About the time when the text of the OT books assumed a standard form, the apostles were writing books that were later to form the NT. When the church was born on the first Christian Pentecost it had the same Bible as the Jewish synagogue. As the apostolic writings began to circulate, they too were read in the worship services of the church.
The reading of the Scriptures held an important place in the church’s worship, just as it did in the synagogue which also served the church as a model in other respects. In what may be Paul’s earliest known letter (1 Thessalonians), Paul charges the church “to have this letter read to all the brothers” (5:27). To the Colossians he writes that when this letter is read they shall see to it that the Laodicean church also gets to read it, and that the Colossians read the letter he wrote to the Laodiceans (Col. 4:16). “Until I come,” he writes to Timothy at Ephesus, “devote yourself to the public reading…” (1 Tim. 4:13). The one who reads the Scriptures to the congregation is given a special beatitude by John the apostle (Rev. 1:3).
Private copies of the biblical books were hard to come by, and so the reading of the Scriptures in the meetings of the believers played an important role. To begin with, however, only the books of the OT were read, interpreted in the light of Christ’s coming, death, and exaltation. The NT books were not available to the church during the first few decades of its existence. The earliest of our four Gospels (probably Mark) was not written until thirty years after our Lord’s ascension to glory. It can be seen that the sayings of Jesus were valued equally highly with the OT Scriptures, for example, from 1 Timothy 5:18, where Deuteronomy 25:4 is quoted together with a saying of Jesus. For an entire generation after Christ’s death the teachings of Jesus were transmitted orally. We should, therefore, say a few things about the period of oral tradition that preceded the writing of the NT books.
We may ask today, Why the delay in the writing of the apostolic books? The early church may have asked, Why the hurry? How can we explain this delay?
First, the apostles were living books. As long as the apostles were present in the church, there was no great need for written records of the life and sayings of Jesus. They were the eyewinesses who knew not only the facts but they could also give the interpretation of the facts. The important place eyewitnesses had in establishing the truth of the gospel can be seen, for example, from 1 Corinthians 15:6, where Paul mentions some five hundred witnesses to Christ’s resurrection, most of whom were still alive. The second-century bishop, Papias, writes: “I do not think that I derived so much benefit from books as from the living voice of those that are still surviving.”1
Moreover, as already mentioned, the church had the OT. Jesus had spoken with high regard of God’s Word in the Jewish Scriptures. The apostles preached from these inspired books of the OT. So it wasn’t that the church had no Bible—albeit a Bible that came from the age of preparation and that was now understood in the light of its fulfillment in Christ.
A third reason, perhaps, why the writing of the NT books was delayed was the Oriental practice of passing on tradition orally. Printing was still a long way off, and the production of scrolls or codices was laborious and costly. Moreover, there was much illiteracy among the common folk. When Jesus taught the multitudes, he would frequently say, “You have heard!” (e.g., Matt. 5:27). They heard the Scriptures read in the synagogue, but there was little private reading. The matter was different, of course, among the scribes whom Jesus asked upon occasion, “Have you not read?” (e.g., Mark 2:25).
Jewish traditions had been handed down orally for centuries, and some of the rabbis had a dislike for writing. The oral law was not written down until about A.D. 200, and the Mishnah in the English translation of Danby runs to some eight hundred pages. All of this material had to be memorized and passed on from teacher to student. Some rabbis boasted of students who had memories like well-plastered cisterns that never lost a drop. There would, then, be nothing unusual about transmitting the teachings of Jesus by word of mouth.
There are those who argue that the strong belief in the imminent return of Christ in the first-century church did little to encourage the writing of books for future generations, but that is hard to prove.
We should not think of the oral tradition of Jesus’ words and works as a confused legacy. It was what A. M. Hunter call “guarded tradition.”2 We all know that when children hear the same story several times they will immediately notice when the storyteller, the tenth time round, changes some details. In a simliar way “the story of Jesus,” as it was told and retold, took on fixed forms.
Paul exhorts the Thessalonians to hold the traditions that they were taught, whether by word or epistle (2 Thess. 2:15). The Corinthians are commended for maintaining the traditions Paul had delivered to them (1 Cor. 11:2). He himself had received his information about what Jesus did and taught from eyewitnesses. Repeatedly he stresses the fact that he had “received” the gospel (e.g., 1 Cor. 15:3).
