Did the New Testament Come About by Forgeries and Politics?

In 2003, Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code became a global phenomenon, eventually selling more than 80 million books.^[1] Although Brown claimed it was a fiction novel, the book made surprising claims about real-world institutions and the secret origin of belief in Jesus. The book includes claims that the New Testament should not be trusted because many other gospels were hidden by the Roman emperor Constantine.

Many of Brown’s readers have understood his fictional account about these matters as descriptions of historical fact. This, in turn, has contributed to a popular opinion that the New Testament’s origins are shrouded in sectarian controversy and power-plays by biased winners of a historical game. As we will see in this article, the evidence about the New Testament’s origins indicates that this narrative is highly inaccurate.

As a representative of this popular opinion, consider a key section of The Da Vinci Code, where the fictional character Professor Teabing begins his skeptical explanation of the origin of the Bible as follows:

The Bible is a product of man, my dear. Not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book.^[2]

The fictional professor continues,

More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relatively few were chosen for inclusion—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John among them.… The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great.^[3]

What intriguing claims! Where can the non-chosen gospels be found? The fictional professor Teabing inaccurately maintains they can be found in the Dead Sea Scrolls; however, he correctly pinpoints some of the books recovered at Nag Hammadi.^[4]

Why did the professor claim that the emperor chose the four gospels and not the others among the eighty? Teabing answers, “Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that made Him godlike. The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and burned.”^[5] The professor then sums up his opinion of the New Testament as it is known today: “The modern Bible was compiled and edited by men who possessed a political agenda—to promote the divinity of the man Jesus Christ and use His influence to solidify their own power base.”^[6]

If this novel’s historical claims are true, which we believe they are not, then the New Testament as we know it today ought to be viewed with utmost suspicion. According to these views, the New Testament canon—the list of books accepted by Christians and Messianic Jews as Scripture—should be revised. The selection of gospels included in the canon should be questioned; Brown’s perspective would consider adding previously lost gospels into the list of accepted books. Moreover, the theological claim of Jesus’s divinity would need to be rejected as a shrewd invention used for political ends.

We bring up Dan Brown at the outset of this article not because he is a credentialed authority on these matters. He is a novelist, and his book is supposedly fiction. However, on a popular level, due to his staggering book sales, he has done more than any other author to promote the idea of the New Testament’s conspiratorial origin, specifically in relation to the “lost gospels.” Nevertheless, his general theory belongs to a school of thought shared by credentialed scholars.

The Bauer–Ehrman Thesis: The Theory in Modern Scholarship

As Dan Brown was building a larger fanbase and his book’s critical claims began resonating with his readers, Bart Ehrman, a real-life professor at the University of North Carolina, was also growing in popularity. Ehrman came from an evangelical Christian background and attended evangelical institutions for his graduate studies. However, he lost faith in the New Testament during his studies and now identifies as an agnostic. Ironically, Ehrman himself has published a book that “thoroughly debunks” the “numerous historical mistakes” in The Da Vinci Code.^[7] Ehrman is no mere novelist; he is a PhD scholar whose work cannot be dismissed as fiction or popular-level speculation.

Despite Ehrman’s rejection of Dan Brown’s specific claims, Ehrman has still found his own way toward skepticism about the New Testament’s authenticity. Early in his career, Ehrman focused on scholarly works related to his primary fields of specialty, namely textual criticism and early Christianity. However, in the early 2000s, Ehrman began writing books for a popular audience. Some of Ehrman’s popular book titles explain what he is trying to accomplish:

With these books and others, Ehrman has established himself as a premier New Testament skeptic and proponent of the New Testament as a corrupted set of documents. Even so, his views are largely derivative from a school of thought established in the nineteenth century by F.C. Baur (1792–1860) and elaborated upon by Wilhelm Bousset (1865–1920) and Walter Bauer (1877–1960).^[8] Indeed, a major refutation of Ehrman’s theories by Köstenberger and Kruger labels Ehrman’s position, “the Bauer-Ehrman thesis,” referencing the 1934 work by Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity.^[9]

A primary thread of argument runs through each of Ehrman’s works: The historical winners, or so-called “orthodox” Christians—those with correct doctrine—manipulated the content of the New Testament, deciding what books and content would be included and excluded. The historical losers—the multiple “Christianities” that did not make the cut—were also vying for the title “orthodox,” but they did not garner enough popularity to survive. Ehrman writes,

The side that eventually won the most converts and decided what Christians should believe is called “orthodox,” because it established itself as the dominant view and thus declared it was right. A “heresy” or a “heterodoxy,” from a modern historical perspective, is simply a view that lost the debate.^[10]

A second thread in Ehrman’s works—prominently displayed in his book Forged—is the assertion that the multiplicity of sects, views, gospels, apocalypses, and pseudepigraphic works in the second through the fourth centuries CE illustrate how there was no theological orthodoxy in the first century CE. For Ehrman, any work that claimed to have the truth about Jesus and the first century were products of later eras constructing their authorized idea of the past. Ehrman writes,

One of the most fascinating features of early Christianity is that so many different Christian teachers and Christian groups were saying so many contrary things. It is not just that they said different things. They often said just the opposite things. There is only one God. No, there are many gods. The material world is the good creation of a good God. No, it comes from a cosmic disaster in the divine realm. Jesus came in the flesh. No, he was totally removed from the flesh…. Not only did those on every side in all of these debates think that they were right and that their opponents were wrong; they also maintained in all sincerity and honesty that their views were the ones taught by Jesus and his apostles. What is more, they all, apparently, produced books to prove it, books that claimed to be written by apostles and supported their own points of view. What is perhaps most interesting of all, the vast majority of these apostolic books were in fact forged. Christians intent on establishing what was right to believe did so by telling lies, in an attempt to deceive their readers into agreeing that they were the ones who spoke the truth.^[11]

As evidence of these claims, Ehrman cites multiple works that are not included in the New Testament, such as The Gospel of Peter, The Gospel of Nicodemus, The Gospel of Thomas, The Coptic Apocalypse of Peter, and many others that are often called “lost gospels.”^[12] We will discuss these types of works at length below. Ehrman contends that early Christians fostered a forgery culture that intended to employ the authority of already-dead important people to justify their own theology. Supposedly, the lost gospels illustrate how little we can actually know about what Jesus said or did. The culture of forgery, he says, explains why fabrications made their way into the New Testament.^[13]

According to Ehrman, the rise of Christianity as we know it was just a power game and a happenchance fact of history that could have gone another way. The masses followed the “orthodox,” but orthodoxy’s victory was not because of its truth, or its connection with living tradition, or the preserving power of God’s Holy Spirit. According to him, whoever had the most power threw their enemies’ books into the bonfires of history, no matter if they were true or false. While we do not deny the influence of political and religious power to a certain extent, such power was not the decisive factor in the development of the New Testament canon.

