"Sacred Roots: Canonization of the New Testament" by Philip Hess

The one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Good afternoon and welcome, everybody, to this session this afternoon in, uh, Eastern Time Zone anyway. Um, we're, uh, glad to, um, get together again and discuss another Sacred Roots topic. This one is Canonization of the New Testament, and we're happy to have, uh, Philip Hess here, uh, with us this afternoon to talk about this. Um, we've had him on before, and we're glad to have him back. And, um, excited to hear from Philip as he, uh, talks about this, uh, big subject. I'm sure we could fill several sessions on, on talk and discussion around the history of the canonization of the New Testament. So, Christians believe that the New Testament is not only a trustworthy record of historical events in the first century, but the inspired revelation of God's Son and His new covenant with mankind.

But how did we get the New Testament? How do we know that it is inspired? How do we know that we have the collection of inspired writings that God wanted us to have? So, join us, uh, this afternoon as we discuss these and other questions related to the canonization of the New Testament. And like usual, we'll have a Q&A at the end, so, uh, be thinking of questions or thoughts that you want to share at the end. So, having said that, we're going to start with a word of prayer, and then I'm going to hand it over to you, uh, Philip, and, uh, it is going to be yours then. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for this opportunity again to, um, gather around discussions about your word.

We thank you for, uh, Brother Philip being willing to study into this and to share with us this afternoon. Give him strength, give him wisdom and, uh, uh, courage to, to talk about this and to teach us the history about this important time in, in history, in, uh, church history. Lord, we thank you for these talks that we've been having on our sacred roots and discovering the many stories that took place in the 2000 years of church history. May they inspire us, may they guide us to, um, worship you and you alone and to make wise decisions in, in our life that we could continue faithful in that path of following you and being faithful to your, your will for our lives, your plan, your, your constitution that you've left us for your kingdom.

May we be loyal citizens and, uh, helping the, for the greater cause of the kingdom wherever we can. Forgive us where we often get, uh, sidetracked and selfish in our interests. And, uh, Lord, cleanse our, our hearts from this and, and may we be drawn closer to you each day. So again, we ask your blessing on this gathering, on this talk, and, uh, may your will be done through it and may we be inspired again by the, the precious gift of the New Testament that we have today. We pray this all in the name of Jesus. Amen.

All right. God bless you, Brother Philip, as you share. Amen. Thank you for that prayer, brother. It's been a privilege to be asked to study into this topic and to do that. It's been a faith builder for me as I studied it and thought about the, the canon of the New Testament, the books that God has given us and his inspiration and written revelation to us.

So I hold in my hands here a Bible, and this is the most illegal book in the history of the world. And so it's a privilege that I can hold it here in front of a screen and not worry about, in this country, any repercussions about that.

The Bible, though, is not only the most illegal book in history, it's currently on a banned list in at least 52 countries. So many people don't have the privilege of owning one today without fear. Now, those of us who are Christians have been taught that the Bible is the inspired revelation of God to mankind, reveals his will, it's his message to us. And it contains the Old and the New Testaments, the Old Covenant explaining God's dealings and working in history up to the time of Jesus, and the New Testament describing God's workings through Jesus and the New Covenant and the founding of the church.

So, um, many of us just read this book and we don't know very much about the history and how it was written down and, uh, transmitted to us as an authoritative book. So I want to talk about that today.

So the canonization of the New Testament. Canonization. What does that mean? That's, uh, the process by which the New Testament was, uh, given to us as an authoritative collection of books. And we're going to talk on these topics: framing the subject, the writing of the New Testament, the collection of the New Testament, how were the books collected together, the early Christian witness to the canon, what did the early church have to say about this, and then we'll have a short conclusion.

So let's talk about framing the subject. What is the biblical canon? Canon comes from a Greek word, which refers to a rod or a measuring stick. And basically, it has the thought of those books that are the rule of life, those that are authoritative for us. So when we talk about the biblical canon, we're speaking of a list of books that are considered authoritative for the Christian.

So how did we get the canon? And why is that an important question? Well, there's a lot of different opinions about that. Uh, we have the extrinsic model, which probably most people in the world who are skeptical of the claims of Christianity would hold to this model, and they would, they would see the collection of the biblical books and the writing of them as a natural, historical, and entirely human process. In other words, one that was not God-inspired and God-directed.

