The Biblical Canon

Its Origin, Transmission, and Authority

McDonald, Lee Martin

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781441241641
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Selected for inclusion in Preaching magazine's "Annual Review of Outstanding Books for Preachers 2006" This is the thoroughly updated and expanded third edition of the successful The Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon. It represents a fresh attempt to understand some of the many perplexing questions related to the origins and canonicity of the Bible.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

I. SOME TOUGH QUESTIONS ABOUT THE BIBLE

Some years ago while I was conducting a Bible study in a church, a layperson asked me a fairly straightforward question that caught me off guard: Why did some ancient books make it into our Bibles, and others did not? He also asked how important this question is for Christians today. The simple answer to the first question is that the Bible is one of the great resources of the church, without which we would be at a great loss to know who God is, who we are as the people of God, and what the will of God is for us. But what if someone asked us why some books in antiquity were added to our Bible and others were not? Further, what books should be in the Bible? When current Bibles do not contain the same books, which collection of books should we be reading?

One might also ask, why do Catholics have a different collection of books in their Bible than do Protestants? Or, why do Greek Orthodox Christians have an even larger number of books in their Bible than do Catholics or Protestants? Why are the OT books of Protestants the same as those of Jews, but they are not in the same order? Who is right and how can we know? Not only is it important to know something about books that “made the cut” and were included in our Bibles, but what about books that were excluded? Who made those decisions and what criteria did they use? Do all of these books reflect the will of God for the church, or would the Christian faith be considerably different if other books were added and others deleted from the Bible?

All of these questions are essentially canon questions and they ask about the books that make up the current Bibles in churches. These questions are easier to formulate than to answer; they are, nevertheless, important for religious communities of faith that order their lives and ministries by a collection of sacred writings they call the Bible. To answer these questions, we have to go behind the scenes and learn something of the origins of the Bible, as well as how, when, by whom, and why the writings in it came to be acknowledged as authoritative Scripture. Answering these questions will not be easy, however, because no surviving documents either in the church or in Judaism offer clear answers to these questions. The available evidence is very sketchy and inferential in nature, and Bible scholars with impeccable academic and ecclesiastical credentials have difficulty agreeing on these matters.

To carry this discussion a step further, most Bible students know that until the invention of the printing press, the church employed scribes to make individual copies of their sacred Scriptures. Until the invention of the printing press no two biblical manuscripts were exactly alike, and yet each manuscript that the scribes produced functioned as Scripture for the communities for which they were copied and preserved. The copiers had differing abilities, and some copies were better than others and some were worse, but each copy functioned as Scripture in the community that authorized or was responsible for their production.

Many mistakes and even deliberate changes were made in the production of these manuscripts, and, as a result, a new craft called “textual criticism” emerged in the church to determine the original wording of the biblical text. Textual critics want to know what the original author of a manuscript wrote, and many have spent their lives trying to decipher and discover as best they can what the original writers put down on parchment or papyrus. Those engaged in this activity often compare thousands of manuscripts, but at the end of the day few claim to have discovered either the original text or even precise criteria for uncovering the original text in the surviving manuscripts.[1] Indeed, some text-critical scholars have abandoned that pursuit as an unattainable goal. Those who study biblical Greek soon learn that the original wording of many passages in the Bible is uncertain, and questions continue to emerge from biblical scholars not only on the meaning of ancient texts, but also on their original wording as well.

The work of text-critical scholars forms the basis for all modern translations of the Bible, and, with the continual discovery of ancient biblical manuscripts that often predate the manuscripts used to translate the King James Bible and other older translations, we must ask which ancient text(s) should be employed in the translation of the Bible. The church has not universally adopted any particular text of the Bible even when text-critical scholars agree on the wording of a particular biblical text. Similarly, of the many translations of the Bible available in the English language and in more than two thousand other languages,[2] which translation is appropriate for the church today? Biblical translations are not all the same, so which translation is the best for church use today? Since many Christians hinge their faith on specific words and phrases of the biblical text, this subject continues to be important. We could well ask, what might the churches’ beliefs look like and what changes would take place if they all began to use the same Bible with the same text and the same translation? Again, all of these questions highlight the importance of canonical issues facing the church today.