Although the contemporary debates over the New Testament canon and Christian origins have often been between Gentile Christians and the Gentile proponents of theories such as Ehrman’s, Jewish believers in Yeshua also have a reason for concern. Like their Gentile Christian brothers and sisters, Messianic Jews draw their understanding of Yeshua and their devotion to him from the New Testament accounts. If those accounts are dubious, then the faith of Messianic Jews becomes suspect as well.

Some apologists for traditional Judaism have begun promoting arguments similar to Ehrman and Brown to challenge Messianic Jewish faith. As one of them writes,

About 50 gospels were written in the first and second century CE; each was believed to be accurate by various groups within the early Christian movement. Four of them (Mark, Matthew, Luke and John) were accepted by the early Christian movement as inspired by God. They were approved for inclusion in the official canon during the 4th century CE, and are found today in every Bible.^[14]

Another Jewish anti-Messianic polemicist claims,

Many scholars believe that the Gospels were originally anonymous works written in Greek, not the language of the Jews, not originally attributed to any particular author and further altered and added to over time. Therefore, there is no way of knowing or retrieving the original text.^[15]

We at Chosen People Answers believe that the views of Ehrman, Brown, and these apologists for orthodox Judaism present inaccurate views regarding the historical formation of the New Testament collection of books. This article will provide evidence for why the New Testament canon is trustworthy. For us, the narrative put forward by Ehrman and others regarding political powerplays and forgeries deviates from the historical evidence.

Introductory Matters

Before we continue with an in-depth response to the Bauer-Ehrman thesis and the topic of the “lost gospels,” there are a few introductory matters to discuss.

A Personal Note About the Allure of the Hidden

Mystery, hiddenness, secrecy, and intrigue: They make conspiracy theories convincing, movies entertaining, art mesmerizing, tabloids addicting, and religious cults captivating. Who does not want to sit up and listen more closely to hints of lost gospels, secret societies, and conspiratorial powerplays? Who does not relish the opportunity to bring down illegitimate power structures with the new knowledge of revealed secrets that are true?

In this article, we will be discussing two types of secret knowledge. First is the modern knowledge so claimed by popular writers like Brown and scholars such as Ehrman, who say they have uncovered the true origin of the New Testament and its theology, an origin that was hidden and forgotten for centuries. Second is the knowledge claimed by the authors of the lost gospels and highlighted by Brown and Ehrman; these schismatic and usually Gnostic works claimed to have secret knowledge about God and religion that mainstream early Christianity was blind to. The first type of knowledge is often used as a weapon against contemporary Christian belief, sometimes resulting in loss of faith (paralleling Ehrman’s faith journey); the second type can allure because it purports to reveal ultimate reality, sometimes leading to a reformulated faith.

However, secret knowledge can only be knowledge if it is true. Secrecy mixed with mere possibility is not enough; neither is secrecy plus speculation. Knowledge as defined by philosophers is justified (or warranted) true belief.^[16] So-called knowledge that is not true is not knowledge at all. Unfortunately, so-called secret knowledge that aligns with one’s already held religious or political position can be too tempting to deny, even if it is untrue. If one already has negative preconceived ideas about Jesus and the New Testament, then the mention of “lost gospels” may be interpreted as confirmation of those notions.

However, we should not allow ourselves to be attracted to secret knowledge simply because it confirms our predispositions. Not all hidden things deserve to be alluring, nor should they divert our gaze. One would hope that a simple reminder of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion would be sufficient to illustrate that many works that claim to have secret knowledge are not only false, but dangerous. That libelous forgery of a book has been disastrous for Jewish people ever since it appeared, and it still spreads its hatred because of the allure and desire to scapegoat all Jews as the secret source of all problems in the world.

We now live in a world where the Protocols exists, and that cannot be undone. No matter how much one might try to get rid of that book, someone, somewhere, would retain a copy of the Protocols on a dusty bookshelf or on some underground web server. It would still find a way to exert its alluring power on readers predisposed to antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Lies that are secrets may be alluring, but they are still lies. Lies deserve to be argued against, written against, exposed, ignored, and—one would hope—eventually forgotten. Sometimes lies are forgotten, and truth wins the day. At other times lies remain with us, clamoring for attention generation after generation.

We do not deny that the allegations about New Testament conspiracies and lost gospels are alluring, even fascinating. We have felt that inherent attraction to peek at the unseen, to consider the unconsidered. However, after peeking and considering for quite some time, we have become convinced that the secret knowledge against the New Testament is not knowledge at all. We invite you to come and see why.

A Spiritual Prelude Before the Historical Evidence

We are about to investigate the historical evidence related to the compilation and canonization of the New Testament,^[17] but that history is not the only reason that people can rely on the trustworthiness of the New Testament. It often takes the Ruach haKodesh, the Spirit of God, to open our eyes to see how God brings forth and preserves the Scriptures for humanity. Nevertheless, historical evidence can be a pathway used by the Spirit to bring about that kind of realization.

The Hebrew Scriptures say that God is in the business of changing hearts and minds, sometimes directly and without long-winded scholarly essays. God once promised King Saul, “Then the Spirit of the Lord will rush upon you, and you will prophesy with them and be turned into another man” (1 Samuel 10:6). This is even more remarkable since King Saul was not a model Israelite. As in Saul’s case, the Spirit of God can provide a change of heart without any other outside influences or human argumentation. Sometimes, spiritual experiences with the God of Israel provide all the reason one needs to follow him.

Many Jewish believers in Yeshua can attest that somehow, often in ways they cannot really explain, they were moved from indifference or even hostility to Yeshua toward curiosity, interest, and fascination. Eventually, this led them to become convinced that Yeshua is who he claimed to be as recorded in the New Testament. Such people report encountering the God of their ancestors in a way that transformed their lives and their relationships. What we are talking about then is nothing less than a spiritual encounter with the living God through Yeshua, whose teachings are contained in the New Testament. With divine experiences like that, a Jewish believer in Messiah can then approach the New Testament with an eagerness to accept all that it says.

