Irish1975 wrote: ↑Thu Jul 25, 2019 2:11 pm
Ben C. Smith wrote: ↑Mon Jul 22, 2019 6:31 pm
How do we know that all of those New Testaments (Tertullian's, Origen's, and so on) contained the exact same list of books?
Without having consulted their texts specifically, I believe (but correct me if I'm wrong) that these authors generally or always cite the NT books under the same titles that appear in the manuscript tradition. An important part of Trobisch's case for a final redaction is that these titles are transmitted along with the texts
without significant variation. That's the first point. And the second point is that, for many of the books but most especially the four gospels, there is no intratextual evidence for their titles. In several cases the title is an awkward fit. Acts of the Apostles is largely about Paul, from whom the author withholds the title apostle (despite the clumsy use of "apostles" in 14:4). 1 John bears no features of a letter. The ordering of 1 and 2 Thessalonians is not obvious. Hebrews is not ascribed to Paul, but was always transmitted in the Pauline collection. Even the title Evangelion kata ___ is uncommon and strange.
All of this, even if 100% true, applies by definition only to those texts which these church fathers cite (indeed, by definition only to those which they cite by name). So my question remains unanswered. How do we know that these New Testaments (Origen's, Tertullian's, Clement's) consisted of the same books?
ETA: Also, 2 John may have at one time
been lumped together with 1 John (as a cover letter?).
Therefore, it is unlikely that different editors making different collections of different books into generic anthologies all somehow called The New Testament would have ended up with both the same texts (largely) and the very same titles for those texts.
But it is
not unlikely if later editions built upon earlier editions. Let us imagine, for example, that an early New Testament contained 1 Peter and 1 John, but not 2 Peter and 2 & 3 John. Let us further imagine that a later edition was based specifically upon this earlier one, but included those other letters. Of
course it is not unlikely that they would continue the naming convention. I give this example because I believe that Tertullian, for one, cites all current NT writings except for 2 Peter, 2 & 3 John, and James. How can we be so sure that his NT, then, even included those epistles? What if they were added to the growing collection after Tertullian but before, say, Origen?
Trobisch's argument that the titles of the NT books are (with the possible exception of the Revelation of John, which takes its title from the opening words of the text) the work of a single, final redactor is thus quite powerful. Obviously there are many who have argued or presumed that the titles were applied "by tradition," but there is precious little evidence of that (Papias? Papias alone?), and the theory fails to account for pervasive pseudonymity in the NT generally.
Oh, I agree that there is an artificial uniformity to the titles of the books. My argument is that this uniformity does not imply, on its own merits, a single early edition, called the New Testament, in which all 27 current books were present. If such uniformity
did imply such a thing, then the New Testament would include, not only the gospels "according to" Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but also those "according to" Peter and Thomas, for starters. Clearly later titles were modeled after earlier titles completely independently of some single collection of scripture.
Well, take Eusebius' discussion, for example. He tells us he is going to list the books of "the New Testament" (τῆς καινῆς διαθήκης), and then he distinguishes between the mutually "confessed" (ὁμολογουμένοις) writings, the "disputed" (ἀντιλεγομένων) writings, and the "spurious" (νόθοις) writings, the latter of which he says may also be classified as "disputed" (ἀντιλεγομένων again), thus collapsing the second and third categories. If one draws the testamental line between the "confessed" and "disputed" writings on the one side and the "spurious" writings on the other, one does come up with our modern 27 book NT (if one ignores the double placement of Revelation).
That seems like weighty evidence for an original edition.
And then his ensuing discussion, which I included but you excluded from this quote, kind of destroys that evidence. The whole passage comes off as if he is dealing with a list of independent texts, not a single volume with a fixed number. I think it is obvious that such volumes existed, and that Eusebius had access to them; what is
not obvious is that he had access to only
one of them which he treated with any real regard. Part of his hesitation on, say, 2 Peter may indeed have stemmed from his knowledge of some editions which included it and some which did not, right?
These authors are listing books, and they are calling those books the New Testament, but those books are not necessarily identical to our list of 27 books.
But neither are they significant departures.
But they
are departures, and they demonstrate that the term New Testament was not thought to belong to a single edition containing our 27 current books. It belonged, instead, to any list of Christian authoritative writings. The relative uniformity of the extant lists, I feel certain, probably
does owe itself at least in part to certain editions which were more prized than others; but it does not seem to owe itself to a single collection, unless that collection grew through various editions with different numbers of books.
I take this fact as evidence that Christianity of the first millennium simply didn't have our modern concept of a precisely and universally fixed canon. Hence the "paradox of the canon." The pattern of generally overwhelming similarity, already evident in the 4 great manuscripts of the Constantinian era (Sinaiticus, A, B, and C), is a reflection of the literary authority of an archetypal, original edition; not of a process of canonization.
I may be able to get behind the general idea of this, so long as it is understood that this edition was actually
several different editions over time and probably over space, as well. (And notice, of course, that Sinaiticus contains the epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd; did those books belong to the archetypal, original edition? What about 1 & 2 Clement, which Alexandrinus contains? We do not know whether Vaticanus included Revelation.)
