Reading the Epistles of James, Peter, John & Jude as Scripture

The Shaping and Shape of a Canonical Collection

David Nienhuis, Robert W. Wall

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781467439114
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Through a detailed examination of the historical shaping and final canonical shape of seven oft-neglected New Testament letters, Reading the Epistles of James, Peter, John, and Jude as Scripture introduces readers to the historical, literary, and theological integrity of this indispensable apostolic witness.While most scholars today interpret biblical texts in terms of their individual historical points of composition, David Nienhuis and Robert Wall argue that a theological approach to this part of Scripture is better served by attending to these texts' historical point of canonization -- those key moments in the ancient church's life when apostolic writings were grouped together to maximize the Spirit's communication of the apostolic rule of faith to believers everywhere. Reading the Epistles of James, Peter, John, and Jude as Scripture is the only treatment of the Catholic Epistles that approaches these seven letters as an intentionally designed and theologically coherent canonical collection.

PART 1

Introduction to a Canonical Collection

Introduction: Chaos or Coherence?

Modern biblical scholarship has shown little interest in maintaining the boundaries of the Bible’s own canonical collections when evidence unearthed by historical-critical investigation has suggested alternative gatherings. Indeed, the dominant historical orientation to the Bible has so privileged the interpretive control of reconstructed origins of individual compositions that the later assembling of the texts into a canonical whole has come to be deemed irrelevant at best or a dangerous ecclesial distortion of the writings’ “original” truth at worst. According to Adolf von Harnack, “Canonization works like whitewash; it hides the original colors and obliterates all the contours,” obscuring “the true origin and significance of the works” contained therein.¹ A generation earlier, Franz Over-beck said:

It is in the nature of all canonization to make its objects unknowable, and one can also say of all the writings of our New Testament that at the moment of their canonization they ceased to be understood. They have been transposed into the higher sphere of an eternal norm for the church, not without a dense veil having been spread over their origin, their original relationships, and their original meaning.²

As a result of this rather rigid focus on the point of composition, introductory textbooks on the NT have come to take on a rather predictable form and structure. While there will always be a few such texts that simply address the biblical writings individually, text by text in canonical order, it is far more likely that a modern primer will analyze the apostolic writings according to “more appropriate” organizational rubrics reflecting the conventions of modern scholarly canonical reconstruction.

It is quite likely, for instance, that one will find prolegomena devoted to historical and methodological issues, followed by a substantial section on the social, political, and religious context of Jesus of Nazareth. Mark will likely be addressed first among the four Gospels, given the widespread affirmation that it has historical priority. Since preoccupation with historical point of origin is oriented toward an interest in authorship, it is almost certain that Acts will be removed from its canonical context to be treated alongside Luke’s Gospel. The Gospel of John will likewise be removed to a later chapter (given its late provenance) to be read with the letters of John in an entirely separate section entitled “Johannine Literature,” which may very well also include discussion of the Apocalypse.

The textbook will undoubtedly include a substantial section on the Apostle Paul. Again, given scholarly interest in historical origins, the author may begin with a chapter or two on Paul’s life and thought. The book might then treat the Pauline epistles in canonical order, but it is far more probable that the letters will be separated like sheep and goats, with the blessed “authentic” writings on one side (reordered according to presumed date of composition, of course) and the subcanonical “Deutero-paulines” on the other.

Despite the many rearrangements of this scholarly biblical canon, the introductory student will still get the sense that “the Gospels” and “the Pauline writings” represent a coherent body of NT biblical literature. But what will that student find in the chapters that follow? The answer is literally impossible to predict, for though every introductory textbook analyzes a gathering of NT writings that are not Gospels and do not come from the pen of Paul, no real agreement seems to exist for how to organize these remaining texts, or indeed, if what remains constitutes anything like a coherent “collection” at all.

