David Trobisch, The First Edition of the New
Testament.
Oxford University Press, 2000.
Reviewed by Robert M. Price.
Though this book has been out for a few years now,
I am reviewing it here and now because more recent research by the same
author, the ingenious David Trobisch, has carried the original thesis a
significant step further, making explicit a crucial point left implicit
in the original. The thesis of the book was bold enough, and
well-defended. In brief, bold, simply stated terms, Trobisch argues that
the New Testament canon of 27 writings that we use today originated not
in the fourth century as the result of a prolonged and anonymous process
of debate and ossifying custom, but rather as the work of a single
editor and publisher in the late second century. Though Athanasius
restricted official use to these 27 books, the table of contents was
nothing new. He was simply lending his imprimatur to an edition of
scripture already some two centuries old, making a widely accepted
edition into a definitive edition. When we still detect debate among
church fathers over this or that book, it is like similar quibbling
among the Yavneh-era rabbis: the debate is over the right of this or
that book to retain its position in the canon, as when, in our own day,
Dewey M. Beegle pronounced the lyrics of “Amazing Grace” as more worthy
of canonical status than the Book of Esther.
Much of
Trobisch’s case rests on simple consideration of New Testament (and even
Christian Greek Old Testament) manuscripts. He has delineated a paradigm
that makes good, inductive sense of many hitherto-puzzling bits of
evidence. He notes that the New Testament books appear, with very few
exceptions, in four groups of codices, and that within each the order of
presentation is virtually always the same. There are the four gospels,
almost always in the familiar order Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. There is
the Acts plus the seven Catholic/General Epistles, again always in the
same order. There is the Pauline canon including Hebrews. And then there
is the Revelation. (Sometimes the Pauline Corpus precedes Acts/Catholic
Epistles.) Such an arrangement is hardly inevitable or obvious. Had
various New Testament writings simply circulated independently and then
been compiled by different scribes at different times in different
regions, we would never see near-uniformity like this. Why would Hebrews
be included among the Paulines so often, when Paul’s name never appears
in the text? Why would everyone have concluded that what we call
Ephesians and Romans were written to those churches when some copies
show no destination city? Would every scribe have thought the Corinthian
and the Thessalonian Epistles belong in the order in which they always
appear? Surely some would have labeled our “First” Thessalonians as
Second Thessalonians, they are so much alike.
Did everyone
“know” or think that the four gospels were penned by individuals named
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? Or were these not more probably the
guesses of a single editor, the first who had to differentiate the four
texts because he was the first to place them side by side in a larger
collection--which henceforth carried the day? Was even the form of the
titles “Gospel according to” self-evident so that all should have
independently come to call them thusly? Or were they not, with their
grammatical arbitrariness, the creative nomenclature of a single editor?
If the New
Testament books are arranged (at least mainly) by genre, come to think
of it, so are the Old Testament books in the Christian canon. Unlike
Jewish Bibles (Hebrew or Greek), the Christian edition of the Septuagint
groups the books by narratives, poetry, and prophecy. Who decided on
this arrangement, so sensible and natural in one sense, but hardly
self-evident and certainly a radical departure from the Jewish
tradition? And why does the Christian Septuagint, alone among Greek Old
Testament versions, replace the letters of the Divine Name (whether in
Hebrew or in Greek in Jewish versions) with the word Kurios (Lord)? It’s
not that such a substitution wouldn’t make sense in Jewish terms,
because it certainly reflects the liturgical usage of the synagogue,
reading “Adonai” aloud when one came to the name Yahve in the text, but
there is no evidence that actually replacing the one name with the other
ever took place in the copying of Jewish Greek Bibles. So it looks like
the striking innovation of a particular editor.
And so does
the peculiarity in Christian Old and New Testament texts of the
Nomina sacra, the abbreviation of words including Theos, Kurios,
Iesous, and Christos by the first and last letter of each (generally)
with a horizontal line drawn over the top. This pattern does not
correspond to any known, more widely used system of abbreviations. It
looks idiosyncratic in origin, as if it stemmed from a particular editor
of a whole Christian Bible.
