ORAL AND WRITTEN TRADITION

The Catholic Church Before The New Testament Was Written Down

CATHOLIC TRADITION
THE KEY TO THE NEW TESTAMENT

by Paul Stenhouse, M.S.C., Ph.D

PART I: THE BIBLE THE ONLY WAY?

The impression given by 'bible' Christians, 'evangelists and others brought up in a non-Catholic view of Christianity, is that the 'authority' of the bible is 'supreme'.

As an 'evangelical' writer in the Sydney Morning Herald put it some time ago (June 15, 1992) 'the Bible is not just a source of knowledge of God, but it is the source — the only source'.

The same author went on to say: 'The view of Martin Luther and his modern-day reformed evangelical counterparts is that there is only one reliable source of knowledge of God: the Bible'.

Without mentioning the Catholic Church the author then goes on to talk about a so-called liberal view, also centuries old and still very much found today within certain church circles (which) suggests that there are potentially four valid grounds for knowledge of God and his dealings with us, namely reason, tradition, experience, as well as revelation.'

The author categorises Catholic views on the important role of Reason and Tradition in the religious quest, as liberal,' implying that the fundamentalist 'evangelical' view is 'conservative'.

The 'Ancient' Christian Faith was Catholic

The evangelical view dates from the time of Martin Luther, and is, indeed, 450 years old. But the author neglects to say (perhaps he doesn't know) that the Catholic view from which Luther sprang and which nurtured him, is 2,000 years old and dates from Apostolic times. The Catholic 'view' is not 'also centuries old.' It is, if the truth be told, the ancient Christian view.

Well, was Martin Luther really returning to the early days of Christianity with his teaching that the scriptures are the only source of knowledge of God, or was he reacting to a situation in which, having rejected the authority of the Pope, and abandoned the Catholic Church, he had to find another 'authority' that could support his views ... as it was later on to support myriad other views, often conflicting and contradictory?

To seek an answer to these questions we have to return to the early centuries and look at the beginnings of Christianity. Let us consider specifically the relationship of the infant Catholic Church to the New Testament — the Christian sacred writings — as distinct from the Jewish sacred writings that are called the Old Testament. And let us see especially the role these Christian scriptures played in the formative early years of the Church.

Our Lord's Commands

To begin with, we recall that after the resurrection and ascension of our Lord, the apostles set about carrying out our Lord's command, 'Go forth, therefore, and make all nations my disciples, baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. And teach them to observe all that I have commanded you. And rest assured: I am with you always, even to the end of time.' (Matthew 28,18-20).

    Notice first of all the priorities that St Matthew stresses:

  1. The disciples are related to their teachers by obedience; the apostles obey Jesus; their disciples obey them; and so on.
  2. The rite of baptism — along with the other sacraments — is what binds them all together into one whole.
  3. The teachers are to require 'observance' of all that our Lord commanded to be taught in his name.
The Gospels

St Matthew wrote his gospel after the destruction of Jerusalem, sometime between 70 and 80AD, around fifty years after the events described in it, and long after the commands of Jesus had begun to be observed and obeyed by his followers.

The gospel of Luke, was written like Matthew's around 50 years after our Lord's death; Mark's about 40 years (between 65-70 AD) and John's around 65 years (at the end of the first century).

The four gospels record who and what Jesus was, and some of what the apostles and disciples did before and after his death and resurrection.

But the work done by the apostles, like the life and deeds and Jesus, was independent of the written record, and antedated it.

In the forty or so years that were spread out between the death of Jesus and the destruction of Jerusalem we find the Church, as an institution taking shape as a result of oral teaching and a living authority based on our Lord's commands.

Catholic Life before the New Testament

The 'breaking of bread,' the Mass, was being celebrated every Sunday, the Christians were going to the Jewish Synagogue on the Saturday; the Sacraments were being administered; priests and bishops were chosen, ordained and given jurisdiction or authority; the doctrine of universal salvation was preached; the chief Sees of Rome, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem were established, and hundreds of thousands of human beings began to live the Christian life, at least twenty years before the earliest extant letters in the New Testament were written; and hundreds of years before the Canon of Christian Scriptures was closed and the 27 'books' of the New Testament appeared in the form with which we are familiar today.

