Wax Drippings and Favorite Passages

On 14 September 201314 September 2013 By Daniel B. WallaceIn Bible Translation, CSNTM, Early Christianity, Exegesis, Textual Criticsim, Theology10 Comments

When the only access that students of the New Testament had to most images of manuscripts was through poor-quality microfilms, interpretation of the data was rather limited. The staff at the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung in Münster, which boasts about 90% of all NT MSS on microfilm, instructed student collators not to try to decipher the marginalia because such were virtually impossible to read. Just the text, please. And even with the text, the students had to guess at quite a bit of the letters and words because of blurred images. Below is an illustration of the kind of images they had to work with (this is codex 2813, photographed by INTF in 1989).

Codex 2813 Microfilm Image

With digital photography, much more data can be seen and interpreted. This includes erasures, different colored ink (including the next-to-impossible-to-see-in-microfilm red and gold), smaller font, ornamentation, prickings (which are used to locate a MS’s scriptorium and age), etc. In addition, wax drippings are visible.

As innocuous as the wax drippings might seem, Henry Sanders, the editor of the editio princeps of Codex Washingtonianus, used them to show what pages were frequently on display. The reason, he argued, is that visitors would often read the pages with a candle, and less-than-careful lectors would inadvertently allow wax to drip from it onto the page.

Sanders’s comment, based on an examination of the actual MS, may have implications that go beyond codex W. With some caveats, it seems that wax drippings can be used to show what passages were favorites. If one were to examine the wax drippings seen in digital images of, say, a twelfth-century minuscule, he or she might be able to determine which passages were favorites from the twelfth century on. Of course, this kind of work would be needed to be done for a good number of manuscripts because an individual MS might be rather idiosyncratic—much the way codex W seemed to be (in that the wax drippings there, according to Sanders, only showed what passages were put on display, not what passages were otherwise favorites of readers). Lectionaries would probably be the least significant for interpreting wax drippings since they were regularly used in church services and the lector would of necessity be reading through the entire lectionary cycle, year after year. And when wax candles were used as opposed to oil lamps to read these MSS needs to be factored in as well. But MSS that were meant for study, personal use, or were otherwise not used much in public worship could contain many secrets of bygone generations of Christians.

I will offer two illustrations, one hypothetical and the other actual. John 3.16 is a favorite verse of American evangelicals today. It has even shown up on placards held by a crazed football fan wearing a multi-color afro, who would stand up in the end zone after a team scored, making sure that the TV cameras would capture the image.

The Gospel on the Simpsons

But was this text that well known and that well loved in ancient and medieval times? A look at digital images of MSS might reveal the answer. Of course, in order to make one’s case, a look at the entire MS’s images would be needed to see which pages had the most wax drippings. Another caveat: if the text on a given page was reworked, scraped, or had extensive marginalia, that might be the reason for extra wax drippings, produced in this case by the scribe him/herself.

An actual illustration can be seen in codex 61, also known as Codex Montfortianus. This is the MS that was produced by a scribe in Oxford named (F)roy in 1520, which included the comma Johanneum (the Trinitarian formula at 1 John 5.7) that made its way into Erasmus’s third edition of the NT (1522). Now housed at Trinity College, Dublin, it is reported to have almost naturally fallen open to 1 John 5 because of the frequent consulting of this passage by researchers over the years. The MS nowadays is no longer available for direct consultation, but the library has produced some adequate digital images of it. And the page which contains the comma has more wax drippings by far than any other. It is also significantly dirtier than any other page, due to the constant handling of the page.

Codex 61: Two Pages before 1 John 5

Codex 61 at 1 John 5

The Comma Johanneum in Codex 61

In the least, examining the wax drippings of digital images in continuous text MSS century by century and production-location by production-location (when known) could produce some interesting results. As these begin to be examined, certain guidelines should emerge on how to interpret the data. The necessary caveats may temper otherwise robust claims, but these should not keep students from examining the data.

