Wednesday, December 12, 2012

The New Testament Canon

A common argument against the truth of the gospel is that the documents upon which Christianity bases its claims are not reliable. How did the collection of documents in the New Testament come to be? Via Justin Taylor, Michael Kruger's responses to the top ten misconceptions about the New Testament Canon:
  1. The term “canon” can only refer to a fixed, closed list of books
  2. Nothing in early Christianity dictated that there would be a canon
  3. The New Testament authors did not think they were writing Scripture
  4. New Testament books were not regarded as scriptural until around 200 A.D.
  5. Early Christians disagreed widely over the books which made it into the canon
  6. In the early stages, apocryphal books were as popular as the canonical books
  7. Christians had no basis to distinguish heresy from orthodoxy until the fourth century
  8. Early Christianity was an oral religion and therefore would have resisted writing things down
  9. The canonical gospels were certainly not written by the individuals named in their titles
  10. Athanasius’ Festal Letter (367 A.D.) is the first complete list of New Testament books
10 Misconceptions about the New Testament Canon – Justin Taylor

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