The Bible and Beyond Podcast Episode

What Texts Did the Early Jesus People Read?

An Interview with Dr. David Brakke

Dr. David Brakke

David Brakke challenges the common notion that Christians had a New Testament type of Bible by around 200. Rather, he claims, their Bible was Jewish scriptures plus a wide variety of written texts by Jesus followers used in multiple contexts. Marcion and his followers would have been the exception, since he rejected the Jewish writings. Brakke’s recent analysis of two ancient Christian texts concludes that the early Christian years were diverse and served different purposes before the biblical canon was established.

The first glimmer of lists appears when Eusebius tries to sort out early Christian literature, but even these lists are tentative. By the end of the first century, the early followers of Jesus would have agreed that they had texts to use, but oral traditions were also important. The transition from oral traditions to written texts introduced the question of Christian authority.

The Muratorian Fragment has often been viewed as evidence of an established canon, but Brakke thinks it was more likely a second-century text that illustrated a wide variety of texts used for different purposes. Some texts were recommended for reading in church; others for special instruction; and others for private reading, such as the Shepherd of Hermas. For instance, since the Shepherd of Hermas wasn’t associated with an apostle, it didn’t seem good to be read in church.

The Secret Book of James was probably a late second-century or early third-century writing. It hasn’t been studied as thoroughly by scholars as the Muratorian Fragment, but it seems to indicate even further evidence of the second-century diversity. It included lists of helpful texts but it also implies a sacred study environment. That is, considering these two texts together leads to the conclusion that early Christ people around 200 CE were likely using different sets of texts in different contexts.

Irenaeus, the Church Father of the second century, probably set the tone for an approval or disapproval of certain texts. He thought various texts should reflect the rule of faith for that time, and this would have excluded such texts as Valentinian – or so-called gnostic types of writing. On the other hand, Irenaeus was also aware of ‘barbarian Christians’ who had no text at all. That didn’t seem to concern him.

Brakke summarizes from his study of the two second-century texts—the Muratorian Fragment and the Secret Book of James—that Christians were very different in antiquity. In 200, people were not interested in asking for a New Testament. They sort of agree on some ancient writings which were very useful, but others not at all.

Professor David Brakke is the Joe R. Engle Chair in the History of Christianity and Professor of History at the The Ohio State University. He studies and teaches the history and literature of ancient Christianity from its origins through the fifth century, with special interests in asceticism, monasticism, “Gnosticism,” biblical interpretation, and Egyptian Christianity.

In our previous podcast interview, we discussed his book The Gospel of Judas: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary.

Brakke is a former president of the International Association for Coptic Studies and a member of the Board of Consultants of the Journal of Religion. From 2005 to 2015 he served as editor of the Journal of Early Christian Studies.

He has produced three courses with “The Great Courses” (aka Wondrium), including one on “Gnosticism” and another on early Christian apocrypha. He also maintains a page on Academia.edu that includes access or reference to his other books and articles.

Some Bible and Beyond podcast episodes are made available as video podcasts on our YouTube channel. This month’s episode can be found here.

Interview Transcript

Shirley Paulson: I am so pleased to have Professor David Brakke come back and visit us on the Bible and Beyond today. I heard David speaking at the Society of Biblical Literature in November, and I thought his topic would be a really interesting one for a wider public. He was talking about looking closer at the way people were reading and thinking about texts and things in the centuries before there was a Bible or a canon, which I found kind of surprising. So I just wanted to invite you to come and talk about this.

So before I let you talk, I just want to introduce you a little bit and say that Professor Brakke studies and teaches history and literature of ancient Christianity from its origins to the 5th century, with special interests in Gnosticism, biblical interpretation, and Egyptian Christianity. In our podcast interview last year, we discussed his new book on the Gospel of Judas, which explores the early history of the Gnostic school of thought.

David is the Joe R. Engel Chair in the History of Christianity and Professor of History at The Ohio State University. He’s also the President of the International Association for Coptic Studies and a member of the Board of Consultants of the Journal of Religion. He’s produced three courses with The Great Courses, a.k.a. Wondrium, including one on Gnosticism and another one on early Christian Apocrypha. So he’s got lots of stuff to talk about, and I want to really welcome you, David. Thanks for coming back.