Trustworthy though this oral tradition may have been, the need for written records must have become more pressing as time went on. The apostles, who were founding churches all over the empire, found it necessary to write letters to these churches, to instruct, correct, encourage, and admonish the young converts. This missionary outreach of the church must have made the apostles aware of the need for written Gospels also. New converts needed written records of the sayings and deeds of Jesus; the Gentile churches often had no access to eyewitnesses. To this day one of the first tasks of the pioneer missionary is to learn the language of the tribe, reduce it to writing, and put at least one Gospel into writing. The missionary intent of our canonical Gospels seems to be quite obvious. John, for example, writes that “these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (20:31).
Moreover, as the gospel spread in the Graeco-Roman world, it entered a literary society. Publishing books was no small business. Bookshops in Rome were covered with advertisements of new books as they are today. A reading public looks for written materials; the written Gospels met that need.
The need for written Gospels and other apostolic books was underscored also by the danger of heresy. False prophets claimed special insights into divine truth. By what norm was the church to determine whether a doctrine was apostolic or not? Written records of the teachings of Jesus and his apostles proved to be a bulwark against the invasion of heresies.
There were also pastoral reasons why a church should have written records of Jesus’ teachings. How important it must have been to know what Jesus had said about divorce, the sabbath, food laws, fasting, and many other issues that the church faced in the first century! When Paul writes to the Corinthians about the matter of divorce he seems to be glad that he can quote a word of Jesus on that question (1 Cor. 7:10). On the question of mixed marriages Jesus had evidently not said anything, and so Paul has to speak on his own apostolic authority (1 Cor. 7:12). Without the written Gospels, the record of the early church’s founding and growth, the many letters to the young churches, and the book of comfort for suffering saints (the Revelation), the churches would have been at a loss concerning their life and mission once the apostles passed off the scene. And so in God’s good providence these Christian writings became part of the church’s Bible. We should remind ourselves that no account of the writing and the collection of these apostolic books is adequate if it fails to reckon with the inspiration and witness of the Holy Spirit.3
Once the NT books were written, they were collected, and eventually these twenty-seven books comprised the NT. However, by the time the limits of the NT canon were being drawn, a great many other Christian books were circulating in the churches. Also, the oral tradition of Jesus’ deeds and sayings continued. And so a distinction between canonical and noncanonical books had to be made.
In order that we might be more aware of this mass of Christian literature surrounding the apostolic writings, we should mention some of these extracanonical books.
Luke tells us in his prologue (1:1-4) that many others had taken it in hand to write “gospels"—other than our four. John informs us that Jesus did many other “signs” not recorded in the Fourth Gospel (John 20:30). In fact, he goes so far as to say that if everything Jesus did were to be recorded the world could not contain the books that would be written (John 21:25).
Outside of the apocryphal gospels, where an attempt is made to supplement the record of Jesus’ deeds in our four Gospels, there is little tradition of what Jesus did (beyond that recorded in our canonical Gospels). It is otherwise with what Jesus said.4 Many sayings of Jesus were known in the early church that are not recorded in the Gospels. These are called Agrapha (meaning, “not written” in our canonical Gospels).
We have a few Agrapha within the NT itself. Paul, for example, in speaking to the elders of the Ephesian church recalls a saying of Jesus, not in our Gospels, “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35). Some Agrapha are found in variant texts in the manuscripts of the NT. Codex Bezae, for example, has a saying of Jesus, at Luke 6:5, to a man whom he found working on the sabbath: “Man if you know what you are doing, you are blessed; but if you do not know, you are cursed and a transgressor of the law.” Joachim Jeremias argues for the authenticity of this saying.5 In other words, if the man was doing something good in obedience to Jesus’ teachings on the sabbath, he was blessed; if he was violating the sabbath out of impudence, he was cursed. In the literature of the early church, references to sayings of Jesus not recorded in the Gospels are not at all uncommon Some of these are recorded by Eusebius, the church historian others are in the writings of the Fathers (Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Jerome, Augustine, and others). One saying that is frequently mentioned is Jesus’ exhortation to be good moneychangers, and some see the vocabulary of that saying reflected in Paul’s command to test everything and to hold fast what is good (1 Thess. 5: 21).