No credible person today seriously believes that the Bible fell out of heaven fully bound in its current state with gilded edges and with a highly precise interpretation from God in it. The human dimension of the origin and production of the Bible, as well as how the divine message is conveyed through human words and ideas, cannot be ignored. Human beings were involved in the origins and production of the Bible, and all of the words and ideas in the Bible are also reflective of human involvement. How the Bible is the word of God and yet comes to us in human form continues to be a mystery to Christians of every generation. This is not only an important part of the church’s understanding about the Bible, but also about God’s involvement in the human activity of Jesus, whom the church continues to confess as Lord and Christ.

Some of us were taught in seminary that the early church received from Jesus a closed biblical canon, our present OT, that was later expanded by the Catholics to include noncanonical (and thereby uninspired) apocryphal writings.[3] In regard to the Hebrew Scriptures (or the OT), we were often taught that Jesus, the church’s final authority, cited or referred to a closed canon of Hebrew Scriptures and that his authentication of them (he cited verses from the three major parts of the OT: Law, Prophets, and Writings) was the church’s mandate for accepting them as authoritative Scripture. In other words, the church simply adopted the canon of Jesus. In regard to the NT writings, many of us were taught that the early church simply recognized (as opposed to determined) its own inspired NT Scriptures that were believed to be apostolic, that is either written by or authorized by an apostle within general proximity to the time of Jesus and the apostles or at least written in the first century. We were further taught that these NT writings were unified in their teaching (i.e., they were orthodox), and for these reasons they were recognized by the majority of the churches to be inspired by God.

This traditional view has been slowly eroding over the years, largely as a result of several important studies on the formation of the biblical canon, especially those by Adolf von Harnack, Robert M. Grant, Hans von Campenhausen, James A. Sanders, A. C. Sundberg, James Barr, John Barton, and G. M. Hahneman (see bibliography). Their efforts caused many scholars to reexamine the historical data related to the formation of the Christian biblical canon. Until recently most (but not all) introductions to both the OT and NT devoted only a few pages to this discussion, but more recent introductions give more serious attention to the major questions involved in canon and by doing so stimulate further research. Of course, not all discussions on the formation of the Bible are of equal value. Some of them offer few advances in our understanding and often simply repeat unjustified assumptions.[4]

Other important questions are under consideration as well:

1. Why were discussions about the scope of the OT biblical canon still going on in the church well into the fourth through sixth centuries (and even later) if the matter had been largely settled before the time of Jesus?
2. Why did it take the church three hundred to four hundred years to establish its twenty-seven-book NT canon?
3. What precisely is a biblical canon, and how sure are we that such notions flourished in the time before, during, or immediately after the first century C.E.?
4. Do biblical canons exist whenever a NT writer or early church father cites a source from an earlier ancient text? In other words, should a cited text automatically become part of an ancient writer’s biblical canon?[5] More recently, one rabbinic scholar has questioned whether the issue of a closed biblical canon was ever discussed among the sages of late antiquity.[6]
5. What sources more accurately reflect the earliest strands of Christian faith? Some scholars today are considering other ancient sources that they believe relate more faithfully the earliest Jesus traditions than those we find in the canonical Gospels. It is not uncommon to hear current discussions about the enlargement of the traditional database for knowledge about the historical Jesus, for example, to include the Gospel of Thomas, the “Unknown Gospel” discovered in the Egerton Papyri, and other noncanonical writings.
6. What of the so-called agrapha, that is, the sayings of Jesus not found in the canonical Gospels? Some scholars suggest that the agrapha, or portions of these sayings at least, ought to be added to the database of reliable information about the historical Jesus. This is not a new proposal, of course, and it continues to surface.[7] The legitimacy of the question stems from these agrapha serving as a scriptural (or authoritative) resource for the Christians who cited them. If we can with some assurance determine which of the more than two hundred sayings are authentic, should those sayings of Jesus be added to the database of information about Jesus, or even to the church’s Scriptures and used in worship, catechetical studies, and the church’s mission?[8] Early texts circulated in the churches apart from the Gospels, but were eventually added to them, and those early agrapha continue to function scripturally in churches to the present day, for example, Mark 16:9–20.
7. Finally, what about the appropriate canonical text for the church today? Childs asks which text of Scripture should be the focus of authority for the church: the text in its original and earliest form or the later canonical form of the text? The latter admittedly has received many textual additions, some of which were intentional and others accidental. For instance, is the canonical or authoritative text of the church the original form of Philippians or the one that currently exists in our NT?[9] Does it make a difference if the two parts are separated for both study and preaching? Is the Gospel of John best read as it was written, namely, as a single gospel, or as the Fourth Gospel? Is the final form of Isaiah the authoritative base for preaching and teaching or do we look for an earlier 1, 2, and even 3 Isaiah? Should we retain in our biblical canon Mark 16:9–20, John 21, Acts 8:37, and other texts with questionable textual support, even though most scholars agree that they were later additions to the text? In the same line of thinking, should we accept as our Scriptures only the earliest texts available to us today, that is, those that most closely reflect the original hand of the author? We have a clue on how to answer this question from the way that the early church sought to root its theology in the witness from the apostolic community.[10]

