Kruger vs Ratzinger 2: “Apostolic Succession” is the adoption of a Second Century Gnostic Concept

 Go now, write it on a tablet for them,
    inscribe it on a scroll,
that for the days to come
    it may be an everlasting witness. (Isaiah 30:8)

Michael Kruger notes, “the movement toward a written text” (in the shift from authority in “oral tradition” to authority in written texts “would have been driven by the very function of the apostolic office as the foundation for the ongoing ministry of the church (Eph. 2:20)” (Canon Revisited, 180).

I’ll have more of this in a future blog post, Lord willing. But this is precisely the opposite of what the Roman Catholic Church teaches. Referring to my previous article, which provided the CCC’s treatment on the topic of the transmission of Divine Revelation, (Scripture, Tradition, “Apostolic tradition” and “ecclesial tradition”, etc), I’d like to break some of these out further, because in conversations I’ve seen about these with Roman Catholics, there is a general lack of understanding on both sides.

In that section, I reproduced, to some degree, what the Roman Catholic official teaching is regarding the relationship between Scripture and Tradition:

The Tradition here in question comes from the apostles and hands on what they received from Jesus’ teaching and example and what they learned from the Holy Spirit. The first generation of Christians did not yet have a written New Testament, and the New Testament itself demonstrates the process of living Tradition [emphasis added].

What we’ll see below, however, is that, while “the content” of “the teaching” (the Apostolic teaching) was paramount in the mind of Paul and the Apostles, in the second century, what became more important was the “who” of the persons doing the transmission of the teaching. And further, this concept was not an Apostolic concept; rather, it was a wholesale adoption of a Gnostic practice by “the church” which set the concept of “apostolic succession” in place.   

For Roman Catholicism, the interactions among “apostolic tradition”, “ecclesial tradition”, “apostolic succession”, and the New Testament writings, are detailed by [none other than] Joseph Ratzinger, in a 1961 essay entitled “Primacy, Episcopacy, and Successio Apostolica”. This essay was reproduced in the recent publication  of the work “God’s Word: Scripture-Tradition-Office” (San Francisco: Ignatius Press ©2008; Libreria Editrice Vaticana edition ©2005).

In it, Ratzinger notes the following:

The concept of succession was clearly formulated, as von Campenhausen has impressively demonstrated, in the anti-Gnostic polemics of the second century; its purpose was to contrast the true apostolic tradition of the Church with the pseudo-apostolic traditions of Gnosis. It is therefore, from the outset, closely connected with the question of what is truly apostolic; in particular, it is clear that successio and traditio were originally neighboring terms; the two concepts were at first practically synonymous (Ratzinger, 22-23).

I’ve already noted this much. At this point, Ratzinger speaks of the word διαδοχἡ, which signified both “tradition” and “succession”. And he builds his case upon this word.

“Tradition” is indeed never a simple and anonymous handing on of teaching, but is linked to a person, is a living word, that has its concrete reality in faith (Ratzinger, 23).

This is the introduction of the concept of the “who” of the persons doing the transmission of the teaching. Von Campenhausen discusses this word at some length. He describes the very first known usage of this word in a technical theological sense:

The decisive step on the development of the concept of tradition was taken … about the middle of the second century. It is about this time that the ideas of “transmitting” and “receiving” tradition acquire new theological importance and a markedly technical meaning. The origins of this phenomenon are, however, not to be sought in the circles which elaborated the ecclesiology of the Great Church [a common name given to the orthodox Roman church of the second century]; instead they take us into the world of the gnosis and its cult of the free individual teacher. At any rate, within the Christian world it is the Gnostic Ptolemaeus who provides the earliest evidence known to us of this new, theologically oriented usage. In the Letter to Flora he speaks explicitly of the secret and apostolic tradition (παράδοσεις) which supplements the canonical collection of Jesus’s words, and which by being handed on through a succession (διαδοχἡ) of teachers and instructors has now come to “us”, that is, to him or to his community. Here the concept of “tradition” is plainly used in a technical sense, as is shown particularly by the collocation with the corresponding concept of “succession” (158).

Note this well. The first and only usage of the concept of “a succession (διαδοχἡ) of teachers and instructors” [within the context of Christianity] prior to Irenaeus is found in the Gnostic Letter to Flora of the Gnostic teacher Ptolemaeus (c. AD 90 – c. AD 168). Von Campenhausen notes in a footnote, “this is the only pre-Irenaean attestation of that conception of παράδοσεις [tradition being handed on] which from now on is the determinative one” (von Campenhausen, 158).

Von Campenhausen elaborates the concept within Gnostic writers of the second century:

To name the original witnesses, and even the intermediaries, by whom such secret traditions were disseminated, presents no problem. Basilides appeals to Glaucias, Peter’s interpreter, and through him to Peter himself; Valentinus is supposed to have been instructed by Theodas, a disciple of Paul; the Carpocratians appeal to Mariamne, Salome, or Martha, the Naasenians to Mariamne, to whom James, the Lord’s brother, “handed on” the teaching. All these inventions exhibit the same method, and have the same end in view: they justify the unfamiliar and exceptional features, which might make a particular teaching suspect as “innovation”, by deriving them from a definite tradition, and they validate the tradition itself by identifying witnesses and chains—at first still fairly short—of witnesses by name.

This, then, is where the concept of “apostolic succession” was developed. At the time of these writers, we are well within the middle of the second century. “The concept of tradition, of ‘handing on’ and ‘receiving’ a teaching from the distant past, was not of course something new invented by the Gnostics. It was not, however, Judaism which they took as their model, nor did they, at a century’s distance, resume the connection with Paul, who in any case used different terminology to refer to the concept.

This, too, is another Roman Catholic bait-and-switch. Paul’s teaching on “tradition” (“παράδοσιν”, 2 Thess 3:6, for example), is frequently lumped in with the same concept. But as von Campenhausen notes, Paul (like the rest of the New Testament) never speaks of διαδοχἡ (“diadoche” and “successio”) but rather of παρέλαβον (as in, the “content” of the teaching). Rather, it is this Hellenistic, Gnostic usage that makes its way into the early church’s concept of authority.

For centuries the concepts of paradosis and diadoche had figured in the philosophical education of antiquity in order to explain the, as it were, genealogical reproduction of traditional teaching from the original master in his disciples and the later heads of the school. For no more than the Church did ancient philosophy know of a communication of teaching without the idea of a community within which this could take place, or at least a personal contact between the earliest figure and his successors. Exactly in the later lists of bishops these philosophical diadochoi are, when the occasion requires, numbered by their “generations” from the founder of the school, and the term diadoche no longer signifies (as paradosis does) the content of the teaching, but instead the link created by the process of handing on and receiving, and so the philosophical school itself … (von Campenhausen, 160).

So, whereas for Paul, the “tradition” referred to “the content” of the teaching, by the middle of the second century, the concept of “who was handing along the content” rather came to the forefront.

Let’s just let this sink in for a while.