Was the New Testament Canon Really Closed in 367 CE?

[00:00:01] Was the New Testament canon really closed in 367 CE, written by Bart Ehrman, read by Mike Johnson? If we are talking about the earliest christian writings, the subject of my previous three posts, we naturally want to know when decisions were made about when church fathers settled on our 27 book canon of the New Testament. Many people, including tons of scholars, set a precise date 367 CE in the decision written by the famous theologian Athanasius of Alexandria. Is that right? [00:00:37] My first academic publication addressed this question and answered no. Here's how I've talked about the issue and my attempt to overturn the widely held view from long ago. [00:00:49] My first semester in the PhD program at Princeton Theological Seminary, I had a seminar on the canon of the New Testament with Bruce Metzger. This was a class that focused on the questions surrounding how we ended up with the 27 books in the New Testament. Who decided that it would be these 27 books and no others? What was motivating these people? What were the grounds for their decisions, and when did they make them? These are all, of course, fundamental questions, and Metzger himself wrote the authoritative book on the topic, which is still the authoritative book in the seminar itself. We did not spend most of our time discussing such matters in the abstract. Instead, we devoted ourselves to translating ancient lists of which books this, that, or the other early christian author thought should belong to the canon, and then, of course, discussing what we translated. The first day of class, Metzger handed out a photocopy of the famous moratorian fragment, a document discovered in the 18th century by the italian scholar Ludovico Muratori. This document gives a list of the books that its anonymous author believed should be considered in the New Testament. It is a fragment because the beginning of it is lost. It starts in the middle of a sentence. It is written in Latin and appears to date from about the 7th century. That is to say, the scribe making this particular manuscript was copying it in the 7th century. But there are debates about when the canon list itself, which the later scribe was copying, was originally composed. Metzger and most others have thought it was originally composed in the late second century, say 170 or 180 CE in Rome. Others have maintained that it was made as late as the fourth century in the east. It's a disputed matter. On this one. I side with Metzgerez, but no matter. [00:02:48] The text is written in Latin, and it is rather awful Latin, at times ungrammatical. Metzger handed out the photocopy and told us our assignment for the next week was to translate it. This was the first day of our class in our PhD program. The guy next to me raised his hand and asked Metzger what we were supposed to do if we didn't know Latin. Metzger, without missing a beat, informed him that they were teaching Latin at the Princeton high school in the evenings, and he suggested he take it rather sensibly. The student simply got a dictionary and a grammar and tried to plow through the text. [00:03:27] We had to write a term paper for the class. Already at this early stage of my PhD work, I was thinking about what I wanted my dissertation to focus on. I had become intensely interested in how church fathers quote the New Testament, and I wanted to pick a father who quoted it a good bit to analyze his quotations in order to reconstruct what his greek manuscripts probably looked like. Metzger had suggested to me in a private conversation that I should consider taking on Didymus the blind, whose commentaries on several books of the Old Testament had recently been published. I started plowing through these commentaries to see what evidence they might yield. They are written in Greek, and there were no english translations, but there were german editions that had been coming out that were well indexed. So I started reading through them, looking for quotations of the New Testament, and as I read, I realized that there might be something there for a term paper on the canon, even though the commentaries are on Old Testament books, Didymus interprets these books by quoting the New Testament, and this is significant for a particular reason. Scholars have long known that the first christian author from antiquity who listed our books of the New Testament as the New Testament, all 27 books and no others, was the famous bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius. In a letter he wrote to all the churches under his jurisdiction in the year 367. It had often been said that Athanasius had finally decided this issue. His canon list became the official list. Didymus lived in the same city as Athanasius and was writing a bit later. They both were seen as theological authorities in his surviving writings. Didymus himself never provided a list of the books he considered to be scripture. Very few ancient christians did. But what I found in reading through his commentaries was that he quoted other early christian books as authoritative texts on a par with the books that were eventually admitted into the New Testament, for example, the shepherd of Hermas and one Clemente. That is striking for several reasons. One is that some of these books were included as part of the New Testament in a couple of our early manuscripts. The fourth century codex Sinaiticus has the shepherd of Hermas and the letter of Barnabas. The early fifth century Codex Alexandrinus has one and two Clement. For both codexes, these books are simply included among the writings of the New Testament, and these books are often connected also with Alexandria. What I argued in my term paper then was that Athanasius did not represent the one and only view in Alexandria at the time and that his view did not immediately become the standard view throughout Christendom. Didymus appears to presuppose a larger canon of scripture. Metzger really liked the paper and urged me to try to publish it. I sent it to one of the major academic journals focusing on the history of early Christianity, vigil Christianae, published by EJ Brill in the Netherlands. It was accepted and published. My first publication.