The Doctrine of Canonicity

We affirm that the Bible is the Word of God. This means the Scriptures communicate God's commands and promises to us. To say the Bible IS the Word of God means God not only inspired human authors in the original manuscripts (or else we could only say that the Bible was the Word of God) but God has also superintended its preservation into our own time.

Unbelievers and some post-Biblical churches (like the TEC) contend that the Bible was created by the Church and that the process by which some books were included and others excluded was akin to watching sausage being made; that is, something not very appealing. To hear some tell it, there was all kinds of wheeling and dealing among white European males that gave shape to our Bible.

So how do we know we have the right books? Are there books that shouldn't be in the Bible? Are we missing some inspired writings? How do we know a book is inspired? What about the Apocrypha? These are questions we attempt to answer as we study the doctrine of canonicity.

Let's begin this examination by looking at 1 Timothy 6:3-4.

If anyone advocates a different doctrine and does not agree with sound words, those of our Lord Jesus Christ, and with the doctrine conforming to godliness, he is conceited and understands nothing; but he has a morbid interest in controversial questions and disputes about words, out of which arise envy, strife, abusive language, evil suspicions, and constant friction between men of depraved mind and deprived of the truth, who suppose that godliness is a means of gain.

By the time Paul writes this letter (dated in the early 60's) there is already circulating among the churches a body of teaching that claims to be authoritative but the Apostle says it does not agree with the "sound words" of the teaching of Christ. From the beginning there was a standard by which competing gospels and teachings were to be measured. The word canon means a standard unit of measure. So the doctrine of canonicity is about knowing the standards against which writings were evaluated to determine which were truly the Word of God.

The Old Testament Canon

The notion that the church created Scripture is completely false. The Christian church was born with a complete canon. When the New Testament refers to "the Scriptures," it speaks of the 39 books of the Jewish canon, what we call the Old Testament. When unbelievers and post-Biblical churches talk about the canon, they make it sound like the Bible was written or compiled like a modern anthology but a committee sitting around a table. The Old Testament was written by 30 authors across a 1,000 years. What other piece of literature spans so great a diversity of context and time?

The Old Testament canon was broken down into three divisions: the Law (Genesis through Deuteronomy), the Prophets, and the Writings, sometimes also referred to as the Psalms because Psalms came first in this section. The Writings comprised the Wisdom literature and books of history. Jesus affirmed these divisions in Luke 24:44 and so Christians consider them canonical.

Some Bibles contain a section called the Apocrypha. These were additional books written after Malachi and before the coming of John the Baptist. These books were included in the Greek translation of the Old Testament called the Septuagint. The Roman Bible based on Jerome's Latin translation of the Septuagint included the Apocrypha. However, the Apocrypha does not meet the standards for Old Testament canonical literature. The first century Jewish historian, Josephus, denied that the Apocrypha were canonical because they did not meet the test for canonicity; namely, that all Old Testament books had to be written by or attested by someone recognized by other prophets as a prophet. The Dead Sea scrolls validate Josephus's position since their Old Testament did not include the Apocryphal books. Jesus never mentions the Apocrypha or quotes from it. No New Testament writer quotes from the Apocrypha.

So, we accept the 39 books of the Old Testament as canonical by the universal consent of Jewish prophets and according to the attestation of Jesus.

The New Testament Canon

By the end of the first century it was clear that Christians would follow the example of their Jewish ancestors and create a canon of books certified as the inspired Word of God. This is a critical point to understand. Canonicity wasn't making a book into the Word of God; canonicity was recognizing that a writing was the truly inspired Word.

The list of 27 books that make up our New Testament first appears in a letter written in 327 AD. That doesn't mean it took three centuries for the church to figure out its Scriptures. This is merely the earliest surviving document that mentions all the books in the order in which we now have them. The great majority of the New Testament was well known and accepted as inspired by early in the second century.

The New Testament was written between the mid 40's and 70 AD (some scholars say the period of writing lasted until 95 AD). There were three criteria for a work to be considered inspired and therefore canonical among early Christians.

1. The book had to be written by an apostle or with the sanction of an apostle. Apostles, like the Old Testament prophets before them, had received special authority and unique gifts from Christ to bear witness to the truth. The Gospels of Matthew and John were written by the apostles directly while Mark was given the information for his Gospel from Peter and Luke received his narrative from Paul. All New Testament books were included in the canon because they were proven to be from the pen or memory of an apostle. This included the letter to the Hebrews. Hebrews does not specifically mention the name of it's author, but from earliest times it was associated with Paul. The fact that its grammar and word usage is different than his letters can be explained by the fact that it was probably written by another believer scribing the words of Paul (tradition says Barnabas).
   
