Rod Bennett - Scripture Wars: Justin Martyrs Battle to Save the Old Testament for Christians

Rod Bennett

Scripture Wars

Justin Martyrs Battle
to Save the Old Testament
for Christians

SOPHIA INSTITUTE PRESS
Manchester, New Hampshire

Copyright 2019 by Rod Bennett

Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved.

Cover by LUCAS Art & Design, Jenison, MI.

Cover illustration by Ian Durneen.

Unless otherwise noted Scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Apocrypha, copyright 1957; The Third and Fourth Books of the Maccabees and Psalm 151, copyright 1977 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. Quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version , NIV, Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. Quotations marked KJV are taken from the King James Version. Those marked LXX are taken from the Septuagint.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bennett, Rod, author.

Title: Scripture wars : Justin Martyrs battle to save the Old Testament

for Christians / Rod Bennett.

Description: Manchester, New Hampshire : Sophia Institute Press, 2019.

Includes bibliographical references. Summary: Recounts conflicts

among the early Christians as they sought to determine the proper

relation between the God and themes of the Jewish Old Testament and of

the Christian New Testament Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019032629 ISBN 9781644130308 (paperback) ePub ISBN 9781644130315

Subjects: LCSH: Justin, Martyr, Saint. Bible. Old

Testament Canon History Early church, ca. 30-600.

Apologetics History Early church, ca. 30-600.

Classification: LCC BR65.J86 B46 2019 DDC 220.1 dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019032629

To a patron and a dear friend,
Mike Aquilina,

who asked for a book about Marcion

Contents

Special Thanks

Special thanks to Dr. Scott Hahn, who encouraged me to write this book and whose insights into the cessation of the laws are incorporated in it.

Likewise to his students Dr. John Bergsma and Dr. Brant Pitre, who lit the way with their own contributions on the topics at hand.

Whatever is true, just, pure, or praiseworthy in these pages I gratefully acknowledge to have originated along the banks of the Ohio, on the bluffs at Steubenville, with careful, studious men such as these.

For any mistakes, exaggerations, or overstatements, on the other hand, I insist on taking full credit.

Introduction

About one hundred years after the founding of the Christian Church, a battle began for the Bible a custody battle, so to speak, over its guardianship, its contents, its proper role in our lives, over its very right to be called a Christian book. The story of that conflict is one of the most interesting, most essential, and yet little remembered sagas in the chronicles of our holy faith. In fact, the questions at stake were so fundamental that it often takes a moment for modern readers to realize they were ever a matter of dispute. The outcome, too, was so foundational to our history that there is scarcely any part of our Christian lives that isnt touched by the result daily. This being the case, I feel that its a story that ought to be better known. In fact, for an incorrigible bookworm like me, it will be a genuine pleasure to reintroduce the world to one of those rare, happy occasions when scholars and sages even a mere lay theology nerd such as St. Justin turned the course of future events as completely as any general or revolutionary might.

This great battle happened so early on, mind you, that the Bible still meant jars full of antique scrolls, some written in Hebrew and some in Greek, read aloud (in a world without printing) from all the pulpits of Christianity at every single worship service. The Bible, as most believers realize, did not fall from heaven complete on golden tablets; nor was it composed by any single prophet or holy man at any one time or place. The jars filled up slowly, over more than a millennium, with scrolls composed by scores of authors working within several distinct literary genres in widely varied historical circumstances. Aye, but theres the rub: not every church in Christendom had exactly the same set of scrolls in its jars; nor, for that matter, did every Jewish synagogue where the oral reading of Scripture had likewise always been part of the regular liturgy and from which the Church inherited the practice. the Ketuvim; while the large body of Greek-speaking Jews outside the Holy Land venerated the much longer Septuagint version and considered all of its contents to be Scripture, too at least seven whole books more than in many modern Old Testaments, with additions to the standard books, to boot. Synagogues associated with the Pharisees, of course, rejected any Christian-made works outright; yet these Hellenized Jews of the Dispersion lingered over them longer and, indeed, were still doing so at the time of our story. As a matter of fact, the Greek-language books that later became our familiar New Testament may have been composed with just this readership chiefly in mind; for of the nearly 350 Old Testament quotations included in them, at least 300 are taken directly from the Septuagint Bible so beloved by the Dispersed.

But as we mentioned a moment ago, even the Christians hadnt yet decided which books really belonged in their jars and which didnt. Many second-century churches still read aloud from debatable works. Early, orthodox writings such as The Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle of St. Clement to the Corinthians so straddled the line between truly sacred and merely profitable literature that even some of the greatest of the early Fathers (such as Irenaeus and Origen) considered them to be divinely inspired, and this at a time when the status of New Testament books such as Hebrews, Second Peter, James, and the book of Revelation was still warmly debated.

The Bible, in other words, was still being born in A.D. 150 both for Christians and for Jews and the issue of which books belong in our jars and how to decide still loomed very large. Yet this question about canonicity, These seem to have been so numerous, in fact, that they eventually overwhelmed even the synagogues most basic requirement: admission by circumcision. Many thousands, at any rate, were allowed to bypass that rite, so repellant to Gentiles, and were admitted to something like a permanent catechumenate by water baptism instead. And one of the most famous of these Greek-speaking Jews, the Alexandrian philosopher Philo, was quite independently fumbling his way toward something like St. Johns Logos theology (In the beginning was the Word) at a time when the Logos Himself, our Lord Jesus Christ, was still walking the hillsides of Galilee.