The Number of Textual Variants: An Evangelical Miscalculation

On 9 September 20139 September 2013 By Daniel B. WallaceIn Contemporary Issues, Early Christianity, Exegesis, New Testament Studies, Textual Criticsim90 Comments

In the Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, by Norm Geisler (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998; p. 532), there is a comment about the number of textual variants among New Testament manuscripts:

“Some have estimated there are about 200,000 of them. First of all, these are not ‘errors’ but variant readings, the vast majority of which are strictly grammatical. Second, these readings are spread throughout more than 5300 manuscripts, so that a variant spelling of one letter of one word in one verse in 2000 manuscripts is counted as 2000 ‘errors.'”

There are several problems with this paragraph, one of which is this: to say that variant readings are not errors is an odd way of putting things. If the primary goal of NT textual criticism is to recover the wording of the autographa (i.e., the texts as they left the apostles’ hands), then any deviation from that wording is, indeed, an error. It may well be a rather minor error (as the vast majority of them are)—in fact, something that cannot even translated it is so trivial—but it is an error nevertheless. The author, however, is most likely equating error with some reading that would render the Bible errant and fallible. It is quite true that (virtually) no viable variants are major threats to inerrancy; the major problems that the doctrine of inerrancy faces are essentially never found in textually disputed passages in which one reading creates the problem and another erases it.

The larger issue, however is how the number of variants was arrived at. Geisler got his information (directly or indirectly) from Neil R. Lightfoot’s How We Got the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1963), a book now fifty years old. Lightfoot says (53-54):

“From one point of view it may be said that there are 200,000 scribal errors in the manuscripts, but it is wholly misleading and untrue to say that there are 200,000 errors in the text of the New Testament. This large number is gained by counting all the variations in all of the manuscripts (about 4,500). This means that if, for example, one word is misspelled in 4,000 different manuscripts, it amounts to 4,000 ‘errors.’ Actually in a case of this kind only one slight error has been made and it has been copied 4,000 times. But this is the procedure which is followed in arriving at the large number of 200,000 ‘errors.'”

In other words, Lightfoot was claiming that textual variants are counted by the number of manuscripts that support such variants, rather than by the wording of the variants. His method was to count the number of manuscripts times the wording error. This book has been widely influential in evangelical circles. I believe over a million copies of it have been sold. And this particular definition of textual variants has found its way into countless apologetic works.

The problem is, the definition is wrong. Terribly wrong. A textual variant is simply any difference from a standard text (e.g., a printed text, a particular manuscript, etc.) that involves spelling, word order, omission, addition, substitution, or a total rewrite of the text. No textual critic defines a textual variant the way that Lightfoot and those who have followed him have done. Yet, the number of textual variants comes from textual critics. Shouldn’t they be the ones to define what this means since they’re the ones doing the counting?

Let me demonstrate how Lightfoot’s definition is way off. Today we know of more than 5600 Greek NT manuscripts. Among these, we know of about 2000–3000 Gospels manuscripts, 800 Pauline manuscripts, 700 manuscripts of Acts and the general letters, and about 325 manuscripts of Revelation. These numbers do not include the lectionaries, over 2000 of them, that are mostly of the Gospels. At the same time, not all the manuscripts are complete copies. The earlier manuscripts are fragmentary, sometimes covering only a few verses. The later manuscripts, however, generally include at least all four Gospels or Acts and the general letters or Paul’s letters or Revelation. But an average estimate is that for any given textual problem (more in the Gospels, less elsewhere), there are a thousand Greek manuscripts (this assumes that less than 20% of all the Greek manuscripts “read” in any given passage, probably a conservative estimate).

Putting all this together, we can assume an average of 1000 Greek manuscripts being involved in any textual problem. Now, assume that we start with the modern critical text of the Greek New Testament (the Nestle-Aland²⁸). Most today would say that that text is based largely on a minority of manuscripts that constitute no more than 20% (a generous estimate) of all manuscripts. So, on average, if there are 1000 manuscripts that have a particular verse, the Nestle-Aland text is supported by 200 of them. This would mean that for every textual problem, the variant(s) is/are found in an average of 800 manuscripts. But, in reality, the wording of the Nestle-Aland text is often found in the majority of manuscripts. So, we need a more precise way to define things. That has been provided for us in The Greek New Testament according to the Majority Text by Hodges and Farstad. They listed in the footnotes all the places where the majority of manuscripts disagreed with the Nestle-Aland text. The total came to 6577.

