How did church leaders decide which books would be included in the New Testament canon?  Why were some let in, but others left out?  Here I continue my discussion as excerpted from the Introduction in my anthology:  The New Testament and Other Early Christian Writings: A Reader, 2^nd ed. 2004 (Oxford University Press.)

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The literature that was produced by early Christians served to bind the various Christian communities together. Leaders and groups from one congregation wrote to others; books written in one place for one purpose were taken to another place, copied there, and read by Christians completely unknown to the author and his or her own community. This earliest Christian literature thus provided spiritual, intellectual, and emotional cohesion for communities that were geographically separated.

The literature that was produced by early Christians served to bind the various Christian communities together. Leaders and groups from one congregation wrote to others; books written in one place for one purpose were taken to another place, copied there, and read by Christians completely unknown to the author and his or her own community. This earliest Christian literature thus provided spiritual, intellectual, and emotional cohesion for communities that were geographically separated.

Already by the middle of the first century C.E., many Christians considered the words of Jesus to be as authoritative as the words of Scripture found in the Hebrew Bible; by the end of the century, some Christian writings were being granted comparable authority. The process is already evident in works that made it into the New Testament: 1 Timothy 5:18, for example, places a saying of Jesus on a par with the Jewish Bible, and 2 Peter 3:16 numbers Paul’s letters among the Scriptures. Even at this relatively early stage, then, two kinds of Christian authority had begun to emerge: traditions about Jesus and writings by his apostles. The Christian canon that eventually developed reflects this bipartite structure, comprising Gospels and other apostolic books.

A good deal of the early Christian literature responded to the needs of the various local congregations. Leaders of the churches were concerned that their followers understood what to believe (doctrine), how to live (ethics), and how to engage in Christian worship and ritual (practice). As might be expected of congregations scattered throughout vast tracts of the Roman empire, individuals coming from richly varied backgrounds—in terms of cultural heritage, social class, economic position, religious upbringing, educational opportunity, and so forth—had widely diverse views about almost everything Christian. The written texts produced by these individuals reflect their range of opinions.

This kind of diversity soon became a problem for Christian leaders intent on the unity of the religion, who saw Christianity as one thing rather than lots of different things, who understood the gospel of Christ as having a single meaning to be professed and practiced by all Christians in the same way everywhere. The diversity of the movement came to be especially evident around the middle of the second century, just after the period covered in the present volume. Forceful and charismatic Christians came forward, advocating beliefs and practices that were seen by others as totally unacceptable. Battle lines were drawn, with each side claiming to represent the authentic Christian tradition passed down from Jesus himself to the disciples.

In the debates that ensued, nothing proved more important than the Christian literature that had been produced earlier. Christians of various stripes put forth their own “authoritative” texts, claiming that books written by apostles were normative for what Christians should believe and how they should live. The side that won these debates decided the contours of the canon that was to be passed down to Christian posterity. We have the results of this victory in the writings of the New Testament. Even for ancient readers, when these books were taken individually outside of their canonical contexts they could be thought to represent a wide range of Christian perspective; but when they were grouped together into one book, the New Testament canon, they were understood to present a unified theological and practical perspective that was acceptable to the majority of Christians involved in the selection process.

The decisions concerning which books should be considered Scripture did not come immediately to an end at the close of the second century. On the contrary, the debates continued for centuries.

To be sure, already by 200 C.E. many churches accepted most of the books that eventually made it into the canon. But not all churches agreed. We know of some second- and third-century Christian communities, for example, that accepted only one of our canonical Gospels as authoritative (e.g., only Matthew or only Luke or only John); other communities that accepted none of the four individually, but used a much fuller Gospel created around 170 c.., a harmonization of our four books into one mega-gospel (the so-called Diatesseron, which no longer survives intact); and other communities that had their own favorites, including Gospels that did not come to be included in the New Testament (e.g., the Gospel of Peter or the Gospel of Thomas).

During this same period, some Christian communities saw the apostle Paul as the only final authority for faith and practice, while other communities saw him as an arch-heretic and enemy of God. There were some communities that accepted the Apocalypse of John as a divine revelation of the future course of events, and other communities that rejected the book as naive and nonapostolic. And there were some communities that accepted the Letter of 1 Clement, The Shepherd of Hermas, and the Letter of Barnabas as Scripture, while other communities did not.

Christians involved in the disputes over the canon of Scripture typically invoked several considerations. Generally it was thought that, to be included, a book needed to be ancient (close to the time of Jesus), apostolic (written by an apostle or one of their companions), orthodox (affirming the “right” belief, whatever that was judged to be), and catholic (widely used throughout the church).

The debates were sometimes harsh; by all counts, they were long and drawn out. Strikingly enough, it was not until 367 C.E.—nearly 250 years after the last of the canonical books was actually written—that any Christian author listed the twenty-seven books of our New Testament, and only these books, as belonging to the Christian Scriptures. The author was Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria, who penned his list precisely because so many people in his community and elsewhere disagreed…. …..  [I’LL CONTINUE FROM HERE IN THE NEXT POST]