In post 27 (Christmas: The Prequel) I referred to various books that did not make it into the New Testament, such as the Proto-gospel of James (an alternate version of the Christmas story), The Acts of Paul and Thecla, The Acts of Peter, etc. Some (all?) of these books appear to be pure historical fiction, invented in order to advance the Christian cause. Although these books did not get into the Bible there were books in circulation in the 1st Century that did end up being quoted in and influencing the writings of the New Testament. By the way, the books that are included in the Bible are considered the “canon” of Scripture, and therefore those that did not get included in the Bible are referred to as “non-canonical.” It is most interesting to read these non-canonical books, and you can find them online at sites like EarlyChristianWritings.com, which is quite comprehensive.
Now, some people seem to believe that the authors of the New Testament simply transcribed what was dictated to them by the Holy Spirit, kind of like the “automatic writing” practiced by some spiritualists and others claiming psychic abilities. A close reading of the Gospels makes it clear they were not created that way. The opening of the Gospel According to Luke explains it thusly:
Since many have undertaken to compile an account of the things accomplished among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, it seemed fitting to me as well, having investigated everything carefully from the beginning, to write it out for you in an orderly sequence, most excellent Theophilus; so that you may know the exact truth about the things you have been taught.
Luke 1:1-4
The author (who never identifies himself, but later was assumed to be “Luke”) tells us up front that he is drawing upon other writings (or oral stories) to compose his account, so that one would know the “exact truth.” It seems “Luke” felt the other sources needed correction or refinement. In fact, Luke appears to use the Gospel of Mark as he quotes it directly in places, yet in other cases where he appears to use Mark’s material he makes changes, apparently to make it more “exact.” If he thought Mark was divinely inspired I suspect he would have used it entirely and simply supplemented it rather than changing it where he thought necessary. The Gospel of Matthew does the same thing: he sometimes quotes Mark exactly but frequently makes his own adjustments. An interesting example also shows what is called “editorial fatigue.” In Mark 6 it describes Herod executing John the Baptist, and Mark calls him “King” Herod. But in Matthew 14 this is “corrected” to “tetrarch,” which is a more accurate term for Herod’s position. However, the author slips in verse 9 and also refers to Herod as “the king” rather than “the tetrarch;” this is “editorial fatigue,” his editing was not complete and he lapsed into saying “king.” Also, Matthew and Luke have material in common which is not found in Mark, and yet they disagree in the way they present it. Look at each’s version of the Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer. Either the Holy Spirit was being sloppy in His dictation or more likely it is as Luke directly tells us: they are using sources to compile their accounts, which is a human not divine effort.
And we can identify some of their sources. As you read the New Testament you will of course find many references to the Old Testament, i.e., the Hebrew Bible, the Scriptures that Jesus and his disciples knew. The early Christians thought of Jesus as being the sequel to and fulfillment of those Scriptures. If Hollywood had developed the New Testament perhaps they would have called it, “God the Father II: This Time It’s Personal!”
However, the New Testament also has allusions to writings outside of the Old Testament. I suspect many people miss such references because they assume they are referring to some OT story, or they are subtle enough that one doesn’t catch that an allusion is being made. I will start with a small epistle that contains several, the Letter of Jude.
The Letter of Jude is one of the shortest books in the Bible, and its authorship is questionable (it implies that the author is a brother of Jesus), but it packs a lot into its few paragraphs. In verses 6 and 7 it says:
And angels who did not keep their own domain, but abandoned their proper abode, He has kept in eternal bonds under darkness for the judgment of the great day, just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, since they in the same way as these indulged in gross immorality and went after strange [different] flesh, are exhibited as an example in undergoing the punishment of eternal fire.
What is this about angels indulging in gross immorality and going after “strange flesh?” There is no such story in the Old Testament, is there? Actually, there is. In Genesis 6 it is written that the “the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose,” and they spawned a race of giants called the Nephilim. This led to the violent world that God sought to destroy with the flood. But does “sons of God” really mean angels? Genesis 6 does not elaborate, but a book known as 1st Enoch does.
