THE ORIGIN, TRANSMISSION, AND CANONIZATION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT BOOKS

Jeremy Royal Howard

T he term canon is the term used to describe the list of books approved for inclusion in the Bible. It stems from a Greek word meaning “rod,” as in a straight stick that serves as a standard for measuring. Hence, to speak of the biblical canon is to speak of authoritative books, given by God, the teachings of which define correct belief and practice. Obviously, only books inspired by God should be received as canonical. The Bible before you includes twenty-seven books in the New Testament (NT). Are these the right books? Do they reliably convey truth about Jesus Christ? This essay argues that the twenty-seven books of the NT canon are the correct books and are fully reliable in recounting truth about Jesus and his earliest followers.

ORIGIN AND RELIABILITY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT WRITINGS

The reliability of the NT books rests on questions about their origin: Were they written by eyewitnesses and men closely linked to them? Were the authors inspired by God as they wrote? Historic Christianity has answered yes to these questions. While skeptics maintain that the books were written by men who were inheritors of a legend that had slipped the bonds of reality, Christian confidence in the NT is well founded. Following are some lines of evidence supporting the reliability of the NT.

(1) Jesus personally groomed twelve disciples. At the outset of his ministry, Jesus did what many gifted teachers of the ancient world did: he chose a small group of men to be his official students. For approximately three years they listened closely to Jesus’s teachings and witnessed his actions. Jesus was intentional in his efforts to teach them; he used effective teaching tools such as parables, repetition, and visual aids. He also taught them how to spread his message (Mk 6:7-11) and then commanded them to give their lives to this task after his resurrection (Mt 28:18-20).

Despite many halts and hitches on the path to understanding, the disciples were dedicated to the tasks of comprehending Jesus’s teachings and remembering them with precision. But how much could they remember decades later when they and their associates wrote the four Gospels? Three considerations suggest the disciples would have had no trouble remembering Jesus’s teachings.

First, note that from the time they last walked with Jesus to the time the Gospels were written, the disciples gave unbroken attention to spreading the word about Jesus. This became their purpose in life. Hence, Jesus’s teachings stayed fresh in their minds through the years as they preached in city after city and were continually challenged to defend their claims.

Second, most of us today have lost touch with the potential powers of the human memory. We store reams of data not in our minds, but in books and computers. Lack of such tools forced the ancients to make better use of the brain’s storage capacities. The Jews in particular were impressive in this regard. As a people to whom God had revealed his will in spoken and written words, Jewish students of religion were motivated to achieve herculean feats of memorization. It was said that advanced students were like baskets full of books; they kept everything in their heads. Though Jesus’s disciples lacked this level of training, it is certain that from the moment they were called to be Jesus’s students they knew that they were expected to comprehend and remember his teachings. To do anything less would be to disrespect their teacher, especially since they believed he was the Messiah.

Third, it is likely that the disciples wrote down key portions of Jesus’s teachings many years before the full Gospels were written. These deposits would have been available to refresh the memory, and they possibly served as handy source material for the writing of the Gospels (see Lk 1:1-4).

(2) The Holy Spirit helped the disciples understand and remember. Jesus sent the Spirit to help his disciples comprehend and remember his teachings (Jn 14:26). Thus they were not left to their own efforts when speaking and writing about Jesus. Internal testimony in the NT shows that the disciples became aware of the Spirit’s role in each other’s writings. The Jews stressed the difference between inspired Scripture and ordinary writing. Rabbis even said the Scriptures “defiled the hands,” a surprising phrase that encouraged Jews to consider carefully their intentions before handling Scripture and to decide if these justified the trouble of becoming ceremonially unclean. This teaching discouraged flippant handling of the Scriptures. To claim that a document is from God would be blasphemous if untrue, and yet this is the very claim made by the NT itself. In 1 Timothy 5:18 Paul quotes Luke 10:7 as Scripture. Similarly, Peter affirms that Paul’s writings are Scripture in 2 Peter 3:15-16. Peter’s writings were in turn received as Scripture on the basis of his apostleship. While it is doubtful that NT authors were conscious at the time of writing that what they wrote was inspired Scripture (for example, see Luke’s purpose statement in Lk 1:1-4), they were aware that they bore God-given authority as chosen messengers, and the church swiftly received their writings as authoritative, inspired words from God.

