April 2008

 Photo: Sue Careless

Q: When did the Church Fathers decide what was to be included in the New Testament and how did this process happen?

Ingalls:  The understanding that the Church and its members live and find the new life brought by Christ in the activity of interpreting Scripture – that is opening it to understanding-- is there from its roots in the preaching and teaching of Jesus himself, who taught his followers to understand what he did and said in relation to the Jewish Scriptures. The process of recognizing the books that we now call 'the New Testament' was long. The best short introduction to this question I know is in J.N.D. Kelly's Early Christian Doctrines, revised edition (Harper & Row, 1978), pages 56-60. Kelly says: “the fixation of the finally agreed upon list of books, and of the order in which they were to be arranged, was the result of a very gradual process. While the broad outline of the canon was settled by the end of the second century, different localities continued to maintain their different traditions, and some...appear to have been less partial to fixity than others”  pp. 59-60. Kelly points out three main features of this process:

1) The criterion was, above all, apostolicity -- a book had to come either from the pen of an apostle or have the authority of an apostle behind it.

2) Some books hovered on the fringe for a long time, but in the end were not included -- usually because they did not meet this criterion.

3) Some books which were later included waited a long time before universal recognition -- especially the Book of Hebrews and the Book of Revelation.

Q: Were there any particular social or political phenomena that influenced the process?

Ingalls:  Certainly. The recognition of 'the Canon' took place in the context of struggles with Gnosticism, struggles with the Roman Empire, struggles with a fellow named Marcion and his followers, and many others. These struggles made a common measure and source of Christian teaching more important and pressing.

Q: I know Jesus was considered a threat by the religious institutions of his day. Could the New Testament be considered the culmination of this 50-60 year religious struggle?

Ingalls:  I'm not sure I've understood this question. If I'm not addressing the question you're actually asking, let me know. It may help to remember that the Church did not represent much of a 'religious establishment' at the time. It was a rag-tag collection of odds and sods, many of them on the outside of existing religious institutions, under the leadership of peasant fishermen and the like. The Church began as a persecuted minority, and attracted especially women, slaves and Gentiles who hung about on the fringes of Judaism.

Q: Has the Church considered the announcement of Jesus' return as a cycle of renewal, which could be also related to the idea of rebirth or resurrection (rather than, literally, the return of Jesus' divine/human presence).

Ingalls:  The ancient Greek and Roman understanding of history is cyclical. History is about the attainment or near-attainment of ideal patterns, followed by periods of decay and recovery. This can be seen, for example, in the ancient historians, in ancient mythology, in Plato's 'Myth of Er' in the last book of the Republic and in the philosophical poetry of Virgil - the sixth book of the Aeneid, where Aeneid visits his father Aeneas in the underworld.

Part of the newness of Christianity was precisely the fact that it claimed that the eternal Reason -- the universal source and ground of all human knowing and loving -- had appeared at a particular place and time, amongst a particular people. The value we place on what is common, material and historical (as opposed to ideal) and particular is very largely a fruit of revolution in understanding and love introduced by Christian faith.

A prior question is whether Jesus rose from the dead in a body. If he did, it would explain why the early Christians would not interpret him simply in terms of recurring cycles (though they certainly did regard him and his resurrection in terms of cyclical phenomena like the changing of the seasons), but as the first-fruits of a new creation. The early Church often thought of Sunday not simply as the seventh day of the week, but as the ‘eighth’ -- a day that stood somehow outside the cycles of nature and history.

Q: I tend to think that Jesus' main contribution was the proposition of a revolutionary ethical and philosophical paradigm that happened to contrast with the over-empowered conservative religious groups of the time. Would this be also considered a Gnostic interpretation?

Ingalls:  An interpretation begins with evidence. A basic question is, “What is the evidence with which we begin?” And when we have an interpretation, the question is whether it does justice to the evidence.

The words 'conservative' and 'revolutionary' also raise questions. Both are relative terms: what they means depends on what people are trying to 'conserve' or the end in view that inspires the revolutionary activity.

Jesus certainly did reject religiously-motivated self-satisfaction and hypocrisy and challenged it in the name of an appeal to the roots of Hebrew religion. He was 'radical' – from Latin radix meaning 'root'. The Sermon on the Mount (as, for example, in Matthew 5-7) makes this clear.

We conserve and we revolt for the sake of what we love. In my mind, one of the most important questions that can be asked of the New Testament is what it is that it opens to view to be known and loved. For Dante, the great medieval poet, the Paradiso is the place where those things that are most intelligible and most beautiful are known with the utmost clarity and loved with the greatest constancy. The Inferno, on the other hand, is the place where the vision of the mind is clouded and the will is divided against even the good that it does know. As Dante makes clear, neither image has anything to do with another life. They describe us here. So he raises the question for us here -- the question I've raised about the New Testament: what is the good we know, and what is the relationship between our will or love and the good that we know? And if we come across something or someone claiming to bear a revelation from the gods or God, what is the good thing that we are given to know and love there? Is it, in fact, knowable and lovable? The early Church rejected the Gnostic texts because they did not place before the reader the same object of knowledge and love known from the earliest and best records of Jesus life and teaching. 

I hope this is helpful, and I hope it opens conversations rather than closes them, and gives rise to questions rather than cutting them off.