The process of canonization was relatively long and remarkably flexible and detached; various books in use were recognized as inspired, but the Church Fathers noted, without embarrassment or criticism, how some held certain books to be canonical and others did not. Emerging Christianity assumed that through the Spirit the selection of canonical books was "certain" enough for the needs of the church. Inspiration, it is to be stressed, was neither a divisive nor a decisive criterion. Only when the canon had become self-evident was it argued that inspiration and canonicity coincided, and this coincidence became the presupposition of Protestant orthodoxy (e.g., the authority of the Bible through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit).
The need for consolidation and delimitation
Viewed both phenomenologically and practically, the canon had to be consolidated and delimited. Seen historically, however, there were a number of reasons that forced the issue of limiting the canon.
Oral tradition had begun to deteriorate in post-apostolic times, partly because many or most of the eyewitnesses to the earliest events of Jesus' life and death and the beginning of the church had died. Also, the oral tradition may simply have suffered in transmission. Papias (died c. 130), a bishop of Hieropolis, in Asia Minor, was said by Irenaeus (died c. 200), a bishop of Lugdunum (now Lyon, France) to have been an eyewitness of the Apostle John. Papias had said, "For I did not suppose that the things from the books would aid me so much as the things from the living and continuing voice." Eusebius (c. 260-c. 340), a church historian, reported these comments in his Ecclesiastical History and pointed out inconsistencies in Papias' recollections, doubted his understanding, and called him "a man of exceedingly small intelligence."
Large sections of oral tradition, however, which were probably translated in part from Aramaic before being written down in Greek-such as the Passion (suffering of Christ) narrative, many sayings of Jesus, and early liturgical material-benefitted by the very conservativism implicit in such traditions. But because the church perceived its risen Lord as a living Lord, even his words could be adjusted or adapted to fit specific church needs. Toward the end of the 1st century, there was also a conscious production of gospels. Some gospels purported to be words of the risen Lord that did not reflect apostolic traditions and even claimed superiority over them. Such claims were deemed heretical and helped to push the early church toward canonization.
Faced with heresy and claims to late revelations, the early church was constrained to retain the historical dimension of its faith, the ephapax, or the "once for all," revelation of God in Jesus Christ.
Impulse toward canonization from heretical movements
Gnosticism (a religious system with influence both on Judaism and Christianity) tended to foster speculation, cutting loose from historical revelation. In defense the orthodox churches stressed the apostolic tradition by focussing on Gospels and letters from apostolic lives and distinguished them from Gnostic writings, such as the Gospel of Truth (mentioned by Irenaeus) and now found in Coptic translation in a collection of Gnostic writings from Egypt; it is a Coptic manuscript of a Valentinian Gnostic speculation from the mid-2nd century-i.e., a work based on the teachings of Valentinus, a Gnostic teacher from Alexandria. In the same collection is the Gospel of Thomas in Coptic, actually a collection of sayings purporting to be the words of the risen Christ, the living Lord. This "gospel" also occurred in Greek (c. 140), and warnings against it as heretical were made by the Church Fathers in the 2nd to the 4th centuries.
In a general prophetic apocalyptic mood, another heresy, Montanism, arose. This was an ecstatic enthusiastic movement claiming special revelation and stressing "the age of the spirit." Montanus (died c. 175) and two prophetesses claimed that their oracular statements contained new and contemporary authoritative revelations. This break with the apostolic time caused vigorous response. An anti-Montanist reported that "the false prophet is one who speaks in ecstasy after which follow freedom . . . and madness of soul."
The single most decisive factor in the process of canonization was the influence of Marcion (flourished c. 140), who had Gnostic tendencies and who set up a "canon" that totally repudiated the Old Testament and anything Jewish. He viewed the Creator God of the Old Testament as a cruel God of retribution and the Jewish Law. His canon consisted of The Gospel, a "cleaned up" Luke (the least Jewish), and the Apostolikon (ten Pauline letters with Old Testament references and analogies edited out, without Hebrews, I and II Timothy, and Titus). This restrictive canon acted as a catalyst to the formation of a canon more in line with the thought of the church catholic (universal).
