'4' PRINCETON, N. J. SAei/. Division . . Ju. -Q.^friO. . Sec/ton .^ .&..2r.rZA Number I.O.vb.jP.... rrvj r «• 1 ^^.'^ ^M^ '^ *• / f i -«. ^< -* ^ » Jw ■"/■y 'i ' '; + -i:*" .*'. ^.Pl-'^ ' J^l^ < '.'^ t^y •/ »), THE CANON THE HOLY SCRIPTURES FROM THE DOUBLE POINT OF VIEW OF SCIENCE AND OF FAITH. BY L.'^GAUSSEN, D.D. (CfirD €buion. LONDON: JAMES NISBET AND CO., 21 BEHNERS STEEET. M.DCCC.LXTiL EDIN'StTROH : peimtkd bv ballauttne and compant, Paul's work. ADVEETISEMENT. The following translation from the French has been carefully revised by the learned and venerable Author; and most of the quotations from the Fathers of the Church and ecclesiastical writers have again been verified by a comparison with the original works. PREFACE. In publishing this work, I am acttiated by the threefold considera- tion— of the real importance of the subject, of its being accessible to every class of readers, and of the very luminous aspect it pre- sents when closely studied. It is only obscure at a distance ; and if to some persons it seems beset with difficulty and uncertainty, it is only owing to their imperfect knowledge, or bad method of studying it. I was not aware that it was so intelligible till I had examined it with great attention. For tliis reason I thought it my duty, in consequence of the very numerous and severe attacks made on the certainty of the canon, to treat it at large for the use of our theological students ; and since that I have felt it desirable to introduce it to the know- ledge of our churches. With this view I have endeavoured to write a book that will be sufficiently intelligible to every .serious reader ; and it has been my desire, that all xmlettered Christians who may have been dis- turbed by these attacks of modem infidelity, may feel theni-selves, on reading it, confirmed in their faith. It is impossible to treat such a subject usefully, — at least from an historical point of view, — without adducing numerous testi- monies from the fathers, with quotations from their writings, both Greek and Latin. But I have made it a rule always to translate those passages, and never to appeal to any of the ancient doctors. VI PREFACE. either of the West or East, without giving some brief notice of his character, his principal writings, and his place in history. I publish these volumes as a complement of that which I brought out, almost twenty years ago, on the inspiration of the Scriptures. That work would have been incomplete unless ac- companied by a treatise on the canon ; for its readers, even those who were most thoroughly convinced, might always object, after having heard me prove by all Scripture that all Scripture was divinely inspired, that it still remained to Vj,'j proved whether Daniel, or Esther, or Canticles, or any other book of the Old Testament, belonged to this inspired Scripture — whether the Epistle of Jude, or that of James, or the Second Epistle of Peter, or the Second and Third of John, or any other book commonly included in the New Testament, legitimately formed a part of it — or whether there was sufficient certainty that all the apocryphal books ought to be absolutely excluded. As long as these questions are not clearly solved, our privilege of possessing an inspired Bible remains illusory, or is at least compromised ; we have a feeling of insecurity in its use ; we cannot clearly discern all its pages ; a depressing cloud of un- certainty floats over our heads between heaven and earth ; and though carrying in our hands a volume denominated the Scrip- tures, we proceed with tottering steps. But, blessed be God ! my Christian brethren, this is not your position ; the God of the holy prophets has prepared better things for His believing people. Your proofs are abundant, and, as we are about to shew, you have also divine guarantees. If your confidence in those Scrip- tures, which constitute the rule and joy of your faith, rests, on one side, on the most solid human reasons, on the other, it is invited to support itself by the strongest divine reasons. On the one hand, there are facts, documents, monuments, historical testimonies — testimonies clear, numerous, certain, and sufficient — .«aich as no human composition under heaven ever possessed. On the other hand, you have something still more simple and abso- "X PREFACE. Vll lute ; your confidence has for its foundation the firmest principles of iaith — an infallible guarantee, — the constant judgment of saints and prophets, the invariable procedure of God in all His revela- tions during fourteen centuries, and the example of Jesus Christ Himself — in a word, the wisdom of God — the harmony, the con- stancy, and the faithfuhiess of His ways. I propose, then, to demonstrate, by arguments purely historical, in the First Part, to all unbelievers, the authenticity of all the scriptures of the New Testament, as might be done, if the ques- tion concerned only purely a human work. Besides this, I propose, with the Lord's assistance, to establish in the Second Part, and to believers only, the canonicity of all the scriptures of both Testaments, as may be done most satisfactorily for every man who is already convinced that inspired books exist, and that God, having revealed Himself from heaven by the prophets at sundry times, and in divers manners, for 1400 years, has in these last days spoken to us, in the person of His Son, by His apostles and evangelists. These two classes of proof have each their distinct place and function ; and while I think that we are under great obligations to all those defenders of the canon who have treated the subject with a view to unbelievers, for the historic proofs they have col- lected in such abundance, I am stUl deeply convinced that, in confining themselves to this office, they have ignored their pri- vileges, and proceeded in part on a wrong track, losing sight of the example of the Eedeemer, forgetting the lessons taught by past ages, and thus neglecting the most important and interesting part of their vocation. To give a clearer idea of the character and design of this work, I would beg leave to state the reason that induced me to publish it. I had first of all written, in 1851 and 1852, for the use of our evangelical School of Theology, the second part of this work, and it was not till a later period, in 1853 and 1854, that I conceived the design of adding what is now the first. via rKKFACE. When wo founded in Geneva, twenty-nine years ago, a School of Theology, for the purpose of elevating the long-depressed banner of the Savioui''s divinity, and the great doctrines connected with it, in the Church of our fathers, I charged myself with the doc- trinal instruction. But, in performing my task, I felt no need for many years of discussing to any extent either the canonicity or divine inspiration of the Scriptures. We attended to what was most urgent, and those truths had not then been publicly called in question by any person in our immediate vicinity. As to myself, in my early years, and during my studies, though very anxious to settle my faith on a satisfactory basis, I never experienced any wavering on these two points. Since Jesus Christ, my Lord and my God, " created all things in heaven and earth, and by him all things subsist," (Col. i. 16,) I said to myself, how could I doubt that He has taken care of His own revelations, whether in giving them at first, or in their sub- sequent preservation and transmission ? Our only business was to study them for the purpose of regulating each one's faith, and conscience, and life. Besides, we invited to our school none but young men who had already owned the authority of the Scrip- tures, and who were esteemed truly pious, as having experienced in their souls something of " the good word of God and the powers of the world to come." We directed our attention in the first place, as I have said, to what was most urgent ; we were eager to reach those vital truths, on the reception of which the stability of a church depends, and without which it falls. Mere logical arrangement would have led us to give every question its exact place in a course of theology ; but it was evident that the greatest attention should be given to those doctrines which had been long disregarded, and too often assailed, which convince men of sin, lead to the feet of Jesus, and keep them there, — I mean, the divinity of the Son of man and His everlasting priesthood, the fall of humanity and its entire ruin, the election of believers from all eternity, their redemption by TEEFACE. IX the expiation of the cross, their regeneration by the Spirit of God, their complete justification by faith alone, and, lastly, their resur- rection from the dust to a life of glory and immortality. But if these evanoelical doctrines belong to all times alike, and their exposition is always in season, if the Church of God cannot dispense with them even for a day, the case is difierent with refutations and ajjologies. These latter are not necessary, nor even beneficial, excepting at a time when the want of them is felt. Till that moment arrives, they may do our minds more harm than good, like remedies for bodily disorders administered before the malady exists. They suggest doubts that would never have been suspected \ they raise unknown difficulties and objections of foreign origin, which, but for them, would never have entered our thoughts. For a hunting party to beat about a district for wild boars would be of no use unless it was ravaged by them ; it would be injurious if there were none in the country ; and it would be foolish and criminal if, for the sake of the sport, the animals were imported from a foreign land. Who can estimate, for example, all the mischief that has been often done in our churches by the young translators of those German works which have exhibited systems of scepti- cism, negation, and heresy, to which previously we had been total strangers, and which we have often seen propagated here long after they had ceased to be spoken of in the country of their birth. It has been justly remarked of apologetics, that it must be remodelled every thirty years, because its wants change from one generation to another ; the apologetics of to-day is no longer that which our fathers required, nor is it that which will meet the wants of our children. In reference to the canonicity and divine insj)iration of the Scriptures, I have arrived at the conclusion that it is highly important to discuss these subjects henceforward with greater fulness. The number of our opponents, the perfectly novel tactics of their infidelity, and the spirit of their attacks on the X PREFACE. written Word, make this a duty on our part, almost a necessity. In former times this need was not felt amon;^ us, as may be easily inferred from the very small space allotted to these questions by our best theological writers — Calvin, Francis Turretine, Pictet, and Stapfer, in their largest and most accredited treatises. But in the present day a great change has come over us, and we are condemned to see a totally novel warfare, no longer carried on from without against the Scriptures, but from within, and by men who profess to be, like ourselves, representatives of Chris- tianity. This kind of warfare is very pernicious ; our fathers were not acquainted with it, or, at least, it never assailed them, excepting by short skirmishes, or by isolated attacks on one or other of our sacred books. In the present day the enemy is drawn up in battle-array against the whole of the Scriptures. Since the first third of the nineteenth century, we have seen almost all the opponents of the living truth vie with each other in efforts, not only, as heretofore, against this or the other vital doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures, but against the depository of them all. For a time they leave undisturbed the distinctive teachings of the written Word as beneath their notice, in order to attack the volume in which God has given them to us. It is no longer the contents that are put upon their trial ; of these our opponents think they can easily get rid, if they succeed in accomplishing the task of discrediting and demolishing the Scrijitures. Their aim is directed against the depository, the entire volume, of revela- tion. Nothing is neglected which may render it suspected, uncer- tain, contradictory, mean, and tainted with error ; — in a word, contemptible as a whole and in all its parts. They will deny its authority, its inspiration, its integrity ; they will deny the canon- icity of each book ; — in short, they will deny its authenticity, its veracity, its good sense, and even its morality ! But the most novel feature of this warfare, the most ill-omened, the most threatening in its immediate effect on our churches, and one which never appeared but in the second and third centuries. PREFACE. XI is that this crusade against the Scriptures is carried on in the name of a certain kind of Christianity. During thirty-three centuries, was a man of God ever seen decrying the Scriptures of God, a pious Israelite decrying the Old Testament, or a Christian decrying the books of the men (the apostles and prophets) who wrote the New Testament ? No ; this was never seen ! "The righteous man," in all ages, has always distinguished himself from the rest of mankind by his reverence for the Sacred Volume ; and a true Christian, from the moment of his new birth, has always thirsted for it, as an infant for its mother's milk, to sustain and strengthen him. It is an apostolic injunction, " As new-born babes, desire the sincere milk of the Word, that ye may grow thereby," (1 Pet. ii. 2.) " The righteous man," David said twenty-nine centuries ago, " takes his delight in this holy law, and he meditates in it day and night," (Ps. i. 2.) By this sign he is recognised in the present day ; by this sign he has been recognised in all ages of the world. " 0 how I love Thy law ! it is my meditation all the day ;" " it is sweeter than honey to my mouth." " I love Thy commandments above gold ; " " the entrance of Thy word giveth light ; it maketh wise the simple." " God has magnified his word above all his name." 1 But in the present day, by whom is this warfare against the Scriptm'es carried on ? " Behold, heaven and earth, and be as- tonished !" In former ages, and for 1600 years, such attacks proceeded only from the most inveterate enemies of the Christian name. The present times remind us of the disastrous days of those ancient Gnostics who caused such grief to the faithful ministers of the second century. In our day these attacks come from persons whom men of the world might suppose to belong to our own ranks, — persons who call themselves members of a Protestant church, and are in many instances ministers of the Word. They 1 Ts. cxix. 97, 103, 127, 130, cxxxviii. 2. HI PEEFACE. profess to speak in the name of science, and to attack our Scrip- tares only to defend the interests of a Chriit whom they have made, and of dirine truth shaped in accordance with their own o:>nceptions. And yet, what do we know in rei.ii:"u:>n unies.s by means of the Bible, and what do they themselves know i Let one of our oppon- oits point out a truth, — ^yes ! only a single tmth relating to God the Father, or to His only Son, to the eternal Spirit, to the resur- rection of the dead, to the fut^^re world, to the last judgment, to heaven or hell or immortality, — yes I I say a single truth which their philosophy has gained, or whieh has been discovered in their school independently of the cntades of God. But men of this stamp pervert aR the principles of religion, as Calvin remarks, " by quitting the Scriptures to go in chase of their own fancies."^ " God hath made foolish the wiadom of Has world," sap St Fiol; " for after thal^ in the visdom of Crod, tiie wodd by wisdom knew not God, it pleased €rod by the foolishness of pteaching to save them that believe,' (1 Cor. L 1<^21.) It is this book of '^ the preaching " which akne has changed the face of the woiid. It alone causes a soul to pass from death into life. It akme;, in these latter days, has brotight more than one Inbe ci cannibals out of darkness into light Let them shew us any other volume — from the times of Confucitis, Plato, or Aristolkv to those of Mohammed, (apart from his sword,) Voltaire, Bayle, Bonssean, Hegd, or Co>iian — which has ever, in any conn- try, reclaimed, by its science, its moialsi, or its philosophy, a vil- lage cmly a angie Tillage, from idolatij to the service of God. Is it nol written, ''Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the dispater of this woild ? (Ucv 0-0^0? ; 701; jpof*^ futTiVf ;) " Where are they, and what have they done 2 This is the interriDgation of the apostle.^ The warfare carried on in our days against the Scriptures is as strange as it is pemicioiis, and the friends of God ought to be 1 Instrtntfon Chretiiiime, torn. L, p. 3-L Firia, 1S59. * 1 Cor. LIS, 20. PREFACE. adii roused to exert themselves to the utmost to counteract its per- nicious effects. Pernicious ! Alas ! it has already been too much so for those who have engaged in it. None can be arrested on this dangerous path, unless by the extraordinary grace of Grod; for the Holy Word, when thus despised, cannot transmit a ray of light to their souls ; on the contrary, the contempt they entertain for it gives birth to fresh contempt, and the night preferred to the light be- comes more intensely dark '• 0 Timothy," says St Paul, '• keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called : which some professing, have erred con- cerning the faith," (1 Tim. vi 20, 21.) " These profane and vain babblings, ' says he again, " will increase unto more ungodliness,'' (2 Tim. ii 16.) Here is the danger, the awful danger of this warfare for those who engage in it ! " Their word will eat, as doth a canker." " They icax worse and ivorse," Paul adds, " {yrpo- Koy^ovaiv iirl to ')^eipov,y' "misleading and misled j" — misleading souls out of the path of immortality, after having been first misled themselves ; for such is the twofold woe that attends the fatal declivity of their course, '' misleading and misled, ("TrXavtovre; xal irXavfOfxevot !)" But if it is a just cause for sorrow to see misled men avow themselves unhesitatingly the detractors of that Bible on which alone the whole Church is founded, and by which alone Chris- tianity subsists, there is in this warfare something still more dis- tressing— namely, the mischief it effects among our people in general, and which may be effected in our churches, even among our most pious communities. As to our people in general, numberless facts speak too loudly. We are reminded by them of Paul's words respecting the Israelites in the wilderness, who " could not enter into God's rest because of their unbelief." And whence this unbelief ^ Because, as he says, " the word preached to them did not profit." And why did it not profit ? Because " it was not mixed untk faith in them XIV PREFACE. that heard it." But liow, I ask — how can the word preached to our Protestant populations be mixed with faith in minds to whom it will appear suspicious and contemptible, in consequence of the disparaging terms applied to the oracles of God, and the flat contradictions given to their contents ? What ! (it will be said to them,) do you believe that this collection of scriptures which is offered you is indeed from God? Do you not know that the books of which it consists are of an uncertain number ? — that some are apocryphal, some are doubtful, some are absolute forgeries ? And again, of those which may be authentic, do you imagine that every part is inspired ? Contradictions are palpable in them, errors abound, and the prejudices of the age may be detected page after page ! . . . . How, I ask, can the word be " mixed with faith " among the persons who are, unhappily, exposed to these suggestions of the tempter, and filled by him with prejudices and feelings of contempt against the ScrijDtures ? No ! these " profane and vain babblings," as the apostle says, " overthrow the faith " of many ; or, rather, they prevent its birth ; they render it impos- sible ! Will it be said that the Scripture cannot be destitute of power ? Is it not powerful, by its divine energy, " to cast down in the human heart every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God?" Is it not " a hammer breaking the rock in pieces?" Is it not " a two-edged sword, piercing to the dividing asunder the joints and marrow?" Yes; it is all this; but only for those who hear it, and who expect to gain something from it. And how can it be all this for those who despise it, and do not believe that it comes from God ? Without reverence, there can be no attention ; and without attention, no means of being touched ; and without all this, there can be no faith, no com- munion possible with God, no efficacy in the blood of the cross, no salvation, no life. And yet, as I have said, this is not all. The mischief will not be confined to those men of the world whom we have desired to PEEFACE. XV conduct to Jesus Christ, but whose prejudices keep them at a distance from Him. It will be felt in our churches, and among the most pious of our members. It may be thought, perhaps, that these attacks will entail little danger on believers, who, nourished by the Scriptures, know by experience what they are, and what they can do. But we must not hope that it will be always so. Even for such persons, this warfare is not without its perils. Oftentimes it will lower the standard of piety and faith, by lowering in their minds the majesty of the Scriptures ; for it can never be without some de- teriorating effect for even those who are most confirmed in the faith to hear repeated depreciating suggestions against one and another of our sacred books, if these suggestions are not combated as often as they are brought forward. However ill-founded they may be, if repeated without being put down, they exert an ener- vating influence on the mind, even when, without accepting them, and yet, without having learnt how to refute them, the unfortunate habit has been acquired of letting them pass without decided opposition. Hence persons are led to believe that, while reject- ing them themselves, other Christians may admit them without damaging their Christianity. These charges and obscurities re- specting the canon of the Scriptures often circulated in the neigh- bourhood of our churches without being noticed by our sentinels, at last settle over them in the atmosphere like a pestilential miasma, which even the healthiest frames cannot pass through and inhale without some injury. Perhaps, at last, tired of resist- ance, and with defective information, they will come to regard these injurious reports as the distant and mysterious echoes of an unknown and superior science, which it would be rash to think of combating, or of attempting to refute. And hence what baneful consequences ! The weakening of faith ; diminished taste for the study of the Scriptures ; less thirst for their use ; less humble submission to regulate the life by them ; less labour to fathom them, and to explore their depths ; less jealousy for purity of doctrine ; for, as Calvin has said, " We Xvi PREFACE. cannot have firm faith in a doctrine till wo aro porsuadod, without any mixture of doubt, that God is its author." It was in the beginning of the year 1850 that a sudden opposi- tion against the authority and authenticity of the Scriptures first broke out at Geneva, in our own theological school, among half a score of Belgian, French, and Canadian students. The cause of it was for us as painful as it was unexpected, and the subsequent disturbance occasioned by it in the churches was also very serious. But the school had passed through such storms more than once ; it had combated them by the divine "Word ; and experience not less than faith had taught us to confide during the tempest in the faithfulness of the Most High, who made it serve in the final issue for the confirmation of the truth. When the calm was restored, we were able to acknowledge with gratitude that the Lord had permitted these days of trouble only to purify an institution consecrated to His service, to lead us to study more closely the foundations of our faith, and to confirm on some essential points the students and the professors, the pastor.*! and their flocks. The declarations of these young men were of such a nature that we should have felt it our duty on any other occasion to have dismissed them immediately from our institution. We had ad- mitted them only to prepare them for preaching the Word of life, and if henceforth they rejected that Word — its inspiration, its authenticity, its authority — what was there in common between them and ourselves ? But we took a different view. We believed that we owed them some reparation, because the evil done to themselves had taken jdace when under our care, and we conceived that, under these circumstances, we ought not to send any of them away till we had taken pains by fresh efforts to bring them back, if possible, to own the authority of the Scriptures. We took our part in this important task, and from this mo- ment, I mean, from the beginning of the year 1850, I made it my study to point out to them the true path of faith in relation to the canon, in a sories of propositions. PREFACE. XVU These propositions established the doctrine of the canon by God's mei-hod of proceeding during all the ages of the Old Testa- ment, by the example of Jesus Christ, and by the Divine declara- tions ; then they confirmed the meaning of these declarations by a twofold collection of numerous, indisputable facts, extending through many ages. This performance was, moreover, accom- panied by a history of the canon, and more particularly of the controverted books. The second part of this work contains the series of these first propositions, expanded in some parts, and in others compressed. After finishing my first course, and on the point of resuming the series of my propositions for the use of a fresh class of young theologians, particularly those that demonstrate the dogma of the canon a posteriori, I was struck with the evidence of the facts which constitute this proof — historical facts, exceptional, astonish- ing, and inexplicable, apart from a Divine intervention, — facts, moreover, very rarely appealed to or known. I believed their publication would be useful. I have since learned, from the language of our opponents, that, before presenting to the world our arguments of faith, it would be indispensable, in order to render the reader attentive and docile, to make a succinct statement of the facts and testimonies relating to the history of the canon, to place before him the objections of opponents, in order to consider them more closely, and to place him in a position for consulting by himself the most important remains of patristic literature. I also conceived that it would be desirable to make it evident that, judging of the canon only by the ordinary rules which in the republic of letters decide the authenticity of a book, the unanimity of the Churches through- out the world has given to our Sacred Volume, as far as regards its twenty-two homologoumena, a certainty unparalleled in the field of ancient literature. To gain the reader's attention to our reasons of faith, I have thought it necessary that, in hearing them, it should never enter his thoughts that we proposed them, because we dared not to look 6 Xviii PREFACE. in the face the facts of history and the objections of science. On the contrary, we liave gatliered from these facts new reasons for belief, — reasons clear, manifold, and invincible. This work would probably have appeared much sooner, had not the hand of God laid me on a bed of suffering for two years in succession by two very serious accidents, which rendered me for a long time almost incapable of continuous application. I commend to the blessing of God, through Jesus Christ, a task out of the usual course of my studies, but undertaken for the sole object of serving Him. May 5, 1862, Sirj; CONTENTS. 7AQB INTEODUCTOEY, (Propp. 1-5,) ..:..! PAET FIRST. CMONICITY OF ALL THE BOOKS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. BOOK L CHAPTER L FAGB Definitions of the Canon, (Propp. 6-7,) .... 5 CHAPTER II.' The Idea of a New Testament Canon as early as the Days of the Apostles, (Propp. 8-10,) . . 6 CHAPTER IIL The Church, from the Commencement, regarded the Collection of Scriptures as a harmonic whole, (Propp. 11-13,) , , 11 CHAPTER IV. First Formation of the Canon, (Propp. 14-23,) ... 13 Xr CONTENTS. CHAPTER V. PAGE Oral Preaching was of necessity by some years anterior to Written Preaching, or the Gift of New Scriptures, (Prop. 24,) . . 17 CHAPTER VI. Historical Division of the Canon into Three distinct Parts, (Propp. 25-29,) 18 CHAPTER VII. This Threefold Division of the Canon is, moreover, warranted by the most authentic Documents of the Church, (Prop. 30,) . 20 Section First. — Three Ante-Nicene Catalogues, (Prop. 31,) 20 Section Second. — Peshito Catalogue, (Propp. 32-36,) . 21 Section Third. — Origen's Catalogue, (Propp. 37-42,) . 25 Section Fourth. — The Catalogue of Eusebius, (Propp. 43-50,) ....... 31 CHAPTER VIII. Of the Council of Nice and its Results, (Prop. 51,) ... 42 Section First. — The Council made no Decree on the Canon, (Propp. 52, 53,) .... 43 Section Second. — From the Date of the Council all dis- agreement regarding the Controverted Books ceased in all the Churches in Christendom, (Prop. 54,) . 45 CHAPTER IX. The Eleven Authentic Catalogues of the Fourth Century, (Prop. 55,) 47 Section First. — Unanimity of all the Catalogues as to the First Canon, the Second Canon, and the Epistle to the Hebrews, (Prop. 56,) .... 47 Section Second. — Catalogues of the Fathers and Cata- logues of the Councils, (Prop. 57,) ... 47 CHAPTER X. The Nine Catalogues of the Fourth Century given by the Fathers, 48 Section First. — Only Three of them omit the Apoca- lypse, (Proi)p. 58-G3,) ..... 48 CONTENTS. XXI PAGR Section Second. — All the other Six Catalogues of the Fathers of the Fourth Century are entirely in accord- ance with the Canon of the Churches, (Propp. 64-77,) 64 CHAPTER XL Some other Catalogues, alleged to be of the Fourth Century, and agreeing with our Canon, are Apocryphal or spurious, (Prop. 78,) 67 Section First. — Catalogue of Innocent I., (Propp. 79, 80,) 67 Section Second. — Catalogue of Damasus, (Prop. 81,) . 69 Section Third. — Catalogue of Amphilochius, (Prop. 82,) 70 CHAPTER XII. The Two Catalogues drawn up by Councils of the Fourth Century, 71 Section First. — Nature of their Testimony, (Propp. 83-86,) 71 Section Second. — Council of Laodicea, (Propp. 87-90,) . 73 Section Third. — The Council of Carthage, (Proj)p. 91-93,) 79 CHAPTER XIII, Summary of all the Testimonies of the Fourth Century, (Prop. 94,) 82 CHAPTER XIV. Vulgar Prejudices which a glance at these Facts ought to have removed, (Propp. 95-102,) ..... 83 CHAPTER XV. Inference from aU the Testimonies of the First Four Centuries, (Propp. 103-106,) ...... 90 BOOK II. Of the First Canon — Historical Basis of its Authenticity, (Propp. 107,108,) 93 CHAPTER I. First Great Historical Fact — The complete and unvarying Unani- mity of the Churches, (Propp. 109-112,) ... 95 xzu CONTENTS. CHAPTER II. The Authenticity of the Twenty-two Homologoumena of the New Testauieut is established by incomparably stronger evidence than what exists in favour of the Authenticity of any other Book of Antiquity whatever, (Propp. 113-125,) 99 CHAPTER III. Three causes, especially, produced this Providential Unanimity, Section First. — The long career of the Apostles, (Propp, 126-134,) Section Second. — The immense number of Churches at the death of the Apostles, (Propp. 135-144,) Section Third. — ^Anagnosis, (Propp. 145-1G3,) 107 107 115 123 CHAPTER IV. The various Monuments of the Canon, . . . .130 Section First. — ^Four Classes of Monuments, (Prop. 164,) 136 Section Second. — ^The field of research, (Propp. 