11 New Testament Canon and Credibility

The word canon can refer to a straight rod or stick that may be used as a standard. So when I refer to the New Testament canon, I am referring to the twenty-seven books of the New Testament as being a standard. But what kind of standard? Are they a historical standard that accurately reflects the words and deeds of Jesus and the early church? Well, in many ways, yes. Do they provide a theological and/or spiritual standard? Again, the answer here is yes. While our focus thus far has primarily been historical, in this chapter we will see that separating history and theology is not always so easy.

When it comes to the New Testament canon, renowned Princeton scholar Bruce Metzger states that the “knowledge that our New Testament contains the best sources for the history of Jesus is the most valuable knowledge that can be obtained from the study of the early history of the canon. In fact . . . it is certain that those who discerned the limits of the canon had a clear and balanced perception of the gospel of Jesus Christ.” In other words, if you want the best sources for learning about Jesus, look to the New Testament.

This chapter will briefly highlight some aspects of how the New Testament was formed to help illustrate Metzger’s point. In doing so, we will look at the canon’s development and at books that were accepted and rejected. Accordingly, this chapter will provide a zoomed-out view of reliability. As we will see, it is in some ways a return to the beginning chapters of this book.

CRITERIA FOR THE CANON?

Let us start with a quick thought experiment as we begin discussing how the New Testament was formed. Pretend for a moment that you are in the early church and want to find out which Christian writings are reliable and authoritative and which are not. As someone who cares about knowing the truth about Jesus and the gospel, you are faced with several works circulating at the time. Each purports to tell you about Jesus and/or the early church. Now, what are you going to do? How will you figure out which sources are reliable and which are not? Do you have any criteria that help you decide? What are they?

Hopefully this book has already provided you with some initial answers. One thing we would want would be to have sources that were written as close as possible to the events themselves (e.g., dating). Additionally, we would want sources that were written by the apostles or someone associated the apostles (authorship). Each of these two criteria seems quite intuitive and obvious. Indeed, we naturally considered them at the outset of this book.

Other criteria for canonicity have also been suggested. For example, widespread acceptance and usage of a writing was also an important factor. Works that were only recognized in small, localized areas were less likely to be authoritative for the whole church (see Clement below). Additionally, the teachings of the works would need to be consistent with what the apostles taught in the churches they founded.

We can see why these criteria guided how the New Testament canon developed. Helpful though they may be, some refinement is in order. While the criteria provide a useful framework for understanding the canon, we need to remember that it would be anachronistic to say that the early church went around looking for reliable writings. Rather, they already had writings they believed were reliable (to varying degrees). In other words, these criteria were the “church’s attempt to explain what it already had, rather than a process of deciding what to have.” Thus these reasonable criteria provide just one angle for understanding the New Testament canon. Although they were helpful, as Metzger notes, “the Church did not create the canon but came to recognize, accept, affirm, and confirm the self-authenticating quality of certain documents that imposed themselves as such upon the church. If this fact is obscured, one comes into serious conflict not with dogma but with history.”

With these comments in mind, we can see that these criteria make sense because we would expect to find teachings different from the apostles in an isolated, local territory. Why? Because it would be highly improbable for the same distortion to occur throughout several churches in other regions simultaneously and independently. Divergent teachings would soon confront the teachings of the universal church. One of the tools used to challenge such teachings would be to appeal to the apostles’ teachings. The apostles were those who were in the best position (historically) to know what Jesus said and did, and they were also (theologically) empowered by the Holy Spirit in sharing this message (Lk 12:12; Jn 14:26).

The early church recognized these connections. For example, Clement of Rome (ca. AD 90) comments, “The apostles were given the gospel for us by the Lord Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ was sent forth from God. Thus Christ came from God and the apostles from Christ” (1 Clement 42.1-2; see Eph 2:20). Likewise, Justin Martyr (ca. AD 150) frequently refers to the “memoirs of the apostles” and states, “The apostles in the memoirs composed by them, which are called Gospels, have thus delivered unto us what was enjoined upon them” (Dialogue with Trypho 66). Indeed, after the initial followers of Jesus began to die and their writings circulated, others in the first and second centuries recognized the authoritative nature of their writings and the need to preserve them.