The ancient church, of course, provided readers with a whole set of literary clues to indicate clearly that the seven letters of James, Peter, John, and Jude, called “the Catholic Epistles” (hereafter “CE”), should be read together as a distinctive and coherent witness alongside the Pauline corpus. The most obvious of these clues is found in the titles themselves: all of Paul’s letters are addressed “to the” recipient (e.g. pros Romaious, pros Galatas) while the CE are set apart, titled “the letter of” the author (e.g. Iakobou epistolē). But only a very small handful of introductory texts present a collection under this title containing these seven letters³ — and even among them, one is hard-pressed to find any who think of these texts as an intentionally constructed canonical unit of the NT. Even Brevard Childs, whose work has set the standard for canonical approaches to the NT, saw no compelling reason to read the letters together as a singular canonical witness.⁴

Indeed, in a survey of introductory works published in English since the 1980s we found a veritable kaleidoscope of options, with at least eight different organizational rubrics in play that include at least seventeen different collections of writings among them. There seems to be basic agreement that at least James, 1-2 Peter, and Jude may be grouped in this “collection” of texts.⁵ But should it include Hebrews, 1-3 John, and Revelation as well? Should we follow Davies, Theissen, and deSilva and include some or all of the so-called Deuteropauline texts, since they were, after all, also not written by Paul?⁶ Or perhaps, since these are obviously all “later” writings, we should follow Ehrman and include some extracanonical early Christian texts?⁷

And how ought we to label this collection? Young calls them the “Non-Pauline Epistles” but leaves 1-3 John to be treated elsewhere, resulting in the confusing implication that the Johannine letters are somehow not “non-Pauline.”⁸ Thielman joins Young in this, creating a nine-letter “non-Pauline” collection that joins Hebrews and Revelation to the traditional seven.⁹ Theissen¹⁰ and Spivey, Smith, and Black¹¹ gather them together under the category of “pseudonymous” NT texts, even though scholarship remains in dispute over the authenticity of these writings (perhaps the reason their “pseudonymous” collections differ). Maybe we should just follow the rather simple approach of Wilder, Charles, and Easley and treat the last eight NT writings as “The End of the New Testament”?¹² Or Davies, whose collection “The Concluding Letters” includes nearly half of the NT writings?¹³ Or just come up with a new, creative organizing thematic that attempts to group writings according to reconstructed historical context or proposed subject matter?¹⁴

Though far from dominant, the most common designation one finds is “the General Letters.” Unfortunately, scholars who use this title do not appear to agree on its exact meaning. A few employ the term as a translation of an ancient title of a collection (i.e., katholikē) and accordingly address the seven letters placed therein by the early church.¹⁵ Most read it as a genre designation, that is, a term for encyclical letters addressed “generally”; they therefore include Hebrews, and sometimes exclude the Johannine letters.¹⁶ Still others extend the genre designation beyond letters to include all encyclical literature; thus they include the Apocalypse of John,¹⁷ and sometimes even texts like the Didache.¹⁸ Tellingly, a great majority of scholars who do employ the title “General Letters” go immediately on to insist that the designation is incorrect and unhelpful because several of the letters were not originally written to function as encyclicals!¹⁹

Given the chaotic state of scholarly opinion, it is not surprising that many others find it acceptable simply to lump all the texts together under the label “other.”²⁰ Note in this regard the rather honest assessment provided by McDonald and Porter in their book Early Christianity and Its Sacred Literature: “Hebrews, the General Epistles, and Revelation constitute their own category of writings in the NT, not because they have many features in common but because they do not fit conveniently into the other categories.”²¹ These texts are simply inconvenient for modern scholarship because they do not fit into the “other categories” — and this is the case, of course, because the “other categories” are organized according to modern historical-critical assumptions that are completely foreign to the theological concerns that shaped the biblical text in the first place.

Clearly, contemporary biblical scholarship does not know what to do with this particular subsection of the NT. The result is an embarrassingly disorganized and tentative scholarly presentation in comparison to the Gospels and Pauline writings. The CE are offered up as the leftovers of the NT, an optional plate of “other writings” to be consumed, should one desire, after the main courses of Gospel and Paul. Indeed, when one factors in the theological impact of the Pauline letters over the course of Christian history, is it any wonder that these other letters continue to be overlooked by scholar and layperson alike?