165-168,) 137 Section Third. — The actors and witnesses of the Two First Centuries of the Church presented in a Tabular Form, (Prop. 169,) 140 CHAPTER V. The Testimony of the Fathers of the Second Half of the Second Century, ...... Section First. — The united Testimonies of IrenoDus, Clement, and Tertiillian, (Propp. 170-172,) . Section Second. — Seven characteristics of their Testi mony, (Prop. 173,) .... Section Third. — TertuUian, (Propp. 174-176,) Section Fourth. — Clement of Alexandria, (Propp. 177- 179,) Section Fifth. — Irenseus, (Propp. 180-185,) Section Sixth. — Other contemporary Fathers, (Propp, 186,187,) ..... Section Seventh.— The result of all their Testimonies, (Propp. 188-192,) .... 148 148 151 154 157 163 176 179 CHAPTER VL The Fragment called Muratori's, (Propp. 193-198,) . 186 CONTENTS. xxili CHAPTER VII. PAOB The Testimony of the First Half of the Second Century, (Prop. 199,) 191 Section Fihst. — Justin Martyr, (Propp. 200-206,) . 191 Sectiost Second. — Objections against the Testimony of Justin Martyr, (Propp. 207, 208,) . . .205 Section Third. — Other Historical Monuments of the Canon in the First Half of the Second Century, (Propp. 209, 210,) . . . . 208 CHAPTER VIII. The Testimony of Pagan Unbelievers in the Second Century, . 211 Section First. — Their Writings, (Prop. 21],) . . 211 Section Second. — Testimony of Celsus, (Propp. 212-215,) 212 Section Third. — Force of this Testimony, (Prop. 216,) . 216 CHAPTER IX. The Testimony of Heretics in the First Half of the Second Century, 219 Section First. — The character of this Testimony, (Propp. 217-220,) ...... 219 Section Second.— Marcion, (Pro^jp. 221-225,) . . 223 Section Third.— Tatian, (Prop. 226,) . . .230 Section Fourth. — Valentine and the Valentiniaus, (Propp. 227-229,) 232 Section Fifth. — Heracleon and Ptolemy, (Propp. 230, 231,) . . ' . . . . .235 Section Sixth. — Basilides and his son Isidore, (Propp. 232-235,) . . . . .237 CHAPTER X. The Apostolic Fathers, . . , . . 240 Section First. — Their Small Number and their Value, (Propp. 236-239,) ..... 240 Section Second. — The Ej)istle to Diognetus, (Propp. 240, 241,) 245 Section Third. — The Circular Epistle of the Church of Smyrna, (Prop. 242,) . . . ... 248 Section Fourth. — The Epistle of Polycarp, (Propp. 243- 247,) . . . . . . .249 2CXiv C50NTENT8. PAGE Section Fifth. — Ignatius, his Martyrdom and Letters, (Propp. 248-253,) ..... 254 Section Sixth. — The Epistle of Clement of Rome to the Coriuthians, (Propp. 254-2G2,) . . ,257 Section Seventh. — lufcrenco from the Testimony of the Apostolic Fathers, (Prop. 2G3,) . . .277 CHAPTER XI. The later Writings of the New Testament attest the existence of a Canon already begun, (Propp. 264-267,) • . . 279 BOOK III The Second-First Canon, (Prop. 268,) . . . .283 CHAPTER L The Apocalypse, ....... 284 Section First.— Its First Reception, (Propp. 269-272,) . 284 Section Second. — The Date of the Apocalypse, (Propp. 273,274,) ...... 287 Section Third. — The Apocalypse in the First Century, (Prop. 275,) ...... 290 Section Fourth. — Testimonies in the First Half of the Second Century, (Propp. 276-279,) . . .291 Section Fifth. — Testimonies in the Second Half of the same Century, (Prop. 280,) . . . .295 Section Sixth. — The First Half of the Third Century, (Propp. 281-283,) ..... 298 Section Seventh. — The Second Half of the Third Cen- tury, (Propp. 284, 285,) . . . .303 Section Eighth. — Witnesses in the Fourth Century, (Propp. 286-289,) ..... 304 Section Ninth.— Fifth Century, (Prop. 290,) . . 308 CHAPTER IL The Epistle to the Hebrews, ..... 309 Section First. — Its character and history, (Propp. 291- 295,) 309 CONTENTS. XXV PAGE Section Second. — The Testimonies of the East in the Fourth Century, (Propp. 296-299,) . . .311 Section Third. — Witnesses of the East in the Third Century, (Prop. 300,) ..... 313 Section Fourth. — Witnesses of the East in the Second Century, (Propp. 301-303,) . . . .315 Section Fifth. — Witnesses of the East in the First Cen- tury, (Propp. 304, 305,) . . . .317 Section Sixth. — Testimonies of the West, (Propp. 306- 311,) 318 Section Seventh, — Recapitulation of these Testimonies, (Prop. 312,) . . . . . . 321 Section Eighth. — The Pauline authorship of this Epistle, (Propp. 313-315,) ..... 323 Section Ninth.— Objections, (Propp. 316-320,) . . 329 BOOK ly. The Second Canon ; or, The Five Antilegomena, . . . 335 CHAPTER L General Facts, (Propp. 321-324,) ..... 335 CHAPTER IL The Epistle of James, ...... 338 Section First. — Its Importance, (Propp, 325, 326,) . 338 Section Second. — Its Immediate Reception by that Por- tion of the Church to which it was first addressed, (Propp. 327, 328,) 340 Section Third.— Its Date, (Prop. 329.) . . .341 Section Fourth. — Causes of the Hesitation of some Churches, (Prop. 330,) . . . .342 Section Fifth. — Witnesses, (Propp. 331-335,) . . 343 Section Sixth. — Its Excellence, (Prop. 336,) . . 346 Section Seventh. — Which James is its Author ? (Propp. 337-340,) ..... 346 XXVi CONTENTS. CHAPTER IlL PAOB The Second Epistle of Peter, . .... 363 Section First. —The study which it claims, (Prop, 341,) 353 Section Second. — The Epistle aflSrms that it was written by Peter, (Prop. 342,) ..... 354 Section Third. — The majestic character of thi.s Epistle strongly confirms this testimony, (Propp. 343, 344,) . 355 Section Foorth. — The obstacles to its acceptance, (Proj). 345,) . . . . . . .358 Section Fifth.— Its Style, (Prop. 346,) . . .358 Section Sixth.— Its History, (Prop. 347,) . . .359 Section Seventh. — The detiuitive assent of all the Chris- tian Churches was late, (Prop. 348,) . . .361 Section Eighth. — The successive assent has been slow, (Propp. 349-353,) ..... 3G2 Section Ninth. — The assent on the appearance of the Book was immediate among a part of th& Churches, (Propp. 354-359,) 368 CHAPTER IV. The Two Shorter Epistles of John, (Prop. 360-363), . . 372 CHAPTER V, The Epistle of Jude, . . . • . . .375 Section First.— (Prop. 364,) . . . .375 Section Second. — The Author of the Epistle, (Propp. 365-367,) ...... 375 Section Third.— Its Date, (Propp. 3G8, 369,) . . 376 Section Fourth. — Objections against this Epistle, (Propp. 370-372,) ...... 379 Section Fifth. — Alleged citations of Apocryphal Books, (Propp. 373-380,) ..... 380 Section Sixth. — Testimonies of the Second Century, (Propp. 381-384,) 390 Section Seventh. — Testimonies of the Third Century, (Prop. 385,) 392 Section- Eighth. — Testimonies of the Foui-th Century, (Prop. 3b6,) ...... 393 CHAPTER VI. General considerations on the Antilegomena, (Propp. 387-400,) • 395 CONTENTS. XXVll PAET SECOND. THE METHOD OF FAITH. CHAPTER II. Objections to the Method of Science, (Prop. 410,) . Section First. — Its Novelty, (Prop. 411,) . Section Second. — Its Inaccessibility, (Prop. 412,) Section Third. — Its Want of Spirituality, (Prop. 413,) Section Fourth. — Its Dangers, (Propp. 414, 415,) PAOK Introductory, (Propp. 401-403,) . . . . .411 BOOK L The Two Methods open for the Knowledge of the Canon, (Pi'op. 404,) 413 CHAPTER I. Comparison of the Two Methods, (Propp. 405-409,) . . 414 418 418 419 419 419 CHAPTER IIL The advantages of the Method of Faith, (Propp. 416, 417,) . . 424 CHAPTER IV. The true use of Science in relation to the Canon, (Propp. 418, 419,) . 426 XXVIU CONTENTS. BOOK IL PAGE The Doctrine relating to the Canon, (Propp. 420, 421,) . . 429 CHAPTER I. First Class of Proofs taken from the Wisdom and Faithfulness of God, (Prop. 422,) 431 Section First. — Books of the Old Testament which are said to have been Lost, (Propp. 423-426,) . . 433 Section Second. — Books of the New Testament which are said to have been Lost, (Propp. 427-432,) . 435 CHAPTER II. Second Class of Proofs founded on the Canon of the Old Testa- ment, (Prop. 433,) ...... 440 Section Fir-st. — The astonishing and immovable Unan- imity of the Jews on the subject of the Canon, (Propp. 434, 435,) 440 Section Second. — The Testimony of the Apostles to the Canon, (Prop. 436,) 443 Section Third. — The Testimony of Jesus Christ, (Prop. 437,) 444 Section Fourth. — First Inference relative to the Old Testament, (Propp. 438-441,) . . . .446 Section Fifth. — The Second Inference, relating to the New Testament, (Propp. 442-449,) . . .450 CHAPTER III. Third Class of Proofs taken from the Declarations of Scripture, (Propp. 450-453,) 457 CHAPTER IV. Fourth Class of Proofs— An assemblage of Facts relative to the Old Testament, attesting a Divine Intervention in its Preser- vation by the Jewish nation, . . . • • 461 Section First. — The constant and wonderful FideUty of the Jews in reference to the Canon, from Moses to Jesus Chri.st, .... .461 CONTENTS. XSIX The First Fact, (Prop. 454,) The Second Fact, (Prop. 455,) The Third Fact, (Prop, 456,) The Fourth Fact, (Prop. 457,) Section Second.— The Fidelity, not less astonishing, of the Jews to their Canon since Jesus Christ to the Present Time, ..... The Fifth Fact, (Prop. 458,) The Sixth Fact, (Prop. 459,) Section Third.— The Text compared with the Versions The Seventh Fact, (Propp. 460-463,) Section Fodrth.— The serious Divisions of the Jews, The Eighth Fact, (Prop. 464,) Section Fifth.— The Example of Jesus and His Apostles in relation to the Apocrypha^ . The Ninth Fact, (Propp. 465, 466,) Section Sixth.— Divine Injunctions, The T6nth Fact, (Prop. 467,) Section Seventh.— The Divine Dispensations, '. The Eleventh Fact, (Propp. 468, 469,) Section Eighth.— The Calamities of the Jews, . The Twelfth Fact, (Prop. 470,) . Section Ninth.— The Miracle of their Race, The Thirteenth Fact, (Prop. 471,) . Section Tenth.— Human Books intruded into the Jew ish Canon by one of the Christian sects, The Fourteenth Fact, (Propp. 472-474,) Section Eleventh.— The Testimony of the Eastern Church, .... The Fifteenth and Sixteenth Facts, (Propp 475- 479,) ... Section Twelfth.— The Resistance of the Eastern Church is rendered more striking by the universality of the use of the Septuagint, ..... The Seventeenth Fact, (Prop. 480,) Section Thirteenth.— Inference to be drawn from these Seventeen Facts, (Propp. 481-483,) . PAGE 461 462 462 462 463 463 463 464 464 467 467 467 467 468 468 469 469 470 470 472 472 473 473 475 475 478 478 479 CHAPTER V. On the Apocrypha, 482 CHAPTER VI. Fifth Class of Proofs— A new assemblage of Facts relating to the New Testament, (Prop. 520,) 483 XXX CONTENTS. PAOE. Section First. — Tho Unanimity of all the Cliurches, . 483 Tke First Fact, (Propp. 521-520,) . . 483 Section Second. — The exceptional Liberty which always presided over the Destinies of the Canon, . 487 Tke Second Fact, (Propp. 527-530,) . . 487 Section Third. — The Progress of Minds in a way reverse of their natural direction, .... 491 Tke Third Fact, {?voji.6Z\,) . . .491 Section Fourth. — During the two centuries and a half in which the Ancient Church still hesitated re.'^pecV ing the Antilegomeua, she never received a Spmious Book into the Canon, ..... 492 Tke Fourtk Fact, (Prop. 532,) . . . ^^92 Section Fifth. — The astonishing Independence of the Church in reference to its Literary Opponents on the subject of the Canon, ..... 493 r/ie i^i/ii/i /'ac;, (Propp. 533-546,) . . 493 CHAPTER VII. The attempts of the Church of Rome against the Scriptures, com- pared with her reserve towards the Canon of the New Testa- ment, strongly attest the Divine Agency by a novel class of facts, ........ 508 Tke Sixth Fact, (Propp. 547-549,) . . 508 Section First. — Her Dogmas and Rites opposed to the Scriptures, (Prop. 550,) .... 510 Section Second. — The Infallibility of Rome opposed to that of the Scriptures, (Proji. 551,) . . . 512 Section Third. — The aversion of Rome to the Written Word, (Prop. 552,) . . • . . 513 Section Fourth. — The anxiety of Rome to keep the Bible at a distance from the People, and the People from it, (Propp. 553-558,) . . . .514 Section Fifth. — The long and cruel Severities of the Church of Rome inflicted on those who wish to read the Scriptures in the A'ulgar tongue, (Projip. 559-562,) 518 Section Sixth. — The Decrees of the Church of Rome re- duce the Scriptm-es to a level with Tradition, (Propp. 563, 564,) ...... 520 Section Seventh. — The Decrees of the Church of Rome place the Scriptures below the Roman Pontiff, (Prop. 565,) ....... 521 Section Eighth. — The Power of all these Facts united to confirm the Doctrine of the Canon, (Propp. 566- 568,) 522 CONTENTS. XXXI CHAPTER VIII. The Seventh Class of Facts— i\\Q Pious Frauds in support of the Doctrines and Pretensions of the Roman Pontiffs, (Propp. 5C9- 571,) FACE 526 Section First.— The False Decretals, (Propp. 572-576,) . 527 Section Second. — The Donation of Constantine, (Propp. 577, 578,) . . . ■ . . .531 Section Third. — False Books of the Fathers fabricated or quoted, (Propp. 579-581,) . . . .533 Section Fourth. — The Breviary, (Propp. 582-584,) . 536 Section Fifth. — The Genuine Works of the Fathers falsified, (Propp. 585-592,) . . . .538 Section Sixth. — The Index Expurgatorius, (Propp. 593- 597,) 542 Section Seventh. — Conclusion of this Chapter, (Propp. 598,599;) 546 CHAPTER IX The Decisive Adoption of the Second Canon contrary to the Natu- ral Inclination of Men's Minds, .... 548 Mghth Fact, (Propp. 600-610,) . . .548 CHAPTER X. The Wonderful Preservation of the Original Text, . , . 655 iV^iWA i^ac^, (Propp. 611-615,) . . .555 CHAPTER XI. The Striking Contrast between the Errors of Rome regarding the Old Testament, and its Fidelity regarding the New, . . 560 ' J'eKi/i i^acif, (Propp. 616-621,) . . .560 CHAPTER XXL The Destinies of the Epistle to the Hebrews, . . . 5m Eleventh Fact, (Propp. C22-625,) , . 566 Section First. — The variations of Rome three times in three hundred years, (Propp. 622, 623,) . . 566 XXXii CONTENTS. PAOB Section Second. — The firmness of Rome since the fix- ation of the Canon, (Propp. G24, C25.) . . 567 Section Third. — Two considerations which render this Proof more striking, (Propp. 62G-G30,) . . 669 CHAPTER XIII. The great Manifestations of that Providence which preserves the Oracles of God, rendering it visible on three occasions in the stormy times of Diocletian, of Charles V., and of Napoleon I., (Prop. 631,) .573 Section First. — ^The Wonderful Preservation of the Scrip- tures after the Persecutions of the Fourth Century, 573 Twelfth Fact, (Propp. 632-637,) . . .573 Section Second. — The Restoration of the Bible by means of the Reformation at the beginning of the Sixteenth Century, (Propp. 638-657,) . . . .680 Section Third. — The Bible Society, at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, circulating the Scriptures throughout the World, (Propp. 658-676,) . . 608 CHAPTER XIV. Final Inferences, (Propp. 677-682,) ..... 622 APPENDIX ON THE APOCRYPHA, Section First. — History of the Apocrypha to the time of the Council of Trent, (Propp. 484-488,) . . . .629 Section Second. — Unanimity of the Testimony of the Church against the Decree of the Council of Trent, (Propp. 489-492,) 635 Section Third. — The Allegations of the Defenders of the Decree, (Propp. 493-519,) 646 CANONICITY THE BOOKS OF THE BIBLE. The object of this work is to demonstrate, from the Word of God and from history, the exclusive right of the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament, and of the twenty-seven books of the New, to a place in the list of inspired writings. This right is called their canonicity. We shall first establish it from history, as regards the New Testament ; and then establish it by doctrinal evidence, as regards the whole Bible. 1. The Christian Church, as Paul declares, is "built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets," who preached the gospel to it, — Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner-stone, on which the whole buUding, fitly framed together, groweth unto a holy temple in the Lord ; and on which all true believers also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit. 2. It is, therefore, on the foundation of Jesus Christ, and of those whom He appointed " apostles and prophets," that the Church finds from age to age, as from day to day, in the constant use of the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, her life, her growth, her power, and her beauty. 3. In a previous work we have, we trust, adequately proved the A 2 CANONICITY OF THE LOOKS OF TIIK IMHLE. divine inspiration of the Holy Scriptures. It is to their integrity, their authenticity, their divbio origin, that our attention is now directed. 4. Since, liowever, as the reader will soon perceive, the evidence which establishes the canon of the New Testament establishes, at the same time, that of the Old, we shall, in Part First, confine our inquiry to the former, and reserve for Part Second our examination of the latter, in reviewing the providential events with which it is connected, &c. 5. The Church has two modes of verifying the canon, — that of science, which appeals to history or sacred criticism, and that of faith, which appeals to a doctrine or principle (" d une clogme.") This treatise we shall divide into two parts. The first, dedicated to the scientific method, will chiefly aim at establishing the authen- ticity of the New Testament. The second, extending to Moses and the Prophets as much as to the New Testament, and following the line of faith, will seek to illustrate what we call the Doctrine of the Canon. PAET FIEST. CANONICITY OF ALL THE BOOKS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. r^^r^^ CHAPTER I. DEFINITIONS OF THE CANON. 6. The use of the term canon,'^ in the acceptation it still retains, may be traced to a very high antiquity. In Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, the words n]3i^, Kdvvrj, Kdvva, Kdvcov, canna, all de- rived from the same source, literally mean a reed, a straight rod, a cane, a measure, a ride ; and Kdvcov, in a figurative sense, more particularly denotes a very accurate and perfect ride. It was in the strict and literal sense that the words rod and canon were applied in the Middle Ages to tubes used in throwing projectiles by means of gunpowder ; and it was figuratively that Paul said to the Galatians, " As many as walk by this rule (this canon), peace be on them ; " 2 and to the Philippians, " Whereto we have attained, let us walk by the same rule." ^ 7. So early as in the times of Paul, the grammarians of Alexandria used the same term to denote the whole assemblage of such ap- proved works as were deemed standards of excellence in literature ; and ecclesiastical writers soon adopted it to express sometimes the whole compass of Christian doctrine — our rule of life ; some- times the Sacred Volume — our only rule of faith ; and sometimes the list of Scriptures, of which that rule consists. The last acceptation finally predominated, and in this sense, accordingly, it will be employed in the present work. • ^ It was in Italy and in Italian {cannone or grande canna) that the term was used to denote an instrument of war. 2 Gal. vL 16. « Phil, iil 16. CHAPTER II. THE IDEA OF A NEW TESTAMENT CANON AS EARLY AS THE DAYS OF THE APOSTLES. The idea of a New Testament canon must have existed at a very early period of the Christian Church. This may be inferred from the nature of the case, independently of direct evidence on the subject. This idea must have had its origin from the moment Tvhcn the "apostles and jDrophets," who had "preached the gospel with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven," began to transmit to their converts apostolic epistles or narratives of the Saviour's life and discourses. In fact, their knowledge of the Old Testament had fully pre- pared Christian congregations for the reception of such docu- ments. That sacred volume, whose canon had been formed for centuries, and about whose divine authority the Jews, as Jose- phus informs us, were entirely agreed, had at all periods been revered by the people of God. It was revered by the apostles, who called it as a whole "the oracles of GocV It was revered by the Son of God himself, who called it " the Law, your Laiu, the Scripture, the Scriptures." It was revered by the Christian con- verts, who read it solemnly in their assemblies. Thus naturally arose in the minds of Christians the notion of a collection of New Testament writings corresponding to the collection of the books forming the Old Testament. • 8. The notion of a canon of Scripture had been, for fifteen hundred years, the great characteristic of the Hebrew nation, and was regarded by them as inseparable from their existence as God's chosen people. This notion, which the Israelitish church received in the wilderness, and ever afterwards preserved, was not that of a THE ORIGIN OF THE IDEA. 7 completed system of legislation, promulgated once for all, and never to receive any additions. On the contrary, it was that of a collection of documents, commencing with the five books of Moses, and gradually enlarging from age to age by fresh communications from heaven, during eleven hundred years, as God, from time to time, raised up successive prophets, and closing only with Malachi, when the spirit of projjhecy became silent for four centuries. It was, therefore, quite natural that, at the advent of the Messiah, the Church should look for fresh communications ; as the spirit of prophecy had just been restored to it, men of God, "apostles and prophets," bad been raised up, even more marvellous than the prophets of old. We will even maintain that it was impossible such an expectation should not exist. The period of Christ's advent was far more important and more solemn than that of its announcement. Its revelations were more striking, its objects more divine, its promises more rich, its prophets more powerful, its signs and wonders more marvellous. 9. Besides, it must not be forgotten that the Church had its origin in the Synagogue, and that, during the first fifteen years of its existence, all its members were Israelites. All its preachers, as well as all its early converts, were Jews. At the period of Paul's last visit to the Christians of Jerusalem, the members of the Church there, the mother of all the other Churches of Christ, already amounted to myriads, (Acts xxi. 20, Troaai fxvpidSe'i.) In all the cities of the Gentiles the apostles began their labours with the children of Israel. In addressing them, they constantly held in their hands the canon of Scripture; incessantly urging them, as Christ had done, to search the Scriptures, as testifying of Christ, (John V. 39.) On all occasions they "expounded to them and testified the kingdom of God, persuading them concerning Jesu,g, both out of the law of Moses, and out of the projihets, from morn- ing till evening," (Acts xxviii. 23 ;) " Saying none other things than those which the prophets and Moses did say should come," (Acts xxvi. 22.) Though, when addressing heathen audiences, they did not directly quote the sacred writings, they earnestly directed to them the attention of believing Gentiles from tlie moment of their conversion. " Now to Him," said Paul, in con- cluding his Epistle to the Romans, " to Him that is of power to b TnE IDEA OF A NEW TESTAMENT CANON stablisli yoii according to my gospel, and the preaching of Jesus Christ, (according to the revelation of the mystery, which was kept secret since the world began, but now is made manifest, hy the scriptures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the everlasting God, made known to all nations for the obedience of the faith ;) to God only wise, be glory through Jesus Christ for ever. Amen." Thus, on the one hand, the idea of a canon of Scripture was, as it were, innate in the minds of the people of God, and inseparable from their conception of a church ; while, on the other, the idea of adding to the sacred books of the Old Testament the no less sacred books of the New, as successively put forth, was equally inseparable from their notion of Scripture. 10. The early existence of this idea of a Scripture canon is dis- tinctly attested by the history of early Christianity. Far from being a subsequent conception, it appears conspicuously under every varied form, from the very commencement of the Christian Church, both among the enemies and the champions of the gospel We shall examine this point more in detail by and by. In the meantime, we confine ourselves to a few quotations. Peter, towards the end of his career, refers, in his second epistle, to " all the epistles " of Paul, as already collected, and calls them " Scriptures ; " putting them on a level with the books of the Old Testament, which he calls " the other Scriptures." l The primitive Christians successively collected the apostolic writ- ings from the moment of their appearance ; received them as of the same authority with the Old Testament, read them in their assemblies, and called them, as Peter did, the Scriptures, or, as the Fathers did, the Booh, ra Bi^ia; the New Testament;^ the ^ 2 Pet. iii. 16. This testimony, independently of the objections of some per- sons to the canonicity of this epistle, incontestably proves the antiquity of the usage that regarded the books of the New Testament as part of the Scriptures ; for we shall demonstrate the antiquity of this epistle, independently of its canon- icity. * See Lardner, vol. viii , page 197. See also vol. ii., page 529. As Paul had given the name of "Old Testament" to the writings of Moses and the Prophets, it was quite natural that the writings of the Evangelists and Apostles should re- ceive the name of "New Testament," and that the books admitted into the Canon should be styled Tcslamental or fvhiaOrjKai, (Eusebius, H. E. vi., 25.) AS EARLY AS THE APOSTLES. 9 Divine Document ; l the Sacred Digest ; 2 the Oracles of God ; or the Gospel and the Apostle, the Gospels and the Apostles ; ^ after the e"?:iimple of Jesus Christ, who had called the Old Testament " the Laiu and the Prophets." It thus appears at how early a period the Christian Church began to speak of the Canon or Ride, and to give the name of ''canonical hooks" to such as formed a part of that infallible code. Irenseus, born in Greece in the year 120, and martyred in the year 202, ■* speaking of the Scriptures as divine, caUs them the Ride, or the Canon, of truth — Kavova t% cCK7]de.la<^.^ Tertidlian, in the same century, contrasting Valentine with Marcion, both deeply immersed in the Gnostic heresy, says of the former, about the year 138, that he, at least, appeared to make use of a complete document, meaning a complete and entke collec- tion of the books of the New Testament, as then received in the Church. 6 Clement of Alexandria, in the same century, speaking of a quotation taken from an apocryphal book, exclaims against those who thought proper to follow any authority besides " the true evangelical canon ;" and Origen, born seventeen years before the end of the same century, zealous, as Eusebius7 says, in maintaining the ecclesiastical canon, rov iKKXrjacaartKbv (pvXdrTcov Kavova, " de- clares that he only recognised the four Gospels ; which alone," he adds, " are received without controversy in the universal Church spread over the whole earth." 8 The same Origen, in giving us a list of the canonical Scriptures, calls them the Testamental Scrip- tures {al ivSidOrjKaL ypacjial), that is, " the Scriptures contained in the New Testament." A thanasius, in his Festal epistle,^ speaks of three sorts of books : ^ Tertidlian adv. Marcion, lib. v., cap. 13. " Ibid., lib. iv., cap. 13. * Clement of Alexandria, Strom, vii., pages 706, 757. Ignatius, Ep. to the Philad., ch. 5 ; Ep. to Diognetus, ch. 11. Justin Martyr, First ApoL, ch. 67 ; Tertul. lian, De Grtec. Scrip., cap. 36 ; Apol., cap. 39. llippolytus the Martyr, On Anti- christ, ch. 58. * Or, according to others, in the year 140. " Adv. Herseses, lib. iii., cap. 11 ; lib. iv., cap. 35 and 69. * Tertidlian, De Prscscript. Htcretic, cap. 36, 3^. 7 Ecc. Hist., vi., ch. 25. » Ibid. ^ Chap, xxxix., vol. ii., p. 901, edit. Benedict, tu Kai/ovtfd/xcj/a (cai napaSodivra 7riaTfv6ei/Ta re dtla eiuai (ii^Xla. 10 CANONICITY VEKY KEMOTE, the canonical, (which are those recognised by the Churcli at tlie present day ;) the ecclesiastical, (which were allowed to be read in Cliristian assemblies ;) and the apocryplial. When, subsequently, the Council of Laodicea (in 3G4?) ordained that no other book should be read in the churches but the Canoni- cal Scrijitures of the Old and the New Testament, it was so far from then introducing for the first time the notion of canonical books, as distinguished from uncanonical, that it merely referred to principles long established in the universal Ciiurch. Jerome, also, frequently speaks of the Canon of Scripture : " Ecclcsiasticus," says he, " Judith, Tobit, The Shepherd, . . . are not in the Canon. Tiie Church permits the reading of Judith, Tobit, and the Maccabees ; but it does not receive them into the list of Canonical Scriptures. The books of Wisdom and Ecclesi- a.sticus may be read for edification by the people, but not as authority for establishing points of doctrine." l Such is the origin of the idea of a Canon of Scripture, and such is its import. ^ See also Lardner, vol. x., pp. 41, 43, 52. CHAPTER III. THE CHUECH, FROM THE COMMENCEMENT, REGARDED THE COLLEC- TION OF SCRIPTURES AS A HARMONIC WHOLE. IT. The primitive Church received the books of the New Testa- ment one after another ; but regarded the collection, in its gradual formation, as one distinct whole, having God for its author, and the manifestation of Jesus Christ as its sole purpose, in the same way that the ancient Israel of God regarded the code of the Old Testament, in its gradual formation, as one harmonic whole, having God for its author, and His plan of redeeming His elect as its sole object. 12. We shall give merely one or two illustrations of this at present, taken from the records of the first century, or of the be- ginning of the second. The author of the beautiful Epistle to Diognetus, a disciple, as he states, of the apostles, represents the Law and the Prophets, the Gospel and the Apostles, as acting in concert to bring grace and joy into the Church. "Thus," says he, " the terror of the Law is proclaimed, the grace of the Prophets made known, the faith of the Gospels established, and the teaching of the Apostles maintained, and the grace of the Church leaps with joy."l Ignatius likewise, about the year 107, in one of his epistles, said to the Philadelphians (ch. v.) : " Your prayers will obtain for me to be perfected in God, fleeing for refuge to the Gospel, as the flesh of Jesus, and to the apostles, as the Presbytery of the Church. We adhere also to the prophets, who themselves pro- ' Chaj). xi. Etra (f)6^os voixov uOerat, Kai ■7Tpo(prjTa>i> ^''P'S' yivaxTKfrai, k(u fvayyt'Kiui' tt'kttls 'i8pvfTai, Kai unoaTuXuv nnpdonn-is (pvXucrafTui, kiu e'/CKXrj- CTKiy X''P'^ (TKipra. 12 THE HARMONIC WHOLE. claimed the Gospel, hoped in Christ, waited for His coming in the unity of Jesus Christ, and found salvation through faith in Him." 1 1 3. As the Canon of the New Testament is a collection of books, written at different times and in different places during the last half of the apostolic century, by eight in.spired authors, it could only be completed gradually, and could only assume its entireness towards tlie end of the first century, or at the beginning of the century following. ^ 'npo(T(\ivys iTp((r^vT€pia> fKKXrjalas. Km rovs Ilpo(t)T]Tas, &c. This epistle, however, ia one of those which Mr Cureton has left out in his Syriac edition. See proposi- tion 250. CHAPTER IV. FIEST FOEMATION OF THE CANOK 14. During the first fifteen years after the death of our Lord the Church was brought into existence, grew and was nourished by the oral preaching of the truth, and by the scriptures of the Old Testa- ment, explained either by themselves or by the teaching of the apostles and evangelists, — " God also bearing them witness, both with signs and wonders, and with divers miracles, and gifts of the Holy Ghost, according to his own will," (Heb. ii. 4 ; 2 Pet, i. 2] .) 15. The apostles and evangelists, while preaching the Word to the Churches, " by the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven," con- stantly appealed, as their Master had done, to the already closed canon of the Old Testament. They required their disciples to study it incessantly ; and declared it " able to make the man of God perfect, mse unto salvation, through faith which is in Jesus Christ, and thoroughly furnished unto all good works," (2 Tim. iii. 15-17.) 