Valerius Maximus, purveyor of anecdotes and sayings from the Roman republic through his own day during the reign of Tiberius, recorded a curious incident in the history of Roman municipal planning. In the late third century bce a certain Marcellus was serving his fifth term as consul and decided to consecrate a single new temple to the gods Honor and Virtue. Noticing an epistemic error underlying Marcellus’s intended building project, the college of priests balked. The priests responded, “should some sign occur there [in the proposed temple], it would be impossible to distinguish to which of the two an expiatory ceremony should be performed.”Footnote ¹ If a single temple were dedicated to the two divinities, the priests argued, there would be no way to discover whether, say, a lightning bolt striking the temple precinct was a portent from Honor, or whether it was from Virtue.Footnote ² Marcellus’s error was made in good faith: he intended only to offer thanks to the gods with a gleaming new temple built in their honor. He erred, however, when he vowed a temple without having the precise scholarly knowledge which was the purview of the priestly college. In this instance we see a “Roman religion … founded upon an empiricist epistemology,” according to Clifford Ando.Footnote ³ It is difficult to draw a straight line from scholarly practices, such as those involved in augury, to the epistemology which underlie them – it is certainly the case here that what Ando means by “epistemology” is rather radically distinct from the way that the term is used in contemporary philosophical discourse. In all events, as historians, we never study ancient epistemic structures themselves, but rather their reflection in scholarly practices and intellectual expectations about what a good argument looks like and how it functions. While studies of ancient epistemology are possible, they consist in studies of practice. In this more limited sense Ando is certainly correct in his reading of Valerius Maximus, who shows us that at Rome priests expected that the content of religious knowledge was ascertained by way of rigorous spatial analysis, in order to determine the identity of the god who provided a sign. Whether this expectation is “epistemic” is a matter of reasonable debate, and I will not wade into it here. What is clear is that in this case an expectation about the proper production of scholastic knowledge – an argument over practices – translated into intentional interventions in the shape of the city’s institutions so that divine communication could be exactingly identified.

According to Valerius Maximus the content of cultic knowledge is just one determining factor on the structuring of the built environment. Another factor, at least as determinative as the need to respond properly to portents, is knowledge of the scholarly basis upon which such interpretations are made. Marcellus’s fundamental misunderstanding when proposing an intervention into the architectural environment of Rome was not that he failed to acknowledge that signs from the gods require a response. Rather, he failed to understand the way that pontiffs go about the business of determining that response. Marcellus knew what could be true – that there could be a sign and that it would require a response – but he did not know how such scholarly knowledge was produced: the way in which a priest would make an argument about which god to propitiate. In this case the formal basis of scholarly knowledge structured the physical environment, with scholars trained in the science of “portents (prodigii)” acting as a check, on the basis of their specialized methodological knowledge.

This chapter explores Christian scholarly practice from the Antonine Age through the end of Severan dynasty. This book as a whole is concerned with the ways in which scholastic shifts motivate changes in knowledge production in Roman scholarship of the fourth and fifth centuries. In the story of Marcellus’s temple we see that already, 600 years prior, methodological concerns impacted not only the obscure scholarly literature of the college of priests but the space of the incipient Roman metropolis. In order to contextualize the seismic shifts caused by the rise of Christianity in the late fourth century, this chapter surveys the tradition of knowledge production within Christian scholarship in the centuries before Christians came to be a ruling elite. I hope to demonstrate that before the fourth century, these traditions of specialized knowledge evince little overlap in how they think a theological argument can be proved. The relative independence of earlier Christian ways of knowing contrasts starkly with the substantial convergence evident among fourth-century Christians adjudicating the Nicene controversy, and the peculiarly Christian scholastic methods underlying and motivating the great scholarly productions of the Theodosian Age. Subsequent chapters will show relative uniformity among Christian scholars concerning the proper way to make a theological argument; this chapter focuses on diversity.

I do not present a totalizing, teleological, or internally coherent account of Christian knowledge formation before the fourth century, however. To tell a coherent story that assimilated all of these writers to a trajectory would be an anachronism, and a historical failure. Such an attempt would presuppose the backward gaze of a fourth-century orthodoxy like Jerome’s, whose On Eminent Men assimilates a bewildering variety of theological methods into a coherent tradition through the dual operations of assimilation and exclusion. Jerome assimilates the work of scholars like Tertullian and Irenaeus, for instance, who approached theological argumentation with fundamentally opposite methods, as I argue later. By placing these two early Christian thinkers together in apparent harmony, their methodological incompatibility elides into a teleological story of the development of Nicene Orthodoxy. Tertullian and Irenaeus might well have agreed with the pronouncements of the Council of Nicaea, had they lived long enough to see them. However, I argue that they would have adjudicated the question of the relationship between the Christian Father and Son in a fundamentally divergent manner. As told by Jerome, the development of Orthodoxy is a story weaving together the lives of great men who held to theological precepts with which the Palestinian theologian agreed. These men, however, often arrived at “proto-Orthodox” positions through radically different methods. Different methods – and perhaps different epistemologies – often undergirded complimentary theological precepts.

In addition to assimilating antithetical methods, Jerome excluded traditions of Christian theological speculation that did not reach his preferred dogmatic conclusions. For instance, Marcion’s work was an important and generative part of Christian theological history, though he appears in Jerome’s catalogue only as a villain. The Gospel of Truth, too, is part of Christian theological history, whether Jerome considers it to be part of the patrimony or not. In this chapter I detail its radically anti-textual approach to truth as a way to focalize the textual fetishism of many late ancient Christian traditions.

Epistemic and Preceptual Knowledge in Antiquity

My analysis focuses on the scholarly method of ancient texts rather than trying to expound precepts which these texts hold to be true. Scholastic methodology – how one goes about the business of producing valid knowledge – can be displayed in any number of ways. One’s method may be expressed in absolute terms through an excursus, as I performed in Chapter 1. Alternatively, method can be read from the structure of scholarly argumentation, investigating the underlying precepts of scholarly practice by watching the argument “in action,” as it were.

For the purposes of my discussion, “epistemic knowledge” refers to truth claims that are methodological or procedural: it defines the way that truth can be produced. “Preceptual knowledge,” on the other hand, refers to the results of epistemic knowledge: substantive knowledge or the-truths-themselves.Footnote ⁴ I use both types of evidence here, but the distinction between “epistemic” and “preceptual knowledge” is not my own, nor an invention of modernity; we share the distinction with distinguished philosophical minds of antiquity. Plato posited a formal opposition between knowledge that is “preceptual (δοξαστικός)” and knowledge that is “epistemic (ἐπιστήμων),” and as I demonstrate later, Clement of Alexandria repeated the distinction.Footnote ⁵ To study “preceptual” knowledge is to study doctrines. To study “epistemic” knowledge, on the other hand, is to study scholarly practices themselves. A distinction between knowledge of precepts and knowledge of philosophical method continues in Latin with the work of Seneca, the first-century Stoic philosopher and advisor to the emperor Nero. He urged Lucilius, the procurator of Sicily, not to forsake “epistemic” knowledge in order to focus entirely on precepts, as some mistakenly commend:

Seneca here expresses a typical tenet of Stoic thought: proper knowledge is foundationally coherent. He claims that the three classical divisions of Stoic philosophy – physics, ethics, and logic – are so interconnected that one might reasonably debate which topic to teach first. The Stoic system cannot be disaggregated and cashed out in terms of either preceptual or epistemic tenets.Footnote ⁷ The Stoic teacher Aristo took it one step further, Seneca continues, arguing that preceptual knowledge was utterly useless, “being nothing but advice from old women. In his view, the greatest help comes from the actual doctrines of philosophy and the structure of the ultimate good. ‘Once someone has thoroughly understood and learned the structure of the ultimate good, he can prescribe to himself what should be done in each situation.’”Footnote ⁸ The rest of Seneca’s substantial letter on philosophical method takes up Aristo’s points one by one, and the philosopher returns the topic of epistemic and preceptual knowledge in his next letter to Lucilius:

