The Forming of Canon Lists
‘The first church leader who came up with a list informing his followers that
“this gospel” and “these letters” were to be given central and special attention—
that is, the closest thing yet to a “canon” list of approved Christian texts—
was Marcion, a man from Asia Minor (modern Turkey) who came to Rome
in the first half of the second century.” Marcion seems to have been a
successful businessman, perhaps a shipbuilder. He gave the Roman church
a large sum of money and initially was welcomed and honored. He died
around 160."
Marcion, however, began teaching doctrines about God and the Jew-
ish scriptures that were at odds with the opinions of much of the rest of the
church.” The God depicted as the creator and the God of Israel in the Old
Testament was not the Father God referred to by Jesus (remember that there
was not yet a “New Testament,” so Christians did not yet call the Jewish
scriptures the “Old Testament,” although I will for convenience). The God of
the Old Testament, the creator god, does exist, but he is a bungling, legalis-
tic god and even has a physical body. The God Jesus speaks of is the God of
grace, love, justice, and mercy.”
Marcion did use the writings that later came to make up the Old Testa-
ment, but only as proof that the god there depicted cannot be the same being
represented by Jesus Christ. So Marcion rejected the use of Old Testament
documents to reveal the Father of Jesus Christ or to teach truths of the gos-
pel. He taught that other Christians who interpreted Jewish scripture
“symbolically” or “allegorically” so that they could discern there the Fa-
ther of Jesus Christ were practicing illegitimate biblical interpretation prac-
tices. Those texts were to be read “literally,” and if Christians did so, they
would find an angry, vengeful god there, not the Father of Jesus Christ.
In place of the rejected “scripture” of the Jews, Marcion selected one
Gospel, the Gospel of Why Luke? It seems clear that Paul was Mar-
cion’s favorite apostle. In fact, he seems to have taught that the other apos-
tles adulterated the pristine gospel taught by Jesus by introducing “judaizing
tendencies.” Paul had retained the true, “law-free” gospel (that is, free of
Jewish regulations and writings). As we will see, Paul taught not just that
gentiles need not attempt to keep Jewish law; he taught them that they must
not attempt to follow Jewish law (see Gal Marcion believed that Paul
was the only apostle to get it right, We have seen that Luke was known to be
of Paul, and by this time Luke’s name had become attached to
the third Gospel. Marcion likely chose the Gospel of Luke out of the many
different possibilities because of its supposed connection to Paul.
To that Gospel, Marcion added ten letters of Paul.’° In our Bibles, Paul
is credited with writing thirteen letters.” Marcion did not include what we
call the “Pastoral Epistles”: 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus. We can’t be certain
why, but I think it was likely just because Marcion didn’t know those letters.
As we will see when we study them, they were not written by Paul himself,
and they may not have been in circulation until well into the second century.
In fact, Marcion’s apparent ignorance of them provides some evidence that
they may not have been written until sometime toward the middle of the
second century. At any rate, they were not included in Marcion’s “canon” list.
You may have noticed that even in the Gospel of Luke and Paul’s let-
ters there are quotations of Old Testament texts as “scripture,” and the God
of Israel, as depicted in the Jewish scriptures, plays a role both in the Gospel
of Luke and Paul’s letters. It seems that Marcion attributed such passages to
the evil meddling of “judaizing” apostles. They adulterated even the “good”
texts accepted by Marcion. Marcion’s later critics maintained that Marcion
got rid of those passages in Luke and Paul that offended his own doctrines
by simply editing them out. Marcion redacted Luke and the ten letters of
Paul he accepted, and that edited version was what he identified as proper
Christian scripture, the list of authoritative writings for Marcion.'*
Dale B. <
Martin
Dale B. Martin is Woolsey Professor of Religious
Studies at Yale University and a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His
numerous books include New Testament History and
Literature.
<
History and
Literature
Book by Dale B. Martin
In this engaging introduction to the New Testament,
Professor Dale B. Martin presents a historical study of
the origins of Christianity by analyzing the literature of
the earliest Christian movements.
