INAUGURAL ISSUE - AUGUST 2003

ISSN 1448 - 6326

Background Notes to the Study of the New Testament Canon

M. G. Michael

Abstract:

Ever since canonical criticism appeared on the field of biblical studies in the 1970's, the study of the New Testament Canon has inspired fresh debate and vigorous dialogue. This is not surprising as the discipline drills deep into the fundamental question of the authority of Church and boundary of Canon. This paper points to some of the landmark contributions which saw the rise of the study of the NT Canon as a "subject" around the 1770's and highlights key actors, questions, and motivations, which were behind the original movement. The review concludes with the positive affirmation that the recent exchange, which confirms that the "canonical process" was a long and complicated adventure, has brought scholars closer together on several of the more important issues.

 

The Pioneers of the Biblical Canon as a Subject

Some investigators prefer to begin with J. D. Michaelis, [1] but most scholars would acknowledge that the study of the Biblical Canon as a "subject" can be traced to one of the pioneers of biblical criticism, J. S. Semler (1725-1791), who between the years 1771-1775 published four volumes with the title, Abhandlung von der freien Untersuchung des Kanons. [2] Semler's approach sought to "de-canonize" the biblical documents from their dogmatic and apologetic position. Semler was successful in that he influenced a large group of scholars immediately afterwards to move away from understanding the NT Canon as a historical continuity of NT tradition. [3] In a spirited but generally controlled response to the radical position of Semler (which in effect questioned the authoritative form of the apostolic writings themselves), there emerged a group of scholars who sought to defend the historical continuity of the NT documents. Within this movement the names of conservative scholars such as J. L. Hug [4] and H. E. F. Guericke [5] played an influential part in the developing dialogue which has not always been acknowledged in the literature of the East. This position, closely aligned to the teaching of the Early Church, [6] argued for the process of canonization to have begun as near as possible to the time of the apostles, establishing both the history of the canonization itself and the authenticity of the documents.

So from the late eighteenth century onwards we find interest in the Biblical Canon becoming a matter for study and of controversy, for in the final analysis it was a question of authority and so it caused a great divide between the opposing sides. From this inheritance and from that time onwards, liberals with a rationalist bend to their approach to biblical theology such as J. G. Eichhorn, [7]   W. M. L. De Wette, [8] and F. C. Baur, [9] or more conservative scholars who held more strongly onto the belief of revelation such as B. F. Westcott [10] and T. Zahn, [11] have gone on to formulate their respective methodologies and critical standards. The position of Zahn, however, whose fundamental thesis was that the NT Canon came into being by the end of the first century, [12] was criticized by Adolf von Harnack [13] in Das Neue Testament um das Jahr 200 published in 1889. It was Harnack's conviction that one of the major factors in the formulation of the NT Canon was the post-apostolic liturgical use of the Christian texts to ascribe to them a canonical status and of the Church's ongoing clash with gnosticism. It is from within these two traditions, the conservative (arguing for growth) and the more liberal (arguing for selection), [14] that we encounter variation and deviation. The famous professor of theology F. Schleiermacher, [15] who had earlier contended that the authority of a NT document depended not on its authorship but on its content, wanted to distinguish between the collecting process which ultimately shaped the collection of the authoritative books and the original setting of each of the texts separately. H. J. Holtzmann, [16] similarly famous for his two source hypothesis of the synoptic Gospels, argued, for example, for the developing NT Canon as tradition within the history of the Catholic Church. In England an important work was to appear in 1911, J. Moffatt's An Introduction to the Literature of the New Testament. [17] The significance of this work, which Raymond E. Brown has called "a scholarly classic", [18] was that it followed the critical position of the Germans and argued for a scientific investigation of the formulation of the Canon. About a decade earlier a similar position, which has been prominent ever since, was introduced to the

United States

by B. W. Bacon. [19] The conclusion of Brevard S. Childs at the end of a section from his magisterial survey into the subject is my understanding as well of what immediately followed:

As a result of the historical critical study of the New Testament a broad consensus emerged by the end of the nineteenth century which continued into the twentieth century in which the New Testament canon was regarded solely as a post-apostolic development without any real significance for understanding the shaping of the New Testament itself. [20]

