The Jesus Memoirs

On a Facebook page dedicated to the Synoptic Problem, I promoted my recent article on the Gospel of the Ebionites and I was reminded about another frequent commenter David Inglis’s post on the same subject. I wanted to interact further with his post, but I do not want to go into too much detail in a blog post. Instead, for those who do not have institutional access to the journal Catholic Biblical Quarterly, I have put up a much earlier pre-publication draft of my article before it was formatted and given page numbers for the journal on my academia.edu page. You will find more detailed source-critical analysis of the passages about John the Baptizer and Jesus’s baptism in my article.

Inglis’s post begins by looking at select Patristic statements about the original Hebrew version of Matthew’s logia (“oracles”) or Gospel and about the text(s) entitled as the Gospel According to the Hebrews as well as a sample of quotations from a handful of scholarly commentators. Some of the academic sources cited are dated (e.g., Inglis notes Montague Rhodes James’ misattribution of the Oxyrhynchus sayings to the Gospel According to the Hebrews which was disproved later after the discovery of the Gospel According to Thomas in the Nag Hammadi Library). The quotes from Epiphanius and Jerome clearly show that these fourth-century writers assumed that there was a single Gospel According to the Hebrews that was the original version of Matthew’s Gospel. Epiphanius drew a distinction between the Nazoraeans’ version of Matthew’s Gospel that they read in Hebrew from the Ebionites’ corrupted text of Matthews’ Gospel, while Jerome translated some extracts from the Gospel that that Nazoraeans read and thought that this was the same Gospel According to the Hebrews that was in the library at Caesarea.

The majority position among modern scholars that the Patristic writers were referencing three Gospels: the Gospel According to the Hebrews, the Gospel of the Ebionites, and the Gospel of the Nazoraeans (note that there is some debate about whether certain fragments have been rightly assigned to one of these three Gospels among contemporary “Three Gospel” theorists). The minority position that I hold, in both my publications and on my blog (e.g., here), is that there were only two non-canonical Jewish Gospels, one of which was quoted by Clement, Origen, Didymus, and Jerome, and the other that was quoted by Epiphanius, and that originally these Gospels had nothing to do with the mistaken tradition that there was an original Hebrew or Aramaic edition of the canonical Gospel of Matthew. Jerome may have also had excerpts from the Nazoraeans’ translation of Matthew’s Gospel. I still think that there are good reasons to distinguish the Gospel According to the Hebrews from the Gospel of the Ebionites (see my bibliography on the latter text):

• No other Patristic writers ascribe Epiphanius’s citations to the Gospel According to the Hebrews;
• The two texts have very different narratives about Jesus’s baptism;
• The Gospel of the Ebionites revises the Greek wording or conflates Greek passages from the Synoptic Gospels to a much greater extent than the Gospel According to the Hebrews.
• The Gospel According to the Hebrews was first quoted by Christian scholars in Alexandria, while the Gospel of the Ebionites has some affinities with Pseudo-Clementine sources that circulated in the Transjordan.
• In addition to misidentifying the Gospel that he had found in Cyprus with the Gospel of the Ebionites, Epiphanius wrongly infers that there was a single group of Ebionites who were also responsible for the Pseudo-Clementine literature and the Book of Elchasai in the thirtieth chapter of his Panarion.

Inglis compares Epiphanius’s citations from the Gospel of the Ebionites in his work Panarion (“Medicine Chest”) to the Synoptic Gospels. Here is a summary of some of Inglis’s suggestions:

