Eric Giunta
Don't quit the day job, Tim: the early church and the Bible(s)
By Eric Giunta
I hope this will be my final contribution to this particular debate with my colleague, Tim Dunkin. Confronted with the theological context of the earliest Christian Fathers, and apparently oblivious to the existence of ancient Christianities other than "Roman" Catholicism, Br. Tim has now turned to revisioning the history of the development of the Biblical canon.
This column is a relatively short one, and that for several reasons. I cannot speak for Tim, but I for one am not an accredited scholar of Christian history, and can only appeal to my own personal study of the matter. What I hope to do, in these exchanges, is direct my readers to scholarship and primary source material that will empower them to do their own study of salvation history.
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.
For those who subscribe to a particularly vulgar form of sola scriptura, the idea that the Apostles and their disciples did not possess a precise canon is fatal to their doctrinal hermeneutic, as it is manifestly the case that neither Jesus nor his Apostles left the early church an inspired Table of Contents. The only way one can escape having to appeal to any sort of magisterium is to assume an uninterrupted oral tradition, going back to the Apostles themselves, defining the contents of that canon.
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.
But enough with my own words. Readers need to consult serious scholarship, if they are to disabuse themselves of fantastical understandings of Christianity that will rightfully earn them the scorn in any serious intellectual setting outside the RenewAmerica discussion boards. I encourage my readers to consult what is presently considered the definitive work on the subject of the Bible canon: The Canon Debate, edited by Lee Martin McDonald and James A. Sanders, and published by Hendrickson. I trust no one will accuse these esteemed Evangelical scholars, and Evangelical publishing house, of kowtowing to a preconceived "Roman" meta-narrative!
There's plenty in this and other volumes to confound the simple-minded reimaginings of both Protestants and Catholics. The former will learn that the Bible was not delivered "once for all to the saints" ready-made and pre-packaged, while Catholics will have to attenuate the narratives received from their apologists, particularly the oft-repeated assertion that the Church definitively settled the matter of the Bible canon in the 4th century and so matters stood until the Protestant Reformers removed seven books from the Christian Old Testament in the 16th century. 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.
Much of The Canon Debate can be accessed on Google Books for free, and a good summary of the most recent scholarship on the subject can be read here. For a more popular, but no less scholarly, presentation, readers will find the late Jaroslav Pelikan's Whose Bible Is It? rather informative.
That the early Church did not have a precisely defined canon is simply not controverted among serious scholars of any religious or ideological persuasion. Perhaps Mr. Dunkin is unaware that the New Testament itself contains a deuterocanon, a collection of seven books scholars commonly call the Antilegomena (Hebrews, 2 Peter, James, Jude, 2 and 3 John, and Revelation) — the inspiration of these books, along with others, were hotly contested among the Fathers, and well after the Roman and Carthaginian synods of the late 4th century attempted to settle the matter. These are not "liberal," much less "Roman" claims; among students of Christian history they're a non-starter, and my colleague's unfamiliarity with some very basic scholarship on the subject cannot but call his patristic exegesis into question.
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, 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.
As to our original debate on the Real Presence, there's no use beating a dead horse or trying to sharpen one's knife on a dull slate. It suffices for me to repeat what I wrote earlier: The overwhelming majority of the world's Christians believe in the Real Presence ("transubstantiation"), and the spiritual sacrifice we offer on our altars, in remembrance of the Lord Jesus, and the glorified Flesh and Blood we partake of, has nothing whatsoever to do with cannibalism. Br. Tim's interpretation of the Fathers makes no sense of their realist language, a language that would pass for nothing short of blasphemy in any mainstream Baptist assembly, whereas it (along with all the "contrary" passages he cited) makes perfect sense to any Catholic or Orthodox Christian.
I'm surprised my colleague has yet to go through the canons of the Council of Trent, or the modern Catechism, to prove that the Tridentine Fathers, with Catholics today, still don't really believe in the Real Presence. With his patristic hermeneutic, such an interpretation is not only possible, it's practically necessitated!
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?
I don't doubt my colleague has such a criteria ready-made and at his finger-tips. I sincerely doubt, however, that it is derived from Scripture Alone.
