The Concept of Canon in the Reception of the Epistle to the Hebrews

David Young

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780567701374
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Studi biblici

David Young argues that the reception of the Epistle to the Hebrews in early Christianity was influenced by a number of factors which had little to do with debates about an authoritative canon of Christian writings, and which were primarily the concern of a relatively small group of highly educated scholars. Through careful study of the quotations and reproductions of Hebrews in their own rhetorical and material context, Young stresses that the concept of canon had little bearing on its early reception. By exploring the transformation of authorship into authority, the patristic citations of Hebrews, the Epistle's position in edited collections of the Pauline corpus and the consequences of translation, this complex reception history illustrates the myriad ways in which early Christians thought of and interacted with their scriptures.

1 The History of Hebrews’ Reception History: Methodological Considerations and a Review of the Scholarly Literature on Hebrews’ Reception

Introduction

Scholarship concerning the reception of New Testament texts has often operated in a manner akin to the old trick for finding one’s way through a maze: start at the end, working your way back to the start, and the one path that leads to the desired destination is easily found, avoiding the many dead ends along the way. That is to say that reception histories of New Testament books have frequently begun with an anachronistic presupposition: each distinct book will inevitably be placed alongside the others and recognized as “canonical,” and the scholarly task is therefore to enumerate the process that led to this presupposed canonization.¹ The “end of the maze” in this case is usually the twenty-seven books of Athanasius’ list, and the goal is to identify the key turns in the path that eventually led to the collection known as the New Testament. This line of inquiry is pursued for any given writing in the New Testament by utilizing the historical evidence relevant to that writing to reconstruct its path toward canonicity. As a result, a variety of evidence ranging from lists of authoritative writings to patristic citations to New Testament manuscripts are marshaled to serve the single purpose of reconstructing the path of a given writing toward a canonicity that must necessarily be achieved. Recently, however, a number of scholars have challenged the homogeneous treatment of these various kinds of evidence, arguing instead that each citation, canon list, and manuscript must be placed in its own distinct social context if the various means for interacting with sacred writings in early Christianity are to be more clearly understood.² When this careful attention to social context is applied to the use and reproduction of the work known as the Epistle to the Hebrews, a complex story of the epistle’s reception emerges, which complicates a simple dichotomy of acceptance or rejection. The Epistle to the Hebrews was written about, quoted, and reproduced to a variety of ends in ancient Christianity, and its reception was influenced by a wide array of factors including its utility in theological arguments, its relationship to the Pauline corpus, its omission from that corpus when it was first translated into Latin, and, to a lesser extent, the lists of sacred scriptures produced by fourth- and fifth-century theologians.

The reception history of Hebrews serves to problematize the notion that such diverse kinds of evidence may be subsumed under a single project of determining when a writing became “canonical.” While patristic citations of Hebrews indicate that the work could be cited in support of a writer’s theological argument at a very early stage, this fact alone does not establish the work’s place among a broadly accepted list of authoritative “sacred scriptures” as determined at a later stage of history. Likewise, though lists of “approved” scriptures began to be enumerated in the fourth century, the manuscripts that include Hebrews share neither the order of writings nor the concerns represented by these lists. On the contrary, these manuscripts can be interpreted as embodiments of distinctive hermeneutic, technological, and linguistic frameworks; each manuscript witness indicates some editorial effort to determine which writings should be included within its own folia, either by the editors of an exemplar or those who produced the manuscript in question, but no single manuscript resolves the location of Hebrews within a preordained collection. No one manuscript, no specific editor, and no single patristic writer settled the question of how Hebrews fits within a larger gathering of apostolic writings, at least not in a definitive manner. Furthermore, the treatment of Hebrews in these manuscripts appears to have been influenced not by an attempt to establish a settled canon but by the book’s availability in the language in which a given manuscript was reproduced; accidents of history linked to geography, language, and local book culture were as significant in determining this work’s inclusion into collections of scriptures as theological judgments regarding its value.³

Tracing the Reception of Hebrews

David Brakke has called for scholars of ancient Christianity to resist a long-standing trend in the study of early Christian writings: the tendency to search for clues capable of documenting the purportedly inevitable establishment of a fixed New Testament canon. As he states,

And so it is simply anachronistic to ask writers of the second century which books were in their canon and which not—for the notion of a closed canon was simply not there. We must not continue to place Christian authors on a trajectory that leads inevitably to Athanasius’s supposedly definitive list of 367.⁴

