Archives: Book Chapters

In the previous chapter we considered the nature and contents of the New Testament as a whole, in order to see why it was that we were treating together these diverse documents produced within the Christian Church of the first century or even century and a half. Now we must go on to consider the documents not as a collection but as documents. Ordinarily most people read these documents in various English translations, and therefore they may sometimes be tempted to forget that they were originally composed not in English but in Greek. To be sure, some scholars have argued that parts, at least, of some of the books were written not in Greek but in Aramaic, and it may be worth while to state briefly why this view, while it may be interesting, can never be convincing. How does one prove that some text is not originally Greek but was translated from another language? (1) First, one must show that the Greek as it now stands is bad Greek. (If one is dealing with a really good translator, one cannot show that he has translated unless he has said so.) But most of the passages treated as bad Greek for this purpose can be shown to be at least acceptable in the Hellenistic Greek of the time. (2) Second, one must show that the Greek passage does not quite make sense. (3) Finally, one must show that the passage if retranslated into the other language does make sense, and that some very simple error could have resulted in the text we now have. This retranslation is harder to make than might be supposed, and where such efforts can be tested the proportion of successful retranslations is rather low; moreover, experts in Aramaic have a tendency to disagree as to what the original was. For these reasons, and because, after all, we do have the Greek text, it seems fitting to deal with it rather than with something else.

But do we have the Greek text? Or what kind of Greek text do we have?

Some early Christian writers were aware of the importance of old manuscripts for the study of the Bible, and copyists during the Middle Ages, both in the East and in the West, made efforts to find ancient models. It cannot be denied, however, that a much more vigorous concern for ancient writings and manuscripts arose at the time of the Renaissance. As far as Christian writings were involved, this concern was first expressed in regard to the works of the early Fathers. Such editions of the Greek New Testament as those of Erasmus (1516) and Robert Ètienne (Stephanus, 1551) were based on the available manuscripts which happened to come from the mediæval Greek Church, and contained a large number of accumulated errors.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries much older manuscripts were discovered. The first of these to be found was the sixth-century Graeco-Latin Codex Bezae, named after the Reformed scholar Theodore Beza, who gave it to the University of Cambridge in 1581. Equally important was the Codex Alexandrinus, now in the British Museum, which in 1628 was sent to the King of England by Cyril Lucar, orthodox patriarch of Constantinople (formerly of Alexandria); he was grateful for English diplomatic assistance against Jesuit intrigues. This fifth-century manuscript contains the whole Bible in Greek, in addition to most of the two letters traditionally ascribed to Clement of Rome. Although the letters were published at Oxford in 1633, the New Testament did not appear until 1786, though scholars earlier made use of the manuscript.

Two more early manuscripts were discovered in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first of these contains Greek writings of the Syrian Father Ephraem; underneath them can be made out, with considerable difficulty, an incomplete Bible of the fifth century. This manuscript, the Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus (‘of Ephraem, written over’), is in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris. A later discovery was that of the highly important Codex Vaticanus (fourth century). In Napoleon’s time the French removed manuscripts from the Vatican Library and among them was this codex, which their scholars found to contain a text remarkably free from later additions. The manuscript was later returned to Rome, where it now is; it is still one of our most important witnesses to the early text.

Later in the nineteenth century, enthusiasm for antiquities led a German scholar named Constantine Tischendorf to search for manuscripts in the Convent of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai. There, in 1844, he found forty-three leaves of a fourth-century manuscript. Since the monks had been about to throw it away, they were willing to give it to him. Again in 1853, and once more in 1859, he returned to search for the rest of the manuscript, but without success. Just before he left after his last visit, the steward of the convent finally showed him the missing leaves; since they included the long-lost Greek text of the epistle of Barnabas, Tischendorf spent the night copying it. The manuscript finally reached the Imperial Library at St. Petersburg (now Leningrad), after a long series of legal disputes over its ownership. Called Codex Sinaiticus from its place of origin, it was sold in 1933 by the Russian Government to the British Museum for £ 100,000.

More manuscripts, of course, have been found along the way, but these five are probably the most important. They moved the clock back nearly a thousand years, and showed what the New Testament was like in the fourth and fifth centuries -- and even earlier, since they were obviously copied from still older originals.

What of the period before the fourth century? We should not expect to find manuscripts, or fragments, from the first century. First, there were probably very few of them. Second, the originals were probably worn out after repeated reading both private and public. Only in legend were the ‘authentic originals’ preserved The case is different for the second and third centuries, however. From the relatively dry rubbish heaps of ancient Egypt have come many fragments of New Testament books -- a few from the second century, and a considerable number from the third. Though interest in papyri arose as early as the eighteenth century, it was not until the end of the nineteenth that systematic investigations of sites began, especially at Oxyrhynchus, from which more than twenty volumes of papyri have been published.

The oldest papyrus fragment of any New Testament book is a scrap, about two inches square, which contains verses from the eighteenth chapter of John on both sides. The dates of non-dated papyri can be determined within a margin of about fifty years by comparative study of the styles of writing used in them. This papyrus scrap, now in the John Rylands Library at Manchester, has been assigned to the first half of the second century, perhaps earlier rather than later in the period. By filling in gaps at both ends of the lines, the length of the lines can be calculated; then by filling in gaps between the verses on the front and those on the back we can determine the number of lines to the page; and finally we can estimate the size of the little codex which contained the gospel. Probably the codex contained this book alone; a larger work would have been difficult to handle, given the size of the pages. Thus we see that early in the second century John was valued in Egypt, probably in upper Egypt; indeed, it may have been so highly valued that it was circulated apart from the other gospels.

From the third century come two highly important collections named after the modern Maecenases who purchased them from dealers. The first is the Chester Beatty papyri, containing nearly all of the New Testament except for some Pauline and deutero-Pauline letters and the Catholic epistles. The second is the Bodmer papyri, still in course of publication, including at least the Gospels of Luke and John, as well as I-II Peter and Jude and a number of apocryphal and patristic writings.

In addition to Greek manuscripts, there are other materials which can be used for the reconstruction of early New Testament texts. There are early versions of the New Testament books, especially in Latin, Coptic, Syriac and Armenian; manuscripts of some books in such versions come from as early as the third century. There are also quotations from the New Testament provided by the writers of the early Church, and though the manuscripts of the patristic writings are often late the quotations they give were not often altered by copyists. Sometimes, indeed, we can get back to a very early period in dealing with these quotations. Thus there is a papyrus scrap of the third book of Irenaeus, ‘Against Heresies’, which contains New Testament quotations. Irenaeus wrote about 180, and the scrap comes from the end of the second century or the beginning of the third. One could hardly get closer.

Finally, there are the lectionaries of various churches, containing excerpts from the New Testament arranged for liturgical reading. Though the lectionaries themselves are late, they Sometimes reflect early texts.

What we have endeavoured to show in dealing with the materials is that we do not lack an abundance of manuscripts and other relevant data by means of which we can get back to a period quite early in the history of New Testament transmission. Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls there was a considerable gap in the transmission of the Old Testament. Such a gap has not existed for some time in New Testament studies. Indeed, a basic difficulty in these studies is not that we have too little, but that we have so much that it is very difficult to control. There are about 4,700 New Testament manuscripts and at least 100,000 patristic quotations or allusions.

The methods employed in dealing with these materials are not free from difficulties. (1) It might be supposed that early manuscripts are naturally better than late manuscripts. Such is not necessarily the case, however, for a manuscript may be late in date but go back to an original text which was very early. Occasionally a group of late manuscripts can be traced back to a hypothetical ancestor, now lost, because of identical errors preserved in them. More often, however, various kinds of readings and ‘contaminations’ have come into the late manuscripts and ancestry is now impossible to trace. (2) It might be supposed that early versions would provide valuable evidence. Sometimes they do; but often they have been corrected from various kinds of Greek texts and we cannot definitely ascertain what the version’s original text was. (3) Patristic quotations are not always absolutely reliable: (a) the Church Father may have been quoting not from a text but from memory; (b) he may have used more than one manuscript; (c) his own works may not have been correctly transmitted; study of their manuscript tradition is required.

Beyond the methods employed in dealing with the manuscripts lie the methods used in relation to the errors they contain. Vaganay has analysed errors as unintentional and intentional. The first group includes (1) additions originating because the scribe wrote the same letter, syllable, word or clause twice (dittography); (2) omissions arising because of the presence of the same elements, sometimes because the scribe’s eye skipped a line which ended in the same way as one he had just copied (homoioteleuton); (3) confusions caused by the presence of different vowels or diphthongs which in Greek were pronounced almost identically (e, e, ei, ai, oi, u; also o and ô); (4) confusions of different letters which in ‘uncial’ writing (capital letters) looked much the same (E—C, O—0, r—T); and (5) confusions arising because the earliest manuscripts contained neither word-separation nor punctuation. The second group includes (1) corrections intended to improve spelling, grammar, or style; (2) ‘harmonizations’ between (a) parallel passages, (b) New Testament citations and Old Testament texts, and (c) New Testament texts and liturgical practice; and (3) exegetical-doctrinal interpolations, suppressions, and tendentious revisions. Exegetical-doctrinal modifications are not very common, but they do exist.

There are a few important passages in the New Testament in which it can be proved conclusively that textual alteration has taken place.

(1) The ending of the Gospel of Mark (16:9-20) is no part of what its author originally wrote: (a) Justin alluded to it and Irenaeus quoted from it; it is included in some important uncial manuscripts, mostly ‘Western’. (b) On the other hand, it is absent from the writings of Clement, Origen and Eusebius, and is omitted in Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, as well as in the older Latin and Syriac versions; the Freer manuscript contains a different ending entirely. (c) Therefore, though it was undoubtedly added at an early date, it is not authentic.

(2) The story about a woman ‘taken in adultery’ and forgiven by Jesus does not belong to the Gospel of John. (a) It occurs in the Byzantine text of the gospel, usually as John 7:53-8:1 but sometimes after John 7:36 or 21:24 (in a small group of manuscripts it is found after Luke 21:38). (b) No manuscript before the end of the fourth century contains it; no Church Father, in the same period, refers to it. (c) Therefore it is not authentic.

(3) A more difficult problem occurs in Luke 22:19b-20: (a) All but a few manuscripts include these verses, which are close to what Paul relates about the Last Supper in I Corinthians 11:24-5. (b) In Codex Bezae and the Old Latin version Jesus says simply, ‘This is my body’; there is no reference to what in the longer version is a second cup at the meal. (c) A Eucharist in which the wine preceded the bread seems to be found in the Didache; therefore some scholars have argued that the shorter version of Luke is the authentic one. (d) On the other hand, it may be that a scribe found the mention of two cups embarrassing and therefore deleted the second notice.

Other examples occur in the epistles.

(4) According to most of the uncials and the Fathers, the epistle to the Romans ends with a doxology (16:25-7). (a) But in the Byzantine text this doxology came at the end of the fourteenth chapter; in the third-century Beatty papyri it occurs after Romans 15:23; in some manuscripts (fifth century and later) it is to be found at the end of both the fourteenth and the sixteenth chapters. (b) Marcion omitted it entirely, as did the scribe of one tenth-century uncial -- though he left a space at the end of the fourteenth chapter. Marcion, who rejected the Old Testament, may well have deleted the doxology because it refers to ‘prophetic scripture’. (c) The passage may be an interpolation, though we cannot be absolutely sure.

(5) At the beginning of Ephesians the words ‘in Ephesus’ present a problem. (a) They are to be found in most manuscripts. (b) On the other hand, Marcion said that ‘Ephesians’ was really addressed to the Laodiceans; Origen omitted the words ‘in Ephesus’; they do not occur in the Beatty papyri, in Codex Vaticanus, or in Codex Sinaiticus (though in both these codices a corrector added them). (c) This evidence suggests that the words are not part of the original letter, though we must not suppose that the addresses of letters always became more specific with the passage of time; Origen omitted a mention of Rome in Romans 1:7 and one Greek manuscript leaves it out both there and in 1:15. Each case must be decided on its own merits.

(6) The text of I John has definitely been interpolated. (a) The later manuscripts of the Vulgate read as follows in I John 5:7-8:

In these words later Latin theologians found proof that the doctrine of the Trinity, only implicitly present in the New Testament, was actually stated in its text. (b) But all early Greek manuscripts, all early Church Fathers (including Jerome and Augustine), all early versions, and the older manuscripts of the Vulgate, read thus:

(c) The ‘heavenly witnesses’ are no part of what John wrote. In cases like these, where the evidence of manuscripts, versions and early quotations is fairly straightforward, it is relatively easy to make decisions about the nature of the original, or more original, text. To be sure, it can still be argued that the additions are valuable for various reasons; but they should not be regarded as part of the earliest New Testament. The statement in I John about the three heavenly witnesses is valuable as an expression of the Church’s faith in the fourth century and later, but it does not come from the author of the epistle.

In most cases, however, the evidence is not so straightforward,, and it is usually necessary to apply some canons of criticism.

Some Principles of Textual Criticism

F. C. Grant has listed three basic principles of textual criticism which deserve further analysis. They are these:

All three principles, indeed, contain a large measure of subjectivity. The first is more valuable negatively than positively; it means basically that all manuscripts and all types of manuscripts may contain errors. The second point introduces literary criticism (see the next chapter) into textual study, and makes us raise the question whether an author always writes in what we may call his style. If not, the principle is not altogether persuasive. The third brings us in the direction of historical criticism (see Chapter iv), and since it is admittedly subjective we need say no more than that the meaning of ‘explain’ is clearer than the means by which the principle is to be employed.

If we try to apply the three principles to a few examples we may be able to see more clearly how they work.

(1) In Mark 1:1 there is a significant variant. Is the ‘gospel’ that ‘of Jesus Christ’ or that ‘of Jesus Christ the Son of God’? The latter reading is found, sometimes with unimportant variations, in most of the early uncial manuscripts and in most of the quotations in the Fathers. The former reading occurs in the Sinaitic (first hand) and Koridethi uncials and in the writings of Origen. (a) The first principle indicates that we cannot immediately decide which reading is correct. (b) The second principle leads us to consider the fact that at high points in Mark’s gospel he speaks of Jesus as the Son of God (the Transfiguration, the trial before Caiaphas, the Crucifixion). Would Mark’s style, then, lead him to employ the expression at the beginning of his book? (c) It is hard to tell which of the two readings explains the other. In the earliest manuscripts words were not separated and ‘sacred names’ were abbreviated. Thus the words ‘of Jesus Christ the Son of God’ would read something like ITXTTTOT; confusion would be almost inevitable. But we cannot tell whether the longer or the shorter form is the original one.

(2) In John 1:18 either ‘the only-begotten God’ or ‘the only-begotten Son’ revealed God. (a) The witnesses to the text disagree, and we cannot give any text type the preference, though in general the earlier ones attest ‘God’. (b) The parallels in John’s own language are hard to assess properly. In John 1:14 we find ‘only-begotten’ (monogenes) without a noun, while in John 3:14 and 16 we hear of the ‘only-begotten Son’. By ‘Son’ John means ‘Son of God’, as the rest of his gospel makes clear. The Logos who became incarnate ‘was with God’ and ‘was God’ (1:1); but Jesus is addressed as God only after his ascension (20:28). The author’s style, on balance, does not seem to allow us to draw a conclusion. (c) We then ask which reading explains the other. Here we note that the earliest witnesses to ‘the only-begotten God’ were Gnostics of the second century. Were they responsible for this reading? Or did they make use of a text older than themselves, retaining ‘God’ though they would perhaps have preferred to read ‘only-begotten’ alone? Since this question cannot be answered, we finally ask whether ‘only-begotten’ by itself would not explain the existence of both ‘only-begotten God’ and ‘only-begotten Son’. Both ‘God’ and ‘Son’ may have been intended to give exegesis of one difficult term; but such a conclusion is purely conjectural.

