By Very Rev. Hugh Pope, O.P., S.T.M.
Doctor in Sacred Scripture
Member of the Society of Biblical Archaeology
Professor of New Testament Exegesis
Collegio Angelico, Rome

A. The Relation of the New Testament to the Old.

THE New Testament is unintelligible without the Old. For, as Tertullian expresses it, "the Law is the root of the Gospels." 1 But, as our Lord Himself said, "not one jot nor one tittle of the Law shall pass." 2 "Ye call men Manicheans," says St. Jerome,

"if they prefer the Gospel to the Law. But rather let us say that in the Law is the shadow, in the Gospel is the Truth ... in the former we are slaves, in the latter the Lord Who is present speaks; in the former are the promises, in the latter their fulfillment; in the former are the beginnings, in the latter their completion; in the former the foundations of the works are laid, in the latter the coping stone of faith and grace is fitted on." 3

And again:

"For the grace of the Law which hath passed away we have received the abiding grace of the Gospel; for the shadows and the figures of the Old Instrument we have the Truth of Jesus Christ." 4

In his commentary on Matt. 5:18, "One jot or one tittle of the Law shall not pass till all be fulfilled," he points out that the New Dispensation is but the fulfillment and not the displacement of the Old:

"Under the figure of these letters we are shown that even those things which are held to be the least in the Law are filled with spiritual mysteries; and all of them are summed up in the Gospel." 5

This same doctrine St. Augustine is never weary of reiterating, especially against the Manichaeans; he sums it up in characteristic fashion in the dictum: "Quae in Veteri Testamento latent in Novo patent." 6

It is only when we have a thorough grasp of principles like these that we can profitably study the New Testament. One and the same God is the Author of both Testaments; one and the same Spirit inspired the various writers how ever widely separated in point of time; one Divine Person dominates every Book, viz. the Savior of the world Who in the Old Testament appears under the veils of prophecy, but in the New is depicted as walking in the flesh. 7

What has been said will suffice to show the authoritative position which the Gospels hold. Thus St. Augustine says to Faustus:

"Show me how you know that Christ is the Author of truth if you dare ascribe falsehood to those who wrote of Him and whose authority has come down to posterity established and rooted in a memory that is but recent? For you have not seen Christ, neither did He speak with you as He did with the Apostles; neither did He call to you from heaven as He did to Saul. What ideas can you have of Him, what can you believe about Him, save what Scripture testifies? And if the Gospels which are spread abroad and familiar to all peoples are a lying document despite the supreme degree of sanctity which from the beginning of the preaching of Christ's Name, has been conceded to them in all the Churches then what Scriptures can be produced to which we can pin our faith in Christ? What writing can you allege which those who do not want to believe will be unable to declare a fiction when once you call in question the Gospel which is so well known?" 8

B. The Preeminence of the New Testament, which in its turn is dependent on the Church.

Hence we are not at liberty to pick and choose among the Gospel records. We must accept all or none. But this we cannot do if we take for our guiding principle simply what appeals to us. We cannot exercise merely subjective critical acumen, or what passes for such. We must not accept what we understand and reject what is beyond our comprehension. We must have some clear objective principle which shall infallibly distinguish between what is inspired and what is not, which shall serve to show us which are true Gospels, which are apocryphal. And this principle, as St. Augustine has just told us, is the universal acceptance of certain Scriptures by the Church. Hence Augustine's famous pronouncement:

"You tell me Manichaeus is an Apostle of Christ! I do not believe it! Perhaps you will read the Gospel to me and try to prove thence who Manichaeus is? But supposing you came across someone who was not yet a believer in the Gospel, what would you say to him if he said: I do not believe? For neither would I believe the Gospel unless the authority of the Catholic Church impelled me thereto! And when I believe those who say to me: Believe the Gospel, why should I not believe them when they say to me: Do not believe the Manichaeans? Take your choice. If you say: Believe the Catholics, then they tell me to put no faith in you! Consequently as long as I believe them I cannot believe you. If you say: Do not believe the Catholics, then you cannot, from the Gospel, compel me to believe in the Manichaeans, for I only believe in the Gospel because the Catholics preached it to me. 9

