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.

The Canon of Holy Scripture: History, Heresy, and Hearsay Pt. 2 by Chris White

Pentecost

We are considering in this essay the question of Canonicity or, put another way, which books truly belong in the Bible and why others do not.  In part one of this series we looked at the canon of the Old Testament and found there to be an almost shocking unanimity about it.  It isn’t in human nature to not have some controversy when it comes to religion, but apparently for the descendants of Abraham, they knew when they heard the voice of God in their prophets, they recorded it in writing, and made copies of their collections for perpetuity.  When the Christian movement began, it came out of Judaism but didn’t leave behind the Law and prophets because in them was a foundational understanding which in part explains and predicts the incarnation and ministry of Jesus Christ.  Thus the canon of the Old Testament was a fait accompli inherited by the Christian Church.

The Christian scriptures, also known as the New Testament, went through their own process of recognition over several centuries which will be attended to in parts three and four of this series.  In this installment, I would like to fill in the story of the New Testament with regards to its completion, collection, and finally its connection to the Old Testament.

The actual writing of the New Testament literature happened between 45 and 85 AD.  Some date some of the Apostle John’s writings to as late as the 90’s which is certainly plausible as there is strong support for the idea that he lived into advanced age.  Given this time frame, the first thing which should strike you is that the events recorded in the Gospels had happened 17 years prior to any of them being written down.  In some regards that does seem like a long time, but on the other hand, nearly all of us have moments that are so profound, they are almost impossible to forget decades and decades later.  I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to say that those who were the eyewitnesses of the extraordinary life of Jesus probably remembered these things as if they happened yesterday.  But there is also another factor we must consider that is unfamiliar to us today and that is the preference for oral tradition that existed in the Eastern world where the Church began.

It could simply be that the Apostles and those who followed shared these stories day-by-day and so often that they knew them by heart.  An analysis of some of the sermons that are recorded in Acts of the Apostles, shows there was a pattern in how the gospel was preached publicly and this pattern seems to be followed in the written versions.  Part of this delay in writing could be explained by belief that Jesus’s return was imminent.  It might also have been related to simple economics.  Before the invention of the printing press, books were hand-copied and as such were quite expensive.  A book the length of Luke’s gospel would have run around $250 in today’s money.  Eventually these things were committed to writing, but when it happens it is done from a position of expediency before eyewitnesses die and in larger cities where copyists can be hired for better prices.

After the Gospels and letters of the New Testament were written, they began the process of being collected together.  This didn’t happen all at once but in segments.  One of the earliest known collections  of the Apostle Paul’s letters was in the city of Ephesus around 100 AD.  St. Luke had written the book of Acts which describes the early church era and the missionary journeys of Paul.  This is turn created an interest to read the other writings of Paul and soon the churches which had a letter from the Apostle began sharing copies with each other.  Soon Acts and the Letters of Paul are copied as a collection and owned by churches and individuals. Simultaneously is the collection of the four Gospels we know simply as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Irenaeus

That these writings were collected are attested by leading Christian teachers in the 2^nd Century.  One such author known as Irenaeus writes a famous book around 150 AD called Against Heresies.  What is important about this book is it catalogues all errors taught by false teachers in the early church.  In this book Irenaeus directly states that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are the only authentic gospels in existence and indirectly he gives testimony to the collection of the New Testament through use of quotations from every book of the New Testament except Philemon.

Hippolytus of Rome (170 AD) gives reference to the expansion of the scriptures to include the New Testament writings by referring to them in his writings as “The Prophets, The Lord, and The Apostles.”  In this same era there was another document written we know today as the Muratorian Canon.  It lists the collected works of the New Testament almost exactly as they are found today.  So even in this early era, collections exist of these individual works and there is an official sense developing of what is and is not truly authentic scripture.

Tertullian: First to name the New Testament

This brings us to the connection of the Old Testament to the New Testament.  The earliest Christians thought of the Jewish scriptures as their own.  The naming of them as “Old” and “New” Testaments is above all a theological statement and speaks to how Christians understand them.  This is why Christians and Jews can actually share a common book as scripture and yet be in opposition regarding their conclusions.  To generalize, Judaism focuses on the laws and covenants and the centerpiece of their faith, while Christians read the Old Testament as a unfolding revelation pointing to Jesus Christ (Jn. 5:39) who is the sum and substance of the true faith.  Historically speaking, it was the North African bishop Tertullian (ca. 200 AD) who first began calling the collection of Christian writings “The New Testament of Our Lord.”

To conclude, the collections of both the Old and New Testament writings are joined in the Christian mind but only with the Old serving as an extended introduction to the New.  The Old Testament does not stand by itself but rather is subsumed in the New.