David Brakke: Oh, I’m glad to be here. It was fun last time, and I’m looking forward to this conversation as well.

Shirley Paulson: That’s just great. Some of the things you said at the SBL meeting, they gave me a different way of thinking about things. You were envisioning the way early church assemblies or gatherings of Christ’s people sort of organized themselves, and you came to your conclusions by comparing two ancient texts, which I’ll let you describe.

But the basic question was, I think, how much or how little people were reading in their different groups than we may have imagined. And one of the documents that you’re going to talk about for us hints that there were certain writings that all good Christians should be reading and not reading. And then the other text seems to indicate, I would say, a more liberal approach to such guidelines, and it places importance on teaching more than being right and wrong.

So it seems to me that this kind of disagreement is still going on today, and somebody sets boundaries for what’s good and what’s bad, and someone else disagrees. So I’d like you to take us back to what was around the turn of the 3rd century and talk about this.

Okay. So why don’t you start taking us there and show us the difference between then and now in terms of what we understand the Bible to be, and was there anything like a Bible then? Let’s just start there.

David Brakke: Yeah, sure. So around 200, believers in Christ, most of them had a Bible, and if you said, what is the Bible? The Bible they would show you would almost certainly be the Jewish scriptures, that is, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and so forth, right? The exact contents of which was not really clear, but was only fuzzy at the edges, so it’s not really a source of disagreement.

There were some Christians who did not use the Jewish scriptures at all. These were followers of a teacher named Marcion who believed that the God of the Old Testament had nothing to do with Jesus, so completely different. So everyone was, except for these Marcionite Christians, as they were called, was into the Jewish scriptures.

Now the question then becomes, are there any writings by Christians, not Jewish writings, but by Christ believers, that hold a similar level of authority, that is, functioning as scripture? And this is the area that is more difficult to be clear about because in some places, almost everyone—yes—used some Christian writings as scripture, but they had not reached any agreement about what those should be.

Shirley Paulson: So how would you define the word scripture? What does it mean?

David Brakke: That is a great question. I mean, the most basic sense is religiously authoritative literature, literature to which a community considers authoritative. But that can be a very large group, right?

And so what we’re kind of interested in, in this situation that we’re talking about, when we talk about scripture, really is writings that Christians consider to have a kind of transcendent authority. That is, their authority comes from, say, God and divinity, rather than say, we read this book because this was a really great leader and he had good insights, right? We’re looking for scripture being things that are, in this case, in this conversation, let’s use this to refer to writings that are pretty much of the same level as Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, right? But that’s how to tell when an early Christian writing has reached that level of status, that’s a difficult thing.

Shirley Paulson: Yeah, I see. So then when did people start deciding on what you might call a Christian canon then? Because you’re saying that there’s a Jewish canon, but then looser? Okay, talk about that.

David Brakke: Right, we don’t start getting a list of New Testament writings until the 300s. So it’s not until the mid-fourth century, like 350 and later, that you get bishops and others saying, “Here is a list of the New Testament to go along with the Old Testament, so that we have a Bible of two parts, and we can list those books, and you shouldn’t add or subtract. This is what it is, right?” You get the first glimmers of a list around the year 300 when the prominent church historian and theologian and bishop Eusebius of Caesarea sits down and tries to sort out early Christian literature: what’s genuine, what’s not genuine, and so forth. But it’s still very tentative. He doesn’t have a firm list of the New Testament. But already in the late 100s, they’re starting to sort through of all these Christian writings that we have, which ones really are authoritative and which not, but they’re not putting together a defined New Testament. That really doesn’t happen until the 300s.

Shirley Paulson: So what’s interesting about what you’re saying right now then is that you’re saying some people had in mind there’s a desire to evaluate them, but we don’t really know who had the authority to do that, is that right?

