The Reason for Canon

Believe it or not, there are scholars today who say that the New Testament was imposed on the church to oppress a certain sect of Christianity.

How do we defend against that kind of thinking? We continue our look at the New Testament canon next on Renewing Your Mind. When we talk about the New Testament canon, we're not referring to an 18th century artillery weapon. What we're referring to is the trusted list of books that Christians through the centuries have agreed are inspired by God. Unfortunately, scholars opposed to the historic Christian faith argue that we can't trust the New Testament canon.

But if the canon comes into question, the gospel those books teach comes into question as well. This week on Renewing Your Mind, Dr. Michael Krueger is with us to strengthen our understanding of the origin of the New Testament. I want to begin our next session with a rather simple but unexpected question for you, and it's a question I'm not sure many of us have ever really thought about before, and that is, why do we have a New Testament at all?

I want to dial back our conversation about New Testament canon by asking this question because I think it's the heart of this whole discussion of New Testament canon. We want to ask the question in this session, why did the New Testament canon really come into existence in the first place? Why do we even have a New Testament? Should we have had a New Testament?

Now, I asked that question. It seems like one of those questions that nobody really asks because for us as Bible-believing evangelical Christians, it's a bit of a given, right, that we would have a New Testament, but you should know that in the world of scholarship, it's not at all a given that early Christians should have had a New Testament or would have had a New Testament. In fact, what we're seeing emerge is a unique challenge. Some are now beginning to challenge whether there even should be a New Testament. They're beginning to argue that the idea of a New Testament was the furthest thing from the mind of the earliest Christians, that they didn't want one, they didn't think there was going to be one, they weren't even thinking about one, and it was only later, years later, centuries later, that the church decided to have a canon, and in one sense imposed this idea of a collection of written books on a church that never really wanted it in the first place. Now, to be sure, the books themselves were written in the first century, right, but the argument goes that yeah, but they were sort of hijacked later and made to serve a purpose they were never intended to serve, to become scripture and have a canon that the church never really ever foresaw, wanted, or desired. Now, that whole idea then suggests that the canon was not innate to early Christianity and was sort of foisted upon her from the outside. That idea then suggests that this whole idea of canon is sort of an extrinsic phenomenon, right? It's a late, after-the-fact idea, kind of pushed on Christianity when she really didn't ever want it or expect it, it's just a late development. Now, that whole idea just laid out for you, believe it or not, is a dominant framework today in canonical studies, and this session is devoted to it for a couple reasons. One reason that we're devoting our time to this is because you need to know that a lot of scholars that you read out there, a lot of people you hear about on the internet and so on, actually are doing their investigations with that whole framework in their head. They were convinced that canon was not innate or natural within early Christianity, it was a late, after-the-fact development, and therefore that colors the whole way.

They see the historical evidence. They don't expect there to be a canon. They think by definition a canon is a late idea, and it's just sort of awkwardly out of sync with what canon was designed to do. But another reason, though, I think that we need to understand this particular model out there and push back against it, because if we can push back against it, we can actually show that canon was innate and natural to the early Christian faith.

In fact, that's what I want to do in this session together with you. I want to argue, and I think there's great evidence for this, that canon was not a late, after-the-fact idea, but I think would have grown naturally out of the early Christian world. And so this is really a discussion in this session of two completely different paradigms. Okay, one paradigm says, canon's an after-the-fact idea, the church was all interested in oral tradition anyway and probably didn't want books, and they really weren't interested in making an authoritative canon of books, and that was something created by the later church. In contrast, we're going to argue for a different paradigm altogether. We're going to argue that, no, there's a reason to think that canon would have emerged very innately, naturally, dare I even say organically, from within early Christianity, and to some extent therefore was inevitable. That's what I want to argue. Now, if I can argue that, how's it going to help us? Here's how it's going to help us. If I can argue that, it's going to give us a framework for expecting an early canon and a canon that would have popped up rather quickly and that Christians would have been quite willing to receive out of the gate, and that can really help our case that Christianity had a authoritative canon from a very early point.