In 1959, a second-century work, the Gospel According to Thomas, was published. This was one of forty-nine documents discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945 in Egypt, and this is a compilation of 114 sayings of Jesus, translated into Coptic from Greek.
Some of these sayings were already known from other literature. Several of them are parallels to words of Jesus in our canonical Gospels; in other cases authentic words of Jesus have been amplified or conflated. However, there are also new sayings, to which there are no parallels in our Gospels. There are beatitudes, fables, and sayings on fasting, circumcision, marriage, and other subjects.6
Many of these sayings are very gnostic in orientation, but there are others that seem to be authentic words of Jesus. We mention the Agrapha only to point out that there were sayings of Jesus that came to be recorded but that are not a part of our canonical Gospels. Also, we must constantly be aware of the fact that before the Gospels took on written form they were transmitted orally.
The vibrant faith of the early church gave birth to what became virtually a flood of Christian literature. Much of these early writings were modeled after the canonical writings. Letters, Gospels, Acts, and Revelations (the four types of literature we have in the NT) were being written, some of which were held in such high regard that several noncanonical books were included in some of the early manuscripts of the NT.
One such letter was that of Clement of Rome, who wrote to the Corinthian church about A.D. 95. It is still found in the fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus Early in the second century Ignatius, the martyr/bishop of Antioch, wrote seven letters to churches in Asia Minor and to the church of Rome. Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, wrote to the Philippians about the middle of the second century. The Letter of Barnabas illustrates how some Christians allegorized the OT. It was held in such high regard that it got into the Codex Sinaiticus. About the middle of the second century a Greek Christian of Asia wrote a letter in the name of all the apostles, called the Epistle of the Apostles, providing the churches with a kind of compendium of Christian doctrine. The account of Justin Martyr’s martyrdom has been preserved in the form of court records, but the Martrydom of Polycarp is in the form of a letter. This is true also of the account of the persecution of the churches in Lyons and Vienne in A.D. 177, whose sufferings are reported in the Letter of the Gallican Churches. A delightful but anonymous Letter to Diognetus is a defense of the Christian faith and could be classified as an apology another form of literature that emerges in the early second century.7
In imitation of the Book of Revelation—a type of literature very popular in Judaism at one time—several Christian writers produced apocalypses The one best known is the Shepherd, written by Hermas, a Roman Christian. Published about the end of the first century A.D., it became very popular and is included with the Epistle of Barnabas in the Codex Sinaiticus. About the middle of the second century a Greek Christian wrote the Revelation of Peter Revelations of Paul, James, Stephen, Thomas, John, Philip, and the Virgin Mary are also known, and with these books we have crossed over into the area of apocryphal literature.
As this Christian apocryphal literature emerged, the Gospels were also imitated. These apocryphal gospels have a greater biographical interest and often seek to supplement our canonical Gospels. There is much legendary material in them and some of it is strongly Gnostic in coloring. From the second century there comes, for example, the Gospel According to the Egyptians, which evidently was but another name for the Gospel According to the Hebrews. The former circulated among Christians in Egypt and the latter among Jewish Christians. From the same century comes also the Proto-Evangelium of James, the Gospel According to Peter, the British Museum Gospel, the Gospel of the Ebionites, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, and several others.
Also, we have several apocryphal parallels to our canonical Acts. One is the Acts of Paul, from the latter half of the second century; another is the Acts of John, from about the same time. Somewhat later are the Acts of Peter, the Acts of Andrew, and the Acts of Thomas (the latter, from the Syriac church). For the complete text of these and the following extracanonical books one might consult the two volume New Testament Apocrypha by Edgar Hennecke, edited by Wilhelm Schneemelcher.8
There are a great many Christian writings from the time when the NT was gaining shape that were modeled after the NT books. But others are not. With the founding of the church came the birth of Christian hymns. Tidbits of such hymns are found in the NT (e.g., 1 Tim. 3:16). While no collection of early Christian hymns has survived, a group of Christian hymns, called Odes to Solomon, stemming from the late first-or second-century Syriac church, were discovered at the beginning of our century.