16. It was not till fifteen years after the ascension of our Savi- our that the old canon of the " oracles of God," which had been closed for four hundred years, was re-opened to receive the earliest writing of the New Testament. I mean the epistles of Paul to the Thessalonians ; for there is every reason to believe that the Gospel of Mark, and even that of Matthew, did not precede these ; and that the Gospels of Luke and John followed them after a very long interval. Thus, for two or three years, the sacred canon of the New Testament consisted merely of these two epistles, which Paul, aided by Silas and Timotheus, had written, about the year 48, to the infant church of Thessalonica. 17. It is, therefore, very probably owing to the circumstance 14 FIIIST FORMATION OF THE CANON. that these two epistles were to commence the new collection oi " oracles of God," that the apostle from the first took such pains to intimate to the Church their divine authority. He " charges them by the Lord," to keep them, to study them, and to spread copies of them. lie solemnly enjoins them, by invoking God's awful name, to cause this earliest portion of Scripture to be made known and read in all the churches of Christ. " I charge you," says he, in conclusion, (SpKi^o) vfia^ rov Kvpiov,) " I charge you by the Lord that this ci)i.stle be read to all the holy brethren," (1 Thcss. v. 27.) This portion of Scripture he addressed to a church that his Gospel had reached, " not in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost," (1 Thess. i. 5 ;) and he carefully reminds them that the word he had brought to them was that of God ; and thanks God that they had received it, "not as the ivord of man, hut, as it is in realitrj, the ivord of God." 18. It was during the sixteen or seventeen years that elapsed from the appearance of these first two books of the New Testa- ment (in 48), and the death of Paul (in 04 or 05"!, that nearly all the other scriptures of the New Testament were written ; at least the twenty hooks we shall by and by have occasion to mention as the^rs^ canon; that i.s, the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the first thirteeen epistles of Paul, the First Ei^istle of Peter, and the First of John. 19. It was at a later period, that is, towards the end of the first century, that the other seven books of the New Testament were put forth, with the exception of the Epistle of James, which must have been written about the year 61 ; as, according to the historian Joaephu^, James was stoned to death during the troubles that preceded the destruction of Jerusalem, that is, immediately after the death of the governor Festus, and while the arrival of Albinus in Judea was still looked for.l 20. Thus the whole canon of the scriptures of the New Testa- ment was commenced and completed during the latter half of the first century. It was during this period that the Church, already formed and unceasingly extending, reached the extremities of tht earth, through the incomparable labours of Paul, Peter, John, * .iViiti<]., XX., c. 8. FIRST FORMATION OF THE CANON. 15 Thomas, and other apostles, as well as of so many other witnesses, whose names, unknown to us, are recorded in heaven. 21. It is, therefore, necessary we should distinctly understand that the primitive Chiu'ch, during her militant and triumphant march through the first half-century of her existence, saw her New Testament canon forming in her hand, as a nosegay is gra- dually formed in the hand ,of a lady walking through plots of flowers with the proprietor of the garden by her side. As she advances, the latter presents to her flower after flower, till she finds herself in possession of an entire bunch. And, just as the nosegay attracts admiring attention before it is filled up, and as soon as the few first flowers have been put together, so the New Testament canon began to exist for the Christian Church from the moment the earliest portions of inspired Scriptures had been put into her hands. In the same manner, under the Old Testament in the time of David, a thousand years before the apostles, the Church of Israel already possessed a sacred canon, consisting of seven or eight books, and called it her Law, her divine and perfect Law, though two-thirds of the Old Testament were still wanting. " The Law," she already exclaimed, " is a light to my feet ; it refreshes my soul ; I talk of it the whole day long." In the same way, also, five hun- dred years before David, and in the time of Moses, the Church of Israel possessed her sacred canon, and expressed herself thus : — " Happy art thou, 0 Israel ! who is like unto thee, 0 people, saved of the Lord ! for this Law is not a vain thing for us, it is our life," (Deut. xxxiii. 29, xxxii. 47.) 22. The Church, at each successive period, was responsible for the books God had already given her, and not for those He might aftei'wards give. At all times she received from Him those she required; and at all times she had reason to say, with David, " The law of the Lord is perfect." 23. It will easily be perceived how important it is, for the con- firming of our faith, that the New Testament, instead of having been communicated all at once by the Founder of our religion Himself personally recording His acts and His revelations, should have emanated from Him successively during the space of half-a- century, in a series of twenty-seven writings, the productions of 16 FIRST FOK.MATION OF THE CUS'ON. ciyev6fj,€vo(ov) copied on precious parchment, and in the way you may deem best fitted for the use of the Church and the solemn lessons from the Divine word, (irapa rrj^i tcov Oeiwv avayvcoa/jidrcov i7ncrKevriel^ at heKaTecrcrape^^ — but he adds, tliat it would not be right to overlook the fact that some persons (rtve^) had rejected the Epistle to the Hebrews on the ground of the Roman Church's having controverted Paul's author- ship of that epistle. The persons {tlv^) to whom Eusebius here alludes were evidently Greeks; but neither their opinion nor even that of the Roman Church had exerted any influence on the churches of Greece and the East ; and the learned historian shews that, notwithstanding such doubts, the ejiistle was, in his estima- tion, clearly and iinquestionahly canonical. As to the Apocalypse, it may at first seem strange that he does not class it with the controverted books, (avriXeyofMeva,) as he speaks of it as deemed by some of Divine authority, and by others spurious. But as the Apocalypse had never, till the time of Dionysius of Alexandria, (about the middle of the third century,) been controverted in the East, where, on the contrary, it had always been regarded as of Divine authority ; and as, on the other hand, Dionysius vehemently maintained that it was the work of an ordinary presbyter of the name" of John, and, consequently, spurious ; the controversy being still at its height while Eusebius was writing his history, he could not, before the close of the dis- ' Versuch zur Vorstellung des hist." Standpuncts fiir die Critic der N. T. Scbr. ETJSEBIUS. 39" cussion, place it among the avriXeyofieva. All parties agreed in excluding the Apocalypse from the class of avrtXeyoixeva' but some insisted that it should be declared of Divine authority, while others maintained it should be pronounced spurious. The Apocalypse was uncontroverted during the second century, and even till the middle of the third, at which time the jiarty spirit that characterised the philosophic theology of Alexandria, during its contest with the antique millenarian theory, ventured to call in question the authority of that book. This ojiposition produced hesitation in the minds of the Greek theologians. Euse- bius did not remain neutral in this doctrinal controversy ; but this did not prevent him from stating the historical points of the question with a faithfulness worthy of respect. 49. We briefly sum up the substance of what we have said to account for Eusebius's having classed the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Apocalypse among the uncontroverted scriptures : — (1.) These two books had been from the first, and during two centuries, received as of Divine authority by all the churches, both of the East and of the West. (2.) Subsequently one of these books, the Epistle to the Hebrews, had been always received in the churches of the East, and the other, the Apocalypse, had always continued to be received in the churches of the West. (3.) When, afterwards, doubts were for a time raised against the Apocalypse in the East, and against the Epistle to the Hebrews in the West, no ancient testimony against either of these books was ever produced, and the only objections brought against them re- lated to alleged incongruities of doctrine and of style, as might be the case at the present day. We shall afterwards examine the subject of dvTtXeyo/Lieva more in detail ; our object at present being merely to describe the cata- logue of Eusebius. 50. In taking this historian, then, as so many other writers have done, for our starting point in establishing the Divine canonicity of the whole New Testament, and in taking our stand with this learned bishoj) in the year 324, (six months before the Council of Nice,) we may say that we select the very moment in history when the objections brought against these two books had reached the 40 ANTE-NICENE CATALOGUES. culminating point. It would be impossible, then, to give a more precise statement of these objections than, we do in expressing them under this form. Our threefold division is more rigorous even than that of Eusebius ; for, instead of classing, as he does, the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Apocalypse among the uncon- troverted books, we assign them a separate position, as they did not attain the rank of uncontroverted, in the unrestricted sense in which the term is employed by Eusebius, till the middle of the third century. In ascending beyond the time of Eusebius, we find the objections gradually diminishing towards this source, and in descending from his time we find them diminishing still more rapidly. The great Origen, who lived before him, received, as we have stated, the entire canon ; and never heard of any hesitation among his contemporaries except in reference to the eighty-ninth part of the New Testament.l The great Athanasius, only twenty- six years younger than Eusebius, received our canon entire, and, in concluding his list of New Testament scriptures, says, " These books are the fountains of salvation, (ravra Tnjyal rov acoTtjplov.) Let no one add to them anything, or take anything from them, (jj,r}Bel He informs us he continued to catechise in 8-17. See his sixth Catechesis; or Cave, (Hist. Litt, vol. i., p. 211.) CYRIL'S CATALOGUE. 49 (ax^Biaadelcrai,) as lie himself informs us, and composed with great simplicity, in order to be intelligible to all." l His catalogue is contained in his fourth Catechesis, 2 under the title, " Of the Divine Scriptures," (Ilepl rwv deloiv Tpa^wv) " This is what we are taught by the inspired scriptures of the Old and the New Testament ; for there is but one and the same God in both, who in the Old foretells God manifested in the New." " Learn, then, from the Church, with a sincere desire to be in- structed, {(f)iXofj,a6co<; iTrljvcoaKe Trapa t% e/c/cXT^cr/a?,) what are the books of the Old Testament, and what those of the New, and read nothing of what is ajjocryphal Eead (avayLvcoa-Ke) the Divine scriptures, the twenty-two books of the Old Testa- ment ; 3 . . . . but have nothing to do with any book that is apocryphal. Study earnestly those books only (ravra^ fi6va<; fjLeXira airovhaLWi) which we read and recognise openly in the Church, (a9 ev rfj iKK\7]aia fiera 7rapp7}alafu,eva Be) as proper to be read by those who, having but recently come among us, are desirous of obtaining pious instruction — the Wisdom of Solomon, and the Wisdom of Sirach, and Esther, Judith and Tobias, and what are called the apostolic institutes, (/cat SLBa)(r) KoXov/xevT) T03V diroaroXeov,) and the Pastor of Hernias. Therefore, beloved, as the former are canonical, and the latter proper to be read, to such alone confine your attention, making no mention whatever oi apocryphal writings, (ovBafMov rcou aTroKpucpcov fjivi'-njn-j) These are an invention of heretics, who have written according to their fancy, and have assigned them dates, in order to palm them on the simple as ancient writings." It is thus perfectly clear that the list given by Athanasius is complete, as was that of Origan, who lived one hundred and fifty years earlier. But even then it was customary to reckon two sorts of writings besides the twenty-seven canonical books. The first was a small number of books which were called ecclesiastical, and which might be read in the churches ; the second was carefully denounced under the name apocryphal. The same distinction will be found in other catalogues. 67. The Anonymous Father. — The second catalogue is that of a contemporary of Athanasius, frequently confounded with him, the Greek text of which is to be found among the collective works of Athanasius, and entitled, " Synopsis of Holy Scripture." l This brief composition is admired as " a model of accuracy, sagacity, and learning,"' according to the Benedictine Fathers, (tanta cura, sagacitate, eruditione elaborata, ut nihil supra.) Its contents are as follows : — " All Scripture is held by us Christians as in- spired, (OeoTTvevarofi.) It consists, not of indefinite books, but of books definite and recognised as canonical, (dWa fidWov copicruiva Kal K€KavoviafMeva e^et ra /3i/3X,ia.) The books of the Old Testa- ment are, (then follows the list.) The canonical books of the New Testament are : The four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the seven Catholic Epistles of diflerent apostles, counted as one book, (he enumerates them in their established order ;) the fourteen Epistles of Paul, counted as one book, (he enumerates them, too, 1 Benedictine edition, torn, ii., p. 125, Paris, 1G98. 58 FOUETH-CENTURY FATUERS. ill their established order ;) and, in addition to these books, (ink rovToit;,) there is also the A])ocalypse of John the divine, received as his, (Sc'xd^^o-a w? eKeivov,) and recognised by the fathers, who were holy men, and inspired of God, (/cat iyKpidelcra viro ttuXiv uyioiv Koi Trv€V/xaTO(})6po)v Traripcov.) " Such are the canonical books of the New Testament, which are, as it were, the first fruits, the anchors and props of our faith, inasmuch as they were written and left as a deposit (kol eKredevTo) by the apostles of Christ themselves." 68. Epiphanius. — The third catalogue, that of Epiphanius, is to be found in his " Panarium," or treatise " Against Heresies." The writings of this father, who was born in Palestine, and of Jewish extraction, are, equally, of great value, owing to the vast extent of his literary attainments, and his acknowledged familiarity with ecclesiastical antiquities {antiquitatwin prcesertim ecclesias- ticariun callentissimus.) 1 He was master of five languages, {jrevTu'fKoicraoL\eKT(p,) the Wisdom of Sirach and the Wisdom of Solomon." " These two books are unquestionably use- ful and edifying," he adds in another place ; " but they are not 60 FOURTH-CENTURY FATHERS. placed among the acknowledged books, and that is the reason why they have not bee admitted into the ark of the covenant, (AXTC et? apiOixov prjTwv ovk dva(f>epovTat, Bio ovBe ei> rfj rt)^ Bia6i]Kr}^ Ki^Q)T(o dvereOjjaav.) ' 7 1 . Jerome. — The fourth catalogue is that of Jerome. Of all the fathers of the fourth century this illustrious doctor is unques- tionably the most worthy to be heard on the canon of Scripture ; not, indeed, for his character, or his meekness, or candour, or spi- ritual knowledge of the gospel, or even for his respect for the sacred books, — his language on this point being often unseemly ; but for his unvaried perspicuity, his acquaintance M'ith the sacred tongues, his erudition, his travels, his immense apijlicatiou, and his long residence in Palestine, where his researches in connexion with the Scriptures were unceasing. This celebrated man, who, by his life, belongs equally to the West and to the East, was raised up by God to spread a great light in the Church, by urging the study of the sacred texts, and bringing back general attention, especially among the Latins and Greeks, to the pure sources of Biblical truth. His career, more- over, was, like that of Ejjiphanius, of great length, as he died in 420 at the. age of eighty-nine. Born in Upper Dalmatia, he re- paired to Rome for the purpose of continuing his studies under the eloquent Victorinus, the African. Entering on his first course of travels, he traversed Gaul, visiting all the libraries, proceeding as far as Treves to meet with Hilarius, and returning by Aquileia to Venice to see Rujinus. From that he went to Tiirace, and, passing over into Asia, proceeded as far as Antioch, for the pur- pose of passing four years in the solitude of the desert, and de- voting himself entirely to the study of oriental languages and the Holy Scriptures. It was only at the age of forty-nine that he was ordained a presbyter. Already, however, famous all over the em- pire, he repaired to Constantinople a short time before the second general council, which was held there in 381. In that capital he attended, with great ardour, the lectures of Gregory of Nazianzus, till he left it in company with Epiphanius and Paulinus for Rome, where he spent three years, and where Bishop Damasus appointed liim one of his private secretaries. Thoroughly disgusted, how- ever, with that city, after the death of Damasu.s, he left it in 38.j, JEEOME. 61 never to return. He visited Epiphanius in Cyprus ; thence passed over to Jerusalem, and, the following year, went to Egypt, where he became a hearer of the illustrious Didymxis. Returning at length to Palestine, he entered on his long and last retirement in the plain of Bethlehem. It was there, during the space of thirty- three years, that he Avrote the greatest part of his works ; and that, constantly visited by the most illustrious individuals, he became the oracle of his age. 72. Jerome has given us his catalogue under more than one form ; and it may be stated, before we proceed further, that the first volume of his works is itself a catalogue. It has been called Divina Hieronymi Bibliotheca, as it contains all the books of Holy Scripture, translated by Jerome from Hebrew or Greek, with pre- faces of great value prefixed. It is divided into three parts. The first comprehends the Hebrew canon, or the Pentateuch, the Pro- phets, and the Hagiographa. The second contains some books of the Old Testament, which Jerome had translated either from the Chaldaic or from the Greek of the Septuagint. The third con- tains all the books of the New Testament, with prefaces and copious notes. In his preface to the seven epistles, which is ad- dressed to Eustochius, the author informs us that, having found, in the Latin manuscripts, the Epistle of Peter misplaced, and put at the head of the rest, (from a mistaken zeal for the primacy of that apostle,) he had been at pains to restore it to its proper place, "in conformity," he says, "to the order always observed in the Greek manuscripts." He informs us, at the same time, that un- faithful translators had omitted the passage relating to the three witnesses in the First Epistle of John. Some have pretended to deny that the preface in question was written by Jerome, but we cannot enter on this point here. 73. Besides this, Jerome has given us his catalogue directly, and more than once ; first in his treatise De Viris Illustrihus, i written in 392, and afterwards in his Epistle to Paulinus,^ written in 397. In that letter he says : — ^ Chap. V. ; Opera, torn. iv. « Tom. iv., p. 574. Edit. Bened. (Martianay), Paris, 1693. 62 FOURTH-CENTURY FATHEIIS. " I shall just briefly refer to the New Testament It contains first Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the four-liorsed chariot of the Lord, the true cheruhims, (then follows a mystic explanation of the chariots of Ezekiel.) Then Paul writes to seven churches, for his eighth ej^istle, that to the Hebrews, is, by the Latins, usually arranged separately, (a plerisque extra numerum 'ponitur) He writes to Timothy and to Titus ; he recommends to Philemon a fugitive slave The Acts of the Apostles seem to describe the infancy of the Cliristian Church ; but on learning that the writer of that book is Luke the physician, ' whose praise is in the gospel,' (2 Cor. viii. 1 8,) we are satisfied that all its words are a remedy for a diseased soul. The apostles James, Peter, John, and Jude, have published seven epistles, as mystic as condensed, and at once both short and long — short as to the words, long as to the sense The Revelation of John contains as many mys- teries as words, (tot hahet sacramenta quot verba.) What I say of it is little in comparison to the merit of the book." He adds, " In verbis singidis multiplices latent intelligentia}." 74. We see, then, that Jerome, like the rest, received the seven epistles controverted and uncontroverted. He considered all the four writers apostles ; he extols the Revelation, and specifies the fourteen epistles of Paul, saying, merely in reference to the Epistle to the Hebrews, that " the Latins for the most part exclude it." He is very far from saying that he himself excludes it, for he is at pains to repeat, in various parts of his writings, that he regards it as canonical, and believes it to be Paul's. He wrote to Dardanus, about the year 414, as follows : — "Our friends (the Latins) must be made to understand that the Epistle to the Hebrews is received as Paul's, not only by the churches of the East, but likewise by all the earlier Greek ecclesiastical authors, {ah omnibus retro ecclesiasticis Grceci sermonis scriptoribvs,) though most people there believe it to have been written by Bar- nabas or Clement. It must also be remarked that it is really of small importance whether Paul or some other planter of the churches wrote it, since its Divine authority is daily recognised, by the fact of its being publicly read in the churches, (et quotidie ecclesiaruni lectione celebratur.) If usage among the Latins has not admitted it to a place among the canonical Scriptures, and if. EUFINUS. 63 on the other hand, the churches of the Greeks do not receive so freely (as the Latins) the Eevelation of John, we recognise both, (tamen nos uty^umque suscipimus,) as aa'c desire to follow, not the usage of the present time, but the authority of ancient authors." 75. Rufinus. — The fifth catalogue is that of Rufinus, a presbyter of Aquileia. Long on term^ of friendship with Jerome, he was liis fellow- student in the schools of Aquileia, travelled, like him, in the East, (about the year 871,) visited, like him, Egypt, attached himself, like him, to Didymus, established, like him, a monastery in Palestine, where he spent twenty-five years ; but, having engaged in a con- troversy with Epiphanius, from zeal for the memory and doctrine of Origen, he drew upon himself the enmity of Jerome, and re- turned to Italy in 397, to die in Sicily in 410." His catalogue, which is to be found in his Exposition of the Apostles' Creed,! is so remarkable for the clearness and precision of its language, that we shall translate the greater part of it : — " It was the Holy Spirit," says he, " that, in the Old Testament, inspired the Laiu and the Prophets, and in the New Testament, the Gospels and the Apostles. Therefore the apostle has said, 'All scripture is given by inspiration, and is usefid for instruc- tion.' That is the reason why it appears to me proper to specify here, by a distinct enumeration, {evidente numero,) from the records of the fathers, the books both of the Old Testament and of the New, which, according to the testimony of the ancients, are held as inspired by the Holy Sjjirit, and transmitted to the churches of Christ. " In the New Testament are the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John ; the Acts of the Apostles, written by Luke ; fourteen Epistles of the Apostle Paul; two of the Apostle Peter; one of James the Apostle, and the Lord's brother ; one of Jude ; three of John, and John's Apocalypse. Such are the books which the fathers have included in the Canon, and on which they have de- sired that the assertions of our faith should be founded, (ex quibus fidei nostroi assertiones constare voluerunt.) " It is necessary, however, to point out, at the same time, that ^ In the works of Cyprian, p. 26. Am.-terdam edition, 1691. 04 FOUETH-CENTURY FATHERS. there are, besides tliese, other books tliat were called by the ancients (a majorihus) not canonical, but ecclesiastical. Such are the Wisdom of Solomon, and the Wisdom of the Son of Sirach, .... the book of Tobit, that of Judith, and the books of the Maccabees. " In connexion with the New Testament, there is the short book called, The Shepherd of Hennas, (or likewise, The Tivo Voices, or, The Judgment of Peter.) All these books, it is true, were allowed to be read in churches, but they could not be quoted for establish- ing points of faith, (non tamen proferri ad auctoi'itatem ex his fidei conjirmandam.) The other books professing to be scriptures are called apocryphal, and are not allowed to be read in churches. " I have thought proper," adds Rufinus, " to mention these cir- cumstances here, which we know from the fathers, for the infor- mation of such as are learning the elements of the faith, that they may all understand at what fountain of the Word of God they may fill their cups." We have here, then, a clear statement of the distinction, which we have mentioned in speaking of Athanasius and Epiphanius, of three sorts of books — canonical, twenty-seven in number and divinely-inspired ; ecclesiastical, to be read in churches solely for edification ; and apocryphal, forbidden to be read at all. 76. Augustin.- — The sixth and last catalogue of the fathers of the fourth century, entirely the same as our canon, is that of the most sublime and the most profound of the ancient doctors, the illustrious bishop of Hippo. He is the latest of the fathers that we intend to quote in the present inquiry. About a hundred years later than JEusebius, he belongs to the end of the fourth cen- tury and the beginning of the fifth ; as Eusebius belonged to the end of the third and the beginning of the fourth. Bom in Numidia, of Christian parents, in 355, though, in spite of his mother's tear.s, early drawn into the fatal doctrines and practices of the Manichaeans, he was a public professor of rhetoric at Carthage, when, at the age of twenty-eight, he left Africa and repaired first to Rome, and afterwards to Milan. It was in this latter city that, through his intercourse with the illustrious Am- brose, who had received him with great kindness, he was convinced of his errors ; but it was only in 388, when he had reached the AUGUSTIN. 65 age of thirty-three, that he was converted from darkness to light, by a manifest display of Divine power. Returning the following year to Africa, he resided for three years in retirement on his father's estate, and was then ordained to the holy ministry at the age of thirty-six. Five years afterwards he was called to the episcopal see of Hippo. He died in 430 at the age of seventy- five, while shut up in the city of Hippo, which the Vandals, already masters of Africa, were then besieging by sea and land. This admirable man, who, during his long career, had never ceased to labour, by his powerful writings, for the defence of the doctrines of grace, and the consolidation of the churches of God all over the world, was raised up not only to overthrow, during his own age, the Pelagian heresy, but to cast a bene- ficent track of light over the Church through all succeeding ages. His works have been published in eleven folio volumes.i His " City of God," his commentaries on the Psalms, his ser- mons, his letters, his recantations, his confessions, his treatises on sin and grace, commend themselves to the Christian reader by two main characteristics — the devotional feeling they every- where breathe, and his argumentative method, which should serve at all times as a pattern to divines, from its being a per- petual exposition of the Word of God through the Word of God itself. He was a pillar in the house of God, and he remains a luminary to all ages. 77. We copy his catalogue as contained in one of the latest of his works, entitled, De Doctrind Christiana,^ begun in 397 and completed in 426.3 For the present we omit what he says regarding the Old Testa- ment, adducing here his testimony merely as to the New : — "The authoritative books of the New Testament are, (Hisce lihris Testamenti Novi terniinatur auctoritas^ — Quatuor lihHs Evangelii, {secundum Matihceum, Mar cum, Lucam, Joannem ;) quatuordecim JEpistolis Pauli apostoli, {ad Rom., ad Cor. duabus, ^ The best edition, the Benedictine, (Paris, 1679, and following years,) has been reprinted at Antwerp, 1700-1703, and at Paris, in royal octavo, 1835-1840. 2 Lib. ii., vol. iii., part i., sec. 13, p. 47. Edit. Paris. 1836. 3 Cave, Hist. Lit., vol. i., p. 290, &c. £ 66 AUGUSTIN. ad Gal, ad Eph., ad Thess. duabus, ad Col, ad Tim. duahus, ad Titum, ad Philemonepi, ad Hehroios ;) Petri duabus; tribus Joan- nis ; und Judce, et und Jacobi; Actibus Apostolomm, libro uno; et Apocalypsi Joannis, libro uno." CHAPTER XI. SOJME OTHEK CATALOGUES, ALLEGED TO BE OF THE FOUKTH CEN- TUEY, AI^D AGKEEING WITH OUE GANOID, AKE APOCEYPHAL OR SPUEIOTJS. 78. Besides these nine catalogues of the fathers of the fourth century, three others are quoted. We have not given an account of these ; because they do not possess a sufficient claim to our con- fidence, one being doubtful and the others forged. In the same way, in Chajjter VI., when treating of the second centmy, we have not mentioned the apocryphal book of Apostolic Canons,'^ which pretends to give, in the name of the apostles, " to all the clergy and laity (Trda-c KkrjpLKoh koI Xa'iKOiv 6foni>evaTa>v Vpacjiav. " Let such be held as the true canon of inspired Scriptures." * This is the Amphilochius who, in order to obt;iin from Theodosius the long- refused decree against the Arians, presented himself one day before the emperor without offering any homage to his son, Arcadius, who sate on a throne beside him. " You are displeased at my irreverence, and with reason. But what must the eternal Father, the King of kings, think of those who refuse to honour Ilia only Son, and who blaspheme His holy name ?" — Sozomen, bk. viL, chap. ix. CHAPTEE XIL THE TWO CATALOGUES, DRAWN UP BY COUNCILS, OF THE FOURTH CENTURY. Section I. NATURE of their TESTIMONY, 83. "What we have now heard from the month of all the Fathers of the fourth century, who have bequeathed to us their definitions of Holy Scripture, is in strict accordance with the state- ments of councils of the same century, that formally inquired into the number of the sacred books, and left us a catalogue of them. Only two councils, during the fourth century, have given ex- pression to the mind of their times on the canon. These are the Council of Laodicea and that of Carthage. The former was held in Asia IMinor, on the banks of the Lycus, in the province of Phrygia, in the year 864, thirty-nine years after the General Council of Nice '; the latter, in Africa, thirty-three years later, presided over by Bishop Aurelius, who was aided, it is said, by the celebrated Augustin, bishop of Hippo, in the year 397. 