Talking Out Of Turn

In response to a friend asking about New Testament canon issues:

The “messy human business” (I like that phrase, it’s a good description of what people think) of the Canon is a fairly recent development in the history of unbelief, and it takes advantage of people’s lack of historical training and gullibility. (I’m going to assume that we’re talking about the New Testament canon here.) It is a major problem these days because of people like Dan Brown (of The Da Vinci Code fame), who famously claimed that church councils following Constantine just dogmatically decided what was in and what was out in the early fourth century, and that was that. But the main council held in his time, the Council of Nicea, specifically did not determine this. His friend, liaison to the church, and personal historian, Eusebius, did make statements about this, and they are interesting, but as far as church councils go, the first “ecumenical” council that solidifies the Canon is the Council of Trent, and that is after the Reformation has already gotten well under way (mostly to protect the apocrypha from being kicked out of the Canon). So, before the church split into East and West, and before the Western church split into Catholic and Protestant, there was no laying down of law, so to speak, as to what was the canon.

Certainly, people made statements. But the fact is, the canon grew organically, and like a mixture of centrifuge and computing grid, everywhere certain books rose distinctively to the top, and certain others distinctively fell to the bottom. This is only a problem if you have a presupposition, that God must have maintained His revelation by handing down the order supernaturally to somebody. But that’s not even how the text was transmitted. If anything, what we see is the remarkable sovereignty of God in preserving both the content of the books and their order throughout history. As early as the second century, we already had things like the Muratorian canon, which listed everything we now have in the New Testament, plus the Wisdom of Solomon (people are still scratching their heads over that one, it’s not even a Christian-era book), minus Hebrews, James, and 1 and 2 Peter, being listed as books which are accepted universally. Then it mentions that there is an “Apocalypse of Peter” which some people refuse to read in church (the implication is that the Muratorian author didn’t think this book was a problem, but he recognized a general consensus already). On the third level from canonicity it mentions the “Shepherd of Hermas” which is recognized as a good devotional work but shouldn’t be read in church. Then it lists some heretical books, most of which do not even exist today, which have no place in worship.

The important thing about the Muratorian canon is not the list so much as it is the recognition of general consensus. Already, over a hundred years before the unification of a church under Roman recognition, we had the general outline of our New Testament, and a recognition that, while some disagreed, a consensus was emerging. When we statistically analyze the quotes and clear references from early church fathers, we find that the winners are the books we have now, whether the fathers themselves lived in Africa, Palestine, Asia Minor, Rome, or Gaul, and this is late-first century through late-third century. Did they quote others? Yes. Would they have disagreed about what was in and what was out? Yes. But the consensus naturally arrived at certain books, and the question that must be asked is, why? What is the common thread in the books that survived into the New Testament we have today? It can’t be antiSemitism, because Hebrews, Matthew, and others are totally the opposite of that. It’s not recognition of Rome; if anything it’s a resistance to centralized authority for the whole church on earth, except in Christ as revealed in Scripture and interpreted by the Apostles. It’s not suppression of women, or asceticism, or legalism. It appears to be a singular, fully-consistent vision of Who Jesus is, and the role He played in the history of redemption, and has yet to play.

Eusebius, mentioned previously, has interesting things to say along these lines too. He does the statistical analysis on previous church writings (in a form in order with his contemporaries, although we’d wonder about it today, I admit), and comes up with this:

1. homologoumena, the universally acknowledged books: our NT minus James, 2 Peter, 2-3 John, Jude, but including Revelation
2. notha, the universally rejected books: the Shepherd of Hermas and the Apocalypse of Peter, as well as John’s Revelation, which book was also in the first category; he admits that it’s about 50/50 on that one, so he threw it in both camps. Eusebius is quite funny sometimes. No other NT books but Revelation are in the list
3. antilegoumena, the “disputed but familiar” books: James, 2 Peter, 2-3 John, Jude (why is Revelation not in here? I guess because people either loved it or hated it; you can’t just leave it on the “disputed” list, I suppose)
4. heretical fiction (sorry, no Greek word here), including the Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Peter, and the Acts of various individual apostles

I would mostly note that (a) we still seem to be asymptotically approaching the 27 books we have now, and (b) if Eusebius, a man who really believed in Constantine’s conversion and his role in church history as it unfolded, would have thought for an instant that Constantine had cemented the canon and had the right to do so, I am certain that Eusebius wouldn’t have considered this to be up for discussion.

Oh, and of the two major manuscripts we have from that period (Sinaiticus and Vaticanus), Sinaiticus’s canon for the NT is ours, plus the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas. (Vaticanus is missing some pages.)

All in all, it appears to have just come together, “everywhere, by everybody, for all time” as Thomas Oden might put it, as a result of God’s moving the church in discernment. A church that couldn’t communicate openly [for fear of persecution].