Epistemic and preceptual knowledge, in other words, are separable in concept but not in practice. Clement of Alexandria likewise espouses an intellectually and morally relevant distinction between preceptual and epistemic knowledge, or put differently, between doctrines and the method through which doctrines are properly contrived. It is likely that Clement came to this position through the direct influence of Stoic tradition – perhaps from Seneca himself, or perhaps through the mediation of Musonius Rufus.Footnote ⁹ In any event, the point is not unique to Stoic thought. Clement writes forcefully in his Patchworks (Stromateis) that scripture itself has a will which imposes itself on a reader, and bids her toward “the highest form of study, the supreme revelation, the foundational episteme that becomes irrefutable through reason”:Footnote ¹⁰

Clement here describes the difference between epistemic and preceptual knowledge, which are conceptually distinct but nevertheless combine to undergird the credibility of theological arguments. The language is playful, and exploits the lexical flexibility in which the roots πιστός and πίστις can describe both the “faith” of a person and the credibility of their argument. Clement is nevertheless clear that epistemic knowledge guides the production of truth, and is ultimately foundational:

We are lucky to have extant from antiquity not only traditions of preceptual teaching but also dedicated, philosophical discussions of proper, rigorous scholarly practice. Clement is probably the most eloquent writer and sophisticated theorist that I discuss in this book. But his concerns about the production of knowledge, and the conceptual categories that he uses as tools to instruct and to edify, are not his alone. His question, “how should one go about the business of finding truth,” is shared by Ignatius, by the author of the Gospel of Truth, by Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Constantine, Athanasius, Hilary, and by others. There are accordances between Christian scholastic thinkers of the second through fourth century, but there is no story to be told of unity or progression. These questions were live, foundational, and boisterously disputed.

Christian Scholastic Practices

Before the fourth century, Christian scholars took a bewilderingly broad range of approaches to authorizing their claims. Of course, diversity is to be expected; the ground rules of orthodox theological discourse were very much in contention during the second and third centuries, and the locus of Nicene Christian authority under Theodosius – creeds – arose in this capacity relatively late in the tradition. The spectrum of scholarly practice was as diverse as the theological spectrum of early Christianity; for hundreds of years followers of Jesus were as divided over the content of theological propositions (“preceptual knowledge”) as they were over the manner in which a theological proposition could possibly be justified (“epistemic knowledge”). A spectrum is visible from Marcion, perhaps the first Christian scholar to define a New Testament canon as intertextually coherent and theologically binding, to the Gospel of Truth, which offers a vision of Christianity wholly removed from exegetical concerns.Footnote ¹² Between these positions we find Ignatius of Antioch, whose interest in Septuagint material is significant, but who explicitly rejects the authority of purely textual arguments in favor of inspired speech. Some early Christians, such as Irenaeus of Lyon and the author of First Clement, considered Septuagintal texts to be central loci of authority. Others such as Tertullian rejected the idea that truth could be read out of a text whatsoever, even if the text in question was undeniably scripture. Even among Jesus followers interested in scriptural interpretation as a method of accessing truth we find significant disputes over what “scripture” is and how it might be deployed.

The idea that scriptural interpretation can produce theological truth is not obvious, and it should not be taken for granted that “Christianity” in the second and third centuries was at any point coterminous with reliance on textualized forms of authority.Footnote ¹³ Christians were not always “people of the book,” and even those in the second and third centuries who were interested in textual interpretation vary drastically in what they think scripture is and for what it is properly used. Thus, studies of Christian scholarly methodology should not be constrained to studying explicit citational practices – doing so would occlude a vast swath of early Christian material whose producers found little reason to base their arguments in texts at all. The proto-Orthodox movement of the third and fourth centuries (often in response to the work of Irenaeus) homed in on scriptural interpretation as centrally authoritative, but even that status did not last.Footnote ¹⁴ The late fourth century witnessed a move to what Mark Vessey has called “patristic commentary (retractatio patrum),” in which scripture no longer held center stage. Rather, scriptural texts were sublimated to creeds and statements of doctrine that had been distilled from scripture, but that were worded by councils and the great doctors of the church: Athanasius, Basil, Gregory, Jerome, Cyril.Footnote ¹⁵

There is a sense in which the Nicene controversy was the last scriptural controversy, in which the proper interpretation of New Testament texts was the crux of the issue. Chapter 3 turns to the controversy itself, where I argue that the dispute played a significant role in the promotion of credal statements over biblical texts when asking questions of doctrinal orthodoxy. I intend to show that no trajectory or story of development is visible in the productions of Christian scholars from in the second, third, and fourth centuries. Rather, each waypoint offers a glimpse at distinct book cultures and epistemic frames within which early Christians moved and breathed. Chapter 4 culminates with the definition of “Orthodoxy” in the Theodosian Age as adherence to a tightly policed statement of faith that was intended to distill a proper reading of scripture within a framework of traditional authority and undergirded by a form of Christian encyclopedism. By the ascension of Theodosius I in 379 ce, the Orthodox movement no longer looked primarily even to scripture in order to adjudicate questions of doctrine. Rather, they looked to an authorized, universal statement of truth. I argue that the “code” form that became ubiquitous in the Theodosian Age resulted from a Christian scholastic worldview that considered a particular theological method to be coterminous with Orthodoxy. Chapters 3 and 4 trace the development of that method, using brief examples to show the variety of Christian scholastic methods. My aim is not just to show that variety of method preceded the coalescence of scholarly practice at Nicaea, and the overhaul thereof in its aftermath. Rather, I want to denaturalize the idea that Christians, in antiquity, were always and singularly interested in text, and that there is any central coherence even among proto-Orthodox thinkers regarding what texts were and how they were to be used. Christians on both sides of the Nicene controversy were textual fetishists, and by the late fourth century their particular and ultimately peculiar approach to books came to define scholarly practice far removed from the theological domain. It is hard to understand just how radical the scholastic revolution of the Theodosian Age was without a background upon which to see its contours. I turn to that background now.

Ignatius

Ignatius was bishop to a community of Jesus followers in Antioch around the turn of the second century, and he knew that he was going to die.Footnote ¹⁶ A collection of his letters survives in three recensions of varying lengths and coherence, portraying the bishop making one final publicity tour through Asia Minor on his way to execution in Rome: stopping to visit with communities along the way and dispensing advice as an official representative of Jesus, inspired by the Holy Spirit.Footnote ¹⁷

Of chief importance for Ignatius was that parishioners obey their (single) bishop and the hierarchical structure of elders underneath him in the same way that they would follow apostles, and, in his words, in the same way that they would accede to the “council of God and the league of apostles.” In fact, he contends that “without these [officials of various ranks], a group cannot be called a church!”Footnote ¹⁸ Ignatius’s concept of authority is institutional and prophetic – he finds dispositive authorization only in inspired speech, and his strong conviction is that divinely inspired speech is found only in a few places: in the words of the prophets as recorded in the Septuagint, in the traditions authentically spoken and handed down by apostles, and in the words of a duly chosen bishop.Footnote ¹⁹ According to Ignatius the words of a bishop are precisely the voice of God. He scolds the Philadelphians, “I cried out among you, speaking in a great voice – the voice of God: ‘Pay attention to the bishop and the presbytery and the deacons!’”Footnote ²⁰ Ignatius claims that he had no previous knowledge of divisions among the Philadelphian community, but that he writes and speaks under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, who told him directly to instruct them, “Do nothing apart from the bishop!”Footnote ²¹ Of particular note here is that Ignatius, who occasionally quotes from the SeptuagintFootnote ²² and has demonstrable knowledge of a corpus of Pauline letters, nevertheless witnesses a form of argumentation wholly removed from exegetical concerns.Footnote ²³ Paul’s own letter to the Romans stands transparently in the background of Ignatius’s as a stylistic exemplar, and while he shows some interest in prophetic writings in so far as their messages “anticipated the good news,”Footnote ²⁴ he explicitly rejects the notion that “ancient records” such as these hold any authority of their own. Attempting to skewer his opponents, Irenaeus exclaims: “For I have heard some saying, ‘If I do not find it in the ancient records (τὰ ἀρχεῖα), I do not believe in the good news.’”Footnote ²⁵

