The Apostles' Creed: Origin, History, and Some Early Commentaries (review)

Originally commissioned to write a commentary on a number of anonymous credal texts as a companion volume to a major text edition prepared by M. Parmentier for Corpus Christianorum, Westra has undertaken and largely completed a comprehensive review of the origin and development of the Apostles' Creed "as a formula" (403) before its final seventh century formulation in the Textus Receptus. This is a substantial and methodically precise study that bases itself on the Latin texts and engages all the major scholarship in the field. Westra uses only critically edited versions of the creeds, and where these are lacking, he has himself supplied a critical edition.

Concerning the origins of the Apostles' Creed (21-72), the author takes up and closely considers the revisionist views of M. Vinzent and W. Kinzig but basically agrees with the position of J. N. D. Kelly, who connects the Apostles' Creed to a fusion of Christological and Trinitarian formulae sometime between 150-250 in Rome from where it spread through the Latin Church. But he follows P. Smulders in positing a "Proto-R"—a version of the creed that lacks unicum and dominum nostrum—as the version that is actually transmitted to various regions in the third and fourth centuries.

The largest question Westra faces concerns the bewildering diversity found in the extant versions of the creed despite substantial agreement on major points. How can we account for this combination of similarity and difference? The traditional explanation is that different regions—separated by natural geographical boundaries—tended to develop distinctive changes in formulation. Westra seeks to support this hypothesis by a close examination of all the extant evidence (73-92). He begins by proposing a "theory of creedal change" (92-98), which distinguishes stylistic alterations from substantive ones. He would expect stylistic changes to be confined to one or two regions only while more substantive ones would travel more widely.

In his two largest chapters the author turns to the daunting task of examining all of the evidence "in search of regional types of the creed." Precisely here Westra's careful method and attention to detail prove most rewarding as he begins to sort out regional differences that can be determined from sources whose date and provenance have (with some degree of probability) already been established (99-276). The procedure has its own critical problems since datable texts tend to be in the form of commentaries on the creed. Westra must, therefore, delicately distinguish the (likely) formulations before the commentator and the (likely) alterations owed to the author's own discourse. In the end he identifies five discernible versions of the creed: Gallican, Spanish, African, North Italian, and Balkan. He concludes this portion of the study with the general features, unique features, and other features of each regional version (272-76).

Having established a set of regional creed-types, Westra devotes his final chapter to the same sort of meticulous review of all the extant "anonymous witnesses to the form of the creed" before the eighth century (277-401). With each witness Westra considers the current scholarship concerning it, reconstructs the form of the creed, and seeks to assign it a region and date. He concludes that the hypothesis of regional diversity has been confirmed but with the interesting twist that changes (even minor ones) of a Roman origin tended to have wider distribution across regions than changes arising elsewhere. And as a whole, despite the range of variants identified, a reader is most impressed by the high degree of consistency in the substance of the creed across the Latin Church.

Assessing his own contribution to creedal study, Westra suggests that his survey of sources replaces that of Hahn (at least for Latin sources of the Apostles' creed) and that he has established a number of tools for assessing possible creedal quotations (406). Certainly, Westra has subjected a great body of evidence to a higher and more self-consciously rigorous review than can be...