Late-2nd-century canons
By the end of the 2nd century, Irenaeus used the four canonical Gospels, 13 letters of Paul, I Peter, I and II John, Revelation, Shepherd of Hermas (a work later excluded from the canon), and Acts. Justin Martyr (died c. 165), a Christian apologist, wrote of the reading of the Gospels, "the memoirs of the Apostles," in the services, in which they were the basis for sermons. In his writings he quoted freely from the Gospels, Hebrews, the Pauline Letters, I Peter, and Acts. Justin's Syrian pupil, Tatian (c. 160), although he quotes from John separately, is best known for his Diatessaron (literally, "through four" [gospels], but also a musicological term meaning "choral" "harmony"), which was a life of Christ compiled from all four Gospels but based on the outline and structure of John. This indicates both that Tatian was aware of four gospel traditions and that their canonicity was not fixed in final form at his time in Syria. Although Tatian was later declared a heretic, the Diatessaron was used until the 5th century and influenced the Western Church even after four separated gospels were established.
The first clear witness to a catalog of authoritative New Testament writings is found in the so-called Muratorian Canon, a crude and uncultured Latin 8th-century manuscript translated from a Greek list written in Rome c. 170-180, named for its modern discoverer and publisher Lodovica Antonio Muratori (1672-1750). Though the first lines are lost, Luke is referred to as "the third book of the Gospel," and the canon thus contains [Matthew, Mark] Luke, John, Acts, 13 Pauline letters, Jude, two letters of John, and Revelation. Concerning the Apocalypse of Peter, it notes that it may be read, although some persons object; it rejects the Shepherd of Hermas as having been written only recently in Rome and lacking connection with the apostolic age. The Wisdom of Solomon (a Jewish intertestamental writing), is included in the accepted works as written in Solomon's honour.
Some principles for determining the criteria of canonicity begin to be apparent: apostolicity, true doctrine (regula fidei), and widespread geographical usage. Such principles are indicated by Muratori's argument that the Pauline Letters are canonical and universal-the Word of God for the whole church-although they are addressed to specific churches, on the analogy of the letters to the seven churches in Revelation; in a prophetic statement to the whole church, seven specific churches are addressed, then the specific letters of Paul can be read for all. Thus, the catholic status of the Pauline letters to seven churches is vindicated on the basis of the revelation of Jesus Christ to John, the seer and writer of Revelation. Wide usage in the church is indicated in calling Acts the Acts of all the Apostles and in the intention of the "general address"-e.g., "To those who are called," in Jude-of the Catholic (or general) Letters-i.e., I and II Peter, I, II, and III John, James, and Jude. The criterion of accordance with received teaching is plain in the rejection of heretical writings. The Muratorian Canon itself may have been, in part, a response to Marcion's heretical and reductive canon.
The criteria of true doctrine, usage, and apostolicity all taken together must be satisfied, then, in order that a book be judged canonical. Thus, even though the Shepherd of Hermas, the First Letter of Clement, and the Didache may have been widely used and contain true doctrines, they were not canonical because they were not apostolic nor connected to the apostolic age, or they were local writings without support in many areas.
During the time of the definitive formation of the canon in the 2nd century, apparent differences existed in the Western churches (centred in or in close contact with Rome) and those of the East (as in Alexandria and Asia Minor). It is not surprising that the Roman Muratorian Canon omitted Hebrews and accepted and held Revelation in high esteem, for Hebrews allows for no repentance for the baptized Christian who commits apostasy (rejection of faith), a problem in the Western Church when it was subjected to persecution. In the East, on the other hand, there was a dogmatic resistance to the teaching of a 1,000-year reign of the Messiah before the end time-i.e., chiliasm, or millenarianism-in Revelation. There was also a difference in the acceptance of Acts and the Catholic Letters. With the continued expansion of the church, particularly in the 2nd century, consolidation was necessary.
