The Origin, Transmission, And Canonization Of The New Testament Books

(1) The gradual creation and dissemination of the NT books. The books of the canonical NT were written over a span of approximately fifty years (AD 45-95). Before winning universal acceptance, each newly written book had to be circulated, copied, examined, and discussed among the churches. This was not a quick process. Books that were written relatively late underwent the sort of treatment that is common for newcomers: they were vetted with especially great care before being granted a seat among the old guard. Also, the Christian faith multiplied rapidly in the early centuries, with new churches cropping up in far-flung regions at a pace that outstripped the dissemination of the Scriptures. Thus, many early churches had access to only a few NT books. Naturally, when new books came to their attention they were cautious about embracing them as biblical, and they accepted them only after careful consideration and consultation with churches that had been founded by the apostles.

(2) Apostolic authority and the NT canon. All the earliest churches were founded by the apostles and their associates as they fanned out from Jerusalem in the years after Jesus’s resurrection. Naturally, the churches depended on these men to teach them about Jesus and the Christian life. At first these teachings were strictly oral, but over time the apostles began writing letters and Gospels for the churches, thus providing early Christians with authoritative “books” to guide them in their beliefs and practices. These apostolic churches were among the first to receive the Scriptures as they were written, and so they were in a good position to help guide newer churches into the correct identification of a NT canon.

(3) The relative independence of each local church. Apostolic authority was honored by all true churches at the advent of Christianity, and yet each local church was relatively independent from any centralized ecclesiastical authority. One practical result of this was that no central office pronounced the NT books authoritative or forced their use in worship abroad. Understandably, it took several centuries for churches sprawled all over the map to forge communicative ties and common consensus on the canon.

(4) The rise of heresy. When someone came into the churches pushing ideas contrary to what had been received from the apostles, their teachings were recognized as unauthorized innovation. This is the very thing that happened in the second century with the advent of so-called Gnostic Christianity. Gnosticism was a popular dualistic Greek philosophy which held that the material world was created by an evil God. Hence, Gnostics stressed meditation on the secrets of a pure invisible realm, and they denied that God could take on material flesh as Christ did. A man named Marcion wedded Gnosticism with Christian elements and petitioned the church in Rome to adopt his views. Among other perversions, Marcion tried to convince Christians to reject the Old Testament Scriptures and adhere only to the writings of Paul plus a heavily edited version of Luke’s Gospel that did not mention Christ’s birth. As inheritors of the apostolic teachings, Christians in Rome and elsewhere knew that Marcion’s teachings did not square with genuine Christian doctrines. As churches marked the distinction between authorized apostolic writings and the heretical innovations of men such as Marcion, and as Christians all across the Roman Empire endured periodic persecutions that threatened death to anyone harboring Christian Scriptures, the NT began to emerge as a defined and defended body of books. So-called “alternative Christianities,” represented in second- and third-century works such as The Gospel of Thomas and The Gospel of Judas, were never considered for adoption into the NT canon because they were written long after the apostles, and their teachings did not match the Old Testament or the apostolic traditions.

Though it took several centuries for the canon to emerge as a definite collection of books that were agreed upon by the majority of churches, it is certain that many of the books were widely recognized as Scripture from early on. For example, in AD 96 Clement of Rome quoted from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5-7) and treated it as Scripture. As a member of a church founded by an apostle, Clement probably had access to all or nearly all twenty-seven canonical books at this time. In AD 110 Ignatius of Antioch, who was a disciple of John, claimed the Gospel materials were Scripture. By AD 180, the famed apologist Irenaeus defended Christianity by appealing to the authority of many NT writings. In total, scholars who have examined Irenaeus’s surviving works believe he used twenty-two of our twenty-seven NT books, including all four Gospels. A short time after Irenaeus an apologist named Tertullian charged Gnostic Christians with misusing “the instrument,” by which he meant the collection of authoritative NT books. That he would refer to the collection of NT books in this way proves that by this time the leading churches had identified a well-defined set of books as canonical. Only James, 2 Peter, and 2 and 3 John go unnamed by Tertullian. A few decades later the church father Origen named all twenty-seven books and noted that six of them (Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and Jude) were disputed by some. These disputed books went on to be the subject of debate for many centuries more, though their revered position among most churches was never shaken.