However, it is likely that many who read this article do not yet agree that Yeshua is the Jewish Messiah, so skepticism about the New Testament remains. Perhaps you have not had God reveal that Yeshua is the Messiah or that the New Testament is a trustworthy set of Jewish writings for Jewish people to follow. Although God can bypass external evidence and speak straight to the heart, he often uses external evidence and reasoning processes to convey his truth. If you are one of the many who wants to see the evidence for the New Testament canon’s authenticity, keep reading.

Definitions

Apostle: One of Jesus’s approved disciples or followers who was commissioned to teach Israel and the nations about God and salvation. Examples of apostles include Peter, Paul, and John. Traditionally it is believed that John was the last apostle to die around the end of the first century CE. Thus, the “apostolic age” came to a close circa 100 CE. All the apostles were Jews who believed in Jesus.

Canon: Books that were written by Jesus’s apostles or those authorized by Jesus’s apostles. The word means “measuring stick,” in that the books of the canon are the ones by which all teaching ought to be measured and judged. Early Christians often declared a book as part of the canon by saying, “it is read in the congregations.”

Canonization: The process by which books were judged to be part of the canon, and the process by which other books were rejected from the canon.

Church fathers: Pastors, theologians, apologists, scholars, and writers who lived after the apostles died and who explained the teachings of the New Testament and defined true belief in contrast to error. Church fathers are typically categorized by being ante-Nicene (pre-325 CE) and post-Nicene, with the close of the church father era at the fall of Rome (476 CE). Most church fathers were Gentile Christians, although some were Jewish (i.e., Melito of Sardis).

Council of Nicaea: The historic church council that declared that belief in Jesus’s divinity was required in order to call oneself a follower of the true Messiah. This council was convened by Emperor Constantine in 325 CE.

Gnosticism: Gnosticism was a movement of syncretistic mystery religions that flourished in the second and third centuries CE. Fusing Middle Platonism, Neopythagoreanism, and Hermeticism, the Gnostics believed in an opposition between the spiritual and physical worlds. They asserted that one can only be saved from the evils of the physical world if one accepts a hidden knowledge (“gnosis” in Greek) that enables one to leave the mortal body and be reunited with the divine pleroma. Gnostics often cloaked their beliefs in the language and concepts of Jewish and Christian thought. The more one learns how to detect Gnostic thought, the more one will see a contrast between the canonical New Testament and the lost gospels.^[18]

Gospels: The canonical biographies of Jesus’s life written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Heresy: An erroneous teaching that disagrees with Jesus and his apostles and leads to belief in a false Jesus. Heresies develop when people deviate from the teachings of the canonical New Testament.

Lost Gospels: Narratives, wisdom sayings, theological treatises, and miscellaneous works that were rejected from the New Testament canon. Many lost gospels were produced by Gnostic sectarian groups in the second and third centuries. The lost gospels are sometimes called “the apocryphal New Testament.” Many lost gospels were found in the Nag Hammadi codices in 1945.

New Testament: The twenty-seven books about Jesus collated into a widely accepted collection by the fourth century CE. This collection begins with the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and ends with the book of Revelation.

Non-canonical: A book that was judged to not be part of the canon, and thus excluded from the New Testament. Non-canonical works were often declared as such by saying, “it is not read in the congregations.”

Orthodoxy: A word that means “correct belief.” All religious groups think they have correct beliefs and thus are orthodox in their own eyes. However, this article limits orthodoxy to belief in 1) The divinity of Jesus of Nazareth and 2) The acceptance of the canonical New Testament. Our use of this term in this way reflects how these were the beliefs of the earliest Jesus-followers we have on record. This article is designed to demonstrate why Christian (and Messianic Jewish) orthodoxy ought to be defined in this way, at least in part. Note: our use of “orthodoxy” in this article does not refer to Orthodox Judaism or the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Pre-Constantinian Era: In this article, we are defining this era as 30–313 CE. This was the time period in which early beliefs about Jesus and early Jewish-Christian and Gentile Christian communities practiced their faith without Roman state approval. During this era, there were no centralized political or spiritual authority structures that mandated one belief about Jesus or the New Testament over another.

Proto-Orthodox: A term sometimes used in scholarship to refer to those groups who held to orthodoxy (as defined in this article) before the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. Our position is that the proto-orthodox were the only true orthodox in the pre-Constantinian era.

The Bauer-Ehrman Thesis: The school of thought that this article argues against. It states that theological diversity about Jesus and the New Testament canon existed before any orthodoxy became widely recognized and accepted. It says that little can be known of Jesus’s life and teachings because the New Testament canon has been corrupted to fit a particular vision of Jesus that coalesced in the second and third centuries—or even at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. This theory is named after Walter Bauer (1877–1960) and Bart Ehrman, who follows in Bauer’s footsteps.

A Historical Investigation: The Canonization of the New Testament

In this section, we will investigate the historical evidence concerning the canonization of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, that is, the process by which these writings became widely accepted as authentic accounts about Jesus and were brought together to form a literary compilation. We will see if the skeptical narratives summarized above can explain what we find. We will ask and answer two main questions:

Ultimately, we will find that the answer to both questions is, “No.”

What Books Are We Talking About?

In our discussions about the New Testament and lost gospels, keeping up with the different types of books and their related terminology may be confusing. For this discussion, we will define the New Testament as the twenty-seven books about Jesus collated into a widely accepted collection by the fourth century CE. This discussion involves asking why those twenty-seven books were picked, why more were not added, and why there is not a different collection of books altogether.

These questions are important because there are books outside the New Testament that claim to be about Jesus or written by his closest associates. The books in question are sometimes called “non-canonical,” signifying that they are outside the boundaries of the normative New Testament. However, the non-canonical books are often called “the lost gospels.” Scholars sometime label them as, “New Testament Apocrypha,” or “New Testament Pseudepigrapha.” It may be confusing to see “New Testament” in these titles, since these books are not part of the New Testament at all. Nevertheless, this title serves to distinguish these books from the “Apocrypha” of the Greek Septuagint (written by Jews before Jesus’s time)^[19] and the “Old Testament Pseudepigrapha” generally written by Second Temple era Jewish people.^[20] The period in question for these works, roughly 200 BCE—200 CE, was a very prolific period of Jewish and Christian works, but only some are included in the New Testament. This article will simply call these books “lost gospels.”