Sermons also were published. One that has found its way together with Clement of Rome’s letter into the Codex Alexandrinus is called 2 Clement. A good many other sermons by men such as Melito of Sardis, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and others are known. Also, exegetical works, such as those of Papias, bishop of Hierapolis, appeared as early as the second century.
A special kind of literature, in which Christian writers defend the Christian faith against attacks by its calumniators, also emerged. The earliest of a number of such apologetic works is the Preaching of Peter. It was written about the beginning of the second century. The Apology of Quadratus, the Apology of Aristides, the Apology of Athenagoras, and the Apology of Justin (who died a martyr in Rome about A.D. 165), are examples of this kind of literature. These works were addressed to non-Christian readers in an effort to show that the evil rumors spread by the enemies of the Christian faith were unfounded. The Letter to Diognetus is called a letter, but is in fact an apology. Perhaps Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho, as well as Tatian’s Address to the Greeks, could also be classified as apologies.
With the end of the second and the beginning of the third century, Christian books in great numbers continued to appear. Writers such as Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Tertullian, Hippolytus, and others enriched the churches with all sorts of books. Nor should it be overlooked that this great body of Christian literature was being produced in difficult times, for up to the beginning of the fourth century the church was often under fire. We should remember, then, that as the limits of the NT canon were being fixed, the twenty-seven books of the NT had to be set off from a vast number of Christian books, some of which were extremely popular in the early centuries of the Christian era.
Among the earliest books that now constitute our NT are the letters of Paul. When Paul wrote to the various churches he was conscious, no doubt, that he was writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. However, he can hardly have known in advance that the letters he wrote—some of them quite chatty and casual—would one day belong to the canon of Holy Scripture. When Luke wrote his second volume, the Acts, he made no mention of the fact that his hero, Paul, had ever written a letter. That means, perhaps, that when Acts was written these letters had not yet been collected. Professor E. J. Goodspeed has suggested that the publication of Acts may have stimulated the collection of the letters of this great church planter, Paul.9 Be that as it may, there is considerable evidence that by the end of the first century the letters of Paul had been collected.
1. Witnesses to a Pauline Corpus. It can be shown from the NT itself that Paul’s letters were being collected. Peter refers to the letters of Paul as if they were perfectly familiar to his readers (2 Peter 3:16), and confesses that there are difficult passages in them, which heretical teachers twist to their own ends. Also, Clement of Rome, writing to the Corinthians (C.A.D. 95) can say: “Take up the letter of the blessed Apostle Paul” (1 Clem. 46:1), assuming that his readers have it in their possession. Clement’s letter reflects his knowledge of other letters of Paul. Ignatius (C. A.D. 110) can write to the Ephesians, reminding them that Paul remembers them in every letter.10 Polycarp, writing to the Philippians, reminds his readers that Paul in his absence wrote letters to them.11 By the middle of the second century Marcion’s truncated canon of one Gospel and ten letters of Paul makes its appearance. “It is clear that by A.D. 100 Paul’s letters had been collected and were widely known and widely accepted.”12
From a strictly human point of view this is a bit surprising, to say the least. Paul wrote to deal with local and temporary situations. Heresies threatened; there was the danger of falling back into pagan ways; persecutions discouraged the saints; enthusiasts went off on tangents; cultural differences among members of the churches threatened to divide the body of Christ—all such matters and more had to be addressed in writing when Paul could not be present in person.
There were times when Paul was not even sure that the church would read the letter addressed to it. “I charge you before the Lord,” he writes to the Thessalonians, “to have this letter read to all the brothers” (1 Thess. 5:27). So little attention was paid to some of his letters that they are now lost. We do not have the first letter he wrote to the Corinthians, which the readers had badly misunderstood (1 Cor. 5:9). Nor do we have his letter to the Laodicians (Col. 4:16).
It does not follow, of course, that something that is temporary and local cannot attain to universal immortality. The music of Bach has become almost universal, yet it was written, we are told, for the Sunday by Sunday performances of Bach’s choir in Leipzig. Also, the collection of Paul’s letters had precedent in the collection of the letters of great men, such as Cicero. Could the collection of the seven letters in the Revelation of John also have been a precedent?
