Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] The first ancient christian list of the books allegedly of the New Testament written by Bart Ehrman, read by Mike Johnson.
[00:00:10] The first church father to name Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as the four gospels in the New Testament is Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyon in Gaul, that is the ancient forerunner of Lyon, France. In his five volume work against heresies, he spent significant time in Rome itself before his appointment in Gaul, and he considered the roman church to be the center of Christendom at his time. But there are no roman authors before him who say anything about it. The important teacher, philosopher Justin, who acquired the epithet martyr, from whom we have three surviving writings about Jesus, scripture and the truth of Christianity, quotes the gospels but never indicates who wrote them. There is another apparent witness to the fourfold Gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John from Irenaeus time and also appears to be connected with Rome. And as it turns out, it is the first list of canonical new Testament books that we have from antiquity. This comes to us in the fragmentary latin text discovered in the 18th century and called the muratorian fragment, which I mentioned in my previous post. This document was discovered by an italian scholar named Lodovico Antonio Muratori in the Ambrosiana library, and so it is named after him. He published it in 1740, and it has been the source of scholarly fascination since.
[00:01:37] As a side note, my first ever PhD seminar in my graduate program at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1981 was taught by Bruce Metzger on the canon of the New Testament. On the first day of class, Metzger handed out a photocopy of the muratorian fragment in Latin, of course, and told us that our assignment for the following class was to translate it into English. This was not easy to do. The text is in truly awful Latin. The guy sitting next to me in class timidly raised his hand and asked what students were supposed to do if they didn't know Latin. Metzger informed him that they taught Latin in the evening school at the Princeton High School, and he suggested he go there to learn it. And so the semester began.
[00:02:20] The meritorian fragment, that is, the manuscript itself, probably dates from the 7th or 8th century. It is called a fragment because it is incomplete. It starts in the middle of a sentence. It is a latin translation of an original greek composition. The matter is debated, but the majority of scholars continue to think that the text contained in the muratorian fragment of was originally composed at the end of the second century, say roughly around the time of Irenaeus, and that it came from Rome based on some of the references in the text. There have been scholars who have wanted to argue that it actually derives from the fourth century and from the east rather than the west, but that view is not generally held.
[00:03:03] The fragment is a list of books that its unknown author believed made up the canon of the New Testament. This is our first surviving instance of a Christian giving us a list of the canonical books, hence the enormous importance of the fragment. The list is surprisingly close to the list of books that eventually became the canon, showing that in proto orthodox circles in Rome, the core of what became the New Testament was accepted as scripture already in some circles. Altogether 22 of the 27 books of the New Testament canon are included here. The exceptions are Hebrews James one and two Peter and three John. Possibly the author didnt know of these books, possibly he didnt think they were scripture. The author also accepted the wisdom of Solomon, strangely enough, and the apocalypse of Peter as part of the New Testament. The shepherd of Hermas is accepted for reading, but not as part of scripture for the church. The author explicitly rejects Paul's letters to Laodicea and Alexandria as marcionite forgeries. We no longer have either letter and condemns many others that he does not name.
[00:04:16] I indicated that the text of the muratorian canon begins in mid sentence after a few words describing some other book. The first full sentence begins by saying the third book of the Gospel is Luke. It then says a word about Luke's gospel before introducing the fourth book, the Gospel of John, which it discusses at greater length in a couple of sentences. It then goes on to discuss the other books of its canon. It seems pretty obvious. I dont think this is much disputed, that the author had four gospels and they must have been Matthew. Missing from the fragment mark only a part of the sentence dealing with that begins the text Luke and John. If thats right, and surely it is, then here we have a second witness, also connected to Rome from near the end of the second century, that, like Irenaeus, names the four gospels that were later universally accepted according to their now familiar names.
[00:05:14] One interesting issue raised by this canon list, in addition to the raw facts that it does not mention some of the books that became part of the christian scriptures, but includes several that did not, is the very fact that along with Irenaeus at about the same time it is the first to have a fourfold gospels. Why do we have no witness to the names of these gospels before then? But at this point in authors connected with Rome we do have such a witness.
[00:05:43] Here is a hypothesis ive floated on the blog before but that ive never seen anyone argue. I suggest that sometime after Justin, but before Irenaeus and the writings of the muratorian fragment, an edition of the four gospels was published in Rome. This edition included the four gospels that were the most widely accepted and used in proto orthodox circles. And in order to indicate which each of them was, the unknown compiler of this edition decided to call them by the names of the apostolic authorities with whom they could each be associated. And so he indicated in his manuscript of the edition that these were the gospels. According to Matthew, according to Mark, according to Luke and according to John.
[00:06:30] This edition of the Gospels became popular and influential in Rome as it was circulated and copied. And so in the roman church. The four church proto orthodox gospels were widely known and came to be called by their now familiar names. It was simply accepted that these books really were by the authors to whom they were ascribed. This view was completely acceptable in proto orthodox circles because it maintained that the four favored gospels were ancient and had apostolic connections, two of them written by apostles and two by companions of the apostles. This spreading idea influenced Irenaeus during his time in Rome and and became his standard view and it influenced the unknown author of the meritorian canon at about the same time. And it became the standard view of all Christendom thanks to the burgeoning influence of the roman church and its views.
