10 Things To Know About the New Testament Canon

I want to share 10 things about the formation of the New Testament that you may find interesting.

• Canon means ‘rule.’ It’s not a list of rules but like a ruler or a measuring stick. The New Testament texts collectively are the standard of Christian faith and practice against which other ideas, writings etc can be discerned. The word canon can be used to refer to a document (Gospel, Letter, etc) that is part of the standard measure of our faith and practice or to the total ‘closed’ collection of these books.

• The earliest disciples of Jesus had no New Testament! This is hard for us to imagine as we’ve had it for so many generations now. Imagine what questions and challenges the church would have had and you can see why the writing of letters, gospels etc became a priority.

• The formalizing of some of the New Testament documents became really important as the eyewitness and Apostles began to die. During the first years, those who literally walked with Jesus were able to guide the church in the way and teaching and understanding of Jesus.

• Much of what today is the New Testament was written, circulated, and pretty much universally agreed upon as being reliable and useful from very early on. The Gospels and the Letters of Paul, Acts and 1 John for example were never really in doubt. We have evidence of these circulating fairly widely by the second century (AD 100s). And thats the evidence we can find – so it likely goes back further. Documents that are now in the New Testament were accepted as authoritative long before finalized collection was considered.

• Although the canon wasn’t formally ‘closed’ until the late 300s, that word formally is important. Again, most of the documents in the New Testament were never seriously contested by the first few generations of Christians.

• Major factors in which books were included in the canon were not only apostolic connection and early dating but also helpfulness. For example, Paul wrote letters to particular churches, but other churches also read them (Colossians 4:16, 2 Peter 3:15-16) and profited greatly from them in the formation of their faith and discipleship.

• One of the major factors that led to the priority of setting limits on the canon was the proliferation of other documents in the second century and following that were erroneously attributed to Apostles and contained beliefs and ideas about who Jesus was and what it meant to be a disciple of his that did not fit with those texts already deemed canonical (rule or norm or standard) Most of these problematic beliefs we call heresies. Many of these documents were associated with gnosticism.

• There were other writings that were used by the church and considered helpful (edifying) but were ultimately not included in the canon, primarily because they were written in the second century and were considered dependent on the earlier apostolic writings – often exposition or commentary on them. These include The Shepherd of Hermas, the Didache, and the Letters of Clement for example. They were considered helpful, but not scripture.

• Some the books that are in our New Testament today were not universally agreed upon until relatively late in the process. These books included Hebrews, James, 2 and 3 John, and Revelation. Sometimes the questions related to applicability (2 and 3 John), authorship (Hebrews) or potential misuse (Revelation).

• The the most part, the Councils in the later 300s and following merely represent the formalization of what the church universal already knew about the reliability, authenticity and usefulness of the documents that make up the New Testament. What was known to be true was formalized as such.

“The canonization of the early Christian writings did not so much confer authority on them as recognize an authority they had long enjoyed” – Harry Gamble