I do not believe that there is any hard evidence that even the earliest Gnostic "gospels" (those of "Peter" and "Thomas") predated the canonical Gospels -- or at least the first three. There is furthermore no evidence in Christian tradition or really any internal evidence that the writing of those first three Gospels happened as a reaction to the writing of Gnostic gospels.
Modern scholars such as Elaine Pagels, who are very hostile to traditional Christianity, are categorical in stating that Gnosticism came first, and then big bad orthodox Christianity with its hierarchical structure and patriarchal attitudes came along and ruined it all. I think that the anti-Christian partisan nature of such theories is fairly obvious, and we should be careful about accepting such things as the "Gospel truth" (forgive the pun.)
There is certainly some internal evidence that the Gospel of St. John was in part written specifically to refute the claims of docetism, an early form of Gnosticism, but the tradition of the Church is clear that the main thing that St. John was doing was conveying many events and teachings from the life of Christ that were not included in the first three Gospels. As the last of the Apostles, he was in a position to "fill in the blanks" for the Church before he died. In addition, he was placing the life of Christ into a more specifically theological context in the sense of knowing God -- hence us calling him St. John the Theologian in the Orthodox Church. And much of that theology can only be thought of as a reaction to Gnosticism by stretching things.
A very strong case has been made that St. Matthew and St. Luke wrote their Gospels primarily for the simple purpose of catechesis. The need for such catechesis would have been very early in the life of the Church, especially as the Church grew beyond the ability of those who had personally seen and heard Christ to visit all of the Christian communities. Such catechesis would also have been necessary whether or not there was heresy in the Church, and that need would have predated the rise of Gnosticism. Converts would be coming from paganism, Judaism, etc... and would need to be taught the faith.
Fr. John Romanides has written about this writing of the Gospels as catechesis both in terms of the inner traditions of the Orthodox Church and in terms of how those Gospels (especially those of Sts. Matthew and Luke) are structured in a literary sense -- a parallelism that contrasts over and over the things of sin, death and the devil against the things of God.
It is interesting that in his writings to his spiritual children, St. Ignaty (Brianchaninov) stressed that the two most important books of the Bible to know intimately first are the Gospels of Sts. Matthew and Luke. They are certainly the Gospels that are most heavily emphasized in the Sunday lectionary of the Church. All of this reflects a residual memory of the primacy of these two Gospels as basic catechesis.
Another very obvious reasons for the Gospels to be written was to have writings to be read liturgically at public worship. The ancient tradition of the synagogue was built around readings of the Scriptures, and it was inevitable that Christians would want to have the words of Christ read to them as a part of their worship.
The very writing of these four Gospels plus the book of Acts is seen by some as a self-conscious creation of a Christian Pentateuch. I recently was told, although I have not found any back-up for it, that recent archaeology discovered a portrayal of the Hebrew Pentateuch and the Christian Pentateuch side by side, so whether or not it was specifically designed as such, there may have been those who saw the parallels very early on.
Likewise, the Epistles were written certainly in part to correct errors, but they are a great variety of errors -- Judaizing, paganism, and just plain sinfulness. The need for these books would have been clear regardless of any specific heresy such as Gnosticism, since we are fallen. But even in the Epistles, there is a lot of teaching and exhorting that has nothing to do with correcting error. I certainly don't see a whole lot in the Epistles that are a reaction against Gnosticism.
Regarding St. Ignatius of Antioch, there are numerous places in his letters where he seems to quote the New Testament, so I don't think that one can categorically state that the New Testament was unknown to him. It is certainly possible that his words are simply drawing on the same oral tradition that the New Testament writers drew on, but unless one wants, again, to claim that the New Testament wasn't written by the Apostles (contradicting the Church's tradition), it would be at least as likely that he was quoting the New Testament. There is certainly no compelling reason to believe that none of the NT writings were known to him.
One interesting thing that does arise from looking at St. Ignatius is that the Gospel that he seems to quote is that of Matthew. If Mark had been the first Gospel written as modern scholars claim (as opposed to the Church's tradition), one would expect otherwise -- especially since St. Ignatius was heir to the Petrine see of Antioch.
