Commenting on “The proper character of Tradition as deposit of revelation,” Doronzo wrote the following:
First,
Christ Himself wrote no books, but only preached his doctrine, and gave
likewise the apostles no command to consign his doctrines to writings, but commanded
them to preach them to all nations under the continued assistance of the Holy
Spirit (Matt. 28.18 f.; Mark 16.15; John 14.16, 26); hence Christ deposited his
revelation in a living and perpetual Tradition.
Secondly,
the apostles constantly claimed for themselves the office of preaching (1 Cor.
7.17; 11.23; 2 Cor. 1.13; Gal. 1.8; Col. 2.6; 2 Thess. 2.14), but never the
task of writing. Hence they proposed the living Tradition as the main deposit
of revelation. In particular St. Paul entrusted the same office to his disciple
Timothy, saying: “Hold to the form of sound teaching which thou hast heard from
me . . . Guard the food trust through the Holy Spirit . . . The things that
thou hast heard from me through many witnesses, commend to trustworthy men who
shall be competent in turn to teach others” (2 Tim. 1.13 f.; 2.2) and he reminded
the Thessalonians of his teaching given to them through his words and his
previous letter “Stand firm, and hold the teachings that you have learned, whether
by word or by letter of ours” (2 Thess. 2.14; the letter here is pointed out
not as something special and formal, but as one of the two means by which de
facto St. Paul communicated his doctrine to the Thessalonians).
Thirdly,
the New Testament Scripture does not bear the character of an official
compendium of doctrine and laws, authoritatively given to the faithful, but it
shows only a limited, or secondary or occasional character. It is a collection
of historical narratives on the life of Christ and on the acts of the apostles,
of pastoral and instructional letters, and of future apocalyptical events,
written unevenly by few of the apostles (Matthew, author of one gospel; John,
author of another gospel, three short epistles and the Apocalypse; James and
Jude each author of one epistle; Peter, author of two epistles; Paul, author of
most of the epistles). If the apostles had intended to leave after them the
Scripture to succeed their preaching as the sole norm of faith, all of them
would have cooperated at least through a common consultation, to its drafting
and they would have written it in clear and orderly manner. In the form of a
code of doctrines and laws for the Church as was done by Moses in the Old
Testament for the synagogue.
Fourthly,
even after the Holy Scripture, or part of it, had been written, the apostles
kept appealing to the authority of their preaching; only once or twice they
mentioned occasionally the authority of one or another writing of the New Testament;
thus St. Peter, 2nd ep. 3.15 f., mentions the authority of the epistles of St.
Paul, and John the Apoc. 1.11; 22.7, 9, 19, 18 f., testifies to the prophetical
character of his own book; St. Paul himself in the second epistle to the Thessalonians
refers to his first epistle merely as to one of the two means by which he had exposed
the doctrine to them [2 Thess 2:15]. (Emmanuel Doronzo, The Channels of
Revelation [The Science of Sacred Theology for Teachers 3; Middleburg, Va.:
Notre Dame Institute Press, 1974], 13-14, comment in square bracket added for
clarification)
In an accompanying footnote we read that:
Christ preached his gospel for
about two years before his death which took place in the year 30 of our era,
and he continued to instruct the apostles for forty days after the
resurrection. The apostles after the Pentecost kept on preaching for about
twenty years before the first writings of the Holy Scripture, namely, the two
epistles of St. Paul to the Thessalonians were issued (about 50-51; a first
gospel of St. Matthew, suppositively written in Aramaic between 40 and 50, is
lost and is not part of the actual canon of Scripture). The three Synoptic
Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles were written between the year 62 and the
year 70; the Apocalypse about the year 95; and St. John’s gospel between 90 and
100. (Ibid., 14 n. 19)
