"Let whoever seeks not cease from his seeking
until he finds. When he finds he will be troubled.
When he is troubled, he will marvel and will reign
over all."-Jesus, The
Gospel of Thomas
The History of
The Bible
reprinted
from The First Battle for The Bible:
ChristianityLibraryToday.com part of
ChristianityToday.com
A century after Christ's death, a literalist
and a spiritualizer forced the church to choose how it would
read the Scriptures it inherited from the Jews.Joseph T. Lienhard, S.J.
By the
year 150, the Christian church exhibited many features that
would mark it for centuries: Christians baptized in the name
of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; they celebrated the
Lord's Supper weekly; they were governed by a bishop,
presbyters, and deacons. But they still lacked one thing that
would become central to Christian identity: a New Testament.
Their only Holy Scripture was that collection of sacred
writings later called the Old Testament, which they generally
read in the "Septuagint" version—a Greek translation
pre-dating Jesus by over a century.
Of
course, the documents now found in our New Testament had
already been written: Paul's letters between 50 and 65, the
four Gospels and Acts by 90 or 100, and the other books by
that time or a little later. Paul's letters had gradually been
collected and circulated; by 96, for example, the church at
Rome had a copy of 1 Corinthians.
For the
earliest Christians, who were Jews, the Sacred Scriptures were
the fixed authority, and they were used to demonstrate that
Jesus was Messiah and Lord. About a century later, the
situation changed. Converts to Christianity, who now came from
among the pagans, readily accepted Jesus as the Christ and the
Son of God, but they often found the Scriptures a stumbling
block.
These
strange writings portrayed God in highly anthropomorphic
terms: with hands, feet, arms, and eyes—and passionate
emotions. God could be talked out of a decision he had made by
Abraham or Moses. The Hebrew preference for the concrete over
the abstract led to unsettling expressions like "circumcise
your hearts."
These
fell with a clang on the ears and minds of educated Greeks
who, following their philosophers, held a highly abstract idea
of God. God was the supreme One, Being itself, far above the
world of human beings and their troubles, "Thought Thinking
Itself," as Aristotle wrote. In comparison, the God of the
Jewish Scriptures was an embarrassment, even a scandal.
Unless,
of course, one knew how to interpret those Scriptures
correctly.
Around
the year 140, two teachers put forth their own unique
solutions to this problem of interpretation. Ultimately, the
church rejected both—and in doing so, it clarified its own
orthodox position.
Mr. Literal
The first
of these teachers, Marcion of Sinope, came from a city on the
Black Sea and made a fortune as a ship owner. Around 140 he
went to Rome and joined the church there, to which he made a
large donation. Four years later, he was excommunicated, and
his money was returned to him. Thereupon he founded his own
church.
Marcion
read the Old Testament intently. He interpreted it literally,
and only literally, and concluded that the god of the Old
Testament was an inferior god, the creator and judge, distinct
from the God of love who was the Father of Jesus Christ. This
creator god was ignorant (he had to ask Adam where he was); he
contradicted himself (first forbidding Moses to make graven
images, then ordering him to make the image of a serpent); and
he commanded dreadful slaughters, even of women and children.
This reading led Marcion to a radical decision: these Jewish
Scriptures must be thrown out of the church.
But
Marcion did not leave the church without a Bible; he created
the first known New Testament "canon," or list of
authoritative books. Marcion's hero was Paul, who had rejected
the power of the Law to save. Paul had also written of "my
gospel" (Rom. 2:16), which must be the Gospel according to
Luke, since Luke was Paul's companion. But both Paul's letters
and Luke's Gospel contained quotations from the Old Testament
that, Marcion believed, had been inserted into the authentic
documents by Judaizing Christians. So he purged these books of
Jewish influence.
Mr. Spiritual
The
author of the Epistle of Barnabas
was Marcion's diametric opposite. Probably written in
Alexandria, Egypt, ca. 135, this pamphlet is also deeply
concerned with the interpretation of the Old Testament in the
church. But if Marcion took the Old Testament only literally
and threw it out of the church, Barnabas took it exclusively
as figurative.
In
Marcion's mind, the Jews interpreted the Scriptures correctly
and worshiped the inferior god of justice. In Barnabas's mind,
the Jews failed to understand their own Scriptures, and they
interpreted them incorrectly—that is, literally.
Barnabas
worked out an extensive explanation. Moses, he wrote, received
the covenant on Sinai. But, when the Jews worshiped the golden
calf, the covenant was broken and never restored. The Jews
then listened to a wicked angel, who told them to interpret
their Scriptures literally. In fact, though, the whole Old
Testament is an enormous Christian allegory.
Barnabas
gives several examples. The prohibition against eating pork
really means avoiding men who pray only when they are needy,
for swine bellow only when they are hungry. The prohibition
against eating rabbits, hyenas, and weasels really warns
against deviant sexual sins (from the nature of these
animals). The law of kosher, eating only animals with cloven
hooves that chew the cud, means associating only with people
who meditate on the Lord and have one foot on earth, one in
heaven.
In his
pièce de résistance, Barnabas writes that when Scripture
attests that Abraham circumcised 318 men, it really teaches
the redemptive work of Jesus Christ, for the number 318 in
Greek (which used letters for numbers) is the first two
letters of Jesus' name (iota and eta, IH = 18)
and tau (T = 300), which represents the cross.
