EARL DOHERTY
CROSSING THE THRESHOLD OF HISTORY
Jesus in the Apostolic Fathers at the Turn of the
Second Century
Part One: 1 Clement and the Shepherd of Hermas
Introduction
In other Supplementary Articles,
I have examined the documents of the New Testament outside the Gospels
and Acts, attempting to demonstrate that they make no identifiable link
between the Christ Jesus they worship and preach, and the human figure
Jesus of Nazareth known to us through the Gospels. Paul and other epistle
writers seem to speak of a divine being very similar to aspects of Jewish
personified Wisdom and the Son and Logos in Greek philosophy (as in 1 Corinthians
8:6 and Hebrews 1:2-3), without linking such a being to the Gospel figure
or events. These earliest Christians believe
in a Son of God, not
that anyone in the recent past
was the Son of God. This Son is a
spiritual entity with whom believers enter upon a mystical relationship.
He is an intermediary between heaven and earth, between God and humanity,
between the spiritual and the material realms of the universe. And he is
for most early Christian sects a savior deity who has undergone a sacrifice
for the forgiveness of sins and humanity’s redemption. All these features
are common elements of contemporary religious philosophy and salvation
religions.
Only three passages in the epistles
give the appearance of linking to an earthly, Gospel-like setting. First,
1 Thessalonians 2:15-16 speaks of “the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus,”
but this is part of a passage which makes a clear allusion to the destruction
of Jerusalem, an event which happened after Paul’s death, and many critical
scholars have long regarded it as an interpolation. (See Supplementary
Article No. 3:
Who Crucified Jesus?)
Second, 1 Timothy 6:13 makes
a passing reference to Pilate, but critical scholars in general regard
the Pastorals as the product of the 2nd century, and thus this reference
could reflect an early development of belief in an historical Gospel Jesus.
Also, some scholars see problems in the fit of this reference within its
context, and although none of them opt for interpolation, there are good
arguments to be made for assuming this possibility. (See the Appendix to
Article No. 3:
Who Crucified Jesus?)
Third, the so-called Lord’s Supper
scene in 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 bears a resemblance to the Last Supper
of the Synoptic Gospels. Yet Paul declares (verse 23) that he has received
this information directly “from the Lord” which conflicts with the standard
reading that this is an item of historical tradition about a Eucharist
established by Jesus, a tradition missing in all other first-century documents
outside the Synoptics. This type of sacred meal is very similar to the
sacred meals of the mystery cults, and thus Paul’s Supper may be relegated
to the realm of myth, something he has come up with himself under the influence
of perceived revelation. (See the “Sacred Meal” section of Article No.
6:
The Source of Paul’s Gospel.)
To address two other, minor,
references. The phrase “brother of the Lord” which Paul uses of James in
Galatians 1:19 cannot be demonstrated to mean “sibling of Jesus” and other
considerations argue against it. Finally, Paul’s two little directives
in 1 Corinthians (7:10 and 9:14) which he says he has received “from the
Lord” again suggest personal revelation. Their subject matter is paltry
compared to the vast silence on Jesus’ ethical teachings found throughout
the epistles. (On these and other references see
The
Sound of Silence: Appendix.)
Thus, in the absence of a ministry
of preaching, miracles, apocalyptic prophecy or the events of the Passion
story, nothing in the New Testament epistles can be reliably linked to
the Gospel picture. When this pervasive silence is set alongside the positive
statements the epistle writers
do make, that Christ is a newly revealed
“secret/mystery” of God hitherto hidden for a long period of time, and
that knowledge about him comes from scripture and revelation (e.g., Romans
16:25-26, Colossians 1:26 and 2:2, Ephesians 3:5), that the critical events
and God’s actions in the present age are solely this process of revelation
through the Spirit (e.g., 2 Corinthians 1:22 and 5:5), when it is God who
is spoken of as providing the gospel and appointing apostles (e.g., Romans
1:1, 1 Corinthians 12:28), when it is God who is said to have instituted
the love command and other ethical teachings (e.g., 1 Thessalonians 4:9,
2 John 6 and several times in 1 John), when Paul says that it is he, not
Jesus, who has been given the task of establishing the new covenant (2
Corinthians 3:5), when all the epistle writers speak of Christ being “revealed”
and “manifested” in these final days (e.g, 1 Peter 1:20, Hebrews 9:26),
or of their expectation of Christ’s future appearance on earth, giving
no suggestion that he had already appeared here in the recent past (e.g.,
Hebrews 10:37, 1 Peter 1:7)—then we have a clear picture of a faith movement
that was not started by any figure in living memory, but one based on revelation
and a new interpretation of scripture, all of it governed by the dominant
philosophical and religious ideas of the age.
Finally, in regard to those handful
of human-sounding references to Christ’s “body,” his sacrifice of “blood”
or his activities in the realm of “flesh,” even his characterization as
“man” (as in 1 Corinthians 15 or Romans 5:15), two observations must be
made. First, not one of them makes a link with a recent historical person
or includes a context of historical time and place. Two, these features
can be interpreted in a Platonic manner, in that elements in the material
world had their corresponding higher counterparts (such as Philo’s Heavenly
Man) in the supernatural dimension, the ascending layers of ever purer
spiritual forms and activities in the heavenly realm. Indeed, the salvation
thinking of the day was centered on a system whereby those two portions
of the universe, the spiritual and the material, interacted with one another.
A savior deity could operate entirely in that upper dimension, descending
through its layers to take on an ever-increasing “likeness” to material
forms and thereby undergo death and resurrection, acts which guaranteed
salvation and other benefits for their devotees in the material world.
(See Article No. 3:
Who Crucified Jesus?) The
activities of the Hellenistic savior gods, such as Attis, Adonis and Mithras,
are every bit as human and earthly sounding as those of Paul’s Christ (even
more so, since they have more developed stories), yet they were in this
period placed in the realm of myth in a Platonic upper-world setting, having
evolved out of a more primitive primordial-time conception. There is nothing
to prevent us from viewing Paul’s Christ in just such a setting. (For a
full discussion of this Platonic picture in early Christianity, see Article
No. 8:
Christ As “Man”: Does Paul Speak of Jesus as
an Historical Person? and Article No. 9:
A Sacrifice
in Heaven: The Son in the Epistle to the Hebrews.)
Other features of the Pauline
spiritual Christ were no doubt concluded from scripture, such as the fact
that he was “of David’s stock” in Romans 1:3 (Paul points to the prophets
as his source), or that he was “born of woman” in Galatians 4:4 (probably
from Isaiah 7:14). This was in keeping with the general view, as evidenced
in documents like Hebrews and 1 Clement, that Christ and his activities
were to be found in the sacred writings and that many passages therein
were to be regarded as his “voice.” Scripture was God’s window onto the
unseen, true reality, and the agencies and workings of salvation.
Even some documents extending
into the second century (some of them
well into it) can be shown
not to contain the concept of an historical Jesus, such as 2 Peter (often
dated a decade or two beyond the year 100 CE), and the Pastoral epistles.
(For the former, see Article No. 7:
Transfigured on
the Holy Mountain: The Beginnings of Christianity. On the Pastorals,
see
The Sound of Silence: 1 & 2 Thessalonians,
1 & 2 Timothy and Titus. (See the Sound of Silence files for detailed
discussion of the silences in all the New Testament documents.) Many of
the major apologists writing throughout the second century do not present
an historical Jesus as part of their picture of the faith, and one, Minucius
Felix, goes so far as to scoff at the claim that Christians worship a crucified
man and his cross. (See Main Article No. 6:
The
Second Century Apologists.) Finally, to round out the picture, the
lack of an historical Jesus in the final book of the New Testament, Revelation,
is presented in Supplementary Article No. 11:
The
Gospel According to the Prophet John.
*
Hopefully, the reader has indulged
me this brief overview in preparation for the present article. If so much
of the evidence points to the lack of an historical Jesus in the thinking
of the earliest Christians and an only gradual and piecemeal adoption of
the historicity of the Gospel picture through the course of the second
century, can we follow the evolution of this adoption through some of the
surviving non-canonical documents that covered the critical crossover period
beginning around the turn of the second century? Four of these I regard
as lying on the antecedent side of that ‘threshold of history.’ Two have
been dealt with at some length in other articles and will not be repeated
here: The Odes of Solomon in Article No. 4:
The Odes
of Solomon, and the Didache, whose lack of an historical Jesus I have
argued in my book review of John Dominic Crossan’s
The
Birth of Christianity.
That leaves the epistle 1 Clement
and The Shepherd of Hermas. On the threshold itself lies the Epistle of
Barnabas. And just beyond it, a few steps into the new Christian world
of a Jesus born of Mary and crucified by Pilate, we find the letters of
Ignatius of Antioch. (This does not mean that these documents were necessarily
written in that order.)
Close dating of these documents
is not critical to the argument, nor is the ‘authenticity’ of their authorship.
Nevertheless, these questions will be addressed, particularly in regard
to the dating of 1 Clement. Many radical scholars over more than a century
have called into question the basic authenticity of 1 Clement and the letters
of Ignatius, often relegating them to much later periods, as late as around
160. We know, of course, that the so-called “Longer Recension” of the Ignatian
letters is a later forgery, in which a host of Gospel features have been
inserted (a prime example of the blatant Christian forgery and doctoring
of writings which infests the overall documentary period). But what of
the “Shorter Recension” which has a less detailed and more primitive character?
I’ll address these points without making a firm decision on precisely where
to locate such documents. The main purpose will be to survey the evolution
of certain strands in the picture of the early Christian Son throughout
a period of, say, up to thirty years, probably spanning the last years
of the first century and the first part of the second.
— I —
The Epistle 1 Clement
Considerations of Dating
Traditional mainstream scholarship
has for more than a hundred years tended to date 1 Clement to the 90s of
the first century, sometimes even pinpointing it to the year following
Domitian’s death in 96. This is chiefly on the basis of the somewhat enigmatic
reference in the first sentence to “the sudden and repeated calamities
which have befallen us,” something that has delayed the writer’s attention
to his letter. The assumption has been that this refers to the reputed
persecution of Christians under Domitian in the latter years of his reign.
But the evidence for such a persecution is scant and uncertain, as some
commentators admit. Kirsopp Lake, for example, in the Loeb
Apostolic
Fathers (vol.1, p.5), allows that “we know very little about the alleged
persecution in the time of Domitian, and it would not be prudent to decide
that the epistle cannot be another ten or fifteen years later.” R. M. Grant
(
The Apostolic Fathers, vol.2, p.16, n.1) notes that “little is
known about such persecutions,” while William R. Schoedel in his chapter
“The Apostolic Fathers” (in
The New Testament and Its Modern Interpreters,
p.461), refers to “an important study” by Gerbert Brunner who denies that
1 Clement 1:1 must refer to a persecution. If that is the case,
“a wide range of possible dates for 1 Clement is thus opened up.”
Schoedel suggests, however, that
a date as early as around 69 (put forward by a few commentators, including
recently Alvar Ellegard in his
Jesus—One Hundred Years Before Christ)
is based on “strained” evidence. (I discuss this question in my website
review of Ellegard’s book.) If 1:1 does refer to a persecution, the letter
of Pliny to Trajan around 112 shows that persecution, even if local and
spottily carried out, must have been fairly frequent during the period,
as Pliny asks for advice of an emperor who was expected to have some familiarity
with a general policy on the matter.
Other indications within the
epistle seem to push the date to a point no earlier than the late years
of the century. At least a generation has passed since the time of the
apostles (44:2-3); those who carry the letter to Corinth “have been with
us from youth to old age” (63:3); and the Corinthian church is “ancient”
(47:6). References to Peter and Paul in chapter 5 apparently place them
at some distance from the writer’s time. Thus it is probably a safe compromise
to date 1 Clement sometime in the period 90 to 110. For the purposes of
this article, a more specific date is not necessary. (The position that
the epistle is a much later “forgery” and not what it purports to be, namely
a letter from a Roman congregation to one in Corinth in response to difficulties
being experienced by the latter community, but is instead a mid-second
century product designed to further a later agenda, will be looked at in
the final part of this section.)
On the matter of authorship,
its assignation by late second century commentators like Irenaeus to the
purported third “bishop of Rome” (in line from the apostle Peter), one
Clement of Rome, is today not generally accepted as having much reliability,
but as this question is irrelevant to the present article, I will not spend
space discussing it here. In any case, the picture of the authority structure
in the epistle’s community seems primitive, lacking a strong, monarchical
head. “Bishops” and “presbyters” are almost on the same footing. This,
together with the implication (as in chapter 44) of a not-too-distant link
to the age of the original “apostles” who began the principle of apostolic
succession—if this is not simply a device within the ‘later forgery’ scenario—would
recommend limiting the date of the epistle to a point not too far into
the second century.
Note: I will primarily use the
translation of Maxwell Staniforth in the Penguin Classics edition (though
I have dropped his capital H’s), because he captures a more natural sense
for modern readers than does Kirsopp Lake’s greater formality in the Loeb
edition. But I will occasionally dip into the latter for a more literal
rendition and to make specific points, identifying it as such.
The Nature of Christ in 1 Clement
Whoever the author was, he is
steeped in Jewish traditions and a knowledge of scripture, though this
is of the Greek Septuagint. This no doubt reflects the character of the
Christian community in Rome of which he was a part, although it does not
require that the community was composed primarily of Jews. As R. M. Grant
points out (
The Apostolic Fathers, p.37), much of the tone of the
epistle is Greek, even Stoic, and at the very least it would have to be
styled as belonging to Hellenistic Judaism. But is the author steeped as
well in a knowledge of the historical Jesus? Assuming, quite naturally,
that the community in Corinth could not have been too different in this
respect from the writer’s own, what picture of Jesus do we find in the
key centers of Rome and Corinth around the turn of the second century?
This overlong, rambling letter
is generally regarded as the earliest surviving Christian document which
is not part of the New Testament, although core parts (if not all) of the
Didache and the Shepherd of Hermas may be roughly as old or older. If we
accept the letter at face value, the Corinthian church was experiencing
a dispute over leadership, a younger group rebelling against the authority
of the appointed elders, so someone from the church at Rome wrote a letter
attempting to mediate and restore tranquility. That the circles which 1
Clement represents are approaching the moment when an historical Jesus
was to crystallize in their thought seems evident, even though they have
not quite reached that point. If a 90s dating for the epistle is accurate,
Ignatius’ arrival in Rome to be martyred in the arena lay only a decade
or two in the future. Whether the Roman community itself was in the process
of adopting an historical Jesus by that time we cannot be sure from the
Ignatian epistle to the Romans. (Perhaps Ignatius himself was to bring
them that conviction!)
The claim that the writer of 1 Clement
possessed the concept of a recent historical Jesus may have some grounds
in the letter, but this impression is compromised by other passages which
suggest a different interpretation. Like much early Christian expression,
the main focus by Clement (I will refer to the author by that name) is
on God the Father, his goodness and mercy, his wishes and commandments
(e.g., 29:1, 38:4). In 35:5, the writer fixes his mind “trustfully on God”;
he finds out “what is pleasing and acceptable to him”; he does “whatever
agrees with his perfect will.” Clement’s emotions, his love and respect,
are almost entirely given to God, not to the figure of Christ. The name
“Jesus” is never used by itself, but only in conjunction with “Christ”
or “Lord” and usually as part of the phrase “Our Lord Jesus Christ” or
a variant. When a single name is used, it is always “Christ.” When Clement
focuses on this Christ, he says things like (7:4), “Let us fix our gaze
on the Blood of Christ, and let us know that it is precious to his Father,
because it was poured out for our salvation and brought the grace of repentance
to all the world.” The closest he comes to expressing a feeling toward
him is 21:6: “Let us reverence the Lord Jesus Christ, whose blood was given
for us.” The largely abstract, even formal, way that the writer deals with
the figure of Jesus, taken together with the vast silence on almost every
aspect of an earthly career, does not speak to the memory of a vital historical
figure in their recent past to whom believers feel a close personal and
human bond.
This is not to say that Christ
is not a prominent entity in the epistle. But the relationship between
the Father and Son sounds like an echo of Paul, with his concept of “in
Christ” and “through Christ,” phrases which Clement also uses frequently.
“[We] have fled for refuge to his [God’s] mercies through our Lord Jesus
Christ…” (22.11). Employing other echoes of Paul and Hebrews, Clement says
(36): “…even Jesus Christ, the High Priest by whom our gifts are offered,
and the Protector by whom our feebleness is aided…through him we can look
up to the highest heaven and see, as in a glass, the peerless perfection
of the face of God…through him the Lord permits us to taste the wisdom
of eternity.” Such passages suggest that Clement sees Christ as a spiritual
entity, an intermediary between God and humanity, one who serves as the
revealer of God and his agent of redemption.
Like Paul, too, Christ is joined
to Clement’s community in a mystical way, closely in parallel with God
himself. “Have we not all the same God, and the same Christ? Is not the
same Spirit of grace shed upon us all? Have we not all the same calling
in Christ? Then why are we rending and tearing asunder the limbs of Christ,
and fomenting discord against our own body?” (46:6-7) That all inhabit
the same celestial and spiritual sphere, and share the same nature, seems
evident from 58:2: “As surely as God lives, as Jesus Christ lives, and
the Holy Ghost (on whom are [presumably plural, the Greek is unspecific]
set the faith and hope of God’s elect)…” As with Paul, there is never any
question about having faith that Jesus of Nazareth was in fact the Christ,
or that he rose from the dead in flesh in the Gospel context, or that such
an historical act was indeed an act of redemption. The process of God revealing
himself through Jesus, saving humanity through Jesus’ blood, or even the
“teaching” of Our Lord Jesus Christ himself (which we shall examine presently),
is never related to an earthly, historical setting or human character.
Christ is a present power, not a past personality.
Speaking Through Scripture
How does this Christ communicate
with Christians? Clement seems to give us two different kinds of answer.
One is reminiscent of Hebrews, where the Son was conceived as speaking
through scripture. (See Article No. 9:
The Son in
the Epistle to the Hebrews.) Clement presents the identical view. It
is most clear in chapter 22:
“All these promises [by God] find their confirmation
when we believe in Christ, for it is he himself [i.e., Christ] who summons
us through the Holy Spirit, with the words: ‘Come, children, listen to
me, and I will teach you the fear of the Lord…’ ”
Scripture, as always, is regarded
as “the authentic voice of the Holy Spirit” (45:2), and here the Spirit
speaks a passage from Psalm 34 (11-17). Clement regards these words as
a personal summons from Christ himself. Christ, in the medium of the Spirit,
speaks through the sacred writings, and because of the way Psalm 39 is
phrased, Clement presents the lines as though Christ is telling Christian
readers that he will teach them the fear of the Lord (i.e., God). Christ
is a spiritual entity who communicates with the world through scripture,
and one of his roles is to reveal God. This is in the same vein as the
somewhat more abstract Logos in thought like that of Philo of Alexandria,
a force which serves as the medium to present to the mind of humanity an
otherwise unknowable Deity who dwells in the highest, purely spiritual
realm of heaven. It is similar to the Son and Word in the Odes of Solomon,
a Revealer entity with no sacrificial dimension, also not linked to an
historical figure on earth. And it is close to the “Son of God” in the
Shepherd, as we shall see.
Following the passage in chapter
36 quoted above, in which Jesus Christ provides (in the present time, an
intermediary function) the “glass” through which one can “look up to the
highest heaven and see the peerless perfection of the face of God,” Clement
goes on to say:
“For it is written, ‘He makes his angels into
winds…’ but of the Son the Lord declares, ‘You are my Son, this very day
have I fathered you…’ Again, God says to him, ‘Sit down at my right hand
until I make your enemies a cushion for your feet.’ ”
Like the writer of Hebrews, Clement sees God speaking of
and to the Son in the writings. Scripture is a window onto the heavenly
realm where Father and Son are seen to converse. Like Hebrews, Clement
shows no knowledge of any tradition that some of these words had been spoken
out of heaven to the human Jesus at the time of his baptism at the Jordan.
If Clement regards Christ as
a revealer of God, of his wishes and intentions toward the world, why is
the vast tradition on these subjects attached to the teaching Jesus in
the Gospels never put forward in the epistle? In the two or three passages
in which Clement suggests a teaching Jesus, are these essentially different
from those implying spiritual communication? Defenders of Jesus’ historicity,
of course, claim that they are. Chapter 13 contains the most significant.
(I have slightly altered Staniforth’s translation of the first sentence
to make it closer to the literal Greek.)
“Let us remember the words of the Lord Jesus
which he spoke (elalêsen) when teaching gentleness and longsuffering.
For he said this: ‘Be merciful, that you may obtain mercy. Forgive, that
you may be forgiven. What you do yourself, will be done to you; what you
give will be given to you; as you judge, so will you be judged; as you
show kindness, so it will be shown to you. Your portion will be weighed
out for you in your own scales.’ ”
There is no denying the close similarity
of these sentiments to parts of the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere,
but neither the words nor their sequence are anywhere near identical to
a Gospel passage. Clement’s phrasing, in fact, is pretty basic and smacks
of the field of popular maxims. We know that this type of moral directive
belonged among the ethical commonplaces of the day. (Both the Didache and
Epistle of Barnabas, not to mention Paul and the epistle of James, quote
maxims similar to Jesus’ Gospel teachings which are never attributed to
him.) It is quite possible that such maxims were now regarded by communities
like Clement’s as having been revealed by a heavenly Christ through prophets.