84. We have hitherto seen, from all the catalogues of this cen- tury, what striking unanimity the Fathers, from the date of the Council of Nice — though on this point no shadow of constraint was ever exerted — spontaneously came to an agreement on the sacred canon of the New Testament, with the sole exception, on the part of a few, of the Eevelation of John. This agreement was unshaken, as it had always been, as to the twenty books of the first canon ; it was henceforth universal in reference to the five antilegomena of Eusebius, or the second canon, and it was no less complete as to the Epistle to the Hebrews. There was no longer any hesitation, real or apparent, except in reference to the Apocalypse. We say real or apparent, because two circumstances 72 COUNCILS. very different from each other may, according to the case, alter- nately account for this diversity. On the one hand, among some, the dispute with the millenarians was still too recent, and the controversy had been too keen, in the East especially, to admit the entire removal of prejudice against that book, which was regarded as the great prop of their views. On the other, even in many of the Churches most distinctly upholding the divine canonicity of the Ajjocalypse, that book appeared too mysterious to be read in public religious meetings. Though, however, these two circumstances still contributed more or less to preser\'e some discordance in the language of the Churches in reference to the Apocalypse, even that discordance had ceased, and all the Churches, on this and on every other point, had come to an entire agreement, and were henceforth to utter but one and the same sound all over the earth. This will now be attested by the Councils of Laodicea and of Carthage, that are going to express themselves as the Fathers have done. 85. It will, however, be proper, before hearing them, to point out the exact object they had in view. That object was, on this point, evidently the maintenance of the discipline and not of the doctrine of the Church. They expressly speak to record testi- mony, and not to establish authoritatively an article of faith. Neither of these councils professes to decide which books shall be held in the Church, henceforth, of Divine authority, and which shall not. Their intention was simply to regulate the public reading in their religious meetings, and, with this view, to declare the mind of contemporaneous churches, and the testimonies of antiquity, regarding the canonical books, and the books allowed to be read in public. " For," says the Council of Carthage, " we know from the Fathers that these are the books which should be read in the church, {quia a patrihus ista accepinius in eccUda legenda). It will thus be seen that there is nothing in their language resembling the haughty tone of the Council of Trent, deciding for the universal Church, as God might do, the canonicity of such and such a book, and pronouncing an anathema {post jactum fidei confessionis fiindamentum) l against all who dare / » Worda of the Covincil of Trent, (Sesa. iv.,) April 8, 1546. LabW, C;&BcUia, toin. liv., p. 74C, LAODICEA. 73 to differ in opinion on this point, {Si quis lihros \istos\ j)'>'0 sacris et canonicis non susceperit, . . . anathema sit.) Tlie decree of the Council of Carthage, as well as that of Laodicea, proves that the councils did not mean to enact what books should be recognised as Divine, but to declare what books were already held as Divine in the Church of God, according to tradition and history, and, therefore, should be publicly read in the religious assemblies of Asia Minor and of Africa Zeugitana. "Neither private psalms {lSicotckov^;, that is, composed by private individuals) nor uncanonical books, (aKavoviara,) " says the Council of Laodicea, "shall be recited (XeyeaOai) in church, but only the canonical books of the New Testament and of the Old. Here are the books to he read, (avayivcoaKeaOaL.) " 1 "It has been deemed by us proper," says that of Carthage, " that, besides the canonical Scriptures, nothing should be read in church under the name of sacred Scriptures (nihil in ecclesia legatiu: sub nomine Divinarum Scri])turarum) except, perhaps, it may be allowable to read in it acts of the martyrs, or the anniversaries of their death." 2 86. The catalogue of Laodicea and that of Carthage have each two peculiarities : — In regard to the Old Testament, the Council of Laodicea en- tirely excludes the apocryphal books, and does not mention the Apocalypse as part of the New ; while, in all other respects, it is identical with the canon of our Churches. On the contrary, the Council of Carthage admits the apocryphal books as part of the Old Testament, and mentions the Apocalypse as part of the New ; so that, as to the New Testament, it is iden- tical with the canon of our Churches. These two orders of facts, when rightly understood, are quite reconcilable, as we shall shew by and by. They are opposed to each other only in appearance. Section II. THE COUNCIL OF LAODICEA. 87. The Council of Laodicea was convoked to represent the ' Cave, Hist. Litt., p. 362. » Mansi, iii., p. 891. 74 COUNCILS, churches throughout the different regions of Asia Minor, and pro- mote the revival of ecclesiastical discipline. Thirty-two bishops assembled at Laodicea, under the moderatorship of their metro- politan, Kunechius, in 304. This date is fiiniished by the " Code of the Canons of the Universal Chiu-ch," which had early admitted the canons of Laodicea, and which was the law of the Church till the sixteenth century. The Council of Laodicea, which was much larger than a provincial synod, as it contained deputies from the whole of Asia Minor, was, from its commencement, an object of respect throughout the Christian Church, and its decisions were regarded at once, both among the Greeks 1 and the Latins, as forming a part of the " Ecclesiastical Eegulations" binding on all bishops. This is evident from the epistle which Pope Leo IV. addressed, about the year 850, to the clergy of Great Britain.^ In fact, it was not only by the sixth Ecumenical Council, held at Constantinople,^ that the canons of Laodicea were admitted into the " Code of the Universal Church," but, previously, by the fourth Ecumenical Council, held at Chalcedon in 451, and by a decree of the Emperor Justinian in 536 ; ^ so that, all over the Church, they had the same authority as the canons of General Councils and the imperial laws that ratified them. On these facts the clear and conclusive writings of Justel ^ and Le Chassier^^ may be consulted, as well as the learned expositions of Bishop Cosin in his work on the canon.7 88. Yet, how great soever may have been the veneration of the ancient Church for the Council of Laodicea, it was to be expected tliat the Eoman doctors would try to destroy its authority,^ as it absolutely excludes from tlie canonical books the Old Testament ^ " Hoc concilium, antiqua nobilitate celeberrinium," says Binnius, " Grsccorum atque Latinorum scriptis celebri memoriso commendatum fecit," (Ex Baronio not 1, in Laod. Cons.) 2 Canon de Libellis, Dist. 20. ^ Quini Sexta Synodua in TruUo, (692,) whose canons have met with some ob- jections. * Novel. 131. ' Procfat. in Cod. Eccl. Univers. Testimonia prrefixa ante cod. Dionysii Exigu. * Opusc. in consult, de controv. inter Papam Paulum V. et Remp. Venet. ^ Art. lix.-lxiii. ® It is marked as doubtful in manj' editions of the Councils, for example, in Harduin, (1. 79.) LAODICEA. 75 apociyplia, admited into the canon 1200 years later by the Council of Trent. The arguments of the Romanists on this point have been very powerfully combated by Bishop Cosin : — 1. " Diont/sius the Little," say the Romanists, "has omitted the catalogue in his translation of the ' Universal Code of Canons.' " But Dionysius the Little is known to have made many other alterations and omissions. 2. Neither does the Roman code, they add, contain it. But it is to the Greeks rather than to the Latins, to the Uni- versal Code, rather than to the Roman Code, that we must appeal. The latter omits, in like manner, eight canons of the Council of Ephesus, the last three of the Council of Constantinople, and the last two of the Council of Chalcedou. Besides, says Cosin, the fraud betrays it through a singular oversight. In discarding from the 59 th canon of Laodicea the catalogue of canonical Scriptures, its 'preface and title have been inadvertently retained, and these make a manifest allusion to the books enumerated further on in all other editions of the Council. Those published by Mercator, Merlin, Crab, Surius, du Tillier, Binnius, as well as those published by Balsamon and Zonaras, all contain the catalogue omitted in the Roman CodeA 3. Catharin, to evade the testimony of the decree of Laodicea, has recourse, on the contrary, to the sujDposition that the catalogue was originally more extended, and that the apocryphal books had been subsequently omitted. " Vehementer susjncor," says he ; "I strongly suspect." But by such gratuitous conjectures anything could be established and anything overturned. 4. Lastly, Baroniiis, in his " Annales," goes still further. He represents the Council of Laodicea as earlier than that of Nice, and makes the latter pass a decree regarding the Apocrypha.^ He thus expected to upset the authority of the former by that of the latter, as a General Council can modify the decisions of a Provincial. But, in the first place, we have already shewn (Theses 52 and 53) that the supposition of a Nicean decree about the book of Judith •is without foundation. 1 Codex Canonum et Decretorum Ecclesise Romanse, p. 502. * We do not add a translation, as the substance has been given in Thesis 87. 7G COUNCILS. In the second place, tlie Code of the Universal Church, in re- producing the canons of Laodicea, specifies 364 as the date of the Council. In the third place, all ancient collections, either Greek or Latin, of the Synodical Canons have always placed those of Laodicea after those of Antioch, and we know that the Council of Antioeh was held sixteen years after that of Nice. Lastly, the Photinians are condemned in the 7th canon of Laodicea. Now, these were first mentioned in 34:5, that is, twenty years after the Council of Nice. 89. The reader will probably feel an interest in reading the entire decree of Laodicea in the original: — Canons LIX. and LX.^ Or/ 01/ du Idiurtxc-j; -^a^arjug XiyiaSui h rfi 'cK/O.rjSia ouSe aTiuvoviSra SilSyju, dX7.d. /j,iva ra '/ia^ovr/.a rr^g '/.aiMYig xai rraXaiag diaO/jxr};. "Oda diT l3i[3Xicc a.ia'yivuiS'/.ieOai t^; irakaiag diciO/iKTig. a. Fiviaig xCs/j,cv, l3',"E^odog et, Aiyj-rrov, y . A'-j/V/xon, 5'. ' AoiQijlo'i, e. AroTioono/xioii, ?','lr,ndi'ovg 5i!io, Tgi; TuXuTag /Mi'a, rr^hg 'Efio'io-jg /Jbia, r:;hg iXirrr:riaJovg /x!a, rr^bg KcXaa- ca'cTg ix'ia, rr^lg QiaeaXouxiTg duo, crsoj 'EjSpaioug /xi'a, c»&; Ti/zodov duo, rr^bg T'lTOv //.id, Tjig */>.^,ao^a /x/a. ^ These are the two last of the canons; but they are numbered 163 and 164 in the Universal Code, -which contains 207, anterior to the time of Dionysius the Little. ^ This is no specifying of the apocryphal book of Baruch, but simply an exegetical mode of pointing out more distinctly what, according to the Jews, their twentieth book contained, which we are accustomed to call "Jeremiah and his Lamentations." It was nearly in the same manner that Origen, a hundred years before, had distinguished in detail the same book of Jeremiah, (Euseb., Hist. Eccl., lib. vi., cap. 25 ;) "Jeremiah" said he, " vnth his Lamentations and his Epidle (ch.ap. 30) forms only one book." Athanasius, also, and Cyril, in designating the book of Jeremiah, add, as the Council of Laodicea does, an indication of the con- tents of chapter 29lh, and of what is to be found in Jeremiah about Baruch. (See chapters 32, 36, 43, and 45.) Besides, the meaning of the council's expres- sion became clear from the number of tuentytwo hooks, which it carefully retains. LAODICEA. 77 90. It may be asked why the assembled bisliops in this council made no mention of the Apocalypse. Had it not been for their silence on this single book, their catalogue would have been per- fect. IMany will undoubtedly attribute this silence to the supposed circumstance of the Apocalypse not having been yet restored to the canon of sacred books. This explanation, however, we think absolutely incompatible with contemporary facts ; and it appears to us much more likely that the Fathers of Laodicea, while they ad- mitted the canonicity of that sacred book, considered it too sym- bolical and too mysterious to be read with propriety in public religious meetings. In fact, we must not lose sight of the object these fathers had in view. Their attention was confined to the public reading of the Scriptures in church, and their declaration referred merely to two points. First, they prohibited the reading of what was not canonical scripture, and, secondly, they decreed that the twenty- two books of the Old Testament and twenty-six books of the New, should he read. But they did not say that the twenty-seventh book, though they did not mention it, was regarded by them as uncanonical. In like manner, the Church of England at the present day ranks the AjDocalypse among the canonical books, (Prayer-book, and sixth of her Thirty-nine Articles,) while, on the other hand, in the Calendar, and in the preface to the Prayer-book, she excludes the Apocalypse from the public lessons. If the bishops, instead of enacting a mere ride of discij^line relating to the lessons of the Church, had professed to exclude the Apocalypse from the canon, the proceeding would have everywhere awakened an outcry, the echoes of which would have reached our OAvn times. The council could not have conceived the idea of setting at nought the striking testimony rendered to the Apocalypse by the most ancient martyrs and the most venerable fathers. The assembly could not have solemnly given the lie to the Justin Martyrs, the Iren reuses, the Methodiuses, the Hippolytuses, the Melitos, the Clements of Alexandria, the Theophiluses of Antioch, the Origens, the Tertullians, without calling forth all over the Church an outburst of amazement and disapprobation. 78 COUNCILS. Tertulliaii, in denouncing "heresies," had specified as one of them tlie rejection of the Ai^ocalypse.l On the contrary, not one of the illustrious admii-ers of the Apocalypse, during that period, was heard to complain. Yet many such flourished at the very time of the council, and the fame of their writings filled the whole Christian world. Athanasius was still alive. So were Epiphanius, Basil the Great, Ephrem, all equally attached to the canonicity of that book.2 Jerome and Rufinus were still in the prime of life. 3 Not only, however, was none of these eminent men heard to complain of the decision so contrary to their convictions, but none of the writers opposed to restoring the Apocalypse to the canon ever appealed to the autho- rity of the decision of Laodicea as giving countenance to his views. Besides, when, thirty-three years later, the Council of Carthage passed the decree in which the Apocalypse is specified, no one regarded it as at variance with the decision of the Council of Laodicea, which all the Churches, both of the East and of the West, held in so great respect. It must unquestionably have been that the difference between the two councils was considered merely a matter of discipline regarding the lessons for the Lord's-day, and the order of public worship — points on which one Church was at liberty to differ from another. Lastly, there is another authentic fact which clearly proves that the two councils were regarded as entirely agreed on all matters of faith, and differing only in points of order and discipline, in which orthodox congregations were at jDcrfect liberty to differ from each other. The fact to which we allude is what was done, at the end of the seventh century, at the sixth General Council, held at Constantinople.^ That great assembly, consisting of 227 bishops, solemnly ratified, by its second canon, the acts of the Council of Laodicea, as well as the epistles of Athanasius, Gregory of Nazian- zus, and AmiDhilochius, (which excludes from the list of Holy Scriptures, as is well known, the Apocr}'pha,) and, at the same * Against Marcion, book iv. * They died respectively twelve, fifteen, and thirty-eight years afterwarda. " In the thirty-third year of their age. * Quini-Sextum, in Truilo, 692. CARTHAGE. 79 time, ratified also the acts of the Council of Carthage. This fact appears to us decisive. It was impossible it could ratify the acts of both councils, had it not regarded the act of the Council of Carthage, relating to the books to be read in church, as a measure entirely compatible with the decree of the Council of Laodicea on the same subject. It follows, as we have said, that both decrees were clearly regarded as relating merely to a matter of discipline. Section III. THE COUNCIL OF CARTHAGE. 91. All accounts of the Council of Carthage agree as to its having been held at the beginning of September 397, (" Caesario et Attico consulihus.'') It decreed, however, by its forty-seventh canon, "that the bishops should consult, on the tenor of their de- cisions, the Church beyond sea, as well as their brethren and colleagues, Boniface, or other bishops of the same regions." Now, this Boniface, the forty-third bishop of Eome, did not enter on his ofiice till one-and-twenty years after the date of this decree. Either, therefore, this mention of the Pope must be one of those later interpolations with which the champions of Eome have disfigured nearly all their records of ecclesiastical antiquity, or the whole forty-seventh canon is a forgery, or (what apjDcars still more probable) the forty-nine canons ascribed to the council belonged to it only in part, and, among others, the forty-seventh was enacted by some other African synod, held during the fifth century, and was afterwards inserted among the acts of Carthage by some blundering compiler, who had arranged them aU according to his fancy, without any regard to their dates. This explanation is confirmed by anot-her act of the same council Canon forty-eighth decrees that the members of the council should consult their brethren, Siricius and Simplicianus, bishops, the one of Rome, and the other of Milan. But between this Siricius, to be consulted according to the forty-eighth canon, and Boniface, to be consulted according to the forty-seventh, there intervened no fewer than three popes, the first having died in 398, a year after the holding of the council, and the second having only entered on his oflBce twenty years later, that is, in 418. 80 COUNCILS. 92. This forty-scventli canon, however, whatever may be its real date, presents to us a record of the universal mind of the churches of the period. In fact, it not only gives us the same list of sacred books as tliat now received by all the churches in the world, but enumerates them as far as the twenty-seventh in the order of our modern Bibles. As given in the edition of the Councils by Labbd and Cossart, (vol. ii., p. 1177, 1) the list is as follows : — " Canon 47. The council has decided that, besides the canoni- cal Scriptia'es, nothing shall be read in church under the name of Sacred Scriptures, (Item placuit ut, prseter Scripturas canonicas, nihil in ecclesia legatur sub nomine Divinarum Scripturarum.) ' The canonical Scriptures of the Old Testament are these : " The canonical books of the New Testament are : — The Gospels, four books ; the Acts of the Apostles, one book ; thii-teen epistles of the apostle Paul ; one epistle of the same apostle to the Hebrews ; two epistles of the apostle Peter ; three of the apostle John ; one of the apostle Jude ; one of James ; and one book of the Kevelation of John, (Novi autem Testamenti, Evangelioriun lihri quatuor ; Actuum Apostolorum, liber U7ius ; Pauli apostoli Epistolae, tredecim; ejusdem ad Hebrceos, una; Petri apostoli, duae; Joamiis apostoli, tres; Judce apostoli, una; et Jacobi, una; Apocahjpsis Joannis, liber unus.^") The Council adds : " This shall be communicated to our brother and colleague Boniface, or other bishops of those regions,3 for the ratification of this canon, as we have it transmitted to us by the ' See also p. 106. Ineger Codex Canonum Ecclesise Africanso, Grixtce et Latine, cap. xxxiv. * Kirchhofer (p. 12) and Dr Wordsworth, (Append., p. 33,) both professing to follow the edition of Mansi, (vol. iii., p. 891,) have omitted the Epistle of James But the Greek code of the canons of the African Church (c. 34) says — 'laKco^ou droaToXov ixla. With this agrees also the code in the library of Cambridge University, E.E. iv. 29, (Westcott, Gen. Survey on the Canon, 185.) Kirchhofer also gives the same canon twice in his collection, at p. 13 (according to Bruns) and at p. 503 (according to Gerhard von Maestricht, Brem., 1772). The epistle of James is wanting in the one, and is given in the other. 3 An ancient manusa-ipt, {rctustus codex,) says Labb^, (Consil. ii., p. 1177,) con- tains these words (sic hahct) : — " For the ratification of this canon, let the Church beyond sea be consulted," {In confirmando isto canone, transmarina Ecchsia con- sulatur.) ' CARTHAGE. 81 Fathers that these are the books to he read in church. It shall, however, be allowable to read the sufferings of the martyrs in celebrating their anniversaries." (" Hoc etiam fratri et sacerdoti l nostro Bonifacio vel aliis earum partium episcopis, pro confirmando isto canone, innotescat quia 2 a patribus ista accepimus in ecclesia legenda. "Liceat enim legi passiones martyrum, cum anniversarii dies eorum celebrantur.") 93. We shall have to return to what regards the Apocrypha in this catalogue of Carthage. To dwell on it at present would dis- tract our attention from the canon of the New Testament, to which we wish first to confine our inquiry. We shall merely remark, before passing on, that if this catalogue seems to differ from that of Laodicea about a, fact, — about an expression, — the discordance, so far as regards the New Testament, is only apparent and exter- nal. As to the fact, the council decrees that those ecclesiastical books, the reading of which had been so often authorised by the ancients, but which the Council of Laodicea had thought proper to prohibit, should be read in the course of public worship. As to the expression, the council, in applying to these books the title canonical, employs the word in a more extended signification than that which it had borne during the first four centuries, and uses it in the sense of lihri regulares, books fitted to regulate Christian sentiments and conduct. Such use of the term, says Cosin, was unknown till after the fourth century, and even then was very rare. We shall have occasion, further on, to explain the mind of the council in employing the term, as Augustin, who was present, (we are told,) never ceased to assert an essential difference between divinely-inspired scriptures and canonical books, and as he never appeals on this point to the decisions of the Council of Carthage, as if the question had been there disposed of.^ ^ Other editions, as that of Binius, read — Et consacerdoti nostro. * For quod, as in Greek — r^wsz/xof sarci) oti . . . . xr. r. ' See, further on, what wo have said on the doctrine of Augustin. CHAPTER XIIL SUMMAKY OF ALL THE TESTIMONIES OF THE FOUETH CENTURY. 94. We have, tlien, marked, in reviewing the space we have passed over, that the voice of the universal Church, ever unanimous, from apostolic times, on the first canon, and unanimous, from the date of the Council of Nice, on the second, finally became, in the course of the fourth century, unanimous on the second-first likewise. The temporary and late hesitations of the Churches of the West regarding the Epistle to the Hebrews had already almost entirely disappeared ; and the temporary and late hesitations of the Churches of the East, regarding the Apocalypse, had, from the early part of the fourth century, disappeared likewise. The canon was thus, universally and for ever, recognised in all the Churches of Christendom. CHAPTER XI\^. VULGAE PREJUDICES WHICH A GLANCE AT THESE FACTS OUGHT TO HAVE REMOVED. 95. In presenting a brief summary of these facts, it may be of importance to specify various erroneous notions and groundless fears that have too often been entertained within the Christian Church. The believer must be on his guard against the confused and delusive echoes that proceed from the schools of science, and which, from being repeated from mouth to mouth, finally obtain a usurped importance, and assume the dangerous semblances of scientific reality. Thus originate inveterate prejudices, laxity of principle, and pernicious doubts. When a smattering of science, with a tone of authority, has once difiused, in a Christian com- munity, devious opinions and inaccurate assertious, unstable minds allow themselves to be led away. They come to imagine that such and such a science, in the recesses of her sanctuary, has, lying before her, imquestionable facts, unanswerable discoveries, to overturn such and such statements of Scri^jture. The dupes feel assured that none will be found rash enough fairly to enter the lists with this iiTesistible opponent, but that all who possess even the slightest share of discretion, will keep as far as possible out of her way. The truth, however, is, that, if any one will but firmly meet this dreaded adversary face to face, and closely scrutinise her pretensions, the phantom will vanish. This has been exemplified, during the last two centuries, in the great question of various readings. It was formerly supposed by many that critical science had in her possession irresistible facts to combat Scripture, and completely overturn its authority. Yet, the result has been that earnest inquirers, by turning from superficial to accurate erudition, 84- PREJUDICES. have speedily found that the fallacies of the opponents of sound Cliristianity will not stand the test, and tliat all attempts to shake the fabric of the faith by arguments from various readings, have but served to make it more firm than ever. The same will be the case in regard to the canon. " We do not hesita^x) to maintain, without fearing the charge of presumption," says Dr Thiersch,^ " that, in the whole compass of liistorical inquiry, there is not a department in which a greater mass of prejudices and fallacies have been adopted than in this — to form a system which still exercises a tyranny over minds other- wise highly enlightened." There exist, then, in connexion with the canon, erroneous motives and pernicious prejudices, which it is of importance to specify before we proceed further. The following are some of them : — 96. First, Many persons speak of the list of sacred Scriptures as if it had furnished nothing but uncertainty to Christians for three centuries, and as if the Divine authority of the books of the New Testament had never been distinctly recognised till the end of the fourth. It is, however, on the contrary, an incontestible fact, that the first canon was, at no time, anywhere an object of any uncertainty to the Churches of God, and that all the writings of which it consists, that is, eight-ninths of the New Testament, were, from the moment of their appearance, and through all suc- ceeding ages have been, universally recognised by all the Churches of Christendom. 97. Second, Many persons speak of the antilegomena^ or five short and later epistles, which we call the second canon, and which form only the thii-ty-sixth part of the New Testament, as if they had not been recognised in apostolic times. This, too, is a mistake. They were not, it is true, universaUy recognised at first, (and we shall point out the cause ;) but, from the very first, they were recognised by most churches {toU 7roXkoi<;) and by most {toU irXeiaTois:) ecclesiastical writers. 98. Third, People also speak of the second-first canon as if the two books of which it consists had not been universally received t * In Lis interesting " Essay on the Canon." " Versuch zur Vorstellung der historiscben Standpuukte fiir die Kiitik der neu-teatamentliclien Scloriften." HESITATION AS TO SECOND CANON. 85 as canonical till a very late period, whereas, on the contrary, they were at first universally received both in the East and in the West ; and it was only at a later period, the commencement of the third century, and on grounds of pure internal criticism, (never in reference to external evidence,) that one of these books, always regarded in the East as of Divine authority, was, for a time, questioned in the West ; and the other, always viewed as of Divine authority in the West, was, for a time, questioned in the East. 99. Fourth, Many persons speak of this hesitation of a small number of churches, in reference to the antilegomena, as having been prolonged to an advanced period of the fourth century. This also is a mistake. It may be seen from all tl^e catalogues of the fourth century that the discordance in question ceased in the churches as soon as they met by representatives in a general council. 100. Fifth, Many profess to regard the hesitation of a portion of the primitive churches on the second canon as a fact painful to Christian piety. This is a very gross mistake. We will shew that, on the contrary, the fact, far from tending to disturb our faith, is fitted to strengthen it, as it clearly proves, on the one hand, the firmness, the holy jealousy, and unceasing vigilance of the primitive Christians in reference to the canon, and, on the other, the perfect liberty with which they examined its claims, sifted its peculiarities, and, in certain cases, contested its authority. All these circumstances prove most forcibly that if, notwithstanding this constant jealousy of the primitive churches, and notwithstand- ing the entire liberty they exercised on this head, they shewed themselves always so unanimous in receiving the twenty books that form the first canon — it was not blindly, it was not without examination, it was not in obedience to human authorities, that they did so, but that, on the contrary, it was solely because they had before them solid, clear, and irresistibly- convincing evidence, which compelled them to adopt the general decision. This is the only explanation that can account for so full, prompt, and universal an assent on the part of men so vigilant, so jealous, and so free. Thus the temporary existence of these very doubts on the part of a minority of the primitive churches contributes in two waya 86 TREJUDICES. to the confirmation of our belief. On the one hand, their exist- ence proves to us that, in everywhere receiving the first twenty books of the New Testament, the churches. had done so be- cause they could not discover the slightest ground for hesitation, and, on the other, the universal disappearance of those same doubts on the subject, demonstrates in like manner that the churches were constrained by ii-resistible evidence when at length they universally received the second canon with the same unwaver- ing conviction with which they had from the beginning received the first. 101. Sixth, Many, also, for the purpose of weakening the authority of the Scriptures, and exalting tradition, have often attempted to shew that the Church, during her earliest and brightest period, proceeded without the written word, and lived solely on the spoken word and tradition. This, too, is a fallacy. No congregation in the primitive Church ever assembled without the reading of the oracles of the Old Testament, which formed the first and principal part of the service. It was always held that the Holy Scriptures are " able to make the man of God per- fect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works, and wise unto salvation, through faith which is in Christ Jesus." After the example of Jesus and His apostles, the Church was always nourished with the written word, and by it was constantly strengthened in hope and faith. Those Scriptures never ceased to be a lamp unto the believer's feet. " Search them," said Jesus, " for they testify of me.'' lO'I. Seventh, ]\Iany, finally, speak of the canon as if the de- finitive fixing of it had been the work of councils, the act of the Church uttering her voice by decrees. This, too, is a fallacy, and entirely at variance with the facts of the case. It is of importance to establish the truth on this point here, though we propose to revert to it elsewhere, when we treat of the most essential grounds of our belief in the canon of Scripture. No human authority interposed in this matter; the determina- tion of it was simply and purely the oflFspring of conscience, inquiry, and liberty. The Churches of God, enlightened by mutual testimony, settled the canon from conviction, under the secret and omnipotent guidance which will ever watch over the NOT FIXED BY HUMAN AUTHOEITY. 