• Pan. 30.13.6: he suggests that Luke depended on Mark and Matthew for the reference to Isaiah and the Gospel of the Ebionites for the reference to John the Baptizer’s parents.
• 30.13.4, 7-8: he notes the parallels with Mark 1:9-11, Matthew 3:13-17, and Luke 3:21-22, as well as the distinctive point about John’s diet, and suggests that its reading egkris (“cake”) was potentially original and misread as akrides (“locusts”, though note Mark has the accusative plural akridas and Matthew the nominative plural akrides). Since the Gospel of the Ebionites places the conversation between Jesus and John after they heard the voice from heaven, which makes more sense than Matthew 3:14-15 as it explains how John knew Jesus, Matthew could have mistakenly rearranged the order. He rejects the view that the Gospel of the Ebionites conflated the forms of the heavenly voice’s saying in Mark 1:11 and Luke 3:22 on the one hand and Matthew 3:14 on the other, arguing instead that it actually quotes a very early form of the saying which expands on the citation from Psalm 2:7 that is also attested in the Western reading of Luke 3:22. He follows some text critics in arguing that this variant was the original reading as it expresses a low Christology.
• 30.13.2-3: he infers that the Gospel of the Ebionite’s account of the calling of the twelve apostles in Peter’s house could have serves as the basis for the other Synoptic accounts since it is unlikely that it would have omitted the literary contexts in which these accounts placed their call narratives.
• 30.14.5: after comparing the passages about Jesus’s true family in the Synoptic Gospels, the Gospel of the Ebionites, the Gospel of Marcion, and the Gospel According to Thomas, he proposes that the Synoptics expanded it with a verse setting the scene (i.e. Mark 3:31; Matthew 12:46; Luke 8:19).
• 30.16.5: he tentatively suggests that Mathew 9:13 could have depended on Jesus’s pronouncement that he came to abolish sacrifices in the Gospel of the Ebionites.
• 30.22.3-5: he makes the case that Luke 22:15-16 was added to the Gospel due to the lack of Synoptic parallels and the lack of attestation for verse 16 in Marcion’s Gospel according to Tertullian and Epiphanius. Further, noting that Luke 22:15 features a Semitism, he argues that the writer of 22:15-16 either drew on a common source shared with the Gospel of the Ebionites or on that Gospel itself. He adds that the Gospel of the Ebionites lack Jesus’s instructions to his disciples in all three Synoptics (though with less detail in Matthew) about finding a man who will lead them into the house where they would prepare the Passover.

Inglis has made some striking observations in his post and I realize that I have not factored in the recent debate about the relationship between Marcion’s Gospel and canonical Luke into my source critical analysis, so I would like to give the latter point more attention than I have time at the moment. However, my main objection would be his supposition that the Gospel of the Ebionites was intended to be a harmony of the Synoptic Gospels. Thus, he questions why it does not always replicate the Synoptics’ wording or omits the quotation from Isaiah at the beginning of the Gospel or particular details in the baptism narratives or the settings of the call of the twelve apostles. If the Gospel of the Ebionites was rather intended to replace the Synoptic Gospels, its author could have just borrowed and combined whatever details from the earlier Synoptic sources that served this author’s interests, and offered an improved narrative in other ways. Of course, we only have the small handful of extracts that Epiphanius has supplied to determine the literary relationship between the Gospel of the Ebionites and the Synoptic Gospels, but the points below offer either specific responses to his arguments or evidence for the dependence of the Gospel of the Ebionites on one or more of the Synoptic Gospels:

• 30.13.6: The line “it happened in the days of Herod king of Judea” agrees verbatim with Luke 1:5, but it is used in the Gospel of the Ebionites to introduce John’s baptizing ministry and dated at the same time as Caiaphas’s priesthood, even though Herod Antipas was the tetrarch of Galilee when Caiaphas was the high priest and John was baptizing people. The best explanation is that the author skipped from Luke 1:5 to 3:2-3 in order to deliberately excise the infancy narrative, but accidently kept the wrong title for the Herod in question.
• 30.13.4: The words egkris and akrides are not that close to be an accidental error, but this could be a deliberate wordplay. The question is why Mark would replace egkris, which alludes to the manna that the Israelites ate in the wilderness (see Exodus 16:31; Numbers 11:8 LXX), with akridas. Then, Matthew would have chosen to follow Mark’s Gospel rather than the Gospel of the Ebionites and also ignored the allusion to the manna in the latter text. The reverse is much easier to explain if the author of the Gospel of the Ebionites wanted to promote vegetarianism, was disgusted by the fact that John ate locusts, or wanted to add an allusion to the manna.
• 30.13.7-8: The Gospel of the Ebionites not only agrees with what the heavenly voice spoke in the three Synoptic Gospels, it reproduces Matthew’s redactional change to Mark in altering “you are” to “this is,” making the heavenly utterance a public proclamation. Further, it improves on Matthew’s narrative precisely in offering the missing explanation as to why John knew who Jesus was and wanted to be baptized by him (i.e. he saw the light and heard the voice). Finally, regardless of whether the textual variant in Luke 3:22 is original or not (note that Codex Bezae also expands the quotation of Psalm 2:7 in Acts 13:33), the author of the Gospel of the Ebionites could have been familiar with this reading from a manuscript copy of Luke’s Gospel and reused it because it supported the author’s lower Christology.
• 30.12.2-3: In the calling of the twelve apostles, the Gospel of the Ebionites identifies Matthew as a tax collector, which seems to be influenced by the redactional replacement of Levi in Mark 2:14 with Matthew in Matthew 9:9. It simply chose to locate Jesus in Peter’s house in Capernaum (cf. Mark 1:29) when he reminded his disciples of when he called them. There might be other echoes of Luke 3:23 in the note about Jesus’s age and Matthew 19:28 in Jesus’s words to the twelve, but that would only be persuasive if the other arguments for the dependence of the Gospel of the Ebionites on the Gospels of Matthew and Luke is judged persuasive.
• 30.14.5: This passage is closest to Matthew 12:47-50 and I would just be cautious about inferences about how a pericope may either be shortened or expanded over time since E. P. Sanders long ago showed evidence that both could occur. It may be difficult to prove the direction of dependence from this passage alone.
• 30.16.5: Matthew 9:9 is not a rejection of cultic sacrifice, though like Hosea it relatives its value in comparison to the command to show mercy, and the Gospel of the Ebionites and the Pseudo-Clementine texts go much further in completely rejecting the institution likely as a later rationalization for the loss of the temple cult. If anything, the saying is an inversion of the “I have come” saying in Matthew 5:17, which clearly affirms that Jesus did not come to abolish the Law.
• 30.22.3-5: Even allowing Inglis’s contention about the absence of Luke 22:16 in Marcion’s Gospel, I am not sure that he has demonstrated that Luke 22:15 was not original simply because it lacks Synoptic parallels and features a Semitism. Even if it was an addition, the Gospel of the Ebionites could be dependent on a copy of Luke that had it and purposely inserted the “not” to make it clear that Jesus would not eat “meat” at the Passover. The three Synoptic Gospels presuppose that Jesus had no qualms eating the Passover meal, which the Gospel of the Ebionites revises based on its vegetarian ethic and in line with how it revised John the Baptizer’s diet.
• One final note is that the post argues that there is no parallel with unique material in Mark, but 30.13.4 does agree with the order of Mark 1:4-6 in narrating John’s ministry, John’s popularity, and John’s clothing against Matthew’s order, while Luke omits the descriptions of John’s clothing.

Since I wrote a whole series on this blog where I tried to undercut the idea that Mark’s Gospel was a distinctly Pauline work, I want to call attention to a recent article by John Van Maaren, “Is the Gospel of Mark Distinctly Pauline? A Critical Evaluation” JBL 143.1 (2024): 125-142. Here is the abstract:

“The renewed interest in the relationship between the Gospel of Mark and the apostle Paul has led to more nuanced arguments for Paul’s influence on Mark based on refined methodologies. In this article, I critically evaluate the current state of the argument, concluding that it depends on too many variables and expects too much of our sparse evidence to make a convincing argument that Mark is distinctly Pauline. Therefore, the Gospel of Mark should be read independently of Paul so that its unique features might be first understood within its own narrative world, rather than interpreted through a Pauline lens.”

Wherever you stand on this issue, the article provides a helpful up-to-date survey of the scholarship on the question and I agree with the author’s criticisms of reading the Gospel of Mark through a Pauline lens.

It is often difficult for me to make the annual and international Society of Biblical Literature meetings and other academic conferences living in western Australia, so I look forward to when the conferences come here. First, I plan to attend the “Paul Within Paganism Symposium” hosted by Ridley College in Melbourne on July 22, 2024. The description for the conference and the call for papers can be found by clicking on the link. A few years ago they hosted a conference on “Paul within Judaism” and published the papers in Paul within Judaism: Perspectives on Paul and Jewish Identity (ed. Michael Bird, Ruben A. Bühner, Jörg Frey, and Brian Rosner; WUNT 507; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2023), which was made available as an open-access volume here if you click on eBook PDF. This symposium is scheduled right before the Society of New Testament Studies conference at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne on July 23-27, 2024. I am grateful that one of my colleagues who is a member of the society has applied to invite me along as a guest. If you happen to be going to one of these two conferences, I hope to see you there!

