Some recent skeptical treatments of the authorship of the gospels that I've come across have raised the objection that only a small number of our gospel manuscripts from the earliest centuries include a gospel title (e.g., "The Gospel According To John"). I want to address some problems with that objection.
Given the fragmentary nature of our earliest manuscripts, it's not significantly problematic that only a small number of the manuscripts of the earliest centuries have a gospel title. And a small number is better than none. If a critic wants us to think that the gospels didn't have titles until sometime in the second century, for example, or that the earlier titles were substantially different (e.g., titles using the opening words of each document rather than titles using the name of each document's author), where's the manuscript evidence for that scenario? If the manuscript evidence for the critic's alternative is weaker, why is he raising an objection that's even more applicable to his own position?
Furthermore, we don't just have our manuscripts to go by. We also have descriptions of manuscripts no longer extant (as far as we know). Tertullian wrote:
"Marcion, on the other hand, you must know, ascribes no author to his Gospel, as if it could not be allowed him to affix a title to that from which it was no crime (in his eyes) to subvert the very body. And here I might now make a stand, and contend that a work ought not to be recognised, which holds not its head erect, which exhibits no consistency, which gives no promise of credibility from the fulness of its title and the just profession of its author." (Against Marcion, 4:2)
Tertullian seems to think it was normal for gospel manuscripts to have a title that included the author's name.
And it's very unlikely that any of the gospel manuscripts with a title that we have today happen to be one of the manuscripts Tertullian saw. Most likely, every manuscript Tertullian saw was different than the manuscripts we have today. And since Tertullian refers to titles for all of the gospels, whereas we only have early manuscripts with titles for some of the gospels, that requires the conclusion that Tertullian had access to some evidence we don't have.
We should supplement Tertullian's comments with something Irenaeus wrote. He referred to manuscripts of Revelation that were "ancient" in his day (Against Heresies, 5:30:1). Other sources made similar comments. Bruce Metzger noted that some patristic sources refer to the preservation of some of the original copies of the New Testament documents (The Canon Of The New Testament [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997], n. 4 on 4-5). He cited the examples of Tertullian's claim that the church of Thessalonica still possessed the original copies of the letters Paul sent them and the claim of Petrus I Alexandrinus that the church of Ephesus still had the original gospel of John. You don't have to believe such claims in order to recognize that the claims probably wouldn't have been made if such documents were never preserved for a long period of time. Given these claims by multiple ancient sources and the time, expense, and other factors involved in producing copies of documents in the ancient world, it's likely that some copies of the gospels would have been preserved for a long time. Tertullian and others operating in relevant contexts probably would have sometimes come across older manuscripts, not just ones recently produced. So, the manuscripts we have from the second and third centuries and the testimonial evidence we have from sources like Tertullian probably were influenced to some extent by manuscripts that were old at the time.
Furthermore, it's not as though the later manuscripts have no significance. They provide evidence for what was likely present in earlier ones. The best explanation for the widespread gospel titles and agreement in authorship attributions later on is that both were widespread earlier. An origination of the authorship attributions and titles in the second century or later offers a weaker explanation of the evidence than an origination in the first century.
What does Tertullian do with the O.T. books without a title? The scribes of the Hebrew Bible did not title their books if it didn't appear in the text. The reason is obvious. These were the words of God, not man. Of course I side with Tertullian against Marcion and think that Marcion may have styled his work to imply that it was inspired by not titling it.
ReplyDeleteUnlike later Christian practice of adding titles to God's word, the Jewish practice takes the first word of the books of the Torah as a designator. The presence or absence of titles signals a greater issue: formatting the text. Formatting, and especially section titling, can influence readers to make assumptions that may obscure other aspects in the text. Some "helpful notes" hinder instead of help the reader by offering an "official" interpretation. I am not totally against study bibles and formatting but crafting such should be done very judiciously.
I don't know of any place where Tertullian addresses the subject. He may not have thought much about it. The issue here isn't the correctness of Tertullian's principles. (I don't agree with them.) The issue is what his comments suggest about ancient gospel manuscripts.
DeleteCraig Evans says similar things in this video (already cued) HERE. At 13:14 [HERE] Evans talks about how at Herculaneum the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD "cooked" books there into carbon and through x-ray tech we can read the books well enough to date them through the hand writing styles and some of them were ~200 and ~300 years old according to paleographic methods. At 12:08[HERE] Craig says pagan authors talked the autographs of the writings of Aristotle that were 250 years old, as well as references to preserved books that were 300, 400 and in some cases 500 years old.
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