Adolf Harnack · 13 of 21

Holy Scripture.

1. Holy Scripture.

To the two Testaments a unique authority was ascribed. They were the Holy Scriptures κατ᾽ ἐξοχήν; every doctrine had to be proved out of them, in other words, opinions that held something necessary to faith which did not occur in Scripture, had no absolute validity. Any one who declared that he took his stand on Scripture alone did not assume an uncatholic attitude. This view of the Holy Scriptures presupposed that their extent was strictly defined, and placed beyond all doubt. But this supposition was for centuries contradicted by the actual facts, which, however, were concealed, partly because men neither would nor dared look at them, partly because they really did not see them. The theologians of Antioch, and especially Theodore, criticised on internal and external grounds the contents of the Canon, as these were gradually being fixed; but in doing so even they were guided by an ecclesiastical tradition. Their criticism still had its supporters in the sixth century, and its influence extended not only to Persia, but even, through Junilius, to the West. But neither the spirit of the criticism nor its results ever made any impression whatever on the great Church.

As regards the O. T., the oldest and most revered of the Greek Fathers followed Melito and Origen, and only recognised the 22-24 books of the Hebrew Canon, according to the others in the Alexandrian Canon only a secondary validity, or none at all. While there was some hesitation about the Book of Esther, and that not only in Antioch, this decision obtained in the Greek Churches, though divergences were not wanting in provincial communities. But it was always in danger of being disregarded, for the sacred books were continually transcribed from the LXX.; and so, as a rule, those writings, excluded in theory, were copied along with the others. The legend of the genesis of the LXX., again, was always highly valued, and it seemed to imply the sacredness of the whole translation. Yet it was only in consequence of the attempts at union with the Roman Church in the Middle Ages, and still more after the ill-fated enterprise of Cyrillus Lucaris (17th century), that the Greek Church was persuaded to give up the Hebrew and adopt the Alexandrian and Roman Canon. But a binding, official declaration never followed; the passiveness and thoughtlessness with which it changed, or upturned its position in so important a question, is extraordinarily characteristic of the modern Græco-Slavic Church. The question is not even yet decided, and there are distinguished Russian theologians, who regard the books of the Hebrew Canon as being alone strictly canonical. They are, however, growing ever fewer. In the Western Church a state of complete uncertainty still prevailed in the fourth century as to the extent of the O. T. But the Latin Bible, complete copies of which may not have been very common, was a translation of the LXX. This fact was more potent than the historical views which found their way into the West from the East, in a disjointed form, and for whose triumph Jerome had laboured. Augustine, who was ignorant of Biblical criticism, held to the current Latin collection (see, e.g., his list in De doct. christ. II., 8), and at the Synods of Hippo, A.D. 393 (can. 36), and Carthage, A.D. 397 (can. 47), the Alexandrian Canon was adopted. The decision that the Roman Church was to be asked for a confirmation of this conclusion does not seem to have been carried out. From that date the Hebrew Canon was departed from in the West, though the view of Athanasius, conveyed to it by Rufinus, and the decision of Jerome, exerted a quiet influence, and even apart from this some uncertainty—e.g., in the case of 4 Esra, the Pastor of Hermas, etc.,—still remained. Cassiodorus seems to have taken a very important part in finally shaping the Latin Bible. But we cannot by any means describe the attitude of the West as uncritical. It only avoided the inconsistency into which scholars had fallen in extolling the LXX. as a divinely composed and authentic work, while they ranked the Hebrew Bible above it.

