THE CATHOLIC CHURCH BEFORE THE NEW TESTAMENT WAS WRITTEN DOWN
What chronologically preceded the writing of the New Testament could not be derived from the New Testament.
This includes, among other things, the hierarchical structure of the Church (choice, laying on of hands, and imparting of jurisdiction of bishops and priests); the authority of the bishop of Rome; the Sacraments, with the rites that conveyed them; the liturgy of the Lord’s Supper, the Mass, the daily discipline of life that received men into the Church, numbered them in it, imposed penances for faults, restored them to full communion, and was the very Christian atmosphere that early Catholics lived and breathed.
All these elements were well and truly in existence when the writings that make up the 27 books of the NT were from 50 AD (the first letter of St Paul to the Thessalonians) to 100 AD (St John’s gospel) sent to particular churches, or intended for certain kinds of believers. Centuries later they were finally collected and made the heirloom of the whole Church that we know as the New Testament.
With these instruments of Divine life in the Church these later writings did not meddle. The Traditions contained in the New Testament were not written down to limit the power of the Church some of whose Traditions they incorporated, confirmed and recorded.
The Church and the Book were never in competition. It was the Catholic Church that jealously regarded the New Testament and excluded false writers and writings from it. She protected its text, and lovingly interpreted its words. It was the Church that collected the various writings, authenticated them and then placed them in her treasury.
But what was always essential and primary and from the Lord, was the perpetual succession of living representatives from the tradition of the apostles; especially Peter, their Chief, That Apostolic succession used all kinds of means to carry out the Lord’s command: the Word contained in the Liturgy; the Word contained in the Sacraments; the Word contained in the New Testament; the Word contained in the various ecclesiastical monuments, decisions, judgements, practices that reveal the living Church in action in the 90s and in the 1990s.
The Baptismal Creed
In the early church, converts were instructed by word of mouth: not by putting a book, still less the book of the Scriptures, in their hand. The very word used by St Luke in the beginning of the gospel addressed to Theophilus, was catechesis. This means mean ‘oral teaching’. A Catechist was a person who taught by word of mouth. Theophilus was not given a text to read but a doctrine taught by personal teachers who spoke to him, and set him the example of their lives. After he had become a Christian, the gospel was given to him by Luke to ‘confirm his faith’.
Catechumens were given a creed (from, credo, I believe) at a certain stage in their baptism. No creed as such is to be found in the New Testament. This baptismal creed was called a ‘Regula Fidei’ or ‘Rule of Faith’ (see Tertullian 160-220) or more usually ‘fides apostolica’, ‘apostolic faith’ or simply ‘Fides’, Faith.
The profession of faith called the Apostles Creed, first mentioned by St Irenaeus who had been born in Smyrna, was a disciple of St Polycarp who had been a disciple of St John and was ordained bishop of Lyon in France in 175 AD – was not written down until centuries later.
Rufinus (345-410) speaking of the Creed in use among the Catholics in Aquilea in Northern Italy says that neither in Aquilea in Northern Italy says that neither in Aquilea nor in Rome had the creed ever been put into writing, and that he regarded the creed of the Church of Rome as the purest because ‘there, the ancient practice was preserved of the catechumens reciting the creed in the hearing of the faithful’. The creed was written down only when it started to be recited at Mass by all the faithful and not just by the catechumens at their baptism.
This ‘ancient practice’ to which Rufinus refers, is not mentioned in the New Testament. St Ignatius of Antioch (martyred in 109 AD) is quoted by Eusebius of Caesarea in the latter’s history (iii, 36) as exhorting Christians whom he met on his way to Rome where he was put to death by Trajan to ‘guard themselves against the heresies that were arising, and to cling with tenacity to the Tradition of the apostles’. He did not tell them to ‘cling to the Scriptures’.
It was the boast of Rufinus that no heresy ever arose within the mother Church of Rome; and of St Ambrose (339-397) that the Church of Rome had preserved undefiled the Symbol (another word of the Creed) of the Apostles.
St Augustine (354-430) in a talk to catechumens (Sermon ccxii) forbids them to commit the Creed to writing: ‘You must by no means write down the words of the Creed in order to remember them: but you must learn them by hearing them. Nor when you have learnt them must you write them down but hold them always in your memory and ponder them.’
The authority of the creeds was not derived from the New Testament, even though the writings of the New Testament contain, at least in germ, the contents of the creeds. The creeds ante-date New Testament.
Daily Life for the converts was a succession of Sacraments:
1. Initiation – Baptism
2. Strengthening: Confirmation
3. Holy Eucharist: food for the journey
4. Matrimony
5. Holy Orders
6. Holy Anointing
7. Penance
The Honoured Place of the New Testament
The books of the New Testament were never an instrument for the teaching of the Faith. They were never put into the hands of the neophytes so that could make a private judgement as to whether they agreed with or contradicted what they had been taught.
