Note: A few months ago, Levi Baker, whom I’ve not yet met, emailed me to ask if I’d be willing to do a review of his new book for the blog. Especially since I’d just made the same request of someone else (Matt 7:12), I agreed to do so. This is that review.
Levi S. Baker, Why a “New Testament”?: Covenant as an Impetus for New Scripture in Early Christianity, Texts and Editions for New Testament Study 19 (Brill, 2025). xxiii + 364.
While we don’t have nearly as many early manuscripts of the New Testament as we would like, we are privileged to have a few from the second century and a good number from the third. Given the current state of debate over the canon of the New Testament, this raises an interesting question. Are such manuscripts themselves copies of (a portion of) the New Testament or are they instead copies of works that would only much later become the “New Testament”? In other words, were our earliest manuscripts already considered by (many of) their users to be “New Testament/Covenant Scripture,” or is this an anachronistic status that assumes the results of a much later process? Though Baker’s study does not focus directly on this question about the manuscript tradition, it is of considerable relevance for how we answer it.
Baker opens with a provocative quote from Harry Gamble: “It ought not to be assumed that the existence of the NT is a necessary or self-explanatory fact. Nothing dictated that there should be a NT at all.” This quote serves a foil against which Baker develops his own argument. While Baker of course recognizes that the final fuzzy edges of the canon were not clarified until the fourth century, he argues that the books we know today as the New Testament would have been received as “New Covenant Scripture,” potentially from the time of their composition and certainly long before the fourth century.
His basic thesis is that “a significant factor that led to the early acceptance of NT writings as scripture alongside the HB was the connection between covenants and covenant documents. Specifically, given the covenant → covenant document pattern in the HB, since early Christians believed that Jesus had inaugurated the new covenant, they received some of their early writings as the documents of that covenant, to be held alongside the documents of the old covenant (the HB).” [4] This argument is developed over seven chapters.
Chapter 1: The Impetus of the New Testament Canon
The lengthy introductory chapter reviews the status quaestionis of the canon debate, and sketches out the primary argument of the book. Baker provides a helpful taxonomy of current views regarding the impetus for the development of the New Testament canon:
1. Second Century Crisis Response: This view sees the concept of the New Testament primarily as a response to a second century threat (Marcion, Montanism, Gnosticism, etc) that forced the “proto-orthodox” to respond by beginning to develop a canon of the New Testament.
2. Fourth-Century Solidification Without Impetus: This view shifts the decisive period of canonical history to the fourth century and sees even the concept of a New Testament canon as being foreign to the earliest stages of Christianity.
3. Early and Internal Impetus: “Scholars within this category believe the canon was not created in response to early pressures...this view locates the impetus for the canon within the theological environment of early Christianity.” [15–16] While working from within this paradigm, Baker seeks to provide a “stronger case for the expectation of new scripture and the early reception of the NT writings as covenantal documents,” [33] arguing that “the connection between ‘scripture’ and’ new covenant’ is not something novel that emerges within the second century, but rather it is part of the fabric of first-century Christian theology...it is appropriate to speak of a functional canon within the first century.” [57]
Baker’s case is essentially textual, and proceeds over five chapters, each of which deals with a different body of literature.
Chapter 2: The Hebrew Bible Foundation for a Scriptural Expectation
The second chapter argues that, already in the Hebrew Bible itself, there is a close connection between covenant renewals and the expansion of the collection of covenant documents. As Baker summarizes his case: “The claim defended here is that early Christians would have recognized a pattern within the HB of God making covenants with Israel and providing them with scriptural texts that address how God’s people might relate to him within those covenantal arrangements. If so, they would have expected God to provide new scriptures that address how they might live faithfully in the new covenant Jesus inaugurated.” [61n2] I found this to be one of the strongest chapters in the book. His development of James Watts’s model for the semantic, performative, and iconic ritualization of texts as “scripture” was particularly helpful, and sparked a number of reflections about the formatting and use of New Testament manuscripts.
Chapter 3: Covenant and Scripture in Second Temple Judaism
The third chapter examines a variety of works from Second Temple Judaism for evidence of (1) the reception of the Hebrew Bible (and especially the Torah) as a covenant document and (2) “an openness to new scriptures (possibly including their own works) that is connected to the notion of covenant.” [113–114] Baker concludes that: “First, the reception of the HB in whole or part as a covenant document is pervasive. Second, some 2T Jewish works were amenable to or claimed to be new scriptures in a manner that was connected to the notion of covenant....an inherent openness by early Christians toward new scriptures associated with the new covenant is entirely plausible, given their belief that Jesus had inaugurated a new covenant.”