Then there's the magisterial model, and that's the idea that the church is the entity that collected these books and declared them to be canonical. The Catholic and Orthodox churches would basically hold that view. And then there's the intrinsic model, and that's the idea that the authority of the New Testament is inherent in the books as God-inspired scripture.

So because God inspired these books and they were written down upon his inspiration by people he had commissioned to do that, they carry an authoritative message from God to us. And any book in the canon is there because it's authoritative and it's there because of the result of divine activity.

I just need to adjust my window a little bit here.

Okay. So Michael J. Kruger writes, "The biblical canon is a collection of scriptural books that God has given his corporate people, which are distinguished by their divine qualities, reception by the collective body and their apostolic connection, either by authorship or association."

So that is the idea of what the canon is that I'll be working from. And another author, L. Scott Kellam, writes this. He says, "To be frank, to study the New Testament canon is to stare into the mists of history.

These mists dispel only occasionally to show bits and pieces regarding the question of canon. For example, in the second century, we have no record of any discussion about forming a New Testament canon. Yet by the end of that century, it is clear much of the New Testament canon is firmly set.

Thus, Bruce Metzger could note, 'Nothing is more amazing in the annals of the Christian church than the absence of detailed accounts of so significant a process.'" So Bruce Metzger says, "This is absolutely amazing that we have so little data on something that's so important.

And I would agree that that's amazing, but I think there's actually an explanation for it. So if the early Christians took it for granted that there was a certain group of individuals who were qualified to write scripture, then the writings of those individuals could be received as scripture with minimal conflict or even comment.

In other words, if you believe that, for example, the Apostle Paul can write to you in an authoritative way and his writings are inspired, then you don't really have to argue about that. The main question would become, was this particular book written by an apostle or not?

Now, on the other hand, if certain church leaders were trying to sort through a mass of materials and ratify those that supported whatever agendas the church leaders wanted to promote, we would expect this to be a protracted and contentious process. So if it's church leaders who are trying to agree and argue about which books are canonical, you would expect a lot of data about that.

And the extrinsic model that I mentioned earlier would demand that sort of a process, sort of an evolutionary process of the church, um, agreeing, disagreeing, and coming to terms about which books are canonical. But as I'm going to try to demonstrate, while the second idea that church leaders selected the canon is often promoted in academia and popular-level presentations, the first suggestion that the writings of the apostles and apostolic men were immediately received as scripture is the clearest interpretation of the data.

Now, L. Scott Kellam goes on to say this, "For the most part, the existing evidence for the canon is known. Agreement on how to interpret those lines of evidence is not forthcoming. Most of this disagreement comes from the development and role of interpretive models that are based on foundational assumptions. So the result is a mass of secondary literature often in disagreement regarding the same pool of evidence."

So we don't have a lot of new evidence to come up with here. We're just going to talk about the best interpretation of that. And the assumptions that we start with are going to determine how we interpret it.

So we have diverging starting points. Now, during the age of enlightenment and beyond, there were a growing number of scholars who sought to explain the world in rationalistic and naturalistic terms. And they simultaneously rejected explanations that involved divine and supernatural causes.

So under point one there, liberal scholars tend to have an anti-supernatural bias. So they want to explain the Christian faith not as founded by a divine human who was born of a virgin, performed amazing miracles, and rose bodily from the dead.

But as a religion that started from the appreciation of certain disciples for their wise teacher, Jesus, and that evolved through time. So everybody agrees there was a wise man, a wise teacher named Jesus, or I should say almost everybody, and that he was crucified. But those who don't believe in the supernatural don't believe he rose from the dead. And they need to explain how we got from a teacher who was appreciated to an idea that he did all these miracles and, uh, that he was the Messiah, that he was the Son of God, God in the flesh, and so forth.

So the way to understand that is, you know, through time, uh, legends and myths grew up about him and, um, and they were eventually written down and became Christian dogma.

So those who follow this line of thinking generally assume the books of the New Testament were written many decades after the events they described, and perhaps by people other than the traditional claims of authorship. They needed time for this Christian faith to develop and take on its distinctive beliefs.

