By B.B. Warfield
Published in 1892, by
the American Sunday School Union,
In
order to obtain a correct understanding of what is called the
formation of the Canon of the New Testament, it is necessary to begin
by
fixing very firmly in our minds one fact which is obvious enough when
attention is once called to it. That is, that the Christian church did
not require
to form for itself the idea of a "canon" — or, as we should
more commonly
call it, of a "Bible" — that is, of a collection of books
given of God to be the
authoritative rule of faith and practice. It inherited this idea from
the Jewish
church, along with the thing itself, the Jewish Scriptures, or the
"Canon of the
Old Testament." The church did not grow up by natural law: it was
founded.
And the authoritative teachers sent forth by Christ to found His
church, carried
with them, as their most precious possession, a body of divine
Scriptures,
which they imposed on the church that they founded as its code of law.
No
reader of the New Testament can need proof of this; on every page of
that
book is spread the evidence that from the very beginning the Old
Testament
was as cordially recognized as law by the Christian as by the Jew. The
Christian church thus was never without a "Bible" or a
"canon."
But
the Old Testament books were not the only ones which the
apostles (by Christ's own appointment the authoritative founders of the
church) imposed upon the infant churches, as their authoritative rule
of faith
and practice. No more authority dwelt in the prophets of the old
covenant than
in themselves, the apostles, who
had been "made sufficient as ministers of a
new covenant" [2 Cor. 3:6];
for (as one of themselves argued) "if that which
passeth away was with glory, much more that which remaineth is in
glory." [2
Cor. 3:11] Accordingly not only was the gospel they delivered, in their
own
estimation, itself a divine revelation, but it was also preached
"in the Holy
Ghost" (I Pet. i. 12); not merely the matter of it, but the very
words in which it
was clothed were "of the Holy Spirit" (I Cor. ii. 13). Their
own commands
were, therefore, of divine authority (I Thess. iv. 2), and their
writings were the
depository of these commands (II Thess. ii. 15). "If any man
obeyeth not our
word by this epistle," says Paul to one church (II Thess. iii.
14), "note that
man, that ye have no company with him." To another he makes it the
test of a
Spirit-led man to recognize that what he was writing to them was
"the
commandments of the Lord" (I Cor. xiv. 37). Inevitably, such
writings, making
so awful a claim on their acceptance, were received by the infant
churches as
of a quality equal to that of the old "Bible"; placed
alongside of its older books
as an additional part of the one law of God; and read as such in their
meetings
for worship — a practice which moreover was required by the apostles (I
Thess. v. 27; Col. iv. 16; Rev. i. 3). In the apprehension, therefore,
of the
earliest churches, the "Scriptures" were not a closed but an
increasing "canon."
Such they had been from the beginning, as they gradually grew in number
from Moses to Malachi; and such they were to continue as long as there
should
remain among the churches "men of God who spake as they were moved
by
the Holy Ghost."
We
say that this immediate placing of the new books — given
the church under the seal of apostolic authority — among the Scriptures
already established as such, was inevitable. It is also historically
evinced from
the very beginning. Thus the apostle Peter, writing in A.D. 68, speaks
of Paul's
numerous letters not in contrast with the Scriptures, but as among the
Scriptures and in contrast with "the other Scriptures" (II
Pet. iii.16) — that is,
of course, those of the Old Testament. In like manner the apostle Paul
combines, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, the book
of
Deuteronomy and the Gospel of Luke under the common head of
"Scripture"
(I Tim. v.18): "For the Scripture saith, Thou shalt not muzzle the
ox when he
treadeth out the corn" [Deut. xxv. 4]; and, "The laborer is
worthy of his hire"
(Luke x. 7). The line of such quotations is never broken in Christian
literature.
Polycarp in A.D. 115 unites the Psalms and Ephesians in exactly similar
manner: "In the sacred books ... as it is said in these
Scriptures, 'Be ye angry
and sin not,' and 'Let not the sun go down upon your wrath.'" So,
a few years
later, the so-called second letter of Clement, after quoting Isaiah,
adds (ii. 4):
"And another Scripture, however, says, 'I came not to call the
righteous, but
sinners'" — quoting from Matthew — a book which Barnabas (circa
97-106
A.D.) had already adduced as Scripture. After this such quotations are
common.
