Audio only:
Joe replies to Gavin’s video examining his position on the Didache and it’s scholarship, as it applies to the Papacy.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I have to apologize in advance. I’m losing my voice a little bit, so this may be a little raspier than usual, but I wanted to reply to Dr. G Orland’s recent video about bishops in the early church and a controversy over the meaning of the did decay. So does the earliest Christian evidence disprove Catholicism on the papacy or does it actually disprove the belief many Protestants have that the early churches were governed simply by elders and deacons. Now, as part of his case against the papacy, Gavin argues that the Bishop of Rome couldn’t be the Pope early on because there was no Bishop of Rome in the early days of the church. He makes other arguments, but I’ve only been focused on this one line of argumentation and one of the ways he supports that argument is that he claims that the Diday testifies to there being only two offices in the church.
Gavin:
So this confirms the picture we get from the New Testament and from the did another important first century testimony that you’ve got two offices in the church. Herein
Joe:
Lies a problem onscreen. There’s a citation claiming to be the new advent version of Dedicate 15 that mentions bishops and deacons. It looks very much like it says there’s just two offices, but as I pointed out in my prior video on this, when you go back and read the text, it actually talks about bishops and deacons as well as prophets and teachers in that sentence. Now that matters because the dedicate doesn’t define what the roles of these prophets and teachers are, and it certainly at least complicates what looks at first like a clear picture of a simple two-tiered church government. Now, I’m going to explain more about all of that in a moment, but when I pointed this out previously, Gavin responded by claiming that I had accused him of altering the text.
Gavin:
He’s responding to my video on the papacy, but he’s specifically focusing on is there a single bishop in Rome early on like in the first century, for example. And the first thing he covers is the did he makes the claim, I’m altering the text.
Joe:
So let me say in no uncertain terms, this is flatly untrue. Not only did I not claim that Gavin was the one who altered the text, I actually took pains not to say that or anything that would insinuate that I simply pointed out that the text in question has been altered, which it has been, and I stress that. All I know is that this happened somehow, and I explicitly said that I’m not accusing Gavin of purposely altering it. The line has been altered, and I want to be clear, I’m not saying he did this on purpose. This happens easily enough accidentally, but it’s important to know there has been a really important alteration here. Somehow those last two got deleted in Gavin’s version and the comma was replaced with a period. No, I said this not only in the interest of fairness and Christian charity, but also because I know how easy it is to mess up in making a video to put in the wrong quotation or the wrong clip.
I’ve made mistakes like this myself numerous times, and frankly I don’t even know if Gavin is the one who puts up onscreen texts. For all I know he’s got somebody and he didn’t even know that the altered text had been used until the video came out. I don’t know. I don’t need to know. It’s not important. And even if he did change it, he might’ve easily done that accidentally or innocently. So I mentioned this not to cast out on Gavin’s character, but because, and I’m going to show this with some scholarship in a moment here. Changing the text like this does seem to change the apparent meaning of the Deac, but Gavin insists falsely that I accuse him of altering the text and he doubles down and says, I also suggest that he’s quote mining or something like that.
Gavin:
It would be one thing if the Deac case said something like a point bishops and deacons and remember the chair of Peter or appoint bishops and deacons and submit to the successor of Peter, then Joe would have a point about altering the text or mining or something like that because then the non quoted text would actually be relevant to the debate.
Joe:
Now, this argument is purely fictional. I don’t even mention mine in my episode. I don’t allude to it, and yet Gavin’s thumbnail is a picture of me with the text. Did I quote mine as if that’s not only an argument that I really made, but in fact the central argument that I made that needed answering and just none of that is true. And he responds to these fictional charges by saying,
Gavin:
But sometimes when someone is basically sort of disparaging you and leading people to think you’re dishonest or something like that, it’s okay to just point out for people what is going on.
Joe:
And if you’re listening to make these claims, you might think, wow, it’s strange. Joe doesn’t normally attack people’s character in his videos. Why is he doing it to a nice guy like Gavin? And the answer is, I’m not. I’m trying to focus on the substance of the historical evidence while he’s saying things about me like
Gavin:
Unfortunately, this tendency to spin my words has now become a habit in Joe’s rebuttals of me. He does a lot of rebuttals of me seven several times.
