Forensic Evidence of Early Church Orthodoxy:
(originally written by Fr Symeon Elias in 2007)
In answer to the constant mantra of “untrustworthy church history” and “untrustworthy scripture texts” I would like to share something in a little more depth on the subject.
The Church, being conscious of its own reality in time, was not interested in “archiving” its writings or creating, in the modern sense, a record of its history. That was not the work or mission of the Church. The Church’s mission was to spread the Good News, Euangelion of the Eu-Charis - to teach the incarnation, sacrifice and new life in Christ, to share the reality of the presence of the Holy Spirit, to spread that presence by Baptism and to give people access to Christ's Body and Blood in the Eucharist - the Good-Grace. The early Church’s treatment of its “texts” was pragmatic and practical. The texts were not the Gospel; they were utilities, tools, practical aids of the teachers, and those who could afford copies, which were not cheap. Old, worn, disintegrating texts of Gospels and letters of the Apostles were not keep as artifacts, but were replace with new usable, more durable copies. And as shocking as it seems today, it was reasonable and practical then to simply discard the crumbling texts, which is what they did. There were no sacred graveyards for “hallowed texts.”
Another witness to the practical way in which the Early Church handled texts is their innovative use of “codex” instead of scroll. This was a great improvement in the portability and durability of texts and increased their convenient use.(The move from Papyrus to Vellum.) Pages were numbered, and a person could easily stop, place the codex in its leather sheath, later open to the same page and continue. The use of Codices (plural of codex) was unique to Christians from the very beginning. Codices had barely made an imprint on the ancient Roman commercial world, when they became the standard of use for Christians. In other words, the advent of the use of “books” coincides with the advent of Christianity. This is known and accepted as the collective evidence by modern Papyrology and Palaeography.
Modern theologians, denying the reality of the Church in time (that is denying Christ’s incarnation in His Body, the Church and so the active and real life of the Church). They have had a heyday writing speculative histories, trying to explain the Church’s emergence in history by anthropological models. Sadly Protestant historians have lead the way, since they hoped to prove a very different “new testament history” as compared with the reality of Church in history. They were greatly aided in this task, or at least left free to speculate, because of the dearth of the Church’s own record. This so-called science of history created a model for the forming of the Church by sociological, psychological, political and economic means. They attributed these forces with the gradual mythologizing of Jesus, changing him into the Christ, the very creation of “christology.” They speculated that it took an “evolutionary” path. They pictured the process as strife between more or less equal bodies of “proto-orthodox” and various “Gnostic sects.” However, advances in archeology, papyrology and palaeography in the last half of the 20th century has greatly debunked the myth-makers and proven something very different. Here are the highlights:
In Oxyrhynchus, a town about 120 miles
south of Cairo, excavations have been on-going for decades and have
turned up an enormous amount of texts. The Academic Literature says
of this, “Among the texts discovered at Oxyrhynchus are plays of
Menander and fragments of the Gospel of Thomas, an early Christian
documents.” This sentence clearly demonstrates the common academic
prejudice in that the “Plays of Menander” are named, fragments of
the Gospel of Thomas are named, and then non-de-script Christian
documents are not named. As turns out the non-de-script Christian
documents are actually the lion’s share of the story. The non-de-script Christian documents include all the Gospels, all
the letters of the Apostles, including Revelations, The Shepherd of
Hermes, and copies of the “Sayings of Jesus” which do not comport
with the “Sayings of Jesus – commonly called the Gospel of
Thomas” from Nag Hammadi, which was a Gnostic text. Also included
are copies (plural) of Against Heresies by Irenaeus, (complete texts
in Greek). This find confirms in an indisputable way the movement
and commerce of early Christianity, the sharing of texts and so on.
It runs the indisputable history of these books to a very early date
and pushes proof of the Irenaeus’ Orthodoxy upon the Church to the
decade he wrote in the late second century. (Circa 180AD) Now, for the record I have adopted the "experts" rendering of this "Orthodoxy" as "proto-orthodoxy" - you see in their minds it can't possibly be that the Orthodox Church of today is the same Orthodox Church then, that is beyond their ability to accept, yet it is the reality. (Relate conversation with Archbishop Dimitri of Dallas).