Chapter 4: New Covenant and New Scripture in the Dead Sea Scrolls
This chapter extends the broader study of Second Temple Judaism in the preceding chapter to “explore the connection between covenant and scripture in the Dead Sea Scrolls.” [153] As Baker sums up: “The sectarian community responsible for the DSS collection believed...that God had inaugurated a new covenant, and therefore, they apparently received their own, recent writings as the new scripture of that new covenant.” [196–97]
Chapter 5: New Covenant and New Scripture in the New Testament
The previous three chapters considered background evidence that makes an association between the initiation of a new covenant and the composition and recognition of new covenant scriptures plausible. This chapter considers the evidence that the New Testament authors themselves (1) saw the work of Christ as the initiation of a “New Covenant” and (2) associated this new covenant with the composition of new covenant documents. Rather than a survey of the full New Testament evidence, this study focuses on the Gospel of Matthew, with brief treatments of 2 Corinthians 3, James 2, and Hebrews. Given the importance of this chapter for the overall argument of the book, this is one place where I would have wished for more extensive treatment than Baker seems to have had the space to provide— especially of Paul’s conception of the authority of his letters (in the conclusion, Baker does highlight this as the “most significant lacuna” in his study).
Chapter 6: New Covenant Scripture in the Second Century
This chapter, like the previous one somewhat pressed for space, argues that “there is significant, early and geographically-diverse evidence for the reception of the Gospels as new covenant scripture.” [271] Crucially, Baker argues that there is significant evidence, even before διαθήκη was established as a title for a collection of New Testament writings, for a strong association “between the reception of the NT documents as scripture and the notion of covenant.” [244n2]
Chapter 7: Conclusion
The brief final chapter summarizes the argument, considers the implications, and provides suggestions for further research. Given my own work as a pastor, I found this paragraph particularly moving:
Finally, the most significant implication is a pastoral one. Frequently, the NT canon is presented as the creation of the church to battle heresy or the result of a lengthy and contentious process of development. Furthermore, it is often asserted that that process began only after Christians were convinced to receive new scripture. Faced with these characterizations, Christians today may ask, “What if they were wrong?” However, if in response to the redemptive and covenant-inaugurating work of Jesus and the Scriptures of Israel, early Christians sought new covenant scripture, an increased level of confidence is warranted. For the early church’s canon was the natural response to God’s redemptive and revelatory work. [282]
Baker’s work significantly advances the case for an “early and internal impetus” for the recognition of the writings that we now know as the “New Testament” as canonical scripture. If Baker is right (and I think he is), we have every reason to believe that most of our earliest manuscripts were already regarded by many of their first users as “New Testament Scripture.” On this account, though the fuzzy edges of the canon took some time to come into focus, the concept of new covenant scripture, far from being a later imposition or a response to an external threat, was already present before any of these documents was composed.
In addition to the arguments and evidence he provides, Baker also interacts with an impressive range of sources (the bibliography runs to no fewer than fifty-one pages!), which makes his work an excellent starting place for further research.
A few points of minor critique:
1. As noted earlier, the crucial Chapters Five and Six seemed slightly disproportionate to the scale of the previous chapters. While my guess is that this reflects a lack of time and space when the original dissertation was written, it would perhaps have been helpful to have developed these further at the publication stage.
2. On a similar note, there are an abundance of very lengthy footnotes (a number of which contain arguments important for the flow of thought), with many pages having more text in the footnotes than in the main text frame. While I would again suspect that this has something to do with getting under the word count for the original thesis, it would have been helpful if more of the argument had been placed in the main text for the published volume, as this sometimes makes for difficult reading.
3. Although they rarely interfere with comprehension, I would be amiss not to note that there are quite a few typos throughout the volume, as well as some stylistic infelicities. Having recently gone through this process myself, it is frustrating that (while their type-setting is excellent) even a prestigious publisher like Brill provides no meaningful editorial assistance other than a few automated checks for particularly common errors.
These, however, are quibbles. On the whole, this is an important book that makes a significant contribution. Given Baker’s obvious pastoral concern, it is to be hoped that he will follow this technical work up with a briefer treatment that makes his work accessible to a much broader audience.
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