Nothing Kept Back

So this is where we lodge our plea. The Lord Jesus Christ sent the apostles out to preach; therefore nobody is to be accepted as a preacher except the men Christ appointed. For “no one knows the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” And the Son does not appear to have revealed him to anyone but the apostles, whom he sent out to preach — to preach, of course, what he had revealed to them. [a]

Now what it was that they preached — that is, what Christ revealed to them — can be proved, and here again I must enter the same plea, in one way only: from the very churches the apostles founded in person, announcing the good news to them face to face, first by their own living voice, as the phrase goes, and afterwards by their letters.

If that is so, then it is equally clear that every teaching which agrees with those apostolic churches — the wombs and origins of the faith — must be counted true, since it plainly holds what the churches received from the apostles, the apostles from Christ, and Christ from God. And every teaching that has any flavor of contradicting the truth held by the churches and by the apostles of Christ and of God must be ruled false before it is ever heard. What is left, then, is to show that this teaching of ours, whose rule I have just set out, comes down from the tradition of the apostles — and that by that very fact every other teaching comes from falsehood. We are in communion with the apostolic churches because our teaching is in no way different from theirs. That is our evidence for the truth.

But the proof is so ready to hand that if I produced it at once there would be nothing left to argue about. So let me give way to the other side for a while, in case they think they can find some way of quashing this plea — as though no proof were coming from us at all. [d]

Their usual line is that the apostles did not know everything. Then the same madness swings them round to the exact opposite: the apostles certainly knew everything, they say, but did not hand everything on to everyone. Either way the blame falls on Christ, for sending out apostles who had either too much ignorance or too little plain dealing.

What sane man could suppose that they were ignorant of anything — men the Lord appointed to be teachers, and kept inseparable from himself, traveling with him, learning from him, sharing his life; men to whom, “when they were alone, he used to explain” everything that was obscure, telling them that “to them it was given to know the mysteries” the crowd was not allowed to understand? Was anything kept back from Peter, who is called “the rock on which the church was to be built,” who was given “the keys of the kingdom of heaven” and the power of “loosing and binding in heaven and on earth”? Was anything hidden from John, the disciple the Lord loved best, who used to lean against his chest, to whom alone the Lord pointed out Judas as the traitor, and whom he handed over to Mary to be a son in his own place? What could he have wanted them not to know — the men to whom he showed his own glory, with Moses and Elijah standing there, and the Father’s voice out of heaven besides? Not that he was rejecting the rest by doing it, but because “every word must be established by three witnesses.”

And no doubt they were ignorant too, the men to whom, after the resurrection, he “explained all the Scriptures” as they walked along the road with him. Yes, he did once say, “I still have many things to tell you, but you cannot bear them now.” But he added in the same breath, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will lead you into all truth.” By that he shows there was nothing they were left ignorant of, since he promised them that all truth would reach them through the Spirit of truth. And he certainly kept the promise, since the Acts of the Apostles proves that the Holy Spirit did come down.

So those who throw that book out cannot belong to the Holy Spirit, since they have no way of admitting that the Spirit has yet been sent to the disciples; nor can they claim to be a church, when they can produce no proof of when their body was founded or in what cradle it was nursed. That is how much it matters to them to have no proofs for what they assert — because proofs would bring with them the exposure of what they invent.

Now, to brand the apostles with some mark of ignorance, they bring up the time Paul rebuked Peter and the men with him. “So there was something missing in them,” they say. They say it in order to build their other claim on it: that a fuller knowledge may have come to the apostles afterwards, the kind that came to Paul when he rebuked the men who were apostles before him. [j]

To those who reject the Acts of the Apostles I have this to say first: show us who this Paul was — what he was before he was an apostle, and how he became one — since they make such heavy use of him on other questions as well. He does tell us himself that he was a persecutor before he was an apostle; but that is not enough for anyone who examines a thing before he believes it, since even the Lord gave no evidence about himself. Still, let them believe without the Scriptures, seeing that what they want is to believe against the Scriptures.

