Theopedia

Development of the canon

Definition

The canon of Scripture is the closed list of books the church receives as God’s own inspired, authoritative word: thirty-nine in the Old Testament and twenty-seven in the New Testament.12 On the confessional Reformed view, these books did not become authoritative because church leaders selected them; their authority is inherent in their divine origin, and the church’s historic acceptance of them recognizes what they already were rather than grants them a new status.3

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession and the Westminster Confession use substantively identical language on the canon, a unified Reformed witness rather than a Baptist distinctive. Both name the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments in full and conclude, “All which are given by the inspiration of God, to be the rule of faith and life.”14 Both confessions then exclude the Apocrypha by name:

The books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the canon or rule of the Scripture, and, therefore, are of no authority to the church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved or made use of than other human writings.2

The confession locates the canon’s authority in God rather than in any human ratification:

The authority of the Holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God (who is truth itself), the author thereof.5

The church’s own testimony can move readers “to an high and reverent esteem of the Holy Scriptures,” but “our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth, and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts.”6 Bavinck traces this principle to the Reformation’s own vocabulary for it: Calvin and the other Reformers spoke of Scripture, through the work of the Holy Spirit, as “self-authenticating” (autopistos). “Scripture’s authority thus arises from its own content; it is not granted by the church’s decision.”7

Biblical Basis

Paul grounds Scripture’s authority in its origin rather than in any human process of selection: “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16). Peter makes the same point about prophetic writing specifically: “no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Pet. 1:20-21).

The New Testament also shows this recognition already under way within its own pages. Writing of Paul’s letters, Peter places them alongside “the other scriptures” (2 Pet. 3:16), a phrase Kruger argues most naturally refers to a body of Old Testament writings functioning as a known standard, with Paul’s letters, plural, now placed on the same footing.8 Jesus himself attests to an already-settled threefold shape of the Old Testament canon when he tells the disciples that “all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me” (Luke 24:44), a structure, Kruger notes, corroborated by the prologue to Ecclesiasticus, the Qumran document 4QMMT, and Philo, and “well established by the time of Jesus and the apostles.”9

Historical Development

Old Testament canon

The Hebrew Scriptures came together as a threefold collection: the Torah (Law), the Nevi’im (Prophets), and the Kethuvim (Writings). The earliest surviving witness to this threefold shape is the prologue to the Greek translation of Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), which refers to “the law, the prophets, and the other national books” and, again, “the law, and the prophecies, and the rest of the books.”10 By the end of the first century A.D., the Jewish historian Josephus described a closed collection of twenty-two books (a number reached by combining several books the English Bible counts separately):

We have not among us innumerable books discordant and contrary to each other, but only two-and-twenty, containing the history of all time, which are justly believed to be divine. And of these five belong to Moses, which contain the laws and the transmission of human genealogy to the time of his death… But from the death of Moses to the reign of Artaxerxes, who was king of the Persians after Xerxes, the prophets after Moses wrote the history of their times in thirteen books. The remaining four contain hymns to God and precepts for human life. From Artaxerxes to our time various books have been written; but they have not been esteemed worthy of credence like that given to the books before them, because the exact succession of the prophets has been wanting.11

A. C. Sundberg argued the church inherited no real canon from Judaism and had to determine its Old Testament for itself; Kruger judges that claim overstated. Even allowing some flux at the outer edges (the exact contents of the Writings), a functional threefold canon was in place by the first century, the same one Jesus and Josephus both presuppose.12

New Testament canon

The four Gospels and Paul’s letters were already circulating and read as authoritative within the first century of the church, well before any formal listing of New Testament books. Around 144 A.D., Marcion published a truncated canon, an edited Gospel of Luke and ten of Paul’s epistles, built on his rejection of the Old Testament’s God. Adolf von Harnack and Helmut Koester credited Marcion, or the church’s reaction to him, with creating the very idea of a Christian canon.13 Bruce Metzger’s judgment, which Kruger endorses, is more measured: “It is nearer to the truth to regard Marcion’s canon as accelerating the process of fixing the Church’s canon, a process that had already begun in the first half of the second century.”14

