Chapter 19: sincere questions about the early church writings. Since writing "Will the Real Heretics Please Stand Up?" several years ago, I have received hundreds of letters from persons with questions about the early church. Many have asked sincere questions about the value and reliability of the early Christian writings. Let's take a look at some of these questions. First subheading: "Won't the Holy Spirit guide us to all truth?" It seems pretty hard to get Christians to agree on much of anything nowadays.
Still, over the past couple of years, five different sincere Christians have written me, none of whom knew the others, but they were in perfect agreement on one point: we don't need the early Christian writings to correctly understand Scripture. Rather, they said, quote, "The Holy Spirit will guide us to all truth," from John 16:13. It crossed my mind to put all five of those persons in touch with each other, since they were united on the issue of how Christians can find truth.
Yet somehow I don't think they would have appreciated my doing so. For you see, they all had a different opinion about what was true. Each was sure the Holy Spirit had guided him to all truth, but each had arrived at a different, quote, "truth." If all Christians were following the Holy Spirit's guidance to all truth, then all Christians would believe and teach the same things, wouldn't they? Yet we are divided into over 22,000 different denominations and sects, all with differing beliefs.
And 22,000, that was in 1992. So where have we gone wrong? First of all, the Scriptures do not say that the Holy Spirit will give direct revelation of all truth to every Christian. The Holy Spirit guides us to truth through the written pages of Scripture and through the historic witness of the oral apostolic tradition. Just because we have the Holy Spirit's guidance doesn't mean that we don't need to look at the historic course of performance of the early church.
Would we claim that we don't need the Bible because we have the Holy Spirit's guidance? It's for good reason that God doesn't normally give direct revelation of all truth to each one of us. Christ doesn't want a cluster of lone rangers out here who have no need of each other. He wants a church. He wants one body, a body that is dependent not only on each other but on the church of the preceding centuries as well. Rugged individualism might be what fueled America's rise to power, but it's not what fuels the church.
If the Holy Spirit directly revealed all necessary truth to the apostles and they revealed it to the church, why should we expect the Spirit to directly reveal those same truths to us all over again? The early Christians were content to receive the Christian truths secondhand through the apostles and the apostolic church. Why aren't we? Interestingly, the early Christians understood John 16:12 and 13 to apply only to the apostles, at least as to direct revelation from God. I'm going to read you a lengthy footnote.
The context of Jesus' words in John 16:13 would support the early church's understanding of this passage. First of all, let's look at the setting. The scene was right after Jesus and the apostles had eaten the Last Supper. Judas Iscariot had already left. Jesus was giving parting words of counsel to his eleven faithful apostles. In the course of this counsel, he told them, "I have many more things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.
But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. For he will not speak on his own initiative, but whatever he hears, he will speak, and he will disclose to you what is to come." John 16:12 and 13. Notice that those words were not spoken to the crowds or even to the seventy disciples Jesus sent out. They were spoken only to the eleven apostles. And not everything Jesus said to his apostles applies to all Christians, at least not to the same degree.
In fact, this passage is actually a reiteration of what he had told the apostles moments before, quote, "But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you." John 14:26. Would anyone argue this parallel passage applies to all Christians? Jesus said the Spirit would bring to remembrance all of the things he said to them.
Does anyone claim today that the Holy Spirit has brought to their memory all of the things Jesus said to his apostles? Now back to the text. They truly believed that all spiritual truth had been revealed to the apostles. They meaning the early Christians. That's why they insisted that the church must hold on to everything handed down by the apostles. They never claimed any special revelation beyond the apostles.
In contrast, it was the heretics, the Gnostics, and the Montanists who were not content merely to receive what had been delivered to the church. Instead, they claimed special, direct, doctrinal revelation from the Holy Spirit. I think that a lot of the ambiguity in Scripture was put there purposefully by God. He didn't want independent-minded persons to be able to just take Scripture by itself and then think they could separate themselves from the church that his Son had established.
