The Canon of Holy Scripture: History, Heresy, and Hearsay Pt. 4 by Chris White

In part four of this series on the Canon of Scripture I want to continue with the theme of precipitating factors that led to its development.  In my last installment we talked about false teachers who wanted to add to and take away from the scriptures based on their theological excesses.  Certainly another factor in this was the government persecution of the church.  Christians weren’t persecuted in every place and everywhere at once, but the first three centuries of the churches existence was marked by a series of 8 major persecutions.

One of the widest persecutions of the Church came from the rule of the Emperor Diocletian.  Christians enjoyed many years of peace under Diocletian who more or less treated “the Christian issue” with benign neglect.  But something happened along the way and in February of 303, Diocletian issued an edict that all copies of the Christian scriptures must be turned into the authorities on pain of death.  Prior to this, leaders and individual Christians had been punished for their faith, but never had their literature been confiscated.  If your life were at risk for hiding a portion of the scriptures for your church to use, wouldn’t you want certainty that it was a canonical book?

As an aside, it is illuminating that Diocletian attempted to destroy the Church by destroying its Scriptures.  It shows the power of God’s Word and the truth of the Gospel that it was considered subversive by the Roman government.  Today, reading in general is down but especially Bible reading among Christians.  I wonder if persecution were to come today whether this strategy would even be viable?

From this persecution came another problem:  what to do with the traditores or “hand-overs” of scripture?  In North Africa, those who cooperated with handing over scriptures to the government were considered apostates unworthy of communion or fellowship with the Church.  But what if all they handed over was a Christian book that was non-canonical.  Were they still outside the pale?  This persecution created an interesting situation where having a definitive statement on the canon would have been helpful.  In point of historic fact, this actual controversy led to a nearly 100 year schism in the North African church.

Beyond persecution, perpetuation of the faith was also an important factor in the development of the canon.  For many reasons, the Early Church was very aggressive in their doctrinal training of its members.  In some instances a convert could not be baptized until they had undergone three years of training.  A canon would regulate which books would be used in this period of spiritual formation.  The flip-side of this coin is Bible translation and mission work.  The sine qua non of the Christian faith has always been  missionary endeavor.  Missionary work in turn necessitated the scriptures be translated as the faith left the Greek speaking world.  With translation and copying being such a difficult and expensive proposition, a canon would clarify which books were essential.

False prophets, persecutions, and forward progress of the faith were some of the “on-the-ground” issues that necessitated a canon be clarified for the entire church.  But how did that happen?  Was there a clear, straight forward process that was applied somewhere?  The answer to that in my closing essay.