Joe:
And look, I know it’s frustrating when people misunderstand or mischaracterize you online, but I’m a big believer that the solution there is just to assume the best and to present your actual position more clearly. I think feeling misrepresented is something that all of us involved in apologetics have to deal with. So let me just try to be clearer about what my argument actually is. So hopefully it won’t be misunderstood as any kind of personal attack. So if you’re only exposure to this debate was watching Gavin’s most recent video, you could be forgiven in thinking that I must not have had any substantive arguments and just used my channel as a platform to launch personal attacks on Gavin. But if you actually watch my video, I think you’ll find out that nothing could be farther from the truth. Unfortunately, Gavin spends so much time responding to arguments I’m not making that he doesn’t really get around to addressing the crux of the arguments that I do make about the evidence. So let’s talk about that evidence beginning first with the diday. As I mentioned, the diday speaks of apostles, prophets, teachers, bishops and deacons. The question is how these roles relate to one another. And the man who translated the dedicate into German for the first time was the liberal Protestant theologian, Adolf Von Hark, and his interpretation of the text was, and in some ways still is massively influential,
Gavin:
And this is this pretty standard scholarly view going back to Adolf Von Hark and JB Lightfoot and Philip Schaff, these older modern scholars who kind of set the table laid foundations for a lot of church history scholarship.
Joe:
Now all three of the guys Gavin mentioned there are Protestant theologians whose scholarship may be unsurprisingly tends to agree with Protestant theology, but since hark is the key figure, I want to take a closer look at him and the subsequent scholarship addressing his vision of what’s going on here in the Diday.
Gavin:
Or you can go online and read Adolf Vaughn harks the mission and expansion of Christianity in the first three centuries. You get to chapter one, it’s about the missionaries, and you can read him, I’ll just read this, but who are these who speak the word of God in the que not permanent elected officials of an individual church, but primarily independent teachers who ascribe their calling to a divine command or charism that he mentions apostles, prophets and teachers and says, these were not elected by the churches as were bishops and deacons alone.
Joe:
As Jonathan Draper points out in the diday and modern research, hark rather rashly celebrated the diday as providing clear and uncontroversial evidence of the early church in contrast to the problematic nature of most early. So and modern Diday scholarship just has not been kind to harks theories. As Gavin points out, hark viewed the diday as describing three itinerant what are called charismatic roles, apostles, prophets and teachers. So people who were going around different churches led by the spirit, and he contrasted these and put him in opposition to two local offices, bishops and deacons. In harks view, the earliest threefold ministry of traveling apostles, prophets and teachers was in the process of being replaced by non itinerant bishops and deacons, a sign of the increasing institutionalization of the second century church. So notice he views bishops and deacons as accretion as replacements for the original Christian structure of the church.
Hark believed that from the time of the apostles onward, there’d been this perpetual strife between the itinerant charismatic leaders and the institutional structures that were emerging in the local church, what he calls early ization. In harks view, Catholicism is distinct from Christianity. Pure Christianity gives way to Catholicism once the apostles, prophets and charismatically teachers ceased and their place was taken by the norm of the apostolic doctrine, the norm of the apostolic canon of scripture and subjection to the authority of the Apostolic Episcopal office. So hark treats doctrine as well as the canon of scripture and the Episcopal as these corruptions of Christianity and a threat to the pure gospel. This is what’s called the oppositional perspective because in harks view there are these apostles, prophets and teachers, and they’re in opposition to the local institutionalized clergy. But as the Wesleyan scholar, James Peddler notes, well, while this perspective continues to circulate at a popular level, it’s difficult to find any significant scholarly work today which continues to oppose institution and charism.
