THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON AND JESUS

Evidently, Jesus’ commission of His Apostles included the writing of the New Testament, and they apparently understood this.

In seems that the New Testament books became Scripture as soon as they were written and received by the various churches! How do we know this? Well, for one thing, Jesus had commissioned His Apostles to do this very thing:

·       “But when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me. And you also will bear witness, because you have been with me from the beginning.” (John 15:26-27)

The Apostles were commissioned to teach the Gospel in two ways. They would testify of what they had seen and experienced, and the Spirit would provide the rest. But how?

·       “But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you ALL things and bring to your remembrance ALL that I have said to you.” (John 14:26)

According to Jesus, the Apostolic message would be the product of the Spirit. The Spirit would make up for their inability to understand and would make the New Testament writings His own (2 Peter 1:19-21):

·       "I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into ALL the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” (John 16:12-14)

The Spirit would supernaturally impart all knowledge to them. Jesus subsequently sent them off into the world with His Gospel:

·       “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe ALL that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:19-20)

He expected a lot of them. They had to teach ALL that they had been taught. However, Jesus never explicitly specified whether their teaching was to be only verbal or whether it was to also include the written Word. However, Jesus did claim that His Words would never pass away (Matthew 24:35), indicating that He environed the New Testament. In either case, their calling could only be accomplished by Divine assistance, and the Apostles also understood this:

·       “Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but TAUGHT BY THE SPIRIT, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.” (1 Corinthians 2:12-13)

According to Paul, since the entirety of the Gospel came from above, it was entirely God-breathed:

·       All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. (2 Timothy 3:16-17)

Because it was entirely God-breathed, it was able to make “the man of God…complete, equipped for every good work.” Had there been any human inaccuracies in the originals, this could not have be asserted.

How did the early Church know that the Apostolic teachings were all God-breathed? The fact that the Apostles had been divinely commissioned by our Lord to bring the Gospel to the world had been made plain to all through God’s miraculous attestations, which put His stamp-of-approval on His Apostles:

·       “How shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation? It was declared at first by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard, while God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will.” (Hebrews 2:3-4)

These signs and wonders accompanied the Apostles in order to validate their divine commission before the Church, and the Church got the message:

·       “And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the APOSTLES.” (Acts 2:42-43)

It therefore was clear to all that the Apostles were teaching with the authority of God Himself in accordance with the commission of their Savior Jesus. It was also these signs that had enabled Paul to declare that he too was speaking and writing the very words of God:

·       “The signs of a true apostle were performed among you with utmost patience, with signs and wonders and mighty works.” (2 Corinthians 12:12)

These miracles were unmistakably divine validations – signs that God approved of Paul's teaching:

·       “So they remained for a long time, speaking boldly for the Lord, who bore witness to the word of his grace, granting signs and wonders to be done by their hands.” (Acts 14:3)

·       “And God was doing extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul, so that even handkerchiefs or aprons that had touched his skin were carried away to the sick, and their diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them.” (Acts 19:11-12)

Consequently, there was never any doubt in the early Church that Paul's 13 letters were each the Word of God. And they were received accordingly.

Some scholars claim that the Apostles would never have believed that they were writing Scripture. However, this claim does not accord with the Scriptural evidence. Clearly, Paul knew that he was penning the Word of God:

·       “Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.” (1 Corinthians 2:6-7)

·       “If anyone thinks that he is a prophet, or spiritual, he should acknowledge that the things I am writing to you are a COMMAND OF THE LORD.” (1 Corinthians 14:37)

Not only did Paul declare his writings to be Scripture, he also claimed that this Word could supernaturally transform:

·       “And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers.” (1 Thessalonians 2:13)

Consequently, his letters were received as Scripture and were copied and carried around to other churches (1 Thess. 5:27; Col. 4:16). Evidently, the various churches regarded his writings as Scripture as soon as they were received.