While the identity and theological method of Ignatius’s opponents remains unclear, they were apparently interested in textual interpretation, and in investigation of “the ancient records.” When Ignatius offers the standard citational formula that he uses elsewhere in the corpus to introduce Septuagintal texts (“as it is written,” ὅτι γέγραπται), his opponents respond cryptically with “that is the question at hand (ὅτι πρόκειται).” Ignatius continues “But for me, Jesus Christ is the ancient records. (Ἐμοὶ δὲ ἀρχεῖά ἐστιν Ἰησοῦς Χριστός) The inviolable ancient records are his cross and death, and his resurrection, and the trust that comes through him.”Footnote ²⁶ Here Ignatius states explicitly what remained implicit in his other letters: while scriptures may be interesting and valuable in so far as they foreshadow Christ, they are not interesting in and of themselves, and they cannot be mined for reliable, or even relevant, theological truth. For Ignatius a theological argument can be true only when offered by an inspired interpreter, and proof of inspiration is found atop an institutional structure. The only “archives” that are relevant are nontextual, and access to them is available at the foot of a duly chosen bishop. I turn now to Justin Martyr, whose interest in authoritative text was provisional, at best.

Justin Martyr

Justin Martyr’s method varied with his audience. He believed in a singular truth, and that sound philosophy would lead a person to god even though they may take a bewildering variety of paths to get there.Footnote ²⁷ Justin’s extant writings are filled with this idea, that the λόγος suffused the world with knowledge of itself, and ultimately of a singular god.Footnote ²⁸ This epistemic conviction allowed Justin to produce bespoke knowledge: arguments tailored to his audience, and intended to persuade by any means necessary. In contexts where his interlocutor found tradition or text to be valid sources of truth, Justin engaged him on those textual or traditional grounds. But Justin did not believe that truth is so impotent as to require human intervention, and he refused to grant that a tradition or a text could act as anything more than witnesses to a truth that is pre-textual, and unable to be bound by a single mode of discovery or path of attainment. Regarding texts, Justin found interpretation a sometimes-useful method, not an aim in and of itself, and certainly not a guaranteed avenue of enlightenment.

Justin lays out his approach to truth at the beginning of his two most famous works: the Dialogue with Trypho the Jew and the First Apology. Two main threads are visible in his prefaces. First, the terminus of true philosophy is knowledge of the deity, though paths to that knowledge vary. Second, Justin holds a negotiated view of traditional authorities, whether traditions of the Jewish prophets or traditions of Platonic philosophy. Such texts point to an original genius and may well inspire awe in their readers, but truth itself is not bound within them.

The most significant meditation on method in Justin Martyr’s body of work comes in the opening chapters of his Dialogue. He claims to be a philosopher, and that “the work of philosophers is to scrutinize things relating to the deity.”Footnote ²⁹ Justin recounts learning this method from an old man while he was still on his philosophical journey to Christian Platonism. “I don’t care … if Plato or Pythagoras or anyone else had such teachings. What I have is the truth; here is how you may learn it (τὸ γὰρ ἀληθὲς οὕτως ἔχει· μάθοις δ’ ἂν ἐντεῦθεν).”Footnote ³⁰ Justin learned from this old man that there are ancient writings of Jewish prophets which have the same sort of status as the writings of Plato: they are original works of truth telling. “In their writings they make no dispositive arguments (οὐ γὰρ μετὰ ἀποδείξεως πεποίηνται) at the time of their statements, for, as reliable witnesses to the truth (ὄντες ἀξιόπιστοι μάρτυρες τῆς ἀληθείας), they are superior to argumentation (ἅτε ἀνωτέρω πάσης ἀποδείξεως).”Footnote ³¹ The old man argues that these texts should be believed because they accurately foretold the future (7.2), and because of the miracles that the prophets were able to perform (7.3). He asserts that these texts are divinely inspired, but even so, for him and Justin both, textual interpretation is not a reliable scholastic tool; even divinely inspired text does not necessarily succumb to interpretation, and thereby offer up reliable insights on the deity. Texts like the records of the Hebrew prophets or the writings of Plato are relevant to Justin not because the arguments of either are wholly dispositive nor because the texts contain the truth in its entirety. Scripture is relevant because it speaks to a singular truth – the same truth that can be found in the writings and doctrines of Plato. Both traditions act as a gateway to Justin’s new life as a philosopher.

Justin’s Dialogue is replete with quotations from the Septuagint, as he argues with a Jewish interlocutor over the possibility of truth, the error of philosophical schools, the relationship of gentiles to Mosaic law and later biblical prophecy, and a variety of other topics covered in the course of 142 chapters. Justin’s interaction with “Christian scripture” has obscured, however, his negotiated relationship with biblical material as a source of truth. The very fact of Justin’s engagement with scripture has been confused with his reliance on scripture as an ultimate source of truth, and interpretation as the singular relevant scholastic method. Irenaeus and the author of the Gospel According to Luke, for instance, certainly thought that as a method, proper exegesis of authoritative texts could lead to reliable truth. This concept is nowhere to be found in the Justin Martyr’s extant writings. Justin used biblical material, but that fact should not lead us to presume that he held a similar understanding of biblical material as his predecessors or contemporaries. Justin’s use of scriptural texts in the Dialogue is, by his own admission, only one method of argumentation among many. He takes a very different tack in the First Apology, which I discuss later. Justin’s seemingly shifting methodology between the Dialogue and the two apologies has led many to suggest that Justin Martyr was two people, or at least that he evidences a fundamental epistemic change between his Dialogue and the rest of his extant works.Footnote ³² This intuition will not stand; Justin is only inconsistent if readers fail to take seriously his own discussions of epistemic methodology that accompany each of his works.

In the Dialogue, Justin engages overwhelmingly with extracts from prophetic texts, claiming explicitly that the “law of Moses” is incumbent only upon Jews – both conceptually and textually – and that the Christ event rendered it wholly obsolete (11.1–2). Rather, Justin’s method mirrors that of his interlocutor, an imaginary Jew.Footnote ³³ When making arguments, prophetic texts are superior to the narrative or legal parts of the Hebrew Bible because they witness to truth and they offer a firm starting point for anyone wishing to live a philosophical life: a life that leads to happiness.

To Justin, the prophets spoke truth, but they were not its fountainhead or its sole source. They are older than the Greek philosophers, but they and Plato spoke of the same singular truth. The prophets are credible “because of the miracles which they performed,” and because their writings inspire awe and spoke to the singular truth long before the advent of the Greek philosophical tradition (7.3). Under inspiration of the Holy Spirit prophets grasped the truth themselves, and point to it in their writings. The only way for Justin, or anyone else, to reach the telos of philosophy is through a similar gift of inspiration from the deity. “No one can perceive or understand these truths unless he has been allowed to understand by God and his Christ” (7.3). As Ellen Muehlberger argues, “In the Dialogue, Justin did not persuade his character Trypho to read different texts, but to read the same texts differently.”Footnote ³⁵ Justin speaks in the First Apology of the “enlightenment (φωτισμός)” which comes to a person as a by-product of baptism,Footnote ³⁶ and he invokes this framework again in the Dialogue, asserting that the unbaptized person reads scriptures in vain, able to grasp the words but not their spirit (29.2).

