Monday, March 11, 2024

Lee Martin McDonald on Early Christians Believing non-scriptural texts to be Inspired (θεοπνευστος)

  

. . . there are examples of noncanonical authors who claimed, or were acknowledged by others, to have been filled or inspired by the Spirit when they spoke or wrote. The point is that the church’s Scriptures were not only the ancient messages or words believed to be inspired by God. Generally speaking in the early churches the common word for “inspiration” (θεοπνευστος; or “God-breathed”; see 2 Tim 3:16) was used not only in reference to the Scriptures (OT or NT), but also of individuals who spoke or wrote the truth of God. For example, Gregory of Nyssa (ca. 330-95) describes Basil’s (330-79) commentary on the creation story and claims that Basil’s work was inspired and that his words even surpassed those of Moses in terms of beauty, complexity, and form: it was an “exposition given by inspiration of God . . . [admired] no less than the word composed by Moses himself.” (Gregory of Nyssa, Apologia hexameron) This is quite remarkable since the text in question is compared to the church’s OT Scriptures (words of Moses) and believed to be superior to them. This reference does not suggest that there was a qualitative difference in the notion of inspiration in either the biblical or ecclesiastical texts. Similarly, the famous epitaph of Abercius (ca. fourth century) was called an “inspired inscription [θεοπνευστον επιγραμμα]” and a synodical letter of the Council of Ephesus (ca. 433) describing the council’s condemnation of Nestorius was termed “his [or its] inspired judgment [or decision] [της αυτον θεοπνεθστου κρισεως].” (Vita Abercii 76. Abercius Marcellus himself, who was bishop of Hieropolis of Phrygia of Asia Minor in the late second century, apparently penned the writing. He died ca. 200 CE)

 

From these and many other examples, we see that the ancient church did not limit inspiration to the Scriptures or even to literature alone. In his Dialogue with Trypho, Justin Martyr suggests that: “the prophetical gifts remain with us even to the present time. And hence you ought to understand that [the gifts] formerly among your nation [Israel] have been transferred to us” (Dial. 82, ANF; see also Dial. 87-88). He was speaking of the present and not of the past writing of NT Scriptures. Kalin finds no evidence that the early church confined inspiration to an already past apostolic age or to a collection of sacred writings, even in writings that dealt with the Montanist controversy (see Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.14-19) in the latter third of the third century. The traditional assumption that the early Christians believed that only the canonical writings were inspired is not demonstrable from the available evidence.

 

The rabbinic notion that “when the latter prophets died, that is, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, then the Holy Spirit came to an end in Israel” (t. Sotah 13:2) was simply not shared by the church. From his investigation of the church fathers up to 400, Kalin failed to turn up one example where an orthodox, but noncanonical, writing was ever called “uninspired”; such a designation appears to have been reserved for heretical authors. He concludes: “If the Scriptures were the only writings the church fathers considered inspired, one would expect them to say so, at least once in a while.” (Kalin, “Inspired Community,” 544-45) He adds that in the church inspiration applied not only to all Scripture, but also to the Christian community as a whole, as it bore “living witness of Jesus Christ.” Only heresy was considered to be uninspired, because it was contrary to this witness. (Ibid., 547) Von Campenhausen agrees but adds that the presence of prophetic literature among the Montanists—literature believed by the Montanists to be born of or prompted by the Holy Spirit but by others to be misguided—shows that at the end of the second century belief in inspiration was beginning to be confined to first-century literature. (Formation of the Christian Bible, 234-35) But if this were the case, we would see more examples of it in the second and later centuries. It would be more accurate to say that inspiration was not limited to the first century, but by the end of the second century the church was beginning to assume that inspired Scripture ceased after the apostolic era. (Lee Martin McDonald, The Formation of the Biblical Canon, 2 vols. [London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017], 2:343-45)

 

Further Reading:

 

Everett R. Kalin, "The Inspired Community: A Glance at Canon History," Concordia Theological Monthly 42 (1971): 541-59