“All indications are that early
Christians were very much given to what we today call ‘networking’
with one another, and that includes translocal efforts.” Dr Larry Hurtado
in his ground breaking study sites the fact that a major find at
Oxyrhynchus shows that copies of Irenaeus’s Against Heresies
had quickly traveled from the hands of its author in Gaul (France) to
Oxyrhynchus in southern Egypt;(nearly 3000 miles) likewise with other
texts from Roman Asia Minor to Oxyrhynchus, easily within the decade they were originally written.
Of the codices discovered there are some very interesting, very early examples that shed light on what the experts are calling “proto-orthodoxy” which by translation means, The Church. A large fragment of one of the Gospels was found. It had numbered pages, (most codices do) which indicated it was part of a combined codex containing the four canonical Gospels. And the remarkable part is that the experts are dating it to the late first or early second century, a mere 65 to 75 years after the ascension of Christ. The implication of this is huge for both the Biblical scholars, and for understanding the already formed, orthodoxy of the early Church. Several examples of “combined books” have been discovered, sets of the Pauline letters, sets of the Gospel of John with his letters and Revelation, most dating to the 100S, or as they say, Second Century. The very fact that a bound version of the four Gospels existed as early as 100 AD destroys the constant mantra from modern scholars that there was no “clear orthodoxy” until the 4th century.
Next, it appears that the content of
the Gospels, and the letters of the Apostles were “fixed”. In
other words, the extant very early copies are consistently the same
with much later copies, except for copying errors and minor
corrections. On the other hand the extant Gnostic literature
remained in flux throughout its history. Why is this? Because the early Orthodox father's understood the healing reality of the Apostolic Tradition, not yet named Orthodoxy and above all, remaining true to that Holy Spirit imbued reality was their foremost goal. Ego was set aside, by the subsequent copiers, not having to stamp their ego upon their work. As we see with both the ancient Gnostic and the modern Protestants and many so-called spiritualities in the Roman Catholic Church, their work even transmitting the Bible only comes with their ego stamp upon it. The Dake Bible, The Scofield Bible, etc., etc.
This is very telling as to
how the “proto-orthodox” functioned compared with the “Gnostic.”
The Church, being the abode of Christ, held to His true Icon as
depicted in the Gospel and Letters of the Apostles and those who knew
them and heard their testimony. The Gnostics having never met Him,
but rather each inventing him, each created a Christ to their own
taste, created texts of their own making in the process, each sect
and generation showing much “flux.” And it is important to realize that the modern Protestant Heresies show the exact same flux.
Next, the finds where the texts are primarily Christian proto-orthodox, New Testament texts and the writing of the early Fathers are accompanied by Christian copies (codices) of Old Testament (codices). It is forensically evident that where “the Church” existed, the “scriptures,” the Old Testament was very much a part of them. Of the books extant, from this early period, there are 22 copies of the Psalms represented. One can have little doubt that the Psalms played both a part as a “teaching aid” and a “hymn book.” It is interesting that “the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament contains nine columns of citations and identified allusions to the Psalms, more than for any other Old Testament writing.” Isaiah comes in next with eight columns of “citations and identified allusion to.” And guess what, the present catalogue of extant manuscripts of Christian Old Testament texts shows that Psalms is the greatest number, and Isaiah the next greatest number – directly corresponding to their importance to the Early Church – as reflected in New Testament! In other words what is reflected in the New Testament is mirrored in the archeological record. This is really amazing stuff and I’m thankful I’ve lived long enough to witness this unfolding story.
Next, of the extant artifacts, the Gnostic literature represents less than 2 percent of the earliest period. The “proto-orthodox” the texts of The Church, represent 98+ percent of extant texts of this early period. Where large quantities of Gnostic literature have been discovered, copies of the Old Testament writings have been absent. This is not surprising since the myriad Gnostic sects were of what the moderns are calling the “demiurgical traditions”. This word “demiurgical” comes from the noun “demiurge” which was a savage god, the Gnostics credited with creating the world in which their “pure spirits” were trapped. But there are “demirugical traditions” that do not actually teach this myth, but rather “in varying ways regard the deity emphasized in the Old Testament as inferior to the true or high deity, with whom they linked Christ and themselves.” Our friend, brother “N” recently demonstrated that he is of the “demiurgical tradition” concluding that the God of the Old Testament in the story of Elijah could not actually have “burned up a hundred people” - an act believable for the inferior “demiurge” of the Jews, but not believable for brother “N’s” high-moral god. This is also called Marcionism, and those in modern Protestantism and liberal Catholicism who reject the God of the Old Testament as inferior, share this heresy with Unitarians of all elk, including Islam.
