A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

Irenaeus, bishop of the (Greek-speaking) community in Lyons, who insisted on
defining the Church through its adherence to a canon of texts, approval of which
could, he claimed, be traced back to the early Church. While, as we have seen,
Christian doctrine was still fluid and intellectual debate lively and wide-ranging,
Irenaeus set the trend towards establishing central authority.
The difficulty lay in formulating this canon of fundamental texts, partly
because there was such a variety of early Christian writings. 5 The oral traditions
about Jesus’ life and teachings had been written down in several, perhaps as
many as twenty, gospels, but gradually four of these, the gospels of Matthew,
Mark, Luke and John, had emerged as the most authoritative, partly because they
were the earliest to have been written. Then there were a few letters, survivors of
probably many more now lost, from the apostle Paul to the early Christian
communities. Manuscripts of the Acts of the Apostles, written by tradition by
Luke, the author of the third gospel, which covers the mission of the Church
from Jesus’ Ascension to Paul’s arrival in Rome (c. AD 62), were also in
circulation. All these books had been composed in Greek, which explains why in
the early centuries Christianity was essentially a Greek-speaking religion. The
very earliest fragment of a Latin Christian text is dated to as late as 180. By AD
200 a selection of these writings can be found listed together as a canon, an
agreed set of core texts, in what is now called the New Testament. Other texts
such as the epistle to the Hebrews and the Book of Revelation were added later,
and the first reference to the complete New Testament as we know it today dates
from as late as 367.
These were not the only canonical texts. Jesus and his disciples had been Jews
and were familiar with the Tanakh, the Hebrew scriptures. 6 For centuries Jews
had been migrating from Israel into the Greek-speaking Mediterranean (the
diaspora), and gradually they began losing touch with their language and culture.
The moment came when if Judaism was to survive at all in the Greek world, the
Tanakh would have to be translated from Hebrew into Greek, and this was done
in the third century BC. Although there is a legend that the translation of the
Tanakh from Hebrew to Greek was ordered by King Ptolemy Philadelphus of
Egypt to fill a gap in the library at Alexandria, it is likely that the impetus for the
translation came from within Judaism itself. The translation is always known as
the Septuagint, following the legend that seventy-two Jewish scholars worked on
it, being led by divine guidance to come up with identical versions.
In the middle of the second century AD, as Christians began to turn away