The first generations of Christians received their instruction in the faith from the lips of the Apostles and their Disciples. Christians learned how to practise the Catholic Faith from teachers who spoke in Christ's name the words that Jesus himself had once spoken.

It was only after this task of preaching the 'deposit of Faith' had been carried out successfully for many years, and in a great many cities and towns and remote villages throughout the roman empire, that the first collections of the writings of some (by no means all) of the apostles and disciples became, as it were, 'public property,' accessible to Christians beyond the geographical boundaries of the select groups for which and to which they had been addressed when they were first written.

The gospel of St John, the last of the four-fold records of the Lord's life and work, was not even written, let alone communicated, to the great mass of believers in the Catholic Church, until more than sixty years after our Lord had died and risen.

And before that time, the structure of the Catholic Church had already been formed. The sound of the Apostolic preaching had gone out to the whole world, a great multitude of teachers had been commissioned by the Apostles; and a vast number of people had been taught by them.

Many hundreds of thousands of thousands of those early believers lived and died out of love for the Lord Jesus without having seen read, or even heard of the New Testament scriptures.

Many, indeed, possibly the majority, could not read, even if they could have obtained a copy of one of St Paul's letters, or of one of the gospels

Oral Preaching of the Catholic Faith

During this whole period - which lasted at least until the death of St John, the Tradition (or 'handing-over') of the Catholic Faith was almost entirely oral. For all this period, the coming of the Kingdom of God preceded the books in which we read, at some distance, of the origins of the Catholic Church.

The New Testament writings did not bring the kingdom into being, nor establish Christianity, any more than Marco Polo's Le Divisament dou Monde created the court of Kublai Khan, and the Mongol culture in China, or Cook's diaries discovered Australia for the British. It describes in a very partial and selective way some aspects of the oral preaching of the kingdom that had for many years been the unique method of communicating Faith in Jesus.

This oral teaching by the apostles embraced three kinds of 'facts':

Apostolic Tradition

  1. What they had been taught by our Lord, whether it was afterwards written down or not: See St John's parting comment to the readers of his gospel (21, 25) that the whole world could not contain all the books that would have to be written if all that Jesus did was written down.

  2. Insights into this teaching of our Lord, that the apostles learnt by the illumination of the Holy Spirit (Jn 20, 30; 21, 25; 16 12) and that, in their turn, they taught to their converts.

  3. What the apostles and disciples, under the leadership of Peter, decided for the good of the Church about discipline, the administering of the sacraments, and the weekly or daily celebration of the 'Divine Mysteries,' of the liturgy.

All these make up what we call the Apostolic Tradition.

Evangelical Protestants, faced with practices or doctrines for which they can find no written authority in the scriptures, dismiss these as of no value: mere interpolations intruded into the life of the Church by an allegedly sinister Pope or hierarchy.

St Augustine held an altogether different view. Writing against the Donatists, he explains that 'Whatever is believed by the whole Church, but has not been ordered by Councils, but has nevertheless always been observed, this we are most correct in believing to have been handed down by none other than the authority of the apostles' (l. iv. De bapt. c. Donat. cap. ult.)

Out of this Treasure House of the Divine and apostolic oral Tradition came the whole planting and spreading of the Catholic Church.

PART II: CATHOLIC TEACHING AUTHORITY AND TRADITION

During this most critical period in the Church's early life, before the New Testament in written form existed, the deeds and life of Christ were first impressed on the world; the character of Christ's people was first formed; the group called Christians came into being, and passed one, and probably two generations.

The principle upon which all this happened was authority. Not the authority of a written record of the revelation of God through Jesus Christ, but the authority of the living Body of Christ, the Church, in the person of Peter its chief bishop, and his fellow apostles appointed by them.

It is almost as if this infancy period of the Church was designed to tell us the nature of the teaching Office of the Church Our Lord's command to make disciples of all people meant, in effect, to establish norms of worship (the Mass), to administer the Sacraments, especially Baptism, to regulate daily life by prayer and discipline, and the organising of Penance as a sort of fresh baptism.

This all happened in Jerusalem, Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, Ephesus, Corinth, Thessalonika and Galatia - in fact wherever the apostles went or sent their representatives - before the writings of the apostles had been circulated at all, or very widely. Quite clearly, by the time of St. Paul.