Justin finds great power and solace in the “sayings of the savior,”Footnote ³⁷ just as he does in the words of the prophets. There is power in Jesus’s words, which have an uncanny capacity to transform lives. He wishes that others would follow his lead, and “never fall away from the sayings of the savior (μὴ ἀφίστασθαι τῶν τοῦ σωτῆρος λόγων). For they have in themselves something awesome (δέος γάρ τι ἔχουσιν ἐν ἑαυτοῖς), and they can instill fear into those who have wandered from the correct path” (8.2). But for Justin, “the sayings of the savior” are not textual – he does not refer to books.Footnote ³⁸ In other instances where he speaks explicitly of textualized Jesus material, he doesn’t use the term “λόγοι,” but rather “ἀπομνημονεύματα” – “memoirs” called “gospels.”Footnote ³⁹ Even if Justin did have textualized Jesus material in mind here (“gospel/s”), neither his argumentation in the Dialogue nor his sustained reflections on philosophical method find ultimate authority in scripture or epistemic value in thoroughgoing exegetical engagement. Justin has no concept of a written, authoritative gospel, whether scriptural or otherwise. Scriptures are useful because of what they point to, and because they can transform the lives of those who come into contact with them. But these textual sources are to be trusted solely because they have proven to be a reliable historical record.

This approach to textual authority leaves Justin open to the charge of incomplete engagement with the text – with “cherry-picking” those passages of the Septuagint that appear to foretell things that had come to pass.Footnote ⁴⁰ In chapter 27 of the Dialogue he responds just such an accusation by Trypho: “Why do you quote only those passages from the prophets which prove your point, and omit those quotations which clearly order the observance of the Sabbath?” (27.1). Justin’s response demonstrates further his ambiguous relationship with textual interpretation as a reliable method. His claim is that parts of the biblical prophetic texts, as well as the Mosaic law as recorded, have been abrogated (27.2). In other words, scripture is not a repository for preceptual knowledge and textual interpretation is not a sufficient or even necessary epistemic operation. Truth, for Justin, is pre-textual. Even the bible teems with error and outdated dogma.

This leads to a more fundamental concern that animates Justin’s approach to the search for truth: he is skeptical of tradition. The opening of his Dialogue (2.1) explains that philosophy has become so “fractured (πολύκρανος – lit. many headed)” because of the failures of traditional authority. Justin does not distrust processes of handing down knowledge from previous authorities because of failures of the knowledge handed down; it is not that Plato’s students did not know what he taught or that Plato’s teachings were not valid. Rather, Justin claims that any philosophy based solely on tradition is destined to fail. In time, the earnest learning of “holy men” necessarily becomes reified as dogma and handed down from teacher to student in the name of the source rather than in service of the truth:

Philosophy became fractious because philosophical schools embraced their founding philosopher rather than the doctrines that he taught. Justin repeats this attack on the authority of tradition in his First Apology, which was addressed to the emperor Antoninus Pius. In fact, the beginning of his address calls on the emperor to forsake “the teachings of the ancients (δόξαι παλαιῶν)” when they are of no value and to follow instead the council of “sound reason (ὁ σώφρων λόγος)” (2.1). Only if the emperor is willing to do this are his subjects correct in counting him among the “pious and philosophers and guardians of justice and lovers of learning” (2.2). At the beginning of his plea to the emperor, Justin reiterates his contention that tradition cannot vouchsafe truth, even when the tradition in question has been passed down without error (2.1). Rather, there is one truth that can be accessed through many different means: sometimes by searching the scriptures to find what they point to, sometimes through the guidance of “sound reason,” and sometimes through the tradition of philosophical investigation. For Justin, the audience and their preexisting methodological commitments determine the relevant path.

To suggest that Justin’s approach to the authority of scriptural traditions is anything like an exegetical concern is a failure to read his own rationale for proceeding in the way that he does in these two different contexts. Even when debating an imaginary Jew, Justin’s locus of truth is not scripture. Biblical material proves the antiquity of his claims but not their veracity. Similarly, in the First Apology he uses Septuagint and New Testament material to prove sociological points about how Christians act, not theological points about what they should believe.Footnote ⁴¹ This structure of knowledge, in which a teacher is a fountainhead of true knowledge but not its guarantor, is confirmed both by Justin’s citations of scriptural texts and his citation of philosophical predecessors. Justin discusses the capacity of philosophers to gain knowledge of the deity in chapter 3 of the Dialogue. He cites Plato to constrain even his own ability to teach truth, or to bring the mind of a student to perceive god.

Justin is committed to the idea that truth is singular even though a wide range of sources witness to it. The commitment allows him to practice a sensitivity to the methodological commitments of his interlocutors and to tailor arguments to their approach. When speaking to a Jew he says: “Since I base my arguments and suggestions on the writings and on examples (ἀπό τε τῶν γραφῶν καὶ τῶν πραγμάτων) you should not hesitate to believe me, despite the fact that I am uncircumcised” (28.2). Justin “bases his suggestions on the writings and on examples” because, by his own admission, he knows that scriptural proofs are useful in the context of debate with Jews. But scriptural interpretation is not a bedrock principle; it is a method. By contrast, biblical material is hardly ever cited in the First Apology. When Justin does cite biblical or New Testament texts, he uses them not to prove a theological point but almost always to prove a sociological one: he first mentions what Christians do and the rationale for it and then brings a citation, usually from the sayings of Jesus, to show that Christian tradition prescribes their actions. These are “citations” in a very different sense from what we see in the Dialogue with Trypho – Justin uses texts simply to show that there is an external source for the teaching which he claims is common among Christians; his citation of New Testament texts does not suppose that the teaching is authoritative.

Justin’s method is context specific: he switches codes depending on his audience. Sometimes texts constitute an authoritative witness to truth while sometimes they are, at best, a sort of secondary documentation that back up claims that Justin makes on philosophical grounds or on the basis of his own personal authority. I argue that this is the fatal flaw in analyses that focus on Justin first and foremost as an interpreter of scripture.Footnote ⁴² Neither his own statements about method, nor an analysis of his work, reveals him to be interested in scriptural interpretation as anything other than a proximate method.

Irenaeus

Irenaeus wrote in Greek during the last two decades of the second century, and he was the first major Christian polemicist to receive widespread and enduring acclaim.Footnote ⁴³ His intellectual project is centrally focused on fabricating a new Christian epistemology able to withstand the arguments of his “gnostic” opponents: Christians who claim to have found truth, but whose gnōsis is “falsely so-called.” According to Eric Osborn, “Irenaeus follows Justin but with wider vision, for he is the first writer to have a Christian bible before him.”Footnote ⁴⁴ He thus serves as a fitting place to continue my investigation of the varied scholastic methods that early Christian scholars employed. While Justin and Ignatius found the central node of authority not in scriptural texts but in institutional structures and in philosophical reasoning (respectively), Irenaeus is the first significant proto-Orthodox voice to consider exegesis to be at least notionally dispositive as a method. At its core, Irenaeus’s opposition to heresy was a project of methodological construction. I argue that he was able to “overthrow” heretical doctrines only by articulating for the first time a structure of knowledge, and a process for knowledge creation, that was immune to the subversions of his “gnostic” opponents.

Josef Hoh argued that there is a central aesthetic quality to Irenaeus’s citational practices that is best described with the rule “it is fitting, it is possible, therefore it is.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In this sense, Irenaeus’s method is not fundamentally dissimilar from that of Marcion, who apparently believed that the plan of salvation can be discerned from the structure of salvation; both men agree that when approaching textual sources the central aim is to understand god’s intention based on god’s actions in the world.Footnote ⁴⁶ For Irenaeus, there was a singular universal plan for salvation that was simultaneously indicated in scripture and passed down from Jesus to the apostles, and ultimately to their followers. In this way, Irenaeus’s hermeneutic allows for no variation, no expansion or evolution, and certainly no contradiction. In fact, as will become clear, Irenaeus claims that allowing the possibility of contradiction among sources is the animating methodological error among gnostic Christians.