Canonical standards of the 3rd and 4th centuries
Clement of Alexandria, a theologian who flourished in the late 2nd century, seemed to be practically unconcerned about canonicity. To him, inspiration is what mattered, and he made use of the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Gospel of the Egyptians, the Letter of Barnabas, the Didache, and other extracanonical works. Origen (died c. 254), Clement's pupil and one of the greatest thinkers of the early church, distinguished at least three classes of writings, basing his judgment on majority usage in places that he had visited: (1) homologoumena or anantirrheta, "undisputed in the churches of God throughout the whole world" (the four Gospels, 13 Pauline Letters, I Peter, I John, Acts, and Revelation); (2) amphiballomena, "disputed" (II Peter, II and III John, Hebrews, James, and Jude); and (3) notha, "spurious" (Gospel of the Egyptians, Thomas, and others). He used the term "scripture" (graphe) for the Didache, the Letter of Barnabas, and the Shepherd of Hermas, but did not consider them canonical. Eusebius shows the situation in the early 4th century. Universally accepted are: the four Gospels, Acts, 14 Pauline Letters (including Hebrews), I John, and I Peter. The disputed writings are of two kinds: (1) those known and accepted by many (James, Jude, II Peter, II and III John, and (2) those called "spurious" but not "foul and impious" (Acts of Paul, Shepherd of Hermas, Apocalypse of Peter, Letter of Barnabas, Didache and possibly the Gospel of the Hebrews); finally there are the heretically spurious (e.g., Gospel of Peter, Acts of John). Revelation is listed both as fully accepted ("if permissible") and as spurious but not impious. It is important that Eusebius feels free to make authoritative use of the disputed writings. Thus canon and authoritative revelation are not yet the same thing.
Determination of the canon in the 4th century
Athanasius, a 4th-century bishop of Alexandria and a significant theologian, delimited the canon and settled the strife between East and West. On a principle of inclusiveness, both Revelation and Hebrews (as part of the Pauline corpus) were accepted. The 27 books of the New Testament-and they only-were declared canonical. In the Greek churches there was still controversy about Revelation, but in the Latin Church, under the influence of Jerome, Athanasius' decision was accepted. It is notable, however, that, in a mid-4th-century manuscript called Codex Sinaiticus, the Letter of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas are included at the end but with no indication of secondary status, and that, in the 5th-century Codex Alexandrinus, there is no demarcation between Revelation and I and II Clement.
In the Syriac Church, Tatian's Diatessaron was used until the 5th century, and in the 3rd century the 14 Pauline Letters were added. Because Tatian had been declared a heretic, there was a clear episcopal order to have the four separated Gospels when, according to tradition, Rabbula, bishop of Edessa, introduced the Syriac version known as the Peshitta-also adding Acts, James, I Peter, and I John-making a 22-book canon. Only much later, perhaps in the 7th century, did the Syriac canon come into agreement with the Greek 27 books.
Developments in the 16th century
With the advent of printing and differences between Roman Catholics and Protestants, the canon and its relationship to tradition finally became fixed. During the Counter-Reformation Council of Trent (1545-63), the canon of the entire Bible was set in 1546 as the Vulgate, based on Jerome's Latin version. For Luther, the criterion of what was canonical was both apostolicity, or what is of an apostolic nature, and "was Christum treibet"-what drives toward, or leads to, Christ. This latter criterion he did not find in, for example, Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation; even so, he bowed to tradition, and placed these books last in the New Testament.
Texts and versions
Textual criticism
The physical aspects of New Testament texts
To establish the reliability of the text of ancient manuscripts in order to reach the text that the author originally wrote (or, rather, dictated) involves the physical aspects of the texts: collection, collation of differences or variant readings in manuscripts, and comparison in matters of dating, geographical origins, and the amount of editing or revision noted, using as many copies as are available. Textual criticism starts thus with the manuscripts themselves. Families of manuscripts may be recognized by noting similarities and differences, degrees of dependence, or stages of their transmission leading back to the earliest text, or autograph. The techniques used in textual studies of ancient manuscripts are the same whether they deal with secular, philosophical, or religious texts. New Testament textual criticism, however, operates under unique conditions because of an abundance of manuscripts and the rather short gap between the time of original writing and the extant manuscripts, shorter than that of the Old Testament.