The Form of Baptism

When St Peter preached on the Day of Pentecost 3,000 people were baptised. This meant that there was a form of baptism, a ceremony which was followed by means of which those who believed in the Lord Jesus were admitted as members of the body of Christ.

The form of baptism used by the apostles and by subsequent followers of Jesus is not recorded in the New Testament. Among the 3,000 present on that Pentecost, there would have undoubtedly been children and infants as well as adults. We know that all these would have been admitted to the sacrament of baptism because Catholic Tradition has from the earliest times admitted children and infants.

The Breaking of Bread

Every Sabbath and every day in some places, when the Bread was broken, this was done according to ritual laid down by the authority of the apostles. The liturgy of the Mass, in the rich variety of its ancient rites, was as an action that ante-dated, and was quite independent of, any subsequent narrative that recorded it.

When St Paul wrote his first epistle to the Corinthians around 56 AD he referred to 'the tradition which I (already) had handed on to you' that 'came from the Lord,' concerning the Lord's Supper - the Mass, (1 Cor 11,23)

We have no written record of what Paul preached to the Corinthians from 50-52 AD when he went to their city and converted them to Christianity.

'Bible' Christians would have us believe that the 'oral' tradition to which St Paul refers, is of no value. And would restrict his whole preaching to the few special points he makes in the scattered written remains of his apostolic labours.

To believe this would be tantamount to saying that because we have no extant literary remains of the Etruscans, this gifted race never existed; or if it did, it had no culture worth preserving.

The Mass was the Church's principal, explicit and most solemn demonstration of her faith in action. The Mass was an act that made Jesus Christ visible to his followers in the midst of the Church. The altar was his throne. The Priest or Bishop was the Person of Jesus, presenting the chief acts of the Incarnation and Redemption and giving them back to the Father. When the unbaptised heard the deacon telling them to leave the group at the end of the Mass of the Catechumens, this warning to leave, was a signal to those who stayed that something marvellous was going to occur.

When the Christians heard the priest call down the Holy Spirit on the gifts on the altar to make the bread and wine the Body and Blood of Jesus, and when the faithful received the Body and Blood and replied Amen, the ceremonies and words made real in an extraordinary way the teaching of Jesus.

The remarkable vision of St John, (Apoc. 1, 9-20; 4, 1-14) latched upon by biblical fundamentalist with no comprehension of its meaning, is seen by Catholics with a knowledge of their faith, to be what it is: a description of the Eucharistic Sacrifice which Peter in the presence of the other apostles, and later on the bishop of each place, surrounded by the ancients and in the presence of the faithful people, celebrated. The vision offers us a view of a Christian building used in the Apostolic age for the offering of the Mass, and the gathering of believers around the Chair of the bishop.

No higher act of authority can be imagined than the prescribing of worship. The apostles received it in secret from their Lord, did not commit it to writing, but imprinted it on the memories of their disciples. They guarded it with care from all, until they had been instructed and then baptised.

Ordination: Transmitting Life to the Church

As they passed from city to city the apostles selected those whom they thought to be suitable and shared their power with them. They did this through the imposition of hands, accompanied by a ritual that like that of the Mass, was not written down, but communicated to the faithful by word of mouth.

The Church's very life depended on this transmission of power. The conveying of this power was an act of authority similar to that which instituted the ritual of the Mass. Part of the power transmitted concerned the right and power to celebrate the Lord's Supper, forgive sins and preach the message of Jesus.

The Pastoral Epistles speak of the grace and power communicated by the imposition of hands on Timothy and Titus. But the letters of St Paul do not contain the rite itself, even though it was crucial for the continuation of the Church's very existence.

Nothing better illustrates the teaching office of the Church, its authority, and the indispensable role that its Tradition played in those early years, than the organisation of the rites of Baptism, Eucharist and Ordination. The power and authority went from Peter to the other apostles, from them to their priests and from the priests to the people.

