As It Is Written . . .
The Second Generation
by Patrick Henry Reardon
The canonical Gospels come to us from the second generation of the Church. The turning point, it appears, was in the mid-60s—the time of Nero's persecution—when Mark transformed the proclaimed Gospel (kerygma) of the first Christian generation into a written narrative for all the subsequent generations.
Our earliest half-dozen witnesses to Mark's work call him "Peter's interpreter" and explicitly tie his composition to Peter's martyrdom. Mark, that is to say, recognized that the apostolic generation was starting to disappear, and he composed his Gospel with a view to preserving an inheritance for all future generations of the Faith.
Over the next few decades, the same concern prompted the other Evangelists—including, I would argue, two of the original Apostles—to inscribe what they knew and remembered of Jesus, for the sake of those who, through their witness, would become believers (John 17:20; 20:29; 1 Peter 1:8).
This preoccupation, a distinctive feature of the emerging second generation, is arguably clearest in Luke, the writer commonly recognized as the Church's first "historian." Early in his Gospel, Luke includes a significant but easily overlooked detail; he records that the mother of Jesus, in response to the greeting of Elizabeth, proclaimed, "all generations will call me blessed." That early in his story, Luke looks out to the coming "generations" of Christians.
"Delivered One Time"
The difference between the first and the second generation of the Christian Church, however, is not reducible to a simple transcription of the "preached" Gospel into four literary works. Prior to, and more basic than, the Gospels was a developing sense of the unique canonical authority of the Church's first generation—the period of the original witnesses, those who had seen and heard the Word of life, what their eyes had beheld, and their hands had handled.
With the passing of those men, there matured a conviction that everything essential was now in place; the Faith itself was henceforth to be maintained as hapax paradothese, "delivered one-time" (Jude 3). The Apostolic period was anointed and sacred, and it was the vocation of the second generation to preserve—indeed, to enshrine—that authority.
But, in doing this, the second generation made itself unique, as well. Ironically, there was in their work, too, something likewise hapax, "once and for all." The second generation not only received the Faith as a bequest; they bestowed on it a new texture and artistic form, which would shape the transmission and expression of the Apostolic inheritance.
The Founder of the Church told stories. Now, with the written Gospels, the Church was equipped to tell his story.
In this unique work of the Church's second generation, we perceive an instance of what José Ortega y Gasset declared about the creative challenge of every inheritance fit to survive. "Life for each generation," he wrote, "is a task in two dimensions, one of which consists in the reception, through the agency of the previous generation, of what has had life already . . . while the other is the liberation of the creative genius inherent in the generation concerned."
New Sources of Authority
Peter and the other Apostles, when they proclaimed the Gospel, held in their hands no other texts than the Hebrew Scriptures. It was a mark of the Church's second generation that they had in hand, as well, new and written sources of authority.
These Four Gospels quickly became the standard of Apostolic truth. From that time on, these literary compositions, each organized as a story, formed an important component of the Church's structure. We correctly regard the Gospels as growing organically from her essence.
It is no slight to their uniqueness, nonetheless, if we note that, as a matter of history, the Gospels sprang of a prior Apostolic impulse to write. This scribal impulse was manifest very early. We detect it not much more than a dozen years before Mark, when Paul, during his second missionary journey, exhorted the new Macedonian converts to "stand fast and hold the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our letter" (2 Thes. 2:15).
Over the next decade or so, other letters—by Paul, James, Peter, Jude, and, a bit later, John—were carried by messengers from church to church, where they were read and copied and reread. Pretty quickly, too, they were gathered into collections. Shortly before Mark wrote down the Gospel that Peter preached, Peter himself included Paul's own epistles among the "Scriptures" (2 Pet. 3:15–16). This is arguably our first hint that the Church would soon have a new testament.
Patrick Henry Reardon is pastor emeritus of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, Illinois, and the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Out of Step with God: Orthodox Christian Reflections on the Book of Numbers (Ancient Faith Publishing, 2019).
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