So here's what I want to do in this session. I want to make an argument that canon was innate and organically developed within early Christianity, and here's how I'm going to do it. I'm going to argue that early Christians had three different doctrinal convictions, three different beliefs that they held, and when you look at those three beliefs together, what I'm going to suggest to you is it creates the perfect soil out of which a canon could sprout and emerge. These three doctrinal beliefs, when looked at as a collective whole, created the perfect environment, the right temperature, the right soil, the right moisture for this little plant we call the canon to sprout up as a seedling out of the soil and start to grow. So think about two different models. Our model is saying that you had the perfect soil within early Christianity for a seedling to sprout and grow, and the other model is saying no, there was no interesting canon in early Christianity, but someone dug a big hole and took a plant from somewhere else and slammed it back in there and forced it on the church, sort of an exterior sort of insertion, if you will.

We're going to say it grew up naturally, whereas the other view says no, it was sort of, you know, planted forcibly in a soil that never held it to start with, sort of as an artificial transplant from some other place. So those are two different perspectives, and I want to argue here that we actually have very good reasons to think canon would have been an early, innate thing based on these three convictions that Christians had. So let's walk through those three convictions in this session now, and we'll just look at them one at a time and talk about how each of them gives us expectations that Christians would have expected and wanted and looked to a new collection of books.

Okay, what's the first of those three beliefs? The first of those three beliefs is that early Christians believed that Jesus finished the Old Testament story. Early Christians believed that Jesus finished the Old Testament story. Now, we tend to not talk that way, and here's why we don't talk that way is because we tend to, as Christians, and I include myself in this, think of the story of Jesus as a new story, that it's this new story that we want to tell people, but that's not how the first Christians viewed it. The first Christians being Jews, right, being born within Judaism, growing up as Jews, they did not see the story of Jesus as a new story. They saw the story of Jesus as the completion of an old story. In other words, what they saw happening in the work, in the life, in the ministry, in the deeds, in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, was they saw that as finishing what God had started generations before.

To put it another way, people who were the earliest followers of Jesus looked at the Old Testament as a story that was incomplete, and that's exactly what it was. If you think about the whole Old Testament narrative for a moment and the story of it, we can't rehearse it all here, but it's basically a story of God making promises, and he makes them initially to Abraham, and he repeats those promises to Israel, and he preached those promises not just through Moses, but through David, and what are those promises? I'm going to redeem the people for myself. I'm going to save them. I'm going to forgive their sins. I'm going to usher in the kingdom, and I'm going to do this all through my Messiah.

You wait and see, says God. I'm going to break into the world in an amazing way. I'm going to transform. I'm going to redeem.

I'm going to save. It's going to happen, and then the Old Testament ends. Everyone's like, well, what? Is the story going to end?

Well, I don't understand. God makes all these promises. You have all this sense that it's going to happen, and then the Old Testament just stops.

Here's what's interesting. When we look in the first century, particularly in the days of Jesus, what we see is a great sense of anticipation that God at some point soon was going to finish that story. In fact, if you look at the Gospel authors and the New Testament writers, they always talk about people being in this posture of longing.

They're kind of on the edge of their seats waiting. Is God now doing what He said He would do in this incomplete story we call the Old Testament? Is He finally going to break into the world and save us like He promised? In fact, this is all over the place when we look at the New Testament. We read in John 1 41 that people were looking for the Messiah. We read in Luke 2 38 that they were waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem. We read in Luke 2 25 that they were longing for the consolation of Israel. Acts 1 6 tells us they were waiting for God to restore the kingdom to Israel. There was this sense that people in the first century were just waiting on the edge of their seats for God to do what He said He was going to do, that the Old Testament story was never done. Think about Jesus' very first sermon in Mark. Jesus ups in Mark and says, I've got good news for you. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the gospel.

Now, you and I hear that and we think, well, what does that mean? But the Jews knew what that meant. When Jesus says the kingdom of God is at hand, what He's saying is God is going to finish His story, the story that He started in the Old Testament. Here's the point I want you to see is that in the first century situation, Jews viewed the Old Testament as a story without an ending. Can you imagine going to the bookstore and buying your favorite novel and not knowing yet, of course, you're going to love it and you read it and you're all excited and you get to the last chapter and it's not there.

You're like, I want my money back, right? What do you mean it's a story without an ending? I want to know how this all wraps up. You feel like there has to be some ending to the story. The scholar N.T. Wright put it this way and I think he's right. He said this, the great story of the Hebrew scriptures was therefore inevitably read in this time period as a story in search of a conclusion. Now, how does this all affect canon?