David Brakke: Right, I mean, evaluating and deciding which are authoritative for us happened in different contexts, right? So sometimes the evaluator is a Christian scholar deciding which texts are right to cite as I make my arguments about the nature of God and Christ and so forth. So what is theologically authoritative among these writings? But another situation is: we are gathered together to have worship and celebrate the Eucharist and that kind of thing and pray and so forth. What writings by Christians are eligible to be read in that situation? So we have, you see, we have different places where Christians are having to sort through their books in these early century and decide what should be legitimate and authoritative and whatnot.

Shirley Paulson: So this is maybe slightly off subject, but I hope it’ll help focus on this a little bit. I also understood that there’s an oral tradition going on. In other words, people did talking without reading at the same time. Was that sort of a different level of authority or were the texts important in terms of deciding what’s right and wrong?

David Brakke: Right, most historians would talk in terms of at some point a kind of transition from oral texts—let’s call them texts because they are written—oral discourses, traditions and the like, having equal authority to written texts. And when does that take place is hard to say, but some would say it’s very early, like the late first century, early second century. But even people of the time period we’re talking about, say the late 100s, will say, “Well yes, we have these texts, but we also have an oral tradition that is separate from these texts that we have received, that is also important. And so, you know, that has been passed down from Jesus.” And so that’s also important and maybe even equally so in understanding these authoritative texts like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and so forth, right?

Shirley Paulson: Okay. All right, so that’s helpful to get that clear about the oral and the written text. So you are talking about two written texts that you’ve compared. So tell us about the one that seems to have had more guidance and rules about what people should or shouldn’t read. What was that called?

David Brakke: Well, we don’t know, but today we call it the Muratorian Fragment because it is a fragment of Latin that a guy named Muratori discovered in a Latin manuscript. So we lack the beginning and the end of this Latin text.

Shirley Paulson: That’s convenient.

David Brakke: Okay. Right. So we don’t have a title. We don’t know who wrote it. We don’t know where the person was who wrote it. So it’s, yeah. And one thing we’re sure of, it was originally written in Greek, not in Latin. You can tell that from the way the Latin is. It’s weird and it has problems and you can kind of tell that originally it was written in Greek. But now it’s in Latin, and it has been known for a couple centuries. And right away, people really were entranced by it because the author seems to place himself in the late second or early third century in terms of time.

Shirley Paulson: Okay, that’s helpful. Refers to a bishop of Rome whom we can date to the middle of the second century. So the author seems to be from that period of time, right?

And yes, he is discussing which books we, he says, or maybe you should say they, they are saying these are the texts we read in church and so forth, and what we don’t, and so forth. It’s not certain what circumstance that is. I mean, is the person really trying to say, here are rules? Or as I think more likely, he’s just explaining what “we” do. Like “we” are my group. Like someone has inquired, you know, what do you guys read?

Shirley Paulson: Oh, okay.

David Brakke: And he’s kind of explaining. Now, very important to say, I know I’m kind of yammering on about this, but scholars disagree markedly about when to date this. And so because we have no… you know, there’s no context. But most, I’d say 75% probably, working scholars date it around 200. Some would date it later.

Shirley Paulson: And can you tell us briefly why it matters?

David Brakke: Why it matters. If it’s from around the year 200, the traditional interpretation of it, which I am challenging, is that this is an attempt to form a closed canon of the kind we, I said, we don’t really see until the 300s. And so for a lot of the history of people writing a history of how did we get the New Testament, this text becomes kind of the important moment—around the year 200—where, with a few still things to figure out, you have an idea of a closed canon, and it’s pretty much what’s going to be in, what’s going to be out is kind of over.

And so, but—if you date this, as some scholars would, to the 4th century, then, well, of course, everyone’s making closed canons in the 4th century. So you can see there’s like a tension between when to date this and then what its dating means for the history of the canon of the New Testament.

Shirley Paulson: And even you, as you point out, it’s not necessarily proving that it’s a canon list. It could just be any kind of a list.

