B. H. Streeter’s Four Gospels at One Hundred

This year, 2024, marks an important centennial for the study of the New Testament text. In 1924, the Oxford scholar Burnett Hillman Streeter published his important book, The Four Gospels: A Study in Origins. Concerning this book Bishop Stephen Neill wrote,

In 1924 Streeter published a large book of over 600 pages, called The Four Gospels: A Study in Origins, a comprehensive gathering together of the results of the scientific study of The Gospels up till that time. That this is a great book, will not, I think, be doubted by anyone who has ever used it.¹Stephen Neill and Tom Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861–1986, New Edition. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 132.

A theory of Gospel origins

In this book Streeter laid out what became the primary theory of Synoptic Gospel origins: The four-source hypothesis. The four sources were (1) the Gospel of Mark; (2) a source of material common to Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark—referred to as Q, from the German Quelle (“source”); (3) M, which was material unique to Matthew; and (4) L, containing material only in Luke. Although there have been alternate views, such as Matthean priority, in the century since Streeter published this book, most scholars have followed some form of Streeter’s four-source hypothesis.

In the course of his treatment of Gospel origins, Streeter advanced several theories which have not fared well among scholars. One was the proposal of a document prior to our Gospel of Luke, which he called “Proto-Luke.” Another was the proposal of a Caesarean textual group or text type, based on several recent manuscript discoveries. Both of these proposals were subjected to careful analysis and have been largely abandoned. A third proposal, positing “local texts” of the great ecclesiastical jurisdictions or sees in the second century, has also been largely ignored by scholars. This brief review will focus on Streeter’s “local texts” in light of recent discoveries and refined research methods.

A theory of local texts of the Gospels

Streeter advanced a theory of “local texts” which developed in the great sees of the church in the second century. The five sees that developed their distinctive local texts, according to Streeter, were

1. Alexandria
2. Antioch
3. Caesarea
4. Italy and Gaul
5. Carthage

For each of these local texts Streeter gave as the primary witness one of the major manuscripts known to him in 1924. Thus for Alexandria he presented Codex Vaticanus (B), for Italy and Gaul Codex Bezae (D), for Carthage the Latin manuscript k, etc. Streeter also explored an “Ephesian text” for the period of the late second century. But that text was not included in his summary chart because no major manuscript could be found to represent that text.

What Streeter did not have when he wrote The Four Gospels in 1924 is the wealth of New Testament papyri which we now possess (some 141 at latest count). Several of these are assigned to the second century, the era of the great sees of which Streeter wrote. Although some of these papyri are fragmentary, there are several larger papyri such as P46 (Pauline Epistles) P66 (John) and P75 (Luke and John). These three papyri, dated to around the year 200 have been very important for textual criticism in considering the early text of the New Testament. But it is important to be clear about how secure their dating is.²See Brent Nongbri, God’s library: The Archeology of the early Christian Manuscripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). For challenges to traditional dating of early papyri. It also must be remembered that, although the early papyri were all found in Egypt, it does not follow that any one of them originated there.³Eldon Jay Epp, Perspectives in New Testament Textual Criticism: Collected Essays, 1962–2004 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 408, 419.

What follows is a comparison of two churches in the late second century, and a proposal about their “local texts,” based on recent research on these two churches.

A tale of two churches

Alexandria

Egypt was “behindhand in welcoming Christianity,” Streeter wrote in the book. That cryptic remark has been confirmed by subsequent study of the subject. In his landmark work entitled Manuscript, Society and Belief in Early Christian Egypt, Colin Roberts wrote,

The obscurity that veils the early history of the Church in Egypt and that does not lift until the beginning of the third century constitutes a conspicuous challenge to the historian of primitive Christianity.⁴Colin H. Roberts, Manuscript, Society and Belief in Early Christian Egypt: The Schweich Lectures of the British Academy for 1977 (London: Oxford University Press, 1979), 1. So also Bruce M. Metzger, The Early Versions of the New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 99 who writes, “The origins of the church in Egypt are enveloped in deep obscurity.”

More recently, noted papyrologist Roger Bagnall has pointed out that the evidence for Christianity in Egypt is non-existent in the documentary papyri until the beginning of the third century AD.⁵Roger S. Bagnall, Early Christian Books in Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 8.

The obscurity of the church in second century Egypt is best explained by the observation that the early Christian community there was largely Jewish. We know that the Jewish community in Egypt did not fare well under the Romans. Especially the Jewish revolt from AD 115–117 led to much death and destruction and had long lasting effects.⁶For an account of the Jewish revolt and its aftermath see Victor A. Techerikover and Alexander Fuks, Corpus Papyrorum Judicarum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), vol. 2, 225–60. And recently, Noah Hacham, Tal Ilan (eds.). Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum Volume 5: The Early Roman Period (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg; Jerusalem: Magnes Hebrew University Press, 2022).

But toward the end of the second century the fortunes of the church in Egypt began to change. The founding of the Alexandrian Catechetical school under Pantaenus and Clement, and the long episcopate of Demetrius (AD 192–232) transformed a small and struggling church into the leading intellectual center of the third century church. Now it was a church capable of producing carefully copied texts, and faithfully preserving the New Testament.

Ephesus

The church in Ephesus had almost the opposite career. With regard to this church and its local text, we may begin by quoting the important observations made by Paul Treblico. In his significant study, he writes that Ephesus was

the capital of the province of Asia and the leading city of Asia Minor, where the church grew very rapidly. There is no doubting the importance of the Church in Asia Minor in the first two centuries. Paul spent a considerable period of time in Asia Minor, and Luke devotes a significant amount of Acts to Paul’s travels in this region. That the early Church grew very quickly in Asia Minor is shown by the number of centers in which, according to our evidence, the early church became established by the end of the second century… In the aftermath of the fall of Jerusalem following the first Jewish revolt of AD 66–73 Anatolia had become perhaps the most important geographical center of Christianity in the ancient world.

