Healthy plants have deep roots and strong pillars have solid foundations. If we are to be Christians who are deeply rooted in Christ and built on the solid Rock, then we need more than mere sound bites. One means that the Lord has used throughout church history to strengthen His people’s faith and witness is reading good books. This book review series is identifying books that can serve as shovels that help you dig deeper in your Christian life.
Book: Surviving Religion 101 – Letters to a Christian Student on Keeping the Faith in College - Michael J. Kruger
In 1945, the shepherd Muhammad Ali (not related to the boxer!) stumbled onto a significant archeological discovery in Nag Hammadi, Egypt. He found a collection of books that contained a different version of Christianity and a very different Jesus. These are known as the ‘Gnostic Gospels’ with the most famous one being the Gospel of Thomas (not actually written by the apostle Thomas). This discovery has spurred on the story that the earliest Christians were in disarray about which books to read. We are told that the apocryphal writings were just as popular as the scriptural ones. This free-for-all continued until high ranking church authorities in the fourth century suppressed these alternative writings and imposed their own collection of scriptural books – what we call a canon – on the masses.
The result is that we can’t really trust our Bible because it is just filled with the preferred books of those who had power, like emperor Constantine in the 4th century. While this story is widely repeated it isn’t true. In chapter 13 of Surviving Religion 101, Michael Kruger helps us see how the canon of scripture formed early and naturally, long before any political or even ecclesiastical power could have put it together. Further, the apocryphal books lacked the historical credentials of the canonical books and therefore were rejected by the earliest Christians.
1) Tracing the Origins of the Canon
In general, Christians were not confused about which scriptural books to read. The Old Testament Scripture was their Bible and they settled on a ‘core’ collection of New Testament books – approximately twenty-two out of twenty-seven – by the end of the second century. This core would have included the four Gospels, Acts, the thirteen epistles of Paul, Hebrews, 1 Peter, 1 John, and Revelation. Amazingly, there was little disagreement about this core and there were no church councils settling the question.
Of course, there were some “disputed” books – typically James, 2 Peter, 2-3 John, and Jude. It’s worth noting these tended to be smaller writings, which naturally were used less often and cited less. Since this is the case, we would expect that it might take longer for these shorter writings to be recognized in the different parts of the empire.
We see this core canon present in a number of key second-century sources. Iranaeus, the bishop of Lyons, affirmed a twenty-two book collection around 180 AD, including a plain affirmation of the four Gospels. About this time, a similar core canon was affirmed by the Muratorian Fragment (the earliest canonical list) and Clement of Alexandria.
As impressive as this historical evidence is, we can go back even further. In the early second century, Papias, the bishop of Hierapolis, receives Mark and Matthew as apostolic Gospels and alludes to 1 Peter, 1 John and Revelation.
Beyond this, Christians were using New Testament writings as Scripture before the second century! 2 Peter refers to Paul’s letters as “Scripture” (2 Pet. 3:16), showing that a corpus of Paul’s letters was already in circulation and regarded as on par with the Old Testament books. Similarly, 1 Timothy 5:18 cites a saying of Jesus as Scripture.
This means that Christians were not in disarray over which books to read. The edges of the canon were a little fuzzy and would take time to solidify, but the larger core of the canon was already in place at a very early time. Further, the emergence of the canon was not the result of politics or authoritative declarations, but organically was received from the bottom up.
This means we must do away with the idea that the Christians were “choosing” books for the canon. They weren’t so much picking books as recognizing books. They didn’t give authority to books but simply acknowledged the books that already had it. To ask the earliest Christians why they chose these books and not others would be like asking someone why he chose his parents. The books weren’t so much picked by Christians as handed down to them.
This settled core canon means that the earliest Christians had a standard by which to make their theological decisions. These core books, along with the Old Testament, shaped the earliest Christian doctrines – about Jesus, salvation, the church, Christian ethics, and so on. This means the theological trajectory for Christianity was in place and helped the earliest Christians rule out later heretical teachings like those we find in the Gnostic gospels.
2) How Popular Were the Apocryphal Writings?
One way to measure the popularity of the apocryphal gospels like the Gospel of Thomas is to observe the number of manuscripts they left behind. The physical remains of texts can tell us which books the early Christians read, distributed and copied. When we look at the second and third centuries, we see that the remains of New Testament writings far outpace the apocryphal writings at a rate of almost 4 to 1!
Another way to measure the popularity of books is by looking at how frequently a book was quoted by the church fathers. Once again, when compared to the canonical writings, the gnostic gospels are hardly a blip on the radar. This confirms that Christians in the second century had settled quickly on a core set of writings as the source of their preaching and theology.
3) What Made the Difference?
What allowed the early Christians to have such unity in recognizing which books belonged in the canon and which ones did not? We must remember the words of Jesus, “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27). Christians recognized these books as having divine authority because in them they were hearing the voice of their Lord.
Additionally, part of what made a person believe a book was from God was whether the human author was in a position to speak for God. In the early Christian movement, the authorized spokesmen were the apostles. The words of an apostle bore the authority of Christ Himself (Mt. 10:20). Thus, for the early Christians, they only would have regarded books that came from the apostles and their immediate companions to bear the authority of Christ.
This principle is essential to understanding the development of the New Testament canon. First, it means that the authority of these books was not something that was added later by a church council or a vote. These books bore authority because of their apostolic authorship and therefore that authority was inherent in the book the moment it was written (2 Tim. 3:16; 2 Pet. 1:21).
Second, this means that some popular Christian writings, like The Shepherd of Hermas, were rejected for the simple fact that they were not apostolic.
4) What About the Old Testament Books?
The primary reason we believe the Old Testament canon should be restricted to our current thirty-nine book collection is because this was the canon of Jesus and the apostles. Jesus had many debates with the Pharisees about how to interpret the Old Testament but there was never a disagreement about what books made up the Old Testament. Also, the New Testament authors frequently cites the Old Testament as scripture and it’s always coming from one of our thirty-nine-book canon.
Beyond this, when we look at other first-century Jewish sources, like Josephus and Philo of Alexandria, we find agreement on the books of the Old Testament. This means that the Apocrypha, which was officially added by the Roman Catholic Church at the Council of Trent in the 16th century, was not regarded as Scripture by Jesus and the apostles or even the Jews of their day.
Conclusion: The biblical canon is not the result of some church council or political maneuver. It developed naturally, organically, and early. The canon, in the end, is the result of God speaking to His people: “God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son” (Heb. 1:1-2).
Surviving Religion 101 – Letters to a Christian Student on Keeping the Faith in College by Michael J. Kruger. Published by Crossway, Wheaton, Illinois, 2021. Softcover, 262 pages.