Booted from the Bible? Not quite ... but some books had a rough journey.
The internet is chock-full of articles about books “Banned from the Bible!” This is not one of those articles.
Instead, it’s an article about the New Testament books that almost didn’t make
it in … and why.
Those Who Made It In Early
If you’re one of the (sadly, small) minority of Christians
who regularly reads the Bible for devotion and study, you’ve definitely noticed
the stylistic differences between the various authors of the New Testament:
- John’s gospel soars to near-mystical heights with its language, as if rising on high to honor Christ’s declaration “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36).
- Paul’s style, while achieving John’s heights now and then, is usually pragmatic, feet firmly planted on the ground of practical matters.
- Luke sports an “international” flavor, with an abundance of stories in his gospel about Gentiles who interacted with Christ.
- Matthew, on the other hand, reveals a solid Jewish education, with far more references to the fulfillment of Hebrew Scriptures than the other gospels.
Spirituality. Practicality. Broad outreach. Depth of scriptural knowledge. It’s easy to see why the gospels, the book of Acts, and the letters of Paul found early acceptance in the growing canon.
But reaching canonical status wasn’t as easy for other
writings we now love and preserve in our Bibles.
Books in Dispute
If you had a chance to
read last month’s blog, you’ll remember that several books of the New
Testament made it into the canon by the skin of their teeth (a fun saying that’s
derived from the Bible itself, Job 19:20).
The church father Eusebius dubbed this small collection of books the antilegomena,
a word basically meaning “disputed.”
Which books made which church father’s disputed lists varied, but their doubts
tended to include:
- Hebrews (questioned by churches of the West)
- James (accepted early by the East, but only very slowly by the West)
- Second Peter (perhaps the most disputed of all NT books)
- Second and Third John (too short, and no named author)
- Jude (probably not the apostle, so there’s that issue)
- Revelation (doubted for being just a bit wacky)
Complicating matters were the ancient books that were included in very early editions of the New Testament, ones no longer accepted as part of our canon. They weren’t rejected for being heretical; they simply turned out not to be “apostolic” enough in nature to win a spot in the final New Testament:
- The Codex Sinaiticus, the
name given our most ancient, complete edition of the New Testament, includes
two books called The
Shepherd of Hermas and the
Epistle of Barnabas, neither of which is accepted any longer as inspired
text. I’ve linked to online versions of
them above, should you ever want to give them a read and consider why they may
have been appealing to some early church fathers.
- The Codex Alexandrinus,
compiled mere decades after the manuscript above, tacks on the epistles 1
Clement and 2
Clement (Clement’s second letter has always struck me as moving and poetic
– “For He called us, when we were not, and from not being, He called us to be”
(2 Clem. 1:8).
- The second-century Muratorian
Fragment, our oldest existing “list” of approved NT books, which speaks
highly of Shepherd of Hermas (hello, again) and mentions acceptance of the Apocalypse
of Peter by some, rejection by others.
Interestingly, the Fragment also references Wisdom of Solomon, popular
among Greek-speaking Jews who followed Jesus early on, as part of the Old
Testament. It retains a spot in the
Roman Catholic canon to this day.
- Numerous lists and writings of the earliest church fathers cite other books as Christian scripture – the Acts of Paul, the fragmentary Gospel of the Hebrews, the much-respected Didache, and others. They were all considered at least briefly by some church fathers for a role in the New Testament’s canon but in the long run were left behind.
Phew – Made It!
Obviously, there was final canon acceptance of Hebrews (the
epistle, not the Gospel mentioned above), James, Second Peter, Second John, Third
John, Jude, and Revelation. They all
appear in the 27-book list famously created in 367 CE by Athanasius, Bishop of
Alexandria, and confirmed as canon by the church’s Council of Rome in 382 CE. Those are the two dates, incidentally, most
often cited as “We have a Bible!” moments.
But what hurdles did those books face, and how did they overcome their
status as “disputed”?
I covered Hebrews and James last month, so let’s tackle the
others. I’ll put most of my effort into
explaining how Peter found its way into the text, since its pathway to
canonization will shed light on the paths of all the others.
Peter, Peter, Who Are You Really?
