The Early Prominence Of Luke's Gospel And Its Christmas Material

Trent Horn recently put out a video that largely reiterates some points he's made before about sola scriptura. In the process, he repeated the claim that none of the New Testament documents were "prominent" before Irenaeus wrote in the late second century. I want to respond to that claim with an example that's relevant to the current Christmas context. On the other issues brought up in his video, see my earlier responses to Trent here and here.

Go here to watch Trent citing Lee McDonald's remarks about the lack of prominence of the New Testament documents before Irenaeus. What I want to do in the remainder of this post is focus on the gospel of Luke as a counterexample. With Christmas coming up later in the week and the popularity among skeptics of denying that the earliest chapters of Luke's gospel were part of the original document, I want to discuss not only the early prominence of the gospel of Luke, but also the inclusion of our first two chapters and other Christmas material in the gospel. (For more about the Christmas material in Luke outside the earliest chapters, see this post.)

Here are several lines of evidence for the early prominence of Luke, sometimes accompanied by evidence for the inclusion of Christmas material within the document. Some of my comments will include links to other posts that address the subject further:

- 1 Timothy 5:18 cites the gospel of Luke as scripture.

- Eusebius refers to how Quadratus and some of his colleagues in the early second century distributed copies of the gospels in the contexts of evangelism and the planting of churches (Church History 3:37:2-3). Those are contexts of a prominent nature, which suggests the prominence of the documents involved. And the most straightforward way of interpreting Eusebius' reference to the gospels without qualification is that Luke was among them.

- One of Justin Martyr's Jewish opponents, Trypho, not only knew of the gospels, but had even "carefully read them" (in Dialogue With Trypho 10).

- Around the year 140, Aristides recommends that the Roman emperor read what's referred to as "the gospel" for more information about Christianity (Apology 2). The source Aristides is referring to is likely either the gospel of Luke or a collection of multiple gospels with Luke at the forefront. For an explanation of why I've reached those conclusions and some internal and external evidence that the material on Jesus' childhood in the third gospel was part of the original document and part of the source Aristides referenced, see here.

- The controversy between the Marcionite movement and their critics was largely about the gospel of Luke, the Marcionites' edited version and the mainstream version we have today. It was a prominent controversy that got a lot of attention (from Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, etc.). The prominence of the controversy and the disagreement involving the third gospel makes more sense if the gospel of Luke was prominent at the time than if it wasn't.

- Clement of Alexandria referred to an account of the gospels' origins that he received from some early elders (in Eusebius, Church History 6:14:5-7). Since Clement was born around the middle of the second century, the elders he appeals to surely lived part of their lives before that time. Clement refers to "the Gospels containing the genealogies", Matthew and Luke. So, Clement's elders either referred to Luke as a gospel with a genealogy or didn't say anything that prevented Clement from thinking of Luke that way. Clement's elders give us evidence for the early prominence of Luke's gospel and for the inclusion of a genealogy in it. For more about their testimony, see here.

- All of the gospels are cited by Justin Martyr, and he refers to the prominent role they had in church services, being read beside the Old Testament scriptures (First Apology 67). He sometimes cites Luke's material on Jesus' childhood in particular (Dialogue With Trypho 78, 84, 88, 100; First Apology 33-34), including in a discussion he had with some Jewish opponents, which he places around the year 135. Not only does Justin treat the Lukan Christmas material the same as he treats the rest of the material in Luke, the other gospels, etc., but he also shows no awareness of a need to explain a recent introduction of a large amount of text into Luke's gospel, and he takes the initiative to criticize Jewish sources for altering some Old Testament texts (something he'd be unlikely to do if he thought some big amount of text, a triple-digit number of verses in modern Bibles, had recently been added to the gospel of Luke). Just after citing some material from Luke 1, Justin refers to how it's "as they who have recorded all that concerns our Saviour Jesus Christ have taught" (First Apology 33), apparently placing that material from Luke 1 in the same category as the rest of the material from the gospels, which he refers to repeatedly as "the memoirs of the apostles" (First Apology 67; Dialogue With Trypho 100). Elsewhere, he refers to how Jesus had "become man through the Virgin, as we have learned from the memoirs" (Dialogue With Trypho 105). The simplest and best explanation for why Justin keeps citing Luke's Christmas material as if it's widely known and widely accepted without further elaboration and keeps placing it alongside material from the canonical gospels, and he does so across multiple contexts involving multiple audiences, is that the Lukan Christmas material had long been part of Luke's gospel.