(3) The NT writings stress the importance of eyewitnesses and hard facts. The NT authors emphasize the role of eyewitnesses and hang their truth claims on the reality of the events they describe. For instance, when Luke discloses his methods and purposes at the beginning of his Gospel (Lk 1:1-4), he says his book is about “the events that have been fulfilled among us” as recounted by “the original eyewitnesses and servants” of Christ. He also says he researched these matters carefully before writing and that his reason for doing this was so his reader could “know the certainty” on which the Christian faith is based. Here is a man who has no place for legends, half-truths, or shots in the dark. His focus is on the real Jesus and on world-altering events that cannot be doubted. John similarly emphasizes the importance of fact. He is sure of what he has written and says he has included only a small fraction of Jesus’s doings (Jn 20:30; 21:24-25). And like Luke, John wants his readers to know Jesus as Lord and thus gain eternal life (Jn 20:31; 1Jn 5:13). Far from passing on shady legends, his goal is to convey assured truth.

Luke and John impress us with their insistence on truth, but the most striking assertion that the NT witness is truthful comes from the apostle Paul. Paul bitterly opposed the young church as it spread from Jerusalem like wildfire. As a zealot for Pharisaic doctrines and all the old ways, he wanted to eradicate Christianity. This all changed when the risen Lord appeared to him on the road to Damascus. In a stunning reversal, Paul then poured the rest of his life into spreading truth about Jesus. The foundation of Paul’s preaching was Jesus’s resurrection. More than just a snappy preaching point, Paul understood that the literal resurrection of Christ was the absolute basis of Christianity. For this reason, in 1 Corinthians 15:12-19 Paul said that if Christ’s resurrection was not a real historical event, Christianity is a myth and Christians are liars. How could Paul dare lay his faith and personal integrity on the line like this? The answer is obvious. Like John, Luke, and every other NT author, Paul knew that Christianity is fixed on the sure foundation of historical reality. Be assured, reader of the NT, that God the Son came in flesh, dwelt among humans, trained disciples for his service, died for us on the cross, rose on the third day and then ascended to heaven, from which he will someday return in power.

Summing up, the NT is to be received as reliable on the basis of the following facts: Jesus trained a group of disciples to comprehend and spread his teachings. Following the established pattern among Jewish students of religion, they would have taken this task with great seriousness, including the memorization of Jesus’s key teachings. For a decade or so after Christ’s resurrection, these men kept his teachings alive by preaching incessantly and by grooming avid disciples such as Luke and Mark. They also accepted Paul as a bona fide apostle after his miraculous conversion (Ac 9). Then, starting in the AD mid 40s, the apostles and their approved associates began writing authoritative, Spirit-inspired letters, which they circulated among the churches. Paul’s writings came first, and later the Gospels. These writings were received as Scripture by the earliest churches and became the standards by which doctrine and practice were judged.

FACTORS IN THE FORMATION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON

If one asks when and how the canon formed, the first thing to note is that the canon, being a list of books and not the books themselves, necessarily came into existence after the books were written. Thus the authoritative books were inspired Scripture prior to a list identifying them as such. Second, the canon formed as a matter of widespread consensus, not executive pronouncement. Third, in keeping with the first two points, it was several centuries before the canon emerged as a widely acknowledged fact. Critics take this relatively late emergence as proof that the books were not initially received as Scripture and that they came to be regarded as holy books only because later Christians lost sight of how they originated. In reality, however, the piecemeal development of canon consensus was a natural reflection of four conditions:

(1) The gradual creation and dissemination of the NT books. The books of the canonical NT were written over a span of approximately fifty years (AD 45-95). Before winning universal acceptance, each newly written book had to be circulated, copied, examined, and discussed among the churches. This was not a quick process. Books that were written relatively late underwent the sort of treatment that is common for newcomers: they were vetted with especially great care before being granted a seat among the old guard. Also, the Christian faith multiplied rapidly in the early centuries, with new churches cropping up in far-flung regions at a pace that outstripped the dissemination of the Scriptures. Thus, many early churches had access to only a few NT books. Naturally, when new books came to their attention they were cautious about embracing them as biblical, and they accepted them only after careful consideration and consultation with churches that had been founded by the apostles.

