How We Got the Bible · Page 3 of 6
The New Testament canon
Apostolic writings, recognized in the churches from the start, tested when rivals appeared, and listed in full by AD 367.
Recognition of the New Testament books starts inside the New Testament. Peter writes about Paul's letters as documents that unstable people twist, 'as they do the rest of the Scriptures': Paul's letters are already Scripture to him. And the first letter to Timothy quotes two sayings under the heading 'the Scripture says', a command from Deuteronomy and a saying of the Lord that Luke's Gospel records: the worker is worthy of his wages.
He writes this way in all his letters, speaking in them about such matters. Some parts of his letters are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction.
2 Peter 3:16 (BSB)
For the Scripture says, “Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain,” and, “The worker is worthy of his wages.”
1 Timothy 5:18 (BSB)
Underneath the recognition stands the claim the writers make about their own work: prophecy did not begin in human invention, and the apostolic writings stand in that line.
For no such prophecy was ever brought forth by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
2 Peter 1:21 (BSB)
The tests the churches used
As more writings circulated, some genuine and some not, the churches asked three questions of any book, the tests Bruce Metzger's history of the canon sets out. Was it apostolic: written by an apostle, or by a close companion whose work carried an apostle's authority? Did it agree with the rule of faith, the teaching the churches had received from the apostles? And was it read across the churches, not prized in one corner only? A book that passed all three was received. A book that failed one was not Scripture, however popular it was.
Marcion's cut-down list
The first list we know of was a rival's. About AD 140, Marcion, a teacher in Rome, rejected the Old Testament and the God it describes. His New Testament was cut down to fit his teaching: one Gospel, Luke with parts removed, and ten letters of Paul. The church in Rome expelled him in AD 144. His list did the churches one service: it forced them to say plainly which books they had actually received, and they had received far more than Marcion allowed.
An early list: the Muratorian fragment
A generation or so after Marcion, an unknown writer drew up a list of the books received, discussing each one. The document survives in a damaged Latin copy, published by Ludovico Antonio Muratori in 1740 and called the Muratorian fragment after him. Metzger dates the list itself to the late second century. It already covers most of the New Testament, and it argues as it goes: it accepts the four Gospels, Acts and Paul's letters, and warns against letters forged in Paul's name. The tests were at work, on paper, within living memory of the apostles' students.
Athanasius, AD 367: the full list
In AD 367 Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, sent his thirty-ninth Festal Letter to the churches under his care, and in it he set out the books 'included in the Canon'. His New Testament list runs: the four Gospels; the Acts of the Apostles; seven catholic epistles, one of James, two of Peter, three of John, one of Jude; fourteen epistles of Paul, Hebrews among them; and the Revelation of John. Count them: twenty-seven, the twenty-seven in a New Testament today, and the first surviving list of exactly these books and no others. In the same letter he keeps two other shelves distinct: books 'appointed by the Fathers to be read', useful for teaching new believers, and 'apocryphal writings', which he refuses outright. Recognizing, sorting, refusing: that is what the process looked like when it finally wrote itself down in full.
Hippo and Carthage: ratification
A generation later the North African churches stated the list in council. At Hippo in AD 393, and again at Carthage in AD 397, the bishops set out the canonical Scriptures that may be read in church, the New Testament exactly as Athanasius had listed it, and closed the canon with the reason: 'these are the things which we have received from our fathers to be read in church.' Received, not invented. The councils ratified a recognition the churches had already made.
And Nicaea?
The Council of Nicaea, in AD 325, is the council named in the folklore claim that a council chose the Bible. It did not, and its own record shows it. Nicaea met over Arius, who taught that the Son of God was a created being, and over the date of Easter. Its twenty canons, which survive in full, are about clergy discipline, ordination, the treatment of Christians who had lapsed under persecution, and standing for prayer on Sundays. None of them names a book of the Bible. The story survives because it sounds like the kind of thing a council would do. This council did other work.
What about Constantine?
Constantine enters the story as a customer, not an editor. Eusebius kept the emperor's letter ordering fifty copies of the sacred Scriptures, written on prepared parchment by professional copyists, for the churches of his new capital, Constantinople. Ordering fifty Bibles is not choosing their contents. The books inside the copies were the books the churches already read.
Sources
- Berean Standard Bible (BSB)
- Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament (1997)
- Athanasius, Festal Letter 39 (AD 367)
- Councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397), Canon 24
- The Canons of the Council of Nicaea (AD 325)
- Eusebius, Life of Constantine 4.36
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