(3) An example of a reading even more conjectural is provided in the Revised Standard Version at Jude 5. The manuscripts tell us that the people were saved out of Egypt by ‘the Lord’ (KC) or by ‘God’ (OC) or by ‘Jesus’ (IC) or by ‘God Christ’ (OC XC). To make a choice is exceedingly difficult. But by applying the third principle the revisers decided to read ‘he who saved the people’, supplying a Greek article (O) in place of any manuscript reading. Decisions will vary on this point; the author very much prefers to read ‘Jesus’.

In view of these examples -- to which many more could be added -- we may wonder whether or not the principles are fully adequate. At the same time, we must recognize that mere antiquity is no adequate indication of the goodness of a particular reading. Early manuscripts may contain multitudes of errors, conscious or unconscious; late manuscripts may preserve readings which seem to be correct.

For this reason, even the discovery of new papyri is not necessarily going to provide a more reliable New Testament text. Perhaps if papyri from the first century should turn up they could be given a considerable measure of confidence. None has turned up, however, and the most important and complete papyri we have come from the third century.

Should we, then, try to do nothing more than trace the history of the varieties of texts from the third century to the tenth or eleventh? This looks like a counsel of despair, and it is not greatly strengthened when it is suggested that the late history of the texts illustrates and illuminates the history of theology. The history of theology is known from the writings of theologians, and New Testament textual variants contribute practically nothing which was not, or could not have been, known independently.

The primary goal of New Testament textual study remains the recovery of what the New Testament writers wrote. We have already suggested that to achieve this goal is wellnigh impossible. Therefore we must be content with what Reinhold Niebuhr and others have called, in other contexts, an ‘impossible possibility’.( To call it an approximation would lessen the measure or paradox in the phrase.) Only a goal of this kind can justify the labours of textual critics and give credit to their achievements and to the distance between what they have achieved and what they have hoped to achieve.

If this, then, is the goal of the textual criticism of the New Testament, we are now able to state what attitude we should take towards the additions in the gospels and the epistles. They are not part of the original text, and they belong to the history of the Church rather than to the New Testament. They have as little, or as much, claim, to present the apostolic witness as does such a work as the Gospel of Thomas. The case is not very different when we consider the conjectural emendations intended to go behind disagreements in the manuscripts we possess. Such emendations obviously belong to the history of New Testament study, and emendations were being made as early as Origen’s time, not to mention that of Marcion.

On the other hand, if we virtuously claim that we are not making any emendations but are simply following what is written, the question of what is written will arise. Are we, so to speak, canonizing a particular manuscript or group of manuscripts? Is there some papyrus or other manuscript which deserves our total allegiance? It would appear that nothing of the sort exists, and that in making decisions about the text, just as in making decisions about the canon, it is still necessary for us to use our minds. Perhaps in consequence of the Fall, human reason has become totally corrupt, but since we are not dogs or cats we must still make use of it.

The New Testament canon consists of those books which the Church came to regard as definitive expressions of its faith and life as set forth in the earliest period of its existence. The books were by apostles or by disciples of the apostles, though the question of authorship is not especially significant; the Church itself was the Church of the apostles.

The existence and the nature of the canon thus implies the existence of the Church. This is to say that without the Church there would be no New Testament. Just as the New Testament expresses the response of the apostles and their disciples to Christ, so the Church expresses the same response; but the New Testament is the product of the Church while the Church is not the product of the New Testament. The Church could have proclaimed, and in fact did proclaim, the gospel without possessing the New Testament; but the New Testament could not have come into existence apart from the Church.

Indeed, Helmut Koester has cogently argued that several of the Apostolic Fathers (the earliest Christian writers outside the New Testament) did not even make use of written gospels. Instead, they relied upon oral traditions of the same sort as those recorded by the evangelists. This means that these early Fathers differ from the evangelists in the degree of their closeness to the earliest traditions, not in the kind of relationship to them. The proximity was recognized in the early Church by those who treated the writings of the Apostolic Fathers as scripture or called their authors ‘apostolic men’ (apostolici). Later on, however, it was recognized that the concerns of the Apostolic Fathers were primarily related to the second century, those of canonical writers to the first. On some basis like this the Apostolic Fathers were excluded from the canon. But it is evident that a very sharp dividing line could not and cannot be drawn, except in so far as the New Testament writings reflect the apostolic age as later writings do not.

In dealing with the canon of the New Testament we must begin with some rather negative statements. First, the earliest Christian Bible was not, and did not include, the New Testament. Instead, it was the Old Testament, usually read in Greek, and often interpreted in the light of a number of apocalyptic documents which were not generally recognized as canonical. Thus the Epistle of Jude contains a quotation from the apocalypse of Enoch and an allusion to a strange lost book known as the Assumption of Moses. Until the middle of the third century, Christian writers often regarded these documents as authoritative. The reason for regarding the Old Testament itself as canonical scripture was, of course, that Jesus and his apostles had so regarded it: they had believed that in Jesus the Old Testament, viewed primarily as prophecy, had been fulfilled. Second, no New Testament as such came into existence for several centuries after the beginning of the Christian movement. At an earlier time there were oral traditions, along with books of varying authoritativeness: but there was no New Testament.

It is a little hard to tell just at what point the idea that Christian documents were scriptural arose. If we can make a distinction between documents and their contents, we can say that the contents were always authoritative, though the form in which they were expressed was not quite so important. For instance, Paul clearly regards his own letters as important and expects that what he says will be heeded; but he does not speak of them as scriptural. On the other hand, when the apostolic council at Jerusalem sends out an encyclical letter, this letter is hard to differentiate from its contents; and the decree which it contains begins with the words, ‘It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us.’ Similarly, the Revelation of John is really a revelation of Jesus Christ through his angel to John; it contains a blessing upon those who ‘keep’ what is written, and a curse upon those who add to or subtract from its contents. Clearly the author of Revelation regards his book as the equivalent of scripture; and the equivalent of scripture is scripture.

If we look for some early Christian writer to whom the Pauline epistles have come to be scripture, we can find him in the author of II Peter. II Peter 3:15-16 says that we are to regard the forbearance of the Lord as salvation -- ‘as our beloved brother Paul, in accordance with the wisdom given him, wrote to you -- as in all the epistles speaking about these matters -- epistles in which there are some things hard to understand, which the ignorant and unsteady pervert, as they do the other scriptures, to their own destruction.’ The remarkable thing about this sentence is not only its loose syntax but its implicit meaning: (1) the Pauline epistles are regarded as addressed just as generally as II Peter itself is; (2) they have been collected and are regarded as scripture; and (3) among them are the Pastoral Epistles, for the forbearance of the Lord as leading to salvation is mentioned in I Timothy 1:15-16 . By this time whatever the time is -- the Pauline epistles have formed at least the nucleus of a New Testament.

Of course we cannot be certain that the ‘development’ of the canon took place everywhere in the same way at the same time. We do not know enough to say more than that it is possible that (1) within the first century all Christians viewed the gospels and epistles as authoritative; (2) only occasionally did they speak of them as scripture; and (3) the presence or absence of the word ‘scripture’ is partly due to chance.

If we are willing to limit our inferences in this way, we shall perhaps not find Marcion as striking a figure as church historians have often made him to be. It is true that Marcion, expelled from the Roman church in 144, rejected the authority of the Old Testament and for it substituted three volumes of his own: (1) the Antitheses (a collection of Old Testament passages which he found contradicted in the Pauline epistles, in Luke, or -- sometimes even in Matthew); (2) the Gospel (that according to Luke, but freed from what he regarded as interpolations; and (3) the Apostle (ten relatively non-Jewish letters of Paul). Marcion was impressed by the newness of Christianity and he wanted to cut it loose from its connection with the Old Testament and Judaism. He admired Paul as the one apostle who really understood Jesus, and Luke as the one disciple who really understood Paul’s gospel about Jesus. He therefore rejected the other gospels then in circulation, as well as a good deal of Luke, which he viewed on literary grounds -- of some sort -- as interpolated into the authentic document.

Scholars have sometimes thought that Marcion created the canon of the New Testament. Certainly he gave impetus to the tendency to produce a list of authoritative books from which those without authority were to be excluded. But it is likely that we should give him credit not for the idea of a canon but for the inclusiveness of the canon which the Church did produce. There are second-century analogies to his work and its effect. For instance, before the rise of Valentinian Gnosticism, Christological doctrine was not always carefully formulated; afterwards, Christian authors expressed their ideas more carefully. We should assume that Marcion, then, did not so much formulate a canon as compel more orthodox Christians to use more carefully the authoritative books which they already possessed.

Even before Marcion’s time we encounter Christian interest in the origins of New Testament books. Papias of Hierapolis tells us about Mark’s intention of preserving all the traditional materials he knew, as well as about Matthew’s compilation of ‘the dominical oracles’, whatever they may have been. It is sometimes suggested that Papias’s correlation of Mark with the apostle Peter was due to his reading of I Peter, where Mark is mentioned as Peter’s ‘son’. We know that Papias knew I Peter. But what we do not know is that in speaking of Mark as Peter’s interpreter Papias was restricted to what he could get out of this epistle. Presumably there were a few Christians who could tell what had actually happened. This interest in historical fact may not have been the chief concern of early Christians; it was a real concern, however.

Actually, when we compare Marcion’s ideas with those of Papias and other contemporary Christians, it can be said that for the first time we encounter the problem which has constantly recurred in Christian history. On the one hand, there is the rather matter-of-fact Papias with his rather simple notions about the work of the evangelists as recorders or compilers; on the other, there is Marcion, with his view that the work of the evangelist Luke had been interpolated by ingenious advocates of Jewish Christianity. The true and authentic gospel, in Marcion’s view, was to be recovered only by deleting from the Gospel of Luke those passages which the Judaizers had added. Now if one were to ask Marcion, ‘How do you know that these passages are interpolations?’ he would tell you that the answer is rather complex. First there was the authentic, non-Jewish gospel of Jesus, not written but transmitted -- and corrupted -- by the Jewish apostles. Then, since this gospel was already being corrupted, there was a reiteration of this gospel in the teaching of the apostle Paul. One might suppose that Paul was not altogether hostile to Judaism; but this idea, Marcion would claim, is due to the form in which the Pauline letters were transmitted. They too were interpolated by Judaizers. Only Marcion had been able to recover that true, authentic gospel of Jesus and Paul which was to be found in his -- i.e. Marcion’s -- writings.

The difference between Marcion and more orthodox Christians was not simply that he was more dualistic than they were; it was that he insisted upon a uniform theological view to be derived from his picture of Jesus and his picture of Paul, while the others were willing to face the difficulties presented by a much more complex picture of both. Around this time such Christian writers as the apologist Justin were speaking of the gospels as reminiscences of the apostles’ and recognizing four of them -- two by apostles, two by disciples of apostles. Justin did nothing to solve the difficulties raised by the existence of various gospels, but at least he was willing to take the risk involved. Similarly, other Christians were accepting not only the Pauline letters which Marcion had recognized but, in addition, four more -- to the Hebrew’s, to Timothy, and to Titus. It is not necessary for us, and as we shall see it was not necessary for early Christians, to maintain that all of these were actually written by Paul. We can now see that when they were included with the other, more genuine Pauline letters, one result was that just as Jesus could not be pin-pointed (since there were four gospels), so Paul could not be pin-pointed either. A Marcion could not say that ‘just exactly this and this is what Paul taught’ and proceed to construct a dynamic but thoroughly one-sided theology. The inclusiveness of the early Christian canon, as it was coming into existence, meant that Christian theology had to be inclusive too.

To be sure, sometimes the orthodox became alarmed when minority’ groups made use of one or another of the canonical books, and they were tempted to remove them from the canon. For instance, Montanus, founder of the ‘new prophecy" in the middle of the second century, taught that he himself was the Paraclete promised in the Gospel of John. Christian critics then compared John with the synoptics and denied its apostolic origin. Their view, however, was not widely accepted. The Church as a whole resisted the temptation to shrink the canon because of the use being made of some parts of it.

On the other hand, there were limits beyond which inclusiveness could not go. The second century saw the production of apocryphal gospels, acts, epistles and apocalypses, usually written in the names of various apostles and almost always reflecting special points of view. Christians hesitated to reject such works if they were close to books regarded as canonical. In the case of such a treatise as the Gospel of Thomas, recently recovered in a Coptic version, they did not hesitate at all. They could recognize that everything in this gospel, no matter how close it might seem to be to authoritative tradition, had been given a special Gnostic twist.

By the end of the second century there was no longer any question about the core of the New Testament, at least among those writers who in their time and later were regarded as orthodox Christians. There were four gospels, neither more nor less. To be sure, the arguments of Irenaeus (c. 180) on this subject are not very convincing. He says there should be four because there are four beasts in the Apocalypse and because there are four corners of the earth. But the very weakness of the argument -- to us -- may suggest that it was not really necessary to prove the point. Again, in the writings of Irenaeus we encounter the first extensive use of Acts and the Pastoral Epistles. When these books were used, a more balanced picture of Paul and of the early Church could he drawn; it was not necessary to rely solely on Romans and Galatians, and to fall into the jaws of Marcion. Because a more inclusive New Testament was being used, it was possible to produce a more inclusive theology, one which took into account the materials and viewpoints provided in such books as I Peter and I John and Revelation. Irenaeus made considerable use of Revelation and reported that the visions were seen by John ‘practically in our own times, towards the end of Domitian’s reign’. In his view, therefore, the New Testament reflected a wide range of Christian insight, even in regard to time, for it included a book written at the very end of the first century. In addition Irenaeus regarded the Shepherd of Hermas (certainly) and I Clement (possibly) as scripture. The fact that he neither mentioned nor alluded to James, Jude and II Peter, then, suggests that he did not know them, for he wanted as wide a range of books as possible, though within the limits of the apostolic faith.

Irenaeus’s silence about these books, and his problematic use of Hebrews, brings us to consider the varying views held about Hebrews, the Catholic epistles, and the book of Revelation in the early Church.

Hebrews

The ‘canonical’ history of Hebrews is somewhat confused by the fact that while it was used by many early Christian writers, some of them were aware that as it stands it cannot have been written by the apostle Paul (see Chapter xix) We first encounter clear traces of Hebrews in the letter of Clement to the Corinthians, written at the end of the first century; but Clement does not say what he is quoting from. On the other hand, the teaching of the Roman Hermas (early second century) contradicts that of Hebrews, and Hermas therefore cannot have regarded the letter as absolutely authoritative.

