Dr. Michael Kruger, Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity, explores how the New Testament canon developed. Looking to the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, he explains how early Christians recognized and received New Testament books as Scripture, offering evidence of an emerging canon in the earliest centuries of the church.
The following is a transcript of the video above.
When it comes to the development of the New Testament canon, one of the things we're always looking for is when did early Christians begin to use these books as Scripture? That's one of the core questions that anyone asks when they think about how the canon developed is how far back can we find Church fathers citing books that ended up in the New Testament as Scripture? Because if we can see that, we can see an emerging canon taking place. One of the earliest places we see this is in a group of writings called the Apostolic Fathers. Now, the Apostolic Fathers makes you think of the Apostles. I know that's confusing as a term, but that's just a modern term we use to refer to a group of writings that roughly were written between 10150 AD and these are not written by apostles. These are written just by early Christians, and they are the earliest Christian writings we have outside the New Testament. So that's what makes the Apostolic Fathers such a significant corpus. And as you might guess, there's a huge debate within modern scholarship about how often those people in the Apostolic Fathers cite New Testament books. Well, I can't unpack that full debate here in this conversation, but I can reassure you that we begin to see the signs of an emerging canon very early in these particular writings. So, for example, we have Apostolic Fathers that cite Paul as Scripture and talk about letter collections from Paul. In fact, when we look at multiple Apostolic Fathers, it looks like there's a fairly developed letter collection of Paul from a very early time that would have been fairly sizable and regarded very highly in. And as I said, some of these Fathers even cited them as Scripture. We even have gospels cited as Scripture in the Apostolic Fathers. A book called the Didache, which is one of our earliest Christian sort of manuals of church, so to speak, cites the Gospel of Matthew fairly plainly as Scripture. And this happens at other places throughout the Apostolic Fathers. And then one particular example that's noteworthy here is Papias, who was an early bishop of Hierapolis writing around 125. He cites both Matthew and Mark and refers to them as gospels that the Church has received. And it's clear that those are gospels that he recognizes in his canon. And some scholars have suggested he even probably knew Luke and John, which would have given Papias a fourfold Gospel canon very early. Here's the point. Even in the Apostolic Fathers, we can see an emerging corpus of books, a collection of Paul's letters and a collection of Gospels and a few other books that seem to be coming up organically and naturally in the church, these books were viewed as scripture not because anyone voted on them, not because there was a council, but because apparently, rather, because the church recognized them as scripture from a very early time.