As regards the N. T., the Alexandrian Church accepted the Western collection in the time of Origen, and in the course of the third century most of the others, though not yet all, seem to have followed its example. In so far as any reflection was given to their historical characteristics, the Scriptures were regarded as Apostolic-catholic, and were acknowledged to contain the real sources of evidence for Christian doctrine. But the principle of apostolicity could not be strictly carried out. In many national Churches apostolic writings were known and revered which were not found in the Western collection, and conversely, it was not always possible to perceive the Apostolic origin and Catholic recognition of a received book. Origen already therefore adopted the idea, consonant to the spirit of antiquity, that the collection embraced those books about whose title a general agreement had prevailed from the earliest times. Canonicity was decided by unanimous testimony. But even this principle did not meet the whole case; Origen himself violated it in forming the group of seven Catholic Epistles. Yet it became the established rule, and put an end to any consideration of the question based on criticism of the facts. Eusebius, who was a very important authority, and who—if we are to understand the passage so—had been commissioned by the Emperor to prepare standard Bibles, followed the view of Origen; yet in the case of one book, the Apocalypse, he expressed his dislike in a way that ran counter to the principle of the Canon. The three, or four, categories, in which he required to arrange the books, show that men were struggling with a difficulty not to be solved in this way, which could only be solved by time with its power to hallow all inconsistencies. If we collected statistically all the Eastern information we possess concerning the extent of the N. T. from the date of Eusebius up to the destruction of Constantinople—direct and indirect statements by Church Fathers, Synodal decisions, Bible manuscripts and indices from the Churches of various provinces, and especially Syria—we would be forced to the conclusion that complete confusion and uncertainty prevailed. But this view would be erroneous. We have to multiply by hundreds the lists which enumerate 26 (27) books, i.e., the Acknowledged and the Disputed melioris notæ of Eusebius.—Athanasius’ Festival Epistle, A.D. 367, was of paramount importance in settling the complete equality of these two classes in the Patriarchates of Alexandria and Constantinople and in the West.—On the other hand, apart from the Syrian Churches, the lists which diverge from the above owe their existence either to a badly applied scholarship, or to individual reminiscences, in rare cases to a divergent usage on the part of provincial Churches. From the end of the fourth century real unanimity prevailed, in the main, as to the contents of the N. T. and the authorship of the separate books, in Constantinople, Asia Minor, Alexandria, and the West. Apart from doubts of long standing, yet ineffectual and isolated, about the Catholic Epistles (and Philemon?), the one exception was John’s Revelation, for which Eusebius’ verdict was momentous. But even in this case attempts to come to a decision were given up: the book was shelved, and reemerged, from the circles in which it had maintained its ground, without exciting any controversy worth mentioning. The disquieting distinction between Acknowledged and Disputed books, abolished by Athanasius, was but very seldom of any consequence in practice; but scholars still recalled it here and there. When the collection was limited to 26 (27) books, the reading of others in the Church was, from the end of the fourth century, more strictly prohibited. But even at the beginning of the fifth, men in a position to know, like Jerome and Sozomen, can tell us that the prohibition was here and there unknown or disregarded. Some primitive Christian writings were thus in use in the Churches down to the fifth century and later; but the Monophysite Churches preserved, as a monkish protest against the spiritualism of Origen, Jewish Apocalypses revised by Christians and belonging to the earliest period, and the barbarism into which they fell spread a protective covering over these writings.

The details are obscure of the way in which the Western Church obtained the Epistle of James, second Peter, and third John. The Epistle to the Hebrews, not unknown to it from the first, it received in the fourth century as a Pauline composition, from the East, through the famous intermediaries. Those same men did away with all uncertainty at the close of the fourth century on the ground of the decisions given by Eusebius and Athanasius. The 27 books, i.e., the Canon of Athanasius, were alone recognised at the Synods of Hippo and Carthage (397), and this result was confirmed by Augustine’s authority (see, e.g., De doctr. christ. II. 8) without any general declaration having been made. But the sharper the line drawn between the collection and all other writings, the more suspicious must those have appeared whose title could lead, or had once admittedly led, to a claim for recognition as Catholic and Apostolic. The category of “apocryphal” in which they had formerly been placed, solely in order to mark the alleged or real absence of general testimony in their favour, now obtained more and more an additional meaning; they were of unknown origin, or ‘fabricated’, and this was often supplemented by the charge of being ‘heretical’. But however great the gulf between the canonical and uncanonical books, it is impossible to conceal the fact that the Church never published a general decision, excluding all doubt, on the extent of the Canon in ancient times. The Canon of Augustine was adopted by Pope Innocent I. (Ep. 6, ch. 7, ad Exsuperium).

With the complete elaboration of the conception of canonical books, every other description applied to them gave way to the idea of their divinity. What could any predicate signify compared with the conviction that they had been composed by the Holy Ghost himself? Therefore the categories of canonical and inspired writings coincided, nay, inspiration in its highest sense was limited to the canonical books. The belief in inspiration was necessarily attended by the duty of pneumatic or allegorical exegesis. This sacred art was then practised by all, who were able thus to disregard the results of any other kind of exposition. The problems which pneumatic exegesis, praised even by cultured Hellenists, had to solve, were mainly the following. It had (1) to demonstrate the agreement between the two Testaments, in other words; to christianise the O. T. completely, to discover prophecy everywhere, to get rid of the literal meaning where it was obnoxious, and to repel Jewish claims; (2) to harmonise the statements of Holy Scripture with the prevailing dogmatics; (3) to furnish every text with a profound meaning, one valuable for the time. Exegesis became a kind of black art, and Augustine was not the only man who was delivered from Manichæan, by Biblical, Alchemy.

