Sorry Mr. Giunta, but you still haven't made your case(s)

By Tim Dunkin

Having engaged in a good deal of discussion to date concerning the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation with my colleague at Renew America, Eric Giunta, I have sought for a while now to find the time to address his final contribution to the discussion. However, the weight of "real world" affairs and the desire to stick primarily to political contributions to this site militated against doing so until now. Originally, I intended to let the matter drop, but since Mr. Giunta directed several questions to me, I feel I should address them in this venue.

Mr. Giunta seems to have given up trying to prove that early Christians in the first few centuries of the faith uniformly held to an understanding and acceptance of the "Real Presence." This is just as well, for trying to prove this from the early patristic writers was always something of a fool's errand anywise. If he is content to simply repeat his original erroneous assertion about the subject, then I am content to let him. He has, however, shifted gears to an attempt to defend the Catholic religion's supposed role in determining the canon of Scripture, a subject that he (erroneously) believes will be more easily proven. It is in this vein that Mr. Giunta begins his last offering,

"Simply put, Tim's assertion that Christianity sprang into being with a precisely-defined Biblical canon is one that won't be validated by a single scholar of the subject, and the historical record just doesn't bear him out. So outrageously intellectually bankrupt is his claim to the contrary, that Christian charity compels me to construe it as an overreaction to what must be a misunderstanding of the position I articulated. Let me be clear: I do not assert that the canon of the earliest Christians was a textual free-for-all, where Gnostic Gospels existed alongside Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, with equal claim to apostolicity, or that the church councils of the 4th century were basically arbitrary in determining what they believed to be the precise content of God's written Word. Dan Brown is completely correct when he attributes the development of the Biblical canon to Catholic Christianity, but he misses the mark completely and utterly when he proposes the aforementioned narrative. It is certainly not what I propose."

As with many of Eric's responses to me throughout this discourse, what is primarily lacking here is actual relevance to anything I've said. Nowhere did I assert that Christianity started with a "precisely-defined Biblical canon," as if it sprang forth fully-formed like Pallas from the brow of Jove. What Eric is doing here is building up and then knocking down a straw man, which is of course easier to do than dealing with your opponent's actual arguments. In point of fact, what I've disputed is nothing more than the notion that the composition of the Biblical canon was determined by the Council of Carthage, in 397 AD, as is asserted by Catholicism's Traditional Account of church history. What I dispute is not the fact of the process of determining which books were truly Scripture, but that it was Catholicism which made this determination authoritatively. If Eric wishes to debate Dan Brown, then by all means, let him direct an article to Dan Brown.

Indeed no serious impartial scholar would accept that the New Testament canon was not generally known and accepted until Carthage. The clear evidence of the patristic writers, both in their habitual usage and in their descriptions of the canon of Scripture, demonstrate that Christians already knew what was Scripture and what was not, long before it was "settled" at Carthage. As I've argued previously as well as in other fora, Christians knew what the canon was, and the Council at Carthage did nothing more than acknowledge what was already well-known. There was no requirement for the "authority" of a church council to tell early Christians what was in the New Testament. In this, despite Mr. Giunta's naysaying, scholarship agrees. For instance, McDonald states,

"Although a number of Christians have thought that church councils determined what books were to be included in the biblical canons, a more accurate reflection of the matter is that the councils recognized or acknowledged those books that had already obtained prominence from usage among the various early Christian communities." [1]

Indeed, contrary to Mr. Giunta's arguments, the canon of the New Testament had already reached its final form and significance by around 200 AD .[2] Or, as Von Campenhausen says later,

"...official decisions by the Church are not involved. Synodal judgments and episcopal pastoral letters concerning the contents of the Bible become usual only in the fourth century, and at first are of only local importance. They encourage uniformity between the various areas of the church, but are unable to bring about a completely uniform canon until the Middle Ages." [3]

Keep in mind that what he is talking about is not that there was no "uniform canon" of the New Testament until the Middle Ages (something which his prior statement contradicts), but that it was only very late (specifically at the Council of Trent) that the Catholic synods and councils "authoritatively" included the apocryphal books of the Old Testament into the canon (something discussed below).

