Instead of bombarding you with a host of facts and figures about the primacy of the single, long gospel tradition I would like to develop the ideas in terms of a question and answer session where the same ideas might be a little easier to follow. So with this in mind I’d like to start with a slightly different question than the one you originally asked me, namely:
Q: If the single, long gospel form ‘makes more sense’ from a Jewish messianic perspective and seems to be witnessed by the early Muslim sources where did we in the West get the idea that ‘the gospel’ could appear as four separate texts? Did it get established by Constantine?
A: Well we can say with a great degree of certainty that this fourfold gospel was already well established throughout the Empire by the time of the Nicene Creed.
Q: Yet how far back can we trace this idea of the gospel being made up of four separate texts written by four separate authors?
A: Any Patristic handbook will acknowledge that at around 180 CE a high ranking church official in Rome named Irenaeus argued in effect ‘that it would be a good idea’ to accept four as the right number of gospels.
Q: Is there anything peculiarly strange about his argument?
A: Well what is immediately striking about this argument is that he doesn’t cite any pre-existing tradition to support his claims. It was of course customary for Church Fathers to cite previous authorities and traditions to shield them from the charge of establishing new and untested opinions. In other places of his work Irenaeus repeatedly cites the opinions of ‘elders’ on various matters but cannot do so here. Why? It must be because no one held this opinion before him. No one thought that the gospel was made up of four texts before Irenaeus.
Q: What kind of arguments does Irenaeus bring forward to support his claims about the gospel of four?
A: It is utterly incredible how weak Irenaeus’ case is. Instead of saying ‘so and so before me thought there should be four gospel’ he brings forward poetic arguments to make his case. These are the kinds of things you would expect from his Gnostic opponents. Irenaeus essentially says that there should be four gospels in our canon because there are four winds in the world, four creatures around the divine throne and the fact that he eats four eggs everyday for breakfast. It is amazing to see him build a case for something so fundamental to our religious experience based on the flimsiest of arguments.
Q: Does any of this mean that Irenaeus wrote or edited our four gospels?
A: David Trobisch, perhaps the world greatest authority on the development of the New Testament canon can be understood to say exactly this. Trobisch argued at length in his First Edition of the New Testament that Irenaeus deliberately designed the four gospels as a set. Each of the four canonical texts were molded and developed to function alongside other texts with a specific purpose – to refute previous ‘editions’ of the gospel which promoted views which he did not like.
Q: So the inference from Trobisch’s research is that …
A: … we no longer possess the original gospel which was used in the Christian communities before Irenaeus.
Q: And this is the consistent argument made by Islamic polemicists?
A: Yes but it is not only limited to followers of Mohammed. There is a consistent chorus of Christian writers from the time of Irenaeus who argue that the Catholic text was a counterfeit gospel.
Q: But if Irenaeus only wrote the four canonical gospels at the end of the second century, how can we explain their near universal acceptance throughout the Empire in the period which immediately followed?
A: Traditional scholarship does not address this issue as their interest is not in explaining the adoption of the canon but only recognizing that all surviving Patristic sources from the third and fourth century authorities acknowledged Irenaeus’ authority and accepted the canonical reformation he initiated.
Q: Yet are there alternative explanations in antiquity to the current model?
A: Yes indeed, a number of ancient traditions have managed to come down to us which tell us that Irenaeus was involved in an Imperial plot with the Emperor Commodus (the wicked Emperor played by Joaquin Phoenix in the movie Gladiator) to corrupt the canon.
Q: Really? That’s an explosive charge. Why don’t these reports get more coverage in the literature?
A: Academic articles have indeed been written on this subject but they typically get buried under a thousand other papers which reinforce the traditional understanding we inherited from the Church. The fact that they were originally written in Arabic and Ge’ez, languages which New Testament scholars don’t typically function well in, is undoubtedly also a factor.
Q: Do these ancient reports specifically reference the existence of a single, unified master gospel?
A: Yes the basic claim here is that was a single, long gospel written in Aramaic and which reflected the values of Christianity’s origins in the Middle East. These sources claim that a Roman Emperor conspired with high ranking Christian authorities to separate this original gospel into four, preserve it only in Greek and to ultimately reflect European social values.
Q: Is there any supporting evidence to uphold these historical claims?
A: Well let’s consider another undeniable but under reported fact. Irenaeus’ fourfold canon never took hold in the Semitic speaking lands of the Middle East – i.e. Syria, Palestine etc. The people who lived in the territories in which Jesus operated or his disciples first promulgated his message did not accept Irenaeus’ separated gospels but held fast instead a tradition wholly dependent on a single, long gospel which they believed was the master text BEHIND our four canonical texts.
Q: So it was this single, long gospel which eventually made its way into the hands of Mohammed?
A: Well it has to be said that in the fifth century Imperial policy mandated the destruction of these single, long texts and the familiar canon of four gospels began to be secured in these territories. However it is highly possible that pockets of the original tradition with their original texts continued to survive down to the time of the prophet of Islam.
Q: So what you are suggesting then is that the differences between Islam and Christianity come down to differing forms to the gospel?
A: Or at the very least ideas present in the single, long continuous text became deliberately broken up in separated gospels of Irenaeus.
Q: Like?
A: The idea that Jesus came as the herald for someone else.
Q: Okay we aren’t supposed to get into too much detail here but it is interesting to note that you say that Irenaeus himself leaves the door open that a single, long gospel lay behind his fourfold gospel?
A: Well look carefully at the structure of his canon. He says that our Gospel of Matthew – the first and most authoritative of the canonical gospels – goes back to an Aramaic original master text called the Gospel According to the Hebrews. When this text is mentioned in later Church Fathers like Epiphanius of Salamis, he identifies the Gospel According to the Hebrews as a single, long gospel, i.e. one which contained all or most of the narratives spread throughout the four canonical texts.
