Tradition and the Canon of Scripture
F.F. Bruce
Let us look at those Scriptures which provide a corrective to unwritten tradition a standard or “canon” by which it may be tested. In other words, we must consider the relation between our general subject of Christian tradition and the “canon” of Scripture. When we speak of the “canon” of Scripture we use the word in a different sense from that of “rule” or “standard”; the “canon” of Scripture is originally the “list” of books recognized by the church as her sacred writings, a use of the word first attested, it appears, in Athanasius.1 But inevitably, because of the close relation between Scripture and the rule of faith, something of the sense of authority has come to be attached in common usage to the terms “canon” and “canonical” when they refer to the books of the Bible.

This is an area in which the most biblicist and anti-traditionalist Christian communities rely perforce upon tradition, a tradition which in fact is more essential the more biblicist a community it is. For the more essential the more biblicist a community is, the more dependent it is for its authority on sola scriptura, and the more necessary it is to define sola scriptura. In other words, the more Christians aim at being “people of one book,” the more important it is for them to know the limits of that one book.



 Delimiting The Canon

There are some churches in which the limits of the canon are laid down by authority; their members (formally, at any rate) accept these limits because their church has defined them. This is true, for instance, of the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of England, and those churches which adhere to the Westminster Confession of Faith. But what of churches which do not have the canon of Scripture delimited for them in this way? (I write now of my own heritage.) On what authority (say) do we accept the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament, as commonly reckoned, either rejecting the Apocrypha altogether or else relegating them to an inferior or “deuterocanonical” status? “We accept these thirty-nine books,” it may be said, “because they make up the Hebrew Bible which our Lord and the apostles acknowledged.” True there seems to have been common ground between our Lord and the Jewish scribes of His day on the content of Scripture, however much they differed on its interpretation and application. We may be sure that He and they accepted the threefold corpus of Law, Prophets, and Writings as it was known from the second century B.C. if not earlier.2 But, in view of the fact that the precise limits of the third group, the “Writings,” do not appear to have been fixed by Jewish authority until the last quarter of the first century A.D., can we be quite sure that our Lord accepted (say) Ecclesiastes or Esther? lf, as the argument from silence might suggest, Esther was unknown as a canonical book to the Qumran community; would it be surprising to discover that it was similarly unknown in our Lord’s circle? Yet we accept Ecclesiastes and Esther as part of Holy Scripture. Why? Not, in our case, because ecclesiastical authority so directs us stubborn individualists as many of us are. If ecclesiastical authority did so direct us, that in itself might stimulate us to refuse the direction. No, we accept them, l suppose, because we have “received” them as included in Holy Writ, in other words, because of our tradition. Our tradition is not inviolably sacrosanct, but unless strong reason is shown for rejecting something that we so receive, like the canonicity of these books, we go along with it.

Take an example of another kind: the Book of Enoch.4 We do not accept this book as canonical. It is not so accepted either by western Catholicism (the rock from which we were hewn) or by eastern Orthodoxy, although it is part of the Bible of the Monophysite Ethiopic church. Yet it is quoted, and quoted as authoritative, by a New Testament writer5. We cannot dismiss Jude’s Enoch quotation as on a level with Paul’s quotations from Menander6 or Epimenides7; Jude quotes from the Book of Enoch as other New Testament writers quote the Hebrew prophets, treating the words as a divine oracles8. No doubt it would put too great a strain on our intellectual agility to defend the divine inspiration of the whole Book of Enoch, even if other parts of it have influenced thought and language elsewhere in the New Testament.9 But it is not because of the difficulty of defending the inspiration of the Book of Enoch that we do not accept it; it is primarily because our tradition does not recognize it: we have not "received" it. Certainly, if valid arguments were forthcoming for the acceptance of this book, we might revise our tradition and accept it; otherwise, we go along with our tradition.

However, Jude’s quotation of a passage from the Book of Enoch as a divine oracle might prompt the query whether the Letter of Jude itself should be accepted as canonical. It was one the “disputed” books in the early church,10 and Luther put it among the four New Testament books to which he accorded a lower canonical status than the other twenty-three.11 But this raises the problem of the New Testament canon, a knottier problem than that of the Old Testament canon. Apart from such questions as might be raised about “marginal” books like Eccesiastes and Esther, the Christian biblicist can properly say that he accepts the Old Testament not on the authority of ecclesiastical tradition but on that of our Lord and the apostles. He has no such short answer to the question of the New Testament canon. These, then, are some of the questions which arise when this subject is under consideration.


The Old Testament Canon

The earliest Christians, as we have seen, found their sacred writings ready at hand in the books of the Hebrew Bible, either in their original text or in the Greek version. The acceptance of the Old Testament was indubitably something which they “received from the Lord” by example as well as by instruction. For, to reproduce a purple passage from a distinguished Old Testament scholar of a past generation:
"For us its supreme sanction is that which it received from Christ Himself. It was the Bible of His education and the Bible of His ministry. He took for granted its fundamental doctrines about creation, about man and about righteousness; about God’s Providence of the world and His purposes of grace through Israel. He accepted its history as the preparation for Himself, and taught His disciples to find Him in it. He used it to justify His mission and to illuminate the mystery of His Cross. He drew from it many of the examples and most of the categories of His gospel. He reinforced the essence of its law and restored many of its ideals. But, above all, He fed His own soul with its contents, and the great crises of His life sustained Himself upon it as upon the living and sovereign Word of God. These are the highest external proofs -- if indeed we can call them external-- for the abiding validity of the Old Testament in the life and doctrine of Christ’s Church. What was indispensable to the Redeemer must always be indispensable to the redeemed.12"

In the apostolic age there is no sign that Christians felt the need of a New Testament in the sense of a collection of writings. They had the sacred writings which their Lord used and fulfilled, writings which not only conveyed the way of “salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” but which also, being divinely inspired, were “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.13” These writings, until well into the second century, constituted the church’s Bible, read, of course, through Christian spectacles. From them the apostles of the first century and the apologists of the second century drew their basic texts as they proclaimed and defended the gospel; the reading of them was sufficient to convince a number of educated pagans of the truth of Christianity.14
One thing which does not seem to have greatly concerned those early Christians was the precise delimitation of their Bible. Actually, there was no particular reason why they should be greatly concerned; they were all agreed about its main contents. It is commonly supposed that the threefold division of the Hebrew Bible corresponds to three stages in the growth of the Hebrew canon.15 The Law and the Prophets were firmly established as well-defined bodies of canonical literature long before the Christian era, and so were most of the “Writings.” The grandson of Jesus ben Sira tells how his grandfather, at the beginning of the second century B.C., was a student of “the law and the prophets and the other books of our fathers.16” Our Lord apparently knew His Bible as beginning with Genesis and ending with Chronicles,17 as the Hebrew Bible traditionally does and He is recorded as speaking of “everything that is written in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms.” Since the Psalter is the first book of the “Writings,” it has sometimes been thought that “the psalms” here might indicate the whole group of documents which it introduces, but this is uncertain. This third group was not authoritatively “closed” until after the catastrophe of A.D. 70, when the rabbis of Jamnia, Yochanan ben Zakkai and his colleagues, undertook the reconstitution of the Jewish polity on a religious basis. But although the “Writings" had remained open until then, so that they could freely discuss the admission of fresh documents or the eviction of others, their final decision seems to have been the confirmation of traditional practice.18 Josephus, writing towards the end of the first century, treats the whole canon of Hebrew scripture as closed and reckons its contents to be twenty-two books in all (a total designed to coincide with the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet).19