Wherever such directives may have come from, scholars such as R. M. Grant
(
The Apostolic Fathers, vol.1:
An Introduction, p.40) acknowledge
that Clement’s source is probably oral, rather than any written version
of a Gospel. (Grant appeals to Helmut Koester, who is generally regarded
as the leading authority on the subject of the Fathers’ dependence on oral
tradition rather than on written Gospels: see his
Ancient Christian
Gospels, p.14-20.)
That Clement knew any of the
Gospels has never been satisfactorily demonstrated. This in itself is an
indicator that the Gospel of Mark was not likely written as early as 65-70,
or intended as an historical account. For how could one explain why the
prominent Christian community in the capital of the Empire would not have
received a copy of it, or that one of its leaders would not be familiar
with key parts of its text, even after the passage of some three decades?
If Matthew and Luke were both written before 90, this should indicate that
interest and knowledge of the Gospels was spreading throughout Christian
communities. And yet Rome, apparently, has yet to hear of them.
Too much in this epistle indicates
that Clement has no knowledge of important Gospel traditions, even in oral
form. A few verses later, in 14:4, he says: “It is written, ‘the kind-hearted
will inhabit the earth, and the innocent will remain upon it, but the transgressors
will be rooted out of it.’ ” Who does not hear in that first phrase the
ringing opening verses from the Sermon itself, one of those Beatitudes
which surely impressed themselves on all who knew anything of Jesus’ teachings?
Yet Clement introduces these words with “It is written,” referring to scripture;
and in fact he is quoting two verses from Proverbs (2:21-22) to which he
goes on to add several more quotations from the Old Testament.
We read other passages in the
epistle: on giving versus receiving (2:1), on repentance (8:1), on the
promise of resurrection (26:2); yet Clement shows no sign of being aware
that Jesus had said anything on these topics. On repentance, Clement goes
so far as to offer a number of lengthy quotes from God himself found in
scripture, but not a word from Jesus’ own catalogue, as in Mark 1:15 or
Luke 13:3-5. Similarly, Clement appeals to scripture and the ‘sayings’
of God as guarantee of the resurrection, while remaining silent on such
Gospel teachings as Luke 14:14 or Matthew 22:31. He can make direct quotation
of the “promises” of resurrection in 26:2, but they are only God’s words,
not those of Jesus. Clement can offer his own parable of a sower (24:5)
without reminding his readers that Jesus had spoken one, too. In his great
panegyric on Christian love in chapters 48 to 50, he has neither room nor
interest, it seems, to quote Jesus’ own inspiring sayings on the subject.
When Clement urges his readers
to believe that God’s purpose to establish his Kingdom will be accomplished
swiftly, he appeals solely to Old Testament prophecies about the Day of
the Lord, ignoring all of Jesus’ Gospel pronouncements about the coming
End and his own Parousia (arrival at the End time). Indeed, the latter
seems unknown to this writer, despite all the Gospel predictions (as well
as Q’s) about the Son of Man and his imminent coming, for in several passages
(23:5, 34:3, 35:4) Clement speaks only in terms of the more traditional
Jewish expectation of the coming of God himself. Could this writer have
any knowledge of the Gospels and its prominent feature of Jesus’ predicted
return? Could the entire tradition on the Son of Man in Q and the Gospels
have any authenticity in regard to Clement’s Jesus, and Clement be ignorant
of it? How could he be ignorant of oral traditions about Jesus’ imminent
coming or return, if this was a widespread and prominent feature of Christian
expectation, as it surely should have been? In 23:5, Clement addresses
himself to “scripture’s own testimony” that the Day of the Lord is imminent:
“He will surely come quickly; he will not delay,” and “With no warning
the Lord, the Holy One you are expecting, will come to his temple.” Clearly
the expected arrival is that of God, not of Jesus.
In chapter 53, after a long dissertation
on forgiveness, Clement searches for words to sum up his case. They are
not words of Jesus on the cross, but the plea of Moses to God that he forgive
the disobedient Israelites. Clement extols Moses’ benevolence: “What immeasurable
love…a minister speaking up boldly to his Lord and demanding pardon for
the multitude!” Would he have chosen words from the Old Testament had he
known of Luke’s saying?
Now, it has been suggested that
some of these objections on Clement’s silence amount to “straw men.” Jesus’
words on the cross, “Father forgive them…” are found only in Luke, whose
invention they may certainly be. The Beatitude popularly known as “Blessed
are the meek,” to which I have compared Clement’s appeal to Proverbs, appears
only in the Sermon on the Mount, and may be an enlargement by Matthew over
the version appearing in Luke’s Sermon on the Plain. We should not, they
say, expect elements in the Gospels now regarded as unhistorical to be
known to early Christian commentators.
Even if Matthew’s specific beatitude
is confined to him, the general sentiment that the lowly and disenfranchised
will prove to be the inheritors when the Kingdom arrives, that the humble
shall be exalted and the mighty humbled, is a central feature of Jesus’
preaching in the Gospels. Any sentiment in such a direction should have
attracted an attribution to him. In general, however, there is a further
consideration that is consistently overlooked.
If a sectarian movement were
begun, or even regarded as begun, by a famous teacher, it is clear that
teachings on important matters that later arose would be put in his mouth;
that practices later adopted by the sect would be regarded as established
by him; that warnings, predictions of the future, promises to send a Spirit
which authenticates later views, and so on, would be imputed to him. This
can be said to be “clear” because the entire Christian record from Q and
the Gospels onward witnesses to this universal phenomenon of sectarian
behavior. All sorts of sayings and deeds were attributed to Jesus which
critical scholarship now regards as inauthentic.
Clement
should have possessed
some word of Jesus to support key issues like repentance and forgiveness,
the promise of resurrection, the coming of the Kingdom and his own return,
whether in fact a real historical Jesus had said anything about them or
not. Any movement following teachings of an historical figure, and certainly
of the historical Jesus supposedly behind Q and the Gospels, should have
possessed a much richer body of tradition associated with such a figure
than Clement displays. Indeed, his catalogue is threadbare.
Other Silences in the Epistle
Nor does Clement possess traditions
about Jesus raising the dead, which would have been a powerful argument
in urging his readers to believe in the feasibility of resurrection. Q
apparently had such traditions (note Luke/Q 7:22), decades earlier and
they are prolific in the Gospels. How much more powerful would Lazarus
have been than the rather strained example of the phoenix (25) as proof
of God’s intent to resurrect humans? Clement should also have had traditions
about Jesus’ healings. And yet in chapter 59, he makes this appeal to
God:
“Save those of us who are in affliction, have
mercy on the lowly, raise the fallen, show thyself to those in need, heal
the sick, turn again the wanderers of thy people, feed the hungry, ransom
our prisoners, raise up the weak, comfort the faint-hearted.”
If Clement is in the same line as
Q and the Gospels, if he was exposed to those oral traditions we would
regard as mainstream in the early Christian movement, how could he not
know that Jesus had reputedly done many of these very things, and at least
make some passing mention of them? Such mention would be absolutely natural,
even if his readers were familiar with them. Why, indeed, not appeal to
Jesus himself to effect these things in the community now?
Q and the Gospels are also centered
on John the Baptist. Was the latter figure not a part of mainstream Christian
tradition? We would have to think not, to judge by the total body of the
New Testament epistles which never mentions him, nor the baptism of Jesus
himself by John. Clement makes that silence more resounding when he focuses
on those who “went about in sheepskins and goatskins heralding the Messiah’s
coming” (17:1) but leaves out John the Baptist, mentioning only Old Testament
figures like Elijah, Elisha and Ezekiel. His “other famous names” are limited
to Abraham, Moses and David.
Another missing figure is Judas,
when we might expect that treacherous apostle to be offered as an example
of how envy and jealousy had adverse effects on famous figures, this one
Jesus himself. In chapters 4 and 5, Clement itemizes many Old Testament
luminaries who suffered at the hands of betrayers, and follows that up
with the more contemporary examples of Peter and Paul who were “assailed
by envy and jealousy.” On Judas he is silent, as also in 45:7 when telling
of “iniquitous men…who delivered over to torments” the pious and the innocent.
And if martyrdom is in view in chapter 5, why is there no mention of Acts’
Stephen who was stoned for his championing of Jesus by the envious Jews?
But there is a void even more
dramatic in Clement’s apparent knowledge of Jesus’ life. Even without a
written Gospel, his community should have possessed traditions about the
historical event of the crucifixion, about Jesus’ trial and sufferings.
In chapter 16 he presents Christ as a pattern for humility: “The coming
of our Lord Jesus Christ…was in no pomp of pride or haughtiness…but in
self-abasement.” Does he go on to provide his readers with an account of
Jesus’ silence and humility during his trial and crucifixion? This is the
context he wants to present (to judge by the content of the material he
does offer), but he seems to have no details about the historical event
itself, for he simply quotes the entire Suffering Servant song of Isaiah
53 from start to finish, with its references to the servant “who carries
the burden of our sins and suffers pain on our behalf,” who “through all
his ill-treatment…never opened his mouth,” who “was led away like a sheep
to be slaughtered.”
This ‘song’ contains much that
relates to suffering and perhaps even death, and it was the source (in
other circles) of many of the details of the passion story, but it hardly
makes a good substitute for the real thing. Clearly, this was the only
type of repository available to Clement for information about Christ’s
crucifixion. Jesus’ blood sacrifice was known only through scripture. For
how could a Christian center of the stature of Rome, even if it had no
written Gospel, not possess
some traditions, some details about
the historical crucifixion, accurate or not. How could Clement not have
wanted to make use of such details, if only as a supplement to the passage
in Isaiah, which would then have served as a prophecy of the event? Indeed,
we would expect him to call attention to this fact—as the evangelists and
many later Christian writers were to do—that the events had fulfilled the
prophecies, the passages in the sacred writings. No such idea is even hinted
at.
Clement supplements Isaiah 53
with verses from Psalm 22 (7-9), another source for the Gospel scene on
Calvary. Once again he introduces them as Christ himself speaking through
scripture:
“And elsewhere, he himself says: ‘I am…an object
of contempt to the people. All who saw me derided me, they spoke with their
lips, nodding their heads and saying, He set his hopes on the Lord; let
him deliver him…’ ”
These words from the Psalm are presented as Christ telling
of his experiences through scripture. But again, where is the comparison
with history? Did the fixation on comparing the “historical record” found
in tradition and the Gospels with the “prophecies” in the Old Testament
begin only after Clement? (It will be found in a very primitive form in
the epistle of Barnabas.) Would one of the heads of the church at Rome,
by the end of the first century, not have been aware of any tradition,
such as in Matthew 27:39-43, that people witnessing Jesus’ crucifixion
had, in fulfillment of prophecy, acted and spoken exactly like the words
of the Psalm?
The long passage from Isaiah
53 is introduced with these words: “…as the Holy Spirit spoke (
elalêsen)
concerning him, saying…” As in Hebrews, the significance of this is evident.
Clement knows Jesus was humble because the Holy Spirit, in scripture, tells
him so. (Barnabas, we shall see, still shares this attitude.) The sacred
writings are not the prophecy of an historical Christ’s life; history does
not fulfill scripture. The quotations Clement offers are not used as “proof-texts,”
confirming or illuminating historical events. History is never interpreted
in the light of the scriptures, a practice later commentators such as Justin
were to revel in. Rather, for Clement, scripture is itself the embodiment
of the Christ event. Christ inhabits the higher spiritual world and scripture
provides a window onto it. When Clement sums up in chapter 16 by saying,
“See what an example we have been given” (of the Lord’s humility), he is
pointing squarely to Christ’s activities in this spiritual realm as seen
through the sacred writings, not to any events in Palestine some three-quarters
of a century earlier, events to which he never casts a glance. The example
is in scripture itself, and this Suffering Servant is equated with Christ,
not a prophecy of him.
Teaching and Remembering
It should be noted that the Holy
Spirit in chapter 16 “spoke” (
elalêsen) using the same verb
with which Christ was said to speak when “teaching” in chapter 13, to which
we can now return. In view of the extremely limited nature of any such
teaching by Jesus known to Clement, and his preponderant reliance on scripture,
we are entitled to see the passage as a string of maxims which are viewed
as coming from the spiritual Christ, somewhat as Paul’s “words of the Lord”
(1 Corinthians 7:10 and 9:14) are regarded by one stream of scholarship
as perceived communications from Christ in heaven. (For example, Werner
Kelber,
The Oral and the Written Gospel, p.206; Rudolf Bultmann,
History
of the Synoptic Tradition, p.127. Such scholars, of course, acknowledge
these ‘dominical sayings’ of early Christian prophetic practice, but style
it as communication from the “Risen Christ” after his departure from the
world. But it is never presented in those terms by any epistle writer.)
A similar situation would fit
the other passage (46:8) in which words are given to Jesus:
“Remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he
said: ‘Woe to that man, it would have been a good thing for him if he had
never been born, instead of upsetting one of my chosen ones. It would be
better for him to be pitched into the sea with a millstone hung round him,
than to lead a single one of my chosen astray.’ ”
This quote, similar to a conflation of Synoptic sayings (e.g.,
Matthew 18:6, Mark 9:42), has all the ring of an admonition thundered out
by some early Christian prophet, claiming to speak in the name of Christ,
or perhaps simply of God. Clement may know it from some body of inspired
pronouncements, passed on as “words of the Lord Jesus.”
The idea that gods “teach” is
a universal phenomenon in the world’s religions. Clement’s use of the term
“when teaching” need imply no more than this. Other Christian epistles
reflect this idea. In 1 Thessalonians 4:9, Paul says (astonishingly) that
“You are taught
by God to love one another” (my italics). In 1 John
2—possibly written around the same time as 1 Clement—the writer declares
that “all knowledge” has come from the sect’s ‘anointing’ ceremony, which
is the gift of “the Holy One” (God). In the Roman community, some body
of teaching is now being imputed to the heavenly Christ, as reflected in
Clement’s reference to “the precepts of Christ” in 49:1. We should note
that in chapter 22 (quoted above) the writer presents, through the words
of Psalm 34, Christ as offering to “teach”—using the same verb as in chapter
13—the fear of the Lord, and this is presented as a teaching in and through
scripture. In other words, through spiritual channels from a spiritual
source.
The use of the word “remember”
in Clement’s introduction to these two passages is commonly claimed to
be an indication of the practice of remembering and passing on the words
spoken by Jesus in his ministry, and so it can be used in other literature.
But such tradition and terminology could exist within any context of adhering
to a body of teaching, and there seems no reason to exclude teaching proceeding
from a revelatory or prophetic source. Compare two other epistle passages.
In Hebrews 2:1-4, the author speaks of the revelatory experience in the
sect’s past—probably marking its beginning. (That it is a revelation he
is referring to and not the ministry of Jesus, I have argued in Article
No 7:
Transfigured on the Holy Mountain). He urges
his readers to “pay heed” to what they have learned. In the 1 John passage,
the readers’ knowledge, which they acquired “at the start” from the Father,
is to be “kept in their hearts,” just as Clement reminds the Corinthians
that Christ’s word has been “stored in their hearts.” In any case, the
point may be moot. How else was Clement to express himself in these passages?
In speaking of “remembering,” he is simply urging his readers to recall
to mind certain teachings attributed to “the Lord Jesus” which are pertinent
to the arguments he is making. There is no context of discussion about
passing on tradition here, and too much is read into a simple word used
in a simple manner.
It has also been noted that in
those passages reputed to be the words of Christ on earth the past tense
is used, whereas in other cases it is the present tense. But this overlooks
the governing distinction. All other instances of “saying” by God or Christ
are taken from the bible. Scripture is an ever-existing, concrete repository
of ongoing revelation. The voice of Christ speaks every time they are read.
Not so with ethical maxims regarded as proceeding from or revealed by Christ.
They exist only in oral form, coming out of the past, presumably through
supposed revelations made to someone connected with the movement, and thus
the use of the past tense would be natural.
One final point in this connection.
The distinction has been noted that only in the case of the two quoted
words of a teaching Jesus, together with 32:2’s reference to “
kata sarka”
(to be examined later), does the identification “the Lord Jesus” appear.
These are the only instances in which the word “Christ” is not used in
conjunction with “Jesus.” It may be difficult to say why this particular
combination of terms appears only in these cases, but two suggestions do
not commend themselves. One is that it represents a lower or more primitive
christology derived from oral tradition. Yet any use of the title “Lord”
cannot be spoken of as low or primitive. “Lord” is one of the titles previously
given to God alone, and as such is more exalted even than “Christ” which
simply means an anointed one, traditionally applied to a human figure.
(This is not to say that in early Christian thought it has not been pressed
into service as a name for the faith’s divine salvation figure or aspect
of God.)
The second is the claim that
the similarity of the maxims in chapter 13 to those of the preaching movement
which produced Q (and the related earlier stratum of the Gospel of Thomas)
should tie Clement’s tradition to that milieu, where the likelihood of
an historical teaching Jesus is allegedly strong. But this fails to work
as well. The Q tradition never speaks of its Jesus as “Lord” or “Christ.”
These terms appear in neither document. Nor does that tradition speak of
a salvific role for the Jesus we can see in the final stages of Q, let
alone of his death and resurrection. All those elements found in 1 Clement
are notably missing from the Q tradition. On the other hand, Clement lacks
the prominent Q element of the Son of Man expectation, and he never expresses
any of the more distinctive ethics of the Sermon on the Mount derived from
Q, such as “love your enemies.”
Thus it is
less likely
that Clement stands in the line of the Q tradition. And when one considers
that the maxims which appear in chapter 13 are little more than expansions
on the Golden Rule, an ancient and widespread idea, such similarity to
the Q dimension ceases to be either surprising or significant. Preaching
of the imminent Kingdom of God was also widespread at this time.
A Chain of Apostolic Authority
But there is one important passage
in 1 Clement which allegedly supports the case for the writer’s belief
in an historical Jesus. It comprises an appeal to the idea of apostolic
tradition, a chain of authority that began at the onset of the movement
and now culminates in those leaders whom the rebels in Corinth have challenged.
Clement uses this apostolic chain to argue for the illegitimacy of the
rebels’ actions. Yet even in this passage there are anomalies and silences
which are almost universally overlooked.
Here is the first part of chapter
42, as translated by Kirsopp Lake:
“The Apostles received the Gospel for us from
the Lord Jesus Christ, Jesus the Christ was sent from God. The Christ therefore
is from God and the Apostles from the Christ. In both ways, then, they
were in accordance with the appointed order of God’s will. Having therefore
received their commands, and being fully assured by the resurrection of
our Lord Jesus Christ, and with faith confirmed by the word of God, they
went forth in the assurance of the Holy Spirit preaching the good news
that the Kingdom of God is coming.”
1 Clement 42 is probably the earliest
example in Christian correspondence of the idea of tracing authority and/or
doctrine back to earlier periods in an authoritative chain. This is something
that even Ignatius lacks, as do the Johannine epistles. But what is it
that the writer is tracing back to?
It would be instructive to compare
this passage with Revelation 1:1-3:
“This is the revelation of Jesus Christ, which
God gave to him to show his servants what must soon take place, and he
[Christ] sent it through his angel to his servant John who, telling everything
he saw, has borne witness to the word of God and the testimony of Jesus
Christ.” [Conflating parts of the NIV and the NEB]
God makes a revelation to Jesus,
who in turn communicates it through an angel to the prophet John. John,
in setting it all down in writing, is passing on Christ’s revelation to
him. The figure of Christ communicates entirely through spiritual, revelatory
channels. For John, Christ is an exclusively heavenly figure, a portrayal
consistent throughout Revelation. (See Article No. 11:
Revelation:
The Gospel According to the Prophet John.)
If John is an apostle of the
Christ, he would claim to have derived his preaching authority and message
from Christ—through an angel—while Christ in his turn has received
his
message from God, both spiritual channels. I suggest that this is precisely
the pattern we see in 1 Clement (a work, by the way, probably close in
time to the writing of Revelation, which is most often dated in the 90s.)
Verse 42:1 says that Jesus the
Christ was sent from God. The root verb “sent” is used many times throughout
Christian epistles in contexts which imply a spiritual sending. It is the
same verb used—including by Clement—to talk of the sending of the Holy
Spirit. There is nothing in this epistle which says that Jesus preached
the Kingdom of God while on earth. In fact, it is notably lacking. Verse
1 says that the apostles received their gospel from the Lord Jesus Christ
in a chain clearly stated: the message passed from God to Christ, then
from Christ to the apostles. The apostles go out preaching the good news
as though they are the first to carry the message. There is a notable silence
on any idea that such a message had previously been preached by Christ
himself, to a much wider audience than the apostles themselves. God tells
Christ, Christ tells the apostles, the apostles tell the world. It is the
same narrow sequence as in Revelation.
And in Paul. In Galatians 1:12
Paul speaks of receiving his gospel—the gospel of God, as he and other
epistle writers style it—through a revelation of Jesus Christ (which could
mean “from” or “about” Christ). The Son has been revealed ‘in and through’
himself (Gal. 1:16), and he is passing it on through his preaching message.
Nothing prevents us from interpreting Clement’s meaning in the same revelatory
way, especially as at the beginning of the next chapter he proceeds to
eradicate any sense of a physical commissioning of the apostles by Jesus
in his ministry: “And what wonder is it if those who were in Christ, and
were entrusted by God with such a duty, established those who have been
mentioned?”
First of all, the phrase “in
Christ” is suspiciously like the Pauline motif “in/through Christ” which
(regardless of whether one believes he knew an historical Jesus or not)
meant the spiritual presence of the heavenly Christ within people or situations.
It is very suggestive of the mystical cult atmosphere found in Paul, which
I maintain is devoid of an historical Jesus. More importantly, if the writer
of 1 Clement just had in mind Jesus’ commissioning of the apostles, either
during his ministry or following the resurrection in flesh, it is hardly
likely he would have reverted to saying that the apostles were “entrusted
by God” with their mission. If, however, Christ were simply a spiritual
force acting as God’s channel, and not the object of human memory, expressing
things this way would be understandable.