The views of Irenaeus (c. 180) are not altogether clear. He certainly alludes to Hebrews (1:3) when he says that the Father created everything ‘by the Word of his power’ (Adv. haer. 2, 30, 9); but this is the only clear allusion in his writings, and he speaks of the Christian ‘altar in the heavens’ (4, 18, 6) in such a way as to show that he is not relying on what Hebrews has to say on the subject. According to Eusebius (H.E. 5, 26) he made use of Hebrews in a book of ‘various discourses’: according to Stephen Gobarus (sixth century) he held that Paul did not write the letter. This was also the Roman view: Hebrews is absent from the Muratorian list and was not accepted by Hippolytus, Gaius or Novatian. It was also the African view. Tertullian quoted Hebrews only once and ascribed the quotation to Barnabas (De pudic. 20).Indeed, the first Western writer to regard Hebrews as canonical was Hilary of Poitier’s (d. 367).

On the other hand, Hebrews was highly valued at Alexandria and elsewhere in the East. Pantaenus (late second century) argued that Paul wrote it anonymously because he was addressing Hebrews who might be suspicious of him. This theory does not explain the stylistic differences between Hebrews and the Pauline epistles, and Clement therefore suggested that Paul, wrote the letter in Hebrew while Luke translated it into Greek. Origen further developed this view by maintaining that either Luke or Clement of Rome -- both, in Origen’s opinion, disciples of Paul -- relied on Paul’s ideas but expressed them in his own style and provided his own arrangement. Origen was unwilling to reach a definite conclusion. Only God, he said, really knew who wrote Hebrews. This lack of precision is reflected in Origen’s writings. In addressing another scholar he criticized those who ‘reject the epistle as not written by Paul’, but in his own treatises he sometimes ascribed the letter to Paul and sometimes did not. Later Eastern writers regarded the letter as Paul’s.

There was considerable confusion in the West at the end of the fourth century. Philastrius of Brescia (d. 397) regarded Hebrews as written by Paul but not canonical; on the other hand, African synods held in 393 and 397 accepted the canonicity of ‘thirteen letters of the apostle Paul’ and ‘of the same, one to the Hebrews’, thus maintaining a distinction without a difference. Augustine quoted Hebrew’s as Paul’s in what he wrote before 409, but after that year he cited it simply as ‘the Epistle to the Hebrews’. He may have been influenced by Pelagius, who published his commentary on the Pauline epistles about this time and did not include Hebrews among them. Considerations of simplicity seem finally to have carried the day, for a council held at Carthage in 419 spoke of ‘fourteen letters of the apostle Paul’, and thereafter the question was not discussed.

Catholic Epistles

In the earliest period for which we have evidence -- the second century -- Christian writers made use of only I Peter and I John (though II John was sometimes treated as part of I John). This usage is reflected in the third century by Hippolytus, Novatian and Cyprian, and by Origen, who mentions doubts about other Catholic epistles but not about these (so also Eusebius in the early fourth century). Still later, only these two Catholic epistles were accepted by Diodortis of Tarsus (d .c. 394) and Nestorius (d. 451). The Cheltenham list, reflecting North African usage about 360, goes somewhat beyond early practice by including I-II Peter and I-II-III John.

The Muratorian list (c. 200) includes Jude and I-II John; it says that ‘some among us wish to have the Revelations of John and Peter read’, but makes no mention of I Peter. On the other hand, both Clement and Tertullian, writing at about the same time, accept Jude, I Peter, and I-II John.

A much more complete list can be derived from the writings of Origen, who accepted all seven Catholic epistles but expressed his doubts about James, Jude, and II Peter, as did his admirer Eusebius. Most of the Greek writers of the fourth century, however, had no doubts about any of the letters, and their view! came to be current in East and West alike, except in Syria.

The Syrian view, a reaction against the growth of the canon, is reflected in the Doctrine of Addai and the writings of Aphraates and Ephraem, all in the mid-fourth century. According to it none of the Catholic epistles was acceptable, and the same opinion was expressed in a canon list about 400 and in the writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia (d. 428). Even in the sixth century the Greek traveller Cosmas Indicopleustes shared this view.

A mediating position was held by John Chrysostom, patriarch first of Antioch and later of Constantinople (d. 407) and by Theodore’s pupil Theodoret (d. 458): the Catholic letters were James, I Peter, and I John. The same view as reflected in the Syriac version known as the Peshitto and is mentioned by Cosmas.

Revelation

Revelation of John was highly regarded by nearly all the second-century writers whom we know, although when the Montanists used it in support of their ideas about the imminent coming of the kingdom, some Christians in Asia Minor and at Rome tried to get it rejected. In the Fast, Clement of Alexandria and Origen accepted it as canonical Origen ‘demythologized’ it by treating it allegorically. His disciple Dionysius found the book hard to deal with, since millennarians were making use of it. He therefore analysed it by means of literary criticism, noting the differences in style, vocabulary and thought between it and the Gospel and ‘the Epistle’ of John. The literary differences proved that two authors were involved, and since the apostle John wrote the Gospel. Revelation was written by someone else. He was willing to retain Revelation in the canon. He claimed, however, that since its author was not an apostle his work therefore did not possess the apostolic authority of the Gospel of John. Similarly, Dionysius would probably have said that Hebrews was inferior to the Pauline epistles and Mark and Luke to Matthew and John. This kind of distinction means that an apostolic’ canon is being set up within the New Testament canon. All New Testament books are authoritative, but some are more authoritative than others. Not all Christians were willing to make such subtle analyses. In the fourth century, Revelation was rejected by all Eastern writers outside Alexandria; West Syrian writers did not accept it until the fifth century; East Syrians, as far as I know, never accepted it. Even in the ninth century, many Greek-speaking Christians still had doubts about the book.

Other Books

We have thus seen that in the cases of Hebrews, the Catholic epistles, and Revelation, there was a long process of hesitation which preceded acceptance. In other words, for many Christians as late as the fourth and fifth centuries the New Testament was considerably smaller than ours is. On the other hand, especially at Alexandria a good many books were read in the early days which later were not regarded as belonging to the New Testament. Books which we usually classify as among the Apostolic Fathers were especially prominent, usually because they were regarded as written by persons mentioned in the New Testament. Thus Clement regarded the Didache or Teaching of the Apostles as scriptural; both he and Origen viewed the author of I Clement as the Clement mentioned by Paul in Philippians 4:3 and the author of the Shepherd as the Hernias of Romans 16:4. Apocryphal books were also sometimes read in church or otherwise regarded as authoritative. About 190, Serapion of Antioch had some difficulty in displacing the so-called ‘Gospel of Peter’, and a mysterious fragment recently discovered by Professor Morton Smith shows Clement claiming that at Alexandria there was a ‘secret gospel of Mark’. Both Hippolytus and Origen made use, of the ‘Acts of Paul’.

With the passage of time and the development of some critical sense, most of these documents were kept out of the New Testament. Towards the end of the second century it was recognized that Hermas, for example lived long after New Testament times, and that the ‘Acts of Paul’ had been composed not as history but as edifying fiction. One criterion, therefore, was historical authenticity. Another was orthodoxy, not in a rigid sense but in the sense that most of the apocryphal documents had special axes to grind, axes different from those ground in the central New Testament writings. Related to both these criteria was that of apostolicity. In addition, there was the criterion of traditional usage; similarly, this criterion was both historical and theological in nature. It was historical in that it was related to investigations into the books which early Christians had actually employed; it was theological in that it was assumed that these early Christians would not have used unorthodox books.

Perhaps the most important single figure in the history of the New Testament canon was Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea in Palestine early in the fourth century. His basic principle was the same as that of some of his predecessors: church usage implies canonicity. Following a scheme apparently used by Origen, Eusebius classified the books which had any claim to be canonical as (1) ‘acknowledged’, (2) ‘disputed’, and (3) ‘spurious’. Obviously the first and third categories were more easily settled than the second. The first included the four gospels, and Acts, fourteen epistles of Paul (including Hebrews), I John, I Peter. and Revelation. The third included the Acts of Paul, the Shepherd of Hernias, the Apocalypse of Peter, the Epistle of Barnabas, and the Didache. These writings, though earlier used at Alexandria and elsewhere, were rejected in Eusebius’s time. As for the ‘disputed’ books, they consisted of James, Jude, II Peter, and II-III John.

Eusebius knows that various views are held about the book of Revelation: ‘Some reject it, while others reckon it among the "acknowledged" books.’ Again, some accepted the Gospel according to the Hebrews (he may be referring to Origen). He himself does not accept it, any more than the gospels ascribed to Peter, Thomas, Matthias, and others, or the Acts of Andrew and John.

Eusebius’s difficulties arise in part from his deficient conception of church history; in his view the Church was semper eadem, and this theory did not prepare him to deal with the variety found not only among various early Christians but even within the thought of individuals. The fact that at Caesarea Origen’s canon was somewhat smaller than it was at Alexandria escaped his notice.

At the same time, he was an important and influential witness to the gradual stabilization of the canon. Though he made no use of Jude, II Peter, or II-III John, he referred to a collection of ‘the seven so-called Catholic epistles’ and frequently quoted from the letter of James. Though he himself did not regard I Clement as canonical, he knew that some churches so regarded it, and he accepted Hebrews as Pauline in substance, though in his view it was actually written by Clement of Rome.

The books which finally came to be generally regarded as canonical are those which Eusebius treated as ‘acknowledged’ and ‘disputed’. They constitute the New Testament as listed by Athanasius in another influential document, the Easter letter of 367, and even though differing opinions as to the relative importance of the various books have been expressed and continue to be expressed, from the fourth century onward the canon has been fixed -- with the exceptions we have noted.

Some questions obviously arise. Athanasius lists the books, but his grounds of judgement were apparently much the same as those of Eusebius, and we do not know that anyone but Eusebius thoroughly investigated the question of early usage. What, then, are we to make of the nature of early usage? No one reading the Church History of Eusebius can fail to be impressed by the gaps in his information about the early Church. Did he actually have information sufficient to make a judgement as to whether or not the New Testament books were read in the early second century (for example)? This question is probably unanswerable; and because it is probably unanswerable we are driven to seek for some ground of canonicity other than early usage, important though this is. We have already seen that early Christians themselves did not use the criterion of apostolicity in any rigid sense, and certainly those New Testament books which view the apostolic age as past (e.g. Hebrews and Jude), or on other grounds seem to come from a later period (e.g. II Peter), cannot be viewed as precisely apostolic.

Perhaps we must be content with a less exact definition of what the New Testament consists of; and a definition in which historical and theological concerns are blended. What is it of which all the New Testament books speak? Who is it to whom they bear witness? ‘If we ask these questions, involving the intentions and purposes of the New Testament writers, we may be able to say that the New Testament books are those which bear witness to Jesus Christ and to God’s act of revelation and redemption in him. Once more, we must go a little beyond such a general definition; we must consider the question of time, of closeness to the event and events of which the authors speak. The New Testament writers are those witnesses to Christ and to these acts of God who stand closest in time to the events. This is not to say that earliness is all-important. Had Pontius Pilate written a report on subversive activities in Palestine, his report would not be part of the New Testament. But it is to say that the New Testament cannot contain writings which are addressed primarily to situations in the second century and later. The sub-apostolic age was obviously a time of much New Testament writing. From it came certainly the Gospels of Mark and Luke and the Epistle to the Hebrews and the book of Revelation probably a good deal more. But the Christians who preserved the New Testament books and compiled the canon were finally unwilling to include such a letter as I Clement, addressed primarily to a situation at the very end of the first century.

These considerations are important in determining what the canon of the New Testament contains and why its contents were chosen. It must also be stated, once more, that the canon was and is the creation of the Church. If there were no Church there would be no canon, for the canonical books are those which the Church chose to preserve as reflections and representations of its faith, life and work in the earliest period of its life. The New Testament therefore contains testimony not to a ‘pre-Christian’ Jesus but to the Jesus to, whom the Church was the response.

Supplement to Chapter 1

The Muratorian Fragment

. . . at which he was present and so he set them down. The third book of the gospel, according to Luke. This Luke was a physician whom, after the ascension of Christ, Paul took with him, since he was a student of the law (?). He wrote in his own name and according to his own view, though he did not himself see the Lord in the flesh and therefore [described events] as far as he was able to ascertain [them]. He began his story from the nativity of John. The fourth of the gospels, of John, one of the disciples. When his fellow disciples and bishops exhorted him, he said, ‘Fast today with me for three days, and what will be revealed to any of us, let us tell one another.’ The same night it was revealed to Andrew, one of the apostles, that they were all to certify but that John should write everything down under his own name. And therefore, though various beginnings are taught in the several books of the gospels, it makes no difference to the faith of believers, since by one guiding Spirit all things are declared in all of them, concerning the nativity, the passion, the resurrection, the life with his disciple and his double advent, the first in humility and lowliness, which has taken place, and the second in royal power . . . and glorious, which is to come. Why, then, is it remarkable if John so constantly sets forth each item in his epistles, saying of himself; ‘What we have seen with our eyes and heard with our ears and our hands have handled, these things we have written to you’ ? For thus he professes himself not only an eye-witness and hearer but also a writer of all the miracles of the Lord, in sequence..

And the Acts of all the apostles are written in one book. Luke briefly intimates to ‘most excellent Theophilus’ that the several events took place in his own presence, as he plainly shows by leaving out the passion of Peter and also the departure of Paul from the city on his journey to Spain.

And the epistles of Paul themselves make plain, to those who wish to understand, what epistles he sent and from what place and for what reason. He wrote first of all to the Corinthians, forbidding schisms and heresies; then to the Galatians, forbidding circumcision; then at greater length to the Romans, setting forth the plan of the scriptures and showing that Christ is their first principle. It is not necessary for us to discuss these individually, since the blessed apostle Paul himself; following the order of his predecessor John, writes by name only to seven churches, in the following order: (1) to the Corinthians, (2) to the Ephesians, (3) to the Philippians, (4) to the Colossians, (5) to the Galatians (6) to the Thessalonians, and (7) to the Romans. And while for the sake of admonition there is a second to the Corinthians and also to the Thessalonians, yet one Church is recognized as spread throughout the world. For John too, in the Apocalypse, though writing to seven churches yet speaks to all. But to Philemon one and to Titus one and to Timothy two were written down from affection and love, to be in honour with the catholic church for the ordering of ecclesiastical discipline. There are current one to the Laodiceans and one to the Alexandrians, both forged in Paul’s name for the heresy of Marcion, as well as many others which cannot be received into the catholic church; for it is not right for gall to be mixed with honey.

Certainly the epistle of Jude and the two bearing John’s name are accepted in the Catholic [Church], as well as the Wisdom written by the friends of Solomon in his honour. We also accept the Apocalypses of John and of Peter only, which some of us will not have read in the church. But Hermas wrote the Shepherd very recently, in our own times, in the city of Rome while his brother Pius the bishop was occupying the episcopal chair of the church of the city of Rome; and therefore, while it ought to be read, to the end of the ages it cannot he read publicly in church to the people, either among the prophets (whose ranks are complete) or among the apostles.

But we receive nothing at all of the Arsinoite (Egyptian) Valentinus or of Miltiades, who have also composed a new book of Psalms for Marcion, and, along with Basilides, the Asiatic founder of Cataphrygians (?).

