BBL 2020 Understanding the New Testament: New Testament Canon

Jens Schröter provides a rich narrative to Christian history by looking back upon the theological forces that created the New Testament canon. Through his textual, historical, and hermeneutical examination of early Christianity, Schröter reveals how various writings that form the New Testament's building blocks are all held together. Jesus not only bound the New Testament, but launched a theological project that resulted in the canon. Schröter's study will undoubtedly spark new discussion about the formation of the canon.

Exploring the history of the New Testament text from a theological perspective, Michael Kruger helps Christians understand the facts behind their faith and the legitimacy of the New Testament Scriptures.

2018 The Gospel Coalition Book of the Year - History and Biography Christianity in the twenty-first century is a global phenomenon. But in the second century, its future was not at all certain. Initially Christianity possessed little social or cultural influence and found itself fighting for its life. While apostolic tradition was emerging as a "rule of faith," factions contested the nature of the gospel, and pagan philosophers found its claims scandalous. And while its pathway was tenuous, Christianity was forming structures of leadership and worship, and a core of apostolic texts was emerging as authoritative. But it was the challenges, obstacles, and transitions faced by Christians in the second century that, in many ways, would determine the future of the church for the next two millennia. It was a time when Christianity stood at a crossroads. Michael Kruger's introductory survey examines how Christianity took root in the second century, how it battled to stay true to the vision of the apostles, and how it developed in ways that would shape both the church and Western culture over the next two thousand years. Christianity at the Crossroads provides an accessible and informative look at the complex and foundational issues faced by an infant church still trying to determine its identity. The church's response to the issues of heresy and orthodoxy, the development of the canon, and the transmission of the Christian Scriptures not only determined its survival, but determined the kind of church it would be for generations to come.

This polemic against the "Bauer-Ehrman Thesis" examines modern New Testament criticism against orthodoxy in early Christianity. Throughout, vigilance is shown toward the modern adherence to postmodern ideals of diversity.

For most evangelicals, a key tenet of belief is a "high view of Scripture," often defined as adherence to a verbal plenary inspiration view, along with the subsequent doctrine of inerrancy this view assumes. In this thought-provoking book, Craig Allert questions whether this view is in fact high enough. In particular, he avers that our view of the Bible has not been sufficiently informed by how the New Testament canon was formed in the early centuries of the church. While maintaining that Scripture is authoritative and inspired, he also believes that the tension between Scripture's nature as both a divine document and a human document has often been skewed too far toward the divine. Seeking to remedy this imbalance, Allert examines various theories of the historical development of the New Testament canon. In addition, he explores how the early church fathers viewed Scripture, canon, inspiration, and authority, coming to the conclusion that while promoting a high view of Scripture, the patristic view does not necessarily line up with the modern conservative evangelical view. Finally, from these conclusions, he proposes twenty-first-century implications for how we view Scripture.

This wide-ranging collection of essays provides the reader with a critical introduction to the New Testament as the church's canon. The authors' conviction is that the Bible belongs first of all to the community of believers rather than to the guild of biblical scholars. But that does not make the tools and tasks of modern biblical criticism unimportant. Rather, they are the constructive means by which the scholar discerns the nature of the ongoing conversation between the church and its biblical canon and helps form the church into a community of worship and witness. Whether from a particular composition's point of origin, or from the various properties added to it during the canonizing process, or from its location within the final canonical product, the scholars recover multiple clues from the ancient church's dialogue with its scriptures that help delimit the boundaries and establish the aims of the same dialogue between today's faith community and its biblical canon.

2013 Preaching Survey of the Year's Best Books for Preachers. Did the New Testament canon arise naturally from within the early Christian faith? Were the books written as Scripture, or did they become Scripture by a decision of the second-century church?Why did early Christians have a canon at all? These are the types of questions that led Michael J. Kruger to pick apart modern scholarship's dominant view that the New Testament is a late creation of the church imposed on books originally written for another purpose. Calling into question this commonly held "extrinsic" view, Kruger here tackles the five most prevalent objections to the classic understanding of a quickly emerging, self-authenticating collection of authoritative scriptures. Already a noted author on the subject of the New Testament canon, Kruger addresses foundational and paradigmatic assumptions of the extrinsic model as he provides powerful rebuttals and further support for the classic, "intrinsic" view. This framework recognizes the canon as the product of internal forces evolving out of the historical essence of Christianity, not a development retroactively imposed by the church upon books written hundreds of years before. Unlike many books written on the emergence of the New Testament canon that ask "when?" or "how?" Kruger focuses this work on the "why?"--exposing weaknesses in the five major tenets of the extrinsic model as he goes. While The Question of Canon scrutinizes today's popular scholastic view, it also offers an alternative concept to lay a better empirical foundation for biblical canon studies.

Completing his New Testament trilogy, eminent theologian Bruce Metzger provides information from Church history concerning the recognition of the canonical status of the several books of the New Testament. Canonization was a long and gradual process of sifting through scores of gospels, epistles, and other books that enjoyed local and temporary authority--some of which have only recently come to light. Metzger discusses the external pressures that led to the fixing of the limits of the canon as well as Patristic evidence that bears on the development of the canon, not only in the West, but also among the Eastern churches. He also considers differences as to the sequence of the books in the New Testament.

A study of the development of the New Testament canon / by William R. Farmer -- The early development of the New Testament canon / by Denis Farkasfalvy.

The story of the making of the New Testament is one in which scrolls bumped across cobbled Roman roads and pitched through rolling Mediterranean seas, finally finding their destinations in stuffy, dimly lit Christian house churches in Corinth or Colossae. There they were read aloud and reread, handled and copied, forwarded and collected, studied and treasured. And eventually they were brought together to make up our New Testament. This revised and expanded edition of The Making of the New Testament is a textbook introduction to the origin, collection, copying and canonizing of the New Testament documents. Like shrewd detectives reading subtle whispers of evidence, biblical scholars have studied the trail of clues and pieced together the story of these books. Arthur Patzia tells the story, answering our many questions:How were books and documents produced in the first century?What motivated the early Christians to commit teaching and narrative and vision to papyrus?How were the stories and sayings of Jesus circulated, handed down and shaped into Gospels?What do we know about ancient letter writing, secretaries and "copy shops"?Why were four Gospels included instead of just one?How were Paul's letters, sent here and there, gathered into a single collection?Who decided--and by what criteria--which documents would be included in the New Testament?Explore these questions and more about these Scriptures whose everyday, gritty story rings true to their extraordinary message: the palpable mystery of the Word made flesh.

I. Introduction -- The problem of the New Testament canon -- Some important terms: Canon, scripture, New Testament -- II. The history of the New Testament canon -- The second century -- The gospels -- The letters of Paul -- Other writings -- The third and fourth centuries -- III. Factors in the formation of the canon -- Intrinsic factors -- Extrinsic factors: Marcionism, gnosticism, montanism -- Criteria of canonicity: Apostolicity, catholicity, orthodoxy, traditional usage, inspiration -- IV. The interpretation of the New Testament as canon -- The canon as a hermeneutical context -- The canon as a theological problem.