In any case, outside the reference in 2 Peter, there is hardly a reference to the letters of Paul prior to A.D. 90. After that, however, they are mentioned frequently. William Barclay makes the observation that “not long after A.D. 90 there was a veritable epidemic of letter writing and something must have given it its impetus.”13 He is of the opinion that the emergence of a Pauline corpus provided this impetus.
We have no record of how they were collected; nor were the limits of the collection clearly defined from the outset. All we can do is suggest some theories on how the letters of Paul were collected.
2. Theories of Collection. Basically there are two theories on how the letters of Paul were collected. One has it that it was a process that went on over a period of time; the other, that there was some historical occasion that led to the collection of all of Paul’s letters at once.
The fact that Paul’s letters stand in different orders in the manuscripts that come from the early centuries, suggest that collections of Pauline writings were made at various centers of the Christian church. Churches like Corinth, for example, that had received letters from Paul, eventually may have procured letters that the apostle had written to other churches also. This process may have gone on for years in places like Ephesus, Corinth, and Rome. Perhaps Paul himself encouraged such a collection when, for example, he asked the Colossians to exchange letters with the Laodiceans (Col. 4:16).
Those who argue that Paul’s letters were all collected at one time are not agreed on what provided the occasion for such a collection. Adolf von Harnack thought Paul’s writings were immediately recognized by the church as having permanent value and that all his available letters were promptly collected. Professor Goodspeed held to a “lapsed interest” theory, and that, as already mentioned, the publication of Acts provided the impetus to collect all of Paul’s writings.14
Another form of this theory of a “complete collection” is that some individual took upon himself the task of making a collection of Paul’s writings. One candidate for such an undertaking might be Onesimus, the converted slave, for, as some scholars argue, it is hard to see how the little Philemon epistle would have been included in the Pauline Corpus if the central character of the letter, Onesimus, had not done the collecting. If we are going to look for candidates, perhaps Timothy, who was charged by Paul to commit to faithful men what he had heard (2 Tim. 2:2), should be given first place.
Since we have no records of how the letters of Paul were collected, we have to content ourselves with theories. Of the two just mentioned, it seems more likely that the collecting of Pauline writings was a process that went on over a period of time. Whether Paul’s letters already formed a complete corpus when the four Gospels were collected, is hard to say. It appears as if the formation of the fourfold Gospel, as we now have it in the NT, took place about the same time as the collection of Paul’s letters.
Luke informs us that many writers before him had undertaken to compile a narrative “of the things that have been fulfilled among us” (Luke 1:1). How many such accounts of Jesus’ life and death were circulating is not known; outside of our four, no gospels have survived. The earliest of our canonical Gospels cannot be datedearlier than about A.D. 60, which indicates that for at least thirty years the gospel was transmitted orally.
The first reference to one of our canonical Gospels is to be found in the Didache, a little manual of church discipline from the end of the first century A.D. Here the writer warns the churches not to pray like the hypocrites “but as the Lord commanded in his Gospel” (8:2)—a reference to the Lord’s Prayer. It can be seen that the Gospel of John had been written by the end of the century from the fact that a papyrus fragment of this Gospel, the John Rylands Papyrus, dating from perhaps as early as A.D. 130, was found in the sands of Egypt. Ignatius, in his letter to the Philadelphians, knows of people who will not believe what is in the gospel if they do not find it in the OT15—another witness to the written gospel. Papias, in the beginning of the second century, mentions Gospels, such as Matthew, by name.16
A reference to gospels in the plural is found in Justin’s Apology (C.A.D. 150), where the “memoirs of the apostles” are called “gospels.”17 By about A.D. 180 Irenaeus finds it necessary to defend the fourfold Gospel.18 Evidently there had been attempts to reduce the four to one. Marcion, for example, had only the Gospel of Luke in his canon (C. A.D. 140). Tatian had prepared a Gospel harmony (C.A.D. 160), called the Diatessaron, in which he had blended the four Gospels into one. Irenaeus defends the fourfold Gospel by arguing that the number lay in the nature of things: there were four points of the compass, there were four covenants, and there were four living creatures.
