In the beginning was Marcion. The New Testament was a creation of this 2nd century teacher. Accordingly, the canon of the NT, as it has been known since Irenaeus of Lyons and is still being used today, developed within a specific apologetical setting: it was meant to refute Marcion’s canon, which consisted of one gospel (later ascribed to Luke) and ten Pauline letters. But if every canonical text either goes back to Marcion’s authorial and editorial work or was written against him, do these scriptures tell us anything reliable about the first hundred years after Jesus’ death? Can we trust the NT as a source for the origins of Christianity? According to Markus Vinzent’s new book, we should not fall into this trap: everything we know about the beginnings stems from non-Christian (Roman and Jewish) texts. We should not expect to find something like “Christianity” in this early period. Only after the Bar Kokhba revolt (c.132–135), the ways of Jews and Christians began to part. What textbooks present as “origins” appears to be a later construction; hence, their modern authors are still under the spell of Irenaeus, Eusebius, and the tradition which relied on them.
This is the outcome of Vinzent’s “new theory of sources and beginnings” in a nutshell.[1] The present book takes up the thread of Vinzent’s earlier monograph, “Writing the History of Early Christianity,” where he argued that we should write the history of Christianity backwards from today, instead of starting with year one.[2] This, he argues, would help to replace “the post-Reformation, denominational and often romantic filter through which the beginnings of Christianity have often been viewed” and free us “from the impulse to subconsciously or even unconsciously allow our preconceived notions of the beginnings of Christianity to guide our historiography” (p. VIII). Vinzent claims that writing history always means to construct history – which is something that one might term ‘reception’. But reception can imply “that an already existing agent, an earlier object, or identifiable content [add: that] is passed down through history puts that agent’s, object’s or content’s recipient… in a secondary position” (p. XIII). Because of this, Vinzent introduces retrospection: he does not ask when a text was written but when it became known and began to exert influence (cf. p. 187, 195, 274). Only then we can cope with the fact that the canon of the NT and many of its parts are not safely attested before the last third of the 2nd century. Were there such writings, and did they have authority, before they were cited and used as arguments? Does their later use of the Gospel narrations tell us anything reliable about the narrated time?
First and foremost, Vinzent attacks the academic discipline of New Testament studies (it does, however, take a while before this addressee is explicitly named). As an example of a book based on futile trust in the historical reliability of the NT, he refers to Udo Schnelle’s “The First One Hundred Years of Christianity”[3]. This textbook serves as an example for the implicit effects of late antique historiography, like within the works written by Orosius (fl. c.417–18), Gregory of Tours (d. 594) or, most prominently, Eusebius of Caesarea (d. 339–40), which propagate, e.g., the idea of “an early dating of the separation between Jews and Christians” (p. 38). Such authors present a romanticized and thus ahistorical view of what Vinzent calls “the black box of imagination” (p. 337). Hence a kind of ‘demythologizing’ is needed: “Digging further down, we always take with us ideas, concerns, intentions and views that have produced vivid images in us, those lenses through which we think we see what is in front of us” (p. 47). Only if we practice retrospection, we will be able to “interpret the past itself as an open beginning” (p. 327).
But how does retrospection actually work? Vinzent’s book contains six chapters that can be divided into two groups: chs. 1–3 are devoted to historical imaginations of the origins, chs. 4–6 to the emergence of scriptural collections and the canon. Ch. 1 deals with Gregory of Tours and Orosius as paradigms of a historicizing view of the beginnings; a section on the pseudepigraphic letter exchange between Paul and Seneca shows that apocryphal literature is more than ‘inauthentic’ but important to reconstruct later discourses (p. 53). Ch. 2 deals with Eusebius’ construction of the earliest time; here, Vinzent discovers the Bar Kokhba revolt as a decisive event insofar as the Church History assigns the parting of the ways, the struggles with heretics and the growing importance of the NT writings to its aftermath (pp. 109–112).[4] Ch. 3 focuses on the Chronographia of Iulius Africanus and on Origen’s and Tertullian’s views on ecclesiastical traditions: they do not read the NT writings as historical accounts but as media for spiritual instruction; at this moment, they were yet to become indisputable authorities. Ch. 4 argues that Irenaeus of Lyons should be credited with the invention of a Bible-based history of the Christian beginnings, while the concept of a canon of the NT as a collection of scriptures is first attested in Marcion (p. 161). Ch. 5 hints at the position of the ‘Praxapostolos’, one of the four main collections, in the oldest NT manuscripts: its placement before the Pauline letters, like in the Codex Vaticanus and Codex Alexandrinus, indicates “an important anti-Marcionite move to distance the message of the Gospels from Paul’s Epistles” (p. 198). Consequently, “Irenaeus, as the first reader of Acts and the Pastoral Epistles known to us… reads and uses Acts within the context of the Praxapostolos and the larger collection of Christian writings, not in order to develop a history of the beginnings of Christianity but rather to derive from it an orthodox, anti-heretical understanding of both the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles” (pp. 210–211). In ch. 6, the genealogy of the latter is compared to the different corpora of Ignatian letters, based on a general model of the emergence of letter collections.[5] The ecclesiastical canon and Marcion’s New Testament thus tell quite different stories about the beginnings of Christianity: “he [sc. Marcion] wrote the Gospel [sc. of ‘Luke’] himself and put the oral traditions about Jesus of Nazareth, which he had collected in the absence of an older written version, into a biographical and geographical form, just as he had done with his arrangement of Paul’s Epistles” (p. 311). Vinzent concludes: “With this historicizing collection, Marcion laid the foundation for the similarly oriented canonical New Testament, even though it would take centuries for these texts to be read from a historical angle rather than an apologetic one” (p. 323).
