The old man, Justin, Clement of Alexandria, the author of De Resurrectione, and Origen were not only testifying to their own experience of Scripture as the self-demonstrating Word of God, they were echoing the self-testimony of Scripture’s authors themselves.

I’ve taken the time to reproduce the words of these authors for three reasons. First, this aspect of early Christian thought is not well known, but deserves to be. That Christian thinkers, virtually from the birth of what we might call self-consciously Christian, philosophical thought, were treating Scripture as God’s self-attesting and self-demonstrating voice suggests the foundational character of this conception. What was revealed in Scripture served as a basis for intellectual discourse. Rather than standing in need of proof, Scripture was proof. Second (and this is probably one reason why this material is not better known), it exposes the deep epistemological chasm that separates the ancients from many of those who study them today in a post-Enlightenment age. To assume that the ancient Christians must have reasoned the way we do is to commit anachronism.

Third, and most immediately relevant for our present purposes, this material is cited here because it provokes some crucial questions: How could people who conceive of Scripture this way, as the self-demonstrating voice of God, presume to judge which books were “useful” enough to be treated as Scripture and which were not? How could those for whom Scripture was the criterion of truth, apply criteria for truth to Scripture? From what they tell us, there is little reason to think that they did.

Quite in keeping with what we have seen above, early Christian writers of the second and third centuries describe their own actions with regard to the books of Scripture with words like “receiving,” “recognizing,” and “confessing.” Irenaeus criticizes the Marcionites for not “recognizing” certain books of the New Testament (3.12.12), and others because they do not “confess” the Scriptures but pervert them with their interpretations (3.12.12); others because they “do not admit” John’s Gospel but “set it aside” (3.11.9). The Muratorian Fragment names certain books that cannot be “received” into the catholic Church (lines 66–7; cf. 82). Justin Martyr had earlier spoken of books “confessed” by the Jews and books not “confessed” by them.

The intuitive response of the church is to receive, confess, adopt whatever God has graciously given to his people, through his authorized mouthpieces, whether the church finds that these books meet its felt needs or whether they challenge or rebuke its needs. For Scripture, as Paul had written, and as the church discovered through experience, is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness (2 Tim. 3:16).

B. Not Chosen but Inherited

Many historians of the canon today tend to envision what happened in something like the following way. It was not until sometime in the second century when churches began to think they needed a new set of Scriptures,⁵² and when they did they were already faced with a sprawling assortment of books that had piled up over the years. As there was no effective, centralized hierarchy in the church issuing authoritative decrees on the subject, each church or group of churches in a region would have to start essentially from scratch and construct its own set of authoritative writings. Thus, as we saw above, scholars posit the need for churches to develop sets of criteria. We saw some of the problems with this approach above. Here we consider the idea that such a “sorting process” began only in the second century with a relatively large body of candidates and was carried out by churches, in various ad hoc ways. Here are two problems with such an approach:

First, if this were the case, and particularly if Christianity was as diverse and disorderly as we are led today to believe, we would expect to find considerably diverging sets of writings being cited as Scripture. But this is not what we find. The sets of books used as New Testament Scripture and called Scripture before the late fourth century vary to some degree, but that degree is not especially large.

We could compare, for instance, the two Christian authors from whom we have the most material near the end of the second century, Irenaeus in Lyons and Clement in Alexandria. Despite the common assertion that the notion of a “New Testament canon,” a closed collection of books, simply did not exist before the fourth century,⁵³ it appears that Irenaeus, for one, disagreed. In Against Heresies 4.33.8 Irenaeus speaks of “the unfeigned preservation, coming down to us, of the scriptures, with a complete collection allowing for neither addition nor subtraction.…”⁵⁴ This sounds a lot like a closed collection of Scriptures, or, a canon. It must be said, however, that neither Irenaeus nor Clement ever produces for us a full list of his New Testament Scriptures. We can only hope to gain a close approximation of what their New Testaments must have contained by looking at the quotations and statements they make in their writings. When we do this, we can see even from our approximations that these collections were very similar. (See figure 3.)

Figure 3. The New Testament Collections of Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria

Despite the abundance of Gospels available (remember, experts claim that perhaps 8–12 other Gospels existed), each of these writers confesses only four to be authentic and authoritative—and these were the same four. Each uses the same book of Acts—no apocryphal Acts of Andrew, Acts of John, or Acts of Peter. Each has apparently the same thirteen epistles of Paul, plus Hebrews, though Clement attributes Hebrews to Paul and Irenaeus gives no indication of its authorship. Each also uses 1 Peter, 1 John, 2 John, and Revelation as Scripture. That is at least twenty-three books of our twenty-seven that the Alexandrian and the Lyonian clearly had in common, and indeed, this group of books appears to be fairly stable throughout the churches of the time.⁵⁵ And what about the remaining epistles, James, Jude, 2 Peter, and 3 John?