Tag Team with Michael Horton on “A New New Testament”
Over the last month, I have offered an extended review of Hal Taussig’s A New New Testament (see here for the final post with all the links). Taussig tries to add 10 apocryphal books to the existing NT canon.
Over at the White Horse Inn Blog, Mike Horton and I have offered a tag team review of this book. Mike offered his own review yesterday (April 30), and then he has posted my review today (May 1). He tackles the book more from a theological perspective and I examine it more from a historical perspective.
Since my portion was already posted here on my own website, let me give … Continue reading...
The Formation of the Biblical Canon: My Review of Lee McDonald’s Latest Book
Note: The review below was just published in the latest issue of Themelios.
I have enjoyed reading Lee McDonald’s many works on the NT canon. He has established himself as one of the leading voices in this area through his numerous books and articles. So I was pleased to see this latest volume, Formation of the Bible: The Story of the Church’s Canon (Hendrickson, 2012), which is intended to be a lay-level introduction to the origins of the Bible. There are very few introductory works on this subject matter (a point McDonald makes in the preface), so it is good to see something written for the person in the … Continue reading...
Why is There a New Testament at All? My New Book with IVP-Academic
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 … Continue reading...
Man-Made Religion at Its Best: Review of a “New New Testament”: Part 3
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 … Continue reading...
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”
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 … Continue reading...