Chapter 51. Gospels, Gnostics and Marcion: The Making of the Canon

The New Testament did not arrive as a finished book. For roughly three centuries after Jesus’ death, Christian communities read, copied, revised and argued over a large and growing body of writings: the four gospels that later became canonical, sayings collections such as Thomas, infancy narratives, revelation dialogues and the letters of Paul. Marcion produced an edited version of some of these, and others were forged in the names of apostles. Two questions run through the sources in the library: when and why did a fixed list of authoritative books emerge, and was the “orthodoxy” that drew up the list there from the beginning, or did it win a contest among rival Christianities? This chapter sets out the evidence and the opposed readings: Bauer, Pagels and Ehrman on one side, Köstenberger, Kruger and the evangelical authors Garlow and Jones on the other, with the esoteric critique of Blavatsky and Ellerbe alongside.

The Four Gospels: Authorship, Dating and Irenaeus

The church tradition ties the four gospels to apostles or their companions. Critical scholarship separates the anonymous texts from the names attached to them later. Bart Ehrman puts the critical position bluntly: “Matthew probably did not write Matthew, for example, or John, John”. He adds the qualification that “neither book actually claims to be written by a person named Matthew or John”. He separates such later misattribution from outright forgery, where “an author lied about who he was” [Ehrman, Forged, #63605, Introduction “Facing the Truth”]. The reference shelf gives the conventional critical date of Matthew as c. 80-90 CE [Wikipedia: Gospel of Matthew].

The person most responsible for binding the four together was Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 180). Pagels reconstructs his reasoning. As a boy he had lived in the household of Polycarp of Smyrna, who claimed to have heard “John, the disciple of the Lord”. Irenaeus was therefore “convinced that this disciple wrote the Gospel of John” and “was among the first to champion this gospel and link it forever to Mark, Matthew, and Luke”. He declared that “only Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John collectively—and only these gospels exclusively—constitute the whole gospel, which he called the ‘four formed gospel'” [Pagels, Beyond Belief, #63510, ch.3].

Irenaeus’ John is also a weapon against heresy. Pagels relays the story, told by Irenaeus on Polycarp’s authority, that John went to the public baths at Ephesus, saw Cerinthus there, and “ran out of the bath house without bathing, exclaiming, ‘Let us flee, lest the bath house fall down; because Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is inside'” [Pagels, #63510, ch.3].

Marcion of Sinope: Two Gods and a Short Canon

Marcion is the pivot of the canon debate. Köstenberger and Kruger summarise his teaching: Marcionism “originated with Marcion of Sinope around AD 144. Marcion taught that Jesus was the Savior sent by God and that Paul was his chief apostle. However, Marcion rejected the Old Testament because he viewed the vindictive God of the Old Testament and the loving God of the New Testament as irreconcilable” [Köstenberger & Kruger, The Heresy of Orthodoxy, #72499, Part 1, n.5]. Garlow and Jones describe his Bible: it “consisted of the Gospel of Luke and ten of the Pauline epistles, which had however been ‘cleansed’ of any Old Testament influence” [Garlow & Jones, Codul spart al lui da Vinci, #15634, section “Marcion: răgetul șoarecelui”; trans. from Romanian].

Marcion’s gospel survives only through his enemies. Gathercole explains that “these church fathers, in their zeal to expose Marcion as a false teacher, explain extensively what Marcion omitted from the Gospel narrative”. He reconstructs it as “an abridged version of Luke’s Gospel”, printed with Luke’s chapter and verse numbers, and notes that Marcion “also produced an edition of Paul’s epistles, in which some of the apostle’s letters are substantially abbreviated” [Gathercole, The Apocryphal Gospels, #69973, no. 10 “Marcion’s Gospel”].

The disputed question is whether Marcion created the idea of a canon or reacted against one that already existed. Köstenberger and Kruger state the alternatives: “Marcion formed his canon either in reaction to an already established standardized collection in the early church or he pioneered the idea himself”. They argue for the former [Köstenberger & Kruger, #72499, Part 2]. Garlow and Jones turn the point against The Da Vinci Code: “Marcion himself had already raised the problem of the canon a hundred and fifty years before Constantine”. This, they say, confirms that “in the second half of the second century there already circulated a canon largely identical with that of today’s New Testament” [Garlow & Jones, #15634, “Crezul Niceean”].