As Brakke’s observation highlights, the search for a “canon” among writers who cannot and did not share the concept obscures the specific contexts and priorities that informed decisions about which texts would be authorized and why, while also flattening diverse evidence into a single interpretive framework. Dimitri Krytatas makes a similar point in an analysis of references to Christian scriptures in martyrological literature. “A distinction between documents considered sacred and documents that were held to be heretical or profane was taken for granted,” he observes, but sacred documents were rarely, if ever, described as “bound all together.” Thus, early-fourth-century accounts about the impact of “the Great Persecution” also suggest that Christian groups held neither consistent ideas about which texts were sacred nor a consistent set of practices binding particular sets of books together.⁵ Even in the fourth century, after the notion of canon emerged as a topic for open discussion, neither the concept of canonicity nor the particular lists of church leaders determined for all Christians everywhere what would be read from that moment forward. On the contrary, such lists appear to be the concern of a very specific group of Christians who were in fact unable to reproduce their decisions in any meaningful way. “Canon” as a concept is anachronistic prior to the fourth century and remains a misleading guide to later Christian scriptures as well.⁶ The case of Hebrews offers one striking illustration of this broader problem.

The present work builds on the observations of Brakke, Krytatas, and others to reopen the question of the reception of Hebrews.⁷ Like previous scholars, I also review the citations of Hebrews by early Christian writers, consider the explicit judgments of theologians and ecclesiastical councils, and survey extant manuscripts of this document.⁸ Unlike these scholars, however, I seek to understand the historical contexts and settings that enabled particular judgments about texts to be made.⁹ As Brakke has emphasized, reflections on the authority of a given text are dependent upon the social contexts in which scholars did their work, the aims such reflections were designed to serve, and the practical circumstances in which such judgments could be realized.¹⁰ Even the famous list of books in Athanasius’ thirty-ninth Festal Letter should not be seen as an attempt to impose a canon where one did not previously exist but to offer an alternative to the less fixed academic canon, the boundaries of which could shift since its authority did not reside in the canon itself but in the teacher who utilized it.¹¹ As a result, the more illuminating question for understanding the reception and utilization of a given scripture is not “How did we get Athanasius’ canon?” but “What are the various ways early Christians were interacting with and reproducing their scriptures?”

The question of Hebrews’ canonicity was not the only, or even a primary, factor in the question of its reception. Early Christians were interacting with Hebrews in a variety of ways beyond merely asking whether or not it was canonical. Christian writers alluded to Hebrews’ distinctive theology when developing their own perspectives; they also adapted Hebrews’ list of biblical proofs regarding the status of Jesus. But a concept of “canon” was not a factor in these uses. Instead, as Margaret Mitchell has helpfully demonstrated, patristic citations of Paul’s letters existed within an agonistic framework that these writers imitated from their classical counterparts. “The whole point, indeed the ‘end’ of interpretation … is the interpretation that is useful or beneficial. Paul and his ancient interpreters had in common strategic variability according to a recognized set of commonplaces for where meaning is to be found—in the letter or in the spirit.”¹² If the question of canonicity or authority is set aside, then another important concept in the interaction of early Christians with their scriptures emerges—usefulness. These quotations and allusions demonstrate that the document was available and useful to that author’s argument. Of course, this availability and usefulness implies a certain kind of limited authority, namely, that the document carries enough weight that the writer found its arguments persuasive, or if well known or directly cited, that the author assumes the audience would find a quotation from the document persuasive. The categories of usefulness and authority and later determinations of “canonicity” are therefore not mutually exclusive.

The manuscripts that include Hebrews among their contents provide another window into the interactions of early Christians with this document. A proper contextualization of the evidence also highlights just how indeterminate issues of canon and authority were in the production of these manuscripts. This is true in the simplest sense that the many manuscripts that contain various New Testament books do not reflect the canon lists of the fourth century. In addition to the fact that entire New Testaments are relatively rare in the manuscript tradition, the collections that do exist often include writings not found in Athanasius’ list. In the case of Hebrews in particular, the epistle continues to be treated distinctively among Paul’s letters, particularly in Latin-dominant contexts. Of course, the production of a manuscript entails some of the same choices about what writings to include and the order in which to include them. However, the available evidence suggests that the decisions of church leaders were not neatly reproduced in the actual material representations of the church’s scriptures.

What does seem to be determinative for the production of these manuscripts are the same kinds of questions that were important for the production of an edition of any author’s works in the ancient world—questions of authentic authorship and the place of a given work within an edition of the author’s corpus of works. This can be seen in the case of Hebrews quite clearly in the Latin manuscript tradition where questions about its Pauline authorship lead to its distinctive treatment among Paul’s letters. As Eric Sherbenske has shown, various editions of the corpus Paulinum were both shaped by interpretative tradition and vehicles of interpretation themselves. That is, the arrangement of Pauline letter collections and the accom...