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by tasty_freeze
591 days ago
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I appreciate your extensive and considered response. There were dozens of other books often attributed to other apostles, and even by the time of Paul, he was warning about false gospels in circulation. The point is that we know that authorship was attributed to various books to give them weight and credibility. It took around 200 more years before the current canonical list of books was settled on -- and then distributed around the world of Christianity without mixups (of course, Eastern Orthodox had their own ideas but the point stands). Considering how much less established and illiterate Christianity was in 180 vs 380 it seems even less surprising that the names of authorship could be chosen and settled. |
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My impression is that "gospel" (evangelion, G2098) is used exclusively to refer to something like "the good news of the Kingdom of God" rather than this or that manuscript or written account. The word is used extensively by Jesus in that sense: "the Kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe in the Gospel" (Mk 1:15) means "believe the good news that I am telling you", not the (rather meta-literary) "believe the literal document that you are now reading, in which I am a character".
This sense carries over straightforwardly to the Epistles. So "false gospels" seems better interpreted in context as "false teachings about Jesus" rather than "counterfeit manuscripts" in particular. In fact, AFAWCT there were no written Gospels when Paul was writing, so he couldn't have been referring to manuscripts.
We do know that there were non-canonical gospel manuscripts floating around at some point, which is not that surprising if we consider a gospel manuscript to be "something somebody wrote down about Jesus". But the non-canonical gospels are for the most part very late, and I'm not aware of any serious early debate about the list of canonical gospels, with one exception: Marcion rejected all of the canonical gospels, along with all of the OT, and substituted his own Gospel of Marcion (based on Luke and composed ~150 AD). There are debates about some of the minor Epistles, but there's no (surviving) argument about this or that community proposing to replace John with Thomas or anything like that.
There is a common misconception that if an Ecumenical Council pronounces a doctrine at a certain date, then the Church must have started believing it on that date. But more often the definitive ruling comes only when a long-held but unarticulated belief is challenged and the Church is forced to respond to the controversy. (Think of how the rules of sports evolve when a player exploits a loophole that obviously isn't in the spirit of the game.) So the fact that the canon was formally defined at a certain date doesn't seem to require that there was no practical fact of the matter as to which accounts were accepted before then: the early sources we have seem pretty unanimous on Gospel canonicity.
But I could be garbling all of this and don't want to overstate my case.