Maybe, said the church fathers amongst themselves, Second
Peter wasn’t really written by the apostle Peter.
Second Peter had numerous obstacles to overcome before it
was universally acknowledged as part of the New Testament canon. Each concern it raised was a straw that might
have broken the camel’s back on its long journey to acceptance:
- Would Peter Use That Word? The ancient church fathers doubted that the vocabulary in Second Peter matched the vocabulary in 1 Peter, the more accepted of the two works. That’s a fascinating linguistic observation, and I promise not to belabor it, but consider – if someone texted you, “I have received an additional convocation whose appointed hour coincides precisely with that of your own meeting, and thusly regret being unable to attend,” you wouldn’t expect the next text to read, “But yo, gurl, ain’t seen you inna minute, so hit me up on the flip side!” As they read the vocabulary differences between the two letters, our Greek-speaking church fathers suspected different people were writing those two texts attributed to Peter.
- Much More Stylish. Beyond just the words, the layout and rhetoric of Second Peter is vastly different from 1 Peter. The ancients noted this with concern. You can probably appreciate their apprehension if you consider different sermon styles by different modern-day preachers you’ve listened to. One preacher might prefer grabbing a topic and bouncing all around the Bible to talk about his chosen theme. Another may prefer to take a passage and do a deep-dive walkthrough of what the scripture writer is saying. Yet a third may quote just one verse and spend the full sermon relating that to modern Christian life. Listen to enough preachers, you’ll be able to tell when one is reading a sermon written by someone else who doesn’t match their style. 😊
- Are the Apostles Gone? Second Peter has a few places where it sounds too late in time to be written by a living apostle. The writer’s discussion in 2 Peter 3:15-16 make Paul’s letters sound like collected works. The problem is, it seems Paul’s letters weren’t passed around in a collected form until a generation after his death. That means Peter was gone already, too. In addition, 2 Peter 3:3-4 mentions those who mock the long delay of the Second Coming of Christ, prompting the writer to explain that to the Lord a day is as a thousand years. That “long delay” further raised the ancients’ suspicions that it wasn’t Peter doing the writing.
- Plagiarism: Second Peter’s second and third chapters copy nearly the entire epistle of Jude. For the church fathers weighing the canon of the New Testament, that was a red flag. Was the author trying to make himself seem apostolic by copying a better-known text?
- Nobody Quotes It: Very few church fathers quoted Second Peter or referred to him as having written a second letter. One exception, Origen, wrote in the early 3rd century: “Peter has left one acknowledged epistle; perhaps also a second, for it is disputed.” Was this the same “second letter” as what we call Second Peter? It’s impossible to say, since Origen quotes nothing from it. With no undisputed 2nd century quotations and very thin 3rd century attestations, it’s unsurprising that 4th century church fathers raised an eyebrow at the text. As my young son might have said: “Bruh, that’s sus.”
The Writer of Second Peter
It’s no spoiler when I tell you Peter’s second letter did,
in fact, get into the canon. But
how? What changed?
If you’ve gone to Bible college or browsed entries at online
apologetics sites, you’ve likely run into the “Silvanus” explanation of why Second
Peter has such stylistic and vocabulary differences from 1 Peter. In fact, 1 Peter 5:12 actually mentions
Silvanus (also called Silas) as the vehicle through which Peter’s letter is
presented to the readers and listeners.
That could explain the vocabulary and style differences between the two
letters – Silvanus helped Peter write the first one, while the second one
(which doesn’t mention Silvanus) was written by Peter alone.
However, did you notice how carefully I worded that? I said, “The vehicle through which Peter’s
letter is presented.” Some Bible
translations will directly say “Silvanus helped me write this letter,” while
other translations will say “I had Silvanus deliver you this letter.” You can see the
variations here for yourself. But
the Koine Greek is simply dia Silouanou, “through Silvanus.” The word-for-word Greek of the verse is
actually: “To you through Silvanus, the faithful brother as I regard (him),
through few words I have written …” and so on.
It’s not clear at all whether Silvanus helped with the writing or
whether it was through him, by his delivering the letter, that the words came to the readers … thus the
differences among a number of translations.