Irenaeus’s Against the Heresies claims a dual intention: it is both an “uncovering” (detectio/ἔλεγχος) and an “overthrowing” (eversio/ἀνατροπή) of heretical doctrines.Footnote ⁴⁷ Surprisingly, in book one Irenaeus hardly relies on textual interpretation at all. This circumstance is curious because elsewhere, Irenaeus leans heavily on scripture as a central locus of authority. In this case, the relative dearth of citations appears to be the result of the opponent that Irenaeus thinks he is arguing against in book one: “gnostics.” His aim in book one is to “uncover” rather than to “overthrow.” Irenaeus saw scripture as a repository from which one could read doctrine, but his opponents found only glimmers of truth in text; doctrine was part of the story but did not encapsulate its entirety. (Rather like Justin’s method, it turns out.) In so far as the aim of book one is an “uncovering” of heretical doctrines and a destruction of “evil interpreters,” Irenaeus apparently thought that scripture was not a particularly potent ally.Footnote ⁴⁸ Beginning in book two, however, and especially in book three, Irenaeus changes tack, using two distinct but intertwined categories as tools to “overthrow” gnostic doctrines: scripture and tradition. Irenaeus defines scriptural texts as “that which was once oral and was handed down by the apostles,” and thus according to his method, scripture and tradition are opposite sides of the same coin.Footnote ⁴⁹ “We received the knowledge of the plan of our salvation through no others than those through whom the gospel (euangelium) was handed down to us. This gospel they first preached orally, but later, by god’s will, they handed it down to us in the writings (in scripturis nobis tradideruntFootnote ⁵⁰) so that it would be the foundation and pillar of our faith.”Footnote ⁵¹ Scripture is relevant only because it is guaranteed by, and guarantees, a certain apostolic succession; Irenaeus places tradition and text together in order to find truth at their intersection. This is possible, he claims, because the scriptures are in harmony with the teaching of the apostles and because each of the apostles unequivocally taught the same thing:

Biblical material is an ally for Irenaeus in “overthrowing” his heretical opponents because it is consistent. This is the central tenet of Irenaeus’s hermeneutical approach: the apostles taught one message among themselves, and that message is repeated as a single, coherent message in scriptures as well. His opponents, for their part, apparently did not assent to the premise. Irenaeus commands that:

Through this hermeneutic Irenaeus was able to build a scholastic method capable of “overthrowing” what he considers to be perverted uses of scripture. Scripture speaks from the position of the apostles, and the apostles’ teaching did not vary according to their audience.Footnote ⁵²

So far as surviving material attests, Irenaeus was the first Christian scholar to suggest that Jesus’s message was fully intact only in four distinct “pillars” called gospels, the first to suggest a name, date, and place for “publication” of the gospels,Footnote ⁵³ the first to offer a thoroughgoing analysis of biblical material based on the premise of scriptural coherence, and the first to connect definitively the interpretation of scripture with the patrimony of apostolic teaching as a check on reading and the production of valid knowledge. According to Hansjürgen Verweyen, this is the true, lasting impact of Irenaeus’s intellectual project.Footnote ⁵⁴ He is certainly correct: Irenaeus’s hermeneutical methodology came to define the boundaries of Orthodox reading and the production of Orthodox truth in a way that no previous method had. But Irenaeus’s method did not appear de novo. It was articulated in the context of an opposing position, and arose as an antidote to a “gnostic” threat. As Elaine Pagels demonstrates, Irenaeus was not concerned simply to root out heretical doctrines. Rather, “what Irenaeus identified as ‘heresy’ among Valentinian Christians was hermeneutical teaching communicated in ritual – and specifically any form of initiation that could constitute distinct groups within Christian congregations.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Irenaeus defined a method for the proper production of knowledge in response to, and as a foil for, opposing (“gnostic”) approaches to truth production. His opponents claimed that the apostolic teaching which appears in written texts stems from the period before the apostles had received “perfect knowledge.”Footnote ⁵⁶ For Irenaeus’s (perhaps real, and perhaps imagined) opponents, proper theological method required a knowledge not only of the scripture but also of the keys to unlock scripture’s true meaning, which were passed down orally.Footnote ⁵⁷ Irenaeus agrees with his opponents in part: both hold that scripture is insufficient without tradition. He adds, however, that it is impossible for scripture and tradition to diverge; they work together, with one as a check on the other:Footnote ⁵⁸

Methodological error precedes and animates heresy, for Irenaeus. Fortunately, errors of this type are not particularly hard to uncover – a believer can identify it through the preceptual truths that it produces by comparing the results of faulty exegesis with the “rule of truth” that they received at baptism. In book one of Against Heresies he takes aim at Valentinian exegetes who behave like Homerocentones: splicing and dicing bits of text to make them say whatever the reader has already decided them to mean:

For Irenaeus, theological speculation is perfectly acceptable, as is some degree of disagreement within the orthodox community.Footnote ⁶⁰ There are, however, a set of precepts and scholarly methods that are nonnegotiable. The most important of these is the notion that scripture and tradition cannot diverge and that scripture is incapable of contradicting itself.

Irenaeus’s scholastic methodology became the dominant approach to theology among subsequent proto-Orthodox thinkers. In fact, the very definition that contemporary scholars use to delineate the “proto-Orthodox” tradition is indebted to this scholarly system: those who held to Irenaeus’s methodology carry on the “proto-Orthodox” patrimony.Footnote ⁶¹ It is immaterial whether this particular approach to scripture and tradition preceded Irenaeus’s engagement with gnostic heretics; subsequent theologians encountered and appropriated Irenaeus’s method through his hereseological account, not through his direct teaching. The theological method that defined boundaries of Orthodoxy in antiquity was founded on, and perpetually reinscribes, the idea that heresy can be substantive, but that it fundamentally proceeds from methodological error.

Irenaeus’s intellectual project was as much epistemic as it was preceptual, and certainly his effect on later Christian theological scholarship was overwhelmingly epistemic. The outsized importance of Irenaeus’s methodological contribution to the patrimony of fourth-century Orthodoxy is underscored by the fact that, from book three, only these statements on proper theological method, as well as records of the tradition’s “chain of custody,” were quoted and thus remain extant in Greek. Irenaeus’s specific arguments against “heresies” faded into the domain of historical knowledge as the specific groups at whom they were aimed were no longer considered a threat. But his method of producing knowledge lived on remarkably intact in the work of subsequent Christian theological thinkers at least through the fourth century, when “apostolic tradition” was refigured around credal statements rather than networks of intellectual patrimony.

Irenaeus focused his critical aim and intellectual energies on refuting opponents who approach scripture illegitimately. These people, “having been refuted by the scriptures, turn around and accuse the same scriptures as if they were neither correct nor authoritative, and assert that they are inconsistent (varie) and that those who do not know the tradition are not able to find truth in them” (3.2.1). Irenaeus’s heretics assert that the truth “was not handed down through written texts (litteras) … but through the living voice.”Footnote ⁶² When he wrote this, perhaps Irenaeus had the long-departed Valentinus in mind, or was taking aim at members of the Valentinian “school.” But one opposing voice who believed that “those who do not know the tradition are not able to find truth” in the scriptures was assimilated into the same canon of proto-Orthodox thinkers as Irenaeus – the voice was Tertullian’s. I turn now to Irenaeus’s younger contemporary, who espoused a fundamentally opposite methodology. It was his preceptual commitments, rather than his scholastic method, that earned Tertullian space under the umbrella of “proto-Orthodoxy,” in antiquity as well as today.

Tertullian

All of Tertullian’s extant writing is occasional and polemical; extended discourses on method are few and far between. The first Christian literary figure of the Latin West spent the majority of his writing career batting down heresies rather than constructing a systematic theological program.Footnote ⁶³ The question of the relationship between scripture, tradition, and heresy, however, gave Tertullian occasion to articulate a theological method on positive terms. His position is found most clearly in Concerning Exemptions against Heretics (De praescriptionibus adversus haereticos). For Tertullian, heresy is the name that one gives to an epistemic failure, not a preceptual position. He argues that texts are at least notionally capable of expressing truth, but that the text of scripture is underdetermined and authoritative exposition of scripture requires a pre-textual knowledge of truth to which scripture is, at best, a faulty witness. Heretics are precisely those who look to scripture, or anywhere else, in order to discover truths beyond the “rule of faith (regula fidei)” received through the apostolic tradition; the act of theological speculation itself is heresy, not the form of the questions or the content of the answers. Tertullian argues, therefore, that heretics should not be engaged on the basis of scripture. They are the recipients of a praescriptio, an exemption.