OK, so now we have enough data to make some general estimates. Even if we assumed that these 6577 places were the only textual problems in the New Testament (a demonstrably false assumption, by the way), the definition of Lightfoot could be shown to be palpably false. 6577 x 800 = 5,261,600. That’s more than five million, just in case you didn’t notice all the commas. Based on Lightfoot’s definition of textual variants, this is how many we would actually have, conservatively estimated. Obviously, that’s a far cry from 200,000!

Or, to put this another way: this errant definition requires that there be no more than about 250 textual problems in the whole New Testament (250 textual variants x 800 manuscripts that disagree with the printed text = 200,000). (It should be noted that, for simplicity’s sake, I am counting a textual problem as having only one variant from the base text, even though this is frequently not the case). If that is the case, how can the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament list over 1400 textual problems? And how can the Nestle-Aland text list over 10,000?

And again, this five million is not even close to the actual number. I took a very conservative approach by only looking at the differences from the majority of manuscripts. But if one started as his base text Codex Bezae for the Gospels and Acts and Codex Claromontanus for the letters, the number of variants (counted Lightfoot’s way) from these two would be astronomical. My guess is that it would be well over 20 million. Or if one started with Codex Sinaiticus, the only complete New Testament written with capital (or uncial) letters, the numbers would probably exceed 30 million—largely because Sinaiticus spells words in some strange ways that are not shared by very many other manuscripts. You can see that the definition of a textual variant as a combination of wording differences times manuscripts is rather faulty. Counting this way results in tens of millions of textual variants, when the actual number is miniscule by comparison. And that’s because we only count differences in wording, regardless of how many manuscripts attest to it.

All this is to say: a variant is simply the difference in wording found in a single manuscript or a group of manuscripts (either way, it’s still only one variant) that disagrees with a base text. Further, there aren’t only 200,000. That may have been the best estimate in 1963, when we knew of fewer manuscripts. But with the work done on Luke’s Gospel by the International Greek New Testament Project, Tommy Wasserman’s work on Jude, and Münster’s work on James and 1-2 Peter, the estimates today are closer to 400,000. Some even claim half a million. In short, as Bart Ehrman has so eloquently yet simply put it, there are more variants among the manuscripts than there are words in the NT.

Although this may leave some feeling uneasy, it is imperative that Christians and non-Christians be honest with the data. I would urge those who have used Lightfoot’s errant definition to abandon it. It’s demonstrably wrong, and citing it reveals a fundamental ignorance about textual criticism. And I would hope that the publishers of numerous apologetics books would get the data right. The last thing that Christians should be doing is to latch on to some spurious ‘fact’ in defense of the faith.

Postscript

I have recently been in correspondence with some apologists (including Geisler), and I am happy to report that they are revising their definition of what constitutes a textual variant. Two or three of them have appealed to their publishers to correct the data in later printings.

Some Notes on the Earliest Manuscript of Paul’s Letters

On 8 June 20138 June 2013 By Daniel B. WallaceIn Bible Translation, CSNTM, Early Christianity, Exegesis, Textual Criticsim, Theology10 Comments

The publication of P46 in 1935–37––then, and now, the oldest extant manuscript of Paul’s epistles––has not ceased to pique the interest of biblical scholars. Beginning with the plates and text published by Kenyon (1936, 1937), and continuing with the virtual birth of reasoned eclecticism with Zuntz’s magisterial The Text of the Epistles: A Disquisition on the Corpus Paulinum (1953), and reconsiderations of its date (Young Kyu Kim, “Palaeographical Dating of P46 to the Later First Century,” Biblica 69 [1988] 248–57), this priceless document has made its way to the front lines of biblical scholarship for a long time. Though Kim’s suggestion that Chester Beatty Biblical Papyrus II was written before the reign of Domitian (81–96 CE) has been refuted, the consensus continues that it was produced c. 200 CE.