Modern interpreters who are keen to maintain Peter’s
authorship are likely to insist that it means he wrote it with Silvanus as his
secretary. This helps them preserve the
idea that an apostle must be the author of a Bible text – they could use backup
writers as designated scribes. But that simply creates a new problem: if the
style and words are Silvanus’s, and that’s what we have today, then the
inspiration of the Holy Spirit came to Silvanus, not an apostle, and
Peter’s original words of dictation were cancelled out. Are we ready to make a claim that the Holy
Spirit had to cancel an apostle to get the words right through a non-apostle? And should we ignore all the other issues – timing,
literary borrowing, and Paul’s letters appearing as collected works?
It turns out all of this discussion is moot when it comes to
the topic of our church fathers refining and finalizing the canon. The Silvanus explanation is largely a modern
apologetic and does not appear to have played a role in the early church’s
canonical deliberations. They actually took a less
confounding path.
“Written by an Apostle” vs. “Apostolic”
As the time of Athanasius’s fourth-century canon list and
the Council of Rome’s imprimatur drew nearer, Second Peter’s use in churches
spread widely. Its acceptance seems to
have created a more flexible mindset among the church fathers of that age,
almost as if they had started asking themselves whether there was any reason not
to have Second Peter in the canon. Being
allowed in became less a matter of a resounding “Yes!” and more a recognition
that there was no compelling reason to exclude it.
After all, nothing in Second Peter contradicted established
doctrines received from the apostles. It
didn’t have any false teachings, and it did a solid job supporting existing
beliefs, particularly in its insistence on combating false teachers and
embracing the hope of a true Second Coming.
Even if it weren’t the apostle’s direct creation, it was very much in
the tradition of the apostles. It was apostolic in nature.
So, the test question changed. No longer were the church fathers asking,
“Did Peter write this?” Instead, they
asked, “Is this orthodox? Would
Peter have written it? Is it
respectfully within a Petrine tradition?”
No, I’m sure they didn’t use that language
specifically. As I said in last month’s
post, they had no checklists. But those
kinds of ideas were behind the adoption of the text of Second Peter and the
acceptance of other books of the New Testament, such as:
- Mark’s gospel compilation, reasoned to be a record of the preachings of the apostle Peter
- Texts by Luke (who wrote more words than any other single author in the New Testament), thought to reflect the teachings of the apostle Paul and based on interviews with other apostles
- John’s second and third letters, finally adopted as being within the community and spirit of the apostle John, even if not claimed as his work directly in the text
- Jude’s epistle, judged orthodox and beneficial despite the actual identity of “Jude” being a bit nebulous and not universally accepted as the apostle Jude
Even the widely doubted book of Revelation overcame the
requirement of proof it was penned by an apostle. The church fathers were split on its
authorship. Dionysius of Alexandria and
Gaius of Rome rejected outright that John the apostle had a role in the writing.
Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian
embraced John’s authorship wholeheartedly.
Origen and Eusebius straddled the middle, simply noting that there was a
lot of disagreement about whether this John of Patmos was the same John as the
Gospel writer. Its connection to
apostolic tradition won the day, however (a recognition lasting until Martin
Luther’s doubts about the book emerged a millennium later).
So, What Do We Do with All This?
Let’s wrap up with some questions that this kind of in-depth
investigation might call to mind.
The Bible speaks in many voices — soaring, practical,
poetic, urgent. When other believers worship or serve differently than I
do, do I assume something is wrong? Or do I remember that unity does not
require uniformity?
Some New Testament books were questioned before they were
embraced. When I look at other Christians – or myself – and wonder whether
we measure up, do I remember Who it is that makes any of us worthy?
Not every book was written by one of the inner circle.
When I feel outside the spotlight,
outside the in-crowd, do I remember that the widow’s penny, the smallest seed,
the quietest faithfulness still matter deeply in God’s kingdom?
And not every question about the Bible was neatly
resolved. Do I allow that same grace
in my own faith? Can doubt coexist with devotion? When uncertainty creeps in,
do I still pray, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief”?
The canon took time.
So do we.
Until next time, next topic,
YoYo Rez / Cosmic Parx
