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The Rev. Frank Logue
Which words are The Word? I want to tell you a story. The story of the heretic who gave us the Bible. Everyone agrees that the problem began with Marcion around the year 144 a.d. But to begin with Marcion is to get ahead of the story. The crisis emerged with Cerdo. The heresy started 6-8 years earlier when, innocently enough, Cerdo made a true profession of faith in a Christian church in Rome. The new convert was immediately transformed. Cerdo was in church every time the doors were open. Its important to understand the use of Scripture in Christian churches now 100 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. At this point, to say the word “Scripture” in a Christian Church was to refer to what we now call the Old Testament. In addition to the Hebrew Bible, which makes up what we call the Old Testament, a loose group of Christian writings had been shared among Christian communities and were being read in worship. These included the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the letters of Paul and some other letters. Not all of these new Christian writings were in the hands of every church and so there was a variety of practice. For a very early look at how the Christian Church viewed Scripture, we can read another passage from II Peter, from which today’s epistle reading was taken. Peter writes, But according to His promise we are looking for new heavens and a new earth, in which righteousness dwells. Therefore, beloved, since you look for these things, be diligent to be found by Him in peace, spotless and blameless, and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation; just as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given him, wrote to you, as also in all his letters, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which the untaught and unstable distort, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction. You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, be on your guard so that you are not carried away by the error of unprincipled men and fall from your own steadfastness, but grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To Him be the glory, both now and to the day of eternity. Amen. Peter tells us that Paul wrote letters “according to the wisdom given him,” which “the untaught and unstable distort, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures.” It is worth noting that this statement from the second letter of Peter, written in the 60s, mentions Paul’s letters as part of Scripture. By the way, that doesn’t mean the 1960s, but written between the year 60 and 69, probably during the reign of the Roman Emperor Nero. Despite what you may have read in The DaVinci Code, the creation of a group of Gospels and letters into the Bible began quite early. The process had begun within 30s years of Jesus death, but was not anywhere near completed when Cerdo converted to Christianity. If we pick back up with Cerdo’s story, we can see how it evolved. Cerdo listened to the readings in church and decided that the god of the Old Testament was a combination of cruelty and righteousness at odds with the god of the New Testament who was a combination of the Good and the Spiritual. Cerdo began to teach in his church and in town in Rome of the two gods and how the god of the Old Testament was well known, while the New Testament god of Jesus was unknown. Cerdo reasoned that as the god of the New Testament was spiritual, then Jesus did not have a real physical body. Using this logic, Cerdo announced that Jesus was not born of the Virgin Mary, he never really suffered, he only seemed to do so, and so no resurrection was needed. Cerdo was booed down in church and stopped from speaking in public. He tried teaching in private, but then was denied a place in worship—evidently the first person to be excommunicated. Now this is early in church history and there is no hierarchy, formal or informal. Excommunication meant that his congregations and those who had heard of it would not welcome Cerdo to receive communion with them until he repented from his false teaching. Cerdo moved out of his church to start one of his own where he could teach what he wanted. It was about this time, in 144, when Marcion came to Rome. Marcion’s reputation had preceded him. His father was the quite orthodox and respected bishop of Sinope, along the Black Sea in Modern Turkey. But Marcion had grown to have a dislike of the material world in general and Judaism in specific. It was also known in Rome that Marcion had been sent away from home for his penchant for trying to talk Christian Virgins, those we would today refer to as Nuns, that they should break their commitments to Christ in this regard. The early church writer Tertullian who wrote of this controversy within a generation later said that Marcion arrived in Rome excommunicated by the Christian Church, for raping a woman who had consecrated herself to Christ. This disregard for morality concerning the body was common among those who emphasized that Jesus was a spirit and only seemed to be human. Marcion naturally gravitated toward fellow excommunicant Cerdo and his small following. But Marcion had what Cerdo did not; Marcion was younger, better looking and by all accounts quite charismatic. Marcion soon had a large following, one that would continue after his death for several centuries. Like