How do we know that the New Testament is God's authoritative word?
The apostolic sermons recorded by Luke in Acts demonstrate how the apostles preached the gospel from the Old Testament. The development of the New Testament canon begins with the writings of the apostles. Did the apostles understand they were writing Scripture?
Two texts are helpful in determining that the apostles understood they were writing authoritative, Godinspired Scripture. 2 Peter 3:15-16—“And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.”
Peter acknowledges Paul’s writings and calls them “Scripture.” Grudem notes: “The word translated ‘scriptures’ here is graphe, a word that occurs fiftyone times in the New Testament and that refers to the Old Testament Scriptures in every one of those occurrences.
Thus, the word Scripture was a technical term for the New Testament authors, and it was used only of those writings that were thought to be God’s words and therefore part of the canon of Scripture” (Grudem, Systematic Theology, p. 61).
1 Timothy 5:17-18—“Let the elders who rule well be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in preaching and teaching. For the Scripture says, ‘You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain,’ and, ‘The laborer deserves his wages.’”
The first quotation is from Deut. 25:4. The second quotation is not found in the OT. It is actually an exact quote in the Greek text from Luke 10:7.
So Paul quotes from the Gospel according to Luke and calls it Scripture. The work of heretics such as Marcion spurred the church to comprehensively recognize the canon. The formation of the New Testament canon began in the early part of the second century A.D. The earliest list was drawn up in Rome, in A.D. 140, by the heretic Marcion.
Although his list was not authoritative, it did demonstrate that the idea of a New Testament canon was accepted at that time. In “Jesus of Nazareth: How Historians Can Know Him and Why it Matters” (pages 25- 26), Craig Blomberg provides a concise summary of the formation of the NT canon: “Already in the mid-second century, Christian writers began to compile lists of books they believed were canonical—that is, uniquely accurate and authoritative and worth putting on a par with the 7 Hebrew Scriptures (what Christians would come to call the Old Testament).
At first, this occurred largely in response to unorthodox teachings like those the various Gnostic sects promoted. But what is intriguing is that we have no record of the Gnostics themselves ever proposing any of their distinctive documents for inclusion in any canon, theirs or anyone else’s. Instead, they tried to reinterpret New Testament writings in a fashion that would support their distinctives for the very reason that they recognized the unique authority attached to those documents.
As the decades went by, the number of books for a New Testament on which there was agreement grew, until in 367 C.E., in his Easter encyclical, bishop Athanasius of Alexandria listed the twenty-seven books that have ever since comprised the canon. Ecumenical councils in both Carthage and Hippo in North Africa at the end of the fourth century ratified this common consensus. As far as we know, the four Gospels, Acts, and the letters of Paul were never seriously in doubt.
The only significant debates surrounded the letter of Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and the book of Revelation. And the only books that were ever serious candidates for inclusion in the New Testament but omitted were also epistles, specifically, from the second-century collection of largely orthodox Christian writings known as the Apostolic Fathers. Even then, there was considerably more enthusiasm for the most weakly supported of the letters that did “make it in” than for any of those that were left out.
In no meaningful sense did these writers, church leaders, or councils ‘suppress’ Gnostic or apocryphal material, since there is no evidence of any canon that ever included them, nor that anyone put them forward for canonization, nor that they were known widely enough to have been serious candidates for inclusion had someone put them forward.
Indeed, they would have failed all three of the major criteria used by the early church in selecting which books they were, at times very literally, willing to die for—the criteria of apostolicity (that a book was written by an apostle or a close associate of an apostle), coherence (not contradicting previously accepted Scripture), and catholicity (widespread acceptance as particularly relevant and normative within all major segments of the early Christian community).”
How did the church know which books ought to be recognized as canonical? What were the criteria for canonicity? The criteria used by the church in discussing as to what books were canonical were primarily three: 1. Conformity to “the rule of faith.” In other words, did the book in question conform with orthodoxy, that is, Christian truth recognized as normative in the churches? 2. Apostolicity. Was the writer of the book an apostle or did the writer of the book have immediate contact with the apostles? Mark’s gospel was understood to be tied to Peter and Luke’s to Paul.
“The Fathers universally rejected pseudonymity as an acceptable literary category for documents bearing the authority of Scripture… That any pseudonymity was knowingly accepted into the New Testament is denied by the evidence” (Carson and Moo, Introduction to the NT, p. 737). 3. Catholicity. For a document to be considered canonical it must have widespread and continuous acceptance and usage by churches everywhere.
“The fact that substantially the whole church came to recognize the same twenty-seven books as canonical is remarkable when it is remembered that the result was not contrived. All that the several churches throughout the Empire could do was to witness to their own experience with the documents and share whatever knowledge they might have about their origin and 8 character.
