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The First Edition of the New Testament

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You don't need to know New Testament Greek to follow Trobisch's arguments. Although an astute reader and clever interpreter of textual evidence, Trobisch spares us the usual myopia and nit picking textual critics like to heap upon their readers. He avoids discussions of authorial authenticity that so easily put many people on the defensive. Instead, he helps the reader appreciate larger redactional issues of how the different components of the New Testament relate to one another. By making comparisons to familiar modern publishing practices, Trobisch makes his arguments easily accessible to the modern reader (for example, he shows how the decisions publishers and editors make and the conventions they establish can affect the final form of the text as much, perhaps, as those of the authors.) There's much here I'll want to re-examine when I've done more reading in this area, but on my first read-through I found Trobisch's thesis exciting and refreshing. This book has certainly changed the way I'll be reading the New Testament from now on.

Trobisch's aim was "to describe the history of the Canonial Edition by analyzing the oldest existing copies and tracing the edition back to the time and place of first publication. With this method, Greek manuscripts became more important witnesses than the lists of canonical writings, quotes from biblical literature, and debates about the authenticity of certain writings, translations, and so on." (p. 37) By doing this, Trobisch is able to draw some interesting conclusions: (1) that the editors of the New Testament took great care in naming the different sections of the Bible, and in doing so validated, rather than minimized, the place of the Old Testament in the Christian Bible, (2) that the sequence of the four Gospels as we have it today is a tradition of long-standing, and one that makes good sense even though it means separating Luke from Acts (his explanation of the role of John 21 in this regard is truly fascinating, p. 96ff), (3) that the "first edition" of the New Testament would have positioned the General Letters after Acts and before the Letters of Paul (the logic being, in part, that the first half of Acts introduces the reader to Peter, John and James, and it is only in the second part that Acts starts to focus on the missionary efforts of Paul), (4) that the editors used an elegant system of internal cross referencing to validate both the authority of the leaders in Jerusalem and of Paul (this seeming harmony serving as a unified barrier against Marcionite error), and (5)that the editors managed to straddle the potentially devisive issue of the date upon which Easter should be celebrated by including both the Synoptic and Johannine traditions. Just to name a few! And don't skip the fascinating discussion of the codex ("bound book") v. the scroll in the establishment of the Canonical Edition of the Bible (p. 69-77).

I must admit the flow of Trobisch's argument was so engrossing that I never really examined the endnotes. But they're there and they're detailed. The bibliography is substantial, too (but be warned, it includes a high percentage of German works).

This book is truly worth the investment (both in money and in the time you'll spend digging into it). Treat yourself!

In this fascinating book, Professor David Trobisch of the University of Heidelberg details his examination of the early Bible manuscripts, and his conclusion that during the second century A.D., that a group of editors produced a Bible that became the archetype for all subsequent Bibles, though the original "Canonical Edition" has been forgotten. This overturns decades of belief that the New Testament was compiled haphazardly over a long period of time, in different locations, and had to be harmonized at a later date.

Through examinations of the earliest of Bible manuscripts, the author takes you on a fascinating tour of what this Canonical Edition contained, how it was organized, and how it was supposed to be read. I must say that that I found this book to be absolutely fascinating. The author makes a good argument supporting his conclusion, and gives the reader a good idea of what this original Bible must have looked like. My one and only complaint against this book is that the author does not examine who these editors were.

But, that said, this is a great book, a fascinating book that I highly recommend. I also highly recommend David Trobisch's subsequent book, Paul's Letter Collection.

This is a startling book, and well worth a detailed read. If Trobisch is right in his conclusions about an early edition of the New and Old Testament, we have much to investigate in this new light. I was persuaded by his carefully reasoned and extremely well documented arguments. And I find the material intensely exciting. What more can Trobisch point out to us, using only the text of scripture itself as he has done here? I can't wait to see response from the academic community to this excellent and compelling work. Anne Rice, New Orleans, La.

This book follows up on an earlier one that focused on the epistles of Paul (see Paul's Letter Collection: Tracing the Origins). Together they provide keys to understanding not only the formation of the New Testament canon but also the meaning of the New Testament text. Since the information that these books present is not found anywhere else, they are essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the New Testament.

The dominant view of the New Testament among scholars today is that it was formed by a long, gradual, spontaneous process that extended over three to five centuries after people first began to write about Jesus. During the first century or so, various groups of Christians wrote and collected literary works that competed for "canonical" status. In the following centuries, various groups continued to judge the merits of each individual work, disagreeing about many of them. Not until the fifth century AD did all Christians finally reached a consensus about which books really should be considered canonical. Evidence for this view is found in a wealth of contradictory canon lists and statements by church leaders. The earliest clear evidence that some Christians advocated considering as canonical the same 27 books we now have in our New Testament comes from the late fourth century. But that was just one group, and it was another century at least before that list became the universal canon. According to this analysis of the formation of the canon, the New Testament came together rather haphazardly, and so it is composed of a jumble of often contradictory viewpoints, with any continuity of theme being largely fortuitous.

Trobisch's thesis is radically different. He asserts that the 27 books we now know as the New Testament were assembled by a single editor or editorial group as a complete and cohesive unit deliberately called "the New Testament." This was the "first edition" of the Bible, and it was created in the late second century AD. This first edition consisted of two parts just as modern Bibles do - Old Testament as well as New Testament. What happened in the ensuing centuries was not a gradual collecting of separate sources into one package but a gradual acceptance by the entire church of various parts of something that was from the beginning created as a single package.

