Did lay members of the Church actually get a look at the four texts ('according to Matthew,' 'according to Mark,' 'according to Luke' and 'according to John') which made up the 'official Gospel'? Did they get to hold a copy or copies in their sweaty, little hands? Of course not. The real problem is that there are too many Protestants in the field which studies these matters. They can't separate Luther from the Church.
So I want the reader to be aware of what I am suggesting about the introduction of the four-fold gospel. We are not talking about a 'conspiracy' where someone took apart the 'one gospel' and made it into four. What I am suggesting is that Irenaeus' methodology was far subtler than most people imagine.
What I am suggesting now is that most of the Church continued to use a single, long Gospel just as they always had. The manner in which scholars have noticed that the gospel citation in 1 Clement 13:1 - 2 becomes transformed into what appears in Polycarp's the Letter to the Philippians is a microcosm of the 're-formation' of the single, long gospel that Polycarp argued was the true gospel of John a generation earlier.
This popular gospel, which was used and known to the lay members of the church was now called 'the Diatessaron.' Notice that Irenaeus never accused Tatian of writing a text like this. The truth is that the gospel of Polycarp had its readings 'corrected' to purge them of any association with heresy.
Look at Philips discussion of the Diatessaronic parallels to Mark chapter 10. There was without a doubt single, long versions of gospel which provided a narrative where the material here was synthesized to a greater degree. The surviving copies of the Arabic Diatessaron do not witness this original tradition. Whatever originally appeared in the basic narrative which now appears in the Diatessaron as:
The Rich Fool
The Rich Youth and Questions Regarding the Kingdom of Heaven
The Rich Man and Lazarus
The Request of the Children of Zebedee
Zacchaeus
The Blind Man of Jericho
Irenaeus systematically EXCHANGED the original readings and variants for what became standardized in his fourfold canon, which as I mentioned never originally saw the light of day and was reserved for the elite ranks of the Church.
We should think of the fourfold gospel as EXACTLY paralleled by what the Mishnah represents in Judaism. Yes to be sure, the Mishnah is a collection which represents WHICH INTERPRETATIONS of the Torah from previous ages represent 'acceptable interpretations' within the new orthodoxy. The same thing, can be seen with regards to Irenaeus' grouping of 'acceptable readings.' There must have been dozens of gospels and gospel readings for a given passage. The specific gospel readings and the order of the narrative which are now associated with 'Matthew,' 'Mark,' 'Luke' and 'John' are no more exact than the Mishnah or the Gemara's associations of particular interpretations with famous rabbinic personalities.
The point is that the Roman government clearly wanted to tighten what doctrines could or could not be promulgated within the Palestinian monotheistic traditions. The Samaritan tradition reports persecutions in the Commodian period. The Christians in Alexandria experience hardship in the same period. Yet for rabbinic Judaism no less than Roman Christianity, the late second and early third centuries were nothing short of a golden age.
Indeed the Mishnah's compiler of 'acceptable halakhah' Rabbi Judah ha Nasi (135 - 210) would have flourished in the very period that Irenaeus compiled 'acceptable readings' of the gospel. Just as Irenaeus and the Christian personalities of the Roman Church are all connected with the Imperial court of Lucius Aurelius Commodus Antoninus, the rabbinic sources identify Judah ha Nasi as literally being in bed (or put to bed) by this same 'Antoninus.'
One last note, the people who put up the Jewish Encyclopedia on line used to allow outsiders to read articles such as 'the halakhah attributed to Emperor Antoninus.' Now when I click on the link I get a blank screen. Nevertheless for those people who aren't aware of the parallel Commodian manipulation of Judaism in the same period I have been developing for Christianity there are some general links here, here and here.
The point of course is that despite what my critics say, I am not INVENTING a conspiracy theory. The problem is that they just aren't very informed about the actual details of the sources themselves. The fact that idiots like Joel Watts don't know that the rabbinic sources and Irenaeus ADMIT and EVEN BOAST of a coziness between their community and (Lucius Commodus) 'Antoninus' is impossible to argue against.
Have we stooped to a level of DENYING EXPLICIT AGREEMENTS in the ALL of our existing sources?
In any event, as I have little time for the ignorant let me go back to the topic of what Irenaeus did with his collection of 'acceptable readings' in a canon developed around four 'principle witnesses.' After recasting the Evangelium associated with Polycarp as a 'Diatessaron' he simply combed through the readings and adjusted the readings of that text to conform to the four-fold 'canon' of acceptable readings associated with the aforementioned 'four principle witnesses' of the Church. Only the members of the presbytery who ever had access to the four-faced gospel. Yet the model for the interrelatedness of exoteric and esoteric gospels was clearly borrowed from Alexandria.
Indeed I think that Irenaeus' inspiration for the four-faced concept 'hiding behind' the veil which separated the lay people from the inner sanctum was also stolen from Alexandria. For as I have demonstrated in my up coming article in the Journal of Coptic Studies, this holy throne with images of the four living creatures was the central mystery of Alexandria, the one Clement references when he says that Mark "added yet other [sayings] and, moreover, brought in certain sayings of which he knew the interpretation would, as a mystagogue, lead the hearers into the innermost sanctuary of that truth hidden by seven veils."I get emails all the time from readers asking what 'gnosticism' is. I always tell them the same thing. It was a ritual process of initiation which led the catechumen to do what the ancient Israelites could not - that is 'apprehend God with their eyes.'
I have always maintained that the earliest Alexandrians believed that THIS THRONE wasn't just an inanimate object. In a manner which exactly paralleled the pagan 'idolatry' that Christians would later admonish, the Alexandrians actually believed that seeing the form of this object 'connected' them with its 'heavenly equivalent' - i.e. the divine throne in heaven.
How do I know this which such certain? Because Pierius of Alexandria (mid to late third century CE) PRACTICALLY says so viz. "in the book on the Passover and on Hosea, he treats both of the cherubim made by Moses, and of the pillar of Jacob, in which passages he admits the actual construction of those things, but propounds the foolish theory that they were given economically, and that they were in no respect like other things which are made; inasmuch as they bore the likeness of no other form, but had only, as he foolishly says, the appearance of wings." [Eusebius Church History]In any event, Irenaeus' new formulation developed the idea of a 'hidden object' connected to the Seraphim in the holy of holies only know it was the gospel. The new mystery was in understanding the public gospel in terms of a secret four-faced gospel formed after the image of the living creatures of God.
It would have been only after a generation where people literally knew nothing better than the sanctity of these four artificially manufactured texts that the tradition became self-sustaining. Still, it is important to note that I AM NOT suggesting that 'religious police' came along and removed copies of 'the original gospel' and replaced it with the canon of four. For almost everyone in the Church the transition from heresy to orthodoxy was seamless. he 'correction' of readings from the Diatessaron to accord what was now established BEHIND THE SCENES in a way that was so faithful to the FORM of the original mysteries of Alexandria, there can be no doubt that Irenaeus - as I demonstrate in my book - was intimately familiar with those aforementioned mysteries.
