"How and when was the New Testament canon put together?"

right like let's continue talking about how did we get our New Testament both the specific books and also how do we know that the manuscripts have been faithfully copied and reliably preserved starting with the Canon how do we get the Canon and especially what's the relationship between Canon and covenant yeah it's a great place to start I mean one of the things that Bauer always claims as you know is that that when it came to which books Christians read it was all over the map you know Bauer gave the impression it was sort of this literary free-for-all and so our section in this book on Canon I think was designed to push against that to say well hold on a second Canon is not sort of this wide open affair that's late and formulated by Constantine but it seems to sort of be innate to early Christianity and kind of grow up within it in one of the ways I showed that is by the link between Canon and covenant people think that early Christians were only interested in oral tradition and they weren't interested having books anyway and it was only later that got kind of pushed on them but when you realize that that the the early Canon was seen as covenant documents that it was seen as God's deposit of a new covenant arrangement you realized well hold on a second Christians thought of what they were in is the new covenant from the start and Jesus at the Last Supper declared that this is an inauguration of the New Covenant in my blood and so if if old if Old Covenant Arrangements had a written deposit of tax we just simply make the argument that a new covenant arrangement would likely also have a written deposit of tax and if so then that just shows you that this idea of a of a sacred collection of writings is not a late idea it's too sort of born up within the Christian movement it grows naturally innately from within so we could even argue in some sense the seed of the covenant idea was already in the soil even if you couldn't see the plant yet he has a brilliant argument and I think maybe just some people watching this may be interested and let's look at the Gospels for example is he really true that he was only in the 4th century that the church decided we're gonna pick those four Gospels and not you know so the Gnostic Gospels like Thomas or Philip or some of the others how would we respond to yeah this is a a common narrative for those who follow the Bauer thesis it's this idea that well some people read Matthew Mark Luke and John but then the Gospel of Thomas the Gospel of Peter in the gospel of Mary were equally popular and just as valid and like you said not until much later worthy where the decisions made but we look at the struggle evidence that's just not the case at all as you well know first of all as far back as we can see when we look at citations from Gospels the citations from the canonical Gospels are just so much more frequent so much more common in out way in dramatic fashion citations from any other church father yes so the Church Fathers make it very clear that we're using these for and and not others and on top of that you could ask the question which books or which Gospels did the Church Fathers cite as Scripture and once again it seems to be Matthew Mark Luke and John I also talked about the manuscripts left behind when we when we want to know which books Christians were reading we can determine that by the amount of copies we find and again the canonical Gospels outmatch the apocryphal ones in great numbers and so all that tells us that when you ask the question of what Gospels really Christians were reading it's not as if it were up in the air it seems to be that there was a core collection of Gospels from from a very early time in a way that doesn't seem like was really ever that much in doubt even Bart Ehrman spoke the lost scriptures I if memory serves he of course left no stone unturned to find those alternative Gospels but I think there's only about 17 Gospels total listed including the secret Gospel of Mark which has been I think I masked as a hoax and others that are infancy gospel is not yes covering you know Jesus entire earthly ministry and then and sayings collections which probably calling them Gospels is a misnomer in any case that's right so that once you really whittle down supposed rival Gospels it doesn't take long before the four Gospels are the only four that are left standing that's right you could ask the question a different way you could you could ask the question this way which gospel is an early Christianity look like they're finishing the Old Testament story if you ask it like that then there's only four really Matthew Mark Luke and John because he read aghast the Gospel of Thomas it's not at all interested in the Old Testament it's not finishing the Old Testament story it doesn't place Jesus in the context of Israel or anything like that and as you mentioned these sayings Gospels these infancy Gospels they're clearly late legendary embellished without an Old Testament framework around it if if early Christians were committed the Old Testament and they were we would have expected them to pick Gospels and read Gospels that that were viewed as finishing the Old Testament narrative and when you read Matthew Mark Luke and John you can see that that's what they're doing they are presenting themselves as the as the end of an older story so it's not so much that the story of Jesus and the Gospels is a news story it's more like the completion of an old story and when you realize that you realize oh wait a second Christians wouldn't have had to look very far to find out which Gospels would have better now playing devil's advocate into another minute here what about the Gospel of Thomas you know that the Jesus Seminar published a book the five Gospels and supposedly listening to many of them the fellows of the Jesus Seminar the that the Gospel of Thomas is the the most primitive the earliest of all of them on what grounds are we rejecting the gospel Thomas now the Gospel of Thomas as you indicated is that is the darling of many in the and the Jesus Seminar and in higher critical scholarship and that's probably the only gospel that has has ever been seriously attempted to be put in the first century along with the canonical floor what's curious to know though is it modern scholars as a whole have not received that there's always some pockets of scholars have tried to put Thomas in the first century but collectively modern scholars have not been persuaded by that even Bart Ehrman whose name we keep mentioning here is he doesn't think Thomas is a first century gospel at all I think Thomas is a second century gospel and recognizes that there's very good reasons to think that I think also of some recent books that have just come out one by Simon gather : one by Mark Goodacre that have both argued for Thomas as a second century gospel and so the evidence is I think pretty persuasive that if you want to get back to the first century there's only four Gospels that get you there Matthew Mark Luke and John that's right that's right one more issue that occasionally comes up which is that if early canonical list such as yeah he's so called moratorium Canon mm-hmm and as you know some controversy has swirled around the traditional date for that list which is around 180 ad which would be very early and of course that canonical list also lists Matthew Mark Luke and John and only those four Gospels tell us a little bit about that controversy and how liberal scholars have tried to yeah you know marginalize that that important piece of historical evidence yeah you know for for critical scholars that want to have the idea that that there was no set Gospels in early Christianity that the moratorium fragment gets in the way because that early list as you indicated traditionally dated to the second century seems to indicate that everyone was fairly unified around least the four Gospels and so some scholars really led by Albert Sundberg and his initial work and then followed by it by Geoffrey Hanneman and others who tried to push the moratorium list into the fourth century but what once again what's interesting is that modern scholars haven't followed suit as a whole certainly there have been people who've who've followed Sundberg but as a whole scholars across the board have regularly realized the evidence just doesn't put it there time and time again scholars have recognized that the their moratorium fragment is really a second century text and what's interesting about is it's really confirmed by other second century evidence because it's not alone in the second century is something that advocates for Gospels so you could say well look it's not just the moratorium canon its rnas four gospels clement of alexandria four gospels tertullian soon thereafter four gospels you know this time period the list of the moratorium fragment is not an anomaly it's just doing what it seems like everybody else has been doing and so intriguingly turns out that conservatives who are sometimes you know accused of maybe tweaking the evidence yeah to make it fit their preconceived notions of doctrine turn out to actually have the evidence historical evidence yes compellingly on their side yeah it's it's fascinating I mean you know when you do this is why I think the study of the Canon is such a fruitful Enterprise for for evangelicals because you know time and time again it seems like there's a great deal of unity around these and there can be an attempt to try to say there's more diversity than there was and we're not denying that there was some diversity and that there were disagreements here and there or that people did weed other books of course that happen but collectively as a whole there was a core New Testament from a very early time and that that swims right in the face of Bauer's thesis

Channel: ReformedSeminary

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Length: 9min 29sec (569 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 01 2017