Christians, however, and particularly Gentile Christians, would not feel bound by the decrees of Jamnia. The rank and file who used the Greek version might include among their sacred books works which were closely associated with those of whose canonicity there was no doubt, although the better informed made a distinction in theory, at least, between those which were part of the Hebrew Bible and those which were not. Here and there in the New Testament we find introduced by a formula which normally indicates a Scripture quotation something which cannot be identified in any Old Testament text known to us (or, for the matter of that, in any other text known to us).20 Jude not only quotes from the Book of Enoch,21 but also alludes to an incident which was probably recorded in the Assumption of Moses.22 It is striking, however, that from “the Books commonly called Apocrypha” no quotation appears to be made by any New Testament writer.23

The earliest Christian list of Old Testament books, compiled about A.D. 170 by Melito, bishop of Sardis, was based on information which he received while travelling in Syria;24 it comprises all the books of the Hebrew Bible except Esther.25 Just a little later is a list preserved in a manuscript in the Library of the Greek Patriarchate in Jerusalem in which the title of each book is given both in Hebrew (or Aramaic) and in Greek.26 Origen (C. A.D. 230) also gives us a list of Old Testament books with their Hebrew and Greek titles; the Book of the Twelve Prophets is accidentally omitted from the textual tradition of his list but is required to make up his total. “Outside these,” he adds, “are the books of Maccabees.”27 Athanasius (A.D. ) communicated to his fellow bishops a list of canonical books, including all the books of the Hebrew Bible except Esther; Esther he includes, along with Wisdom, Ben Sira, Judith, and Tobit, among those “other ‘books outside our list which are not canonical, but have been handed down from our fathers as suitable to be read to new converts."28

As late as the second half of the fourth century, then, there survived in the church a strong tradition putting the books contained in the Hebrew Bible on a higher level than those not contained in it, although doubts persisted regarding the status of Esther.

The question of the Old Testament canon is discussed by Jerome in the prologues to his Latin translation of the books of Samuel (or, as he called them, I and II Kings), of the Solomonic books and of Daniel. Jerome’s acquaintance with Hebrew was far in advance of that of any other father of the western church --far in advance, one might say, of that of any other church father in west or east after the time of Origin -- and he attached high importance to the “Hebraic verity,” as he put it. It was he who first used the adjective “apocryphal” of the books outside the Hebrew canon,29 indicating not that they were in any sense spurious but that although the church “does not receive them within the canonical scriptures,” yet she “reads them for the edification of the people, not to confirm the authority of ecclesiastical dogmas.”30

But Jerome’s careful distinction tended to be forgotten by others who had no direct access, as he had, to the Hebrew Bible and who had received the books which he called the Apocrypha together with those which belonged to the Hebrew canon. Augustine, for example, reckons the Old Testament books as forty-four in number (including Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, I and II Maccabees),31 and the same view was accepted in his time by the Synod of Hippo (393) and the Third Synod of Carthage (397).

But the law was not laid down dogmatically about the limits of the Old Testament canon: they remained a matter of tradition until the sixteenth century.32 It was in the Reformation period that a serious issue was made of them. While the Anglicans and Lutherans generally followed the precedent of Jerome,33 treating the apocryphal books as unsuitable for the establishment of doctrine, the Council of Trent (1546) ignored his precedent and declared that all the books in the Vulgate were canonical without distinction, and at the opposite extreme the Reformers who followed the pattern of Geneva ultimately took the line that “the Books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are not part of the canon of the Scripture and therefore are of no authority in the church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings.”35

The position taken up at Trent was reaffirmed at Vatican Council I (1869-70),36 but in practice the distinction made by Jerome is observed today by many Roman Catholic scholars, who find it convenient to use the old classification of biblical books into “protocanonical” and “deuterocanonical.”37 But positions taken up in an atmosphere of controversy tend to be maintained as party traditions: there are, for example, some people even today who, not being well versed in the history or status of the apocryphal books, think of them as in some sense the perquisite of Rome. Thus a reviewer of the New English Bible, criticizing it for including these books, remarked: “Rome can rightly rejoice that at last her view of the canon of Scripture has displaced that of the Apostolic Church”38 as though all the major Protestant versions of the complete Bible, from Coverdale to the Revised Standard Version, had not included the Apocrypha as a matter of course.

The New Testament Canon

While the Old Testament constituted the church’s earliest Bible, it was the Old Testament read and applied in the light of the gospel. The gospel God’s final and perfect word to men was supremely authoritative, since it was embodied in Christ Himself, the church’s Lord. But for a generation and more there was no need to appeal to a written record of the gospel even if from an early date there were notes or digests of the ministry or teaching of Jesus, compiled for the use of preachers or teachers, no particular authority attached to such notes or digests. The authority belonged to the message which they documented, and ultimately to the Lord whom the message proclaimed. His authority could not be rated below that of the prophets who foretold His coming: Clement of Rome, for instance, quotes “the words of the Lord Jesus” on the same level as the Spirit’s utterances through Jeremiah and Hannah.”39

The authority of the Lord was exercised by His specially commissioned apostles,40 as may be seen both in those whose base was Jerusalem and in Paul as he pursued his Gentile mission and directed his Gentile churches. The Jerusalem decree of Acts l5:29 is an early example of the authority wielded by the Jerusalem apostles, and a careful reading of Paul’s letters indicates that they or, if not themselves in person, then others in their name tried to extend their authority over his mission field.41 Paul, for his part, teaches his converts to recognize in his writings “a command of the Lord” (I Cor. 14:37) and indicates that he lays down one “rule in all the churches” (I Cor. 7:17; cf. 11:16; 14:33b). But in writing to a church outside the area of his own apostolic responsibility, he shows the restraint and delicacy that he would have liked his fellow apostles to exhibit in their approach to his churches.42

After the apostolic age, however, the recognition of separate spheres of apostolic service disappeared. While in the second century we find Marcion, on the one hand, venerating Paul as the only faithful apostle of Jesus,43 and the Ebionites, on the other hand, execrating the memory of Paul and exalting the names of Peter and especially James the Just,44 the church as a whole carried out in practice Paul’s own exhortation to recognize that all the apostles and teachers “whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas” belonged to them all (I Cor. 3:22). However unhistorical we may judge the claim of the churches of Rome and Corinth to be joint-foundations of Peter and Paul,45 the attitude expressed in such a claim was a sound one. And this attitude finds expression in the New Testament canon, where every document that could colourably be called apostolic found its place in due course.