Vinzent’s argument builds on many previous studies, including a study on the development of the collections of the Pauline Epistles which has not been published yet (see, e.g., p. 298 n. 168). In addition to a monograph on Marcion[6], he recently wrote two more books on the development of the NT in the 2nd century.[7] He criticizes the obstinacy of NT scholars to discuss his findings (S. 339) but refuses to partake “in extensive and unnecessary Germanic footnote wars” (whatever this may be; p. XIV), and only engages with ‘classical’ NT scholarship selectively, with the exception of his discussion of Schnelle’s views. Vinzent even draws a parallel between Eusebius and modern scholars insofar as “orthodoxy and age as guarantors of reliability… remain the starting points in New Testament to this day” (p. 95; similarly p. 110). But do scholars really adhere to such an “Eusebian” or “Orosian” view of history? Vinzent complains that the Annual Meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature indulge in “overspecialization” instead of focusing on the bigger picture (p. 186). This is certainly true (also for the International Conferences on Patristic Studies!). But he could have referred, e.g., to the overview by Schmid and Schröter[8] who pay due attention to Marcion as an agent in the process of canonization but also show, with good reasons, that Vinzent’s late datings of the Gospels and the Praxapostolos are not simply the forthcoming consensus.
The strength and the weakness of his argument are both discernible in Vinzent’s insistence on the importance of collections. He trusts the collections of the 4th century as witnesses to anti-Marcionite discourses of the 2nd century and argues – following Matthias Klinghardt, David Trobisch, and Jan Heilmann – that one should pay attention to the process of compiling the four sub-collections of Jesus-related writings and the large collection known as the NT, first attested in Irenaeus (with different sequences of writings). On the other hand, his retrospective approach leads him to a kind of reductionism: the questions of authorship and dating of the NT writings are left aside and evaluated as being “more difficult and perhaps less illuminating” (S. 187). Thus, we end up with Marcion being the only known agent of writing and collecting (even the ‘historical Paul’ and his letters are only accessible through the former’s editing; p. 322). The anti-Marcionite movement in the 2nd century produced new and reworked existing (Marcionite – and perhaps other) texts which Irenaeus then assembled as the NT; one could say, alluding to Karl Barth, that Irenaeus ‘imposed the canon unto the church’.[9] The whole process is thus triggered by a single elusive figure[10] – no space is left for non-polemical factors in the emergence of Christian scriptures. But why did everyone in every place accept Irenaeus’ canonization of the NT texts against Marcion? Does the anti-heretical focus explain the entire matter, or should we at least speculate about the importance of liturgical and parenetical use of scriptures which contributed to their authority? Vinzent admits that the historian may well be tempted “to adopt a kind of tunnel vision in trying to explain things too systematically and monocausally” (p. 333). In any case, it is time to seriously discuss his undertaking of “resetting the origins” and to see whether this will necessitate a paradigm shift or – which is more modest but perhaps helpful – a thoroughly revised assessment of what we thought we already knew.
Notes
[1] A first version was published in German: Markus Vinzent, Offener Anfang. Die Entstehung des Christentums im 2. Jahrhundert (Freiburg: Herder, 2019).
[2] Markus Vinzent, Writing the History of Early Christianity: from Reception to Retrospection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) pp. 5–76 (“Methodological Introduction”).
[3] Udo Schnelle, The First One Hundred Years of Christianity. An Introduction to Its History, Literature, and Development (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020); ET of: Die ersten 100 Jahre des Christentums, 30–130 n. Chr. Die Entstehungsgeschichte einer Weltreligion (3rd ed. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019).
[4] Vinzent does unfortunately not discuss Michael J. Hollerich, Making Christian History. Eusebius of Caesarea and His Readers (Christianity in Late Antiquity 11; Oakland CA: University of California Press, 2021).
[5] For the author’s view of the dating of the letters Ignatius of Antioch, see Vinzent, Writing the History of Early Christianity, pp. 266–464.
[6] Markus Vinzent, Tertullian’s Preface to Marcion’s Gospel (Studia Patristica. Suppl. 5; Leuven: Peeters, 2016).
[7] Markus Vinzent, Christi Thora. Die Entstehung des Neuen Testaments im 2. Jahrhundert (Freiburg: Herder, 2022); Id., Concordance to the Precanonical and Canonical New Testament (Texte und Arbeiten zum neutestamentlichen Zeitalter 70; Tübingen: Narr Attempto, 2023).
[8] Konrad Schmid & Jens Schröter, The Making of the Bible. From the First Fragments to Sacred Scripture (Cambridge MA; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021), esp. pp. 222–279; ET of: Die Entstehung der Bibel. Von den ersten Texten zu den heiligen Schriften (München: C.H. Beck, 2019).
[9] Cf. Karl Barth, Die Kirchliche Dogmatik, vol. I.1 (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1932), p. 110: „Die Bibel… ist Kanon, weil sie sich als solcher der Kirche imponiert hat und immer wieder imponiert.“
[10] See Winrich Löhr, “Problems of Profiling Marcion,” in Christian Teachers in Second-Century Rome. Schools and Students in the Ancient City (H. Gregory Snyder, ed.; Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 159; Leiden: Brill, 2020) pp. 109–133.