87 written word. The first canon was universally determined by the Churches of Christ ere any council whatever was held ; and the councils, when they began to be convoked, discussed every other point but the fixing of the canon. Vie shall afterwards demon- strate with greater precision that, for fourteen centuries, no general council ever jDretended to fix the canon by a decree, as we have already shewn that even the two provincial councils of Laodicea and Carthage, too frequently appealed to as having established the canon by enactments, cannot be justly regarded as having come to an authoritative decision on the question that now occupies our attention. The reader may be here referred to the works of Lardner, who proves, by long quotations from the Pathers, that the canon of the New Testament was never settled authoritatively. 1 Basnage may be consulted, who devotes three chapters to the same thesis in his History of the Church. 2 Bead Le Clerc, who, in his Ecclesiastical History, under the years 29 and 100, says, " There was no occasion for a council of grammarians to declare authoritatively which are the genuine works of Cicero or of Virgil. In like man- ner, the authenticity of the Gospels was established and maintained without any decree of the rulers of the Church. The same re- mark applies to the apostolic epistles. They owe all their autho- rity, not to the decision of any ecclesiastical assembly, but to the concurrent testimony of all Christians, and to the tenor of their contents." Augustin said, thirteen centuries before Le Clerc — " We know which are the writings of the apostles in the same way as we know which are the Amtiags of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Varro, and others ; and as we know which are the writings of other ecclesias- tical authors — from the testimony of their contemporaries, and of persons who lived in the ages that successively followed." Let it suflfice here to say, that the ancient Fathers, in forming their decisions on the canon, appealed solely to the free and un- varying testimony of the chm'ches ; while, at the same time, they added a careful scrutiny of the books they were invited to receive. ^ Supplement, p. 50-52, Second Part, vol. i. ; vol. vi., pp. 325, 381 ; vol. ii., pp. 325, 49C, 529, 576 ; vol. viii., pp. 102, 225, 268; vol. x., pp. 193, 207, 208. ^ Book viii., chaps, v., vi., and vii. 88 PREJUDICES. In giving in their catalogue, they never pretend to publish them either as results of their own discoveries, or of the decisions of any authority whatever. They record the mind of preceding ages — the unbiased testimony of the primitive Christians — the evidence they had received from their predecessors by continuous transmission from the days of the apostles. Origen, who was born 142 years before the Council of Nice, does not, in putting forth his catalogue of the canonical Scrip- tures, (jojv ivSiaO'qKwv ypa(f)(il)v,) confirm it by a reference to the decisions of any council, but merely to the testimony of the early Christians, (ol dp^alot dvBpe<;,) and to iminterrupted historical evidence, (0)9 iv irapahoaet fiadcov.) His words have been pre- served to us by Eusebius, who adds, in quoting his testimony as to the Gospels : " Origen follows tradition and the ecclesiastical canon ; l and he testifies that only four Gospels have been unani- mously received by all the churches under heaven." 2 Eusebius himself, in expressing his mind on the books of the New Testament, and on their division into books universally received and books controverted, makes no reference to any authority or any council, but presents his catalogue as resting on ecclesiastical tradition, {tcara rrjv eKKXTja-iacrTiKrjv irapdBoatv.) 3 Athanasius, likewise, who was born in the year 296, puts forth his catalogue, identical with ours, as grounded on " testimony com- municated to the Fathers by those who had been eye-witnesses and ministers of the word from the beginning." ^ But he does not refer to any council, and merely enumerates the books that were recognised as forming the canon, handed down and held as of Divine authority. ^ Not one author, either of the fourth, or fifth, or sixth century, appeals, on the subject of the canon, to the decisions of any council. Thus, when Cyril, patriarch of Jerusalem, who was bom (it is believed) twenty years after Athanasius, gives us his cata- ^ Hist. Eccl., vi. 25 — Ton h.xXria/aeTr/.ov ^v'ka.TTUv xafd^a. ' "a Kui (iliVtt, dvavTi^lrird iv r^ u'tto tov ov^athv r/ixXriala, toZ QiOU. * Hist. Eccl., iii. 25 — 0/ ruvTag rra^ccdoing, * Festive Epistle, xxxix. — Ka^ws 'jra^sdoffav roT; rrar^uaiv, * Tci xayoyi^6f/,nia xai rra^udoCetra jriariufnTu n OiTa thai /3//3x/a. CANON NOT DEPENDENT ON COUNCILS. 89 logue of inspired books,! be refers to no council, and only appeals to " the apostles, and the ancient bishops who presided over the churches, and transmitted to us those books as inspired." 2 Likewise, when Augustin, about the end of the same century, or rather the beginning of the fifth, wrote an answer to certain persons who had inquired of him " which books were truly canonical," he simply referred to the testimony of the various churches of Christendom, and not to any council whatever. 3 Likewise, when Eufinus, a presbyter of Aquileia, about the year 340, gives his catalogue, (also identical with ours,) he simply professes to present "the tradition of their ancestors, who had transmitted these books to the churches of Christ, as divinely inspired," and he declares that he gives it just as he had copied it from the records of the Fathers. ■* Lastly, when Cassiodorus, a Eoman consid in the sixth century, gives us three catalogues of the books of the New Testament, (one from Jerome, another from Aug-ustin, and another from an ancient version,) he, too, makes no reference to any decree or to any council. 5 Let it, then, be no longer said that the authority of councils fixed the canons of Scripture. It was, indeed, fixed ; but the authority of councils had nothing to do with it. It was the will of God that Christians individually, and Christian congregations, enlightened by the testimony of successive generations of believers, should form their opinions on the subject of the canon with entire liberty of judgment, that the authenticity of the sacred books might be rendered more manifest. We shall afterwards examine this important fact under another point of view. But the evidence here given will suffice to shew how erroneous and how entirely at variance with facts it would be to persist in seeking for the origin or settlement of the canon in any ecclesiastical decree. * a'l diO'TVivdroi y^a^ai, « Catech., iv., 33. * De Doctrina, Christiana, lib. ii., vol. iil, Part i., p. 47. Edit. Paris, 18S6. (Ho began this book in 397, and finished it in 407.) See also Lardner, vol. x., p. 207- * In Symb. Apost., p. 26 — " Quga secundum majorum traditionem per ipsuna Spiritum Sanctum inspirita creduntur et ecclesiis Christi tradita, competens videatur in hoc loco evident! numero sicut ex Patrum monumentis accessimus designare." * Lardner, vol. xi., p. 303. — Cassiod, De Institutione Divinar. Litterar., cap. xi. ^ CHAPTER XV. INFERENCE FROM ALL THE TESTIMONIES OF THE FIRST FOUR CENTURIES. ]0.3. Thkee cardinal facts and three important questions result from this lengthened review, and the combined testimonies of these fourteen catalogues, the bequest of four centuries, and of which the first was put fortli at the death of John, about the end of the first century ; the second at the death of Irenacus and of Clement of Alexandria, about the end of the second century ; the next at the approach of the fall of Roman paganism, about the end of the third century ; and the eleven others, during the fourth, between the time of Eusebius and the death of Gregoiy of Nazian- zus, or the Council of Carthage. lO^-. In the first place, from the first fact — the constant and universal unanimity of the Churches in maintaining the twenty books of the first canon, this striking fact confirmed from cen- tury to century, and denied by none — arises the first question : On what is this constant, free, marvellous, universal unanimity gi-Qunded ? How was it produced ? The answer to this question will form the subject of our Second Book. It will confirm our reliance in the full authenticity of the first canon ; it will increase our respect for the Holy Scriptures, and dispose us to submit more implicitly to their guidance. 105. Along with this first fact, another presents itself, which is, that, besides the twenty books of the first canon, the two epistles which form the second-first canon shared, from their first appear- ance till the middle of the thii'd century, the same universal re- cognition as the homolofjoiimena. This second fact gives rise to INFEEENCES. 91 this second question : Whence orio-inated the objections to these two books after that period? What were the nature and extent of these objections, and how was the authenticity of the second- first canon established after this subsequent and temporary oppo- sition ? The answer to this second question will be the subject of our Third Book. 106. Lastly, from the same testimonies results a third fact of no less importance, which is, that the five brief epistles, forming the second canon, and amounting to only a thirty-sixth of the New Testament, though received by most churches, were not, however, received by all, and were universally recognised as of Divine authority only -from the date of the Council of Nice, twenty- five years after the close of the third century. Hence arises the third and last question : How is it possible that the antilegomena, if they are authentic, should not have been received from the period of the death of the apostles ? How did they come to be received ultimately, and how does it happen that the partial oppo- sition they experienced does not invalidate their authenticity, and even detract from the perfect certainty attributed to the other books of the canon 1 The answer to the various aspects of this question will form the subject of our Fourth Book. Afterwards, as we have said, we shall, in Part Second, enter on a field totally difierent, and present to our readers a novel class of proofs, in our estimation, still more cogent, in support of the canon. We now pass on to Book Second. BOOK IL OF THE FIEST CANON— HISTOEICAL BASIS OF ITS AUTHENTICITY. 107. The perfect authenticity of the first canon is founded on such an assemblage of proofs that the literary history of ancient times cannot furnish a similar instance of complete and irresistible evidence. Accordingly, it was at first our intention to dispense with the formal demonstration of so manifest a truth. The homologoumena, we felt, are impregnable in point of testimony ; and the only object we proposed to ourselves in the present work was to establish on a solid basis the authenticity of the antilego- mena. Our labours are intended for the benefit of such earnest believers as, notwithstanding their faith in Divine revelation, are troubled with objections erroneously supj)osed to be derived from science, and, in consequence, require to have their views settled by the testimony of science itself more accurately consulted. We afterwards became convinced that a glance at the irresistible evi- dence in favour of the first canon would aid inquirers in per- ceiving the authenticity of the antilegomena also, and serve to strengthen our faith in the entire canon. 108. Our readers have already seen, in Book First, and will be pleased to keep in mind, in perusing Book Second, that nearly all 04< TUE FIRST CANON. the arguments in support of the first canon, so far as regards the first two centuries of the Church, equally apj^ly to the two books of the second-first canon ; that Eusebius himself had, accordingly, classed them among the homologoumena. We shall begin with the proof so clearly flowing from the primi- tive, constant, and universal unanimity of all the Churches, in re- gard to these twenty-two books. CHAPTEEI. FIEST GEE AT HISTOEICAL FACT — TEE COMPLETE AND UNVAEYING UNANIMITY OF THE CHUECHES. 109. The simple review, contained in Book First, of all the au- thentic catalogues bequeathed to science by the early ages of the Church, must vividly strike every attentive inquirer. Fourteen catalogues, at least, have been furnished us by the three centuries immediately succeeding the death of the apostles. We say at least, because to these might be added two others, known as the catalogue of Amphilochius and the Muratori docu- meut.l All these, taken together, constitute the concurrent testi- mony of the most learned and the most venerable men both of the East and of the West. This testimony, too, is not, on their part, a mere expression of individual conviction, but a public utterance of the mind of the Christian community. It is a unanimous re- cognition of a great historical fact, a fact uncontested and uncon- testable— the witness of all the Churches in the world regarding the first canon. Such, we say, is the voice of all preceding ages, the voice of the whole Christian people, from the days of the apostles — a voice invariably precise, clear, and unhesitating. We have listened to all the traditions of ancient times to ascertain whether even one discordant sound might reach us from within the compass of the ancient Church, and we have been able to per- ceive none. We have looked across the expanse of ages to descry aught that might warrant even the slightest doubt, and the eye has not discovered, from the one extremity of the vast horizon to the other, even the most minute speck of contradiction, much less any " cloud, even of the size of a man's hand." ^ See our Propositions, 31, 61, 78, S2, and 191-196. 96 THE riVENTY-TWO BOOKS. And what sort of witnesses to attest to us the mind of their age were an Origen, a Eusebius, an Athanasius, a Cyril, a Gregory of Nazianzus, a Jerome, an Epiphanius, an Augustin ? Did ever witnesses exist that had better means of information, were more competent to judge, more worthy of credence ? They occupied the most elevated positions ; they were spread over all parts of the known world, and at great distances from each other. Some of them were on the banks of the Euphrates or of the Nile, or of the Save or the Ehone ; others were on the coasts of the African Syrtis, or on those of the Euxine. WTio more worthy of credence ? They had nearly all suffered for the gospel ; nearly all had hearts so imbued with so fervent a love for the Holy Scriptures, that they had shewn themselves willing to die in their defence. All of them were so sincere and so fearless in their inquiries as to announce without reserve all they knew. They spontaneously inform us that, besides the homologoumena, there are five brief epistles of a later date than the rest, which, though received by most people, were doubted by some ; while, as to the other twenty books, they tell us that no hesitation regarding any of them had ever been heard of in any church in the world. Were there ever witnesses more discern- ing or better acquainted with the facts of the case ? They were all men of learning ; all profoundly versed in the Scriptures ; all had travelled for the interests of the Word of God, both in the East and in the West. They had visited Rome and Alexandria, Constan- tinople, and Jerusalem ; they had met in the councils ; and they all possessed so extensive and accurate an acquaintance with Christian antiquity that, in this respect, modem scholars are but children in comparison What a witness, for instance, at the commencement of the fourth century, or end of the third, was a Eusebius, who, in order to draw up, in 324;, his history of the origin and progress of Christianity, made himself master of the whole field of ancient literature ; ransacked the libraries collected at Caesarea by Pam- philus, and at Alexandria by Alexander ; and read all the writings, now lost, of Aristion, Quadratus, Aristides, Hegesippus, Papias, Tatian, and Melito, of which modem scholars hardly know any- thing except through Origen. What a witness, likewise, a hundred years before Eusebius, was an Origen, " he of brazen entrails," as he has been called, who, from the end of the second century, de- OVERWHELMING TESTIJIONY. 97 voted all the energies of his genius to scriptural researches, and who had been himself a disciple of Clement of Alexandria, whose birth was only forty years later than the death of the apostle John. 110. From this imposing evidence may be drawn the following four conclusions : — 1st. Where so large a number of persons, so well informed, so sincere, and so unshackled, tell us from aU parts of the world, that, after having carefully studied the history of the churches of God, from the days of the apostles, they were not able to dis- cover among Christian communities, till the beginning of the third century, the slightest difference of opinion regarding the authority of all the books of the first canon ; we must admit that all antiquity does not present to us a single historical fact so completely established as this unvarying unanimity of the churches. 2d. This unanimity is so complete as to exclude the very possibility that a single book of the homologoumena would have obtained such recognition had it not been originally received during the lives of the apostles, and under their sanction. 3d. It would, in like manner, have been absolutely impossible, after the death of the apostles, for so many thousand churches, spread over all the earth, to have immediately consented to receive into their canon any additional book, even had that book been previously received by a large portion of the churches on the best evidence of its apostolic authenticity, as was afterwards the case with the antilegomena. Such a book could never have obtained reception in so many thousand churches in Egjrpt, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Greece, Spain, Africa, Italy, and Gaid, without encountering for a long time scruples, opposition, and reservations, the sound of which would have reached the ears of such men as Origen, Cyril, Athanasius, and Eusebius. 4th. If such a posthumous reception into all the churches on earth has been accomplished in regard to the antilegomena, so as to silence all opposition, this fact, in the highest degree improbable till it actually took place, can only be humanly accounted for by the overflowing evidence that these books, though late in being universally received, were found to possess in their favour. 111. But if, shortly after the death of the apostles, an attempt 98 THE TWENTY-TWO BOOKS. liad been inatle to interpolate the primitive canon of twenty-two books communicated to all contemporaneous cliurclies by the apostles themselves, and to effect the posthumous insertion of some additional book ; it is impossible to admit that such addi- tional book, though recognised by most of the churches, could have been at once unanimously received to the ends of the earth. The very supposition is such as no man in his senses could enter- tain. It would, if possible, be still more absurd to imagine that such a book could, after the death of the apostles, have obtained universal admission into the canon, even in churches the most independent of each other, without resistance, without discussion, without objection, and without delay ; and all this in such a manner as to leave no trace to indicate that any resistance or objecti-on had ever been made. To fancy that in such a manner an additional book could have found admission into the list of apostolic writings, and even have the same rank assigned it, would be pushing oiu' hypothesis beyond all the limits of possi- bility. Yet it is necessary to admit all this, if the primitive recognition of the twenty-two homologoumena did not take place before the decease of the apostles, and during their active ministiy. 112. It is thus established by irresistible historic evidence that not one of the homolofjoumcna was received into the canon after the death of the apostles. CHAPTER II. THE AUTHENTICITY OF THE TWENTY-TWO HOMOLOGOUMENA OP THE NEW TESTAMENT IS ESTABLISHED BY INCOMPAEABLY STRONGER EVIDENCE THAN WHAT EXISTS IN FAVOUR OF THE AUTHENTICITY OF ANY OTHER BOOK OF ANTIQUITY WHATEVER. 113. With this majestic unanimity of evidence before us we can fearlessly maintain that in the whole comj)ass of ancient literature there is not a book to be at all compared to our first canon, as to the complete demonstration of its authenticity. History does not present a similar instance of literary evidence. Should any doubt the accuracy of this assertion, let him mention a single book in favour of the authenticity of which a tenth part of the same proof can be produced. "The testimony to its genuineness," says Michaelis, " is infinitely superior, and that in numerous respects, to anything that ancient literature could pre- sent to us in favour even of the most abundantly-attested books." The immense inequality, in such comparison, will appear from ten or eleven peculiarities. 114. Even the most eminent profane works were addressed merely to individuals, by authors unconnected with each other ; and most frequently they were not addressed to any person at all. The writings of the New Testament, on the contrary, were addressed by the apostles to the churches of their time ; that is, by eight public personages to large associations of individuals by whom they were known, and whom they knew, spread over the earth, permanently settled, unrestrained, connected with the apostles, and with each other, by the closest relations, and the most sacred ties. 100 Till-: TWENTY-TWO BOOKS This is tlic first powerful guarantee of authenticity exclusively belon.t;ing to the writings of the New Testament. 115. Even the most authentic and the most distinguished works of antiquity, how eagerly soever they may have been MX'lcomcd by contemporary readers, never awakened among them anything at all to be compared to the intensity of interest with which the primitive Christians received the Scriptures. To the readers of heathen works it was of no great importance to be preserved from error respecting the genuineness of the books, and the identity of the author. Their endeavours to ascertain the real authorship would naturally correspond to the amount of the interest at stake. They risked but little in falling into a mistake in regard to Tacitus, Pliny, Plutarch, or Cicero. All their efforts to find out the real truth in the matter would be limited. But the case was very different with the primitive Christians to whom were communicated, in the name of the apostles, the books in which these holy men had spoken under the impulse of the Holy Spirit. It was a vital question whether or not any particular book was written by any of the apostles or prophets on whom the Church of the living God is built as its foundation, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone. 1 For these living oracles every believer was ready to endure the extreme of tor- ture. His Christianity, his faith, his salvation, were involved in the trial. This is the second powerful guarantee belonging exclusively to the Sacred Scriptures. IIG. When the writings of heathen antiquity made their ap- pearance, their contemporaneous readers, for the most part, were neither eye-witnesses nor competent judges of the facts those works report. Our sacred books, on the contrary, appeal to facts which the whole primitive Church and every individual believer could verify by the evidence of the senses. Living witnesses, actors in the work, ministers known for twenty years to all contemporary Christendom, miracles performed in their own days, congregations who had been present when they were performed, prophecies, gifts of tongues, cures that continued to bo wrought during the ^ Eph. ii. 2-20. COMPARED ^YITH THE CLASSICS. 101 ft lives of the apostles,! and during the succeeding generation, that is, till the commencement of the second century. This is the third guarantee, rendering all mistake in the pri- mitive churches on the subject of the canon a matter of impossi- bility. 117. The productions of ancient literature which have come down to our times were put forth without the aid of any associa- tion of men specially intrusted with the task of verifying their origin and watching over their transmission. The books of the New Testament had for these purposes the churches and their bishops, on the one hand, and, on the other, the college of apostles, whose long career extended to the end of the first century. Paul alone had disseminated the gospel from Arabia to Jerusalem, from Jerusalem to Illyria, and beyond Illyria to Italy, and, perhaps, further west,2 encumbered as he was daily with the care of all the churches.3 Peter was for thirty years at the head of the evan- gelisation of the circumcised, as Paul was in respect to the cir- cumcised,* and John, till the commencement of the second century, had the superintendence of the churches of Asia. This is the fourth guarantee of authenticity, entirely wanting in favour of the most incontestable writings of heathen antiquity. 118. The most celebrated Avorks of the ancient world were, no doubt, perused by contemporaries with eagerness ; but their popu- larity was subsequently transferred to other productions no less valued, and they were consigned to neglect for ages. But how different was the case with the Holy Scriptures of the New Tes- tament ! Believers continued to refer to them unceasingly, copied them with their own hands, earnestly and constantly studied them ; the most barbarous tribes learned to read only in order to become minutely acquainted with their contents ; the followers of Christ meditated on them day and night ^ from generation to generation, for, since the days of David, such was ever the practice of " the righteous," who imceasingly made the Scriptures the light, the guide, and the consolation of their lives. This forms a fifth guarantee of authenticity, belonging exclu- sively to the sacred canon. 1 See Gal. iii. 2; Acts xix. 2; 1 Cor. xiv. 27. * Rom. xv. 19, 24. 3 2 Cor. xi. 28. * Gal. ii. 8, 9. « Ps. i. 1-3. 1 02 THE TWENTY-TWO LOOKS 119. The writings even of the most eminent of the ancients might in a brief space of time disappear and be lost, without ex- citing great emotion on the part of any one, and, in this manner, in fact, have perished a great number of the finest works of antiquity, even of such as were at first preserved with the greatest care : the Hortensius of Cicero, nearly the whole of Varro, the works even of ]\Ienander, which almost everybody knew by heart, those of Ennius and of Pacuvius, three-fourths of Livy, the great history of Sallust, the greatest part of Tacitus, the books of Pliny the Elder on the war in Germany, the last part of the Fasti of Ovid, sixty books of the Roman History of Dio Cassius, twenty- five books of the Bibliotheca of Diodorus Siculus, and nearly the whole of Polybius. Greatly as these works were valued by an- tiquity, they have been lost. Such, however, could not have been the case with our sacred books, for, besides the eagerness of every Christian to possess a copy of them, they were preserved in innumerable places of worship in all parts of the world, and all true ministers of Jesus Christ, as history testifies, were at all times ready to surrender their lives rather than be deprived of the Scriptures. This forms the sixth guarantee of authenticity, exclusively be- longing to the canonical Scriptures. 120. In regard to most even of the masterjjieces of antiquity they were not translated into various languages tiU many ages after their first appearance. The books of the New Testament, on the contrary, were, at the beginning of the second, and even before the close of the first, translated into all the principal lan- guages of the East. They were translated first into Syriac, then into Arabic, Coptic, Sahidic, Armenian, Persian, and afterwards into Ethiopian. In the West, they were translated first into Latin, afterwards into Gothic, Sclavonic, Celtic, and Anglo-Saxon. We have already spoken of the Peshito and its high antiquity. A Latin version was made during the earliest days of the Church. It is believed that the Vetus Itala, in common use till the time of Jerome, was completed before the end of the first century, and we find Tertullian already quoting it towards the end of the second. Such, then, is a seventh guarantee of authenticity, exclusively belonging to the canonical Scriptures. RECOGNISED BY THEIR ASSAILANTS, 103 121, The productions of ancient literature did not give rise, like the books of the New Testament, to controversies ahnost con- temporaneous, the sound of which, reaching our own times, serve indirectly, but, for that very reason more forcibly, to establish their authenticity. As to the books of the New Testament, on the contrary, the very attacks against them serve to prove the anterior existence of the canon, the apostolicity of its authors, and its re- ception by the primitive Christians, so that the earliest unbelievers and the earliest heretics attest with irresistible force, by their very hostility, the apostolic authenticity of our sacred books. In com- bating the doctrines of the Scriptures, these enemies recognise the respective writers, and unconsciously and unintentionally bear witness to future ages that these books were, previously to their attacks, already revered by the whole Christian Church as the code of its faith. They contest their teaching, but not their authenticity. They reject them as erroneous, but not as spurious. They load them with odious abuse, but, at the same time, admit them to be written by the apostles whose names they bear. We shall return to this subject more in detail; but it was necessary to m^ake brief reference to it at this stage, as the inci- dental testimony of enemies is, perhaps, of more weight than that of all the orthodox Fathers. Such is an eighth guarantee of authenticity, to which there exists nothing equivalent in favour of any other production of literary antiquity, 122. Even the most distinguished vsritings of the ancients are comparatively little quoted by the authors of succeeding ages. With our Holy Scriptures the case is quite otherwise. Quoted, commented on, interpreted, employed to furnish texts of sermons, by an uninterrupted series of ecclesiastical writers, they might, had they been lost, have been, as Lardner remarks, entirely recon- structed from the quotations contained in the writings of early Christian authors. The works of the whole series of Fathers would almost seem intended to furnish materials for this very purpose. We have already spoken of the immense labours of Origen on the whole of the Scriptures. IrensEus, before him, daring the second century, in Gaul, copiously quoted from every one of the homologoumena. Clement of Alexandria, during the 104 THE TWENTY-TWO BOOKS same period, quoted them iii Egypt. As for TertuUian, who was bom about the middle of the second century, he so copiously quoted by name all the books of the first canon, and of the second- first, in Africa, that, according to the remark of Lardner, were we to collect all the passages of the New Testament quoted in his writings, their amount would be greater than all the quotations made from Cicero during two thousand years by all writers that are kno\\Ti to exist. Such is the ninth special guarantee of the authenticity of the New Testament. 