And additionally, those who see the development of the canon this way often believe the books of the New Testament were selected out of a large body of gospels and epistles. And the ones that happened to survive were those that were approved of by the church as it developed and solidified its beliefs.

So in this, uh, liberal thought line, if Christianity had developed differently, then different books might have been promoted as canonical. So here's an example of, uh, something that might suggest that this book here that I'm holding up is called The Lost Books of the Bible and the Forgotten Books of Eden.

Now, I don't know what the compilers really think, but I would say that this title is attempting to convey an impression. And the impression here is that certain books could have been included in the Bible, um, but for one reason or another, maybe they were suppressed by the church, but somehow they were kept out.

And so there's this suggestion that here are the lost books that could have been in the Bible. However, they were sidelined and forgotten.

Now, I would say that the liberal view of the New Testament tends to rule the day in academia and things you, um, you see written. So a good example would be just go to Wikipedia and look up authorship of the gospels. Now, they'll, they'll let you know there are people who disagree with this, but they'll say things like this.

Matthew. Most modern scholars hold that it was written in the last quarter of the first century by a male Jew who stood on the margin between traditional and non-traditional Jewish values and who was familiar with technical, legal aspects of scripture being debated in his time.

Mark. Traditionally attributed to Mark the Evangelist, the companion of the Apostle Peter, the Gospel is anonymous, and scholarship is inconclusive on its authorship. It is dated to around 70 AD and was likely written in Rome for a Gentile audience.

Luke. The author is anonymous. The traditional view that Luke the Evangelist was the companion of Paul is still occasionally put forward, but the scholarly consensus emphasizes the many contradictions between Acts and the authentic Pauline letters. The most common dating for its composition is around AD 80 to 90.

And the Gospel of John. Early Christian tradition, first found in Irenaeus, identified this disciple with John the Apostle. But most scholars have abandoned this hypothesis or hold it only tenuously. There are multiple reasons for this conclusion, including, for example, the fact that the Gospel is written in good Greek and displays sophisticated theology and is therefore unlikely to have been the work of a simple fisherman.

Most scholars estimate the final form of the text to be around AD 90 to 110. So, of course, this prompts an obvious question. What is the reason that the apparent majority of scholars put the authorship of the Gospels late in the first century and they doubt they were written by the traditional authors?

Well, as I mentioned, it's really because they have an anti-supernatural bias. They need time in their theory for myths and legends to collect about the miracles of Jesus and so forth. But especially, there's one point especially that causes them to put these Gospels late in writing in comparison to conservative Christians. And that is, if you don't believe in divine prophecy, then you assume that these Gospels, particularly the three synoptic Gospels, must have been written after the fall of Jerusalem.

That's because the three synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, describe in detail events leading up to the fall of Jerusalem and as a predictive prophecy. So if you don't believe in predictive prophecy, then you have to believe they were written after that point.

So conservative scholars, in contrast, accept the claims of the New Testament as true and inspired by God. They generally believe the evidence supports earlier dates for the writing, that the traditions that assign the writings of the New Testament to Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Peter, James, and Jude are accurate.

In short, they accept the New Testament as true and authoritative for the Christian. So those are two poles there, but obviously between those two poles, there's any number of intermediate positions. So there are people who see the development of Christian doctrine.

Maybe they think that Paul had certain positions about the role of women in church leadership, but the truths that Jesus introduced into the world have continued to mature and we've moved past some of those early ideas. Maybe we've moved past their cultural world and we just need to apply Jesus' teachings to our modern world.

Or they might think that the Apostle Peter wrote the letter we call First Peter, but maybe they doubt that he wrote the one called Second Peter.

So there's, it's not just a liberal or conservative possibility. There's plenty of intermediate positions. But now if someone belongs to the Catholic Church and has what I call the magisterial view, they're less concerned about the authorship of some of the books of the New Testament because they believe that the Church, in that case, the Catholic Church or maybe the Orthodox Church, has the power to determine canonicity. So they might think that we don't know who wrote Second Peter, but that doesn't really matter. The Church has decided that it belongs in the canon. So it has the authority of the Church behind it.

