Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] My next book, Creating the How We Got the Canon of the New Testament by Bart D. Ehrman, read by John Paul Middlesworth.
[00:00:11] Now that my book Love Thy Stranger is done in press being prepared for publication March 24, you can pre order it with a price guarantee from Amazon already.
[00:00:22] And as far as I'm concerned with over and done with, I have moved on to the next project or projects.
[00:00:29] I think it will be two a trade book for general audiences and an academic book for scholars, both on how we got the Canon of the New Testament.
[00:00:37] My tentative title, which will no doubt be changed roughly 79 times before we come up with the final one, is Creating the How we got the 27 books of Christian scripture.
[00:00:49] Three years ago or so, I wrote up a prospectus for my publishers, Simon and Schuster, and shared it with blog readers. I thought it would be a good time now to put it up again, along with a couple of relevant posts, just to get the juices starting to flow before I return in a few days to the New Testament in a Nutshell series, here's how I started the prospectus.
[00:01:11] How did we get the New Testament? This is the one question I get asked more than any other.
[00:01:18] It is not about when the books of the New Testament were published, who wrote them, or how they came to be copied over the years.
[00:01:25] It is a question of how we got these 27 books in particular.
[00:01:29] Why didn't any of the other ancient Christian writings end up in the Bible? The other gospels, epistles, and apocalypses? Who made the decisions? When and how? Was there a vote?
[00:01:42] The question was almost never raised throughout the course of Christian history, from the fifth century until the Protestant Reformation in the 16th, when Martin Luther relegated four of the new Testament bookshebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation to an appendix of his highly influential German translation. But even then, no one wanted to broaden the canon. No one argued for the canonical authority of other gospels, for example, or particularly wondered why they were left out.
[00:02:11] That began to change toward the end of the 19th century with the discoveries of other early Christian writings, including the Gospel of Peter and various heretical writings.
[00:02:22] The major shift, however, occurred with the discovery of the Gnostic gospels, known as the Nag Hammadi Library in 1945, and the resultant recognition, at least among scholars, that there were more kinds of Christianity in antiquity than anyone had imagined, each of them evidently basing its views on books allegedly written by apostles.
[00:02:44] Even in the mid 20th century. Most lay people, of course, remained oblivious to the issues.
[00:02:49] The New Testament simply was the New Testament. The books of Scripture. The turning point came in the 1970s with the appearance of popular publications discussing the other Gospels, most noticeably Elaine Pagel's bestseller the Gnostic Gospels, from 1977.
[00:03:06] Since then, publications have come fast and furious, and the reading public at large has a growing awareness that the collection of the 27 books of the New Testament involved a matter of choice among a wide range of opinions, the leading to the inevitable questions of who made the decisions, when and how committed. Bible believing Christians, of course, continue to maintain that the process was entirely guided by the providence of God, and conservative apologists have written extensively to show how, in their view, the process worked historically.
[00:03:41] But active readers even in those circles are sometimes perplexed by the historical facts.
[00:03:47] In the early centuries, different Christians and Christian groups, including some that were seen as completely orthodox, accepted, read and quoted books as canonical scripture that in the end did not make it into the New Testament, for example the Apocalypse of Peter and the shepherd of Hermas.
[00:04:06] Several of the books that did make it into the canon were hotly debated until the 4th century, for example 2 Peter and the Revelation of John.
[00:04:15] And the first time that any Christian on record listed precisely our 27 books as canonical was in 367 CE in a letter by Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, Egypt.
[00:04:28] The process took three centuries, and even then the matter was not decided or the canon closed. Debates continued into the 5th century until a virtual consensus was reached.
[00:04:41] But why did the process take so long and why were there so many doubts? What factors figured into the decision, and how can we know it was made correctly?
[00:04:52] My Interest and the Importance of the Topic I have been interested in these questions for my entire academic career. My very first PhD seminar in graduate school was devoted to the formation of the Canon of the New Testament, taught by Bruce Metzger just a few years before he published the scholarly vade mecum of our generation, the Canon of the New Its Origin, Development, and Significance the term paper I wrote for that class became my first academic publication of any kind, the New Testament Canon of Didymus the Blind, published in Vigalia Christine in 1983.
[00:05:29] In it I showed that Athanasius canon did not represent everyone's views of the matter or or decide the issue for all time. In the 40 years since then, I have read, thought, and taught about the topic. Now I want to write a trade book on it.
[00:05:45] No book like the one I'm proposing exists. There have been lots of scholarly publications both before and after Metzger's. These all take different angles from evangelical scholars arguing that canon formation was a virtual fait accompli from the outset to historians of various persuasions dealing with sundry aspects of the issues at a technical level.
[00:06:06] But there is no book for a layperson to consult for easily accessible discussions of many of the most interesting questions, including those I'm particularly interested in.
[00:06:16] Why the Gospel of Mark but not the Gospel of Peter?
[00:06:20] Why the letter to the Hebrews but not Paul's letter to the Laodiceans?
[00:06:25] Why the Apocalypse of John but not the Apocalypse of Peter? Why Philemon?
[00:06:31] The range of issues involved in this book are far more broad ranging than anyone would expect.
[00:06:36] Many of them would seem to be unrelated to the question of the canon, the universalist salvation taught by Origen, the prophecies of the Montanists, the teachings of Marcion, Papyrus Egerton 2, the passion for Paul among Gnostic groups, the banalities of Paul's letter to the Laodiceans, the writing style of the author of Revelation, the Arian controversy, and on and on.
[00:07:02] I'll be talking about these and oh so much more in times to come.
[00:07:06] What larks we will have.