Although there are dozens of these non-canonical lost gospels, they fall into several different genres, and various groups with diverse theological standpoints produced them. For example, in his 1924 collection of apocryphal books,^[21] medieval scholar James Montague Rhodes listed dozens of books under the following categories:

This is where the field stood in 1924. However, the subject of non-canonical works was revolutionized when the Nag Hammadi codices were discovered in 1945 in Egypt.^[22] This amazing archaeological discovery included some books that had been known previously, and many that were either unknown or fragmentary. Some of the books from Nag Hammadi include the following:

Many other books were found at Nag Hammadi, and they often claim to be written by close associates of Jesus or their followers. The Nag Hammadi works, and the ones known by Rhodes in 1924 are the ones that we call “lost gospels.” This article compares and contrasts these works with the canonical New Testament. Now that we have introduced these apocryphal works, we will present our reasons why we believe these books should not have been included in the New Testament or accorded any historical credibility regarding Jesus.

The Key Era: Canon and Theology Before Constantine

In the Roman Empire from the time of Julius Caesar (first century BCE), Judaism was recognized as a legal religion (religio licita). This enabled Jewish people to observe the Torah and be exempt from sacrifices to the emperor under certain conditions.^[23] Gentile followers of Jesus were not afforded the same political and religious freedom until the fourth century. Instead, Roman officials persecuted and murdered the followers of Jesus if they refused to recant their faith by sacrificing to the emperor.^[24] The reigns of the emperors Nero (54–68 CE), Domitian (81–96 CE), and Diocletian (284–305 CE) are full of stories of Christian martyrs who died because of their faith.

It was not until Emperor Constantine I issued the Edict of Milan in 313 CE that Gentile Christians achieved legal standing and freedom from persecution. Before that time, as enemies of the state, followers of Jesus were unable to wield political power. After Constantine, the situation changed. But what did Jesus’s followers believe about the New Testament before Constantine came to power? What about before 313 CE, before the politics of power came into play?

If the power play theory were correct, we should expect to find chaos and confusion regarding the New Testament and theology about Jesus before 313 CE. We should see a mass of theological groups—each with their own understanding of Christianity—without any particular group having dominance or widespread popularity. We should find no consensus on any particular book’s canonical status, but rather a cacophony of voices for and against each one’s status. Then, according to the Constantinian power play theory, Constantine would have had to come with his imperial sword, convene a council and force everyone to accept his definition of the New Testament. In simple terms, we should expect the following: Before Constantine, theological dissent, no “orthodoxy,” and overwhelming diversity; after Constantine, theological uniformity and “orthodoxy.” But this is not what we find, as we will demonstrate.

How Should We Account for Theological Diversity in the Pre-Constantinian Era?

Was there a diversity of theological opinions about Jesus before Constantine? Yes. Was it as chaotic and confusing as skeptics portray? No. Just as the many tributaries of a grand river do not argue against the existence of the grand river, so too the many small offshoots of heretical “Christian” groups do not argue against the existence of the grand historic orthodoxy of the majority that was present since the 30s CE.

Many people today have grown up in church with the assumption that their faith as Christians is substantially similar, if not identical, to the faith of Jesus’s early followers. While modern-day Christians do not know much about church history in the second, third, or fourth centuries, they see the Christians of those eras as their brothers and sisters. They assume that theological orthodoxy reigned in those centuries and that the New Testament canon and the teachings of the Council of Nicaea (Jesus’s divinity) were accepted as orthodoxy because they were true. Christian theology and faith are assumed to be orthodox, uniform, continuous, and even obvious. Up against those assumptions come scholars such as Bart Ehrman, who have introduced many readers to a world of theological diversity that they did not previously know existed.

Anyone who sits down to study the pre-Constantinian era will be confronted with a slew of groups and positions that do not fit the narrative of theological uniformity. We see the beginnings of schisms and alternative or contradictory teachings in the early congregations in first-century writings (1 John 2:18–19, Acts 20:29–30), and when we continue to the second and third centuries, the list of schismatic groups balloons in size. We have writings about groups from this era such as the Marcionites, the Valentinians, the Basilides, the Montanists, the Gnostics, the Ebionites, and more. These groups did not merely have denominational differences like Baptists versus Presbyterians. They disagreed on fundamental topics concerning reality and God. Moreover, we have polemical writings from Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and others who cataloged second- and third-century heresies and argued against them.

What are we to do with these historical records which indicate such theological diversity? How should diversity affect our understanding of the New Testament canon and what is currently seen as orthodox Christian theology? There are two main models for approaching these questions, and the weight of the evidence leads us to prefer the first model.

Model 1: Theological Orthodoxy Preceded Theological Diversity: Our Preferred Model

In this model, it is believed that there was an early agreement upon theological matters that stemmed from the agreement between Yeshua’s disciples, who in turn agreed with the teachings they accurately heard from Yeshua’s own mouth. On issues such as the deity of Messiah, God’s redemption through Messiah, and the resurrection of Messiah from the dead, Yeshua’s earliest followers, the apostles, had full agreement with one another, even in the 30s CE. They each came from a unified theological position when they sat down to write the books attributed to them. For example, James and Peter and John extended the “right hand of fellowship” to Paul and Barnabas (Galatians 2:9), and all of Yeshua’s apostles were present and in agreement with each other on fundamental theological matters at the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15). This theme of unity among the apostles is a focus of the New Testament book of Acts, and proponents of Model 1 view Acts as an accurate, early history of the Jesus movement.

Then, as the years went on, as second- and third-generation followers of Jesus were brought into the congregations (i.e., they had not heard Jesus with their own ears), alternate teachings began creeping into the congregations, like tributaries departing from the river. The teachers of these antithetical ideas ran into opposition with the congregational leaders who rejected their hybrid teachings, so the new teachers were forced to leave and attract their own followers. They took their partial knowledge of the apostles’ teachings with them and fused them with Platonism, Gnosticism, or magic, leading to syncretistic religious mixtures. They started writing their own books and taught the books to their followers as if they were the true testimonies about Jesus. Thus, what was previously a theological consensus became splintered, although the original consensus remained the majority view. The splinter groups were small and local, whereas the mainstream congregations were populous and were spread throughout the known world.

The mainstream body of Jesus’s followers—both Jewish followers of Jesus and Gentile Christians—claimed a continuous chain of theological heritage since the apostles, who had founded many of their congregations. As heirs of the apostles’ teachings, these mainstream leaders wrote against these schismatic groups and sought to clarify the difference between theological orthodoxy and heresy. The historic congregations of apostolic origin banded together to define which books they accepted, which ones they denied, and which theological positions they held since their inception. They made these declarations by the stroke of the pen, not at all enforced with the sword, and they grew in popularity despite their lack of political power to enforce their opinions on dissenters. Those who disagreed with the mainstream congregations could leave and start their own religious communities, which some did.