Peter also regarded his writings as the commandments of the Lord:

·       “You should remember the predictions of the holy prophets and the commandment of the Lord and Savior THROUGH YOUR APOSTLES,” (2 Peter 3:2)

Peter also regarded Paul's writings as Scripture (2 Peter 3:15-16). And John regarded his as Scripture:

·       “I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book, and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book.” (Revelation 22:18-19)

John could only issue such a warning if he was convinced that what he had written was Scripture.

The Apostles evidently understood that Jesus’ commission for them to teach the Gospel also pertained to their writings, as much as it also did to the Hebrew Scriptures, which all regarded as the product of the Spirit.

The churches didn't have to wait for a Church Council for them to adopt the Apostolic writings as Scripture. No expert pronunciation was necessary. Instead, the Lord had made their writings, authored of the Spirit, plain to the Church.

Clearly, only the Apostles had such authority among the first century churches. Consequently, there was only one way to exert influence among the churches - to pose as an Apostle, attaching an Apostle's name to their own pseudonymous (falsely named) letters. And this is exactly what many imposters did.

Therefore, Paul warned the Church against such early forgeries (2 Thess. 2:2; 3:17; 1 Cor. 16:21; Gal. 6:11; Col. 4:18). Such a warning would only be appropriate if his own letters carried significant, even divine, authority among the churches.

Consequently, it wasn't until about 200 after the Cross that the Church began to seek further assurances for seven of the Epistles. The other 20 books of the NT were never questioned. The witness of the early Church in their recognition of the Spirit-given Apostolic writings was that unified!

While it is true that the formal identification of the 27 books of the New Testament was not complete until the late 4^th century, by every other indication, the early churches, had, from the beginning, received these 27 as Scripture. We have no record that any Church Father disputed any of the 27 books until the third century.

Why the later debate regarding the other seven books? Norman L. Geisler and William E. Nix explain:

·       The noted biblical scholar B. F. Westcott observed, “Its general agreement with our own [canon] is striking and important; and its omissions admit of easy explanation.” The omitted books were originally destined for the Western [Latin] world, and the Syrian church was in the East. The distance and lack of verifying communications slowed down the final acceptance of these books in the Eastern Bible [The Old Syriac Translation], which had come out before that evidence was available to them. (From God to Us: How we Got our Bible, 109-110)

The opposite was also true. The Western world had not received all of the books that the Eastern world had initially received. Communications between the two worlds had no doubt been interrupted by intense persecutions. Nevertheless, according to Geisler and Nix, the two worlds combined had received all of the 27 NT books:

·       Between the two earliest Bibles in the Christian church there is a recognition of the canonicity of all twenty-seven New Testament books. (110)

What was this early recognition based upon? The Early Church had been convinced by the miraculous confirmatory attestations that if a book was Apostolic, it was Scripture. Therefore, the canon was not a matter of political/ecclesiastical maneuvering but of the sovereign work of God.

Had Jesus commissioned the Apostles to write Scripture? We have already seen that He had commissioned His Apostles to go throughout the world carrying His teachings. However, did He also have His written teachings in mind? He must have! How do we know this? For one thing, in His Olivet Discourse about the end and His evidential return, He claimed that His Words would never disappear:

·       Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. (Matthew 24:35)

His Apostles would disappear but not Jesus’ Words. How could this be unless He had envisioned or instructed them to be written! Evidently, the Apostles had been convinced that He had also ordained their written as well as their verbal ministry.

If Jesus had prepared the way for the canon of the New Testament, we should find some tangible evidence for this, and we do. We find that the early churches were copying the individual books for dissemination:

·       All twenty-seven books of the New Testament were written, copied, and began to be distributed among the churches before the close of the first century. In the first  half of the second century…almost every book of the New Testament was explicitly cited as Scripture.  (Geisler, 155)

Evidently, the canonization process started immediately. One indication of this are the authoritative citations from these 27 books by the Church Fathers:

·       By the end of the first century some fourteen books of the New Testament were cited. By A.D. 110 there were nineteen books recognized by citation. And within another forty years (A.D. 150) some twenty-four New Testament books were acknowledged. Before the century ended, which is about one hundred years after the New Testament was written, twenty-six books were cited. (157)

·       Not only did the early Fathers cite all twenty-seven books of the New Testament, they also quoted virtually all of the verses in all of these twenty-seven books. (157)

Lists and manuscripts containing the accepted books of the New Testament also began to appear.