Here's where I want to go with this and this is very important. The earliest Christians who were Jews believed that God did finish the story and they believed that it was finished in the work and the teachings and the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. The story had its proper conclusion. If in fact they believed that God had finished the story in Jesus of Nazareth, it is all the more reasonable to think that that story might have actually been written. To put it another way, it's all the more reasonable to think that someone might have actually penned that last chapter. Otherwise, you would have a play with no final act, right?

You'd be like, go in, you go to intermission, you come back, the play doesn't end, but you know it's got something to say. The Christian said, we're not going to let that happen. We've got a reason that we think that story has reached its proper conclusion in Jesus of Nazareth and the New Testament books would have been that conclusion. They would have been them finishing the Old Testament story. In fact, this finds confirmation in the fact that when we look into some of the New Testament writings, we can see evidence that they think they're finishing the Old Testament story.

I don't know if you've ever noticed this before. A good example of this is the Gospel of Matthew. The Gospel of Matthew is the very first book in the New Testament and you're thinking, well, if anybody would portray himself as finishing the Old Testament story, by golly, we might expect Matthew to do that, right? The very first book in the New Testament canon. And in fact, Matthew does do that, but in a way, we often miss.

You know, why? Because we don't like genealogies. Matthew's Gospel, as we all know, starts with the genealogy and I know what you do when you get to it because you do the same thing I do. I get the genealogy and you're like, oh my gosh, not a genealogy. These are so tedious.

They're so boring. Can I just skip this and get to the real part of Matthew? And what you realize is that Matthew starting with a genealogy was a very Jewish way of placing the story of Jesus within the larger story of Israel. Genealogies were not just names in a list.

Genealogies were a story of God's dealings with his people and Matthew was saying Jesus finishes the Old Testament story, which is in one sense Matthew saying, I am writing the completion of the Old Testament story. Now, you may not realize this, but the last book in the Old Testament canon in the days of Jesus was probably not Malachi. We don't know for sure exactly the order of the books in the Old Testament canon in the days of Jesus, but the best bet we can conclude is it's probably Chronicles.

I know that sounds odd. Like, why would you end with Chronicles? But the best evidence we have is that the last book in the Old Testament canon was probably Chronicles in the days of Jesus. Now, what's interesting about Chronicles is guess what it starts with? A genealogy. And it starts with a genealogy about who?

David. And what does Matthew start with? The first book in the New Testament canon? A genealogy.

And what is it about? The son of David. What you have here is the last book of the Old Testament canon and the first book of the New Testament canon linking together on what point, namely that Matthew views himself as writing the last chapter. What I want you to see from this first theological point, it's very simple, is that there would have been a natural reason for Christians to pen that last chapter in light of the fact that they didn't want the Old Testament story to be left with no ending, abrupt, without a conclusion. Now, that's just one of three doctrinal beliefs that early Christians had that I think would have led to a canon. Let's look at a second one.

And this is also very important. Christians not only believe, first of all, that Jesus finished the Old Testament story. Secondly, Christians believe that Jesus inaugurated a new covenant.

He inaugurated a new covenant. Now, this is an interesting move by early Christians. They didn't just see Jesus as just saving Israel or saving them from their sins. They saw the work of Jesus in a particular theological category, right? The category of covenant.

Now, for a Jew in the first century, this was a pretty well-known category, right? Because the Jew in the first century would have been well-versed in the covenant language of the Old Testament. God had made a covenant with Abraham, covenant with Moses, with David, and so on.

They would have understood this covenant language quite well. And when they looked at the ministry of Jesus, they saw that as God extending a new covenant, a new arrangement with his people to save them from their sins. Now, the word covenant, there's all kinds of different definitions, but for our purposes here, just think of a covenant kind of like a treaty, right?

It's kind of like a contract between two parties. And it would have been a well-known entity in the ancient world because different nations and different kings would often have treaties and they would call these covenants and God made a treaty, if you will, a covenant with his people to save them from their sins in the person of Jesus. And when we look in the New Testament writings, what we see is that they interpreted the work of Jesus in covenantal language.

I'll give you a few examples of this. At the last supper, what does Jesus say? This cup poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood. Jesus himself says that what I'm doing for you is inaugurating a new covenant. John the Baptist father Zachariah, when thinking about the covenant of Christ said that this is God remembering his holy covenant to Israel, Luke 1 72. Third example, Paul in 2 Corinthians 3, 6 refers to himself.