When consideration is given to the diversity in cultural backgrounds and in orientation to the essentials of the Christian faith within the churches, their common agreement about which books belonged to the New Testament serves to suggest that this final decision did not originate solely at the human level.” (Barker, Lane, and Michaels, p. 29; quoted in Carson and Moo, Introduction to the NT, p. 736). “It was not so much that the church selected the canon as that the canon selected itself” (Carson and Moo, Introduction to the NT, p. 735).
The concept we have today of a completed Bible was formulated early in the history of the church. By the end of the second century all but seven books (Hebrews, 2 and 3 John, 2 Peter, Jude, James, and Revelation) were recognized as apostolic, and by the end of the fourth century all twenty-seven books in our present canon were recognized by all the churches of the West.
After the Damasine Council of Rome in A.D. 332 and the third Council of Carthage in A.D. 397 the question of the canon was closed in the West. By the year 500 the whole Greekspeaking church had also accepted all the books in our present New Testament. J. 1. Packer writes: The church no more gave us the New Testament canon than Sir Isaac Newton gave us the force of gravity. God gave us gravity, by his work of creation, and similarly he gave us the New Testament canon, by inspiring the individual books that make it up (J. 1. Packer, God Speaks To Man, p. 81).
A distinction needs to be made between canonizing and collecting. No man or council can pronounce a work canonical or scriptural, yet man was responsible for collecting and preserving such works. F. F. Bruce writes: “One thing must be emphatically stated. The New Testament books did not become authoritative for the Church because they were formally included in a canonical list; on the contrary, the Church included them in her canon because she already regarded them as divinely inspired, recognizing their innate worth and generally apostolic authority, direct or indirect.
The first ecclesiastical councils to classify the canonical books were both held in North Africa-at Hippo Regius in 393 and at Carthage in 397-but what these councils did was not to impose something new upon the Christian communities but to codify what was already the general practice of these communities” (F. F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?, p. 27).
In the early 4th century, Eusebius of Caesaria produced a list made up of three categories: 1) recognized books (homologoumena)—the four gospels, Acts, 14 letters he attributes to Paul (including Hebrews), 1 Peter, 1 John, and Revelation; 2) disputed books (antilegomena), he further divided this category into disputed but generally accepted books (James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John) and books that are probably not canonical; and 3) heretical writings.
The first list that names only the 27 books found in our New Testament appears in the Easter letter of Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, Egypt, in 367 C.E (William Abraham, Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology, OUP, 31). Although the books appear in a different order, the 27 books of the NT, and only these books, appear in Athanasius’ list.
The Third Council of Carthage in 397 recognized all 27 canonical NT books, and there has been little dispute in the Western church since then. Athanasius published a list of books that were to be read in the churches under his care. His list included precisely those books we have in our Bibles (with this exception — he admitted Baruch and omitted Esther in the Old Testament). “These are the fountains of salvation, that he who thirsts may be satisfied with the living words they contain. In these alone the teaching of 9 godliness is proclaimed.
Let no one add to these; let nothing be taken away from them. For concerning these the Lord put to shame the Sadducees, and said, Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures.” Other such lists had been published by others, as early as the year 170, although they did not all agree (Hebrews, James, 2 and 3 John, 2 Peter, Jude, and Revelation. How did the men who published these lists decide which books should be called Scripture?
Scholars who have studied this matter closely have concluded that the lists of books are merely ratifications of the decisions of the majority of churches from earliest days. We are able to prove this by examining the surviving works of Irenaeus (born 130), who lived in days before anyone felt it was necessary to list the approved books. He quotes as Scripture all of the books and only the books that appear in the list published on another continent and sixty years later by Origen.
It is evident that the elders of each congregation had approved certain writings and rejected others as they became available. By 170, most of the churches were in agreement, having approved the same books independently. Prominent teachers were also influential in this process. About that time bishops began to prevail in the Church, as governors of groups of churches, and they simply ratified with these lists the results thus arrived at.
These books constituted the standard rule of faith for all the churches. We must not imagine that the canon was imposed by ecclesiastical authorities. The canon grew up by many independent decisions of elders who were responsible for their congregations alone. Some disagreements arose along with the rise of heresies. The elders of the churches became wary, and even began to doubt some of the writings they had formerly received as copies from other churches. Writings which came under question were Hebrews, James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and the Revelation of John.
The reasons for doubt were various. The author of Hebrews does not identify himself. James was not an apostle, and his message seemed to contradict Paul's message. Jude was not an apostle, and he quotes books which the churches did not receive as Scripture. 2 Peter, it seems, was not widely distributed at first. The author of 2 and 3 John does not identify himself plainly. The author of the Revelation identifies himself as John, but does not say that he is the apostle John, and the style of the book is different from the Gospel of John. Nevertheless, the majority of churches received and used these books without questioning them, while vigorously rejecting all others. Author Mark Driscoll