In a letter written in 431, Pope St Celestine writes to the Catholic bishops of Gaul: 'Let us consider the sacred rites which we use in priestly supplication, which have been handed down to us from the Apostles, and are uniformly celebrated throughout the entire world and in every Catholic Church, where the law of supplication establishes the law of belief. When those who preside over the Holy People in various places exercise the office of Ambassador (of God to men) committed to them, they plead the cause of the human race before the Mercy of God, and offer their requests and prayers, while the whole church joins with them in urgent entreaty.'

Early Faith not changed when some of it was commited to Writing

The authority set up by God to preserve and spread the doctrine received by the apostles from Jesus, was not modified or in any way lessened because the 27 letters and gospels were later written and sent off to the various churches.

This is clear both from the fact that Jesus promised his assistance and that of His Spirit, (John 14,26) for all time, to those who exercised authority within the Church; and from a consideration of some of the following circumstances that surrounded the writing of what we call the New Testament:

Written texts when they were handed round the various Christian communities, were aide-memoires and 'samplings' of the faith. They were:

The gospels and epistles were all written

Not all the Faith is found in the Scriptures

None of the sacred writers intended to give complete instruction in the doctrine, discipline or worship of the Christians. In none of their writings is the whole of Christian belief set out in any catechetical form. None of the writings makes any claim to present the entirety of Catholic belief and practice.

In each of these documents, many very important matters are either omitted or touched upon lightly. From all this it is clear that it was never the intention of the authors to substitute these letters or documents for the pastoral ministry of priests and bishops whom Christ had appointed to go out to the world and teach his doctrine. Still less, to oppose the selective statements contained in these few writings, to the teaching authority of the Church built on Peter and the other apostles.

Even if these few letters and documents actually contained the whole of Christian faith (which they demonstrably don't) it is clear that these were scattered records and of a supplementary role in the teaching of the faith, because hardly anyone could read or write at that time.

Was faith only for the literate? And was the deposit of faith to be determined by the personal judgement of the reader?

For fundamentalists (or for the 39 articles of the Church of England) to claim that all revealed doctrine concerning Jesus and his mission, is found in the New Testament, is clearly preposterous.

In addition, there is not a vestige of any command that the doctrine of Jesus should be committed to writing, either in the words of Jesus, the sayings of the apostles, of any of the sacred writers, or in the arrangement and scope of the New Testament or in the mind of Christians, until the 'reformation' of Martin Luther.

On the contrary, it is evident from the form of the New Testament, that the letters and documents that comprise it were not in any way written for the purpose of teaching the whole of the Christian religion to each of the faithful, independently of the teaching office of the Church.

Written to those with Faith

All the writings of the New Testament were addressed to those who were already Christians. They give advice and correction that could not easily be understood except by those who have previously been instructed in the Faith.

They refer the faithful in express words to the preaching that they had heard and received and to which they were advised to remain faithful.

They refer to the Guardians of the Deposit, and to a line of authentic teachers who will continue to hand the faith on from generation to generation.

What had in fact been established by Jesus Christ was not a written text, or a command to write down what he had taught, but an Apostolic Succession of men in whom his Power and Presence would be felt, to whom he promised the Holy Spirit, and whom he sent out to preach in His Name.

It is unthinkable that his Personal, Living Authority which was the source of faith for the first two generations of Christians, and which guarantees the credibility of the Scriptures themselves, should be abolished. For to this authority, our Lord committed the task of bearing his word (oral or derivative written) to the world, for all time.

PART III: THE CHURCH AND THE NEW TESTAMENT
ARE NOT IN COMPETITION

What chronologically preceded the writing of the New Testament could not be derived from the New Testament.

This includes, among other things, the hierarchical structure of the Church (choice, laying on of hands, and imparting of jurisdiction of bishops and priests); the authority of the Bishop of Rome; the Sacraments, with the rites that conveyed them; the liturgy of the Lord's Supper, the Mass, the daily discipline of life that received men into the Church, numbered them in it, imposed penances for faults, restored them to full communion, and was the very Christian atmosphere that early Catholics lived and breathed.

All these elements were well and truly in existence when the writings that make up the 27 books of the NT were from 50 AD (the first letter of St Paul to the Thessalonians) to 100 AD (St John's Gospel) sent to particular churches, or intended for certain kinds of believers. Centuries later they were finally collected and made the heirloom of the whole Church that we know as the New Testament.