Where Are the Pastoral Epistles?
One curiosity of this papyrus is that, in its current state, it lacks the pastoral letters. With 86 of the original 104 leaves still extant, scholars have a good amount of material to work with as to whether it would have originally contained the pastorals.

How do they know that it originally contained 104 leaves? Two features are used to infer this. First, the manuscript is a single quire codex. This means that all the double leaves (or bifolia) were laid down on top of each other, then folded and sewn into the binding. The fact that it was a single-quire codex can be detected by size of the pages: moving from the beginning to leaf 52, the pages get increasingly narrower. Then, from leaf 53 to the end, the pages get increasingly wider. This can only mean that all the bifolia were laid down in one stack, folded, then trimmed on the outside so that all the leaves were relatively flush. (The later, standard quire was eight leaves [or four double leaves], used throughout the early to middle ages.)

Second, each page is numbered by the original scribe. This is unusual for manuscripts of any age. Usually the quires are numbered, and frequently the leaves were numbered (on the front page), but not the pages. Since the first extant page is numbered 17 (folio 8), and starts with Romans 5.17, we can extrapolate that the manuscript began with Romans 1 and is missing the outer seven double leaves.

What is extant are nine ‘Pauline’ letters: Romans, Hebrews (almost always included in the Pauline corpus as far as ancient manuscripts are concerned), 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Ephesians, Galatians, Philippians, Colossians, and 1 Thessalonians. Missing are 2 Thessalonians, Philemon, and the pastoral letters.

Almost surely 2 Thessalonians followed 1 Thessalonians, as it does in all other manuscripts which have both letters. But what about Philemon? Most scholars are of the opinion that Philemon was also included in this codex.

But the pastorals? This is where opinions have varied. Kenyon started the ball rolling with the suggestion that the last five leaves were left blank and did not include the pastorals. The argument is that there was simply not enough room to include the pastorals and Philemon, which would require about twice as many leaves. Why would this be the case? Was the scribe unaware of them? If he was, this might suggest that they are not authentic.

Although Kenyon’s view held sway for many decades, and is even now occasionally affirmed, Jeremy Duff’s article in New Testament Studies 44 (1998), “P46 and the Pastorals: A Misleading Consensus?” challenged this hypothesis.

One of the points made by Duff is that the letters are more compressed at the end of the codex than in the middle. He noted that there are half again as many letters per page in the last leaves than in the middle leaves. But this is partially due to the fact that the outer leaves are wider than the inner leaves. Nevertheless, there are more letters in the back outer leaves than the front outer leaves, showing that at least some compression did take place. And this seems to suggest that the scribe was aware of the problem he had created for including the pastorals and he began to compensate upon realizing his mistake.

There are problems with Duff’s analysis, however. The scribe seemed to understand to some extent how much space it would require to produce his codex. This is seen in his notes at the end of each book of how many lines he wrote. This was customary for professional scribes; it was in essence a bill for services, since they were paid by the line. He may have been working from a manuscript that had already indicated the number of lines, and thus would have known how many leaves he needed for his manuscript. Of course, the fact that his words were more compressed at the end of the codex seems to show that as careful as he was in his calligraphy (and he was), this tells us nothing about his math skills.

A Fresh Examination of the Codex
This week I had the privilege of examining P46 in the flesh. Fifty-six of the 86 leaves are housed at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. I have spent the last three days examining them in some detail, comparing them to the editio princeps by Kenyon. Sir Frederic Kenyon produced the plates of this famous papyrus in 1937. Each image has been assumed to be exactly the same size as the actual leaf it represents. I measured each leaf against Kenyon’s plates and noticed some interesting phenomena.

Of the 88 plates (44 leaves) I was able to measure, the plates in Kenyon’s volume are off at least 61 times. Most of these are within 1 mm or so, but a few are fairly significant. At least three are off by 3 mm, and one is off by as much as 5 mm.

