In my previous blogging about sola scriptura, one of my fellow parishioners emailed me about David Trobisch’s The First Edition of the New Testament (Oxford: 2000). I was intrigued. He offered it to me as a gift. And I am extremely grateful. I present here something of a summary and review of Trobisch’s argument.
First, a resume of the conventional “conservative” understanding of the formation of the canonical New Testament. Each individual book that would later form the canon was inspired from the moment of its writing. The canonization process was primarily a matter of the Church’s recognition of that divine origin and authority. Over the period of about two and a half centuries from the consensus date of the composition of the last of the New Testament books, the early Church sifted through various early documents purporting to be divinely authoritative, eventually settling on the 27 we now recognize. There was no ecumenical council who declared these books to be canon, but a grassroots recognition as exemplified in the “Muratorian canon,” in the works used by early Christians such as Origen in their own writings, and St. Athanasios’ festal letter (though this was later recognized by local councils in Rome, Hippo and Carthage), so that by A.D. 400, the canon of the New Testament was recognized universally.
Trobisch, however, wants to call this “consensus view” into question.
The thesis of this study is that the New Testament, in the form that achieved canonical status, is not the result of a lengthy and complicated collecting process that lasted for several centuries. The history of the New Testament is the history of an edition, a book that has been published and edited by a specific group of editors, at a specific place, and at a specific time. (6)
I have restrained myself from advancing a theory about where and when and who published the Canonical Edition. However, I hope this study will serve as an important step toward finding valid answers to these questions. In addition, I do not intend to challenge the current consensus that none of the writings included in the New Testament originated significantly later than 150 C. E. (7)
Indeed, this canonical edition was in place early and used widely.
At the end of the second century and in the beginning of the third, Irenaeus was reading this edition in Lyons; Tertullian read it in Carthage and Asia Minor; Clement had it in Alexandria, and Origen in Palestine. This particular edition, in other words, was read worldwide. (106)
A view such as this, that breaks with the received scholarship is going to have to argue cogently and clearly for such a position. Trobisch does just that. His argument falls into three parts: the manuscript evidence, internal evidence of a final redaction and internal evidence of the editor(s) addressing the readers. I will focus primarily on the manuscript evidence.
Manuscript evidence
Trobisch focuses on five key pieces of evidence in the manuscripts that, he argues, provides incontrovertible evidence of a final redaction of an editor (or group of editors) intent on publication of the volume. Those five pieces of evidence are: the widespread use of nomina sacra; the almost exclusive use of the codex; the arrangement of the writings into clearly demarcated groups, and the number of those writings; the titles of the works; and the title of the canonical edition.
nomina sacra
The nomina sacra are abbreviations of sacred words such as theos (God), huios (Son), christos (Christ), iesous (Jesus), and so forth. The manuscripts vary in how they abbreviate the original word, and have a horizontal line drawn across the word. That these are not intended to be abbreviations is evident from the fact that there is no standard shortening to which they adhere and that in many cases would take more time and effort (especially in drawing the horizontal line over the word) than would standard abbreviations. Neither are the nomina sacra an imitation of the Jewish Tetragrammaton (the four consonantal characters for the name of God, usually rendered in English YHWH, and always unpronounced, with the word Adonai, Lord, usually substituted in oral readings), since the Tetragrammaton was frequently written in Hebrew characters. Further the nomina sacra was not a consistent convention for the Tetragrammaton even in the Septuagint (the Greek Old Testament).
Furthermore, the nomina sacra exist in our earliest manuscripts and consistently throughout all our earliest New Testament writings. It is extremely unlikely that the nomina sacra was an agreed convention by all the New Testament writers since they wrote at such disparate times and places and under extremely variant circumstances.
Clearly then the nomina sacra are an intentional publishing convention.
use of the codex
Christians were alone among their contemporaries for devoting their important literature to the codex form. Trobisch charts a provisional graphic demonstrating the growth of the use of the codex from the first century onward. Among the users of the codex, Christians by far outnumbered their contemporaries. Indeed, our earliest copies of the New Testament are codices.
