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2. GOD FROM GOD

Until the nineteenth century, the gospel attributed by second-century Christian tradition to the apostle Matthew was considered the first and most authoritative of the New Testament gospels, this because it appears first in the traditional sequence of New Testament texts, and because it offers a much fuller account of Jesus' life than does Mark. However, we now know that Matthew was written around 90 A.D., possibly in Syria. The author used both Mark and Q for much of his narrative, but he adapted his material to a dramatically altered political and theological landscape in the wake of the failed Jewish revolt of 66-70 A.D. After the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple, conservative Pharisaic rabbis wrested intellectual control of Judaism from radical, nationalistic Pharisees, and began to create a less belligerent, more accommodating faith. Early Christianity, with its explicit faith in the imminent "day of the lord," when the Messiah would return and lead Israel to victory over its secular and supernatural oppressors, was to many late-first-century rabbis a dangerously radical form of Judaism -- dangerous not because it represented a schismatic new faith, but because it adhered to so many familiar, popular beliefs about the redemption of Israel in the last day.

Matthew's response to the conservative rabbis was to constantly anathematize them as "hypocrites" -- mere pietistic impostors -- and declare Jesus and his followers as the true legacy of Israel. It is hardly by accident that Matthew opens with a detailed, sixteen-verse genealogy tracing a direct lineage from Abraham through David to Jesus the Messiah. So intent is Matthew on seeking Old Testament legitimacy for his New Testament Messiah that where the Old Testament prophetic book of Zechariah (9.9) makes parallel use of the terms "donkey" and "colt" to describe the donkey colt on which the messiah takes a triumphant ride, Matthew, taking the parallel usage literally, has Jesus ride both an ass and a colt -- though apparently not both at once -- into Jerusalem (Mt 21.7).

The Gospel attributed to Luke was written close to the end of the first century. It is actually a two-volume gospel, including the author's book of Acts, which picks up the history of the early church after the resurrected Jesus ascends into heaven. Like Matthew, Luke is also heavily indebted to Q and Mark. But Luke is much more international in character, reflecting the Greco-Roman culture of the Mediterranean world, and downplaying the expectation of the imminent return of Israel's Messiah. It is the first gospel to suggest what Christianity would transform itself into over the next few centuries: An international community of Gentile believers, living in the indefinite future rather than on the edge of time.

The John gospel, also written at the end of the first century, is the first New Testament gospel with a narrative independent of Mark (thus the other three are known as the "synoptic" gospels). Evidencing no awareness of the three synoptic gospels, John's account is derived from the much earlier Signs Gospels, and in certain details is more historically plausible than the synoptic gospels. But Jesus' long-winded philosophical discourses, rooted in a hellenistic version of Jewish dualism ("And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not") are the anonymous author's unique construction. John's self-conscious Jesus, introducing his messianic boasts with a relentless "I am..." ("I am the way.."; "I am the true vine..."), points the way to the self-fulfilling divinity of later Christian orthodoxy, not to the distinctly Jewish Jesus of history.

The second century A.D. witnessed an explosion of Christian literature, written as fiercely competing Christian sects attempted to mandate the true faith of the risen Christ. "Jewish Christian" sects like the Nazoreans and Ebionites produced their own gospels, while the Marcionites insisted on the primacy of Luke and Paul and rejected the Hebrew scriptures entirely. The Gnostics, a tremendously vital sect in the second century, believed that Jesus had been sent to bring the lost knowledge (Greek gnosis) of God to souls imprisoned in human bodies and the material world (which had been created by evil force); through this knowledge one might obtain reunion with the entirely spiritual "first principle." Centered in Alexandria, the intellectual center of the Mediterranean world, the Gnostics produced a startling variety of elaborate mythology and thoughtful wisdom literature; the Gnostics were also fond of the Gospel According to Thomas and added a layer of their own sayings to it.

Attempting to define itself amid this sectarian free-for-all, early Christianity began to grope toward orthodoxy. Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons in Roman Gaul and author of Against the Heresies, a treatise on the Gnostic threat, was the first to insist on the primacy of the three synoptic gospels and John. Irenaeus' selection, however, was curiously arbitrary; he insisted there must be four gospels because there are four apocalyptic figures in the vision of the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel. (Had Ezekiel seen only three such figures, perhaps biblical inerrantists would have been spared the absurd intellectual contortions required to reconcile the conflicting narratives of John and the synoptic gospels.)

Irenaeus' four gospels were a tentative step toward a Christian canon that wasn't formalized until the last half of the fourth century. The author of the first comprehensive Christian canon was Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, and a key player throughout a century that so dramatically altered the fate and outlook of the Christian church. The turning point was the conquest of the Eastern Roman Empire by the Christian proselyte Constantine the Great in 324 A.D., little more than a decade after the last great Roman persecutions (of Christians, that is).

The Christian Empire was immediately caught up in an ongoing controversy over who Jesus had been. In 325 A.D. Constantine was forced to convene the Council of Nicaea to consider the argument, first advanced by an Alexandrian cleric named Arius, that Jesus did not come to earth as an eternal deity "of one substance" with God -- the direction to which John had pointed -- but instead was something of an adopted son who had been gradually perfected in wisdom and grace through the trials of his very human existence. Athanasius was the point man against the Arian position; with his guidance the Council voted its far-reaching Nicaean creed, establishing as Christian orthodoxy the eternal status of Jesus as "God from God."

Despite the victory at Nicaea, Athanasius continued to struggle against the still-powerful Arians, who succeeded in deposing him on five occasions. Athanasius had finally secured his position by 367 A.D., when he wrote an Easter letter to his churches, specifying 27 approved books of the New Testament and placing them in the order known today. Matthew was first and foremost among those books, and the Gospel of Thomas was nowhere to be found. Other than a few books added in later centuries (most importantly, Revelations, a curious and always controversial vestige of Jewish apocalypticism), the Christian canon had been established. Yet it was not merely the sequence and selection of the sacred books that had been established as a result of the struggles and triumphs of Christianity's fourth century; it was the entire context of that sacred canon. The gospels were thenceforth to be regarded as a single divinely inspired narrative, the story of an eternal deity no longer subject to the vagaries of Roman and Jewish politics, but who had ordained his own suffering and triumph over death at the very moment he conceived the cosmos. The gospels became the story of God, written by God, not the story of a man, told by men.

Next: THE QUEST OF THE HISTORICAL JESUS

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