It is Polycarp Week so I was going through books that I have on Polycarp and I came across Helmut Koester's discussion of the Letter to the Philippians, the 'only known' letter of Polycarp in existence. He has great language skills. He clearly knows how to paraphrase and understand what other scholars have written. But his conclusions here are stupid. Sorry, it's true. I know he is part of 'the team' of scholars who defend the authenticity of the Letter to Theodore but his arguments are not always convincing.
Let me show you what I mean.
Everyone knows that there is this Letter to the Philippians. What is less well known is that P N Harrison (Polycarp's Two Epistles to the Ephesians 1936 Cambridge) came up with an observation that the letter is actually a combination of two letters to the Ephesians. This thesis was endorsed by Hans von Campenhausen (Polykarp von Smyrna 1951) and has been widely accepted ever since.
This isn't the 'idiotic' part. Scholars are generally good at the noticing anomalies. The part they suck at is EXPLAINING the phenomenon or at least - at deciding 'what the most likely explanation of a given phenomenon is.'
Here is Koester's explanation of the phenomenon:
The absence of the term 'gospel' is equally noteworthy in the Letter of bishop Polycarp of Smyrna to the Philippians ... Polycarp's first letter, written at the time of Ignatius, is preserved in chapters 13 - 14 of the extant document. But it is in the portions which belong to the later letter (chapters 1 - 12 and 15) that several quotations of gospel materials occur.
One of the quotations, Pol. Phil. 2.3, is copied from the quotation of the saying of Jesus in 1 Clem 13.1 - 2, including the quotation formula ("Remember what the Lord said when he was teaching"). However, while the quote in 1 Clem 13.2 had been drawn from the oral tradition, Polycarp, who knew the Gospels of Matthew and Luke corrected the text in order to establish a more faithful agreement of Jesus' words with the wording of the written gospels from which he had also drawn his other gospel materials (Phil. 2.3b, 7.2, 12.3). At the same time it is remarkable that Polycarp never uses the term 'gospel' for these documents [Koester Ancient Christian Gospels p. 20]
Now I know that Koester is up here (as I place my hand over my head) and I am down here (as I place my other hand near my knees) but this is just one explanation of the phenomena here. It happens to be an explanation that most every scholar will buy into of course. The bottom line is that it is the explanation which forces us to move very little furniture around in our little house.
But let's stop for a moment and NOT JUST MAKE A WHOLE BUNCH OF ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT THE TEXT as Koester does here. If we remove Koester's 'assumptions' we could only say the following about the material:
The absence of the term 'gospel' is equally noteworthy in the Letter of bishop Polycarp of Smyrna to the Philippians ... Polycarp's first letter,
One of the quotations, Pol. Phil. 2.3, is paralleled by the saying of Jesus in 1 Clem 13.1 - 2, including the quotation formula ("Remember what the Lord said when he was teaching").
Are my readers with me now? Koester just assumes that the copies of Polycarp's letter came down to us like they were shipped from the ancient world by Federal Express. The idea that someone had a vested interest in reshaping Polycarp's image as a witness to the orthodoxy that eventually emerged in Rome during the reign of Commodus - i.e. IRENAEUS - hasn't even crossed his mind.
The point again is that everyone agrees there is this parallel between Phil 2.3 and 1 Clem 13.1 - 2 where someone has 'corrected' the original saying in 1 Clement so that the readings match those of Matthew and Luke (even if the STRUCTURE of the quote still retains the original citation of 1 Clement):
Be merciful, that you may obtain mercy; forgive, that it may be forgiven to you; as you do, so shall it be done to you; as you judge, so shall you be judged; as you are kind, so shall kindness be shown to you; with what measure you measure, with the same it shall be measured to you [1 Clement 13. 1 - 2]
Judge not that ye be not judged, forgive and it shall be forgiven unto you, be merciful that ye may obtain mercy, with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again [Polycarp Phil. 3.2]
What almost no one has noticed is that the original reference from 1 Clement actually resembles what is found in the Diatessaron.
Judge not, that ye be not judged: condemn not, that ye be not condemned: forgive, and it shall be forgiven you: release, and ye shall be released: give, that ye may be given unto; with good measure, abundant, full, they shall thrust into your bosoms. With what measure ye measure it shall be measured to you. See to it what ye hear: with what measure ye measure it shall be measured to you [Diatessaron x. 13f]
Now you see the way scholar work is that they will only focus on the question of the relationship between the first two citations. Here is Stephen Carlson's wonderful effort to explain how the citation from Polycarp was harmonized by someone to look more like Luke and Matthew.
Yet where Koester and others deserve to be taken behind a woodshed is for the fact that as scientists their explanation fails to take into account why the Arabic Diatessaron would so resemble the restructured text in Polycarp's Letter.