The Scriptures were held in the Church’s hand: given to the Faithful as documents beyond the reach of their criticism, guaranteed by the same authority by which they had become Christians: that of the Body of Christ, the Catholic Church.
The idea of treating the narratives of our Lord’s life and deeds and teaching as common books, subject to the judgement of their readers would have struck the early Christians with horror.
They had a special name for weak and unfaithful Christians who gave up their holy books to those who were unbaptised; they called them traitores – traitors. It would have been treason in their mind to hand the gospels or the other Christian writings over to people without faith: as it would have been treason to question the truth of a miracle or of the words of Jesus as transmitted by word of mouth, or as recorded in those writings.
The reasons for this respect given to the New Testament writings was the fact that behind them lay the full authority of the living Church.
It was as a result of the love and grace of that church had first learnt of the scriptures. That the Spirit of God lay behind writings was something that they learnt only from the church. The kingdom of which these writings spoke was the Church herself. The New Testament was her book; it spoke of her.
The Scriptures did not produce the hierarchy by which the Church was and is still governed; nor the Sacraments by which she was sustained; not the discipline by which the Christian people lived out their daily lives.
The Church from the outset was the dispenser of the Scriptures. She selected passages for recitation in her Eucharistic liturgy. She referred to the sacred writings daily in her prayers and teaching. They were a treasury out of which she brought gifts, new and old.
Worship of the Written Tradition
This continued to be the relationship between the Church and the New Testament up to the time of the ‘reformation’. The texts were copied out by the generous labour of unwearying and loving monastic and priestly hands.
Before the time of printing (1450) it was even physically impossible that the scriptures could ever have been an instrument of teaching the faith: copies were too costly.
It was only around the time of the invention of printing that a new notion was circulated by an apostate Catholic priest – Martin Luther – who maintained that the Catholic Church and her bishops and priests were not the ones to whom our Lord committed the propagation of the faith but that each Christian was to teach himself by studying the written word of the revealed scriptures. This written word was the sole authority for faith, according to Luther; it was the only way to God.
This meant that the written word replaced the church replaced the church for people who accepted the ideas of Luther.
There seems to have been a genuine confusion in the mind of Luther and his followers between the outward, material Word which members of the newly formed Protestant churches read and studied, and the inner Word which is the true sense of the document. So they argued naively that from possessing the former, a person somehow automatically possessed the latter.
They also seem to have thought that unity of belief would follow from various individuals’ studying of the same text. They buried their heads in the sand and would not fact the inescapable fact that they were substituting their own private and personal interpretation of the text for the Church’s public and authorized one.
And that as a result, there was no longer any one true meaning, but as many meanings as there were devout and ‘sincere’ readers of the text.
In the words of John Dryden (1631-1700) in The hind and the Panther – in which the poet describes his conversion to Catholicism –
What weight of ancient witness can prevail
‘If private reason holds the public scale?’
‘As long as words a different sense will bear,
Our airy faith will no foundation find.
The Word’s weathercock for ev’ry wind.’
The ‘reformers’ opposed what they called the Word of God (the real sense of New Testament as interpreted by a sincere seeker after truth) to the word of Man, which is what they called the Catholic Church’s Traditional interpretation.
There is, indeed something flattering in this idea of an immediate contact between God and the individual and an illumination of the seeker’s mind by the Holy Spirit.
But this idea of Luther’s at one stroke got rid of the hierarchical Catholic Church, of all authority especially that of the Pope and the bishops, of the sacraments, of Church discipline and all spiritual controls that for 1500 years had characterized Christianity.
Objections to Luther’s novel views were obvious:
Firstly, it was not only illogical and without justification from the scriptures. But it was directly opposed to the words of Jesus: ‘Go into the world and preach the gospel to every creature’ and to all the passages in the scriptures themselves where the establishment of the Church and spiritual authority is clearly stated.
Secondly, it was clear that this elevation of Catholic written Tradition to the status of a unique and total statement of Christian belief and practice, and this cutting out, by Protestant Christians, of the living roots of Catholic oral Tradition and Papal Authority, would inevitably lead to disunity and confusion and the proliferation of sects and antagonistic and pseudo-religious bodies all claiming to be true.
This objection, made at the time of Luther has – in the light of 450 years of bible-based Christianity – been proven tragically true.
St Augustine should have the last word in his brief sketch on the relationship between the Catholic Church’s oral Tradition, and this oral tradition’s very selective confirmation and record, that we know as the New Testament.
‘I should not believe the Gospel itself, if the authority of the Catholic Church did not move me to do so’.
