Do we have the right books?

“Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction” (2 Peter 3:15-16).

Critics allege there were (depending on who’s raving) hundreds to thousands of potential books, especially gospels, that could have been in the New Testament canon. The NT and modern Christianity are what they are, these people say, only because of political wrangling that allowed the books we use to rise to the top of the pile, helped by the influence of the Roman emperor Constantine. Is there any truth to that? Should we doubt the books we have or explore the ones that didn’t make the cut?

In AD 367, Athanasius published a list of the NT canon as we know it today. Did he pull those out of thin air? Did some committee choose those books? Let’s look at some interesting points in history.

The road to the formation of the NT canon began when the heretic Marcion, who held to a form of gnosticism, published a list of the books he considered acceptable, somewhere around AD 140. This gnostic would, naturally, have chosen some of the several gnostic gospels to be in his canon, right? Nope. His canon consisted of an edited version of Luke and edited versions of ten of Paul’s letters. (In truth, most of the gnostic gospels hadn’t been written yet, so he couldn’t include them.)

Somewhere between 160—175 Tatian produced his Diatessaron, which was a harmony of the four canonical gospels. No other gospels were included.

The Muratorian Canon, written 170ish, listed four gospels (our copy is damaged, we can’t tell which two gospels preceded Luke and John, but it’s not hard to guess), Acts, thirteen letters of Paul, Jude, two letters of John, and Revelation as well as the Wisdom of Solomon and the Apocalypse of Peter.

Origen (c. 184—c. 253) published a suggested canon. There are, he says, people in the church who are unsure about Hebrews, James, and 2 Peter, but about the gospels he clearly lists Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John saying, “The Church possesses four Gospels, heresy a great many.”

The pattern should be clear by now. Though there was discussion about which books should be in the Christian canon, there was never any doubt about which gospels should be in it. The four gospels quickly became a unit. The letters of Paul also, according to Lightfoot, were quickly accepted and assembled into a unit. As the verse quoted above shows, Paul’s writings were considered “scripture” before the NT was even completely written.

Why were some of the other books disputed? From Lightfoot:

Several of our New Testament books, at least for a while, were included among the “disputed” books. But these books were questioned not because they taught a different gospel but, especially in several instances, because they were not well known and widely circulated in the church. James, 2 and 3 John, and perhaps others, are to be included in this group.

But over time the church worked out a way to tell which books were authoritative. They were books that were written by apostles or their close associates, that were widely accepted, and that conformed to the traditional teachings of the church as they had been passed down.*

The gnostic books fail on all three counts. They were written late, long after the apostles had passed on, were never widely accepted, and they did not teach the same gospel.

There were orthodox books that were in the early running to be considered canon that also didn’t make it. In addition to the two mentioned above, the Didache, the Shepherd of Hermas, and the First Letter of Clement of Rome were widely respected, but they were not written by apostles. Today these are still considered useful writings, but they’re not scripture. RC Sproul says, “It becomes clear if one reads them that the writers were conscious that their work was subapostolic and postapostolic.”

So the truth of the matter is that the books were not selected by a committee; they were the ones that naturally rose in prominence above all the others. They were not forced on us by Constantine, who died 30 years before the canon was finalized. And the gnostics were recognized as heretics and their “gospels” rejected pretty much as soon as they were written.

I think of the process like gem stones. In the end, gems are just rocks. What committee decided that diamonds would be more valuable than quartz? No one did. Certain rocks began to be valued because people admired them for their characteristics, be it color or hardness or simply rarity. In the same way, the early Church began to value characteristics that they saw in some of the books that were in circulation, so those books rose in prominence above all the rest.

The bottom line is that we don’t need to worry that we’re missing something by reading the NT we have today. The early church separated out the forgeries, the heretics, and the merely good from the great, keeping those that experience had taught them have the power to change hearts and lives.


* This, by the way, is why the canon is "closed" (meaning that no more writings can be added to the Bible today): the apostles are gone.


For more information, see How We Got the Bible by by Neil R. Lightfoot.

Image credit: Amila Tennakoon, creative commons