Canonicity… What It Meant to the Early Church

Today, we’re going to spend some time on the criteria and process that the early church used to determine if a book is canon or not, and how they came up with our current Bible, paying special attention to the New Testament. Hopefully it can help us understand the importance of the books of the Bible and appreciate both the Bible and the people who put it together.

I. Old Testament

But first, a few words about the Old Testament: pretty much from the beginning, the Church adopted the Old Testament as it was translated into Greek in the Septuagint translation, rather than Hebrew, since Greek was the most used language in the Church. The Septuagint list, which doesn’t quite follow our current order, and includes some books that we now call the Apocrypha, goes like this:

The Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, Deuteronomy)

History (Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1-4 Kingdoms[1]; 1-2 Chronicles, 1-2 Esdras[2] Esther[3], Judith, Tobit)

Poems and Wisdom (Psalms[4], Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Job, Wisdom, Ecclestiasticus)

Prophets (the twelve “minor prophet” books as we have them, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Baruch, Letter of Jeremiah, Daniel[5])

“Appendix” (1-4 Maccabees)

However, ever starting from the time the Septuagint was translated (which is about 200 B.C.), there were doubts in the Jewish community about the authorship of many of the books and their authenticity. The Church inherited those doubts, and this led to Jerome (whom we’ll talk about below) to label the books that the Church (and the Jews) had doubts on as the Apocrypha and put them at the end of the Old Testament. None of the questionable books were cited by the Lord or his Apostles, as far as we know, which creates further doubt on their canonicity. The Protestant denominations generally consider them not canon but possibly edifying, while the Catholic church consider them part of the canon but do also consider them to be of lesser value.

II. Precursor to the New Testament Canon – the Diatesseron and Pauline Collection

We don’t exactly when they were written down, but pretty early, even before the Church had the mind to consider compiling a canon, the Church had already, in general, accepted the canonicity of the four gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) – they were all considered to be correct by Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis (~125) and probable disciple of John.[6] The other church fathers of the time of whom we know anything about their writing also seem to accept the four gospels. Tatian (late 2^nd century) produced an interesting work, the Diatessaron, which tries to make a continuous narrative edition of the four gospels, by using John as a framework and pasting passages from the other three gospels into it. The Diatessaron was very popular in Syria and Asia, and continued to be used for several centuries as the sacred text there.

Paul’s letters were also considered authoritative pretty early. The earliest manuscript that we have of his letters, however, do not include the three Pastoral Epistles (1-2 Timothy and Titus) but include Hebrews, which the eastern Church considered to be written by him starting from very early times but which the western Church never recognized his authorship and in fact for a while did not recognize as canon. Apparently at time churches had already been collecting Paul’s letters, perhaps even in Paul’s own lifetime, as education for their people.

III. Marcion

As we mentioned last week, Marcion, the leader of a radical Gnostic movement, was the first person to try to create a canon. He disavowed any connection between Jesus and the Jews, and he considered Paul the only faithful Apostle – all other Apostles perverted Jesus’ words and were apostates -- however, so he created a collection that was designed to allow people to see no connection between Jesus and the Jews. His canon had two components – Gospel and Apostle. His Gospel was Luke, but with all references to Jesus’ birth and his connection to Judaism deleted. His Apostle included most of the Pauline letters that we have now, except he labelled Ephesians as “Laodiceans,” but again with all references to Israel deleted.

Marcion was, of course, a heretic, whose “canon” was nothing short of a whimsical mutilation of existing canonical works (and we can see this from extant Marcionite texts – the way he edited the texts made them make no sense in many cases, even if you accept Marcionism as such). But the contribution he made to the Church is that he spurred the movement for local churches and orthodox Christian fathers to begin to collect works that they would consider canon.

IV. The Church’s Response to Marcion

In response to Marcion, the churches everywhere apparently began to think harder on what was canon and what was not, and also, the Church felt that its canon needs to be catholic (that is, inclusive), not only in response to Marcion’s anti-Hebrew doctrines but also to other heretical teachers, some of which argued that James or Peter was the only true Apostle and that Paul was in fact an enemy of Christ. We don’t have much documentation of the process they went through, but it is clear that in this endeavor they paid attention to these factors:

Apostolicity (whether the work was written by a recognizable Apostle)

Edification (whether the work was edifying)

Authenticity (whether the work can be traced to the apostolic era)

The Church also showed plenty of evidence that they, while not confident that they made the right selections in all cases in their human frailty, believed that the Holy Spirit would guide them in this process and ensure that the right books are included; the Church viewed the difference between it and heresies was the correct use of Scripture.