In addition, I noticed a curiosity: some of the plates in Kenyon’s volume were photographed without the lens plane exactly parallel to the leaf. For example, the photograph of folio 39 verso (1 Cor 1.14–23) is slightly wider than the actual leaf on the bottom, while the top of the leaf is the same size in both the photograph and actual manuscript. And leaves 49 recto (1 Cor 10.1–10), 50 recto (1 Cor 10.21–30), and 51 verso (1 Cor 10.31–11.6) are also somewhat trapezoidal. This suggests that the camera got cocked, or the tape around the plates (for Kenyon’s photographs were of the papyrus under glass) got doubled up, creating the trapezoidal effect.

How much the incorrect sizes of the leaves in Kenyon’s volume impact the discussion of whether P46 originally contained the pastorals is yet to be seen. But in the least, this anomaly needs to be factored into the discussion. Much can still be learned from this renowned papyrus.

The Authenticity of the Gospel of Judas

On 11 April 201311 April 2013 By Daniel B. WallaceIn Contemporary Issues, Early Christianity, Textual Criticsim, Theology21 Comments

Katherine Weber of the Christian Post asked me some questions this week about the recent revelation that the Gospel of Judas had been authenticated by a number of means. See http://science.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/08/17656331-scholars-reveal-how-they-scrambled-to-authenticate-gospel-of-judas for the news report, and http://www.christianpost.com/news/gospel-of-judas-free-of-forgeries-but-still-fake-heretical-says-new-testament-scholar-93781/ for Katherine’s article (published 11 April 2013).

Below are her questions and my responses. This will also be published in the Christian Post later this week.

1) What are your thoughts on the authenticity of the Gospel of Judas? Is ink testing and comparison, in your opinion, an adequate method of determining the validity of an ancient text?

Paleography—the discipline of analyzing, deciphering, and dating ancient manuscripts—is little known outside of specialized circles. Traditionally, scholars especially use handwriting analysis to date manuscripts. Handwriting changes over time, and ancient Greek papyri, of which there are hundreds of thousands still in existence, give us plenty of illustrations of these changes. Actual dated papyri give us concrete evidence for when a particular style of writing was used. Of course, the manuscripts do not use our modern dating system. Instead, they are indexed to the reigns of the Caesars, mention a known person in an official capacity whose dates are known, or speak of astronomical events. For example, a petition to a government official written in “the 25th year of Marcus Aurelius Severus Antoninus Caesar” was penned in AD 216. By such fixed dates on some of the papyri, scholars can fix the patterns of handwriting of other papyri to a range of dates. On such undated papyri, the range can be as short as fifty years.

But Coptic manuscripts are notoriously difficult to date because the handwriting was more stable than Greek manuscripts. Pinpointing the date to within one hundred years is difficult, if not impossible, in most cases. Ink analysis is important because of the shifts in ancient technology and methods that can be located in time. Radiocarbon dating is not usually used on ancient manuscripts because, until recently, it necessarily destroyed part of the document being analyzed. Apparently, radiocarbon dating was used on the Gospel of Judas, however. (There is a relatively new method for dating manuscripts that is non-destructive. I did not see any discussion of this in the report. Developed by Dr. Marvin Rowe of Texas A & M University and his doctoral assistant, Professor Karen Steelman, the method uses a plasma chamber that does not damage the artifact. See Marvin W. Rowe and Karen L. Steelman, “Non-destructive 14C Dating: Plasma-Chemistry and Supercritical Fluid Extraction,” March 2010, ACS National Meeting 2010. So it would indeed have been possible to get a relatively firm date on this fragment without destroying any text.) One problem with all kinds of radiocarbon dating, however, is that this too cannot give a precise date. Depending on the age of the artifact, the range can vary widely.

The recent revelations by Joseph Barabe indicate a date of “approximately A.D. 280,” but this seems to be more precise than the technology would suggest. Most likely, the confluence of ink analysis and radiocarbon dating have both legitimately authenticated this codex and fixed the date to the late third to early fourth century.

2) What criticisms do you have of the Gospel of Judas’ authenticity?