Contra. Epist. Fundament. i,6
What chronologically preceded the writing of the New Testament could not be derived from the New Testament.
This includes, among other things, the hierarchical structure of the Church (choice, laying on of hands, and imparting of jurisdiction of bishops and priests); the authority of the bishop of Rome; the Sacraments, with the rites that conveyed them; the liturgy of the Lord’s Supper, the Mass, the daily discipline of life that received men into the Church, numbered them in it, imposed penances for faults, restored them to full communion, and was the very Christian atmosphere that early Catholics lived and breathed.
All these elements were well and truly in existence when the writings that make up the 27 books of the NT were from 50 AD (the first letter of St Paul to the Thessalonians) to 100 AD (St John’s gospel) sent to particular churches, or intended for certain kinds of believers. Centuries later they were finally collected and made the heirloom of the whole Church that we know as the New Testament.
With these instruments of Divine life in the Church these later writings did not meddle. The Traditions contained in the New Testament were not written down to limit the power of the Church some of whose Traditions they incorporated, confirmed and recorded.
The Church and the Book were never in competition. It was the Catholic Church that jealously regarded the New Testament and excluded false writers and writings from it. She protected its text, and lovingly interpreted its words. It was the Church that collected the various writings, authenticated them and then placed them in her treasury.
But what was always essential and primary and from the Lord, was the perpetual succession of living representatives from the tradition of the apostles; especially Peter, their Chief, That Apostolic succession used all kinds of means to carry out the Lord’s command: the Word contained in the Liturgy; the Word contained in the Sacraments; the Word contained in the New Testament; the Word contained in the various ecclesiastical monuments, decisions, judgements, practices that reveal the living Church in action in the 90s and in the 1990s.
The Baptismal Creed
In the early church, converts were instructed by word of mouth: not by putting a book, still less the book of the Scriptures, in their hand. The very word used by St Luke in the beginning of the gospel addressed to Theophilus, was catechesis. This means mean ‘oral teaching’. A Catechist was a person who taught by word of mouth. Theophilus was not given a text to read but a doctrine taught by personal teachers who spoke to him, and set him the example of their lives. After he had become a Christian, the gospel was given to him by Luke to ‘confirm his faith’.
Catechumens were given a creed (from, credo, I believe) at a certain stage in their baptism. No creed as such is to be found in the New Testament. This baptismal creed was called a ‘Regula Fidei’ or ‘Rule of Faith’ (see Tertullian 160-220) or more usually ‘fides apostolica’, ‘apostolic faith’ or simply ‘Fides’, Faith.
The profession of faith called the Apostles Creed, first mentioned by St Irenaeus who had been born in Smyrna, was a disciple of St Polycarp who had been a disciple of St John and was ordained bishop of Lyon in France in 175 AD – was not written down until centuries later.
Rufinus (345-410) speaking of the Creed in use among the Catholics in Aquilea in Northern Italy says that neither in Aquilea in Northern Italy says that neither in Aquilea nor in Rome had the creed ever been put into writing, and that he regarded the creed of the Church of Rome as the purest because ‘there, the ancient practice was preserved of the catechumens reciting the creed in the hearing of the faithful’. The creed was written down only when it started to be recited at Mass by all the faithful and not just by the catechumens at their baptism.
This ‘ancient practice’ to which Rufinus refers, is not mentioned in the New Testament. St Ignatius of Antioch (martyred in 109 AD) is quoted by Eusebius of Caesarea in the latter’s history (iii, 36) as exhorting Christians whom he met on his way to Rome where he was put to death by Trajan to ‘guard themselves against the heresies that were arising, and to cling with tenacity to the Tradition of the apostles’. He did not tell them to ‘cling to the Scriptures’.
It was the boast of Rufinus that no heresy ever arose within the mother Church of Rome; and of St Ambrose (339-397) that the Church of Rome had preserved undefiled the Symbol (another word of the Creed) of the Apostles.
St Augustine (354-430) in a talk to catechumens (Sermon ccxii) forbids them to commit the Creed to writing: ‘You must by no means write down the words of the Creed in order to remember them: but you must learn them by hearing them. Nor when you have learnt them must you write them down but hold them always in your memory and ponder them.’
The authority of the creeds was not derived from the New Testament, even though the writings of the New Testament contain, at least in germ, the contents of the creeds. The creeds ante-date New Testament.
Daily Life for the converts was a succession of Sacraments:
1. Initiation – Baptism
2. Strengthening: Confirmation
3. Holy Eucharist: food for the journey
4. Matrimony
5. Holy Orders
6. Holy Anointing
7. Penance
The Honoured Place of the New Testament
The books of the New Testament were never an instrument for the teaching of the Faith. They were never put into the hands of the neophytes so that could make a private judgement as to whether they agreed with or contradicted what they had been taught.