Christ’s Resurrection
Before pursuing Clement’s chain
of authority argument further, let’s go back to the idea of the resurrection,
as alluded to in 42:3. Most translations, of course, assume the Gospel
background and imply that the apostles went out to preach full of encouragement
having just witnessed Jesus’ return from the grave. But is this overlooking
a more natural meaning in the text itself? The verb for “fully assured”
(
plêrophoreô) implies “filled with confidence, faith,
determination, etc.” (colloquially, “pumped up”), but it is followed by
the preposition “
dia” which means “on account of, by reason of”).
This is general enough to make possible the meaning that the apostles were
filled with confidence at the thought of the resurrection, in the sense
of an article of faith. In fact, this is the sense in which Ignatius uses
this verb and idea in the opening of his epistle to the Philadelphians,
where he says that his readers “have sure and certain conviction in the
resurrection of our Lord”; and it is used in the same sense in the enumeration
of Jesus’ biographical elements in Magnesians 11.
But there is more to support
the meaning of ‘convinced by faith.’ Following on the statement that the
apostles are “fully assured by/on account of the resurrection,” the writer
adds that they are “filled with faith in the word of God.” What is it that
they feel an assured belief in, if not the resurrection just referred to?
That such a thing is designated “the word of God” would indicate that this
is in fact an article of faith, the product of revelation, and not something
known through eyewitness. (This second phrase has been curiously dropped
from Staniforth’s Penguin translation.)
Paul, too, confesses his and
others’ conviction of Jesus’ resurrection in terms suggesting faith, not
historical eyewitness, as in Romans 10:9 and 1 Thessalonians 4:14. And
in 1 Corinthians 15:12-15, in urging the assurance of resurrection on his
readers, Paul declares that if there is no general resurrection, then Christ
himself cannot have been raised, and he and other apostles have been lying
about what God has said. This implies that the source of what Paul preaches
about the resurrection of Jesus has come from God, not from history and
tradition. In other words, it is an article of faith, revealed from divine
sources.
The whole passage in 1 Clement
42:1-3 seems to be saying this: the apostles, having received the gospel,
by (spiritual) revelation from God through Christ, and pumped up by the
thought of the resurrection of Christ and fully believing God’s word (through
revelation or scripture) that it was true, set out to preach to the world
(which hears it for the first time) the coming Kingdom of God.
Appointment of Apostles
After saying that the apostles
had gone out, having been “entrusted by God” to preach the Kingdom, Clement
goes on to provide further evidence that he intended no picture of Christ
commissioning apostles during an earthly ministry. The main purpose of
Clement’s letter is to impress upon the rebel Corinthians that they must
accept the authority of their appointed elders, and he marshals all manner
of evidence, mostly drawn from scripture, to support the principle of this
authority. While there may be some distinction of roles between appointed
apostles and appointed bishops and deacons, this passage (chapters 42-44)
is one in which Clement is addressing the concept of delegation—from God
through Christ to the apostles. The flow of thought, right up to 44:3,
indicates that the God-Christ-apostles chain is being extended through
the apostles’ appointment of bishops and deacons in the communities they
converted. Clement goes on to search for a sacred foundation for the legitimacy
of these appointments. He finds a foundation and precedent in the books
of Moses and the prophets, where those figures under divine guidance set
down instructions for such proceedings. For proof that appointment of church
ministers is inviolable, Clement has recourse to Moses’ appointment of
Aaron and a prophecy in Isaiah.
But a missing precedent should
be evident: the record of Jesus’ personal appointment of the Twelve (or
however many) and their authority to do everything in his name. Where are
the words he would have spoken on such an occasion—even if developed in
later church imagination? Where is Matthew’s directive to Peter himself—supposedly
the first bishop of Clement’s own community, which would have seized on
any such tradition—that here was the rock upon which the church was to
be built, giving Peter powers to bind and loose? If the Roman community
possessed no tradition of the dramatic appointment of Peter (because it
was an invention of the Matthean evangelist and his community somewhere
in Syria, and perhaps at this time not yet set down on paper), I have argued
earlier that the Roman church should not have failed to preserve or develop
specific traditions concerning Jesus’ teachings and directives, and this
would include an appointment of apostles. The very occurrence of situations
which this epistle addresses would guarantee such a thing.
Even given the technical distinctions
between apostles and community leaders, one would think that such precedents
as these, such foundations of authority, would have struck Clement as pertinent
and would have accompanied his scriptural arguments. The bare reference
in chapter 42 will not do, as we have already seen; further, because there
are none of the particulars we would expect if this represented a tradition
of appointment on earth by Jesus. Look at the details Clement supplies
in the matter of Moses in the next chapter.
Finally, Clement rounds off his
discussion here (chapter 44) with this statement: “Our apostles also knew,
through (
dia) our Lord Jesus Christ, that there would be dissensions
over the title of bishop.” This would be an odd way of expressing the idea
that Jesus during his ministry or resurrection appearances had given the
apostles this forecast, but perfectly natural if the meaning is of a revelation
gained from the spiritual Christ. As Lightfoot points out (
The Apostolic
Fathers, vol.1, p.398), “
dia” is frequently used by Clement
to denote the mediatorial channel which Christ in heaven represents; “
dia
toutou” (through him) occurs five times in chapter 36 alone with precisely
this meaning. The plain sense of the statement quoted above in 44:1 is
one of communication from the heavenly Jesus. If so, since it ties itself
(through the word
kai) to what has come previously, this casts the
same meaning back upon the entire discussion about the apostles and their
commission from God through Christ. We may say that given such a meaning,
no thought of an historical Jesus can be present in the writer’s mind,
for the first apostles of Christ were not likely to have been characterized
as being appointed in any other way than by the earthly Jesus himself.
A century ago, bishop Lightfoot,
a British clerical scholar, made this perceptive comment (
op.cit.,
p.398): “To Clement Jesus is not a dead man whose memory is reverently
cherished or whose precepts are carefully observed, but an ever living,
ever active Presence, who enters into all the vicissitudes of Clement’s
being.” What Lightfoot is saying, inadvertently, is that there is no sign
in Clement’s mind of the historical Jesus who said and did things in the
past, no sign of a now-dead human being who was supposedly the foundation
of his present faith. For Clement and his predecessors, Jesus was no historical
person but an ever-living spiritual being who provides a channel to God
and the means for salvation. Deities in heaven have ever filled this role,
and until the Gospels came along, this Son of the Jewish God in the spiritual
realm was all anyone believed in or needed.
That said, one should reemphasize
the observation made earlier, that Clement’s thoughts and emotions are
mainly theocentric, and that Lightfoot may be exaggerating the role Jesus
plays for the writer of this epistle. After outlining all the promises
and indicators that the Creator has supplied to give us assurance of resurrection
(26), Clement’s devotion and love remain on God, and are expressed for
him alone: “Seeing then that we have this hope, let us knit fast our souls
to him who is ever true to his word and righteous in his judgements…let
us rekindle the ardour of our belief in him…” And only a few verses later
(29), it is God “we must approach…in holiness of spirit, lifting up pure
and undefiled hands to him in love for the gracious and compassionate Father
who has chosen us to be his own.” Even in the little ‘ode’ to love in chapter
49, which echoes 1 Corinthians 13, the writer speaks only of “love for
God,” and that “love binds us fast to God,” while the passage at the end
of this chapter, the only seeming reference in the epistle to Christ’s
love for us, is in fact grammatically ambiguous, and may be saying, “…because
of the love
he [God, as God is the only one hitherto referred to]
bore us, our Lord Jesus Christ, at the will of God, gave his blood for
us, flesh [
sarx] for our flesh, his life [
psychê, literally,
soul] for our lives.”
“Kata Sarka”
This reference to “flesh” will
lead us to consider one further passage in 1 Clement. Those who maintain
that the writer does indeed envision an historical Jesus say it constitutes
a fly in the ointment. Verse 32:2 refers back to the reference to Jacob
in the preceding chapter:
“For it is from him [Jacob] that all the priests
and Levites who minister at God’s altar have since descended. From him,
too, according to the flesh, has come the Lord Jesus. From him there have
issued kings and princes and rulers, in the line of descent from Judah.”
Actually, none of the English words of descent or coming
appear in the Greek, which is literally “From him, the priests/Lord Jesus/kings
and princes…” The reference to Jesus is a bare one: “From him, according
to the flesh [
kata sarka], the Lord Jesus.” Again, let’s consider
the nature of this statement. It makes no perceivable connection to the
Gospel figure, and its context is scriptural. And once again, it uses that
curiously stereotyped and cryptic phrase found throughout early Christian
correspondence:
kata sarka or
en sarki, or sometimes just
the dative
sarki: “in, according to, in relation to,” perhaps even
“in the realm of, the flesh.” (See the discussion on this terminology and
its appearances in the epistles in
The Sound of
Silence: Appendix.)
Beginning in Ignatius and coming
to full flower in Justin and just about everyone beyond, discussion of
Jesus and his life is put in unmistakably human, historical terms, based
on the Gospels. The phrase “
kata sarka” is no longer pressed into
service. What force, what mode of thinking, led every earlier letter writer
to speak of Jesus, a more vivid and recent figure in their past than he
was to men like Justin, in such an obscure and non-committal way, devoid
of all sense of circulating historical tradition? We might accept it as
a quirk of expression if such a thing stood beside other, more natural
expressions of a recent human figure and his life story. But this is all
we get, from Paul and the christological hymns, to 1 Clement at the end
of the century, and even beyond.
In Romans 1:3, the Son is “
kata
sarka” of David’s stock, which Paul identifies as part of the gospel
of God about his Son found in the prophets. In Romans 9:5, the reference
is almost identical to that in 1 Clement: “and from whom [the patriarchs]
the Christ, according to the flesh [
kata sarka].” In the hymn of
1 Timothy 3:16 (which may be earlier than the rest of the epistle), the
“mystery” of the faith is that Christ Jesus was “manifested/ revealed in
flesh [
en sarki]” with no other activities on earth stated. Even
in referring to “the days of his flesh” in Hebrews 5:7, Christ’s activities
are based on scripture. 1 Peter 3:18 has Christ “put to death in the flesh
[
sarki]”—and raised “in the spirit,” as does the 1 Timothy hymn.
(1 Peter, as in 1 Clement 16, describes Christ’s sufferings (2:22) by paraphrasing
Isaiah 53, silent on any historical traditions found in the Gospels.)
This strange and universal pattern
of expression in almost the first hundred years of Christian letter writing
(and more formal treatises like Hebrews) cannot be dismissed out of hand.
It is part of a clearly perceptible evolution throughout the documentary
record from silence on a human, Gospel figure to the gradual integration
of such a figure and story into Christian thinking. In the earliest period,
the use of a phrase like “
kata sarka” represented a philosophical
concept. It refers to the theoretical state which divinities inhabited
or entered when they performed their work of redemption, when they lived
out the elements of their myths. “Flesh” and “spirit” were the great opposites
within the view of the universe held during the centuries dominated by
Platonism and other mystical philosophies. The former was the world of
humanity, the latter the realm of Deity. The whole tradition of myth said
that certain gods and supernatural beings in their dealings with humanity
took on human form—sometimes it is explicitly stated that it is only a
“likeness” to that form—and underwent human-like activities. In any system
where the saving deity suffered, he had to leave the more spiritual layers
of heaven and do so within a human setting. For the early Christians, “flesh”
was the commonest designation for that setting, but this encompassed a
number of the universe’s levels, including the lowest spirit layer of the
air, which possessed characteristics very like the level of matter and
were inhabited by evil spirits with corporeal type ‘bodies.’ (These matters
are discussed at length, with references, in Articles No. 3 and No. 8.)
In early Christian circles, a
further element was introduced and this was the Jewish scriptures. The
concept of a divine “Messiah” had evolved out of this body of writing and
tradition, and aspects of such a figure in scripture had to be applied
to the new savior god Christ Jesus: thus, all these “descents” from David
or the patriarchs or the line of Judah, or even from the “woman” of Isaiah
7:14. In the early literature, when Christ comes to the “sphere of flesh”
he does only what scripture tells of him. To convey the idea, the stock
formula “
kata sarka” and its variants was apparently developed,
woolly at best because it had no historical foundation on which to base
itself. But it conformed to that flesh/spirit dichotomy of prevailing thought
about the workings of the universe. And the phrase itself is ambiguous
enough that it could encompass the connotation of referring to acts that
have an
effect on the human dimension, so that in some instances
it may entail only the thought of being or acting “in relation to the flesh.”
This more general application is seen in Paul’s use of kata sarka in 2
Corinthians 5:16 (in the NEB translation): “With us, therefore,
worldly
standards have ceased to count in our estimation of any man…” As well
as of Christ, whose “flesh” here is not in view.
Postscript: Could 1 Clement Be a Mid-Second Century
‘Forgery’?
Since the days of the Dutch Radicals
(such as W. C. Van Manen), the ‘authenticity’ of 1 Clement has been called
into question, much more than in regard to its author or specific occasion.
While the letter purports to be a reaction by a Roman community to vicissitudes
in Corinth, such alternate interpretations regard it as something written
at a later date, 140 to 160 perhaps, using the scenario of discord at Corinth
to provide a homily with a different, broader agenda. That agenda is seen
as relating to the issue of authority, and is most often characterized
as reflecting the Roman Church’s developing ambition to exercise some form
of authority over the wider Christian community.
In the convoluted world of early
Christianity and its complex documentary record, one has to admit that
almost anything is possible. Cases have been made for the mid-second century
provenance of 1 Clement, and it would be foolhardy to say that they have
no merit. Thus, I am not going to argue at length over the issue here,
but simply offer observations that lead me to believe it is unlikely.
First, if the letter is not what
is presented on the surface, an “agenda” must be in mind. Whatever that
agenda is thought to be, there must be fairly obvious indicators in the
text which throw a spotlight on it. If the ‘forger’ intends his creation
as support for a claim of authority by some body such as the Roman church,
the elements in the letter which argue this cannot be so subtle as to be
virtually undistinguishable. And we know from experience that Christian
forgers and interpolators are rarely subtle, which is why their handiwork
is usually so easily identifiable. The issues and agendas they are addressing
are right there in plain view (as, for example, in the Pastorals). In 1
Clement, the issue of some centralized authority beyond the appointed elders
of any individual community is nowhere in evidence.
No mention is made of the rebels
in Corinth submitting to an outside group; guidance is all that is being
offered by the writer. He focuses on the “rivalry and dissension” (63)
within the Corinthian community, not on any failure to render obedience
to some larger network. The epistle never implies that Corinth owes fidelity
to Rome. In 56:1, the writer urges that the rebels “surrender themselves,
not to us but to the will of God.” In chapter 65, the writer is praying
for “news of the truce and unity” in Corinth, nothing else. He has certainly
made his epistle one of unconscionable length and repetition of its main
themes, but there is no compelling reason to see this as any more than
an expression of his own volubility, along with perhaps a measure of vanity
in demonstrating his knowledge of scripture.
If even the subtlest agenda advancing
Roman authority were in the mind of the writer, we would surely not encounter
the situation we see in chapter 5. Later Roman claims were heavily based
on Peter and Paul’s precedent in having come to Rome, both of them to be
martyred there, the former to become its first bishop and establish a chain
of authority that would culminate in the Papacy. But Clement, in discussing
Peter and Paul’s activities, is maddeningly vague, if not completely silent,
on such later traditions. He does not even state clearly that either of
these apostles ended their lives in martyrdom, and certainly there is no
mention of Rome as the place of such events. In fact, his statement that
“after reaching the furthest limits of the West, and bearing his testimony
before kings and rulers, he passed out of this world…” might even imply
that the legend of Paul as it then stood was that he had died in the distant
west of the empire. There is no sense that Clement is familiar with the
last days of Paul as portrayed in Acts.
As for Peter, the writer’s failure
to play up any martyrdom in Rome, and his complete silence on any connection
of the apostle to that city, let alone that he had been its first bishop,
not only belies later Petrine tradition on such things, it makes it impossible
to believe that this writer has any concept of Roman hegemony, since Peter’s
role in support of this would be something he could not have passed up.
In this connection, we should note Ignatius’ silence on any linkage of
Peter and Paul to Rome in his epistle to the Romans (4:3), even when he
refers to them by name while discussing his impending martyrdom. In fact,
the contrast he draws between himself and those illustrious figures virtually
rules out the later traditions about their martyrdom. “They were apostles,
and I am a condemned criminal,” is not something he would likely have said
if both Peter and Paul met the same kind of fate (execution) in Rome which
Ignatius is on his way to. “They were free men, and I am still a slave,”
(the latter not meant literally) makes no sense if both men were no freer
than Ignatius in the concluding stages of their lives.
Second, the lack of reference—indeed,
knowledge, as I have argued—concerning an historical Jesus in the epistle
of Clement, makes it difficult to place it in the mid-second century, especially
in a community such as Rome. Even though the record of the second century,
from Apostolic Fathers to apologists, indicates that acceptance of an historical
Jesus progressed gradually and unevenly, if any community was at the forefront
of that development, it was Rome. Justin testifies to that, and so does
everything we think we know about Marcion. He came to Rome sometime around
140, adopted a gnostic view of Jesus and formed what was probably the first
canon of documents (ten epistles of Paul and an Ur-Luke) to make his case
about Jesus’ preaching of the true God. And since the Roman scene, as the
mid-second century arrived, was characterized by the Marcion-orthodoxy
conflict, any letter written at that time with a ‘hidden’ agenda would
surely have wanted to focus on the burning issue of the day, perhaps purporting
to find ammunition from the earlier period to counter Marcion’s gnostic
threat. Of the latter, there is not a hint in 1 Clement.
One of the issues in the struggle
with Marcion and gnosticism was that between the principle of ecclesiastical
authority and the less-structured attitudes of gnostic spirituality and
individual self-reliance, but even of this no sign can be detected in Clement.
The rebel community is not one that resists authority structures in principle,
since the community was previously in harmony; there is no sign that any
faction come out of a different background, and the writer does not argue
from the perspective of conflict with gnostic standards (as Paul might
be said to do in parts of his Corinthian epistles). To observe that 1 Clement’s
advocacy of appointed authority in the community is general enough to apply
to a range of situations, and that it was indeed used in the later second
century to support orthodox positions, does not demonstrate that it was
designed to do so, especially when the specifics of those situations are
conspicuously absent.
There is no particular reason
to believe that the epistle was later written in some more distant Christian
community, one that was far from these issues and from the knowledge of
an historical Jesus, with the letter being cast in the Rome to Corinth
scenario simply as a vehicle. But even if this were so, it would still
mean that the only ‘agenda’ in view would be the one the letter puts forward:
obey the elders in your community who have been appointed over you. Since
this would involve no issue of centralized authority beyond the community
itself, and since the picture of that communal hierarchy is a primitive
one, nowhere near the “monarchical bishop” model we find later (or even
the one advocated by Ignatius), there would be no compelling reason to
date such a ‘forgery’ to the mid-second century. Such an epistle could
as easily come from the end of the preceding century, even if we are not
in a position to prove it.
Thus, whether the epistle is
what it purports to be, or is simply someone else’s homily on community
harmony and government cast in a Rome-to-Corinth setting, nothing changes
in our analysis of the epistle and its knowledge of an historical Jesus.
Since the more primitive nature of its environment and thought would tend
to mitigate against a later provenance, there seems little justification
in rejecting it as providing a window onto the period under examination.
— II —
The Shepherd of Hermas
The Shepherd of Hermas is the
longest and probably least familiar surviving Christian document before
Justin. It seems to have taken shape over a few decades in the early second
century, involving perhaps three different authors. Editing is evident
and ideas are not always consistent throughout. Later tradition identified
the author as “Hermas” (the name given to the recipient of the visions),
who was regarded as the brother of Pius, bishop of Rome around 148 CE.
But most if not all of the work was likely written before that time. Some
scholars have even placed it in the late first century, which would fit
its primitive theology and predominantly Jewish character.
F. L. Cross, for example (
The
Early Church Fathers, p.24), dates the Shepherd to the end of the first
century, due to its crude theology, undeveloped church organization and
the overall primitiveness of the work. R. M. Grant (
The Apostolic Fathers:
An Introduction, p.85) notes that the Muratorian list’s assignment
of the work to the bishopric of Pius after 140 “does not explain how Pius
could be bishop of Rome if presbyters and bishops were practically identical
and those called presbyters governed the church.” He subscribes to the
view that the Shepherd is a composite work, with earlier parts coming soon
after the accession of Trajan (97 CE). Simon Tugwell (
The Apostolic
Fathers, p.63) agrees that the post-140 dating is problematic and opts
for the 60s or 70s of the first century. All of them accept a Roman provenance.
The work is a series of revelations
to Hermas by angelic and other celestial figures. One of these is “the
shepherd,” angel of repentance, which gives the writing its name. The book
is divided into three large sections: 5 Visions, 12 Commandments, and 10
Parables. The genre is apocalyptic. The author’s central concern is the
question of sin after baptism: is forgiveness available to Christians for
sins committed following their conversion? Hermas argues that repentance
is still possible—though only once.
This is indeed a strange Christian
document. For all its length, the names of Jesus and Christ are never used.
(The sole appearance of “Christ” in one manuscript of the second Vision,
in 2:8, is thought to be a later emendation of “Lord”—meaning God—which
appears in other manuscripts of the passage.) Instead, the writer refers
to the “Son of God.” He is by no means the central figure, however; once
again, this is a thoroughly theocentric piece of writing. “Lord” is always
God. The author speaks of glorifying the name of God (Vision 3, 4:3); those
who suffer persecution do so for the name of God (Vision 3, 5:2). It is
the ordinances of God which must be kept (Vision 1, 1:6).