The purpose of this book is to deal with the New Testament (and other early Christian literature as reflecting the historical life of the early Christian Church. This literature was produced in this Church, by members of this Church, for the use of this Church. The Church is the primary historical reality which stands behind the literature, and without the ‘hypothesis’ of the Church the literature does not make sense. The New Testament consists of twenty-seven heterogeneous books which were written at various times and under various circumstances; some of them were accepted and used by Christians almost at once, but as a whole the collection was not universally, or almost universally accepted until the fourth or fifth century. It was the ‘mind of the Church’ which finally recognized the significance of all twenty seven books as setting forth the basic statement of what the earliest Christianity was. No other literature has anything of value to say about Christian origins and the earliest Christian movement. To be sure there are a few ‘traditions’ recorded in apocryphal writings or in the works of the Church Fathers, but their historical or theological importance is practically nil. In so far as they can be checked, they have to be checked in relation to the primary documents which the Church recognized.

At the same time, the primary documents are not self-explanatory, as Christians have recognized since very early times. In our present collection we find four gospels, a book of Acts, fourteen letters ascribed (with varying degrees of plausibility) to the apostle Paul, seven general or catholic letters, and a book of Revelation. This scheme of arrangement does little to indicate the meaning and significance of the various writings. In order to understand them, we must look for the history which stands behind the books. This is to say that we are trying to deal historically with the New Testament writings.

The central historical problems in relation to the New Testament can be defined in several ways, but before they can be approached we need to consider the periods into which early Church history can be divided. The question of periodization arose in the second century and has been examined by church historians ever since. Generally speaking, historians have differentiated three periods in the life of the early Church: 1) the period of the Incarnation, or the lifetime of Jesus of Nazareth; (2 the apostolic age, from the resurrection or the ascension to the reign of the emperor Nero; and (3) the sub-apostolic age, from Nero’s reign to some later date, not usually defined with any clarity. The real significance of this periodization is to be found not in the periods of time involved but in the characteristics of the Church’s life in the various periods and in the key events which mark the transitions from one age to another. In dealing with the characteristics and the events we must recognize that there were continuities and discontinuities; there was sameness and change. We must be on our guard against assuming too readily that either sameness or change was dominant. At the same time, we must remember that the community, usually conscious of its self-identity, was likely to lay more emphasis on continuity than can always be justified by the extant texts. The simple chronological periodization mentioned above may obscure significant changes related to the basic directions which the Christian movement took.

First we should say something about the primary elements which provided continuity. These were to be found in (1) the relation of Christian disciples to the Old Testament with its revelation of God and its proclamation of his future acts; (2) the relation of Christians to Jesus and the community which he brought into existence, and (3) their life of worship and mission in this community. Without these elements there would have been no Church and there would have been no New Testament. But, second, these elements were expressed in different ways because of the different historical circumstances in which Christians lived and in which they carried on the mission. Several of these historical circumstances can easily be identified. (1) The first disciples of Jesus were called in Galilee and accompanied him to Jerusalem; even though there are occasional indications that they moved outside Judæa and Galilee, their primary location was in this area; their mission was addressed to Palestinian Jews; Jesus himself, as Paul said (Rom. 15:8) , was ‘minister to the circumcision on behalf of God’s truth’. It may even be possible, though the evidence is far from clear, to point to differences in emphasis between his proclamation in Galilee and that in Jerusalem. Certainly there are later differences between Galilean and Judæn Christianity. (2) There is also a difference between the life of the early Church in Jerusalem and the life of the gentile communities which gradually came into existence. This difference is reflected in Paul’s account of the Jerusalem council (Gal. 2) and in the viewpoints set forth in the materials in Acts which describe events from the standpoints of Jerusalem and of Antioch. The difference is also present even within the Gospel of Matthew, with its two contrasting statements, Go not into a way of the gentiles, nor enter a Samaritan city’ (10:5) and ‘Go, make disciples of all nations’ (28.19). (3) There are differences in the ways in which early Christians looked back at the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Not only are there differences between the Gospel of John and the synoptic gospels as a group; there are also differences between each synoptic gospel and the others and between each and John. To some extent these differences can be explained if we attempt to provide historical settings for the various books and relate them to the life of various kinds of community. (4) There is also a difference between the literature which is clearly apostolic and that which is less certainly so. The most obvious example is to be found in II Peter, with its mention, of the Christian goal as sharing in the divine nature (1.4) and, of entrance into the eternal kingdom of Christ (1:11). In II Peter the earlier idea of the kingdom as inaugurated by Jesus but still to come in power has disappeared. The future coming of Christ has been almost entirely neglected in favour of his past coming (1:16). Another example probably occurs in the Pastoral Epistles as a group. In them the primary emphases of the major Pauline epistles have been, so to speak, domesticated. They reflect the life of churches which live in relation to ‘faithful sayings’ and are concerned with organizational problems. (5) At the end of the New Testament period come the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, in which we see how the gospel and the life of the Church are being still further interpreted in relation to new environments and new circumstances. There is a difference between these writings and the earlier documents which cannot fully be explained simply in relation to their settings. In the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, as in II Peter and the Pastoral Epistles, the Church has almost become ‘established’ -- not in relation to the State, but in some measure in relation to the various cultures of the Græco-Roman world. This movement becomes more clearly defined as we move through the Jewish and gentile forms of Christianity in the early second century towards the works of the Apologists.

Our purpose in discussing the history of the New Testament is to see how the Church came into existence, what its life was like, and how it expressed its mission in relation to the various environments in which it lived. Our starting point and our ending point will be the same: the Church as the congregation of believers brought into existence in response to the event of Christ. This event includes his ministry in Galilee and Jerusalem and his crucifixion, but it finds its climax in his resurrection, which can be defined as the creation of the new community. Even though Luke, like the later Gnostics, set an interval between the resurrection and the origin of the Church, such an interval is nowhere reflected in the Pauline epistles, and we may suppose that it is due to an attempt to provide historical periodization at a point where it is not really useful. The Church is the resurrection community; the apostles were apostles of the risen Lord.

Our purpose in dealing with the materials provided by the New Testament and other early Christian literature is not, however, simply to make affirmations or pronouncements about them. It is to deal with these materials in a sober and cautious manner in order to show what is actually known, what is actually not known, and how we can perhaps proceed from the known to the unknown. This is not to suggest that the documents or their contents will somehow miraculously arrange themselves in order to prove our points. There is a kind of dialogue between ourselves and the materials, a dialogue in which we do not lose our own subjectivity although we may hope that it will be modified by what the materials say. We do not necessarily or entirely become ‘objective’; but we check our own subjectivity in the light of the subjectivities of those who created and transmitted the materials and (it may be) in the light of others farther back in the chain of tradition. This kind of checking is what one can hope to acquire by means of critical methods.

But before we can turn to the conclusions we hope to reach, we must look at the materials themselves; and before we can look at the materials we must consider the various methods which can be used in looking at them. At this point we therefore turn to the methods used in analysing the New Testament and early Christian literature as a whole, examining these methods in order to make sure that they will bear all the weight that has often been placed on them. To a considerable extent our analysis will seem negative. This negative aspect is certainly present, but it is present for a purpose. We hope that by criticizing criticism we can make it a more useful and effective instrument for proceeding to positive conclusions about the early Christian writings as reflections of the life of the early Church.

Theory of Interpretation

Perhaps it may seem odd to begin an introduction to the New Testament with a discussion of the principles to be employed. Are they not either self-evident or so abstruse as to defy explanation? Doesn’t everyone employ the historical method, based on enlightened common sense, while some scholars employ it better than others because they are so acute? The answers to these questions must be negative. What characterizes a great deal of modern New Testament study is (1) an inadequate historical method and (2) a rather excessive confidence in those who employ it with sufficient acuteness. These characteristics are no substitute for a carefully-thought-out method which bears a closer relation both to common sense and to historical experience.

The principles will be discussed in the following sequence. (1) We shall deal with the New Testament in the Church in order to determine what the New Testament consists of and how and why it was collected in a canon or authoritative anthology of books. (2) Next we shall consider the transmission of the text of the New Testament and the analytical procedure used in determining (a) the relations of various texts to one another and (b) the textual readings which are probably more original than others. Consideration of the text will lead us to investigate the nature of translations made from the text or texts into other languages. (3) Since understanding a text involves more than a word-by-word translation, we must investigate the ways in which the literary structure of an author’s work can be analysed, and try to see what this analysis contributes to our interpretation. (4) In so far as the New Testament, documents are related to historical events and historical circumstances, they are subject to historical criticism; but historical criticism deserves much more criticism than it has received in recent New Testament work. (5) Finally, the New Testament writers wrote for a purpose or for purposes which have to be examined by a method which we venture to call both historical and theological.

It is obvious that in setting up this method of analysis we have laid great emphasis on what may perhaps be regarded as a ‘phenomenological’ approach. We are concerned with what the New Testament authors said, how they said it, and why they said it. This kind of understanding tends to minimize the importance of two other possible approaches. (1) There is what is sometimes called the theological approach, in which the New Testament books are examined for what they have to say, explicitly or implicitly, systematically or unsystematically, to us. Our reason for not following this line is that we believe that by undertaking to find out what the New Testament writers said in their own time we may achieve two purposes: (a) we may be able to safeguard our interpretation from an excessive degree of subjectivity and may thereby reach conclusions which can be more generally accepterl within the double context of the culture and the Church within which we live and (b) similarly, we may be better able to do justice to the rich complexity which in our opinion characterizes the writings; we shall not be so strongly tempted to search {br, or to claim that we have found, a single theological key to all doors, or a single axe to grind. (2) On the other hand, there is what is often regarded as ‘the’ historical approach, in which the New Testament writings are co-ordinated with what is understood to be their environment and the result of this co-ordination is used to show the extent to which the writers were ‘historically conditioned’. We are not emphasizing this approach for two reasons: (a) the co-ordination is highly subjective and to a considerable extent involves the explanation of the known (the New Testament writings) by the unknown (their precise environment or environments) and (b) we do not share the view of those who believe that items which can be correlated with the ancient environment(s) can or must, for that very reason, be relegated to the dustbin.

Our major emphasis, therefore, will be laid upon the interpretation of the New Testament books themselves, more or less as they stand, and the method (in theory, at least) primarily involves literary and historical analysis of them.

I do not claim that there is anything unique about this method. On the contrary, I have come to believe that it would be positively wrong to apply a special method of interpretation to the New Testament. (1) If the New Testament literature is actually different from other literature, this fact can best be shown by applying a common method. (2) In so far as the New Testament literature is literature, it can best be investigated by using a common method. (3) In so far as the New Testament, theologically and historically considered, reflects the revelation of God in his incarnate Son, similar observations should be made; both the divine nature and the human nature (to speak with fourth-century symbols) can be best approached if we are using normal literary-historical methods by means of which the difference between God and man, and the action of man as man, can be understood. This is to say that in my view a direct and immediate understanding of the New Testament as either ‘spiritual’ or ‘existential’ (in so far as either term is understood as atemporal) is analogous to the docetic understanding of Christ as a purely spiritual being. Just as the Incarnation involves acceptance of the categories of time and space, so the New Testament is a collection of books created in time and in space, and it therefore needs to be considered by means of a method which takes these categories seriously. The uniqueness of the New Testament, then, becomes clear if, and only if, we use a method which is not unique.

At the same tune, we should probably point out that not everything in the New Testament is unique. There are words, phrases, forms and ideas which are also to be found in Judaism or in Græco-Roman culture. Our method must pay some attention to these features of the New Testament; it need not, and indeed must not, neglect them. We have already intimated why this is so. The revelation of God in the New Testament is not confined to the unique items. The Christian claim about Jesus Christ is not that his message was absolutely novel but that it was true. Indeed, the notion that the unique is the revealing was advocated in ancient times not by orthodox Christians but by the dualist New Testament critic Marcion.

We are trying to deal with our subject matter by use of a method at least relatively logical, for in our view such exegesis of time New Testament has suffered from its lack not of theological but of logical method. This is the reason for which we begin with the canon. If we arc going to study certain literary phenomena, it is well to have some idea of the basis on which we regard these phenomena as belonging to much the same class. For instance, one might think of the New Testament books as ‘Christian classics’; but to classify them as classics would not quite adequately differentiate them from Augustine’s Confessions, the Summa Theologica, or Concluding Unscientific Postscript. If we are going to consider something called the New Testament, we need to know what the New Testament is. Now in order to answer this question we can do one of at least two things. We can immediately appeal to authority and say that the New Testament is what the Church, or our particular church, says it is. In the modern world, however, as Hannah Arendt has pointed out, such direct appeals to traditional authority are not as convincing as they once were. People are all too likely to ask why the Church regards these books, and not others, as belonging to the approved list or canon. We are therefore driven, as we so often are, towards a second method -- to examine the evidence concerning the canon.

But before we turn to this evidence we should have a few questions in mind. What are we going to look at the evidence for? What do we think we are going to find? Are we going to find that original authentic something which can serve as a norm for our own conclusion, on the view that the earliest is time best? Are we going to say that the history will help us see how the present situation came into existence and therefore, in a way, justify it? Or are we going to examine a process in the course of which the Church reached certain conclusions which, though possessing great weight, are not necessarily infallible? Perhaps we should simply raise these questions without attempting to answer them at this point.

On his missionary journeys Paul surely met people who were unable to believe in his preaching of the resurrection for the very reason that they believed in the immortality of the soul. Thus in Athens there was no laughter until Paul spoke of the resurrection (Acts 17:32). Both the people of whom Paul says (in 1 Thessalonians 4:13) that ‘they have no hope’ and those of whom he writes (in 1 Corinthians 15:12) that they do not believe there is a resurrection from the dead are probably not Epicureans, as we are inclined to believe. Even those who believe in the immortality of the soul do not have the hope of which Paul speaks, the hope which expresses the belief of a divine miracle of new creation which will embrace everything, every part of the world created by God. Indeed for the Greeks who believed in the immortality of the soul it may have been harder to accept the Christian preaching of the resurrection than it was for others. About the year 150 Justin (in his Dialogue, 80) writes of people, ‘who say that there is no resurrection from the dead, but that immediately at death their souls would ascend to heaven’. Here the contrast is indeed clearly perceived.

The Emperor Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher who belongs with Socrates to the noblest figures of antiquity, also perceived the contrast. As is well known, he had the deepest contempt for Christianity.

One might think that the death of the Christian martyrs would have inspired respect in this great Stoic who regarded death with equanimity. But it was just the martyrs’ death with which he was least sympathetic. The alacrity with which the Christians met their death displeased him.( M. Aurelius, Med., XI, 3. To be sure, as time went on he more and more gave up the belief in the soul’s immortality.) The Stoic departed this life dispassionately; the Christian martyr on the other hand died with spirited passion for the cause of Christ, because he knew that by doing so he stood within a powerful redemptive process. The first Christian martyr, Stephen, shows us (Acts 7:55) how very differently death is bested by him who dies in Christ than by the ancient philosopher: he sees, it is said, ‘the heavens open and Christ standing at the right hand of God !’ He sees Christ, the Conqueror of Death. With this faith that the death he must undergo is already conquered by Him who has Himself endured it, Stephen lets himself be stoned.

The answer to the question, ‘Immortality of the soul or resurrection of the dead in the New Testament’, is unequivocal. The teaching of the great philosophers Socrates and Plato can in no way be brought into consonance with that of the New Testament. That their person, their life, and their bearing in death can none the less be honoured by Christians, the apologists of the second century have shown. I believe it can also be demonstrated from the New Testament. But this is a question with which we do not have to deal here.

