Der Ursprung des Apostolikums im Urteil der kritischen Forschung (review)

Markus Vinzent has distinguished himself with a number of original studies of the earliest history of the Apostles' Creed. His contribution to the three-author volume Tauffragen und Bekenntnis (1998), "Die Entstehung des 'römischen Glaubensbekenntnisses'," was hitherto the most important. To these has now been added an impressive monograph on the various views and arguments, from late antiquity into the twenty-first century, on the origin of the Apostles' Creed.

The author has collected together an almost overwhelming amount of learned contributions, and endeavours to offer a concise evaluation of every single one. To have accomplished this is a major feat in the historiography of patristic scholarship, and Vinzent's book will be a great help to students of the Apostles' Creed for years to come. As a result, the reasonably reliable but totally outdated studies by Kattenbusch (1894) and De Ghellinck (1946) may now safely be laid aside. Anyone who has had to work with either or both of these will recognize the relief that at last someone has actually done what many longed to see done, but no one dared to do.

Vinzent's work is more than just bibliographical and evaluatory in nature, however. The author rightly points out that with regard to the origin of the Apostles' Creed, various arguments appear, disappear, and reappear time and again. Nor is this remarkable, as although the Apostles' Creed is a text that is known to practically every Christian, virtually no hard and fast data are available concerning its origin. When everything that can be studied has been studied, scholars are left with a number of choices for which they only have their intuition about what is probable and what is not to guide them. Did the Apostles' Creed originate in a dogmatic, catechetical, or a liturgical context? What exactly is its relationship with the so-called regula fidei? Whence does the term symbolum spring? What did the ancient authors actually intend to convey when they said that the Apostles' Creed "had always faithfully been preserved" in Rome, and were their claims justified or not? Vinzent shows in a convincing way that most of the answers to these questions that can be formulated today were already posited in the eighteenth century or even earlier, and that these answers were influenced to a large extent by the respective scholars' own positions in the ecclesiastical questions of their times.

Vinzent's account of the history of this scholarship is particularly valuable for the period down to the first half of the twentieth century (pp. 22-266). For the subsequent period, even he seems at times to stagger under the burden of a stream of publications of very mixed standards and purposes. In the last section of the book (pp. 312-395), the author presents his own position together with the criticism that it elicited from the writer of the present review, and endeavors to take the discussion a step further. This review is not the place to enter into this discussion; suffice it to say that Vinzent offers an intelligent and straightforward summary of Westra's arguments, and that the questions that he asks him are indeed the ones that matter.

The main question that remains after perusing this invaluable contribution to creedal scholarship is this: is Vinzent right in claiming (pp. 10-11) that the current positions on the origin of the Apostles' Creed are marked too much by reliance on "Forschungsgeschichte" rather than "Forschungsliteratur," and if so, can this indeed be remedied by "die Quellen zu bemühen und die riesigen Anstrengungen der Älteren mit größtem Respekt und eingehendem Bemühen zur Kenntnis zu nehmen, ihre Arbeiten und Ergebnisse zu studieren und sie möglichst unter Absehung der eigenen Einsichte zunächst einmal zu verstehen und darzulegen" (p. 20)? In my opinion, the present disagreement is less a question of which model should be followed to explain the sources...