Why these Gospels? How did the Church make the New Testament?

Muratorian Canon – the oldest list of the New Testament books. Dates from the end of the 2nd century

According to the latest survey, there are more than 95% of Christians in Croatia. However, I doubt most of them have read even the New Testament let alone the whole Bible! It comes as no surprise to me since I know that sociologists have studied this phenomenon across Europe. A similar situation is in all of the European countries. British sociologist Grace Davie called it a “believing without belonging”. Basically, you go to Church once or twice a year, call yourself a Christian, and everything you know about the history of your faith comes down to a set of nonsense delivered by Dan Brown’s book (and movie) Da Vinci Code. Due to poor knowledge of Christianity, people have no idea that Bible is not a book – it’s a compilation of more than 60 different books (divided into the New Testament, and Old Testament/Hebrew Bible). The New Testament itself contains 27 different books. This, of course, begs the question of how did the Church decide which books should enter into the canon of the New Testament? Especially when one knows that there indeed were many other books (gospels, epistles, apocalypses, etc.) that were rejected by the Church. So, in this text, I’ll try to explain the basic tenets of the formation of the New Testament canon focusing on the four gospels. Why is it that only four Gospels were eventually taken to be part of the canon and all the others were left out? How was this process carried out? Who made these decisions? On what grounds? For Dan Brown, the answer is clear: it was the fourth-century emperor Constantine who made the decisions. Leigh Teabing (portrayed in the movie by a famous British actor Ian McKellen) states this view openly in his conversation with Sophie Neveu: “The fundamental irony of Christianity! The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great… Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that made Him godlike. The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and burned”. For us historians this idea is filled with much more fiction than fact – no matter what Dan Brown tells you.

After Jesus’ death, Christianity started to spread across the Mediterranean world (from Jerusalem all the way to Rome and eventually Spain). The Gospels of the New Testament are our earliest surviving accounts of the life of Jesus and they were written probably between 65 and 100 CE. (see here). Looking back on things, it seems almost investable that Christians would eventually have a canon of scripture, because Christianity started out with Jesus, a Jewish teacher who accepted the Jewish Torah, followed its customs, and kept its laws. The earliest Christians, of course, were followers of Jesus, which means that from the beginning Christians had a sacred canon that they accepted as containing books given by God, the canon of the Jewish scriptures. But Christians also were to break off from their Jewish roots, and when they did so (the process already started during the course of the 1st century), they naturally started collecting sacred texts of their own, later known as the New Testament. We have evidence in the epistle known as 2 Peter (part of the New Testament) that at the end of the 1st century Paul’s letters were depicted as the “Scripture” (at the same level as the Old Testament). The point is clear: near the end of the 1st century (long before Constantine) Christians were already accepting some new books (in this case: Paul’s letters) as a canonical authority.

What was motivating this Jesus’ movement to accept a group of books as canonical authorities? To give an appropriate answer, one has to know something about the social outlook of early Christianity. Today there are more than 30 thousand different denominations of Christians in the world. Just think of the difference between Roman Catholics and Baptists, Greek Orthodox and Mormons, Episcopalians and Presbyterians. However, all of them claim to preach the right faith in accordance with the historical Jesus and his apostles. This radical diversity isn’t a modern phenomenon. It goes back to the earliest Christian times. In the second century, we know of people who claimed to be following the true teachings of Jesus who believed all sorts of things that would strike most modern-day Christians as bizarre and crazy.  There were, of course, Christians who believed in one God and his Son Jesus who was raised from death and whose death brings salvation. Scholars call this stream of Christianity proto-orthodoxy because it eventually triumphed against all other forms of Christian communities during the 2nd and 3rd centuries. But others (who also called themselves Christians) believed there were two different Gods. Yet some “Christians” said there were 12 or even 356 gods! There were Christians who maintained that Jesus was both human and divine (a belief that most of the Christians share today!), but others believed that Jesus was just a great moral teacher and Messiah, but not God in any sense. The crucial point is this: all of these different streams of Christians had their own books (Gospels, epistles, apocalypses, etc.) and they insisted that these books should be accepted as scriptural authority for all Christians. So in reality, there were other gospels floating around and the Church leaders (leaders of the “proto-orthodoxy”) had to stabilize this problem by fixing a canon of the books for all the communities of the proto-orthodox Church). In that process, Church had several basic criteria that had nothing to do with political power and the emperor Constantine.