But while these tasks were generally fixed, a sure and unvarying method was still wanting. Even the principles of Origen were not strictly retained. On the other hand, the historical antiquarian interest, which he had awakened, in Holy Scripture, continued to exert its influence. It not only lasted up to the fifth century, but it also exerted a critical and restrictive influence on pneumatic exegesis This was the case among the scholars of Antioch. Diodorus and Theodore tried, following the precedent set by Lucian and Dorotheus, to form an inner connection between the pneumatic and the grammatico-historical exegesis. It cannot be held that this gave rise to a more rational method, or one more tenable from the critical standpoint. Yet in detail they followed sound principles. These again had been already pared down by Chrysostom and Theodoret in favour of the dominant method, but they lasted in the Nestorian Church and its schools as long as science existed there at all, and their influence extended into the West through Junilius.

The West received through Hilary, Ambrose, Jerome, and Rufinus, the erudite pneumatic method of the Greeks, as practised especially by the Cappadocians. Before this, and for a few decades afterwards, the exegesis of the West was mainly characterised by absence of system; along with reverence for the letter we find all sorts of allegorical explanations, and in turn a predilection for a dramatic close to earthly history. Jerome was far from having fixed exegetic principles, since he allegorised against his better knowledge wherever the orthodox confession required it. In his time Tychonius, a Donatist, drew up for the interpretation of Holy Scripture seven rules which were to remove all difficulties (Augustine, De doctr. christ. III. 30 sq.). These were adopted by Augustine in his work ‘On Christian Science’, which, subject as it is to the errors of the age, is a glorious memorial of the great Bishop’s love of truth, and evangelical feeling. Of evangelical feeling, in so far as Augustine, in opposition to all biblicism, declared the study of Holy Scripture to be merely the path towards love; he who possessed love, no longer needed the Scripture, he lived with Christ and God; accordingly he had ceased to require separate ‘saving truths’, for he lived in truth and love.

But this thought of the book does not give its prevailing colour; this is furnished, on the contrary, by the other ideas that Scripture is the only way by which to come to God and Christ, that it is to be interpreted by the rule of faith, that obscure passages are to be explained by clear ones, and that the literal meaning, where offensive, must yield to the deeper sense. The numerous hermeneutic rules set up by Augustine, which are so many expedients and very like Origen’s methodic principles, determined the nature of exegesis in later periods in the West. In connection with whatever else was derived from the East, the view that there was a triple and fourfold meaning in Scripture became a fixed doctrine. The little book by Junilius which contained the Antiochene system of hermeneutics as handed down at Nisibis, although much read, made few changes. But it was exceedingly significant that Augustine, in spite of his view that it was only a means, had placed the Bible on such a pinnacle that all theologians who afterwards took their stand upon it alone as against tradition, were able to appeal to him. As a matter of fact Scripture held quite a different place in the Church life of the West from that in the East: it came more into the foreground. That also is to be explained, above all, by the influence of Augustine, and the deficiency of the West in speculative ability.

As the Church had never published a general decree, exclusive of all doubt, on the extent of Scripture, it had also failed to publish one concerning its characteristics. Freedom from error was generally deduced from inspiration, and it was, as a rule, referred to the very words. But on the other hand, an attempt was made here and there to leave room for the individuality and historical limitation of the authors; minor inconsistencies were not wholly denied (see even Aug., De consensu evang.); and exegesis was often practised as if the strict dogma of inspiration did not exist. A clear idea of the sufficiency of Scripture was certainly not reached; it was maintained in general phrases, and was violated in generalities and in details. Finally, as regards the relation of the two Testaments to each other, three views existed side by side. The Old Testament was a Christian book as well as the New: it was throughout the record of prophecy: it contained the true creed under certain limitations and imperfections, and led and still leads educationally to Christ. These points of view were adopted alternately as the occasion required. It was recognised that the Jewish nation had possessed a covenant with God, yet the consequences of this were far from being admitted. The same method of employing the Bible was still upheld in apologetic arguments as was followed by the Apologists of the second century. For the rest, even Cyril of Alexandria still brought “heathen prophecy” to bear in this matter, while in other respects—speaking generally—the assumption of heathen ‘prophets’ and inspired philosophers excited suspicion.