The Holy Spirit and the Intermediate State of the Dead

And now we come to the last question. When does this transformation of the body take place? No doubt can remain on this point. The whole New Testament answers, at the End, and this is to be understood literally, that is, in the temporal sense. That raises the question of the ‘interim condition’ of the dead. Death is indeed already conquered according to 2 Timothy 1:10: ‘Christ has conquered death and has already brought life and incorruptibility to light.’ The chronological tension which I constantly stress, concerns precisely this central point death is conquered, but it will not be abolished until the End. I Corinthians 15:26, death will be conquered as the last enemy. It is significant that in the Greek the same verb is used to describe both the decisive victory already accomplished and the not-yet-consummated victory at the end. John’s Apocalypse 20:14 describes the victory at the end, the annihilation of Death: ‘Death will be cast into a pool of fire’ ; and a few verses farther on it is said, Death will be no more’.

That means, however, that the transformation of the body does not occur immediately after each individual death. Here too we must once again guard against any accommodation to Greek philosophy, if we wish to understand the New Testament doctrine. This is the point where I cannot accept Karl Barth’s position as a simple restatement of the original Christian view, not even his position in the Church Dogmatics (K. Barth, Die Kirchliche Dogmatik, II, I [1940], pp. 698ff; III 2 [1948], pp. 524ff, 714ff.) where it is subtly shaded and comes much nearer (It is another question, of course, whether Barth does not have the right to adduce relationships in this whole matter which yet lie outside the New Testament circle of vision. But if so, then this ‘going beyond the New Testament’ should perhaps be done consciously and should always be identified as such with clarity and emphasis, especially where a constant effort is being made to argue from the point of view of the Bible, as is the case with Barth. If this were done, then the inevitable danger which every dogmatician must, confront [and here lies the dignity and greatness of his task] would be more clearly recognized: namely, the danger that he may not remain upon an extension of the biblical line, but rather interpret the biblical texts primarily ex post facto, from the point of view of his ‘going beyond the New Testament. Precisely because of this clear recognition of the danger, discussion with the exegete would be more fruitful.) to New Testament eschatology than in his first writings. (Especially The Resurrection of the Dead [1926]) Karl Barth considers it to be the New Testament interpretation that the transformation of the body occurs for everyone immediately after his individual death -- as if the dead were no longer in time. Nevertheless, according to the New Testament, they are still in time. Otherwise, the problem in 1 Thessalonians 4:13ff. would have no meaning. Here in fact Paul is concerned to show that at the moment of Christ’s return ‘those who are then alive will have no advantage’ over those who have died in Christ. Therefore the dead in Christ are still in time; they, too, are waiting. ‘How long, oh Lord?’ cry the martyrs who are sleeping under the altar in John’s Apocalypse (6:11). Neither the saying on the Cross, ‘Today you will be with me in paradise’ (Luke 23:43), the parable of the rich man, where Lazarus is carried directly to Abraham’s bosom (Luke 16:22), nor Paul’s saying, ‘I desire to die and to be with Christ’ (Philippians 1:23), proves as is often maintained that the resurrection of the body takes place immediately after the individual death. (Also the much-disputed words of Luke 23:45 ‘Today you will be with me in Paradise’, belong here. To be sure it is not impossible, though artificial, to understand. The statement is to be understood in the light of Luke 16:23 and of the late Jewish conception of ‘Paradise’ as the place of the blessed [Strack-Billerbeck, ad. loc.; P. Volz, Die Eschatologie der jüdischen Gemeinde im neutest. Zeitalter {2nd Edn, 1934}, p. 265]. It is certain that Luke 16:23 does not refer to resurrection of the body, and the expectation of the Parousia is in no way supplanted. Such an interpretation is also decisively rejected by W. G. Kümmel, Verheissung und Erfüllung, 2nd Edn (1953), p. 67. A certain disparity here over against Pauline theology does exist in so far as Christ Himself on the day referred to as ‘today’ has not yet risen, and therefore the foundation of the condition wherein the dead are bound up with Christ has not yet been laid. But in the last analysis the emphasis here is on the fact that the thief will be with Christ. Menoud [Le sort des trépassés, P. 45] correctly points out that Jesus’ answer must be understood in relation to the thief’s entreaty. The thief asks Jesus to remember him when He ‘comes into His kingdom’, which according to the Jewish view of the Messiah can only refer to the time when the Messiah wilt come and erect his kingdom. Jesus does not grant the request, but instead gives the thief more than he asked for: he will be united with Jesus even before the coming of the kingdom. So understood, according to their intention, these words do not constitute a difficulty for the position maintained above). In none of these texts is there so much as a word about the resurrection of the body. Instead, these different images picture the condition of those who die in Christ before the End -- the interim state in which they, as well as the living, find themselves. All these images express simply a special proximity to Christ, in which those dying in Christ before the End find themselves. They are ‘with Christ or in paradise’ or ‘in Abraham’s bosom’ or, according to Revelation 6:9, ‘under the altar’. All these are simply various images of special nearness to God. But the most usual image for Paul is: ‘They are asleep.’(The interpretation which K. Barth (Die Kirchliche Dogmatik, III, 2, p. 778) gives of the ‘sleeping’, as if this term conveyed only the ‘impression’ of a peaceful going to sleep which those surviving have, finds no support in the New Testament. The expression in the New Testament signifies more, and like the "repose’ in Apocalypse 14:13 refers to the condition of the dead before the Parousia.) It would be difficult to dispute that the New Testament reckons with such an interim time for the dead, as well as for the living, although any sort of speculation upon the state of the dead in this interim period is lacking here.

The dead in Christ share in the tension of the interim time. (The lack of New Testament speculation on this does not give us the right simply to suppress the ‘interim condition’ as such. I do not understand why Protestant theologians [including Barth] are so afraid of the New Testament position when the New Testament teaches only, this much about the ‘interim condition’: (1) that it exists, (2) that it already signifies union with Christ [this because of the Holy Spirit]). But this means not only that they are waiting. It means that for them, too, something decisive happened with Jesus’ death and Resurrection. For them, too, Easter is the great turning point (Matthew 27:52). This new situation created by Easter leads us to see at least the possibility of a common bond with Socrates, not with his teaching, but with his own behaviour in the face of death. Death has lost its horror, its ‘sting’. Though it remains as the last enemy, Death has no longer any final significance. If the Resurrection of Christ were to designate the great turning-point of the ages only for the living and not for the dead also, then the living would surely have an immense advantage over the dead. For as members of Christ’s community the living are indeed even now in possession of the power of the resurrection, the Holy Spirit. It is unthinkable that, according to the early Christian point of view, nothing should be altered for the dead in the period before the End. It is precisely those images used in the New Testament to describe the condition of the dead in Christ which prove that even now, in this interim state of the dead, the Resurrection of Christ -- the anticipation of the End -- is already effective. They are ‘with Christ’.

Particularly in 2 Corinthians 5: 1-10 we hear why it is that the dead, although they do not yet have a body and are only ‘sleeping’, nevertheless are in special proximity to Christ. Paul speaks here of the natural anxiety which even he feels before death, which still maintains its effectiveness. He fears the condition of ‘nakedness’, as he calls it; that is, the condition of the inner man who has no body. This natural dread of death, therefore, has not disappeared. Paul would like, as he says, to receive a spiritual body in addition, directly while still living, without undergoing death. That is, he would like to be still alive at the time of Christ’s return. Here once again we find confirmation of what we said about Jesus’ fear of death. But now we see also something new: in this same text alongside this natural anxiety about the soul’s nakedness stands the great confidence in Christ’s proximity, even in this interim state. What is there to be afraid of in the fact that such an interim condition still exists? Confidence in Christ’s proximity is grounded in the conviction that our inner man is already grasped by the Holy Spirit. Since the time of Christ, we, the living, do indeed have the Holy Spirit. If He is actually within us, He has already transformed our inner man. But, as we have heard, the Holy Spirit is the power of life. Death can do Him no harm. Therefore something is indeed changed for the dead, for those who really die in Christ, i.e. in possession of the Holy Spirit. The horrible abandonment in death, the separation from God, of which we have spoken, no longer exists, precisely because the Holy Spirit does exist. Therefore the New Testament emphasizes that the dead are indeed with Christ, and so not abandoned. Thus we understand how it is that, just in 2 Corinthians 5:1ff. where he mentions the fear of disembodiment in the interim time, Paul describes the Holy Spirit as the ‘earnest’.

According to verse 8 of the same chapter, it even appears that the dead are nearer Christ. The ‘sleep’ seems to draw them even closer: ‘We are willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be at home with the Lord.’ For this reason, the apostle can write in Phil. 1:23 that he longs to die and be with Christ. So then, a man who lacks the fleshly body is yet nearer Christ than before, if he has the Holy Spirit. It is the flesh, bound to our earthly body, which is throughout our life the hindrance to the Holy Spirit’s full development. Death delivers us from this hindrance even though it is an imperfect state inasmuch as it lacks the resurrection body. Neither in this passage nor elsewhere is found any more detailed information about this intermediate state in which the inner man, stripped indeed of its fleshly body but still deprived of the spiritual body, exists with the Holy Spirit. The apostle limits himself to assuring us that this state, anticipating the destiny which is ours once we have received the Holy Spirit, brings us closer to the final resurrection.

Here we find fear of a bodiless condition associated with firm confidence that even in this intermediate, transient condition no separation from Christ supervenes (among the powers which cannot separate us from the love of God in Christ is death -- Romans 8:38). This fear and this confidence are bound together in 2 Corinthians 5, and this confirms the fact that even the dead share in the present tension. Confidence predominates, however, for the decision has indeed been made. Death is conquered. The inner man, divested of the body, in no longer alone; he does not lead the shadowy existence which the Jews expected and which cannot be described as life. The inner man, divested of the body, has already in his lifetime been transformed by the Holy Spirit, is already grasped by the resurrection (Romans 6:3ff., John 3:3ff.), if he has already as a living person really been renewed by the Holy Spirit. Although he still ‘sleeps’ and still awaits the resurrection of the body, which alone will give him full life, the dead Christian has the Holy Spirit. Thus, even in this state, death has lost its terror, although it still exists. And so the dead who die in the Lord can actually be blessed ‘from now on’, as the author of the Johannine Apocalypse says (14:13). What is said in 1 Corinthians 1554b, 55 pertains also to the dead: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?’ So the Apostle in Romans 14 writes: ‘Whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord’ (verse 8). Christ is ‘Lord of the living and the dead’ (verse 9).

One could ask whether in this fashion we have not been led back again, in the last analysis, to the Greek doctrine of immortality, whether the New Testament does not assume, for the time after Easter, a continuity of the ‘inner Man’ of converted people before and after death, so that here, too, death is presented for all practical purposes only as a natural ‘transition’.(We have already spoken of K. Barth’s attempt [which indeed goes too far] to place a positive valuation in dialectic fashion alongside the negative valuation of death.) There is a sense in which a kind of approximation to the Greek teaching does actually take place, to the extent that the inner man, who has already been transformed by the Spirit (Romans 6:3ff), and consequently made alive, Continues to live with Christ in this transformed state, in the condition of sleep. This continuity is emphasized especially strongly in the Gospel of John (3:36, 4:14, 6:54 and frequently). Here we observe at least a certain analogy to the ‘immortality of the soul’, but the distinction remains none the less radical. Further, the condition of the dead in Christ is still imperfect, a state of ‘nakedness’, as Paul says, of ‘sleep’, of waiting for the resurrection of the whole creation, for the resurrection of the body. On the other hand, death in the New Testament continues to be the enemy, albeit a defeated enemy, who must yet be destroyed. The fact that even in this state the dead are already living with Christ does not correspond to the natural essence of the soul.

Rather it is the result of a divine intervention from outside, through the Holy Spirit, who must already have quickened the inner man in earthly life by His miraculous power.

Thus it is still true that the resurrection of the body is awaited, even in John’s Gospel -- though now, of course, with a certainty of victory because the Holy Spirit already dwells in the inner man. Hence no doubt can arise any more: since He already dwells in the inner man, He will certainly transform the body. For the Holy Spirit, this quickening power, penetrates everything and knows no barrier. If He is really within a man, then He will quicken the whole man. So Paul writes in Romans 8:11; ‘If the Spirit dwells in you, then will He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead call to life your mortal bodies also through the Spirit dwelling in you.’ In Philippians 3:21 : ‘We wait for the Lord Jesus Christ, who will conform our lowly body to the body of His glory.’ Nothing is said in the New Testament about the details of the interim conditions. We hear only this: we are nearer to God.

We wait, and the dead wait. Of course the rhythm of time may be different for them than for the living; and in this way the interim-time may be shortened for them. This does not, indeed, go beyond the New Testament texts and their exegesis, (Here I follow R. Mehl’s suggestion, Der letzte Feind, p. 56.) because this expression to sleep, which is the customary designation in the New Testament of the ‘interim condition’, draws us to the view that for the dead another time-consciousness exists, that of ‘those who sleep’. But that does not mean that the dead are not still in time. Therefore once again we see that the New Testament resurrection hope is different from the Greek belief in immortality.

Between the Resurrection of Christ and the Destruction of Death

We must take into account what it meant for the Christians when they proclaimed: Christ is risen from the dead! Above all we must bear in mind what death meant for them. We are tempted to associate these powerful affirmations with the Greek thought of the immortality of the soul, and in this way to rob them of their content. Christ risen : that is we stand in the new era in which death is conquered, in which corruptibility is no more. For if there is really one spiritual body (not an immortal soul, but a spiritual body) which has emerged from a flesh then indeed the power of death is broken. Believers, according to the conviction of the first Christians, should no longer die: this was certainly their expectation in the earliest days. It must have been a problem when they discovered that Christians continued to die. But even the fact that men continue to die no longer has the same significance after the Resurrection of Christ. The fact of death is robbed of its former significance. Dying is no longer an expression of the absolute lordship of death, but only one of Death’s last contentions for lordship. Death cannot put an end to the great fact that there is one risen Body.

We ought to try simply to understand what the first Christians meant when they spoke of Christ as being the ‘first-born from the dead’. However difficult it may be for us to do so, we must exclude the question whether or not we can accept this belief. We must also at the very start leave on one side the question whether Socrates or the New Testament is right. Otherwise we shall find ourselves continually mixing alien thought-processes with those of the New Testament. We should for once simply listen to what the New Testament says. Christ the first-born from the dead! His body the first Resurrection Body, the first Spiritual Body. Where this conviction is present, the whole of life and the whole of thought must be influenced by it. The whole thought of the New Testament remains for us a book sealed with seven seals if we do not read behind every sentence there this other sentence: Death has already been overcome (death, be it noted, not the body) ; there is already a new creation (a new creation, be it noted, not an immortality which the soul has always possessed) the resurrection age is already inaugurated. (If, as the Qumrân fragment most recently published by Allegro seems to confirm, the ‘teacher of righteousness’ of this sect really was put to death and his return was awaited, still what most decisively separates this sect from the original Christian community [apart from the other differences, for which see my article, ‘The Significance of the Qumrân Texts’, J. B.L.,1955. pp. 213ff] is the absence in it of faith in a resurrection which has already occurred.)

