Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books
Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books by Michael J. Kruger
I grew up in the Christian faith. I’ve never really doubted that God exists and that he has spoken to us in the Bible. As a child, I simply accepted my Bible as it was without much thought as to how it came to be. But when I reached the questioning teens, I began to think about how we know that our Bible is what it should be. How do we know all the right books are included and none of the wrong ones? Yes, Jesus affirms the Old Testament that the Jews used—and you can’t doubt Jesus—but what about the New Testament? Who affirms it?
The answers I was given didn’t entirely satisfy me. Not that I distrusted my New Testament. I’d already begun to see the Bible as a unified whole and it would have taken a lot to convince me it contained the wrong books. But I still had a niggling feeling that while I believed the New Testament canon was correct, the reasons I had for believing were inadequate.
It’s exactly this question that Michael Kruger’s Canon Revisited seeks to answer: Do Christians have sufficient grounds for affirming the New Testament canon?
Kruger examines the various approaches that have been used to determine the New Testament canon. The commonly used methods fall into two general categories. The community determined canonical models sees canonicity as something imposed on books by people, either individually or as a group. In the Roman Catholic model, for instance, the authority of the church is necessary for us to know the New Testament canon. As with all community-determined models, the canon is valid because people—in this case, the church—received it. A response from the community is necessary for a canon to exist.
Historically determined canonical models see the canon as something that is determined by the historical merits of the books—or, in some cases, parts of books. The canon is established by historical investigation, asking questions like, “Is this book apostolic?” or “Does this passage contain ‘authentic Jesus tradition’?” As you can imagine, the canons resulting from the different models in this category vary widely. Some affirm all 27 New Testament books and some affirm very few.
Both the community determined models and the historically determined models have strengths, but they share one big problem: “they authenticate the canon on the basis of something external to it.” What’s wrong with this? Kruger argues that “to insist that the canon must measure up to some independent standard that we have erected is to inevitably produce a canon of our own making.”
In the bulk of Canon Revisted, Kruger explains and defends a better model for determining the canon of the New Testament—the self-authenticating model. It’s a little bit like a presuppositional approach to the canon. This method of authenticating the canon is simply “applying Scripture to the question of which books belong to the canon.”
[I]f the canon bears the very authority of God, to what other standard could it appeal to justify itself? Even when God swore oaths, “he swore by himself” (Heb. 6:13).
It is God who forms the New Testament canon by inspiring books of scripture, and we use principles from the canon of scripture to validate it.
Does this sound a little circular? It might be, but only in the way that authenticating any foundational authority must be circular. And for the Christian, what God says—Scripture—is a fundamental source of knowledge. We cannot, to quote C. S. Lewis, put “God in the dock”; we cannot stand in judgment over him. We presuppose that God’s testimony is reliable, so we use what he says to guide us in our authentication of the canon.
While the self-authenticating model for determining the canon uses extra-biblical data, it does so only under the authority and guidance of Scripture. And “[i]n the end, the self-authenticating model of canon actually serves to unite the various canonical models by acknowledging that no one attribute is ultimate.” Three intertwined attributes which scripture leads us to expect of canonical books confirm the New Testament canon. A canonical book must have divine qualities, apostolic origins, and have been received corporately.
Michael J. Kruger is associate professor of New Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary. His research on Christian origins has made him a trusted authority on the development of the New Testament canon.
Also by Michael Kruger:
The Gospel of the Savior
Gospel Fragments (coauthor)
The Heresy of Orthodoxy (coauthor)
I wish someone had answered my youthful canon questions using this model. I’m sure the arguments would have given me enough justification for my belief in the canon to satisfy me.
Canon Revisited is written at a college level, so it’s not a quick read—at least it wasn’t for me—but there’s no prerequisite knowledge required. Everything is explained clearly enough for a novice, either in the text or the footnotes. (Yes, footnotes! And footnotes that are often as engaging as the text.) Still, I wouldn’t recommend it for a teenager, but for a motivated adult.
If you need answers for canon questions—your own or those of others—Canon Revisited is the place to start. Christians can have assurance that the books we have in our New Testament are all the right ones, because, as Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27, ESV).