24. The New Testament Canon
24. The New Testament Canon
INTRODUCTION
Etymologically, κανών (kanon, "canon”, G2834) is a Semitic loanword that originally meant "reed” but came to mean "measuring reed” and hence "rule” or "standard” or "norm.” In the course of time it came to have the purely formal sense of "list” or "table.” In ecclesiastical usage during the first three centuries, it referred to the normative doctrinal and ethical content of Christian faith. By the fourth century it came to refer to the list of books that constitute the Old and New Testaments. 1It is this latter sense that predominates today: the "canon” has come to refer to the closed collection of documents that constitute authoritative Scripture.
The first Christians, of course, possessed no New Testament canon; they relied on the gospel that was being preached by the apostles and others, and on the books in what we now call the Old Testament canon. The historical question of the New Testament canon, then, is how the twenty-seven books that make up our New
Testament came to be recognized as authoritative and distinctive from other literature. The answer depends on careful reading of the Fathers. This was done in a cursory way in the previous chapters, as the account of how each New Testament book was adopted into the canon was briefly related, and major studies put this material together and treat it in some detail. 2 But the theological questions relating to the canon are in many ways more important, and certainly more disputed. What is the relation between canon and authority? Which comes first, a book’s canonical status or its functional authority? What is the relationship between the authority of the text and the authority of the ecclesiastical body that recognizes (some would say "confers”) its canonical status? Are the reasons (as opposed to the conclusions) adopted by the early church regarding the contours of the canon binding on us today? If not, are the conclusions themselves in jeopardy? In what follows, there is no attempt at rigorous treatment of any of the subjects introduced; we present only the briefest survey of some of the most important points in the contemporary debate, and some indication of the directions in which the evidence takes us.