The growth of the New Testament is more complex and controversial. The earliest Christians used oral tradition to pass on the story of Jesus’ acts and words, often told in the context of preaching and teaching. As the first generation passed away, however, the need for a more permanent and lasting tradition of the life of Jesus became apparent. Mark" class="md-crosslink">St. Mark first conceived the plan of composing a connected narrative, probably in the decade before—or at some time near—70 ce, when the Temple was destroyed by the Romans. The Gospels that traditionally were thought to have been written by St. Matthew and St. Luke borrowed from Mark and were compiled in the generation after his Gospel. Toward the end of the 1st century and reflecting the persecutions of the emperor Domitian, the Gospel According to John was written. Nevertheless, even after the Gospels were in common circulation, oral tradition was still current; it may even have been preferred. The Gospels themselves, which were probably intended for pastoral uses, did not immediately assume the status of Scripture. Well into the 3rd century, new gospels were being compiled, such as the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Judas, which were not incorporated into the canonical New Testament. The Synoptic Gospels seem to have been used by the apologist Justin Martyr" class="md-crosslink">St. Justin Martyr at Rome about 150 ce in the form of an early harmony (or synthesis of the Gospels); to this, Justin’s Syrian pupil Tatian added the Gospel According to John to make his Diatessaron (according to the four), a harmony of all four Gospels so successful that in Mesopotamia (Tatian’s homeland) it virtually ousted the separate Gospels for 250 years. In the late 2nd century, St. Irenaeus accepted as the standard version of the Christian Scriptures the four Gospels and several other texts that would become part of the canonical New Testament.
On a second level of authority stood the apostolic letters, especially those of Paul" class="md-crosslink">St. Paul. The first of the letters appeared about 50 ce, and well before 90 ce the main body of his correspondence was circulating as a corpus (body of writings). Paul’s letters were the earliest texts of the Christian Scriptures. In addition to them, there are the seven so-called Catholic Letters (i.e., James; I and II Peter; I, II, and III John; and Jude), which were among the last of the literature to be accepted as part of the canonical New Testament.
St. Paul’s antitheses of law and grace, justice and goodness, and the letter and the spirit were extended further than Paul intended by the radical semi-gnostic Marcion of Pontus (c. 140–150), who taught that the Old Testament came from the inferior vengeful Jewish God of justice and that the New Testament told of the kindly universal Father. As the current texts of Gospels and letters presupposed some divine revelation through the Old Testament, Marcion concluded that they had been corrupted and interpolated by Judaizers. Marcion therefore established a fixed canon of an edited version of Luke’s Gospel and some of the Pauline Letters (expurgated), and with Old Testament at all. He was ultimately denounced as a heretic.
The orthodox reaction (by such theologians as Justin, Irenaeus, and Tertullian in the 2nd century) was to insist on the Gospel as the fulfillment of prophecy and on creation as the ground of redemption. Reasons were found for accepting the four already current Gospels, the full corpus of Pauline Letters, the Acts of the Apostles, John’s Revelation (Apocalypse), and the Catholic Letters. On the authorship of the Letter to the Hebrews there were doubts: Rome rejected it as non-Pauline, and Alexandria accepted it as Pauline. The list once established was a criterion (the meaning of “canon”) for the authentic Gospel of the new covenant and soon (by transference from the old) became entitled the New Testament. (The Greek word diathēkē means both “covenant” and “testament.”) The formation of the canon meant that special revelation ended with the death of the Apostles and that no authority could be attached to the apocryphal gospels, acts, and apocalypses proliferating in the 2nd century. The problem of theological authority
Third, a check was found in the creed, an authoritative profession of the faith. At baptism, after renouncing “the devil and his pomps,” initiates declared their faith in response to three questions of the form:
Do you believe in God the Father almighty? Do you believe in Jesus Christ his Son our Lord…? Do you believe in the Holy Spirit in the church and in the Resurrection?
In time, these interrogations became the basis of declaratory creeds, adapted for use by clergy who felt themselves required to reassure colleagues who were not especially confident of their orthodoxy. The so-called Apostles’ Creed, a direct descendant of the baptismal interrogation used at Rome by 200 ce, is similar to the creed used in Rome in the 3rd and 4th centuries. Each church (or region) might have its own variant form, but all had the threefold structure.
The internal coherence given by creed, canon, and hierarchy was necessary both in the defense of orthodox Christianity against gnostic theosophical speculations and also in confronting pagan society. The strong coherence of the scattered congregations was remarkable to pagan observers. Early heretical movements
Gnosticism, from the Greek gnōstikos (one who has gnōsis, or “secret knowledge”), was an important movement in the early Christian centuries—especially the 2nd—that offered an alternative to emerging orthodox Christian teaching. Gnostics taught that the world was created by a demiurge or satanic power—which they often associated with the God of the Old Testament—and that there is total opposition between this world and God. Redemption was viewed as liberation from the chaos of a creation derived from either incompetent or malevolent powers, a world in which the elect are alien prisoners. The method of salvation was to discover the kingdom of God within one’s elect soul and to learn how to pass the hostile powers barring the soul’s ascent to bliss. The gnostics held a Docetist Christology, in which Jesus only appeared to assume the flesh. Although not assuming material form according to the gnostics, Jesus nonetheless was the redeemer sent by God to reveal his special gnōsis. St. Irenaeus and other Christian theologians dismissed gnosticism as pretentious but dangerous nonsense.
Along with Irenaeus and others, the writers of the later New Testament books seem to have opposed early gnosticism. The supporters of what would become orthodox Christianity stressed the need to adhere to tradition, which was attested by the churches of apostolic foundation. A more hazardous reply was to appeal to ecstatic prophecy. About 172 ce a quasi-pentecostal movement in Phrygia was led by Montanus with two prophetesses, Prisca and Maximilla, reasserting the imminence of the end of the world. He taught that there was an age of the Father (Old Testament), an age of the Son (New Testament), and an age of the Spirit (heralded by the prophet Montanus). Montanism won its chief convert in Tertullian. Its claim to supplement the New Testament was generally rejected, and the age of prophecy was held to have ended in the time of the Apostles. Relations between Christianity and the Roman government and the Hellenistic culture Church-state relations
The Christians were not respectful toward ancestral pagan customs, and their preaching of a new king sounded like revolution. The opposition of the Jews to them led to breaches of the peace. Thus, the Christians could very well be unpopular, and they often were. Paul’s success at Ephesus provoked a riot to defend the cult of the goddess Artemis. In 64 ce a fire destroyed much of Rome, and, in order to escape blame, the emperor Nero killed a “vast multitude” of Christians as scapegoats. For the first time, Rome was conscious that Christians were distinct from Jews. But there probably was no formal senatorial enactment proscribing Christianity at this time. Nero’s persecution, which was local and short, was condemned by Tacitus as an expression of the emperor’s cruelty rather than as a service to the public good. Soon thereafter, however, the profession of Christianity was defined as a capital crime—though of a special kind, because one gained pardon by apostasy (rejection of a faith once confessed) demonstrated by offering sacrifice to the pagan gods or to the emperor. Popular gossip soon accused the Christians of secret vices, such as eating murdered infants (because of the secrecy surrounding the Lord’s Supper and the use of the words body and blood) and sexual promiscuity (because of the practice of Christians calling each other “brother” or “sister” while living as husband and wife).