Hence, it would appear that the actual argument that I've put forward in this discussion stands, based upon what scholarship says about the matter. And of course, there is no need, as Eric seems to think, for any magisterium to rule upon what is canonical and what is not. The Scripture itself — which Mr. Giunta's own Church accepts as inspired canon — tells us that the Spirit of God would guide Christ's Apostles into all truth (John 16:13), and that non-apostles would have this discerning anointing as well (I John 2:20,27). This guidance would obviously include something as fundamental as knowing what was Bible and what wasn't. That this process took place is, in fact, borne out by the testimony of the following centuries.

As I've already cited, Christians in the first centuries knew what made up the canon. They routinely and widely cited them as authoritative Scripture. They included them in lists of the canon (such as the Muratorian) that long preceded Carthage. Even with respect to books that are thought by some to have been considered dubious or questionable (II Peter, II and III John, Jude, Hebrews, James, Revelation), scholars point out that the lack of citation of these books by certain writers may not indicate rejection, but simply non-use because of the relative shortness of most of these books or because of the subject matter. For instance, Hahneman points out that the Muratorian Canon (typically dated to the latter part of the 2nd century) lacks James, Hebrews, and I Peter — but that this lack may be due to the poor quality of the manuscript from which the Canon was obtained, rather than any conscious rejection of these books .[4] Further, the listing in this Canon of "two" epistles of John need not imply a rejection of III John, but rather a folding of I John together with the Gospel of John, yielding the two remaining epistles as the "two" mentioned in the Muratorian.

Indeed, if we look at Christian usage up until around the 200 AD date indicated by von Campenhausen, we do indeed see that these "disputed" books were used by Christian writers right alongside the other twenty books of the New Testament. Let's take a look, for a moment, at some information gleaned from the first three volumes of the ten volume set of Ante-Nicene Fathers, as edited by Philip Schaaf, which will carry us up to around 200 AD. In the first volume (dealing with the subapostolic writers Clement of Rome, Mathetes, Polycarp, Ignatius, the pseudonymous Barnabas, the fragments of Papias, Irenaeus, and Justin Martyr), we see the following citations of these "disputed" books:

• Hebrews — 37 times
  
  
• James — 20 times
  
  
• II Peter — 12 times
  
  
• II John — 5 times
  
  
• III John — 1 time
  
  
• Jude — 3 times
  
  
• Revelation — 47 times
  
  

In the second volume, consisting of the extant works of the 2nd century writers Tatian, Athenagorus, Theophilus, Clement of Alexandria, as well as the Shepherd of Hermas, we see:

• Hebrews — 67 times
  
  
• James — 29 times
  
  
• II Peter — 2 times
  
  
• II John — 2 times
  
  
• Jude — 27 times
  
  
• Revelation — 31 times
  
  

Finally, in Volume Three, containing the primary works of Tertullian, we see:

• Hebrews — 44 times
  
  
• James — 11 times
  
  
• II Peter — 6 times
  
  
• III John — 1 time
  
  
• Revelation — 96 times
  
  

What is the point to all of this? It is to demonstrate that these supposedly "disputed" books were used quite readily by a broad cross-section of early Christian writers, representing both the Greek East and the Latin West. Not only that, but when we dig down a bit and examine the uses to which these writers put these books, we find that they used them doctrinally. In other words, they relied upon these supposedly "disputed" books to derive and support doctrinal positions about what Christians should believe and how Christians should act. Again, this suggests that these books were widely understood, both by the writers and by their readers, to be just as much inspired scripture as the four Gospels and the Pauline corpus.

Eusebius, writing in the early 4th century, noted that all the books of the New Testament but five (II and III John, II Peter, James, and Hebrews) were "universally accepted," and that these other five were disputed by some, but nevertheless were "familiar to the people" suggesting that there was a broad, general acceptance of them despite the quibbles of some. Athanasius concluded all 27 books as canon, several decades before Carthage, and Codex Sinaiticus (dating to the early 4th century) also contains all 27. Cyril of Jerusalem, in his Catechal Lectures, included all 27 books around the middle of the 4th century. The Laodicean Synod (~363 AD) acknowledged all 27 books of the New Testament. What these represent is an ever more generalized understanding among Christians of what was Bible and what wasn't — with or without official pronouncement on the subject. Obviously, there was a period in which early Christians were "feeling out" exactly what was and was not really Scripture. Nobody denies this. But that simple fact does not lead to the conclusions that Mr. Giunta is trying to force upon it. He is simply trying to read too much into it.

