New Blog Series:10 Common Misconceptions About the NT Canon

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Over the next month or so I plan to write a new blog series on 10 common misconceptions (or misunderstandings) about the origins and development of the NT Canon.   These are misconceptions that are not only held by the average layman, but are often shared by those in the academic community as well.   It is always difficult to know how such misunderstandings develop and are promulgated.   Sometimes they are just ideas that are repeated so often that no one bothers (anymore) to see if they have merit.  In other cases, these ideas have been promoted through popular presentations of the canon’s origins (e.g., The Da Vinci Code).  And in other cases, scholars have made sustained arguments for some of these positions (though, in my opinion, those arguments are not, in the end, convincing).   Either way, it is time for these issues to be dusted off and reconsidered.

Given that this is a blog, and not an academic monograph, my posts on these issues will not be overly technical.   Nor will they be overly lengthy.  Nonetheless, I hope these posts will serve to reinvigorate a much-needed discussion over these matters.

Here are the 10 misconceptions:

  1. The Term “Canon” Can Only Refer to a Fixed, Closed List of Books
  2. Nothing in Early Christianity Dictated That There Would be a Canon
  3. The New Testament Authors Did Not Think They Were Writing Scripture
  4. New Testament Books Were Not Regarded as Scriptural Until Around 200 A.D.
  5. Early Christians Disagreed Widely over the Books Which Made It into the Canon
  6. In the Early Stages, Apocryphal Books Were as Popular as the Canonical Books
  7. Christians Had No Basis to Distinguish Heresy from Orthodoxy Until the Fourth Century
  8. Early Christianity was an Oral Religion and Therefore Would Have Resisted Writing Things Down
  9. The Canonical Gospels Were Certainly Not Written by the Individuals Named in Their Titles
  10. Athanasius’ Festal Letter (367 A.D.) is the First Complete List of New Testament Books

Of course, this list is not exhaustive.  Nor are these necessarily the MOST common misconceptions.  Thus, I welcome more suggestions!

Comments

New Blog Series:10 Common Misconceptions About the NT Canon — 14 Comments

  1. Thanks so much for this! As you well know, many (most? all?) misconceptions about the NT canon come from seperating canon from Christ and redemptive history. I look forward to this series of posts.

    • Thanks, Rich. Yes, you are correct that looking at canon through the lens of redemptive history is key. That is a major category for canon in my forthcoming book, Canon Revisited.

      • I think I heard an interview of you about your book a short time ago, maybe on Reformed Forum. I know I read that you develop Ridderbos. I ordered the book and very much look forward to reading it. It looks like it will greatly advance the discussion in the right direction. Thanks!

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  5. I read Hill’s book on the gospels and found it persuasive — the gospels were accepted very early on as authoritative. Indeed, to my mind, the very strangeness of maintaining a fourfold, overlapping canon of gospels with variance in detail and words and resistance to a synthesis like the Diatessaron is evidence of the church’s view of their authenticity and authority. This fact of “gospels not gospel” is so strange on first glance that it seems unlikely that it would have been planned this way or left this way by church authorities who could do something about it.

    All that is to say, due to the fine spadework already done, the gospels and Paul’s letters are to my mind well attested as authoritative and accepted. These have received a lot of the coverage on canon questions that I’ve found, and I think solid answers have been given to critics.

    The problem spots for me are the other books, particularly Hebrews, 2 Peter, Jude, and Revelation. Can you add a question to deal in more detail with those (authorship, process of acceptance, etc.)?

    • Yes, Hill’s book is excellent. I highly recommend it. I agree that more needs to be done on some of the problematic books (2 Peter, Jude, etc.). Perhaps I can include more discussion of those in a future post.

  6. Another question: Gaffin says in Inerrancy and Hermeneutic that the tests for canonical acceptance criteria like apostolic origin, antiquity, use in church meetings, etc. is a failed project because criteria can’t be identified that include all of our canonical books and only those. Do you agree, and why or why not?

    • I agree with many of Gaffin’s critiques of the criteria of canonicity. However, I think apostolicity is a core canonical attribute (notice I used “attribute” and not “criteria”). In my book, I discuss how I think apostolicity can identify canonical books as long as it is not conceived of as some independent, neutral, criteria to which Scripture must measure up.

  7. Still another question: I’d also like to see something about the closing of the canon. Reformed folk, following Ridderbos, have argued that special revelation accompanies epochal redemptive history, which is true as far as it goes. But they then go further with the negative side of this event-revelation correlation, which implies silence in revelation when there’s no quantum leap in redemptive history.

    First, this doesn’t seem to me to deal fairly with the development of the OT (according to mainstream conservatives at RTS/WTS/etc., not liberals) or wisdom literature in particular. If we’re going to admit, say, Job as an exception to the correlation, then we don’t seem to have an airtight closed canon based on correlation with redemptive events.

