CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER ONE
HOLY SCRIPTURE
THE WORD ‘CANON’
When we speak of the canon of scripture, the word ‘canon’ has a simple meaning. It means the list of books contained in scripture, the list of books recognized as worthy to be included in the sacred writings of a worshipping community. In a Christian context, we might define the word as ‘the list of the writings acknowledged by the Church as documents of the divine revelation’. In this sense the word appears to have been first used by Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, in a letter circulated in ad 367.
The word ‘canon’ has come into our language (through Latin) from the Greek word kanōn. In Greek it meant a rod, especially a straight rod used as a rule; from this usage comes the other meaning which the word commonly bears in English—‘rule’ or ‘standard’. We speak, for example, of the ‘canons’ or rules of the Church of England. But a straight rod used as a rule might be marked in units of length (like a modern ruler marked in inches or centimetres); from this practice the Greek word kanōn came to be used of the series of such marks, and hence to be used in the general sense of ‘series’ or ‘list’. It is this last usage that underlies the term ‘the canon of Scripture’.
Before the word ‘canon’ came to be used in the sense of ‘list’, it was used in another sense by the church—in the phrase ‘the rule of faith’ or ‘the rule of truth’. In the earlier Christian centuries this was a summary of Christian teaching, believed to reproduce what the apostles themselves taught, by which any system of doctrine offered for Christian acceptance, or any interpretation of biblical writings, was to be assessed. But when once the limits of holy scripture came to be generally agreed upon, holy scripture itself came to be regarded as the rule of faith. For example, Thomas Aquinas (c 1225–1274) says that ‘canonical scripture alone is the rule of faith’. From another theological perspective the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), after listing the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments, adds: ‘All which are given by inspiration of God, to be the rule of faith and life.’ These words affirm the status of holy scripture as the ‘canon’ or ‘standard’ by which Christian teaching and action must be regulated. While the ‘canon’ of scripture means the list of books accepted as holy scripture, the other sense of ‘canon’—rule or standard—has rubbed off on this one, so that the ‘canon’ of scripture is understood to be the list of books which are acknowledged to be, in a unique sense, the rule of belief and practice.
The question to be examined in the following pages is: how did certain documents, and these only, come to receive this recognition? Who, if any one, decided that these, and no others, should be admitted to the list of the holy scriptures, and what were the criteria which influenced this decision?
PEOPLE OF THE BOOK
Many religions have sacred books associated with their traditions or their worship. There was a once-famous series of volumes entitled The Sacred Books of the East. But Jews, Christians and Muslims have come to be known as ‘people of the book’ in a special sense. This is a designation given repeatedly in the Qurʾān to Jews and Christians. Among ‘people of the book’ the ‘book’ has a regulative function: conformity to what the book prescribes is a major test of loyalty to their religious faith and practice.
For Jews the ‘book’ is the Hebrew Bible, comprising the Law, the Prophets and the Writings (from the initials of these three divisions in Hebrew the Bible is often referred to among Jews as the TeNaKh). For Christians it is the Hebrew Bible, which they call the Old Testament (amplified somewhat in certain Christian traditions), together with the New Testament. Muslims recognize the Hebrew Bible, the tawrat (the Arabic equivalent of Heb. tôrāh, ‘law’), and the Christian New Testament, the injīl (from Gk. euangelion, ‘gospel’), as earlier revelations of God, but these find their completion in the revelation given through the Prophet, the Qurʾān (literally ‘recitation’ or ‘reading’), the ‘book’ par excellence.
THE TWO TESTAMENTS
Our concern here is with the Christian Bible, comprising the Old and New Testaments. The word ‘testament’ in English normally means a will (someone’s ‘last will and testament’); but this is not the sense in which it is used of the two parts of the Christian Bible. Our word ‘testament’ comes from Latin testamentum, which similarly means a will, but in this particular context the Latin word is used as the translation of the Greek word diathēkē. This Greek word may indeed mean a will, but it is used more widely of various kinds of settlement or agreement, not so much of one which is made between equals as of one in which a party superior in power or dignity confers certain privileges on an inferior, while the inferior undertakes certain obligations towards the superior. It is used repeatedly in both Old and New Testaments, both in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible and in the original Greek of the New Testament. It is usually rendered by our word ‘covenant’, and its most distinctive usage relates to an agreement between God and human beings. Here, of course, there can be no question of an agreement between equals.