Then in the fourth century, Emperor Constantine converted to the faith of mainstream Christianity, convened the Council of Nicaea, and announced that non-mainstream versions of Christianity would be denied political legitimacy. After some decades of power shifts between pro- and anti-mainstream churches (communities), the mainstream church won hearts and minds, and the creed articulated at the Council of Nicaea, which resulted from years of consistent teaching, has continued to be the definitive understanding of orthodoxy to this day. The early theological orthodoxy of the church, taught by Jesus’s Jewish followers and preserved by later Gentile Christians, was vindicated.

This is the general narrative that we hold concerning the origin of the New Testament canon and its interplay with the rising political power in the fourth century. The books’ canonical status was determined long before Constantine, and theological orthodoxy preceded theological heresy. Later in this article, we will introduce scholars who hold to this position, including Larry Hurtado, Richard Bauckham, Andreas Köstenberger, Michael Kruger, and Talmudic scholar Daniel Boyarin. However, Model 1 is not the only narrative for the period.

Model 2: Theological Diversity Preceded Theological Orthodoxy: The Bauer-Ehrman Thesis

Proponents of this model believe there is no way to know the original teachings of Jesus or the apostles because the earliest period of Christian history was fraught with fundamental dissent and sectarianism that was only removed by fourth-century imperial coercion. Ehrman espouses this view, but it was originally associated with nineteenth- and twentieth-century German scholars F.C. Baur, Wilhelm Bousset, and Walter Bauer.^[25] The influence of the latter in this model leads Köstenberger and Kruger to label this model, “the Bauer-Erhman thesis.” In this view, theological orthodoxy was not vindicated in the fourth century; it was constructed by the winners.

Because this model presupposes that the New Testament and church fathers ought to be viewed with suspicion, scholars who propose this model reject the narrative told in those works. Instead, they advocate a variety of speculative narratives to account for the divergent groups.

A popular method has been to drive a theological wedge between John’s Gospel and the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, postulating that an evolutionary development in John’s theology (i.e., Jesus’s divinity) indicates his disagreement with the Gospels that preceded him.^[26] Some have postulated a fundamental disagreement between Paul and the other apostles, such that Paul’s churches represented a Gentile-centric “Pauline Christianity” that was at odds with the “Jewish Christianity” taught by James and the Jerusalem church.^[27] Another pathway has been to deny any eyewitness quality to the Gospels, stating that much later (late first and early second century) schools of thought (i.e., “the Johannine community”) produced the Gospels by placing words in Jesus’s mouth.^[28] Some claim that the canonical Gospels have a historical core that may be somewhat recovered through modern theories, but later sectarians embellished and corrupted the texts to align the Gospels with emergent orthodoxy.^[29]

This model’s approach to the lost gospels employs similar methods. For those who subscribe to this model, the lost gospels were also products of schismatic communities that may also have had a historical core of truth but were embellished to teach their unique doctrines. The lost gospels were also produced and edited by late (second century and later) communities while the canonical Gospels were being produced and edited by rival schools. To use Larry Hurtado’s analogy, in this model, “there was a ‘free-market’ religious economy in the Christian movement,”^[30] with the eventual winning gospels as a toss-up. All these groups were grappling with who Jesus was, and while they all agreed that he was an influential figure and a unique teacher, they disagreed on his identity and his teachings. Some thought that he was divine, others thought he was an angel, and others thought he was a Platonic demiurge but not the highest divinity. This diversity of thought leads many to conclude that we cannot know with any certainty the identity of the historical Jesus.

According to this diversity-precedes-orthodoxy model, no one can identify an initial theological orthodoxy espoused by Jesus or his followers. Adherents of this model believe that all later sectarian groups (called “Christianities” by Ehrman) had to construct their own origin stories and fabricate arguments for their group’s legitimacy.^[31] Ultimately, the diversity of theological opinions could only be settled through coercion, which is what Constantine provided in the fourth century: Picking one Christianity as the winner for personal gain and declaring the other Christianities to be heresies.^[32] According to this approach, along with Constantine’s choice of a winner came the canon of the New Testament that remains in use today.

While popular among skeptical scholars, this model has come under intense criticism in recent decades.^[33] In a satirical paragraph about this diversity narrative, New Testament scholar D.A. Carson puts it well (cf. John 1:1–3):

In the beginning was Diversity. And the Diversity was with God, and the Diversity was God. Without Diversity was nothing made that was made. And it came to pass that nasty old ‘orthodox’ people narrowed down diversity and finally squeezed it out, dismissing it as heresy. But in the fullness of time (which is, of course, our time), Diversity rose up and smote orthodoxy hip and thigh. Now, praise be, the only heresy is orthodoxy.^[34]

Along with Carson, we believe the diversity model lacks historical merit. While there was diversity in the early centuries, a cohesive orthodox theology came first, and diversity came later through schismatic, syncretistic, and minority splinter groups. We hold to Model 1 over Model 2, and for the rest of this article, we will justify the reasons why.

Four Reasons Why the “Diversity Before Orthodoxy” Model Fails

When considering the literary evidence of the pre-Constantinian era, we find a diverse range of books about Jesus, far beyond those found in the canonical New Testament. We proposed that there are two ways that one can approach the evidence:

This section will explain four reasons why the second model is a misleading theory when considering the dynamics of the pre-Constantinian era.

Reason 1: Jesus’s Earliest Followers Believed He was the Divine Son of God

A significant driving force behind the “lost gospels” narrative has been skepticism of the New Testament’s central theological claim: “In [Yeshua the Messiah] the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Colossians 2:9). Without a doubt, this is a controversial claim, especially to modern Jewish ears that are accustomed to hearing the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4). We do not think the Shema should be understood as contradicting the idea of the divinity of the Messiah.