It is difficult to believe that
this author could have possessed any sense of a Jesus on earth who began
the Christian movement. Hermas treats the “church,” the body of believers,
as a mystical entity. It is God himself who has created the church (Vision
1, 1:6), including its pre-existent prototype in heaven. There is constant
reference to the “elect of God,” with no tradition in sight of a church
established by Jesus. Nothing which could fit the Gospel ministry is referred
to. The central section, the Commandments (or Mandates), discusses a great
number of moral rules, some resembling the teachings of the Gospels, but
to Jesus no attribution is ever made. The writer can speak of “apostles,”
but never associate them with an historical figure who appointed them;
there is no tradition of anything going back to such a figure. Instead,
“apostles and teachers preach the name of the Son of God” (Parable 9, 16:5),
in the same way that Paul and other Christian prophets preached the divine
Christ.
The Son in the Shepherd
And who or what is the Son? The
writer describes him in highly mystical language. He is older than all
creation, the Father’s counselor (Parable 9, 12:1). He “supports the whole
world” (14:5). Parable 9 tells of the building of a heavenly tower representing
the church. The Son is the foundation rock and the gate; one cannot enter
this tower, this Kingdom of God, except through his Son. All this is a
reflection of that underlying concept encountered at every turn throughout
the early Christian period: that God is known and accessible only through
his emanations, through the intermediary Son. Salvation comes to those
who are “called through his Son” (Parable 8, 11:1). Of a death and resurrection
there is not a whisper in the entire document.
This Son, Parable 9 goes on to
tell, “was made manifest” in the last days of the world: “
phaneros egeneto,”
he became known. Once again we meet the universal language of the earliest
Christian writers: not a coming to earth to live a life as a human being
in recent history, but a revelation by God today, in these last times before
the End.
Hermas equates the Son with the
Holy Spirit (Parable 9, 1:1, and in Parable 5 which we shall examine in
detail below). This is the more traditional Jewish manner of speaking of
the communicating aspect of God. Elsewhere (Parable 8, 3:2), it is the
Jewish Law that is God’s Son. This writer has no sense of a Son with a
distinct personality, biography or role separate from longstanding ways
of thinking about God’s dealings with the world. He is part of the paraphernalia
of heaven, the way Wisdom is in other circles of Jewish expression.
The Parable of the Son
Let’s take a closer look at the
fifth Parable. Commentators claim to see an account both of the incarnation
and of the ministry of Jesus. An angel has told Hermas a parable in which
the servant of a rich landowner is given charge to tend a field. As the
angel explains it, the field is the world, the landowner God, and the servant
is the Son of God who labored in this field for the benefit of its plantings,
the people of God. In chapter 6 the angel goes on to further elucidate
the parable this way (K. Lake, in the Loeb
Apostolic Fathers, volume
2):
“2God
planted the vineyard, that is, created the people, and gave it over to
his Son. And the Son…cleansed their sins, laboring much and undergoing
much toil… 3When, therefore,
he had cleansed the sins of the people, he showed them the ways of life
and gave them the law which he received from his Father… 4But
listen why the Lord took his Son and the glorious angels as counselors
concerning the heritage [or heirs: see below] of the Servant. 5The
Holy Spirit…did God make to dwell in the flesh which he willed [or chose].
This flesh in which the Holy Spirit dwelled served the Spirit well, walking
in holiness and purity, and did not in any way defile the Spirit. 6When,
therefore, it had lived nobly and purely, and had labored with the Spirit…he
[God] chose it as companion with the Holy Spirit; for the conduct of this
flesh pleased him, because it was not defiled while it was bearing the
Holy Spirit on earth. 7Therefore
he took the Son and the glorious angels as counselors, that this flesh,
having served the Spirit blamelessly, should have some place of sojourn
and not lose the reward of its service. For all flesh in which the Holy
Spirit has dwelt shall receive a reward if it be found undefiled and spotless.”
F. L. Cross (
op.cit., p.26)
has called the author of the Shepherd “a man of no great intelligence,”
and all who have studied this work speak of its “confusion.” The writing
is often unclear, to say the least, and in this particular Parable there
is a striking inconsistency between the parable itself and the explanation
of it, which we need not go into. Even in the above passage there are obscurities
between the Son, the Servant and the Holy Spirit which make analysis difficult.
But let’s focus on some key points.
If the author is familiar with
even a general concept of Jesus’ historical life and death, why in verse
3 does the Son’s “cleansing of the sins of the people”
precede his
“showing them the ways of life and giving them the Law”? The “cleansing”
is through the labor and toil spoken of in verse 2, but neither here nor
anywhere else is this put in terms of suffering and atonement, let alone
a death and resurrection. As for “giving them the Law,” this is clearly
through spiritual channels, for a later Parable states that the angel Michael
(who in Parable 9 is equated with the Son of God) has “put the Law into
the hearts of those who believe.” There is no preaching by an historical
Son in evidence anywhere in this work, and in the above Parable such things
as vineyards and toil are best seen as a symbolic description of the workings
of God through his intermediaries.
To find a reference to the incarnation
in verses 5 to 7 is to draw water from a stone. First of all, despite an
identification of the Son with the Holy Spirit in Parable 9 (which is often
regarded as a later layer of this work by a different writer), there is
in Parable 5 no obvious link between the Son and the Spirit; in fact, verses
4 and 7a make them distinct. It seems, therefore, that it was not the Son
who was sent to dwell in flesh. Verse 7 further fails to link the Son with
the “flesh” under discussion. In any event, the manner in which this flesh
is spoken of cannot fit an incarnate Christ’s human side, unless it be
given a peculiarly gnostic interpretation which is nowhere in evidence
in this book. Instead, it has a decidedly ‘human’ character, in the sense
that the writer is speaking here of ordinary human beings.
Thus, there is no thought of
incarnation in this passage. The writer is speaking of the Holy Spirit
being sent by God to dwell in certain humans. Such men and women are those
who stay pure and holy, who do not defile the Spirit while it dwells in
them; they will be given a place of sojourn as a reward. The “all flesh”
of verse 7b shows that the writer does not have the specific flesh of an
incarnate Christ in mind. Besides, Christ’s human side hardly enjoys a
continued existence after his incarnation so that it can be given a reward.
Such an interpretation requires
one simple adjustment. In verse 4, Lake and others give the word “
klêronomia”
the usual translation of “heritage” or “inheritance” as though the writer
is about to detail the fate of the servant who in the parable is identified
as the Son. But as Bauer’s Lexicon points out, a word like this can be
given an abstract translation, so that here it may signify those who receive
the inheritance. In other words, the writer is about to describe the rewards
received by the
heirs of the servant/Son, namely the believers in
whom God has sent the Holy Spirit to dwell.
This interpretation is hardly
a leap of faith or wishful thinking. For the writer in the next chapter
(7) goes on to spell it out for us. I need only quote part of the first
three verses:
“Listen, now,” (the angel) said. “Guard this
flesh of yours, pure and undefiled, that the Spirit which dwells in it
may bear it witness, and your flesh may be justified… For if you defile
your flesh you defile also the Holy Spirit, and if you defile the flesh
you shall not live.”
Only the need to find some trace
of Christian orthodoxy somewhere in this book would lead to a failure to
make the obvious connection between these verses and the meaning of those
which have immediately preceded them. Nor does the writer give us any indication
that he is drawing some kind of parallel between the believers and the
incarnated Christ. The “flesh” spoken of in chapter 6 is not that of Christ
on earth, but of the believers whom the writer is addressing. In sum, the
longest early Christian document in existence presents us with a divine
Son who is never referred to by the names Jesus or Christ, is never said
to have died or risen, and who never shows sign of having been to earth.
The “confusion” the scholars
speak of in Hermas is not that of the author but rather is a product of
the attempt to impose the Gospel background on him. This writer is rooted
in Hellenistic-Jewish mythology with its picture of a heaven in which different
forces form part of the workings of divinity. The Son is one figure in
the class photo which includes the Holy Spirit and angels of several ranks,
and these are occasionally allowed to merge into one another. The Son sometimes
seems identified with other figures, and angels such as Michael are at
times involved in the work of redemption. As Charles Talbert puts it (“The
Myth of a Descending-Ascending Redeemer in Mediterranean Antiquity,”
New
Testament Studies 1975, p.432), “the Savior is described basically
in terms of an angelology which has coalesced with the categories of Son
and Spirit.” Talbert’s choice of the word “category” is perceptive, for
Hermas is dealing with philosophical concepts here, not a historical figure
who was God’s incarnation. Had he possessed any idea of the Son as a human
personality who had walked the earth in recent memory, suffered and died
and resurrected to redeem humanity, he could never have buried him in this
densely obscure heavenly construct and allowed the entire picture ‘recorded’
in the Gospels to evaporate into the mystical wind.
At the Threshold
As we stand on the threshold
of historical awareness of a human Jesus, we can look back over a consistent
picture. Amid much variation, the early Christian documents lying outside
the Gospels and Q display a common denominator: a spiritual divine Son
who acts as God’s intermediary in the work of saving humankind or an elect
portion of it. They are consistent in their view of the medium through
which this work is done: an ongoing realm of the spirit which inspires
apostles and teachers to impart the divine truth. The Shepherd of Hermas
is perhaps the best example to show that this was an age saturated with
mystical thinking and heavenly imaginings. This is how religious minds
saw the world around them. To ignore that consistency, that common picture,
to fail to account for universally missing elements like apostolic tradition
going back to Jesus, or an historical ministry which served as the ultimate
source of Christian teaching and prophecy, to seek to paper over the widespread
absence of any concept of death and resurrection and so much else, is simply
a burying of the head in sand.
Our picture of early Christian
diversity, when looked at with eyes unobscured by orthodox lenses, provides
a fascinating view onto the religious world of the first and early second
centuries, an amalgam of a Judaism which has stepped adventurously beyond
its mainstream paths, and a Hellenism which has brought its established
philosophy into a Jewish embrace. (It matters not whether these adventurers
were Jew or Greek.) Such syncretism still inhabits a rich spiritual realm.
The Shepherd is not the only Christian or Jewish writing to lay before
us a world of angels, heavenly churches, celestial figures representing
forces between God’s heaven and man’s earth, a universe where vibrations
from the unseen spiritual side of reality can be felt by the mystic, absorbed
by the believer, sought and discovered in the sacred writings from whose
pages God, his emanations and his messengers speak. Until we can allow
ourselves an unbiased reading of what lies plainly in view in the early
Christian documents, we will deny ourselves a proper knowledge of that
important transitional period in the religious evolution of the western
world which led to the modern era of faith in an incarnated Son who trod
the land of Palestine.
The Son’s journey to earth was
inevitable, perhaps, for western society is the human branch most responsible
for developing science, beginning with the Greeks, and science requires
substance in matter, things observable in a tangible universe. Western
philosophy and religion could not long subsist on a diet of pure spirit,
on myth which never touched real ground. That offspring of Judaism and
Hellenism needed to embrace a Son in flesh, to touch his wounds and see
the love and sacrifice in his eyes. Ignatius craved his violent end in
the arena because he saw it as a parallel to the real suffering of a human
Christ under Pontius Pilate, and his fury at those who denied a genuine
suffering Christ in the flesh came from the fear that without such a thing,
his own fate would be meaningless and “for nothing.” That view, that need,
is still with us today. And so in the space of a few critical decades around
the turn of the second century the human Jesus crystallized out of his
spiritual predecessor, though it would take the better part of a century
before all Christian circles were converted. By the time of Irenaeus, Tertullian
and Clement of Alexandria, our hybrid western religion had completed its
creation and for the next eighteen centuries the new church was to preserve
the “memory” of the Son who had lived and worked among us.
=================
Part Two: The Epistles of Barnabas and Ignatius
— III —
The Epistle of Barnabas
An Emerging Jesus of History
For the document known as the
Epistle of Barnabas, most scholars prefer a date between 115 and 132, though
some have placed it before the end of the first century. Kirsopp Lake summarizes
the two positions (Loeb
Apostolic Fathers, vol.1., p.337), that
the ten kings in chapter 6 may refer to emperors, which would place the
epistle within the first century, though at a date uncertain since “there
is no unanimity as to the exact manner in which the number of the ten Emperors
is to be reached.” The later choice of date, often specified as close to
130, is based on the reference to an expected—apparently imminent—rebuilding
of the Temple (16:3-4). While such a hope may have flared up at various
times during this period, it was at its height on the eve of the Second
Jewish War. While the writer mentions the first War (making the document
no earlier than 70), he fails to refer to the second, which should place
the upper limit at 132.
The traditional ascription of
the epistle in ancient times to Paul’s companion Barnabas is rejected today.
Where it was written is uncertain, though Rome is not likely. It seems
to be the product of “a learned Jew” (Staniforth’s phrase), quite possibly
in Alexandria, since its earliest attestation is by Clement and Origen
in that city. If so, this Jew has disowned his ancestral religion and claimed
the sacred writings of the Jewish heritage for Christianity. Others have
suggested that he is a gentile writing to other gentiles who have thoroughly
absorbed Judaism and who see themselves as the inheritors of a new covenant
which the Jews have forfeited.
It would perhaps be easy to characterize
this epistle as one which reflects a primitive knowledge of the historical
Jesus of the Gospels, something which would not be surprising of a document
that may have been written as late as the second or third decade of the
second century. But closer examination calls this into question, and it
will be fascinating to look at this epistle to see just how far the picture
of a Christ derived from the sacred writings could develop before it ruptured
its scriptural skin and spilled into actual history. The impression created
by the epistle of Barnabas suggests one of those moments in movies and
television where one scene starts to fade out and simultaneously a new
scene fades in. The clash of worlds is at times almost bizarre.
Viewing the Old Testament books
as prophecy, the writer of this epistle has progressed to the point where
he envisions Christ as having lived on earth at some time in the past.
But as to exactly when that was, or even about the few details offered
by Ignatius, he gives us no information. His sole source for an account
of that newly-conceived Incarnation in historical flesh still seems to
be scripture.
In this polemic against all things
Jewish, “Barnabas” accuses the Jews of failing to understand their own
writings. (They were misled by an evil angel.) They were guilty of making
a literal interpretation of scripture instead of an allegorical one. The
latter made it clear that the Old Testament, the rites and regulations
of the Jewish Law, were entirely God’s coded prophecy about Christ and
his cross. This epistle is an attempt to demonstrate this contention, employing
a range of exegesis which is both imaginative and occasionally ludicrous.
A Picture of Christ’s Passion
The crucifixion and its significance
lies at the very center of the author’s theology. What does he tell us
about it? He touches on some details that could be said to be related to
the Gospel story, but in every case he points to scripture as the source
of his information. Not only does he not possess a written Gospel (very
telling if we are to date Barnabas a fair distance into the second century),
he shows no sign of any access to oral traditions which supply an account
of Jesus’ historical experiences.
Consider the opening verse of
chapter 5. (My translations are based on Staniforth in the Penguin edition,
but with occasional changes in the direction of the literal Greek.)
“Now, when the Lord [i.e., Jesus] resigned himself
to deliver his body to destruction, the aim he had in view was to sanctify
us by the remission of our sins…For what scripture says of him is: ‘he
was wounded on account of our transgressions, and bruised because of our
sins, and by his scars we were healed. He was led to the slaughter like
a sheep, and like a lamb that is dumb before its shearers.’ ”
This idea of dying to remit sins
could have been illustrated by Mark 10:45, that “the Son of Man…(came)
to surrender his life as a ransom for many,” surely a representative tradition
in any interpretation of Jesus’ death. It is difficult to believe that
any Christian community would not by now have possessed
some tradition,
some saying of Jesus himself, which related to the significance of his
sacrifice on the cross.
Other references to the passion
suggest a very imperfect picture of its outline, often at odds with the
Gospel story. In a ‘description’ of Jesus’ sufferings, Barnabas appeals
to the prophets of the Old Testament, quoting ten examples in all, beginning
at 5:13:
“Even the actual form of his Passion he willingly
embraced, since the word of prophecy had doomed him to meet his death on
a tree. ‘Spare my life from the sword,’ it said; and then, ‘Pierce my body
with nails, for the congregation of the wicked have risen up against me.’
And again he says, ‘See, I have tendered my back to scourgings and my cheeks
to blows, and I have set my face as firm as a rock.’ ” (Quotations are
from Psalms 22 and 119 and Isaiah 50.)
Barnabas then goes on:
“Moreover, after he had done as it was commanded
him, what does he say then? ‘Who presumes to accuse me? Let him stand up
to face me…’ ”
In Barnabas’ sequence, the false
accusations, which we would associate with the trial portion of the passion
story, follow after the biblical passages representing the crucifixion
itself. After this further quote from Isaiah 50, he goes on to offer other
passages which in the Gospel tradition are not associated with the passion,
focusing for example on the reference in Isaiah 28 to the foundation stone
that becomes a cornerstone. Following this, he dips back into Psalm 22:
“A gathering of wicked men surrounded me; they
came about me like bees round a honeycomb,’ and also, ‘they cast lots for
my garments.’ ”
This chain of biblical prophetic
passages creates a hodge-podge impression, completely out of sequence with
the Gospel story, and indeed conveying no sequential picture at all, certainly
not one which the writer might be associating in his mind with an historical
scene. Rather, his mind is focused on the ‘story line’ in the Psalms and
prophets. And like Clement he hears the voice of Jesus in the first person
words of the prophets and Psalmists. Barnabas’ ‘account’ of an historical
crucifixion seems to be determined solely by scripture. We wait in vain
for any spelling out of the corresponding event in history, events of the
time of Herod and Pontius Pilate. No such historical time or figures are
ever provided.
This silence is repeated all
through the epistle. Barnabas never supplements his scriptural quotations
with a corresponding historical version of things. This creates a curious
effect. Though he regards scripture as “prophecy,” we are never given a
concrete equivalent in history which constitutes the fulfillment of the
prophecy. The actual experiences of Jesus on earth seem to be theoretical.
That is, the writer is deducing their existence from scripture and then
labeling scripture as a prophecy of them; his eye rests solely on the latter.
The prophecies are given no independent support or illustration, let alone
reference to a Gospel.
To make a brief comparison with
Justin. In chapter 104 of the
Dialogue with the Jew Trypho Justin
quotes lines from Psalm 22, including: “They parted my garments among them
and cast lots for my vestments.” He then goes on to say, “And this is recorded
to have happened in the memoirs of his Apostles. I have shown that after
his crucifixion they who crucified him parted his garments among them.”
In other words, Justin has drawn two sides of a clear parallel or equation:
Psalm 22 prophesies an event, and here is the event itself, independently
presented from a different source. Justin’s source was a written one, which
Barnabas may have lacked, but there should have been nothing to prevent
Barnabas from offering his own independent source in the form of oral traditions,
in a description of the events of history derived independently of scripture.
His Christian world should have been full of such things, traditions and
ways of speaking about Jesus’ passion and the events of his life which
did not rely entirely on the words of scripture, as though scripture were
the only concrete source available.
For this author, such a silence
is glaring. Elsewhere, Barnabas’ concern is repeatedly to draw a clear
parallel between a biblical prototype and a present-day equivalent. He
is at pains to show how ancient Hebrew institutions prefigured counterparts
in current Christian belief and practice. This is one of the chief aims
of his letter, the purpose of his allegorical interpretation of scripture:
to show that the scriptural “past” is fulfilled in the Christian “present.”
But when he turns to describing Christ’s passion in scripture, the corresponding
fulfillment in the experiences of Christ “on earth” go undetailed, unidentified
in terms of specific historical content.
Perhaps the most bizarre example
of this is the passage immediately preceding the ‘story line’ of the passion
in chapter 5.
“For God tells us that the bruising of [the Son’s]
flesh is from them [the Jewish people], for he says: ‘When they strike
the shepherd, the sheep will be scattered.’ ”
To show that the Jews are guilty of killing Jesus, he points
to a scriptural passage (Zechariah 13:7) in which God is seen to declare
this. He does not say, “God prophesied that the Jews would kill his Son
and history shows its fulfillment.” Rather, he seems to be implying that
the knowledge of ‘history’ itself comes from the scriptural passage. It
is God, not historical memory, which has identified the Jews as those who
killed his Son.
This view of the history of Barnabas’
Jesus figure is more than implied. It is spelled out by the writer himself.
Following the quote in 5:3 of Isaiah 53 (above), he tells his readers:
“Therefore we ought to give great thanks to the
Lord that he has given us [i.e., through the scriptures he has just quoted]
knowledge of the past, and wisdom for the present, and that we are not
without understanding of the future.” (From the Lake translation)
In other words, Barnabas is stating that we know of Christ’s
experiences on earth through the scriptures, through passages like Isaiah
53. Near the start of the letter (1:7) he has declared the same principle:
“For the Lord made known to us through the prophets things past and things
present and has given us the firstfruits of the taste of things to come.”
It would seem that there is no recent history, no oral tradition, in Barnabas’
mind which also tells of Christ’s experiences. Knowledge of the past comes
through scripture and scripture alone. (Staniforth’s translation in 5:3
that the writings “give us an insight into the past” looks to be fanciful;
I can find no evidence that the verb “
gnôridzô” is so
accommodating.)