Granted that it is only inaugurated, but still it is decisively inaugurated. Only inaugurated: for death is at work, and Christians still die. The disciples experienced this as the first members of the Christian community died. This necessarily presented them with a difficult problem. (See in this regard Ph. H. Menoud, ‘La mort d’Ananias et de Saphira’, dux sources de la tradition chrétienne. Melanges efferts à M. Goguel [1950], particularly pp. 150ff.). In 1 Corinthians 11:30 Paul writes that basically death and sickness should no longer occur. We still die, and still there is sickness and sin. But the Holy Spirit is already effective in our world as the power of new creation; He is already at work visibly in the primitive community in the diverse manifestations of the Spirit. In my book Christ and Time I have spoken of a tension between present and future, the tension between ‘already fulfilled’ and ‘not yet consummated’. This tension belongs essentially to the New Testament and is not introduced as a secondary solution born of embarrassment, (See particularly F. Buri, ‘Das Problem des ausgebliebenen Parusie’, Schweiz. Theol. Umscan [1946], pp. 97ff. See in addition O. Cullmann, ‘Das wahre durch die ausgebliebene Parusie gestellte neutestamentliche Problem’, Theol. Zeitschr. 3 [1947], p. 177ff; also pp. 428ff.) as Albert Schweitzer’s disciples and Rudolph Bultmann maintain. (R. Bultmann, ‘History and Eschatology in the New Testament’, New Test. Stud., I [1954], pp. 5ff.) This tension is already present in and with Jesus. He proclaims the Kingdom of God for the future; but on the other hand, He proclaims that the Kingdom of God has already broken in, since He Himself with the Holy Spirit is indeed already repulsing death by healing the sick and raising the dead (Matthew 12:28, 11:3ff, Luke 10:18.) in anticipation of the victory over death which He obtains in His own death. Schweitzer is not right when he sees as the original Christian hope only a hope in the future; nor is C. H. Dodd when he speaks only of realized eschatology; still less Bultmann when he resolves the original hope of Jesus and the first Christians into Existentialism. It belongs to the very stuff of the New Testament that it thinks in temporal categories, and this is because the belief that in Christ the resurrection is achieved is the starting-point of all Christian living and thinking. When one starts from this principle, then the chronological tension between ‘already fulfilled’ and ‘not yet consummated’ constitutes the essence of the Christian faith. Then the metaphor I use in Christ and Time characterizes the whole New Testament situation: the decisive battle has been fought in Christ’s death and Resurrection; only V-day is yet to come.

Basically the whole contemporary theological discussion turns upon this question: Is Easter the starting-point of the Christian Church, of its existence, life, and thought? If so, we are living in an interim time.

In that case, the faith in resurrection of the New Testament becomes the cardinal point of all Christian belief. Accordingly, the fad that there is a resurrection body --Christ’s body -- defines the first Christians’ whole interpretation of time. If Christ is the ‘first-born from the dead’, then this means that the End-time is already present. But it also means that a temporal interval separates the First-born from all other men who are not yet ‘born from the dead’. This means then that we live in an interim time, between Jesus’ Resurrection, which has already taken place, and our own, which will not take place until the End. It also means, moreover, that the quickening Power, the Holy Spirit, is already at work among us. Therefore Paul designates the Holy Spirit by the same term -- first-fruits (Romans 823) as he uses for Jesus Himself (1 Corinthians 15:23). There is then already a foretaste of the resurrection. And indeed in a twofold way: our inner man is already being renewed from day to day by the Holy Spirit (2 Corinthians 4:16; Ephesians 3:16); the body also has already been laid hold of by the Spirit, although the flesh still has its citadel within it. Wherever the Holy Spirit appears, the vanquished power of death recoils, even in the body. Hence miracles of healing occur even in our still mortal body. To the despairing cry in Romans 7:24, ‘Who shall deliver me from this body of death?’ the whole New Testament answers: The Holy Spirit!

The foretaste of the End, realized through the Holy Spirit, becomes most clearly visible in the early Christian celebration of the breaking of bread. Visible miracles of the Spirit occur there. There the Spirit tries to break through the limits of imperfect human language in the speaking with tongues. And there the community passes over into direct connexion with the Risen One, not only with His soul, but also with His Resurrection Body. Therefore we hear in I Corinthians 10:18: ‘The bread we break, is it not communion with the body of Christ?’ Here in communion with the brethren we come nearest to the Resurrection Body of Christ; and so Paul writes in the following Chapter 11 (a passage which has received far too little consideration) if this Lord’s Supper were partaken of by all members of the community in a completely worthy manner, then the union with Jesus’ Resurrection Body would be so effective in our own bodies that even now there would be no more sickness or death (1 Corinthians 1 1:28-30) a singularly bold assertion. (F. J. Leenhardt’s new study, Ceci ese mon corps. Explication de ces paroles de Jésus-Christ [1955], is also to be understood in the light of this.) Therefore the community is described as the body of Christ, because here the spiritual body of Christ is present, because here we come closest to it; here in the common meal the first disciples at Easter saw Jesus’ Resurrection Body, His Spiritual Body.

Yet in spite of the fact that the Holy Spirit is already so powerfully at work, men still die; even after Easter and Pentecost men continue to die as before. Our body remains mortal and subject to sickness. Its transformation into the spiritual body does not take place until the whole creation is formed anew by God, then only, for the first time, there will be nothing but Spirit, nothing but the power of life, for then death will be destroyed with finality. Then there will be a new substance for all things visible. Instead of the fleshly matter there appears the spiritual. That is, instead of corruptible matter there appears the incorruptible. The visible and the invisible will be spirit. But let us make no mistake: this is certainly not the Greek sense of bodiless Idea! A new heaven and a new earth I That is the Christian hope. And then will our bodies also rise from the dead. Yet not as fleshly bodies, but as spiritual bodies.

The expression which stands in the ancZeitschrift, I [1945], pp., 105ff, seeks to explicate the expression ‘resurrection of the flesh’ both from the point of view of biblical theology and the history of dogma). Paul could not say that. Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom. Paul believes in the resurrection of the body, not of the flesh. The flesh is the power of death, which must be destroyed. This error in the Greek creed made its entrance at a time when the biblical terminology had been misconstrued in the sense of Greek anthropology. Our body, moreover (not merely our soul), will be raised at the End, when the quickening power of the Spirit makes all things new, all things without exception.

An incorruptible body! How are we to conceive this? Or better, how, did the first Christians conceive of it? Paul says in Philippians 3:21 that at the End Christ will transform our lowly body into the body of his own glory just as in 2 Corinthians 3:18 ‘We are being transformed into his own likeness from glory to glory’ This glory was conceived by the first Christians as a sort of light-substance; but this is only an imperfect comparison. Our language has no word for it. Once again I refer to Grünewald’s painting of the Resurrection. He may have come closest to what Paul understood as the spiritual body.

Body and Soul -- Flesh and Spirit

Yet the contrast between the Greek idea of the immortality of the soul and the Christian belief in the resurrection is still deeper. The belief in the resurrection presupposes the Jewish connexion between death and sin. Death is not something natural, willed by God, as in the thought of the Greek philosohers; it is rather something unnatural, abnormal, opposed to God. (We shall see that Death, in view of its conquest by Christ, has lost all its horror. But I still would not venture as does Karl Barth, Die Kirchliche Dogmatik, III, 2 [1948], p. 777 ff [on the basis of the ‘second death’ distinguished in Apocalypse 21:8], to speak in the name of the New Testament of a ‘natural death’ [see 1 Corinthians 11:30!]). The Genesis narrative teaches us that it came into the world only by the sin of man. Death is a curse, and the whole creation has become involved in the curse. The sin of man has necessitated the whole series of events which the Bible records and which we call the story of redemption. Death can be conquered only to the extent that sin is removed. For ‘death is the wages of sin’. It is not only the Genesis narrative which speaks thus. Paul says the same thing (Romans 6:23), and this is the view of death held by the whole of primitive Christianity. Just as sin is something opposed to God, so is its consequence, death. To be sure, God can make use of death (1 Corinthians 15:35ff, John 12:24), as He can make use of Satan to man.

Nevertheless, death as such is the enemy of God. For God is Life and the Creator of life. It is not by the will of God that there are withering and decay, dying and sickness, the by-products of death working in our life. All these things, according to Christian and Jewish -- thinking, come from human sin. Therefore, every healing which Jesus accomplishes is not only a driving back of death, but also an invasion of the province of sin; and therefore on every occasion Jesus says: ‘Your sins are forgiven.’ Not as though there were a corresponding sin for every individual sickness; but rather, like the presence of death, the fact that sickness exists at all is a consequence of the sinful condition of the whole of humanity. Every healing is a partial resurrection, a partial victory of life over death. That is the Christian point of view. According to the Greek interpretation, on the contrary, bodily sickness is a corollary of the fact that the body is bad in itself and is ordained to destruction. For the Christian an anticipation of the Resurrection can already become visible, even in the earthly body.

That reminds us that the body is in no sense bad in itself, but is, like the soul, a gift of our Creator. Therefore, according to Paul, we have duties with regard to our body. God is the Creator of all things. The Greek doctrine of immortality and the Christian hope in the resurrection differ so radically because Greek thought has such an entirely different interpretation of creation. The Jewish and Christian interpretation of creation excludes the whole Greek dualism of body and soul. For indeed the visible, the corporeal, is just as truly God’s creation as the visible. God is the maker of the body. The body is not the soul’s prison, but rather a temple, as Paul says (I Corinthians 6:19): the temple of the Holy Spirit! The basic distinction lies here. Body and soul are not opposites. God finds the corporeal ‘good’ after He has created it. The Genesis story makes this emphasis explicit. Conversely, moreover, sin also embraces the whole man, not only the body, but the soul as well; and its consequence, death, extends over all the rest of creation. Death is accordingly something dreadful, because the whole visible creation, including our body, is something wonderful, even if it is corrupted by sin and death. Behind the pessimistic interpretation of death stands the optimistic view of creation. Wherever, as in Platonism, death is thought of in terms of liberation, there the visible world is not recognized directly as God’s creation.

Now, it must be granted that in Greek thought there is also a very positive appreciation of the body. But in Plato the good and beautiful in the corporeal are not good and beautiful in virtue of corporeality but rather, so to speak, in spite of corporeality: the soul, the eternal and the only substantial reality of being, shines faintly through the material. The corporeal is not the real, the eternal, the divine. It is merely that through which the real appears -- and then only in debased form. The corporeal is meant to lead us to contemplate the pure archetype, freed from all corporeality, the invisible Idea.

To be sure, the Jewish and Christian points of view also see something else besides corporeality. For the whole creation is corrupted by sin and death. The creation which we see is not as God willed it, as He created it; nor is the body which we wear. Death rules over all; and it is not necessary for annihilation to accomplish its work of destruction before this fact becomes apparent -- it is already obvious in the whole outward form of all things. Everything, even the most beautiful, is marked by death. Thus it might seem as if the distinction between Greek and Christian interpretation is not so great after all. And yet it remains radical. Behind the corporeal appearance Plato senses the incorporeal, transcendent, pure Idea. Behind the corrupted creation, under sentence of death, the Christian sees the future creation brought into being by the resurrection, just as God willed it. The contrast, for the Christian, is not between the body and the soul, not between outward form and Idea, but rather between the creation delivered over to death by sin and new creation; between the corruptible, fleshly body and the incorruptible resurrection body.

This leads us to a further point: the Christian interpretation of man. The anthropology of the New Testament is not Greek, but is connected with Jewish conceptions. For the concepts of body, soul, flesh, and spirit (to name only these), the New Testament does indeed use the same words as the Greek philosopher. But they mean something quite different, and we understand the whole New Testament amiss when we construe these concepts only from the point of view of Greek thought. Many misunderstandings arise thus. I cannot present here a biblical anthropology in detail. There are good monographs on the, subject,(W.G. Kümmel, Das Bild des Menschen im NeuenTestament [1948]) not to mention the appropriate articles in the Theologisches Wörterbuch. A complete study would have to treat separately the anthropologies of the various New Testament authors, since on this point there exist differences which are by no means unimportant. (Also the various Theologies of the New Testament should here be mentioned.) Of necessity I can deal here only with a few cardinal points which concern our problem, and even this must be done somewhat schematically, without taking into account the nuances which would have to be discussed in a proper anthropology. In so doing, we shall naturally have to rely primarily upon Paul, since only in his writings do we find an anthropology which is definable in detail, even though he too fails to use the different ideas with complete consistency. (W. Gutbrod, Die paulinische Anthopologue [1934]; W. G. Kümmel, Römer 7 und die Bekehrung des Pau1us [1929]; E. Schweitzer, Rom. 1:3f und der Gegensatz von Fleisch und Geist vor und bei Paulus’: Evang. Theol., 15 [1955], pp. 563ff; and especially the relevant chapter in R. Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament [1955]).

The New Testament certainly knows the difference between body and soul, or more precisely, between the inner and the outer man. This distinction does not, however, imply opposition, as if the one were by nature good, the other by nature bad. (Also the words of Jesus in Mark 8:36, Matthew 6:25 and Matthew 10:28 [life] do not speak of an ‘infinite value of the immortal soul’ and presuppose no higher valuation of the inner man. See also re [Mark 14:38] Kümmel, Das Bild des Menschen, pp. 16ff.) Both belong together, both are created by God. The inner man without the outer has no proper, full existence. It requires a body. It can, to be sure, somehow lead a shady existence without the body, like the dead in Sheol according to the Old Testament, but that is not a genuine life. The contrast with the Greek soul is clear: it is precisely apart from the body that the Greek soul attains to full development of its life. According to the Christian view, however, it is the inner man’s very nature which demands the body.

