Well, I can tell you that me and Polycarp go way back. I can still remember having photocopies of the Letters of Ignatius (you know the short, long and longer ones explicitly associated with Polycarp in the margins) and I'd have the parallel sections highlighted so I could see how the original material was expanded.
So you're still wondering why I love Polycarp. Well let me make clear that I don't love Polycarp the way Joel Watts loves Polycarp. I wouldn't call myself 'Polycarp' or name my firstborn son after the Church Father.
I guess like other forms of love my affection for Polycarp began when I realized that - at long last, after wading through the Acts of the Apostles and other fictitious narratives of the Church - I finally HAD STUMBLED UPON A REAL PERSON. You can't know what that means. It was like the first time a held a girl's hand or saw a naked woman with an expression of interest on her face (I can enjoy the naked woman with DISINTEREST on her face every night now that I am married).
It was because Polycarp was real that I knew I had something to work with. We were coming out of the historical darkness that starts just after the end of the Bar Kochba Revolt. You have this image of an old itinerant preacher coming out of the night, wanting to die - hoping to die for God, to die for John who never had a proper martyrdom - and then the psychologist in me comes out and says 'I have stuff to work with.'
Polycarp is interesting because he was real, even with Irenaeus' whitewashing of embarrassing details of his life.
I would like to spend a whole week dealing with the historical problem which is Polycarp. We'll call it 'Polycarp Week' at the blog. I now think that Polycarp figures into every important discussion that one can have about early Christianity - even the Letter to Theodore.
Yet before we begin let me tell you what Polycarp is not. Polycarp DOES NOT represent ‘the beginning of Christianity.’ Christianity had been around for about a hundred years before Polycarp. Yet what came before him was substantially different from what came after him.
Polycarp represents something akin to what is seen when one flies over the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. Scientists remained puzzled what amazing force of nature could have cause a river to flow backwards against its original direction. This is what Polycarp embodies as a historical figure. Someone who quite literally began the transfiguration of Christianity into something it wasn’t. He initiated the transformation of the religion from an elitist Alexandrian mystical tradition to something which Philip Carrington rightly notes was “middle class or bourgeois” at its core.
Let me say that I think that von Campenhausen was right the first time. Polycarp wrote the Pastoral Epistles. He probably wrote the first editions of the Acts of the Apostles and the Gospel of John. Yet before I get into proving all of this, we should acknowledge that he was attached to a collection of writings which represent the first witness to these 'disputed writings.'
I know that for most people this ‘rational fable’ that is the Acts of the Apostles ‘makes intuitive sense’ on some level. Yet the actual ground for this ‘familiarity’ was the fact that the Christian Scriptures Polycarp inherited from his predecessors was reshaped to make it more palatable to Roman tastes (don't just take my word for it, Al Jabbar's source makes the very same point).
As Arlyn Lyle Sturtz notes the Acts of the Apostles “is a picture of the Christian movement which is compatible with Greco-Roman ideals and concerns: it fulfills philosophical and utopian ideals; it is not a threat to the established order; indeed it functions in a well-defined and orderly way; while at the same time, the community itself is [portrayed as] divinely guided, directed and protected.”
Christians today believe that their religion is embodied in the particular collection of scriptures which emerged from centuries of synods and official (and unofficial) consultations with the representatives of Caesar. So it is that there HAVE TO BE four gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, a collection of letters attributed to someone named ‘Paul’ and so on.
Yet isn't it at all possible that Christianity originally represented something wholly foreign and 'strange'? Something so curiously 'oriental' that it was viewed with the deepest suspicion when it started to exert worrisome influence over the population of Alexandria, the most important strategic port in the Empire.
I can't help but see a most bizarre mystery religion emerging out of Alexandria and then - almost creeping behind it like some kind of inverted shadow - a 'perfectly normal' and 'perfectly bourgeois' religion claiming to represent the 'lost truth' of this religion suppressed by the 'Alexandrian heretics.'
All we have to do, its proponents tell us, is to ignore the unmistakable connection of the 'creative team' behind this new Christianity and the court of the Emperor Commodus.
Yes to be sure – ‘God works in mysterious ways.’ But how did we get from the twofold gospel system represented in To Theodore to the Gospel in Four of Irenaeus? The New Testament canon as we now have it came from somewhere. It didn’t just fall from the sky.
The answer to everything about the early Catholic Church is 'that it came through Polycarp.' Even Irenaeus repeats this refrain every chance he gets. With Polycarp we are witnesses to the ‘first steps’ towards the New Testament as we now know it. We also see quite clearly a side of Christianity that few want to acknowledge. God did not create his canon with a divine ‘fiat.’ There was no presto alakazam!
I want to tell my readership about the original Evangelium and the seven letters of the Apostolicon that accompanied it. Yet in order to get there I am going to have to talk about the compromise in Alexandria that Clement alludes to in the Mar Saba letter and more importantly still I am going to have to talk about Polycarp for a week ... maybe even for a whole month if it need be.
Above all else I want the reader to see that there was a different official canon in the Church in the middle of the second century than there was at the end of the second century. The New Testament of Polycarp was a radical revision of what came before it and – more significantly – this ‘canon’ was again radically reshaped at the time of Irenaeus.
God might have created the world in six days but the Church Fathers fabricated the New Testament over seven generations. Even if this truth never makes it into any discussion of Christian origins it needs to be declared because it clears the way for something better, stronger and more glorious – even the truth.
