David L. Dungan,
Constantine’s Bible: Politics and the Making of the New Testament.
Fortress Press, 2007.
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
One
of the many things Dan Brown got wrong in the supposedly historical
background of his novel The Da Vinci Code was that the emperor
Constantine chose, more or less ham-handedly, a set of books henceforth
to count as Christian scripture. As often, there is the merest element
of truth amid Brown’s distortions, and if one wants to know what it is
in this case, one might read David L. Dungan’s Constantine’s Bible:
Politics and the Making of the New Testament. (For the full story
one ought to read this fascinating book along with David Trobisch’s
The First Edition of the New Testament.) Dungan begins with the very
helpful observation that “scripture” and “canon” do not mean the same
thing; then he demonstrates how Eusebius’ famous classification of New
Testament books was a discussion of scripture and not an attempt
to define a canon of scripture, i.e., some official list of what
is in and what is out. Dungan shows that Eusebius was merely doing what
the legatees of all philosophical schools (or even librarians) did:
organizing the writings ascribed to founders of the school, dividing
them into authentic, debatable, and spurious, according to general
opinion. There was no hint that some of the writings were evil or to be
shunned, just zeal to safeguard the outlines of a particular tradition
by distinguishing authentic texts from pseudepigrapha or misattribution,
and by keeping accurate copies available. One also looked to heirs of
the founders to try to maintain the original interpretation. It wasn’t
that no one had freedom to reinterpret old traditions; one simply wanted
to keep the historic originals extant and available.
Eusebius knew who among his
predecessors and contemporaries regarded which writings as orthodox in
content and apostolic in authorship, and on this basis he reckoned
twenty books as genuine or acknowledged (our four gospels,
Acts, thirteen or fourteen Pauline epistles, 1 Peter, and 1 John).
Revelation seems formerly to have belonged in this category but had
begun to lose its position because of an anti-Roman bias that
ill-comported with Constantinian patriotism. The second group was the
disputed: James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John (and, according to
some, the Epistle to the Hebrews). These were held in good repute by
very many, but some had second thoughts about their authenticity. Third
came the spurious: nothing sinister, just not authentically
apostolic (Shepherd of Hermas, Gospel according to the Hebrews, Acts of
Paul, Apocalypse of Peter, Apostolic Constitutions, and Epistle of
Barnabas. Some place Revelation here, deeming it the work of the heretic
Cerinthus). This third group would appear to be constituted by the books
that some Catholic bishops/scholars accepted, but which Eusebius and/or
the majority rejected. The fourth group of texts were rejected
as heretical forgeries pure and simple: Gospel of Peter, Gospel of
Thomas, Infancy Gospel of Matthew, Acts of Andrew, Acts of John, of
Thomas, of Peter (all ascribed, along with the Acts of Paul, to a
Gnostic named Leucius). Naturally, not everybody rejected these books,
as they continued to be used and copied for centuries. But they were
unwelcome in the “catholic, orthodox” circles, the only ones whose votes
mattered for Eusebius and Constantine.
Let me pose a modern
analogy for Eusebius’s four categories: the four color voting system of
the Jesus Seminar. The Seminar Fellows discus the issues and then vote a
gospel passage red if they feel very sure Jesus said it or did it. They
vote it pink if it looks quite likely to be authentic but with a
lingering grain of doubt. It is rated gray if the probability is low but
the door is not shut completely, while the black vote denotes a spurious
saying.
Dungan’s excellent point
about “canon” not covering the same ground as “scripture” illuminates
things right at this point: different sects may (informally) prefer and
use certain writings and not others, ignoring the favorites of other
sects. Enochic Judaism and Pharisaic Judaism had different books, as did
Samaritan versus Pharisaic Jews. The Sukhavati Sutras were central to
the Pure Land Buddhist sects, irrelevant to others. But none of these
groups was trying to make a list of books which were alone were to be
used by the faithful. That is where Constantine came in. As is well
known, he inserted himself into the theological affairs of the church
like a Papal Bull in a China shop. It was he who convened the Council of
Nicea to endorse and enforce the Christological views of Athanasius. And
it was he who, in the case of scripture, made the descriptive into the
prescriptive.