In principle. This simply is not a good way to understand the ator or church history. In other words. Now to be clear, Gavin is the one who introduced the dedicate doing it as testimony of this clear two tiered leadership structure in the local church. And it’s also true that that argument was once widely accepted from scholars. That’s the rash conclusion that Hark is accused of coming to. And this is true particularly when did a case studies were dominated by other Protestants, people like Philip Schaff and Lightfoot. And in response to this, my own argument is not that they did a case, some super clear proof for the Catholic side. No, my argument is much more modest. It’s just that scholars now realize that it’s not the clear and uncontroversial evidence for the Protestant dew that it was once believed to be. Now, when I pointing this out previously that modern scholars don’t agree with Gavin’s characterization, he responded.
Gavin:
There are some scholars who take this view that sometimes you’ll get the idea that there’s a transition going on at this time around when the dike is written from some offices to others. The single and only scholarly resource that Joe cited and put on screen itself mentions some of the features of this view. So if you look at the very next sentence after the one he highlighted, it references von Harks view and the possibility of a transition from the traveling apostles, prophets and teachers to the non itinerant bishops and deacons. So even there you see that distinction
Joe:
And sure, I originally cited only one scholarly resource summarizing the state of Diday scholarship because Gavin hadn’t cited any, but I’m happy to offer more details on this. Aaron Vic described in 2014 how I’m going to quote here. During the last 40 years, harnack and his successors have been largely marginalized. As a result, the field of dedicated studies has been caught up in a confusing diversity of scholarly opinions. There is no single origination hypothesis, no single methodology and no single research program to guide our way. The field of did case scholarship is thus in disarray and unable to substantially contribute to the academic questions of our day. So while Gavin continues to speak of what he claims is the overwhelming majority view, did a case scholars say, no, our field is in disarray. We don’t agree on even the basics of what this document is saying or what it’s about.
Now I’m going to look at a smattering of some of the scholarly views that are out there, particularly on this question. I’m going to do my best to illustrate what I think that their model looks like. Now understand this is my own kind of artistic endeavor, and I might be oversimplifying unwittingly, but this is my best attempt. First, you’ve got Cambridge’s professor Judas Liu. She points out that contrary to her next theory, biblical texts like First Corinthians 12 actually seem to treat prophets and teachers as being present in the local church rather than roving, itinerant. And just as the dedicate distinguishes between outsiders who visit for a few days and those outsiders who come in and join the community, come to live in the community, abide with them. The dedicate also seems to distinguish between itinerant apostles compared to prophets who come and abide with the community.
Well, why does that matter? Because as BH Streeter pointed out a long time ago when the dedicate describes the prophet that stays with them as the high priest of the local church and as the abiding prophet who’s called to administer the eucharistic sacrifice that looks like what would later be called a monarchical bishop. You’ve got one guy who’s in this high priestly role later. This language is used explicitly to describe the single bishop of a diocese or take the work of the Evangelical scholar Clayton Jeff. Now he actually outlines four different theories why presbyters don’t get mentioned in the diday, but the theory that he prefers is that the book is a manual of instruction for aspirants to the office of Presbyter. I’ve mentioned this in one of my books, but when St. Paul writes to Timothy and Titus, he doesn’t tell them to put one man in charge of the church’s in Ephesus and in Crete, and that’s not because there wasn’t one man in charge, it’s because Timothy and Titus were those men.
So Jeff’s argument works similarly that perhaps the dedicate doesn’t mention the third tier of the local church hierarchy because he’s speaking to the third tier. Now that might seem like just a random guess, but Jeff actually offers some interesting textual support. For instance, the text has things like instructions for how to perform a baptism and significantly what prayers to pray in offering the Eucharist. And that looks a lot more like a manual for aspiring priests than it does allay catechism. Now, I’d add to this also the Diday isn’t addressed to a church community, and instead the author of the Diday speaks to whoever it is who is the intended recipient simply as my child, which happens to be the same Greek word used by St. Paul and his addresses both to Timothy and to Titus as these spiritual sons who are going to carry forward the kind of ministry.