In short, neither the Council of Carthage nor the "authority" of the Catholic Church or its later magisterium were needed to "approve" the canonicity of the books in the New Testament. While there may have been individual deviators who rejected a book here or there, the general run of Christianity from earliest times understood that these books were inspired and approved. Mr. Giunta mistakes occasional dissent from this generally understood truth as evidence for some sort of widespread unsettledness on the issue. He states,

"The real history is far more complex; while succeeding Christian centuries do evince an ever clearly defined Biblical core, the fact of the matter remains that the Christian canon was not definitively dogmatized (for either Catholics or Protestants) until well into the 1500s, and even then a certain ambiguity still persists in many parts of the Eastern Christian world."

By his own arguments, if we take them to their logical conclusion, the canon of Scripture is still not settled — because a few groups somewhere in the world aren't quite sure they've got it figured out yet. This is, of course, absurd, but it fits the general run of argumentation that Eric has tried to present on the subject, whereby any deviation from today's canon list is an indication that nobody back then knew what was Scripture until very late. In point of fact, the Council of Carthage (technically, following the synod at Hippo in 393) drew up a canon list of Scripture and recommended that the Roman church be consulted for confirmation. This represents an effort to dogmatize the content of the canon, regardless of Mr. Giunta's assertions that Carthage didn't really do this. To the extent that the "canon" was not settled until the Council of Trent in 1546, this involves that council's addition of the apocryphal books to the Old Testament canon.

Mr. Giunta then segues into an...odd...quibble,

"Allow me to direct my readers' attention to another one of Br. Dunkins's rhetorical scare tactics: his denial that Rome was the "decider" of the Biblical canon. Not the Catholic Church, dear readers, but Rome. Mr. Dunkin can just barely bring himself to refer to the primitive Church by her proper name, at least not without the Roman qualifier, knowing full well what such phraseology will conjure up in the minds of his readers: everything that was sickly about the Roman Empire, given a just-barely Christian veneer by an ambitious papacy that propounded what was little more than revamped Babylonian mysticism. (Nimrod was the first Pope, don't ya know?) While I'm certainly not privy to all the nuances of Tim Dunkins's theology, everything he's written thus far is totally consistent with this traditional anti-Catholic narrative. He demonstrates not the least familiarity with Catholic ecclesiology, nor with the vast cultural complex that is the Christian world. Transubstantiation is not a "Roman" doctrine (just ask the Orthodox, Oriental, and Assyrian churches!); and to say that the Church ultimately determined the canon of the Bible is not to say that it was "Rome" which did the determining."

This paragraph has all the hallmarks of a paranoid ramble. Because I used the term "Rome" as shorthand to refer to "the Roman Catholic Church" (you know, much the same way as "Washington" is used as shorthand when referring to the United States government?), this means I think Nimrod was the first pope? I admit to being unable to follow the convoluted thought process that led Mr. Giunta down this rabbit trail. One suspects at this point that he writes what he does because he is angry that I disagree with him, and he takes this disagreement with his religious beliefs as a personal affront. That's a shame, because I originally started responding to him on the hope that such a discussion could be conducted with the maturity necessary to have such a conversion in a pluralistic society. This is really all that needs to be said about this point.

Eric then continues to his discussion of the Old Testament canon by making the following statement,

"Tim's ignorance of some very basic history is mind-boggling. How can anyone take seriously a man who says that Basically, for the first couple of centuries after Christ, you see practically no usage of these apocryphal books by Christian writers whatsoever. Are you serious, Tim? Not only do the writers of the New Testament demonstrate a familiarity with the Greek Septuagint and the Old Testament deuterocanon (and many other scriptures besides), the same is true of the earliest Fathers,
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who freely and authoritatively cite the Catholic deuterocanon (and other scriptures) without distinguishing them from what would later be called the protocanon (i.e., those books shared by all Christians). For documentation, I direct my readers here, here, and here, and to the aforementioned sources."