Compared with other ancient manuscripts, the text of the New Testament is dependable and consistent, but on an absolute scale there are far more variant readings as compared with those of, for example, classical Greek authors. This is the result, on the one hand, of a great number of surviving manuscripts and extant manuscript fragments and, on the other, of the fact that the time gap between an oral phase of transmission and the written stage was far shorter than that of many other ancient Greek manuscripts. The missionary message-the kerygma (proclamation)-with reports of the Passion, death, Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus Christ and collections of his deeds and sayings was, at first, oral tradition. Later it was written down in Gospel form. The letters of Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles who founded or corresponded with churches, were also collected and distributed as he had dictated them. All autographs of New Testament books have disappeared. In sharp contrast to the fact that the oldest extant full manuscript of a work by the Greek philosopher Plato (died 347 BC) is a copy written in 895-a gap of more than 1,000 years bridged by only a few papyrus texts-there was a time gap of less than 200 or 300 years between the original accounts of the New Testament events and extant manuscripts. In fact, a small (about 2.5 inches by 3.5 inches [6.4 by 8.9 centimetres]) papyrus fragment with verses from the 18th chapter of the Gospel According to John can be dated c. 120-130; this earliest known fragment of the New Testament was written 40 years or less after the presumed date of the production of that Gospel (c. 90).
Excluding papyri found preserved in the dry sands, as in Egypt (where the Gospel According to John was evidently popular judging from the large number of fragments found there), the approximate number of New Testament manuscripts dating from the 3rd to 18th centuries are: 2,000 of the four Gospels; 400 of Acts, Pauline, and Catholic letters together; 300 of Pauline letters alone; 250 of Revelation; and 2,000 lectionaries-i.e., collections of gospel (and sometimes Acts and letter) selections, or pericopes, meant to be used in public worship. Quotations from the Church Fathers-some of which are so extensive as to include almost the whole New Testament-account for more than 150,000 textual variants. Of the quotations in the Fathers, however, it is difficult to make judgments because the quotations may have been intended to be exact from some particular text traditions, but others may have been from memory, conflations, harmonizations, or allusions. Of the many New Testament manuscripts to date, however, only about 50 contain the entire 27 books of the New Testament. The majority have the four Gospels, and Revelation is the least well attested. Prior to the printing press (15th century), all copies of Bibles show textual variations.
Types of writing materials and methods
In Hellenistic times (c. 300 BC-c. AD 300), official records were often inscribed on stone or metal tablets. Literary works and detailed letters were written on parchment or papyrus, though short or temporary records were written or scratched on potsherds (ostraca) or wax tablets. Scrolls were made by gluing together papyrus sheets (made from the pith of the papyrus reed) or by sewing together parchment leaves (made from treated and scraped animal skins); they were written in columns and read by shifting the roll backward and forward from some wooden support on one or both ends. Such scrolls were used for literary or religious works and seldom exceeded 30 feet (nine metres) in length because of their weight and awkwardness in handling.
In contrast, the church used not scrolls but the codex (book) form for its literature. A codex was formed by sewing pages of papyrus or parchment of equal size one upon another and vertically down the middle, forming a quire; both sides of the pages thus formed could be written upon. In antiquity, the codex was the less honourable form of writing material, used for notes and casual records. The use of the book form testifies to the low cultural and educational status of early Christianity-and, as the church rose to prominence, it brought "the book" with it. Not until the time of the Roman emperor Constantine in the 4th century, when Christianity became a state religion, were there parchment codices containing the whole New Testament.