1st Enoch (aka The Book of Enoch) was written as if by the ancient patriarch mentioned in Genesis 5, but scholars typically place it in the range 300 to 100 BCE. We know from fragments including the Dead Sea Scrolls that the book was known to 1st Century Jews and therefore early Christians. Its first part, The Book of Watchers, goes into detail about the angels who descended to earth, mated with human women, spawned the Nephilim and taught them various arts, including weaponry and magic. But is Jude really referencing this book? He makes it clear a few verses later that he knows the book:
It was also about these men that Enoch, in the seventh generation from Adam, prophesied, saying, “Behold, the Lord came with many thousands of His holy ones, to execute judgment upon all, and to convict all the ungodly of all their ungodly deeds which they have done in an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.”
Jude 14, 15
This quotation appears in Enoch 1:9. Jude specifically attributes it to the Enoch in the book of Genesis, suggesting that he had some confidence in 1st Enoch as an authentic text. And thus he appears to accept what that book says about angels mating with human women.
There are also a number of phrases used in the Gospels and Paul’s letters that have parallels in 1st Enoch. You can look up this article online if you want to read further: Henry Hayman, Jul 1898, “The Book of Enoch in Reference to the New Testament and Early Christian Antiquity”, The Biblical World, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 37-46.
Did Paul know 1st Enoch? Hayman suggests there are twenty phrases in Paul that have parallels in Enoch, although some he mentions are in letters now thought to be written by later disciples in Paul’s name (pseudepigrapha). But Paul was a devout Jew and seemingly well-read, so it is possible if not probable, and he may have dropped us a clue in 1st Corinthians 11. In this passage Paul is talking about women wearing a head covering while praying and adds the enigmatic statement, “Therefore the woman ought to have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels.” I wonder if he means that her prayers would draw the attention of angels who might be tempted to lust at the sight of an uncovered (immodest) head, like the lustful angels described in 1st Enoch. Hard to say for sure since Paul does not explain further.
There is more from Jude:
But Michael the archangel, when he disputed with the devil and argued about the body of Moses, did not dare pronounce against him a railing judgment, but said, “The Lord rebuke you!”
Jude 9
That scene is not described in the Old Testament. Where did it come from? Origen, the 3rd Century theologian and prolific author said it is a story from The Assumption of Moses (aka The Testament of Moses). We have a fragmentary copy of the book (you can find it online), but it does not contain this scene, leading some to suspect it was in the missing ending of the book (Moses is still alive at the end of the fragment). Perhaps Jude was simply using the story to illustrate his point and is not trying to elevate it to the level of Scripture, but interesting that he knows the story and expects his Christian audience to recognize it. At the least he was familiar with these books popular among 1st Century Jews and was willing to use them in his letter. And he was not constrained by the canon of Scripture because the canon we know today had not yet coalesced.
Although not really “outside” the Old Testament it is worth mentioning the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, widely used by Greek-speaking Jews and then Christians. Whenever I run across a quote from the Old Testament in the New Testament, I like to turn back to read the original passage. Often the wording is a bit different. For example, in Luke 4 Jesus is reportedly in the synagogue reading from the scroll of Isaiah[1], what we would now call chapter 61, and he reads, “And recovery of sight to the blind.” That phrase is not in my version of Isaiah, but it is in the Septuagint version. Minor difference, but there are many such examples which show that the New Testament authors used it as their primary source rather than the Hebrew texts. Not so minor is when the Gospel of Matthew quotes the Septuagint version of Isaiah 7 and applies it to Mary to show that she was a virgin (Gr: parthenos), not merely a young maiden as in the Hebrew text (Heb: alma), and therefore the fulfillment of a prophecy. People still argue about that one word, because they ignore the context of Isaiah 7; see post 23: The Problem with Prophets, Part 3 for more on that.
In the book of 2nd Timothy we have:
Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so these men also oppose the truth, men of depraved mind, rejected in regard to the faith.
2nd Timothy 3:8
These names are not mentioned in Exodus, but apparently a tradition developed assigning these names to the magicians in Pharaoh’s court who challenged Moses. Again we have Origen suggesting that the source for this verse is a book called The Book of Jannes and Jambres, aka The Apocryphon of Jannes and Jambres the Magicians, for which a few fragments remain. So this may be another book that was read by and influenced the early Christians, even though it did not come to be considered “scripture.”
