In response to William Petersen who argued that there “is abundant Patristic evidence for the text of the New Testament, much of it very ancient:
. . . despite the optimism of
Petersen, there are significant doubts about whether the Apostolic Fathers can
tell us much about the state of the New Testament text during this time period.
The following should be considered:
1.
Identifying citations. A fundamental challenge
in extracting a patristic citation is determining whether an author intended
to cite his source, or whether he is simply offering an allusion,
reminiscence (echo), or locution. Exegetical (e.g., commentaries) or polemic
patristic works—most of them arose around the time of Irenaeus or later—are more
likely to provide actual citations. This presents real challenges for the
Apostolic Fathers, which generally lack these characteristics and are significantly
earlier.
2.
Citation practices: Even if we might
conclude that an author intended to cite a source, there is still the question
of the manner of citation. Charles Hill—surveying the traditions of Homer,
Herodotus, Philo, Plutarch, Philo and others—has argued that “Christian writers
inherited from Greco-Roman and from Jewish culture an approach to literary borrowing
which did not prize exact replication of the text.” In other words, Christian
authors, even when citing a text, would often adapt, modify, conflate, or make
other stylistic changes, in order to make that text more applicable to their particular
contexts. Moreover, Hill observes that such imprecise quotation have little to
do with whether a text was considered sacred. Even for texts regarded as Scripture,
adaption or paraphrase was not uncommon. The principle here is fundamental:
there is a difference between the way a patristic writer might cite a New Testament
writing and the way a scribe would copy an actual manuscript of a New Testament
writing. The difference, as Barbara Aland has observed, is “der größeren Freiheit des Zitierenden im
Vergleich mit dem Kopisten eines Manuskripts [RB: the greater freedom of the
person quoting compared to the copyist of a manuscript].” If so, then it is
difficult to see how the Apostolic Fathers would provide reliable data about
the state of the text in this early period.
3.
Intermediate sources. One of Petersen’s
primary arguments that second-century writers (including the Apostolic Fathers)
were in fact citing directly and precisely from their sources (as opposed to
paraphrasing or adapting) is because the “variants” readings in these citations
would also appear in other patristic texts. However, we should not
forget that it was not uncommon for church fathers to either cite one another
or to cite a common source such as a testimonia book or collection of excerpts—which
themselves may have been conflated or harmonized. The use of such “intermediate”
sources is evident in the way the fathers cited the Old Testament, but also in
the way they cited the New Testament. Thus, such shared variant readings do not
necessarily reflect the state of the New Testament text itself.
4.
Oral Tradition. When it comes to
citations of Jesus tradition in the Apostolic Fathers (the NT epistles are another
matter), we cannot be sure the author is actually drawing upon one of our
canonical Gospels as opposed to oral tradition about Jesus which continued to
be utilized well into the second century and beyond. Thus, what appears to be a
citation from one of the Gospels may in fact be an appeal to an oral version of
the same story or saying. We will explore this further below, but for now it’s
worth noting that divergent citations of Jesus tradition in the Apostolic
Fathers cannot prove that “textual chaos” marked the transmission of the Gospels
if these citations are not from the Gospels in the first place.
5.
Transmission of the Apostolic Fathers.
Perhaps most overlooked in discussions of the New Testament text in the
Apostolic Fathers is whether the text of the Apostolic Fathers itself has been
reliably transmitted. Metzger raised this issue years ago, and it has been
rightly raised again by Paul Foster: “None of the manuscripts that preserve the
writings of the Apostolic Fathers comes from the second century. . . . The
reality is that even the limited manuscript evidence that attests the
transmission of these writings shows that the copying of these documents [the
Apostolic Fathers] was at times extremely unstable.” In other words, when we
find a textual variant in what appears to be a citation of a New Testament
writing by the Apostolic Fathers, we cannot know whether that variant comes
from the writing being cited or comes from a later scribe who copied the text
of the Apostolic Fathers. (Michael J. Kruger, “The Writings of the New
Testament in the Apostolic Fathers,” in The Apostolic Fathers, ed. Paul
Foster [Ancient Literature for New Testament Studies 4; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan
Academic, 2025], 467-69, comment in square brackets added for clarification)