Listen to this language, fascinating. He refers to himself as a minister of the new covenant, a new covenant agent, if you will. And then of course, there's the book of Hebrews, as you well know, packed with all kinds of statements about Jesus being the guarantor of a new covenant and how we have a new covenant and we're as believers in the blood of the covenant and so on. Now, all of that makes it clear that when early Christians saw the work of Jesus, they said, this is the beginning of a new covenant. Why does that matter for Canon though?

It's got anything to do with Canon? Here's the trick. Here's what's interesting is that in the ancient Jewish world, there was a tight link between covenants and written documents. And this is an important thing to recognize. In fact, this was true in the Old Testament. If you have a covenant, you have a written manifestation of that covenant. If you have a covenant, you have the terms of that covenant, what?

Written down in a book. To put it another way, when God makes covenants, he gives books to his people that tell the terms of the covenant, that lay out the stipulations, that lay out the blessings, that lay out the terms of it, their redemption, and so on. God did it in the old and you would expect it in the new. In fact, so tight was the link between covenants and written texts that covenants more often just viewed as books. To say you had a covenant was to say you had a book. We see this throughout the Old Testament.

Listen to a few of these examples. Exodus 24, 7, then he took the book of the covenant and read it. 2 Kings 23, verse 2, and he read in there hearing all the words of the book of the covenant. Deuteronomy 4, 13, he declared to you his covenant, that is the 10 commandments, and he wrote them on two tablets. Exodus 34, 28, he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant. Deuteronomy 29, 21, the covenant written in this book.

What does this tell us? This tells us in the minds of Jews, covenants were written books. It's like you have a covenant and no written books. In fact, they were so tightly related, you could almost hold up a written book and say, this is the covenant that God has made with his people.

If that's true, here's the payoff. Christians believe that Jesus has started a new covenant, and if Jesus started a new covenant, they would have expected what? A new deposit of books that lay out the terms of that covenant. What that means then is if you were to go to an early Christian and say, hey, we have new writings now that are authoritative guide for the church, a Christian would not have said, well, how bizarre is that? I wouldn't expect that to happen. No, they would have said, well, of course, I've been waiting for that.

Why? Because God made a new covenant with us. And when God makes a covenant, we're waiting for his written manifestation of that covenant in books. This would have meant that a written canon would have been an early natural idea within the early Christian faith. Now let me mention a third theological belief here as we come now to the final one. And by the way, what's interesting about these theological beliefs is they don't even actually have to be true for there to have been a canon that emerged out of early Christianity. Now, of course, we believe these theological beliefs were true, right? We're convinced these are true. But let's imagine for the sake of argument, they're not even true.

That doesn't really matter. The fact is the early Christians thought they were true. And therefore we would have expected a canon to emerge quite naturally regardless. So our argument is not dependent on whether these beliefs were in fact true, even though we were convinced they are, of course, right?

But they still would have led to an early canon. What's the third belief then? The third belief Christians held was that God had given through Christ special authority to his apostles. Early Christians believed in the authority of the apostles. Now this is quite obvious throughout the pages of the New Testament that Christ had appointed for himself special representatives that we call apostles to speak for him, to act on his behalf, to be his mouthpiece, to bear his authority. These apostles not only could do miracles and do amazing acts, but when they spoke, Christ spoke. When they acted, Christ acted. They were his emissaries.

They were his representatives. And so much so that the words of an apostle in their office of an apostle would have been viewed as authoritative as the words of Christ. In fact, we see this all throughout the New Testament writings. And so this is why the apostles went and they delivered their message, right? That you should receive what we say because we speak for Jesus. We have his authority.

We have his commission. Now when the apostles first delivered their message in the earliest days of the first century, it would have been orally, right? They would have gone around and preached. And that had been received as the authoritative words of Jesus.

But let's ask this question for a moment. What if an apostle had taken his message and put it on paper? Normally he would have said it verbally.

What if he took his message and wrote it down? How would the earliest Christians have viewed that document? Well, here's what we see that's amazing is that they would have viewed that document with the absolute authority of the apostle, which was equal to the authority of Christ because the apostle was a spokesman for him. This is interesting because Paul makes it clear in his own writings as an example of this that they should listen to his letters just like they listen to him. Listen to this language in 2 Thessalonians 2 15. Paul says this, stand firm and hold to the traditions you were taught by us.