Some very early New Testament manuscripts and fragments thereof are papyrus, but parchment, when available, became the best writing material until the advent of printing. The majority of New Testament manuscripts from the 4th to 15th centuries are parchment codices. When parchment codices occasionally were deemed no longer of use, the writing was scraped off and a new text written upon it. Such a rewritten (rescriptus) manuscript is called a palimpsest (from the Greek palin, "again," and psao, "I scrape"). Often the original text of a palimpsest can be discerned by photographic process.
In New Testament times there were two main types of Greek writing: majuscules (or uncials) and minuscules. Majuscules are all capital (uppercase) letters, and the word uncial (literally, 1/12 of a whole, about an inch) points to the size of their letters. Minuscules are lowercase manuscripts. Both uncials and minuscules might have ligatures making them into semi-connected cursives. In Greco-Roman times minuscules were used for the usual daily writing. In parchments from the 4th to the 9th centuries, both majuscules and minuscules were used for New Testament manuscripts, but by the 11th century all the manuscripts were minuscules.
In these early New Testament manuscripts, there were no spaces between either letters or words, rarely an indication that a word was "hyphenated," no chapter or verse divisions, no punctuation, and no accents or breathing marks on the Greek words. There was only a continuous flow of letters. In addition, there were numerous (and sometimes variable) abbreviations marked only by a line above (e.g., IC for IHCOUC, or Jesus, and KC for kyrios, or Lord. Not until the 8th-9th century was there any indication of accents or breathing marks (both of which may make a difference in the meaning of some words); punctuation occurred sporadically at this period; but not until the Middle Ages were the texts supplied with such helps as chapters (c. 1200) and verses (c. 1550).
Occasionally, the parchment was stained (e.g., purple), and the ink was silver (e.g., Codex Argenteus, a 5th-6th-century Gothic translation). Initial letters were sometimes illuminated, often with red ink (from which comes the present English word rubric, based on the Latin for "red," namely ruber).
Types of manuscript errors
Since scribes either copied manuscripts or wrote from dictation, manuscript variants could be of several types: copying, hearing, accidental, or intentional. Errors in copying were common, particularly with uncial letters that looked alike. In early manuscripts OC (for hos, "[he] who"), for example, might easily be mistaken for the traditional abbreviation of God: _C (for _EOC, theos). Dittography (the picking up of a word or group of words and repeating it) and haplography (the omission of syllables, words, or lines) are errors most apt to occur where there are similar words or syllables involved. In chapter 17, verse 15, of John, in one manuscript the following error occurs: "I do not pray that thou shouldest take them from the [world, but that thou shouldst keep them from the] evil one" becomes "I do not pray that thou shouldst take them from the evil one." This is obviously a reading that omitted the words between two identical ends of lines-i.e., an error due to homoioteleuton (similar ending of lines).
Especially in uncial manuscripts with continuous writing, there is a problem of word division. An English example may serve to illustrate: GODISNOWHERE may be read "God is now here" or "God is nowhere." Internal evidence from the context can usually solve such problems. Corrections of a manuscript either above the line of writing or in the margin (and also marginal comments) may be read and copied into the text and become part of it as a gloss.
Errors of hearing are particularly common when words have the same pronunciation as others but differ in spelling (as in English: "their, there"; "meet, meat"). This kind of error increased in frequency in the early Christian Era because some vowels and diphthongs lost their distinctive sound and came to be pronounced alike. For example, the Greek vowels e, i, and u and the diphthongs ei, oi, and ui all sounded like the ee (as in "feet"). Remarkable mistranslations can occur as, for example, in I Corinthians, chapter 15, verse 54: "Death is swallowed up in victory"-becomes by itacism (pronunciation of the Greek letter e) "Death is swallowed up in conflict" (neikos). Another problem of itacism is the distinction between declensions of the 1st and 2nd persons in the plural ("we" and "you") in Greek, which can sound the same (hemeis, "we"; humeis, "you"), because the initial vowels are not clearly differentiated. Such errors can cause interpretative difficulties.