Around the time of Tertullian’s birth the jurist Gaius defined the legal term praescriptio as a clause or document that precedes a legal formulary. It constrains the authority of the judge and the validity of the proceedings to a particular aspect of a case, for instance the validity of a contract.Footnote ⁶⁴ Whatever Tertullian means by praescriptio, it is not precisely the legal use of the term from Roman formulary procedure.Footnote ⁶⁵ Rather, Tertullian’s own use of the term should be understood as a praescriptio, a discussion before one gets to interpretative questions regarding scripture with heretics. The point of the argument is nicely summed up in its appellation: truth itself is prae-scriptio – it is to be grasped before one accedes to, or even approaches, text. In a very real sense, truth is “pre-scriptural.” It cannot be found in books, and thus there is no use in debating interpretive method with heretics who do not come to scripture having already assented to a set of preceptual commitments. Tertullian does not offer such an absolutist position as we will see in the Gospel of Truth, which denies the capacity of text to contain or express truth in any useful sense. For Tertullian, the text of scripture serves as an exemplar of behavior but it is not a depository of truth. Scriptural texts could clearly state answers to metaphysical and Christological questions answered (wrongly) by heretics, but they do not. Tertullian is the earliest extant writer to espouse this position regarding the relationship between textuality and truth. By the advent of the Theodosian Age this position was dominant and coterminous with Orthodoxy – at least with the Orthodoxy of which Athanasius is an exemplar.

Tertullian’s conception of heresy is, at base, etymological: it is a “choice,” derived as it is from the Greek word αἵρεσις.Footnote ⁶⁶ The existence of heresies was foretoldFootnote ⁶⁷ both by “the sayings of the Lord and … the letters of the apostles” (4), but true Christians are not permitted to make theological choices in any capacity:

Wherever there is dissension among Christians heresy has arisen, and it has arisen out of vain and ill-considered speculation beyond the bounds of “the rule of faith (regula fidei).” Tertullian argues that the “rule of faith” comprises preceptual knowledge and not epistemic method. While his position appears to be quite a bit more absolutist than Paul’s, here Tertullian echoes and extends the apostle’s own admonition to the Galatians that any message which deviates from his own, original teaching – whether from him or even an angel – should be disregarded and the messenger accursed.Footnote ⁶⁸ In Tertullian’s estimation, the truths that have been revealed are the only truths to which Christians are privy, and they comprise those truths which were spoken by Christ to the apostles and passed from the apostles onward. This knowledge should be considered an end in and of itself, and not a stepping stone for progressive revelation or ever more fine-grained theological analysis. His position is clear: theological speculation itself is heresy:

The most surprising piece of Tertullian’s excursus on methodology in Concerning Exemptions against Heretics is his use of scriptural texts to discount the validity of textual interpretation as an epistemically valid maneuver. It is the heretics, Tertullian stresses, who quote Matthew 7:7, which says: “Seek and you shall find.” But this message was preached by Jesus at the beginning of his ministry and was aimed at Jews. It does not apply to gentiles, who are Tertullian’s audience, and constitutes only an “example (exemplum)” (8). The apostles were told to seek and find. Tertullian argues that they sought, they found, and importantly, there is no longer a need for anyone to continue the process of seeking. Truth has already appeared in the world, it is the “rule of faith” that can be laid out in the space of 116 words, the final sentence of which reads: “This rule was instituted by Christ. It raises no questions among us other than those than those which heresies introduce and which make people into heretics.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Textual interpretation, as an epistemic method, was relevant only before the advent of truth, brought by Jesus. In the wake of the Christ event searching the scriptures for truth became nonsensical because the texts are not a depository for the preceptual truths to which all Christians must properly accede. Theological seeking beyond the revealed rule of faith is like trying to fit letters into the black blocks of a crossword puzzle after the answer key has been published. A clever person might be able to squeeze some characters in here or there, but doing so contravenes the design of the game and serves only to move them further away from the correct solution.

For Tertullian, true faith is preceptual and tightly bound. But this is not to say that it comprises the extent of possible preceptual knowledge – knowledge beyond the “rule of faith” is at least notionally possible. The act of seeking anything beyond that which was received in faith, however, is a rejection of that faith. Seeking is epistemic heresy, no matter the preceptual outcome. Tertullian is explicit in claiming that Jesus’s admonition to “seek” is categorically disallowed to anyone who would call themselves a Christian (11). Tertullian repeatedly points to scriptural stories as a way of stressing that scripture is not a repository for truth and that the act of searching for answers beyond the “rule of faith” is itself heresy (11). Tertullian’s method, then, is to deny access to the scriptures for anyone who will not come to the scriptures already agreeing to the rule of faith. When heretics “use” the scriptures they mutilate them by way of their very interaction, because any attempt at theological speculation beyond the “rule of faith” is itself heretical, no matter what the outcome.Footnote ⁷⁰ For Tertullian, there is no such thing as Christian theological speculation.

This is the fundamental distinction between Tertullian’s “rule of faith (regula fidei)” and Irenaeus’s “rule of truth (κανὼν τῆς ἀληθείας)” or “doctrine of faith (πίστεως ὑπόθεσις).” Both Irenaeus and Tertullian would assent to the preceptual positions set forth in Tertullian’s regula fidei. Irenaeus, however, is willing to wrestle with heretics. For instance, he will take on heretics over the resurrection of the body, as he does in Against Heresies 5.31, attempting to convince “evil exegetes” that their position is wrong because it is falsifiable within the framework of scripture. Tertullian, on the other hand, will not. Unless someone is willing to assent to the “rule of faith” that already answers the question of whether or not Christians are resurrected in bodily form, then wrestling with them over the interpretation of scripture is not just futile, it renders both parties heretics. Paraphrasing an apocryphal saying of Mark Twain, Tertullian might offer, “never argue with a heretic. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.”

For Irenaeus, on the other hand, truth is fractal: it can be continually refined, further and further into the minutiae, and even so it remains precisely the same:

For Irenaeus, the true message remains the same even when messengers possess different levels of rhetorical ability and theological skill, and proper theological method allows further cosmic truths to be uncovered. In one sense Tertullian agrees: one could speculate more into the nature of the cosmos and the divine, but the act of doing so is contradictory because it is predicated on a rejection of revealed truth. According to Irenaeus, there are scholarly methods which allow practitioners to delve deeper than Tertullian’s regula fidei. Though these methods can lead to the appearance of divergent messages, it is sometimes the case that the appearance is merely the same message presented in greater or lesser detail. Different presentations of doctrine are not the result of a mutable truth but of scholarship: some undertake properly guided theological speculation and arrive a new truths even beyond the bare reading of scripture, and beyond the “doctrine of faith” that they received at baptism:Footnote ⁷³

All of the verbs that Irenaeus uses are verbs of extrapolation: προσεπεργάζομαι, ἐκδιηγέομαι, σαφηνίζω. His list continues, detailing theological propositions that proper epistemic method, rooted in a novel hermeneutic, can successfully adjudicate. The “doctrine of faith” allows one to “search out (ἐξερευνᾶν)” the answer to “why ‘God consigned all things to disobedience, in order that he may have mercy on all (διὰ τί συνέκλεισε πάντα εἰς ἀπείθειαν ὁ Θεὸς, ἵνα τοὺς πάντας ἐλεήσῃ),’” as Paul says in Romans 11:32. Some things will remain a mystery, but many answers are available, even as the fundamental truth stays the same.

