The Formation Of The New Testament Canon
THE FORMATION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON
If we think of the New Testament canon as a "closed” list of recognized books, the principal turning points are well known and not largely in dispute. The first such closed list to come down to us is that of Marcion. Heavily influenced by Syrian dualism, he rejected the entire Old Testament and accepted only one gospel—a highly edited edition of Luke—plus his edition of ten letters of Paul, excluding the Pastorals. But although Marcion’s list is the first, it is going too far to say that the very idea of a Christian Bible is the work of Marcion. '’Paul’s letters were already circulating in collected form, and probably the four canonical gospels as well. More important, the idea of New Testament Scripture, certainly well established in the first part of the second century, presupposes some sort of canonical limit sooner or later.
Undoubtedly the work of Marcion and of other heretics spurred the church to publish more comprehensive and less idiosyncratic lists. In the same vein, the Montanist movement, which sought to elevate the voice of prophecy to a level of supreme authority in the church—a level it did not enjoy even in Paul’s day (1 Cor. 14:37-38)— also served to force the church to make public decisions as to the standard of orthodoxy. By the end of the second century, the Muratorian list, though virtually valueless as a guide to the origin of the New Testament books to which it refers, reflects the view of the great church in recognizing a New Testament canon not very different from our own. The list is fragmentary, so that Matthew and Mark do not appear, but doubtless they are presupposed, since Luke is referred to as the third gospel, and John as the fourth. Luke is also recognized to be the author of "the acts of all the apostles.” Thirteen letters are recognized as authentically Pauline. The list excludes an Epistle to the Laodiceans and another to the Alexandrians (which some take to be Hebrews). Two Johannine epistles and Jude are accepted. The apocalypses ascribed to John and to Peter are both accepted, but the list admits that there was some opposition to the public reading of the latter work. The Shepherd of Hermas is accepted for private but not for public reading, on the grounds of its being such a recent compostion. Gnostic, Marcionite, and Montanist writings are all rejected; a rather odd passage recognizes the Wisdom of Solomon to be canonical.
The pattern by which this or that Father cites the various New Testament books as Scripture has been lightly surveyed throughout this Introduction ; but such a pattern does not itself establish when the New Testament canon as a closed list of books was recognized. For this, the most important source is probably Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 260-340), whose views were largely indebted to the Alexandrian fathers Clement and Origen. In discussing the New Testament canon, Eusebius deploys a tripartite classification: the recognized books (homologoumena), the disputed books (antilegomena), and the books put forward by heretics in the name of the apostles but rejected by those Eusebius regards as orthodox. In the first category, Eusebius includes the four gospels, Acts, fourteen Pauline epistles (Eusebius includes Hebrews, though he is aware that the church in Rome did not hold Hebrews to be Pauline), 1 Peter, 1 John, and, apparently (though with some reservation) the Apocalypse. The disputed books Eusebius subdivides into those generally accepted (James, Jude, 2 Peter, and 2 and 3 John) and those that are not genuine (Acts of Paul, Shepherd of Hermas, Apocalypse of Peter, Epistle of Barnabas, the Didache, and, perhaps, the Apocalypse). 16 The third category, embracing clearly heretical writings, includes gospels such as those of Peter and Thomas, acts of Andrew and John, and similar writings (H.E. 3.25).
In other words, the four gospels, Acts, the thirteen Paulines, 1 Peter, and 1 John are universally accepted very early; most of the remaining contours of the New Testament canon are already established by the time of Eusebius. The Cheltenham manuscript, thought to represent North African views c. A.D. 360, includes all the New Testament books except Hebrews, James, and Jude. The first list that includes all and only the twenty-seven books of our New Testament is that of the Easter Letter by Athanasius in 367—clearly prescriptive rather than descriptive for the Alexandrian church. The sixtieth canon of the Council of Laodicea (c. 363) includes all twenty-seven books except the Apocalypse, but the manuscript evidence suggests this canon may have been a later addition (though in all probability still fourth century). 17 The Third Council of Carthage (397), attended by Augustine, recognized the twenty-seven New Testament books, and thereafter in the West there was little deviation from that stance.