Of course, many other names could have been added to this introduction of the early period, including those of R. Simon, Friedrich Lücke, A. H. Charteris, A. Alexander, G. T. Purves, C. A. Credner, Louis Gaussen, Alfred Loisy, J. J. Given, J. Cramer, Franz Overbeck, F. Bleek, J. B. Lightfoot, Adolf Jülicher, and R. Knopf, each one providing new perspectives and in many cases inspiring fresh debate. [21] In the Eastern Orthodox world two principal reasons did not permit for any commensurate response. [22] First, given the normative recognition of Scripture and Tradition as two equal rules of authority and revelation, the idea of questioning the NT Canon would have been considered extravagant and in some places even irreverent; second, Greece was under the yoke of Ottoman rule and the Russians were beset by their own internal problems; and though there were major periods of spiritual renewal these were not the ideal conditions for the flowering of critical scholarship. [23]

Fundamental Problems of the Investigation

The complexity and difficulty of the investigation of the history of the NT Canon has not been denied by scholars. The fundamental reasons for this difficulty is that the primary evidence for such studies has to be collected from Early Christian literature, which can be, as Michael W. Holmes rightly notes in the context of the Apostolic Fathers at least, "largely a matter of tradition and somewhat arbitrary." [24] In turn this creates the problem of the authenticity and age of many of these early writings; this is particularly problematic for the first two generations after the time of the Apostles, the most important period. And even when a consensus on these matters is found to be acceptable, the question arises as to the best way of how this determining evidence should be interpreted. However, the recent reawakening and strong interest in canonical studies, inspired especially by Brevard S. Childs and James A. Sanders, [25] has seen good progress and some common ground. At the same time, canonical criticism itself, is engaged in a lively and productive dialectic. As Robert W. Wall and Eugene E. Lemcio explain, for Childs the fundamental claim "is that the canonical text alone is the medium of divine revelation... what matters is a text's Sitz im Leben des Kanons." [26] Sanders, however, as the same authors continue, sees other paradigms emerging "across five cultures" during the written history of the biblical documents and speaks of the "'monotheizing pluralism'" of canon. [27] Yet very importantly, the approach to the study of the sacred documents of both Brevard S. Childs and James Sanders "raises common questions, although their answers vary sharply":

To what extent, in what sense and how should the canon be considered as authoritative when Scripture is appealed to in theological and ethical reflection? [28]

Biblical scholars, whether from a canonical criticism approach or not and from diverse confessional traditions, have come closer to collective judgement on a number of issues relating both to the NT Canon and to the interpretation of relevant NT pericopes (i.e. Mk 12:24; Jn 10:35; Rom 15:4; 2Tim 3:15-16; 2Pet 1:19-21, 3:15-16). Significantly, even where there still remains a great divide on the question of authoritas Scripturae or Tradition for instance, the dialogue that canonical criticism has inspired within biblical theology has helped to narrow the differences, as is generally accepted nowadays by most of the specialists in the field, to the most important questions. At the forefront of this modern-day consensus is the widespread recognition of these scholars, that the development and dynamics of the formation of the Biblical Canon were much more involved and intricate than was earlier believed. It has been very well stated by Bruce Metzger when he says, "discussion of the notae canonicitatis, therefore, should distinguish between the ground of canonicity and the grounds for the conviction of canonicity." [29] The phenomenal unearthing in 1945 of the Gnostic library of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt has also revealed to investigators, that the highly interiorized struggle of the believing community to define the nature of the evangelium was an essential component of the operation in which the decisions of the Early Church were made regarding canonicity. [30] Finally, the process to the establishment of the NT Canon as an infallible witness to an authoritative list of divinely inspired books was a gradual and often contradictory process, marked by stages and diverse, sometimes unpredictable causes. [31]

REFERENCES

[1] W. G. Kümmel for instance, who says that Michaelis', Einleitung in die göttlichen Schriften des Neuen Bundes, (1750), was "the first great work of introduction in which the problems of the origin of the various writings and the canon were handled in a consciously historical manner": Werner Georg Kümmel, Introduction to the New Testament, (London: SCM Press, 1975), 30.

[2] Trans. Treatise on the Free Investigation of the Canon. As Metzger has noted, "the two basic theses that Semler formulates, opening the way for the 'free investigation' of the New Testament, rest on dogmatic and historical presuppositions": Bruce Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 16.

[3] But this influence was not uniform and different paths were followed in accordance to which thesis of Semler's "broadside attack" was accepted or rejected. See F. C. Schmid (Leipzig, 1775), H. Corrodi (Halle, 1792), C. F. Weber (1798) in Metzger, The Canon, 17.

[4] J. L. Hug, Introduction to the New Testament, (London, 1827).

