Tag Archives: NT Canon

10 Misconceptions about the NT Canon: #10: “Athanasius’ Festal Letter (367 A.D.) is the First Complete List of New Testament Books”

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Origen

Note: this is the tenth and final installment of a blog series announced here.  The full series can be found here.

When it comes to the study of the New Testament canon, few questions have received more attention than the canon’s date.  When did we have a New Testament canon?  Well, it depends on what one means by “New Testament canon.”   If one is simply asking when (some of) these books came to be regarded as Scripture, then we can say that happened at a very early time.  But, if one is asking when we see these books, and only these books, occur in some sort of …

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Did the Early Church Fathers Think That They Were Inspired Like the Apostles?

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church fathers

A number of years ago, Albert Sundberg wrote a well-known article arguing that the early church fathers did not see inspiration as something that was uniquely true of canonical books.[1]  Why?  Because, according to Sundberg, the early Church Fathers saw their own writings as inspired.   Ever since Sundberg, a number of scholars have repeated this claim, insisting that the early fathers saw nothing distinctive about the NT writings as compared to writings being produced in their own time period.

However, upon closer examination, this claim proves to be highly problematic.  Let us consider several factors.

First, the early church fathers repeatedly express that the apostles had a distinctive …

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New Publication: “Manuscripts, Scribes, and Book Production in Early Christianity”

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Christian Origins

A number of years ago my wife purchased a Kindle e-reader from Amazon.  Now, she reads a number of her books digitally.  And she is not alone.  It seems like our modern world has become to digest books more and more in a digital format–e-readers, ipads, digital phones, etc.   Much of this technical innovation is positive.  People can easily access material in ways never before available.

However, in the midst of this technological innovation, our modern concept of the “book” has been transformed.  It has largely ceased to be a physical object that you can touch, hold, and smell, and now has become entirely digital.  Books are merely words, and …

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10 Misconceptions about the NT Canon: #9: “The Canonical Gospels Were Certainly Not Written by the Individuals Named in Their Titles”

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title

Note: this is the ninth installment of a blog series announced here.  The full series can be found here.

One of the most commonly made claims regarding the canonical gospels is that they were not written by the individuals named in their titles.  Instead, we are told that these gospels were written later in the first century by anonymous individuals outside of Palestine who were not eyewitnesses of any of the events that they record.  After all, the text of the gospels themselves offers no indication of their authorship.   And the gospel titles, it is argued, were added at a later point—probably the middle of the second century—in …

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