That the use of the codex was an intentional publishing convention is seen from its universality among the manuscript copies we have, dating back to our earliest copies, and that this was a unique characteristic of the “first edition of the New Testament” that set it apart from similar works of its day.
arrangement and number of writings
The oldest complete copies of the New Testament all show the complete list of 27 New Testament canonical books (or it can be determined, if they are incomplete, that they are almost certainly to have done so). The fourth century codex Siniaticus lists all twenty seven, in the groups of Gospels, Praxapostolos (Acts with the Catholic epistles), the Letters of Paul and the Apocalypse. Fourth century Vaticanus is incomplete but from various factors is considered to have had the New Testament 27. The fifth century codices Alexandrinus and Ephraemi Rescriptus had all twenty-seven books. All four of these early manuscripts are independent text traditions (different families of copies) and all of them contain the Septuagint—thus making them complete Christian Bibles. And although the arrangement of the books differ among the codices, both in the arrangement of the four groups (Gospels, Praxapostolos, Letters of Paul and Apocalypse) and works withing those groups, they all have the same four groupings and all groupings have the same works within them.
Given this consistent grouping of the New Testament books, this is almost surely an intentional publishing decision.
titles of individual works
That the titles of the individual New Testament books (e. g., “Gospel according to John”) were not original is almost universally accepted. But our earliest manuscripts contain these titles. These titles are awkward both in the grammatical constructions (“according to [author's name]”–kata plus accusative) and are not entirely accurate representations of the genre they entitle (gospel, praxapostolos), once again points to an intentional publishing decision.
title of the canonical edition
Finally, tucked away in 2 Corinthians 3 is the distinction made between the “old testament” and “new testament.” The joining of the Septuagint and the canonical New Testament in our early manuscripts, and the denomination of them as “old” and “new,” similarly represents an intentional publishing decision to give the entirety of the New Testament books a name and reflects a clear theological position on the relationship of the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament.
Internal evidence
implied authorship
Trobisch notes that the titles of individual works indicate who the authors are. The entire New Testament canon is put together in such a way so as to identify the authors. For example, the order of the catholic epistles matches the order of the list of the “pillars” of Galatians 2:9. The identity of Matthew is provided by the references to “Levi” in the other gospels, but by “Matthew” in the Gospel according to Matthew. Mark is identified in the Acts and in Paul’s letters; which serves to connect Peter with Paul and all of Paul’s letters. Trobisch goes into great details making all these connections. But his point is simple, the entirety of the canonical New Testament serves to authenticate the authorial titles of individual works with dozens of intricately connected references within the New Testament works itself.
That this preponderance of connections was an intentional publishing decision seems a very strong plausibility.
canonical New Testament arrangement mirrors Septuagint
The title of the canonical edition, noted in 2 Corinthians 3, is joined with the Greek Old Testament, and the arrangement of the New Testament canon is a mirror of the arrangement of the Old Testament canon. The Torah is the foundation of the Septuagint as the Gospels are for the New Testament. Just as the historical books of Joshua through Esther connect the Torah with the wisdom literature, so too does the Acts connect the Gospels with the Epistles; where the wisdom literature and the epistles together put into practice what is fundamentally revealed in the Torah and the Gospels. The prophetic literature of the Old Testament points to the coming of the Lord in his incarnation just as the Apocalypse points to the coming of the Lord in his glory.
That this was an intentional publishing decision, especially since the arrangement of the Septuagint differs markedly from the Hebrew Masoretic text, seems clear.
editorial note to the reader
The Gospel according to John ends (21:25) with a very clear address to the reader. There are other similar such notes scattered throughout the New Testament. There is Luke’s acknowledgment of other Gospels in Luke 1:1-4. There is Peter’s acknowledgment of Paul’s writings as canonical Scripture (2 Peter 3:15-16). Paul himself acknowledges other of his own writings that are not present in our canon (the epistle to the Laodiceans, Colossians 4:16). All of these, and others Trobisch discusses, are an intentional publishing redaction intent to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that what they hold in their hands is the canonical edition of the New Testament.
My extremely brief summary of Trobisch’s argument does not do the book justice. His work is only a bit over a hundred pages long, but his evidence and argumentation are dense and tightly written.
I’m not competent to judge Trobisch’s argument on its merits. I know just enough of some of the subjects he addresses (textual criticism, New Testament manuscripts, etc.) to both follow his argument and find it extremely persuasive.
I definitely recommend this book for your reading.
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