A different category of error occurs in dictation or copying, when sequences of words, syllables, or letters in a word are mixed up, synonyms substituted in familiar passages, words read across a two- (or more) column manuscript instead of down, or assimilated to a parallel. Intentional changes might involve corrections of spelling or grammar, harmonizations, or even doctrinal emendations, and might be passed on from manuscript to manuscript. Paleographers-i.e., scientists of ancient writing-can note changes of hands in manuscript copying or the addition of new hands such as those of correctors of a later date.
Paleography, a science of dating manuscripts by typological analysis of their scripts, is the most precise and objective means known for determining the age of a manuscript. Script groups belong typologically to their generation; and changes can be noted with great accuracy over relatively short periods of time. Dating of manuscript material by a radioactive-carbon test requires that a small part of the material be destroyed in the process; it is less accurate than dating from paleography.
Critical scholarship
Textual criticism of the Greek New Testament attempts to come as near as possible to the original manuscripts (which did not survive), based on reconstructions from extant manuscripts of various ages and locales. Assessment of the individual manuscripts and their relationships to each other can produce a fairly reliable text from various readings that may have been the result of copying and recopying of manuscripts. It is not always age that matters. Older manuscripts may be corrupt, and a reading in a later manuscript may in reality be ancient. No single witness or group of witnesses is reliable in all its readings.
When Erasmus, the Dutch Humanist, prepared the Greek text for the first printed edition (1516) of the New Testament, he depended on a few manuscripts of the type that had dominated the church's manuscripts for centuries and that had had its origin in Constantinople. His edition was produced hastily, he even translated some parts for which he did not have a Greek text from Jerome's Latin text (Vulgate). In about 1522 Cardinal Francisco Jimenez, a Spanish scholarly churchman, published his Complutensian Polyglot at Alcala (Latin: Complutum), Spain, a Bible in which parallel columns of the Old Testament are printed in Hebrew, the Vulgate, and the Septuagint (LXX), together with the Aramaic Targum (translation or paraphrase) of Onkelos to the Pentateuch with a translation into Latin. The Greek New Testament was volume 5 of this work, and the text tradition behind it cannot be determined with any accuracy. During the next decades new editions of Erasmus' text profited from more and better manuscript evidence and the printer Robert Estienne of Paris produced in 1550 the first text with a critical apparatus (variant readings in various manuscripts). This edition became influential as a chief witness for the Textus Receptus (the received standard text) that came to dominate New Testament studies for more than 300 years. This Textus Receptus is the basis for all the translations in the churches of the Reformation, including the King James Version.
Large extensive New Testament critical editions prepared by the German scholars C. von Tischendorf (1869-72) and H. von Soden (1902-13) had Sigla (signs) for the various textual witnesses; they are complex to use and different from each other. The current system, a revision by an American scholar, C.R. Gregory (adopted in 1908), though not uncomplicated has made uniform practice possible. A more pragmatic method of designation and rough classification was that of the Swiss scholar J.J. Wettstein's edition (1751-52). His textual apparatus was relatively uncomplicated. He introduced the use of capital Roman, Greek, or Hebrew letters for uncials and Arabic numbers for minuscules. Later, a Gothic P with exponents came into use for papyri and, in the few cases needed, Gothic or Old English O and T with exponents for ostraca and talismans (engraved amulets). Lectionaries are usually designated by an italicized lowercase l with exponents in Arabic numbers.
Known ostraca-i.e., broken pieces of pottery (or potsherds) inscribed with ink-contain short portions of six New Testament books and number about 25. About nine talismans date from the 4th to 12th centuries; they are good-luck charms with a few verses on parchment, wood, or papyrus. Four of these contain the Lord's Prayer. These short portions of writing, however, are hardly of significance for a study of the New Testament textual tradition.
Texts and manuscripts
In referring to manuscript text types by their place of origin, one posits the idea that the major centers of Christendom established more or less standard texts: Alexandria; Caesarea and Antioch (Eastern); Italy and Gallia plus Africa (Western); Constantinople, the home for the Byzantine text type or the Textus Receptus. While such a geographical scheme has become less accurate or helpful, it still serves as a rough classification of text types.