The church's verdict
In
rejecting Marcion and not following Barnabas, the church began
to define its own position. Against Marcion, the church
asserted that the God of the Old Testament and the Father of
Jesus Christ are one God. The Old Testament was and remains
the Word of God, to be interpreted in light of Christ. Against
Barnabas, the Old Testament had a true literal sense. God did
make a covenant with Abraham and gave the Law to Moses.
A few
decades after Marcion, a Gnostic teacher named Ptolemy wrote a
letter to a woman, Flora, who had asked him how to understand
the Law of Moses. Ptolemy undertook what modern scholars call
a "source-critical" approach—using the supposed literary
sources of Bible books to throw light on their meaning. The
Old Testament represents not one lawgiver, but three: God
himself, Moses, and the Elders. Ptolemy could quote the Gospel
according to Matthew to prove his point: God made marriage
indissoluble (Matt. 19:6), Moses granted divorce as an
exception (), and the Elders invented corban ().
Thus
there are three levels in the Old Testament: God's law, which
Christ fulfills (such as the Ten Commandments); the law of
Moses, which Christ abolished (such as "an eye for an eye");
and symbolic legislation (like unleavened bread, circumcision,
and animal sacrifice), which provided images of higher
realities; with Christ, the practices were abolished but the
higher truth remained.
Thus
Ptolemy accepted some Old Testament texts literally,
understood others figuratively, and rejected still others as
invalid. Modern Christians should not rush to reject Ptolemy,
for he saw a real problem. One might consider two verses from
the King James Bible: , "Thou shalt not commit adultery," and
, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." Both are Holy
Scripture, God's Word. Must both be interpreted today in the
same way?
What did
the Christian church do about the right interpretation of the
Old Testament? That question could not be answered
definitively until there was a New Testament, for the
authoritative message of Christ and about Christ would also
provide the key to interpreting the Old Testament.
The New
Testament canon took shape gradually. By 150 or so, the three
synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) were accepted and
circulated together. There was more resistance, in some
quarters, to the Gospel according to John, because the
Gnostics made use of it (the oldest commentary on that Gospel
is by a Gnostic). By the end of the second century, however,
it was generally accepted. Sixteen other books were also
accepted: thirteen Pauline letters, but not Hebrews; Acts, as
the continuation of Luke; and the first epistles of Peter and
John. Thus, by the year 200, a canon of twenty books was
almost universally acknowledged. This New Testament made a
Christian interpretation of the Old Testament possible, but it
did not of itself provide one.
Solving the Two-Testament Puzzle
In
essence, there are two ways to relate the Old Testament to the
New. One is history, envisioning a process of divinely guided
progress and progressive revelation that comes to its
fulfillment in Christ. Irenaeus of Lyons (died ca. 200) and
later, in their own way, the Antiochene exegetes followed this
path. The other way is that of promise and fulfillment, shadow
and reality, type and antitype. This was the way followed by
Origen (died 254) and by the Alexandrian school of
interpretation.
Irenaeus,
a Greek by birth, was the bishop of Lyons in Gaul (now France)
at the end of the second century. His great work was
Against the Heresies, by which
he meant various forms of Gnosticism. The Gnostics denied the
historicity of the gospel: neither the historical Jesus (whose
flesh, they said, was not real anyway) nor the events of his
life meant anything for salvation; they were all signs of an
eternal, invisible reality. Matter and the world were the
product of an inferior god, and the human call was to escape
from the body, matter, and time and to return to the higher
world from which we fell.
In
response, Irenaeus proposed a sweeping historical vision, a
great ellipse with Adam and Christ as its two foci. Matter was
created by the one God who is also the Father of Jesus Christ;
salvation took place in time and history; and Old and New
Testaments form a single vision within this historical sweep.
Moreover,
the interpretation of all of Scripture had to be guided by the
Rule of Faith, a loosely formulated confession of faith in the
one God whose name is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; in the
saving cross of Jesus Christ; and in the work of the Holy
Spirit in the church. Irenaeus thereby established the
principles for the "right interpretation" of the Scriptures,
guided by the Rule of Faith, and insisting the whole Bible
portrays one continuous history, from creation to redemption
and consummation.
Origen's pastoral approach
Origen
did something wholly new and ultimately necessary: he worked
his way through almost the whole of the Old Testament (and the
New, too), verse by verse. The second-century crisis of
interpretation was resolved in the third century by actually
interpreting the Scriptures. To dismiss Origen's
interpretation as "allegory" is to do him injustice. Real
allegories are relatively rare in Origen.
It is
better to say that he did almost anything to find something in
a word or a phrase in the Old Testament that would speak to
Christians of his day. Sometimes he was reminded: water
reminded him of baptism, wood of the cross, bread of the
Eucharist. Sometimes he saw types: Joseph a type of Christ,
the bride of the Song a type of the church. Sometimes he saw
moral lessons: the Christians of the New Covenant must go
beyond observing the Law to selfless charity.
The way
that Origen trod was unexplored before him, and his influence
on the tradition of exegesis has yet to be fully grasped. As
one admirer wrote, Origen was a vessel of precious nard; the
vessel was shattered, and the perfume has filled the whole
world.
Thus the
crisis of interpretation was resolved by seeing Christ as the
key to understanding the Scriptures. The door has been
unlocked, but in a modern interpretive environment shaped by
critical methods that owe little to faith, we still have not
fully entered into the world it leads to.
Joseph T.
Lienhard is professor of theology at Fordham University, New
York.
"recognize what is
in front of your face, and what is concealed
will be revealed to you. For there is nothing hidden
that will not be disclosed."
-Jesus, The
Gospel of Thomas
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