Update: the registration fees and conference program for the “Paul Within Paganism” Symposium is now available here. Note that there is another volume coming out with the title Paul within Paganism: Restoring the Mediterranean Context to the Apostle that is edited by Alexander Chantziantoniou, Paula Fredriksen, and Stephen L. Young and I look forward to reading it, but there will be a different volume coming out of this upcoming conference. Finally, the academic program for the following SNTS conference has also been posted.

The announcement for my article entitled “The Gospel of the Ebionites and the Synoptic Problem” has just been published for the Catholic Biblical Quarterly 86.2 (2024) has just been posted on their website. Here is my abstract:

“David B. Sloan and James R. Edwards have revived the antique hypothesis that there was a single Gospel according to the Hebrews underlying the diverse Patristic testimonies about it and that it was a significant source behind the Synoptic tradition. Specifically, Sloan and Edwards equate this reconstructed text with either Q or L, two hypothetical sources in B. H. Streeter’s classic solution to the Synoptic Problem, respectively. In this paper, I defend the common scholarly view that the text known to Epiphanius, which modern scholars entitle as the Gospel of the Ebionites to distinguish it from the Gospel according to the Hebrews, was a Greek text that, at points, harmonizes passages from the Synoptics. I will focus on this Gospel’s baptism narrative to demonstrate that it replicates Matthean and Lukan redactional elements, thus making it unlikely to be the source of the Synoptic double tradition or the Lukan Sondergut.”

I want to express my gratitude to Stephen Carlson and James Baker for accepting my proposal to present an earlier draft of this paper at a joint Synoptic Gospels and textual criticism session at the Society of Biblical Literature and to Barker for answering my questions on the Diatessaron. I also thank James Edwards and David Sloan for reading my initial draft, even though I reached the polar opposite conclusions than they did. Sloan’s extensive knowledge of the history of research on the Synoptic Problem is impressive and I look forward to his future books on Q, but our conclusions just differ on the place of the Gospel According to the Hebrews and the Gospel of the Ebionites in the Synoptic Problem (see also my earlier article “Did Papias of Hierapolis Use the ‘Gospel According to the Hebrews’ as a Source” JECS 25.1 [2017]: 29-53 and more recent discussion in Tax Collector to Gospel Writer: Patristic Traditions about the Evangelist Matthew [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2023]).

As I have noted in an older post, my revised PhD published under the title The Gospel on the Margins: The Reception of Mark in the Second Century (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015) was greatly indebted to Brenda Deen Schildgen’s Power and Prejudice: The Reception of the Gospel of Mark (Detroit: Wayne University State Press, 1998). Another relevant publication that I completely managed to miss, unfortunately, was Seán P. Kealy’s Mark’s Gospel: A History of Its Interpretation (New York; Ramsey: Paulist Press, 1982) and A History of the Interpretation of the Gospel of Mark: Volume 1 Through the Nineteenth Century and Volume 2: The Twentieth Century (Lewiston – Queenston – Lampeter, Edwin Mellen Press, 2007). Since he covers so much data in these books, his surveys of the Patristic period do not go into too much depth, but he does also note the decline of interest in Mark’s Gospel throughout the Medieval area and into the modern period before the discovery of Markan priority.

Another important recent survey can be found in Joseph Verheyden’s chapter “The Reception History of the Gospel of Mark in the Early Church,” in Reading the Gospel of Mark in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Geert Van Oyen (BETL 301; Leuven: Peeters, 2019), 395–430. He also has an excellent survey of the 16 potential references to Mark’s Gospel in Irenaeus’s Against Heresies in “Four Gospels Indeed, but Where is Mark? On Irenaeus’s Use of the Gospel of Mark” in Irénée de Lyon et les débuts de la Bible chrétienne. Actes de la Journée du 1.VII.2014 à Lyon (IPM 77; Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 169-204. I appreciate Verheyden’s engagement with my own work as well as the ways he goes beyond it in closely examining the Patristic texts that do comment on Mark’s Gospel. I think that Verheyden’s work just further confirms the point that Mark’s Gospel, even though it was defended as an apostolic work and included in the New Testament canon, was mostly neglected in favour of the other canonical Gospels. Even for those who commented on specific passages in Mark’s text, their readings were often informed by the Synoptic parallels.