What
needs emphasis at present about these facts is that they
obviously are not evidences of a gradually-heightening estimate of the
New
Testament books, originally received on a lower level and just
beginning to be
tentatively accounted Scripture; they are conclusive evidences rather
of the
estimation of the New Testament books from the very beginning as
Scripture,
and of their attachment as Scripture to the other Scriptures already in
hand.
The early Christians did not, then, first form a rival
"canon" of "new books"
which came only gradually to be accounted as of equal divinity and
authority
with the "old books"; they received new book after new book
from the
apostolical circle, as equally "Scripture" with the old
books, and added them
one by one to the collection of old books as additional Scriptures,
until at
length the new books thus added were numerous enough to be looked upon
as
another section of the Scriptures.
The
earliest name given to this new section of Scripture was
framed on the model of the name by which what we know as the Old
Testament was then known. Just as it was called "The Law and the
Prophets
and the Psalms" (or "the Hagiographa"), or more briefly
"The Law and the
Prophets," or even more briefly still "The Law"; so the
enlarged Bible was
called "The Law and the Prophets, with the Gospels and the
Apostles" (so
Clement of
most briefly "The Law and the Gospel" (so Claudius
Apolinaris, Irenaeus);
while the new books apart were called "The Gospel and the
Apostles," or most
briefly of all "The Gospel." This earliest name for the new
Bible, with all that
it involves as to its relation to the old and briefer Bible, is
traceable as far back
as Ignatius (A.D. 115), who makes use of it repeatedly (e.g., ad
Philad. 5; ad
Smyrn. 7).
In one passage he gives us a hint of the controversies which the
enlarged Bible of the Christians aroused among the Judaizers (ad
Philad. 6).
"When I heard some saying," he writes, "'Unless I find
it in the Old [Books] I
will not believe the Gospel' on my saying, 'It is written.' they
answered, 'That
is the question.' To me, however, Jesus Christ is the Old [Books]; his
cross and
death and resurrection and the faith which is by him, the undefiled Old
[Books] — by which I wish, by your prayers, to be justified. The
priests
indeed are good, but the High Priest better," etc. Here Ignatius
appeals to the
"Gospel" as Scripture, and the Judaizers object, receiving
from him the answer
in effect which Augustine afterward formulated in the well known saying
that
the New Testament lies hidden in the Old and the Old Testament is first
made
clear in the New. What we need now to observe, however, is that to
Ignatius
the New Testament was not a different book from the Old Testament, but
part
of the one body of Scripture with it; an accretion, so to speak, which
had
grown upon it.
This
is the testimony of all the early witnesses — even those
which speak for the distinctively Jewish-Christian church. For example,
that
curious Jewish-Christian writing, "The Testaments of the XII.
Patriarchs"
(Beni. 11), tells us, under the cover of an ex post facto
prophecy, that the
"work and word" of Paul, i.e., confessedly the book of Acts
and Paul's
Epistles, "shall be written in the Holy Books," i.e., as is
understood by all,
made a part of the existent Bible. So even in the Talmud, in a scene
intended
to ridicule a "bishop" of the first century, he is
represented as finding Galatians
by "sinking himself deeper" into the same "Book"
which contained the Law of
Moses (Babl. Shabbath, 116 a and b). The details cannot be
entered into here.
Let it suffice to say that, from the evidence of the fragments which
alone have
been preserved to us of the Christian writings of that very early time,
it appears
that from the beginning of the second century (and that is from the end
of the
apostolic age) a collection (Ignatius, II Clement) of "New
Books" (Ignatius),
called the "Gospel and Apostles" (Ignatius, Marcion), was
already a part of the
"Oracles" of God (Polycarp, Papias, II Clement), or
"Scriptures" (I Tim., II
Pet., Barn., Polycarp, II Clement), or the "Holy Books" or
"Bible" (Testt. XII.
Patt.).