So we have limited time and I'm not going to spend a lot of time refuting the many positions and variations. But what I'd like to do is develop a theology of the New Testament starting from the ground up.

Let's start from the Old Testament and the teaching of Jesus that made the writing and validation of new authoritative scripture inevitable.

So the writing of the New Testament. The Old Testament, I think, has an expectation that if you follow the logic of it, would indicate a New Testament is going to be written. So Isaiah chapter 2, verse 3 says, "Many people shall come and say, 'Come and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways and we shall walk in his paths. For out of Zion shall go forth the law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.'" So the context here is predicting the new covenant in the Christian era and the law is going to go forth from Jerusalem.

In the Christian church, initially the Gospel did go out of the city of Jerusalem, could be referring to that, but also the church is called the new Jerusalem.

And so it could just be talking about the law and the word of God going out of the church. Could be both. It wouldn't limit it to one or the other. But the old covenant was given by Moses and was written down in authoritative writings for the Jews in the Old Testament. And so if there's a new law, you would have an expectation that would be written down too.

You'd have an expectation that the message would be preserved in such a way that it couldn't be changed by word of mouth or over time. And so I think you could just kind of assume that the Old Testament in predicting a new covenant is looking forward to new scriptures.

So who would have the authority to write those new scriptures?

Well, there were a unique group of people in the early church with a unique level of authority who were called apostles. Now, initially, Jesus called 12 disciples and it says there, I think in Luke's Gospel, that he named them apostles.

So the first group of apostles were 12 men. But eventually that term was broadened out a bit. Now, we have to be careful with this word because the Greek word apostolos can just mean somewhat generically one who is sent or a messenger. So not every time that the Greek word apostolos is written down does it refer to this group of authoritative individuals.

However, the early Christians often used it in a specialized sense. And I'm going to be talking about that. They used it of a group of people who were called to found the church and they were an extension of Jesus' authority for the church.

So an example of that would be in Ephesians 2:19-20. "Now therefore you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone." So there's a sequence here. Jesus is the chief cornerstone, but there's also a foundation of apostles and prophets. And these are people who helped in the foundation of the church.

Now, it wasn't, it's not just the scripture that we can source this idea out of. The bishop Ignatius of Antioch wrote around the year AD 105 on the way to his martyrdom, and he agrees with this understanding. So he wrote a letter called the Epistle to the Romans by Ignatius. And he said, "I do not, as Peter and Paul, issue commandments unto you. They were apostles."

So here is Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, but he considers himself to have a different level of authority than Peter and Paul, who issue commandments to the church. So who were the apostles? Well, as I mentioned, it was initially 12.

But you can get a pretty good idea of who these were in 1 Corinthians 15. I have that up on your screen. Paul writes this, "For I delivered to you, first of all, that which I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures, and that he was seen by Cephas, and then by the 12. After that, he was seen by over 500 brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain to the present, but some have fallen asleep.

After that, he was seen by James, then by all the apostles. Then, last of all, he was seen by me also as one born out of due time." So there in verse 7, Paul refers to a group who apparently on one occasion all saw Jesus together.

And because the word apostolos means one who is sent, we could possibly infer that at this event there was some sort of commissioning given to them. Now, I don't know if this was the only commissioning that can make someone an apostle, because obviously the 12 were commissioned by Jesus to carry his message and bear his authority. But here, the resurrected Christ is seen by James and then by all the apostles.

Now, there's one last apostle, Paul says, and that's himself. And he has the claim to be an apostle because of two reasons. He was, he saw the resurrected Christ, you know, the story of how he was struck down on the road. And at that sighting of Christ, he was given a commission. And Jesus called him to go to the Gentiles and preach the gospel to them. So he says, "Last of all, he was seen by me also as one born out of due time."

So who were these apostles who saw the resurrected Christ and were considered to be an apostles? Considered to be apostles. Well, we don't know for sure who all they were, but we have various verses that give confirmation of this idea of an apostolic group. So in Galatians 1, verses 18 to 19, Paul says, "Then after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter and remained with him 15 days.

But I saw none of the other apostles except James, the Lord's brother." James, of course, was mentioned in the previous passage, 1 Corinthians 15. But James is not one of the 12. He is the brother of the Lord Jesus.