David Brakke: Well, here’s the thing. This is one of the things that I’m kind of saying is it’s not even a list. I mean, when you get lists in the 300s, you get just a list, you know, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, the letters of Paul. I mean, you know, it’s a list. This is not … it doesn’t have the literary form of a list. The author is talking about which gospels they use. And then he says, “Well, you know, these gospels are different from one another. How do we understand that?” And then he turns to the letters of Paul and he does name them. But then he says, “well, you know, why should we read these? They were written for very specific churches like Corinth. So why should we read letters that were written, you know, over 100 years ago to people who are not us?”

And then he comes to a group of apocalypses, revelations. And there, apparently, the community disagrees about which ones should be read in church and which not. And then he says, well, then there are some other writings that we really don’t accept. So it doesn’t have a formal, it’s kind of like a discussion of the books we use and does not necessarily have a sense of, you know, this is a list. Don’t add to it. Don’t take off of it. It’s kind of more a discussion, you know. But people have treated it as though it were kind of a canon list, which I just think is really just not right.

Shirley Paulson: Interesting. So that’s very helpful background in terms of understanding what you’re challenging. Tell us how your second text relates to this question. What is the second text you’re talking about?

David Brakke: So the second text I studied in the paper that you heard is called the Secret Book of James or Apocryphon of James. And once again, that’s our title because once again, we have lost the beginning of the text where apparently the title was. It is one of the texts in Nag Hammadi Codex I. So it’s from the first, well, as we number them, the first of the Nag Hammadi codices. And so it’s in Coptic. But again, everyone agrees it must have been written in Greek and translated into Coptic. And it’s clearly written by James, the brother of the Lord, most likely. But of course, you know, there is the James who is the brother of John.

Shirley Paulson: Very confusing. Yes.

David Brakke: Yeah, I know. But it’s pretty clear it’s James, the brother of the Lord, because he says he wrote this thing in Hebrew, which obviously he didn’t. But he claims I wrote this in Hebrew characters.

Shirley Paulson: And tell us why really quickly. Why it’s obvious that he didn’t write it in Hebrew.

David Brakke: Because no early Christians really knew Hebrew. And we can tell the Greek from the text, right? We can see the Greek words. Through the Coptic. Right. So, yeah. So it would have been, you’d have to necessitate writing in Hebrew and then being translated into Greek and then into Coptic, right? And that just isn’t something that people did.

Why would James say that then if that wasn’t even real? Well, we’re going to call him pseudo-James because we’re going to agree this is not James, brother of the Lord. This is a pseudepigraphic text. He likes to present…well, first of all, it makes it seem more plausible that James wrote it because James, the brother of Jesus, almost certainly did not know Greek. Okay. He almost certainly would have spoken Aramaic, but we’re also certain he would have been illiterate and unable to write anything anyway. But obviously part of saying it’s in Hebrew is to say, oh, yeah, it really is Jesus’s brother, James.

Okay. But it’s also, you know, the author says this is a secret thing that I’m writing for you. And so I think this is also to create a kind of mysterious, esoteric quality. Only people who can read Greek, I mean, Hebrew, would be able to actually read this text. And, you know, and it’s secret. So it’s all meant to kind of create an aura of “this is knowledge that isn’t available. This, what I’m writing is not for everybody.”

Shirley Paulson: Okay. Special knowledge. Okay.

David Brakke: Special. That’s right. So now the question is, when was this written? Yeah. Like the other thing we, you know, we’re going to say it’s in Greek. We know it was certainly written before the fourth century because that’s when the Nag Hammadi codices were transcribed, right? And the vocabulary that the author uses, the terms he uses, find most of their resonances with authors of the late second and early third century, like Clement of Alexandria and Origen, right? So it seems to come from that time period. And it seems to be before everyone was like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. You know, at some point all the Christians are like, oh yes, the four gospels. And that happens, you know, fairly rapidly. But he still seems to be operating in a context where it’s not just Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. There are bunches of texts about Jesus floating around, and he thinks they’re all interesting. worthwhile.

Shirley Paulson: Wow! So then what’s his disagreement then with the Muratorian fragment that you’re talking about?

David Brakke: Right. Well, they’re not, you know, I think it’s unlikely that either knew the other. So we’re just looking at difference among Christians rather than an active disagreement between the two.