It was in the fourth century that the NT canon clearly emerged as a widely accepted set of holy books. First, Eusebius of Caesarea, known as the father of church history since he was the first to write a comprehensive history of Christianity, named twenty-seven books that were commonly accepted as NT Scripture by the churches. He had reservations about the book of Revelation, but all in all he names the same canon as we use today. In AD 367 the Bishop of Alexandria, a stalwart man named Athanasius, wrote a festal letter in which he listed all twenty-seven NT books as Scripture. He made no note about disputed books—an indication that the disputes mentioned by Origen and Eusebius had diminished in importance by this time. A little more than a decade later the renowned scholar Jerome translated all twenty-seven NT books into Latin and included them in his Bible, which is commonly called the Vulgate. As for the disputed books, he was convinced that their long-standing acceptance in the churches proved that they were indeed Scripture. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, agreed that the twenty-seven were all canonical. Of the disputed books he said they are to be accepted because the majority of churches, especially those accorded great authority due to their apostolic origins, have long accepted them. Finally, in AD 393 and AD 397 the Councils of Hippo and Carthage concluded that the NT canon properly includes twenty-seven books, no more and no less.

The Reformation era was a time in which many beliefs and practices were reexamined in the light of Scripture. Men such as Luther and Calvin desired to peel away the traditions of men and take their cues only from God’s authoritative Word. This emphasis highlighted the need to be certain about which books were from God and which were not. When Luther published a German translation of the NT in AD 1522, he included all twenty-seven books of the traditional canon even though he sounded a few notes of disapproval over the disputed books. In the table of contents he listed them separately from the undisputed books. For Luther, it seems, the books of the NT were divided into first-class and second-class canons. All twenty-seven books were from God, but he did not believe Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation measured up to the others. Despite Luther’s reservations, Christianity’s long-standing acceptance of a twenty-seven-book NT canon was not seriously questioned. In AD 1546 the Roman Catholic Church affirmed all twenty-seven books at the Council of Trent, and a hundred years later the Protestants did the same in the Westminster Confession of Faith. No sustained challenge to the canon has arisen in the churches since that era.

It has become popular in recent decades for skeptics to claim that the NT books have evolved beyond all recognition since the days when they were written. Amateur copyists, hapless monks, rogue theologians, sly politicians—folk from many quarters are said to have had a turn at corrupting the text by adding, deleting, and modifying at will. One popular critic famously says that the total number of variations found in the existing manuscripts exceeds the number of words in the entire NT! Technically his claim is true, but the conclusions to be drawn from it are far less drastic than he would have us believe. The fact is the vast majority of all changes are easily detected, and they amount to nothing more than simple misspellings and other minor alterations that have no impact whatsoever on the meaning of the NT. In the few places where the changes potentially have theological importance, scholars are often able to trace the text back to its original reading with confidence. In cases where the original reading is in greater dispute, textual scholars have rightly said that you could eliminate all such verses from the NT and not detract from a single vital doctrine of Christianity. In other words, none of the corrupted verses serve as the sole basis for any NT doctrine. So even if we dropped such verses from the Bible, we could always point to undisputed verses elsewhere in the NT as support for the doctrine in question. In this light we see that the variants are not very important. A fair assessment of the evidence reveals that the NT manuscripts have been preserved remarkably well through centuries of transmission. Aside from inconsequential alterations, the NT manuscripts on which our translation is based are very close replications of the original writings.

The churches that initially received the letters and Gospels written by the apostles and their commissioned associates understood that the writings were Scripture, for they came from men who were recognized as the authorized exponents of Jesus’s life and message. These writings were copied with care and circulated to other churches. Awareness of the approved books among Christians increased as the decades clicked away, for slowly the copies reached churches that sprang up far from the point of Christian origins in Israel. It is nevertheless true that many sincere Christian devotees in the early centuries would have been unaware of several or even many of the inspired works since many newer churches had little or no access to Scripture. Hence, the fact that the canon was not widely described until the fourth century does not mean the canon itself was an open question among those who were in a good position to judge the matter. After all, we find clear references to most of the canonical books in the writings of the early church fathers, and certainly Christians who worshiped at churches founded by the apostles had an early grasp of the NT canon since their churches were among those that received the original writings in the first century. It is no exaggeration to say that once the practical obstacles to travel, communication, and dissemination of the manuscripts were alleviated, the twenty-seven-book NT canon quickly became the consensus position in Christendom.

Looking back, it is apparent that all the books that were admitted into the canon met the following criteria. (a) They were written either by an apostle or a sanctioned associate of the apostles. (b) They had enjoyed wide and long-standing usage in the churches, especially churches that were founded by the apostles. (c) They reflected high praise for Jesus, were true to the apostolic tradition that had been handed down to the churches, and fit with the overall theology of the other biblical books in both testaments.

In summary, church history shows that great care was taken when candidate books were assessed; the fact that a number of the books in our canon were repeatedly quizzed for their merits proves this beyond all doubt. Our NT canon is a well-proven, carefully protected heritage in which Christians can rejoice and place their full confidence.