On the Relationship of Inspiration to Canon in the Church Fathers

Today, there is a renewed focus on the primary sources pertaining to the New Testament text (just peruse most of the posts on this blog) and its canon. Some of our source material is relatively new (MS finds, whole works of church fathers rediscovered etc.), but with regard to canon, the relevant sources have been at our fingertips for a long time. In any case, all of this evidence is under great scrutiny now, and this development is welcomed, for returning to the primary sources is the surest way forward in our current discussions.

One particular area under scrutiny is how to describe the nature of early Christian writings. Did early Christians think only the eventual NT books were inspired or did they view inspired literature as a wider category of books than what eventually became recognized as the canon of authoritative-for-doctrine Scripture? Michael Kruger has brought this issue to the fore in a recent blogpost and it is worth presenting his view along side of Lee McDonald’s, whose view he mentions in the post, in short order without attempting to resolve the differences between the two. Both views affirm the inspiration of the NT books. Both views affirm that early Christians thought their works were inspired in some sense. Both views affirm that early Christians recognized (at least eventually) the NT books as unique revelation. The disagreement is over why early Christians saw these NT books as unique, not whether they saw them as unique.

It’s important to remember that this is a blog exchange and that Kruger has written whole books and articles on the topic of canon. He didn’t say everything in his post. I bet Lee McDonald would even say he didn’t write everything in his most recent two volume tome on the biblical canon. I will include these works along with a few others in the Further Reading section below.

New Book: The Biblical Canon Lists from Early Christianity

The Biblical Canon Lists from Early Christianity: Texts and Analysis (OUP) by yours truly and Ed Gallagher releases in the UK this week (see the preview on Google Books here; see Amazon UK here; see Amazon USA here). It will be available on the tables at SBL in Boston, MA, and it will release in the USA on Jan. 2.

What is the relevance of this book for canon studies? The biblical canon of the Old and New Testament was formed over centuries. There were many Jewish “scriptures” or sacred writings of inviolable authority as shown from the MSS from Qumran and the deuterocanonical literature from Palestine and Alexandria. Even significant works such as the Didache or the Shepherd of Hermas reveal the early impulse for Christian literary output. Answers vary for how and why the churches settled on the same core Jewish canon with variation at the edges (N.B. the differences between the modern HB/OT Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox canons). Furthermore, the answers differ over the formation of the twenty-seven-book NT canon. These questions focus on the quantity and the quality of our evidence. Scholars have noted the variegated nature of the evidence for the biblical canon. What do we learn from MSS (e.g. Dead Sea Scrolls; Christian codices), citations of religious literature (e.g. early Christian usage of the Shepherd), ancient translations (e.g. Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures), ancient notices (e.g. “The Law and the Prophets”), and canon lists? Thus, a book on canon lists will necessarily not tell the whole history of the canon, but we suggest that the various, early lists provide the most specific information about the ancients’s canon.