Loading...Why did it take so long to decide on which books would be in the canon?
I continue my reflections on the issues connected with fixing a canon of Scripture in early Christianity, drawing from excerpts of my book Lost Christianities (Oxford University Press, 2003).
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It may seem odd that Christians of earlier times, while recognizing the need for authoritative texts to provide guidance for what to believe and how to live did not see the need to have a fixed number of apostolic writings, a closed canon. But in fact there is no evidence of any concerted effort anywhere in proto-orthodox Christianity (or anywhere else, for that matter) to fix a canon of Scripture in the early second century, when Christian texts were being circulated and ascribed authority. And different proto-orthodox Christians had different attitudes toward sacred texts.
Let me illustrate the point
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Hmmm. I find it interesting that they were dealing with gender confusion back in the second century!
Mr. Ehrman, I have a totally (or borderline totally) unrelated question, which I would have preferred to submit for a Q&A, but I have already submitted one for the next Q&A, and, frankly, I don’t know if I am going to be alive until the one after that! So… Here it is:
I am reading the Gospels horizontally and I came across something that I found really interesting in Jonh’s Gospel and, in particular, the resurrection narrative (20:1-12).
So my question is this: since John does not explicitly says that Mary went inside the tomb the first time she got there, isn’t it reasonable to assume that either a)he thinks it’s obvious/self-evident that the reader understands that she actually did enter the tomb the first time but saw nothing, or b)she didn’t enter the tomb the first time, and John wants, for some reason, to emphasize that the angels chose to appear to Mary, when she entered the tomb after it had already been examined by the 2 disciples? The latter would mean that the angels would not appear inside the tomb for the disciples or anyone else in general but only for Mary.
Yes, it’s debated. It may be that he wanted the male testimony to be the definitive one.
Dr. Ehrman, I was wondering if you had a study Bible that you recommend? Or, a good resource that will aid in reading the bible to understand the geography and the timeline more easily? Thank You.
Absolutely. I very much like the HarperCollins Study Bible. It’s what I use with my students.
Call me crazy, but I’d say one of the reasons it took so long for a canon to develop, particularly the canon we now have, is simple logistics. It must have taken a long time for all of those various works to be transmitted around Christendom to the point where a lot of Christians were even aware of all of them.
As it was, the NT canon works were written over something like 50-60 years’ time (as I understand it Paul’s letters were from the 40s or 50s while John was written in the 90s). Once they were composed they then had to be “broadcast” (to use a maybe-too-modern word) in the form of hand-written and hand-carried copies. It had to have taken a very long time for all of them to reach into every part of Christendom, so that Christians as a community could even recognize them as important, if not “canon.”
The problem is that in later times the books were known in various parts of Christendom but some were seen as Scriptural, others not, and there were harsh debates about it (as well as mild debates!)