Last year, as I was teaching on Martin Luther and his views on Scripture, one of the undergrads perked up and asked, “But didn’t Luther change the books of the Bible?” It’s a fair question, but the answer is, “not really.” Luther was pretty well in-step with a long line of humanist-inflected scholarship on the canon going back to Origen and Eusebius. His views on, say, the Catholic/General Epistles were not fundamentally different from most pre-Tridentine humanist Roman Catholic scholars either.
Writing c. 547, Cosmas Indicopleustes (“sailor to India”) had his own hot take on the General Epistles and the biblical canon, which reminded me of Luther in multiple ways. Cosmas, we think, was a merchant from Alexandria who later became a monk. Where the biblical canon is concerned, his evidence is useful because he traveled across the world, which would have given him a sense of the beliefs of Christians in different regions. He also comes as reasonably well read; from his references and theological style, I get the impression that he had spent a long time thinking about Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History in particular.
In a longer discourse concerning cosmology and the eschaton, Cosmas makes an excursus on the Catholic Epistles because they contain scriptural evidence inconvenient to his larger argument. He begins this aside with a sardonic bit of preterition:
And let’s be quiet about the fact that, from the outset, the Church has held the Catholic Epistles as disputed, and that everyone who has documented (ὑπομνηματίσαντες) the sacred scripture, not one of them gave an account (λόγον ἐποιήσατο) of the Catholic Epistles! And instead, those who canonized the registered books of divine scripture all put them down as disputed.[1]
Cosmas then lists a series of old authorities: Irenaeus, Eusebius of Caesarea, Amphilochius of Iconium, and Severian of Gabala. (He conveniently leaves out Athanasius and his Festal Letter 39, which rather famously included these epistles and the hotly-disputed book of Revelation as fully canonical.) From there, Cosmas quotes different opinions that have existed about the historicity of the letters, with Eusebius and Irenaeus serving as chief witnesses. Some Christians accept a selection of the Catholic Epistles, he says, while “others accept them all.” He singles out the Syrians as Christians who only accept James, 1 Peter, and 1 John: “For the others are not found with (the Syrians).”
Cosmas’ punchline is most intriguing:
It is necessary that the mature Christian not draw support from the disputed books, when the registered and commonly agreed-upon books sufficiently declare everything about the heavens, the earth, the elements, and all Christian dogma. [2]
Cosmas’ diatribe against the Catholic Epistles first came to my attention because I was trying to get a better sense of how Christian commentators dealt with apocryphal/noncanonical literature after the era when the canon was supposedly consolidated in the late fourth century. Some have conjectured that apocryphal literature became much more kosher once the canon was defined, as there was no longer any perceived competition. And it is true that some apocryphal books do start to receive rehabilitation (especially in the context of the cult of the saints), as Gregory of Tours does with the Acts of Andrew or as various early medieval sources do with the Dormition apocrypha. I, for my part, see a lot more evidence for angst over a hierarchy within the biblical canon itself, à la Cosmas. Frankly, it’s difficult for me to believe that apocrypha were ubiquitously embraced when we have positive evidence that books with a much longer tradition of acceptance and a much older pedigree (e.g., Revelation) themselves faced significant criticism and resistance.
But back to return to Luther: not only does Cosmas criticize the Catholic letters in terms redolent of Luther’s criticism of e.g., James, he simultaneously articulates a version of sola scriptura. (Nor was he the only ancient theorist to do so.) That is, even without those disputed letters, a mature Christian has everything necessary for belief in the undisputed writings. Indeed, he thinks one should not be basing one’s theology at all on the disputed biblical writings—which naturally raises questions about other additional forms of authority.[3] To be sure, Cosmas had his own idiosyncratic beliefs and agendas here, but we know from him and other contemporary sources that others would have agreed with him. What he was arguing was not outside the sixth-century theological Overton Window, as it were.
All translations and paraphrases are my own, based on Christian Topography 7.68–71, using the Greek text of Wolska-Conus, 3:129–133.
↑
Οὐ χρὴ οὖν τὸν τέλειον χριστιανὸν ἐκ τῶν ἀμφιβαλλομένων ἐπιστηρίζεσθαι, τῶν ἐνδιαθέτων καὶ κοινῶς ὡμολογημένων Γραφῶν ἱκανῶς πάντα μηνυόντων περί τε τῶν οὐρανῶν καὶ τῆς γῆς καὶ τῶν στοιχείων καὶ παντὸς τοῦ δόγματος τῶν χριστιανῶν. ↑
One could object that Cosmas accepts the judgment of Irenaeus, Eusebius, et al. Aren’t they themselves “authorities”? Someone is going to have to write a whole book on this, but in my view, the answer is a pretty emphatic “no.” At least, these are two very different kinds of “authority.” Irenaeus and Eusebius are employed as historical witnesses and learned men, not oracular or dogmatic sources of orthodoxy. What so much of the chicken-and-egg discourse (i.e., did the Church make the Bible or did the Bible make the Church?) misses is that philology and textual criticism were a hugely important factor in forming the eventual canon. Judgments in this sphere were not seen as “ecclesiastical,” and they relied on making persuasive arguments more than making declarations ex officio. ↑