The attempts to reduce the Gospels to one, as well as the defense of the fourfold Gospel, indicate that the early church was not sure why there should be four. If the Gospels had been strictly narratives or biographies, one might have been enough; but gospels are good news, and the good news about Jesus Christ can be proclaimed in different ways. In fact, the gospel of Christ is so rich it can never be exhausted.19
What does all this have to do with the collecting of our Gospels into a fourfold Gospel? Such questions and debates clearly witness to the presence of a fourfold gospel by the beginning of the second century. However, where and by whom our four Gospels were published for the first time as a Tetraevangelium is not known.
When the four Gospels were gathered into one collection, Luke’s two-volume work, Luke-Acts, was split up; the Gospel went with Matthew, Mark, and John, and Acts was left standing as a single volume. In the process of collecting the twenty-seven-book canon, the most natural place for Acts was between the Gospels and the Epistles. “Acts played an indispensable part in relating the two collections to each other,” writes F. F. Bruce.20 And, as most early lists indicate, Acts did become the connecting link between these smaller collections.
It stands to reason that Acts should follow the Gospels. We want to know what happened after the death, resurrection, and ascension of our Lord. Acts provides that sequel. On the other hand, if we read the Epistles, we ask for the background of these letters. Were it not for Acts, we would know very little about the founding of the churches to whom Paul wrote. Acts, then, performs double duty: it continues the story of the Gospels and also provides the setting for the Epistles. Thus Acts found a secure place in the NT canon.
If one reads Acts one discovers quickly that Paul is not the only apostle who preached the gospel and established churches. In the early chapters of Acts, Peter and John work together. James dies by the sword. About the other disciples of Jesus (except Judas, who was replaced by Matthias) Luke is silent, and we must rely on extrabiblical traditions for information on their ministry. In any case, Peter and John also wrote letters, as did James and Jude, our Lord’s brothers. John also wrote the Revelation. Marcion did not accept their books into his canon, and it may well be that Luke’s account of the activity of these apostolic men in Acts, helped to secure a place for the General Epistles and Revelation in the canon.
No one can deny that there were questions about the limits of the NT canon, and the next chapter will give a survey of what the NT canon looked like in the early centuries and how it came to be closed.
Barclay, W. The Making of the Bible. Nashville: Abingdon, 1961.
Bruce, F. F. The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? 5th rev. ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmant, 1970.
, Jesus and Christian Origins Outside the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974.
, Tradition: Old and New. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1970.
Geisler, N. L. and Nix, W. E. From God To Us. Chicago: Moody, 1974. See “The Extent of the New Testament Canon,” pp. 113-25.
Jeremias, J. Unknown Sayings of Jesus, trans. R. H. Fuller. London: SPCK, 1958.
Martin, R. P. New Testament Foundations, 2 vols. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, Vol. 1, 1975. See chapter 3, “How the Gospels Came to Be Wrritten.”
1 Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, iii, 39.3.
2 A. M. Hunter, Paul and His Predecesors, rev. ed. (London: SCM Press, 1961), p. 22.
3 F. F. Bruce, Tradition: Old and New (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1970), p. 71.
4 Bruce, Tradition, p. 87
5 J. Jeremias, Unknown Sayings of Jesus, trans. Reginald Fuller (London: SPCK, 1958), p. 51.
6 Bruce, Tradition, pp. 87-107.
7 For a review of early Christian literature, see E. J. Goodspeed A History of Early Christian Literature, revised by R. M. Grant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
8 E. Hennecke and W. Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, 2 vols., trans R. Mel. Wilson (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1963)
9 E. J. Goodspeed, The Formation of the New Testament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1926), p. 21.
10 Ignatius, Ephesians, 12:2.
11 Polycarp, Philippians, 3:2.
12 W. Barclay, The Making of the Bible (New York: Abingdon, 1961), p. 65.
13 Barclay, Making of the Bible, p. 65.
14 Barclay, Making of the Bible, p. 68.
15 To the Philadelphians, 8:2.
16 Eusebius, Eccl. History, iii, 39.16
17 Justin, Apology chap. 66.
18 Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. iii, 2.8.
19 O. Cullmann, The Early Church, trans A J. B. Higgins (London: SCM Press, 1956). p. 52
20 F. F. Bruce, Commentary on the Book of the Acts (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1955), p. 15.