Now it may just be me but I was under the impression that the early Christians did not have a Bible to begin with and Tertullian is speaking about the Gospel, the message of Jesus passed down, and not the Gospels,MMLJ, that were written but not yet affirmed as part of the canon. The whole statement in the end is a little iffy. Even if we take the writer in reffering to “early Christians” as 100 years after Tertullian’s death we still don’t even have a formal declaration on the canon of Scripture. Didn’t this come about at the Council of Carthage in 357(date?)?
You have bought one of the silliest arguments in contemporary Catholic apologetics. Just because all the arguments about the limits of the canon hadn’t been settled doesn’t mean that they didn’t have a Bible. Early Christians used both the OT and NT liturgically, which is the primary function of the Bible. I’d say they had a Bible all right.
Besides, Spielvogel’s point isn’t really about the Bible vs. tradition but about Christian sources of knowledge vs. pagan ones.
The more valid critique is that Spielvogel is taking Tertullian as if he were representative of Christianity as a whole. I don’t have any of my copies in front of me, so I don’t remember if he mentions other strains in early Christianity or not, but I don’t think he does. He definitely has a bit of an anti-Christian bias (he focuses unduly on the negative aspects of the Middle Ages, for instance). I used Spielvogel when I taught Western Civilization at a state university. Initially I picked him because I was given ten minutes to choose a textbook (I was signed on at the last minute as an adjunct), and I liked the fact that he had lots of primary sources included in the text. I became rather fed up with his bias after a couple of semesters, but it’s not too bad (as in the case you cite, he doesn’t usually say things that are downright wrong, but he tends to make generalizations based on unfavorable examples) and the book is fairly good in other respects, so I kept using it because frankly I didn’t want the bother of switching. If I had continued to teach the class much longer I would have chosen a new textbook, though.
Remember that no textbook is perfect–they are all going to have some kind of bias and innacuracy.
As for Spielvogel’s degree in Reformation history–unfortunately Reformation studies tends to be bifurcated between those who focus on theology and those who focus on social and political history–or in the words of my advisor: “those who read Latin and those who count wax.” Spielvogel appears to be primarily a wax-counter, or more precisely a political historian (I think he wrote his dissertation on the aristocracy at Nuremberg during the Reformation years), although his doctoral advisor (Harold Grimm) worked with theological texts, so presumably he picked up a good deal of theology there. But he didn’t necessarily study patristic or medieval stuff that much. My former advisor (David Steinmetz) specializes in looking at the relationship of the Reformation to earlier Christianity, which is one of the reasons I chose to study with him. But many other Reformation scholars, especially those who work in history departments, may not pay a lot of attention to Christian theology outside their particular period.
In short, I would guess that Spielvogel has read a lot of Luther and other sixteenth-century texts but tends to focus primarily on the historical and social aspects of the Reformation. I certainly didn’t get the impression from using the textbook that he had a particularly profound understanding of Christian theology.
Edwin