The
sharp-eyed Trobisch accepts the thinking of John Knox (Marcion and
the New Testament, 1942) and Hans von Campenhausen (The Formation
of the Christian Bible, 1968) that the New Testament in the form we
have it is largely a counterstrike against the Marcionite Sputnik:
already a counter-testament to Marcion’s Apostolicon. It was
already evident that the inclusion of Matthew, Mark, and John was an
attempt to lose the Gospel of Marcion (a shorter predecessor of Luke) in
the shuffle, as was the padding out of Luke to make it Catholic (not to
mention the “ecclesiastical redaction” of John, originally heavily
Gnostic and Marcionite, as Bultmann showed). Acts and the Pastorals were
the product of whoever padded Luke and (according to Winsome Munro)
added a domesticating Pastoral Stratum to Marcion’s Paulines. Acts, of
course, parallels Peter and Paul in order to heal the breach between
Catholicism (=Peter) and Marcionite Christianity (= Paul), or rather to
co-opt the latter in the interest of the former. The grab bag of the
Catholic Epistles was simply ballast, counterweight to the Pauline
letter corpus.
Well,
Trobisch traces out many more individual clues to the same conclusion.
He points out signs of redaction as well as arrangement of traditional
materials. For instance, he makes the Catholic Epistles an adjunct to
Acts in the same way the Pastorals are to the Marcionite Pauline canon.
One reads of Peter, John, and James the Just (and of the brothers of the
Lord generally, Acts 1:14) in Acts, then turns directly to letters
bearing the names of Peter, John, James, and Jude his brother. But, you
object, the “Johannine” letters are strictly anonymous. Yes, and pray
tell who is responsible for tagging them as John’s? Since everyone in
the early church held the same by no means obvious opinion as to
authorship, it must be derived from the editor of the whole collection,
the same one, on this hypothesis, who saw to it that John was mentioned,
almost cosmetically, in Acts. And, to prepare the way for the Epistle of
James, he has written an encyclical for James to send to the same
audience, believers among the Diaspora, in Acts 15.
In the same
way, we find a gospel named for Mark and a character named Mark who is
at various points (1 Peter, Colossians, 2 Timothy) made an associate of
both Peter and Paul, a “narrative-man” (Todorov) who does no more than
embody a particular function, in this case, bridging the Pauline (Marcionite)
tradition and the Petrine (Catholic) one.
The character
Luke is made implicitly the author of both the third gospel and Acts,
while John is made the author of the fourth gospel. Trobisch uses a
clever bit of “reader-response” logic here. Everyone knows how
conservative writers of New Testament introductions like to piece
together clues in the fourth gospel so as to narrow down the author to
John the son of Zebedee. “Hm, let’s see, the Beloved Disciple could not
have been Peter, since he appears in the same scene with him, etc.,
etc., so who’s left? John!” Likewise, “Which one of the companions of
Paul mentioned in Acts might have been on hand during the ‘We’ passages,
etc.? Must have been Luke!” In this light the famous “We” passages may
be seen as a device to guide the reader to narrow down the possible
candidates for Paul’s companion and the authority for the book as a
whole. Likewise, the point of ending Acts on the eve of Paul’s martyrdom
is to make it coincide with, actually, to lead into the fictive scene of
writing for 2 Timothy. One can hardly blame Harnack for missing this,
but one can thank Trobisch for spotting what Harnack missed.
Is it a
coincidence that Levi the publican becomes Matthew the publican only in
the gospel that bears the name Matthew? Who would have had the
redactional agenda to change the name from the nobody Levi to that of an
apostle? Oh, I don’t know—maybe a canonical redactor who wanted thereby
to make it, after the fact, an apostolic writing? Suppose a clever
redactor planted all these clues, and that the traditional authorships
are all the creation of this editor. Tradition did not tag these texts
with these names: a single editor did. Everyone else got it from him.
Again, it is
this editor we hear in Luke 1:1, referring to “many” previous gospel
writers, who must now be seen to be referring to the prior efforts of
Mark, whom one has just read, and Marcion’s gospel, which this one
supplants. One hears the same voice in John 21:24, where he
distinguishes himself from the author of the gospel in order to endorse
his work, and where he refers to a superabundance of Jesus’ miracles
which would require many more books to hold them all, i.e., at least
Matthew, Mark, and Luke! There he is again in 1 Corinthians 1:2, where
he adds a Catholicizing interpolation to signal that the letter is now
general property. There he is yet again in Revelation 22:18-19, which,
placed where it is, even if not an interpolation, must mean to cover the
whole canon to which it now forms the conclusion.