© Eric Giunta
I hope this will be my final contribution to this particular debate with my colleague, Tim Dunkin. Confronted with the theological context of the earliest Christian Fathers, and apparently oblivious to the existence of ancient Christianities other than "Roman" Catholicism, Br. Tim has now turned to revisioning the history of the development of the Biblical canon.
This column is a relatively short one, and that for several reasons. I cannot speak for Tim, but I for one am not an accredited scholar of Christian history, and can only appeal to my own personal study of the matter. What I hope to do, in these exchanges, is direct my readers to scholarship and primary source material that will empower them to do their own study of salvation history.
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.
For those who subscribe to a particularly vulgar form of sola scriptura, the idea that the Apostles and their disciples did not possess a precise canon is fatal to their doctrinal hermeneutic, as it is manifestly the case that neither Jesus nor his Apostles left the early church an inspired Table of Contents. The only way one can escape having to appeal to any sort of magisterium is to assume an uninterrupted oral tradition, going back to the Apostles themselves, defining the contents of that canon.
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.
But enough with my own words. Readers need to consult serious scholarship, if they are to disabuse themselves of fantastical understandings of Christianity that will rightfully earn them the scorn in any serious intellectual setting outside the RenewAmerica discussion boards. I encourage my readers to consult what is presently considered the definitive work on the subject of the Bible canon: The Canon Debate, edited by Lee Martin McDonald and James A. Sanders, and published by Hendrickson. I trust no one will accuse these esteemed Evangelical scholars, and Evangelical publishing house, of kowtowing to a preconceived "Roman" meta-narrative!
There's plenty in this and other volumes to confound the simple-minded reimaginings of both Protestants and Catholics. The former will learn that the Bible was not delivered "once for all to the saints" ready-made and pre-packaged, while Catholics will have to attenuate the narratives received from their apologists, particularly the oft-repeated assertion that the Church definitively settled the matter of the Bible canon in the 4th century and so matters stood until the Protestant Reformers removed seven books from the Christian Old Testament in the 16th century. 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.
Much of The Canon Debate can be accessed on Google Books for free, and a good summary of the most recent scholarship on the subject can be read here. For a more popular, but no less scholarly, presentation, readers will find the late Jaroslav Pelikan's Whose Bible Is It? rather informative.
That the early Church did not have a precisely defined canon is simply not controverted among serious scholars of any religious or ideological persuasion. Perhaps Mr. Dunkin is unaware that the New Testament itself contains a deuterocanon, a collection of seven books scholars commonly call the Antilegomena (Hebrews, 2 Peter, James, Jude, 2 and 3 John, and Revelation) — the inspiration of these books, along with others, were hotly contested among the Fathers, and well after the Roman and Carthaginian synods of the late 4th century attempted to settle the matter. These are not "liberal," much less "Roman" claims; among students of Christian history they're a non-starter, and my colleague's unfamiliarity with some very basic scholarship on the subject cannot but call his patristic exegesis into question.
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, 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.
As to our original debate on the Real Presence, there's no use beating a dead horse or trying to sharpen one's knife on a dull slate. It suffices for me to repeat what I wrote earlier: The overwhelming majority of the world's Christians believe in the Real Presence ("transubstantiation"), and the spiritual sacrifice we offer on our altars, in remembrance of the Lord Jesus, and the glorified Flesh and Blood we partake of, has nothing whatsoever to do with cannibalism. Br. Tim's interpretation of the Fathers makes no sense of their realist language, a language that would pass for nothing short of blasphemy in any mainstream Baptist assembly, whereas it (along with all the "contrary" passages he cited) makes perfect sense to any Catholic or Orthodox Christian.
I'm surprised my colleague has yet to go through the canons of the Council of Trent, or the modern Catechism, to prove that the Tridentine Fathers, with Catholics today, still don't really believe in the Real Presence. With his patristic hermeneutic, such an interpretation is not only possible, it's practically necessitated!
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?
I don't doubt my colleague has such a criteria ready-made and at his finger-tips. I sincerely doubt, however, that it is derived from Scripture Alone.
© Eric Giunta
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