  1. Ancient criteria: For Gospel to be accepted into the New Testament it had to be written close to the events it describes. For example, if you are living in the middle of the 2nd century and your neighbor reads a Gospel written couple of years ago, it can’t be accepted into the canon. It doesn’t pass this criteria! Of all the Gospels we have, only those are part of the New Testament were written in the 1st century. Other ones dates from the middle of the 2nd century or later!
  2. Criteria of catholicity: Gospels had to be popular among the church communities. If a book was popular just in one community in (for example) Asia Minor, then it was a problem! Already, suspicion arises. Why this book didn’t gain wider popularity? It has to be a reason: let’s not use it!
  3. Criteria of apostolicity: Gospel had to carry an authority of the apostles. In other words, the book had to be written either by an apostle (e.g. John and Matthew) or a companion of the apostles (e.g. Mark and Luke).
    1. The problem for the Church was that there were other Gospels claiming to be written by apostles. For example, we know that some communities in the 2nd century used a Gospel of Peter.
  4. That brings us to the fourth and the most important criteria: Criteria of orthodoxy! Book had to contain a message that was in accordance with the faith proclaimed by the Church. To some extent the other criteria were handmaidens to this one. For if a book was not orthodox, it was obviously not apostolic, it was not ancient (written in the 1st century) nor it was catholic.

The best example of this comes from Serapion, bishop of Antioch who lived in the latter part of the 2nd century. He found out that some local community uses the Gospel of Peter. At first, Serapion saw no difficulty with that: if Peter the apostle had written a Gospel, then certainly it was acceptable for reading in church. But then he was informed that this so-called Gospel of Peter contains a false theology which isn’t in accordance with the orthodoxy faith proclaimed by the Church Serapion presides over. It was claimed that this book contains a docetic theology (the idea that Jesus wasn’t fully human and that he didn’t really die on the cross!). Once he learned this, Serapion acquired a copy of the book for himself and came to see that in fact there were several problematic passages. He then wrote a little pamphlet “On the So-Called Gospel of Peter”, and sent it to the Christians of Rhossus with instructions that they were no longer to use the book in their communal services.

Finally, it should be noted that long before Constantine came along, Christians agreed that the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) are the only ones acceptable. The first author who explicitly names these gospels as authority was Irenaeus writing around 180 CE. He writes precisely to push back other dangerous “Christian” groups that he depicts as heretics, and whose faith isn’t in accordance with Jesus and his message. At least, Irenaeus thought so! Also, from about that time comes our first canon list. It’s called the Muratorian Canon (named after the eighteenth-century scholar Muratori, who discovered it in a library in Milan).   Muratorian Canon includes the four Gospels that became eventually part of the New Testament. All of this happened 200 years before Constantine!

So, unlike claims made by Dan Brown, Constantine had nothing to do with the process of canonization. It was a decision made by Church leaders who were acting according to specific criteria. And in the end, they did choose the oldest books available. This decision had nothing to the with political power. All of this was happening well before Christians had any political power whatsoever. They were still a sporadically persecuted minority in the Roman empire. The process of canonization was a direct consequence of the diversity that marked the early Christian centuries. In a world where different Christian communities use different books claiming to convey the original message of Jesus of Nazareth, the proto-orthodox Church had to stabilize its own identity and draw a line between acceptable and unacceptable books. Out of this emerged the New Testament. A collection of texts that 95% of Croats believe in, and so few have ever read them.

P.S. There is a series of texts on this topic, but unfortunately (for those whose native language isn’t Croatian) it’s not written in English. The author is a great friend of mine and an excellent historian (see here).

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