[5] H. E. F. Guericke, Historisch-kritische Einleitung in das Neue Testament, (Leipzig, 1843).

[6] See M. G. Michael, The Canonical Adventure of the Apocalypse of John, Doctoral dissertation (2002), Australian Catholic University, Qld., Australia , 53-74.

[7] W. G. Kümmel has said of Eichorn's five-volume Einleitung in das Neue Testament, (Leipzig, 1804-27), that it was the "first really free investigation of the origin of the canonical Scriptures and of the NT text": Kümmel, op. cit., 30.

[8] It is telling that De Wette (1780-1849), briefly a colleague of Friedrich Schleiermacher at the theological faculty in Berlin, studied under J. J. Griesbach (1745-1812) who was one of the first to break with the Textus Receptus by developing his own critical text.

[9] Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860) is considered one of the founders of historical theology "through his development and application of principles of historical criticism to the history and theology of the canon": Richard N. Soulen, Handbook of Biblical Criticism, (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1981). 28. As Kümmel writes, "Baur and his Tübingen School steered the science of introduction into a new direction." Baur defined introduction "as criticism of the canon, or as scholarly research on the origin and the original character of the canonical Scriptures": Kümmel, op. cit., 30. His major work in which the evolved positions of his approach and methodology are set out in the context of proposed solutions to the "conceptual conflicts of the apostolic and post-apostolic periods" is Kirchengeschichte der 3 ersten Jahrhunderte, (1853): ibid. The work was translated and edited some 25 years later for English-speaking scholars by A. Menzies, Church History of the First Three Centuries, (London: Williams and Norgate, 1878-89).

[10] Brooke Foss Westcott was Professor of Theology at Cambridge (1870-90) and Bishop of Durham (1890-1901). He is especially noted for his collaboration with F. J. A. Hort on their critical edition of the Gk NT (1881).

[11] For a list of Theodor Zahn's major studies on the NT, see Brevard S. Childs, The New Testament  as Canon: An Introduction, (London: SCM Press, 1984), 5.  He is, of course, the author of the classic two volume commentary, Die Offenbarung des Johannes, (Leipzig: Deichert, 1924-26).

[12] T. Zahn, Geschichte des neutestamentlichen Kanons (2 Vols), (Erlangen, 1888-90).

[13] Adolf Karl Gustav von Harnack (1851-1930), who at one time was able to hold the positions of professor of church history at the University of Berlin, member of the Academy of  Sciences in Berlin, and director of the Prussian State Library, was a theologian and church historian who exerted a strong influence in the development of modern theological and historical scholarship. He viewed dogma as a disintegrative force and the diverse systems of doctrine (Lehrbegriffe) emerging as a result of later speculation. As G. E. Ladd notes, Harnack's "What Is Christianity" (Eng. Tr. 1901), "is a classic statement of this liberal view": George Eldon Ladd, A Theology of the New Testament, (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1993), 5. One of his major challenges came interestingly from the German Jewish Reform rabbi, Leo Baeck, who in 1901 argued against one of Harnack's central positions, that original Christianity was unrelated to the Jewish tradition. For a list and publication dates of Harnack's major works, see Donald Guthrie, New Testament Introduction, (Illinois: IVP, 1970), 999.

[14] The succinct and telling distinction of the development of the NT Canon "as one of selection" or "the idea of growth", is from Metzger, The Canon, 24.

[15] Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher's (1768-1834) contribution to the development of NT criticism and hermeneutics is significant. As Child's informs us, it was in Schleiermacher's posthumously published (lecture notes), Einleitung ins Neue Testament, (1845), that the author "brilliantly develops some of the hermeneutical and exegetical issues involved in the critical understanding of the New Testament canon": Childs, As Canon, 7. This was, as I have noted above, his discrimination between the collecting process of each of the NT books which would eventually comprise the Canon itself, and the original setting of each of these books separately outside this collection process. These ideas are also strongly intimated in his: Über den sogennanten ersten Brief des Paulus an den Timotheus, (1807), where he disputed Pauline authorship of First Timothy on the evidence of language and situation.

[16] Heinrich Julius Holtzmann (1832-1910) was professor in NT both in Heidelberg and Strassburg. His "two source hypothesis" of the synoptic Gospels: Mark and Q [Quelle source] behind Matthew and Luke, has been, as Soulen writes, "the basis of synoptic criticism ever since": Soulen, op. cit., 91. His contribution to the question of canon in his Lehrbuch der historisch-kritischen Einleitung in das Neue Testament, (Freiburg, 1885) is given, as Metzger says, "extensive consideration": Metzger, The Canon, 23.