As we continue to explore Patristic literature on this blog, I want to note the helpful annotated bibliographies that have been compiled by Kyle R. Hughes on the Patristic writers Justin Martyr, Irenaeus of Lyons, and Tertullian. If you are researching these figures as I have been in my work on the Patristic reception of the Gospels, these bibliographies will introduce you to the critical editions of their writings and some key English scholarly monographs on them. Finally, Don W. Springer has provided an extensive bibliography of Irenaeus on his academia.edu page.

Over the last few posts, I have looked at the more “controversial” use of the Gospel of John in support of Montanism, Quartodecimanism, and Valentinianism. At least, it was controversial for certain Christian heresiologists who rejected these constructed viewpoints as heretical. I do not mean to reinstate what Charles E. Hill has dubbed the “orthodox Johannophobia paradigm” in his monograph The Johannine Corpus in the Early Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). According to this older paradigm, “orthodox” Christians were hesitant to embrace the Gospel of John due to its perceived “heretical” use until Irenaeus rehabilitated it as a useful text in refuting his theological opponents, but there was still conservative theological opposition to the Gospel of John that was spearheaded by figures such as Gaius of Rome. Hill has sufficiently demonstrated that John’s Gospel was widely accepted as authoritative in Irenaeus’s day based on the writings of his contemporaries and later Christian artistic depictions of select scenes in the Gospel, plus that there is much earlier evidence of the positive use of it among “orthodox” Christians prior to Irenaeus. I am not completely persuaded by Hill’s efforts to swing the pendulum in the total opposite direction. I do not accept all of the references to the Gospel of John that he finds in Christian sources in the first half of the second century CE, his very early dating of the emergence of an authoritative four-Gospel collection (e.g. based partly on his case that Eusebius’s source for Ecclesiastical History 3.24.5-13 goes back to Papias), his reconstruction of the contemporaries of Irenaeus who rejected John’s Gospel as heterodox Christians, or his underestimation of the positive use of John’s Gospel among certain “Gnostic” writers. I suspect that the Gospel of John was probably initially more popular among Christians in certain locales (e.g., Asia Minor, Alexandria) than in others (e.g., Rome) and that there were conflicting interpretations of it, but the “fourfold Gospel canon” was widely though not universally held in high regard before Irenaeus attempted to defend it.

In this post, I will make no effort to distinguish between what the historical Valentinus taught in Alexandria or in Rome in the second century CE, what his disciples taught, and to what extent have the Patristic writers represented the Valentinians’ beliefs and practices accurately or not. There is also a question about how much some of the more esoteric teachings of the school of Valentinus were common knowledge among Christians in Rome outside of these circles. Valentinus must have commanded some respect among some of his peers as he had hoped, according to Tertullian (Against the Valentinians 4), to become a bishop in Rome and Irenaeus wrote a letter to a presbyter named Florinus reprimanding him for embracing Valentinian ideas (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 5.20.1, 4-8). If you are interested in researching Valentinianism further, there are publications that are accessible online from experts such as David Brakke (see also this video lecture), April DeConick, and Philip Tite and I have provided a bibliography below.

