This month, I’ve been thinking about how God used real communities, over real time, to recognize the sacredness of early writings that would one day be canonized as our Bible. The process took more time than you might guess. Some books were disputed longer than others … and that story might surprise you.
But let’s start with a parable:
There once was a woman who walked
into her dining room and unexpectedly beheld a beautiful German Chocolate Cake
on her table. Thrilled, she immediately
sat and helped herself to a delicious piece of that scrumptious dessert.
In time, her husband entered the
room and asked with surprise, “Where did that come from?”
“It’s a German Chocolate Cake,”
said his wife between mouthfuls, “so, obviously, Germany.”
“No, no,” said her husband, “I
mean, where did that particular cake come from? And if you don’t know, why are you eating
it? How do you know what’s in it?”
“Doesn’t matter,” said his
wife. “’cuz it’s so yummy!”
THE OLD TESTAMENT: A CONUNDRUM
When we were born, the Bible already existed. Or, in the terms of our story above: It was
there on the table when we walked in the room, and it looked beautiful,
delicious, downright scrumptious to those of us who have become believers. But if one of our fellow humans walked into
the room and posed the question “Where did it come from?” are we prepared to
give a reason for our hope and faith in it (see 1 Peter 3:15)?
Let’s spend this month doing a little history. I’ll try not to make it boring (that’s a
chore for me, since I’ve never found history boring). I’ll adopt a light, chatty tone to take you
on a journey through the evolution of the New Testament.
A couple points up front, though: First of all, I’m only
going to deal with the New Testament.
The canon (a fancy word for “official list”) of the New Testament is
universally accepted by all Christian groups.
However, inter-tradition agreement on the canon of the Hebrew Scriptures,
the Old Testament, remains fuzzy at the edges.
You might think I’m talking about the differences between the Protestant
Old Testament and the Roman Catholic inclusion of deuterocanonical works like Tobit
(a very cool book, by the way) and additions to Daniel (some awesome detective
stories, not kidding). But I also mean:
- The Eastern Orthodox canon (featuring 2 Esdras, Psalm 151, 3 Maccabees, and others)
- The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo canon (starring 1 Enoch and Jubilees)
- The Armenian Apostolic Church canon (including Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs)
- The Samaritan Pentateuch canon (containing only Torah, the first five Hebrew books)
Those groups account for a quarter to a third of Christians
worldwide (I’m not counting the Samaritan community since they don’t identify
as Christians). When you add in Roman
Catholics with their deuterocanonical texts, it means well over half, and
perhaps as many as two-thirds, of all people worldwide who call themselves Christian
use an Old Testament canon that is not identical to that of Western
Protestantism.
Yeah. When I ran
those numbers, I was surprised, too. So,
I’ll leave aside discussion of the Hebrew Scriptures (in all honesty, I can
only juggle so many flaming chainsaws at once) and focus on the more
universally accepted canon of the New Testament.
Oh, and I said I had a couple points to make up front. Here’s the second one: German Chocolate Cake is not from Germany. It’s a 1957 recipe crafted by Mrs. George Clay of Texas, USA , using a sweet, dark chocolate developed by American chocolatier Samuel German. We should be thankful Mrs. Clay named it after Mr. German and not after herself. No one would eat Clay Cake.
And that last paragraph is a parable, too. It's about expectations.
THE NEW TESTAMENT: HOW IT WASN’T MADE
I’ve run into more than one scoffer who’s said some version
of this, either in part or in full: “Why do you follow an ancient book that was
written in the Iron Age? Talk about
outdated ideas! It’s a bunch of rules
whipped up for a slaveholding, autocratic society. And the parts that aren’t rules are bizarre
hallucinations by writers who were probably under the influence of
mind-altering drugs.”
I suppose I could argue each of those points. In my opinion, they’re founded on ignorance
(after all, Aristotle and Plato were products of that same Iron Age, and their
ideas still inform modern-day philosophers.)
But I'm only restating cynical arguments here to demonstrate how extreme some
views can get -- definitely the far end of a “view-of-the-Bible” spectrum.
That spectrum has another extreme, though. I’ve also met Christians who believe some
version of the following, either in whole or in part: “The Bible was spoken by
God directly into the ears or minds of human beings, word by word with no human
participation in the text. There were no
other influences, only the dictation of God.
Upon completion of each part, the pieces were added to the Scripture
until it was all closed up by the words of Revelation 22:18-19, then translated
into King James English, then printed by the Gideons, and then distributed into
hotel-room drawers everywhere.”
I have examined a number of these claims in other blogs, so I won’t rehash them too much here:
- The Lord is clearly working with humans through their individual minds and voices. That point’s obvious even in translation to anyone who’s read and compared the styles of John’s Gospel, Luke’s Gospel, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs. I explore the unique and all-too-human style of Ecclesiastes here.