1 23. There is a tenth peculiarity which of itself would constitute an immense distinction between the writings of the New Testament and all the other literary productions of antiquity. The latter were perused, however, extensively by individuals detached from each other, and the reading of them thus furnished no collective guaran- tee for their authenticity. The Holy Scriptures, on the contrary, were, from the days of the apostles, read by permanent associations established for the purpose, — read uninterruptedly from week to week and from day to day — read in every countiy then known — read so repeatedly that often individual believers knew them all by heart — read invariably, in a word, during worship, from the days of the apostles, as tliey are still read at the present day, and as they will continue to bo read in every living church till the day that Jesus Christ shall appear from the heavens. This tenth guarantee, more strong, perhaps, than all the rest, will again require our attention more in detail. ] 24. Lastly, there is a further circumstance of emphatic signi- ficance in'faVour of the New Testament, which does not apjDly to the docimients of classic antiquity. In connexion with these, there existed no continuous order of .earnest guardians, jealously occupied in verifying their authenticity, and watching, with a holy severity, in order to exclude all books that were doubtful, and give their sanction to no one till its authenticity was fully established. In regard to the Scriptures, on the contrary, we can trace from the days of the apostles the uninterrupted exist- ence of such a body of examiners and guardians. A close attention to the history of the churches will shew that, from the commencement, they were in possession of twenty-two CAREFULLY GUARDEEK 105 books, received during the lives of the apostles, and that not the slightest opposition to any of these in any church whatever was heard of during two centuries ; that, however, during the same period, five short letters, addressed to certain individuals or certain churches, were not received unanimously, though recognised by the majority, (TrXeto-roi?,) but were, in certain parts of the world, regarded, for a time, as doubtful. This reserve, freely maintained in reference to a very small portion of the canon, (the thirty-sixth,) gives additional force to the unanimous assent accorded to all the rest. " From the close of the first century," says Dr Tiersch,! in his useful work on the canon, " the churches henceforth left to them- selves, and more than ever jealous of the sacred deposit, shewed themselves watchful to prevent innovations, and actuated by a thoroughly conservative spirit, and determined to regard the col- lection of genuine scriptures as for ever closed, till they obtained the fullest evidence that such and such a late epistle, which had long been held as apostolic by a great number of churches, was really of Divine authority." Still they did not venture to issue a decision of their own regarding its authenticity, and admit it into the canon, notwithstanding the mind of the majority in its favour, but confined themselves to declaring, that not having received it at their foundation, they waited, in perfect liberty, for fuller proofs on the subject. It was thus that, on the one hand, their admirable firmness in regard to the first canon, and, on the other, their holy vigilance and increasing jealousy in reference to the second, furnish us with one and the same testimony, and equally serve to confirm our belief. Had their not been in some churches more or less hesitation in regard to the late epistles, there might have been ground for suspecting that there existed on their part too much facility and indifference in receiving and transmitting the canon. But the difficulty felt, for two centuries, by a portion of the churches regarding these five epistles, — that holy slowness to receive them, joined to their dread of rejecting them, — that prudent and yet re- spectful disposition which for a time neither ventured to condemn nor to sanction them, — that long and scrupulous hesitation, suffi- 1 Chap. iv. — Versuch zur Wiederherstellunr/ des hist. Standpunlcts fiir die Kritih der N. T. Schrlften. 1845. lOG THE TWENTY-TWO BOOKS. ciently indicates the wisdom with which they acted, the liberty with which they examined, and the mature deliberation that pre- ceded their decision. These striking facts, then, all taken together, bestow new force on the unshaken and unanimous testimony to the first canon. 1 2-5. What has already been said might be sufficient for com- pletely establishing our thesis, and justifying us in fearlessly asserting that this unanimity of all the churches in the world, combined with all the incomparable circumstances accompanying it, gives the first canon, or rather the twenty-two homologoumena, a certainty unequalled by any in the whole compass of ancient literature. Complete, however, as the evidence here produced may already be, it is of importance to exhibit it in a still stronger light, by pointing out the causes of so marvellous an agreement. To what human circumstances is this great historical phenomenon to be attributed ? This is the question we are going to examine in the following pages ; and the inquiry will open up new sources of evidence to confirm the authenticity of our canon. We shall first examine, in the following chapter, three other historical facts, which, while they illustrate the character of the primitive Church, exj^lain to us how the astonishing unanimity of the people of God all over the world, in reference to the firs'c canon, came to be so promptly established. CHAPTER III. THEEE CAUSES, ESPECIALLY, PRODUCED THIS PEOVIDENTIAL UNANIMITY. Section. I. THE LONG CAEEEE OF THE APOSTLES. 126. The first leading fact which pre-eminently affected the cha- racter and condition of the primitive Church, and which was neces- sary to produce throughout the whole Christian community the unanimity to which we refer, was the great length of the career of the apostles, notwithstanding the unceasing toils of their lives, and the numberless perils ■ of their ministry. This fact appears stiU more remarkable when we consider their position in the world, " as sheep among wolves." "Alway delivered unto death for Jesus' sake," as they themselves tell us ; " persecuted, but not forsaken, cast down, but not destroyed," "accounted as sheep for the slaughter," they were nearly all, by the providence of God, spared for a mmistry of thirty, fifty, and sixty years. 127. From the earliest ages of the world, God, we perceive, whenever He intended to effect any great and enduring revival, always took care to bestow a long career on the individuals ap- pointed to accomplish it, and thus granted to them the necessary time to consummate and consolidate the work. After driving man from Paradise, He granted to each of the early patriarchs a life of nearly nine hundred years, to enable them to maintain among their children's children, to the twentieth generation, the knowledge of the fall and of the promise. The son of Enoch, who had been for two centuries and a half a con- 1 08 CAUSES OF UNANIMTY. temporary of Adam, ^Yas likewise, for nearly six centuries, a contemjjorary of Noah, appointed to be to a new world " the preacher of that righteousness which is by faith." When the earth had been purified by the deluge, God thought proper to spare Noah for three centuries and a half more to instruct the new generations that sprung from his loins ; and preserved Shem, Noah's second son for seventy-five years, to the call of Abraham, the father of believers. At a later period, when God brought His people out of Egypt, to give them their institutions, laws, and promises of grace, He added forty years to the venerable age of ]\Ioses, and likewise twenty-four years to that of Jo.shua, the son of Nun, that these two great men might have full time — the one in the desert, and the other in Canaan — to train Israel to the new discipline of the written Word. When, at the end of the rule of the Judges, He resolved, as a preparation for the line of the prophets, to effect that revival in which " all the house of Israel lamented after the Lord," He placed at the head of the nation, for fifty years, the prophet Samuel. When He introduced the regal order, and the temple worship. He gave Israel two pro- phet-kings, each of whom reigned forty years. When, finally. He determined to rally His people round His Word of Life in their Babylonish captivity. He preserved to them Daniel for seventy years. If we come down to more recent times, we shall jjerceive that, in like manner, at the holy Reformation of His Church through the gospel, God gave to the churches of Germany, on the one hand, and to those of Geneva and France, on the other, thirty years of the ministry of Luther, thirty years of that of Cal- vin, thirty-three of that of Farel, and forty-six of that of Bcza. 128. Now, if such an arrangement was so often required to ac- complish in the Church great changes decreed from on high, it was especially required in the first century when God was to constitute the Christian peojile among the Jews and among the Gentiles, intrusting to believers for all succeeding ages the oracles of the New Testament, and impressing on the whole Christian community, in the vast renovation that was taking place, a powerful and ma- jestic unity. It was necessary that the apostles, appointed to this great work, should be granted a long life for the purpose of watching, continuously and in concert, under the guidance of the LONG CAKEEE OF APOSTLES. 109 Holy Spirit, over the progress of the churches, the arrangements of their worship, and, above all, the iniiversal reception of the Holy Scriptures. It was necessary that the churches, duly exer- cised in the life of faith previously to the decease of the apostles, should be left, till Christ's second coming, to the sole direction of the Holy Spirit and the written word. And this is what took place. 129. With the single exception of the brother of John, James the Greater, (who suffered martyrdom by order of Herod Agrippa only ten years after the ascension of our Saviour,) all the apostles exercised a very long ministry in the Church. James the Less, the brother of our Lord, and the first of the three pillars of the primitive Church, (Gal. i. 18,) remained eight and twenty years at the head of the churches of the circumcision, and died only in the year 62 ; and yet all the other apostles sur- vived him, some of them even thirty and some forty years. Esteemed by the Jews, and styled by them " the Just," he was so revered that the Talmud mentions certain miracles "wrought by James, the disciple of Jesus the carpenter ; " and Josephus, relating, according to his own notions, James's martyrdom, (Antiq. xx. 8,) declares that the wisest of the nation deplored his death as one of the principal causes of the ruin of Jerusalem, and of the wrath of God against the Jews. Simeon, who was, like him, one of the brothers of the Lord, became, as historians inform us,l bishop of Jerusalem immediately after the death of James, and, if the state- ment of Eusebius be correct, was crucified in 107, when much more than one hundred years old, after having presided over the Christians in Jerusalem during forty-five years. Peter and Paul superintended the churches of the Gentiles as well as those of the Jews, during a ministry of thirty years and more ; for we must fix the martyrdom of both between the burning of Rome in July G4 and the death of Nero in June 68. Besides, it appears that most of tbe apostles attained a still greater age. Though we cannot place entire confidence in the too varied traditions of the Fathers, according to whom Mark died at Alexandria in 68, Timothy in 97, Thomas and Bartholomew in Lidia, Jude in Lybia, Matthew, 1 Eusebius, Hist, Eccl, ill., 2, 32, 11. i 1 0 CAUSES OF UNANIMITY. according to Paifinus, among the Ethiopians, or, according to others, among the Parthians ; the infallible books of the Acts and tlie Tvevelation of St John arc sufficient to put it beyond doubt, first, that all the rest of the apostles survived Paul, Peter, and the two Jameses ; and, secondly, that John, banished to Patmos, during a persecution which began under Domitian, and terminated in 96, returned to the shores of Asia to write his " Ptcvelation," and end his days there. His brother James had, forty years before, opened the list of apostolic martyrs, (in 43,) and he himself was to com- plete that list of the sufferings of the apostles long afterwards, at the beginning of the second century.i All ancient traditions agree in representing him as having reached an extreme old age. He could no longer walk, says Jerome, and was carried to the meet- ings of the faithful.2 He had, it is said, preached among the Parthians, and even in India; bat what seems incontestable is, that, having settled at Epliesus with the mother of Jesus, and there terminated his earthly career at a very advanced age. Jerome tells us that his tomb was to be seen there. Both Irenseus and Eusebius 3 assure us that he died there under Trajan, in the third year of his reign. According to others, he died in 103. If Epiphanius is correct, (Hser. 51,) he was then ninety-four. Ac- cording to others, he was still more. 180. When we consider tlie uninterrupted intercourse of the apostles with the churches they planted, their long career is a fact of vast importance, as it gives irresistible force to the unanimous testimony of Christendom regarding the twenty-two homologou- mena. It explains that otherwise inexplicable unanimity. It makes it not only easy to conceive, but a matter of course. If it is admitted that the apostles and their inspired assistants exercised so long and so genial a ministry in the churches for more than half a century, it becomes abundantly obvious that all the churches would in consequence exhibit the most perfect agreement in their views of the twenty-two books already put forth by the apostles and evangelists before their decease. On the other hand, follow * He was sentenced several times, but died a natural death. * See Jerome on the Epistle to the Galatians, and De Viris Illust., cap. ix. ^ Irenacus — Ihorcs.jiii., 3 ; ii., 39. Eusebius— Uist. Eccl., iil, 23 — Chron. Euseb. See also Augustin, Sorm. 253, chap. iv. LONG APOSTOLIC SUrERINTENDENCE. Ill the inverse line of argument, the striking fact of such unanimity throughout the churches, and we perceive, in like manner, that these twenty-two books must have been communicated by the apostles, and that these men of God had superintended the use of them in the Christian community. It is equally clear that, after so long an aj^ostolic superintendence, none of the churches could, after the death of the apostles, have been induced to receive any additional book, which none of the apostles had ever mentioned, and that, most especially, a large number of churches could not have re- ceived it, and certainly could not have received it without objec- tion or opposition, or without a surviving trace that any objection to it had ever been made. We have already said — but it is well to repeat — that there is not in history, there is not in criticism, a supposition so absurd as not to be admissible, if we are to regard the possibility of such reception as having even the slightest shadow of probability. Let us, for a moment, place ourselves in the situation of those primitive Christians, and ask how, after half-a-century's ministry of so many inspired men, we could have received, after the death of the apostles, any additional book which they had not communicated during their lives. With what spirit of holy jealousy should we have armed ourselves to repel every novelty, to protest against every intrusion, to reject every book that had not in its favour the clear sanction of these men of God ! We shall have occasion to point out afterwards how much force this argument receives from the history of the five late epistles. 131. It is thus manifest that there exists a logical connexion between these two unquestioned facts — the long ministiy of the apostles in the primitive Church, and the perfect uniformity of that entire Church regarding the homologoumena, and, in addition, a stiU more necessary connexion between these two facts and the authenticity of all these books. Were we told at the present day that the author of a modern work had for forty years watched over all its successive editions all over Europe, and were we informed, moreover, that, at the end of these forty years, no bookseller in Europe had the sKghtest doubt of the authenticity of the book in question, would not such unanimity be considered sufficient and unquestionable evidence? 1 1 2 CAUSES OF UNANIJIITY. And yet, in how much more complete a form is this twofold guarantee — the long superintendence of the author and the unani- mity of booksellers — exhibited in favour of the New Testament ? Instead of one author, we have eight. We have all the apostles jointly and severally guaranteeing the work. We have men of God, we have their inspired companions — Mark, Luke, Simeon, Timotheus, Apollos, Silas, Barnabas,!^ and so many others — who presided over the churches during half a century. Instead of the booksellers of Europe, we have all the churches — all the churches in tlie world. And, instead of one book, we have twenty books, in reference to which the most complete unanimity of testimony is direct, universal, unvaried, and immovable, 132. There is another characteristic feature of the primitive Church that must be kept in view, in order to feel all the force of this double guarantee, — long superintendence and complete unani- mity. This is the intercourse so uninterrupted, so intimate, so varied, that existed between the apostles and the churches, and be- tween the churches themselves. This feature appears in all the details of their history, and in all existing traditions respecting them. Numberless facts bearing on this point have been recorded, of which we do not warrant the authenticity. We are told, for example, that the ajDostle John, in the last part of his career, settled at Ephesus, as at a common centre of Eastern and Western Christendom, where he might stretch out both his arms to the churches of the East and of the West. We are told by numerous ancient witnesses (Caius,^ Eusebius,^ Jerome,^ Victorinus,^ Chry- sostom,*5 Theodorus of ^Mopsuestia^) that the bishops of Asia pre- sented themselves to him at Ephesus, and requested him to draw up for the use of the churches of God a gospel that might complete the Gospels already pubUshed. Tertullian 8 and Jerome 9 inform * Acts xiiL 1 — w^op^ra/ — 2 Tim. i. 6 ; 1 Tim. iv. 14. ' About 196. In the famous Canon called Muratori's, which many attribute to him. 3 H. E., iii., 24. * In Matt. Proccm. ' In Apocal. Bibl. Tatr., iii., 418. ^ Auct. Incert. Montfaucon, viii., 132. ' Cabena in Joan. Corderii. Mill. N. T., p. 198. Edit. 1723. * If this fact were admitted, it would not at all affect the inspiration of this fourth Gospel. * Tertull. De Baptismo, 15 and 17. Jerome, Catal. Vii-. IlL, in Luc, 7. INTEECOUESE OF EAELY CHUECHES. 1 1 3 US that a presbyter of Ephesus having put forth a book entitled " The Acts of Paid," was by the apostle convicted of imposture, though the ■writer tried to excuse himself by alleging a i:)ious intention of doing honour to the memory of Paul. In selecting these statements from a collection of so many similar traditions, our object is simply to shew what vigilance the apostles exercised for half a century. We seldom appeal to mere traditions, and usually refer only to the facts of Scripture as authentic history ; but the tradition we here repeat serves of itself to throw light on the subject. Indeed, the Ej^istles and the Acts of the Apostles fully shew the unceasing solicitude of these men of God, and particularly of Paul, for the welfare of the churches they had planted. He himself tells us that he had continually " the care of all the churches," from Jerusalem to Illyricum, from Eome to Macedonia and Asia. He was constantly visiting them. He traversed for this purpose the whole empire. He suffered ship- wreck, in the discharge of his apostolic duty, four times.l He was often "in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by the Jews, in perils by the Gentiles, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren, in weariness and painfulness, in cold and nakedness." He sent to the churches his companions in the ministry ; he received from them letters and messages ; he required to know their condition ;2 he wept in his prison at Eome on hearing of the waywardness of certain Philippians ; he was refreshed when he received good news from the churches ; he was incessantly struggling in prayer for each of them, and even for such of their members as he had never seen ; he adjured them in the name of the Lord that his ejiistles should be read by all the brethren, and that they should be com- municated by one church to another.^ just as Peter afterwards re- commended the reading of the epistles of Paul as well as of the rest of the Scriptures ; * he constantly inquired into their condition with the solicitude of a mother desiring to know the state of the child at her breast ;5 he watched over their religious views with a 1 2 Cor. xi. 25-27 ; Acts xxvii. 41. = 1 Thess. iii. 5-8 ; Philip, ii. 19-29. 3 Philip, iii. 18; 1 Thess. iii. 8; Col. i. 9, ii. 1-5, iv. 12; Rom. xv. 30; Philip. i. 3; 1 Thess. i. 2; v. 27; Col. iv. 16. * 2 Pet. iii. 16. « Gal. iy. 18; Philip, iv. 17, ii. 28, iii. 18; Col. i. 8, 9, 2i; 1 Thesa. iii. 6-10. H 1 1 t CAUSES OF UNANIMITY. holy jealousy ; he was in the deepest concern when they were wandering from the truth ;i "who is weak/' he exclaimed, "and I am not weak? who is offended, and I burn not?" 2 "My little chililren," he says to the Galatians, "of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you."^ 133. It is easy, then, to perceive that, during such a ministry, which, in the case of some of the apostles, was extended to periods of fifty, sixty, and almost seventy years, it was impossible that any spurious book could be introduced into the Church ; and that the churches should unanimously ratify a book that had not been acknowledged by these men of God. 131. It is, in like manner, easy to perceive that, after the death of the ajDOstles, at the conclusion of so lengthened a ministry, all the churches would Inevitably be deeply imbued with a religious respect for all apostolic institutions, and a conservative spirit carried to the greatest height, and a jealous distrust regarding every article of doctrine that had not been sanctioned by the apostles during their lives, and, above all, suspicion regarding every book which, previously to the death of the apostles, had not obtained a place in the sacred canon. Owing to these causes, the latest writings of some of the apostles, which, shortly before their death, they had addressed to various churches, encountered oppo- sition down to the time of the Council of Nice, as we shall have occasion to state more in detail, and only mention here by antici- pation. "We shall, however, at the same time, shew that these five short books were received by the great majority of Christians, owing to the positive proofs of their authenticity, and received, in particular, by those churches whose position best enabled them to decide, as it was to them that the books in question were addressed, as they were thus most interested in rejecting them if spurious. We shall, further, shew that these same facts afford an admirable proof of the vigilance of the churches, of the freedom of their action, and of the thorough conviction that produced their imani- mity regarding the twenty- two homologoumena. We have, however, to consider two other historical facts still more important, which furnish additional evidence regarding our sacred canon ; and which, combined with the great fact of the 1 Gal. iv. 10, 20. « 2 Cor. xi. 29. ' Gal. iv. 19. EAPID SPEEAD OF THE GOSPEL. 115 unanimity of all the cliurches of the first centuries in reference to the homologoumena, demonstrate with a force that is irresistible the authenticity of all these books. Section II. THE IMMENSE NUMBER OP CHURCHES AT THE DEATH OP THE APOSTLES. 135, The triumphant rapidity of the conquests of the Church previously to the death of the apostles, and its immense extent at the end of the first century, form an amazing fact, but a fact as unquestionable as prodigious. 136. This new religion, which avowedly aimed at the annihila- tion of all others, and which, taking its rise among persons of humble condition, and in the most despised of all the nations of the earth, denounced all error, openly assailed every evil pas- sion of the human heart, and spared neither the pride of the great, nor the pretensions of the priesthood, nor the prejudices of the multitude ; — that religion Avhich, while it declared war against all the false deities that had been worshipped with so much sj^lendour from the most remote ages, was at first preached only by persons of low degree, and yet called upon mankind to recognise their God in the person of a Jewish carpenter, who had been rejected by his own people, and through them brought to capital punishment ; that religion which was opposed by the people, the priests, the religious teachers, the magistrates and kings, of every nation ; that religion which required every individual to regard himself as a criminal in the sight of God, and to give up for its sake his pro- perty and his life ; that religion which, though unceasingly perse- cuted, had for three centuries shed no blood but its own ; — that religion had already in forty years put forth a power that fore- boded the conquest of the world. In forty years it had traversed the globe ; it had overflowed its surface as the Nile overflows Egypt ; it had spread itself everywhere like a river of life. The apostles had not yet terminated their career when there appeared in every land missionary churches, devoted, and without number. Perhaps this remarkable fact does not occupy an adequate place in the minds of those who turn their attention to the study of the 1 1 G CAUSES OF UNANBIITY. canon. It is, however, a fact of vast significance ; and at the same time it is abundantly established from both those sources of proof — between which the investigators of Christian antiquity divide their ijrefercnccs — the declarations of Scriptiu'c, and the testimonies of history. 137. Scripture leaves no doubt on this subject. Paul, after only seventeen years of his ministry, states, in addressing the Chris- tians at Rome, (xvi. 26,) that the " gospel had been already made known to all nations;" that he himself (xv. 19) "strove to carry it exclusively to parts where it was previously unknown ; " and yet that he had fully preached it in all the regions " from Jerusalem to Illyricum." The voice of the messengers of the glad tidings had gone forth, like the light of the sun, " through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world," (Rom. x. 18.) This statement was no poetic hyperbole ; and from his success may be inferred what had been achieved by the labours of all the other apostles and evangelists. Besides, in thus spreading the gospel all over the earth, they had been merely carrying out the command and fulfilling the promise of their Master. Jesus, in foretelling to them the destruction of Jerusalem, that was to take place thirty-six years after His death, had declared to them that, previous to that event, the "gospel of the kingdom should be preached all over the world as a testimony to all nations." " Go, then," He had said to them, " and convert all nations." This command was in a short space of time so fully carried into effect, that IMark, in writing his Gospel, (xvi. 20,) could already say of the apostles, " They went forth and preached everywhere," {eKrjpv^av 'iravTa-)(ov.) Paul, in his Epistle to the Colosslans, says to them, (about the year GO,) " The gospel is come unto you, as it is in all the ivoiid; and bringeth forth fruit." He adds, in ver. 23, " The gospel, which ye have heard, and which has been 2'>reached to every creature that is under heaven." Only four years after these words had been written, the same gospel, though violently persecuted by the Emperor Nero, already counted, as Tacitus informs us, " an immense multitude " of fol- lowers in the city of Rome alone. Paul, six years before he wrote to the Colossians, was preparing to proceed to Spain,l and there is 1 Rom. XV. 2L VAST NXJMBEES OF EARLY CHRISTIANS. 117 nothing improbable in the supposition that he actually did proceed thither, as Clement of Kome l tells us that he went to the utmost bounds of the West, (eVi to repfia t7)9 Avaeco^;.) But even if Paul's journey to Spain may be considered uncertain, it is an un- questionable fact, that, in the year in which he was preparing to go to that country, the Christian Jews in Jerusalem alone amounted to at least fifty or sixty thousand, (how many myriads, 'Kocrat, fivpLaheal towns, market-places, the senate, the forum. We have only left you the temples, {sola vohis relinquimus templa.) We can make war upon you without taking arms ; it is enough not to live with you ; for if the Chris- tians who compose so great a multitude {tanta vis hominum) should abandon you and retire into some other country, it would be the ruin of your jjower, and you would be terrified at your own solitude." "The Gothic nations," he says elsewhere,^ "the various INIoorish tribes, all the regions of Spain and Gaul, and places in Britain inaccessible to the Romans, have been subjected to Christ, as well as the Sarmatians, Dacians, Germans, Scythians, and nations yet unknown." After this survey, he expresses his admiration that in so short a time the empire of Jesus Christ was far more extensive than that of Nebuchadnezzar, of Alexander, or of the Romans. 142. This period of the Church, signabsed by such a marvel- lous increase, reaches to the reign of Hadrian, (117-138.) Chris- tianity had then made its way even to barbarous nations, and numerous churches had been founded among the Egyptians, Celts, and Germans. We may here notice " those many nations of barbarians" {iroWa eOvr] tmv jBapfBapoiv) to whose judgment IrenseusS appeals against the Gnosis of the heretics of his ^ Adv. Gentes, lib. ii., p. 44, 45. Lugd. Batav,, 1651. ^ lu his dialogue, entitled, Octavius. " Apoluget., ii., cap. 37. * In his book Adversus Judacos, chap. 7. " Hicrcs., iii., 4, 2. He also says, (i., 2,) " The Church is disseminated through- out the whole habitable world, {khO' oXrjs t^s oiKovfji(VT}s,) and even to the ex- tremities of the earth," Cewy nepaTuv r^s yrjs binxnapfiivrj.) THKEE GEEAT FACTS. 121 time,l affirming that these nations had been christianised before the aj^pearauce of the Gnostic sects. But it is well known that scholars place the birth of these sects in the age of St John, and even before the publication of the fourth Gospel.2 If we believe the most trustworthy statements of the learned Armenian, Moses of Chorene,3 Christianity had penetrated the East very early among the people using the Syriac language, the Armenians, and the Persians. We must read the thirty-seventh chapter of the third book of Eusebius to form a just idea of the prodigious extension of the gospel in Trajan's reign, and the admirable activity of the churches to effect it. Allowing for some inflation of language, this grand historic fact is brought to light, that " the immediate disciples of the apostles, building on the foundation laid by those men of God, had scattered the seed of the kingdom of heaven throughout the whole extent of the habitable globe," (to, (Jcorii]pta aTripfiara tj}9 rcov ovpavwv ^aaikela'i ava iraaav eh 7r\drop. 78-82, second ed., 1812; or the French translation by Biirnier, 1843, pp. G6, 67. * See Lightfoot's Harmony, p. 479, and his Horaj Hebr. et Talmudicaj in Evang., &c., vol. xi., p. 88, quoted by Whatcly in the appendix to his Essay on the Kingdom of Christ, p. 256, (or 215 of the French translation.) ANAGNOSIS. 