The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins 
by 

Larry W. Hurtado

 

 

Tradition Is What I Say It Is

Remarkably, the motivation for Hurtado to write this book is that the earliest Christian texts have been of little interest to Christian historians. He quotes Harry Gamble, a leading scholar, approvingly that "the close study of these manuscripts has remained almost exclusively the preserve of paleographers and textual critics, historians of early Christian literature having taken little interest in exploiting them for the history of Christianity and its literature."

This is important, Hurtado points out, because “in these early centuries Christianity was by no means monochrome; there was diversity, sometimes radical, among Christians.” This diversity was not yet deemed heretical. What was preserved, disseminated, and revered by Christians as ‘sacred’ had not yet been dictated by any central authority. Hurtado’s approach, therefore, is to investigate the very earliest of surviving documents of various kinds - canonical, apocryphal, and literary - in order to understand the range and prevalence of Christian beliefs and practices. While much of the book is of interest only to academic specialists, his overall conclusions based on the composition of the documents themselves are relevant more generally.

There are about 400 extant documents, all incomplete or fragmentary, from the period prior to the official recognition of Christianity by the Emperor Constantine. About half are biblical texts of both Christian and Hebrew origin (the latter dominated by copies of the Psalms). And about one quarter include various religious texts ultimately deemed non-canonical, that is, not to be considered as inspired biblical texts. All date from the late second to the mid-third century, that is from a period roughly 100 to 200 years after the death of the last surviving witnesses of the events recorded in the Christian Bible.

What is surprising about the composition of these documents for the non-scholar is the relative amount of late and non-canonical material there is in comparison with key texts, especially the gospels. For example, although the Gospel of Mark is by all scholarly opinion the first written record of the life of Jesus, it is found relatively rarely. Rather it is the gospels of Matthew and John that dominate across nascent Christian communities. Matthew is considered, along with Mark, to be based on an even earlier lost document, referred to as ‘Q’ in the biblical trade. John is by far the most recent gospel, probably written around the turn of the second century, and showing substantial addition of new and non-biographical information.

Even more interesting is the frequency of apocryphal texts within these communities. The so-called Shepherd of Hermes, written in the second century, is almost as frequently encountered as the Gospel of John, in fact more frequently than any other document than that Gospel. And, somewhat amazingly, I think, there are more copies of the apocryphal gospels of Peter, Thomas and Mary than of the canonical Mark and Luke. These non-canonical texts, according to Hurtado, were held by typical not aberrant Christians: “[T]hose who copied and read the ex­tant Greek manuscripts of [the Gospel of] Thomas [were] basically the same sort of Christians who also read and prized the other texts found in the site (which otherwise seem to reflect recognizably mainstream Christian textual preferences).”

Given the likelihood that many of the (ultimately so determined) non-canonical texts were either destroyed as doctrinally suspect, or simply not cared for so diligently as approved documents, the prevalence of these ‘alternative’ views of Jesus and the Christian message must surely be considered a baseline. There was probably much more widespread ‘deviancy’ that we are able to gauge through the admittedly small sample to which scholars have access. One implication of this is that it is theological politics not popular belief that drove the standardisation of the canon as well as dogmatic formulations. 

Tradition refers to that which is ‘handed over’ from generation to generation. It would appear that many textual batons were dropped in early Christianity, not because there was disagreement about their merit as representative of the Christian message but because of the needs of organisational power. The existence of contrary texts in the early Christian communities did not create a doctrinal problem because there was no doctrine. Not until theologians decided that certain texts are not just contrary but contradictory, did their existence side by side with other texts pose a religious issue. The question of course is: how could they possibly decide which texts were orthodox and which not outside of the texts themselves? The relative priority of chickens and eggs certainly comes to mind. So Christians don’t like answering this question.

Postscript: For more on the analysis of primitive Christian documents, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...