But how do we know that we have the right Gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? Skepticism about this was given new life in 1946 when the Gnostic Gospels (GG) were uncovered at an Egyptian site – Nag Hammadi. Although we had already known about these “gospels” from the writings of the Church Fathers, who excoriated them, this was the first time that scholars actually had many of them in hand.

Since then, some extreme voices have declared that these “gospels” are just as valid as the Biblical ones. Dan Brown’s fictional work, The DaVinci Code, even theorized that the church had used all of these “gospels” until the Council of Nicea (315 AD) when they were finally banned. However, there are many compelling reasons for confidence in the four Canonical Gospels (CG):

1. The GGs reflect a theology alien to the Bible and more in line with Greek and Eastern thought. For instance, they maintain that the creation is evil, created by an evil sub-god. This directly contradicts the Biblical creation account which holds that God had regarded the creation as “very good” (Genesis 1:31). In contrast, the CGs do not contradict the Hebrew Scriptures – exactly what we’d expect to find if God is the author of all.

2. The GGs are all pseudonymous – deceptively attributed to an Apostle. This was clearly a device used in hope of gaining acceptance within the church. In contrast, the CGs are all unnamed. Seemingly, they had nothing to prove and were concerned more about truth than in gaining acceptance or personal notoriety.

                                                                             

3. The GGs are consistently dated late into the 2nd century and after, and therefore could never have been regarded as Apostolic or as eyewitness accounts. In contrast, the CGs are all dated within the 1^st century, even by the skeptics. One liberal scholar, J.A.T. Robinson had dated the CGs 40-65 AD. The Church Fathers all contend that the Gospels were Apostolic. Consistent with this, they claim that Mark’s Gospel recorded Peter’s eyewitness accounts, while Luke’s Gospel reflects Paul’s sermons.

4. The CGs were universally accepted by the church. There was never any indication that the church had ever questioned any of the four. In contrast, the GGs were accepted by none! There is no ancient Bible manuscript that contains any of them alongside with other NT writings. The only times that a Church Father quoted them was to criticize them. Even the Gnostic philosophers never cited them as canonical. Nor did they write commentaries on them. Meanwhile, they did write commentaries on a couple of the CGs!

5. The Gnostic philosophers cite the NT CGs as authoritative. One Gnostic philosopher, Marcion 160 AD, identified his “bible” as containing simply the Gospel of Luke and ten of Paul’s Epistles. None of the Gnostics ever cited GGs as part of their bible.

6. While all of the ancient canonical lists contain the four CGs, they never contain any of the GG.

7. The Gnostics either claimed that they had been privileged to have received secret knowledge from the Apostles or from within. However, they were never able to produce any evidence of such a transmission of material. Nor is there any evidence that the GGs were ever part of anyone’s church. In fact, the Church Father Irenaeus (180 AD) attempted to check out their claims by interviewing a number of church elders who would have knowledge of any secret transmission of teachings. However, he reports that they were all unaware of any such teachings.

8. The CGs are all God-centered. As such, even the Apostles are portrayed in a disparaging light. Clearly, the CGs are not self-promoting, but instead, seem committed to presenting a factual picture of the life of Jesus. In contrast, the GGs are very self-promoting – a quality that makes them less trustworthy. It is only the spiritually enlightened who are capable of understanding their secret message and of being saved.

9. The GGs disappeared, while the CGs remained. The Bible declares that the Word of God endures forever (Isaiah 40:8). This certainly could not be said about the GGs!

Our Lord has promised that He would protect His Word (Matthew 24:35; Isaiah 40:8), and He has. Although humans played a significant role in the writing and preserving of the books of the New Testament Canon, by all indications, our Lord exercised sovereign oversight over the entire process.