A New New Testament (Forward)

THE TRADITIONAL NEW TESTAMENT was already established by the end of the fourth century. The pressing question, then, is why suggest A New New Testament- even with A, not The - after a millennium and a half have passed?

It is not - emphatically not - that all or most of what is inside that traditional New Testament is bad or deficient while most or all of what is outside it is perfect and preferable. But why, then, entitle this book A New New Testament rather than, say, Other Early Christian Texts?

For myself, I see two reasons why this particular book and this precise title are necessary and needed. I put them to you as challenges, maybe even as principles, and in aphoristic format to facilitate memory and thought.

My first reason is a rather simple redundancy with regard to the traditional New Testament: to know what is outside it, you must know what is outside it. In other words, it is a matter of adult education because education affirms options while indoctrination denies them. Since that is probably obvious, I. offer only one example.

You open your standard New Testament and find four versions-four "according to" s - of the gospel. Stay inside that volume and you could easily conclude that all existing versions had been gathered and presented. Go outside to A New New Testament and you realize immediately that many other versions - and indeed types, modes, and styles - of gospel were available - and avoided.

What you do with that knowledge, and how you judge between texts in or out, is a separate issue. But you should know that all gospel versions were not taken, that a selection was made, that some were accepted and others rejected. And that knowledge is, to repeat, an education, and education is about knowing options.

My second reason for A New New Testament is that, with regard to the traditional New Testament, to know what is inside it, you must know what is outside it. I offer you two examples of that principle, two cases to illustrate that, even if you are exclusively focused on the traditional New Testament, you cannot do so. You must know what was rejected to understand what was accepted. And why, and when, and where. Both of my examples involve images to remind us that we do not live in a world made only of words - be they old words or new words.

A first example. High on the northern slopes of the Būlbūl Daği, off the mid-Aegean coast of Turkey, is a small flat clearing on the hillside with a stone frontal for a small doorway. This opens into a cave carved in antiquity to an eight-by-eight-by-fifty-foot passageway shrine called the Grotto of St. Paul by excavators from the Austrian Archaeological Institute in the 1990s. Beneath later plaster they found frescoes from around the year 500 CE.

On entrance, to your immediate left, is a scene almost completely obliterated but still residually recognizable. A standing man holds aloft a large knife above a much smaller kneeling figure whose tiny feet are about all that has been left by time the destroyer. It is, of course, the story of Abraham and Isaac from Genesis 22.

You turn next to the fresco on the wall at entrance right. It is much better preserved, with the upper half almost totally untouched by decay. But it is not a scene you recognize from either the Hebrew Bible or the Christian New Testament. Of its three figures, the central one is definitely "Paulos" - bald-headed, double goateed, named, but not haloed. He is seated and reading from -an open book on his lap (A New New Testament, maybe?). His right hand is raised in the teaching-and-blessing gesture of Byzantine iconography-fingers separated into two and three, for the two natures in Christ and the three persons in the Trinity.

To viewer right of Paul is a standing woman named "Theoklia”, coiffed as a matron by the veil around her hair. She is slightly taller than Paul, and her right hand is raised in a gesture identical to his. But her dignity, importance, and teaching authority are all negated by having her eyes blinded and her hand scraped and burned off the wall (not iconoclasm, by the way, as only her eyes were obliterated).

To viewer left of Paul is a second female figure ichnographically designated as a nubile virgin - her hair is unveiled and she listens to Paul's message, not with others out in the open but from a window in a red-brick house that encases her completely. Her name, "Thekla”, is still - but barely-discernible to the left and right of her head.

Those three figures present a scene that summarizes a story which you, as viewer, are supposed to recognize. But you do not do so because, whatever about Paul, neither Theoklia nor Thekla - and Thekla, by the way, is the focal point of the fresco - is anywhere in your traditional New Testament. The textual version of that dramatic scene is in the Acts of Thecla, which is still extant as the opening chapters of the second-century Acts of Paul-hence it is often called the Acts of Paul and Thekla.

In those Acts - as in all the other second- and third-century Acts of the Apostles from outside the traditional New Testament-the challenge is celibate asceticism and most especially for women in a patriarchal world. Thekla, for example, is about thirteen years of age and would have been speedily married soon after her first menses. She would have passed, with or without her ultimate consent, from the power of her father to that of a husband at least twice her age.

Image and text visualize the dramatic moment when Thekla, having heard Paul preach the challenge of ascetic celibacy, decides to reject Thamyris, the man chosen to be her husband by parental authority. But such a decision - by a teenage girl-designates not just domestic disturbance but social subversion. Thecla ends up condemned to death in the arena but is saved by divine protection with not only all the women-pagan and Christian alike-on her side but even with a lioness fighting on her behalf against bear and lion.

You will, of course, find that Thecla story in the unit entitled "The Acts of Paul and Thecla" in this book, A New New Testament. But why is that inclusion important? Because if you do not know Thecla, you will not know Paul. You will not understand the thirteen letters, attributed to him and making up half the texts inside the traditional New Testament.

