Quotes from F. F. Bruce and B. B. Warfield on how the NT
Canon was created:
F. F. Bruce1 The historic Christian belief is that
the Holy Spirit, who controlled the writing of the individual books,
also controlled their selection and collection, thus continuing to
fulfil our Lord's promise that He would guide His disciples into all
the truth. This, however, is something that is to be discerned by
spiritual insight, and not by historical research. Our object is to
find out what historical research reveals about the origin of the New
Testament canon.
The first steps in the formation of a
canon of authoritative Christian books, worthy to stand beside the Old
Testament canon, which was the Bible of our Lord and His apostles,
appear to have been taken about the beginning of the second century,
when there is evidence for the circulation of two collections of
Christian writings in the Church.
At a very early date it appears that
the four Gospels were united in one collection. They must have been
brought together very soon after the writing of the Gospel according to
John. This fourfold collection was known originally as "The Gospel" in
the singular, not "The Gospels" in the plural; there was only one
Gospel, narrated in four records, distinguished as "according to
Matthew", "according to Mark", and so on. About AD 115 Ignatius, bishop
of Antioch, refers to "The Gospel" as an authoritative writing, and as
he knew more than one of the four "Gospels" it may well be that by "The
Gospel" he means the fourfold collection which went by that name.
One thing must be emphatically
stated. The New Testament books did not become authoritative for the
Church because they were formally included in a canonical list; on the
contrary, the Church included them in her canon because she already
regarded them as divinely inspired, recognising their innate worth and
general apostolic authority, direct or indirect. The first
ecclesiastical councils to classify the canonical books were both held
in North Africa—at Hippo Regius in 393 and at Carthage in
397—but what
these councils did was not to impose something new upon the Christian
communities but to codify what was already the general practice of
those communities.
B. B. Warfield2 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. … 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 of "New Books", called the "Gospel and
Apostles", was already a part of the "Oracles" of God" or
"Scriptures", or the "Holy Books" or "Bible".
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." 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 given by the apostles to the churches
as their code of law; and we
must not mistake the historical evidences of the slow circulation and
authentication of these books over the widely-extended church, evidence
of slowness of the "canonization" of these books by the authority or
taste of the church itself. (1) See the full article The Canon Of The
NT, F. F. Bruce (1910-1990), chapter 3, The New
Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?, IVP, 1959
(2) B.B. Warfield (1851-1921), The Formation
of the Canon of
the New Testament, Philadelphia, PA: American Sunday School
Union,
1892.