Re: The Gospels Were Not Published Until c.150
Posted: Sun Oct 23, 2016 5:58 am
I think we have to make a distinction between "publicizing" and "publication".Kapyong wrote:Well, my focus here is on the publication of the Gospels. Irenaeus' part in that was in naming them. Irenaeus obviously played an important part in all this, but it's not really clear. He does seem to know most of the books.DCHindley wrote:I would agree that Irenaeus is the first author to quote or allude to virtually every NT book in the present canon, but doesn't that just mean that, as is the position of David Trobisch, he had access to the "first edition" of a unified NT?
Trobisch dwells at length on "publication" in the ancient world, which isn't quite what we know today. No copyrights, no typesetting, no "ownership" of a text. Once you let your work out for others to see, which usually starts by reading aloud [semi] publically to gain feedback, then release to like-minded friends who might find it helpful, with these making a fair copy, and the chain of copying begins, anything could, and did, happen.
The well-to-do would, of course, have trained scribes do that for them, but early Christians would have to do so themselves, which would no-doubt slow the process down unless the friends are a group that pools funds to hire a scribe or temporarily offset the needs of a member temporarily dedicated to the task. But unless someone is copying them, these so-called "gospels" cannot be well known.
If someone wanted to copy an existing text in common circulation among, say, booksellers, he or she could make any change he or she wanted, and "re-publish" the work with his or her changes, and no one could, or would, stop them. The original author might complain, and they sometimes did, but that would just been too bad for him/her.*
This is why studies of Voluntary Associations in this period becomes so important. There was an astonishingly wide variety of them, from mystery religions to drinking clubs, most technically illegal, so almost always masquerading as a burial society, as did Tertullian's.
I suppose that whoever published the set of Gospels that Irenaeus had in his possession may have collected anonymous gospels, giving names to the authors who he or she believed, or just wished, had written them. So, earlier authors might mention one or another of the Gospels, or at least allude to one or two, but not all four canonical gospels, because they only knew the one, maybe two, anonymous ones used in their communities, and were guessing at their authorship. However, once a four gospel set was "published" as above (the publisher gathered together four gospels he knew or approved of), where they were assigned authorship, anyone who had that set could name the authors, or refer to a particular gospel by the author's "name", as Irenaeus did.
So now, in his own independent writings like Against Heresies, Irenaeus can name the "authors" because, to him, these "are" the authors indicated in the set he used. Irenaeus, then, publicizes the sets he was aware of (e, a, p & r), by citing and alluding to the works in them, although he does not mention how he got them. Club secret, I suppose.
DCH
*An analogy might be a serial publication sold by subscription, say the Ante-Nicene Christian Library series, 28 volumes, published in Scotland in the mid 19th century, which is later combined by another publisher in another part of the world (USA) into an 8, then 9 and finally 10, volume set, as The Ante Nicene Fathers series, in the latter half of that century. Each volume may contain numerous "books" (works) that were, initially, separate and independent. There are translations of works in the original series to which authorship was not assigned, which the editors of the USA edition supplied because they recognized the translation, which had previously been published by the translator himself.