Now, obviously there’s way more that you could say about the scholarship in the Diday area, and plenty of people agree with Gavin that they think that, yeah, no, the original theories were right, it was just two tiers and then you have three itinerant ones. My point isn’t to prove that any one of the scholarly theories is correct. I’m simply pointing out as Draper does that the Diday is one of the most enigmatic and contested of early Christian writings. Scholars don’t know what the text means about prophets, teachers, bishops, deacons or whether there were presbyters, and that’s why I pointed out the alteration to the did case citation that Gavin offered not to call his character into question because the alteration matters. It makes confusing evidence look clearer than it really is. A sentence that originally mentioned, bishops, deacons, prophets, and teachers somehow got paired down to only mention bishops and deacons and to be used as proof that that’s all there was in the local church.
Now, Gavin claims that this change is not a change because there’s no punctuation in the original Greek and because style guides routinely allow a period to conclude a partial quotation, but this isn’t Greek and it’s not an essay. This is a YouTube video quoting the new Advent English translation of the Diday. And I counted 16 other instances in just Gavin’s original video in which there were citations to part of a sentence or a thought. And in each of the ones that I saw, the text ended with an ellipsis or a comma or with no punctuation at all. Something that signaled this is not the full thing. The fact that in this one instance, a period it’s introduced where it doesn’t belong, alters the text in an important way, whether it was meant to or not. I’m not accusing anyone of bad faith here because as we’ve just seen, there’s this complicated scholarly debate over the relationship of these roles, whether they’re offices, whether they’re local or itinerant.
Chopping the sentence up makes it look like the dedicated is clear on a question. It’s just not clear of even if you think the diday is meant to teach a two-tiered system of local church government, let’s at least agree. It does not clearly say that. So I’m certainly not saying this was malicious or dishonest or intentional or anything like that, but I am saying that getting the facts straight here matters because once this misread in the did case off the table, what are we left with? Well, the evidence we’re left with it all seems to me to point in one direction that each of the early churches was structured around a single bishop, and I want to make sure that we don’t get so caught up straining at commas that we just swallow camels and miss the big picture of all the early evidence. You’ve got the church in Jerusalem, which certainly seems to have an ax, a single head first Peter, then James.
And you also have the examples of Timothy and Titus that I’ve mentioned already outside of the Bible as early as 96 ad or so. You’ve got the letter of St. Clement of Rome, in which he talks about how the early Christians view church government not as something that has evolved over time, but is something that they received from the apostles. Now, hark recognized that that’s what Clement was driving at, and he called Clement’s description of an authoritative apostolic order to the local church, a momentous fiction. Now, I would suggest in response, I think it’s better to trust a first century Christian over the state of first century Christianity than a 19th century scholar writing 1800 years later. Fast forward about a decade in 1 0 7, St. Ignatius says quite explicitly that a church by definition has the threefold structure of bishop Elder or Presbyter and deacon, and he is explicit that the Church of Rome is a church that seemingly shows that it has this three-tiered structure that has a bishop at the top.
The very thing that we’re trying to establish, and we find plenty of explicit evidence, not only that there is a bishop of Rome, but even who it is throughout this period. Pius the first is mentioned in the mortan fragment is occupying the chair in Rome, and that fragment is typically dated to about one 70 describing a period shortly before in about the year 180. Saint Iran Aus names every bishop of Rome from the time of the apostles forward. Tertullian goes on to point out that every church founded by the apostles could do the same. Indeed, we’ve actually got hundreds of still existing bishop lists from third century North Africa, one of the few places where the climate is dry enough for papyrus to last this long. So that’s actually a lot of evidence. What do we do with that? None of these churches bear in mind are claiming they recently invented a third tier of government.
None of them are saying the apostles set up a two-tiered system, but we decided to change to three-tiered. For some reason, the unanimous witness seems to point in the direction that this system of government comes from the apostles, and we find it wherever we find clear evidence. And these Christians are early on enough that it certainly seems that they’d be in a position to know this. They would remember if there’d recently been a change to the very structure of the church. So how do we treat these earliest Christians? Do we say they’re lying about the Abic origins and structures of their church, or do we trust them when they say things like the very great, the very ancient and universally known church that is the Church of Rome was founded and organized by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul, with a succession of bishops coming down to the present day. That’s my actual argument. It’s not an attack on Gavin, it’s that the evidence here seems to clearly establish from quite early on that there’s a bishop of Rome that can be traced back to the apostles. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.