New Book on the Authority of Scripture
If we learn anything from church history, its that the church fights the same battles over and over again. Until Christ returns and redeems His church, this reality is, to some degree, inevitable. And one of those reoccurring battles is the issue of biblical authority. For a variety of reasons, this topic continues to pop up again and again.
In the last 50 years, one of the key issues related to biblical authority is the issue of inerrancy. Is inerrancy a recent, post-enlightenment, rationalistic (and largely American) invention as so many maintain? While one most always be careful to explain and nuance the meaning of the term, I don’t … Continue reading...
What is the Earliest Complete List of the Canon of the New Testament?
In the study of the New Testament canon, scholars like to highlight the first time we see a complete list of 27 books. Inevitably, the list contained in Athanasius’ famous Festal Letter (c.367) is mentioned as the first time this happened.
As a result, it is often claimed that the New Testament was a late phenomenon. We didn’t have a New Testament, according to Athanasius, until the end of the fourth century.
But, this sort of reasoning is problematic on a number of levels. First, we don’t measure the existence of the New Testament just by the existence of lists. When we examine the way certain books were used by … Continue reading...
New Book on Early Christian Apocrypha
Over the last number of years, scholarly (as well as popular) interest in Christian apocryphal works has continued to grow. Folks just can’t seem to get enough of “lost” Gospels and other books that did not make it into the New Testament.
My own interest in this area goes back to my thesis at the University of Edinburgh under Larry Hurtado on the apocryphal gospel fragment P.Oxy. 840. That was published later as The Gospel of the Savior: An Analysis of P.Oxy. 840 and its Place in the Gospel Traditions of Early Christianity (Brill, 2005).
Because of my own interest in the subject, I was pleased that yesterday in the … 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...
“When They Read the Old Covenant”: Canonical Clues in 2 Cor 3:14
Although most discussions about the development of the canon focus on the patristic period (second century and later), there is much canonical gold yet to mine from the pages of the New Testament itself. One passage that I think contains a number of intriguing clues is 2 Cor 3:14 when Paul says, “When they read the Old Covenant, that same veil remains unlifted.”
Often overlooked in this passage is that Paul understands a covenant to be something that you read; i.e., covenants are written documents. When we look at Paul’s Jewish context this should come as no surprise. So close is the relationship between the covenant, and the written … Continue reading...