Focus, for example, on the one text among those attributed letters that people seem to know even if they know nothing else about Paul. It is this sweeping indictment of what was clearly already in practice: "A woman must learn, listening in silence with all deference. I do not consent to them becoming teachers, or exercising authority over men; they ought not speak" (1 Timothy 2:11-12).

There is a massive scholarly consensus- based not externally on political correctness but internally on linguistic differences - that the three letters 1-2 Timothy and Titus, were written well over a half century after Paul's death. They were post-, pseudo-, and even anti-Pauline compositions created in his name but re-acting flatly to his radical views on equality for all those in the Christian community whether they entered as Jews or gentiles, females or males; slaves or freeborn (Galatians 3:26-29). But what caused that reaction to female teaching authority?

The obvious answer is patriarchal dominance- men did not want women to be equal to them, let alone have -any authority over them. That certainly explains those negative commands in 1Timothy 2 that leaders cannot be female. It also explains those positive commands that Christian leaders must be male. But why does 1 Timothy also insist that those male leaders - be they first-level or second-level ones - be "married" and have "children" (3:2, 4, 12)?

The deeper problem for 1 Timothy is not just female pedagogy but ascetic celibacy. That is why it warns, in thoroughly nasty language, about those who "forbid marriage and enjoin abstinence from certain kinds of foods" (4:3). What frightens 1Timothy’s anonymous author(s) so profoundly is the challenge to Roman normalcy represented by Christian celibacy-especially by female celibates thereby out of male control and, most especially, by female teenagers thereby out of parental control. Thecla is the specter that haunts 1Timothy.

In other words, to understand 1 Timothy you will have to look both inside and outside the New Testament: inside it, by looking at Paul's challenge of celibacy in 1 Corinthians 7; and outside it, by looking at Thecla's challenge of celibacy in A New New Testament. That is just a single case, but it touches on Paul and, in action by him or reaction to him, he makes up half the traditional New Testament.

All Christians should know how important that challenge of ascetic celibacy was in our earliest traditions - and especially how it proclaimed the right for women to choose their lives despite patriarchal ascendancy. (Today and here we might not consider celibacy as a badge of freedom, but "today" and "here" are not normative for always and everywhere.)

I test that general principle concerning the traditional New Testament-that you cannot know inside without knowing outside-with one further example, from A New New Testament. It concerns the resurrection of Christ and therefore touches on the very heart of Christianity itself. I begin, once again, with an image - not a single instance in a hidden cave but one found on icons, frescoes, and mosaics from the Tiber to the Tigris and the Nevsky to the Nile. From ancient psalters to modern churches, among scenes of the life of Jesus, icons of the Twelve Great Feasts, and banners of Easter celebration, this image is how Eastern Christianity imagines "The Resurrection" of Christ. But you will not understand, will not even recognize that image from anywhere in our traditional New Testament.

On the one hand, Western Christianity imagines the resurrection by showing Christ arising in muscular majesty-think Titian or Rubens-above sleeping or cowering tomb guards. He is magnificently alone and individual - as if to forget that he is not the first or last Jewish martyr to die on a Roman cross. You might be able to get that scenario by reading, say, Matthew.

On the other hand, Eastern Christianity depicts not an individual but a communal resurrection of Christ. It shows Christ, wounded, haloed, robed, and carrying a scroll in earlier examples but a cross in later ones. He is surrounded by a mandorla of heavenly light, stands on the bifold gates of Hades shaped into cross format, with broken locks and shattered bolts all around. He reaches out, grasps the hand of Adam-or Adam and Eve-and drags them forcibly to himself inside that aureole of radiant divinity.

You will never understand or even recognize that Eastern Christian iconography through studying the traditional New Testament. But you could do both from reading A New New Testament if you turn to Ode 42 in the section entitled "The Fourth Book of the Odes of Solomon:' Read that Syrian Christian hymn from possibly as early as 100 CE. Read it slowly and carefully, thoughtfully and prayerfully, until you can see Christ's resurrection as communal rather than individual and as God's great peace-and-reconciliation covenant with our violence-scarred humanity. I would almost rest my case for having A New New Testament on the presence of that single early Christian Ode 42 within its covers.

I conclude by thinking- and asking you to think as well-about gain and loss. I gave you only two examples where I think our traditional New Testament has lost something precious. It would have been better, for example, to have both Timothy and Thecla in there as confrontational challenge rather than Timothy alone…Better for the New Testament, better for Christian history, better for women, and, yes, better also for men. That, surely, was loss.
Again, none of the Odes of Solomon are in the New Testament, and without their poignant poetry our Western vision of the resurrection of Christ has become severed from that of Eastern Christianity. That, too, is loss. As you read each single text in A New New Testament, ask yourself that same question: What has our traditional New Testament lost when it lost this text? At the end we may mourn, with apologies to Thomas Wolfe, like this: "O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.” There may yet be other texts lost to us still, but here, in A New New Testament, at least we have the opportunity to consider that loss and, possibly, to move beyond it.