This is the first time in Christianity we have someone attempting to
say, “This is an authoritative list of accepted books. These books are what
should constitute Christian scripture.”"” Marcion came to be considered a
heretic by those Christians who would later be identified as “orthodox.” The
church in Rome kicked him out and returned his donation.” Of course, we
must keep in mind, as this book will stress repeatedly, that there were many
different kinds of Christianity. In the second century, there were no agreed-
on lines between “orthodoxy” and “heresy.” Therefore, it is anachronistic, in
a sense, even to speak of Marcion as “heretical” and those who rejected his
teachings (and accepted both Jewish scripture and four Gospels) as “ortho-
dox.” Sometimes in this book, therefore, I adopt the term “proto-orthodox,”
which is just a somewhat clumsy way of identifying those kinds of Christi-
anity that happen to have agreed, more or less, with what later, in the fourth
and fifth centuries, would “win out” as Christian orthodox doctrines.” But
it is interesting that the first Christian to come up with an authoritative list
of Christian scripture was one later rejected as a heretic—mainly because
of his rejection of the God of Israel and Jewish scripture.
For much of the twentieth century, scholars believed that Marcion’s
“canon” list was a major impetus for other Christians to come up with their
own canons of Christian scripture.” If one did not accept Marcion’s list,
what alternative should be suggested? Should the church choose one among
the different known Gospels as its favorite? What should be read in church?
Some Christian writers in the second century started arguing that the church
should accept the four Gospels they believed were truly connected to real
apostles: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Was this a reaction to Marcion’s
selection only of Luke?
In the past few decades, some scholars have questioned just how in-
fluential Marcion and his list really were on the formation of the Christian
canon.” Yet there can be little dispute that Marcion’s activities and his list
are the earliest attempt we know about to identify particular works—and to
reject others—as constituting “Christian scripture” set apart from Jewish
scripture. His “solution” does demonstrate that having four different Gos-
pels, and these four in particular rather than others, demanded debate and
defense in the second century.
There were other ways of dealing with the problem. Tatian was a dis-
ciple of Justin Martyr. He took the four Gospels and wove them together to
form an edition that combined all four into one book. The product was a
book one could hold up as containing everything necessary from each of the
four Gospels, now in one handy Gospel. It went by the name Diatessaron,
which is a Greek word meaning “through four.”** Other people seemed to
prefer one or another Gospel, Papias believed that Mark had followed Peter
to Rome and had written down version of the So Mark’s Gos-
pel gets us closest to Peter, the apostle closest to Jesus. Others seem to have
preferred Matthew, who was, after all, one of the twelve, and who is named
as a tax collector in the First Gospel (Matt 9:9; the tax collector is named
Levi in Mark 2:14 and Luke 5:27). The author of the Gospel of John was also
believed to have been a disciple of Jesus,”° and John seems to have been the
favorite of other Christians in the second century.
‘The problem with all of this, from our modern perspective, is that Pa-
pias and these other early Christians didn’t really know what they were talk-
ing about. Papias, for example, also thought that the Gospel of Matthew had
originally been written in Hebrew and only later had been translated into
Greek.”’ That is wrong. It is clear to modern scholars that Matthew was written
in Greek. It shows no signs of being a translation from Hebrew, and in some
instances it makes a point by using Greek words that cannot have been trans-
lations from Hebrew.”* If Papias was so wrong about those “facts” about which
we can check him, we probably shouldn’t trust him on those “facts” about
which we have no other evidence either. So doubt all these
ancient traditions: that Mark was the disciple of Peter who wrote version
of the gospel; that Matthew was written by the actual disciple Matthew; that
Luke was written by the disciple of Paul; and that John was written by John,
son of Zebedee. We accept none of these ancient traditions about authorship.
‘The four Gospels were published anonymously. Note that they are not
“pseudonymous,” which is the term for a document published under a false
name. Rather, they seem to have been written with no authors’ names at-
tached. We don’t know how or when these names were attached to these
Gospels; that is lost to history. They are four of the earliest gospels that sur-
vive, all four probably dating from the first century, while most of the “non-
canonical” gospels we possess were probably written in the second century
or later. They are the culmination of the circulation of first-century oral and
written traditions about Jesus.