A minor reference is in Hebrews 11:37, which mentions martyrs who were “sawn in two.” This may have been drawn from the Ascension of Isaiah, dated to the late 1st Century, and also mentioned in the Talmud, in which the prophet Isaiah is sawn in two by the evil king Manasseh. Some scholars also see a connection between the epistle 2nd Peter and the non-canonical Apocalypse of Peter, but not as clear-cut as some of these others.
The last one I will mention is most interesting to me, and is so subtle that most readers do not catch it. In Matthew 12 Jesus is confronted by religious leaders who accuse him of exorcising demons by the power of “Beelzebul the ruler of the demons” (v. 24). Jesus then gives several related responses (Matthew often appears to group some of Jesus’ teachings together in one section, as in the Sermon on the Mount). Toward the end he says:
“The Queen of the South will rise up with this generation at the judgment and will condemn it, because she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and behold, something greater than Solomon is here.”
Matthew 12:42
Perhaps Jesus is simply invoking this story with the Queen of Sheba to rebuke the Pharisees for being shown up by a Gentile who sought wisdom, but there may be more to it in the context of demon exorcism. There is a book called the Testament of Solomon claiming to be written by Solomon himself; scholars date the book to no earlier than the 1st Century CE, although it may contain material from much earlier traditions, as well as much later additions. In this book Solomon is said to subdue demons including Beelzebul himself with the help of a ring given to him by the archangel Michael, and he then forces them to build his temple.[2] Thus, when Jesus says, “something greater than Solomon is here,” he may have been referring specifically to the belief that Solomon had power over demons and Jesus is claiming to have an even greater power that allows him to exorcise demons, no ring necessary!
What do these non-canonical references mean? What do they tell us about what the early Christians believed or what books did they consider authoritative? It is hard to say. The fact that an allusion is made to a particular book is not necessarily an endorsement of all that the book says. Any reasonably well-read person knows that books tend to use allusions to stories that are not factual. If I said, “Getting Congress to pass election reform is a Herculean task,” you would not assume that I believed the Hercules myth is true; it just helps illustrate the point. On the other hand, Jude seems to believe that 1st Enoch was in fact written by that patriarch, or at least contains prophecy from him, giving it some weight and credence to his readers.
It should not be surprising that the earliest Christian writers drew upon books and traditions outside of the Bible: there was no Bible yet! Many Christians today have beliefs that are actually from traditional sources rather than the Bible. For example, many believe that Joseph was an old man and that Mary remained a virgin; that’s from tradition, not the Bible. The belief that Peter was crucified upside down in Rome: tradition, not the Bible. I suspect many people have a view of the end times that is based more on the Left Behind book series than what the Bible actually says. Do such beliefs matter? Probably not – unless you make them a criteria for being part of the community of believers. Or worse yet, use them to influence public and political policies (e.g., using the passage in Jude to justify discrimination against the LGBTQ community even though it’s talking about angels with humans).
Personally, I think these allusions show that the early Christian writers had a more flexible view of “scripture” than those Christians today who speak as if the Bible were written in stone by the finger of God. The Bible as we know it today did not even exist in their day. Thus, they could use their own judgment as to what sources to draw upon in teaching what they believed to be true. That is, until the church hierarchy developed and leaders began to dictate which writings were orthodox and which were heretical. However you take these non-canonical references, I think such an examination gives us some interesting insight into what early Christians were reading and listening to, and what may have influenced the development of Christian beliefs and traditions.
Thinking exercises:
1. Have you ever held a belief that you later found out was not actually in the Scriptures of your religion? Did that change your belief?
2. Wikipedia has an article talking about more of these non-canonical references in the Bible: see “Non-canonical books referenced in the Bible.”
3. Reading books outside the New Testament gives a fuller understanding of the beliefs of the early church. If you haven’t read 1st Enoch/The Book of Enoch, you can buy it in print or find it online for free. I think you will recognize hints of it in the New Testament.
4. Various websites offer such reading for free, such as pseudepigrapha.com (also includes Mormon writings), earlychristianwritings.com (very thorough), gospels.net (mostly alternative gospels), or do a search for “Christian apocrypha.”
[1] Excavation of Nazareth suggests it was a small and obscure town and therefore unlikely to have a synagogue or a scroll of Isaiah.
[2] The Testament also has Beelzebul claiming to have once been the highest ranking angel in heaven, which found its way into Christian tradition.