With these instruments of Divine life in the Church these later writings did not meddle. The Traditions contained in the New Testament were not written down to limit the power of the Church some of whose Traditions they incorporated, confirmed and recorded.

The Church and the Book were never in competition. It was the Catholic Church that jealously guarded the New Testament and excluded false writers and writings from it. She protected its text, and lovingly interpreted its words. It was the Church that collected the various writings, authenticated them and then placed them in her treasury.

But what was always essential and primary and from the Lord, was the perpetual succession of living representatives from the tradition of the apostles: especially Peter, their Chief. That Apostolic succession used all kinds of means to carry out the Lord's command: the Word contained in the Liturgy; the Word contained in the Sacraments; the Word contained in the New Testament; the Word contained in the various ecclesiastical monuments, decisions, judgements, practices that reveal the living Church in action in the 90s and the 1990s.

The Baptismal Creed

In the early church, converts were instructed by word of mouth: not by putting a book, still less the book of the Scriptures, in their hand. The very word used by St Luke in the beginning of his gospel addressed to Theophilus, was catechesis. This means 'oral teaching'. A Catechist was a person who taught by word of mouth. Theophilus was not given a text to read but a doctrine taught by personal teachers who spoke to him, and set him the example of their lives. After he had become a Christian the gospel was given to him by Luke to 'confirm his faith'.

Catechumens were given a creed (from, credo, I believe) at a certain stage in their baptism. No creed as such is to be found in the New Testament. This baptismal creed was called a 'Regula Fidei' or 'Rule of Faith' (see Tertullian 160-220) or more usually 'fides apostolica', 'apostolic Faith' or simply 'Fides', Faith.

The profession of faith called the Apostles Creed, first mentioned by St Irenaeus who had been born in Smyrna, was a disciple of St Polycarp who had been a disciple of St John and was ordained bishop of Lyon in France in 175 AD - was not written down until centuries later.

Rufinus (345-410) speaking of the Creed in use among the Catholics of Aquilea in Northern Italy says that neither in Aquilea nor in Rome had the creed ever been put into writing, and that he regarded the creed of the Church of Rome as the purest because 'there, the ancient practice was preserved of the catechumens reciting the creed in the hearing of the faithful'. The creed was written down only when it started to be recited at Mass by all the faithful and not just by the catechumens at their baptism.

This 'ancient practice' to which Rufinus refers, is not mentioned in the New Testament. St Ignatius of Antioch (martyred in 109 AD) is quoted by Eusebius of Caesarea in the latter's history (iii, 36) as exhorting Christians whom he met on his way to Rome where he was put to death by Trajan, to 'guard themselves against heresies that were arising, and to cling with tenacity to the Tradition of the apostles'. He did not tell them to 'cling to the scriptures'.

It was the boast of Rufinus that no heresy ever arose within the mother Church of Rome; and of St Ambrose (339-397) that the Church of Rome had preserved undefiled the Symbol (another word for the Creed) of the Apostles.

St Augustine (354-430) in a talk to catechumens (Sermon ccxii) forbids them to commit the Creed to writing: 'You must by no means write down the words of the Creed in order to remember them: but you must learn them by hearing them. Nor when you have learnt them must you write them down but hold them always in your memory and ponder them.'

The authority of the creeds was not derived from the New Testament, even though the writings of the New Testament contain, at least in germ, the contents of the creeds. The creeds ante-date the New Testament.

Daily Life for the converts was a succession of Sacraments:

  1. Initiation—Baptism
  2. Strengthening: Confirmation
  3. Holy Eucharist: food for the journey
  4. Matrimony
  5. Holy Orders
  6. Holy Anointing
  7. Penance
The Honoured Place of the New Testament

The books of the New Testament were never an instrument for the teaching of the Faith. They were never put in hands of the neophytes so that they could make a private judgement as to whether they agreed with or contradicted what they had been taught.

The Scriptures were held in the Church's hand: given to the Faithful as documents beyond the reach of their criticism, guaranteed by the ame authority by which they had become Christians: that of the Body of Christ, the Catholic Church.

The idea of treating the narratives of our Lord's life and deeds and teaching as common books, subject to the judgement of their readers would have struck the early Christians who with horror.