As a final side-note, there are actually some fairly interesting theories that Gnosticism did have some subtle after-the-fact influences on the text of the New Testament in its Alexandrian text-type. The Alexandrian text-type whose handful of manuscripts primarily underlie the modern critical texts on which all modern translations are based has readings that can, according to some, be read in a Gnostic way -- whereas the Byzantine text-type of those same readings are not at all Gnostic-friendly. None of this is provable, but it certainly adds additional reasons to be cautious regarding the Alexandrian text-type. The links between residual Gnosticism and the later Monophysitism that came to capture Egypt seem, to me, to be fairly clear, which I also find interesting in this regard.
I can certainly understand a measure of zeal in attempting to convince our Protestant brothers of the self-evident fact that the Church and its oral tradition predated the writing down of the New Testament Scriptures, and that thus the understanding of what those Scriptures meant and didn't mean was shaped from the beginning by this Apostolic tradition.
But to swallow the idea that our New Testament Scriptures were written only to react to Gnostic writings seems to me to be "a bridge too far." Likewise, assigning dates of composition to these Gospels beyond the 1st century is not at all in line with our Church's tradition. Dating them much beyond the early 2nd century doesn't even jibe with most scholarly opinions.
Kosta: Again, the Church did not compile the New Testament so that the Reformed may discover the "true" church 15,000 [should have been 1,500] years later, but because of some 200 false Gnostic "gospels" launched by Satan and his demons
FK: So it was the Church that decided to create the New Testament, and it was because of the Gnostics? Seeing as how you don't mention God at all in the creation of the NT, I guess we really have the Gnostics to thank for its creation. How did the Church get God to agree to inspire the Church's word?
Agrarian: I do not believe that there is any hard evidence that even the earliest Gnostic "gospels" (those of "Peter" and "Thomas") predated the canonical Gospels -- or at least the first three. There is furthermore no evidence in Christian tradition or really any internal evidence that the writing of those first three Gospels happened as a reaction to the writing of Gnostic gospels
Regrettably, the whole thing is taken out of context and twisted. Firt of all, I stated that the Church decided to "compile the New Testament..." for such and such a reason, to which FK suggests I said that the Church "decided to create the New Testament..." and Agrarian simply dismissed the New Testament and referred only to the four Gospels instead!
Wow! Compile, means to gather, to collect in an ordely fashion something that already exists. That is how I used the word. To FK (unintentionally I am sure), complile became "create" -- as in write, make something new which is a complete corruption of my statement, as was Agrarian's (likewise unintentional, I am sure) reference to only four Gospels.
The New Testament consists of 27 books, including the four Gospels, so to take my statement "to compile the New Testament" and twist it to mean to write only four Gospels is simply amazing -- and puzzling. There is also a genuine confusion as to what I was referring to with respect to Gnosticism, as well as some lack of understanding of the historical sequence of events that resulted in the book we now call the New Testament.
As for Elaine Pagles and her satanic group favoring Gnosticism, the fact remains that Gnosticism predates Christianity and has incorporated Christian themes in a number of false and misleading "gospels" and "espistles," staring in the latter half of the first century A.D. and peaking in the second secondy, when the Church, under +Ireanaeus launched a vigorous campaign to combat these ideas and make sure that none of the Gnostic writings find their way into Christianity.
All in all, there were some 200-plus "gospels" and "espitles" written and circulated at the end of the first and throughout the second century A.D. Many of them incorporated verses from the four Gospels and adopted the style and manner similar to, and confusing of genuine Christian texts such as 1 and 2 Peter, 1, 2 and 3 John, the Revelation of John, etc.
Gnostic "gospels" of Thomas, of Judas (mentioned by name by +Ireanaeus and recently discovered), the "gospel" of Peter (seen as supportive of docetism), the, "gospel" of the Hebrews, the "gospel" of Philip, the secret "gospel" of Mark, the Apocalypse of Peter, the "gospel" of Mary Magdalene, etc. composed in the mid 1st to mid 2nd centuries A.D. circulated together with genuine Christian Gospels, and Epistles.
The picture was actually made more complicated, and the work of the Church that much more difficult, with the appearances of various other works which were acceptable to the Church for one reason or another, but were never incorporated with the canonical works -- such as the Gospel of James (2nd century), which introduced the theme of the perpetual virginity of Theotokos (Mother of God), and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, and the so-called "harmony gospels."