- It's ironic that people like Trent give so much attention to Irenaeus, considering how much Irenaeus drew from earlier sources. What Irenaeus says about the prominence of the New Testament, including Luke, isn't a new development, but rather is something that predated Irenaeus' time of writing and was held by earlier sources Irenaeus mentions. He tells us that some heretics rejected some New Testament documents (Against Heresies 3:11:7), but that most "do certainly recognise the Scriptures; but they pervert the interpretations" (3:12:12). Elsewhere, Irenaeus wrote, "We have learned from none others the plan of our salvation, than from those through whom the Gospel has come down to us, which they did at one time proclaim in public, and, at a later period, by the will of God, handed down to us in the Scriptures, to be the ground and pillar of our faith." (Against Heresies 3:1:1) Trent cites that passage in his video (see here), but while discussing sola scriptura, not the prominence of the New Testament documents. What Irenaeus said is relevant to that latter topic, though. If something is "the ground and pillar of our faith", that seems to be something prominent. Trent could interpret Irenaeus' comments in some qualified way, such as interpreting him to be saying that the scriptures would become the ground and pillar of the faith several decades after the apostolic era or that it would take several decades for Christians to develop an understanding that the scriptures had that significance, but Trent would have to argue for that sort of qualified interpretation and interact with the evidence against it in Irenaeus and in other sources (like the ones I've been discussing in this post). The simplest and best interpretation of what Irenaeus said is that the New Testament scriptures the apostles produced were recognized as the ground and pillar of the faith from the time they were handed down onward, which is why the documents were preserved so much, so widely disseminated, accepted even by heretical groups who had to distort the meaning of the documents in an attempt to appear to be consistent with them, etc. The pre-Irenaean history of the documents and Irenaeus' comments about them make more sense under the scenario I've just outlined than under Trent's scenario. Thus, Irenaeus can write of how there was already, before he wrote, a situation in which "So firm is the ground upon which these Gospels rest, that the very heretics themselves bear witness to them, and, starting from these [documents], each one of them endeavours to establish his own peculiar doctrine." (3:11:7) Furthermore, later in the same section of the document Trent had cited (3:1:1), Irenaeus makes some comments about the gospels that Trent didn't mention. What Irenaeus says about the gospels there, including Luke, seems to have been taken from an earlier source, a Roman one, as I've discussed elsewhere. So, the passage Trent is citing from Irenaeus is an example of how the prominence of the New Testament, including Luke, predated the time when Irenaeus wrote and was held by sources other than Irenaeus in that earlier timeframe.

Irenaeus not only refers to Luke's Christmas material as circulating among Christians, but also refers to how it was circulating among the heretics, along with their own alternative interpretations of the passages (Against Heresies 1:8:4). That sort of widespread distribution of the material and time to publicly go back and forth about how to interpret the passages makes more sense if Luke's Christmas material was circulating for a longer rather than shorter period of time. In the passage just cited, Irenaeus refers to Luke 2:36 as part of "the gospel", not some sort of oral tradition, an account that was independent of the gospel, etc. For further references to Christmas material as coming from Luke, see Against Heresies 3:10:1-4 and 3:14:3.

- For reasons like the ones I explained in a response to Bart Ehrman last year, this sort of evidence for the early prominence of Luke has implications for Acts as well. Luke anticipates Acts, and Acts refers back to Luke. For more on the subject, see the post just linked. So, although I've been focused on Luke here, there are implications for how Trent is wrong about Acts as well. There are similar implications for the gospels other than Luke in contexts in which multiple gospels are involved (the activities of Quadratus and his colleagues, Trypho's use of the gospels, Justin Martyr's use of them, the comments of the elders cited by Clement of Alexandria, etc.).