A. The Muratorian List

In 1740 a Latin list, dated to about the 7^th century, of Biblical books was discovered and published by the scholar Lodovico Antonio Muratori. Upon examination, most scholars of today concur that the list, while there might have been errors in transmission, reflect the language of the Church from the late 2^nd century – around the start of the canonicity movement.

The manuscript itself was missing its start – since it mentioned Luke as the third book of the Gospel, it was probably the case that Matthew and Mark were the first two but ripped off the manuscript during the years. The list goes, following that:

Luke, John, Acts, Corinthians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Galatians, Thessalonians, Romans, Philemon, Titus, 1-2 Timothy, Jude, 1-2 John, Wisdom[7], Apocalypse of John[8], Apocalypse of Peter[9], Shepherd of Hermas

As can be seen, it doesn’t include 3 John, James, or Hebrews, or either of the Petrine letters, and includes the Apocalypse of Peter and Shepherd of Hermas, the former of which we consider totally non-canon and the latter we consider edifying but not part of the canon. Since, although we have a good idea of the timing of the Muratorian list but don’t know whether if it represented an accepted list in the Church, it is but one piece of data we can look at.

B. References by Church Fathers

By contrast, for reason we don’t understand, a lot of the church fathers of the time and a bit later didn’t actually give a list of canon, per se; nevertheless, what they considered canon might be gleaned from the books that they cited as canon and the books they rejected as part of their argument. Below are some charts of books that they made reference to, whether approvingly as canon (+), disapprovingly or condemning (-), expressed doubt on (?), or said nothing on the works that we have from them (blank). Books that we consider canon are in regular type and listed first, while books that we don’t consider canon are in italics and listed following.

1 Irenaeus of Lyons (became bishop in 177)

2 Tertullian of Carthage (wrote ~196-212)

3 Cyprian of Carthage (became bishop in 248, martyred in 258)

4 Clement of Alexandria (arrived in Alexandria ~202)

5 Origen of Alexandria (185-254)

6 Eusebius of Caesaria (became bishop ~314, died in 339)

	1	2	3	4	5	6
Matthew	+	+	+	+	+	+
Mark	+	+	+	+	+	+
Luke	+	+	+	+	+	+
John	+	+	+	+	+	+
Acts	+	+	+	+	+	+
Romans	+	+	+	+	+	+
1 Corinthians	+	+	+	+	+	+
2 Corinthians	+	+	+	+	+	+
Galatians	+	+	+	+	+	+
Ephesians	+	+	+	+	+	+
Philippians	+	+	+	+	+	+
Colossians	+	+	+	+	+	+
1 Thessalonians	+	+	+	+	+	+
2 Thessalonians	+	+	+	+	+	+
1 Timothy	+	+	+	+	+	+
2 Timothy	+	+	+	+	+	+
Titus	+	+	+	+	+	+
Philemon	+	+		+	+	+
Hebrews[10]	+		+[11]	+	+?	+
James	+[12]				+?	+?
1 Peter	+	+	+	+?	+	+
2 Peter					+?	+?
1 John	+	+	+	+?	+	+
2 John	+			+?	+?	+?
3 John					+?	+?
Jude		+[13]		+?	+?	+?
Revelations	+	+	+	+	+	+[14]
Shepherd of Hermas[15]	+	-[16]	+[17]	+?	+?	?
Wisdom	+
Didache[18]			+[19]	+?	+?	?
The Gospel Acc. to Egyptians[20]				+?	-
Letter of Barnabas[21]				+?	+?	?
Apocalypse of Peter[22]				+?		?
The Gospel Acc. to Hebrews[23]				+?	?
Clement[24]				+?	?[25]
Preaching of Peter				+?	?
Traditions of Matthias				+?
Sibylline Oracles				+?
Acts of Paul[26]		-			?	-

(Some other works explicitly rejected by Eusebius include the Gospel of Peter (for its docetism), Gospel of Thomas (a work that Gnostics based many of their doctrines on; it was probably written by a Gnostic); Acts of Peter (as fiction), Acts of John, of Andrew, of John (as Gnostic works), and Acts of Thomas (as fantastical).<