Because of a perceived incompatibility between the divinity of Jesus and the Second Temple Judaism within which he lived, nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars attempted to situate the divinity of Jesus as an evolutionary and innovative development that was not present in Jesus’s self-consciousness or that of his earliest followers.^[35] This assumption of incompatibility has recently been brought under disrepute based on scholarly studies that recontextualize the divinity of Yeshua from the Tanakh itself,^[36] Second Temple Jewish works,^[37] and rabbinic works.^[38] Ehrman is merely a contemporary popularizer of an old evolutionary paradigm promoted by F.C. Baur, Wilhelm Bousset, and Walter Bauer, a paradigm which has lost scholarly momentum in recent decades. For example, Ehrman lays out his speculative evolutionary theory as follows:

Originally, Jesus was thought to have been exalted only at the resurrection; as Christians thought more about the matter, they came to think that he must have been the Son of God during his entire ministry, so that he became the Son of God at its outset, at baptism; as they thought even more about it, they came to think he must have been the Son of God for his entire life, and so he was born of a virgin and in that sense was the (literal) Son of God; and as they thought about it more again, they came to think that he must have been the Son of God even before he came into the world, and so they said he was a preexistent divine being.^[39]

This narrative is merely a repackaging of Bousset’s 1913 Kyrios Christos, which has come under significant scholarly criticism in recent years. New scholarly research shows that Jesus’s followers have always believed that the man Jesus was fully divine—not merely an exalted man—since the earliest stage of the movement.

In 2003, British scholar Larry Hurtado’s Lord Jesus Christ provided a magisterial analysis of theological material from the first and second centuries, undermining theories of evolutionary development espoused by Bousset, Bauer, and Ehrman.^[40] Hurtado investigated all extant streams of Jesus-devotion from the era (Pauline, Petrine, Johannine, Apocryphal, Valentinian, Marcionite, etc.) and concluded that all parties—both within and outside the theological mainstream—accepted Jesus’s divinity in some sense.^[41] Beyond this, Hurtado advanced an innovative proposal of investigating early worship practices of Jesus-followers, concluding that these practices imply the divinity of Jesus.^[42] Hurtado received wide accolades for his work and succeeded in shifting the scholarly conversation about the origin of belief in Jesus’s divinity.^[43] New Testament scholar Crispin Fletcher-Louis assessed Hurtado’s research, along with the sympathetic studies of Martin Hengel and Richard Bauckham, and concluded that it has led to an “emerging consensus” in scholarship and a “sea change” that belief in Jesus’s divinity originates from the 30s or 40s CE in Jewish circles.^[44]

Indeed, the early sources indicate a significant theological uniformity and unanimity among Jesus’s earliest followers regarding his divinity. In contrast, the non-canonical gospels and apocalypses often redefine Jesus’s divinity in Gnostic directions, which the New Testament does not do (see below). The lost gospels turn Jesus into a demiurge, an emanation, a created spirit, or some other semi-divine being, but something less than the qualitatively unique divinity taught by Yeshua’s disciples in the canonical New Testament. Hurtado wrote,

Marcionites, Valentinians, and the other versions of second-century Christianity that distinguished the true/high/good deity from the world creator of the Old Testament also produced significantly different ways of representing Jesus. Separated from the God of the Old Testament and the story of Israel, and indeed from human history altogether, Jesus was not in any way the fulfillment of human history, the agency, rationale, and goal of creation, as was characteristically claimed in proto-orthodox traditions from the New Testament onward (e.g., John 1:1–18; Heb. 1:1–4; Col. 1:15–20). Despite comparatively minor variations, the portraits of Jesus in the heterodox versions of Christianity examined here (and in other circles not logged here) all disconnected him from the world and its fortunes. In doing so, they advocated a markedly different stance.^[45]

In other words, the Jesus of the non-canonical works was a different Jesus as described in the canonical New Testament, and the divine Jesus of the New Testament is present in the earliest stage of the movement’s theology and practice.

In addition, the non-canonical books appeared only in the second century and later, coming after the theological unanimity of the first-century New Testament works. As New Testament scholars Andreas Köstenberger and Michael Kruger correctly note,

What is more important than what Gnostics (and other sects) believed about Jesus is when they started believing it. Unlike the orthodox, whose core Christological beliefs coalesced in the early to mid-first century, Gnostics did not solidify their Christology—if such solidification ever occurred—until sometime in the second century. The same is true of all other known first- and second-century sects. Orthodoxy, then, emerged first, followed by a variety of rather amorphous second-century heresies. These heresies, for their part, diverted from an orthodox Christology that was already widely believed and taught.^[46]

The early first-century sources show a consensus on Jesus’s divine identity and contradict any theory that theological diversity was the hallmark of the early Jesus movement. The evidence of the period has led Talmud scholar Daniel Boyarin to question any notion of Jesus’s divinity being invented long after his death. Boyarin writes,

I suggest that Jesus and Christ [as a designation of divinity] were one from the very beginning of the Jesus movement. It won’t be possible any longer to think of some ethical religious teacher who was later promoted to divinity under the influence of alien Greek notions, with his so-called original message being distorted and lost; the idea of Jesus as divine-human Messiah goes back to the very beginning of the Christian movement, to Jesus himself, and even before that.^[47]

Thus, the doctrine of Jesus’s divinity was not imposed upon a set of books, with only a few books making the cut in the later centuries. Rather, Jesus’s divinity was a doctrine that was present at the outset of his ministry in Israel, and any dilution or metamorphosis of the doctrine in later texts was a sign of their inauthenticity.

Reason 2: The Second and Third Centuries Contain a Canon Similar to that of the Fourth

One needs not skip to the fourth century to find a widely accepted list of books about Jesus. A significant amount of evidence from the second century indicates a functioning canon similar to the twenty-seven books in use today. Any theory about the formation of the canon needs to account for why these books had such early and widespread public support.

The Muratorian Fragment: A Second-Century List of New Testament Books

In 1740, Lodovico Antonio Muratori discovered an ancient list of New Testament books in a Latin codex copied in the seventh or eighth century. Many scholars believe that the so-called Muratorian Fragment is a translation of a Greek original that dates to the second century.^[48] After Muratori found his fragment, additional manuscripts of the list were found in an Italian monastery.^[49]

Most scholars date the original composition of the Muratorian Fragment to around 170 CE for two reasons. First, the Muratorian Fragment refers to a Christian work called The Shepherd of Hermas, and it describes the work as being written by Hermas “quite recently, in our own times, when his brother Pius occupied the bishop’s chair in the church of the city of Rome.”^[50] We know from other sources that Pius was bishop during the reign of the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius (138–161 CE). If Hermas was written during the emperor’s reign, the Muratorian Fragment was likely written shortly afterward. Second, the Fragment refers to multiple heretical leaders from the second century, including Valentinus, Miltiades, Basilides, and Marcion. It includes no references to persons from the third century or later. Therefore, the document with the list of New Testament books was likely written sometime during the end of the second century CE.

