Church Tradition & Apostolic Fathers

It is a frequent claim by the Christian missionaries that the Church Fathers believed that the New Testament was considered as 'inspired' Scripture.

Bruce M Metzger, a noted authority on the New Testament, analyzing the Apostolic Fathers viz., Clement of Rome, Ignatius, the Didache, fragments of Papias, Barnabas, Hermas of Rome, and the so-called 2 Clement concludes the following:



Clement Of Rome

By way of summary, we see that Clement's Bible is the Old Testament, to which he refers repeated as Scripture, quoting it with more or less exactness. Clement also makes occasional reference to certain words of Jesus; though they are authoritative to him, he does not appear to enquire how their authenticity is ensured. In two of the three instances that he speaks of remembering 'the words' of Christ or of the Lord Jesus, it seems that he has a written record in mind, but he does not call it a 'gospel'. He knows several of Paul's epistles, and values them highly for their content; the same can be said of the Epistle of the Hebrews with which he is well acquainted. Although these writings obviously possess for Clement considerable significance, he never refers to them as authoritative 'Scripture'.[16]



Ignatius Of Antioch

The upshot of all this is that the primary authority for Ignatius was the apostolic preaching about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, though it made little difference to him whether it was oral or written. He certainly knew a collection of Paul's epistles, including (in the order of frequency of his use of them) 1 Corinthians, Ephesians, Romans, Galatians, Philippians, Colossians, and 1 Thessalonians. It is probable that he knew the Gospels according to Matthew and John, and perhaps also Luke. There is no evidence that he regarded any of these Gospels or Epistles as 'Scripture'.[17]



The Didache

The Didache is a short manual or moral instruction and Church practice. The Church history writer Eusebius and Athanasius even considered to be on the fringe of the New Testament Canon[18]. Assigning the composition of Didache has ranged from first century to fourth century by the scholars, but most of them prefer to assign it in the first half of the second century[19]. Metzger summarizes the book as:

By way of summary, we can see from Didache that itinerant apostles and Prophets still find an important place in the life of the Church, but this authority is declining. Their activity is surrounded by all sorts of precautions and rests ultimately on the authority of the traditional teaching deriving from the Lord, whose manner they must exhibit: 'Not everyone who speaks in a spirit is a prophet, except he have the ways of the Lord. By their ways, then, the false prophet and the true prophet shall be distinguished' (xi. 8). The author refers to the gospel, but he cites only words of Jesus. This 'gospel', which is without doubt the Gospel according to Matthew, is not regarded as a necessary source from which the words of the Lord, with indispensable warrants, come to the faithful, but quite simply as a convenient collection of these words.[20]



Papias Of Heirapolis

By way of summary, Papias stands as a kind of bridge between the oral and written stages in the transmission of the gospel tradition. Although he professes to have a marked preference for the oral tradition, one nevertheless sees at work the causes that, more and more, would lead to the rejection of that form of tradition in favour of written gospels. On the whole, therefore, the testimony of Papias concerning the development of the canon of the New Testament is significant chiefly in reflecting the usage of the community in which devotion to oral tradition hindered the development of a clear idea of canonicity.[21]



Barnabas

Epistle of Barnabas is a theological tract. Both Clement of Alexandria and Origen valued the work highly and attributed its composition Barnabas, the companion and co-worker of the apostle Paul.

Metzger summarizes the position of Barnabas concerning the scripture as the following.

By way of summary, one can see that for Barnabas the Scriptures are what we call the Old Testament, including several books outside the Hebrew canon. Most of his contacts with the Synoptic traditions involve simple sentences that might well have been known to a Christian of that time from oral tradition. As against the single instance of his using the formula, 'it is written', in introducing the statement, 'Many are called, but few are chosen', must be placed his virtual neglect of the New Testament. If, on the other hand, he wrote shortly before or after 130, the focus of his subject matter would not make it necessary to do much quoting from New Testament books - if indeed he knew many of them. In either case he provides no evidence for the development of the New Testament canon.[22]



Polycarp Of Smyrna

By way of summary, the short Epistle of Polycarp contains proportionately far more allusions to the writings of the New Testament than are present in any other of the Apostolic Fathers. He certainly had a collection of at least eight Pauline Epistles (including two of the Pastorals), and was acquainted as well with Hebrews, 1 Peter, and 1 John. As for the Gospels, he cites as sayings of the Lord phrases that we find in Matthew and Luke. With one exception, none of Polycarp's many allusions is cited as Scripture - and that exception, as we have seen, is held by some to have been mistakenly attributed to the Old Testament. At the same time Polycarp's mind is not only saturated with ideas and phrases derived from a considerable number of writings that later came to be regarded as New Testament Scriptures, but he also displays latent respect for these apostolic documents as possessing an authority lacking in other writings. Polycarp, as Grant remarks, 'clearly differentiates the apostolic age from his own time and, presumably for this reason, does not use the letters of Ignatius as authoritiesóeven though they "contain faith, endurance, and all the edification which pertains to our Lord" (xiii. 2)'.[23]



Hermas Of Rome

By way of summary, it is obvious that Hermas was not given to making quotations from literature; in fact, the only actual book anywhere named and quoted in the Shepherd ( Vis. ii. 3) is an obscure Jewish apocalypse known as the book of Eldad and Modat. Despite reminiscences from Matthew, Ephesians, and James, Hermas makes no comment that would lead us to think that he regarded them as canonical Scripture. From the testimony contained in the Shepherd, it can in any case be observed how uneven during the course of the second century was the development of the idea of the canon.[24]



The So-Called Second Epistle Of Clement

This work is not the genuine work of Clement of Rome. This is regarded as an early Christian sermon. The style of this work is different from that of 1 Clement. Both date and composition of this work are difficult to determine. It was probably written around 150 CE. Metzger summarizes the contents of this work as:

By way of recapitulation, the unknown author of 2 Clement certainly knew and used Matthew and Luke, 1 Corinthians and Ephesians. There is no trace of the Johannine Gospel or Epistles, or of the Book of Acts. And one can not say more than that he may have known Hebrews, James, and 1 Peter. Of the eleven times he cites words of Jesus, five are not to be found in the canonical Gospels. The presence of these latter, as well as the citation in xi. 2-4 of an apocryphal book of the Old Testament, introduced as 'the prophetic word', shows that our homilist's quotations of divinely authoritative words are not controlled by any strict canonical idea, even in relation to Old Testament writings.[25]

After studying the writings of all the Apostolic Fathers, Bruce Metzger concludes that:

For early Jewish Christians the Bible consisted of the Old Testament and some Jewish apocryphal literature. Along with this written authority went traditions, chiefly oral, of sayings attributed to Jesus. On the other hand, authors who belonged to the 'Hellenistic Wing' of the Church refer more frequently to writings that later came to be included in the New Testament. At the same time, however, they very rarely regarded such documents as 'Scripture'.

Furthermore, there was as yet no conception of the duty of exact quotation from books that were not yet in the full sense canonical. Consequently, it is sometimes exceedingly difficult to ascertain which New Testament books were known to early Christian writers; our evidence does not become clear until the end of second century.[26]

We have evidence of the spotty development and treatment of the writings later regarded as the New Testament in the second and third centuries CE. Gradually written Gospels, and collections of epistles, different ones in different regions, became to be more highly regarded.

So for 200 years or so there was nothing like New Testament to begin with. The great Church tradition did not even bother to collect the 'Scriptures' between two covers!



Church Tradition & The Early Lists Of The Books Of The New Testament

Now when the Church tradition finally started to make up her mind on compiling the New Testament various lists of books in the Canons of the Bible were drawn. Bruce Metzger gives the following list of the Canons of the Bible drawn at different times in the 'western' Church. Please note that we still do not have the great deal of idea about how many lists were drawn in the Eastern Churches such as Coptic and Ethiopic. The following are the canons drawn at various points of time in the Church history.

To complete the thoughts about how the New Testament evolved, a brief survey of early lists of the books of the New Testament is necessary. The list is taken from Appendix IV of Bruce Metzger's The Canon Of The New Testament: Its Origin, Significance & Development[27].

•The Muratorian Canon

•The Canon Of Origen (A.D. c. 185 - 254)

•The Canon Of Eusebius Of Caesarea (A.D. 265 - 340)

•A Canon Of Uncertain Date And Provenance Inserted in Codex Claromontanus

•The Canon Of Cyril Of Jerusalem (c. A.D. 350)

•The Cheltenham Canon (c. A.D. 360)

•The Canon Approved By The Synod Of Laodicea (c. A.D. 363)

•The Canon Of Athanasius (A.D. 367)

•The Canon Approved By The 'Apostolic Canons' (c. A.D. 380)

•The Canon Of Gregory Of Nazianzus (A.D. 329 - 89)

•The Canon Of Amphilochius Of Iconium (d. 394)

•The Canon Approved By The Third Synod Of Carthage (A.D. 397)


The earliest exact reference to the 'complete' New Testament as we now know it was in the year 367 CE, in a letter by Athanasius. This did not settle the matter. Varying lists continued to be drawn up by different church authorities as can be seen from above.

The Catholic Church proclaims itself to be the authority for the Canon and the interpretation of scripture, therefore the owner of the list of 27 books. Nevertheless, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, entry Canon of NT proclaims that 20 books of the New Testament are inherently worth more than the 7 deuterocanonical books (Hebrews, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, James, Jude, Revelation), acknowledging that the authenticity or reliability of them had already been challenged by ancient Christian authorities.

The Catholic New Testament, as defined by the Council of Trent, does not differ, as regards the books contained, from that of all Christian bodies at present. Like the Old Testament, the New has its deuterocanonical books and portions of books, their canonicity having formerly been a subject of some controversy in the Church. These are for the entire books: the Epistle to the Hebrews, that of James, the Second of St. Peter, the Second and Third of John, Jude, and Apocalypse; giving seven in all as the number of the New Testament contested books. The formerly disputed passages are three: the closing section of St. Mark's Gospel, xvi, 9-20 about the apparitions of Christ after the Resurrection; the verses in Luke about the bloody sweat of Jesus, xxii, 43, 44; the Pericope Adulteræ, or narrative of the woman taken in adultery, St. John, vii, 53 to viii, 11. Since the Council of Trent it is not permitted for a Catholic to question the inspiration of these passages.[28]

We will deal more with the individual books (i.e., Hebrews, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, James, Jude, Revelation) later, inshAllaah.

Church Tradition & 'Inspiration' Of New Testament Books

Whatever this word 'inspiration' means in the Church tradition to select the books, it does not mean what it actually means. A small list of the following books which are not there in the present day New Testament were at once time considered 'inspired'. Going further in history as the concept of New Testament 'Canon' evolved many books were considered 'inspired' which we do not see in the Bibles of 20th century. A brief survey of those books would be considered here.



The Didache:

Several of the writings of the Apostolic Fathers were for a time regarded in some localities as authoritative. The Didache was used both by Clement of Alexandria and by Origen as Scripture, and there is evidence that during the following century it continued to be so regarded in Egypt.[29]



Epistle of Clement:

The text of the (First) Epistle of Clement is contained, along with a portion of the so-called Second Epistle of Clement, at the end of the fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus of the Greek Bible (the manuscript is defective at the end). Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen all made use of the epistle. We know that about A.D. 170 it was customary to read 1 Clement in public services of worship at Corinth.[30]