And here we find out that he's an apostle. So you may have wondered, well, what made James an apostle? Well, perhaps it was that event described in 1 Corinthians 15, when all the apostles saw the Lord.

Now, Paul has more to say about what constitutes an apostle. In 2 Corinthians 2, verse 12, he says, "Truly, the signs of an apostle were accomplished among you with all perseverance and signs and wonders and mighty deeds." So Paul is claiming to have a commission from God, and he is validating that by signs and wonders and mighty deeds.

I certainly believe that Jesus can gift people with healings and miracles and so forth, but Paul seems to think that he has quite a significant demonstration of this as a claim of his apostolic authority. So he goes on to talk about what the authority of an apostle is.

And in 1 Corinthians 14:37, he says, "If anyone thinks himself to be a prophet or spiritual, let him acknowledge the things which I write to you are the commandments of the Lord."

So not only does Paul consider himself an apostle, but as part of that calling, when he writes a letter, it should be considered as the Lord's commandments. And this really is what establishes our understanding of New Testament scripture. The apostles and prophets according to Ephesians 2:20 were uniquely tasked with founding the church, and that involves transmitting the message of Jesus, but also establishing doctrine. We see the apostles doing that in various places throughout the New Testament.

So if a book was written by an apostle or carries apostolic authority, then it should be viewed as the commandments of the Lord and as scripture.

So not all the apostles wrote down scripture. Some of them probably were just busy preaching. Maybe they didn't have the gift of writing. Maybe they were satisfied with the writings of others. But we have several men who are clearly listed as apostles who wrote scripture, and those are Matthew, John, Paul, and James.

So apostolic authority, however, could be considered to be conferred on someone who's a close associate of an apostle. And the way to think about that is like this. If you can infer that an apostle gave their approval and maybe lent their authority to a work, then it carries apostolic authority.

So the remaining authors of the New Testament were Mark, Luke, and Jude. And we have some debate about who wrote Hebrews, although that's outside of our scope.

And the early church had some opinions about what sort of authority these men had. The early church said that Mark was the companion of Peter and that his gospel was a written summary of Peter's teaching. So if that's the case, then it would be logical to assume that he showed it to Peter and Peter gave his stamp of approval on that writing. And so it can be considered to carry Peter's authority.

Luke, of course, is a close companion of Paul. There's no doubt that Paul was aware of his writings and could have given his approval and authority to those writings. But I don't think we should dismiss Mark and Luke as having apostolic authority in their own right. So we don't know who all these men were who were called the apostles in Acts 15. But an early Christian named Epiphanius of Salamis wrote in the late 4th century that Mark and Luke were of the 70.

During his earthly ministry, Jesus sent out 70 disciples. Now, I can't confirm that, but it's certainly possible that these men had apostolic authority in their own right.

And Jude is also linked in an apostolic context. So Paul is writing to the Corinthians about his right to have a wife. And he says, "Do we have no right to take along a believing wife, as do also the other apostles, the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?" So the way that he frames that statement, it would connect the idea of apostles to the brothers of the Lord, as if they were part of that group. Now, Jude was the brother of James and the brother of Jesus, so he's included in that statement. So I think possibly he could be considered to have apostolic authority.

And certainly in his book being considered canonical by the early church, they believe that he did as well.

So here we've been talking about the self-authenticating nature of scripture. Scripture has within itself evidence that its authority claims can be vindicated. And obviously, something can be self-authenticating or it can receive authentication from the outside as well. But the scripture actually makes quite a lot of claims about itself, and I'm just going to go through some of those. So first, Peter calls Paul's writing scripture, 1 Peter 3, an account that the long suffering of our Lord of salvation, even as our beloved brother Paul, also according to the wisdom given unto him, hath written unto you. As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable rest, as they also do, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.

So Peter is equating Paul's writings with scripture. Now, some might counter and say, "Well, the Greek word for scripture, graphed, does not necessarily mean canonical or inspired." And that is true. But if you look at the context here, Peter is obviously talking about authoritative writings. You don't take a cookbook and rest it to your own destruction because you don't really care what it says. However, if you consider something to have authority and you dislike the authority that it has, then you might want to twist it. So Paul's writings were clearly considered authoritative.

