There’s an old canard that ancient Christians were completely hostile to pagan, sectarian, or else “apocryphal” literature, and that when they had the power, they tried to destroy the “apocryphal” books especially.[1]
As far as what Christians could and couldn’t countenance as reading material, I can only think of one, third-century source, a church order called the Didascalia, that prescribes its audience read nothing but the Bible. True enough, there was always tension about how to handle (in particular) pagan learning and literature, but most Christians at least tolerated pagan material, even well after the empire’s Christianization.[2] To put it bluntly, there was simply no other way to obtain an education.
That Christians widely tolerated pagan literature should also offer a hint as to how they viewed noncanonical, would-be sacred writ, yet some have simply asserted that any sharp Christian criticism of a text necessarily entailed overt censorship: theologically questionable or faulty books should be banned or destroyed.
Elaine Pagels made such a claim about Irenaeus in her 2003 spiritual-historical reflection Beyond Belief. In her account, this presbyter of Lyons-Vienne instructed “congregations about which revelations to destroy and which to keep.” He demanded “that believers destroy all those ‘innumerable secret and illegitimate writings’ that his opponents were always invoking.[3]
I can find nothing in the relevant passage, Against Heresies 1.13.1, saying anything about destroying any writings, however, nor to my knowledge is there any hint of such a suggestion anywhere else in Irenaeus’ work. In fact, with Irenaeus at least, I think this reflects just another example of a common anachronism where a much later, far more institutionally defined ecclesiastical hierarchy has been retrojected onto figures of the pre-Constantinian era. That is to say, because we think of this as the sort of thing later heresy-hunters would do in the Middle Ages and Reformation era, we assume someone like Irenaeus must have operated the same way.[4]
Modern claims of Christian book-banning/burning are also made about Athanasius of Alexandria, who is often taken as a kind of anti-apocryphal heir to Irenaeus and his ilk. His Festal Letter 39, we are told, not only established a biblical canon and criticized apocryphal book, it also banned the latter and defined it as “illegal.” Sometimes, historians have linked Athanasius’ directives to the burial of the Nag Hammadi codices, replete with theologically “colorful” texts, in the Egyptian desert some time in the mid-300s. Though again, nothing about destroying or even proscribing the ownership of such books appears in the portions of the letter we have. (Scholars may be even more surprised to find friendly associates of Athanasius reading and teaching about the contents of apocryphal texts in Alexandria itself, but that’s a story for another time.)
As one could have foreseen, Constantine and the imperial government are inevitably dragged into this meta-narrative: it was the heft of the empire (not least its men with pointed sticks) that effectively cemented the biblical canon we know today and concomitantly napalmed the lush spiritual undergrowth of noncanonical books.[5] But yet again, we may be startled to discover Christians in the centuries after Constantine i) debating the status of certain books we would consider canon today, ii) still licitly reading and studying apocryphal books, and iii) frequently deviating from older patristic norms (pre- and post-Constantine) about how certain questionable books could be used. (The one thing Constantine did get around to banning, at least for a time, was the writings of Arius, after a particularly impolitic letter from the latter to the former.)
Most of this evidence, moreover, is not buried deep in some medieval monastery’s archive: it was always right there more or less on the surface of not particularly obscure primary sources. Yet when it comes to explaining the origins of what we know today as “orthodoxy,” just like a laser pointer to cats, Constantine proves simply irresistible to the popular imagination and to not a few scholars as well.
At what point, then, did Christian authorities begin to actively censor theologically insalubrious books? The earliest examples I have found appear in the fifth-century papacy with Innocent I and Leo I. Depending on how you read him, in 405, Innocent seems to ban certain noncanonical books, saying they “ought to be rejected and condemned.” Several decades later in 447, Leo took a comparable policy a step further, saying that apocryphal texts “not only should be prohibited but even removed completely, and burned in the fire.”
In this course of action, the papacy was arguably much more in step with the Roman government’s procedures (going back even as far as the Republic) than with longstanding episcopal protocol.[6] Even so, publicly burning “Manichean” literature became something of a rite of passage for Roman pontiffs in the next few generations.
So, no, ancient Christians were not particularly censorious, nor were they busily constructing complex indices librorum prohibitorum. To the extent that phenomenon occurred, it was patchy and skewed later in the timeline. Where scholars go wrong here, I have come believe it has much to do with insufficient attention to use and context. Reading an apocryphal book as a scholar was one thing; reading it to formulate doctrine or to teach the local congregation during a church service was another.[7] And it was particularly the latter applications that made anti-heretical types, such as Irenaeus and Athanasius, quite jumpy.
For a variety of reasons, I count the well-known but spontaneous and voluntary incident of destruction of occult texts in Acts 19:19 to be a fundamentally different though obviously related phenomenon here.
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Raffaella Cribiore, Writing, Teachers, and Students in Graeco-Roman Egypt (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996), 281. See the more expansive discussion in Christoph Markschies, Christian Theology and Its Institutions in the Early Roman Empire: Prolegomena to a History of Early Christian Theology, trans. Wayne Coppins (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2015), 33–55. On the Didascalia in particular, see Karl Olav Sandnes, The Challenge of Homer: School, Pagan Poets and Early Christianity, Library of New Testament Studies ; Early Christianity in Context 400 (London ; New York, NY: T & T Clark, 2009), 102ff.
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Elaine H. Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (New York: Random House, 2003), 142, 147. Credit to Charles Hill’s work for drawing my attention to these excerpts. Charles E. Hill, Who Chose the Books of the New Testament? (Bellingham: Lexham Press, 2022).
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I have argued the same anachronism appears in how most people have typically read Irenaeus’ arguments about apostolic succession. Just like saying the magic words “apostolic succession” would not have helped Irenaeus in the actual case he was making, neither would it really have advanced his agenda to flatly order spurious spiritual texts burned. Institutional authority and theological epistemology were precisely the matters at issue, such that asserting one’s institutional office would have been begging the question. Gnostics themselves could have made comparable assertations. Irenaeus’ readers needed to know how to adjudicate those competing claims of authority. ↑
David L. Dungan, Constantine’s Bible: Politics and the Making of the New Testament (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 122. See similarly Pagels, 168ff.
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Probably the best study of ancient book-burning is Daniel Christopher Sarefield, “‘Burning Knowledge’: Studies of Bookburning in Ancient Rome” (Dissertation, Columbus, The Ohio State University, 2004). ↑
An idea developed by David Brakke, “Scriptural Practices in Early Christianity: Towards a New History of the New Testament Canon,” in Invention, Rewriting, Usurpation: Discursive Fights over Religious Traditions in Antiquity, ed. David Brakke, Anders-Christian Jacobsen, and Jörg Ulrich, Vol. 11, Early Christianity in the Context of Antiquity (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), 263–80. ↑