How Did the New Testament Canon Come Together?

Notes

¹ “The apostles are the New Testament counterpart to the Old Testament prophets (see 1 Cor. 2:13; 2 Cor. 13:3; Gal. 1:8-9; 11-12; 1 Thess. 2:13, 4:8, 15; 2 Peter 3:2).” Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology (Zondervan, 1994), p. 1050.

² These continued to be the three streams of authority for Christians in the post-apostolic period. Note 1 Clement 45-47; Ignatius, Epistle to the Philadelphians 9.1-2; and Irenaeus, Haer. 2.2.5. Polycarp mentioned the three streams about 120, “As he [Christ] himself commanded us and the apostles who preached the gospel to us and the prophets who announced beforehand the coming of our Lord” (Pol. Phil. 6.3).

³ Papias, Interpretation of the Lord’s Oracles, quoted in Eusebius, H.E. 3.39.1-4.

⁴ See David Trobisch, The First Edition of the New Testament (Oxford University Press, 2000), 19-21.

⁵ Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott, 2d ed. (Hinrichs, 1924), 210-15, 441-44; Hans von Campenhausen, The Formation of the Christian Bible, trans. J. A. Baker (Fortress, 1972), 148.

⁶ See John Barton, “Marcion Revisited,” in The Canon Debate, ed. Lee Martin McDonald and James A. Sanders (Hendrickson, 2002), 342-344.

⁷ The “apostolic fathers” are the first set of Christian literature written after the apostolic age. Normally included in this collection are: 1 Clement, 2 Clement, seven letters of Ignatius, Polycarp’s letter(s) to the Philippians, The Martyrdom of Polycarp, The Didache, The Letter of “Barnabas,” The Shepherd of Hermas, The Letter to Diognetus, and fragments from Papias.

⁸ See Kenneth Berding, review of Paul Hartog, Polycarp and the New Testament in WTJ 64 (2002), 416-417 for comments about Polycarp’s probable possession of the entire Pauline corpus and Polycarp and Paul (Brill, 2002), 33-125 for a comprehensive analysis of Polycarp’s biblical allusions.

⁹ See Graham Stanton, “The Fourfold Gospel,” New Testament Studies 43 (1997): 317-46 for arguments. Note also Everett Ferguson’s comment in “Factors Leading to the Selection and Closure of the New Testament Canon: A Survey of Some Recent Studies,” in The Canon Debate, p. 304, that the separation of Luke from Acts attests to an already extant collection of the four Gospels. Since they are parts one and two of the same book, they had to be separated to make the four-fold Gospel. “And this separation presumably occurred before Marcion, for he accepts Luke but not Acts.”

¹⁰ Trobisch’s argument is based upon the recurrent abbreviation in NT manuscripts of nomina sacra, the use of the codex form, commonalities in arrangement of the four earliest “complete editions,” and the book titles. Trobisch, First Edition.

¹¹ Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Clarendon, 1987), p. 99.

¹² Ferguson, “Factors,” in The Canon Debate, p. 295. On the same page, Ferguson gives these examples: “In reference to the Gospels, for instance, Irenaeus spoke of ‘The gospels handed down to us from the apostles’ (Haer. 3.11.9), and ‘The gospel handed down to us by the will of God in scriptures’ (ibid., 3.1.1). Clement of Alexandria specified ‘The four gospels that have been handed down to us’ (Strom. 3.13.93). Serapion of Antioch rejected the Gospel of Peter as ‘pseudepigraph,’ ‘knowing that we [orthodox Christians] did not receive such writings’ (Eusebius, H. E. 6.12.3).”

¹³ Including Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Origen, and perhaps also Melito of Sardis and an anonymous anti-Montanist tract. See Trobisch, First Edition, pp. 43-44.

¹⁴ Our main evidence for this are statements in Irenaeus and the Muratorian Fragment. Recently, since an article by Sundberg in 1973, some have argued that the fragment is actually from the fourth century (See A. C. Sundberg, “Canon Muratori: A Fourth-Century List,” Harvard Theological Review 66 [1973]: 1-41.) But this flies in the face of the statement in the fragment that the Shepherd of Hermas “…was written by Hermas in the city of Rome quite recently, in our own times, when his brother Pius occupied the bishop’s chair in the church of the city of Rome.” See rejoinder to Sundberg by E. Ferguson, “Canon Muratori: Date and Provenance,” Studia Patristica 18.2 (1982): 677-683.

¹⁵ Hebrews: The main issue was authorship. Since one of the main criteria was that a document had to come from the time of the apostles, this became difficult for Hebrews since it was not known whom the writer was. But this sermonic letter was evidently written by someone from the time of, and among the broader apostolic circle, as it shows evidence of having been written by someone who knew Timothy (13:23) and before the ceasing of temple sacrifices in A.D. 70 (10:1-2; 8:13).

James: There was apparently a bit of hesitancy toward acceptance of James, as Eusebius seems to indicate (Eusebius, H.E. 3.25.3) when he says that it was a “disputed” book, though Eusebius himself seems to have accepted it as genuine since he often quoted James. Clement of Alexandria much earlier apparently wrote a commentary on James, though it is no longer extant. See B. F. Westcott, A General Survey of the History of the Canon of the New Testament, 6th ed. (Macmillan, 1898; repr. Baker, 1980), pp. 357-58. 2 Peter: There were occasional doubts about whether Peter wrote it. But, as E. M. B. Green notes, even though it is the least externally attested book of the New Testament, it “has incomparably better support for its inclusion than the best attested of the rejected books.” E. M. B. Green, 2 Peter Reconsidered (Tyndale, 1961), p. 5 as cited in D. A. Carson, Douglas J. Moo, and Leon Morris, An Introduction to the New Testament (Zondervan, 1992), pp. 434.

Jude: It was used often by writers around the end of the 2nd century and into the 3rd century. But Jude’s reference to the book of Enoch created a problem, especially in the 4th century and onward, by people who could not believe that a canonical writer would refer to a piece of non-canonical literature.

2 John and 3 John: They were so small that they were easily overlooked.

Revelation: Justin Martyr attributed it to the apostle John. Clement of Alexandria cited it as Scripture. The main reason some people in the Eastern church had trouble with acceptance of this apocalypse was because of its visionary content, its materialistic eschatology, and, for some, its millenarianism.

¹⁶ Eusebius, H.E. 8.2.1 and 4.

¹⁷ Eusebius, Vit. Const. 4:34, 36-37.