Apostolic tradition: Guarding the mystery

Within a generation of Christ’s death and resurrection, the church broke free from the orbit of Jerusalem and swerved into the path of the Gentile world and its bewildering array of pantheons, temples, astrologists, sorcerers, philosophers, and mystery cults.

Some of the interactions proved beneficial. In Cities of God Rodney Stark convincingly argues that Isis worship softened pagan converts to some of the themes of Christianity. But other interactions were more challenging. Of Paul’s exchange with the Athenians on Mars Hill, H. L. Mencken says in Treatise on the Gods that the Christian God was seen as “barbaric . . . lately in from the desert and still a bit shaggy and forbidding.”

Yahweh’s country bumpkin qualities weren’t the only liabilities. The whole Gospel story proved tough to swallow: God born of a woman? Born in a Palestinian backwater? Rejected by his own people. Executed by a Roman governor? Hanged on cross? Rose from the grave? Ascended to Heaven? Returning to judge the living and the dead? For a pagan audience the story got more ludicrous with every twist.

“It would all have been less startling to the ancient mind if only the story could be cut free of its historical anchorage and interpreted as a cosmic or psychological myth attached to an esoteric mystery-cult,” Henry Chadwick says in The Early Church.

The second-century Gnostics were one of the first groups to start the task of cutting and reinterpreting. The job, says Mencken, was to “introduce the fruits of Greek philosophic speculation into the naïve theology of the Synoptic Gospels.” They tidied up the Gospel, corrected its posture, and applied some heavy makeup.

When the Gnostics were finished, the church could hardly recognize its own faith. New gospels and tracts, like The Gospel of Peter, started to circulate and vied for superiority over the Gospel story taught and believed by the church since the time of the apostles. How to challenge them?

Serapion was bishop of Antioch during the reign of Emperor Commodus (around 190). Some of his parishioners wanted to read The Gospel of Peter. Fine by him. How could anything written by Peter be a problem? Then Serapion read the book for himself. Problems! “[W]e find many things in accordance with the true doctrine of the Savior, but some things added to that doctrine. . . .” He said that he and fellow church leaders “receive both Peter and other apostles as Christ; but we reject intelligently the writings falsely ascribed to them, knowing that such were not handed down to us.” This wasn’t his father’s Oldsmobile.

Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, did the same thing. In Against the Heresies, he panned the Valentinians because their doctrines didn’t square with anything “the prophets preached, nor the Lord taught, nor the apostles handed down” Other translations of the passage use the word “delivered” for “handed down.” And in Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, he prefaces his summary of the faith as what was handed down through the elders from the Apostles to his contemporary readers.

This concept of handing down—the idea of a certain set of teachings being transmitted or delivered by Christ to the apostles and by them to the church—starts in the New Testament Epistles:

Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ. Now I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions even as I delivered them to you. . . . For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you. . . . (1 Cor. 11.1-2, 23)

I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. (Jude 3)

But we ought always to give thanks to God for you . . . because God chose you as the firstfruits to be saved, through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth. To this he called you through our gospel. . . . So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter. (2 Thes. 2.13-15)

Pretty straightforward: The transmission of Gospel truth — all of it — extends from Christ, as Paul says, to the apostles and through them to the saints, the church.

Importantly, this transmission was both written and oral, as Paul also says. The Gospels and the Epistles were not cemented into final form until the time of Athanasius. Some twenty books were generally accepted as early as the second century, but disputes about Jude, Hebrews, Revelation, and others persisted for almost two centuries in some quarters.

The process for deciding what ended up in Holy Writ (the four Gospels, Paul’s Epistles, etc.) and what ended up in the rubbish bin (the Gnostic texts) was the same. The authenticity and canonicity of the Scriptures depended in large part on “ecclesiastical tradition” and “the succession of ecclesiastical writers,” as Eusebius records. The church was recognized as the arbiter and custodian of the Gospel message, a recognition that squares with Paul’s statement to Timothy that “the church of the living God” is “a pillar and buttress of the truth.” (1 Tim. 3.15)

This authority was primarily founded upon oral tradition and the teaching handed down from the apostles. Says Roland Bainton in Christianity, “By the end of the second century three sources of authority had emerged: the canon, the creed, and the oral tradition. The first two were interpreted in terms of the third. The Church was developing in its role as custodian of all, and thus as the living source of authority.”

Serapion and Irenaeus knew the Gnostics were full of it because the tradition of the apostles had no space for additions to the Gospel of Jesus. The faith was once for all delivered, said Jude. By definition novelty wasn’t handed down. It was spurious by default and thus rejected.