Nova Scotia Scott

Some contemporary biblical scholars and historians believe that the early church was awash with gospels, epistles, and apocalypses that are not found in today’s New Testament.  These other texts, according to this view, were allowed to circulate within the early church more or less freely and were judged heretical and tossed out only after Emperor Constantine had embraced Christianity and brought the church under the protection of Roman power.

Only then were leaders of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, with the indispensable aid of imperial authority, able to root out teachings and texts deemed threatening to church order and stability.  Given the opportunity, they ruthlessly suppressed alternative scriptures containing Gnostic, proto-feminist, egalitarian, or other subversive accounts of Jesus’ life and teaching.

In The Lost History of Christianity, Philip Jenkins shows that this view doesn’t make sense by looking at ancient texts of the Syriac-speaking Church, which came into existence in the Middle East soon after Christ’s resurrection.

An Assyrian Christian named Tatian, a disciple of Justin Martyr for many years, wrote a book around AD 170 that became an authoritative text in the Syriac Church.  The Diatessaron of Tatian, the first harmony of the four canonical gospels, was popularly accepted as the Gospel text until a complete Syriac Bible with Old and New Testaments was translated and compiled.  This was the Peshitta, which was completed in the early 5th century and remains the authorised version in Syriac churches (both Nestorian and Monophysite) to this day.

The Diatessaron and the Peshitta speak decisively against the claim that the early church accepted numerous contradictory texts written by putative apostolic authors.

The problem with all this is that the Eastern churches had a long familiarity with the rival scriptures, but rejected them because they knew they were late and tendentious. Even as early as the second century, the Diatessaron assumes four, and only four, authentic Gospels. Throughout the Middle Ages, neither Nestorians nor Jacobites [Monophysites] were under any coercion from the Roman/Byzantine Empire or church, and had they wished, they could have included in the canon any alternative Gospels or scriptures they wanted to. But instead of adding to the canon, they chose to prune. The Syriac Bible omits several books that are included in the West (2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and the book of Revelation). Scholars like Isho’dad wanted to carry the purge further, and did not feel that any of the Catholic Epistles could seriously claim apostolic authorship. The only extraneous text that a few authorities wished to include was the Diatessaron itself. The deep conservatism of these churches, so far I removed from papal or imperial control, makes nonsense of claims that the church bureaucracy allied with empire to suppress unpleasant truths about Christian origins.

Although they did not include them in the canon of scripture, all the Eastern churches knew many ancient Christian texts, including apocryphal Gospels and apocalypses, and many scholars quote from now-lost patristic texts and commentaries.

(Footnotes omitted, quoted from p. 88.)

Isho’dad of Merv (in present-day Turkmenistan) was a ninth-century Nestorian bishop and Bible scholar.

That Eastern churches were familiar with alternative accounts of Jesus and his teachings is further corroborated by the fact that the Gnostic texts discovered at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945 are in Coptic, the language of Egyptian Christians.

I reviewed The Lost History of Christianity here.

Tags: Bible, Christian history, Eastern Christianity, Monophysitism, Nestorianism, Philip Jenkins