The gospels, anonymous though they were, were recognized as transcripts of the apostolic witness to Christ and, from an early point in the second century, were brought together, so that they no longer circulated separately in their respective constituencies but as a fourfold collection. It is difficult to say how far advanced this process was in the time of Ignatius, but he clearly had a written gospel to appeal to, and equally clearly he had to contend with more conservative brethren who disapproved of the idea of appealing to any written authority alongside the Old Testament scriptures as interpreted in the church’s oral tradition. This is the point of the reference in his Letter to the Philadelphians, to those people who asserted “lf l do not find it in the archives [the Old Testament], l do not believe it [if it is contained] in the gospel.” To which he replied “lt is written” “Scripture says” (meaning that the gospel is “scripture”). But they say, “That is the very point at question” i.e., is the gospel“scripture”? And then Ignatius, like many another debater driven into a corner, takes refuge in rhetoric.
"But my archives are Jesus Christ; the inviolable archives are His cross, His death, His resurrection, and the faith which is exercised through Him. . . .46"

Plainly lgnatius regarded Jesus Christ as his “tradition.” Within that tradition everything had a place which bore true witness to Him: the Old Testament scriptures because they pointed forward to Him, the written gospel because it was the record of His incarnation and passion, the letters of the apostles because they were His delegates, and the church’s faith and worship because they had their source in Him. Plainly, too, Ignatius had not thought his tradition through to first principles, so that he could give a logical defense of it in every part, including his recognition of the gospel as “scripture.” The earliest recognition of the New Testament writings was spontaneous and instinctive; the rationale of the canon came later. Hence the history of the canon at its outset has untidy edges; we cannot give a cut and dried account of its first formation any more than lgnatius or his contemporaries could have done.

The necessity of a canon of written documents as a check on the corruption of oral tradition was as apparent to many Gnostics as it was to those who maintained the tradition of the apostolic churches. Valentinus, according to Tertullian, used the whole New Testament canon,47 and the substantial truth of this statement has been confirmed in recent years by the evidence of Valentinian documents found among the Nag Hammadi papyri. The Gospel of Truth, for example, acknowledges the authority of every major section of the New Testament except the Pastoral Epistles.48 It was in their interpretation of the documents, not in their recognition of them, that the Valentinians were distinguished from the catholic church.49

Marcion, for his part, also knew the value of an authoritative written canon and, strong in his cast-iron presuppositions, he promulgated his edition of the Euangelion and Apostolikon as (in his view) they must originally have been, thus creating a new tradition for his followers. The catholic leaders had an older tradition, but no doubt it was the promulgation of Marcion’s canon that stimulated them, and especially the leaders of the Roman church, to define that tradition more precisely than they had thus far felt necessary. Whereas Marcion’s canon expressed his exclusive devotion to Paul (Luke the evangelist enjoying special credit because of his association with Paul),50 the catholic canon was catholic in a further sense, comprising the writings of other apostles or “apostolic men” alongside Paul, and of three other evangelists alongside Luke, and binding the Euangelion and Apostolikon together with Luke’s second volume, henceforth called the Acts of the Apostles, which provided the sequel to the gospel story and the historical context of the apostolic letters, presenting independent evidence for the genuineness of Paul’s apostolic claims51 and for the loyal witness of other apostles whom Marcion had denigrated. Acts was thus, as Harnack aptly put it, the “pivot” of the New Testament.52

Justin Martyr attests the use of an informal New Testament canon; he tells how “the memoirs of the apostles,” otherwise called “gospels,” were read in church in the same way as “the compositions of the prophets”53 and quotes Old Testament texts together with passages from the writings of the new covenant (especially sayings of Jesus) as though they shared the same authority.54 If here and there his works contain traces of materials from the pseudonymous Gospels of Peter or Thomas, these are very few in comparison with his use of the fourfold Gospel.

Justin’s disciple Tatian is best known for his Diatessaron or Harmony of the four Gospels, which provides sufficient evidence of the separate level on which these four records were placed in his time. In places Tatian appears to have amplified the fourfold record by means of the Gospel according to the Hebrews, which may have been a sectarian revision of Matthew but not to an extent which impairs the fourfold pattern of his Harmony.55

For Irenaeus, the fourfold Gospel is one of the facts of life, as axiomatic as the four pillars of the earth or the four winds of  heaven.56 This shows how thoroughly he and his contemporaries took it for granted that there were, and could be, only four gospel writings. Even more thoroughly did they take it for granted that these four could only be Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John: this is something which, for them, did not even need to be proved. By the time of Irenaeus, too, the main contents of the catholic canon were fixed and accepted throughout the Christian world. He does not give us a formal list, but it is plain that for him the fourfold Gospel, Acts, the Pauline corpus, I Peter, I John, and Revelation were “scripture” (as also were I Clement and The Shepherd of Hermas).57

The earliest catholic list of New Testament books that has been preserved to us is that in the “Muratorian” canon, which probably represents the tradition of the Roman church at the end of the second century.58 The one surprise in this list is the omission of l Peter (this omission, in view of the corrupt state of the text in the only extant copy of the list, could conceivably be accidental).59 As it is, the list contains the four Gospels, Acts, the letters of Paul, Jude and John,60“John’s Apocalypse and Peter‘s,61” with the Wisdom of Solomon.62 The Shepherd of Hermas, edifying as it is, is too recent to be reckoned canonical.63 The writings of the Valentinians, Marcionites, and Montanists are to be rejected.

As interesting as the contents of the list is the kind of argument put forward for the canonical acceptance of the various books. Luke was Paul’s “legal expert,” an official who issued decrees and similar documents in accordance with his superior’s judgement;64 thus Luke’s writings are made to share Paul’s authority. Luke’s second volume is inappropriately called “the Acts of all the apostles” possibly by way of anti-Marcionite emphasis but possibly also to make it clear that this was the only genuine book of apostolic Acts. In recent decades the five volumes of “Leucian” Acts had appeared-- of Peter, John, Andrew, Thomas, and Paul65-- and the compiler of our list wishes it to be understood that it is to the canonical Acts, and not to these apocryphal works, that one must go in order to find an authentic record of the apostles’ journeyings. Should anyone ask why Luke breaks off his narrative without tracing Paul’s career to its end, the answer is that he narrated only those things which took place in his presence.66 This same insistence on eyewitness testimony --a further token of the author’s acquaintance with Roman law --appears in his treatment of the Gospel of John, in which, he maintains, the Evangelist recorded only “what we have seen with our eyes and heard with our ears and our hands have handled” quoting I John l:l.

When he comes to deal with the canonicity of Paul’s letters, he makes the quite astonishing statement that Paul wrote letters to seven churches in accordance with the pattern set by John, who did the same in the Apocalypse. Presumably the canonicity of John’s seven letters depended on his being a prophet, and the authority of Paul’s letters was established by analogy with John’s. 67 The same implication that prophecy is the main criterion of canonicity appears in his remark about The Shepherd of Hermas. This obviously could not be accepted as an apostolic writing, but its character would have qualified it for inclusion among the prophets, had the prophetic list not been closed long since.

The principal criterion of New Testament canonicity imposed in the early church was not prophetic inspiration but apostolic authorship or, if not authorship, then authority. In an environment where apostolic tradition counted for so much, the source and norm of that tradition were naturally found in the writings of apostles or of men closely associated with apostles. Mark and Luke, for instance, were known not to be apostles, but their close association with Peter and Paul6 8respectively was emphasized. As for the epistles, however, the tendency was for canonicity to be tied to the ascription of apostolic authorship. The Letter to the Hebrews, for example, was known in the Roman church earlier than anywhere else69 (so far as our evidence goes), but Rome was one of the last important churches to acknowledge it as canonical, just as Rome was one of the last important churches to ascribe Pauline authorship to it not out of conviction, but out of an unwillingness to be out of step in this regard with Alexandria and the other great eastern churches.

This unwillingness to be out of step with other churches reminds us that another criterion of canonicity was catholicity. A document which was acknowledged only in one small corner of Christendom was unlikely to win acceptance as canonical one which was acknowledged over the greater area of Christendom was likely to win still wider acceptance.