The Fathers’ hostility was personal. Irenaeus records that when Marcion met Polycarp and asked, “Do you recognize me?”, the bishop replied, “Yes, I recognize you—firstborn of Satan!” [Irenaeus, AH 3.3.4, as quoted in Pagels, #63510, ch.3]. Tertullian, as Garlow and Jones quote him, called Marcion “the Pontic mouse who… gnawed the Gospels” [Garlow & Jones, #15634, citing Tertullian, Against Marcion].

Gnostic Gospels and the Nag Hammadi Discovery

James M. Robinson, who later served as permanent secretary of the international committee that published the facsimile edition, devotes a whole volume to the discovery and to the “monopoly” over access that followed. He records Jean Doresse’s field inquiry: the find was made “around 1945, at the foot of a mountain of Upper Egypt, the Djebel et-Târif, a hundred kilometers north of Luxor, on the right bank of the Nile, near the hamlet of Hamra-Doum… near the ancient sites of Phbôou and Khénoboskion”, places tied to early Pachomian monasticism. He also discusses archival letters of abbots of the Pachomian order that passed “through the same canals to reach the same European repositories” as the nearby Dishnā Papers, judging an independent origin “theoretically possible, but hardly probable” [Robinson, The Nag Hammadi Story, Vol. 1, #80600, ch.1-3].

For Pagels the Gospel of Thomas preserves a form of Christianity that the canon excluded. Thomas’s Jesus, she writes, “does not tell us what to believe but challenges us to discover what lies hidden within ourselves”, as in the saying: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you” [Pagels, #63510, “Thomas”]. She sets this against the Gospel of John, which proclaims Jesus the “only begotten son of God”, while Thomas encourages disciples “to recognize themselves, as well as Jesus, as ‘children of God'”. It was the second vision, she argues, that was “suppressed” [Pagels, #63510, ch.3].

Pagels then links the canon to the burial of the codices. In 367 Athanasius of Alexandria, “an admirer of Irenaeus”, issued his Easter (Festal) Letter. In it he offered “the earliest known list of the twenty-seven books he calls the ‘books of the New Testament'”. He called on Christians to “cleanse the church from every defilement” and to reject “the apocryphal books”, which were “filled with myths, empty, and polluted”. Pagels proposes: “It is likely that one or more of the monks who heard his letter read at their monastery near the town of Nag Hammadi decided to defy Athanasius’s order and removed more than fifty books from the monastery library, hid them in a jar to preserve them, and buried them near the cliff where Muhammad Ali would find them sixteen hundred years later” [Pagels, #63510, ch.5 “Constantine and the Catholic Church”]. She frames this as a likelihood, not a documented fact.

The Muratorian Fragment, a Latin list of accepted books, is the other main witness to an early canon. Pagels notes that it is “a source taken by Harnack and others to be from the late second century”, which implies that the dating is disputed [Pagels, #63510, notes to ch.1]. Köstenberger and Kruger engage the revisionist late dating (Hahneman) through Ferguson’s review [Köstenberger & Kruger, #72499, Part 2, notes].

The Bauer Thesis and its Critics

The scholarly framework for “lost Christianities” goes back to Walter Bauer’s Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (German 1934). Köstenberger and Kruger summarise it. Bauer examined four centres, Asia Minor, Egypt, Edessa and Rome. In Egypt he found “the early presence of Gnostic Christians” and “no representative of truly orthodox Christianity… until Demetrius of Alexandria (AD 189-231)”. In Edessa he argued that “the teaching of Marcion constituted the earliest form of Christianity”. Rome, he claimed, “imposed its version of orthodox Christian teaching onto the rest of Christendom”, “expunging the record of deviant forms of belief”. In each centre, on Bauer’s view, “heresy preceded orthodoxy” [Köstenberger & Kruger, #72499, Part 1 “The Bauer Thesis”].

Its heirs, as they trace them, include Bultmann (“in the beginning, faith is the term which distinguishes the Christian Congregation… not orthodoxy”), Koester and Robinson’s “trajectories”, Dunn, and Pagels’ Beyond Belief [Köstenberger & Kruger, #72499, Part 1].