It was Irenaeus’s notion of epistemic possibility that lived on, and not Tertullian’s. Irenaeus’s method motivated disputants at the Council of Nicaea some 100 years later; everyone in attendance believed that the proper scholastic methods, applied to the right set of texts, could yield an abundance of theological truth beyond that which is stated plainly in scripture. While all disputants would accept the content of Tertullian’s “rule of faith,” neither faction would agree with his method. Put differently: Tertullian would be aghast to see the type of theological speculation engaged by Alexander, Arius, and their partisans in the beginning of the fourth century. He would call the whole lot “heretics” because they were asking questions beyond that which was revealed and looking to scriptural interpretation to adjudicate their preceptual differences.Footnote ⁷⁴ Truth is not fractal, says Tertullian; a pox on both their houses. They were heretics the moment they stepped foot in the door.

Irenaeus argued that even when the truth is expounded, it is not changed. I turn now to the Gospel of Truth, which points to a secret teaching beyond the message preserved in scripture.Footnote ⁷⁵ It is an oral teaching passed down from the apostles and constitutes the “true gospel.” Importantly, this gospel is fundamentally a-textual. The Gospel of Truth witnesses no exegetical concerns whatsoever, and its author apparently conceived of a Christianity wholly removed from authoritative text.

The Gospel of Truth

The Gospel of Truth may seem to be the odd-source-out in my discussion of early Christian theological method. It seems that way because it is. Of the seven traditions of Christian truth-making surveyed in this chapter, the Gospel of Truth is the only one for which no author is known or claimed.Footnote ⁷⁶ If we did know the author, they would certainly not have made the cut for Jerome’s famous catalogue On Eminent Men, which is as good an indicator as any of the intellectual lineage claimed by Nicene Christian scholars of the Theodosian Age, even when the examples were negative. The Gospel of Truth presents a conceptual counterpoint to Christian scholastic tradition claimed by the likes of Athanasius, Arius, or Constantine. It speaks to an ancient conception of Christianity wholly devoid of exegetical concerns. While the other case studies in this chapter index a variety of approaches to truth and its proper construction by early Christian scholars, each example nevertheless defines its own authority with reference to, and often by direct invocation of, textual sources. But these are only instances of one kind of Christianity: a Christianity predicated on the ability of text to possess authority. They speak to threads visible in the Christian scholastic methodology that “won out,” so to speak, but the imperial court’s eventual embrace of Catholic orthodoxy was not historically necessary, nor is it obvious that a text could be imbued with meaning. One can easily imagine a nontextual Christianity spreading in the second and third centuries in the same way that an exegetically minded set of communities did. The Gospel of Truth reminds us that the decision to cite scripture is just that – a decision – and it already forecloses a wide variety of approaches to the creation of truth by ancient people equally as Christian as Ignatius, Tertullian, or Justin.

Almost nothing certain is known about the Gospel of Truth. It has been described as “a homiletic reflection of the ‘Gospel’ or the message of salvation provided by Jesus Christ,” though if it is a homily, it is of very different sort from any other ancient example of the genre.Footnote ⁷⁷ We know nothing about a community that might have held this text in regard and nothing certain about the reaction of any ancient reader to its contents. The most that anyone can claim definitively is that this text appears to have been copied at a monastery in the fourth or fifth century, perhaps one that was part of the Pachomian network.Footnote ⁷⁸ But neither ownership nor composition of a text suggests that the readers or writers considered the Gospel of Truth an authority. A. J. Berkovitz and I have written elsewhere of the historiographical fallacy by which texts like the Gospel of Truth are supposed, a priori, to index rival Christianities that were subverted by an ascendant Orthodox Church in Late Antiquity.Footnote ⁷⁹ I will pass over, then, ongoing arguments as to whether this text is a work of “Valentinian” Christians or not, and whether it is the same “Gospel of Truth (evangelium veritatis)” mentioned by Irenaeus.Footnote ⁸⁰ To date, all of the theories adduced on the authorship of this text, its ideological forebears, its social location, and even its title, fail by virtue of circularity and, at best, explain little about the context or content of the Gospel of Truth itself.

My chief concern is to explore the text’s epistemic method: how it conceives of human access to truth. The Gospel of Truth is centrally concerned with questions of truth – who can access it, what it entails, where it came from, and what its relationship is to other discourses of humans – and yet it cites no text, carries the name of no author, and claims to speak only to those who already know the message which it conveys.Footnote ⁸¹ In this sense it is not wisdom literature, if wisdom literature is meant to impart wise words to people in need of instruction. It is something quite apart, and although it may reflect some literary relationship with the Gospel according to John, for instance, intertexts must be searched out in the gaps: nothing in the Gospel of Truth suggests that the text is presented as anything but a self-contained revelation.

The Gospel of Truth is called as such by modern scholars because of its incipit, which reads: “The message of the truth [or gospel of truth] (ⲡⲉⲩⲁⲅⲅⲉⲗⲓⲟⲛ ⲛ̅ⲧⲙⲏⲉ) is joy for those who have received grace from the Father of truth.”Footnote ⁸² By calling this literary production the Gospel of Truth we have already suggested what the referent is of the clause “the Gospel of Truth is joy”: it is the text that we are reading.Footnote ⁸³ But what follows explicitly, repeatedly disavows that truth could be found in a text, or that truth is even discoverable by anyone other than those who have been chosen to receive such knowledge. A better name for this text might be About the True Message; while this text points to “the true message,” it is not “the true message” – at least it doesn’t claim to be.Footnote ⁸⁴

The Gospel of Truth/About the True Message begins with a prologue followed by a story: a return to the beginning, before creation. The story goes like this: “the Totality went out searching for the one from whom they had come forth” (17.5–6), and succumbing to fear because it could not find the Father, the Totality gave rise to Error, which became powerful because it did not know the truth. With this new-found power, Error, “set about with a creation” (that is, the world as known by and to humans) and offered “power and beauty” as a “substitute for truth” (17.18–20). The text goes on to offer its first adjuration, one of many which are motivated by a central cosmological epistemology: everything that is made, is made by Error. “For this reason despise error” (17.28–29). “Knowledge” in this text is referred to as ⲡⲓⲥⲁⲩⲛⲉ, the Lycopolitan spelling of the Sahidic ⲥⲟⲟⲩⲛ with a semantic range equivalent to that of ἐπιστήμη. The Gospel of Truth argues that knowledge came into the world though the agency of Jesus (18.16–21), and that Jesus offers knowledge of the Father only to those who are preordained to receive the truth: those whose names are “in the living book of the living – the one written in the thought and the mind of the father … that (book) which no one [but Jesus] was able to take” (19.34–20.6).

This, then, is the core of the epistemic system that undergirds the Gospel of Truth: the “true message” is available only to those to whom it has been revealed; “the living who are inscribed in the book of the living” are given instruction “about themselves” (21.4–5). The text describes this return to knowledge in a series of arresting poetic images that resonate even today. Those who are given knowledge grasp the truth as “one who, having become drunk, has turned away from his drunkenness, and having returned to himself, has set right what are his own” (22.16–20). As in Seneca’s Stoicism, in the Gospel of Truth, cosmology, epistemology, and ethics are radically coherent; the system is self-referential, and preceptual knowledge is useless without a correlative epistemic outlook.

