Revising the Roots of Orthodoxy

This trend continues in the rest of the NT, all of which was written before the end of the first century, and much of which was written within fifty years of the ministry of Jesus (and very probably by apostles or associates of apostles). The result is that, as the apostles were passing from the scene, the Pastorals and Jude can already exhort the next generation to guard the apostolic deposit “once for all committed to the saints.”

We see a similar appeal in the Apostolic Fathers, who wrote in the first half of the second century.¹² The fathers are especially cognizant that the apostolic (i.e., orthodox) faith is guarded by the succession of bishops and elders that stems from the founding of the primary churches. So, for example, 1 Clement (written around AD 100) is a letter from the church in Rome¹³ to the church in Corinth in which the Corinthians are urged to reinstate certain deposed presbyters in favor of others who had usurped their authority. The letter’s argument includes an appeal to the fact that these men had been entrusted with the gospel by the apostles or their immediate successors with the approval of the church. As even Ehrman notes, the argument appears to have had its intended effect, since Dionysius, bishop of Corinth in 170, relates that 1 Clement was read as Scripture in the church there. But this is of great importance. The Corinthian church was founded by Paul around AD 50, at which time he presumably appointed elders. Fifty years later, that is, within the living memory of some of the older members of the church and within one or two generations of leadership from Paul himself, the church is urged by 1 Clement to reject a heterodox coup and return to orthodoxy by reinstating the rightful “Pauline” elders. And the Corinthians bought the argument! How could the argument from apostolic succession have been successful so soon after the founding of the church if it was not in fact valid? Revisionists reject the orthodox appeal to apostolic succession, noting that the heretics made similar appeals and that even some bishops in the orthodox line of succession became heretical. But this is to overlook the antiquity of the argument and of its successful employment. It also does not sufficiently consider that the later appeals to apostolic succession in the Ante-Nicene Fathers were not merely appeals to succession per se, but to a legitimate succession as tested by conformity of doctrine to the NT, to ancient summaries of catechetical instruction (the “rule of faith”), and to the ancient teaching of other apostolic churches (catholicity). Doubtless in later generations some bishops were or became heterodox and some people eventually became bishops for political reasons as well as spiritual, as the revisionists claim. Taken alone, such examples do mitigate the force of the argument from apostolic succession for a valid orthodoxy. But taken with other orthodox arguments of catholicity of doctrine, conformity to the rule of faith, and concordance with NT, the argument from apostolic succession has substance. Thus Irenaeus can submit that heretics check the historical teaching of all apostolic sees to find out what the apostles taught. He does not suggest that what any one bishop teaches is necessarily apostolic.

On the other hand, the doctrines of heterodox sects are demonstrably late and theologically far from the historical Jesus. No heterodox document is earlier than, or even comparably early as, the NT. The earliest possibilities are the Gospels of Peter and Thomas, which most scholars date no earlier than the first half of the second century, at best fifty years after the last of the canonical Gospels. Most others are even later. And though many heretical groups and writings lay claim to apostolic succession, the nature of their teachings render the claims highly suspect. It is historically implausible, for example, that the Jewish rabbi Jesus taught anything like Marcionism, which among other things rejected the God of the OT as an inferior deity to the Father of the Christ, and considered his creation of the world as an evil act. Such doctrines fit the Zeitgeist of popular Hellenistic philosophy much more comfortably than the historical background of Jesus in Palestinian Judaism. The various Gnostic systems are similarly doubtful. Indeed, the regular claim of heterodox sects to teach “secret” knowledge from Jesus represents an inherent admission that their gospels are outside the mainstream of early Christianity. It is telling that while few if any heterodox “Scriptures” seemed to have been used outside of particular sects, virtually all sects of early Christianity, orthodox and heterodox, cherished in whole or part one or more of the four canonical Gospels. In other words, it was only those Gospels whose apostolicity was undisputed.

Conclusion

The revisionist argument thus fails, and with it the move to “relativize” orthodoxy. Orthodoxy can validly claim to have its roots in the teachings of Jesus and the apostles in a way that the heterodox sects of early Christianity cannot. Ehrman claims the proto-orthodox became “orthodox” only because they won the rhetorical battle with their opponents. But he never quite tells us why the proto-orthodox rhetoric was more convincing to a majority of Christians. The best answer seems to be, because it was true.

Alan Hultberg(M.Div., Talbot; Ph.D. Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is Assistant Professor of Bible Exposition and New Testament and Director of the M.A. program at Talbot. Alan and his wife Darcie have four children, and Alan very rarely wears shoes to class.

Notes

¹ The Gnostic Gospels (Random House, 1979)

² The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters (TPI, 1992)

³ Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (Random House, 2003)

⁴ The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (Oxford, 1996); Misquoting Jesus: The Story behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (Harper San Francisco, 2005)

⁵ Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (Oxford, 2005).

⁶ An accessible translation of the Ecclesiastical History is Eusebius: The History of the Church from Christ to Constantine, trans. G.A. Williamson (Augsburg, 1965).

⁷ Church leaders in the orthodox tradition who wrote prior to the Council of Nicaea (AD 325) are referred to generally as the Ante-Nicene Fathers. The earliest Ante-Nicene Fathers, those of the one or two generations that immediately followed the apostles, as well as other orthodox texts from this era, are called the Apostolic Fathers.

Useful English translations include, The Ante-Nicene Fathers, 10 vols, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, Philip Schaff, and Henry Wace (Hendrickson, 1994), and The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations of Their Writings, 2nd ed., trans. J.B. Lightfoot and J.R. Harmer, ed. and rev. Michael W. Holmes (Baker, 1992).

⁸ For a translation of the Nag Hammadi texts, see The Nag Hammadi Library, ed. James M. Robinson (Harper and Row, 1981).

⁹ See, for example, Graham Stanton’s The Gospels and Jesus (Oxford, 1989) or, more recently, James D. G. Dunn’s, Jesus Remembered (Eerdmans, 2003) and the series of articles in the Bulletin of Biblical Research, beginning in vol. 10 no. 2 (2000), by members of The Historical Jesus Study Group of the Institute for Biblical Research (of which Talbot’s Dr. Michael Wilkins is a participant).

¹⁰ The standard collection of these documents in English is New Testament Apocrypha, 2 vols, ed. Wilhelm Schneemelcher, trans. R. McL. Wilson (Westminster, 1991, 1992).

¹¹ Galatians was probably written around AD 48, and 1 and 2 Thessalonians around 50. The rest of the Pauline epistles, and the first of the Gospels, were penned between 55 and 68.

¹² The earliest texts of the Apostolic Fathers are 1 Clement and the Didache, both written around AD 100. The other texts range from about 110 to 130.

¹³ Though the letter is anonymous and only mentions the senders as the church in Rome, early tradition associated it with Clement, the third bishop of Rome. The attribution is considered by many scholars as likely to be correct.