And what now is the role played by the flesh and spirit? Here it is especially important not to be misled by the secular use of the Greek words, though it is found in various places even in the New Testament and even within individual writers whose use of terminology is never completely uniform. With these reservations, we may say that according to the use which is characteristic, say, for Pauline theology, flesh and spirit in the New Testament are two transcendent powers which can enter into man from without; but neither is given with human existence as such. On the whole it is true that the Pauline anthropology, contrary to the Greek, is grounded in Heilsgeschichte. (This is what Kümmel, Das Bild des Menschen, means when he states that in the New Testament, including the Johannine theology, man is always conceived as an historical being.) ‘Flesh’ is the power of sin or the power of death. It seizes the outer and the inner man together. Spirit is its great antagonist: the power of creation. It also seizes the er and inner man together. Flesh and spirit are active powers, and as such they work within us. The flesh, the power of death, entered man with the sin of Adam; indeed it entered the whole man inner and outer yet in such a way that it is very closely linked with the body. The inner man finds itself less closely connected with the flesh; (The body is, so to speak, its locus, from which point it affects the whole man. This explains why Paul is able to speak of ‘body’ instead of ‘flesh’, or conversely ‘flesh’ instead of ‘body’, contrary to his own basic conception, although this occurs in very few passages. These terminological exceptions do not alter his general view, which is characterized by a sharp distinction between body and flesh.) although through guilt this power of death has more and more taken possession even of the inner man. The spirit, on the other hand, is the great power of life, the element of the resurrection; God’s power of creation is given to us through the Holy Spirit. In the Old Testament the Spirit is at work only from time to time in the prophets. In the End-time in which we live -- that is, since Christ has broken the power of death in His own death and has arisen -- this power of life is at work in all members of the community (Acts 2:16 ): ‘in the last days’). Like the flesh, it too already takes possession of the whole man, inner and outer. But whereas, in this age, the flesh has established itself to a substantial degree in the body, though it does not rule the inner man in the same inescapable way, the quickening power of the Holy Spirit is already taking possession of the inner man so decisively that the inner man is ‘renewed from day to day’, as Paul says (2 Corinthians 4:16). The whole Johannine Gospel emphasizes the point. We are already in the state of resurrection, that of eternal life -- not immortality of soul: the new era is already inaugurated. The body, too, is already in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Wherever the Holy Spirit is at work we have what amounts to a momentary retreat of the power of death, a certain foretaste of the End. (See my article, ‘La délivrance anticipée du corps humain d’après le Nouveau Testament’, Hommage et Reconnaissance. 60^th anniversaire de K. Barth [1946], pp. 31 ff.) This is true even in the body, hence the healings of the sick. But here it is a question only of a retreat, not of a final transformation of the body of death into a resurrection body. Even those who Jesus raised up in His lifetime will die again, for they did not receive a resurrection body, the transformation of the fleshly body into a spiritual body does not take place until the End. Only then will the Holy Spirit’s power of resurrection take such complete possession of the body that it transforms it in the way it is already transforming the inner man. It is important to see how different the New Testament anthropology is from that of the Greeks. Body and soul are both originally good in so far as they are created by God; they are both bad in so far as the deadly power of the flesh has hold of them. Both can and must be set free by the quickening power of the Holy Spirit.

Here, therefore, deliverance consists not in a release of soul from body but in a release of both from flesh. We are not released from the body; rather the body itself is set free. This is made especially clear in the Pauline Epistles, but it is the interpretation of the whole New Testament. In this connexion one does not find the differences which are present among the various books on other points. Even the much-quoted saying of Jesus in Matthew 10:28 in no way presupposes the Greek conception. ‘Fear not them that kill the body, but cannot kill the soul.’ It might seem to presuppose the view that the soul has no need of the body, but the context of the passage shows that this is not the case. Jesus does not continue: ‘Be afraid of him who kills the soul’ ; rather: ‘Fear him who can slay both soul and body in Gehenna.’ That is, fear God, who is able to give comletely to death; to wit, when He does not resurrect you to life. We shall see, it is true, that the soul is the starting-point of the resurrection, since, as we have said, it can already be possessed by the Holy Spirit in a way quite different from the body. The Holy Spirit already lives in our inner man. ‘By the Holy Spirit who dwells in you (already)’, says Paul in Romans 8:11, ‘God will also quicken your mortal bodies.’ Therefore, those who kill only the body are not to be feared. It can be raised from the dead. Moreover, it must be raised. The soul cannot always remain without a body. And on the other side we hear in Jesus’ saying in Matthew 10:28 that the soul can be killed. The soul is not immortal. There must be resurrection for both; for since the Fall the whole man is ‘sown corruptible’. For the inner man, thanks to the transformation by the quickening power of the Holy Spirit, the resurrection can take place already in this present life: through the ‘renewal from day to day’. The flesh, however, still maintains its seat in our body. The transformation of the body does not take place until the End, when the whole creation will be made new by the Holy Spirit, when there will be no death and no corruption.

The resurrection of the body, whose substance (I use this rather unfortunate term for want of a better. What I mean by it will be clear from the preceding discussion.) will no longer be that of the flesh, but that of the Holy Spirit, is only a part of the whole new creation. ‘We wait for a new heaven and a new earth’, says 2 Peter 3:13. The Christian hope relates not only to my individual fate, but to the entire creation. Through sin the whole creation has become involved in death. This we hear not only in Genesis, but also in Romans 8:19ff, where Paul writes that the whole creation (The allusion in verse 20 to the words ‘for your sake’ of Genesis 3:17, excludes the translation of as ‘creature’ in the sense of man, a translation advocated by E. Brunner and A. Schlatter. See O. Cullman, Christ and Time [1950], p. 103.) from now on waits longingly for deliverance. This deliverance will come when the power of the Holy Spirit transforms all matter, when God in a new act of creation will not destroy matter, but set it free from the flesh, from corruptibility. Not eternal Ideas, but concrete objects will then rise anew, in the new, incorruptible life-substance of the Holy Spirit; and among these objects belongs our body as well.

Because resurrection of the body is a new act of creation which embraces everything, it is not an event which begins with each individual death, but only at the End. It is not a transition from this world to another world, as is the case of the immortal soul freed from the body; rather it is the transition from the present age to the future. It is tied to the whole process of redemption.

Because there is sin there must be a process of redemption enacted in time. Where sin is regarded as the source of death’s lordship over God’s creation, there this sin and death must be vanquished together, and there the Holy Spirit, the only power able to conquer death, must win all creatures back to life in a continuous process.

Therefore the Christian belief in the resurrection, as distinct from the Greek belief in immortality, is tied to a divine total process implying deliverance. Sin and death must be conquered. We cannot do this. Another has done it for us ; and He was able to do it only in that He betook himself to the province of death -- that is, He himself died and expiated sin, so that death as the wages of sin is overcome. Christian faith proclaims that Jesus has done this and that He arose with body and soul after He was fully and really dead. Here God has consummated the miracle of the new creation expected at the End. Once again He has created life as in the beginning. At this one point, in Jesus Christ, this has already happened ! Resurrection, not only in the sense of the Holy Spirit’s taking possession of the inner man, but also resurrection of the body. This is a new creation of matter, an incorruptible matter. Nowhere else in the world is there this new spiritual matter. Nowhere else is there a spiritual body -- only here in Christ.

Socrates and Jesus

Nothing shows more clearly than the contrast between the death of Socrates and that of Jesus (a contrast which was often cited, though for other purposes, by early opponents of Christianity) that the biblical view of death from the first is focused in salvation-history and so departs completely from the Greek conception. (Material on this contrast in F. Benz, Der gekreuzigte Gerechte bei Plato im N.T. und in der alten Kirche [1950]).

In Plato’s impressive description of the death of Socrates, in the Phaedo, occurs perhaps the highest and most sublime doctrine ever presented on the immortality of the soul. What gives his argument its unexcelled value is his scientific reserve, his disclaimer of any proof having mathematical validity. We know the arguments he offers for the immortality of the soul. Our body is only an outer garment which, as long as we live, prevents our soul from moving freely and from living in conformity to its proper eternal essence. It imposes upon the soul a law which is not appropriate to it. The soul, confined within the body, belongs to the eternal world. As long as we live, our soul finds itself in a prison, that is, in a body essentially alien to it. Death, in fact, is the great liberator. It looses the chains, since it leads the soul out of the prison of the body and back to its eternal home. Since body and soul are radically different from one another and belong to different worlds, the destruction of the body cannot mean the destruction of the soul, any more than a musical composition can be destroyed when the instrument is destroyed. Although the proofs of the immortality of the soul do not have for Socrates himself the same value as the proofs of a mathematical theorem, they nevertheless attain within their own sphere the highest possible degree of validity, and make immortality so probable that it amounts to a ‘fair chance’ for man. And when the great Socrates traced the arguments for immortality in his address to his disciples on the day of his death, he did not merely teach this doctrine: at that moment he lived his doctrine. He showed how we serve the freedom of the soul, even in this present life, when we occupy ourselves with the eternal truths of philosophy. For through philosophy we penetrate into that eternal world of ideas to which the soul belongs, and we free the soul from the prison of the body. Death does no more than complete this liberation. Plato shows us how Socrates goes to his death in complete peace and composure. The death of Socrates is a beautiful death. Nothing is seen here of death’s terror. Socrates cannot fear death, since indeed it sets us free from the body. Whoever fears death proves that he loves the world of the body, that he is thoroughly entangled in the world of sense. Death is the soul’s great friend. So he teaches; and so, in wonderful harmony with his teaching, he dies -- this man who embodied the Greek world in its noblest form.

And now let us hear how Jesus dies. In Gethsemane He knows that death stands before Him, just as Socrates expected death on his last day. The Synoptic Evangelists furnish us, by and large, with a unanimous report. Jesus begins_‘to tremble and be distressed’, writes Mark (14:33). ‘My soul is troubled, even to death’, He says to His disciples.( Despite the parallel Jonah 4:9 which is cited by E. Klostermann, Das Markus-Evangelium, 3rd Edition [1936], ad loc., and E. Lohmeyer, Das Evangelium des Markus [1937], ad loc., I agree with J. Weiss, Das Markus-Evangelium, 3rd Edition [1917], ad loc., that the explanation: ‘I am so sad that I prefer to die’ in this situation where Jesus knows that He is going to die [the scene is the Last Supper!] is completely unsatisfactory; moreover, Weiss’s interpretation: ‘My affliction is so great that I am sinking under the weight of it’ is supported by Mark 15:34. Also Luke 12:50, ‘How distressed I am until the baptism [=death] takes place’, allows of no other explanation.) Jesus is so thoroughly human that He shares the natural fear of death. (Old and recent commentators J. Wellhausen, Das Evangelium Marci, 2nd Edition [1909], ad. loc., J. Schniewind in N.T. Deutsch [1934], ad. loc, B. Lohmeyer, Das Evangelium des Markus [1937], ad loc., seek in vain to avoid this conclusion, which is supported by the strong Greek expressions for ‘tremble and shrink’, by giving explanations which do not fit the situation, in which Jesus already knows that He must suffer for the sins of His people [Last Supper]. In Luke 12:50 it is completely impossible to explain away the ‘distress’ in the face of death, and also in view of the fact that Jesus is abandoned by God on the Cross [Mark 15:34], it is not possible to explain the Gethsemane scene except through this distress at the prospect of being abandoned by God, an abandonment which will be the work of Death, God’s great enemy.) Jesus is afraid, though not as a coward would be of the men who will kill Him, still less of the pain and grief which precede death. He is afraid in the face of death itself. Death for Him is not something divine : it is something dreadful. Jesus does not want to be alone in this moment. He knows, of course, that the Father stands by to help Him. He looks to Him in this decisive moment as He has done throughout his life. He turns to Him with all His human fear of this great enemy, death. He is afraid of death. It is useless to try to explain away Jesus’ fear as reported by the Evangelists. The opponents of Christianity who already in the first centuries made the contrast between the death of Socrates and the death of Jesus saw more clearly here than the exponents of Christianity. He was really afraid. Here is nothing of the composure of Socrates, who met death peacefully as a friend. To be sure, Jesus already knows the task which has been given Him: to suffer death; and He has already spoken the words: ‘I have a baptism with which I must be baptized, and how distressed (or afraid) I am until it is accomplished’ (Luke 19:50). Now, when God’s enemy stands before Him, He cries to God, whose omnipotence He knows: ‘All things are possible with thee; let this cup pass from me’ (Mark 14:36). And when He concludes, ‘Yet not as I will, but as thou wilt’, this does not mean that at the last He, like Socrates, regards death as the friend, the liberator. No, He means only this: If this greatest of all terrors, death, must befall Me according to Thy will, then I submit to this horror. Jesus knows that in itself, because death is the enemy of God, to die means to be utterly forsaken. Therefore He cries to God; in face of this enemy of God He does not want to be alone. He wants to remain as closely tied to God as He has been throughout His whole earthly life. For whoever is in the hands of death is no longer in the hands of God, but in the hands of God’s enemy. At this moment, Jesus seeks the assistance, not only of God, but even of His disciples. Again and again He interrupts His prayer and goes to His most intimate disciples, who are trying to fight off sleep in order to be awake when the men come to arrest their Master. They try; but they do not succeed, and Jesus must wake them again and again. Why does He want them to keep awake? He does not want to be alone. When the terrible enemy, death, approaches, He does not want to be forsaken even by the disciples whose human weakness He knows. ‘Could you not watch one hour?’ (Mark 14:37).

Can there be a greater contrast than that between Socrates and Jesus? Like Jesus, Socrates has his disciples about him on the day of his death; but he discourses serenely with them on immortality. Jesus, a few hours before His death, trembles and begs His disciples not to leave Him alone. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, who, more than any other New Testament author, emphasizes the full deity (1:10) but also the full humanity of Jesus, goes still farther than the reports of the three Synoptists in his description of Jesus’ fear of death. In 5:7 he writes that Jesus ‘with loud cries and tears offered up prayers and supplications to Him who was able to save Him’. (‘The reference to Gethsemane here seems to me unmistakable. J. Héring, L’Epître aux Hébreux [1954], ad loc., concurs in this.) Thus, according to the Epistle to the Hebrews, Jesus wept and cried in the face of death. There is Socrates, calmly and composedly speaking of the immortality of the soul; here Jesus, weeping and crying.

And then the death-scene itself. With sublime calm Socrates drinks the hemlock; but Jesus (thus says the Evangelist, Mark 15:34 -- we dare not gloss it over) cries: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ And with another inarticulate cry He dies (Mark 15:37). This is not ‘death as a friend’. This is death in all its frightful horror. This is really ‘the last enemy’ of God. This is the name Paul gives it in 1 Corinthians 15:26, where the whole contrast between Greek thought and Christianity is disclosed. (The problem is presented in entirely false perspective by J. Leipoldt, Der Tod bei Griechen und Juden [1942]. To be sure, he correctly makes a sharp distinction between the Greek view of death and the Jewish. But Leipoldt’s efforts always to equate the Christian with the Greek and oppose it to the Jewish only become comprehensible when one notes the year in which this book was published and the series [Germanentum, Christentum und Judentum] of which it is a part.) Using different words, the author of the Johannine Apocalypse also regards death as the last enemy, when he describes how at the end death will be cast into the lake of fire (20:14). Because it is God’s enemy, it separates us from God, who is Life and the Creator of all life. Jesus, who is so closely tied to God, tied as no other man has even been, for precisely this reason must experience death much more terribly than any other man. To be in the hands of the great enemy of God means to be forsaken by God. In a way quite different from others, Jesus must suffer this abandonment, this separation from God, the only condition really to be feared. Therefore He cries to God: ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’ He is now actually in the hands of God’s great enemy.

We must be grateful to the Evangelists for having glossed over nothing at this point. Later (as early as the beginning of the second century, and probably even earlier) there were people who took offence at this -- people of Greek provenance. In early Christian history we call them Gnostics.

I have put the death of Socrates and the death of Jesus side by side. For nothing shows better the radical difference between the Greek doctrine of the immortality of the soul and the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection. Because Jesus underwent death in all its horror, not only in His body, but also in His soul (‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me’), and as He is regarded by the first Christians as the Mediator of salvation, He must indeed be the very one who in His death conquers death itself. He cannot obtain this victory by simply living on as an immortal soul, thus fundamentally not dying. He can conquer death only by actually dying, by betaking Himself to the sphere of death, the destroyer of life, to the sphere of ‘nothingness’, of abandonment by God. When one wishes to overcome someone else, one must enter his territory. Whoever wants to conquer death must die; he must really cease to live -- not simply live on as an immortal soul, but die in body and soul, lose life itself, the most precious good which God has given us. For this reason the Evangelists, who none the less intended to present Jesus as the Son of God, have not tried to soften the terribleness of His thoroughly human death.