(2) Apostolic authority and the NT canon. All the earliest churches were founded by the apostles and their associates as they fanned out from Jerusalem in the years after Jesus’s resurrection. Naturally, the churches depended on these men to teach them about Jesus and the Christian life. At first these teachings were strictly oral, but over time the apostles began writing letters and Gospels for the churches, thus providing early Christians with authoritative “books” to guide them in their beliefs and practices. These apostolic churches were among the first to receive the Scriptures as they were written, and so they were in a good position to help guide newer churches into the correct identification of a NT canon.

(3) The relative independence of each local church. Apostolic authority was honored by all true churches at the advent of Christianity, and yet each local church was relatively independent from any centralized ecclesiastical authority. One practical result of this was that no central office pronounced the NT books authoritative or forced their use in worship abroad. Understandably, it took several centuries for churches sprawled all over the map to forge communicative ties and common consensus on the canon.

(4) The rise of heresy. When someone came into the churches pushing ideas contrary to what had been received from the apostles, their teachings were recognized as unauthorized innovation. This is the very thing that happened in the second century with the advent of so-called Gnostic Christianity. Gnosticism was a popular dualistic Greek philosophy which held that the material world was created by an evil God. Hence, Gnostics stressed meditation on the secrets of a pure invisible realm, and they denied that God could take on material flesh as Christ did. A man named Marcion wedded Gnosticism with Christian elements and petitioned the church in Rome to adopt his views. Among other perversions, Marcion tried to convince Christians to reject the Old Testament Scriptures and adhere only to the writings of Paul plus a heavily edited version of Luke’s Gospel that did not mention Christ’s birth. As inheritors of the apostolic teachings, Christians in Rome and elsewhere knew that Marcion’s teachings did not square with genuine Christian doctrines. As churches marked the distinction between authorized apostolic writings and the heretical innovations of men such as Marcion, and as Christians all across the Roman Empire endured periodic persecutions that threatened death to anyone harboring Christian Scriptures, the NT began to emerge as a defined and defended body of books. So-called “alternative Christianities,” represented in second- and third-century works such as The Gospel of Thomas and The Gospel of Judas, were never considered for adoption into the NT canon because they were written long after the apostles, and their teachings did not match the Old Testament or the apostolic traditions.

AUTHORITATIVE WITNESSES TO THE CANON IN THE EARLY CHURCH

Though it took several centuries for the canon to emerge as a definite collection of books that were agreed upon by the majority of churches, it is certain that many of the books were widely recognized as Scripture from early on. For example, in AD 96 Clement of Rome quoted from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5-7) and treated it as Scripture. As a member of a church founded by an apostle, Clement probably had access to all or nearly all twenty-seven canonical books at this time. In AD 110 Ignatius of Antioch, who was a disciple of John, claimed the Gospel materials were Scripture. By AD 180, the famed apologist Irenaeus defended Christianity by appealing to the authority of many NT writings. In total, scholars who have examined Irenaeus’s surviving works believe he used twenty-two of our twenty-seven NT books, including all four Gospels. A short time after Irenaeus an apologist named Tertullian charged Gnostic Christians with misusing “the instrument,” by which he meant the collection of authoritative NT books. That he would refer to the collection of NT books in this way proves that by this time the leading churches had identified a well-defined set of books as canonical. Only James, 2 Peter, and 2 and 3 John go unnamed by Tertullian. A few decades later the church father Origen named all twenty-seven books and noted that six of them (Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and Jude) were disputed by some. These disputed books went on to be the subject of debate for many centuries more, though their revered position among most churches was never shaken.

It was in the fourth century that the NT canon clearly emerged as a widely accepted set of holy books. First, Eusebius of Caesarea, known as the father of church history since he was the first to write a comprehensive history of Christianity, named twenty-seven books that were commonly accepted as NT Scripture by the churches. He had reservations about the book of Revelation, but all in all he names the same canon as we use today. In AD 367 the Bishop of Alexandria, a stalwart man named Athanasius, wrote a festal letter in which he listed all twenty-seven NT books as Scripture. He made no note about disputed books—an indication that the disputes mentioned by Origen and Eusebius had diminished in importance by this time. A little more than a decade later the renowned scholar Jerome translated all twenty-seven NT books into Latin and included them in his Bible, which is commonly called the Vulgate. As for the disputed books, he was convinced that their long-standing acceptance in the churches proved that they were indeed Scripture. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, agreed that the twenty-seven were all canonical. Of the disputed books he said they are to be accepted because the majority of churches, especially those accorded great authority due to their apostolic origins, have long accepted them. Finally, in AD 393 and AD 397 the Councils of Hippo and Carthage concluded that the NT canon properly includes twenty-seven books, no more and no less.