Evidence for a settled, bounded body of Christian Scripture appears well before the fourth century. Around 170 A.D., Dionysius, bishop of Corinth, took pains to distinguish his own pastoral letters from “the Scriptures of the Lord,” lest anyone mistake them for new canonical writings, and called his own letters “inferior” by comparison. Around 180, Irenaeus insisted that the four Gospels “can[not] be either more or fewer than the number they are.” An anonymous writer against Montanism, around 196, explicitly applied Deuteronomy 4:2’s “neither add nor take away” to the Christian writings, which he called “the new covenant of the gospel.”15 By around 200, a document called the Muratorian Fragment lists most of the New Testament books recognized today.

In 367, Athanasius’ Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter listed the twenty-seven books of the New Testament by name, matching the canon in use today. Eusebius, the Codex Claromontanus, Rufinus, Jerome, and Augustine, along with the Synods of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397), soon agreed. Kruger reads this fourth-century consensus as recognition rather than creation:

There was no formal, official declaration of the church that closed the canon… the canon was closed when the last apostolic book was written. We can agree with Ehrman that “the canon of the New Testament was ratified by widespread consensus rather than by official proclamation.”16

Opposing Views

Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox canons

The Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church include books in their Old Testaments that the Hebrew canon and the Reformed confessions exclude: Tobit, Judith, additions to Esther, 1 and 2 Maccabees, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch, and additions to Daniel. These books circulated in the Greek Septuagint but were not part of the Hebrew canon Josephus describes. Rome formally defined its wider canon at the Council of Trent (1545-1563).

The Roman Catholic model of canonical authority

Beyond the list of books themselves, Roman Catholic theology grounds canonical knowledge differently than the confessions above. Catholic teaching holds that Scripture, tradition, and the Magisterium (the church’s teaching office) together carry authority, but that the Magisterium alone has the right to define what belongs to Scripture and tradition in the first place.17 As H. J. Adriaanse puts it, “Catholic Theology… has solved the canon problem with a plea to the authority of the Church.” Karl Rahner states the position bluntly: “[Scripture] exists because the church exists.” Cardinal Stanislaus Hosius, papal legate to Trent, went further still: “The Scriptures have only as much force as the fables of Aesop, if destitute of the authority of the Church.”17 On this model, Protestant sola scriptura is incoherent, because an ultimate authority cannot certify its own boundaries; some further, infallible authority is needed to say which books count as Scripture in the first place. Kruger, while rejecting the model’s conclusion, grants that it “rightly captures certain aspects of canon,” including the real, corporate role the church’s reception plays in canon history.18

The historical-critical model

A separate line of modern scholarship, associated with Adolf von Harnack, Helmut Koester, and Elaine Pagels, treats the canon as a fourth-century construct: a set of texts the institutional church settled on for theological and political reasons well after the books themselves were written, with no meaningful sense in which they were regarded as Scripture before the late second century.13 On this view, the canon’s contours reflect the church’s later interests more than any property inherent in the books themselves.

Objections and Responses

Without an infallible church to certify the canon, Protestants have no way of knowing which books belong in the Bible. This is the core Roman Catholic epistemological challenge described above. Kruger’s response is that the objection proves too much: even an inspired document that supplied an explicit “table of contents” for Scripture would itself need to be authenticated as belonging to the canon, generating the same question one step removed, “how do you know this book is from God?” No finite chain of documents can terminate the regress; built into the Catholic objection is the prior assumption that no document can be self-attesting, which is precisely the point at issue rather than something the objection can simply assume.19