Throughout the third and fourth centuries the definition of the New Testament canon continued to become more and more precise until in 367 Athanasius70 (followed by the Synod of Hippo in 393 and the Third Synod of Carthage in 397) listed as canonical the twenty-seven books which have been handed down to us. Until then it was customary to distinguish the (universally) acknowledged books and the disputed books, the spurious books (those laying false claim to apostolic authorship), and the heretical books which were erroneous and utterly to be repudiated. If a disputed book taught apostolic doctrine and was sufficiently ancient, it tended to be given the benefit of the doubt. The authorship of Jude, for example, was uncertain but, as Origen said, it was “full of words of heavenly grace”72 and so it ultimately gained admission. The Shepherd of Hermas, on the other hand, popular as it was and recommended for reading in church, was known to be of post-apostolic origin and was so ruled out on the score of insufficient antiquity.73
But, as has already been said, these criteria of canonicity were largely devised to justify a tradition which already existed. Authority precedes canonicity that is to say, the various writings do not derive their authority from their inclusion in the canon, they were included in the canon because their authenticity was recognized.74 It is going too far to say, as Oscar Cullmann does, that “among the early Christian writings the books which were to form the future canon forced themselves on tho Church by their intrinsic apostolic authority, as they do still, because the Kyrios Christ speaks in them”75 - at least, if this is to be taken as a statement of history. “Intrinsic apostolic authority” is a difficult entity to define.

With our longer perspective we can say that the early church, in recognizing the books which make up the New Testament canon as uniquely worthy to stand alongside the sacred scriptures of the old covenant, was guided by a wisdom higher than its own. When we think of other early Christian documents more or less contemporary with the latest books of the New Testament --the Epistle of Clement of Rome, the Epistle of Barnabas, The Shepherd of Hermas, the Letters of lgnatius, and the Didache for example --we may be thankful that they did not succeed in gaining admission to the canon, although some of them were on the fringe of it for a considerable time. The question has been raised whether it is legitimate for us to defend the early church’s decision about admission and exclusion with arguments quite different from those which were used at the time.76 But we have no option if we accept the canon we must defend our acceptance of it with arguments which we hold to be valid.

The Reformation And After

At the time of the Reformation, the canon of Scripture, like everything else that was handed down by tradition, was subjected to scrutiny. In many of the traditions handed down through medieval times, the Reformers recognized a close kinship to that “tradition of men” with which our Lord found fault because it displaced “the commandment of God.”77 The danger of this tendency, said Calvin, lies in the fact that “whenever holiness is made to consist in anything else than in observing the law of God, men are led to believe that the law may be violated without danger.” Then he adds “Let any man now consider whether this wickedness does not at present abound more among the Papists than it formerly did among the Jews.”78 And in many other places where the Gospels said “Pharisees” the Reformers read “Papists.” Yet church tradition was not jettisoned completely by the mainstream Reformers; in doctrine and practice alike they went back beyond the Middle Ages to appeal to the fathers of the early centuries. Calvin himself was no mean patristic scholar and adduces patristic evidence freely and copiously in support of his arguments. But the fathers themselves were subject to the superior authority of Scripture. Calvin himself does not discuss the canon of the Scripture as distinct from its authority which he defends alike against those who in practice made it subordinate to church tradition and those who rejected it in favor of their private revelations.79 “Those who are inwardly taught by the Holy Spirit acquiesce implicitly in Scripture. . . . Scripture, carrying its own evidence along with it, deigns not to submit to proofs and arguments, but owes the full conviction with which we ought to receive it to the testimony of the Spirit.”80 He does not explicitly make the inward testimony of the Spirit a criterion of canonicity, but if the question had been directly put to him how he knew (say) that the Hebrew and Aramaic text of Daniel was Scripture whereas the additions in the Greek version were not, he might well have done so. The apostolicity of I I Peter is for him secondary,81 but "it contains nothing unworthy of Peter, and.. . . shows throughout the power and grace of the apostolic spirit. . . . Certainly since the majesty of the Spirit of Christ expresses itself in all parts of the epistle, l have a dread of repudiating it, even though I do not recognize in it the genuine language of Peter.”82 This is in effect, an appeal ” to the testimony of the Spirit for decision regarding a "disputed" book.83

Luther expressed himself more freely, if less systematically.He translated the apocryphal books along with the Hebrew Bible, but gave them the same inferior rank as Jerome did. The same inferior rank, indeed, was given with emphasis to one of the books of the Hebrew Bible “I hate Esther and II Maccabees so much ” he said,“ that I wish they did not exist. There is too much Judaism in them and much heathen vice.”84 But within the New Testament also he assigned a lower rank to some books than to others. As is well known, in the list of books prefaced to his German New Testament he attaches serial numbers to the first "twenty-three, which he calls elsewhere “the right certain capital books,”85 and separates off the remaining four Hebrews, James Jude, and Revelation by a space and by the absence of serial numbers, In his prefaces to these books he indicates his reasons for relegating them to what was in essence deuterocanonical status. Hebrews, he reckoned, contained some "wood, straw and hay” along with the “gold, silver and precious stones" which were built into its fabric, and so it could not be placed on a level with the apostolic epistles.”86James contradicted the doctrine of Justification by faith, and although it pressed home the ‘law of God, it bore no evangelical witness to Christ.87 Jude, which he (mistakenly, no doubt) regarded as an abstract of ll Peter, was "an unnecessary epistle to include among the capital books which ought to lay the foundation of faith”; it was also held against it that it included uncanonical teaching and history (a reference to the Enoch quotation and the dispute about the body of Moses).88 Revelation “lacks everything that I hold as apostolic or prophetic”89although the sharpness of this judgement, expressed in 1522, was subsequently mitigated.

To a large degree Luther’s deuterocanonical books coincide with those which the early church ranked as disputed, but it was not the verdict of the early church that weighed with Luther so much as evangelical content. Therefore he had no difficulty about ll Peter or ll and lll John, although their apostolicity was questioned in the early church. The criterion of canonicity at least for protocanonicity, for inclusion among the "capital books"was for Luther “what presses home Christ" (was Christum treibet)90 Not the identity of the writer, but the character of the writing, is what counts. “That which does not teach Christ is not apostolic, even if Peter or Paul taught it. Again, that which does preach Christ is apostolic even if Judas, Annas, Pilate or Herod did it."91 In this Luther shows himself a true disciple of Paul: “even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to You a gospel contrary to that which we preached to you, let him be accursed” (Gal 1:8)

Luther's criterion is still widely accepted. When Dr.Norman Snaith delivered his Fernley Hartley Lecture on the Distinctive Ideas of the Old Testament, he found that the distinctive ideas were those which were taken up and brought to perfection in the New Testament, not least in the letters of Paul, while "the true development from Pauline theology is to be found in Luther and in John Wesley.92 Some readers might find it a surprising coincidence that the finest flowering of the biblical revelation should be discerned in the tradition of which Dr. Snaith is himself such a worthy and devoted exponent; but l have no doubt he is right --although too may not be entirely unbiased in this regard.