- Human writers freely borrow (guided, I believe, by the Spirit) from existing human, nonbiblical sources regularly in both the Old and New Testaments, as I will discuss in detail in a future blog post (although I mention it in passing in this essay).
- And, while the King James Version is rendered in beautiful, poetic English, I discuss fully here how King James Onlyism is a stance even the translators of the King James Version would reject.
THOSE GUYS WHO “BUILT” THE NT
There’s an “easy” version of how the New Testament was
assembled. It’s usually shared with
freshman-year Bible students. In this
version, students are told that the books of the Bible were assembled centuries
after they were written and subjected to a checklist-like test by 3rd
and 4th century church councils to see if they should be allowed
into the church’s canon. That “checklist,”
reimagined today, usually includes items like
- Book/letter was written by or for one of the original 12 apostles
- Text contained no unacceptable, non-Christian ideas
- Most local churches already accepted it and used it
- It was inspired by the Holy Spirit
- It was really old (from a 3rd and 4th century perspective)
That list is an adequate summary as summaries go, but it
leaves the impression that the early church fathers had a systematic approach
to declaring, “This one’s in, this one’s out!” It also leads to a number of questions … for
example:
- How did they know it was really written by or for an
apostle? Was it signed and
notarized? Three hundred-plus years had
passed, which made the texts older than the constitutions of any modern nation on Earth
except the Republic of San Marino (I thought I’d give you something to look
up).
- How did they evaluate whether the texts had “non-Christian
ideas”? Today, we judge an idea as
Christian or non-Christian based on the New Testament which, no surprise, they didn’t
have. Were Christians using oral
tradition and ecclesiastical authority to make their judgment calls about
doctrines (something Protestants tsk-tsk Catholics for today)?
- How did they judge that local churches were already using most
of these letters and books, since, by the 4th century after Christ, Christianity
had spread as far west as current-day Spain and Ireland, as far east as
Turkmenistan, north beyond the Black Sea, and south into Algeria and Libya? Communications were limited in ancient times.
- What tests did they apply beyond “gut feelings” to determine
a work was Holy Spirit-inspired? That
feels as if it needs a checklist of its own.
- How did they decide a work was “really old"? They likely had very few “autographs,” original first-draft manuscripts, in the 4th century. Parchment, handled for regular liturgical use, has a 150-year lifespan in a first- and second-century Judean environment, if we’re being generous. Papyrus for scrolls was more fragile still. Thus, the church fathers would have had newer copies of copies of copies (at least) as their references.
All of those questions have (tentative and debated) answers,
of course. Unfortunately, those answers
fill up multiple bookshelves in texts written by scholars who are way more
qualified than I’ll ever be. My point in
showing you the questions is to encourage you to ask them yourself, and to
understand that, no, the ancient councils did not have a formulaic checklist. In fact, those checklist categories weren’t
even defined until after the Reformation in the 1600s CE, when it became more
important to ask, “Does this book really belong in our Bible?”
HOW IT REALLY HAPPENED.
MAYBE.
In his book The Question of Canon, American Reformed
New Testament scholar Michael J. Kruger argues convincingly that much of the
New Testament was accepted by believers as authoritative and God-breathed from
the very start. Rather than being crafted
by councils, he sees the canon as arising organically, affirmed by the new and
growing Christian community over decades.
Council declarations simply rubber-stamped, centuries later, what believers
had agreed upon for centuries.
Kruger’s argument is compelling. As an amateur, I can’t do it justice
here. If you’re not going to read his
book, you can get a much less time-consuming summary of his ideas by watching
him on video here while enjoying what has to be the best hair and beard amid
the ranks of modern biblical scholars – modest coiffing complementing his
softly tailored, textured sports coat over a palette-restrained button down, projecting
an air of … um. My bad. I think my mind wandered there.
Ah, yes, how it really happened! Here we go, moving beyond Kruger to some
scholarly consensus about when and why various Christian writings started being
accepted as authoritative and on their way into a later-declared canon. Keep in mind, these are scholars' findings we’re
talking about, so there will be outlier opinions and new discoveries that shift
things around in the future. But this, as best as I
can tell, seems to be the consensus so far for the order in which parts of the New Testament were accepted by believers as authoritative, even Scriptural:
Paul’s epistles to churches – shared & revered, 60 – 100 CE
Probably the first scrolls being copied and passed around
church-to-church were the church letters in the New Testament written by Paul,
former enemy of the church. The honor of
being accepted as authoritative first is an ironic one for Paul. He started his apostolic career later than
the other apostles as “an untimely birth,” (1 Corinthians 15:8), referring to
his arrival with the Greek word ektromati, meaning a miscarriage or even
an abortion. He positions himself as the
least of the apostles, but his letters to churches were the first to rise to
the canonical top.
