Category Archives: New Testament Canon

Why is There a New Testament at All? My New Book with IVP-Academic

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Question of Canon 2

For most of us, the key question about the NT canon is “Why these books and no others?” But, I think there is another, more foundational question (that is asked much less frequently), and that is, “Why is there a New Testament at all?”

The answer, according to some scholars, is not to be found in the first-century—there was nothing about earliest Christianity (or the books themselves) that would naturally lead to the development of a canon. Instead, we are told, the answer is to be found in the later Christian church. The canon was an ecclesiastical product that was designed to meet ecclesiastical needs. Sure, the books themselves were …

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Man-Made Religion at Its Best: Review of a “New New Testament”: Part 3

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new new testament

Note:  The previous posts in this series can be found here, here, and here.

This will be the last installment of my extended review of Hal Taussig’s A New New Testament (Houghton Mifflin, 2013) which attempts to create a new canon, with 10 “new” apocryphal books added to the traditional 27-book corpus.

In prior posts, I have examined the overall purpose of the project, the promotional language on the cover flap, and the apologetic offered in the introduction.  In this final post, I will make some observations about the last part of the book entitled, “A Companion to A New New Testament.”

The problems in this section …

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Ten Basic Facts about the NT Canon that Every Christian Should Memorize: #5: “The Four Gospels are Well Established by the End of the Second Century”

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the-four-gospels

Note: This is the fifth installment of a blog series announced here.

When it comes to basic facts about the NT canon that Christians should memorize, one of the most critical is the statement by Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, around A.D. 180: “It is not possible that the gospels can be either more or fewer than the number they are.  For, since there are four zones of the world in which we live and four principle winds… [and] the cherubim, too, were four-faced.”[1]

Here Irenaeus not only affirms the canonicity the four gospels, but is keen to point out that only these four gospels are recognized by the …

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Review of a “New New Testament”: Part 2

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new new testament

I have been working through an extended review of the new book by Hal Taussig called A New New Testament (Houghton Mifflin, 2013) which adds 10 “new” apocryphal books to the existing 27 books of the New Testament.  In my prior post, I examined the promotional language on the inside cover flap.  In this post, I will focus on the introduction to the book (xxxiii-xxvii) where Taussig offers his apologetic for this ambitious project.

1. Taussig opens his defense with the following statement:

This New New Testament is not simply the produce of one author.  The ten added books have been chosen by a council of wise and nationally

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