A Void on the Gospels
In light of all this, we can
look at the passage which seems most ‘historical’ and help resolve the
question of whether Barnabas could have known any written Gospel, or even
corresponding oral traditions. 5:7-9 reads in part:
“[By allowing himself to suffer] he was able
to fulfill the promise made to our ancestors… and to show…while he was
on earth, that he will raise mankind from the dead and judge them. Moreover,
by teaching the people of Israel and performing miracles and wonders, he
made known his message and his love. But when he chose the apostles who
were to preach his gospel, men who were sinners of the worst kind, he showed…that
he came not to call saints, but sinners.”
The view that Christ had taught
and performed miracles (Barnabas never itemizes any of these miracles)
conformed to a universal expectation about the Messiah based on scripture.
Here, the writer may simply be assuming that such things had happened.
Another possibility is that this view of teaching and miracle-working grew
out of precedents in the mythical phase of the faith: out of the belief—on
the part of men like Paul—that the spiritual Christ communicated with Christian
prophets, “teaching” them through the Spirit; out of the fact that miracles
had been performed by such prophets in Christ’s name. For such things to
be attached to a new historical Jesus would have been natural. This is
a pointer to the likely derivation of Barnabas’ next idea, that Christ
had appointed apostles, for in the earlier phase he had done so: an appointment,
through spiritual channels, of apostles (like Paul and Peter) who believed
they had been called by Christ himself.
(In 8:3 Barnabas declares that
these apostles were twelve in number. But he never gives us any names,
and he supplies the origin of his own reasoning: because the tribes of
Israel were twelve. There is no need to see historical tradition as the
source of this information.)
That Barnabas is not in touch
with actual history—at least, the history as portrayed in the Gospels—is
shown by his description of these “apostles.” No one who possessed the
later traditions about Peter and Paul would have been likely to call them
“sinners of the worst kind.” Who, then, does he have in mind? Though he
never states it, it is possible that Barnabas had some sense of when the
Christian movement started, which means that he may have placed such “apostles”—and
consequently Jesus himself—around the time of Peter and Paul. Indeed, he
may even have these men in mind, and perhaps the traditions about such
early preachers of the Christ were, in Barnabas’ circles, less than flattering.
But something else may be operating
here as well. In the text, the phrase, “He came not to call saints but
sinners” is not set out as a quote; Barnabas does not identify it as coming
from any writing, though it does have that flavor. Scholars are quick to
focus on it as something taken from Mark 2:17, or the equivalent oral preservation
of such a saying by Jesus. It is true that we know of no other location
for this saying, but elsewhere Barnabas quotes other things whose source
cannot be identified, so this could be from some writing now lost. In any
case, those who would claim it to be the saying by Jesus would have to
acknowledge that Barnabas’ application of it is an anomaly. In the Gospel,
Jesus is speaking about the people at large to whom he is appealing in
his ministry, “not the righteous, but sinners.” He is not referring to
the apostles he has called, which is the way Barnabas applies it. It looks
as though the expression itself, wherever he derived it, has influenced
Barnabas’ picture of the apostles to which he thinks it applies. If Barnabas
believes this quotation (if it is that) refers to men like Peter and Paul,
then it would indicate to him that those apostles were in fact sinners.
Thus, it is difficult to maintain,
as many do, that the line is a quotation from a Gospel, for such a Gospel
should have conveyed a different picture of the apostles than the one which
Barnabas presents. Even identifying it as an oral tradition of Jesus’ words
faces objection, for in that case Barnabas would more likely have labeled
it Jesus’ own saying.
The same problems apply to the
claim that another Gospel quotation appears in 4:14. After pointing out
that the people of Israel were rejected by God, Barnabas cautions his readers
not to be among such people “…of whom it is written that many are called,
but few are chosen.” This saying appears in the mouth of Jesus in Matthew
22:16, attached to the parable of the wedding guests. Perhaps it comes
from a version of the parable unattached to Jesus, set down in writing
elsewhere. Or it may have been an established Jewish apocalyptic pronouncement.
But to claim that a Gospel is
Barnabas’ source for the saying is virtually unsupportable. Again, Barnabas
is more likely to have identified it as the words of Jesus, rather than
to say simply, “it is written,” which is the traditional formula used for
holy scripture. At this early date, a primitive Gospel account of Jesus’
life would hardly be regarded this way, and there is no evidence for such
a reverent attitude toward such accounts until considerably later. Moreover,
if this were a Gospel, Barnabas would have before him a wealth of material
on Jesus’ life. Not only would he then be unlikely to portray the “apostles”
the way he does in 5:9, he would possess a detailed historical record to
which he could point as the fulfillment of those Old Testament “prophecies”
he uses to illustrate Jesus’ passion, as Justin does.
Furthermore, he would not show
the astonishing ignorance he does on the teachings of Jesus relating to
numerous subjects which he discusses throughout the epistle. The question,
for example, of whether the Jewish dietary laws are valid is an issue Barnabas
expounds on at length (10), without considering any of Jesus’ Gospel pronouncements
on the subject. What will happen at the End time is a topic of immediate
interest to Barnabas, yet nowhere does he introduce any apocalyptic sayings
by Jesus, let alone the identification of Jesus as the Son of Man. In a
letter whose central concern is “hearing” the word of God that bestows
moral direction and correct understanding of the past, present and future,
no contribution from Jesus himself is put forward. Barnabas refers to “the
new Law of Jesus Christ” (2:6) but never gives us a word of it.
Once again, the point should
be made that even if Barnabas had no written record of teachings by Jesus,
they should have been present in oral tradition; and even if there were
no authentic teachings by Jesus on these issues, at least some of the latter
should by now have prompted the invention of such teachings with an attribution
to Jesus.
Thus, it is possible to conclude
that Barnabas’ concept of Jesus as a teacher of Israel in 5:7 is simply
a hypothetical one, of fairly recent development and not grounded in actual
historical memory. We should note further that the “Two Ways” section appended
to the epistle, forming chapters 18-21, is a compendium of Jewish-Christian
moral directives, somewhat similar to the opening section of the Didache.
In neither document is there any attribution of such teachings to Jesus.
It concludes (21:1) with the statement that “All this shows what a good
thing it is to have learned the precepts of the Lord [God], as they are
set forth in scripture.” And in 21:6 the writer (who in these closing chapters
may have been a later editor who added this material) advises his readers
to “take God for your teacher.”
A few other silences in the epistle
are worth noting. Barnabas supports (2:4) Isaiah’s condemnation of animal
sacrifices, but fails to offer the fact that Jesus had made a similar disparagement
while pointing to this very passage of Isaiah: “Go and learn what that
text means, ‘I require mercy, not sacrifice’ ” (Matthew 9:13). He scoffs
at physical circumcision (9) and declares that Abraham’s circumcision served
only to prefigure the name of Christ and the cross, ignoring any question
of Jesus’ undergoing of the rite at birth. In discussing the Jews’ loss
of their Covenant (4:6-8), there is no mention of a new Covenant established
by Jesus. He even seeks to discredit the term “son of David” for Christ
(12:10-11), appealing to the same argument Jesus himself makes in Matthew
22:43-5, though he shows no sign of being aware of this. As for the Gospel
post-resurrection appearances, the writer makes only this brief, cryptic
statement (15:9): “We celebrate with gladness the eighth day in which Jesus
rose from the dead, and was made manifest, and ascended into heaven.” (Lake’s
quite literal translation.) Not only does this contradict Acts, “was made
manifest” (that ubiquitous verb
phaneroô) hardly seems to
do justice to the full range of Gospel traditions about Jesus’ post-resurrection
appearances.
Scripture Vs. History
Two passages will further illustrate
that this writer is not deriving his statements about Jesus “on earth”
from his sense of history—or familiarity with a Gospel story—but from scripture.
In both cases, Barnabas compares “past” and “present” without ever leaving
the pages of the Old Testament. In 7:3, he asks his readers if they know
“why he [Christ] was given vinegar and gall to drink at his crucifixion.”
Is this the historical side of the equation I have earlier said was missing?
Barnabas goes on to detail two prefigurings of this ‘event,’ one in scripture
and another of unknown provenance, both relating to priestly practice.
He then enlarges on the idea of the drink at the crucifixion which he says
those practices ‘foretold’ (using his characteristically strained exegesis).
In these remarks (7:5), there is an allusion to Psalm 69:21—No. 68 in the
Septuagint, which is the version of the bible the writer is using. The
Septuagint passage reads:
“They gave me also gall [xolê] for
my food, and made me drink vinegar [oksos] for my thirst.”
In all four Gospels, Jesus on the cross is offered only vinegar
[oksos: Mk.15:36, Mt.27:48, Lk.23:36, Jn. 19:29]. Mark, whom all the others
are likely copying, probably read the Septuagint passage but took only
the vinegar reference as applying to a drink. However, “
xolê”
can also be used of a bitter tasting liquid, and Matthew apparently decided
to use the first phrase of the Psalm passage as well, rendering it as a
drink. But he does so in a separate incident, having the soldiers offer
Jesus a drink of gall mixed with wine (not vinegar) before nailing him
to the cross (27:34). In none of the canonical Gospels is Jesus at any
point offered a drink which is a
mix of both vinegar and gall. Only
in the apocryphal Gospel of Peter (5:16), is the drink offered to Jesus
such a mix. (This is another argument against Crossan’s view that his “Cross
Gospel” stratum of the Gospel of Peter was the first passion story penned,
serving as the source for at least the Synoptics, for it is not likely
that all three evangelists would reject the mixed-drink feature and substitute
a single ingredient.)
Thus, Barnabas’ “drink of vinegar
and gall at his crucifixion” is more likely to be based on the Septuagint
passage than on Gospel or oral tradition. This is rendered virtually certain
by the way he enlarges on the ‘event’ in 7:5. He says that the priestly
practices served as a prefiguring of Christ’s crucifixion,
“Because ‘when I am about to offer My Body for
the sins of this new People of Mine, you will be giving Me gall and vinegar
to drink. That is why you shall be the only ones to eat, while the people
of Israel are fasting and lamenting in sackcloth and ashes.’ In this way
he indicated his predestined sufferings at their hands.”
The inner quotes are Staniforth’s, but they serve to make
it clear that Barnabas is presenting this as Christ himself speaking and
explaining the prophetic meaning of the priests’ actions. And the reason
for doing this may well have been the nature of the Septuagint passage
itself, which speaks in the first person: they gave
me gall and
vinegar. Not only does the same form of expression indicate that this is
Barnabas’ source, it is a direct confirmation of the principle that early
Christian writers up to this time are finding Christ, his words and his
activities, in scripture itself and not in historical tradition. Thus,
as stated earlier, Barnabas exhibits the peculiar and fallacious paradox
of declaring scripture to be a prophecy of the Christ, and then extracting
the ‘historical’ part of the equation from scripture as well.
As the final sentence quoted
above puts it, “In this way [that is, ‘words’ of Christ in based on Psalm
69], he indicated his predestined [in scriptural priestly practice] sufferings
at their hands.” One doesn’t quickly recover from the dizzying effects
of that kind of circularity.
Barnabas goes on immediately
(7:6) to detail another example of the same fallacious practice. He describes
the ritual of the Day of Atonement as recorded in Leviticus 16. The treatment
of the two sacrificial goats is declared to be, in its various details,
a prefiguring of the experience of Jesus in his passion. How does Barnabas
describe that experience (7:9)?
“Now what does that signify? Notice that the
first goat is for the altar, and the other is accursed; and that it is
the accursed one [which he is comparing to Jesus] that wears the wreath.
That is because they shall see him on That Day clad to the ankles in his
red woolen robe and will say, ‘Is not this he whom we once crucified, and
mocked and pierced and spat upon? Yes, this is the man who told us that
he was the Son of God.’ ”
The resemblance of these details to the Gospel scene of the
crucifixion is undeniable, of course—because the Gospel picture is derived
from scripture—but there are several telltale anomalies. First, Barnabas
is not pointing directly to the passion but to a Parousia scene (“That
Day”) when Christ will arrive at the end of the world; the passion is only
looked at in a kind of flashback at that time. And the details (possibly
with one exception) are presented in conformity with their scriptural derivation,
not in historical or Gospel terms. Thus, the long robe is based on the
eschatalogical scene of a robed Joshua in Zechariah 3:1-5, not on the Gospel
detail of Jesus in a mock kingly mantle at his scourging. The question
asked in the above quotation is based, not on a Gospel account or historical
tradition, but on the words of Zechariah 12:10 (“They shall look upon him
whom they have pierced”), with other scriptural references to mocking or
rejecting (Isaiah 53) and spitting (Isaiah 50) thrown in.
Once again, Barnabas points to
scripture (the ritual of the goat) as a prefiguring of Jesus, but the event
that such things prefigure is entirely taken from scripture (Zechariah
and Isaiah).
The last phrase, “the man who
told us that he was the son of God,” is harder to pin down, but since the
preceding references are derived from scripture, there is no reason to
think that this one is not as well. The writer of this epistle is notorious
for his bizarre stretches of interpretation, and perhaps this idea has
even been wrung out of the concluding phrase of Zechariah 12:10 which speaks
of a “first-born son,” something Christians at that time took as referring
to the Messiah. It has been pointed out, of course, that the line about
the man who said he was the son of God is very similar to Matthew’s description
(27:43) of the taunts by the crowd at Jesus’ crucifixion. This is true,
but Barnabas fails to point this out, and any claim that a Gospel or even
a corresponding oral tradition was the source of this idea founders on
the rest of the passage.
If Barnabas knew a fine detail
such as this about the crucifixion scene (one recorded only in Matthew,
though Luke says something similar), then he must have had access to a
fairly thorough account of the passion. Why then does he show clearly that
he knows of no crown of thorns (Matthew 27:29 and parallels)? He is detailing
the ritual handling of the two goats, pointing out that the accursed one—to
be driven into the desert—has a wreath of scarlet wool wound about its
head. He is at pains to draw a correspondence in Christian faith with every
feature of the ritual. He continually speaks of “types” of Jesus—things
in scripture that symbolize and prefigure Jesus’ own features.
So what does the red wreath of
wool around the goat’s head signify? Barnabas can know nothing of a tradition,
or a Gospel account, that Jesus wore a crown of thorns during his passion,
for he offers no such parallel. Instead he points to the practice of removing
the wool wreath once the goat has reached the desert and placing it on
a bramble bush. This, he declares, is to signify that the Christian in
reaching for the wool (a symbol of something precious, namely the faith)
risks pain and anguish from the bramble thorns on which wool has been placed,
a symbol of the suffering and persecution which is the lot of the believer.
Even the reference to the “thorns” in the bushes does not prompt the writer
to refer to the Gospels’ crown of thorns on Jesus’ head.
We look in vain, then, for anything
pointing to history, written or oral, to be found in the Epistle of Barnabas.
Scripture may be bursting its seams, but this writer’s picture of an historical
Christ is still bounded by the sacred pages of the ancient writings.
A Savior in Flesh
Barnabas’ language, especially
the phrase “when he was on earth”—something no epistle writer before him
states so explicitly—shows that his idea of Jesus “in flesh” (
en sarki)
has progressed beyond that of his predecessors. He no longer limits Christ’s
“incarnation” to the lower spirit layers of heaven and mythological contexts.
In 5:10 we are given an insight into the reasoning behind the development
of this idea, that the Son had of necessity to enter the material world:
“Furthermore, supposing that he had not come
in the flesh, how could it then have been possible for men ever to ‘look
upon him and be saved’?” (Inner quotes are by Staniforth.)
That last phrase, if meant as a quote, might be from an unknown
piece of writing, or it may represent a current philosophical debate. Barnabas
is saying that salvation by beholding God is only possible if his Son assumes
flesh. Earlier he had declared that Christ’s suffering in human flesh was
needed in order to prove that the dead can rise (5:6). The point is, belief
that the divine Son came into the world was a product of philosophical
necessity and religious need, not an interpretation of an historical figure
or event.
We can see in 1 John 4 that this
need was not universal. In fact, some in the Johannine circle are
denying
that
Jesus “has come in the flesh,” and the writer opposing them labels them
“antichrist.” Barnabas’ use of the phrase “come in flesh” (
êlthen
en sarki) is almost identical to the phrase in 1 John 4:3, that Jesus
Christ “has come in the flesh” (
en sarki elêluthota), and
is thus a pointer to its meaning in the other epistle, that the Johannine
dispute was over whether Christ had incarnated to the earthly world, and
not over some docetic question. (Neither epistle makes or addresses any
arguments relating to docetism.) Barnabas’ argument, as we shall see, is
very similar to that of Ignatius who maintained that Christ had to have
come in material flesh, else humanity’s sufferings had no meaning and no
assurance of salvation was possible.
Grant makes the observation (
The
Apostolic Fathers, vol.3, p.35) that “Barnabas shows little interest
in or awareness of Jesus’ earthly life.” We have come scarcely any way
at all from the similar situation in regard to Paul, over half a century
earlier. Grant makes another telling observation (
Ibid., p.36) that,
while “Lord” is used for Jesus in connection with his sufferings, the title
is also “freely used for God,” a fact which “makes precise interpretation
difficult in many passages.” That is, it is often unclear just who Barnabas
is referring to, and as Grant puts it, “Jesus’ functions often seem to
overlap with those of God,” and “Jesus’ acts were God’s acts.” This merging
of the two figures is best explained as a continuing vestige of the phase
of the faith which Barnabas’ world is just emerging from, the view that
Jesus was a spiritual entity only, an aspect of God in heaven. His is a
world that is only starting to develop the sense of the Son as a distinct
historical personage, though all that can be known of him is still dependent
on scripture.
The Sin of the Jews
While Barnabas now postulates
a Christ on earth, his starting point remains of the old variety: Jesus
Christ is the divine Son in heaven—who then came to earth. He does not
start from the historical Jesus of Nazareth and declare him to have been
the Son of God. In fact, this is an issue, a question of faith, which nowhere
appears in the epistle, despite the writer’s focus on a multitude of debated
questions. Even more tellingly, the Jews are never accused of or condemned
for not believing that Jesus was the Messiah, which is the way someone
like Justin was to put it, as were the Gospels. Rather, the Jews’ “sin”
was that they had done the same thing to the Son as they (allegedly) had
done to all the prophets sent from God: they had persecuted and slain him
(5:11). Nowhere does Barnabas say that this was because they had not believed
in his identity and divinity.
This is a subtle but crucial
observation. The rejection of Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah would have
been a piece of information based on historical record, whereas there would
be nothing in scripture to point to a feature like this. (And Barnabas
does not try to give us such a thing.) Even Paul in Romans 10, scouring
the sacred writings for passages foretelling a lack of response on the
part of the Jews, fails to offer anything which could fit the idea of rejecting
someone who claimed to be God’s Son. Rather, Paul applies his findings
only to the rejection of messengers like himself, of apostles who declare
the word of God, as the ancient prophets had done. Barnabas, too, casts
the Jews’ rejection of Jesus solely as the killing of the messenger, though
he goes a step further in equating that messenger with the Son himself.
The point is, such a rejection is something which need not be dependent
on historical record but rather would be derived from scripture.
In fact, this is precisely what
Barnabas tells us. Throughout chapters 5 and 6 he quotes Old Testament
passages which he interprets as pointing to the Jews’ killing and rejection
of the Son. But there is a critical difference between Barnabas’ picture
of the Jews’ rejection and killing of Jesus, and that of the Gospels. For
Barnabas is lacking the central feature of the Gospel Jews, the essential
failing they were accused of by generations of subsequent Christians: that
they had closed their minds to his true identity, to his fulfillment of
the prophecies; they had rejected his claims to be the Son of God and Messiah.
In fact, Barnabas seems to do the opposite. He wraps up (6:7) with a quotation
from the Wisdom of Solomon:
“And the prophet says of the Jews, ‘Woe to their
souls, they have planned a wicked scheme to their own hurt, saying, Let
us bind the Just One in fetters, for he is a vexation to us.’ ” (2:12)
In other words, Barnabas assumes from this passage that the
Jews knew Jesus was the Son of God but killed him because they did not
like his message. He tells his readers (5:11) that all this had been intended
by God in order to consummate the Jews’ long and sinful history of rejection
and to sweep the stage for the new inheritors of his promise.
If behind Barnabas had lain a
near-century of condemnation of the Jews on the grounds that they had rejected
the man Jesus of Nazareth as being the Messiah and Son of God (the picture
created by the Gospels and held to this day), he is hardly likely to have
presented things in his own peculiar way.
A Missing Link
“Barnabas” is typical of a certain
class of early Christian writer. He is not an intellectual giant and not
particularly inspiring, and some of his pieces of interpretation strike
us today as ridiculous and embarrassing. Still, he is a knowledgeable student
of the scriptures, which makes his lack of a written Gospel and his equally
empty stock of oral tradition about Jesus something which cannot simply
be ignored, especially as he was probably writing in a major center like
Alexandria, in the early decades of the second century or perhaps late
in the first.
Though he still draws his script
from God’s coded word in the ancient books, Barnabas has moved the scene
of Christ’s salvation activities onto the stage of history. As such, he
is a “missing link” in the evolution of Jesus of Nazareth. The impulse
to place the spiritual Christ in a material past resulted from a combination
of psychological need and a study of scripture. As the sacred writings
were plumbed ever deeper for more information about the Christ who had
entered flesh, the words themselves would have created an increasingly
immediate and vivid picture. After all, the writings of the prophets were
not about the spiritual realm; most of them were too early to possess a
concept of the later Platonic-style creations. The ancient writers had
spoken of material events and people, in the context of their own times.
What later ages were to make of their words would have flabbergasted them.
But their down-to-earth language eventually reasserted itself and pulled
the spiritual Christ in that very direction, onto the land of Israel and
into the time of the early empire. It told interpreters like Barnabas that
he had actually taught and performed miracles, that he had chosen followers,
that the Jewish leaders had conspired against him and killed him. It had
probably told other preachers whose names are now lost many other things
about him which were imparted to their audiences and slowly entered Christian
consciousness.