Trobisch finds and reports evidence that the editors deliberately assembled, arranged, and edited the books with some specific themes in mind, such as:
* They wanted to enhance the edition's authority by including sources from all of the major apostles and by showing that all of these original Christian authorities were in agreement with each other (from earlier collections of Paul's epistles this does not appear to be the case).
* They wanted to validate the continued authority within the Christian church of the Old Testament (which had been challenged by some, most notably by Marcion).
* By including multiple gospels with stories about Jesus that conflicted in particulars, they asserted that the unity of the gospel is dependent on its spirit and not a literal reading of the words written about it. (Trobisch asserts that this differentiates Christianity from Judaism and Islam, where exact wording of scripture is of paramount importance.) The more specific goal here was to avoid letting a dispute about the date of Easter cause a schism in the church.

Most of the evidence presented comes from painstaking examination of thousands of ancient manuscripts. Trobisch found in them similarities that are hard to explain unless they ultimately derived from a single prototype, such as:
* A consistent set of abbreviations ("nomina sacra") is used throughout the manuscripts.
* With very few exceptions, the manuscripts all present the books in the same order.
* The titles of the books - which are editorial additions - are consistent throughout the manuscripts.

Trobisch also points to links between the text of the New Testament books and editorial additions to them. For instance, there are numerous instances in which an author's name presented in the title of one book functions as a link to mentions of that name in the text of other books (book titles were created by editors; the gospels in particular are anonymous and identify their authors only in the titles). The frequency and consistency with which these links appear suggests they are not coincidental, and they tend to make the whole package appear to be the production of a unified college of apostles. For example, although Galatians ch.2 reports a sharp rift between Paul on the one hand and Peter and James on the other, the New Testament appears designed to imply that the rift was mended in the end. Not only does it include epistles from all three, but also the names "Mark" and "Luke" function as links tying together apostles who might otherwise appear to be add odds.

Based on his conclusions, Trobisch offers some practical recommendations for further study of the Bible. For example, if the package was itself an editorial creation, then the editors put them in a particular order for a reason. Present-day Bibles have an arrangement of books that reflects a repackaging done in the Middle Ages and thus to some degree may cause the intended message of the package as a whole to be misrepresented or obscured.

The evidence is presented is presented effectively and the analysis is convincing. Even those who are not convinced in every particular are likely to find new insights by reading this book. It is hard for me to imagine anyone reading this book without coming away from it with a very different perspective on the the Bible, especially the New Testament.

My only caveat is that the book is likely to be a little intimidating to the general reader. Like all good scholarship, it does not just tell results of an investigation: it presents all of the evidence and reasoning that led the scholar to his conclusions. The reader cannot just passively read but is challenged to think in order to follow the author's reasoning. Many readers may find some stretches where the evidence is piling up to be less than exciting reading. Also, the book does occasionally throw in academic jargon likely to be familiar only to specialists - Latin terms such as lectio difficilior ("the most difficult reading is preferred"), verso ("front"), recto ("back"), etc. And some sections quote New Testament text in Greek rather than both Greek and English. Nevertheless, the book's arguments as a whole are presented in clearly-written English, and any reader who wants to read critically, and to judge the evidence and arguments for himself or herself, will find reading this book a very rewarding experience.

Trobisch's thesis raises some interesting questions. If the editors put together a package that intended to emphasize authenticity, did they know that many of the letters they included were forgeries? If they were so intent on achieving their ends, did they heavily edit the texts of the books they assembled, in order to enhance that objective? Might they have actually been themselves the forgers of some of the books as well as the creators of the books' titles? And who were they anyway? The editors would almost have to have been lead by someone we have heard of, since only a well-connected authority could undertake such an expensive and ambitious project. Trobisch does propose an answer to this last question in a later article published in the periodical _free inquiry_: he suggests that the original editor of the New Testament was Polycarp of Smyrna. A PDF of that article is available on his personal web page, which can be found by doing an internet search on his name.

This book presents compelling evidence to the early existence of a canon for the New Testament. The subject of the canon is not addressed often enough in textual criticism, especially books aimed at the lay person. Trobisch asserts that the common approach of dating the canon to the fourth century is flawed, and points out several features that lead to the conclusion that Christians had a canon long before the generally accepted dates. This thesis has an impact not only for the scholar, but for the average Christian who desires to know the provenance of the books upon which he bases his faith.

When I was new to Amazon several years ago, I reviewed this book (below) anonymously. Well, I no longer have the means to edit that review, but I can copy the contents here: This is a startling book, and well worth a detailed read. If Trobisch is right in his conclusions about an early edition of the New and Old Testament, we have much to investigate in this new light. I was persuaded by his carefully reasoned and extremely well documented arguments. And I find the material intensely exciting. What more can Trobisch point out to us, using only the text of scripture itself as he has done here? I can't wait to see response from the academic community to this excellent and compelling work. Anne Rice, New Orleans, La.
Let me add now, years later, that this book had an incredible impact on me. I tend to think that Trobisch's idea: that the
New Testament as we have it was an "edition", carefully edited and compiled and distributed with the thought of uniting
the early Christians makes an enormous amount of sense. His scholarship is simply excellent. He's using internal evidence and
external evidence. He's consulted the manuscript evidence; he's knowledgeable about the nomina sacra and other stylistic elements,
and his thoughts on N.T. identifies its own authors are very thought provoking.
I'm mightily impressed with this book. I'm surprised that it did not get a great deal more attention in biblical studies.
Maybe it will yet be re-discovered. Or maybe it's better known than I think. Anyway, I think it's a power book with powerful insights.
It might be unsettling to some to have to see the N.T. in this light; but this author has laid out the reasons for his conclusions here
in persuasive and responsible terms.