It is the Catholic Church which preached the Gospel. It is she who acknowledged as her own and set her seal upon the four Gospels which are acknowledged as canonical. They are dependent upon her, not she upon them. For the written records, whether Gospels, Acts, Epistles or Apocalypse, are but accidents in the life and development of the Church. The Apostles were sent to preach, not to write; to teach by word of mouth, not by "paper and ink." 10 Hence St. Irenaeus' declaration:

"If dispute arose touching some small point would it not be necessary to have recourse to the most ancient Churches in which the Apostles dwelt, and inquire from them what was certain and clear on the point? Supposing that the Apostles themselves had left us no Scriptures, would we not have to follow the order of tradition handed down by those to whom the Apostles committed the Churches? With this principle agrees the state of many barbarian peoples who believe in Christ, but who have salvation written in their hearts by the Holy Spirit without the help of paper and ink, and who diligently hold to the ancient tradition." 11

The whole New Testament is "occasional," i.e. it was written simply as occasion demanded. Gospels were committed to paper because some heresy arose which made it a duty to write as in the case of St. John's Gospel Epistles were written because the chance of finding a bearer offered itself. But the writers were preachers before they were writers and we can even feel that they grudged the time spent in writing. Tertullian pithily expresses this feature of the New Testament when he terms it "compendiously short." 12 Eusebius, too, remarks that "the Apostles published the knowledge of the kingdom throughout the whole world, paying little attention to the composition of written works," and he instances especially St. Paul who,, despite "his vigor of expression and richness of thought, committed to writing no more than the briefest Epistles." 13 Eusebius has also preserved for us a remark of Origen to the effect that " St. Paul did not write to all the Churches which he had instructed, and to those to which he did write he sent but few lines."14 And Origen expressly points out the incompleteness of the Gospel narrative when he says:

"Who is so clever as to be able to discover the whole Jesus from the four Evangelists? Who can fathom any one point completely by his own unaided study? Who can find out all Christ's journeys, all His discourses or deeds?" 15

This is, of course, in accordance with the positive statement of St. John 20:30, 21:25. This dependence of the Gospels and of the whole of Scripture upon the Church's authority could not be more forcibly expressed than in St. Augustine's concluding words to Faustus:

"In brief I would admonish you that if you wish to follow that authority of Scripture which is to be preferred to all others, then you must follow that which from the very days of Christ's presence in our midst has come down to us through the ministry of the Apostles, and which, through the certain succession of Bishops in their Sees, has been safeguarded unto our days as a trust, and has been set in clear light throughout the world. For there you will find even the obscurities of the Old Testament unveiled and its predictions fulfilled." 16

St. Augustine constantly recurs to this question when arguing against Faustus the Manichee:

"It is one thing not to receive these Books at all and refuse to be bound by them in any sense, as do the heathen with all our Books, as the Jews do with the New Testament, as we ourselves do with your books and those of other heretics if they claim any books as peculiar to themselves, and as we do too with the books called apocryphal not of course that these latter have any hidden authority, but we reject them because they rest on no particular light that bears witness to them but are adduced on some unknown secret principle and on the pure presumption of some unknown persons. It is one thing, I say, to refuse to be tied down to the authority of any set of Books or of any set of people, but it is quite another thing to say: this Saint has written all this quite truly and this particular Epistle is his, but in it this particular point is his this other is not his. For when you find some opponent of yours saying prove it! you do not appeal to more correct copies or to the weight of a greater number of manuscripts or to that of the more ancient ones or to the original language from which the Epistle in question was translated, but you simply say 'I prove that this is his and the other not his because the first named makes for my views whereas the latter runs counter to them. You then are the Rule of Truth! What makes against you cannot be true! ... But what origin do you assign to any Book you allege in your favor? What antiquity, what series of witnesses do you claim for it? Even if you made the attempt it would not avail you. Whereas you can see for yourself what weight the authority of the Catholic Church has on this point. For she is established upon the series of Bishops who succeeded one another down to the present day in the unquestioned (fundatissimis) Apostolic Sees, as also upon the consentient opinion of so many nations. Consequently, if question should arise touching the reliability of copies, as happens in a few instances of variant readings which are quite well known to students of Holy Scripture, then discussion amongst us would be decided by copies from other districts whence the doctrine in question came to us; or, if even there copies varied, then the testimony of the majority of manuscripts would be preferred to that of the minority, or of the more ancient to that of the more recent; and if even then the variants remained uncertain we should consult the original language from which the translation was made. In this fashion they act who when anything disturbs them in Holy Scripture, which rests on such weighty authority, are anxious to find what may make for their instruction, not what may help them in their squabbles." 17

The Fathers urged, in season and out of season, this principle of the complete dependence of Holy Scripture on the Church and Tradition. Thus note St. Irenaeus' words on the way in which heretics treat both Scripture and Tradition:

"When they are convinced out of the Scriptures," he says, "they turn round and accuse those very Scriptures, saying that they are not correct, that they are not authoritative, that they are not consistent and that the truth cannot be gathered from them by people who are ignorant of Tradition. And Tradition, they urge, was not delivered in writing but by the living voice. ... But then again, when we appeal against them to that same Tradition which flows from the Apostles and is safeguarded in the Churches by the succession of Presbyters, they become opponents of Tradition and urge that they themselves are wiser not only than the Presbyters, but even than the Apostles themselves, and they say that it is they themselves who have discovered the real truth." 18

Note, too, a remarkable passage in the De Fide contra Manichaos, a work attributed to St. Augustine; the writer is talking of the birth of Christ from a Virgin:

"You will be told," he says, "that it is in the Gospel. But with your usual stupidity you will at once declare that Scripture to be false! You fail to realize that any other blind person who is like- minded with yourself can do precisely what you are doing and dub false what you deem true and true what you deem false! Thus you open the door to every human error and crime, so that every individual is at liberty to accept those Scriptures which he is pleased with and repudiate those which he does not understand and which, because he stumbles at them, he holds to be bad. Owing to this mistaken procedure of yours there remain no means of correcting people like you! Receive then the Canonical Scriptures in their entirety if you would be yourselves entire!" 19

Neither is it simply question of which Scriptures are canonical. For even when we know what Scriptures we are to accept and what to reject, we still need a guide in our interpretation of them. No one has written more forcibly on this point than St. Irenaeus:

"True knowledge," he says, "is the teaching of the Apostles, and the ancient system of the Church throughout the world, and the impress of the Body of Christ according to the succession of the Bishops to whom the Apostles handed down the Church which is in every place. This is that guardianship which has come down to us; this is full treatment of Scripture without disguise, without addition, without diminution. There we have the text without falsification, 20 its exposition according to the Scriptures, legitimate, diligent, affording no room for danger nor blasphemy." 21

In the same spirit Tertullian writes that

"the Holy Ghost in His greatness foresaw all such interpretations as these (i.e. the false interpretations put on i Thessalonians of which he is speaking), and therefore suggested to the Apostle the passages in 2 Thessalonians." 22

For, as Tertullian himself remarks elsewhere:

"Divine reason lies in the very pith and marrow of things, not on the surface, and very often is at variance with appearances." 23

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1 Tertullian, Scorpiace, 2, and cf. St. Jerome in Ezech. xlii. 1; P.L. XXV. 409, "Ut et Lex teneatur in Evangelic et Evangelium de Legis radice nascatur"; cf. Lactantius, Instit. V. 2.