EUSEBIUS’S FOUR CATEGORIES

During the first centuries after Jesus’ death, a few factors came together to create a greater need for a standard or canon of Christian writings. Eusebius of Caesarea was an early church historian who wrote Church History (also known as Ecclesiastical History) around AD 320. This work contains one of the earliest lists of accepted Christian writings. Eusebius describes various Christian writings along with some comments about how Christians viewed them. Notably, in his own assessment, he gives four different categories of writings: accepted, disputed, spurious, and heretical (Ecclesiastical History 3.25.1-7). We can illustrate the breakdown of these four categories in the following way:

Table 11.1. Categories of early Christian writings

Canonical

Noncanonical

Recognized writings

Spurious (helpful, but not Scripture)

Disputed writings

Heretical

Using his classifications will help us to further understand why some books were included in the New Testament canon and why others were excluded.

Canonical. Books that were eventually included in the canon were either accepted all along by the church or initially disputed by some.

Accepted. Some books were widely and readily accepted. Included in these writings are the Gospels, Acts, and Paul’s letters (which, for Eusebius, includes Hebrews). In addition to these writings, Eusebius mentions the first epistles of Peter and John. He then closes with Revelation as the final book to be included, though noting that there were some differing opinions. This first group, then, includes twenty-two books of the New Testament. We have seen throughout the present book that the Gospels, Acts, and Paul’s letters are particularly reliable, and it should be unsurprising that the early church recognized this as well. For Eusebius, these books are “acknowledged as genuine” (Ecclesiastical History 3.25.3).

Disputed. Eusebius then moves to books he considers disputed, “though they are known and approved by many” (Ecclesiastical History 3.25.3). The five books he lists are James, Jude, 2 Peter, and 2 and 3 John. Elsewhere Eusebius notes that James and Jude are among the epistles of the universal church and are “publicly used in most of the churches” (Ecclesiastical History 2.23.25). Thus, although there were some questions regarding these books, they were in fact widely used and well known. They complete the New Testament canon when included in the list above. There are, then, a total of twenty-seven books when we combine the twenty-two accepted books with the five disputed books.

Table 11.2. Subcategories of canonical writings

Canonical

Recognized

Disputed

Gospels

Acts

Paul’s Writings (14, including Hebrews)

1 Peter

1 John

Revelation

James

Jude

2 Peter

2 John

3 John

Noncanonical. Not all books outside the canon fall into the same category because some were considered helpful and others were considered heretical.

Spurious. The next set of books were considered helpful but not on the same level as Scripture. These works included the Acts of Paul, Shepherd of Hermas, Apocalypse of Peter, Epistle of Barnabas, Teachings of the Apostles (also known as the Didache), and Gospel of the Hebrews. While each writing had a differing level of usefulness in the churches, of these writings perhaps the most popular were the Shepherd of Hermas, Epistle of Barnabas, and Teachings of the Apostles.

What is interesting about these writings is that although they are noncanonical, they remain useful for us to consider. They illustrate that meeting one (or more) of the above criteria was not always sufficient to include a book in the canon. Clement’s letter to Corinth, for example, was written during the time of the apostles and by someone who was associated with the apostles (Phil 4:3) but was never canonized (see Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.16.1, 3.39.1). The letter was considered beneficial to read, especially in Corinth, but not on the same level as Scripture. With works like these being excluded from the New Testament canon, even though they were considered helpful, we see a general practice of excluding books rather than uncritical acceptance. Despite their popularity, even writings like the Shepherd of Hermas or the Epistle to Barnabas were not considered to have the same authoritative status as others.

