Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 3.djvu/323

 CANON

275

CANON

commandments of Jesus Christ) bore with it its own sacredness and authority from the very beginning. This Gospel was announced to the world :it large by the Apostles and Apostolic disciples of Christ, and this message, whether spoken or written, whether taking the form of an evangelic narrative or epistle, was holy and supreme by the fact of containing the Word of Our Lord. Accordingly, for the primitive Church, evangelical character was the test of Scrip- tural sacredness. But to guarantee this character it was necessary that a book should be known as com- posed by the official witnesses and organs of the Evangel; hence the need to certify the Apostolic authorship, or at least sanction, of a work purporting to contain the Gospel of Christ. In BatiffoPs view the Judaic notion of inspiration did not at first enter into the selection of the Christian Scriptures. In fact, for the earliest Christians the Gospel of Christ, in t he wide sense above noted, was not to be classified with, because transcending, the O. T. It was not until about the middle of the second century that under the rubric of Scripture the New Testament writings were assimilated to the Old; the authority of the N. T. as the Word preceded and produced its authority as a new Scripture. (Revue Biblique. 1903, 226 sqq.) Monsignor Batiffol's hypothesis has this in common with the views of other recent students of the N. T. Canon, that the idea of a new body of Bacred writings became clearer in the Early Church as the faithful advanced in a knowledge of the Faith. But it should be remembered that the inspired character of the N. T. is a Catholic dogma, and must therefore in some way have been revealed to, and taught by, Apostles. — Assuming that, Apostolic authorship is a positive criterion of inspiration, two inspired Epistles of St. Paul have been lost. This appears from I Cor., v, 9 sqq.; II Cor., ii, 4, 5.

(c) The formation of the Tetramorph, or Fourfold Gospel. — Irena'us, in his work "Against Heresies" (a. d. 182-88), testifies to the existence of a Tetra- morph. or Quadriform Gospel, given by the Word and unified by one Spirit ; to repudiate this Gospel or any part of it, as did the Alogi and Marcionites, was to sin against revelation and the Spirit of God. The saintly Doctor of Lyons explicitly states the names of the four Elements of this Gospel, and repeatedly cites all the Evangelists in a manner parallel to his citations from the O. T. From the testimony of St. Irenreus alone there can be no reasonable doubt that the Canon of the Gospel was inalterably fixed in the Catholic Church by the last quarter of the second century. Proofs might be multiplied that our canonical Gospels were then universally recognized in the Church, to the exclusion of any pretended Evangels. The magisterial statement of Irenseus may be corrobor- ated by the very ancient catalogue known as the Muratorian Canon, and St. Hippolytus, representing Roman tradition; by Tertullian in Africa, by Clement in Alexandria: the works of the Gnostic Valentinus, and the Syrian Tatian's Diatessaron, a blending to- gether of the Evangelists' writings, presuppose the authority enjoyed by the fourfold Gospel towards the middle of the second century. To this period or a little earlier belongs the pseudo-Clementine epistle in which we find, for the first time after II Peter, iii, 16, the word Scripture applied to a N. T. book. But it is needless in the present article to array the full force of these and other witnesses, since even rationalistic scholars like Harnack admit the canonicity of the quadriform Gospel between the years 140-175.

But against Harnack we are able to trace the Tetra- morph as a sacred collection back to a more remote period. The apocryphal Gospel of St. Peter, dating from about 1.30, is based on our canonical Evangel- ists. So with the very ancient Gospel of tin- He- brews and Egyptians (see APOCRYPHA). St. Justin Martyr (130-63) in his Apology refers to certain

"memoirs of the Apostles, which are called gospels", and which "are read in Christian assemblies together with tin 1 writings of tin Prophets". The identity of these "memoirs" with our Gospels is established by the certain traces of three, if not all, of them scat- tered through St. Justin's works: it was not yet the age of explicit quotations. Mansion, the heretic re- futed by Justin in a lost polemic, as we know from Tertullian, instituted a criticism of Gospels bearing the names of Apostles and disciples of the Apostles, and a little earlier (c. 120) Basilides, the Alexandrian leader of a Gnostic sect, wrote a commentary on "the Gospel " which is known by the allusions to it in the Fathers to have comprised the writings of the Four Evangelists.

In our backward search we have come to the sub- Apostolic age, and its important witnesses are divided into Asian, Alexandrian, and Roman: (a) St. Igna- tius, Bishop of Antioch, and St. Polycarp, of Smyrna, had been disciples of Apostles; they wrote their epistles in the first decade of the second century (100-1 10). They employ Matthew, Luke, and John. In St. Ignatius we find the first instance of the conse- crated term "it is written" applied to a Gospel (Ad Philad., viii, 2). Both these Fathers show not only a personal acquaintance with "the Gospel" and the thirteen Pauline Epistles, but they suppose that their readers are so familiar with them that it would be superfluous to name them. Papias, Bishop of Phry- gian Hierapolis, according to Irenanis a disciple of St. John, wrote about A. D. 125. Describing the origin of St. Mark's Gospel, he speaks of Hebrew (Aramaic) Logia, or Sayings of Christ, composed by St. Matthew, which there is reason to believe formed the basis of the canonical Gospel of that name, though the greater part, of Catholic writers identify them with the Gos- pel. As we have only a few fragments of Papias, preserved by Eusebius, it cannot be alleged that he is silent about other parts of the N. T. (/3) The so-called Epistle of Barnabas, of uncertain origin, but of highest antiquity (see Barnabas, Epistle), cites a passage from the First Gospel under the formula "it is written". The Didache, or Teach- ing of the Apostles, an uncanonical work dating from c. 110. implies that "the Gospel" was already a well-known and definite collection. (7) St. Clem- ent, Bishop of Rome, and disciple of St. Paul, addressed his Letter to the Corinthian Church c. A. D. 97, and, although it cites no Evangelist explicitly, this epistle contains combinations of texts taken from the three synoptic Gospels, especially from Si. Matthew. That Clement does not allude to the Fourth Gospel is quite natural, as it was not composed till about that time.

Thus the patristic testimonies have brought us step by step to a Divine inviolable fourfold Gospel existing in the closing years of the Apostolic Era. Just how the Tetramorph was welded into unity and given to the Church, is a matter of conjecture. But, as Zahn observes, there is good reason to believe that the tradition handed down by Papias, of the approval of St. Mark's Gospel by St. John the Evan- gelist, reveals that either the latter himself or a col- lege of his disciples added the Fourth Gospel to the Synoptics, and made the group into the compact and unalterable "Gospel", the one in four, whose ex- istence and authority lilt their clear impress upon all subsequent ecclesiastical literature, and find their conscious formulation in the language of St. Irenseus.

(d) The Pauline Epistles. — Parallel to the chain of evidence we have traced for the canonical standing of the Gospels extends one for the thirteen Epistles of St. Paul, forming the other half of the irreducible kernel of the complete X. T. Canon. All the au- thorities cited for the Gospel Canon show acquain- tance with, and recognize, the sacred quality of these letters. St. Irena'us, as acknowledged by the Har-