Well, he takes the Muratorian canon, which clearly is a fragment, clearly has a sense that we should sort through this literature and only use, say, for Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The Secret Book of James takes a kind of sense of, “You know, there’s lots of interesting Jesus literature out there, and we should study all of it and devote ourselves to finding what is useful and will lead us on a new path to Jesus from whatever is there.”

And we, and now I’m going to say the “we” of the Secret Book of James is “we” are very smart intellectual Christians, who should feel free to make use of this to help ourselves ascend to higher contemplation of Jesus, right? So, and even this text that I am writing, me, James, is, you know, secret and should not be shared with everybody until they are ready for it.

So it’s, you know, to be put, you know, to be blunt, it’s a little elitist, but it’s, you know, hoping, I suppose, that most people, many people would be interested in making the kind of intellectual journey that it promotes.

Shirley Paulson: All right. So then put them together for us, even though they didn’t speak to each other or know each other, perhaps, but help us understand what your comparison is doing for us.

David Brakke: What the comparison, and using both of them, was to show, and is still to show, to gather from both of them the different ways that early Christians were using early Christian writings. And if you look at the Muratorian Fragment, we can see different things. He talks about what we read in church, that is, when we’re gathered together for worship and so forth. Then he refers at some point to instruction.

So he says there are, you know, he refers to the pastoral epistles, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus, right? And those are kind of troubling for him because they aren’t even written to churches. They’re just written to people. But he says, “Well, but, you know, we can still use those for instruction.”

So there seems to be a different context called instruction where you can use different texts. And then he refers to a text called the Shepherd of Hermas, which is a very early, probably early 2nd century Christian apocalypse, and says we should not read that in church. It’s not by an apostle, but you should still read it.

So he’s got yet another sense that there is kind of private reading that Christians are doing for their own edification and learning and so forth and so on. Then you add to it the Secret Book of James, which seems to envision an even more scholarly study kind of environment where you read a whole bunch of different texts about Jesus and try to take the best from them.

So what my use or comparison or putting together of these two texts was meant to do was to illustrate that Christians around the year 200 were using Christian texts scripturally, if you want to put it that way, in different contexts and probably had different sets of books that made sense for different contexts.

So for the author of the Muratorian fragment, the Shepherd of Hermas was an appropriate text to read on your own. Perfectly good book, but not appropriate to read at church. And the pastoral epistles might be good for teaching people, but maybe not so much to read in church.

Do you see what I’m saying? So our interest in finding when did they come up with a single list of the New Testament? It runs aground here because they weren’t at this time doing a single thing. They were instead doing a lot of different activities where different Christian writings serve different purposes.

Shirley Paulson: So you’re talking about different purposes, which I want to go back to your point about the teaching, because you’re showing that the Secret Book of James has more teaching than the Muratorian Fragment. Does that imply that there were churches that didn’t want to teach as much or that the teaching wasn’t very important?

David Brakke: Right. So what we should imagine is that there are different Christian communities of different characters. So, for example, there might be groups of Christ believers who really aren’t what we might think of as a congregation. They’re more like a book club or a study circle. And they get together, probably led by some very learned person, and read together, say, The Shepherd of Hermas or something like that, and talk about what we learn from it and so forth and so on.

While other Christians obviously are not interested in that kind of activity. They come together and they celebrate the Eucharist and they pray and sing hymns and they hear something read and maybe have a little sermon and so forth and so on. Now that group may also have people in that group who also do this other thing, meet separately. So it’s like we have to imagine Christian groups coming together for all sorts of different reasons and not doing, you know, when we think of a church right now, we think of a community that has lots of different activities and it’s all well organized and there’s a pastor in charge and Sunday school is over here, the group is meeting and then there’s Sunday school and they have all these different things they’re doing.

We have to imagine more informal groups who get together for different reasons. And there might have been many Christians who just, you know, they came to these Sunday gatherings, they got the Eucharist, they heard a nice little sermon and that was Christianity for them, right? While others may not even have done that. Instead, they were like, Jesus, what an interesting person, he has great teachings, let’s read something that’s taught by him. But then they weren’t necessarily interested in going to this other thing.