Now, here's another one. Paul called Luke's gospel scripture. And I find this in 1 Timothy 5:18. Paul writes, "For the scripture says, 'You shall not muzzle the ox while it is threshing, and the laborer is worthy of his wages.'" So that "You shall not muzzle the ox" comes from Deuteronomy.

But the laborer is worthy of his wages is not found in the Old Testament anywhere. So where does that come from? Well, it's Luke 10:17. Now, it seems clear from this that Paul is referring to the Gospel of Luke as scripture.

So here we have the authority of the Apostle Paul in referring to Luke's gospel in a scriptural context.

Now, that may not be enough evidence by itself, but we'll go through some more later on. So let's talk about the timing of these writings. We believe that 2 Timothy was written around AD 64. So that would indicate that Luke's gospel, quoted by referenced by Paul, was written before then. So I think it can be shown that the gospels were written early, before the year AD 70, or the destruction of Jerusalem.

Now, interestingly, there's a great number, a large percentage of majority text manuscripts, Greek handwritten writings that are ancient, that have marginal notes in them which give dates for the writings of the gospels. So a large number of Greek manuscripts in the colophons or the sidebars of the Gospel of Matthew say, "Published eight years after the ascension of Christ." Now, that would be the year AD 41, if we understand Christ to have died in the year 33.

Mark's gospel, a great number of manuscripts have the marginal note, "Published 10 years after the ascension of Christ." That would be AD 43. Luke, a great number of manuscripts say, "Published 15 years after the ascension of Christ." That would be AD 48.

And quite a number of John's gospel have a marginal note that says, "Published 32 years after the ascension of Christ," which would be AD 65. Now, let's talk about that a little bit. I know that many people would think this is too early. They would be very skeptical of those dates.

Maybe we'll start with the Gospel of Luke. So we first meet Luke in AD 49. He shows up at Philippi. And it appears that he was left there in charge of the church when Paul moved on after baptizing the Philippian jailer. And then later on, he rejoins Paul on his journey. So apparently, Luke was a mature enough Christian in his faith that by AD 49, he was left in charge of a church.

And Luke himself seems to claim that he was there at the beginning of the Christian movement. So in his gospel, chapter 1, verse 3, he says, "He had a perfect understanding of all things from the very first." That would seem to indicate that at least from the earliest days of the church, he was there and he was observing.

Now, John Chrysostom, in his homily on 2 Corinthians 8, talks about what Paul says. Paul says, "We sent the brother whose praise in the gospel was spread throughout all the churches." And said that some people believe that refers to Luke.

And the reason his praise in the gospel was spread throughout all the churches is because he had written the gospel and that had been passed around quite extensively. And if that's true, then his gospel writing had been spread throughout the churches by the year 56 AD, which is about the timing of 2 Corinthians.

And I think that would validate a suggestion that his gospel was written around the year AD 48. There's a bit more about that.

Well, I'm going to set that aside for the moment. Now, I mentioned that John was published, according to many marginal notes, 32 years after the ascension of Christ. And people are going to tend to be skeptical of that because many people have suggested that John's gospel was written quite late in the 1st century. But I want you to notice in John 5:2, it says, "Now there is in Jerusalem by the sheep pool, by the sheep gate, a pool which is called in the Hebrew Bethesda, having five porches."

So John says, "This is the case." Now, he maybe had a slip of the pin, depending on whether you're willing to allow that to an inspired gospel writing. Or he wrote this before AD 70 because after the destruction of Jerusalem, this situation no longer existed. The entire city was destroyed. And to say that there is in Jerusalem by the sheep gate a pool called in the Hebrew Bethesda was not true after the year AD 70.

So that, along with a few other things, suggests to me that, in fact, the early Christian proposal that this was written by the year AD 65 may well be correct.

And if you think about it, it really would be no surprise if the apostles wanted to write down the teachings of Jesus very early. As the gospel is going out from Jerusalem and you're converting people, to trust that they would simply remember your words orally with nothing written down stretches my imagination. It's very easy for me to imagine that Matthew's gospel being written eight years after the ascension of Christ is a likelihood. And while there has been a lot of pressure in academia to put gospels late, and that tends to influence us, I personally don't know of any reason why those dates could not be accurate.