This response helps to exemplify the dichotomy between tradition and empiricism that I drew in my last essay. Instead of dealing with the evidences that were actually presented, Mr. Giunta falls back on directing the reader to a set of insular Catholic references that affirm what he is saying, but do little to actually elucidate the subject at hand. Eric is merely trying to talk around the evidences, which is a fine tactic for a lawyer, but not so great for a scholar.

Indeed, the evidences that Eric points to through his links have already been shown to be less salutary than he might hope. Apocryphal quotations in the New Testament? Not quite. Most of them turn out to either be so vague as to be inconclusive either way, or else are citations that are originally found in the Old Testament. It shouldn't surprise us, however, if there are references to apocryphal books made at points in the New Testament. After all, the Jews of that day lived in a social milieu in which these other books existed and were part of their cultural heritage. Citing them does not imply that they were viewed as canonical scripture any more than Paul's quotation of Epimenides or Aratus implies that the Apostle thought these pagan poets to have written Holy Writ under inspiration. Likewise, if mere citation in the New Testament guarantees inclusion in the "true" Old Testament canon, then why does Eric not consider The Book of Enoch and The Assumption of Moses, both of which were quoted in Jude, to likewise deserve inclusion into the expanded canon held by Catholics?

The same general argument can be made for the patristic writers. For the first two centuries, their citation of the apocryphal books are very sparing, as the link above demonstrates, and shows little to no evidence that they actually placed these books on par with the traditional Hebrew 22 book canon (what we would call the 39 books of the Old Testament today). The patristics also quoted from Plato and Cicero. Did that mean that the early Christians thought that these pagan writings were canonical? Of course not. One has to look at how a citation is used, just as much as that it was used, a distinction Eric seems to be missing.

Further, looking again to the first three volumes of Schaaf's edition of the Ante-Nicene Fathers, we see that my original statement, "Basically, for the first couple of centuries after Christ, you see practically no usage of these apocryphal books by Christian writers whatsoever" in fact stands unassailed. Let's look at the references. Again, in the first volume, which takes us down to roughly 150 AD, we see the following uses of the apocryphal books:

• Tobit — 2 times
  
  
• Judith — 2 times
  
  
• Wisdom of Solomon — 6 times
  
  
• Baruch — 2 times
  
  
• Susanna — 2 times
  
  
• Ecclesiasticus — 2 times
  
  

Keep in mind by comparison that the citations from the 39 books of the Old Testament number into the thousands. In the second volume, basically a set of works ranging across the latter half of the 2nd century AD, we see:

• Tobit — 4 times
  
  
• Judith — 1 time
  
  
• Wisdom of Solomon — 35 times
  
  
• Baruch — 4 times
  
  
• II Maccabees — 1 time
  
  
• II Esdras — 2 times
  
  
• Ecclesiasticus — 76 times
  
  

More will be said specifically on this data set in a moment. The third volume, that of Tertullian who wrote around the end of the 2nd century and the very beginning of the 3rd, shows the following:

• Tobit — 1 time
  
  
• Wisdom of Solomon — 4 times
  
  
• Baruch — 1 time
  
  
• Susanna — 1 time
  
  
• Bel and the Dragon — 1 time
  
  
• I Maccabees — 2 times
  
  
• II Maccabees — 1 time
  
  
• II Esdras — 1 time
  
  

A couple of comments bear mentioning at this point. First, the only extensive use that we see made of these apocryphal books among these writers occurs in Volume 2 — and more specifically, the vast majority of these citations are made by one writer — Clement of Alexandria. As his name suggests, Clement was active in Alexandria...which is specifically the place where, as I noted in my last essay on this subject, the textual critic Kenyon stated was the only place where the apocryphal books had gained any early currency. I reprint the citation from Kenyon,

"It is noticeable that while there are many quotations in the New Testament from each group of books in the Old, there is not a single direct quotation from the Apocrypha. A similar distinction is found in Josephus and Philo. It was probably only in Alexandria that the apocryphal books had equal currency with the canonical." [5]

It is also unsurprising then that Clement's student Origen, also working out of Alexandria, was the first textual critic of the Septuagint who appears to have included the apocryphal books into that translation (in the 3rd century), as I pointed out in my last article.