The Approach of This Study

It is precisely here that a close examination of the ancient canonical process that brought this collection into being offers real promise for the Bible reader committed to hearing the apostolic message as it is communicated through the integrity of the final, fixed form of the text. Unlike most modern treatments of the CE, which gather interpreters around their respective, reconstructive points of composition, this book targets their formation and final form as a discrete canonical collection. We contend that this is their real point of origin as Scripture, a perspective that proposes a different reading strategy — one that supplies additional observations about their meaning and application for today.

We admit at the outset that the proposed theological coherence of the CE collection is at odds with modern criticism’s consensus, which underscores its literary diversity and theological incoherence and the original independence of each letter from the others, no matter what interpretive strategy is employed. Those who analyze texts from a largely historical point of view propose theological definitions retrieved from different points of origin where different authors respond to the spiritual crises of their different recipients shaped within different social and religious worlds. On the exegetical landscape of current biblical studies of these texts, then, the theological diversity found within the catholic corpus can be explained as the by-product of differing moments/places of origin and their respective trajectories/tradition histories.

Those who also treat the CE primarily as literature do not disagree with this conclusion. Their own explanatory constructions, however, explicate the same theological diversity as the by-product of different genres, textual structures, or rhetorical patterns — regardless of who wrote these texts, for whom, when, or where. In this light, then, the CE is no real collection at all but an arbitrary grouping of literary miscellanea gathered together and arranged during the canonical process at a non-Pauline address, without any thought of their theological coherence or canonical function as a per se collection. Even if one admits that their titles present these letters as the enduring deposit of Jerusalem’s apostolic “Pillars” (see Gal. 2:9), the theological incoherence of the CE, and their independence from each other, has become a matter of critical dogma.²²

Without denying the importance of this work, our book inclines the angle of approach toward the CE differently, admitting into evidence new findings from the canonical period when these seven books were formed into a second collection of letters “to provide a broader and more balanced literary representation of the apostolic witness than the letters of Paul furnished by themselves.”²³ In doing so, we intend to challenge the critical consensus regarding the theological incoherence of the CE collection. Put simply, we contend that the canonical collection of four witnesses, James, Peter, John, and Jude (“the Pillars of Jerusalem”), be read together as the interpenetrating parts of a coherent theological whole. The historical process that formed them into a collection can also help guide the church’s present use of its seven epistles as Scripture for spiritual wisdom and moral guidance. In fact, our thesis is that when this epistolary collection is embraced in the church according to the hermeneutics of the canonical process, both its theological coherence and its crucial role within the biblical canon will become more clearly understood.

As the backdrop for this new assessment of the CE, we observe that a central phenomenon of the canonical process is the purposeful formation of individual collections that eventually add up to form a single canon of collections that the church came to recognize as maximally effective in forming the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. That is, the canonical process was vested in the importance of relationships among writings rather than in the authorization of individual writings in isolation from all the rest.²⁴ In this sense, both the final shape of each collection and the finality of the single biblical canon create an aesthetic that is substantively and functionally different than those alternate “shapes” of biblical writings created according to the interests of modern scholarship in an individual text’s authorship, date, and social location. For example, the shape of Luke-Acts, an invention of modern criticism, differs from the shape of biblical canon received by the church, which locates the Gospel within a fourfold Gospel and Acts outside it (see below). Even though the canonical approach to Scripture’s aesthetic should not be considered a substitute for critical constructions such as Luke-Acts, our project places significant historical interest in the canonization of biblical texts (and not their composition) as their real “point of origin” as the church’s Scripture.

The deep logic of this shift of focus from composition to canonization, with its various additional claims of canonical rather than authorial intent, follows the epistemology of modernity’s defense of a text’s “original meaning.” Fo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Part 1: Introduction to a Canonical Collection
• Part 2: Introduction to the Catholic Epistles
• Part 3: Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index of Modern Authors
• Index of Subjects and Ancient Names and Texts
• Index of Scripture References