Listen to this phrase, either by our spoken word or by our letters. In other words, Paul is saying what I say to you verbally as an apostle and what I write down in my letters as an apostle bear the absolute same authority, namely the authority of Christ. Paul says elsewhere this in 2 Thessalonians 3 14, if anyone does not obey what we say in this letter, take note of that person and have nothing to do with him. Paul is saying my letters bear the absolute authority of Christ.

If someone rejects that, then they're to be rejected. Now we're going to come back to that whole theme a little bit later in another session, but for now I simply note that these books, as soon as they were written, would have borne the authority of the apostles and people would have recognized that from the very start. Now if that's the case, then you don't need to wait 200, 300 years to have a New Testament canon because you have books written with the authority of an apostle even in the first century that people would have known bore that apostles authority and therefore you would have had books with the authority of Christ from the very get-go. So when someone comes along and says, oh Christians could never have conceived of a new collection of authoritative books, I'm thinking to myself, but what about the books the apostles wrote? They would have been seen as a new collection of authoritative books and you wouldn't have to wait for a church council to tell you that.

You wouldn't have to wait for some vote to tell you that. You don't have to wait 400 years to know that. You know that the very moment that Paul wrote his letter and sent it to you and Paul even acknowledges, you better listen to my letter.

I speak with the authority of Christ. These books would have been inherently viewed as canon from the very get-go. Now what does that mean then when we tie all three of these theological beliefs together?

These three sort of form a package deal. Remember what I've argued here is they create this perfect soil, right, out of which the canon can grow. Christians thought that the Old Testament story was incomplete and that Jesus had completed it and we would expect that last chapter to be written so to speak. Christians believe that he started a new covenant and covenants always come with written documents and then thirdly Christians believe in the authority of the apostles and the authority of the apostles was manifest in written documents even in the 50s of the first century if not the 40s. So for someone to come along and say, oh, Christians could never have anticipated a New Testament canon. That was the furthest thing from their mind.

I would suggest to you that it was not the furthest thing from their mind. I would suggest to you that it was built into the DNA of Christianity from the very start. I want to suggest to you that the canon was put in the soil of Christianity like a little seed. It was always it was always there. Took some time for it to grow when it had been watered but it grew up.

The canon is not transplanting a plant from somewhere else digging a big hole and slamming it down in there going, okay, here's a canon for you. No, it was always there from the start and here's the payoff of that. That's true. That's going to affect the way we view the historical evidence. Now we don't have to wonder, well, is it fourth century or fifth century? No, there's something built into Christianity about the authority of these books. There's something inherent, something organic, something natural from the very start Christians would have expected these books to have authority. So when we talk about Christians having a canon and having a reliable canon we don't have to speculate about what they would have thought 300 years later. We can think and see that they would have understood there to be a collection of books as authoritative from the very beginning and if that's true we have much more reason I think they would have gotten it right because they didn't have to think 300 years later about it. They would have been standing right there looking at Paul in the face and they would have very good reasons to know that these books are in fact the books that Christ gave His church.

That builds such confidence, doesn't it? We're thankful for Dr. Michael Kruger's teaching this week on Renewing Your Mind. His series, The New Testament Canon, provides us with sound reasons to believe that the New Testament is the authentic, true, and inspired Word of God. Unfortunately, arguments against the canon are becoming more prevalent in our culture and it's important for us to be able to counter them. To that end, we'd like to send you this six-part series for your donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries.

You can give your gift online at renewingyourmind.org or you can call us at 800-435-4343. And again, the title of the series is The New Testament Canon by Dr. Michael Kruger. Well, we're grateful that you've joined us today. We never outgrow the basic truths of the Christian faith, what it means to be born again, to follow Christ, and to belong to His church. In order to keep growing, we need these core truths to master us again and again. That's why we're grateful for your financial support.

Christians around the world are hearing the timeless truths of God's Word because of your donations. Well, to better understand how we arrived at the 27 books in the New Testament, it's helpful to look at the timeline. Historical evidence takes us back. We have the natural assumption that the canon would have grown up very early. We can see that we would have expectations of a very early canonical collection.

But here's the question. Can we go even further? Can we go into the first century?

Do we have any reasons to think that in the first century, books were already being used as Scripture even then? But what if we don't? What if we don't? What if we don't? Is the Bible being used as Scripture even then? Dr. Krueger will look at the date of the canon, and we hope you'll join us tomorrow for Renewing Your Mind. .