Quite similar is the argument of the late Edward J. Carnell that, since Justification by faith is systematically expounded only in Romans and Galatians, “therefore, if the church teaches anything that offends the system of Romans and Galatians, it is cultic"93 (“cultic” apparently having the sense of “sectarian” as opposed to “catholic”). Again “whenever a passage conflicts with teaching of Romans and Galatians, either the mind has failed to grasp its meaning, or the passage falls under the concept of progressive revelation.94
The Canon In The Twentieth Century

But we have received the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, and while individual readers or teachers may make distinctions between those among them which are “capital” and those which are of lower grade, our church tradition has made no distinction since the end of the fourth century. The statement of Article Vl, that these twenty-seven are books of whose authority was never any doubt in the Church,” is not true it we press our quest back earlier than that date, but from the on it represents the general consensus, if we overlook some of the separated eastern churches. lf, however, we are asked today why we accept these twenty-seven, or why we accept any specific one of them, do we give our tradition as a sufficient answer or do we seek an answer more satisfactory to ourselves and to our questioners?

Some of us, theological students and the like, have studied the formation of the canon and can give a historical reason of sorts for our position. But what is the ordinary church member to say, especially if his church’s formularies make no explicit statement about the canon? A Roman Catholic layman will appeal to the authority of the church, which has made clear pronouncements on this subject, but what does the ordinary free churchman say? Hardly, I suppose, “Because the church say so” the only church he knows may be the local church to which he belongs, and it is unlikely ever to have made a pronouncement on the canon. Will he say, “Because my pastor says so, and he is a man of such piety and learning in fact, he is a B.A. (Theol.) of Manchester that he cannot be wrong”? Perhaps; but what if his pastor voices doubts about the canonicity of Jude or the apostolicity of II Peter? He is then quite likely to say, "My pastor, I fear, is a little unsound; he does not believe the whole Bible and that is the result of his attending those classes in Biblical Criticism at Manchester University.” But how does he know what “the whole Bible” is? Most probably by tradition sound and reliable tradition, no doubt, but tradition nonetheless.

l turn now to a body of nineteenth-century origin unsurpassed in its professed adherence to sola scriptura and repudiation of the authority of tradition --the Exclusive Brethren-- and cite no unlearned church member but their ablest scholar, William Kelly. William Kelly was no mean theologian, but he would have been the last man to acknowledge any debt to "mere" tradition.95 Yet he “was the staunchest upholder of the entire Nicene and Athanasian doctrine,”96 and to him the New Testament canon was a datum. ln his commentary on the Epistles of Peter, for example he notes the doubts that some had expressed in his day about authorship of II Peter, but he takes a short and sharp line with them.

The Petrine authorship and divine inspiration of II Peter as of l Peter, he says, is apprehended by "any unbiased Christian”97 which is a good example of the preemptive strike in theological controversy. He refuses to admit catholic tradition, as authority for the genuineness and canonicity of the document but with equal vigour he rejects the Protestant assertion of private judgement; both alike tend to the deification of man and the dethronernent of God. Perhaps he would have allowed the appeal to the inward witness of the Spirit, but he does not explicitly say so. What he does say is more peremptory and he says it in criticism of Bishop Christopher Wordsworth's argument that, in view of the many pseudepigrapha circulating in Peter's name it was the church’s duty to suspend judgement on II Peter until adequate proofs of its authenticity were available.98“It is never a duty,” says Kelly, “even for the simplest Christian, to doubt scripture, but only to believe.”99 True but how is the simplest Christian to know in the first instance what is scripture and What is not? Kelly leaves this question unanswered, what is the more surprising in such an able thinker. Again, he may have held that the simplest Christian knows Scripture by the inward witness of the spirit but again, he does not explicity say so. Even so, the Spirit's inward witness may assure me that what I hear or read is the word of God to me; it will hardly give an answer to questions of authorship or date.

It is noteworthy that when it comes to textual criticism or straight exegesis, as distinct from the history of the canon, Kelly can use his private judgement in as sound and uninhibited a manner as any other scholar, though he is always apt, having established the true test or the proper exegesis on a grammaticohistorical basis, to turn his weapon round and say that any spiritual and unprejudiced reader can see that this is the right way of it.

To us the canon is something “received” --the books “disputed by some" being handed down with, and carried by, those “acknowledged by all.”100 Any talk of enlarging or contracting it at this time of day is unrealistic. We may toy with the fancy that some discovery to the future, like that of the Qumran or Nag Hammadi texts, may bring to light a lost letter of Paul’s, say his “previous” letter to the Corinthians101 - or a copy of the Gospel of Mark complete with its “lost” ending(supposing that it was not the Evangelist’s intention to finish at Mark 16:8). Would there be a move to have such a document added to the canon? It is difficult to see how this could be effected. For one thing, scholars would certainly not be unanimous about its authenticity. For another thing, there is no competent authority, acknowledged throughout Christendom, to decree its addition. Even if we could imagine the Pope, the Ecumenical Patriarch, and the presidents of the World Council of Churches and the International Council of Christian Churches agreeing to recommend the addition, there are some awkward nonconformists who would probably repudiate the idea just because it was recommended by one or all of these. If the analogy of history is relevant it suggests that the common consensus of Christians over several generations would have to precede any official pronouncement.

Suggestions that the Canon might be augmented by the inclusion of other “inspirational" literature, ancient or mordern, arise from a failure to appreciate what the canon actually is. It is not an anthology of inspirational literature.The question is not what is to be read in church: when a sermon is read, the Congregation is treated to what is usually, in intention at least, inspirational literature, and the same may be said of prayers which are read from the prayer book or hymns which are read from the hymnbook. it is a question of getting as near as possible to the source of the Christian faith.

In a lecture delivered at Oxford in Professor Kurt Aland expressed this view that as the Old Testament canon underwent a de facto narrowing as a result of the new covenant established in Christ,102 so also the New Testament canon "is in practice undergoing a narrowing and a shortening," so that we can recognize in the New Testament as in the Old a "canon within the canon."103 This is a natural attitude on the part of a scholar in the Lutheran tradition; we know how depreciatory is the judgement passed today by many scholars in this tradition on those parts of the New Testament which smack of “primitive catholicism."104 The “actual living, effective Canon,” as distinct from the formal canon, “is constructed according to the method of ‘self-understanding.’105 “ But if it is suggested that Christians and churches get together and try to reach agreement on a common effective canon, the difficulty is that the “effective” canon of some groups or individuals differs from that of others. If the inner canon to some consists of Romans and Galatians (with the two Corinthian epistles), to others it consists of the Captivity Epistles, to others of the Synoptic Gospels, to others of the Johannine Gospels and Epistles, and to others (one might be tempted to think) of the Apocalypse.

It would be precarious to try to name any part of scripture --even the genealogical lists! --in which some believing reader has not heard the word of God addressing him effectively and in context. William Robertson Smith gave as his reason for believing in the Bible as the word of God “Because the Bible is the only record of the redeeming love of God, because in the Bible alone I find God drawing near to man in Christ Jesus, and declaring to us, in Him, His will for our salvation. And this record I know to be true by the witness of His Spirit in my heart, whereby I am assured that none other thank God Himself is abl;e to speak such words to my soul."106 If he had been asked just where in the Bible he recognized this record and experienced this witness, he would probably not have mentioned every book, but he might well have said that the record of God's love and the witness of the Spirit were so pervasive that they gave character to the Old and New Testament canon as a whole. Other readers might bear the same testimony, but might think of other parts of the Bible than Robertson Smith had in mind. No wonder, then, that Professor Aland speaks of the necessity of questioning one’s own actual canon and taking the actual canon of others seriously.107

The appeal to the testimony of the Holy Spirit is valid, but it will scarcely enable all to decide the precise limits of the canon. By an act of faith one may identify the New Testament canon as we have received it with the entire paradosis of Christ to which in Oscar Cullmann’s view, all the apostles contribute, each passing on to another that part which he himself received.108 This may be so, but it cannot be proved. It is better to say of the New Testament books what Hans Lietzmann said of the four Gospels in the early church, that "the reference to their apostolic authority, which can only appear to us as a reminder of sound historical bases, had the deeper meaning that this particular tradition of Jesus and this alone had been established and guaranteed by the Holy Spirit working authoritatively in the Chruch."109 No doubt within “this particular tradition” may be diverse strands of tradition indeed diverse traditions may be detected. But although critical scholars may emphasize their diversity, the church, both ancient and mordern, has been more conscious of their overall unity, in contrast to other interpretations which patently conflict with the New Testament witness but cannot substantiate a comparable claim to apostolic authority.