In the earliest books of the Old Testament God makes a covenant with Noah and his descendants (Gen. 9:8–17), and again with Abraham and his descendants (Gen. 15:18; 17:1–4). The external token of the covenant with Noah was the rainbow; the external token of the covenant with Abraham was the rite of circumcision. Later, when Abraham’s descendants (or at least one important group of them) had migrated to Egypt and were drafted into forced labour gangs there, God remembered his covenant with Abraham and brought about their deliverance. Having left Egypt under the leadership of Moses, they were constituted a nation in the wilderness of Sinai. Their national constitution took the form of a covenant into which the God of their fathers entered with them, making himself known to them by his name Yahweh. The terms of this covenant were, very simply, ‘I will be your God, and you shall be my people.’ Yahweh undertook to make various kinds of provision for them; they undertook to worship him exclusively and to obey his commandments. These undertakings were recorded in a document called ‘the book of the covenant’. According to the narrative of Exodus 24:4–8,
Moses wrote all the words of Yahweh. And he rose early in the morning, and built an altar at the foot of the mountain, and twelve pillars, according to the twelve tribes of Israel. And he sent young men of the people of Israel, who offered burnt offerings and sacrificed peace offerings of oxen to Yahweh. And Moses took half of the blood and put it in basins, and half of the blood he threw against the altar. Then he took the book of the covenant, and read it in the hearing of the people; and they said, ‘All that Yahweh has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient.’ And Moses took the blood and threw it upon the people, and said, ‘Behold the blood of the covenant which Yahweh has made with you in accordance with all these words.’
This narrative is summarized in the New Testament, in Hebrews 9:18–20, where the covenant thus ratified is qualified as ‘the first covenant’. This is because the writer to the Hebrews sets it in contrast with the ‘new covenant’ promised in Jeremiah 31:31–34. Over six hundred years after the ratification of the covenant of Moses’ day at the foot of Mount Sinai, the prophet Jeremiah announced that, in days to come, the God of Israel would establish a new covenant with his people to replace that which he had made with the Exodus generation when he ‘took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt’ (Jer. 31:31–34). That ancient covenant made the divine will plain to them, but did not impart the power to carry it out; for lack of that power they broke the covenant. Under the new covenant, however, not only the desire but the power to do the will of God would be imparted to his people: his law would be put within them and written on their hearts. ‘In speaking of a new covenant’, says the writer to the Hebrews, ‘he treats the first as obsolete’ (Heb. 8:13). And he leaves his readers in no doubt that the new covenant has already been established, ratified not by the blood of sacrificed animals but by the blood of Christ, a sacrifice which effects not merely external purification from ritual defilement but the inward cleansing of the conscience from guilt.
This interpretation of the promise of the new covenant is fully in line with Jesus’s own words. During the evening before his death, sitting with his disciples round the supper-table, he gave them bread and wine as memorials of himself. When he gave them the wine, according to Mark’s record, he said, ‘This is my blood of the covenant (my covenant blood), which is poured out for many’ (Mark 14:24). The echo of Moses’ words, ‘Behold the blood of the covenant …’, can scarcely be missed. That the covenant associated with the blood of Jesus (his voluntary offering himself up to God) is Jeremiah’s new covenant is implied; the implication is explicit in Paul’s record: ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood’ (1 Cor. 11:25).
Each of these covenants—the ancient covenant of Sinai and the new covenant inaugurated by Jesus—launched a great spiritual movement. Each of these movements gave rise to a special body of literature, and these bodies of literature came to be known in the Christian church as ‘the books of the ancient covenant’ and ‘the books of the new covenant’. The former collection came into being over a period of a thousand years or more; the latter collection has a more inaugural character. Its various parts were written within a century from the establishment of the new covenant; they may be regarded as the foundation documents of Christianity. It was not until the end of the second century ad that the two collections began to be described, briefly, as the Old Covenant (or Testament) and the New Covenant (or Testament). These short titles are attested in both Greek and Latin almost simultaneously—in Greek, in the works of Clement of Alexandria; in Latin, in the works of Tertullian of Carthage.
It has been suggested that the expression ‘the New Covenant (or Testament)’ is first used to denote a collection of books in ad 192, in an anti-Montanist work in Greek by an unknown writer, addressed to the Phrygian bishop Avircius Marcellinus, from which Eusebius quotes some extracts. This work speaks of ‘the word of the new covenant of the gospel, to which nothing can be added by any one who has chosen to live according to the gospel itself and from which nothing can be taken away’. It is unlikely, however, that this is a reference to the New Testament in our sense of the term; the anonymous writer is a little disturbed by the possibility that his own work might be viewed as an addition to ‘the word of the new covenant of the gospel’.
A CLOSED CANON
The words ‘to which nothing can be added … and from which nothing can be taken away’, whatever they precisely meant in this context, seem certainly to imply the principle of a closed canon. There are some scholars who maintain that the word ‘canon’ should be used only where the list of specially authoritative books has been closed; and there is much to be said in favour of this restrictive use of the word (a more flexible word might be used for the collection in process of formation), although it would be pedantic to insist on it invariably.
Such language about neither adding not taking away is used in relation to individual components of the two Testaments. To the law of Deuteronomy, for example, the warning is attached: ‘You shall not add to the word which I command you, not take from it’ (Deut. 4:2; cf 12:32). A fuller warning is appended to the New Testament Apocalypse: ‘I warn every one who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if any one adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book, and if any one takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book’ (Rev. 22:18 f.).