Their rebuttal makes several points. Edessa, Bauer’s main case, has “extremely limited” literary data, which requires “the historian to fill many historical gaps with conjecture”. The episcopal office Bauer credited to Roman power was already defended by Ignatius, “who was not from Rome”, so Rome “may not have given birth to orthodoxy but simply replicated what Rome had already inherited”. And any version of the faith calling the Old Testament God “a ‘demiurge’—as in the case of the heretic Marcion—would have been deemed unorthodox” from the outset by the apostolic writings themselves. They cite a judgment “diametrically opposed to the Bauer thesis: ‘While Walter Bauer believed he could detect a movement from diversity to unity within the early church, the first Christians rather developed from unity to diversity'” [Köstenberger & Kruger, #72499, Part 1 and Part 2]. On the gospels specifically they conclude that “no apocryphal gospel was ever a serious contender for a spot in the New Testament canon” [Köstenberger & Kruger, #72499, Part 2].

Apocrypha and Forgery

Gathercole’s collection shows how varied the excluded material is. It includes infancy gospels (the Protevangelium of James, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas), ministry gospels (Thomas, the Diatessaron, Marcion’s gospel), Jewish-Christian gospels, and passion gospels (Peter, Nicodemus). He judges that some later texts use the label “Gospel” as “little more than an attempt to confer authority on the text” [Gathercole, #69973, Contents and Part IV]. H.T. Andrews, writing earlier, notes that the Gospel of Nicodemus “contains two documents of very different character and origin: (1) the Acts of Pilate; (2) the Descent of Jesus into the Underworld” [Andrews, Apocryphal Books of the Old and New Testament, #68300].

Ehrman’s Forged goes further. Because Christianity, unlike pagan cults, was “exclusivistic” and “rooted in truth claims”, it needed apostolic authority, and “gospels were in circulation that claimed to be written by Jesus’s disciples Peter, Philip, and Mary and his brothers Thomas and James”. The view that ancient pseudonymous writing “was not thought to be lying” is, he says, “flat-out wrong”: “Ancient authors who talked about this practice… said that it was both lying and deceitful”. He holds that some forgeries entered the New Testament itself, including letters in the names of Paul, Peter, James and Jude [Ehrman, #63605, Introduction; ch.2-3]. Irenaeus made the same accusation from the other side, charging that heretics “introduce an indescribable number of secret and illegitimate writings, which they themselves have forged” [Pagels, #63510, ch.3].

Esoteric and Critical Readings

Helen Ellerbe reads the episcopal programme as the “seeds of tyranny”. Ignatius “believed that the rankings of bishop, priest and deacon mirrored the heavenly hierarchy”, and Irenaeus insisted that outside the one church “there is no salvation”. Some Gnostics, by contrast, held that “truth and Gnosis… was found, not by looking to the Church, but by looking within oneself” [Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History, #6699, ch.1 “Seeds of Tyranny”, drawing on Pagels]. H.P. Blavatsky claims that the apostles “had received a ‘secret doctrine’ from Jesus”. She cites Jerome, who she says “confessed it in an unguarded moment” about the Hebrew “genuine Gospel of Matthew”, and she accuses Irenaeus and Theodoret of misrepresenting the Gnostic distinction between the unrevealed Logos and the Christos [Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, #39673].

Key points

• Irenaeus (c. 180) fixed the “four formed gospel” and championed John, partly on the strength of his link to Polycarp [Pagels, #63510].
• Marcion (c. 144) rejected the Old Testament God and used an abridged Luke plus ten Pauline letters. Whether he pioneered a canon or reacted to one is disputed [Köstenberger & Kruger, #72499; Gathercole, #69973].
• Polycarp reportedly called Marcion “firstborn of Satan” (Irenaeus AH 3.3.4); Tertullian called him “the Pontic mouse” [Pagels, #63510; Garlow & Jones, #15634].
• Athanasius’ Festal Letter of 367 gives the earliest known 27-book list. Pagels suggests it prompted the Nag Hammadi burial; Robinson documents the 1945 find and its Pachomian setting [Pagels, #63510; Robinson, #80600].
• Bauer argued that heresy preceded orthodoxy in Edessa and Egypt. Köstenberger and Kruger reply that the evidence is thin and that core beliefs show “unity to diversity” [#72499].
• Ehrman holds that ancient writers themselves condemned writing in another’s name as lying, and that some New Testament books are forgeries [#63605].
• Ellerbe and Blavatsky read the episcopal canon as a suppression of inner gnosis and of a secret apostolic doctrine [#6699; #39673].