Read Misquoting Jesus for Free Online Page A

teachers”—for example, in his letter to the Galatians. Reading the survivingaccounts, we can see clearly that these opponents were not outsiders. They were Christians who understood the religion in fundamentally different ways. To deal with this problem, Christian leaders began to write tractates that opposed “heretics” (those who chose the wrong way to understand the faith); in a sense, some of Paul’s letters are the earliest representations of this kind of tractate. Eventually, though, Christians of all persuasions became involved in trying to establish the “true teaching” (the literal meaning of “orthodoxy”) and to oppose those who advocated false teaching. These antiheretical tractates became an important feature of the landscape of early Christian literature. What is interesting is that even groups of “false teachers” wrote tractates against “false teachers,” so that the group that established once and for all what Christians were to believe (those responsible, for example, for the creeds that have come down to us today) are sometimes polemicized against by Christians who take the positions eventually decreed as false. This we have learned by relatively recent discoveries of “heretical” literature, in which the so-called heretics maintain that their views are correct and those of the “orthodox” church leaders are false. 8
    Early Christian Commentaries
    A good deal of the debate over right belief and false belief involved the interpretation of Christian texts, including the “Old Testament,” which Christians claimed as part of their own Bible. This shows yet again how central texts were to the life of the early Christian communities. Eventually, Christian authors began to write interpretations of these texts, not necessarily with the direct purpose of refuting false interpretations (although that was often in view as well), but sometimes simply to unpack the meaning of these texts and to show their relevance to Christian life and practice. It is interesting that the first Christian commentary on any text of scripture that we know about came from a so-called heretic, a second-century Gnostic named Heracleon, who wrote a commentary on the Gospel of John. 9 Eventuallycommentaries, interpretive glosses, practical expositions, and homilies on texts became common among the Christian communities of the third and fourth centuries.
    Â 
    I have been summarizing the different kinds of writings that were important to the lives of the early Christian churches. As I hope can be seen, the phenomenon of writing was of uppermost importance to these churches and the Christians within them. Books were at the very heart of the Christian religion—unlike other religions of the empire—from the very beginning. Books recounted the stories of Jesus and his apostles that Christians told and retold; books provided Christians with instruction in what to believe and how to live their lives; books bound together geographically separated communities into one universal church; books supported Christians in their times of persecution and gave them models of faithfulness to emulate in the face of torture and death; books provided not just good advice but correct doctrine, warning against the false teachings of others and urging the acceptance of orthodox beliefs; books allowed Christians to know the true meaning of other writings, giving guidance in what to think, how to worship, how to behave. Books were completely central to the life of the early Christians.
    T HE F ORMATION OF THE C HRISTIAN C ANON
    Eventually, some of these Christian books came to be seen not only as worthy of reading but as absolutely authoritative for the beliefs and practices of Christians. They became Scripture.
    The Beginnings of a Christian Canon
    The formation of the Christian canon of scripture was a long, involved process, and I do not need to go into all the details here.