What Made the Cut?
Rev. Donald Sensing, in his second-to-last Tennessee One Hand Clapping blog post, provides his typically-excellent explaination of what did and didn't make the cut as part of the Christian Bible's New Testament, and why.
Given current news about a so-called "Gospel of Judas" and the success of "faction" novel and soon-to-be movie "The DaVinci Code", Sensing's insights deserve wide reading.
Here are a few highlights:
What happened is that by the middle of the second century Christians increasingly made a distinction between the apostolic time and their own. Also, there were so many writings claiming Christian authenticity that documents of genuine apostolic origin were being squeezed out. Through a complex series of episcopal meetings, by the fourth century the Church decided that only Gospels of actual apostolic origin should be considered canonical. That meant that writings well known to the Church, such as the Didache (Teaching of the Twelve Apostles), Gospel of Peter, First Letter of Clement, Letter of Barnabas, Apocalypse of Peter and Shepherd of Hermas, and now the so-called Judas gospel were excluded. They simply dated far too late to have apostolic authority.
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The single most decisive factor in the process of New Testamenty canonization was the influence of Marcion, who flourished about 140. Marcion was a wealthy, influential shipbuilder who thought of himself as Christian. However, his religion was basically Gnostic. He set up his own canon that totally repudiated anything Jewish, including the Jewish Scriptures. The “Father” Jesus spoke of was an altogether different deity than the God of the Jews, according to Marcion. Marcion and his many followers viewed the God of the Old Testament as a cruel God of retribution. (Even today, we hear some Christians say that the God of Old Testament was a God of judgment but the God of the New Testament is a God of grace. Such a view has been held by the Church for 1800 years to be heretical, which perhaps shows how strong Marcion’s influence was.)
Marcion rejected the gospels of Matthew, Mark and John as too Jewish. He heavily edited Luke and deleted from Paul’s letters all Old Testament references. One result of Marcion’s influence was the writing of the Apostles Creed by Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons. Adapted from a very early baptismal liturgy of the church in Rome, Irenaeus intended the Apostles Creed to be the definitive and irreducible statement of Christian faith, a test it has endured since that day.
As a result of Marcion’s challenge, church leaders began to enforce some principles for determining the authenticity of Christian writings. The main three criteria were apostolic origin, true doctrine and widespread geographical usage. Satisfying all three of these criteria resulted in rejection of many writings from the Christian canon because they were not apostolic or were unconnected to the apostolic age, or they were local writings without support in many areas. The question of divine inspiration was not thought very important by many church leaders because they held that the Spirit’s inspiration was continuous. So a writing might be thought divinely inspired but still not make the cut as canonical.
There was dispute over some issues between the western church and the eastern church but these were resolved in the fourth century. The twenty-seven books of the New Testament, and no other books, were agreed by both east and west to be canonical at the Council of Nicea in 325, the same council that gave us the Nicene Creed. By the end of the 300s, the New Testament books other than the present 27 became definitively excluded.
MITM will miss your blog, Rev. Sensing!
Note: Sensing's blog is ending because he thinks the era of the one-author blog is passing. He feels it takes too much work to keep up for one person to do it well enough to garner large readership.
Speaking as such an author, I think of it as more of a journal, for those who care what I think about various issues to consider, the book my siblings wanted me to write that I never did.
Looking back on my three years of entries, I'm struck by how often an old entry still fully covers my feelings about a "new" issue. There have been times when for one or two months nothing at all has come up that hasn't already been discussed in the blog previously. And surprisingly few of the entries have been dated enough to delete as no-longer-relevant.
Naturally, I'd like lots of folks to read MITM. But even if few other than me ever do, it will at least be a useful-to-me repository of my best thoughts and reference information from others on issues I consider important, in case the same issues ever need further thought. So readers or not, I expect to post here occasionally so long as God gives me breath. Thanks for reading!
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