Heresy and Criticism: The Search for Authenticity in Early Christian Literature (review)

Grant is at his best when his attention is focused on problems which many of us have looked at in pieces but have neither gathered together nor expressed with his clean prose and sharp wit. The audience this book can most help includes scholars who look with disdain on the "pre-critical" winners of early Christian struggles and Christian fundamentalists who know that "criticism" is the devilish invention of the Enlightenment or the not-so-enlightening creation of the Devil. As might be expected, however, those of us in between will be its most avid readers.

The thesis is clear: Christians who became known as "heretics" had by the second century employed the critical tools of Hellenistic scholarship on the texts of the Christian tradition, particularly its emerging canon. But by the end of the second century, Clement of Alexandria had used those tools in more "orthodox" projects. Later Origen, Dionysius of Alexandria and Jerome, as well as others, continued the process until both "lower and higher" criticism were commonly applied to the Bible.

The first remarkable critical project of early Christianity was that of Marcion who laid out a gospel that had no truck with Mark, Matthew or John or even found numerous interpolations in trusted Luke's text. Marcion's project was primarily a theological one, but he also used grammatical and stylistic judgments in making decisions. His work forced other Christian theologians to form various critical judgments. Irenaeus gave few reasons we find compelling, but he did settle on four gospels and a collection of Paul's letters. His results probably represent both Roman and Asia Minor traditions. Origen employed many Hellenistic textual and grammatical tools worked out by Hellenists on their tradition. Both Julius Africanus and Jerome brought such historical-critical efforts into the discussions among more "orthodox" theologians with the result that centrist Christianity baptized these methods for following generations.

One of the strengths of Grant's book is that he looks at the efforts of Ptolemaeus and Apelles, Gnostic Christian critics, not only in separate chapters but also in the context of the general study of texts during the period. He devotes one chapter to "literary criticism in early Christian times" and another to Galen's writings on the problems with texts of Hippocrates.

The questions dealt with in this volume continue to agitate us. Queries about the authorship of New Testament documents or some patristic pieces are rats' nests, particularly when we have so little literature written by ancient Christians and too often nearly nothing about them. Some New Testament books are actually anonymous, including the crucial gospels, while most if not all Gnostic gospels claim to be written by an apostle. At times when names are given, we do not know which John, James or Jude. The criteria we apply can be odd although very old. The pastoral epistles were not written by Paul because the vocabulary and themes are so different from the seven authentic letters. Vocabulary lists were used by ancient critics to establish authorship. Dionysius of Alexandria, on the basis of grammar, vocabulary and style, judged the Apocalypse to be the work of some John other than the one who wrote the Gospel and I John.

What frustrated ancient critics still frustrates us. If we had the same measly information about Wittengenstein or Heidegger that we have for New Testament authors, and the same tantalizing kinds of apparent cross references, would we be able to tell that their early and late works were written by the same persons? Certainly not on the basis of vocabulary and theme. And if authorial intent is so difficult to discover even for volumes whose authors have good biographies, we may press it too far in many of our interpretations.

The interpolation industry, warned about in the Apocalypse, was operating well in the Hellenistic era. Long before that period Herodotus had insisted that Onomacritus "edited the oracles of Musaeus and...