I mentioned David Trobisch
earlier. Trobisch showed to my satisfaction that the 27-book New
Testament dated from long before these debates. Marcion had compiled the
first New Testament, consisting of the Evangelicon (Ur-Lukas) and the
Apostolicon (Galatians, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Laodiceans
[Ur-Ephesians], 1 and 2 Thessalonians, Philippians, Colossians, and
Philemon (?). The Pastorals had not yet been written (being rejoinders
to him). Our 27 book New Testament was Polycarp’s counter-blast
to the Marcionite Sputnik. Polycarp turns out to have been the
Ecclesiastical Redactor of Luke and John, and the author of Acts, the
Pastorals (and Hebrews?). This was slightly after the middle of the
second century. All our manuscripts attest this selection, much earlier
than Eusebius’ list or the Easter Encyclical of Athanasius in 367. It
would appear, however, that this edition of the New Testament, while
widely influential, was not binding on anybody but merely enjoyed great
favor among the circles who copied it and used it in church. Some were
less certain about some of the shorter works Polycarp had included, and
that debate is enough to account for the second and third categories of
Eusebius. Likewise, some thought Polycarp should have included a few
more. It would have been such people who picked the contents of Codex
Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus (adding Barnabas, Hermas, etc.), which
would then have been pre-Constantinian, though some have suggested they
were among the fifty shiny-new pulpit Bibles Constantine ordered up. But
such flexibility abruptly ended as of Constantine’s intervention. From
now on, Polycarp’s edition became the one and only Catholic, Orthodox
New Testament. The monks of St. Pachomius had to burn or bury their
other books, and they decided on the former.
So I would supplement
Dungan’s excellent presentation with Trobisch’s. It is the latter who
explains, as the former does not, what ancient agendas led to the
specific contents of the New Testament.
My main quibbles with
Dungan’s history of canonization occur in his discussion of Jewish and
Islamic canonizations. Dungan avers that the Rabbis did not focus on the
books of scripture, but on the oral traditions of Torah interpretation,
the Mishnah. With other scholars, he dismisses the long-standing belief
that there was a decision on the canon of scripture at the Yavneh
Sanhedrin. Well, I am missing a piece here. It seems clear that there
had been no one Jewish canon in the first century of the Common Era, as
a glance at the table of contents of the Dead Sea Scrolls will reveal.
But surely the Pharisees had a definitive list? Wasn’t one of the
reasons they rejected the Septuagint that the latter contained certain
books they considered apocryphal? Dungan dismisses Jospehus’ insistence
that Judaism accepted only the 22 books (= the Protestant 39 book OT),
commenting that we don’t know that Josephus is speaking for Judaism in
general here. If not, however, what’s he doing? At least he seems to
want us to think he is, right? And why say he was lying? He certainly
shared the Rabbinic dogma of the cessation of prophecy, itself a kind of
canon-closing maneuver. The Qumran sect, the Samaritans, and the
Sadducees all perished with the century, and so did whatever scripture
collections they revered, and wouldn’t that leave the Pharisees’ version
as normative by default?
And when it comes to the
canonization of the Koran, I wonder if Dungan is not conflating two
different scripture collection projects. Tradition tells us that already
in the caliphate of Abu-bekr there had been an initial gathering,
charged to Zaid ibn-Thabit, of disparate fragments of revelation,
pictured as individual but complete Surahs. These were only arranged by
length, from longest to shortest, with no further work required. But the
in the reign of Uthman came the text-standardization. Complaints arose
that theological debates went deadlocked because, when one side appealed
to the Koran, the verse did not read the same way in the other’s copy.
To solve the problem, Uthman ordered the collection of all known copies.
He had, again, Zaid collate all manuscript evidence and produce a
critical text. Uthman directed that all the older texts be burned. Now
all would be playing on the same game board. The trouble here is that
both of the collection traditions appear to be fully as spurious as the
old legends of the verbatim, inspired translations of the Septuagint (as
well as, one might add, the modern scholarly legend of the Yavneh
canonization). As for the collection of Abu-bekr, this seems an attempt
to bridge the fiction of an oral origin of the Koran in the preaching of
the Prophet and the written volume called the Koran, which, however,
repeatedly refers to itself as “this book.” As Günter Lüling has shown,
the Ur-Koran was an Arabic Christian hymnal.
As for the Uthmanic
collection, as John Burton and others have argued, this collection is a
fiction, too. It appears to have been an invention to allow various
ulemma to claim a Koranic pedigree for this or that favorite (and
spurious) hadith. If modern preachers, in a moment of enthusiasm,
exclaim, “It ain’t in the Bible, but it oughta be!” these hadith-mongers
were saying, “It ain’t in the Koran, but it used to be!” They
claimed they had derived so-and-so reading from a family copy of a Koran
predating the Uthmanic collation/standardization. It was a way of
pretending that the standard Koran is not the real Koran. The real one
used to contain this reading. Thus I question whether either the Jewish
or Islamic parallels Dungan discusses are relevant, at least in the way
he thinks they are.
Finally, I have to admit
that the evidence of Irenaeus, apparently defending the outlines of
Polycarp’s New Testament, appear already to be a definite move toward an
official, exclusive canon. He does not want anybody using any but the
four gospels. He marshals every cockamamie rationalization he can think
of to clinch it that there must be four and only four gospels: Matthew,
Mark, Luke, and John. No Gospel of Truth, etc. To me that sounds an
awful lot like the intolerance for scriptural pluralism that Dungan
doesn’t expect till Constantine some centuries later.
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