Q: That’s really quite incredible. So what you are saying is that our four texts were established by Irenaeus in Rome as a ‘gospel set’ to borrow Trobisch’s terminology at the end of the second century. But that at least one and possibly many single long gospel texts were being used at that time by a number of Christian communities one of which was obliquely referenced by Irenaeus himself as the basis to his canon?
A: Yes, exactly.
Q: So if this is true why don’t I hear more discussion about the single, long gospel in scholarly circles?
A: Well, you can’t prove that Irenaeus fashioned his fourfold canon out of a single, long gospel from just one statement. You can only see it when you layer after layer of evidence and see the same pattern repeating itself over and over again.
Q: So why doesn’t traditional scholarship see this ‘pattern repeating itself over and over again’?
A: They get obscured by the disinformation set up by later Church Fathers. Indeed in this case we see a number of Patristic writers promote the idea that the single, long gospel was in fact only a deliberate ‘harmonizing’ of our four canonical texts. The usual ‘villain’ here was a man named Tatian, who happened to be Syrian. He lived at the time Irenaeus promoted the ‘gospel of four’ and undoubtedly because he rejected Irenaeus’ innovation he is frequently accused of authoring any single, long gospel text that later Church Fathers ran into. His gospel was stigmatized as ‘the Diatessaron’ (Gk the gospel ‘made from four’). The label stuck and so now anyone who refers to the single, long gospel tradition ends up employing a name which by its very nature identifies it as a composite text wholly subordinate to the ‘original’ fourfold canon of Irenaeus.
Q: How are you so sure that Tatian didn’t just compose his single, long gospel from four pre-existent canonical texts?
A: Well for one Irenaeus never accused him of doing this. The charge only manifests itself among later Church Fathers who wrote long after Tatian had already died. Secondly Tatian is universally acknowledged to have been a student of Justin Martyr and the surviving letters of Justin show that he used a single, long gospel. As such if Tatian carried on the tradition passed on to him by his master Justin it would undoubtedly have included a gospel of the ‘single, long’ variety.
Q: Aren’t there a number of Arabic manuscripts which claims to preserve Tatian’s Diatessaron?
A: Yes but these claims are ridiculous. It is true that in the nineteenth century a number of single, long gospel manuscripts which identify themselves as ‘Tatian’s Diatessaron’ were discovered, mostly in Egypt. While many scholars rubber stamp these claims academics who specialize in the field of Diatessaronic studies reject this identification on a number of grounds.
Q: So where is that original ‘single, long gospel’ that Justin passed on to Tatian?
A: The American scholar William Petersen (d. 2005) developed a comprehensive diagram listing dozens of single, long gospels manuscripts in every language imaginable (English, Dutch, Persian, Arabic, Armenian etc). He argues that they all went back to a lost, original text used at the time of Justin Martyr or forty years before Irenaeus developed our canon. This text did not use material now found in our Gospel of John, only stories common to Matthew, Mark and Luke.
Q: Is there any proof is for your assertion that the single, long gospel type came before Irenaeus’ invention of the fourfold gospel?
A: Bart Ehrman surveyed all the manuscript evidence in his book The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research p. 77 and wrote "[i]n raw chronological terms, the Diatessaron antedates all MSS of the NT, save that tiny fragment of the Gospel of John known as P52." Of course, if you really look at the fragment and compare it to the surviving Diatessaron text you see that the same material is present in the single, long gospel. In other words, there is no way to disprove the claim that all the earliest surviving manuscripts of the New Testament are of the single, long gospel variety.
Q: So what you are claiming is that Irenaeus took this single, long gospel which included stories which ar now found in the gospel of John and divided them into the fourfold gospel we are now familiar with?
A: Yes.
Q: And this finally proves that the single, long gospel came first?
A: Well there is one more important piece of evidence to consider.
Q: Go on.
A: It does require listener know a story which is fundamental to the history of the Church Fathers.
Q: And what story is that?
A: Irenaeus makes a famous claim which every student of the writings of the Church Fathers knows very well. He says that he inherited ALL his beliefs from a famous preacher named Polycarp of Smyrna (fl. 140 – 161 CE) who in turn inherited ALL his beliefs from John, the beloved disciple of Jesus. Irenaeus swears up and down that what he taught perfectly exemplified the original apostolic faith and as such nothing was changed or altered along its transmission from Jesus.
Q: And what’s wrong with that?
A: I am wrote a book back in 2000 which demonstrates that Irenaeus can indeed be accused of falsifying this tradition of Polycarp which he claimed to be a faithful eyewitness. If we examine Polycarp’s citations of ‘the gospel’ in his one surviving letter it shows that he never even so much as heard anything about our ‘fourfold gospel.’ He only used the Diatessaron.
Q: And the upshot of this is …
A: Irenaeus can’t claim on the one hand that he faithfully preserved the original tradition of Polycarp and Polycarp witnessed a single, long gospel and Irenaeus a gospel made of four. Irenaeus must be responsible for the invention of the fourfold canon. The reason he can’t cite any authorities before him who used this form of the gospel was because everyone knew that his master Polycarp really used the Diatessaron. The reason he can’t condemn Tatian for using a single, long gospel just because it was a single, long text was because the rest of the world around him was also still using this form of the gospel.
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Stephan Huller's Observations by stephanhuller.blogspot.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at stephanhuller.blogspot.com.
dating back to conversations with his grandfather, Gaston Frank. "He said we represent one of the last descendants of the Frankist Jewish faith in the world," he muses. "I grew up thinking that our family was something like the Last of the Mohicans."