15. ST. CLEMENT’S CITATIONS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT (2)

We observed last time that St. Clement likes to refer to speakers when he cites the Bible.

Paul J. Achtemeier explains an important aspect of this fact when he says in a slightly different context that “the New Testament must be understood as speech,”¹ not as printed matter. As anyone who has ever examined facsimiles of ancient Greek or Latin knows, nothing in the texts provides the enormous number of clues which modern typography does; all organizational cues are aural.² 

Therefore, we must grasp that the Old Testament did not mean to St. Clement what the it means to us.  For us, Scripture is above all a book.   For St. Clement, the Old Testament, though a book in Greek already available for centuries, was primarily God’s vital message.  It was heard by most people and read by a very small number; its value ultimately came from God or the men whom he appointed to speak for him.      

Returning to the New Testament, we notice that it took centuries before the New Testament would be established as the canonical collection which we have today.  Why did it take so long for that to happen?  Why did the Fathers of the church disagree about the canon of the New Testament so peacefully for so long?  Part of the reason has to be (as Ernst Robert Curtis puts it) that while “Christianity became the religion of a book, . . . it did not begin as such.”³  

This explains why St. Clement could be so excited about the Septuagint and at the same time did not bother himself about the exact wording of any Septuagint text.  This is also why the innumerable and tiny inconsistencies of the gospels were so unimportant to the early Christians that no one bothered to harmonize them.⁴  Who cares about details when the substance is all that matters?  Why focus on the feather, the stylus, the papyrus, the pixel, the screen, when the only thing that matters is the message?   

As Achtemeier said, the Scriptures were primarily an aural experience.  What he does not emphasize is that this aural experience occurred in a liturgical setting.  The aural experience connects the audience not to the documents but to the authors or the speakers.  From the point of view of the early Christians, the later interest in gathering and comparing manuscripts in order to establish the best readings would likely be seen as signs of cultural rot or dementia, as an inexplicable victory of petty details over dynamic message. 

The indifference of the early church to the Bible as a book is therefore due to the mind of the believers:  their faith was a response to a message of incredibly good news.  While the core New Testament documents were generally agreed upon from a pretty early era, there was no felt need for codification.  Who needs to codify living ideals?  Living ideals drive men to do crazy things to serve them; only dead ideals need to be codified and defended. 

St. Clement needed no authorized canon; indeed, Chrysostom says that if we lived in a truly Christian manner, we would need no Bible.⁵  Only in our bookish age can anyone conceive of reducing the faith to a codified text; only in our times can we be advised that just as Christ was God’s Word in the flesh, so the Bible is God’s Word in print.⁶ 

In conclusion, St. Clement’s habit of referring to speakers provides us with evidence that what really matters is the message, not the medium.  This habit seems to support Vellas’ view that it is the person who is inspired, not the document.

ENDNOTES FOR THE CURIOUS

1.  Paul J. Achtemeir, “Omne Verbum Sonat:  The New Testament and the Oral Environment of Late Western Antiquity,” Journal of Biblical Literature 109 (1990), p. 19.

2.  Idem, p. 17.

3.  European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. Willard R. Trask (Bollingen/Princeton, 1953), p. 257f.  It was a happy day when I found this brilliant book in the small library of the University of Maryland at Munich.  To further recommend Curtis to the reader, I note his observation that “Church law . . . fixes canonical ages for ecclesiastical offices.  Only in the case of a priest’s female cook is there no definite stipulation.”  Make of that what you will.

4.  Except of course for the heretic Tatian.  Tatian was shunned, but after Christianity became a religion of a book, his Gospel harmony was translated into a huge number of languages from England to Central Asia.

5.  Homily 1 on Matthew.

6.  As an Evangelical Christian charmingly put it to me.  To understand such a bizarre claim, see Alvin Kernan’s account of the 18^th century transition from an oral/scribal culture to a print culture in Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print (Princeton, 1987).  The press might have been introduced to the West from China in the 15^th century, but according to Kernan it was not until the 18^th century that English culture made the transition to a print-based culture.  So Achtemeier’s article on the oral environment of the New Testament is concerned only with one period in the larger oral/scribal culture which persisted until a few centuries ago.