Why Are There Four Gospels? (4 of 6)

The most famous ancient answer to this question is also the worst one, and it is quoted constantly by people trying to make the early church look foolish.

The argument is weak. What sits underneath it is not.

What Did Irenaeus Say About the Four Gospels?

That there could not be more or fewer than four, because there are four zones of the world and four principal winds.

He develops it further with the four living creatures and the four covenants. It is symbolic reasoning of a kind that persuades nobody now, and it is the passage skeptics reach for when they want to show that the number four was arbitrary and mystical.

Taken as an argument for why the number should be four, it fails. That much should be conceded without flinching.

Was Irenaeus Inventing the Number Four?

No, and this is where the passage is usually misread.

Look at what he is doing. He is writing around AD 180 against Marcion, who had cut the Gospels down to one, and against Valentinians using books of their own. His opponents are the ones proposing a different number. He is defending the number the churches already used.

By his time the four Gospels were very likely being bound together in single codices. He is not surveying available material and selecting four. He is explaining why the arrangement he inherited is fitting.

That reverses the usual reading. The collection comes first and the winds come afterward. Irenaeus is rationalising an established fact, not deriving a fact from cosmology.

It is worth saying plainly that this is a criticism of a church father made by the same method this site applies to everything else. Stripping the later lens off a text means doing it to the people on your own side too, and saying so is what makes the rest of the argument credible.

What Is the Muratorian Fragment?

A damaged Latin manuscript containing the earliest surviving orthodox list of Christian books.

It names four Gospels, though the opening is lost and only the entries for Luke and John survive intact. It covers Acts, the letters of Paul, and several others, and it comments on which books are read publicly and which are not. It rejects some works by name, including a letter to the Laodiceans it says was forged in Paul’s name to serve Marcion’s teaching.

It also gives the judgment on the Shepherd of Hermas: worth reading, but not to be counted among the prophets or the apostles. That distinction, between useful and canonical, is one the fragment is making explicitly.

How Old Is the Muratorian Fragment?

Between roughly 170 and 200 on the majority view, and there is a real minority arguing for the fourth century.

The dating rule matters enough to state as a rule. Never cite this document with a flat date. The majority position places it in the late second century, which would mean the churches were listing their books within a generation of Marcion. A minority position, associated with Sundberg and later Hahneman, argues for a fourth-century eastern origin.

The stakes are large. On the majority dating, an orthodox list exists within about forty years of Marcion’s challenge and the response was rapid. On the minority dating, the earliest orthodox list moves two centuries later and the whole shape of the argument changes.

The honest move is to show the reader that the dispute exists and what turns on it, rather than picking silently and presenting a date as settled. Most treatments do the second, and a reader who later discovers the debate has reason to distrust everything else they were told.

Why Not More Gospels or Fewer?

Because of what the churches were already using, and the criteria they applied afterward.

The four were in use across a wide geography very early, they had connections to the apostolic generation, and they were consistent with the teaching the churches recognised as their own. The alternatives generally failed on date, on geography, or on content, and usually on more than one.

That is a less satisfying answer than the winds, and it is the actual one. The number four is not a theological principle. It is a description of what survived the churches’ use, and Irenaeus reached for cosmology because he was defending it against people who wanted a different number for reasons of their own.

Does the Weakness of the Argument Undermine the Result?

No, and the distinction is one worth being able to make.

An argument can be bad while its conclusion is well founded on other grounds. Irenaeus gave a poor reason for something the evidence supports independently, which happens constantly and is not evidence against the thing itself.

What it does mean is that the four winds should not be repeated as though it were a reason. It is a second-century bishop’s attempt to make a settled arrangement look inevitable, and the arrangement was settled by use rather than by symmetry.

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

Sources

Irenaeus, Five Books of S. Irenaeus Against Heresies, trans. John Keble (Oxford: James Parker, 1872), 3.11.8. The four-winds argument. In my Logos library.

The Muratorian Fragment. The earliest surviving orthodox list. Widely available in translation.

Albert C. Sundberg and Geoffrey Mark Hahneman are the principal advocates of the fourth-century dating of the fragment. Their case is cited here as a named minority position rather than adopted.

Where the sourcing stops: the reading of Irenaeus as defending an existing collection rather than creating one is a common scholarly view. The judgment that showing readers a dating dispute is better practice than silently picking a side is my own editorial position.

Footnotes

1. The Muratorian dating dispute is a good test of how a source is being handled. A treatment that gives a flat date of around 180 with no qualification is either unaware of the debate or has decided the reader should not know about it. Neither is a good sign about the rest of the treatment.
2. The fragment’s distinction between books worth reading and books to be counted among the prophets and apostles is one of the clearest early statements that the category of useful Christian writing was wider than the category of Scripture. That distinction is the whole reason the Apostolic Fathers were preserved without being canonised.