NT Origins 1
If you have your bible handy, pick it up and thumb through it . . . Have you ever asked yourself, “How did this book, the bible, come to be in the exact form in which I now hold it?” Why 4 Gospels and not 5 or 3? Why 1 book of Acts and not 4? Why so many of Paul’s letters and so few of the other Apostles? Why 27 books in total and not 25 or 30? In other words, how did the NT as a book originate? There are 2 issues to delve into here: the NT as a canon and the NT as a text. First, let’s look at the NT as a canon.
“Canon” comes from the Greek word that literally means “rod” (like a staff). Paul uses it in Gal 6:16, where it connotes “norm,” “rule” or “standard.” Hence, when we talk about the NT canon, we’re speaking about the NT as a sacred, religiously authoritative text.
Sometimes (at least in the distant past) theologians would equate the New Covenant with the New Testament—but this is inaccurate & anachronistic. In Greek texts “New Covenant” is never equated with “New Testament.” “New Covenant” appears in the NT, and refers to God’s oral contract/agreement with his people; but “New Testament” never appears in the NT, and it came to refer only to the collected writings that we now call “the New Testament.”
OK, so how were these 27 texts which comprise our NT chosen? And why these specific texts and not others? First, let’s deal with a prior question: why was a canon formed in the first place? There were 2 types of factors which led to the formation of a canon.
First, there were internal factors, factors arising from within the Christian movement. One such factor was the insufficiency of the Jewish scriptures.
During the time of the Apostles and in the succeeding generations, the bible of the early Christians was the Jewish scriptures, i.e., the Old Testament. But having only the OT presented a problem. The Jewish scriptures were not all that clear about Jesus as we would like to think; e.g., different groups of Jews had different ideas about the characteristics of the messiah: Qumran Jews thought 1 thing (actually, different things over the course of their 200-year existence); Jewish Pharisees thought something else; Essene Jews thought something else, etc. It wasn’t crystal clear. Consequently, and ironically, non-Christian Jews would use the Jewish scriptures (OT) to discredit Christianity (e.g., if Jesus is the Messiah why hasn’t he gathered together Diaspora Jews [Jews living outside of Palestine], since that’s what the Messiah is supposed to do?). This insufficiency of the Jewish scriptures caused some groups of Christians to want to distinguish themselves from Judaism. While Christianity was seen as closely associated with Judaism (many Romans, for example, regularly confused the two), many believers wanted to establish their identity as an entity separate from Judaism. Another insufficiency of the Jewish scriptures was that it was unknown to Gentiles—the people who essentially formed the mission field for early Christians. Why would, for example, a Goddess Diana-worshipping Roman consul be familiar with the book of Isaiah?
Another internal factor was the passing away of the Apostles. The Apostles were the indisputable leaders of the early church. They were eyewitnesses of Jesus, taught by him, and commissioned by him to lead the church on his behalf. Their deaths left a huge void in spiritual authority—one that had to be replaced. The writings of the Apostles, then, replaced the Apostles as the final authority in the church.
A third internal factor was the proliferation of oral traditions about Jesus. Remember, Jesus wrote nothing. What we have is his sayings written down by his followers. Anybody who heard or saw Jesus—Apostle or otherwise—could memorize his teachings, or if they were literate, could write them down, and then pass them along to others. So by way of example, I had nothing to do with my all-time favorite TV show, Seinfeld, but I’ve watched it (over and over and over and over [and over]—much to my wife’s chagrin), and I often (without provocation) quote lines from the show: “The sea was angry that day, my friend, like an old man trying to send back soup at a deli” (George). Authorized Seinfeld writers are not the only people who can pass along script lines from Seinfeld. Similarly, over time with so many leaders and lay people passing along oral traditions about Jesus, these oral traditions became very unwieldy: some of these traditions would have been completely accurate, some partially accurate, and probably some completely inaccurate (but likely formed with the best intentions). In order to cut through the proliferation of the ever-burgeoning oral traditions about Jesus’ sayings and his acts, authoritative members of the church needed to put these traditions into writing. These are some of the internal factors that led to the formation of the NT canon. There were also external factors.
The external factors—factors arising outside of the church—were mainly theological. There were three major theological threats which attacked the early church. The first was Marcionism. “Marcionism” is named after Marcion, a leading figure in the church in the 2nd century who, among other things, rejected bible texts with any Jewish elements—b/c he was an anti-Semite. Hence, he rejected the authority of the OT, on the one hand; on the other hand, if you look at the NT, he found most of our texts way too Jewish for his liking. So he only believed that the letters of Paul—the Apostle to the Gentiles—and writings of Luke (Gospel of Luke, Book of Acts), whom he believed to be a Gentile, as inspired by God and authoritative.
Another threat came from Gnosticism. “Gnosticism” comes from the Greek word which translates “knowledge.” Gnostics, among other things, emphasized secret knowledge: a person could only be saved if they possessed this secret knowledge from Jesus. For this group, the writings of John were very important b/c John uses words like “knowing,” “knowledge,” “reveal,” and the like a lot. Hence, b/c of this Gnostic emphasis on John’s writings, the writings of John fell into disrepute among many early Christians (they in essence decided to throw the baby out with the bath water).
A third major threat came from Montanism, named after its 2nd-century leader Montanus. This group claimed that God was still giving them new, divine revelation, which should be considered as authoritative and binding as the OT or the writings of the Apostles. Obviously, if God is still giving “scripture,” where do you draw the line, if indeed a line can be drawn?
An external factor of a completely different kind was the development of the codex, i.e., books with pages rather than just single scrolls that were rolled/unrolled. This development facilitated the collection of individual texts (e.g., Gospels, letters) into a single book.
All of these internal and external questions led to the formation of the NT canon: a sacred, spiritually authoritative text adhered to by Christians universally for almost 2000 years.