[17] J. Moffatt, An Introduction to the Literature of the New Testament, (Edinburgh: Clark, 1911).

[18] Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament, (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 17.

[19] B. W. Bacon, An Introduction to the New Testament, (Folcroft Library Editions, 1900).

[20] Childs, As Canon, 11f.

[21] For summaries and bibliographical details of these scholars and for others, see Metzger, The Canon, 11-24 and Kümmel, op. cit., 28-34; the following names are representative of the more prominent of those who have made extensive contributions to the study of the biblical canon in recent times: Walter Brueggemann (1982), W. R. Farmer and D. M. Farkasfalvy (1983), James Barr (1983), David L. Bartlett (1983), Brevard S. Childs (1984), J. A. Sanders (1984), H. Y. Gamble (1985), R. Gnuse (1985), David G. Meade (1986), D. A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge (1986), Bruce M. Metzger (1987), John Barton (1988), F. F. Bruce, (1988), James D. G. Dunn (1990), Georg Strecker (1992), R. W. Wall and E. E. Lemcio (1992), G. M. Hahneman (1992), Rolf Rendtorff (1993), John W. Miller (1994), Lee M. McDonald (1995), John Barton (1997). More currently the investigation has been brought up to date with the fresh insights from a "soteriological rather than an epistemological" way of thinking in the work of William J. Abraham (1998), and in E. E. Ellis' concentrated study The Making of the New Testament Documents (1999), where the argument is made for the "corporate authorship" of the NT by "cooperating apostolic missions sharing common traditions but pursuing different tasks."

[22] For a traditional Eastern Orthodox appraisal of the NT Canon, see Michael Pomazansky, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, trans. Seraphim Rose, (California: Saint Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1997), 25-29; also see John Meyendorff, Living Tradition: Orthodox Witness in the Contemporary World, (New York: SVS Press, 1978), 13-17; and Dumitru Staniloae, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology: The Experience of God, (Brookline: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1994), 37-51.

[23] For a fair and telling description of the "Church under Islam" in which the author takes into account both religious and social issues, see Kallistos (Timothy) Ware, The Orthodox Church, (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 87-101. For the conflicts within Russia , beginning with the "schism of the Old Believers": ibid., 102-125.

[24] Michael W. Holmes, (Ed. & Rev.) The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations, (Michigan: Baker Books, 1999), 3.

[25] James Barr who has written against Childs' "constant allegation" that modern biblical theology has neglected the canon of scripture, has still said, that Childs' "literary insights... have deservedly raised considerbale interest among biblical scholars": Barr, op. cit., 78, fn. 2; J. A. Sanders, however, has found some support in Barr who agrees on a number of points of  Sanders' position, particularly that he "rightly questions the idea that interpretation on the basis of what is claimed to be 'canonical context' really functioned in any community before the Reformation...": ibid., 156.

[26] Robert W. Wall and Eugene E. Lemcio, The New Testament as Canon: A Reader in Canonical Criticism, (England: Shefield Academic Press, 1992), 31f.

[27] ibid.

[28] ibid., 31; Wall and Lemcio, of course, are making their own very significant contribution to the entire discussion with particular emphasis on the canon "as intrabiblical dialogue", as James A. Sanders, himself, points out (in the Foreword to their cited work): ibid., 9.

[29] He immediately continues to make an all important distinction, "[t]he former has to do with the idea of the canon and falls within the province of theology; the latter has to do with the extent of the canon and falls within the domain of the historian": Metzger, The Canon, 284.

[30] Related to this question are the insights into the "canonical process" that can be derived from the "reconstructing of the literary history of the Dead Sea Scrolls." For a perspective on this subject from the standpoint of canonical criticism, see James A. Sanders, Canon and Community: A Guide to Canonical Criticism, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 12-16.

[31] See Brevard S. Childs for further discussion on the importance of this "remarkable consensus" for biblical studies and for the principal causes that brought some of these agreements about: Childs, As Canon, 18-33. However, he importantly adds (and with this including his own approach), that "it would be unrealistic and even arrogant for any person to claim that a new understanding of canon could resolve all these genuinely perplexing questions": ibid., 21.

Dr. M. G. Michael is an Eastern Orthodox theologian who has specialised in Church history and New Testament. He has written two dissertations on the Book of Revelation.