The author of the Didachē (an early manual of church order) echoes the warning of Deuteronomy when he says, ‘You shall not forsake the commandments of the Lord, but you shall keep the things you received, “neither adding nor taking away”.’ Around the same time (end of the first century ad) Josephus uses similar language about the Hebrew scriptures: ‘Although such long ages have now gone by, no one has dared to add anything to them, to take away anything from them, or to change anything in them.’ This language can scarcely signify anything other than a closed canon.
LITURGICAL RECOGNITION
The status of the scriptures is symbolically acknowledged in various traditions of public worship. Special veneration is paid to the scrolls of the law in a synagogue service as they are carried from the holy ark, where they are kept, to the bimah, from which they are read to the congregation. In the liturgy of the Orthodox Church the gospel book is carried in procession, and the reading from it is preceded by the call: ‘Wisdom! All stand; let us hear the holy gospel.’ The veneration thus paid to the gospel book is not paid to the materials of which it is composed not to the ink with which it is inscribed, but to the Holy Wisdom which finds expression in the words that are read. In the Catholic liturgy the gospel is treated with comparable veneration and the reading from it is preceded and followed by special prayers. In the Anglican communion service the people stand while the gospel is read, and when it is announced they commonly say, ‘Glory to Christ our Saviour’, while at its conclusion, when the reader says, ‘This is the gospel of Christ’, they respond, ‘Praise to Christ our Lord’.
In churches of the Reformed order (such as the Church of Scotland and other Presbyterian churches throughout the world) the first formal action in a service of public worship takes place when the Bible is carried in from the vestry and placed on the reading desk. Someone, of course, must carry it (the beadle, perhaps, or ‘church officer’), but the person who does so has no liturgical significance (even if, in earlier days, he thought it proper to ‘magnify his office’); it is the Bible that has liturgical significance. The Bible is followed at a respectful distance by the minister. And why? Because he is the minister—that is to say, in the original sense of the term, the ‘servant’ of the Word. No letters indicating academic achievement or public honour can match in dignity the letters V.D.M., appended to the pastor’s name in some Reformed churches—Verbi Divini Minister, ‘servant of the Word of God.’ When the time comes in the service for the audible reading of the Bible, this lesson is underlined by the introductory exhortation: ‘Let us hear the Word of God.’
It is from the contents, the message, of the book that it derives its value, whether we think of the gospel in particular or the Bible as a whole. It is therefore important to know what its contents are, and how they have come to be marked off from other writings—even holy and inspired writings. That is the point of examining the growth of the canon of holy scripture.
R. P. C. Hanson, Origen’s Doctrine of Tradition (London, 1954), pp. 93, 133; cf his Tradition in the Early Church (London, 1962), p. 247.
See pp. 71, 78, 79, 208f.
The Greek word was probably borrowed from the Semitic word which appears in Hebrew as qāneh, ‘reed, ’rod’. From the same origin come Latin canna and Eng. ‘cane’.
See p. 150, 179.
Thomas Aquinas, On the Gospel of St. John, Lesson 6 on John 21 (sola canonica scriptura est regula fidei, perhaps ‘… a rule of faith’); Westminster Confession of Faith, 1, § 2.
The 55 volumes, originally under the general editorship of Friedrich Max Müller, appeared between 1879 and 1924 (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
This word is an acronym, formed of the initial letters of Tôrāh (‘law’, ‘direction’), Neḇîʾîm (‘prophets’) and Keṯûḇîm (‘writings’), the names given to the three divisions (see p. 29).
See pp. 47f.
See p. 181.
See Ex. 3:7–15.
Paul’s is the earliest written record we have (ad 55): it preserves the words of institution as he learned them shortly after his conversion. Mark’s record (put in writing c ad 65) reproduces the words as they were transmitted along another line.
See p. 188.
See p. 180.
Also spelt Abercius (Gk. Aberkios).
Hist. Eccl. 5. 16. 3.
At one time W. C. van Unnik thought that this might indeed be the earliest surviving instance of the phrase ‘New Covenant’ or ‘New Testament’ (Gk. kainē diathēkē) to denote a collection of writings (‘De la règle mēte prostheinai mēte aphelein dans l’histoire du canon’, Vigiliae Christianae 3 [1949], pp. 1–36, later, however, he had second thoughts on this (‘Hē kainē diathēkē—a Problem in the Early History of the Canon’, Studia Patristica = TU 79 [1961], pp. 212–227, especially p. 218).
It is immaterial for our present purpose whether this warning comes from the seer of Patmos or from an editor of his work.
Didachē 4.13.
Against Apion, 1.42.
See p. 32. Similar language about neither adding not subtracting occurs in the Letter of Aristeas, 311 (see p. 44), where, after the translation of the Pentateuch into Greek, a curse was pronounced, ‘in accordance with custom, on any one who should make any alteration, either by adding anything or changing in any way whatsoever anything that was written or leaving anything out’; also twice in Irenaeus (Against Heresies, 4.33.8; 5.30.1.)—on the latter occasion as a warning to those who reduce the number of the beast (Rev. 13:18) by 50 so as to read 616 (perhaps the first, but certainly not the last misuse of the warning of Rev. 22:15 f. to inhibit the proper exercise of textual criticism). See also Athanasius (p. 79).