The Muratorian Fragment provides a list of books similar to the New Testament canon in use today, and the author of the fragment also makes comments about why some books were accepted or rejected. Here is the list^[51] of books included in the Muratorian Fragment according to the author’s own classifications:

Accepted Gospels 1.Unnamed Gospel 1 (text is lost) 2.Unnamed Gospel 2 (text is lost) 3.Luke 4.John The Acts of the Apostles 5.The Acts of the Apostles Accepted Letters of Paul 6.First Letter to the Corinthians 7.Second Letter to the Corinthians 8.To the Ephesians 9.To the Philippians 10.To the Colossians 11.To the Galatians 12.First Letter to the Thessalonians 13.Second Letter to the Thessalonians 14.To the Romans 15.To Philemon 16.To Titus 17.First Letter to Timothy 18.Second Letter to Timothy

Other Accepted Books 1.The Letter of Jude 2.First letter ascribed to John 3.Second letter ascribed to John • The Wisdom of Solomon[52] 4.The Apocalypse of John (Revelation) Controversial Books – “Some of us are not willing that [it] be read in church” • The Apocalypse of Peter Profitable for reading, but not publicly in congregations • The Shepherd of Hermas Rejected Books –“Cannot be received” • Paul to the Laodiceans (by Marcionites) • Paul to the Alexandrines (by Marcionites) • The writings of Arsinous, Valentinus, Miltiades, Marcion, Basilides, and the Montanists (Cataphrygians)

According to this list, the second-century churches known to the author of the fragment accepted twenty-two books in the current New Testament canon. It is reasonable to identify the unnamed first and second Gospels as Matthew and Mark, the common traditional order. Consequently, the only New Testament books missing from the list are Hebrews, James, First Peter, Second Peter, and Third John. We have in this account a remarkably similar list to the twenty-seven books included in the New Testament today.

The list includes some surprising differences around the periphery of the canon (i.e., outside the four Gospels and the works of Paul). While there may have been questions about some canonical books, such as Hebrews, Jude, and 2 Peter, the core texts of the New Testament, such as the four Gospels and the Pauline Epistles, were never in question. The fragment also has a positive attitude about several works that are not in the traditional New Testament canon. The Wisdom of Solomon is the only book given full approval that does not appear in the traditional canon.^[53] Two other books—the Apocalypse of Peter and the Shepherd of Hermas—are given mild or controversial praise.

In sum, in this second-century list of books we have a core of twenty-two books that are familiar to all Jesus-followers today, as well as some differences of opinion about a handful of books that were ultimately not included in the canon. This is highly relevant evidence, as it dates to roughly a century and a half before Constantine’s reign.

Irenaeus’s Canonical Citations in the Second Century

Writing around the time of the Muratorian Fragment was the church father Irenaeus (140–202 CE). He described only four Gospels that were used in congregations:

Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect,^[54] while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome, and laying the foundations of the Church. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter. Luke also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the Gospel preached by him. Afterwards, John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon His breast, did himself publish a Gospel during his residence at Ephesus in Asia.^[55]

This is the closest to a canonical list that Irenaeus gave in his works, but we can piece together his understanding of accepted works based on the New Testament quotations he included in his writings. Besides the four Gospels, Irenaeus appealed to Acts, as well as the following books, as summarized by New Testament scholar F.F. Bruce:

[Irenaeus] does not list the letters of Paul, but he evidently accepted the whole corpus of thirteen letters (the Pastorals included); the only letter he does not mention is the short letter to Philemon, which he had no occasion to cite. There is a probable quotation from Hebrews 1:3 in the third book Against Heresies, where God is said to have created all things ‘by the word of his power.’… He knows 1 Peter as the work of the apostle Peter; twice he quotes 1 Peter 1:8 (‘without having seen him, you love him …’). He quotes 1 and 2 John as the work of John the evangelist, ‘the disciple of the Lord’. There is one fairly clear quotation of James 2:23 (‘he [Abraham] believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness; and he was called the friend of God’), but its source is not given, nor is any reference made to James. The Apocalypse is quoted frequently towards the end of the treatise Against Heresies as the basis of the eschatology held by Irenaeus and many of his predecessors and contemporaries; it is ascribed to ‘John the disciple of the Lord’, and treated as a genuine prophecy, in keeping with its own claim (Rev. 1:3; 22:7, 10, 18, 19).^[56]

In sum, Irenaeus’ listing of the four Gospels and his quotations indicate that he accepted at least twenty-two of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament. As one of our earliest witnesses to second-century Christian thought, Irenaeus’ use of New Testament works is valuable.

More Second-Century References to the New Testament

The literature composed in the first to early fourth centuries (before 313 CE) contains copious quotations of the New Testament books. Church fathers such as Papias, Clement, Ignatius, Tertullian, Justin Martyr, and many others quoted the New Testament books as trustworthy and divine accounts. In the third century, authors like Origen composed commentaries on entire books of the New Testament. All these authors quoted from New Testament books as if they had canonical status. In their joint book on textual criticism, Bart Ehrman and Bruce Metzger claim, “Indeed, so extensive are these citations that if all other sources for our knowledge of the text of the New Testament were destroyed, they would be sufficient alone for the reconstruction of practically the entire New Testament.”^[57] Theologian Norman Geisler summarized the relevant authors and citations:

A common body of books was cited by Fathers in the second century. This includes the six books crucial to the historicity of Christ and his resurrection, the Gospels, Acts, and 1 Corinthians. Clement of Rome cited the Gospels in 95 [CE] (Corinthians, 13, 42, 46). Ignatius (ca. 110–115 [CE]) quoted Luke 24:39 (Smyrnaeans 3). Polycarp (ca. 115 [CE]) cites all Synoptic Gospels (Philippians 2, 7). The Didache (early second century) cites the Synoptic Gospels (1, 3, 8, 9, 15–16). The Epistle of Barnabas (ca. 135 [CE]) cites Matthew 22:14. Papias (Oracles, ca. 125–140 [CE]) speaks of Matthew, Mark (chronicling Peter), and John (last) who wrote Gospels. He says three times that Mark made no errors. The Fathers considered the Gospels and Paul’s Epistles to be on par with the inspired Old Testament (cf. Clement’s Corinthians [47]; Ignatius’s Ephesians [10]; To Polycarp [1, 5]; and Polycarp’s Philippians [1, 3–4, 6, 12]).^[58]

The significant number of quotations of the New Testament before the rise of Constantine indicate that the canonical New Testament books were widely influential before the emperor or a church council made any official pronouncement.