The canon was not really fixed as Scripture until the church formally declared it in the fourth century. The evidence surveyed above tells against a late date. Dionysius of Corinth, Irenaeus, and the anonymous anti-Montanist writer all treat the New Testament’s boundaries as already closed a century and more before Athanasius’ Festal Letter. Even Ehrman concedes that 367 A.D. ratified an existing consensus rather than manufacturing one from nothing.16

Marcion invented the very idea of a Christian canon, so the church’s canon is a defensive, second-century reaction rather than an original apostolic reality. Metzger’s judgment, endorsed by Kruger, is that Marcion’s truncated list accelerated a process of recognition already under way earlier in the second century rather than originating it.14

Related Doctrines

Further Reading

  • F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988)
  • Roger T. Beckwith, The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church and Its Background in Early Judaism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986)

References

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 2. ↩ ↩2

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 3. ↩ ↩2

  3. Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), “Conclusion”: “All three aspects of canon, divine qualities, apostolic origins, and corporate reception, are able to work in tandem to provide a solid foundation for our knowledge of the canon.” ↩

  4. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scripture,” para. 2. ↩

  5. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 4. ↩

  6. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 5. ↩

  7. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 6, “Faith”: “Scripture’s authority thus arises from its own content; it is not granted by the church’s decision. This is what the Reformation teachers such as Calvin meant when they spoke of Scripture, through the work of the Holy Spirit, as self-authenticating (αὐτοπιστος).” ↩

  8. Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 6, “The Corporate Reception of the Canon”: “One of the earliest examples comes from the well-known phrase in 2 Peter 3:16, where Paul’s letters are regarded as on par with the τὰς λοιπὰς γραφὰς (‘the other Scriptures’) of the Old Testament… this passage refers not just to a single letter of Paul, but to a collection of Paul’s letters.” ↩

  9. Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 4, “The Divine Qualities of the Canon”: “The threefold structure of the Hebrew Old Testament seems well established by the turn of the century, even if the exact makeup of the writings was still in flux (e.g., Luke 24:44; Sir. 39:1; 4QMMT [95-96]; Philo, Contempl. Life, 25).” ↩

  10. Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), chap. 15, sec. 18: “the earliest notice of the contents of the Hebrew Canon is that contained in the prologue to the Greek translation of Ecclesiasticus, where it is described as ‘the law, the prophets, and the other national books,’ ‘the law, and the prophecies, and the rest of the books.’” ↩

  11. Josephus, Against Apion 1.8, quoted in Barrows, Companion to the Bible, chap. 15, sec. 18. ↩

  12. Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 4, n. 55, responding to A. C. Sundberg, “The ‘Old Testament’: A Christian Canon,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 30 (1968): 152. ↩

  13. Michael J. Kruger, The Question of Canon: Challenging the Status Quo in the New Testament Debate (Nottingham: Apollos, 2013), “Introduction”: describing Adolf von Harnack’s, Helmut Koester’s, and Elaine Pagels’s arguments that the canon’s formation owed more to second-century controversy and later ecclesiastical consolidation than to the books’ own early recognition as Scripture. ↩ ↩2

  14. Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 99, quoted in Michael J. Kruger, The Question of Canon: Challenging the Status Quo in the New Testament Debate (Nottingham: Apollos, 2013), chap. 5, “The Date of Canon,” 155-203. ↩ ↩2

  15. Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 8, “Problem Books and Canonical Boundaries.” ↩

  16. Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 8, “Problem Books and Canonical Boundaries”: “there was no formal, official declaration of the church that closed the canon… We can agree with Ehrman that ‘the canon of the New Testament was ratified by widespread consensus rather than by official proclamation.’” ↩ ↩2

  17. Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 1, “The Church’s Book.” ↩ ↩2

  18. Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 1, “The Church’s Book”: “It should be noted from the outset that, like the historical-critical approach above, the Roman Catholic model rightly captures certain aspects of canon.” ↩

  19. Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 1, “The Church’s Book”: on the “twenty-eighth book” thought experiment and the infinite-regress problem facing any demand for an external, infallible “table of contents.” ↩