125 of God, necessarily gave tliein their form, so tliat it would have been practised as a matter of com-se, even had there been no injunction on the subject in the apostolic writings ; but there was one, as we are about to shew. 148. Anagnosis, then, in the Christian assemblies, preceded the appearance of the New Testament, instead of a long time having elapsed, as has been asserted, before it was practised. The Holy Scriptures of the Old Testament were read as in the syna- gogues ; and that regular reading of Moses, the Psalms, and the Prophets, was exclusively in use during the fifteen years which preceded the appearance of the first apostolic epistles, in the innumerable churches formed by the apostles, and particularly in those founded by Paul before the year 49 or 54 in Samaria, Syria, Arabia, Cyprus, Galatia, Lycaonia, Mysia, Pisidia, Thrace, and Macedonia. It is, in fact, in 49 that we think (according to Orosius l) the decree of Claudius against the Jews of Rome (Acts xviii, 2) must be placed ; and we know it was then that Paul, with Silas and Timothy, wrote those two beautiful epistles to the Thessalonians, which were, it would seem, the beginning of the written word of the New Testament.2 149. As we have said, it was necessarily from the time of the apostles and the first promulgation of the gospel that the custom of reading the Scriptures of the Old Testament passed from the assemblies of the synagogue into the assemblies of the Church ; for no sooner had the year 70 arrived, no sooner had Jerusalem been destroyed, the temple burnt, the Jewish believers dispersed, and all the apostles gone to their rest, than the spirit of the Christian churches (as all history testifies) became too hostile to ^ VII. 6. The third year of Claudius. Others place it in the second year. Suetonius speaks of the decree in his life of Claudius, but without giving the date. 2 We do not pretend to fix the date of Matthew's Gospel; for it is very probable, as Lardner thinks, that none of the four Gospels preceded the Council of Jerusalem, (Acts xv.,) if that of Mark must be placed late, (Mark xvi. 20.) and that of Luke at a later distance of time from the publication of the Acts, (the years 60, 61, 62.) Yet the fact reported by Euscbius (H. E., v. 10) of the Gospel of Matthew in the Hebrew language, ('E,3patcoi' -ypa^/xao-t,) which the apostle Bartholomew canied to India, seems to place the first Gospel very near St Paul's first epistles, or rather even before them. 1 2G ANAGNOSIS. the Hebrew nation and to the Judaising Christians, to allow hence- forth of borrowing anytliing from their in.stitution.s. 150. Moreover, the custom of reading in these assemblies of the Church, besides the scriptures of the prophets of the Old Covenant, the scriptures of the apostles and prophets of the New, (as far as they were published,) was one which must necessarily have ap- proved itself to all the churches and to all the faithful, as at once most natural and indispensable. Were not the writings of the apostles superior in their eyes even to the writings of the Old Testament? Did not these men of God, at the time when they wrote, jicrform works of power much more wonderful than the greatest of the ancient prophets had ever accomplished ? Were they not, as apostles and ijrophcts, the twelve founders of the Church ? (Eph. ii. 20.) And besides, did not their writings (the Gospel of John, for example, and the Apocalypse of John) claim to be inspired from on high as much as Isaiah or the Pentateuch? Why, then, and how, by what right and for what reasons, was it possible, while they read every Lord's-day the scriptures of the ancient jirophets, to leave imread the scriptures of the new, and while they listened to those prophets who had divinely announced the Son of man, to doom to silence those prophets who had heard His own voice, and had divinely iDvoclaimed Him, " God bearing them witness with signs and wonders, and with divers miracles and gifts of the Holy Ghost?" (Heb. ii. 3, 4.) Can we believe that all these Christian societies, after the death of their founders, the apostles, could be content to read publicly only the Old Testament, and to hear, after that reading, nothing but the discourse — the X0709 of which Justin ]Martyr l speaks — the unpremeditated discourses of ministers who had neither the miraculous spirit with which the departed apostles had been filled, nor even the charisms of the apostolic men who followed them. This cannot be admitted ; even the bare thought of it must not be entertained. 151. If, as certain opponents of the canon would have it, the public recognition of the books of the New Testament by anag- nosis did not take place till the latter half of the second century, they must solve for us two historical impossibilities. In the first ^ In his First Apology, chap. 67. ANAGNOSIS. 1 27 place, how can it be admitted by any one who has studied the character of the second century in the original authorities, that such a revolution was effected in the public worship of all the churches in the world — a change so important that it would be absolutely incompatible with the conservative and traditional spirit that history attributes to the Christians of that epoch ? And, in the second place, how would it be possible that so great an event, which has not its parallel in the annals of that ejDoch, could take place without any commotion, without any report of it having come down to us, without any of the fathers having spoken of it, without even Eusebius, who relates so much in detail all the reminiscences of those primitive times, being apprised of it, and without Irenccus, in whose youth this astounding fact must have occurred, saying a word about it ? No one can give an answer to these simple questions. It is sufficient for us to enunciate them, to shew that they do not allow of one. 152. Thus for any one who contemplates by the light of these facts the primitive Church performing its worship, and reverently listening every Sunday to the voice of the readers, nothing is more easy to conceive than the successive formation of the first canon ; nothing can be more naturally explained than the unan- imity of all the churches as to its contents and constant preserva- tion. All was accomplished without dispute or noise, by the calm and regular course of anagnosis. Only suppose ourselves present at this consecrated practice of the first century, and all is explained. To settle this great affair, we have no need of councils, or of agi- tation, or of efforts, or of decrees. The apostles had not even to create the institution by their directions, (though they really have given them ;) it existed before their time — " from ancient genera- tions " (e'/c yevecov dp'x^aicov) ; 1 it maintained itself during their life ; it acquired permanence after their death. At the most, they had only to sanction it by their approval, and by the part which they took in it. And when, after a half-century of anagnosis, they all disappeared from the earth, the Christian churches had everywhere such a perfect knowledge of their sacred canon by continual reading, that simple believers were often to be met with who had thus learnt their scriptures by heart, and could correct the anag- 1 Acts sv. 21. 128 ANAGNOSIS. nostcs (the reader) if he mistook a single word.^ Historians attest this fact. We can thus understand that nothing but this practice was needed to create the canon, and to make it known in its purity, to sanction it in every place, and to render it irre- vocable. 153. We see, then, that the reading of the Old Testament never ceased, either in the synagogue or the church; it existed in the' first assemblies at Jerusalem ; it was always an indispensable part of their service ; it passed afterwards from the congregations of Jewish Christians to those of the Gentiles ; for example, it followed the Corinthian believers into the house of Justus,^ and from the synagogue of Ephesus entered the school of T}Tannus,3 for all knew, as St Paul had said,4 that by the reading of the Holy Scriptures, "the man of God is perfected, thoroughly furnished unto all good works, and made wise to salvation through faith that is in Christ Jesus." At a later period, as a new epistle or a new gospel was given by the apostles to the churclies, believers were anxious to add to the reading of the Old Testament that of these new prophets, whose wiitings, they knew, proceeded from the same Spirit which had been shed upon them in greater abundance and plenitude. ]5-i. Possibly, though we do not affirm it, the anagnosis of these new books was not so frequent as long as the churches had still in their midst either the apostles possessed of the great signs of apostleshipS or men invested with those charisms (or super- natural gifts) which the apostles had conferred upon them by imposition of hands for the common benefit. Yet it remains evi- dent that the churches, when deprived of the personal teaching of these men of God, and only having in their possession the writings they had left, took good care not to abandon the usage to the individual piety of every Christian in his own house, and offered them publicly for the edification of all by a solemn and regular anagnosis. ^ Such, for example, aa John the Blind in Palestine, St Anthony in Egypt, and Servulus at Rome. Eusebius, De Martyr. Palest., xiii., p. 344; Aiigustin, De Doct. Christ., in prologc, torn, iii., p. 3 ; Greg. Mag., Horn, xv., iu Evangelia., torn, iii., p. 40. " Acts xviii. 7. ^ Acta xix. 9, 10. * 2 Tim. iii. 15, 16. » 1 Cor. xii. 2; 2 Cor. xii. 12. ANAGNOSIS. 1 29 155. In this manner the successive recognition of all the books of our sacred canon prevailed in the churches of God eflfectively, but without any parade ; and, as Dr Hug has remarked, (in his Introduction to the New Testament,'^) as the pubHcation of a work of profane literature was anciently made by its recital before an assembly of the author's friends,^ so for the books of the New Testament, it was their anagnosis in the church to which they had been originally sent, that very soon consigned them for the use of all the people of God to the oecumenical treasury of their sacred books. 156. Yet though we have shewn, by the simple logic of facts, how this anagnosis of the apostolic scriptures would necessarily be established in the primitive churches, even had there existed no injunction of the apostles on this point, we ought not to forget that such an injunction was actually given by them ; and any one may be convinced that they composed their epistles and their other writings with the intention that they should be read in the assem- blies for worship. 157. As to the apostolic injunction, we must carefully observe that it was given by Paul with remarkable solemnity in the very epistle which was the first published of the writings of the New Testament : " I charge (or adjure) you by the Lord," he wrote to the Thessalonians,3 " (OpKl^co vfj,d» ?? '^ r1 S 03 S 53 ►-s ->j tr' .i >> a "r! t,- lllli ^ » ^ ^ I .> S "S T) -^ s ^ S § cs o a> 2 ■43 ja =* •^ J? ^ ■» O «*H - a) ■< i-s «» .s 25 ^ fl; a> o «i ^ > -e MoW^ § .s o o S 5^ o n S f- t? o "2 -"^ ca « cS •^ jj- O fc. . >'o * ^ cs o U -w ■73 a OJ •- {U > C3 00 . S g o a ^- K o So a ^ 00 r^ 0) - C« •S to e sK' o .s^'o a 9r ^ 2 cS »-a J? a R jH '_C- ry: <1> C- ^ rH ^ a c5 .2J O "^ 03 a a a, (M PL, o rt a a n, •" m r- ^ C^ « rH a 23-' ^ .'2 ■« .9 S "* o"? O J- 09 W S '^ a ^3 ^ • r- t -f ^Z a o a fl 2 ' aj a o ■ a a 3 0) S _ at-s 3 ■»^ «4-i a a o -a 0) a > a a ' a a p t; a >- TS to O t; >-• O « -e -a .^hi TT rt t>>^3 amp a^ S a a 00 3 2 a "Sb.S -g ^® - 8^ § §.^'?= -§ C 2 a 3 S 2 ^ 2 5: ^ g S s ^ a 2t^ V 1^ ais! a « & 1^ e> S.2's«as:3 § *M s-^^ ^ o, §,««' _C I— a •« aa <1 s rt a o ^- * '■4-t *^ — ' -«J ■a m *^ J -ta .3 g ^ > lU Eh 143 ^ '-' o 2 p S n !>; 2 -a cs a> g o •"ti h 05 £ fii ^-i .2 fl-2 a -e rv] ^ '^ o o ^ '^ w . -P c3 05 ^ 05 2 !h CO 05 ? S t? o >>;3 o ^ , S c« a d 8 : l>* M ^ d "3 S' 3 bd ri 0) • O 05 _3 =« £ > -d ' 3 § I « • MOW*, 2 s-i ^ ■*^ 05 ^ d c« 5 "^ ?-. J c3 O . 03 <] 3 03 2 1 fl-r? t- a ? o g P " Si o l>> CO ^ ^ ^ - ^ CM ■§ d i,-^ •S -^ 03 ■T3 o "^ 2 .3 03 05 3 ^ -^ ^4h ® ^^ a ® .2 S-2'3 c3 ' d d -^ CI !-. 05 ^ ■ © 05 a,1l ^ J 03 03 .2 S ■" "■5 3 ;§-^^ ro o rt S t. 2 o s a _i. ,'« CO 03 Cj 'rt-S-S^ o •^ "05 .2 •-0 ^ . ^ S Sod 3-2 . 05 ,i; !- y ri fl ^ O 03 o P 2 ^ ^ ■ ri C3 05 •^ 1^ s g y ±! T) .^ 2 03 =0 '05 05 >>;g ^ i^ a S g-^ g 03 •d ±1 -3 d ,2 ^ ,jq 'O +j c3 cS -p 03 " r« =y a 05 «! a ~ 05 J NT of Alexandri ted Platonic phi n about the year din 217. His wi numerous, {Stromat tation to the Gent Jerome and Theod mate him highly for ledge and genius. tJ tn f-" 0) 6 144 i: >- ^ Pi -«• t^ g ^ El K •| ^1 1 O ^ < Q i <« s _ <" 3 * a 2. fe S 2* 0) " w -Saw 6 "".2 g 2 ^5; i •'^ "Z ?- o a -« •« *< 2 -^^ * IS ' Q rt ^ >-,2 c 5 t, -►:. . tc.s c , !5J3 tc'-'S i. z. S S 43 .3 . -. 3 "1 cJ ■2k 2 ^ I- o «■ '^ " : ^ c U) M 2 o C CO =^ ^ p -^ CO g 3 -s* B 2 2 , J a CC W m >> ^^ « Ti t^ ^ H s >:, W *:^ o «j o 2 " . S 51 S -2^ ? W " R ® 3 S fl ^^ H §.2f n "* m £ O '"' hC! -^ d k s a> i 0 0;+^" « 'rt 2- JJ g u u o ^ if -I Sac , O rt ?1 <,■: s o » m to - o '^ "t; » 60 ^ ^ 'E ? ^ -r: ■E -t; => "^ O aj 3 2 g m J 4) !0 C3 S ti &I-3 i'S^-25' p S Eh a ^g O rt« ^ a:SS a H^ „ a!.2 •-" rt > -*^ to C 3 0) « 2 a -S c' t- a S ' -»j o -^ ' 0) sc p jH :3 . g.9 ^ I S ft fl eS a '-s 2-i . D >5 > a"^ S3 1* fro was 71. ^ o -r -S aJ<^' •i-i ^ M o "s — ce -g CO -^ S ^•"^f^ M^ yn O += d ^ o 0O-ggo-»9S92 s S 2 "3j 2 .^H S _-J2 co^ 9- "^ g j3 -i2 1 O 0) o c< 1 14G SIsgg- , 1 u o o 2 =15 " - 2 e >-i ^ t < B o Q CO 1 g <{ ;3 .3 o -^ .a 1 fe .g fe a ■ to "O p 5 g-s § ►^ ^ 9 3-ii 5 l^J at C Qi 'e S P fl c SPdJ O t) -^-» ■^''^Yl ■'^ 8 2 §.t: 3 H s ^ ;$ -S d =-^ ^ "S a ^-^ i 1 "S. « K J o (2 o ca H H H ^*^ +^ ^ ^~^ . O o' -li -^ '3 " s :3 >■ s n O 1 •s 1 a P3 o Q CO 1 1 . 11 EH s ^ . » °^ -S g « ^1^-2 |g-: rt oi :s S -rt3SP 00^.2 2 OJ .a ^ t-> (14 ;:? "^ H ft O o d s c i _ 1 1 t^ Ml CO Ml 1 OS Ml « Ch "1 CN (M (M "3 t3 •5 fe" a O Q Ml >- 03 g Ml jJ Ml Q CO O C-i Q si E= 2 8-3 to g tJ to p 1> n a o S - a r; MONUMENTS OF THE CANON. 147 169. To render the review of all these monuments of antiquity more clear and striking, we begin with the latest ; and thus going back in the order of time, we first of all listen to the least ancient fathers before we reach those of the first half of the second cen- tury ; from these again, we j)roceed to the fathers of the first century, then to the apostolic fathers, and lastly, to those apostles who wrote the last books of the New Testament. CHAPTER V. tue testimony of the fathers of the second half of the second centuky. Section First. the united testimonies of iren^us, clement, and tertullian. 170. If we place ourselves at the entrance of the third century, in the year 202, when the terrible persecution of Septimius Seve- rus was raging throughout the whole extent of the empire, and young Origen, who had just seen his father Leonides beheaded, was beginning at Alexandria his long and splendid career, we shall find, on the theatre of the world, three brilliant lights occup}dng high positions, and for a long period illuminating the Church. These were Irenceus, Clement of Alexandria, and Tcrtullian. AVhile Origen had already devoted himself to those immense biblical researches which, with all his errors, will ever endear his name to the Churches of God, these three great men commanded the atten- tion of all Christians for a long series of years, and their writings were circulated through every part of the Roman Empire. Like three lighthouses, erected at great distances from each other, their beams were seen from afar : Irenaeus, beyond the Alps, in the dis- tant metropolis of Gaul, where they spoke Greek, Latin, and Celtic ; Clement in Alexandria, that seat of learning where Coptic and Greek were spoken ; and, lastly, Tcrtullian at Carthage, the metropolis of proconsular Africa, where they spoke Latin and the Punic language. For a length of time the voices of these three men were heard. Irenajus, an octagenarian and more, for a quarter of a century. TESTIMONY OF THE FATHEES. 149 fed the flock of Christ at Lyons, and was destined to end his long career by martyrdom in the year 202.1 Clement, aged fifty-two, did not die before 217 ; and the great Tertullian, the most ancient of the Latin fathers, then in his forty-second year, but converted seventeen years before, and presbyter of Carthage for ten years, exerted in Africa, as throughout the Latin Church, a long and beneficial influence. We know the respect afterwards paid to his memory, in this very Carthage, by the bishoj) and martyr Cyprian. " What Origen was for the Greeks, that is to say, the first of all," said the famous Vincentius of Lerins,2 (two hundred years after Cyprian,) " Tertullian has been for the Latins, that is to say, incon- testably the first among us," (iiostrorum omnium facile princeps.) "Who has been more learned than this man, and who has had greater experience both in Divine and human things ? " 371. It would be impossible to imagine for the second half of the second century three men more competent to bear witness to the prevailing belief respecting the Scriptures. Everything recom- mends them to our confidence on this point : their character, their erudition, their labours, their travels, the esteem in which they were universally held, and all the sacrifices they had made for these holy writings. Besides, if we select them as the representatives of the second half of the second century, their testimony (especially that of Irenceus) goes back, by the circumstances of their life, much higher than the time when they began their ministry. It reaches almost to the times of the apostles. Every one is ac- quainted with that famous epistle of Irengeus to norinus,^ in which he tells of having passed his early youth in intimacy with Poly- carp, who himself had been, he says, a hearer of St John, and who had repeated to him his pious recollections, " wholly conformable to the Holy Scriptures," he is careful to add. Moreover, what gives the greatest weight to the testimony of these three men is, that their writings still remaining are very extensive. Those of Irengeus (Grabe's edition) make a folio volume of about five hundred pages ; the best edition of Tertullian (that of Venice, 1746) is also a large folio ; and the best of Clement of Alexandria (in Greek, with a ^ This martyrdom is, however, not perfectly certain. 2 Edit, of Baluze. 1G63. P. 323. ^ Hist. Eccles., i., 5, cap. 19, 20. Iren,, Adv. Hseres., iii., 3. 1 50 TESTIMONY OF THE FATHERS. Latin t ran. •elation) makes two folio volumes. Moreover, these three witnesses, particularly Clement and TertuUian, were converted from the pagan doctrine to the profession of the gospel simply through recognising the power of the testimonies rendered to our sacred books, and finding in all the contemporaneous churches a common, constant, and undisputed conviction respecting them. They had before their eyes decisive reasons for abjuring their ancient errors, and for believing in the Divine origin of the Scriptures. All three, trained from their youth to critical investigations, had all the means of ascertaining the certainty of those books which be- came henceforward the rule of their life. All three had travelled in Asia, Greece, and Italy ; they were acquainted with men of every land who represented the knowledge of their times. They were, besides, very near the original sources, being almost contemporaries of the immediate successors of the apostles ; so that, when they owned the authority of the Scriptures, which had been already received as Divine in all the churches, they possessed, in order to receive this faith everywhere persecuted, all the means, as well as all the motives, for ascertaining the legitimate supremacy which those books had acquired in all Christian societies. 172. Do we wish, then, to hear the voice of the second century, and to know its opinion, as expressed at the time, of the sacred Scriptures ? Let us open one of the important writings of these three great teachers, and say if it be possible to imagine testimony more abundant, either of their personal conviction, or of the uni- versal belief which prevailed in their times, in all the Churches of the East and of the West. We shall experience, it must be con- fessed, some embarrassment in giving an account of this testimony, from its very abundance. It seems to us that the attempt to demonstrate it by quotations is to ignore and weaken it, and all we can say of it will always be far below the impression that would be made by the simple reading of these works. Let a person occupy himself with them only for a single da}'', and the impression he will receive will be far deeper than any words of ours can make. He will find himself borne along, so to speak, on the full current of the Scriptures — he will be transported into the midst of a generation which lived in the light of the New Testa- ment— he will hear the men of that generation appealing to our CHAEACTERISTICS OF THEIK TESTIMONY. 151 sacred books in order to establish a truth, just as for any object of sight we should make use of the light of the sun. All their pages shew them to us, constantly depending on the oracles of God as the only foundation of their faith and the faith of every one ; they are only ministers of this word ; they quote it as their rule, because it is the universal standard, and for any one to oppose it is, they say, " to avow himself a heretic — it is to forsake the Church," — for the whole Church follows its rule as one man. This word is for them the supreme law by which every heresy, past, present, and future, is to be judged, as it will judge hereafter the living and the dead. We do not think it jDossible to cite an author among the moderns who has ajDpealed in his writings more frequently, and with a more absolute deference, to the infallible authority of this holy word. Not only the bulky volumes of these three men are throughout penetrated with it — not only are they a tapestry in which the passages of Scripture constantly recur like a thread of gold along the warp to strengthen and adorn the texture ; but you at once perceive that such language could not be employed except in a generation that had long been submissive to the written word, and accustomed to bow, as one man, to its authority, l But before we give a specimen of their testimony by some quotation, we believe it will be convenient to exhibit six or seven general traits which distinguish it. Section Second, seven characteeistics op their testimony. 173. In the first place, these fathers do not confine themselves to making citations continually from the twenty books which com- pose our first canon. They speak very frequently of the assemblage of these books as forming a whole — a book — a New Testament — which the Church of their times had fully received — which it had joined to the sacred oracles of the old covenant, and called indifier- ^ The most striking passages of the fathers on each of the books of the canon may be found in great number in the valuable collection of Kirchhofei- in his work, entitled, Quellenf3ammlu)!g zur Geschichte des Neutestamentlichen Canons bis auf Hieronymus. Zurich, 1842. See especially pp. 17-29. 152 TESTIMONY OF THE FATHEIJS. cntly the ScninuRE, or tLe Scriptures, the new deed, the New Testament, the Dominic.vl Scriptures, (ra? KupiaKa'M,) " the perfect Scriptures," " the Scriptures uttered by the Word of God and by His Spirit ;" and they declare of the sacred writers, that they were all imeuniatophoyn, (bearers of the Holy Spirit,) and that they all spoke by one and the same Spirit of God. (4.) Further, they professed this perfect faith in the Di\ine inspiration of all these books while associating themselves with the whole Church ; they represent it as the common faith held by all the Christians in the world ; they declare that for any one to set himself against this oecumenical rule of Truth, is in the opinion of all to belong no more to the Christian Church — it is to go out of it, (exeuntes;) because not the least discordancy of sentiment exists on this point in any contemporary church. (5.) Such, in this respect, is their calm and confident peKuasion — such is the peaceable universality of this conviction among the Christians of their time — that you never find them occupied in defending it. And why should they ? It was everywhere firmly settled ; it was in all the consciences of those who profess the truth ; it was not disputed by any party in the Chmxh in the second century, and you cannot hear agauist any of the twenty books of the canon one of those objections which biblical criticism multi- CHARACTEEISTICS OF THEIR TESTIMONY. 153 plies in our day. They hold thein for a universal and undisputed code. When they bring forward a passage to establish any dis- puted truth, it is just like bringing a light into a dark place to shew an unknown object distinctly. You may differ about the object, but not about the light, which is the same for all. The Scriptures are the light. This common confidence is taken for granted in the second century ; they never demonstrate it. If I were speaking of the Ehone in Geneva, should I stay to prove that it passes through that city, and that we find water there ? Why, then, should these three teachers demonstrate to the men of their day that the river of the Scripture flowed through the city of God, and that they found there the living waters of grace in abundance ? They never did it. In all their folios, they discuss the biblical meaning of this or that expression, but never its Divine authority; they profess themselves interpreters of the New Testament, but never its defenders. What object could they have in defending it ? No one in the Church attacked it, and if you wish to meet with despisers of the Word, you must go forth and search for them in the Eoman schools of Cerdo, Marcion, or Yalentinus.^ (6.) A sixth trait is, that, in religion, everything is decided for them, and everything must be decided for the whole Church as soon as it clearly understood what the Scripture has said. " The Scriptures," they say, "are a perfect revelation of the Christian faith ;" " their teaching is fully sufficient," {scripturarum tractatio 2)lenissima,) "admitting neither retrenchment nor addition." "I adore," was their language, "the plenitude of the Scriptures." " A person," they add, " teaches nothing, if he cannot say of what he teaches. It is written." Let not any one allege tradition ; for them there was nothing that could stand against the declarations of the written word. (7.) Lastly, listen to them. " It is to the Scriptures all must always appeal in order to explain the Scriptures, (utt avTMv irepi, atjToJv,) if we wish to arrive at the truth in a convincing manner, (airoSeiKTCKO)';.) " 2 ^ These three leaders of three heretical sects, bearing respectively their names, taught in Rome during the second half taf the second century. ^ These different expressions will be met with later, and we shall point out the place. 15 4- TESTIMONY OF THE FATHERS, Let US now hear nearer at hand these three great teachers of the second century, by quoting briefly from them in succession. It would be much easier to multijily these quotations than to select them, for they offer themselves in abundance in all their writings, and we might find even stronger ; but we have first of all taken those which would best exemplify the six or seven traits we have just specified. We shall begin with the youngest, and then go back to his seniors — Tertullian, a presbyter of Carthage. Section Third, tertullian. 174;. Although the youngest of these three teachers, Tertullian is the most ancient of the Latin fathers whose writings have come down to us. Born in paganism, only about fifty years after the death of St John, this eminent man, whose father was a centurion in the army of Africa, was educated according to the pagan philo- sophy, and in the study of jurisprudence. At the age of thirty- five, he was converted, by being an eye-witness of the punishment and Christian constancy of some martyrs. From that time he consecrated his genius and his talents to the gospel of Christ with all the disinterestedness of a determined heart. The unfair man- ner in which he believed himself treated by the clergy of Rome obliged him, about the year 207, to protest, by several writings, against the corruptions of the Church, and he soon fell into Mon- tanism — a rigid sect, which seems to have erred especially in its excessive views of discii^line, and in wishing to put the revelation of their prophets on a level with those of Scripture. Tertullian died about the year 220. His principal works are, his five books against Marcion, written, as he tells us himself, in the fifteenth year of Sevcrus, in 207;^ his admirable Apologeticus, about the year 217 ; his books against the Jews and Heretics; his treatises on Public Shovrs, on the Soul, on Monogamy, on the Crown of the Soldier, on the Pallium, on the Resurrection of the Flesh, &c. 175. Tertullian made constant use of the Scriptures; he dis- ^ These dates are taken from a very able dissertation on Tertullian, from which an extract will be found at the head of his Apologetiais. (Giry's translation. Auiflter., 1712.) The imaginary dates of Pamelius and Barouiua are there refuted. TERTULLIAN. 155 tiuctly quotes eacli of the twenty books of the first canon,"! without forgetting even the very short Epistle to Philemon ;2 and we have already mentioned irf reference to the innumerable testimonies that Tertullian bears to the canon, the words of the learned Lardner,^ " that the quotations made by this father alone from the little volume of the New Testament are more extensive and more abundant than those from the works of Cicero by all the writers of all kinds and in all ages." " How happy is that Church ! " Tertullian exclaims, in his book De Praescriptionibiis Haereticorum.^ " It knows one God, Creator of all things, and Christ Jesus, Son of God the Creator, born of the Virgin JNIary, and the resurrection of the flesh ; it mixes the law and the prophets with the evangelic and apostolic writings, and from these it drinks in its faith." (Legem et P^^ophetas cum Evangelicis et Apostolicis miscet; et inde j^otat fidem.) In his treatise Pe Monogamia,^ speaking of second marriages, and qiioting a passage from the New Testament, (1 Cor. vii. 39,) he makes use of a Latin version, " which," he says, " we may plainly know is not so in the authentic Greek." (Sciamus plane non sic esse in Graeco authentico.) The j)hrase JS^ew Testament for the collection of our sacred books was already received in his time ; but the two collections had previously been called " the one and the other instrument^' and Tertullian bears witness to the ancient usage, not only of having a collection of our scriptures, but of joining this new collection to the old. In his fourth book, Adversus Marcionem, (chap, i.,) com- plaining of the heresy of this man, "who attempted to establish an ojiposition between the God of the law and the God of the gospel, he calls the law and the gospel, " the one and the other instru- ment," (cdterum alterius instrumenti, vel quod magis iisui est, ^ We speak here only of the first canon; about which we would say with Kirchhofer, (p. 2G3, Quelleusammlung, Zurich, 18-12,) that he cites equally all the canonical books of the New Testament, excepting (a.s this author says) only three allusions, more or less disputable, are found to the Epistle of James. ^ Adv. Marcion., lib. v., cap. 42. ^ Prop. 122. * Cap. xxxvi. Opera, ed. Leopold, Lips., 1841. Pars, iii., p. 25. ^ Cap. xi., p. 532 of the edition of Bale, 1515, ed. Leopold, Lips., 1841. Pars, ii., p. 128. 1 50 TEfJTIMONY OF THE FATHETiS. Testamenti,^) or, as it is now more usually expressed, he says, " the one and the other Testament." And in his book, De Pvaescriptionihus, he oxclaims,2 " If Marcimi has separated the New Testament from the Old, {Novum Testamentum a Vetere) he is later than that which he has separated, for he could separate only what had been united." 