Did the Early Church Quote the Gospels? (2 of 6)

This is the post that answers the claim that the New Testament was assembled in the fourth century.

The answer is not an argument. It is a list of what men writing between roughly AD 95 and 130 were already quoting, and the striking thing is that none of them stops to justify it.

Why Does Quotation Matter More Than Argument?

Because nobody argues for what everybody accepts.

If the writings had been contested in the generation after the apostles, we would expect to see them defended. Instead we find them used, woven into pastoral letters as the natural authority to appeal to, with no case made for why they carry weight.

Clement of Rome in particular cites organically, without introductory formulas, which is what people do with texts whose standing is not in question.

That silence is the evidence. Argument would indicate a dispute. Use indicates a settled habit.

What Does 1 Clement Quote?

A wide spread, from a letter written around AD 95 to 96.

Clement references the canonical Gospels, Acts, 1 Corinthians, Philippians, Titus, Hebrews, 1 Peter, and possibly James. Allusions across the letter reach Matthew, Mark, Luke, Acts, Romans, 1 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Timothy, Titus, and 1 Peter.

He is writing to Corinth about a leadership dispute, roughly thirty years after Paul’s death, and the material he reaches for to settle it includes both testaments used the same way.

What Does Ignatius Quote?

Paul heavily, Matthew directly, and John in a manner that is harder to categorise.

His seven letters are deeply shaped by Paul’s and quote from them freely. He quotes Matthew at least three times and alludes to narrative details from both Matthew and Luke. And he uses phrases found only in John, which is a different kind of evidence from formal quotation and in some ways a more interesting one, since absorbed vocabulary indicates long familiarity rather than consultation.

He is writing under guard on the road to his own execution, which is not a situation that permits research. Whatever he is drawing on, he is drawing on it from memory.

What Does Polycarp Quote?

More than either of them, in a much shorter letter.

Polycarp certainly quotes Romans, 1 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, 1 Timothy, and 1 Peter. He probably quotes Matthew, 2 Corinthians, 2 Timothy, and 1 John. He possibly quotes Luke, Acts, and 2 Thessalonians. The total may reach as high as fifteen New Testament books.

The density is the point. His epistle is far shorter than Clement’s and the signs of familiarity with apostolic writing in it are considerably greater.

This is also the man Irenaeus heard as a young man, and who had been taught by apostles. The chain and the citations reinforce each other.

What Is the Earliest Citation of a Gospel as Scripture?

A line in 2 Clement, introducing a saying of Jesus with the formula used for the Hebrew Scriptures.

The text says that another scripture says, I came not to call the righteous but sinners. That saying is in the canonical Gospels, most likely Mark 2:17, and it also appears in Matthew.

The formula is what matters. A Gospel saying is being introduced the way one would introduce Isaiah. It is the first clear instance of a New Testament passage placed on the same level as an Old Testament text.

One caution about dating. Some place this as early as the end of the first century, and that is the dating the strength of the claim depends on. 2 Clement is a separate document from 1 Clement, generally taken as an anonymous sermon rather than a letter, and its date is argued. If it is later, the citation is still early and still significant, but the very earliest claim would need adjusting.

That caveat is worth carrying rather than dropping, because the argument does not need the earliest possible date to work.

What Does This Actually Prove?

Not a canon. A functioning authority, which is a different and prior thing.

None of these men produces a list. None defines a boundary. What they demonstrate is that within a generation of the apostles, across Rome, Antioch, and Smyrna, the same body of writing was in use, quoted from memory, and treated as decisive.

That is what a canon looks like before anyone writes one down. The lists, when they come, are describing this.

Why Is This the Strongest Argument in the Series?

Because it is the one that cannot be explained by later authority.

Constantine is two centuries away. The councils are three. Nothing about the situation in AD 95 gives anyone the power to impose a collection on churches from Rome to Asia Minor, and no mechanism existed to do it.

What the evidence shows instead is independent congregations, in different cities, using the same documents and not discussing why. That distribution is very hard to account for except by the documents having arrived early and carried their own weight.

The canon question opens with Marcion in the next era. This era is the reason he had something to attack.

Part of a series on how the New Testament came together, following the canon timeline.

Footnotes2

1. Citation without an introductory formula is easy to read past and it is doing real work. When Clement drops apostolic material into an argument the way he drops in Isaiah, he is telling us something about its standing that a defence of its authority could not tell us as clearly.
2. Ignatius writing under guard on the way to execution is a detail with evidential weight. He had no library. Everything he reaches for is what a bishop of Antioch carried in his head in the first decade of the second century.

Sources

Andreas J. Köstenberger, L. Scott Kellum, and Charles L. Quarles, The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown: An Introduction to the New Testament (B&H Academic, 2016), 6-7. Supports the Clement and Polycarp citation lists, the observation that Clement cites without introductory formulas, and the 2 Clement 2.4 citation.

Greg Lanier, A Christian's Pocket Guide to How We Got the Bible (Christian Focus, 2018), 76-77. Supports the specifics on Ignatius quoting Matthew and using phrases found only in John.

Vincent Henry Stanton, "New Testament Canon," in A Dictionary of the Bible, ed. James Hastings (Scribner's, 1911-1912), 3:532. Supports the assessment that Polycarp's density of apostolic citation exceeds Clement and Ignatius despite the shorter letter.

Clement of Rome, First Epistle to the Corinthians; Ignatius of Antioch, Letters; Polycarp, To the Philippians; 2 Clement. All in The Apostolic Fathers, and free in full at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

Where the sourcing stops: the dating of 2 Clement is genuinely argued and the very earliest proposed date is not adopted here. The counts given as certain, probable and possible for Polycarp reflect the standard assessment of citation confidence, which is a scholarly judgment rather than a mechanical result.