The Significance Of The New Testament Canon
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON
It must be admitted that this more or less traditional approach to the canon is in danger of giving a false impression, namely, that the church took inordinately long to recognize the authority of the documents that constitute the New Testament. This is entirely false. Discussion of the canon is discussion of a closed list of authoritative books. The books themselves were necessarily circulating much earlier, most of them recognized as authoritative throughout the church, and all of them recognized in large swaths of the church. 25 There was an authoritative message from the beginning. Already in his early preaching Jesus set himself up as an authority on a par with, and in some sense fulfilling, Old Testament Scriptures (Matt. 5:17-48, esp. vv. 21ff.). The revelation of the good news, the gospel of God’s dear Son, was so bound up with the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus that accounts of this "good news” came to be called gospels. This good news was passed on by apostles: in Acts 2, Luke insists that the believers who constituted the first church devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching. Already in 2 Corinthians 3:14, Paul writes of Jews reading the Scriptures of the old covenant. 26 By implication, a new covenant has dawned, the new covenant foretold by Jeremiah (esp. Jer. 31:31-34; cf. Heb. 8) and announced by Jesus in the words of institution on the night he was betrayed ("This cup is the new 27 covenant in my blood”). Implicitly, new covenant Scriptures are not far away. The epistle to the Hebrews begins by contrasting the former period of revelation with what has taken place "in these last days” in which God has revealed himself in his Son (Heb. 1:1-3). The locus and source of all authoritative new-covenant revelation rests, finally, in the Son. The apostles, in the narrower sense of that term, 28 were viewed as those who mediated such revelation to the rest of the church; but precisely because that revelation was tied to the Jesus who appeared in real history, an implicit closure was built into the claim. There could not be an unending stream of "revelations” about Jesus if those revelations were detaching themselves from the Jesus who presented himself in real history and who was confessed by the first eyewitnesses and apostles.
Thus there was both extraordinary authority and implicit closure from the very beginning. Extracanonical recognition of this pair comes as early as Ignatius. When he is challenged by some men (presumably Jews) who refuse to believe anything in the gospel that is not to be found in "our ancient records” (the Old Testament?), Ignatius responds, "But for my part, my records are Jesus Christ, for me the sacred records are his cross and death and resurrection and the faith that comes through him” (Phil. 8:2). Arguably, the genesis of the New Testament canon lies in the appeal to "gospel” and "apostle,” 29 with Jesus Christ himself ultimately standing behind both.
If, then, we pursue the question as to when and how the various New Testament books were read as authoritative witnesses to the gospel, instead of the question as to when and how the canon was closed, we are forced back, not to the closed lists prepared by Fathers who tend to be later, but to the use of the New Testament books (as compared with other sources) in the early Fathers. Then we discover that even most of the antilegomena are widely cited. Hebrews, for instance, is quoted extensively in 1 Clement (probably A.D. 90-110); James is attested in 1 Clement and Hermas (mid-second century). Indeed, even within the New Testament, an Old Testament passage and a gospel quotation can lie adjacent to each other and be introduced by "the Scripture says” (1 Tim. 5:18). Even if this gospel quotation is not from a written gospel, the passage is at least evidence that a teaching of the Lord Jesus enjoys the same authority status as Old Testament Scripture. In 2 Peter 3:16 the epistles of Paul are recognized as Scriptures.
Three other strands of evidence are important:
1. In the earliest stages of transmission, before efforts were made to provide written records (see Luke 1:1-4), the "tradition” was passed on orally. As has often been recognized, 30 "tradition” (παραδοσις [paradosis, G4142]) has no necessary negative overtones in the New Testament. For instance, in Paul traditions have bad overtones when they are simply human or are utterly divorced from the gospel (Gal. 1:14; Col. 2:8); they are to be cherished and tightly held when they are the gospel, as passed on by an accredited messenger (1 Cor. 11:2; 2 Thess. 2:15; 3:6).
2. But this does not mean that oral tradition was widely viewed as intrinsically superior to the written documents that soon began to circulate. The one passage that everyone cites to justify the perception that the oral tradition was more highly cherished is a statement of Papias reported by Eusebius (H.E. 3.39.4), which in Campenhausen’s translation reads, "That which comes from books seems to me not to be of such service as that which begins as living speech and remains so.” 31 It has been convincingly argued that Papias magnifies the importance of oral tradition for his commentary on the words of the Lord, not for the actual content of those words. 32 The slighting reference to books probably refers to the writings of heretics who at this point were doing what Papias was: commenting on the received words of the Lord, but from their own theological perspective. Papias’s response, in effect, is that he prefers to retain the traditional (oral) interpretations of the Lord’s words. After all, elsewhere Papias rushes to deny that there is any error in Mark’s gospel, even though that gospel is not a chronological presentation: surely this would be a strange maneuver if Papias disparaged all written records.