In this post, I will just focus on Irenaeus. In Against Heresies 3.11.7, he offers the following generalization about how the Ebionites preferred Matthew’s Gospel, those who divided the human Jesus from the divine Christ (i.e. Cerinthus or Carpocrates) preferred Mark’s Gospel, Marcion preferred Luke’s Gospel, and the Valentinians preferred John’s Gospel. Two of Valentinus’s pupils, Ptolemy and Heracleon, wrote commentaries on John’s Gospel. It may be difficult for the uninitiated to follow Ptolemy’s conception of the various emanations from the Father (i.e. 30 paired aeons in total that make up the spiritual pleroma or “fullness”), but it may have ultimately been an attempt to explain how all of reality in all of its complexity originated with a single transcendent divinity. In the preceding chapters Irenaeus recounted what he assumed was a widely-held “Valentinian” fall narrative, in which the youngest aeon Sophia (“Wisdom”) generated Sophia Achamoth (“Lower Wisdom”) who was separated from the pleroma and gave birth to the ignorant “demiurge” or “craftsman” who created the inferior material cosmos. Irenaeus documented how Ptolemy attempted to align his pleromatic myth to the wording of John’s prologue, because he believed that part of the work of refuting it was simply to expose it. He likened the “Valentinian” exegetical method to someone who took an artistic depiction of a king, and remade it into a poor portrait of a dog or a fox while still maintaining that it was a king, or someone who randomly took lines from the Homeric epics out of context and re-arranged them in such a way to present a totally new meaning to them (Against Heresies 1.8.1; 1.9.4).

Bibliography

• Bentley, Layton and Brakke, David. Editors. The Gnostic Scriptures Translated with Annotations and Introductions. Second Edition. Anchor. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021.
• Brakke, David. The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.
• Dunderberg, Ismo. Beyond Gnosticism: Myth, Lifestyle, and Society in the School of Valentinus. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
• Ehrman, Bart D. Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew. Oxford: OUP, 2003.
• King, Karen L. What is Gnosticism? Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.
• Lampe, Peter. From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003.
• Lewis, Nicola Denzey. Introduction to “Gnosticism”: Ancient Voices, Christian Worlds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
• Litwa, M. David. Found Christianities: Remaking the World of the Second Century CE. London: Bloomsbury, 2022.
• Marjanen, Antti and Luomanen, Petri. Editors. A Companion to Second Century Christian “Heretics”. SVC 76. Leiden: Brill, 2005.
• Markschies, Christoph. “New Research on Ptolemaeus Gnosticus.” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 4 (2000): 225–254.
• Pagels, Elaine. The Johannine Gospel in Gnostic Exegesis: Heracleon’s commentary on John. SBLMS 17; Nashville: Abingdon, 1973.
• Rasimus, Tuomas. “Ptolemaeus and the Valentinian Exegesis of John’s Prologue.” Pages 145-171 in The Legacy of John: The Second Century Reception of the Fourth Gospel. Edited by Tuomas Rasimus. SuppNT 132. Leiden: Brill,
• Skarsaune, Oskar and Hvalvik, Reider. Editors. Jewish Believers in Jesus: The Early Centuries. Peabody: Hendrickson, 2007.
• Smith, Geoffrey S. Valentinian Christianity: Texts and Traditions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020.
• Thomassen, Einar. The Spiritual Seed: The Church of the “Valentinians”. Leiden: Brill, 2006.
• Williams, Michael Allen. Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
• See also the bibliography on the Valentinians compiled by Rob Bradshaw and the bibliography on Heracleon’s commentary on John’s Gospel compiled by Peter Head.

In the fourth century, the Christian historian Eusebius reports how the Christian world was almost torn apart over whether the date for celebrating Jesus’s death and resurrection should be connected to the Jewish celebration of Passover (see Ecclesiastical History 7.23—25). The translations below are taken from Jeremy Schott’s The History of the Church: A New Translation: Eusebius of Caesarea (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019). Eusebius introduces the conflict as follows:

“The communities of all Asia considered it necessary, as though it was ancient tradition, to observe the feast of the Savior’s Pascha on the fourteenth of the month in which the public notice was given by the Jews to sacrifice the [paschal] lamb, so that the fasts must end on that day, whatever day of the week that it happened to be. But it was not the custom to celebrate it this way for the churches throughout all the rest of the inhabited world, which observed the custom that still holds sway in the present, that no other day is proper for ending the fasts besides the day of the Saviour’s resurrection.” (7.23.1; p. 264)