The Gospel of Truth goes out of its way to clarify that this knowledge is not textual. While textualized metaphors are used – “book (ϫⲱⲱⲙⲉ) of the living” (19.35), “a will (ⲇⲓⲁⲑⲏⲕⲏ)” (20.15), or “the edict (ⲇⲓⲁⲧⲁⲅⲙⲁ) of the Father” (20.26) – the content of the “true message” cannot be bound in language:

Here the author uses playful, bookish metaphors to stress precisely that no text could possibly contain truth. The “knowledge of the living book” may refer either to truth itself or to the names of those selected to know the truth. In either case, the knowledge itself is “neither vowels nor consonants” – literally, “they are not places of sound nor are they letters lacking their sounds” (23.3–5). The message cannot be contained in textualized form nor spoken in audible words. The Gospel of Truth has remarkably little to say positively about either preceptual truths or how one gains access to the “true message.” The message, it stresses repeatedly, is known only to those who have been elected. The text is clearest only in a negative sense: books do not contain truth. One possible epistemic corollary to texts as repositories of truth – that the proper hermeneutic, applied to the right corpus of texts, could produce theologically defensible statements – is ruled out from the start.Footnote ⁸⁵

In this sense, the Gospel of Truth forms an almost perfect contrast both with the traditions discussed in this chapter and with another text known from Nag Hammadi: the so-called Gospel of the Egyptians, written originally in Greek and preserved in two different versions in Codices 3 and 4.Footnote ⁸⁶ Quite apart from the Gospel of Truth’s self-effacing textualizing metaphors, the Gospel of the Egyptians ends by declaring that the text was written by Seth himself in primordial times – literally “in letters” ($\overline{ϩⲛ}$ ϩⲉⲛⲥϩⲁϊ 3.68.11) – “in order that, at the end of the times and the eras … it may come forth and reveal this incorruptible, holy race of the great savior” (3.68.14–22). Here, the Gospel of the Egyptians presents the preceptual knowledge which “comes forth” as that knowledge stored away in texts written by Seth, similar to the antediluvian knowledge that is recorded in Nag Hammadi’s The Three Steles of Seth. In other words, a rejection of texualized, universal knowledge is not fundamentally “gnostic,” nor is it found throughout the Nag Hammadi codices.Footnote ⁸⁷ But it is visible in bits and pieces, and represents a Christian epistemic tradition just as sophisticated as anything in Tertullian, Irenaeus, or Justin.

It is not clear whether the Gospel of Truth constituted “scripture” for any community in antiquity. The text is self-effacing; it stresses over and again that truth is not so feeble as to require the written word, and that no language has the power necessary to express truth, let alone convey its meaning to those who do not possess it already. The text does not engage in a mere apophaticism, in which the mystery of truth will always outstrip any description, nor does it express a negative theology, in which only negative statements can be made with confidence, as a sort of precursor to the late ancient theological outlook attached to the name of Dionysus the Areopagite. Rather, it presents an epistemic system that purposefully repudiates the idea that a book could reveal knowledge that is anything more than an emanation of Error. As I move on to discuss other Christian epistemic systems it will be important to keep in mind that the seeming inevitability of textual interpretation, even among Christians, is a mirage; the great doctrinal controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries played out on a field of Orthodox construction. The fact of textual interpretation as theologically foundational is neither obvious nor uncontroversial – even among Jerome’s “eminent men.” Nor was it universal, as we see in the system of knowledge supposed and promulgated by the Gospel of Truth.

A misplaced textualism runs through the history of scholarship on the Gospel of Truth. Geoffrey Smith cites ten separate studies considering what he calls the text’s “unwavering commitment to biblical interpretation,” to which we can add Smith’s own article as well.Footnote ⁸⁸ There is at least one problem with this characterization of the Gospel of Truth, however. In regard to biblical interpretation, this text is neither. Put differently, if “biblical interpretation” is to remain a category of critical use whatsoever we must say that the Gospel of Truth does none of it. There are no citation formulae. There are no quotations. There is no discussion of written authority. There are, at best, allusions to topics, words, and concepts that are also discussed in scriptural texts.Footnote ⁸⁹ But it would be difficult to discuss the generation of the Son as Platonic logos, for instance, without language that sounds like the Gospel according to John 1:1 and 1:18. Likewise, the relationship of a personified Error to its source, framed in almost any way, will look like an oblique reference to Ben Sira 24:3 to a sufficiently motivated critic. There may be “scriptural resonances” in the Gospel of Truth, and the text as we have it might be a meditation on texts that would eventually become part of the Orthodox Christian canon.Footnote ⁹⁰ In other words, it might engage in allusion as defined by Devorah Dimant: “a device for the simultaneous activation of two texts.”Footnote ⁹¹ However, if similar language, or even purposeful allusion to a biblical text constitutes “an unwavering commitment to biblical interpretation”Footnote ⁹² even in the absence of an epistemic method in which authoritative knowledge could be found in a text, then the concept of “biblical interpretation” has lost all utility as a scholarly tool. If “biblical interpretation” indicates simply that a text uses biblical language, we have already allotted a linguistic primacy to the bible which can only be defended on theological grounds. Further, we have emulsified our sources such that every text, no matter what its generative epistemic method, necessarily “interprets biblical text” if the text has anything to say about Jesus. This would be an absurd position to take, of course. Whatever it is that the Gospel of Truth is doing – even if there are purposeful biblical allusions, invocations, or resonances strewn throughout the text – it is a far cry from what Irenaeus means by biblical interpretation or from the operations that Athanasius performs in reading New Testament texts as an anti-Arian cudgel.

The only thing that can be said with certainty concerning the Gospel of Truth is that a Christian community in Egypt was interested in preserving it in the fourth or fifth century. This is especially intriguing because known Christian communities in late ancient Egypt were, so far as we can tell, more or less uniformly interested in scriptural exegesis, and in textualized forms of truth production. The Gospel of Truth stands in stark contrast, and appears to be inexplicable within a late ancient Egyptian Christian context. And yet, there it was: preaching a message of epistemic certainty that text is no container for truth and espousing an epistemic position that explains in simple terms why it cites no text, carries the name of no author, and appears as a wholly self-contained revelation that is, nevertheless, not Truth.

Conclusion

Marcellus’s error, with which this chapter began, was epistemic. He failed to understand the Roman augur’s methods, and therefore his proposed temple was religiously unacceptable because he did not distinguish between the preceptual truths which he knew – that gods sent signs – and the epistemic truths by which the source of such signs were identified. Some of the authors investigated in this chapter, such as Irenaeus and Tertullian, held to remarkably similar theological precepts even when their opinions differed dramatically about why such precepts were true. With the addition of Justin, these three authors found authoritative text to be a useful ally in making theological arguments, while Ignatius and the author of the Gospel of Truth rejected the idea that textual interpretation could serve as a vector for the production of reliable knowledge. Of those surveyed who reject scriptural interpretation as a central locus of truth production, only the author of the Gospel of Truth was omitted from Jerome’s late fourth-century catalogue of influential Christian men.

I have argued throughout my survey of second- and third-century Christian sources that in the period before the Nicene controversy, those calling themselves “Orthodox” (ὀρθόδοξοι) distinguished between correct and heretical theologies on the basis of preceptual (δοξαστικός) knowledge. Jerome’s list of “eminent men” who contributed to the Orthodox patrimony demonstrates that even in the waning years of the fourth century methodological diversity among “Orthodox” fathers was acceptable, at least among those who lived before the Nicene controversy. In his biography of Ignatius, for instance, Jerome pointedly demonstrates knowledge of the bishop’s letters themselves rather than just stories about the martyr.Footnote ⁹³ But he offers no methodological censure of Ignatius, even though he knew Ignatius’s rejection of scriptural interpretation, and even though he willingly criticized eminent men like Tertullian for theological, preceptual lapses.Footnote ⁹⁴

I turn now to the Nicene controversy, in which the underdetermined nature of scripture led to a schism among Christians who called themselves Orthodox (and “Universal”/καθολικοί). In response to the crisis, Christian scholars came up with new ways of making arguments, and over the course of a generation came to define Orthodoxy in a more expansive manner. Scholars such as Athanasius redefined Orthodoxy not only as a series of preceptual truths, but as a set of preceptual truths arrived at through a newly articulated scholastic method. It was not enough to arrive at common precepts by way of different scholarly practices, as Irenaeus and Tertullian had done generations before. Diversity of method came to the fore as a theological problem among Catholic Christians. Chapter 3 describes the redefinition of Orthodoxy to include both preceptual and epistemic knowledge.