It is important to distinguish two concepts regarding its authenticity. First, there is the issue of whether this document is a modern forgery or a bona fide ancient text. The evidence seems to be quite strong that this is the latter. Second, when we hear the word ‘authentic’ regarding an early sub-Christian writing it is natural to conclude that authentic = true as regards the historicity of the Christian faith. This is not the case in this instance. All that is being claimed is that the manuscript really was produced in the late third century.

3) If it became a fact that the Gospel of Judas were real, how would this change the study of the New Testament?

Most likely, the original Gospel of Judas was written in the second half of the second century. Irenaeus, writing in about AD 180, condemned a gospel by this name as a fake, and described its contents as revealing that Judas “alone, who knew the truth as no one else did, accomplished the mystery of the betrayal” of Jesus. This fits well with the contents of the codex, in which Jesus praises Judas as the one who will set his spirit free from the bonds of his physical body. This is vintage Gnosticism, which made a hard distinction between the spiritual and material world, branding the one good and the other bad. But does this mean that there is any historical truth to the Gospel of Judas, that it actually tells us the real story about the relation of Jesus to Judas? Hardly. Not a single scholar thinks that this conversation has any historical credibility. Irenaeus was right: this is a fake gospel which promotes a heretical idea about Jesus of Nazareth. The discovery and authentication of the Judas codex does nothing to disturb that assessment.

A New New Testament: Are You Serious?

On 17 March 2013 By Daniel B. WallaceIn Contemporary Issues, Early Christianity, New Testament Studies, Theology77 Comments

Just released from the giant publishing firm, Houghton Miflin Harcourt: A New New Testament: A Bible for the 21^st Century Combining Traditional and Newly Discovered Texts, edited by Hal Taussig.

The advertisement from HMH distributed widely via email last week was not shy in its claims for the 600-page volume. The subject line read, “It is time for a new New Testament.” In the email blast are strong endorsements by Marcus Borg, Karen King, and Barbara Brown Taylor. Borg and King, like Taussig, were members of the Jesus Seminar (a group headed up by the late Robert W. Funk, which determined which words and deeds of Jesus recorded in the Gospels were authentic). King and Taylor are on the Council for A New New Testament. All of them share a viewpoint which seems to be decidedly outside that of the historic Christian faith, regardless of whether it is Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant.

The New Books

The title of the book sounds provocative; the reality is just as much so. “A council of scholars and spiritual leaders” was convened to determine which books besides the traditional 27 should be added to the New Testament. Significantly, it’s not called a “council of scholars and church leaders” for a reason. Although, to be sure, there were bona fide scholars on the council, not all were church leaders; arguably, in fact, almost none were. The council of 19—including two rabbis—examined several ancient writings which the jacket blurb euphemistically calls ‘scriptures’ and determined which of these worthies deserved a place at the table with original New Testament books. Ten books were selected for this honor, along with two prayers and one song. The song (if that’s the right term) is called “The Thunder: Perfect Mind” and is one of the Nag Hammadi codices. There are no references to it in the ancient world; it never mentions Jesus and may, in fact, have been written three centuries before he was born. Some of the council members wanted it to be listed first in the New New Testament, in spite of (or because of?) its apparent non-Christian perspective. How it is possible for the jacket blurb to say this book was ancient ‘scripture’ when our only knowledge of it comes from Nag Hammadi staggers the mind.

Here is the list of new books added to the New Testament by this council:

The Prayer of Thanksgiving
The Prayer of the Apostle Paul
The Thunder: Perfect Mind
The Gospel of Thomas
The Gospel of Mary
The Gospel of Truth
The Acts of Paul and Thecla
The Letter of Peter to Philip
The Secret Revelation of John
The First, Second, Third, and Fourth Books of the Odes of Solomon

What strikes one immediately is that most of these additions seem to be of two types: Gnostic or proto-Gnostic essays and writings that exalt women. Further, what is also striking are books that did not make the cut. Among them are the Shepherd of Hermas, the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, First Clement, and other books in the collection known as the Apostolic Fathers. In other words, the books selected by the council were selected with an agenda in mind; they were not chosen because they ever made a serious claim to canonicity. Indeed, as was mentioned above, at least one of them is not even mentioned in any extant ancient writing.