All the same, out of this rebuke of Peter by Paul that they keep producing, they still have to show that Paul added some further form of the good news beyond the one Peter and the rest had already set out. In fact, once he had turned from persecutor to preacher, he was brought in as a brother to brothers, by brothers — and by men who had received the faith from the apostles’ own hands. Afterwards, as he tells it himself, he “went up to Jerusalem to see Peter,” because of Peter’s office, naturally, and by the right that a shared faith and a shared preaching gave him. They would hardly have been astonished that a persecutor had become a preacher, if what he preached were something contrary; nor would they have “glorified the Lord” over a Paul who had set himself up as the Lord’s opponent.

So they even gave him “the right hand of fellowship” as a sign that they agreed with him, and they arranged a division of work among themselves — a distribution of assignment, not a difference of message. Each was to preach the same good news, not a different one, to different people: Peter to the circumcised, Paul to the Gentiles. And since Peter was rebuked because, after living with the Gentiles, he began to keep away from their company out of deference to certain people, the fault was plainly in his conduct, not in his preaching. Nothing in the episode shows him announcing any God but the Creator, any Christ but the son of Mary, or any hope but the resurrection.

I am not so fortunate — or rather, I should say, I am not so badly off — as to set apostles fighting each other. But since these thoroughly perverse fault-finders keep pushing that rebuke forward on purpose, to throw suspicion on the earlier teaching, I will put in a defense for Peter, so to speak. Paul himself said that he “became all things to all men — to the Jews a Jew,” and to those who were not Jews as one who was not a Jew, “so that he might win them all.” So it was according to the occasion, the people concerned, and the reasons at hand that they criticized certain practices — practices they would not have hesitated to follow themselves, given the same occasion, the same people and the same reasons. It is as if Peter had criticized Paul for circumcising Timothy with his own hands while forbidding circumcision. [m]

Let them look to it, these men who pass sentence on apostles! It is a good thing that Peter stands level with Paul even in the glory of martyrdom. As for Paul being carried up to the third heaven, caught up into paradise, and hearing certain things revealed there — that cannot possibly be taken to have qualified him to teach a different doctrine, since the things themselves were of a kind that could not be passed on to any human being at all. But if that unspeakable something did leak out and become known to somebody, and if some heresy claims that it is following the same thing, then either Paul must be charged with betraying the secret, or else they must produce another man, caught up into paradise later, who had permission to say out loud what Paul was not allowed even to mutter.

But here, as I said, is the same madness again. They allow that the apostles were ignorant of nothing and preached nothing that contradicted one another, and at the same time they insist that the apostles did not disclose everything to everyone: that they announced some things openly and to the whole world, and let out others only in secret and to a few. Their reason is that Paul said even this much to Timothy: “Timothy, guard the deposit entrusted to you,” and again, “Keep the good thing committed to you.” [p]

What is this deposit? Is it so secret that it must be reckoned to belong to some other teaching? Or is it part of the charge he speaks of — “This charge I commit to you, Timothy my son” — and part of that command of which he says, “I charge you before God, who gives life to all things, and before Jesus Christ, who gave his good testimony under Pontius Pilate, that you keep this command”?

So what is the command, and what is the charge? Read what comes before and after, and it will be plain that there is no dark hint here about some far-off doctrine. What is given is a warning against receiving any teaching except the one Timothy had heard from Paul himself — and heard publicly, I take it, since Paul’s own phrase is “before many witnesses.” And if they refuse to let the church be meant by those “many witnesses,” it makes no difference: nothing produced “before many witnesses” can have been secret.

Nor can his wanting Timothy to “entrust these things to faithful men, who will be able to teach others as well” be turned into proof of a hidden gospel. When he says “these things,” he means the things he is writing at that moment. Had he meant hidden matters, he would have called them, as things not on the page, those things and not these things, writing as he was to a man who already shared the knowledge with him.