Our Protestant attitude towards apostolic tradition sometimes resembles that of the Gnostics. As Irenaeus said about them, quote, "When we refer them to that tradition which originates from the apostles and which is preserved by means of the successions of elders in the churches, they object to the tradition, saying that they themselves are wiser, not merely than the elders, but even than the apostles, because they have discovered the unadulterated truth." End quote.
Remember, if the Holy Spirit guides us to all truth, then he also guided the Christians of the second and third centuries to all truth as well. Our truth should be the same as theirs. If it's not, one of us has not been following the Holy Spirit's guidance. Relying upon a historic course of performance of the early church does not diminish the work of the Holy Spirit one iota. I believe that it was the Holy Spirit's guidance that led me to the witness of the early church in the first place.
I believe the Spirit would lead all Christians back to that witness if only we could put aside our prejudices and preconceptions. And it is only by the anointing of the Spirit that we can walk down the same pilgrim road that the early Christians followed. Next subheading: "Were the early Christian writings accurately preserved?" The early Christian writings are a valuable historic source only if the manuscripts we have of their writings are authentic.
So let me say this: next to Scripture itself, few ancient writings are better attested to than the early Christian writings of the first and second centuries. For example, the oldest Greek manuscript we have of the entire New Testament is the Codex Sinaiticus. It dates back to the 4th century, AD 300 to 399. That codex also contains the Epistle of Barnabas and a portion of the Shepherd of Hermas, both of which are early Christian writings. In fact, some papyri manuscripts date back to around the year 290.
They also contain a sizable portion of the Shepherd of Hermas. Another one of our oldest manuscripts of the New Testament is the Codex Alexandrinus. It dates back to the 5th century AD. In addition to our New Testament, it also contains the Letter to the Corinthians written by Clement of Rome, as well as the texts of an early Christian sermon, generally known as Second Clement.
Although most of our manuscripts of early Christian writings do not date back that far, I know of no scholar, Catholic, Protestant, or Agnostic, who questions the authenticity of these works. It's true that for some of the works, all we have is one manuscript. Yet the teachings of those works harmonize nicely with the teachings of the other works that have better manuscript support. But how do we know that the Roman Catholic Church didn't alter these writings to make them fit Catholic theology? People often ask me.
For one thing, the Roman Catholic Church didn't have control over most of these manuscripts. These manuscripts have been sheltered in a variety of geographical places, from Western Europe to Africa, from the Middle East to Russia. Several of the works have been preserved in a variety of languages: Greek, Latin, Syriac, Armenian, Coptic, Arabic, Ethiopic, Georgian, and Slavonian. No single church or person had control over these documents to be able to falsify them.
Secondly, the Roman Catholic Church had no particular need to falsify these writings, for it does not view most of the pre-Nicene writers as church fathers. The quote "great fathers," unquote, of the Roman Catholic Church include none of the pre-Nicene writers. Instead, there are Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, Gregory called the Great, Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, and John Chrysostom, all of whom lived during or after the 4th century.
So rather than falsifying the early Christian writings, to a large degree, the post-Nicene church simply ignored them. Oh, a few fake writings did circulate, such as a number of spurious letters attributed to Ignatius. Yet these forgeries have all been pretty well exposed, and no scholars today are claiming that any of these forgeries are genuine. Actually, the very content of the writings themselves testifies convincingly that the Roman Catholic Church has not doctored up these works.
That's because these writings don't support many of the key teachings of today's Catholic Church. In fact, they don't completely fit any denomination. The early Christians were neither Catholic nor Protestant in the modern sense of these words. They are in a class by themselves. Their writings breathe a pristine, ancient quality that is not seen in later writings. They contradict some of the major teachings of both the Reformers and the Roman Catholic Church.
Furthermore, in the West, for nearly a thousand years, a substantial portion of these writings were actually forgotten. They didn't come back into general circulation until after the Reformation. By then, the tenets of the Reformation were set in stone, and nobody was willing to change them. So once again, to a large degree, the Western church simply ignored these invaluable writings.