The Eastern church, at least as represented by the Syriac (Peshitta), omitted 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and the Apocalypse, a pattern followed by the native (as opposed to the Greek-speaking) Syrian church today. Still, it is important to recognize that not a few Fathers from the Eastern church recognized exactly those twenty-seven books that constitute our canon today. 18 At the other extreme, the Ethiopian church recognizes not only the standard twenty-seven books but adds eight others, mostly dealing with church order. 19 Nevertheless, Dunbar is right to conclude:
Yet it is fair to say that wherever Christians in particular localities have been concerned to know the extent of the New Testament and have searched for this knowledge in a spirit of open communication with the larger church, unanimity of opinion has generally been the result. So it is significant that the reopening of the questions of canon by the leaders of the Protestant Reformation led to a narrowing of the Old Testament canon over against Roman Catholic usage but effected no similar change in the extent of the New Testament canon. 20
Indeed, it is important to observe that although there was no ecclesiastical machinery like the medieval papacy to enforce decisions, nevertheless the worldwide church almost universally came to accept the same twenty-seven books. It was not so much that the church selected the canon as that the canon selected itself. This point has frequently been made, and deserves repeating.
The fact that substantially the whole church came to recognize the same twenty-seven books as canonical is remarkable when it is remembered that the result was not contrived. All that the several churches throughout the Empire could do was to witness to their own experience with the documents and share whatever knowledge they might have about their origin and character. When consideration is given to the diversity in cultural backgrounds and in orientation to the essentials of the Christian faith within the churches, their common agreement about which books belonged to the New Testament serves to suggest that this final decision did not originate solely at the human level. 21
Whatever the pressures that encouraged the church to issue canonical lists— including persecution, distance from the historical Jesus, the pressure of Montanism, the rise of Gnosticism and other movements with scriptures to be rejected—the criteria used by the church in discussions as to what books were canonical were primarily three: 22
1. One basic requirement for canonicity was conformity to the "rule of faith” (o κανών τής πιστεώς [ho kanon tes pisteos];, from κανών + πιστις, G2834 + G4411, in Latin, regula fidei), conformity between the document and orthodoxy, that is, Christian truth recognized as normative in the churches. Although many scholars have denied that any clear distinction was made between "orthodoxy” and "heresy” in subapostolic times, let alone in the New Testament, it is hard not to detect the roots of the distinction in passages such as Galatians 1:8-9, Colossians 2:8ff., 1 Timothy 6:3ff. and 1 and 2 John. And already in Ignatius there is considerable concern to distinguish the true from the false. This concern rapidly increased with time.
2. Perhaps the most commonly mentioned criterion in the Fathers is apostolicity, which as a criterion came to include those who were in immediate contact with the
apostles. Thus, Mark’s gospel was understood to be tied to Peter; Luke was tied to Paul. When the Muratorian Fragment rejects the Shepherd of Hermas for public reading, it does so on the ground that it was too recent and therefore cannot find a place "among the prophets, whose number is complete, or among the apostles” ("the prophets” here refers to the Old Testament books, and "the apostles” to the New). For the same reason, wherever the Fathers suspect pseudonymity, they reject the work.
Thus, as we have seen (chap. 15), the New Testament itself betrays principled rejection of pseudonymous letters (esp. 2 Thess. 2:2; 3:17); now we observe that the Fathers universally reject pseudonymity as an acceptable literary category for documents bearing the authority of Scripture. This leaves very little space for the common modern assertion that pseudonymity was a widely acceptable practice in the ancient world. That pseudonymous apocalypses were widespread is demonstrable; that pseudonymous letters were widespread is entirely unsupported by evidence; that any pseudonymity was knowingly accepted into the New Testament canon is denied by the evidence. 23
3. Scarcely less important a criterion is a document’s widespread and continuous acceptance and usage by churches everywhere. Thus Jerome insists it does not matter who wrote Hebrews, for in any case it is the work of a "church-writer” (ecclesiastici viri, by which Jerome probably means someone writing in conformity with the truth taught in the churches, a variation of the first criterion) and is in any case constantly read in the churches (Epist. 129). If the Latin churches were slow to accept Hebrews and the Greek churches were slow to accept the Apocalypse, Jerome accepts both, in part because many ancient writers had accepted both of them as canonical. 24