I’ve merely touched the surface of the latest confirmation of the Orthodox Apostolic Tradition coming out of modern Hermeneutical research. It is important to grasp that what is confirmed in this is not only an undeniable confirmation of the integrity of Holy
Scripture, through time – which our demiurgist, brother “N” cannot accept, but the confirmation of the Orthodox Apostolic Tradition, and specifically the undeniable confirmation of early Church History the Church tells of herself.
What this teaches is that both the Evangelical hope for a “new testament” ecclesia, devoid of the history and ecclesiology of the Orthodox Catholic Church, and hopes of modern Gnostics that the Orthodox Catholicism would be shown to be merely one of many competing sects is proven false. What is confirmed is the Orthodox Apostolic Tradition held by Orthodoxy today is confirmed from the very beginning.
To this date, of ALL the early writings, (Christian old testament, new testament and early church fathers) only one writing discovered appears in drastically different versions and that is the longer and shorter forms of the Epistles of Ignatius, (AD 35- 108) known since 1840 and first published side by side in the 1860s in English translation. They are not of the same sort of flux as with the Gnostic writings, which present drastically different content as to meaning, version to version. The two versions of Ignatius’ letters consistently agree in import, even if at points different words and pictures are used to convey meaning. It is a debate whether the shorter is a redaction of the longer or the longer an exposition of the shorter, but in any case there is a harmony of meaning in the two versions, and they are preserved in shared order of thought, requiring no cutting and pasting when placed side by side.
I know this seems rather technical, but I hope someone’s faith is confirmed and truth affirmed.
God Bless All
Fr S.
This was written using as the primary source “The Earliest Christian Artifacts – Manuscripts and Christian Origins” by Larry W. Hurtado – A scholarly assessment of the state of Biblical Hermeneutics at the beginning of the 21st century. Hurtado sites 247 scholarly articles and books in the field, as well as eight online repositories of ancient manuscripts.
Another interesting fact proven by Hurtado’s study:
All contemporary art histories place the advent of Iconography in the 4th century. Anti-church historians have made much of this in their arguments about the “late date” for the development of Christology. They have especially used the fact that there is no evidence of “picturing the crucifixion” prior to the 4th century. Of course the Church tells a different story, attributing the first Icon of the Blessed Mother to Saint Luke. It is understood by the Church that Icons have been painted and repainted and if the Icons of the first century are extant they exist under layers of repainting.
However, very telling as to this ancient date of usage of Icon is that another type of Icon is extant on these early manuscripts, symbols still used and easily recognized in the Church today. Specifically the tau-rho, the chi-rho, the Alpha & Omega and other symbolic contractions – “christograms and staurograms.” The very earliest manuscripts, and through the second and third century, copyist used a sort of short hand, not uniformly used by all, but none-the-less, a recognizable form, and common usage where Jesus and Christ were substituted with the Alpha and Omega – where references to the crucifixion, or the crucified one, were represented with the “staurogram” - stauroo means crucifixion, stauros means crucified one. These two words would be substituted with a sigma (s) then the tau-rho – rather like a capital P with a line horizontally through it making a cross – and then ending with o or os according to context. One of the very oldest fragments of the New Testament was uncovered with a red Tau-Rho at the beginning, causing scholars to dismiss its ancient age, claiming that since it contained an “iconographic image” of the crucifixion it had to be of 4th century or later origin. The discovery of massive numbers of staurograms and other Christograms and many symbolic contractions, on these very early texts, making the texts themselves an iconographic record which changed the date of the just mentioned fragment, and pressed Iconographic evidence into the late first or early second century. Now, scholars will have to take a new look at catacomb art as well.
This fact was seen as so important to the understanding of the development of Christology that Hurtado was given permission by his publisher to post this chapter concerning “staurograms” on line. The content of the web page is actually superior to the chapter, so quickly is the scholarship unfolding.
(Sorry Link no longer exists.)
Fr S.
No comments:
Post a Comment