This is exactly Irenaeus’ view a century later, who writes: “For the Lord of all gave to his apostles the power of the Gospel, through whom also we have known the truth, that is, the doctrine of the Son of God; to whom also did the Lord declare: ‘The one who hears you hears me, and the one who rejects you rejects me and him who sent me’ (Lk. 10.16)” (AH 3.praef.). Even though these last quotations do not mention books, they show where the authority lay.
The claim of the churches in the late second century is that they had not chosen their books out of a larger pool of contenders but had inherited them through chains of Christian leaders that were in some cases only a few links away from Jesus’ apostles. This claim is not contested by our evidence, as far as it goes, which shows that at least most if not all of our New Testament books were in use from the time of their first circulation to the late second century, and beyond. While it may be tempting to write off such claims as either naïve, or duplicitous, or both, their consistency and wide distribution are not so easy to explain.
It is also interesting to note that while so many modern critics dispute or dismiss such claims, ancient critics apparently did not. Celsus, a second-century, pagan opponent of Christianity, accepted that the Gospels went back to Jesus’ apostles. So did the advocates of “alternative” Christianities. Valentinians and Gnostics typically did not deny or dispute the church’s claims that their books could be attributed to the apostles of Jesus or their companions. Instead, they tried to do them one better, claiming that the apostles “wrote before they had knowledge,”68 or that what the apostles wrote had been corrupted by the church (Marcion). Some of these groups made great interpretative efforts to use the church’s writings and adapt them to their teaching. But the ace they always held up their sleeve was a claim to possess superior knowledge, “secret” knowledge delivered privately by Jesus to one or two disciples:
The Gospel of Judas, introduces itself as “The secret revelatory discourse in which Jesus spoke with Judas Iscariot.”
The Gospel of Thomas, begins, “These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down.”
The Gospel of Mary has Mary saying to the apostles, “Whatever is hidden from you and I remember, I will proclaim to you.”
The Apocryphon of James even depicts the apostles of Jesus writing their books, before it goes on to record a new revelation of Jesus to the apostles after the resurrection.
Here is the point: to trade on secret words of Jesus concedes that there are public words already well-known, functioning as a kind of standard or criterion. These “alternative voices” thus in a backhanded way seem to attest to the mainstream, orthodox tradition.
The early Christians did not see it as their task to “choose” the New Testament books. When allowed to speak for themselves, they give no indication of participating in some kind of open application process, in which all candidates—all Gospels, epistles or apocalypses claiming apostolic credentials—were invited for submission and given equal consideration. They speak rather of accepting and passing on what had been passed down to them from the apostles, Jesus’ commissioned witnesses, those entrusted with the facility to speak by the Holy Spirit in Jesus’ name.
IV. CONCLUSION
A culture that perceives itself as increasingly post-Christian benefits from a grand narrative, a myth, that can account for its one-time devotion to Christianity and its Bible. But some myths cry out loudly for myth-busting. The books of the New Testament, as it turns out, were not chosen by Constantine, his generals, or the bishops he summoned to Nicaea in 325. These twenty-seven books did not gain their authority through the discovery that they were the most effective blunt instruments by which orthodox Christians could thrash their rivals.
Nor is it right to regard the books of the New Testament as simply the survivors of a long and tortuous selection process conducted by churches, either individually or collaboratively, who set out to gather from a wide array of options the best worship and teaching resources to meet its evolving needs. The churches of the second century did not see themselves as authorized to make such selections for themselves.
They saw themselves instead as the favored recipients, preservers, and proclaimers of the life-giving message God had given to the world in Jesus Christ. They believed that Jesus, just as the Gospels and Acts portrayed it, had entrusted that message to a definite group of apostles, who ultimately became the source of a new set of books. In these books the church continued to hear the self-attesting, saving, and abiding voice of God. Even as these books were being written and circulated, communities of Christians were being birthed here and there throughout the known world. Besides the books that emanated from genuine apostolic sources, other books appeared which paralleled, imitated, or supplemented them. The course of historical events that brought consensus to a church so widely distributed and often expanding was neither quick nor especially orderly. But it is important to stress that until that consensus was reached in the fourth century, the church was never without the word of God. At first the apostolic preaching, and then a collection of apostolic books bearing the self-authenticating message of Jesus was functioning all the way through, even if it was sometimes incomplete, and sometimes joined by the voices of other useful books, to provide that word of God for the people of God.
Bruce Metzger, one of the last century’s leading scholars of the New Testament canon, had it right, I think, when he observed, “neither individuals nor councils created the canon; instead they came to recognize and acknowledge the self-authenticating quality of these writings, which imposed themselves as canonical upon the church.”69 William Barclay put it more succinctly: “It is the simple truth to say that the New Testament books became canonical because no one could stop them doing so.”70 These historical assessments could well be seen as commentaries on the words Jesus once spoke to a group of his critics: “My sheep hear my voice” (John 10:27).