But before the end of the second century, things began to change, and Ephesus would lose its prominence. Perhaps the most important factor was the the debate over the date of Easter known as the Quartodeciman controversy. The long standing tradition in Asia was to celebrate Easter on the fourteenth Nisan, the day of the Passover, whatever day of the week it fell. The church of Rome saw the matter differently and believed that Easter must always be celebrated on a Sunday.

For a long time, the churches agreed to disagree and respect each other’s tradition. But when the tolerant and pastoral Eleutherus, Bishop of Rome, died in AD 189, he was replaced by Victor, a north African who insisted that all churches celebrate the great feast on a Sunday. Polycrates, the Bishop of Ephesus, wrote to Victor pleading for toleration. Victor replied by insisting on the Roman way and excommunicating Ephesus and the Asian churches. From AD 190 onward, Asia in general, and Ephesus in particular, seems to have lost its premier position. We do not find in the third-century Asian church the strong cast of leaders such as one finds in the second century: Papias of Hierapolis, Polycarp of Smyrna, Melito of Sardis, Apollinaris of Hierapolis, Polycrates of Ephesus, and others.

To his credit, Streeter knew that such an important local church in Asia, with its great see at Ephesus, must have had its own distinctive local text. He therefore sets out to discover “the text of Ephesus” on the basis of the available evidence. His conclusion was that the evidence was far too scanty to draw any definite conclusions. Further he remarked that text of Ephesus would have succumbed at an early date to the standard text found in the two dominant patriarchates, Antioch and Constantinople so that it “was swamped at an early date and has left no trace on the manuscript tradition.”

This comparative study of two second-century churches presents us with an anomaly. In Egypt, we find several early and carefully copied New Testament papyri, but we also find the profile of a small and struggling church hardly capable of producing strict and careful manuscripts. On the other hand, the church in Asia/Ephesus was well developed with strong leadership but has left us no trace of its local text. What do we make of this tale of two churches?

A home for a homeless text

In 1881, B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort published their influential edition of the Greek New Testament. This critical edition dominated the landscape in New Testament studies for decades thereafter. A distinctive feature of Hort’s rationale in the introduction to their New Testament is his proposal of the “neutral text.” This was the text of Codex Vaticanus (B) and Codex Sinaiticus (א) where they agree. Concerning Hort’s “neutral text” Streeter wrote, “Hort declined to recognize any connection of B א with Alexandria … and assigned it to no definite locality.”

Hort’s neutral text was homeless and needed a home. Most scholars of the text in the generations following the publication of the Westcott-Hort text assigned that text to Alexandria, and Streeter followed suit. It remains exactly there in twenty-first-century presentations of how the New Testament text developed.⁷Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament, 312–313.

However, in light of the history sketched briefly above, it seems unlikely that the “neutral text” began its life in Alexandria.⁸I have recently argued that the “Alexandrian text” did not originate there but came originally from Ephesus. See Peter R. Rodgers, “The Origins of the Alexandrian Text of the New Testament,” Filologia Neotestamentaria, XXXV (2022), 61–65. The chief city of Asia, with its strong church of the second century, provides an appropriate home for the “neutral text.” Toward the end of the century, when the church of Ephesus began to struggle and the church in Alexandria was gaining strength, that text migrated to the place that was to become the intellectual capital of the whole church from the third century. The neutral text was given new life in its new home.

So, what is the final analysis of Streeter’s important work a century later? Streeter was Dean Ireland’s Professor of Biblical Exegesis in Oxford, where he did most of his work. It’s a place Matthew Arnold famously called “the home of lost causes.” And while this may sometimes be the case, for the reasons stated above, a fresh pursuit of the local texts of the great sees in the second century, far from being a lost cause, may turn out to be a very promising and fruitful exercise. Perhaps the century after Streeter will finally answer the question.

A larger version of this paper may be found in Filologia Neotestamentaria, 37 (2024): 65–74 which is online here.

Notes

• 1
  Stephen Neill and Tom Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861–1986, New Edition. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 132.
• 2
  See Brent Nongbri, God’s library: The Archeology of the early Christian Manuscripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). For challenges to traditional dating of early papyri.
• 3
  Eldon Jay Epp, Perspectives in New Testament Textual Criticism: Collected Essays, 1962–2004 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 408, 419.
• 4
  Colin H. Roberts, Manuscript, Society and Belief in Early Christian Egypt: The Schweich Lectures of the British Academy for 1977 (London: Oxford University Press, 1979), 1. So also Bruce M. Metzger, The Early Versions of the New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 99 who writes, “The origins of the church in Egypt are enveloped in deep obscurity.”
• 5
  Roger S. Bagnall, Early Christian Books in Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 8.
• 6
  For an account of the Jewish revolt and its aftermath see Victor A. Techerikover and Alexander Fuks, Corpus Papyrorum Judicarum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), vol. 2, 225–60. And recently, Noah Hacham, Tal Ilan (eds.). Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum Volume 5: The Early Roman Period (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg; Jerusalem: Magnes Hebrew University Press, 2022).
• 7
  Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament, 312–313.
• 8
  I have recently argued that the “Alexandrian text” did not originate there but came originally from Ephesus. See Peter R. Rodgers, “The Origins of the Alexandrian Text of the New Testament,” Filologia Neotestamentaria, XXXV (2022), 61–65.

Peter R. Rodgers

Peter (BLitt, Oxford University) taught for many years at Fuller Theological Seminary, Sacramento campus, and is Rector Emeritus of St. John’s Episcopal Church, New Haven, CT. He is the author of Text and Story: Narrative Studies in New Testament Textual Criticism and several other works.