In the canon we have the foundation documents or the charter of the Christian faith. For no other document or group of documents from the earliest Christian generations can such a claim be made. (Even the most debatable of the “disputed” books in the New Testament canon has more of the quality of apostolic authority about it than the letters of Clement of Rome and Ignatius of Antioch or The Shepherd of Hermas.) What has been said, however, is not tantamount to shutting the Holy Spirit up in a book or collection of books. Repeatedly, new movements the Spirit have been launched by a rediscovery of the living power which resides in the canon of Scripture. The New Testament "not one of the paralysing and enslaving forces of the past, but it is full of eternal and present strength to make strong and to make free."[^110]

Footnotes:

1 Athanasius, Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter (see p. 65). Cf. T. Zahn, Grundriss der Geschichte des neutestamentliehen Kanons (Leipzig, 1904), p. 87, cited by H. Oppel, KANON (Philologus, Suppl. 30, Heft 4, Leipzig, 1937), pp. 70f., cited by R. P. C. Hanson, “Origen’s Doctrine of Tradition,” JTS 49 (1948), 23.

2 The Law comprises the Pentateuch (Genesis-Deuteronomy); the Prophets comprise the Former Prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings) and the latter
Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the Book of the Twelve Prophets); the Writings comprise Psalms, Proverbs, Job, with the five Megillot or “Rolls” (Canticles, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther) and Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles: twenty-four books in all.

3 Esther is the only book of the Hebrew Bible unrepresented among the Qumran manuscripts

4 “That is, the “Ethiopic Enoch” (a compilation so called because it is extant in its entirety only in the Ethiopic version), distinguished as I Enoch from the much later ll Enoch (the “Secrets of Enoch,” originally composed in Greek but extant only in Slavonic) and II Enoch (a Hebrew mystical treatise). Aramaic
fragments of l Enoch have been found among the Qumran manuscripts; rather more than one-third of the work is extant in a Greek version.

5 I Enoch l:9 is quoted in Jude 14f.

6 I Cor. 15:33.

7 Titus1:12; cf. Acts l7:28a.

8 As John Bunyan reckoned it his duty to take comfort from Ecclus 2:10, even if it was an apocryphal work, because it was "the sum and substance of many of the promises" (Grace Abounding. 65), soit could be said that I Enoch 1:9 may well rank as a divine oracle because it is the sum and substance of many of the prophetic warnings of judgement. Tertullian, accepting an antediluvian date for I Enoch, and regarding Jude’s quotation as lending authority to the book (since Jude is in his eyes an apostle), adds the further consideration that "nothing which pertains to us must be rejected by us" (On the Apparel of Women, 3).

9 Not only the references to fallen angels in Jude 6 and ll Pet. 2:4 (cf. the "spirits in prison" of I Pet 3:19) i.e., to the trespassing “sons of God” of Gen. 6:2, 4, on whose sin and penalty I Enoch enlarges but also the portrayal of the "Son of Man" in the independent section called the "Similitudes of Enoch" (Enoch 37-71); cf. M. D. Hooker, The Son of Msrk (London, 1967), pp.33ff

10 See p.75.

11 See p.78.

12 G. A. Smith, Modern Criticism and the Preaching of the Old Testament (London,1901),p. II.

13 ll Tim. 3:15-17.

14 "One of the extraordinary features of the early Church is the number of
who were converted by reading the Old Testament” (W. Barclay, The Making of the Bible [London, 1961], p. 41).

15 See, e.g., O. Eissfeldt, The Old Testament: An Introduction, E. T. (Oxford, 1965), pp. 560ff.

16 Ecclesiasticus, prologue. It is evident from Ecclus. 48:22-49:10 that Ben Sira knew all the “Latter Prophets”—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve-as canonical. In the first half of the first century A.D. Philo of Alexandria speaks of the Therapeutae as studying “laws, and oracles uttered through prophets, and hymns and the other things by which knowledge and piety are increased and brought to perfection” (On the Contemplative Life, 25).

17 This is the most natural inference from His language about “the blood of the all prophets shed from the foundation of the world . . . from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah” (Luke 11:50f.) —Zechariah being best identified with the martyred prophet of ll Chr. 24:20— 22.

18 “The upshot of their debates was that, in spite of objections, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Canticles and Esther were acknowledged as canonical; Ecclesiasticus was not acknowledged (Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 30b; Mishnah Yadaim 3:5; Bahylonian Talmud Megillah 7a; Palestinian Talmud Megillah 70a). The Jamnia debates “have not so much dealt with the acceptance of certain writings into the Canon, but rather with their right to remain there” (A. Bentzen, Introduction to the Old Testament i [Copenhagen, 1948], 31). There was some argument earlier in the school of Shammai about Ezekiel, long since included among the Prophets, but when an ingenious rabbi showed that he did not really contradict Moses, as had been alleged, misgivings were allayed (TB Shabbat 13b).

19 Against Apion I. 37- 43. Since Josephus does not name the individual books,but classifies them in three groups of five, thirteen, and four respectively, wecannot say positively that his canon coincided precisely with that laid down at Jamnia, but if he reckoned Ruth as an appendix of Judges and Lamentations of Jeremiah, his total of twenty-two would correspond with the traditional twentyfour. Canonicity for him depends on prophetic inspiration, which dried up in the reign of Artaxerxes I: “Our history has also been written in detail from Artaxerxes to our own times, but is not esteemed as of equal authority with the books already mentioned, because the exact succession of prophets failed.”

20 E.g., the utterance of “the Wisdom of God” in Luke 11:49; the passage
beginning “What no eye has seen . . .” in I Cor. 2:9 and the “scripture” quoted
in James 4:5.

21 See p. 61.

22 “Jude 9; cf. Clement of Alexandria, Adumbrations on Jude. (The relevant partof the Assumption of Muses is no longer extant.)

23 The “Books commonly called Apocrypha” (Wesminster Confession I, 3)
are I and Il Esdras (III and IV Esdras in the Vulgate), Tobit, Judith, additions to Esther, Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus (Wisdom ofJesus ben Sira), Baruch,
Letter of Jeremiah, Additions to Daniel (The Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon), Prayer of Manasseh, I and II Maccabees. There may be allusions to Wisdom in Rom. 1:18-2:16, but if so they express dissent as well as assent. The martyrs of the Maccabaean struggle (cf. II Mace. 6- 7) are probably in view in Heb. 11:35b- 38, the author of which indeed was probably acquainted with IV Maccabees, but IV Maccabees was never accounted a canonical book. If the argument from silence is pressed, it shotuld be realized that one could apply it to Canticles and Esther, which are not quoted in the New Testament (there may be allusions to Ecclesiates in Rom 8:20 and I Cor. 15:32).