In Part Three of the Main Articles
(“The Evolution of Jesus of Nazareth”), I suggested that the impulse to
the historicization of the spiritual Christ was not confined to the Gospels,
that such an impulse may also have been developing independently of them.
Since Barnabas shows none of the biographical detail we see in Ignatius,
which can reasonably be put down to the spread of basic Gospel ideas in
the northern Levant region two or three decades after Mark was written,
it may make better sense to see the trend in Barnabas’ community as something
that was not, thus far, impelled directly by Mark or the later evangelists.
Could Mark have been influenced
in part by the beginnings of a wider trend toward historicization? Or were
they two parallel developments which only began interacting with each other
after both were under way? While the internal evidence within Mark itself
would indicate that his tale was an allegory employing midrash on scripture,
I have said that to the extent that he was part of a Q-type milieu, Mark
could have imagined the existence of a founding figure such as evolved
in the later Q document, and his Gospel may have been designed as a fictional
expansion on such a figure, perhaps for instructive purposes and symbolic
of much that was going on in his own community. How much the later evangelists
believed that Mark’s story was based on history is not possible to say.
If, at the same time, Mark had come in contact with circles of the Christ
cult who were beginning to think historically about their Son of God, such
as we see in the Epistle of Barnabas (even if this particular document
was likely written later than Mark), this may have influenced the first
evangelist’s ‘biographical’ creation.
Of course, this is essentially
speculation. But deductive speculation is what one has recourse to after
all the evidence has been examined, and one seeks to formulate a scenario
which best explains the features of that evidence. It is a legitimate exercise,
even if certain elements of the scenario have no specific illustration
in the documents themselves. This goes on all the time in historical research,
and especially in New Testament research. For the first hundred years after
the time of the reputed life of Jesus, we have a miniscule number of documents
compared to the amount that must have been written by these various apocalyptic
sects, religious cults and reform movements, Jewish and Hellenistic, operating
across the empire. The few we have are like narrow windows onto an obscure
landscape, and none of them are concerned with presenting scientific, unbiased,
or historically accurate pictures of the world around them. For too long
we have allowed our own picture of the period to be determined by the faith
traditions and interpretations of the Christian Church, and that includes
the bulk of the scholars who for centuries have been engaged in biblical
research. It is time to offer new scenarios, new paradigms, to attempt
to achieve a better understanding of how Christianity began and unfolded,
now that the old paradigms have crumbled with the arrival, in critical
New Testament study, of more rational standards by which to judge the documentary
evidence.
— IV —
The Letters of Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch
Of the fifteen ancient letters
that bear Ignatius’ name, eight have long been rejected as spurious, including
ones addressed to the Virgin Mary and the apostle John, as well as the
cities of Antioch, Philippi and Tarsus. The remaining seven, to the Ephesians,
Magnesians, Trallians, Romans, Philadelphians, Smyrneans, and to Polycarp,
bishop of Smyrna, exist in shorter and longer forms (“Recensions”), with
the shorter almost universally judged for the past two centuries to be
the genuine version. The longer Recensions have been heavily interpolated
with Gospel references and other polemical and devotional material.
Traditional dating of these letters,
along with many biographical elements about Ignatius himself, is dependent
on the document known as The Martyrdom of Ignatius. Its reliability remains
in question, as do most ‘biographical’ accounts of early Christian figures
set down at later times. Accepting a certain degree of reliability leads
to dates of either 107 or 116 CE as the year of Ignatius’ death in the
arena at Rome, with the added, perhaps fanciful, detail that the sentence
was imposed at Antioch by the emperor Trajan himself on his way to a campaign
in the east.
Whether all the circumstances
of Ignatius’ condemnation and martyrdom are historical or not, the question
of the authenticity of the letters themselves is a separate issue. Traditional
scholarship by and large accepts them; radical scholarship since the late
19th century has tended to date them later, perhaps as late as 160. Again,
it is not crucial for the purposes of this article to arrive at a firm
decision as to authenticity. My own inclination would be to lean away from
authenticity but to date them no more than a decade or two after Ignatius’
passing. The main reason for finding a date after the middle of the century
unconvincing is the absence in the shorter recension of all but the most
basic Gospel data along with elements like apostolic tradition and succession,
and the conclusion that the writer was familiar with no written Gospels.
These features will be discussed at length below.
The reasons arguing against authenticity
of authorship are the alleged circumstances of the letters themselves.
It is difficult to believe that under the situation of arrest and transport
by military guard, Ignatius would have had the freedom to receive delegations
from several Christian churches along the way. At Smyrna he was also visited
by clerical representatives from three other cities of western Asia Minor,
and one wonders at the logistical difficulty which would have been attendant
on coordinating such a visit. One also wonders at the willingness of all
these bishops and church people to place themselves in danger of being
arrested and charged with similar offences. That Ignatius would have the
opportunity and materials to write at such length to so many, and find
ways to dispatch all these letters, also raises doubt. Finally, the letters
themselves are suspiciously well crafted, and go on often repetitively
and unnecessarily long to make their points, more like little treatises
than pieces written under difficulty and duress. None of these objections
is decisive, but they are enough to give one pause in accepting the letters
at face value. Perhaps a later author designed them as a tribute to the
martyred bishop and as vehicles for the issues they address, but we have
no way of knowing how genuine is the scenario in which the letters are
cast, and it may be that the Martyrdom has been based on the circumstances
portrayed in the letters.
Does Ignatius know any of the Gospels?
Apart from Ignatius’ fixation
on martyrdom, which often approaches the unsavory, there are two issues
which he repeatedly addresses, and we can assume that if the letters are
not authentic, these constituted the ‘agenda’ of the later writer—as indeed
they would have been of Ignatius himself. One is the authority of the clergy
in Christian communities. Obey your bishops and presbyters is a constant
exhortation. The picture of clerical government seems a little further
advanced here than in 1 Clement, for there is a greater implication of
hierarchy, a pyramid with the bishop at the head (e.g., Trallians 3:1,
Magnesians 13:2). One thing still missing, however, is any sense of a centralized
authority, even an advocated one, across the wider Christian world. The
Inscription of the epistle to the Romans designates that church as “holding
chief place in the territories in the district of Rome,” but whether this
implies an authority over the others cannot be said, and Ignatius never
urges deference to any outside church upon the congregations he writes
to.
Perhaps the chief reason Ignatius
is concerned with obedience to eccesiastical authority concerns the other,
more important issue he addresses in all the letters but Romans. He is
concerned with unity, for there seems to be a widespread contention, a
troubling heresy or heresies, in the Asia Minor communities, from Antioch
itself to Smyrna and Ephesus on the Aegean. The exact nature of this heresy,
or whether Ignatius is attacking two separate and distinct groups—usually
styled Judaizers and docetists—is still unsettled. I will offer my own
view of the situation, but first the question of whether Ignatius knew
any written Gospel needs to be addressed.
Two general observations. At
no time does Ignatius point directly to a written Gospel in support of
his claims about Jesus against his opponents. His occasional reference
to “the gospel” is always singular, with no name of a reputed author attached
to it, nor any sense that there are more than one of these entities, requiring
differentiation. As in the case of the other Apostolic Fathers, scholars
tend to judge that Ignatius draws on no written Gospel but only on oral
tradition. (See William R. Schoedel:
Ignatius of Antioch, p.108,
115. Schoedel judges that all the uses of the term “sound much more like
references to a message than to a document.”) Thus the term “gospel” denotes,
as in Paul, the preached kerygma. And if this is the case, it implies that
Ignatius cannot be familiar with a written “Gospel,” else he would have
to make a distinction between the two categories. In Philadelphians 5,
he refers to the gospel message he “clings to” and in the next sentence
says that the Prophets also preached this “gospel.” The latter cannot be
referring to any product of the evangelists.
This is not to say that
some have not suggested a knowledge on Ignatius’ part of Matthew or John
(rarely Luke and never Mark). It is true that expressions in the epistles
often have a particular affinity to passages in Matthew. The problem is—as
in 1 Clement—knowledge of a Gospel implies that a whole range of material,
supplying arguments and precedents, should have been available to the writer
in regard to issues that are clearly important to him, and there would
have been no feasible reason for him not to appeal to it. In defense of
his claims for the veracity of such historical details as Jesus’ birth
from Mary, his baptism by John, his crucifixion by Pilate, it is difficult
to believe that Ignatius would not have pointed directly to a written document
that contained an account of such things. Many episodes in the Gospel story
could have demonstrated the ‘humanity’ of Jesus. If Ignatius wants his
readers “to be convinced” of this or that aspect of his human Christ, he
should have been quoting Matthew on these occasions, and clearly identifying
his source at least some of the time.
Some of the glaring silences
include the idea of apostolic succession. Unlike 1 Clement, which contains
a primitive form of the idea, in that the first apostles appointed leaders
to govern each new community and thus the appointed elders in Corinth derive
their authority from such a precedent, Ignatius expresses no such concept.
As Schoedel puts it (
Ibid., p.201), “There is no apostolic succession
in Ignatius,” and appointment of authorities is only “in terms of a divine
power which continually realizes itself in the institutions of the church.”
Had Ignatius a Gospel like Matthew, he would surely have found precedents
in Jesus’ own appointment of apostles and the powers with which he invested
them. Indeed, the practice of Christian communities should have been universally
based on such traditions—and by extension, on the chain of succeeding appointments
going back to the first apostles.
There is very little if anything
in Ignatius about apocalyptic expectation. Ephesians 11:1 has a bare reference
to these being “the last times.” But nowhere does Ignatius intimate that
Jesus will be returning as those last times come to an end, something that
is a major focus of Matthew, with his Parousia of Jesus as the Son of Man.
Could Ignatius’ community possess a Gospel like Matthew and ignore its—and
Jesus’—eschatological predictions? (The first element of the declaration
that Jesus is “son of man and Son of God, in Ephesians 20:2, is simply
referring to his dual nature.) Ignatius even uses the word Parousia to
signify the Incarnation itself (Phil. 9:2), the birth of Jesus into the
world, not his promised return to judge it, which is the centerpiece of
Matthew’s apocalyptic picture. Schoedel calls this a “shift” of the Parousia
terminology to a “first coming”—a shift of usage which, tellingly, no earlier
documents display. But it is more likely that Ignatius has no tradition
of a Parousia of Christ, just as other circles apparently lacked it (such
as those of 1 Clement and 1 John).
The other curiosity about Ignatius’
references to “the gospel” is that his description of its content (written
or orally preached) is entirely limited to the birth, baptism, passion
and resurrection. Nothing in Ignatius’ catalogue speaks to the ministry
in Galilee, to miracle-working, to any prophecy by Jesus. No word or deed
of Jesus on earth is ever appealed to, beyond the fact of his dying and
rising, and his birth is simply stated. This, and two passages which scholars
like to relate to Gospel incidents, will be looked at later.
No less dubious is the assumed
presence of oral tradition in Ignatius’ thinking, and by extension in his
community. He never appeals to the idea that certain things have been passed
along from earlier generations of apostles, that sayings or traditions
go back to Jesus himself. While he several times refers to Jesus in a teaching
role (e.g., Ephesians 9:2: “the commandments of Jesus Christ” or Magnesians
9:1: “Jesus Christ our sole teacher”), no actual saying is ever identified.
Not even on the subject so dear
to Ignatius’ heart, martyrdom, is a saying of Jesus put forward. In Romans
6:1 he says: “The ends of the earth and the kingdoms of this world shall
profit me nothing. It is better for me to die in Christ Jesus than to be
king over the ends of the earth.” In such a fervent declaration, one might
have expected him to appeal to the saying in Matthew 16:26, “What will
it profit a man if he gains the whole world yet forfeits his soul,” or
the dramatic Temptation scene in which the devil offers Jesus the kingdoms
of the world. R. M. Grant (
The Apostolic Fathers, p.91) confidently
declares that Ignatius’ words are based on Gospel sayings about self-denial,
and commentators as a rule always seem secure in their knowledge of what
is present in the writer’s mind, but no such mental connection is ever
evident in the text itself. In Ephesians 14, in recommending a certain
moral outlook to his readers, Ignatius appeals to the same thought which
Jesus expresses in Matthew 12:33, that “a tree is known by its fruits.”
The instinct of the preacher ought to have led to a mention of this parallel,
the impetus provided by Jesus’ own words, which is a phenomenon we see
expressed in preachers of all ages since.
In fact, the impression is consistently
conveyed that in these ‘echoes’ of the Gospel, Ignatius has no awareness
that he is quoting Jesus. In his letter to Polycarp, he admonishes the
bishop of Smyrna to “in all circumstances be wise as the serpent though
always harmless as the dove.” In this sort of context, the urging of some
attitude or behavior, the most natural thing would have been to say something
like, “as Jesus told us.” These very words are found in Matthew 10:16.
(So close are they to the Gospel saying that Staniforth puts them in italics
as though signifying a quote.) Ignatius makes no such attribution. In fact,
an example like this suggests the likely source of many of the Gospel-like
sayings Ignatius uses, namely commonplace maxims, culled from the expression
of the time, both Jewish and Hellenistic, some of them age-old, some reflecting
contemporary innovative thinking. Scholars who discount knowledge of a
written Gospel on Ignatius’ part suggest that both he and Matthew are drawing
on oral traditions, creating a commonality of wording and sentiment. But
the fact that no attribution to Jesus is ever offered by Ignatius suggests
rather (as does an epistle like James) that these ideas were simply in
the air of the time and were only placed in Jesus’ mouth by the evangelists,
some of them earlier in Q.
Claims are also made that Ignatius
may know the Gospel of John, pointing especially to Philadelphians 7:1.
Here the writer speaks of the Spirit, which “knows whence it comes and
whither it goes, and tests secret things.” The first part of the quote
is almost identical to part of John 3:8, also speaking of the Spirit. But
the phrase has the ring of an established saying about the Spirit which
could have been known to many. A similar idea is expressed in 1 Corinthians
2:10, though not with common wording. The point is, in the absence of any
clear identification with a Gospel on the part of a writer, the possibility
that both are drawing on common stores of expression from the background
culture of the time is by far the more sensible interpretation.
To mention a related silence,
Ignatius is also fixated in Christ’s own sufferings and their “true” nature,
yet he never once offers any details of those sufferings such as are recounted
so vividly in the Gospels. That traditions about gory details of the crucifixion,
authentic or not, would not have been circulating at least orally, is difficult
if not impossible to believe, and yet Ignatius is silent on the whole subject—as
is Paul.
Rising in Flesh
Here we can look at one of the
Gospel-like anecdotes the letters contain. In Smyrneans 3 we read the following
(in the Lake translation):
“For I know and believe that he was in the flesh
even after the Resurrection. And when he came to those with Peter he said
to them: ‘Take, handle me and see that I am not a phantom without a body.’
And they immediately touched him and believed, being mingled both with
his flesh and spirit.”
If there is any place in the Ignatian
letters where we would expect the writer to appeal to all the resources
at his command, oral and written, this is it. Is he quoting a Gospel here,
however loosely? Here is the passage in Luke which bears some resemblance
to Ignatius:
“And he said to them, ‘Why are you troubled,
and why do questionings rise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet,
that it is I myself; handle me, and see; for a spirit has not flesh and
bones as you see that I have.’ ” (24:38-40 RSV)
Grant (
op.cit., p.115) suggests
that Ignatius is not likely to be quoting Luke so freely and that he is
relying on oral tradition. One phrase, “
psêlaphêsate me
kai idete,” “handle me and see,” is identical between the two, but
the thought is so basic it is difficult to conclude that one borrows from
the other. Schoedel (
op.cit., p.225) also suggests that he is not
loosely quoting Luke, if only because “further evidence for dependence
on Luke is virtually absent in Ignatius.” One might add that if Ignatius
was consciously presenting a passage from a written document (even if he
didn’t have it before him), he would have said so, for pointing to such
a document would have been a natural impulse as a way of giving his declaration
authority and support.
The same argument applies in
regard to the “doubting Thomas” episode in John. Those who suggest that
Ignatius knows the Fourth Gospel need to acknowledge that such a claim
founders on this passage, for Ignatius would surely have referred to the
Thomas incident to make his point much more vividly, and again, he would
have spotlighted his source. But we can go further. The “doubting Thomas”
episode can hardly have been circulating in oral tradition, for Ignatius’
silence on it is a clear indicator that he knows of no such incident.
The Gospel of Matthew has no
equivalent scene where Jesus directs his followers to touch him (Matthew’s
post-resurrection scenes are more primitive and less detailed, being only
the first rung on the evangelists’ ladder of invention following Mark’s
bare empty tomb ending), although he has the women take hold of Jesus’
feet when they meet him on the road. But if Ignatius knew Matthew, one
might expect he would appeal at least in a general way to the post-resurrection
scenes in that Gospel to bolster his contention of Jesus’ true resurrection.
How, then, do we interpret the
anecdote in Smyrneans 3? All commentators make the assumption that there
has to be a source—however garbled in the transmission—going back to Easter
or the early apostolic preaching. But this is unfounded, especially in
the absence of any indication that Ignatius ever appeals to traditions,
oral or written, going back before his own time. (I’ll enlarge on that
when considering Ignatius’ faith declarations against his opponents.) How
do such sayings or anecdotes materialize? The simplest explanation is that
they are invented: by preachers and writers, by figures like Ignatius,
seeking to illustrate a newly developed belief about Jesus. Paul himself
offers more than one directive, incident or prophetic scene which he states
or implies has come to him ‘from the Lord,’ by perceived revelation. When
a preacher is in front of an audience (or readers), making some theological
declaration, describing some act or experience of Jesus, if something comes
into his mind which would effectively add to his exposition, he is not
likely to pass it up. Later he may regard it as a revelation. He may be
expanding on an earlier statement or scenario known in the community, equally
invented. (Who has not seen modern evangelists employ similar techniques,
even making claims that God or Jesus had spoken to them personally?) We
must keep in mind that the early Christian preaching movement was based
on the idea of revelation from the Lord, both in the study of scripture
and in Christian meetings where prophets prophesied and others interpreted
glossolalia (see 1 Corinthians 12 and 14). Once the principle is established
that the Lord communicates information about himself, about commandments,
about the ‘gospel,’ then anything appearing in any piece of writing can
conceivably be imputed to such an origin, if there is no clear declaration
or evidence to the contrary.
Besides, if the evangelists can
simply make things up, why not Ignatius? Critical scholars often judge
that Gospel figures like Judas, incidents like Gethsemane, or many of the
post-resurrection scenes, are likely the evangelists’ invention. Luke,
in order to demonstrate the reliability of the physical resurrection, invented
a ‘reliable’ scene in which the apostles touch the physical Jesus. The
fact that no other writing before the Gospel of John arrives ever mentions
the dramatic “doubting Thomas” episode—something that should have been
a prime candidate for preservation and transmission by oral tradition—can
only lead us to conclude that the fourth evangelist simply made it up.
Besides, what does Ignatius’
anecdote actually say? It’s pretty basic. Speaking to Peter and the disciples,
Jesus said, touch me and see that I am not a phantom without a body. Ignatius
is having to deal with heretics who declare that Jesus was a phantom without
a true physical body. Ignatius’ counter to this in the Smyrneans passage
is little more than the basic denial, No he was not. There is no necessity
to see it as derived from some circulating tradition. Ignatius “knows and
believes” that Jesus was in flesh after his resurrection. The anecdote
is his way of stating such a principle, something he does not attribute
to any source, oral or written, lying outside or prior to himself.
When he goes on to say that “after
his resurrection he ate and drank with them as being in flesh,” this, too,
need not be tied to tradition but could well be a statement based on the
assumption that if Jesus had been resurrected in the flesh and spent time
with the apostles, he would likely have shared meals with them, if only
because it would have been an obvious way to prove himself.
If it is a virtual certainty
that Ignatius had no written Gospel, and never identifies oral or apostolic
traditions about Jesus’ ministry and passion circulating in that part of
the empire, we face an astonishing situation. The bishop of Antioch, living
in the foremost Christian center in the eastern Mediterranean, almost on
the outskirts of Galilee and Judea, seemingly has no access to knowledge
about Jesus’ life and death beyond the basic biographical data he puts
forward. He does not identify a single saying or moral dictum attributed
to Jesus; he seems to know nothing about miracles; he mentions two incidents
which bear an uncertain and superficial resemblance to Gospel events. He
never alludes to features of early Christian history surrounding the apostles,
save the bare names of Peter and Paul (Romans 4:3)—not even making a reference
to their martyrdom, a key issue for Ignatius. This silence, as in 1 Clement
5, would tend to show that at this time the legends about such a fate concerning
the two apostles had not yet developed. Of earlier documents, Ignatius
shows a familiarity with 1 Corinthians and possibly one or two other Pauline
epistles and Hebrews. Almost a century after the reputed crucifixion, perhaps
a full hundred years if the letters are somewhat later creations, this
is the state of knowledge about the seminal figure and events of the Christian
movement. It certainly casts serious doubt on the almost universal consensus
(based on no concrete evidence) that Mark had been written by 70, and the
rest of the Gospels—and Acts—by the year 100. Rather, the picture created
by Ignatius fits consistently with the slow-developing, fragmented condition
we see in earliest Christianity, the limited contacts between communities,
the lack of doctrinal agreement among them, the puzzling anomalies, the
perplexing variety of ideas, and the vast silence on the Gospel story,
which the murky first hundred years presents.
The Nature of the Heresy in Ignatius
In railing against those who
disagree with his own position, Ignatius throughout five of the seven letters
makes a handful of basic biographical statements about his historical Jesus.