Suppose the
glaring anachronism of 2 Corinthians 3:6 and 14, mentioning “old
testament” and “new testament,” the former as a book of scripture,
is meant to correspond to the two sections of scripture in the very
edition in which these verses appear? It would be like those many
references in the Koran which make Muhammad refer to “this Koran” as if
it already existed for him to comment on.
Likewise,
when 2 Peter 3:16 refers to “all” of Paul’s letters, it is not referring
to some collection of Pauline Epistles, but to the one contained
in the very New Testament one is now reading.
Professor
Trobisch answers the intriguing question is a paper called “Who
Published the Christian Bible?” delivered at the January 2007 “Scripture
and Skepticism” conference (Committee for the Scientific Examination of
Religion). The answer has been hidden in plain sight, but it has also
been, like the light from Nietzsche’s distant star, on its way for a
long time. First, C.F.D. Moule, A. Strobel, Stephen G. Wilson, and
Jerome D. Quinn all contributed to the theory that Luke-Acts share a
single authorship with the Pastoral Epistles. (One may modify this
thesis to suggest that the author of Acts and the Pastorals was the
redactor of an Ur-Lukas shared with Marcion, not the author who worked
up Luke from Mark and Q.). Hans von Campenhausen suggested, quite
plausibly, that the author of the Pastorals was Polycarp of Smyrna.
Combine these theories and you end up with Polycarp as the author of
Acts and the Pastorals (as well as, I would add, of the Pastoral Stratum
of interpolations in 1 Peter and the Pauline Corpus, and even as
Bultmann’s Ecclesiastical Redactor of John).
Trobisch
makes Polycarp the editor and publisher of the Christian Bible. And he
has more reasons still. We would need someone with a definite antipathy
toward Marcion and a desire to co-opt his churches and his scriptures
for Catholicism. Polycarp would fit the role nicely. We also need
someone who would have a reason for juxtaposing John and the Synoptics.
Again: Polycarp, because placing the very different John side by side
with Matthew, Mark, and Luke would serve to reinforce (even to canonize)
the lit-and-let-live truce worked out to settle the Quartodeciman
Controversy between those who celebrated Easter on Sunday (Western
style, implied in the Synoptics) and those who observed the Asian
tradition, celebrating Easter coincident with the 14th of
Nissan, no matter on which the day of the week it might fall (implied in
John). Polycarp went to Rome in 150 to discuss the matter with Pope
Anicetas, and they agreed to disagree, an accord (to skip most of a long
story) which Polycarp would go on to enshrine by making both options
scriptural.
Polycarp may
even have, so to speak, signed his work. Trobisch notes how 2 Timothy 4
lists many names familiar from Acts and earlier Pauline Epistles, except
for two. “When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at
Tro'as, also the books, and above all the parchments.” Carpus?
And this man has Paul’s “cloak”? The cloak of Pauline authorship? For he
also has charge of Paul’s manuscripts. Short for Polycarp? You
bet! The other name is Crescens (v. 10); it appears nowhere else in the
New Testament. Guess where it does pop up, though? Why, right
there in the Epistle of Polycarp 14:1!
All right,
then may I suggest that Polycarp has inserted himself into John 15:5,
too? “He who abides in me, and I in him, the same shall bring forth
much fruit (karpon
polun)”?
And then, as Alvin Boyd Kuhn and, more recently, Stephen Hermann Huller
have suggested, mustn’t the Theophilus to whom Luke and Acts are
addressed be Bishop of Theophilus of Antioch, Polycarp’s ally?
I should say
that David Trobisch’s The First Edition of the New Testament
together with his “Who Published the New Testament?” provide an ideal
example of a theoretical, “Kuhnian” paradigm, a theoretical framework
which, when laid over the evidence like a transparency, reveals a whole
new way of making sense of the hitherto-disparate data. I’m sold.