24 Quoted by Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. IV.26.l4.

25 See p. 61. One objection to the canonical acceptance of Esther was the factthat the name of God makes no appearance in it; another (voiced naturally among Jews rather than among Christians) was its record of the institution of a new festival (Purim), which conflicted with the view that all the festivals were instituted by Moses. Lamentations and Nehemiah are not specifically mentioned by Melito, but they may have been included with Jeremiah and Ezra respectively.

26 Cf. J. P. Audet, “A Hebrew-Aramaic List of Books of the Old Testament in 5 Greek,” JTS, NS I (1950), l35ff. Lamentations is not mentioned by name but may have been counted as an appendix to Jeremiah. This list makes the total twenty-seven.

27 Quoted by Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. VI.25.2. Origen’s total, like Josephus’s, is twenty-two.

28 Athanasius, Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter. His total also is twenty-two. To the five recommended books “outside our list” he adds The Shepherd of Hermas (see p.60).

29 Prologue to Samuel (Prologus Galeatus). The adjective “apocryphal” (Gk.,
“hidden”) had previously been used to denote books which were esoteric in content or withdrawn from general reading (cf. II Esdras l4:46f.); Jerome uses it of those hooks which other church fathers called “ecclesiastical” (i.e., suitable for reading publicly in church).

30 “Prologue to books of Solomon. This is the passage referred to in Article VI: “And the other books (as Hierome saith) the Church doth read for example of life, and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine.”

31 “Augustine points out that the books of the Maccabees (and others) “are held as canonical not by the Jews but by the church” (City of God xviii. 36). He further explains that books like I Enoch have no place in the canon “because their antiquity brought them under suspicion, and it was impossible to ascertain whether these were his [Enoch’s] genuine writings” (City of God xv. 23; cf. xviii. 38)

32 “The distinction between the Apocrypha and the books contained in the Hebrew Bible was preserved by some medieval scholars, especially those who
knew Hebrew or at least paid attention to Jerome. Thus Hugh of St.-Victor (died
c. 1141) in a chapter De numero librorum sacri eloquii enumerates the books of the Hebrew Bible and adds: “There are also in the Old Testament certain other
books which are indeed read [i.e., in church] but are not inscribed in the body
of the text or in the canon of authority: such are the books of Tobit, Judith and
the Maccabees, the so-called Wisdom of Solomon and Ecclesiasticus”
(De Sacramentis I, Prologue, chap. 7: Patrologia Latina 176, cols. 185- I86 D).

33 “Richard Hooker defends the Anglican attitude in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Vol. V (London, 1597), p. 20.

34 “Sessio IV, Decretum de canonicis scripturis. III and IV Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh are not included in these books: III and IV Esdras ( = I and
II Esdras of the “Protestant” Apocryplia) are placed in an appendix to the Vulgate and versions translated from it. (The Eastern Church confirmed the canonicity
of the apocryphal books included in the Septuagint in l642 and 1672.)

35 Westminster Confession of Faith I, 3. The word “ultimately” is used deliberately: earlier representatives of the Geneva tradition are not so uncompromising. Coverdale (1535), who first gathered the apocryphal books together as an appendix to the Old Testament, says he did so because “there be many places in them, that seme to be repugnaunt vnto the open and manyfest trueth in the other bokes of the byble,” yet will not “haue them despysed, or little sett by” because if they are read in the light of the canonical books “they shulde nether seme contrary, ner be vntruly & peruersly alledged.” The Geneva Bible (1560), following Jerome, says that “as bokes proceding from godlie men” they “were receiued to be red for the aduancement and furtherance of the knowledge of the historic, & for the instruction of godlie maners: which bokes declare that at all times God had an especial care of his Church and left them not vtterly destitute of teachers and meanes to confirme them in the hope of the promised Messiah, and also witnesse that those calamities that God sent to his Church, were according to his prouidence, who had bothe so threatened by his Prophetes, and so broght it to passe for the destruction of their enemies, and for the tryal of his children.”

36 “Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith: chap. 2, “Of Revelation.” Vatican II does not go into detail about the Old Testament canon.

37 Cf. C.Lattey, The Book of Daniel, Westminster Version (Dublin. 1948), where the historicity of the protocanonical narratives is defended, whereas the deuterol canonical ones “are strange, and while it would be wrong to join in deriding them, it may be felt wiser not to close the door absolutely to an explanation which would allow an element of fiction in them” (p. iii).

38 I. R. K. Paisley, The New English Bible-Version or Perversion? (Belfast, 1961), p. 3.

39 I Clement 13:lf.

40 “Cf. F.J. A. Hort, The Christian Ecclesia (London, 1897), pp. 82f.; C. K. Barrett, “Christianity at Corinth,” BJRL 46 (1963-64), 269ff.; “Things Sacrificed to idols,” NTS ll (1964- 65), l38ff.

41 Cf. II Cor. 10:7ff. (F. F. Bruce, Paul and Jerusalem," Tyndale Bulletin 19 [1968], 3ff. Corinthians, Century Bible [London, 1971], ad loc.).

42 Cf. Rom. l:8ff.; l5:l4ff.

43 Cf. A. Harnack, Marcian (Leipzig, 1924); Neue Studien zu Martian (Leipzig, 1923).

44 Cf. H.J. Schoeps, Theologie and Geschichte des Judenchristentums (Tubingen, 1949), p. 120, where Paul is seen as “beyond question” the “enemy” of the Ebionite Epistle of Peter to James, 2.

45 Cf. lrenaeus, Heresies IIl.3.l; Dionysius of Corinth, quoted by Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. II.25.8.

46 Ignatius, Philadelphians 8:2.

47 Tertullian, Prescription against Heretics, 38.

48 Cf. W. C. van Unnik, “The ‘Gospel of Truth’ and the New Testament,” in
The Jung Codex, ed. F. L. Cross (London, 1955), pp. 81ff., 124.

49 As in the commentary on John by the Valentinian Heracleon (c. 175), the
earliest commentary on that Gospel, quoted repeatedly by Origen in his commentary on John

50 Marcion’s Euangelion was a revision of the Third Gospel, beginning at Luke 3:1 and going straight on from there to 4:31 so as to exclude all suggestion that the story of Jesus is linked with preceding history or that he came into the world by birth: “In the fiiteenth year of Tiberius Caesar Jesus came down to Capernaum, a city of Galilee” (Tertullian, Against Marcion lV.7.l).

51 Cf. Tertullian, Prescription against Heretics, 22f

52 A. Harnack, The Origin of the New Testament, E. T. (London, 1925), pp. 53, 63ff.

53 Justin, First Apology 66:3; 67:3. He refers elsewhere (Dialogue 106:3) to the“memoirs” of Peter, meaning either the Gospel of Mark or the pseudonymous
Gospel of Peter (see p. 75), the latter of which he seems to quote (from 3:6f.) in First Apology 35:6.

54 E.g., First Apology 63:l- 8, where lsa. l:3; Matt. 11:27; Luke 10:16 (or rather something like it) and Exod. 3:6ff. (abridged) are quoted together.


55 Cf. A. Baurnstark, “Die syrische Ubersetzung des Titus von Bostra and das ‘Diatessaron’,” Biblioa 16 (I935), 257ff.

56 “Irenaeus, Heresies lll.ll.Il.

57 “Irenaeus, Heresies IlI.3.2; IV.34.2.