Furthermore, if life is to issue out of so genuine a death as this a new divine act of creation is necessary. And this act of creation calls back to life not just a part of the man but the whole man -- all that God had created and death had annihilated. For Socrates and Plato no new act of creation is necessary. For the body is indeed bad and should not live on. And that part which is to live on, the soul, does not die at all.

If we want to understand the Christian faith in the Resurrection, we must completely disregard the Greek thought that the material, the bodily, the corporeal is bad and must be destroyed, so that the death of the body would not be in any sense a destruction of the true life. For Christian (and Jewish) thinking the death of the body is also destruction of God-created life. No distinction is made: even the life of our body is true life; death is the destruction of all life created by God. Therefore it is death and not the body which must be conquered by the Resurrection.

Only he who apprehends with the first Christians the horror of death, who takes death seriously as death, can comprehend the Easter exultation of the primitive Christian community and understand that the whole thinking of the New Testament is governed by belief in the Resurrection. Belief in the immortality of the soul is not belief in a revolutionary event. Immortality, in fact, is only a negative assertion: the soul does not die, but simply lives on. Resurrection is a positive assertion: the whole man, who has really died, is recalled to life by a new act of creation by God. Something has happened -- a miracle of creation! For something has also happened previously, something fearful: life formed by God has been destroyed.

Death in itself is not beautiful, not even the death of Jesus. Death before Easter is really the Death’s head surrounded by the odour of decay. And the death of Jesus is as loathsome as the great painter Grünewald depicted it in the Middle Ages. But precisely for this reason the same painter understood how to paint, along with it, in an incomparable way, the great victory, the Resurrection of Christ: Christ in the new body, the Resurrection body. Whoever paints a pretty death can paint no resurrection. Whoever has not grasped the horror of death cannot join Paul in the hymn of victory: ‘Death is swallowed up -- in victory! O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?’ (1 Corinthians 15:54f).

If we were to ask an ordinary Christian today (whether well-read Protestant or Catholic, or not) what he conceived to be the New Testament teaching concerning the fate of man after death, with few eceptions we should get the answer: ‘The immortality of the soul.’ Yet this widely-accepted idea is one of the greatest misunderstandings of Christianity ll-read Protestant or Catholic, or not) what he conceived to be the New Testament teaching concerning the fate of man after death, with few exceptions we should get the answer. There is no point in attempting to hide this fact, or to veil it by reinterpreting the Christian faith. This is something that should be discussed quite candidly. The concept of death and resurrection is anchored in the Christ-event (as will be shown in the following pages), and hence is incompatible with the Greek belief in immortality; because it is based in Heilsgeschichte it is offensive to modern thought. Is it not such an integral element of the early Christian proclamation that it can neither be surrendered nor reinterpreted without robbing the New Testament of its substance? (See on the following also O. Cullmann, ‘La foi à la résurrection Ct l’espérance de la résurrection dans le Nouveau Testament’, Etudes théol. et rel [1943], pp. 3ff; Christ and Time (1945), pp. 231ff; Ph. H. Menoud, Le sort des trépassés [1945]; R. Mehl, Der letzte Feind [1954]).

But is it really true that the early Christian resurrection faith is irreconcilable with the Greek concept of the immortality of the soul? Does not the New Testament, and above all the Gospel of John, teach that we already have eternal life? Is it really true that death in the New Testament is always conceived as ‘the last enemy’ in a way that is diametrically opposed to Greek thought, which sees in death a friend? Does not Paul write: ‘O death, where is thy sting?’ We shall see at the end that there is at least an analogy, but first we must stress the fundamental differences between the two points of view.

The widespread misunderstanding that the New Testament teaches the immortality of the soul was actually encouraged by the rock-like post-Easter conviction of the first disciples that the bodily Resurrection of Christ had robbed death of all its horror, (But hardly in such a way that the original Christian community could speak of ‘natural’ dying. This manner of speaking of Karl Barth’s in Die kirchliche Dogmatik, III, 2 [1948], pp. 776ff, though found in a section where otherwise the negative valuation of death as the ‘last enemy’ is strongly emphasized, still seems to me not to be grounded in the New Testament. See 1 Corinthians 11:30 [on that verse see below, pp. 34, 37]). and that from the moment of Easter onward, the Holy Spirit had awakened the souls of believers into the life of the Resurrection.

The very fact that the words ‘post-Easter’ need to be underlined illustrates the whole abyss which nevertheless separates the early Christian view from that of the Greeks. The whole of early Christian thought is based in Heilgeschichte, and everything that is said about death and eternal life stands or falls with a belief in a real occurrence in real events which took place in time. This is the radical distinction from Greek thought. The purpose of my book Christ and Time was precisely to show that this belongs to the substance, to the essence of early Christian faith, that it is something not to be surrendered, not to be altered in meaning; yet it has often been mistakenly thought that I intended to write an essay on the New Testament attitude toward the problem of Time and Eternity.

If one recognizes that death and eternal life in the New Testament are always bound up with the Christ-event, then it becomes clear that for the first Christians the soul is not intrinsically immortal, but rather became so only through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and through faith in Him. It also becomes clear that death is not intrinsically the Friend, but rather that its ‘sting’, its power, is taken away on/y through the victory of Jesus over it in His death. And lastly, it becomes clear that the resurrection already accomplished is not the state of fulfillment, for that remains in the future until the body is also resurrected, which will not occur until ‘the last day’.

It is a mistake to read into the Fourth Gospel an early trend toward the Greek teaching of immortality, because there also eternal life is bound up with the Christ-event. (In so far as John’s Gospel is rooted in Heilsgeschichte, it is not true, as Rudolf Bultmann wrongly maintains, that a process of demythologizing is already to be discerned in it.) Within the bounds of the Christ-event, of course, the various New Testament books place the accent in different places, but common to all is the view of Heilsgeschichte. (As Bo Reicke correctly maintains, ‘Einheitlichkeit oder verschiedene Lehrbegriffe in der neutestamentlichen Theologie’, Theol.Zeitschr., 9 [1953], pp. 401ff.) Obviously one must reckon with Greek influence upon the origin of Christianity from the very beginning, (All the more as the Qumrân texts show that the Judaism to which embryonic Christianity was so closely connected was already itself influenced by Hellenism. See 0. Cullmann, ‘The Significance of the Qumrân Texts for Research into the Beginnings of Christianity’, Jounr,. of Bibl. Lit., 74 [1955], pp. 2I3ff. So too Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament [1955], Vol. II, p. 13 note.) but so long as the Greek ideas are subordinated to the total view of Heilsgeschichte, there can be no talk of ‘Hellenization’ in the proper sense. (Rather, it would be more accurate to speak of a Christian ‘historicization’ [in the sense of Heilsgeschichte] of the Greek ideas. Only in this sense, not in that employed by Bultmann, are the New Testament ‘myths’ already ‘demythologized’ by the New Testament itself.) Genuine Hellenization occurs for the first time at a later date.

The present work is the translation of a study already published in Switzerland, (Mélanges offerts à KARL BARTH à l’occasion de ses 70 ans [pubi. by Reinhardt, Bâle, 1956][Theologische Zeitschrift, N. 2, pp. 126ff]. See also Verbum Caro [1956], pp. 58ff.) of which a summary has appeared in various French periodicals.

No other publication of mine has provoked such enthusiasm or such violent hostility. The editors of the periodicals concerned have been good enough to send me some of the letters of protest which they have received from their readers. One of the letter -- writers was prompted by my article to reflect bitterly that ‘the French people, dying for lack of the Bread of Life, have been offered instead of bread, stones, if not serpents’. Another writer takes me for a kind of monster who delights in causing spiritual distress. ‘Has M. Cullmann’, he writes, ‘a stone instead of a heart?’ For a third, my study has been ‘the cause of astonishment, sorrow, and deep distress’. Friends who have followed my previous work with interest and approval have indicated to me the pain which this study has caused them. In others I have detected a malaise which they have tried to conceal by an eloquent silence.

My critics belong to the most varied camps. The contrast, which out of concern for the truth I have found it necessary to draw between the courageous and joyful primitive Christian hope of the resurrection of the dead and the serene philosophic expectation of the survival of the immortal soul, has displeased not only many sincere Christians in all Communions and of all theological outlooks, but also those whose convictions, while not outwardly alienated from Christianity, are more strongly moulded by philosophical considerations. So far, no critic of either kind has attempted to refute me by exegesis, that being the basis of our study.

This remarkable agreement seems to me to show how widespread is the mistake of attributing to primitive Christianity the Greek belief in the immortality of the soul. Further, people with such different attitudes as those I have mentioned are united in a common inability to listen with complete objectivity to what the texts teach us about the faith and hope of primitive Christianity, without mixing their own opinions and the views that are so dear to them with their interpretation of the texts. This inability to listen is equally surprising on the part of intelligent people committed to the principles of sound, scientific exegesis and on the part of believers who profess to rely on the revelation in Holy Scripture.

The attacks provoked by my work would impress me more if they were based on exegetical arguments. Instead, I am attacked with very general considerations of a philosophical, psychological, and above all sentimental kind. It has been said against me, ‘I can accept the immortality of the soul, but not the resurrection of the body’, or ‘I cannot believe that our loved ones merely sleep for an indeterminate period, and that I myself, when I die, shall merely sleep while awaiting the resurrection’.

Is it really necessary today to remind intelligent people, whether Christians or not, that there is a difference between recognizing that such a view was held by Socrates and accepting it, between recognizing a hope as primitive Christian and sharing it oneself?

We must first listen to what Plato and St Paul said. We can go farther. We can respect and indeed admire both views. How can we fail to do so when we see them in relation to the life and death of their authors? But that is no reason for denying a radical difference between the Christian expectation of the resurrection of the dead and the Greek belief in the immortality of the soul. However sincere our admiration for both views, it cannot allow us to pretend, against our profound conviction and against the exegetical evidence, that they are compatible. That it is possible to discover Certain points of contact, I have shown in this study; but that does not prevent their fundamental inspiration being totally different.

The fact that later Christianity effected a link between the two beliefs and that today the ordinary Christian simply confuses them has not persuaded me to be silent about what I, in common with most exegetes, regard as true; and all the more so, since the link established between the expectation of the ‘resurrection of the dead’ and the belief in ‘the immortality of the soul’ is not in fact a link at all but renunciation of one in favour of the other. 1 Corinthians 15 has been sacrificed for the Phaedo. No good purpose is served by concealing this fact, as is often done today when things that are really incompatible are combined by the following type of over-simplified reasoning: that whatever in early Christian teaching appears to us irreconcilable with the immortality of the soul, viz. the resurrection of the body, is not an essential affirmation for the first Christians but simply an accommodation to the mythological expressions of the thought of their time, and that the heart of the matter is the immortality of the soul. On the contrary we must recognize loyally that precisely those things which distinguish the Christian teaching from the Greek belief are at the heart of primitive Christianity. Even if the interpreter cannot himself accept it as fundamental, he has no right to conclude that it was not fundamental for the authors whom he studies.

. . . . . . . . . . .

In view of the negative reactions and ‘distress’ provoked by the publication of my thesis in various periodicals, should I not have broken off the debate for the sake of Christian charity, instead of publishing this booklet? My decision has been determined by the conviction that ‘stumbling-blocks’ are sometimes salutary, both from the scholarly and the Christian point of view. I simply ask my readers to be good enough to take the trouble of reading on till the end.

The question is here raised in its exegetical aspect, we turn to the Christian aspect, I would venture to mind my critics that when they put in the forefront, they do, the particular manner in which they wish themselves and their loved ones to survive, they are involuntarily giving grounds to the opponents of Christianity who constantly repeat that the faith of Christians is nothing more than the projection of their desires.

In reality, does it not belong to the greatness of our Christian faith, as I have done my best to expound it, that we do not begin from our personal desires but place our resurrection within the framework of a cosmic redemption and of a new creation of the universe? I do not under-estimate in any way the difficulty one may experience in sharing this faith, and I freely admit the difficulty of talking about this subject in a dispassionate manner. An open grave at once reminds us that we are not simply concerned with a matter of academic discussion. But is there not therefore all the more reason for seeking truth and clarity at this point? The best way to do it is not by beginning with what is ambiguous, but by explaining simply and as faithfully as possible, with all the means at our disposal, the hope of the New Testament authors, and thus showing the very essence of this hope and -- however hard it may seem to us -- what it is that separates it from other beliefs we hold so dear. If in the first place we examine objectively the primitive Christian expectation in those aspects which seem shocking to our commonly accepted views, are we not following the only possible way by which it may perhaps none the less be given us, not only to understand that expectation better, but also to ascertain that it is not so impossible to accept it as we imagine.

I have the impression that some of my readers have not troubled to read my exposition right through. The comparison of the death of Socrates with that of Jesus seems to have scandalized and irritated them so much that they have read no farther, and have not looked at what I have said about the New Testament faith in the victory of Christ over death.

For many of those who have attacked me the cause of ‘sorrow and distress’ has been not only the distinction we draw between resurrection of the dead and immortality of the soul, but above all the place which I with the whole of primitive Christianity believe should be given to the intermediate state of those who are dead and die in Christ before the final days, the state which the first-century authors described by the word ‘sleep’. The idea of a temporary state of waiting is all the more repugnant to those who would like fuller information about this ‘sleep’ of the dead who, though stripped of their fleshly bodies, are still deprived of their resurrection bodies although in possession of the Holy Spirit. They are not able to observe the discretion of the New Testament authors, including St Paul, in this matter; or to be satisfied with the joyful assurance of the Apostle when he says that henceforth death can no longer separate from Christ him who has the Holy Spirit. ‘Whether we live or die, we belong to Christ.’

There are some who find this idea of ‘sleep’ entirely unacceptable. I am tempted to lay aside for a moment the exegetical methods of this study and ask them whether they have never experienced a dream which has made them happier than any other experience, even though they have only been sleeping. Might that not be an illustration, though indeed an imperfect one, of the state of anticipation in which, according to St Paul, the dead in Christ find themselves during their ‘sleeping’ as they wait for the resurrection of the body?

However that may be, I do not intend to avoid the ‘stumbling-block’ by minimizing what I have said about the provisional and still imperfect character of this state. The fact is that, according to the first Christians the full, genuine life of the resurrection is inconceivable apart from the new body, the ‘spiritual body’, with which the dead will be clothed when heaven and earth are re-created.

In this study I have referred more than once to the Isenheim altar-piece by the medieval painter Grünewald. It was the resurrection body that he depicted, not the immortal soul. Similarly, another artist, John Sebastian Bach, has made it possible for us to hear, in the Credo of the Mass in B Minor, the musical interpretation of the words of this ancient creed which faithfully reproduces the New Testament faith in Christ’s resurrection and our own. The jubilant music of this great composer is intended to express not the immortality of the soul but the event of the resurrection of the body: Et resurrexit tertia die . . . Expecto resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi saeculi. And Handel, in the last part of the Messiah, gives us some inkling of what St Paul understood by the sleep of those who rest in Christ; and also, in the song of triumph, Paul’s expectation of the final resurrection when the ‘last trumpet shall sound and we shall be changed’.

Whether we share this hope or not, let us at least admit that in this case the artists have proved the best expositors of the Bible.

Chamonix

15^th September 1956