The principal ones are these (in the Staniforth translation):
Ephesians 18:2
“Under the divine dispensation, Jesus Christ
our God was conceived by Mary of the seed of David and of the Spirit of
God; he was born, and he submitted to baptism so that by his passion he
might sanctify water.”
Magnesians 11
“I want you to be unshakably convinced of the
birth, passion, and the resurrection which were the true and indisputable
experiences of Jesus Christ, our hope, in the days of Pontius Pilate’s
governorship.”
Trallians 9:1
“Close your ears, then, if anyone preaches to
you without speaking of Jesus Christ. Christ was of David’s line. He was
the son of Mary; he was verily [alêthôs] and indeed
born, and ate and drank; he was verily persecuted in the days of Pontius
Pilate, and verily and indeed crucified, and gave up the ghost in the sight
of all heaven and earth and the powers of the nether world.”
Smyrneans 1:1-2
“You hold the firmest convictions about our Lord;
believing him to be truly of David’s line in his manhood, yet Son of God
by the divine will and power; truly born of a virgin; baptized by John
for his fulfilling of all righteousness; and in the days of Pontius Pilate
and Herod the Tetrarch truly pierced by nails in his human flesh…”
In a few other places, Ignatius
makes statements that more clearly refer to docetism and his rejection
of it as unacceptable:
Trallians 10
“It is asserted by some who deny God—in other
words, who have no faith—that his sufferings were not genuine…In that case,
I am giving away my life for nothing, and all the things I have ever said
about the Lord are untruths.”
Smyrneans 2-3
“And suffer he did, verily and indeed; just as
he did verily and indeed raise himself again. His passion was no unreal
illusion, as some skeptics aver…” This is followed by his declaration that
“I know and believe that he was in actual human flesh, even after his resurrection,”
and the anecdote discussed above about appearing to his disciples, who
touch him and verify his physicality.
Smyrneans 4:2
“After all, if everything our Lord did was only
illusion, then these chains of mine must be illusory too.”
Smyrneans 5:2
“So what is the point of my standing well in
the opinion of a man who blasphemes my Lord by denying that he ever bore
a real human body?”
There is no question that in this
latter group of passages, Ignatius is combating a position known as docetism.
But a clarification is required here. It is recognized that the earliest
form of this kind of outlook was significantly different from the one Ignatius
witnesses to. Associated with Cerinthus (about whom knowledge is scanty)
around the beginning of the second century, this doctrine claimed that
Jesus was a mere man, into whom the spirit of the divine Christ entered
only at the former’s baptism, to depart from that man before the crucifixion.
Consequently, the passion was not undergone by Christ himself. (A corollary,
we must assume, is that for such as Cerinthus, the suffering and death
of Jesus was not the source of salvation, and that there was no real resurrection.)
This, strictly speaking, is not docetism. Rather, the true docetic doctrine,
of which we have no other evidence before we get further into the second
century, stated that Christ was born, lived his life, suffered, died and
resurrected only in the artificial
semblance of a material body
(
dokein=to seem), but that he was really spirit all the time, a
“phantom.” This avoided the distasteful (to some) idea that a divine being,
especially one who was part of God, would have entered flesh and suffered
from its pain and frailties. The latter, however, was an absolute necessity
to minds like Ignatius. If all that Christ suffered was an illusion, not
genuine, then “I am giving away my life for nothing” (Tral. 10) and “our
resurrection is jeopardized” (Sm. 5:3).
One point to note in passing
is that if we have reason to doubt that at the time of Ignatius’ death
as tradition sees it, the later form of docetism had fully materialized,
the picture of Ignatius’ opponents in the letters becomes suspect, leading
us to give greater credence to dating them perhaps a decade or two later.
Before examining the first group
of passages, a further question needs to be addressed. Scholars are still
divided as to how to interpret the opponents in Ignatius’ letters. Do they
represent one ‘heresy’ or two? Is there a distinction between those who
are advocating a docetic view of Jesus and those who advocate an adherence
to Judaism, or are they essentially the same people who combine both positions?
Beyond that, I would ask, is there an element which denies the historicity
of any Jesus in the recent past, docetic or not, Judaizing or not?
The docetists are addressed in
the second group of passages listed above. The Judaizing faction is represented
in a few passages like Magnesians 8-10:
“Never allow yourselves to be led astray by the
teachings and the time-worn fables of another people…If we are still living
in the practice of Judaism, it is an admission that we have failed to receive
the gift of grace…so lay aside the old good-for-nothing leaven, now grown
stale and sour, and change to the new, which is Jesus Christ…To profess
Jesus Christ while continuing to follow Jewish customs is an absurdity.”
As Staniforth points out, most scholars
tend to assume two different groups of opponents, although a few like Lightfoot
and Bauer postulated a single ‘Judaeo-Docetic’ heresy. (None, of course,
recognize a full-blown denial of the very historicity of Jesus.) But Ignatius
never makes it clear that he is speaking of distinct groups of opponents.
While he talks of “some” here and “some” there, they all seem to blur together,
only with different emphases voiced in different places. Let’s start by
looking at those passages in the first group quoted above, which seem to
be focusing on the veracity of basic historical elements.
In the Days of Pontius Pilate
When Ignatius declares in Magnesians
11 that he wants his readers to be convinced of the birth, passion and
resurrection which took place at the time of Pontius Pilate, and that these
things “were truly and certainly done by Jesus Christ” (Lake), or when
in Trallians 9 he declares that Christ was truly born of Mary in the family
of David, truly persecuted by Pilate and truly crucified in the sight of
all, the language goes beyond a counter to docetism, if indeed it addresses
it at all. As Schoedel says in regard to Magnesians (
op.cit., p.125),
this is “relatively anemic as an anti-docetic statement.” Ignatius conveys
nothing so much as a declaration that these events had actually happened,
that they are historically true, implying that others were denying such
a historicity. If, for example, he only meant that when Christ was born
of Mary it was in an actual physical body, not a phantom one, we might
have expected him to be thus specific. In the several passages where he
is stating historical facts like this, he never gives us that specific
docetic orientation or language.
The word
dokein is used
only in passages that clearly address docetism, such as Trallians 10 and
Smyrneans 4:2. Schoedel claims that using the phrase “ate and drank” in
Trallians 9 betrays an interest in docetism. Possibly, but it could also
be a handy phrase representing the idea that Jesus had ‘lived’—coming between
being born and being persecuted by Pilate. It meant he did the normal things
real men do.
While maintaining that Ignatius’
historical arguments are “designed to answer docetism” (
Ibid., p.153),
Schoedel nevertheless admits (p.124) that a passage like Magnesians 9 “also
suggests that Ignatius had in mind a denial of the passion more thoroughgoing
than our argument has so far indicated. What ‘some deny’ in Sm. 5.1 is
the very reality of Christ’s death.” Schoedel pulls back from this abyss
by going on to judge that the Ignatian comment in Magnesians 9:1—“though
some deny him”—is an “exaggeration” (
Ibid., p.125, n.9), a kind
of throwaway link made between the Judaizers he is criticizing and the
docetists.
Schoedel, as do others, calls
attention to the frequent use of the word “
alêthôs”
(truly) as an anti-docetic indicator in Trallians 9 and Smyrneans 1. But
this adverb can also entail the meaning of “in actuality,” in reference
to historical veracity or any other perceived truth. Its use here is ambiguous,
and it is used both in reference to the “true” sufferings of Jesus and
his “true” birth from Mary and crucifixion by Pilate. (In Romans 8:2 it
is used in a general sense, when Ignatius claims that he is “speaking truly.”)
Does the presence of genuinely
anti-docetic statements, such as the second group listed above, force us
to regard all of Ignatius’ arguments as having solely a docetic context
(as unspecific as they might be), and that he cannot be arguing for a purely
historical factuality as well? Let’s consider a couple of other passages.
The passage in Magnesians (8-10)
quoted above deals undeniably with “Judaizers,” either converted Jews who
want to retain some of their heritage, or gentiles who are urging that
Jewish customs be adopted or maintained. “If we are still living in the
practice of Judaism,” we are without grace, says Ignatius. Drop the “old
leaven” for the “new.” “It is monstrous to talk of Jesus Christ and to
practice Judaism” (Lake). And yet in the midst of these admonitions, Ignatius
says this:
“That death [of Jesus], though some deny it,
is the very mystery which has moved us to become believers, and endure
tribulation to prove ourselves pupils of Jesus Christ, our sole teacher.
In view of this, how can it be possible for us to give him no
place in our lives…” (my emphasis; literally, “how shall we be able
to live without him”)
Apparently these Judaizers hold
viewpoints which go beyond the simple advocacy of Jewish traditions. But
is it docetism or something more? If they simply hold a docetic doctrine,
would this have to mean that they are denying the death of Jesus, or that
they are entirely doing without him, as Ignatius charges? Staniforth’s
explanation (Mag., notes 4 and 5), that these people are indeed docetists
and this is simply a denial of “the reality of the Passion,” and that living
without him or giving him no place in our lives is “by the docetic rejection
of his death and resurrection,” seems strained, an attempt to force the
writer’s words into a preconceived mold. It is not impossible that Ignatius
sees things this way, but there is no denying that the language he uses
is much more sweeping.
It is similarly more sweeping
in the Trallians 9 passage: “Close your ears, then, if anyone preaches
to you without speaking of Jesus Christ.” In Philadelphians 6, Ignatius
condemns those who “fail to preach Jesus Christ,” the latter also in the
context of those who advocate Judaism. As in Magnesians 9, no docetic language
is in view here; rather, the thought seems to be that there are Christians
who go about failing to preach the Jesus that Ignatius believes in, and
which he defines in historical terms, not in anti-docetic ones. Because
the language
could be ambiguous, with docetic implications read
into it, the issue cannot be definitively resolved, but we are still faced
with the implications which the texts themselves more openly convey: that
this is a denial of the historical fact of birth by Mary, baptism by John,
and crucifixion by Pilate. Can we formulate a picture of the conditions
at the time of Ignatius which would see the various positions given to
Ignatius’ opponents as part of a conglomerate yet coherent situation?
A Cauldron of Ideas
Here we need to step back and
consider the broader picture. If everyone Ignatius is opposing is simply
a docetist, including those who also advocate Judaism, we have to ask how
such a position arose. Everything that Ignatius says indicates that these
opponents lived and operated
within the wider Christian community.
Like the opponents in 1 and 2 John, they are being received and listened
to by Christians, which is why Ignatius adjures them not to do so (Eph.
7:1, Phil. 6:1). In the orthodox scenario, this would mean that the movement
toward denying the physical reality of everything Christ underwent, probably
denying the role of the resurrection itself since such a thing was only
that of a phantom, would have to have been a staggering about-face in regard
to the central kerygma of the faith, a complete rejection of some 80 years
or more of belief presumably held by Christians of all stripes in all places.
Why would there be a widespread enough acceptance of such new preaching—or
at least a willingness to consider it—that Ignatius must regard it as of
the greatest danger to contemporary communities and preach so virulently
against it? How could we understand such a development? If based on philosophical
considerations (which the docetic stance was), why did it develop only
in Ignatius’ time; why not earlier in the time of Paul?
Moreover, docetism as generally
envisioned is essentially a negative movement. If we follow the usual interpretation
of commentators like Schoedel, a great number of Christian preachers have
coalesced all across Asia Minor (at least) to preach a doctrine of denial,
that Jesus Christ was
not real, that he had not undergone suffering,
death and resurrection in true bodily form. Could this idea have motivated
so great a number of Christian believers to become apostles and propagate
such denials? Missionaries are rather driven by
positive convictions,
by new ideas they perceive as advantageous. Ignatius’ opponents would be
in the unenviable position of approaching people who had long believed
in their faith and telling them that they were mistaken, deceived and defrauded
by three-quarters of a century of teaching. At the same time, they would
be trying to substitute a much less appealing view, almost an insulting
one, of the Jesus of Nazareth Christians had hitherto embraced. How did
such preachers get past the first encounter at the prospect’s doorway,
much less avoid having a chamber pot thrown at their heads?
This standard view of docetism
makes little sense. We need to look for a new alignment of the movement
within early Christianity. It seems natural to regard it as part and parcel
of the growing gnostic phenomenon, that the world and matter was evil,
that separation from it and a return to one’s divine nature in unity with
God in heaven was the goal of salvation, and that if a Savior figure had
entered the material world to impart the knowledge of those truths, he
had not done so in material form. Current scholarship on the wider spectrum
of the gnostic movement has concluded that it began and existed independently
of Christianity, though links were eventually made by some gnostic sects
to the Christian Jesus; and that it had its own range of Savior figures
that were independent of Jesus and were mythological in nature (such as
the Third Illuminator in the
Apocalypse of Adam, or Derdekeas in
The
Paraphrase of Shem).
It looks as though some of these
ideas had developed within the circle of Christian communities of which
Ignatius was a part. A passage like Smyrneans 5 strongly suggests that
this ‘heresy’ had arisen
inside the community. But instead of regarding
it as coming up against a long-established way of viewing Jesus, rooted
firmly in an historical base and traditions no one prior to this time had
questioned, we need to see the two tendencies as competing on a level playing
field. They emerged more or less at the same time. (Here we can appeal
to Walter Bauer’s seminal
Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity
for its picture of a widespread Christian landscape during the first and
second centuries—including in Ignatius’ Syria—which was as much ‘heretical’
as ‘orthodox.’) In other words, Ignatius’ historical Jesus who had been
born of Mary and crucified by Pilate was no more entrenched than the docetic/gnostic
one. The apostles of the latter movement were going about “not speaking
of Jesus Christ” the recent human man, they were gaining a hearing and
undoubtedly some converts, because the historical Jesus was an equally
newly-developed idea, advocated by such as Ignatius in language aimed at
establishing, first and foremost, his historical veracity. The docetists
were not bucking a tradition of decades, or butting their heads against
longstanding views of Jesus the man and an historical, physical resurrection.
The clash of these two outlooks
produced two effects, two central arguments. One was centered on the docetic
question. As long as Christians, like Paul, had propagated a divine Christ
in heaven, one who had not yet set foot on earth, the issue of his corporeal
form and nature did not arise. Once he was claimed to be historical, acting
on earth, the docetists had to resist, to advocate that, even if so, he
was only
seemingly a physical man. (Or, a non-physical Jesus may
already have been a part of their message, and not a direct reaction to
the historicizing trend.) One can envision that there were also those who
resisted placing him on earth at all, denying that he had been here in
any form. Thus, we see the dispute in 1 John against those who deny that
he had “come in the flesh” (4:3), and a little later, Ignatius’ adamant
claims to a fleshly historicity with basic biographical details.
These claims, it has to be stressed,
cannot be backed up by appeals to documents or oral traditions, or by any
sense that they are longstanding views held in the community. Not even
the bishops and other clergy hold the correct view because of links to
past teaching or past orthodoxy. Ignatius never makes the argument that
‘we have believed these things about Jesus for generations,’ much less
that they were written down. He doesn’t say that ‘the apostles knew Jesus
in the flesh and have passed on undeniable traditions about him.’ The docetists
are never accused of ‘overturning’ established tradition, of trying to
shove the Christian train into reverse. (Rather, they are simply “mad dogs”
[Eph. 7:1], “false-hearted wolves” [Phil. 2:2], and “beasts in the form
of men” [Sm. 4:1].) Ignatius’ truth is not time-honored, it is one of necessity.
His argument is that the historical position must be so because it
needs
to be so. Without a Jesus in flesh, our sufferings are pointless. That
is the extent of his pleading for historical veracity, and the legitimacy
of his position over that of his opponents.
The second effect relates to
those who are Jews or subscribe to Jewish tenets. It is one thing to compromise
monotheism by postulating a separate divine person, a Son, in heaven, as
Paul did. It is another to place him on earth and give him human flesh
and blood. When elements of the Christian movement started to develop the
latter idea, the Jewish-minded among them must have felt compelled to say,
Stop, that’s too much! You can’t associate a human with God. And so in
Ignatius’ circles, the “Judaizers” could also be found guilty of resisting
the historical Jesus and “denying him,” as we see in Magnesians 9 and perhaps
Smyrneans 5. They could be accused of “giving Jesus no place in our lives”
and “failing to preach Jesus Christ” (Phil. 6). Some of them may have joined
in the docetic chorus and compromised by adopting the ‘phantom body’ position.
The confusion about opposing
groups, the mix of motifs found in Ignatius’ admonitions, the sense of
a level playing-field: this picture is most easily explained by adopting
the view that at the beginning of the second century, the wide and varied
‘Son and Savior’ salvation movement was a cauldron of different ideas,
a competing variety in a state of flux. Some of it was moving toward a
coalescing orthodoxy in bringing the spiritual Christ to earth and appropriating
the Jewish heritage, other parts were moving toward a full-fledged gnosticism
that rejected the world of flesh and regarded the Jewish Deity as a subordinate,
evil God who was responsible for the hated world of matter. None of it
was grounded in a genuine historical figure or set of events in the recent
past. In Ignatius’ own world, which seems to have extended across Asia
Minor, many voices were raised with different ideas and ways of looking
at saviors and salvation. Ignatius was simply trying to shout louder than
the rest.
Finally, where did Ignatius get
his biographical data? I have postulated elsewhere that it may ultimately
proceed from Mark, that a Gospel written two or three decades earlier in
a community not too far distant in Syria or Galilee, a Gospel not originally
intended to reflect history, may have produced a gradual ‘leakage’ of ideas
that Ignatius and other Christians of the region were exposed to. Some
ideas could have come from the milieu that produced the later stages of
Q. Many people could have found them appealing, adopting them with an increasing
conviction. Perhaps this adoption was further encouraged by a wider trend
toward the historicization of the spiritual Christ, as discussed above
in regard to the epistle of Barnabas. I have tended to discount the suggestion
(in my book review of Alvar Ellegard’s
Jesus—One Hundred Years Before
Christ) that it was Ignatius himself, or perhaps his circle, who came
up with these biographical features, and this in turn influenced the first
evangelist who set them within his Gospel. Such a scenario is not impossible,
though it would require that all the Gospels be placed in a post-110 or
so time frame. There are radical scholars and mythicists who advocate such
a dating scheme, though I have reservations. But it cannot be ruled out.
The Nature of Jesus in Ignatius
From our earliest record to the
early second century (outside the Gospels), one of the central threads
is an attempt to define the nature of Jesus the spiritual Son. Those who
made docetic claims were continuing in that tradition, in the face of the
snowballing trend to bring him into matter and onto earth itself. They
were defining his human nature when he came to earth in different terms
than those of Ignatius. That alternate nature was hardly bizarre or unprecedented.
Angels had long been looked on as having taken on the semblance of bodily
form to appear to humans, and Satan and his evil brood in the lower realms
of the heavens were believed to possess some kind of corporeal form. But
it was not matter itself. It could be said that the ‘docetist’ position
was more orthodox than that of Ignatius, for Paul and the early cultists
had kept Christ in a spiritual realm, and this was all that the gnostic-leaning
docetists were intent on doing. Their movement toward a stark dualism,
however, the separation of spirit and matter into good and evil, was more
radical.
What does the Son in Ignatius’
picture tell us?
The first thing we encounter
in Ignatius’ view of Jesus Christ, in the inscription to the epistle to
the Ephesians, is the phrase “Jesus Christ our God.” Jesus is declared
to be a fully divine entity, inseparably joined to God himself. Paul never
went quite this far, though he could speak of his Christ Jesus as an integral
part of the heavenly Godhead, fulfilling divine functions similar to those
of Wisdom and the Logos, as in 1 Corinthians 8:6. Ignatius calls Jesus
“God” at a few other points in the epistles.
In Magnesians 6:1, Ignatius says
that Christ was “with the Father from all eternity,” that is, he is pre-existent,
again as Wisdom and the Logos were regarded, although it is not clear whether
Ignatius sees the Son as subordinate, being an emanation of God. Probably
so. The days of elevating the Jesus figure to absolute equality with the
Father, as in the Trinity, seem not to have arrived until later, perhaps
not until the Councils. Both the pre-existence and the blatant identification
of Jesus
as God go considerably beyond the portrayal of Jesus in
the Synoptic Gospels. Rather than see this as an evolution beyond the Gospel
picture, it actually reflects the earlier Pauline Christ, who was seen
as a transcendent divine entity. The Gospel Jesus, though syncretized with
the cultic Christ, was essentially derived from the Q milieu, from the
perception of a teaching prophet and wisdom sage, and the apocalyptic Son
of Man. Ignatius’ roots lie with the former, onto which he has grafted
the human conception, perhaps from echoes of Mark. The Gospels, coming
from the other direction, have not yet caught up to Ignatius’ own world
of a pre-existent Christ as full God.
In a few very revealing passages,
Ignatius betrays an inseparability of God and Christ which does not properly
fit his idea of Jesus as a recent man, a distinct personality on earth
who had given rise to the faith. For Ignatius, Jesus could be said to be
‘theocentric.” God himself is present and acting—and experiencing—in and
through Jesus. This is one way of describing an ‘emanation’ of God, and
it is an earlier, more primitive way of viewing the Son. It is ultimately
grounded in the Logos, which (as in Philo) is virtually an abstract force
given off by God: his thought, power, image. This force becomes the agency
by which God reveals himself, contacts and saves humanity. In Ephesians
18:3, “God was now appearing in human form” defines Jesus as God himself
taking on human nature. In Magnesians 8:2, God has “manifested himself
through Jesus Christ his son, who is his Word proceeding from silence.”