Allegedly, the Roman bishop Victor (189-199 CE) organized a number of synods in different locales to support the Roman dating of Good Friday (i.e. the date of Jesus’s death) and Easter Sunday (i.e. the date of Jesus’s resurrection). This contrasted with the practice of the Christians in Asia Minor to always honour the memory of Jesus’s death on the fourteenth of Nisan, the day in which the Passover lambs were sacrificed, and this is why they were referred to as Quartodecimans or “fourteeners.” The Ephesian bishop Polycrates was not swayed by Victor’s efforts. He wrote to him claiming that the Quartodeciman practice went all the way back to John, the one who “reclined on the Lord’s chest” and who “became a priest wearing the petalon” before he was laid to “rest in Ephesus” (7.24.3-4; p. 265). In response, “Victor immediately tried to cut off the communities of all of Asia together with the neighboring churches from the common unity, for acting in a heterodox way, and made a public proclamation through letters announcing that all the brothers [and sisters] there were utterly without fellowship” (7.24.9; p. 266). Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons, intervened and reminded Victor that his predecessor, the Roman bishop Eleutherus, agreed to disagree amicably with Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna, on the Quartodeciman practice (7.24.16-17).

A helpful article for understanding how the Quartodeciman practice was rooted in the dating of Jesus’s death on the Day of Preparation when the Passover lambs were sacrificed in preparation for the Passover meal in John 19:14 and 31 is Brian Schmisek’s “The Quartodeciman Question: Johannine Roots of a Christian Controversy” Biblical Theology Bulletin 52.4 (2022): 253-261. Schmisek notes that, according to John, Jesus’s death was paradoxically the moment of his exaltation when he was “lifted up” (see John 3:14; 8:28; 12:32, 34). The article is behind a paywall for those who do not have institutional access through an academic institution, but a short bibliography for further research on Quartodecimanism can be seen by clicking on the link.

I have been reading more about the charismatic movement that is commonly referred to as Montanism since I concluded my series on the Alogi. The “New Prophecy” was launched by a trio of prophets and prophetesses named Montanus, Prisca, and Maximilla in a village in Phrygia, a region in west-central Asia Minor. There are various named figures associated with the movement in Asia Minor and Rome. It even found a champion in the “orthodox” defender of the faith in North Africa named Tertullian. Other Christians were either drawn to, or repulsed by, the mode of delivering prophecies in a trance-like state in which the “Spirit” spoke through the prophetic spokesperson, the content of the prophecies such as the belief that the new heavenly Jerusalem would appear in Phrygia, or the asceticism and morality of the adherents of the “New Prophecy.” Important monographs on the Montanists include Ronald E. Heine’s The Montanist Oracles and Testimony (NAPSPMS 14; Macon: Mercer University Press, 1989), Christine Trevette’s Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophesy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and William Tabbernee’s Fake Prophecy and Polluted Oracles: Ecclesial and Imperial Reactions to Montanism (Leiden: Brill, 2007). There are a number of articles on Montanism available at Tabbernee’s academia.edu site. Philip Harland has posted Heine’s collection of the “oracles” assigned to the Montanists, while Tabbernee offers “a totally new classification and numbering of Montanist logia” (pp. 318-19) at the end of a chapter for a festschrift.

One thing that you will notice about the oracles is that the prediction about the new Jerusalem seems to draw on the book of Revelation (e.g., Rev 21:2), while the claim that the prophecies are inspired by the “Paraclete” (“called + alongside”) allude to the description of the “Spirit of Truth” in the Gospel of John (e.g., John 14:16, 26; 15:26; 16:7). This may be the reason why certain unnamed “others,” according to Irenaeus of Lyon, rejected the Gospel of John or why Gaius of Rome denied the apostolic authorship of Revelation in his written dialogue with the Roman Montanist leader Proclus. There is a debate between Heine (see “The Role of the Gospel of John in the Montanist Controversy” The Second Century 6 [1987]: 1-19) and Trevett over whether the original prophets and prophetesses were already appealing to the Paraclete in the Gospel of John or whether this was a later development among the adherents of the “New Prophecy” in Rome that subsequently influenced Tertullian. If the latter is the case, then the critics of the Gospel of John known to Irenaeus could have been located in Rome. On the contrary, Trevett detects Montanist influences in the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons to the Churches of Asia Minor and Phrygia that documents the sufferings of the martyrs in Vienne and Lyons in Gaul around 177 CE, including in its allusions to the Paraclete passages in the Gospel of John. Opponents of the Montanists may have had serious concerns with how they were interpreting the Gospel of John and claiming that the Paraclete was inspiring a new prophetic revival.