Secondly, when we look again at the type of uses to which these books were put by these early writers, we see that, excepting the case of Clement of Alexandria, the uses were not doctrinal, but rather exemplary or historical. In other words, the rest of these writers besides Clement seem to have used them strictly to make illustrations to a point or to relay some piece of historical information. As such, they were not viewed as scripture on par with the 69 canonical books of the Old and New Testaments. We should also note that the only writer in this period who seems to have thought they were — Clement of Alexandria — was also heretical in several areas of his theology, adopting a more modalistic view of the Godhead (in contradistinction to the orthodox exposition of the Trinity) and at several points demonstrating Neo-Platonic influences. Hence, the only one in this period who used the apocryphal books doctrinally was himself a doctrinal heretic. It wasn't until the third century, after Origen had introduced these books into the Septuagint, that they began to be more widely used by (some) Christian writers.

Again, the issue is my empiricism versus Eric's reliance upon the traditions of Catholicism. Eric completely ignored the arguments made about the disposition of the Septuagint, and the history of revision that this translation underwent, and the tendency of citation of the apocryphal books to increase only after the LXX had been revised and promulgated in the third century. My original statement that the apocryphal books found only very sparing use still stands, as the link above shows. Eric hasn't shown the contrary.

In short, Eric simply doesn't know what he's talking about. I do. I'm not relying upon directing the reader to friendly apologetic websites. Instead, I am demonstrating to the reader the fruits of actual, empirical research garnered from the source materials themselves. When I say that the early Christian writers barely used the apocryphal books, but that they did evince a widespread knowledge of the entire New Testament canon long before Catholic and liberal evangelical scholarship says they should have, I do so because that is what the actual evidences suggest.

Finally, in response to Eric's terminal questions directed towards me,

"If Br. Tim insists on continuing this discussion, I hope he'll address this question, which I also leave to my readers to chew on: Where do the Scriptures give us a) an inspired Table of Contents, or b) any kind of criteria whereby we may distinguish a divinely inspired work from one that is not inspired? How do we apply this criteria to books like Esther, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, or for that matter any or all of the Antilegomena?"

The first question is easily answered by simply noting that it is irrelevant. It doesn't address anything that I've actually asserted (as opposed to what Eric imagines I have), and I trust that what I have written above more than adequately lays out my true position on the issue of the biblical canon.

The answer to the second question I have also already alluded to above. How did early Christians know that books like Esther were canonical? Two ways. First, the guidance of the Holy Spirit, which was promised to every Christian, not to councils or an unbiblical hierarchical magisterium. Second, there is also the fact that the Old Testament canon (minus, of course, the apocryphal books) was already well-known among the Jews in the intertestamental period. Paul himself instructed early Christians that the Jews had been the protectors of the "oracles of God" (Romans 3:1-2), meaning that as God's people, they were the repository of the scriptures, it was to them that God had entrusted the preservation and transmission of the Bible. The Jews knew of only 22 canonical books (comprising today's 39 books of the "Protestant" Old Testament). Again, as with Carthage, the hypothetical Council of Jamnia merely affirmed what was already common knowledge among the Jews. In fact, it is thought that the Old Testament canon had already been fixed during the Hasmonean dynasty (140–37 BC),

"With many other scholars, I conclude that the fixing of a canonical list was almost certainly the achievement of the Hasmonean dynasty." [6]

This fixed canon did not include the apocryphal books, some of which (such as the Wisdom of Solomon and Ecclesiasticus) may not even have been written yet. As such, there seems to be no reason to think that God's own choice to place the Scriptures into the caretakership of the Jewish people prior to the Church Age was anything less than completely fulfilled.

While I applaud, once again, Mr. Giunta's willingness to engage in a discussion that many would shy away from for various reasons, I reiterate that his arguments to date have not been convincing and have not proven the points he hopes to make.

NOTES:







© Tim Dunkin