IN ORDER to obtain a correct understanding of what is called the
formation of the Canon of the New Testament, it is necessary to begin
by fixing very firmly in our minds one fact which is obvious enough
when attention is once called to it. That is, that the Christian church
did not require to form for itself the idea
of a "canon," - or, as we should more commonly call it, of a "Bible,"
-that is, of a collection of books given of God to be the authoritative
rule of faith and practice. It inherited this idea from the Jewish
church, along with the thing itself, the Jewish Scriptures, or the
"Canon of the Old Testament." The church did not grow up by natural
law: it was founded. And the authoritative teachers sent forth by
Christ to found His church, carried with them, as their most precious
possession, a body of divine Scriptures, which they imposed on the
church that they founded as its code of law. No reader of the New
Testament can need proof of this; on every page of that book is spread
the evidence that from the very beginning the Old Testament was as
cordially recognized as law by the Christian as by the Jew. The
Christian church thus was never without a "Bible" or a "canon."
But the Old Testament books were not the only ones which the
apostles (by Christ's own appointment the authoritative founders of the
church) imposed upon the infant churches, as their authoritative rule
of faith and practice. No more authority dwelt in the prophets of the
old covenant than in themselves, the apostles, who had been "made
sufficient as ministers of a new covenant "; for (as one of themselves argued) "if that which passeth away
was with glory, much more that which remaineth is in glory."
Accordingly not only was the gospel they delivered, in their own
estimation, itself a divine revelation, but it was also preached "in
the Holy Ghost" (I Pet. i. 12) ; not merely
the matter of it, but the very words in which it was clothed were "of
the Holy Spirit" (I Cor. ii. 13). Their own commands were, therefore,
of divine authority (I Thess. iv. 2), and their writings were the
depository of these commands (II Thess. ii. 15). "If any man obeyeth
not our word by this epistle," says Paul to one church (II Thess. iii.
14), "note that man, that ye have no company with him." To another he
makes it the test of a Spirit-led man to recognize that what he was
writing to them was "the commandments of the Lord" (I Cor. xiv. 37).
Inevitably, such writings ', making so awful a claim on their
acceptance, were received by the infant churches as of a quality equal
to that of the old "Bible"; placed alongside of its older books as an
additional part of the one law of God; and read as such in their
meetings for worship -a practice which moreover was required by the
apostles (I Thess. v. 27; Col. iv. 16; Rev. i. 3). In the apprehension,
therefore, of the earliest churches, the "Scriptures" were not a closed
but an increasing "canon." Such they had been from the beginning, as
they gradually grew in number from Moses to Malachi; and such they were
to continue as long as there should remain among the churches "men of
God who spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost."
We say that this immediate placing of the new books - given the
church under the seal of apostolic authority - among the Scriptures
already established as such, was inevitable. It is also historically
evinced from the very beginning. Thus the apostle Peter, writing in
A.D. 68, speaks of Paul's numerous letters not in contrast with the
Scriptures, but as among the Scriptures and in contrast with "the other
Scriptures" (II Pet. iii.16) -that is, of course, those of the Old
Testament. In like manner the apostle Paul combines, as if it were the
most natural thing in the world, the book of Deuteronomy and the Gospel
of Luke under the common head of "Scripture" (I Tim. v.18): "For the
Scripture saith ' 'Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out
the corn ' [Deut. xxv. 4]; and, 'The laborer
is worthy of his hire'" (Luke x. 7). The line of such quotations is
never broken in Christian literature. Polycarp (c. 12) in A.D. 115
unites the Psalms and Ephesians in exactly similar manner: "In the
sacred books.... as it is said in these Scriptures, 'Be ye angry and
sin not,' and 'Let not the sun go down upon your wrath."' So, a few
years later, the so-called second letter of Clement, after quoting
Isaiah, adds (ii. 4): "And another Scripture, however, says, 'I came
not to call the righteous, but sinners'" -quoting from Matthew -- a
book which Barnabas (circa 97-106 A.D.) had already adduced as
Scripture. After this such quotations are common.
What needs emphasis at present about these facts is that they
obviously are not evidences of a gradually-heightening estimate of the
New Testament books, originally received on a lower level and just
beginning to be tentatively accounted Scripture; they are conclusive
evidences rather of the estimation of the New Testament books from the
very beginning as Scripture, and of their attachment as Scripture to
the other Scriptures already in hand. The early Christians did not,
then, first form a rival "canon" of "new books" which came only
gradually to be accounted as of equal divinity and authority with the
"old books"; they received new book after new book from the apostolical
circle, as equally "Scripture" with the old books, and added them one
by one to the collection of old books as additional Scriptures, until
at length the new books thus added were numerous enough to be looked
upon as another section of the Scriptures.
The earliest name given to this new section of Scripture was framed
on the model of the name by which what we know as the Old Testament was
then known. Just as it was called "The Law and the Prophets and the
Psalms" (or "the Hagiographa"), or more briefly "The Law and the
Prophets," or even more briefly still "The Law"; so the enlarged Bible
was called "The Law and the Prophets, with the Gospels and the
Apostles" (so Clement of Alexandria, "Strom." vi. 11, 88; Tertullian,
"De Prms. Men" 36), or most briefly "The Law and the Gospel" (so
Claudius Apolinaris, Irenaeus); while the new books apart were called
"The Gospel and the Apostles," or most briefly of all "The Gospel."
This earliest name for the new Bible, with all that it involves as to
its relation to the old and briefer Bible, is traceable as far back as
Ignatius (A.D. 115), who makes use of it repeatedly (e.g., "ad Philad."
