We all got Book

So if Baby got Book in the last post, how did we all get the Book. How did the Canon of Scripture develop and did it have some thing to do with the Council of Nicea?

Although the final collection and authoritative list of all twenty-seven books of the New Testament came much later (found for the first time in 367 A.D. in a pronouncement by Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, and not in 325 A.D. during the Council), the process began much earlier.

The earliest collections were the letters of Paul, and the “Fourfold Gospel” (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John). By the end of the first century these four Gospels began to circulate together in codex (book) form.  While there were books that were popular among Christians that were not included in the New Testament (such as The Shepherd of Hermas and The Epistle of Barnabas), and early Christian writers knew and quoted from other gospels (The gospel of Hebrews and The gospel of Peter), no others were given the normative status of the four Gospels. New Testament scholar, Paul Achtemeier of Union Theological Seminary sums up this early consensus on the four Gospels:

"From these writings it is evident that the four canonical Gospels not only pretty well exhausted the reliable traditions about the sayings of Jesus, but also that all four were already well known in widely scattered Christian communities. A consensus had therefore emerged by the end of the first century that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were primary sources for, and authoritative expressions of, the Christian faith."

The first “canon” (authoritative list of books regarded as Scripture) was made not by mainstream Christians, but by the Gnostic teacher and leader, Marcion, in ca. 144 A.D. His Bible included only an edited version of Luke, and ten letters of the apostle Paul. There are two ironies to this. First, it was not mainstream Christians who were the first to make an authoritative list of Scriptures which excluded other books, it was the Gnostic community championed by Dan Brown in his Da Vinci Code. The second and more significant irony is that Marcion – himself a teacher with strong Gnostic leanings – did not include any of the Gnostic literature that Brown contends was excluded from the New Testament under Constantine!

It was Marcion and his truncated Bible that forced mainstream Christianity to respond in kind. Thus, from the middle of the second century on, lists of books regarded as authoritative for Christian faith began to circulate. Although there were occasional differences of opinion on some books, the four Gospels are on every list, and no others are. There  are several lists of books that were considered canonical,  which pre-date the council of Nicea- here are three:
The Muratorian Fragment (ca. 170);
Clement of Alexandria (ca. 200);
Origen (beginning of third century)

Comments

[A]

An exceelent and thoroughly enjoyable (to me, anyway) summary of the cdevelopment of the NT canon. Thank you for this M-i-T!

I hope all is well with you and yours.
Peace