New Evidence the Apostles Rejected Sola Scriptura?

Anyone familiar with Protestant vs. Catholic polemics will be familiar with the sola scriptura debate. Protestants think that Scripture—the 66-book Protestant Bible—is the sole infallible rule of faith. Catholics reject that proposition. For starters, they think there are more books in the canon. But, more importantly, they think there are other infallible rules of faith, including Sacred Tradition.1

One question that comes up in this debate is whether the early church believed in sola scriptura. Protestants often have difficulty pointing to clear, explicit formulations of sola scriptura in the earliest centuries. I think an honest observer will say that the Catholics score a point in their favor from the relative absence of explicit affirmations of sola scriptura, together with the (apparently many) appeals to tradition.

But what if an early church father expressly rejected sola scriptura? What if, moreover, this father was a student of the apostles? And, still more, what if this apostolic pupil was entrusted with an episcopal office and was friends with the likes of Polycarp? All that would, I should think, be bad news for the Protestant view.

And yet, there is apparently one example of a father of that description that I have not seen others bring up.2

Some time ago, I took up the hobby of reading as much of early Christian literature that I could get my hands on. So I picked up a translation of the apostolic fathers—the earliest Christian writers outside the New Testament. If you do the same (and you should), you will, I think, be surprised by how much we have from the period immediately following the apostles. If you finish the corpus, you will wish we had more.

I was reading Ignatius’s letters for my own edification as part of my hobby, not to find anything in particular about sola scriptura. For those who don’t know, Ignatius was the second bishop of Antioch after Peter. He knew the apostle John. He was friends with the great Christian martyr, Polycarp, sometime bishop of Smyrna. And he himself, around the year of our Lord 107, went on to his reward after the Romans fed him to wild beasts in the Colosseum. Before he suffered there, Ignatius wrote seven letters—six to churches and one to Polycarp. We are very lucky indeed to have them.

Across his letters, Ignatius is very anxious about different heresies that emerged around the turn of the second century. He was worried, for example, about docetism—the view that our Lord was not really a physical human being. (By the way, he denounced that heresy in language that sounds very Catholic.3)

He was also, apparently, anxious about what I will call proto-sola scriptura. As I was reading his letter to the Philadelphians, I came across the following passage, which struck me as rejecting something like the modern Protestant position:

Moreover, I urge you to do nothing in a spirit of contentiousness, but in accordance with the teaching of Christ. For I heard some people say, “If I do not find it in the archives,4 I do not believe it in the gospel.” And when I said to them, “It is written,” they answered me, “That is precisely the question.” But for me, the “archives” are Jesus Christ, the unalterable archives are his cross and death and his resurrection and the faith that comes through him; by these things I want, through your prayers, to be justified.5

As I read them, the proto-Protestantism in these few lines leapt from the page. Here’s what I think Ignatius was getting at. As the bishop of Antioch, Ignatius would exercise his office by teaching. In response, some people—the proto-Protestants—objected: “If it’s not in the Bible [as it were], then it’s not in the gospel.” (Sound familiar?) Ignatius responded by saying that it is written. But he went on: The Scriptures, in their fullest sense, are not just the written word, but the living faith that comes down to us from our Lord.

This passage suggests that Ignatius did not share a view in which written texts alone function as the decisive criterion of belief. At minimum, his understanding of authority is less textually bounded than what later came to be articulated as sola scriptura.