5; ("ad Smyrn." 7). In
one passage he gives us a hint of the controversies which the enlarged
Bible of the Christians aroused among the Judaizers (" ad Philad." 6).
"When I heard some saying," he writes, "'Unless
I find it in the Old [Books] I will not believe the Gospel' on my
saying,' It is written.' they answered, 'That is the question.' To me,
however, Jesus Christ is the Old [Books]; his cross and death and
resurrection and the faith which is by him, the undefiled Old [Books] -
by which I wish, by your prayers, to be justified. The priests indeed
are good, but the High Priest better," etc. Here Ignatius appeals to
the "Gospel" as Scripture, and the Judaizers object, receiving from him
the answer in effect which Augustine afterward formulated in the well
known saying that the New Testament lies hidden in the Old and the Old
Testament is first made clear in the New. What we need now to observe,
however, is that to Ignatius the New Testament was not a different book
from the Old Testament, but part of the one body of Scripture with it;
an accretion, so to speak, which had grown upon it.
This is the testimony of all the early witnesses - even those which
speak for the distinctively Jewish-Christian church. For example, that curious Jewish-Christian writing, "The
Testaments of the XII. Patriarchs" (Beni. 11), tells us, under
the cover of an ex post facto prophecy, that the "work and word" of
Paul, i.e., confessedly the book of Acts and Paul's Epistles, "shall be
written in the Holy Books," i.e., as is understood by all, made a part
of the existent Bible. So even in the Talmud, in a scene intended to
ridicule a "bishop" of the first century, he is represented as finding
Galatians by "sinking himself deeper" into the same "Book" which
contained the Law of Moses ("Babl. Shabbath," 116 a
and b). The details cannot be entered into here. Let it suffice
to say that, from the evidence of the fragments which alone have been
preserved to us of the Christian writings of that very early time, it
appears that from the beginning of the second century (and that is from
the end of the apostolic age) a collection (Ignatius, II Clement) of
"New Books" (Ignatius), called the "Gospel and Apostles" (Ignatius,
Marcion), was already a part of the "Oracles" of God (Polycarp, Papias,
II Clement), or "Scriptures" (I Tim., II Pet., Barn., Polycarp, II
Clement), or the "Holy Books" or "Bible" (Testt. XII. Patt.).
The number of books included-in this added body of New Books, at the
opening of the second century, cannot be satisfactorily determined by
the evidence of these fragments alone. The section of it called the
"Gospel" included Gospels written by "the apostles and their
companions" (Justin), which beyond legitimate question were our four
Gospels now received. The section called "the Apostles" contained the
book of Acts (The Testt. XII. Patt.) and
epistles of Paul, John, Peter and James. The evidence from various
quarters is indeed enough to show that the collection in general use
contained all the books which we at present receive, with the possible
exceptions of Jude, II and III John and Philemon. And it is more
natural to suppose that failure of very early evidence for these brief
booklets is due to their insignificant size rather than to their
nonacceptance.
It is to be borne in mind, however, that the extent of the
collection may have - and indeed is historically shown actually to have
varied in different localities. The Bible was circulated only in
handcopies, slowly and painfully made; and an incomplete copy, obtained
say at Ephesus in A.D. 68, would be likely to remain for many years the
Bible of the church to which it was conveyed; and might indeed become
the parent of other copies, incomplete like itself, and thus the means
of providing a whole district with incomplete Bibles. Thus, when we
inquire after the history of the New Testament Canon we need to
distinguish such questions as these: (1) When
was the New Testament Canon completed? (2) When did any one church
acquire a completed canon? (3) When did the completed canon -the
complete Bible - obtain universal circulation and acceptance? (4) On
what ground and evidence did the churches with incomplete Bibles accept
the remaining books when they were made known to them?
The Canon of the New Testament was completed when the last
authoritative book was given to any church by the apostles, and that
was when John wrote the Apocalypse, about A.D. 98. Whether the
Let it, however, be clearly understood that it was not exactly
apostolic authorship which in the estimation of the earliest churches,
constituted a book a portion of the "canon." Apostolic authorship was,
indeed, early confounded with canonicity. It was doubt as to the
apostolic authorship of Hebrews, in the West, and of James and Jude,
apparently, which underlay the slowness of the inclusion of these books
in the "canon" of certain churches. But from the beginning it was not
so. The principle of canonicity was not apostolic authorship, but
imposition by the apostles as "law." Hence Tertullian's name for the
"canon" is "instrumentum"; and he speaks of the Old and New Instrument
as we would of the Old and New Testament. That the apostles so imposed
the Old Testament on the churches which they founded - as their
"Instrument," or "Law," or "Canon" - can be denied by none. And in
imposing new books on the same churches, by the same apostolical
authority, they did not confine themselves to books of their own
composition. It is the Gospel according to Luke, a man who was not an
apostle, which Paul parallels in I Tim. v. 18 with Deuteronomy as
equally "Scripture" with it, in the first extant quotation of a New
Testament book as Scripture. The Gospels which constituted the first
division of the New Books, - of "The Gospel and the Apostles," - Justin
tells us were "written by the apostles and their companions." The
authority of the apostles, as by divine appointment founders of the
church was embodied in whatever books they imposed on the church as law
not merely in those they themselves had written.
The early churches, in short, received, as we receive, into the New
Testament all the books historically evinced to them as give by the
apostles to the churches as their code of law; and we must not mistake
the historical evidences of the slow circulation an authentication of
these books over the widely-extended church, evidence of slowness of
"canonization" of books by the authority or the taste of the church
itself.