THE CANON FROM THE REFORMATION TO THE PRESENT

The Reformation era was a time in which many beliefs and practices were reexamined in the light of Scripture. Men such as Luther and Calvin desired to peel away the traditions of men and take their cues only from God’s authoritative Word. This emphasis highlighted the need to be certain about which books were from God and which were not. When Luther published a German translation of the NT in AD 1522, he included all twenty-seven books of the traditional canon even though he sounded a few notes of disapproval over the disputed books. In the table of contents he listed them separately from the undisputed books. For Luther, it seems, the books of the NT were divided into first-class and second-class canons. All twenty-seven books were from God, but he did not believe Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation measured up to the others. Despite Luther’s reservations, Christianity’s long-standing acceptance of a twenty-seven-book NT canon was not seriously questioned. In AD 1546 the Roman Catholic Church affirmed all twenty-seven books at the Council of Trent, and a hundred years later the Protestants did the same in the Westminster Confession of Faith. No sustained challenge to the canon has arisen in the churches since that era.

PRESERVATION OF THE MANUSCRIPTS THROUGH THE CENTURIES

It has become popular in recent decades for skeptics to claim that the NT books have evolved beyond all recognition since the days when they were written. Amateur copyists, hapless monks, rogue theologians, sly politicians—folk from many quarters are said to have had a turn at corrupting the text by adding, deleting, and modifying at will. One popular critic famously says that the total number of variations found in the existing manuscripts exceeds the number of words in the entire NT! Technically his claim is true, but the conclusions to be drawn from it are far less drastic than he would have us believe. The fact is the vast majority of all changes are easily detected, and they amount to nothing more than simple misspellings and other minor alterations that have no impact whatsoever on the meaning of the NT. In the few places where the changes potentially have theological importance, scholars are often able to trace the text back to its original reading with confidence. In cases where the original reading is in greater dispute, textual scholars have rightly said that you could eliminate all such verses from the NT and not detract from a single vital doctrine of Christianity. In other words, none of the corrupted verses serve as the sole basis for any NT doctrine. So even if we dropped such verses from the Bible, we could always point to undisputed verses elsewhere in the NT as support for the doctrine in question. In this light we see that the variants are not very important. A fair assessment of the evidence reveals that the NT manuscripts have been preserved remarkably well through centuries of transmission. Aside from inconsequential alterations, the NT manuscripts on which our translation is based are very close replications of the original writings.

CONCLUSION

The churches that initially received the letters and Gospels written by the apostles and their commissioned associates understood that the writings were Scripture, for they came from men who were recognized as the authorized exponents of Jesus’s life and message. These writings were copied with care and circulated to other churches. Awareness of the approved books among Christians increased as the decades clicked away, for slowly the copies reached churches that sprang up far from the point of Christian origins in Israel. It is nevertheless true that many sincere Christian devotees in the early centuries would have been unaware of several or even many of the inspired works since many newer churches had little or no access to Scripture. Hence, the fact that the canon was not widely described until the fourth century does not mean the canon itself was an open question among those who were in a good position to judge the matter. After all, we find clear references to most of the canonical books in the writings of the early church fathers, and certainly Christians who worshiped at churches founded by the apostles had an early grasp of the NT canon since their churches were among those that received the original writings in the first century. It is no exaggeration to say that once the practical obstacles to travel, communication, and dissemination of the manuscripts were alleviated, the twenty-seven-book NT canon quickly became the consensus position in Christendom.

Looking back, it is apparent that all the books that were admitted into the canon met the following criteria. (a) They were written either by an apostle or a sanctioned associate of the apostles. (b) They had enjoyed wide and long-standing usage in the churches, especially churches that were founded by the apostles. (c) They reflected high praise for Jesus, were true to the apostolic tradition that had been handed down to the churches, and fit with the overall theology of the other biblical books in both testaments.

In summary, church history shows that great care was taken when candidate books were assessed; the fact that a number of the books in our canon were repeatedly quizzed for their merits proves this beyond all doubt. Our NT canon is a well-proven, carefully protected heritage in which Christians can rejoice and place their full confidence.