3. If we ask when and how the first collections of at least some of the New Testament books were made, the brief answer is that we do not know. We do know that by the middle of the second century at the latest, the four canonical gospels were being circulated together as the fourfold gospel "according to Matthew,” "according to Mark,” and so forth. Probably earlier still, the Pauline Epistles were in wide circulation. The process of circulating such materials was doubtless aided by the wide use that Christians made of the codex form of books. Until that time, valuable writings were normally published in scrolls; the adoption of the codex (more or less like modern books, with individual leaves sewn or glued on one edge) not only made the books more "user-friendly” but made it easier to publish several different books together in one volume. 33
That Paul wrote other letters that have not come down to us is certain (see 1 Cor. 5:9; Col. 4:16), but the principles of selection, and the party or parties that put together the collection, have not been identified in any of our sources. Nevertheless, on the basis of a number of carefully drawn inferences, it is entirely plausible to suppose that the collection was put together by Paul’s associates, such as Timothy, shortly after Paul’s martyrdom. 34
Finally, four contemporary approaches to the significance of the canon should be briefly noted.
1. Some (e.g., Koester) have argued that the notion of a canon should be abolished. There is no qualitative difference between the New Testament books and other early Christian literature, they say; whatever sources shed light on the early Christian movement should be treated the same way, so that James, say, should not be treated with more respect or as having more authority than, say, Clement of Rome.
Clearly, this view becomes plausible only if one rejects not only the notion of canon as a closed list of authoritative books but also the notion of Scripture. The view is also helped along by an easy willingness to abandon rather quickly the established heritage of the church, and especially by critical views that read several of the canonical books as late, pseudonymous writings, completed after a number of other early Christian sources that have come down to us.
2. There is at present a complex debate about the possibility of a "canon within the canon.” All of us tend to lean rather more heavily on some parts of the canon than on others—just as Luther and Calvin made much more of Romans and Galatians than, say, of 1 Peter or the Apocalypse. Why not therefore make a virtue of necessity and recognize that different groups have the freedom, perhaps even the obligation, to define certain parts of the canon as being definitive for them? A more attenuated form of this theory suggests we should think of the canon as a spiral, with the outermost elements (James, 2 Peter) gradually giving way to the inner core, the very heart of genuine Christianity (John, Romans). 35
But surely the notions of Scripture and canon forbid such approaches. True, preachers may more greatly stress one part than another, judging them to be more immediately relevant to their contexts than other parts. Some parts of the New Testament may continually wield greater influence because they are longer and more comprehensive. But to raise pragmatic pastoral choices and the accidents of composition to the obligation to relativize the canon is to deny that there is a canon that must stand as the test of our pastoral choices.
3. Traditional Roman Catholic theology has sometimes spoken of the church’s role in forming (or establishing) the canon, and this in turn gives rise to a view of the church’s authority rather different from that in Protestantism. The latter locates the deposit of the gospel in Scripture; conservative Catholicism locates the deposit of the faith in the church, Scriptures being one component of that deposit.
Some of the resulting debates are dissipating today, because both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism are in a state of enormous flux. But some of the problems associated with the Protestant position are largely alleviated if the distinction advocated here between Scripture and canon is carefully maintained. The church’s role is not to establish what books constitute Scripture. Rather, the scriptural books make their own way by widespread usage and authority, and the church’s role is to recognize that only certain books command the church’s allegiance and obedience, and not others—and this has the effect of constituting a canon, a closed list of authoritative Scripture.
4. There has been considerable interest in the rise of so-called canon criticism. Although this branch of study has many forms, 36 the heart of its assumption is that, whatever sources and pressures have gone into making Scripture as we know it, the text as it stands represents the church’s handling of its own traditions, including the peculiar interpretations established by inner-biblical connections, and these must be accepted as normative for the church.
There is much that is healthy about this movement. It represents a determined effort to read the Bible as a whole, and to read biblical books as finished products. In practice, however, some exponents of canon criticism tend to espouse abstract truths that can be inferred from the text as a whole, but reject numerous biblical claims that have historical referents. This inconsistency conjures up the specter of a certain kind of raw fideism: adhere to the canon where it cannot be tested, and reserve judgment where it can. This form of fideism makes canon criticism as frequently practiced (at least in some circles) intrinsically unstable.
In short, that God is a self-disclosing, speaking, covenant-keeping God who has supremely revealed himself in a historical figure, Jesus the Messiah, establishes the necessity of the canon and, implicitly, its closure. The notion of canon forbids all selfconscious attempts to select only part of the canon as the governing standard of the Christian church: that would be to decanonize canon, a contradiction in terms. Because the canon is made up of books whose authority ultimately springs from God’s gracious self-revelation, it is better to speak of recognizing the canon than of establishing it. And canonical theology cannot rightly be divorced from hard questions that tie God’s revelation to real history.