And so without evidence of the contrary, I'd suggest that we just assume they may be correct. So let's talk a little bit about criticisms of these early dates. Skeptics like Bart Ehrman present a hypothesis that the apostles were illiterate men. The teachings of Jesus circulated in an oral form for decades before eventually written down.

According to this viewpoint, many gospels were written, but the ones that survived were the ones that agreed with what became official church dogma, and the rest were discriminated against and devalued by the early church.

Well, I would say that the scholars have possibly made too much out of the suggestion that most people in the Roman world were illiterate. Often you hear statistics like only 3% of people could read.

And Bart Ehrman says things like this, "Was Peter, a lower-class fisherman from rural Galilee among that minuscule fraction of the Palestinian population who could compose books in elegant Greek? He was not wealthy. He would have had no time or resources for an education, let alone an education in reading a foreign language, let alone an education in Greek composition."

So he says, "Peter was probably illiterate." But let's talk about whether or not that is as likely as he says. Jews and later Christians highly valued their written scriptures. And thus, they valued reading and education more than any previous culture. And there's data to show that literacy in the Roman world appears to have been higher than at any other time than the present. So it was very important to Jews that they knew their scriptures well because they considered them vital for their religious life. And therefore, it's important to have an education. It's important to be able to read. So Josephus, the 1st-century Jewish historian, wrote this, "Our principal care of all is this: to educate our children well.

And we think it to be the most necessary business of our whole life to observe the laws that have been given to us and to keep those rules of piety that have been delivered down to us." So he says, "We educate our children well."

A modern author, Ryan Hembry, wrote this, "Significantly, the facts of history and archaeology truly illuminate the ignorance of the critic regarding reading and writing in the 1st century. As Brian Edwards and Clive Anderson have documented, all over Israel, 1st-century texts have turned up in Aramean, Nabatean, Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, including marriage and divorce documents, food lists, orders for merchandise, soldiers' payslips, legal documents, and even graffiti. Not infrequently, texts were in more than one language. When Mount Vesuvius erupted and engulfed Pompeii in AD 79, its legacy was to preserve a snapshot of 1st-century Greek and Roman life. Writing appears everywhere.

And literally thousands of inscriptions, political advertising, love notes, and the erotic have been found scratched on the walls." So I think possibly historians are sometimes guilty of chronological snobbery in thinking that most people in the 1st century were illiterate. I'm not sure the evidence bears that up.

And it's interesting when Pilate crucified Jesus, he had an inscription put over Jesus' cross written in Hebrew and Greek and Latin. Apparently, he thought enough people could read it that it was worth doing that.

So in contrast to folks who might suggest that the gospels could not have been written down because the apostles could not read or write, I don't think we have evidence to prove that.

So were there lots of gospels? Along with the idea of a late writing based on oral transmission comes the idea of lots of gospels. So Ehrman says again, "We shouldn't think that there were basically four and everything else was dependent more or less on the four. There were lots floating around all at the same time. The four became the four only by the end of the 2nd century at the earliest."

But where does he get this idea from? Well, surprise, he gets it out of his head. And he goes on to say, "I'm still wrestling with how to imagine the situation at the end of the 1st and beginning of the 2nd century.

Unlike the vast majority of my posts where I'm writing something I never think, here I'm simply thinking out loud. I really am trying to figure this one out. At this point, I'm imagining two scenarios and I'm not sure which one is better."

So I would suggest that we leave off our imaginations and look at the actual historical testimonies. And if we do that, we would find the historical record says that four authentic gospels were written down by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and that later in the 2nd century and beyond, Gnostics and other heretics wrote down competing gospels.

However, if you compare these, they do not have the eyewitness character and the historical reliability of the authentic gospels, and they teach a Gnostic view of Christianity. So I don't think we have evidence that there were lots of gospels and the church selected four of them.

Origen has this to say, "Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Luke," he writes, "did not try to write. They wrote their gospels when they were filled with the Holy Spirit. As a result, the church has four gospels while heretics have very many."

So that's how a late 2nd-century, early 3rd-century Christian thought about the gospels.