Cerdo, Marcion taught that the Jehovah of the Old Testament was not the same as the God of Jesus of the New Testament. So he was allergic to any Old Testament references in his new Church. Marcion took the Gospel of Luke and the letters to the Romans, I and II Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, Philemon and Colossians. Then he edited out all Old Testament references and pronounced it Scripture above all other contenders. In doing so Marcion drafted the first attempt at a body of Christian Scripture. Most importantly, Marcion created the need for Christians to be more clear about what was and was not Scripture. If all of this sounds a bit distant and disconnected from your day to day life, consider this. Marcion’s views are still quite common in Christianity today. Many Christians think of God as found in the Old Testament as cruel and Jesus and the New Testament as loving. And many Christians, who read scripture at all, find it easy to read the New Testament, while the Old Testament seems less relevant. In fact, even the designation Old Testament is revealing. Hebrew Scripture or Hebrew Bible would be a better designation, one which includes a current place of prominence for those texts, when Old Testament could sound, well, old, historic, irrelevant. The teaching of Marcion, Cerdo and other Gnostic Christians as they are now known needed a response beyond excommunication. It was not enough to simply disallow them to disturb Christian worship, the Christians needed some right teaching lest others be led astray. So, the Christian response was to begin a conversation about what was being read in Church. In time the response was to decide how to decide what would be in the Christian Bible. Over and against Marcion, everyone agreed that the Hebrew Bible was a part of Christian scripture. Guided by the Holy Spirit they further decided that to be included, a work must have:
Our earliest source of information on the canon of scripture comes through a text from 170 a.d. known as the Muratorian Fragment (a fragment as the beginning is missing). This text lists the books then routinely being used in churches as consisting of the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John; the Book of Acts; 13 letters of Paul; and some other writings. This early list differed from the current New Testament in not including Hebrews, James, I and II Peter, and 3 John, while adding the Wisdom of Solomon, and the Apocalypse of Peter and noting that Revelation was not used in all churches and The Shepherd of Hermas should be read, but not in public worship. All Gnostic writings are rejected. Another important source is the letter Polycarp, a Bishop of Smyrna wrote to the Philippians. Ploycarp, who was a disciple of Jesus’ disciple John quoted 17 books of the New Testament including all four Gospels. While his letter is not intended to show what was and wasn’t scripture, it does shows a very similar idea of what texts were sacred to Christians at about the same time as Marcion was creating a much smaller Bible. But most importantly for this morning, not one single Christian writer ever disputed the ongoing value of the Hebrew Bible. Look at how closely what we now refer to as Old and New Testaments are in this morning’s readings. Moses’ story is recounted in the Book of Exodus. In the passage we read this morning, Moses has been with God and his face shines so brightly it frightens those around him. In the Gospel, Jesus goes up on a mountain to pray and encounters Moses and Elijah and Jesus’ whole body is transfigured, shining brightly. While on the mountain, we are told that when Moses and Elijah appear in glory they speak to Jesus of his departure, the Greek word for departure is Exodus. They are there to prepare Jesus for his Exodus. Finally, in the second letter of Peter, he writes that his letter is to prepare his fellow Christians for his departure, his Exodus. There is a strong connection in our readings between the Moses experience of Exodus to the Christian experience in the cross of Jesus Christ. This is part of why the Hebrew Bible remains important. It is because the Old and New Testaments are one Bible telling one story. To understand Jesus’ Exodus on the cross, it helps to have crossed through the Red Sea with Moses. For the story of the Bible is one story, the story of a people who cross from death to life. And in the scripture, we are challenged ourselves to cross from death to life. Peter tells us in his letter that the way we learn this story is in the scripture. Peter writes, “No prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by human will, but man moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.” Through the scripture, all of the Christian scripture, God still speaks. The way to get God’s interpretation and not mine or anyone else’s is to prayerfully read the Bible for yourself. God worked through fallible humans through the centuries to write, assemble in to one book and pass on to you these words. The words of the Bible can move you from the realm of death to the realm of life. But you can’t just let those words lie still in a dust-covered book, you have to actually open the pages and prayerfully read. And then listen to how God is speaking to you. For God inspires those words anew each time they are read to move us from the power of death to the power of life. Amen.
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