Rejected. We now turn to the final section, where most questions are raised today. In this category, Eusebius includes writings “by the heretics under the name of the apostles,” which include the Gospel of Peter, Gospel of Thomas, and the Gospel of Matthias, while the Acts of Andrew, Acts of John, and the acts of “others” are also mentioned. Why were these books rejected? Why were they, in Eusebius’s words, considered “rejected as altogether absurd and impious” (Ecclesiastical History 3.25.7)?

Let us look briefly at the Gospel of Thomas since it is one of the most discussed of the noncanonical Gospels. First, Eusebius notes that works like this have a different “character” from those mentioned above and that they deviate “as far as possible from sound orthodoxy” (Ecclesiastical History 3.25.7). This is evident in considering the text itself. Unlike the New Testament Gospels, Thomas is a sayings document that records various sayings of Jesus.

What does Thomas write concerning the words of Jesus? Perhaps the last saying in Thomas (logion 114) is the most notable. It says, “Simon Peter said to them, ‘Let Mary come out from us, because women are not worthy of life.’ Jesus said, ‘Behold, I will draw her so that I might make her male, so that she also might be a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of God.’” This seems quite different from Jesus’ words in Mark 3:35, where those who do the will of God are Jesus’ “brother, and sister, and mother.” It also seems quite different from Paul’s teachings in Galatians 3:28, where there is “neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Similar language is also used in Romans 10:9-13, where Paul discusses salvation.

Second, this work was written far too late to have been actually written by Jesus’ disciple Thomas. Simon Gathercole has done a detailed study on Thomas and concludes that it was written sometime around AD 135–200. It seems that Thomas’s name was attached to this writing to make the “secret” teachings within this work appear more authoritative.

Accordingly, Thomas, like the other works mentioned by Eusebius, was widely rejected. “It is not surprising,” Kruger writes, “that Thomas is never mentioned in any early canonical list, is not found in any of our New Testament manuscript collections, never figured prominently in canonical discussions, and was often condemned outright by a variety of church fathers.” This is not just a theological point but also a historical one, since Thomas is not often regarded as very useful in historical investigations into Jesus’ life.

Table 11.3. Subcategories of noncanonical writings

Noncanonical

Spurious

Rejected

Acts of Paul

Shepherd of Hermas

Apocalypse of Peter

Epistle of Barnabas

Teachings of the Apostles (Didache)

Gospel of the Hebrews

Gospel of Peter

Gospel of Thomas

Gospel of Matthias^a

Acts of Andrew

Acts of John

“Others”

^aAs F. F. Bruce notes, Origen recognized the Gospel of Matthias as a heretical writing (Homilies on Luke 1). See Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1988), 201. Eusebius’s reference here is clearly not to the canonical Gospel of Matthew, since he earlier references the four Gospels as accepted in this chapter and elsewhere in his work.

CONCLUSION

We have seen some initial reasons why the New Testament canon is a reliable collection of books. It is not the fault of believers that the early church collected the best and most reliable sources. As Bart Ehrman writes, “Whatever one thinks of them as inspired scripture, they can be seen and used as significant historical sources.”

We started this chapter with Ehrman’s professor Bruce Metzger and his comments regarding the strength of the canon’s reliability. After having been introduced to a sampling of these issues, we might now agree with him that “one can say with even greater assurance than before that no books or collections of books from the ancient Church may be compared with the New Testament in importance for Christian history or doctrine.”

KEY TAKEAWAYS: NEW TESTAMENT CANON

■From a historically reliable perspective, the sources collected by the early church and put into the New Testament canon (or “standard”) are the best sources we have. As Metzger argues, nothing compares to the New Testament canon, as it consists of the “best sources.”

■Just like in other areas of history, various criteria help us understand why some books were included, others were considered, and still others were rejected. These criteria offer a helpful framework for understanding the canon and include being associated with an apostle, being written during the right time, having widespread agreement/use, and so on.

■Eusebius provides some important information regarding the views of the early church and the formation of the New Testament canon.

11 New Testament Canon and Credibility