They had a special name for weak and unfaithful Christians who gave up their holy books to those who were unbaptised: they called them traditores — traitors. It would have been treason in their mind to hand the gospels or the other Christian writings over to people without faith: as it would have been treason to question the truth of a miracle or of the words of Jesus as transmitted by word of mouth, or as recorded in those writings.

The reasons for this respect given to the New Testament writings was the fact that behind them lay the full authority of the living Church.

It was as a result of the love and grace of that church had first learnt of the scriptures. That the Spirit of God lay behind writings was something that they learnt only from the church. The kingdom of which these writings spoke was the Church herself. The New Testament was her book; it spoke of her.

The Scriptures did not produce the hierarchy by which the Church was and is still governed; nor the Sacraments by which she was sustained; not the discipline by which the Christian people lived out their daily lives.

The Church from the outset was the dispenser of the Scriptures. She selected passages for recitation in her Eucharistic liturgy. She referred to the sacred writings daily in her prayers and teaching. They were a treasury out of which she brought gifts, new and old.

Worship of the Written Tradition

This continued to be the relationship between the Church and the New Testament up to the time of the 'reformation'. The texts were copied out by the generous labour of unwearying and loving monastic and priestly hands.

Before the time of printing (1450) it was even physically impossible that the scriptures could ever have been an instrument of teaching the faith: copies were too costly.

It was only around the time of the invention of printing that a new notion was circulated by an apostate Catholic priest — Martin Luther — who maintained that the Catholic Church and her bishops and priests were not the ones to whom our Lord committed the propagation of the faith but that each Christian was to teach himself by studying the written word of the revealed scriptures. This written word was the sole authority for faith, according to Luther; it was the only way to God.

This meant that the written word replaced the church for people who accepted the idea of Luther.

There seems to have been a genuine confusion in the mind of Luther and his followers between the outward, material Word which members of the newly formed Protestant churches read and studied, and the inner Word which is the true sense of the document. So they argued naively that from possessing the former, a person somehow automatically possessed the latter.

They also seem to have thought that unity of belief would follow from various individuals' studying of the same text. They buried their heads in the sand and would not face the inescapable fact that they were substituting their own private and personal interpretation of the text for the Church's public and authorised one.

And that as a result, there was no longer any one true meaning, but as many meanings as there were devout and 'sincere' readers of the text.

In words of John Dryden (1631- 1700) in The Hind and the Panther— in which the poet describes his conversion to Catholicism —

What weight of ancient witness can prevail
If private reason holds the public scale?
'As long as words a different sense will bear,
Our airy faith will no foundation find.
The Word's weathercock for ev'ry wind.

The 'reformers' opposed what they called the Word of God (the real sense of the New Testament as interpreted by a sincere seeker after truth) to the word of Man, which is what they called the Catholic Church's Traditional interpretation.

There is, indeed something flattering in this idea of an immediate contact between God and the individual and an illumination of the seeker's mind by the Holy Spirit.

But this idea of Luther's at one stroke got rid of the hierarchical Catholic Church, of all authority especially that of the Pope and bishops, of the sacraments, of Church discipline and all spiritual controls that for 1500 years had characterised Christianity.

Objections to Luther's novel views were obvious:

Firstly, it was not only illogical and without justification from the scriptures. But it was directly opposed to the words of Jesus: 'Go into the world and preach the gospel to every creature' and to all the passages in the scriptures themselves where the establishment of the Church and spiritual authority is clearly stated.

Secondly, it was clear that this elevation of Catholic written Tradition to the status of a unique and total statement of Christian belief and practice, and this cutting out, by Protestant Christians, of the living roots of Catholic oral Tradition and Papal Authority, would inevitably lead to disunity and confusion and the proliferation of sects and antagonistic and pseudo-religious bodies all claiming to be true.

This objection, made at the time to Luther, has — in the light of 450 years of bible-based Christianity — been proven tragically true.

St Augustine should have the last word in this brief sketch of the relationship between the Catholic Church's oral Tradition, and this oral tradition's very selective written confirmation and record, that we know as the New Testament.

'I should not believe
the Gospel itself,
if the Authority
of the
Catholic Church
did not move me to do so.'
Contra Epist. Fundament, i,6



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