Besides, if that were how it worked, then to the man he handed the ministry of the good news he would have added an instruction not to deliver it just anywhere, and not to just anyone, in keeping with the Lord’s saying: “Do not throw your pearls before pigs, or give what is holy to dogs.” But the Lord spoke openly, with no hint of a hidden mystery. He had himself commanded that whatever they had heard in the dark and in private they should “speak in the light and from the rooftops.” He had himself shown by a parable that they were not to keep a single mina shut away, earning no interest — one word of his, that is. He used to tell them that a lamp is not shoved under a bushel basket but set on a stand, so that it “gives light to everyone in the house.” [s]

If the apostles did not carry all this out — if they hid any part of the light, that is, of the word of God and the mystery of Christ — then they either neglected it or failed to understand it. They were afraid of no one, I am quite sure: not of Jewish violence, not of Gentile. Men who did not hold their tongues in the synagogues and the public squares would certainly have spoken all the more freely in the church. In fact they could never have won Jews over or brought Gentiles in unless they “set out in order” what they wanted them to believe. Still less, once the churches had grown in the faith, would they have withheld anything from them in order to hand it over privately to a chosen few.

Even granting that they held certain discussions among close friends, so to speak, it is unbelievable that those discussions brought in some other rule of faith, different from and contrary to the one they were announcing publicly in every church — as though they spoke of one God in the church and another at home, described one substance of Christ in the open and another in secret, announced one hope of resurrection to everybody and another to the few. And in their own letters they begged people to say all the same thing, and to have no splits and no quarrels in the church, since they preached the same things, Paul and the rest alike. They also remembered the words, “Let your speech be yes, yes and no, no; anything beyond that comes from evil.” So they were not to handle the good news two different ways.

Since, then, it is unbelievable either that the apostles did not know the whole scope of the message they had to deliver, or that they failed to make the entire rule of faith known to everyone, let us look at the next possibility: that the apostles announced it plainly and fully, and the churches, by their own fault, set it out otherwise than the apostles had. You will find every one of these anxious doubts raised by the heretics. They remember how the apostle rebuked churches: “You foolish Galatians, who has put a spell on you?” and, “You were running so well; who got in your way?” and how that letter actually begins: “I am astonished that you are so quickly moving away from him who called you to himself in grace, to another good news.” [z]

They remember, too, what was written to the Corinthians: that they were “still fleshly,” that they had to be “fed with milk” because they could not yet “take solid food,” and that they “thought they knew something when they did not yet know anything as they ought to know it.” But when they bring up the fact that the churches were rebuked, let them grant that the churches were also put right. And let them remember the churches whose faith and knowledge and way of life made the apostle “rejoice and give thanks to God” — churches that to this day share, with the rebuked ones, the privileges of one and the same body.

Very well: grant that they all went wrong; that the apostle was mistaken when he gave his testimony; that the Holy Spirit had no such care for any single church as to lead it into truth, though Christ sent him for exactly that, and asked the Father for him so that he might be the teacher of truth; grant even that he, God’s steward and Christ’s deputy, neglected his office and allowed the churches for a time to understand differently and believe differently from what he himself was preaching through the apostles. Is it likely that so many churches, and such great ones, all went astray into one and the same faith? [ab]

No accident spread across many people comes out the same in all of them. If the churches had gone wrong in doctrine, the results would have had to vary. But when what has been deposited among many is found to be one and the same, that is not the work of error; it is the work of handing on. Would anyone, then, be reckless enough to say that the men who handed it on were the ones in error?

However the error got in, it reigned, naturally, only for as long as there were no heresies. Truth was waiting for a few Marcionites and Valentinians to come and set it free. And in the meantime the good news was preached wrongly, people believed wrongly, so many thousands were baptized wrongly, so many works of faith were done wrongly, so many acts of power and so many gifts of the Spirit were set going wrongly, so many priestly duties and so many ministries were carried out wrongly — and, to put the whole of it in a word, so many martyrs won their crowns wrongly! [ae]

Or else it was not done wrongly and not done for nothing — and then how does it come about that the things of God were already running their course before anyone knew which God they belonged to? that there were Christians before Christ had been found? that there were heresies before true doctrine? No. In every case the truth comes first and the copy after; the likeness follows the real thing. And it is absurd enough that heresy should be reckoned to have come before the doctrine it came out of — absurd for this reason too, that the doctrine itself is what foretold there would be heresies for men to guard against. It was to a church that already held this doctrine that the words were written — or rather, the doctrine itself is writing to its own church: “Even if an angel from heaven should preach any good news other than the one we preached, let him be cursed.”