58 “A convenient edition is that in the series Kleine Texte edited by H. Lietzmann: Das Maratorische Fragment and die Monarchianischen Prologe zu den Evangelien (Berlin, 1933).

59 “T. Zahn thought that some words had fallen out after “John’s Apocalypse
and Peters,” and that the original text ran: “John’s Apocalypse and Peter’s epistle. There is also another epistle of Peter, which some of our people refuse to have read in church” (Geschichte des neutestamentlichen Kanons ii [Erlangen, 1890], p. 142; the italicized words are supplied by Zahn).

60 Two by the aforementioned John,” says the list: if this means two in addition to I John, mentioned some lines earlier in connexion with the Gospel of
John, these two will be our ll and lll john; otherwise we should have to conclude
either that only one of the two shorter letters of John was included, or else that
ll and lll John were reckoned together as one.

61 The Apocalypse of Peter has been preserved (cf. New Testament Apocrypha,
ed. E. Hennecke, W. Schneemelcher, R. McL. Wilson [ET London, 1965], pp. 663- 683); its lurid pictures of the torments of the damned are the source of much medieval imagery, e.g., of their portrayal in Dante’s Inferno.

62 We associate Wisdom with the Old Testament Apocrypha rather than with
the New Testament, but in date it is closer to the New Testament than to the Old

63 Hermas is said to have been the brother of Pius I, bishop of Rome e. A.D. l50. He may have been an older brother, as the date of The Shepherd of Hermas is probably nearer the beginning of the second century than the middle.

64 Cf. A. Ehrhardt, The Framework of the New Testament Stories (Manchester, 1964), pp. 16ff.; he deduces from the technical language of Roman law used here that the document must have been composed at Rome, and in Latin, perhaps under Pope Zephyrinus (197 - 217).

65 Cf. New Testament Apocrypha, ed. E. Hennecke, W. Schneemelcher, R.McL. Wilson, pp. 167-531.

65 Two events are mentioned as unrelated by Luke for this reason Paul’s
departure for Spain and Peter’s execution in Rome. It is no accident that both
of these are related in the “Acts of Peter."

67 Cf. K. Stendahl, “The Apocalypse of John and the Epistles of Paul in the Muratorian Fragment,” in Current Issues in New Testament Interpretation, ed. W. Klassen and G. F. Snyder (New York, 1962), pp. 239ff.

68 Eusebius mentions some who went so far as to suggest that, when Paul
speaks of “my gospel” (Rom. 2:16; 16:25; II Tim. 2:8), he refers to the Gospel of
Luke (Hist. Eccl. III.4.7).

69 Clement of Rome (c. A.D. 96) knows the letter and quotes it-misinterpreting it in one place (I Clem. 17:1) where he takes those who “went about in skins of sheep and goats” (Heb. 11:37) to be Elijah and Elisha—but he gives no inkling of its authorship nor does he treat it as an apostolic document.

70 Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter (see p. 65). Athanasius includes the Didache and The Shepherd of Hermas along with five of the Old Testament apocrypha as read in church but not canonical.

71 Thus the Gospel of Peter was allowed to be read in the church of Rhossus in Syria, until Sepapion, bishop of Antioch, discovered its Docetic tendency and put them on their guard against it (Eusebius, Hist Eccl. VI.12.2ff.).

72 Origen, Commentary on Matthew x. 17 (on Matt.13:55).

73 There were also practical considerations which made the contents of the canon better known among the rank and file of Christians; it was important for
to know which books might be appealed to in disputes with heretics and (in the last imperial persecution) which books might be handed over to the police .,for:}glestruction and_which must be guarded at the cost of one’s life, if necessary.

74 Of course their authority came to be recognized in a practical way from their presence in the canon, but this is a ratio cognoscendi, not the ratio essendi.

75 O. Cullmann, “The Tradition,” in The Early Church (London, 1956), p.91.

76 “Cf. E. Flesseman-van Leer, “Prinzipien der Sammlung und Ausscheidung
bei der Bildung des Kanons,” Zeitschrift Fur Theologie and Kirche 61 (1964), 404ff.

77 Mark 7:8

78 Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists, trans. W. Pringle (Edinburgh, 1845), p. 251.

79 Inst., I. 7, 1-9, 3.

80 Ibid., I, 7, 5.

81 "I conclude that if the epistle is trustworthy it has come from Peter; not that he wrote it himself, but that one of his disciples composed by his command what the necessity of the times demanded" (Commentary on Hebrews and I and II Peter, trans. W. B. Johnston [Edinburgh, 1963], p.325).

82 Ibid.

83 Sebastian Castellio’s treatment of Canticles as a secular lovesong (though included it in his new Latin version of the Bible) was a principal reason for the Genevan ministers' declining to ordain him (Calvini Opera xi = CR 39, cols 674ff.)

84 Table Talk, W.A., I, p.208; De servo arbitrio, W.A., 18, p.666.

85 Preface to Hebrews, Die deutsche Bibel, W.A., 7, p. 345.

86 Preface to Hebrews, W.A., 7, pp.344f.

87 Preface to James, W.A., 7, p. 387.

88 Preface to jude, W.A., 7, p.387.

89 Preface to Revelation, W.A., 7, p. 404.

90 Preface to James, W.A., 7, pp. 384f.

91 Ibid.

92 N. H. Snaith, The Distinctive Ideas of the Old Testament (London, 1944), p. 186.

93 E.J. Carnell, The Case for Orthodox Theology (London, 1961), p. 59

94 Ibid., p. 99.

95 Except in so far as he was faithful followers of J N. Darby. " 'Read Darbyl' he used to say, to the last" (Memories of the Life and Last Days of William Kelly, ed H. Wreford [London, 1906], p. 75). C.H.Spurgeon described him as "a man 'who, born for the universe, narrowed his mind' by Darbyism (Commenting and Commentaries [London, 1887], p. 164).

96 W. B. Nearby, "Mr. William Kelly as a Theologian," Expositor, 7th series, 2 (London, 1907), p.79.

97 The Epistles of Peter: The Second Epistle of Peter (London, 1923) p.10. The commentaries on I and II Peter in this volume are paginated seperately; that on II Peter was left unfinished at his death in 1906.

98 C. Wordsworth, The New Testament in the Original Greek, ii (London, 1862).

99 Kelly, p.5.

100 The terminology is Origen's: the universally acknowledged books are the or, while the disputed ones are (Quoted by Eusebius, Hist. VI.25)

101 Cf. I Cor. 5:9.

102 The reference may be to those parts of the Old Testament directly cited in the New as fulfilled in the gospel.

103 K. Aland, The Problem of the New Testament Canon (London, 1962), pp. 27ff.

104 E. Kasemann. “Paul and Early Catholicism," New Testament Questions of
Today (ET London, 1969), pp. 236ff. See critique by H.kung, The structures of the Chruch (ET London, 1965), pp.142ff.

105 Aland, p.29.

106 W.R. Smith, Answer to the form of libel now before the free Chruch Presbytery of Aberdeen (Edinburgh, 1878), p. 21.

107 Aland, pp. 31f.

108 O. Cullmann, p. 73.

109 H.Lietzmann, The Foundation of the Church Universal (ET London, 1950), p.97.

110 A. Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East (ET London, 1927), p. 409.
 
 
Write the lyrics for a misc song made in 2013, titled "Tradition and the Canon of Scripture", by artist "F.F. Bruce".