    Secondly, even though we’re on the other side of the climax of redemptive history, that doesn’t mean that there are no more subplots to appear. What if God wanted to provide new authoritative revelation for some special work before the consummation, e.g., the conversion of the Jews (or something we haven’t thought of, but that may seem clear in retrospect — like the mystery of the salvation of Gentiles in Eph. 3).

  8. Last comment (for now!).

    There’s an interesting line of thought on the assembly of the NT from the liberal scholar David Trobisch. In short, his thesis is that Paul selected some of his own letters to be published to the churches (Hill thinks that is likely too). Some in the early church — notably Marcion — viewed Paul as in conflict with the apostles in Jerusalem (esp. Peter and James) on the matter of grace and works, and the NT itself was assembled and arranged as a collection — in a different order from what we’re used to, with the general epistles by Peter, James, Jude, and John intentionally before Paul’s — partly to refute this disagreement and show that the apostles ultimately represent a united front. (Note the Bauer thesis implicit in this theory, but also note that the thesis has at least a grain of truth, as the NT itself attests to some division between Paul and the others.)

    In this regard, he suggests that several books of the NT exhibit a “canon consciousness.” In his article making the case that Polycarp, who was a direct disciple of the apostle John, was the original compiler of the NT during the mid-100s, Trobisch says of Acts:

    Like no other book of the New Testament, the book of Acts offers a view into the whole collection. Being the second volume of Luke’s work, it provides a link to the Four-Gospel-Book. In its first half, Acts introduces the authors of the General Letters: Peter, John, James, and Jude; in the second half, it introduces Paul, the author of the other New Testament letter collection. In addition, Acts provides information that makes it possible to identify Luke, the author of the Gospel, as the doctor who travels with Paul and to identify Mark as someone close to Peter and Paul.

    And in his book on The First Edition of the NT (which has not one but two Amazon reviews apparently by the Anne Rice, and another nice review by someone else [Tom Dykstra] that gives a fairly detailed summary of the argument of the book):

    When 2 Peter is read as an integrated part of the Canonical Edition of the Christian Bible, the apparent cross-references to the collection [of] units are quite astonishing. The Old Testament is quoted abundantly. Biblical prophecy is explicitly addressed, its relevance for the present time of readers id demonstrated, and it is related to a theology of divine inspiration formulated in a manner applied to other New Testament writers as well. The letter clearly refers to the canonical Gospel collection by pointing to John (Jn 21), Mark, and the synoptic account of the Transfiguration. The references to 1 Peter and Jude serve as links to the Praxapostolos. It presupposes that the readers have access to a comprehensive collection of Paul’s letters. In addition to these literary links, the treatment of Peter and Paul as equals is another trait 2 Peter shares with the editorial interest of the Canonical Edition. (David Trobisch, The First Edition of the New Testament, 95).

    Conservative NT scholar Michael Bird comments on Trobisch’s argument:

    I doubt Trobisch’s main contention that there was a single archtype “edition” of the NT that became exemplary for later compilations of the NT writings. Most of the inner-canonical unities that he finds look like incidental post-compilation observations, rather than deliberate editorial creations by the formulators of the first New Testament collection. That said, I think that Trobisch does show how 2 Peter gives us a virtual precis of the NT itself with interwoven OT themes, references to synoptic material, veneration of Paul’s letter collection, and incorporation of Jude.

    Of course, one needn’t agree with all of Trobisch’s theories (including that Polycarp was the compiler or that the NT includes some forgeries) to find some value in what he says. It’s also nice to see a liberal giving an early date for the finished (or virtually finished) canon.

    So if I had to distill this into a question for your list, I’d ask: Do we have a fallible collection of infallible books? If Paul select some of his own letters for inclusion in the canon (e.g., omitting 0th and 3rd Corinthians, perhaps including the letter to the Laodiceans as what we now call Ephesians, etc.), and if John published his gospel, intending to add it to the already authoritative synoptic witness (as the Muratorian canon suggests) with Andrew et al. approving it, and if the apostles themselves delivered some of their own or their compatriots’ work as authoritative for the early churches, is our collection of books infallible, partly infallible, or wholly infallible?

    • Wow, you have a lot of questions today! Yes, I found Trobisch helpful in many ways, but I don’t adhere to all his positions. The question of whether we have an “fallible collection of infallible books” is a common one. I don’t prefer to ask or state it that way. Obviously, I think all the books in the canon are infallible. If so, then they are definitely the “right” books for the church. The only objection one might raise is “But, what if some are left out or lost?” My response: (a) I think the mechanism God put in place for his church to recognize his books is effectual; i.e., I believe it got the job done (more on this in my book); and (b) even if a book was ‘lost’, all the books we do have are infallible and inspired and thus the church has divine resources for its life and ministry.