Consider again the writings of the Apostolic Fathers. These are writings that were considered orthodox in that they offer a similar viewpoint on doctrinal and practical matters as is found in the New Testament. They are purportedly written by first-generation disciples of the original apostles, though in some cases they are another generation removed. The Shepherd of Hermas was so highly regarded in the ancient church that we have more copies of it from before AD 300 than we do the Gospel of Mark. The Muratorian Canon speaks highly of it but stops short of treating it as bearing the same authority as the New Testament books because of its known recent vintage (mid-second century). But certainly the Shepherd has far better credentials than any of the 13 newly discovered writings for canonization. That the ancient church rejected even this document is implicitly damning evidence that none of the new discoveries really belong within the pages of Holy Writ. We will revisit this issue of the ancient church’s view of authoritative writings at the end of this short review.

The Council of Nineteen and the Ancient Church Councils

The council of nineteen that is attempting to do nothing less than reshape Christianity into an image more compatible with their worldview requires some scrutiny. Who are these people and on what basis does this council have any binding authority on anyone? Most of them are professors, pastors, authors, or rabbis. I cannot say for sure, but I do not believe that any one of them would consider themselves to be orthodox in the sense of holding to the seven universal creeds of the ancient church. John Dominic Crossan and Karen King are perhaps the best known scholars in the group. All we are told about their purported authority to add thirteen writings to the New Testament (bringing the total to 40, a number which often speaks of trials and judgment in the Bible!) is that this group was “modeled on early church councils of the first six centuries CE that made important decisions for larger groups of Christians” (A New New Testament, 555). But the similarities with the ancient councils stop there. Perhaps this is why nothing more is said.

The ancient church sent representatives to the great councils who would make decisions that the churches agreed were to be binding on all. These ancient councils especially hammered out doctrinal issues. And today, all branches of Christendom embrace the decisions and viewpoints of these universal councils as at least good guidelines on what constitutes orthodoxy, if not fully authoritative. There is one key exception to this: the liberal Protestant branch of the church rejects these councils because it rejects the divinity and bodily resurrection of Christ. And the council of nineteen? I cannot speak for all of them, but a good portion of them at least are adamantly against Christ’s deity, his bodily resurrection, his atoning death, the Trinity, and that the Bible has any kind of authority in doctrinal matters.

And they certainly did not conduct their meetings in the spirit of the ancient councils. Those councils were populated by persecuted Christians, representing the major churches and sees, who came to theological decisions based on the final deposit of revelation in the New Testament. Many of them were exiled or lost their lives after the state was swept along by every wind of doctrine while the persecuted saints remained steadfast in their beliefs. The council of nineteen may claim some semblance to these ancient councils, but there is more dissemblance than semblance in the their attempted coup.

Ancient Canon Decisions

As for thinking through what belonged in the New Testament, there was no universal church council that ever made an official list. Here is another point of incongruity between this postmodern council and the ancient ones: the council of nineteen has, by its own self-asserted authority, pronounced a verdict on what goes into the New Testament. At least they did not throw out the Gospel of John, something that more than one member of the Jesus Seminar was wont to do!

Even though there was no ancient universal council regarding the New Testament canon (suggesting, in the words of Bruce Metzger, that the canon is a list of authoritative books [the Reformed view] rather than an authoritative list of books [the Catholic view]), the ancient church did follow three basic guidelines: apostolicity, orthodoxy, catholicity. These will be briefly explained below.

Apostolicity meant that a book had to be written by an apostle or an associate of an apostle if it was to be included in the New Testament. Practically speaking, this meant that any document written after the end of the first century was automatically disqualified. This is why the Muratorian Canon—the first orthodox canon list, composed in the late second century—rejected the Shepherd of Hermas as authoritative, even though it considered it to be very beneficial to Christians. Further, any book that was known to be a forgery was rejected by the ancient church. Not one of the thirteen books proposed by the council of nineteen was written by the person it is ascribed to. The ancient church would—and often did—immediately reject such books because of their spurious nature. The test of apostolicity alone thus disqualifies all thirteen newly discovered books. Relatively speaking, almost all of these newly discovered books should also be called new books.