So in short, the criticism that the four gospels were written late and are not eyewitness testimonies based on modern biases about the formation of Christianity and ignores historical evidence to the contrary.

So let's talk about the collection of the New Testament. Well, first, there were sub-collections of New Testament books.

Early Christianity had an authority structure that flowed out from the 12 apostles. They were the recognized first leaders of the church. And the early church was highly interconnected. We can see this as we read through Acts and the Pauline letters. There were traveling evangelists who went from Jerusalem to Rome and beyond. They kept the churches in contact with each other to some degree as they traveled.

And the gospel went forth from Jerusalem, but collections of money were taken in European churches and went back to the church at Jerusalem. So I don't think it would be a surprise that as the gospels were written down by authoritative individuals, they were known to all and they were very early collected together.

So we don't have very much evidence that there was a situation where part of the church knew about John's gospel and part of the church knew about Mark's gospel. In reality, the fact that there were four gospels was known to all from the very early times.

So a 2nd-century writing, which is known as the Muratorium Fragment, says this about John's gospel. "The fourth of the gospels is that of John, one of the disciples. To his fellow disciples and bishops who had been urging him to write, he said, 'Fast with me from today to three days, and what will be revealed to each one, let us all tell it to one another.'

In the same night, it was revealed to Andrew, one of the apostles, that John should write down all things in his own name while all of them should review it." So by the year 170, there was this story about John's gospel being written down. And Eusebius, book three, says, "When Mark and Luke had already published their gospels, they say that John, who had employed all his time in proclaiming the gospel orally, finally proceeded to write for the following reason. The three gospels already mentioned having come into the hands of all, and then to his own too, they say that he accepted them and bore witness to their truthfulness, but that there was lacking in them an account of the deeds done by Christ at the beginning of his ministry."

So John felt there were some gaps in the record, and he wanted to add to them. But this indicates that from the very beginning, there were four gospels known. So these four gospels quickly began to circulate as a collection. Now, it's interesting, prior to this time, the popular form of books was the scroll. But if you put all four gospels into a scroll together, it would be much too long and too large to be very manageable.

To go from one place to the next, you'd have to unroll and re-roll quite a bit of a scroll. So the early Christians began collecting books in the codex form. Now, the codex was very similar to our modern book, and it contained individual leaves bound at the margin, like a modern spine-bound book. And the codex was well-suited to compilations of different materials where a person might want to flip back and forth between sections rather than unrolling from beginning to end.

So we have evidence that very early, all four gospels were circulating together in one codex. But also, the same is true of the Pauline letters.

Now, there's various theories about how the Pauline letters were all collected together. Some have suggested there's six or more theories. What we do know is that they did circulate together very early as a collection. And there's actually a reference to this in Peter's letter, I believe, where he says, refers to all of Paul's epistles.

Peter knew there were multiple epistles, and that reference to all of his letters would imply that there was a known collection of them.

So there are many early manuscript fragments showing multiple Pauline letters collected together, although the fragmentary nature of these manuscripts often makes it difficult to determine how many letters were included.

Some collections appear to have had 13 letters, omitting Hebrews. Other collections had 14. For example, the Muratorium Fragment, likely composed around AD 170, mentions 13 epistles of Paul.

So the evidence that we have is that the Pauline corpus circulated as a 13 or 14-letter collection because some in the West were doubtful about Hebrews. Now, I have a quote from my book, Creating the Canon, about this regarding Hebrews. "Contrary to common assumptions, the recognition of the apostolic authority of Hebrews does not appear to have been a late development. The author of 1 Clement quotes extensively from Hebrews, that'd be around AD 90. Many additional writers regarded Hebrews as a Pauline writing and recognized its authoritative status."

So it was really later that more questions about Hebrews came up, and not everyone was sure it should be included in the canon. So how do you explain the Pauline collection? Well, I believe the most compelling theory is the personal involvement theory, and that's that Paul himself is responsible. So if Paul understood himself to be writing scripture, and I think that there's evidence of that when Paul says that the things that I write are the commandments of the Lord, then it would be natural for him to collect his writings together. Now, we have record from other people in the 1st century, like the Roman statesman Cicero, that often a writer would send a letter to someone, but he would retain a copy of the letter in his own collection.