176. According to Tertullian, a dogma ought not to be preached if we cannot say of it, "It is written." \Yoq, according to him, to those who add anything to, or retrench anything from, what is written. " To wish to believe without the Scriptures, (of the New Testament,) is to wish to believe against them." In his treatise Adversus Hermogenem,^ in speaking of a certain doctrine, he says, "Nothing is knowTi about it, because the Scripture does not exliibit it." (Nihil de eo constat quia Scriptura non exhihet.) In the same manner, in his book De Came Ghristi,^ " They prove nothing, because it is not written." (Non prohant quia nee scriptum est, nee, etc) In his treatise Adversus Praxean^ — "You ought to prove what you say," he says, "as plainly from the Scriptures as we prove that God made His own Word His Son." " Let us refer," he says, in his treatise De Anima, "these questions to the Scrip- tures of God" — (" revocando quaestiones ad Dei literas.") 6 In refuting an error of Hermogenes,7 he says, " Let the heretics have to prove their doctrines by the Scriptures alone, and they will not be able to stand." (De Scripturis soils quaestiones suas sistant et stare non poterunt.) In the same book, first speaking of all the Scriptures, and then contrasting the New Testament, a gospel, ■v\'ith the entire collec- tion, he exclaims, " I adore the plenitude of Scripture, .... but in the Gospel I find more ; I find the "Word as the minister and ^ He employs this term, the New Testament, many times elsewhere, to desig- nate the canon. Thus Ad. Praxean, cap. sv., p. 508, ed. Kigali. Paris, 1634. Pars, iv., p. 266, ed. Leopold, Lips., 1841. * Cap. XXX., p. 212, ed. Paris, 1629. Pars, iii., p. 21, ed. Leopold, Lips., 1841. 8 Cap. i., p. 33, ed. Paris, 1664. * Cap. vi., p. 312, Pars, iv., p. 6, ed. Leopold, Lips., 1841. ^ Cap. xi., p. 505, Pars, iv., p. 259, ed. Leopold, Lips., 1841. * Cap. ii., p. 2C5, Pars, iv., p. 171, ed. Leopold. ^ Adv. Hermog., cap. xxii., p. 241. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA. 157 mediator of the Maker." (" In evcmgelio vero amplius et minis- trum et a7'bitrum Factoris invenio sermonem.") And as to this subject, (he goes on to say,) let the workshop of Hermogenes shew that " it is written ;" but " if it is not written, let him fear the ' woe ' appointed for those who add to or take from the Scriptures."^ (Si noil est scriptum timeat " Vce illud " adjicientibus aut detra- hentihiis destinatum.)^ And again, in his book De Praescrip- tionihus, indignant at the temerity of the heretics whom he was refuting, and holding for an axiom that ".all faith ought to be founded on the Scriptures," he exclaims, " Well ! let them believe without the Scriptures, since they will believe contx-ary to the Scriptures ! " {Sed credant sine Scripturis, ut credant adversus Scripturas) And now, if from proconsular Africa we pass on to Egypt, we shall hear Clement of Alexandria delivering a perfectly similar testimony with equal copiousness. Section Foueth. clement of alexandria. 177. This father, though older than Tertullian, died three years before him, about the year 207. He himself, he says in the first book of his Stromata, " approached very near the days of the apostles." Born in paganism, and versed in all the science of the Greeks, he had for a long time professed their philosophy, when he was converted in Egypt by Pantgenus, the pious and celebrated head of the Christian school at Alexandria. And when Pantsenus left that city, about the year ] 89, to preach the gospel for several years in India, Clement took his master's place in that institution, and greatly increased its reputation by his philosoiDhic knowledge, and the charm of his instructions. Many ancient authors assert that he was born at Athens, and in that city formed his eloquence and acquired his erudition. However that may be, it has from ancient times been the practice to surname him " of Alexandria" to distinguish him from the celebrated Clement of Eome, whom all the Church had honoured a century before him. In 202, the ^ An allusion to Rev. xxii. 18, 19. * Caj). xxii. and cap. viii., Pars, iv., p. 19, ed. Leopold. 1 53 TESTIMONY OF THE FATHERS. persecution of Soiitiiiiius Scverus liaving forced liim to leave Egypt, he repaired to Jerusalem, and thence to Antioch ; but some years after, towards the end of the reign of Caracalla, returned to Alexandria to resume his office of teacher, in which he continued to his death. He had an active mind, a prodigious memory, and great zeal for the advancement of the Christian faith. Unfortu- nately for the Church and himself, but to the great admiration of his age, he employed his genius in seeking to form an alliance between the religion of Jesus Christ and the philosophy he always professed. He aimed at making his Platonism serve as an intro- duction to Christianity ; and thus this man, though of unques- tionable piety, powerfully contributed to lower the faith and spiritual life in the Eastern Church. Such an undertaking can at no time and in no place be made without affecting the doctrine of original sin, which underlies all the teachings of Jesus Christ, but is a doctrine which has ever been rejected by human wisdom. We do not, therefore, quote Clement as an interpreter of sacred truth, but as a very faithful rei^resentative of the belief of his age on the canon of Scripture. In fact, he received the suffrages of all the ecclesiastical authors who came after him. " His writings," says Eusebius,! "are full of the most varied and useful erudition," (7rX6i<7T7?9 xPV(^TOfiaOeLa<; €/Ji7r\eoi.) " Full of erudition and elo- quence," says Jerome,2 "both as regards the Scriptures and all the documents of secular literature," {tarn de Scripturis quam de secidaris literaturae instrumento.) " What is there in these writincs which is not learned ? rather, which is not drawn from the depths of philosophy?" {Quid in illis indoctum .? Imo quid non e media philosophia est ?) His principal writings which have come down to us are, his Exhortation to the Gentiles, {Ao'yo^ irporpeTTTiKO'; ;) his Paeda- gogue, in three books ; his treatise Quis Dives Salvetur, addressed to rich Christians ; above all, his Stromata, in eight books, a discursive collection of .his thoughts, whether Christian or philoso- phic. He professes, in some measure, to introduce his readers to what he calls a more profound Gnosis or knowledge ; and this * He siDeaks in particular of the Stromata, H. E., vi. 13. " Script. Eccl., cap. 48, and Ep. ad Magnum, cap. 2. CLEJIENT OF ALEXANDRIA. 1 59 work, as he informs us liimself,i must have appeared in 1 92, " 222 years," he says, " after the battle of Actium." It is believed, also, that we have a work of his, (at least an abstract by. Cassiodorus,) AdumhrationesP' or sketches on the catholic epistles. Lastly, we have lost his Hypotyposes, or, at least, only very short fragments have been recovered ; it was a concise exposition of the contents of the Old and New Testaments. ^ 178. But the use of the Scriptures of the New Testament, quotations from their text, appeals to their infallibility as a sovereign judge of controversies, and the only source of all Divine truth, even of the mystic traditions which Clement admitted, and the frequent expression of his confidence in their universal inspiration, — all this is found in abundance in his writings. And not only is it his personal faith in the Scriptures collectively which he expresses in almost every page, not only his faith in each of the books, (for he continually quotes them,) it is the faith of the Church, In Kirchhofer's useful work^ we may read a copious collection of these quotations. "Clement," this writer says in speaking of the Stromata — " Clement, almost in every page, cites passages taken from the New Testament, from all the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, each of Paul's Epistles, the First and Second Epistle of John, that of Jude, that to the Hebrews, and the Apocalypse. There is no part of the first canon of which some passage is not found quoted by him except the short Epistle to Philemon. But this is purely accidental, owing to the brevity of that epistle, which contains only twenty -five verses, and has nothing doctrinal. But it appears, according to Eusebius, that it was quoted in his book of the Hypotyposes, now lost ; and, as we have seen, it was mentioned at the same period in Africa by Ter- tullian ; 5 and at the same period, also, it was so fully recognised by the Christian world, that at Rome the audacious Marcion him- seK reckoned it as the ninth of Paul's epistles. " It is only the brevity of this epistle," wrote Tertullian, " which has allowed 1 Stromata, i., pp. 339, 340. ^ For this reason the title is in Latin. 3 The best edition of his works is by Potter, Oxford, 1715. 2 vols, folio. [A cheap and useful edition by Klotz, Lips., 1831. 4 vols. 8vo. — Tb.] ^ Quellensammlung, &c., p. 22. ^ Adv. Marc, v. 42. See also Epiph., Hcores., xlii. 9. 1 GO TESTIMONY OF THE FATHERS. it to escape from the falsif3'mg hands of Marcion." (Sola huic epistolae hrevitas sua profuit sit falsarias manus Marcionis eva- deret) And Jerome,^ in eulogising it, tells us, that if it had. not been believed to be the apostle Paul's, " it would not have been received by all the churches throughout the world," {in toto orhe a cunctis ecclesiis fuisse susceptam.) "In his book of Hy polyposes"^ says Eusebius, "Clement has given compendious accounts of all the canonical Scriptures, {iraa'^'i T>}9 evSiaderov 'ypa(j)j] kut AlyvTrriov^;,) but in that according to the Egyptians." He always places both Testaments in the same rank as the "Word of God. Thus, in the second book of the Stromata,^ he says, — " The just shall live by faith — by that faith which is accord- ing to the Testament and the commandments, (t?)"? Kara ttjv Sta- 6i]KT]v Kol T09 ivTo\d<;,) since these two as to name and time being given economically, according to age and progress, are one as to their power, (Bwdfiet fila ovaai,) the Old and the New are supplied by one God through the Son," (?} jxev iraXuid, ^ 8e Kacvi], Bta vlov Trap evo<} Oeov ')(opr]yovvraL) He also calls the collective canon, the Gospel of the Apostle, the Dominical Scriptures, the New Testament. ' Comment, in Ep. ad Philem., prooem, (0pp., turn, iv., p. 442.) » Hist. Eccl., vi. 14. 3 Strom., iii., cap. 13, § 93, p. 465, ed. Paris, 1629. VoL ii., p. 2G6, ed. Klotz, Lipa., 1S31. •* II., cap. 6, § 29. Vol. iL, p. 141, ed. IJotz. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDKIA. 161 In the seventh book of the Stromata^ he compares them to the Virgin ^Mary givmg birth to the Lord, and yet remaining a virgin. " Siicli," he says, " are the Dominical Scriptm'es, (at KvpiuKal ypa(f)al) giving birth to the Truth, and remaining virgins while concealing the mysteries of the Truth." " We have for the beginning of the teaching," 2 he says a little further, "the Lord, leading us from the beginning to the end of knowledge by means of the prophets, and by the gospel, and by the blessed apostles!' " Both the gospel and the apostle," he says again,3 " command us to mortify the old man." He always appeals to the Scriptures against his opponents as an inspired book, a universal rule, the sole rule of faith, the in- fallible judge of controversies. In the seventh book of his Stromata,^ he says, " Those who do not foUow God when He leads, fall from their elevation ; and He leads according to tlie divinely-inspired Scriptures," (fijelraL 8e Kara ra? Oeoirvevarovi jpa^d^;.) And further on, " When we have refuted them by shewing that they are evidently in opposition to the Scriptures, (o-a<^co9 evav- TLovfievovi rac'i jpa^al^;,) you always see their leaders do one or other of these two things, (Svolv Odrepov) either despise the con- sequences of their own doctrines, or prophecy itself, or rather their own hope, {r-j v tcov KVpiaKOiv dvdyvci)aicov.y' Clement, in his philosophy, or Christian Gnosis, as he calls it, admitted the existence of a certain mystical tradition, which had been given by Christ to four of His apostles, solely on the con- cealed sense of Scripture, and which had since been transmitted only to certain rabbins of the Church, to be passed from them, from age to age, to a certain number of initiated persons, whom he calls Gnostics, or 3Ien of Gnosis. And yet, in spite of this system of tradition, maintained by him alone, and combated at the same time by Irensous, as well as Tertullian,3 Clement did not cease to declare that the Scri2)tures are the universal rule of faith, for the gnostic initiated into their most profound sense, equally with the simple believer, ('O jvcocrTiKO^ yap, he says, olSev Kara t})v lypacjjijv.)^ " Those," he says again in the seventh book of the Stromata^ — "those are believers who have only tasted the Scriptures, (Ot fxev diroyevadfievot pLovov TOiv ypatpwv Triarol,) but those are the Gnostics who have advanced much further, and who become the exact gnomons of the truth. They discover the hidden senses, which are not perceived by the vulgar/' But we pass on to the pious Irenseus, who apjDroaches much nearer even than Clement and Tertullian to the apostolic times. 1 Strom., vi., 2, p. 78G. 2 Strom., vii., 16, § 96, p. 891. Vol. iii., p. 282, ed. Klotz. 3 Irenajus, Adv. Hares, i., 242, p. 101 ; iii., 14 and 15, pp. 235, 237. Tertullian, Do PrsDscript., cap. 8, 25. He calls it madness to suppose that the apostles had not revealed the same things to all, but taught certain things in secret to a few, {qiiaedam secrete et paucis demandasse.) * Strom., vii., 11. 0 Vol. vii., 16, § 95. Vol. iii., 281, ed. Klotz, Lips., 1832; p. 891, ed. Potter, Oxford, 1715; p. 757, ed. Heinsius, Paris, 1623. IREN^US. 168 Section Fifth. IREN^US. 180. Irenceus, born among the Greeks of Asia about the year 120 — that is to say, only seventeen years after the death of St John, and in the same parts where the apostle ended his days — had received in early life the culture of a Greek education, and at the same time the instructions of Christian discipline ; for he had the happiness, he tells us, when he was yet a child, (ttol^ mv en,) of being in frequent intercourse with the pious bishop of Smyrna, the martyr Polycarp. " This Polycarp," he says,i " instructed by the apostles, and familiar with many persons who had seen our Lord — this Polycarp who was placed by the apostles over the province of Asia as bishop of Smyrna — we have seen in our early years teaching all the things v/hich he had learned from the apostles, (eV ry Trpcorrj yfiwv rjXiKia.)" And again, in the interest- ing fragment preserved by Eusebius,2 he thus writes at a later period : — " 0 Florinus ! these impious dogmas (of the Gnostics) are not what those taught you who were disciples of the apostles ; for I have seen you, when I was yet a child, in Lower Asia, with Polycarp, when you shone at the imperial court, and sought to be distinguished there. I remember better what passed then than more recent events, for the things heard in childhood take root in the mind. I could tell the place where the blessed Polycarp sat ; his appearance and his gait ; his mode of life and his looks ; and the discourses he made to the people ; and his familiar intercourse with John, and with those who had seen the Lord ; and how he repeated their discourses, and all which they had told him about the Lord, His miracles and His doctrine. But these things which Polycarp narrated were all in harmony with the Scriptures, (TTuvTa av/xcficova rah ^ voluntatem Dei in Scripturis nobis tradideruni.)" The Scriptures, we see, are for Irenaeiis, tradition, the true tradition ; "given by the will of God," he adds, "to be after them the foundation and pillar of Faith." " This interpretation of which we .speak," 4 he says, " is in ac- cordance with the tradition of the apostles ; for Peter, and John, » III., 25, p. 256, Giabe. Tom. ii., p. 115, ed. Harvey. 2 III., 11, p. 213. Tom. ii., p. 41, ed. Harvey. 3 III., 2, pp. 199, 200. Tom. ii., p. 7, ed. Harvey. ♦ III., 25, p. 256, Grabe. Tom. ii., p. 115, ed. Harvey. IREN^US. 173 and Matthew, and Paul have thus spoken. In fact, the same Spirit of God who spoke in the prophets has also announced in the apostles the fulness of the time, and the approach of the kingdom of heaven." " The fathers," the learned Mr Goode remarks, in his Divine Rule,^ when speaking of Irenseus, and especially of those who foUoAved him, " constantly employ the terras Tradition and Apostolic Tradition, (fj aTrocrrdkiKr} irapaSocrL';,) to designate the Scriptures ; and it is by a strange abuse that Messrs Newman and Keble cite them to support the totally different meaning given to this expression by the doctors of Rome." Mr Goode even shews that the passages from Athanasius, alleged by these authors in favour of tradition in the Roman sense, speak precisely the contrary, and recommend only the Written Wo?rl. We may see, by numerous quotations from Irenseus, Athanasius, Gregory of Nazianzus, Cyrill of Alexandria, Socrates the historian, Cy- prian, and even Jerome, that by Evangelical Tradition the fathers understood the Gospels as distinct from the Acts and the Epistles ; and by Apostolic Tradition, the Acts and Epistles of the apostles. It is very true that Irenseus, like the rest of the fathers, some- times uses this expression to designate a still recent remembrance which was preserved of the apostles and their teaching, in the places where they had been heard ; but even then, he employs it in a sense quite difiFerent from that of the Roman doctors. The heretics, when confounded by his quotations from the Scriptures, alleged the tradition of the apostles to justify their errors, and pretended to appeal to the wise teaching of these men of God. Irenseus, to refute them, was eager to request that they should reaUy consult that tradition of the apostles which was still acces- sible, that is to say, the remembrance of them which remained during his times in the churches founded by them. Nothing could be more rational. If in our day, for example, any one maintained, in our presence, some historical falsehood relative to the passage of the Alps eflFected by Bonaparte fifty-eight years ago, before the battle of Marengo ; and if the authors of the falsehood, ' Divine Rule of Faith and Practice. London, 1853. Vol. i., p. 68; alao, vol. iii., pp. 23, 2G. 174 TESTIMONY OF THE FATHERS. refusing the testimony of books, appealed to the oral traditions collected on the s]X)t, we should be able, like Ircnfcus, to accept the challenge, to turn with confidence this source of information against them, and to challenge them to find in their favour any trustworthy testimony. But if, instead of Napoleon, the points in question regarded Hannibal, and, instead of the passage of the Alps by the French, that of the Carthaginians, two thousand and seventy-five years ago, we should look back upon it as an absurdity to appeal to local tradition, and should be ]:)erfectly sure that, at this distance of time, nothing could be expected from it. So it was with Irenajus. He never thought of a tradition infallible for ages, or trans- mitted from generation to generation without its being known how. But when the Valentinians, unable to impugn his arguments from Scripture, presumed to oppose to them the oral teaching of the apostles, his reply was, " We know it better than you, and we can easily recover it in the churches they founded." It was then only the second age of Christianity ; the living remembrance was preserved of the succession of bishops who had followed them ; in many places were still to be found (as Irenseus has told us) " men invested with charisms which they had received from an apostle.l or even some ancient believers who had conversed with the imme- diate disciples of Jesus Christ." It was, then, perfectly legitimate for the father to appeal to such reminiscences. " Dearly beloved," he exclaims at the beginning of his third book,2 complaining of the Gnostics and their bad faith, " see the men with whom we have to combat. They glide under all our proofs like serpents, and so it comes to pass that they will not submit to the Scriptures at first, nor even to tradition afterwards, {evenit itaque neque Scrip- turis jam, neque traditioni consentire eos.) Thus, in all the Church, the men who wish to see the truth can recognise the tradition of the apostles rendered manifest to the whole world. AVe have only to enumerate the bishops instituted by them in the different churches and their successors down to ourselves : they have never taught anything nor known anything similar to the absurdities in which these teachers indulge, {qui nihil tale docu£- ^ See above, Prop. 180. » III., ii., p. 200, Grabe. Tom. ii., p. 8, ed. Hanrey. IRENJJUS. 175 runt neqiie cocfnovcrnnt, quale ah his deliratur)" And in the two chapters that follow.i Irenccus aims again to confound his Marcionite and Valentinian opponents by the very kind of testi- mony they dared to call in, in the first, which he entitles, " Of the Succession of Bishops since the Apostles," and in the second, entitled, "The Testimony of Those who saw the Apostles, con- cerning the Preaching of the Truth." We see, then, what Irenseus meant by the term Tradition was a recent and tangible tradition, (yeterem traditionem apostolo- ruTn;) not a late, apocryphal, untraceable tradition, such as the bishops of Rome appeal to after 1700 years. Irenseus meant a human and fallible, though well-informed, tradition ; not that so- called Divine and infallible, though very misinformed, tradition which the Council of Trent has presumed to put on a level 2 with the Scrij)tures, and even above them. 3 Further ; These reminiscences of the apostles, which might still be recovered in the local traditions, Irenseus, whatever respect he had for them, never failed to subject to the control of the Sacred Scriptures. He never admitted any tradition, however near it might be, if it taught what was not taught by the written Word. And in that famous epistle to Florinus 4 v/hicli we have quoted, you see, after calling to mind the recitals of Polycarp respecting John, and those of John respecting Jesus Christ, he takes care to add that these traditions reported by that holy bishoj) respecting John and Jesus Christ were all conformable to the Scriptures, (a7r')]y'yeW€ Tvavra av/jiipcova rats" vcrec ovre avOpwirlvr) ivvola ovTQ) fieyaXa koI Oela yivcoaKetv av6p(07roi<; Bvvarov, aXka ry avo)9ev eVl TOVv dnoaroXcov, rj to. avy-ypafifxaTa twv TrpoCPrjTav dvayivacTKeTai fjie)(pis iyxcopei. 2 P. 75, B, ed. Cologne. Tom. i., pars, i., p. 86, ed. Otto. * He combines, in fact, the narrative in Luke i. 31 and in Matt. i. 20, 21. * 'Qf oi aTropvi]p.ovev(TavT€s ttuvto, to Trept tov ScoT^pos fjpoov 'irjcrov Xpiarov fSiba^av ois eVicrreucra/xei/. ® A KoXdrai EvayytXia, that is, this is the common name of these Memoirs among the churches. 198 JUSTIN MAETYR, times of tho Memoirs of the apostles, but takes care to repeat ten times that they were written by the apostles. He even goes so far as to make a more precise distinction between those Cospels which had apostles, properly so called, for their authors, as Matthew or John, and those which (such as the two Gospels of Luke and Mark) were composed by their companions. "In the Memoirs,"! he writes, "which I have said were composed by the apostles, and by those who accompanied them, it is written that the sweat fell from Him like drops of blood while He prayed and said, Let this cup pass from me." And the distinction which Justin makes is so much more worthy of attention because not one of the various spurious Gospels which were given to the world in the second century ever professed to be the work of " a. companion of the apostles." Lastly, Trypho the Jew himself also knew our Gospels, for he said to Justin, " I know that your precepts, contained in what is called the Gospel,^ are so great and admirable that no one can observe them, for I have myseK taken care to meet with them." 3 We have entered into so many details in order to anticipate the difficulties which an eager negative criticism in Germany has attempted to raise against these testimonies of Justin, We shall say a few more words about it presently. 204. In the third place, the books of Justin, thougli all three were addressed to men hostile to Christianity, present, compared with their size, an extraordinary abundance of quotations from the Gospels. We have counted fifty in his Apology, and more than seventy in his Dialogue. But the quotations are evidently almost all taken from our three synoptical Gospels, and report with many of the details, the facts of tlie life and death of the Saviour, and also the greater j^art of His moral teachings. This was his rational task in a defence of Christianity. It was neces- sary to shew to his opponents in all the facts relating to Christ the striking accomplishment of ancient prophecies, and in the in- ^ 'Ev To'lS anofiv .... a <^rifxi. vtto rcov iinoaToXoiV avTOv Kai Tiiv CKeifnis irapaKoKovOrjauvrav uvvTiTa^^Oai. ^ 'Y^i(i>v hi Kai Tu (V Tu Xeyofxtva euayyeXt'u) Trapnyyt X/xnra. — P- 227, ed. Cologne. Tom. i., pais, ii., p. 38, td. Otto. ** 'E/zoi yuj) tixiKrjaev fVTV\iiv avrols. JUSTIN MARTYE. 199 comparable excellence of His teachings, the Divine character of a religion that had descended from on high. And this is what directed him in the choice of quotations ; he took them almost exclusively (as we have just said) froni our three synoptic Gospels ; that of John (the spiritual Gospel, as it has been called) being too profound to be often cited in an Apology addressed to pagans or Jews. Notwithstanding this, many of Justin's expressions recall to us a reader of St John ; he even goes so far as to name this apostle and his Apocalypse.l " There is also among us," he says to Tr}^3ho, " a man of the name of John, an apostle of Jesus Christ, who, in a revelation (apocalypse) made to him, has pro- phesied that those who have believed in our Christ will live a thousand years in Jerusalem." But Justin's principal citations are taken from IMatthew and Luke ; they are made with freedom, and often in long passages. Being addressed to pagans and Jews, he was not obliged to a literal exactitude, provided he gave the true sense. In these 120 quotations you never find a single passage which has a legendary taint, or which could be referred to some apocryphal Gospel. They are all reminiscences of our Gospels ; he knows only what these know ; he reports only what these have reported — the infancy of Jesus according to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, His descent from Abraham by ]\Iary,2 the sending of the angel Gabriel, the accomplishment of the prophecy of Isaiah, (vii. 14,) the vision that appeared to Joseph to prevent his putting away his wife, the prediction of Micah about Beth- lehem, the enrolment, the journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, Cyrenius, the inn, the stable, the manger, the Magi, their offerings and adoration, the name of Saviour given to the holy infant, the flight into Egypt, the massacre of the infants, the prophecy of Jeremiah on the lamentation of Eachel, Archelaus, the return from Egypt, the thirty years of Jesus, all the history of John the Bap- tist, the Elias who was to come, the baptism of Jesus, His tempta- tion in the wilderness. His miracles of healing, the dancing of the daughter of Herodias, and the death of the prophet ^ E77fiTa Kai nap 7]fjuu uvrjp tis, a> ovofxa 'l aTrorrToKtp ia-)(aTT} K€iTac ;) the first to the Thessalonians in the seventh, while the apostle puts it in the ciglith ; and as to the Epistle to the Romans, he has put it (he says) in the fourth place, that, as far as he is concerned, nothing may remain in its place, that nothing might be right with him, (Jva firjBev opOov irap avTu> €i7).)" 1 Certainly this unanimity of the churches in arranging our sacred books everywhere in the same order, and different from their respective dates, is in days so remote a very significant fact to shew us the place already taken by the canon in the usages of the universal Church. (G.) Lastly, the indignation of all the fathers on the subject of Marcion's attempts against the Scriptures, and the precise charges which they brought against him, attest with what holy jealousy the text of our Scriptures was then guarded in the churches of God. But the testimony of Tatian will come to complete that of Marcion. Section Third. TATIAN. 226. Cave and other ecclesiastical historians often comjjlain of the uncertainty that prevails in the chronology of all the heretics of the second century. Thus, as to Tatian, while Epiphanius puts in the second year of Antoninus Pius (that is to say, in 149) the end of the long sojourn which this heretic made in Rome, whither he went to found a school of heresy, others would place these facts twenty years later.2 As to ourselves, who are going back through the years of the second century, we think it convenient, without wishing to decide. the question, to place Tatian immediately after Marcion, because history throws important light on that of the teacher of Sinope. He was, like Marcion, a clever, learned man, but haughty and impetuous, and, like him, resided for a time in Rome ; and again, like him, after having appeared to unite himself to the Church of God, violently broke ofi" from it, and set himself against one part of its canon, but yet not against the same books. It is as such, ^ Haercs., xlii., p. 308. * Cave, Scripta Eccles. Iliat. Litt., vol. i., p. 75. TATIAN. • 231 also, that Tatian renders our Scriptures a testimony which serves to complete that of Marcion and that of Justin Martyr. Born in Assyria, of a pagan family, he at first devoted himself with great ardour to the study of the philosophy of his time, when he repaired to Rome, and there met Justin, " that admirable man, (o davfMa- amraro^ 'lovarivo^,)" as he calls him.l From that moment he made a profession of Christianity, and attached himself so closely to Justin, that after his martyrdom he aimed to continue his school. But very soon his success inflated him, and became his ruin, Irenseus said. He devoted his attention to the systems of error borrowed from the philosophies of the East, and on returning to Mesopotamia, he became the chief of the Encratites, ascetics who united the foolish fancies of Valentine with the repulsive theories of Marcion. We have said that, with regard to the canon, Tatian completes at the same time the testimony of Justin and that of Marcion : of Justin, since he cites without hesitation the writings of Paul and those of John, while the works of the martyr which have come down to us say little of them ; and of Marcion, since he attributes directly to Paul the Epistle to Titus, while Marcion, as we know, rejected it. Besides this, in his Address to the Greeks, Tatian makes evident allusions to the Gospel of John and to his Apocalypse. Moreover, we learn from Iren0eus,2 and also from Jerome,^ that to defend his heresies, he called in the authority of the Epistles of Paul to the Corinthians and to the Galatians. But still further, we have to cite from this mischievous man a literary fact very significant for the authority of the canon, and more especially of the sacred collection of the four evangelists. It is, that among the great multitude of his works, (infinita volu- niina, says Jerome,) the authors of that time often name " the im- portant harmony of the four Gospels," 4 which he himself called. The Composition of the Four, (to Ata Tea-aapwv) " It was,'' says Eusebius,5 " a collection and a certain combination of the Gospels, ^ In his Address to the Greeks, pp. 18, 19. * Haeres., i. 28. See also Eusebius, H. E., iv., 29 ; Tatian, Orat. ad Graec, cap. xlii., 135, 18, 19. ^ De Scriptor., cap. xxix. ■• Epiohauius aays expressly the four Gospels. ^ II, E., iv., 29. 232 • TESTIMONY OP HEEETICS. (arvud(f)eidv riva koI GVva'^oi'^i]V . . . tcop evajye\L(ov r?}? av6^0')(yt,d(TTOu Srj/XLOvpyLa';, a> rcov airpocrhoKr^TWv evepyecTLcov,) that the iniquity of many should be hidden in one Just One, and that, by the righteousness of one, (hiicaioavvrj he ew9,) He should justify many of the lawless, {'jroWov'i dv6/jbova