Orthodoxy meant that those books considered for canonical status needed to conform to what was already known to be orthodox. Orthodoxy was known even before any writings were accepted as scripture. It was known through hymns, the kerygma, and the traditions passed down by the apostles. If there never had been a New Testament, we would still have enough to go on to guide us as to what essential Christianity looked like. And it looked nothing like most of the thirteen books proposed by this new council. The Gnostic and proto-Gnostic books were soundly rejected by the ancient church. And even those that were closer to orthodoxy (like The Acts of Paul and Thecla) were rejected because they failed the test of apostolicity. To put The Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Mary, and The Gospel of Truth into the New Testament, side by side with writings that embraced a diametrically-opposed view of the Christian faith, is unspeakably brash. And although Professor Taussig and his friends think they are doing Christendom a favor by including known heretical writings in their expanded New Testament, they are doing so at both the cost of historical integrity and pedagogical method. This can only confuse laypeople, yet even Barbara Brown Taylor—considered one of the ten best preachers in America, and thus someone who knows better than to create Chicken Littles out of the chaos that this tome will almost surely incite—has endorsed the plan and layout of this volume. Orthodoxy seemed to be the furthest thing from the minds of the New New Testament council.

Finally, catholicity was a criterion used in deciding what earned a place at the table of the New Testament canon. By ‘catholicity’ I do not mean Roman Catholicism. No, I mean that for a book to make the cut it generally needed to be accepted by all the churches. To be sure, some New Testament books struggled in this department, but not all did. In fact, within a century of the completion of the New Testament, the ancient church throughout the Mediterranean world achieved a remarkable unanimity concerning at least twenty of the twenty-seven books. This included all thirteen letters ascribed to Paul and the four Gospels. The rest would find acceptance by the fourth century, in both the eastern and western branches of the church. Most of the new additions to the New Testament fail this test miserably, too. Again, catholicity is not something that the council of nineteen considered when deciding on what books to put in. Rather, catholicity is something that this book aims to achieve. And yet it does so principally through a Gnostic-like route: by urging Christians to accept these books on the basis of their largely politically correct viewpoint, the council is seeking to reshape Christianity into something more palatable to the postmodern world, where presumably knowledge replaces faith.

(For more on these criteria, see Reinventing Jesus, by Ed Komoszewski, James Sawyer, and Daniel B. Wallace.)

Conclusion

In short, the New New Testament is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The council that put these books forth is a farce. It has nothing to do with the councils of old, yet implicitly seeks to claim authority on the basis of concocted semblance. The books were selected by those who, though certainly having a right to scholarly examination of the Christian faith, are not at all qualified to make any pronouncements on canon. That belongs to the church, the true church. Outsiders may address, critique, and comment on the New Testament. They have that right—a right given them by the very nature of the Bible: this book is the only sacred document of any major religion which consistently subjects itself to historical inquiry. Unlike the Bhagavad Gita, the Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha, the Qur’an, or the Gospel of Thomas, the Bible is not just talking heads, devoid of historical facts, places, and people. It is a book that presents itself as historical, and speaks about God’s great acts in history, intersecting with humanity in verifiable ways. This is where orthodoxy and heterodoxy should meet, dialoging and debating over whether the Bible is in any sense true. But to suspend the discussion by a sleight of hand is both cowardly and bombastic.

Epilogue: The Value of the New New Testament

After reading the critique above, one might be tempted to ask, “Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, what did you think of the play?” There actually is value in this book—even, I think, for laypeople. These are important ancient books that show both continuity with the early church and discontinuity. Some are essentially orthodox; most are subchristian. But they represent how ancients perceived the Christ event and remind us that even in the early period not all ‘Christian’ groups truly embraced Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of God. Heresy is found in the earliest period of the Christian faith, too: it dogged the apostle Paul and even found a home in some of his churches after he left for other mission fields. At bottom, the question that we must all grapple with, and what many of these ancient writings grappled with, is this: What will you do with Jesus of Nazareth? That question is still the most important one that anyone can ever ask.