The
number of books included-in this added body of New
Books, at the opening of the second century, cannot be satisfactorily
determined by the evidence of these fragments alone. The section of it
called
the "Gospel" included Gospels written by "the apostles
and their companions"
(Justin), which beyond legitimate question were our four Gospels now
received. The section called "the Apostles" contained the
book of Acts (The
Testt. XII. Patt.) and epistles of Paul, John, Peter and James. The
evidence
from various quarters is indeed enough to show that the collection in
general
use contained all the books which we at present receive, with the
possible
exceptions of Jude, II and III John and Philemon. And it is more
natural to
suppose that failure of very early evidence for these brief booklets is
due to
their insignificant size rather than to their nonacceptance.
It
is to be borne in mind, however, that the extent of the
collection may have — and indeed is historically shown
actually to have
varied in different localities. The Bible was
circulated only in handcopies,
slowly and painfully made; and an incomplete copy,
obtained say at
in A.D. 68, would be likely to remain for many years
the Bible of the church to
which it was conveyed; and might indeed become the
parent of other copies,
incomplete like itself, and thus the means of
providing a whole district with
incomplete Bibles. Thus, when we inquire after the
history of the New
Testament Canon we need to distinguish such questions
as these: (1) When
was the New Testament Canon completed? (2) When did
any one church
acquire a completed canon? (3) When did the completed
canon — the
complete Bible — obtain universal circulation and
acceptance? (4) On what
ground and evidence did the churches with incomplete
Bibles accept the
remaining books when they were made known to them?
The
Canon of the New Testament was completed when the last
authoritative book was given to any church by the apostles, and that
was when
John wrote the Apocalypse, about A.D. 98. Whether the
however, had a completed Canon when it received the Apocalypse, or not,
would depend on whether there was any epistle, say that of Jude, which
had
not yet reached it with authenticating proof of its apostolicity. There
is room
for historical investigation here. Certainly the whole Canon was not
universally received by the churches till somewhat later. The Latin
church of
the second and third centuries did not quite know what to do with the
Epistle
to the Hebrews. The Syrian churches for some centuries may have lacked
the
lesser of the Catholic Epistles and Revelation. But from the time of
Ireanaeus
down, the church at large had the whole Canon as we now possess it. And
though a section of the church may not yet have been satisfied of the
apostolicity of a certain book or of certain books; and though
afterwards
doubts may have arisen in sections of the church as to the apostolicity
of
certain books (as e.g. of Revelation): yet in no case was it more than
a
respectable minority of the church which was slow in receiving, or
which
came afterward to doubt, the credentials of any of the books that then
as now
constituted the Canon of the New Testament accepted by the church at
large.
And in every case the principle on which a book was accepted, or doubts
against it laid aside, was the historical tradition of apostolicity.
Let
it, however, be clearly understood that it was not exactly
apostolic authorship which in the estimation of the earliest churches,
constituted a book a portion of the "canon." Apostolic
authorship was, indeed,
early confounded with canonicity. It was doubt as to the apostolic
authorship
of Hebrews, in the West, and of James and Jude, apparently, which
underlay
the slowness of the inclusion of these books in the "canon"
of certain churches.
But from the beginning it was not so. The principle of canonicity was
not
apostolic authorship, but imposition by the apostles as
"law." Hence
Tertullian's name for the "canon" is
"instrumentum"; and he speaks of the Old
and New Instrument as we would of the Old and New Testament. That the
apostles so imposed the Old Testament on the churches which they
founded —
as their "Instrument," or "Law," or
"Canon" — can be denied by none. And in
imposing new books on the same churches, by the same apostolical
authority,
they did not confine themselves to books of their own composition. It
is the
Gospel according to Luke, a man who was not an apostle, which Paul
parallels
in I Tim. v. 18 with Deuteronomy as equally "Scripture" with
it, in the first
extant quotation of a New Testament book as Scripture. The Gospels
which
constituted the first division of the New Books, — of "The Gospel
and the
Apostles," — Justin tells us were "written by the apostles
and their
companions." The authority of the apostles, as by divine
appointment founders
of the church, was embodied in whatever books they imposed on the
church as
law, not merely in those they themselves had written.
The
early churches, in short, received, as we receive, into the
New Testament all the books historically evinced to them as given by
the
apostles to the churches as their code of law; and we must not mistake
the
historical evidences of the slow circulation and authentication of
these books
over the widely-extended church, evidence of slowness of the
"canonization"
of these books by the authority or taste of the church itself.