I think there are traces of the knowledge of both 2 Peter⁵⁶ and of 3 John⁵⁷ in Irenaeus’ writings, though these are not so clear as to be obvious. There is no apparent use of James and Jude. It is not impossible that Irenaeus simply found no reason to cite James or Jude and that he had all twenty-seven books of our New Testament.⁵⁸ I would not claim that he did, only to observe that his New Testament, if it was not identical to our own, must have been quite close to it.

As for Clement, he seems to have accepted all of the non-Pauline letters of the New Testament. So, it appears that Clement had all twenty-seven books. The catch is that Clement may have accepted two or three, some say as many as five other books as well (Ps. Barnabas, the Apocalypse of Peter, The Shepherd of Hermas, possibly 1 Clement, and Didache). He certainly used these books and valued them highly, though it is not entirely clear that he considered any or all of them to be Scripture (and I would have particular doubts about the last three).⁵⁹

In any case, the fact that the collections of new Christian Scriptures used by Clement and Irenaeus in the late second century, on opposite sides of the Mediterranean Sea, resemble each other so closely, undermines the notion that churches, at a relatively late date in the second century, were only beginning to sort through a large mass of Christian writings.

To carry the story of these early corpuses or canons further for a moment, already by about the middle of the third century one could say that the ones used by Clement and Irenaeus are coalescing, as is visible in the work of Origen. In his Homilies on Joshua Origen actually gave a list of the New Testament books which corresponds exactly with our own twenty-seven, including James and Jude but no Barnabas, Shepherd, or Apocalypse of Peter. Some scholars, however, disqualify this list because we have it only in an early fifth-century Latin translation by Rufinus of Aquileia and the original Greek is lost. Besides, Origen reports elsewhere that some of the New Testament books (2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, 2 Timothy) were disputed by others.⁶⁰ But, as Metzger has suggested, it is entirely understandable that Origen would give his own view in a homily while qualifying his reports in his more scholarly writings.⁶¹ Moreover, the same list of New Testament books is all but established by Origen’s use of and comments about them elsewhere.⁶²

The textbooks will emphasize that by the time Eusebius wrote his Ecclesiastical History in the early years of the fourth century, several of the books of the New Testament were still disputed: Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and Jude, and by this time, Revelation too had fallen under suspicion in the minds of some, including Eusebius himself. What the textbooks usually bypass is that while Eusebius faithfully reports that these books are disputed by some, he also says they are used by “most” of the churches (HE 2.23.24–25; 3.31.6). And if you add these “disputed” books to the group he says are “acknowledged by all,” you get a list of exactly our twenty-seven—meaning that according to Eusebius, “most” churches were using just these twenty-seven, and no other books as their New Covenant Scriptures. This state of affairs in the church owes nothing to Constantine the Great or the Council of Nicaea. And if we take Eusebius’s words seriously, it means that when Athanasius in 367 gave a list of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, he was hardly proposing something novel. On the contrary, he was reproducing what must have been by that time the traditional New Testament of many churches.

Besides the fact that the collections of New Testament Scripture at the end of the second century look very similar, another reason for doubting the idea that the churches began “selecting” books in the second century by the use of certain criteria, is that these collections did not simply materialize at that time. The writers profess that they had received their Scriptures from past generations. As Everett Ferguson says, “The early ecclesiastical writers did not regard themselves as deciding which books to accept or reject. Rather, they saw themselves as acknowledging which books had been handed down to them.”⁶³

In Antioch in the 190s, Bishop Serapion testifies that the pseudonymous Gospel of Peter was not among the books he had received from his forebears (HE 6.12.3–6).⁶⁴ This means, of course, that other books were in that collection. As noted in a footnote above, to judge from the works of Theophilus, one of Serapion’s immediate predecessors, the New Testament collection or canon in the Antioch church must have included at least the four canonical Gospels, Acts, a corpus of Paul’s epistles, and Revelation. At just about the same time, Clement in Alexandria speaks in a similar way about “the four Gospels that have been handed down to us” (Stromateis 3.13.93). About a decade earlier, Irenaeus in Gaul had spoken of the Gospels, and other books, as having been handed down to the church (AH 3.1.1). He once contrasts the so-called Gospel of Truth to “those [Gospels] which have been handed down to us from the apostles” (3.11.9).

In other words, the churches represented by these authors did not see themselves as involved in a process of trying to decide which books, out of the many available, would be most useful for meeting the changing needs of their congregations. It seems quite significant that we encounter not only nearly the same collection of books, but also the same way of perceiving of these books—as handed down from the earliest of times—in geographical regions so far separated from each other as Antioch, Syria; Alexandria, Egypt; and Lyons, Gaul, at roughly the same time.

The terminology used by such writers also illustrates an important social reality. The handing on of authoritative books involved chains of human relationships in the churches. Generations of Christians passed down the holy books, not unlike the way heirlooms might be passed down in a family. Irenaeus claims that the chain goes all the way back to the apostles.

And in Irenaeus’s mind, that chain was not very long. As a child, and extending into his late teens and possibly well into his twenties, Irenaeus had sat under the teaching of Polycarp in Smyrna.⁶⁵ At that time Polycarp was an elder statesman of the church, but when Polycarp was a young man being nurtured in the faith, several of Jesus’ apostles were still alive. According to Irenaeus, Polycarp had been ordained by apostles, and used to recount publically some of the things he had heard from apostles. While we cannot, of course, accept everything that Irenaeus says uncritically, it is at least a good inference that when Irenaeus in the 180s speaks of Gospels and other books handed down from the apostles, he would probably have had in mind the books used in the church of his youth in Smyrna under Polycarp’s leadership, perhaps 30–50 years earlier. And in his perception, these books had been in use there even before he was born in about 130. He believed that the apostle John was alive “almost in our day” (AH 5.30.3)⁶⁶ and was active in the region in which Irenaeus had grown up (AH 3.3.4).

Polycarp himself, in the lone letter preserved under his name, does not mention any personal acquaintance with any apostles, unless it is this: “So, then, let us serve him with fear and all reverence, just as he himself has commanded, as did the apostles who preached the gospel to us …” (To the Philippians 6.3). It is entirely possible that by “us” Polycarp is including himself personally.⁶⁷ But even if not, Polycarp affirms the indispensable channel by which he and the rest of the church received the gospel: the apostles of Jesus. This same channel is mentioned by Polycarp’s older contemporary, Clement of Rome, who, probably in the last decade of the first century, writes,

The apostles received the gospel for us from the Lord Jesus Christ; Jesus the Christ was sent forth from God. 2. So then Christ is from God, and the apostles are from Christ … (1 Clement 42.1–2).