Why Did Early Christians Want a New Canon of Scripture?

[00:00:01] Why Did Early Christians Want a New Canon of Scripture? [00:00:05] By Bart D. Ehrman Read by John Paul Middlesworth in previous posts, I discussed how we got the canon of the Hebrew Bible Old Testament. I now will discuss the formation of the New Testament canon. Why these 27 books? Who decided when? On what grounds? [00:00:24] This will be the focus of my next book, which I am beginning to read and think seriously about. [00:00:30] The following is the basic overview that I provide in my book the A Historical and Literary Introduction, second Edition, Oxford University Press. [00:00:39] This will take two posts. [00:00:42] We are much better informed about the formation of the canon of the New Testament than for the ot, in no small part because we have the writings of later church fathers who explicitly discussed the matter. We do not have nearly as much information as we would like to, as is true for almost every set of historical events from the ancient world. [00:01:01] But we have enough to give us a good idea of what motivated Christians to come up with a list of canonical books, what criteria they followed in deciding which books should be included, and how the process or canonization proceeded over the course of time. [00:01:15] Motivating Factors In Considering the Formation of the Christian Canon the first and most important point to make is that the Christians already had a body of scriptures at the very outset. [00:01:26] Jesus and his followers were of course Jews, and as Jews of the first century, they accepted the Torah and the prophets of the Hebrew Bible as their scripture along with some of the other books. But after the death of Jesus, his followers came to adopt other written authorities as Scripture on a par with the books accepted by Jews as canonical. [00:01:48] We can see this movement already within the pages of the New Testament. [00:01:52] A key passage comes in the book of first Timothy, which quotes two sayings as scripture. One is a passage from the Torah, the other is a saying of Jesus. [00:02:04] By the time this author is writing at the end of the first century, Jesus words themselves are being taken as scriptural authority. Eventually, that will lead to the canonization of the teachings and life of Jesus as embodied in the Gospels. [00:02:18] In addition, the seudonymous author of two Peter spoke of the letters of Paul and also included them among the Scriptures. [00:02:28] Already by the early second century, then, we have Christians seeing writings about Jesus and writings by his apostles as scriptural texts. [00:02:37] This is the beginning of the movement towards a Christian canon which will consist of these two works relating to Jesus and writings by his apostles. [00:02:47] What was driving this movement toward establishing a canon? For one thing, the followers of Jesus were increasingly attempting to differentiate themselves from Jews. If the Christians embraced a separate religion, they needed a separate group of Authorities distinctive to themselves, while accepting of course, the Jewish scriptures as well. [00:03:06] But there was an even more important factor motivating Christians to have written authorities for their views. [00:03:12] As we have seen, Christians from the outset maintained that it was very important for members of the faith to believe the right things. [00:03:19] Our earliest author, Paul, was insistent that his converts accepted his message and not the message of other apostles that he rejected. [00:03:28] Eventually, there were many different interpretations of what it meant to be a follower of Jesus, not just the views of Paul and his sundry opponents. [00:03:36] Over time, different Christian groups developed distinctive views, with Jewish Christians saying one thing, Marcionites saying another, various groups of Gnostics saying other things, and, well, lots of groups saying lots of things about who God was and how many gods there were, what God's relation to the world was, who Jesus was, how salvation worked, and so on. [00:04:00] The striking thing is that all of the various Christian groups could back up their claims to represent the true interpretation of Christianity, because all of them had books that were allegedly written by the apostles of Jesus themselves. [00:04:15] And so there were gospels of Matthew and John and Peter and Thomas and James and Philip and Mary, and on and on for a very long way. [00:04:25] There were various accounts of the apostles lives. There were letters allegedly written by Peter, Paul, James and others. There were apocalypses allegedly written by John, Peter, Paul, Isaiah and yet others. [00:04:38] Christians appealed to all of these books because they were living long after the days of Jesus and they needed to know which views were quote unquote true and acceptable. [00:04:48] It was the apostles who would know. And so unknown authors wrote books claiming to be apostles to support their points of view. [00:04:57] The movement to define a canon was thus in large part a product of the conflicts between what we have been calling orthodoxy and heresy. [00:05:06] These conflicts were waged in an effort to win converts to one point of view or another. [00:05:11] The victor in these struggles was the side that decided what Christian belief would be for all time to come. [00:05:18] The winning side, for example, said there were not 2 or 12 or 36 gods, but only one God. That Jesus was not just a human or not just a divinity, but that he was both fully man and fully God at one and the same time. [00:05:34] That the world was not a cosmic disaster, but the good creation of the one true God. [00:05:40] These became the standard views, so much so that they are the accepted views of virtually all Christians today. [00:05:47] The side that won these conflicts claimed they had always been the majority view within the religion, and they appealed to their own books to prove it and rejected the books of the other groups. And so Matthew Mark, Luke and John were in, and the Gospels of Peter, Thomas, James and Mary were out. [00:06:05] It was all a matter of having written authorities to support your views. [00:06:10] In the next post, I'll discuss the criteria Christians use to decide which books should belong in the canon and and how the entire process worked itself out over time.