Category: New Testament Canon

Walter Wagner Reviews Christianity at the Crossroads

Over the last year or so, I’ve been encouraged by the many different reviews of (and interactions with) my book, Christianity at the Crossroads: How the Second Century Shaped the Future of the Church.  For a list of some of those reviews, see prior post here.

One of the reasons I wrote this book is because of the enormous gap in scholarship on the study of second-century Christianity. There just hasn’t been much done on this “Cinderella Century” (to use the phrase of Larry Hurtado).

But, of course, there are exceptions to that pattern of neglect. One is the fine book by Walter Wagner, After the Apostles: Christianity … Continue reading...

Were the Earliest Christians Only Concerned about Oral Tradition?

Over the last number of years, I’ve had the opportunity to spend a lot of time in the writings of the Apostolic Fathers.  The Apostolic Fathers are an informal collection of early Christian writings, roughly 95-150 AD, which include books like the Didache, 1 & 2 Clement, the Epistle of Barnabas, and letters from Polycarp and Ignatius.

In recent years, scholars have expressed increased skepticism about whether these writings can inform our understanding of the development of the canon.  What appear to be citations of and allusions to New Testament books are not that at all, we are told, but instead are best explained by these authors … Continue reading...

Apocryphal Gospels, Conspiracy Theories, and the Mainstream Media

One thing that I have observed over the years is that major media outlets love apocryphal gospels.  Whenever the person of Jesus is discussed–usually at Easter and Christmas–there is always a discussion about how the real story of Jesus has been suppressed and can only now be found in these lost gospels.

Sweeping claims are then made about how there was no agreement on much of anything in the first four centuries of the faith and that other stories of Jesus circulated by the thousands. Only after Constantine came along does the church decide which books to accept (and then subsequently denies all other books admission to the club).

When … Continue reading...

Persistent Myths about the Origins of the New Testament

Are the NT manuscripts corrupted?  Have scribes irreparably changed the text?  Were Christian scribes competent to copy the text reliably?

How many “other” gospels were there in early Christianity? Were these gospel suppressed by “orthodox” groups? Were these lost gospels as popular as the canonical ones?

Don Carson and I answer these questions for a TGC video:

[iframe width=”1000″ height=”550″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/soRcOA-3pa4″ frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture” allowfullscreen></iframe]… Continue reading...