   
2. The second test for inclusion in the canon was the proven antiquity of the document. In a previous post we published this link to a table of ancient church leaders who specifically mention a New Testament writing. Comparing the pseudoepigrapha ("false writings") at the bottom of the list with the 27 canonical books at the top, the evidence is quite clear that the so-called gnostic gospels of such current interest to post-Biblical believers are Johnny-come-latelies. The four Gospels, Acts, 13 letters of Paul, 1st Peter, and 1st John were accepted very early. Collections of these documents were circulating by the end of the first century.
   
   
3. The third test for canonicity was the orthodoxy of the writing; in other words, did its content agree with and was it consistent with previous revelation (including the Old Testament). A Gospel that told the story of the child Jesus killing people didn't exactly align with what the apostles knew to be the truth. New age gurus and Dan Brown's Davinci Code notwithstanding, that is why the Gospel of Thomas is not canonical.

Some books that are included in our canonical New Testament were questioned by the early church. Hebrews, as stated above, was anonymous. But over time Paul was verified as the author. James was apparently not widely circulated at first and to some, the books emphasis on " "faith without works" seemed to contradict Paul's teaching that we are "saved by faith apart from works." But the confusion was cleared up and the letter of James was accepted by the early church as inspired. Revelation had difficult symbolism, but its provenance was unmistakable. 2 Peter has become the favorite whipping boy of post-Biblical churches. The style doesn't match 1 Peter. The second letter was not as widely circulated as 1 Peter and so some bishops in the early church didn't know of it. But the style can be explained by its having been written by a secretary for Peter. Again, the chart shows its provenance was well established by the middle of the first century. The Roman church didn't like it based on the first verse in which Peter affirms that there is no difference between him and those to whom he is writing. Is it just a coincidence that the book that contains the most warnings about false teachers in the church should be omitted from the canon of the post-Biblical scholars? Second and third John had were late being recognized, again because they had probably not been circulated widely and some bishops thought they were too short.

Remember this: there was no single authority who approved what was included or excluded in the early New Testament. The canon was established long before the rise of the papacy or other centralized church hierarchy. The 27 books of the New Testament were accepted by many different churches in the East and the West because they clearly met the three tests for canonicity.

In the 16th century, the Protestant Reformers raised many questions about the acceptability of New Testament books. Luther and Calvin wanted to strip away any accretion of superstition and human tradition that was unfaithful to the Gospel. In large part they raised questions about some of the books because the Catholic Bible included the Apocrypha which they did not accept on good historical grounds. But in the end Luther and Calvin accepted the canonicity of the Old and New Testaments.

The 27 books of the New Testament are canonical by the witness of the Holy Spirit operating through many churches over more than 15 centuries as preserving the faith of the original apostles and the true Word of Jesus.

Copies of Copies

None of the original manuscripts survive. It's easy to say the Bible was perfectly inspired in the original manuscripts, but how do we know we have the original text?

The text of no other book is so well attested as the Bible. The works of Greek philosophers, even the relatively modern works of Shakespeare and Milton, have only a handful of surviving copies from which we assume the original text. Compare that to the more than 4,000 copies of Scriptural fragments and complete manuscripts that exist today. Perhaps better than any other ancient book, we know exactly what the original manuscripts said. Of course all these fragments and manuscripts are not identical. But it is amazing the degree to which these thousands and thousands of copies agree. In some cases words are misspelled. Sometimes words are put in different places and on a few occasions a different word might be used to describe an incident. But none of these inconsistencies come close to changing the meaning of a text. There is no other literary work in all of human history that can be reconstructed with such confidence as the Bible.

On-going scholarship continues to shed light on the original text. Recent discoveries have called into question Mark 16:9ff. We know that the ending about drinking poison and handling snakes was not included in the earliest copies of the Gospel now available to us. Same goes for John 7:53-8:11, the story of the woman taken in adultery. Archeologists have unearthed some manuscripts that do not contain this story. Most Bibles today acknowledge the textual variants of these passages. But the overall direction of most archeological discoveries has been to affirm the reliability of the Bible.

Conclusion

The Bible is the Word of God. The Scriptures were not only inspired by those who wrote, but preserved by the Holy Spirit over time to be the unique and reliable communication of God's commands and promises to the world.

The Development of the Canon

An interesting compilation of authorities and their opinions about the canonicity of early Christian writings. Notice that the canonical books are attested early and widely while other writings only show up later and are usually condemned by more authorities than those who accept them.

http://www.ntcanon.org/table.shtml

Stand to Reason: Is the New Testament Text Reliable?

Stand to Reason: Is the New Testament Text Reliable?

John MacArthur Talks About Scripture

Much of my presentation this past week came from remarks by John MacArthur at this link.