These various works were single books, actually, scrolls, which were carried from city to city and read liturgically. No one had all of them neatly packaged into one neat bundle with reference marks and alphabetical index. There simple was no such thing as the New Testament book; only individual scrolls, and no one could for sure know which were genuine and which were not.
When Gnosticism and other heresies began to pop up towards the end of the first and throughout the second century A.D., the Church, with +Ireanaeus at the helm, began exposing these false writings for what they were, and at the same time the Church started collectively examining each known scroll (200-plus) with utmost attention to every word and doing everything to determine the Apostolic authorship with certainty and separating those from the rest.
The one scroll that gave the Church great deal of difficulty was the Revelation of John -- it was not accepted as inspired for over 200 years.
It took the Church fathers, each individually reading and sifting through available scrolls, about three hundred years to separate the genuine inspired works (23 of them in addition to the four Gospels), and reject almost 200 of them. When the Church was sure that the accepted scrolls were works of Apostolic origin, the Church compiled them into what we now know as the New Testament, thereby finalizing the Christian canon officially in 397 A.D. (end of the fourth century of Christianity) at the Council of Carthage. Actually, the complete listing of the current 27 books was done 30 years earlier by +Athanasius, but the "official" birth of the New Testament as we know it had to wait the aforementioned Council, when all bishops consented.
Agrarian's comment that +Ignatius knew the Gospels is correct. The Gospels, at least three of them, were well known (and accepted as inspired) by the end of the first century. It is interesting that +Polycarp (born around 80 AD), who was a disciple of "John," and martyred at the age of 87, never quotes from the Gospel of John, indicating that he did not know of this work supposedly written by the Apostle at the very end of the 1st century.
It was the 3rd c. bishop Eusebius (the first Church historian) who launched the idea that +Polycarp was a disciple of the Apostle John, but he was known for some interesting statements which cast a lot of doubt on his objectivity as a historian.
The point of this lengthy exposé was to clarify whence came the New Testament and why, and what role did God play in the creation of individual scrolls as opposed to what role the men of the Church played in collecting them into what all Christians including Protestants accept as part of the Bible. To say that the New Testament is simply something given to us by God, or to imply that the Church had nothing to do with it is false and misleading.
The most important point of all this is that the knowledge of what is genuine faith prior to having complete selection of canonical books had to be based on Church Tradition, based on oral and written Apostolic teachings for centuries before the New Testament saw the light of the day, and that the Church fathers were ultimately responsible for selectiong and compiling of the New Testament inspired writings.
Thus, I never implied nor stated that the genuine inspired works contained in the Christian Canon were written specifically to combat Gnosticism! I stated and do state that the process of compilation of genuine inspored works into what we know as the New Testament was driven by the existence of false and dangerous forgeries of faith, mostly Gnostic in origin, because there was no sure way of knowing which scrolls were liturgically true and which were nort.
The canonical books of the New Testament were written because they were inspired by God. However, these works found themselves surrounded by Gnostic works masquerading as "gospels" and "espistles." In response, the Church undertook a herculean task of separating Gnostic works from genuine inspired works in order to prevent corruption of faith, and decided to compile them into one body so that no other works would be read liturgically, and that all Christians would know which works are genuine and which are not.
I would like to ask those who comment on my posts to read each and every word of mine as to the meaning and to respond to that meaning and not to "extrapolate" other meanings.
If unsure as to why I am saying something that may seem hyperbolic or odd, I ask you to ask for an explanation before jumping to all sorts of conclusions. Sometimes out of eopcnomy and perhaps common knowledge, we resort to brevity, and make summary statements, because the body of knowledge behind it is simply too voluminous to post each and every time.
I think Kosta was referring to the Canonization of the NT Scriptures, not its original writing. There were a number of valuable writings that many local churches were content to read DURING the Liturgy that were later not accepted as part of the Canon. For example, the First Letter of Clement to the Corinthians was read by the Corinthian churches for over 150 years during the Mass. It was only later forces of Marcion and Gnosticism (opposing forces of contraction/expansion) that "forced" the Church to determine the contents of the Canon.
Regards
This also opens up an issue I have never thought of before. If it was man's decision to write and put together the Bible, and if the Bible is an inspired work, then were all the writings of the authors of the Bible inspired? It doesn't make sense to me that everything Paul EVER wrote since his conversion made its way into the Bible. Therefore, are there "lost" writings that really do belong in the Bible?