Canon Revisited

One of the first things I am interested in when I read a contemporary academic book is why the author felt it necessary to write this book. Surely other things have been written on the subject, often a lot of other things, and what is it that makes this work stand out from the crowd. In other words, why is this better or different than something written 50 years ago on the subject?

Entry points into already extensively charted territory are what make the life of a modern academic particularly difficult. Universities demand production of articles and books and producers demand novelty and so it winds up that many books that ought not to be published get published.

What drew me to Dr. Michael Kruger’s book Canon Revisited was that he was attempting to answer a question that very much has intrigued me for a long time and a question to which I had never received a satisfying answer: why do the 27 books that we have in the New Testament comprise the New Testament? This may seem like a simple question, so let me tease out why it vexes me like it does.

After Dan Brown’s ludicrous DaVinci Code was published, it caused a flurry of scribbling about the date of the formation of the Christian canon and how widespread fidelity to and belief in that canon was in early Christian history. Brown’s contention was that heterodox Christianity had ruled the day until the mean patriarchal Romans took over and burned all the evidence of alternate gospels and enshrined the alpha-male version of Christianity in opposition to the feminine divine so prevalent in actual early Christianity. (Seriously, this was chick lit at its worst.)

The premise of the book, however laughable and far-fetched, had the virtue of exciting interest in otherwise hardly marketable topics, and in my early Christianity history class at Colorado State that year (where we actually read the book!) I wrote a paper about the historical belief in Christ’s divinity in the early church that taught me a lot. (Confirming me in my orthodoxy might be the exact opposite of the effect desired by Dan Brown when he wrote the book, a fact that pleases me very much.) I still have the paper and still enjoy reading it from time to time, though the writing style of my 20 year old self can be a bit painful to witness.

My point is that the question of early Christian belief in Christ’s divinity and even in the historical acceptance of the canon of Scripture we read today has been settled in my mind for a long time, and though I know there are many challenges to the canon from historical standpoints, by my lights the orthodox have arguments just as persuasive as the detractors. Everyone who writes on the canon writes from a position of faith, after all.

But the question that still vexed me was different than the one I answered when I was young: I wasn’t merely interested in the fact of early Christian acceptance of the canon; the question I wanted answered was why these books are all Scripture and why the canon has been closed. For example, if we found another letter of St. Paul’s in some ancient Persian library why would we not consider it for inclusion in the canon? If another gospel account was shown to bear apostolic authority and was orthodox, say The Gospel According to Bartholomew, why would that not be considered? And what about books like 2 & 3 John, whose authorship is dubious, or the epistle of James, which Martin Luther famously lamented was part of the canon at all. How do we know these books, and none other, constitute God’s word to his Church?

That is the question Dr. Kruger set out to answer in this book and, while I still have questions and am not fully satisfied, I was cheered to read in his introduction that historical questions regarding the canon are not the only ones to concern ourselves with, important as they are, we must also be vigilant in pursuing the theological questions of canon.

In a series of posts to follow I will engage with this work of Kruger’s, mostly summarizing his contentions, but also seeking answers to some of the questions this book raises that I hadn’t anticipated.