These questions, and others as well, have given rise to the recent interest in the formation of the biblical canon and related issues. Before any new advances can be made in our understanding of the formation of the Bible, however, much more inquiry than has emerged thus far needs to take place. I think that we are on the threshold of new advances in canonical studies that will change our perceptions of the canonical process. As a result, we will probably see more attempts at redefining the biblical canon, even though the current shape of the Christian Bible will probably not change much as a result. Some Christians will probably continue to find clever ways to marginalize those parts of the biblical canon that no longer appear relevant or that offend their sensibilities rather than explore new ways of changing the canon or interpreting it in fresh and more applicable ways![11] On the other hand, it is refreshing to find more references to noncanonical literature in evangelical writings, primarily as reference points to understand the meaning of the biblical text.[12]

What has contributed to the growing interest in the origins and formation of the Bible? In the last fifty years there have been several significant inquiries into the viability of the current biblical canon. With little or no change in the biblical canon for hundreds of years, why is there such vigorous inquiry now into the formation and authority of the Bible, and why are some scholars making recommendations about changing the contents of the Bible? Aland, for example, raises the question of reducing the biblical canon to take out those portions of the Bible that he believes are an embarrassment to the majority of Christians with the goal of promoting church unity.[13] Similarly, Käsemann also asks whether there should be some way to recognize a “canon within the canon”—in essence, a selective use of the Bible and a reduction of the biblical text—in order to alleviate the concern over the diversity within the Bible.[14] Some members of the well-known and often controversial Jesus Seminar promote the notion of both reducing the current biblical canon (eliminating especially Revelation and other apocalyptic literature in the Bible such as Mark 13, Matt 24, etc.) and expanding it to include the Gospel of Thomas and the “Unknown Gospel” of the Egerton Papyri.[15] One can well imagine the response of dispensational and Adventist churches to the proposed rejection of the book of Revelation by the Jesus Seminar in their projected Scholars’ Canon!

I agree with Metzger, who contends that although the Bible canon may in princ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the Third Edition
• Foreword to the First and Second Editions, by Helmut Koester
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Abbreviations
• Part 1: Scripture and Canon
• Part 2: Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Canon
• Part 3: New Testament Canon
• Appendix A. An Outline of Canon Research: Primary Sources and Questions
• Appendix B. Lists and Catalogues of Old Testament Collections
• Appendix C. Lists and Catalogues of New Testament Collections
• Appendix D. New Testament Citations of and Allusions to Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphal Writings
• Appendix E. Brevard Childs’s Canonical Approach
• Select Bibliography
• Index of Modern Authors
• Index of Names and Subjects
• Index of Ancient Sources
• Notes