One interesting note: also accepted at this time was Paul’s
personal letter to Philemon. It is, in
fact, one of the least controversial entrants into the canon, accepted early on
and lumped in with Paul’s letters to full church congregations as early
acceptable Pauline writing. Stay tuned,
because that won’t be the case for Paul’s pastoral epistles below.
The Gospels & Acts – spotlighted as central, 90 – 150
CE
The Gospels grew out of oral tradition, collections of the
sayings of Jesus, and interviews with first-century followers of the Lord. Two of them, Matthew and John, claim direct
authorship by original apostles, while the other two, Mark and Luke, are once-removed
from direct apostolic penning. Luke’s
material in his gospel came from multiple interviews and eyewitness sources, as
he says in the gospel’s opening (Luke 1:2-4).
Mark's gospel is claimed to be based on the preaching of the apostle Peter, whom Mark followed. Our only evidence of that, however, is a claim and citation made by the church
father Eusebius of Caesarea, two and a half centuries after Christ’s death. Regardless of the status
of Mark’s connections to Peter, the early church accepted the writings as solid
apostolic tradition, and it became one of the four most revered attempts at
capturing the life of Christ. There were many other attempts, as Luke records (Luke 1:1). But only four rose to the top.
Paul’s Pastoral Epistles – gradual acceptance,
100 CE – 180 CE
Paul’s letters to Timothy and Titus are slower to be
acknowledged by the Christian community.
This could have been for one basic, understandable reason: they were
written to private individuals, not churches, and so weren’t being read
liturgically or copied for distribution to others early on. Unlike Philemon, which seems to have been
distributed by its recipient, these epistles remained in the hands of those who
received them. Their spiritual value was
not missed later on, though, and by the writings of church fathers Irenaeus (around
180 CE) and Tertullian (around 200 CE), they were clearly considered part of NT
Scripture.
Fun history fact: Tertullian is the dude who formalized the
concept of “New Testament” and “Old Testament” in his 207 CE work Adversus
Marcionem. The canon wasn’t yet, um,
canonized, but the playing field boundaries had at last been defined.
The “Hmm, Maybe” Books – struggled for acceptance,
120 to 200 CE
Four epistles – Hebrews, James, 1 Peter, and 1 John – had a
tougher time being embraced by the church at large.
Hebrews was accepted widely in the eastern churches
of Central Asia but doubted in the western communities aligned with the church
of Rome. The issue: It wasn’t tied,
directly or indirectly, to any specific apostle. Claims that it was written by Paul fell flat
because of different Greek style, vocabulary, and its way of approaching
theology. In the end, though, its sustained
use and theological consonance prevailed. Some attempted to associate it
with Paul … although it’s placed after Paul’s contributions as a “probably-not-Paul
entry” to the NT.
James, on the other hand, suffered from a
distribution issue. It was trusted less
because fewer churches had access to it.
In addition, the book itself makes no claim to having apostolic
authority, simply listing its author by the then-common name Iakobus,
which could be rendered either as James or Jacob in English script. There were early content fears as well, with
James’s emphasis on works. As acceptance
grew that the teachings were clearly apostolic, the book gained acceptance.
1 Peter circulated pretty well in early churches, but, suspiciously, not in geographical areas where Peter was known to have travelled. That was the first strike against the church fathers believing it was actually authored by Peter. The second strike
was the Greek itself – polished, elegant, highly educated in style, and not likely
the work of a Galilean fisherman. But
then there's Silvanus, whom Peter mentions is doing the actual writing of the
letter (1 Peter 5:12). Clearly, the reasoning went, the high quality of the Greek was Silvanus's contribution. As later church
leaders came to appreciate the apostles’ use of amanuenses (Latin for “secretaries”), the compelling Christology of 1 Peter won the day.
1 John suffered the same affliction as Hebrews – no named
author. We may think it has an
author’s name, since it’s right there in the table of contents, but we need to
remember that the titles of books in Scripture are later additions. Nowhere does the writer of John call himself
John or identify himself as an apostle. Oddly, though, 1 John never suffered the same level of doubt Hebrews had to overcome. Church fathers noticed the anonymity and considered it little more than an oddity. The letter's close ties to the theology and style found in the Gospel of
John earned it recognition as being, at the very least, in the apostolic tradition, probably preserved by
John’s community. It was in.
We’re left with a group of books called the Antilegomena
… a term used by the ancients for 2 Peter, 2 John, 3 John, Jude, and
Revelation. “Antilegomena” means “disputed”
or “spoken against” … and these books certainly were spoken against by some of
the ancients. They had to fight to earn
their spots. For the record, there were other disputed books, too. Those didn't earn a spot at all, and we need to explore why.
However, I am over my monthly word count, and the Antilegomena story takes a bit more nuance. How did these final, much-doubted books finally win their spots in canon?
I guess I know what next month’s topic will be! Until then --
Marana Tha,
Cosmic Parx / YoYo Rez
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