the Old Testament might be of common heritage (though even this faced the challenge of a Marcion, who wished to do away with it), the emerging textual tradition of the Christian era provided a challenge: which text? what scripture? If the Christ of the Church is the ‘Christ of the scriptures’, determining the content of those scriptures – or those texts accorded scriptural authority in their receipt and influence -becomes critical. More than this, subverting the potential influence of texts deemed unsuitable stands as an essential task. To approach the era authentically, scholarly reading of the rise of a New Testament canon in the early Church must be combined with an understanding of the means and methodologies of its necessary correlate, textual exclusion. I shall argue here that this was accomplished through an exegetical method of subversion more intricate and nuanced than is often perceived.
1 On the concept of the ‘scriptural Christ’, see Behr, J., The Formation of Christian Theology, vol. 1: The Way to Nicaea (New York, 2001), 49–70.Google Scholar
2 The common idea that Marcion wanted to eliminate the OT canon is perhaps misleading; there is widespread agreement among scholars that while the Jewish community at the turn of the millennium held to a clear view of ‘scripture’, it had no correlate sense of ‘canon’ – a fluidity of approach mirrored in the early Fathers. See Sheeley, S. M., ‘From “Scripture” to “Canon”: the Development of the New-Testament Canon’, Review and Expositor 95 (1998), 513–22, at 514 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 On difficulties with the terms ‘Gnostic’ and ‘Gnosticism’, see the already seminal work of Williams, M. A., Rethinking ‘Gnosticism’: an Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton, NJ, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 51–3 for his suggestion of alternative terminologies. While there remain challenges yet to consider, Williams’s work redresses a major difficulty with modern-day usage.
4 See the seminal work on the subject by Blanchard, Y.-M., Aux sources du canon: le témoignage d’Irénée (Paris, 1993)Google Scholar.
5 The so-called ‘Muratorian Fragment’, c. AD 170. See Hahneman, G. M., The Muratorian Fragment and the Development of the Canon (Oxford, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 So cited in Athanasius, 39th Paschal Epistle (AD 367). Official listings of canonical books were proffered at Hippo in 393, and Carthage in 397 and 419; cf.Metzger, B., Canon of the New Testament: its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford, 1987), 237–8.Google Scholar
7 Unpublished paper given at the Oxford Patristics Seminar, 2005: ‘How to Mock a Heretic: an Exegesis of Satire and Parody in the Early Fathers’.
8 Compare Refutation, 3.11.9 (ed. Adelin Rousseau and Louis Doutreleau, SC 264 [Paris, 1979]), and the Nag Hammadi Codices I, 3 and XII, 2. Connection of the NHS tractate with the text mentioned by Irenaeus is longstanding and widespread; a catalogue of scholars supporting the connection is offered in Tiessen, T. L., Irenaeus on the Salvation of the Unevangelized (London, 1993), 44 n. 30.Google Scholar As to the title of Irenaeus’s longer work, I am increasingly convinced that the common abbreviation ‘Against heresies’ is misleading, polarizing Irenaeus’s focus in a way inauthentic to his own style. It additionally leaves out the emphasis on right and wrong knowledge that the proper title makes central, a contributing factor in continuing misuse of the term ‘Gnostic’ as applicable to the era. Throughout, I will refer to Irenaeus’s main work as the Refutation (Ref). Translations herein are my own.
9 Identification of the Apocryphon of John as among Irenaeus’s sources goes back as far as Schmidt, C., ‘Irenaeus und seine Quelle in Adversus haereses 129’, in Kleinert, P., ed., Philotesia (Berlin, 1907), 315–36 at 317 Google Scholar. Gospel of Truth, has been posited at least as far back as Van Unnik, W. C., Newly Discovered Gnostic Writings: a Preliminary Survey of the Nag Hammadi Find, Studies in Biblical Theology 30 (London, 1960), 60 Google Scholar, who suggests that Irenaeus may in fact have had a copy of the text at hand when writing the Ref., despite the fact that he never makes direct use of it in his descriptions of Valentinian doctrine in Ref., 1.
10 Ref., 1.11.4 (SC 264: 174–6).
11 Ibid. (176).
12 See Hippolytus, Ref., 5.9.8; cf.Grant, R. M., Gnosticism: a Source Book of Heretical Writings from the Early Christian Period (New York, 1961), 105 Google Scholar. For further commentary on parody in Irenaeus, see Osborn, E., ‘Irenaeus on God: Argument and Parody’, Studia Patristica 36 (2001), 270–81.Google Scholar
13 Compare Apocryphon of John, 2.33-11.35.
14 See Ref., 3.11.8.
15 A matter I explore in some detail in Steenberg, M. C., ‘Scripture, graphe, and the Status of Hermas in Irenaeus’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly (forthcoming, 2007).Google Scholar
16 Irenaeus’s most famous expression of the regula fidei is at Ref., 1.10.1-2.
17 For a later example of the same fluidity apparent even after trie advent of canonical lists, see Burrus, V., ‘Canonical Reference to Extra-Canonical “Texts”: Priscillian’s Defense of the Apocrypha’, in Lull, D. J., ed., Society of Biblical Literature: 1990 Seminar Papers (Atlanta, GA, 1990), 60–7.Google Scholar