The Scriptures were held in the Church’s hand: given to the Faithful as documents beyond the reach of their criticism, guaranteed by the same authority by which they had become Christians: that of the Body of Christ, the Catholic Church.
The idea of treating the narratives of our Lord’s life and deeds and teaching as common books, subject to the judgement of their readers would have struck the early Christians with horror.
They had a special name for weak and unfaithful Christians who gave up their holy books to those who were unbaptised; they called them traitores – traitors. It would have been treason in their mind to hand the gospels or the other Christian writings over to people without faith: as it would have been treason to question the truth of a miracle or of the words of Jesus as transmitted by word of mouth, or as recorded in those writings.
The reasons for this respect given to the New Testament writings was the fact that behind them lay the full authority of the living Church.
It was as a result of the love and grace of that church had first learnt of the scriptures. That the Spirit of God lay behind writings was something that they learnt only from the church. The kingdom of which these writings spoke was the Church herself. The New Testament was her book; it spoke of her.
The Scriptures did not produce the hierarchy by which the Church was and is still governed; nor the Sacraments by which she was sustained; not the discipline by which the Christian people lived out their daily lives.
The Church from the outset was the dispenser of the Scriptures. She selected passages for recitation in her Eucharistic liturgy. She referred to the sacred writings daily in her prayers and teaching. They were a treasury out of which she brought gifts, new and old.
Worship of the Written Tradition
This continued to be the relationship between the Church and the New Testament up to the time of the ‘reformation’. The texts were copied out by the generous labour of unwearying and loving monastic and priestly hands.
Before the time of printing (1450) it was even physically impossible that the scriptures could ever have been an instrument of teaching the faith: copies were too costly.
It was only around the time of the invention of printing that a new notion was circulated by an apostate Catholic priest – Martin Luther – who maintained that the Catholic Church and her bishops and priests were not the ones to whom our Lord committed the propagation of the faith but that each Christian was to teach himself by studying the written word of the revealed scriptures. This written word was the sole authority for faith, according to Luther; it was the only way to God.
This meant that the written word replaced the church replaced the church for people who accepted the ideas of Luther.
There seems to have been a genuine confusion in the mind of Luther and his followers between the outward, material Word which members of the newly formed Protestant churches read and studied, and the inner Word which is the true sense of the document. So they argued naively that from possessing the former, a person somehow automatically possessed the latter.
They also seem to have thought that unity of belief would follow from various individuals’ studying of the same text. They buried their heads in the sand and would not fact the inescapable fact that they were substituting their own private and personal interpretation of the text for the Church’s public and authorized one.
And that as a result, there was no longer any one true meaning, but as many meanings as there were devout and ‘sincere’ readers of the text.
In the words of John Dryden (1631-1700) in The hind and the Panther – in which the poet describes his conversion to Catholicism –
What weight of ancient witness can prevail
‘If private reason holds the public scale?’
‘As long as words a different sense will bear,
Our airy faith will no foundation find.
The Word’s weathercock for ev’ry wind.’
The ‘reformers’ opposed what they called the Word of God (the real sense of New Testament as interpreted by a sincere seeker after truth) to the word of Man, which is what they called the Catholic Church’s Traditional interpretation.
There is, indeed something flattering in this idea of an immediate contact between God and the individual and an illumination of the seeker’s mind by the Holy Spirit.
But this idea of Luther’s at one stroke got rid of the hierarchical Catholic Church, of all authority especially that of the Pope and the bishops, of the sacraments, of Church discipline and all spiritual controls that for 1500 years had characterized Christianity.
Objections to Luther’s novel views were obvious:
Firstly, it was not only illogical and without justification from the scriptures. But it was directly opposed to the words of Jesus: ‘Go into the world and preach the gospel to every creature’ and to all the passages in the scriptures themselves where the establishment of the Church and spiritual authority is clearly stated.
Secondly, it was clear that this elevation of Catholic written Tradition to the status of a unique and total statement of Christian belief and practice, and this cutting out, by Protestant Christians, of the living roots of Catholic oral Tradition and Papal Authority, would inevitably lead to disunity and confusion and the proliferation of sects and antagonistic and pseudo-religious bodies all claiming to be true.
This objection, made at the time of Luther has – in the light of 450 years of bible-based Christianity – been proven tragically true.
St Augustine should have the last word in his brief sketch on the relationship between the Catholic Church’s oral Tradition, and this oral tradition’s very selective confirmation and record, that we know as the New Testament.
‘I should not believe the Gospel itself, if the authority of the Catholic Church did not move me to do so’.
Contra. Epist. Fundament. i,6
© Paul Stenhouse, MSC, PhD 0