2 Matt. v. 18; Luke xvi. 17; cf. Origen, Praef. g in Joan.; P.G. XIV. 35; St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catech. iv.

3 Adv. Pelag. I. 31; P.L. XXIII. 525,

4 Ep. CXII. 14; P.L. XXII. 925; cf. in Matthaum, xi. 28-29; P.L. XXVI. 76; Origen, Praef. in Joan. 14; P.G. XIV. 47; Lib. I. 4, in Rom. i. 4, ibid. 847-8.

5 Comment. on Matth. v. 18; P.L. XXVI. 36.

6 Quaest. in Heptateuchum, II. Ixxiii.; P.L. XXXIV. 623; cf. Contra Adversarium Legis, I. xvii. (35), II. 31; P.L. XLII. 623, 656; Contra Adimantum, viii-ix., P.L. XLII. 139-140; Sermon, XXV. i, P.L. XXXVIII. 167; Enar. in Ps. cxliii. 2, P.L. XXXVII. 1856; Contra Faustum, IV. 2, P.L. XLII. 219.

7 Bar. iii. 36-38.

8 Contra Faustum, XVI. n, cf. 13 and XVII. 4; P.L. XLII. 321, 323, 342.

9 Contra Ep. Manichai, V. P.L. XLII. 176; cf. Origen, Contra Celsum, V. 22.

10 2 John 12; 3 John 13.

11 Adv. Haer. III. iv. 1-2; P.G. VII. 855.

12 Contra Marcionem, IV. I; cf. St. Jerome in Isaiam, x. 23, P.L. XXIV. 140, and in Isaiam, xxx. 21, ibid. 346.

13 H.E. III. xxiv. 3.

14 H.E. VI. xxv. 7-8

15 Origen, X. 6, in Joan.; P.G. XIV. 319.

16 Contra Faustum, XXXIII. 9; P.L. XLII. 517-518.

17 Contra Faustum, XI. 2; P.L. XLII. 245-246.

18 Adv. Haer. III. ii. 1-2; P.G. VII. 846-7; cf. St. Cyprian, Ep. LXVII. 5; Lactantius, Instit. IV. 5.

19 Pseudo-Augustine, De Fide contra Manichaeos, xxii.; P.L. XLII. 1145.

20 For the fact that the text was early corrupted see H.E. IV. xviii. xxiii. xxix.; V. xx.

21 Adv. Haer.lV. xxxiii. 8; P.G. VII. 1077; cf. IV. xxvi. 1-5, cols. 1053-6. For an ideal Introduction to the study of Holy Scripture see Cassiodorus, De Institutione Divinarum Literarum, i.-xvi.; P.L. LXX. 1105-1131.

22 De Resurrections Carnis, xxiv.

23 Ibid., iii. Origen goes further still: "We must know that just as the Law contains but a shadow of future good things, which are announced by that Law when set forth in truth, so too the Gospel, which even some of the common herd fancy they understand, teaches us but a shadow of the mysteries of Christ. Indeed what John terms the Eternal Gospel (Apoc. xiv. 6), and which might properly be termed the spiritual Gospel, clearly sets before the eyes of them that understand, all the things of the Son of God, both the mysteries shown forth in His discourses and those things of which His very actions were but veiled images." Tom. I. 9 in Joan. P.G. XIV. 35-38. Hence Origen also says: "We must show all diligence in studying even those things which seem to be clear. Nor must we despair of finding in His discourses, however homely and simple they may seem, something worthy of His sacred lips for them that seek aright." Tom. XX. 29, in Joan. P.G. XIV. 658; cf. Tom. II. 2, ibid. 186. On the whole question see Mgr. Le Camus, Fausse Exegese: Mauvaise Theologie, Lettre aux Directeurs demon Seminaire, apropos des idees expos ees par M. A. Loisy dans Autour d'un Petit Livre; Paris, Oudin, 1904.