It is even more strongly expressed in Polycarp 3:2. (Staniforth presents
it in its seemingly metrical form, which may indicate an existing liturgical
poem, or possibly one of Ignatius’ own. The terms used indicate that the
thought is applied to God himself.)
“…but also keep your eyes on Him who has no need
of opportunities, being outside all time.
Whom no senses can reveal
Was for us made manifest;
Who no ache or pain can feel
Was for us by pain opprest;
Willing all things to endure,
Our salvation to procure.”
Schoedel (
op.cit., p.20)
acknowledges that Ignatius’ reference to the “blood of God” (Eph. 1:1,
which Staniforth softens to “divine blood”) and the “passion/suffering
of my God” (Rom. 6:3), indicate Ignatius’ “undifferentiated…sense of the
divinity of Christ.” In other words, he lacks the sense of Christ as a
fully distinct entity, or he is reflecting an earlier (and probably not
too much earlier) form of expression which lacked that sense.
This close identification of
Jesus with God, a degree of integration which sees God as manifesting himself
and undergoing suffering through Jesus, is an indicator that the faith
began, not with a man who created a belief that he was a part of God, but
with a Godhead that came to be seen, through philosophical meditation,
as containing a subordinate element, serving as an intermediary, revelatory
and salvific agency. This heavenly Son became increasingly regarded as
having entered the world of flesh, eventually to take on full human nature
and live an earthly life. But the highly elevated nature of this Son, compared
to the paucity of information and historical connection in regard to his
perceived incarnation, strongly suggests that he began as the former and
not the latter. We are brought back to Paul’s mode of expression, his starting
point in a Jesus who is a transcendent heavenly being never linked to a
specific historical man. Ignatius betrays the same way of thinking, the
same starting point, only a new dimension, still opaque and with few details
attached, has been introduced.
Schoedel also remarks that “there
is as yet no critical reflection in Ignatius on how the divine and the
human can be joined in Christ.” Indeed, before Ignatius, no one ever raises
the point. Paul is unconcerned with understanding how God could become
human and take on two natures, and we must conclude by many of his statements
(as in 1 Corinthians 15:44-49) that this is because he had no concept of
his Jesus
possessing two natures. Ignatius raises the subject in
Ephesians 7:2:
“…there is one Physician, who is both flesh and
spirit, born and yet not born, who is God in man, true life in death, both
of Mary and of God, first passible and then impassible, Jesus Christ our
Lord.” (Lake’s translation)
But as Schoedel says (see above),
there is nothing in this passage suggesting that current Christian thinkers
had to grapple with the concept of the divine-human duality in Jesus, nor
does Ignatius engage his opponents on such an issue. The above verse (possibly
a hymn, due to its rhythmic nature) shows for the first time that Christians
are expressing that duality, but the idea has not been around long enough
to generate critical examination.
Ignatius also expresses the idea
of mystical union of believer with Christ. In Ephesians 4:2, the readers
“are indeed members of his [God’s] Son’s Body,” and “parts of [Christ’s]
own Body” in Trallians 11. None of the Gospels contain this idea of the
believer being united with the savior god and being a part of a common
“body” (a feature of mystery cult thinking), which places Ignatius in the
line of Pauline mystical thought, not that of a Jesus of Galilean ministry.
In the Deep Silence of God
There is one passage in Ignatius’
letters which is overtly mythical, opening a window onto a previous phase
of the faith before an historical Jesus was introduced. This is Ephesians
19, which I will quote in its entirety in the Staniforth translation.
“Mary’s virginity was hidden from the prince
of this world; so was her child-bearing, and so was the death of the Lord.
All these three trumpet-tongued secrets [literally, ‘three mysteries of
a cry’: Bauer translates ‘cry’ as “(to be) loudly proclaimed”; the ANF
as “of renown”] were brought to pass in the deep silence of God. How then
were they made known to the world? [Literally, how was he manifested
to the ‘aiôsin’—see below.] Up in the heavens a star gleamed
out, more brilliant than all the rest; no words could describe its luster,
and the strangeness of it left men bewildered [literally, it caused astonishment].
The other stars and the sun and moon gathered round it in chorus, but this
star outshone them all. Great was the ensuing perplexity, where could this
newcomer have come from, so unlike its fellows? Everywhere magic crumbled
away before it; the spells of sorcery were all broken, and superstition
received its death-blow. The age-old empire of evil was overthrown, for
God was now appearing [literally, being manifest] in human form to bring
in a new order, even life without end. Now that which had been perfected
in the Divine counsels began its work; and all creation was thrown into
a ferment over this plan for the utter destruction of death.”
Attempts to demonstrate that this
passage is a hymn have proven inconclusive. Schoedel (
op.cit., p.88)
settles on regarding it as “a product of Ignatius’ rhetorical methods,”
though he could be putting in his own words a summary of a ‘cosmic myth’
that already existed in the community. Its resemblance to the gnostic redeemer
myth has been pointed out, with its implications of a descent of the savior
while hidden from the evil spirits, and his re-ascent to heaven as represented
by the “star” which shines out and gains power over the world of evil in
magic, sorcery and superstition, bringing in a new order. Some of these
elements can be found in the Pauline epistles (e.g., Eph. 1:10 and 3:10),
but perhaps the closest parallel is in the Ascension of Isaiah 9, in which
the Son descends through the spheres of heaven, to be hung on a tree by
the god of the firmament, Satan. There, Christ’s identity is hidden from
the evil powers who “do not know who he is.” (See Article No. 3:
Who
Crucified Jesus?)
The parallels are also striking
in 1 Corinthians 2:6-8. There, God’s wisdom in Christ is also a hidden
“mystery,” while “the rulers of this age” are unaware of the Lord of Glory’s
identity and crucify him. The debate over the meaning of “
tôn
archontôn tou aiônos toutou” in 2:8 should be elucidated
by Ignatius’ use of the identical phrase—with “ruler” in the singular—here
and elsewhere as a reference to Satan, and not to any worldly authority.
It makes a strong argument for taking Paul’s phrase as also referring to
the evil powers of the lower heavens. (Schoedel is another scholar who
concedes that this is the meaning of Paul’s term “the rulers of this age.”)
Paul’s “hidden wisdom of God” and Ignatius’ “deep silence of God” convey
the same thing: the spiritual realm of God where spiritual processes take
place, and those to whom they are of most concern and whom they most affect
are the spirit powers.
In fact, Ignatius’ passage speaks
of these “secrets” of God being “made known to the
aiôsin.”
Both Staniforth and Lake translate the latter term as “the world,” but
this is an avoidance of the more direct meaning. There are other words
Ignatius could have used to signify the world as a spatial area or the
people that inhabit it. Instead, he uses the plural (dative) of “
aiôn.”
This can mean “ages” in regard to an expanse of time, and the writer elsewhere
uses it as such. But it can also mean supernatural beings, “Aeons,” who
inhabit the celestial spheres. Bauer’s Lexicon provides such a meaning
(def. 4), and suggests this as the meaning in Ignatius’ Ephesians 19:2.
Further, it regards this as the probable meaning in the Pauline Ephesians
2:2—“when you followed the aeon [spirit ruler] of this world” (“the age
of this world” doesn’t really make much sense)—as well as in Colossians
1:26—“hidden from the aeons and from the generations” (the spirits and
the humans, since “from the ages and from the generations” would be a redundancy)—and
in Ephesians 3:9, although it allows that other meanings in these passages
are possible. Schoedel (
Ibid., p.91, n.24) supports the reading
of supernatural beings in Ignatius.
Such a reading is internally
supported. Ignatius asks how these things were made known to the world/aeons.
Since he goes on to speak solely of the effects created in heaven—the “star”
portion of the passage—and not of effects on a human audience, “aeons”
is to be preferred. Staniforth’s translation of “it left men bewildered”
is not specified in the text, which merely says that the new star caused
astonishment; and since this is enlarged on by reference to “the other
stars, with the sun and moon gathered in chorus round this star” (Lake),
we ought to be left in no uncertainty as to where this scene takes place.
Thus, if Ignatius means “how
were these things revealed to the aeons,” the spirit powers, we are squarely
in the realm of the mythological, part of a family of passages in several
documents which provide mutual support to each other, including the crucial
1 Corinthians 2:8. We need not make all the tortured readings most commentators
feel are necessary to get around the plainest meaning of the passage. It
represents a mythical outlook predating the adoption of the new historical
Jesus. The virginity of Jesus’ mother, the birth, and Jesus’ very death
itself, are mythological events that “came to pass (
epraxthê,
aorist passive of
prassô)”—were wrought (Lake), performed,
executed—within that mythological setting. To get around this, Staniforth
suggests they were “prepared” in the silence of God. Schoedel notes that
it could mean that these three things were “effected within the purpose
or sphere of the divine” (
Ibid., p.91), but then chooses to drop
them into history on the basis of the use of same verb in Magnesians 11
and Smyrneans 4:2 in connection with Ignatius’ historical declarations
about Jesus. The latter consideration is hardly conclusive. It is the context
that determines the meaning we should draw, and
prassô is
an extremely common verb, used in all sorts of contexts.
In the earlier form of this myth,
we are led to assume that the name of Mary did not appear (just as Paul
does not give us her name in Galatians 4:4’s “born of woman”); this is
possibly Ignatius’ own amendment. Schoedel suggests that the two elements
at the head of this mythical scene, Jesus’ conception by a virgin and his
birth, are a direct mirroring of Isaiah 7:14 (“A virgin shall conceive
and bear a son”). But he fails to follow through and conclude that these
things are not based on historical traditions but are in fact mythical
elements grounded in scripture, just as we can surmise in regard to Paul’s
Galatians 4:4 statement. The Christian myth before historicization was
the product of meditation on scripture. Everything in the New Testament
epistles points in this direction.
When we get to the “star” passage,
we encounter some uncertainty. It is by means of this star that the Aeons
learn of the conception, birth and death of Jesus—things already brought
to pass. If this myth has ties to gnostic thought, the star could be seen
as the ascended Christ himself, now shining out in heaven. It is after
his death and exaltation that he gains the power to destroy magic and superstition,
and the old empire of evil forces and death is brought to an end. Because
gnostic mythology does not specifically use the image of a star in the
ascension of the divine redeemer, but only light and glory, Schoedel and
others claim the star refers to Jesus’ descent into the world, not his
ascension, and their tendency is to relate it to the Star of Bethlehem,
though not assuming that the latter is literally historical. The precise
alignment of the star motif is not spelled out in this passage, and it
may not matter. But if the plainer meaning of the opening sentences is
adopted, that all activities of the Savior have already been accomplished,
then the star in this sequence of thought must appear at the ascension
and not at the point of birth.
It is quite possible that the
Star of Bethlehem feature of Matthew’s Nativity story (it is missing in
Luke’s) is derived from this sort of mythological background. Ignatius’
thought milieu is undeniably closer to elements of the Matthean Gospel
than any other, and the similarity of many passages in Matthew to expressions
in Ignatius is best explained by postulating that Matthew was being written
in the same general area around the same time.
This “myth” in Ephesians 19,
then, is a hold-over from the pre-historical Jesus phase of the Ignatian
community. All its elements fit a mythological setting, including the wonder
and confusion of the other stars as representing the spirit forces, good
and bad, from whom the identity of Jesus has been hidden from “birth” to
death. Under the historical scenario, it may well be questioned how Satan
could be unaware of the birth and death of Jesus, taking place under the
open skies of Judea and in the sight of many. If Ignatius sensed inherent
contradictions, now that Jesus had died outside Jerusalem under sentence
of Pontius Pilate, he shows no sign. But old modes of expression are often
adapted to new understandings, while anomalies are glossed over or ignored.
Ignatius says that the three
“mysteries,” Jesus’ conception, birth and death, were brought to pass in
the “deep silence of God,” which although obscure, strongly suggests a
spiritual realm that is inaccessible to human observation where God carries
out his work of salvation. The word “silence” is “
hêsuxia”
and this word appears a few chapters earlier in another passage which commentators
find obscure. In 15:1, Ignatius says that “the man who truly possesses
the word of Jesus can also hear his silence.” Staniforth muses over and
rejects a possible application to Jesus’ silence before the High Priest
and Pilate, but he fails to offer any meaningful alternative. But here
Jesus’ “silence” which the one possessing his “word” can penetrate suggests
the same mythical significance as in the later passage. Jesus began as
a spiritual entity who also worked in the deep and impenetrable mythical
realm of God.
A Rite of Chrisma
Finally, a quick look at the
second Gospel-like anecdote in the Ignatian epistles. In Ephesians 17:1,
Ignatius tells his readers:
“The reason for the Lord’s acceptance of the
precious ointment on his head was to exhale the fragrance of incorruptibility
upon his church. So you must never let yourselves be anointed with the
malodorous chrism of the prince of this world’s doctrines, or he may snatch
you into his own keeping and away from the life that lies before you.”
That the “chrism” refers to an anointing
at the time of baptism (here contrasted with the Devil’s anointing), part
of a rite of initiation, is a common interpretation and undoubtedly correct.
The first Johannine epistle, probably coming from the same geographical
area of northern Syria a little earlier than Ignatius, also refers to a
rite of chrism (2:20/27). That Ignatius’ is alluding to the Gospel episode
of the anointing of Jesus at Bethany is also a common suggestion, but this
is far less certain. Not only are no historical details attached to it,
the reference bears all the marks of a traditional cultic explanation for
the community’s rite, in that sectarian thinking tends to develop myths
about the founder establishing the ritual or performing some act upon which
the ritual is allegedly based, or which gives it its meaning. In this passage,
Ignatius refers to the rite of chrism, and makes his remark about the Lord,
specifically to explain a certain aspect of the rite’s significance. This
is an example of the phenomenon which anthropologists such as Mircea Eliade
have long noted, that of ‘ritual producing explanatory myth.’ In this same
class, we may place Paul’s scene of the Lord’s Supper in 1 Corinthians
11:23-26, something he says he has “received from the Lord.” Here Paul
may be inventing on his own and claiming revelation, attempting to impart
a sacramental quality to the communal meal whose spirit he feels the Corinthians
are abusing. (See Article No. 6:
The Source of Paul’s
Gospel.)
Again, Ignatius does not appeal
to any Gospel account or apostolic tradition as the source of this information.
The alleged similarity to Matthean wording (26:7) relates only to the word
“ointment” and the phrase “upon his head,” basic ideas that can hardly
avoid being expressed in a common way. As for the possible derivation of
Ignatius’ idea from a more general oral tradition, this is undermined when
one notes that no consistent tradition is in evidence in the Gospels, since
both Luke and John portray their equivalent scene as an anointing of Jesus’
feet. It is much safer to conclude that Matthew may have derived
his scene from mythical precedents such as we see in Ignatius.
Postscript
From the vantage point of the
mythicist position, it is safe to say that not a single early Christian
document outside the Gospels from the first hundred years of the faith—and
some extending beyond that—actually says the things that orthodox scholarship
would like them to say and which it has done its best to make them say.
From the 19th century translator of Minucius Felix (in the
Ante-Nicene
Fathers), who labeled Octavius’ denigration of the idea of a crucified
man and his cross as “A reverent allusion to the Crucified, believed in
and worshipped as God,” to J. H. Charlesworth’s scouring of the Odes of
Solomon in search of some word that could refer, no matter how obscurely,
to the resurrection, Christian scholars have imposed one small segment
of the early Christian documentary record, the Gospels and Acts, upon their
reading of everything else.
The Hellenistic era was the age
of personal salvation, through the individual’s mystical union with a personal
savior god. While the Greeks looked only for the ascent of the soul to
the divine, Jews and Christians looked for a place in the Kingdom of God.
While Paul did not envision this Kingdom as located on earth in the material
world, he still looked for a resurrection in a transformed body, made of
spirit material like that of Christ. The god’s own death and resurrection
in the heavenly dimension guaranteed that of the believer, but as Christian
thought moved increasingly toward resurrection in the flesh, the divine
redeemer who was entrusted with this role had to do so by taking part in
the same flesh: to save it he must enter it. But the exact nature of his
coming to earth was not universally accepted. Its precise nature had to
be worked out. Some circles along the way resisted the more concrete manifestations
‘in flesh.’ The conflict first appears in 1 John 4, although exactly what
the writer of that epistle conceived of as constituting “in flesh,” or
the precise position of his opponents, is not clear. It is notable that,
writing probably a decade or two before Ignatius, he did not enumerate
any of the bishop of Antioch’s historical biographical details, and the
basis of his own belief was revelation through the Spirit.
There was one way to ensure that
a divine Savior had fully partaken in flesh and human nature, that his
redemptive acts were sufficient to guarantee the benefits to his devotees:
place him in history. This was a need which the equivalent salvation religions
among the Greeks did not so urgently feel—probably because they had no
need or desire to perpetuate the flesh. Though they conceived of their
savior gods as ‘approaching matter’ in some way, of having a body and experiences
that possessed the “likeness” of those of humans, they were content to
leave them in mythical times and settings. The earliest Christians as well
were content with this much: a Christ Jesus, an Anointed Savior, incarnated
in a mythical part of God’s heavens, grappling with the evil spirits who
were one of the chief concerns of both Deity and humanity. Man as a whole
was separated from God largely because Satan and his evil angels were the
rulers of this age, cutting off earth from heaven. They were the cause
of much misery, misfortune and unbelief in the world, including the original
Fall. Jesus had a job to do in the heavens and in the underworld—perhaps
his principal job—to destroy the power of the demons, restore the unity
of the universe, and rescue the souls of the righteous.
The victory over the evil powers
would automatically set the scene for salvation and a new age. The righteous
who believed in Christ Jesus would enter the Kingdom when Jesus came to
earth to judge the world. A simple, efficient system. Some time before
Ignatius, it ceased to be enough. Jesus had to have entered history and
material flesh. His parentage had to be elucidated, though he kept the
universal paternity of the ancient world gods and heroes as son of a Deity
by a virgin. The agency of his suffering had to become a human force (as
was humanity’s own), the governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, with an active
part played by the hostile and despised Jewish authorities. The biographical
details were largely supplied from scripture. But there was another, fortuitous
source for his activities in flesh: the milieu of Kingdom preaching centered
in Galilee. Probably by the grace of the writer of Mark, the imagined founder
of that movement became wedded to the savior god come to suffer and die
on earth. Thus the single most dramatic and influential historical event
in the planet’s history, the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, entered
human consciousness. Before Ignatius, no Christian document—allowing for
the inauthenticity of 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16 and a second century provenance
for 1 Timothy—refers to it in that context.
Ignatius himself clearly shows
the fundamental impulse for this development, for the historicization of
Jesus and his ‘true’ human experience of suffering and exaltation. It is
not because it is so recorded, not because some reliable account of it
exists to be read and drawn upon. It is not because these traditions have
been passed down through the generations since the events themselves. It
is not because some carefully thought-out theology and process of philosophical
deduction urged such a doctrine upon him, for this, too, Ignatius never
offers us in his letters. It is for purely subjective reasons, personal
and immediate, that he “knows and believes” that Jesus Christ was truly
born of Mary, truly suffered under Pilate, was truly crucified in human
flesh and rose in the same state. It is so because “by believing in his
death you may escape death” (Tral. 2:1), and here he is drawing on the
universal pattern of Hellenistic salvation thought: the paradigmatic parallel
that has both deity and believer undergoing the same experiences. It is
because if Christ’s suffering was only a semblance, then Ignatius is “dying
in vain” (Tral. 10:1). If all of Christ’s experiences were simply an illusion,
then his experiences too are only an illusion (Sm. 4:2). This is the true
source of all theology: human need. What we need we will create theologies
to support. God’s Anointed Savior arose when certain circles within the
Hellenistic Jewish milieu created their own divine intermediary to their
increasingly inaccessible God, and a Messiah to rescue them and bring them
into their destiny. This Christ Jesus emerged into history when the need
of the individual for salvation became paramount and only a Jesus who had
been fully human could accomplish the task.
Before long, the political advantages
of possessing a human figure as the fount of the movement also emerged,
providing a chain of authority and correct doctrine that could be traced
back to him who had established it, and the Jews could be accused of rejecting
a human figure who had been in their midst. If the first apostles could
be claimed to have seen Jesus in the flesh, the assurance of human resurrection
in the flesh was secure, but it could only be available through the institution
that preserved those traditions and guaranteed their historical veracity.
The power over the human mind is the power most sought after, and human
fear is its most vulnerable channel. Humanity’s most primitive fear is
the fear of death, and the story of Jesus evolved to take away that fear.
*
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Translations:
Staniforth, Maxwell:
Early Christian Writings,
Penguin Classics, 1968
Lake, Kirsopp:
The Apostolic Fathers (2 volumes),
Loeb Classical Library, 1912-13
Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol.1 (1870), reprinted Eerdmanns,
Grand Rapids, 1951-78
Translations also included in some works below.
Commentaries:
Cross, F. L.,
The Early Christian Fathers, Duckworth,
London, 1961
Grant, R. M., editor (and author of vols. 1, 2 and 4),
The
Apostolic Fathers (6 vols.), T.
Nelson, New York, 1964-68
Schoedel, William R.,
Ignatius of Antioch, Fortress
Press, Philadelphia, 1985
Kleist, J. A.,
Ancient Christian Writers *
Tugwell, Simon,
The Apostolic Fathers, London,
Chapman, 1989
Lightfoot, J. B.,
The Apostolic Fathers (5 vol.)
*
Richardson, Cyril,
Early Christian Fathers, London,
SCM Press, 1953
Barnard, L. W.,
Studies in the Apostolic Fathers and
Their Background, Schocken, New York, 1966
Molland, E., “The Heretics Combatted by Ignatius of Antioch,”
JEH 1954
http://www.jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/supp12Two.htm
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