Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] How and When Did Christians Decide what Should be in the New Testament?
[00:00:05] By Bart D. Ehrman Read by John Paul Middlesworth in my post yesterday, I discussed the factors that motivated Christians to come up with a canon of the New Testament.
[00:00:16] Now I can talk about how they decided which books should belong and how the process played itself out as leaders debated the issues over time.
[00:00:26] The Criteria Used the Orthodox Church fathers who decided on the shape and content of the canon applied several criteria to determine whether a book should be included or not.
[00:00:39] Four criteria were especially 1. A book had to go back to the very beginning of the Christian movement or it could not be accepted. If a really good and important book that was fully informed and true were written, say last year, that would not be good enough for it to be part of Scripture. The canon of Scripture contained books from the beginning of the Christian Movement.
[00:01:03] 2.
[00:01:04] Only books that were written by apostles could be accepted as part of the canon.
[00:01:09] This included the disciples of Jesus and their followers of the first generation.
[00:01:13] And so, for example, the writings of Paul were obviously acceptable. So were the writings of the disciples Matthew, John, and Peter. So too were the books of Mark, Peter's companion, and Luke, Paul's companion. If books were anonymous, such as the Gospels, they had to be attributed to apostles or they could not be considered canonical.
[00:01:34] 3. Only books that were universally used throughout the Church could be accepted as part of the canon. Recall that the term catholic means universal local favorites were not to be accepted by the Church at large. A book had to be utilized by a broad range of churches throughout all of Christendom.
[00:01:52] 4.
[00:01:53] Most important of all, a book had to be orthodox in its perspectives and teachings if it were to be accepted as part of the canon of Sacred Scripture.
[00:02:03] Any book that taught a heretical view could obviously not be from God or written by a true apostle, and so books had to be judged as presenting the right teachings or they had no chance at all of being included as canonical.
[00:02:18] The Canonical Process we have seen that there was a movement toward having distinctly Christian authorities already during the New Testament period itself, and that early on different Christian groups accepted and promoted different written texts as embodying those authorities.
[00:02:35] In almost every instance, these texts were attributed to apostles.
[00:02:39] The first person who was actually known to have come up with a canon of Scripture and to insist that these books and only these books were to be seen as canonical was not a member of the Orthodox Church Church, but in fact was a person who was later branded as one of the arch heretics. Marcion.
[00:02:55] Marcion accepted Paul as the apostle par excellence and rejected all things Jewish as being not Christian.
[00:03:03] Marcion's views were very popular, and the Marcionite church spread far and wide in the late second century ce.
[00:03:10] In about the middle of the century, Marcion had relocated from his home in Sinope, northern Asia Minor, to Rome, the capital city of the empire and already home to one of the largest and most influential churches in the Christian world.
[00:03:24] Marcion spent some five years in Rome developing his theology and writing his books. No book was more important than a collection of sacred writings that he put together and then claimed was the Christian Bible, because for Marcion, the Jewish God was not the true God. Marcion's Bible did not include any of the writings of the Old Testament. And because Paul was his hero, he included all the writings of Paul that he knew, 10 of them, all except the pastoral epistles, which may not have been available to him.
[00:03:55] Throughout Paul's writings, of course, he refers to his Gospel. And so Marcion included a gospel along with Paul's 10 letters. This was a form of the Gospel of Luke, possibly because Luke was thought of as Paul's companion, possibly because it was the Gospel Marcion grew up with.
[00:04:12] That was the entirety of Marcion's canon of scripture, 11 books altogether. He claimed that his view of the Christian faith was rooted in this canon and that it was authentic because these were the authoritative writings of the Church.
[00:04:26] Marcion's orthodox opponents had a different view of things, and it may have been Marcion himself who compelled other church leaders to argue for a different canon of Scripture.
[00:04:35] It was not long after Marcion that his opponents claimed that he had a skewed view of the Christian faith because he had eliminated from consideration books of Scripture that showed his views to be wrong.
[00:04:46] In the Orthodox opinion, there was not just one Gospel, Luke, there were four. And Christians needed to heed what was in all four to come away with a true understanding of the faith.
[00:04:58] Moreover, Paul was not the only apostle to be included in the canon. There were the writings of Peter, James, John and Jude as well.
[00:05:07] Marcion may have provided the impetus for orthodox communities to decide on which books to be included. But there was not an immediate response that led to the finalization of the 27 book canon as we have it today.
[00:05:19] Quite to the contrary, that did not happen for centuries.
[00:05:23] Still, by the end of the second century, most of the orthodox churches agreed on the fourfold gospel canon, the letters of Paul, including the Pastorals, which were seen as opposing Marcion, and the letters of 1st Peter and 1 John.
[00:05:37] There continued to be debates for a long time over other books. Some church fathers wanted to include the Apocalypse of John. Others wanted to include an apocalypse allegedly written by Peter. Others wanted to include them both. And yet others wanted to include neither.
[00:05:53] Some church fathers thought Hebrews was written by Paul and so should be included.
[00:05:58] Others thought it was not by Paul and should not be included.
[00:06:01] Some church fathers wanted to include a book called the shepherd of Hermas. Others wanted the letter allegedly written by Paul's companion, Barnabas. Others wanted a book known as First Clement.
[00:06:12] Some wanted the letters of Second Peter, Jude, and James. Others did not.
[00:06:16] These debates went on for a very long time. The first time any church father of record indicated that there are 27 books of the New Testament, and who named the 27 books that we have today as the New Testament was In the year 367 CE in the writings of an influential bishop of Alexandria, Egypt, Athanasius.
[00:06:36] In a letter sent to his churches, Athanasius specified that although other books like the shepherd were worth reading, only the 27 could be accepted as canonical. It cannot be stressed enough that this letter was written nearly 300 years after the individual books of the New Testament were first put into circulation.
[00:06:55] The New Testament did not drop from the sky a few weeks after Jesus died or after Paul finished writing his books. It was a matter of ongoing debate for decades and decades and, well, centuries even. Athanasius letter did not end the debates. It was not until after the 5th century or so that most Christians agreed on the 27 books that are now almost universally considered to be the canon of the New Testament.