Shirley Paulson: So I read, I think it was Irenaeus who made the point that he didn’t like some of the writings that were circulating because they were too focused on learning things like Gnosis as opposed to believing.

David Brakke: That’s right. Okay. Yeah, Irenaeus is an interesting case, right? So he is writing around 180. So, you know, from the big perspective of history around the same time as the things I’m looking at, if not a little earlier. And he lives in Lyon in Gaul, modern day France, right? And yes, he’s aware of all sorts of different pieces of early Christian literature and he finds some simply wrong to use, ones he says are teaching false Gnosis, right? False Gnosis.

And he, you know, names at least one such text, the Gospel of Truth, we believe was found at Nag Hammadi in the same codex as the Secret Book of James. And, you know, so he, you know, he’s aware of those, right? But he’s an interesting case because for him, he still prioritizes the oral tradition over written texts like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John!

What he says is that Jesus handed on to the disciples and then the disciples to bishops and clergy what he called the “rule of faith,” a kind of teaching of the gospel, right? And what we should use—we Christians of Irenaeus’ kind—are texts that accurately reflect that rule of faith. And the Gnostics, you know, Valentinian texts, Gnostic texts, they do not do that. So we don’t want that, right?

But then at one point he says, well, you know, there are barbarian Christians who have no books of Christianity at all, but they know the rule of faith. That’s fine. So do you see what he’s saying?

Shirley Paulson: I’m hearing then two sources of authority. Maybe there’s the maybe apostolic authority and then there’s also the authority of a text itself and where it comes from. And then no authority of anybody. Is that right? There’s just sort of an ambiguity of authority going on.

David Brakke: Yes, that’s exactly right. Where is, you know, where is truth to be found? Andwhere, you know, what is the touchstone of what is true Christianity and not? And some early Christians, like Irenaeus, had a great interest in this question because they’re very interested in defining true Christianity and what’s not, right? Some probably were more relaxed about that question. But yes, it’s a real issue. And, you know, it’s not as simple as if you read the Gospel of Matthew, you have it, right? Yeah. Yeah. Which is even true today because, you know, people will read the New Testament and come up with different ideas. So that’s true.

Shirley Paulson: So let’s sort of maybe be summarizing all this. How do you see the relationship between these two texts as if they appeared around the same time? What’s your conclusion then for how you find both of these simultaneously?

David Brakke: You know, this will be a very banal conclusion. Okay. But here it is. Christians were very different from each other, right? And what we have to imagine is that around the year 200, people were not sitting around going, “You know what? We need a New Testament. Let’s make one.” And let’s end that then they, like, disagreed. Like they were like, “Oh, should we include this or not?” I don’t, I think so. La la la la. No. Instead, they were all using different texts. There were some that everyone kind of agreed was great, like the letters of Paul. Pretty much everyone loves the letters of Paul. But, you know, they were using these texts for all sorts of different reasons and they weren’t necessarily all involved in a project of making the New Testament. So, you know, there’s a time in Christian history when there was no New Testament.

Shirley Paulson: I love the way you help us push our own minds out of this mindset of looking for the authority of the canon because it’s just sort of not there the way you’re describing this, that this happened in a different way from… it didn’t just fall out of the sky and into Jesus’ hands and into the apostles and then into our libraries. So I think this is a really helpful dive into the world of the early Christian thinkers to find out why it was more mixed. And I guess what I like about this is that people were looking for different things and it helps us to look for different things too, I think is what I’m finding helpful about this.

David Brakke: I mean, you know, there have always been Christians accessing the tradition of Christianity in different ways and with kind of differing goals. And that was true in the year 200 and it’s still true, you know, in 2024. And so, yes, now, I mean, the existence of the New Testament is now a fact, but for people who are Christian. But in those days, it wasn’t. And so it was kind of, it was different.

Shirley Paulson: Great. What a fun conclusion. Thank you so much for coming to talk about this. I just feel like you, once again, you expand our minds and that’s all right. This is okay. We can do this.

All right. Thanks so much, David.

David Brakke: Thank you. Thanks for having me.