In other words, if it were just some idiosyncratic effort on the part of Polycarp to 'correct' what 'Clement of Rome' said a couple of generations earlier, why does this effort show up almost exactly (remember the text called 'the Diatessaron' that we have now was likely translated from Syriac into Arabic) in this other text that was nothing short of canonical in the eastern parts of the Empire.
The point is that this wasn't just some 'slight corrective effort' on the part of Polycarp. The author of 1 Clement had a gospel (I don't believe that Flavius Clement was the name of the original author of this or any of the Clementine texts). In this and other Letters of Clement we see clear signs that the author's gospel resembled a non-canonical gospel (either the Gospel of the Hebrews or the Gospel of the Egyptians).
The letter which goes by the name 'Polycarp to the Philippians' uses an identical formula as what we see in 1 Clement but then someone came along and made the gospel readings conform to the canonical gospels. The purpose of these corrections were to demonstrate that 'Polycarp' was orthodox. Yet strangely the editor cannot identify 'the gospel' or 'gospels' by name. This is left strangely ambiguous.
Given the fact though that the Diatessaron so closely resembles this 'little correction' - i.e. making the saying of Jesus resemble what appears in the canonical gospels - we are left with two possibilities:
(1) Polycarp not only corrected this reading in the saying in what is now called '1 Clement' because he knew the existence of 'according to Luke' and 'according to Matthew' but that this 'little correction' was part of a massive effort at harmonizing the gospel of '1 Clement' to conform to the four canonical gospels. In other words, the text which now passes as 'the Diatessaron' was also edited by Polycarp.
(2) Irenaeus, the man who claimed to be the only authority on Polycarp, changed the original readings to make Polycarp an indirect witness for the 'Gospel in four.' Remember it is textual critics who see the resemblance between Polycarp and 1 Clement. The text never gives any sign that the author is drawing from another author.
Under the second scenario, a single, long gospel was shared by the authors of '1 Clement' and 'Polycarp.' They were part of a tradition that used 'the Gospel of the Hebrews' or some such text and then Irenaeus not only corrected the reference in Polycarp but also reformulated a version of the 'mixed gospel' (i.e. the Diatessaron) where the general structure of the narrative remained consistent but where the text itself was used to witness the original readings of the four texts of the new canon.
In other words, Polycarp did not use the four gospels. Everyone in his day knew that he used only one gospel which he received from John. That is why Irenaeus can never say that 'the elder' (viz. Polycarp) used or promoted 'the four-faced gospel.'
Nevertheless, Irenaeus COULD say that the single, long gospel which the Valentinians like Florinus (see Connolly's article on the use of the Diatessaron in the Valentinian tradition) said that Polycarp used 'really' represented a 'mixture' of the four gospels. This finally explains why Tatian's text was lost very early in early Christian history. The Diatessaron is a re-forming of the original, long gospel SHARED by Tatian, Polycarp and Theophilus.
In any event, scholars like von Campenhausen, Koester and Carlson want to keep the explanation of how 1 Clement's gospel citation became Polycarp's in to the Philippians WITHOUT explaining the Arabic Diatessaron. The reason for this is obvious - THEY ARE TOO LAZY TO 'MOVE ALL THE FURNITURE IN THE HOUSE' and work up a sweat. Above all else they want to show that the discovery of a parallel between 1 Clement and to the Philippians 'does not upset everything.'
The same person who 'changed' the reference in 1 Clement to the citation in 'to the Philippians' ALSO had a hand in developing the text behind the Arabic Diatessaron (undoubtedly also the one used by Ephrem). This cannot be avoided. It is impossible to believe that the editor of this proto-Diatessaron constructed the whole text to 'add' the change of 'to the Philippians.' Nor it is possible to suggest that 'it was just a lucky hit' - i.e. that both the author of the proto-Diatessaron and the editor of to the Philippians arrived at the same changes to the gospel of '1 Clement' independently of one another.
The bottom line is that either Polycarp changed the entire gospel of the author of 1 Clement and then naturally cited his 'corrected' Diatessaron during the course of his citation of the original material OR Irenaeus corrected BOTH 'to the Philippians' AND the original gospel of Polycarp which eventually became 'the Diatessaron.'
The corollary of either possibilities is that Polycarp used a text like the Diatessaron or Irenaeus 'corrected' the original text of 'to the Philippians' to make it look like he knew the four canonical gospels THROUGH the Diatessaron. Either way, the implications are the same. The real Polycarp of history wasn't as orthodox as later authorities pretend that he was. Maybe that's why Irenaeus most often avoids mentioning his name and refers to him by the cryptic epithet 'the elder.'
I think this shows that other people - viz. like Florinus and Gaius of Rome - had 'dirt' on Polycarp. But I will let you decide ...