Despite this evidence in favor of the New Testament’s influence before Constantine, one might still object that other books that did not make it into the New Testament were also viable candidates. Just because the Muratorian Fragment and the church fathers prioritized the canonical books, perhaps there were others who disagreed and had their own competing lists of books. Why accept the canonical New Testament books when the other books could be just as authentic?

We have not dealt with this issue so far; up to this point we have focused on addressing the notion that the traditional canon of the New Testament lacked widespread use and popularity before the rise of Constantine. Further below we will address why the traditional canon was so popular: It had credibility that the other books lacked.

Reason 3: Some Non-Canonical Books Accepted the Canonical Books

Any books that quote the canonical New Testament books must have been written after the New Testament quote had circulated. Put another way, one cannot footnote a book that has not been written yet. Ironically, some of the “lost gospels” make use of the canonical books of the New Testament through approving quotations as if the quotes are functioning as Scripture. For example, the following non-canonical books cite the listed New Testament passages (and this list is by no means exhaustive):

The Gospel of Philip (ca. third century): 1 Corinthians 15:50, John 6:53, Matthew 6:6, Mark 15:34, Matthew 3:15, John 8:34, 1 Corinthians 8:1, 1 Peter 4:8, Matthew 3:10, John 8:32, Matthew 15:13^[59]

On the Exegesis of the Soul (ca. second-fourth centuries): 1 Corinthians 5:9–10, Ephesians 6:12, Ephesians 5:23, John 6:44, Matthew 5:4–6, Luke 14:26, Acts 13:24^[60]

The Hypostasis of the Archons (third century): Colossians 1:13, Ephesians 6:12 [Paul is called “the great apostle]^[61]

The Apocalypse of Peter (ca. third-fourth centuries): Luke 6:43–44, Matthew 25:29^[62]

These quotations within books found at Nag Hammadi illustrate that a wide variety of canonical New Testament books were in use by the communities who produced the lost gospels. Outside of Nag Hammadi, the church father Tertullian claimed that the Gnostic teacher Valentinus used the entire New Testament in his writings, according to Tertullian’s understanding of the New Testament in the late second century.^[63]

These quotations depict two things: First, the lost gospels above were composed after the canonical works they cite, illustrating the early origin of the canonical New Testament books. Second, the canonical books had widespread reputations for being authentic, such that even schismatic groups made use of them—whether to agree or disagree with them.

In contrast, the canonical New Testament books never quote from any of the lost gospels, showing an asymmetrical relationship between the two sets of works. The canonical books had a high reputation, and the lost gospels attempted to benefit from that reputation by citing them. This is an argument in favor of the canonical New Testament books’ authenticity since the lost gospels presuppose the influence of the works they cite.

In the mid-fifth century, after the consolidation of the New Testament canon, theologian and monk Vincent of Lérins made a scathing observation against those he perceived as heretics and their use of Scripture:

Do heretics also appeal to Scripture? They do indeed, and with a vengeance; for you may see them scamper through every single book of Holy Scripture—through the books of Moses, the books of Kings, the Psalms, the Epistles, the Gospels, the Prophets. Whether among their own people, or among strangers, in private or in public, in speaking or in writing, at convivial meetings, or in the streets, hardly ever do they bring forward anything of their own which they do not endeavour to shelter under words of Scripture. Read the works of Paul of Samosata, of Priscillian, of Eunomius, of Jovinian,^[64] and the rest of those pests, and you will see an infinite heap of instances, hardly a single page, which does not bristle with plausible quotations from the New Testament or the Old.^[65]

Therefore, the non-canonical works’ use of the canonical New Testament books are a sign of the canonical books’ priority and higher authenticity.

Reason 4: Orthodoxy Became Mainstream Without Political Coercion

The “diversity before orthodoxy” view needs a powerful force to consolidate orthodoxy from the chaos that preceded it. The proponents of this view believe they have found that force in Emperor Constantine in the fourth century; for them, it was he, through the power of the Roman state, who established a new orthodoxy by punishing all who disagreed with it. As the Da Vinci Code claimed, “The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and burned.”^[66]

If one were to follow the development of other religions’ holy books, such as the Qu’ran, one might be tempted to think that the New Testament’s consolidation went through a similar process. Islam’s holy book underwent a decade or two of popular, uncontrolled recopying after the death of Mohammed. As one Muslim apologist explains, there were multiple Qur’ans in multiple Arabic dialects in use, each of which was thought to have originated from Mohammed.^[67] But then Caliph Uthman came to power (644–656 CE), and he did not like there being different versions of the Qu’ran. According to the Hadith, one of Islam’s holy books containing the official traditions of Islam, “Uthman sent to every Muslim province one copy of what they had copied, and ordered that all the other Qur’anic materials, whether written in fragmentary manuscripts or whole copies, be burnt.”^[68] The only versions that were allowed to exist were the Arabic versions approved by the Caliph, the political head of state.

Unlike the history of the Qur’an, the books of the New Testament gained widespread usage long before any political intervention, that is, much earlier than Constantine’s reign. Followers of Jesus in the second and third centuries lived in an unregulated atmosphere in which ideas could flourish and be rejected based on their inherent merits and historical connection with Jesus’s apostles. Christian leaders could speak or write against bad teachings and false gospels, discouraging their congregations from considering them, but they had no power to coerce those outside their congregations or stop the production of their books. The pre-Constantinian bishops and other leaders of the Christian churches did have ecclesiastical power to excommunicate (banish) people in their ranks, but their power was a byproduct of their historical and doctrinal connection with the apostles who had founded their congregations.^[69]

Hurtado writes of the organic and non-coercive victory of “proto-Orthodox Christianity” in the pre-Constantinian era as follows:

There was, after all, no real means of “top-down” coercive success for any version of Christianity over others until after Constantine, when imperial endorsement and power could be brought to bear. Second-century bishops were elected by Christians of the locale in which they were to serve. So, for example, if a bishop did not have (or could not win) sufficient support from the local Christians, he could hardly impose on them some version of faith contrary to the preferences of the majority. Thus, if any version of Christianity enjoyed success and became more prominent than others in the first three centuries (whether locally or translocally), it was largely the result of its superior ability to commend itself to sufficient numbers of adherents and supporters. To reiterate the point, the apparent success of what I am calling “proto-orthodox” Christianity was probably the result of teaching and behavior that were more readily comprehended and embraced by larger numbers of ordinary Christians of the time than were the alternatives.^[70]

Moreover, there was no centralized power in the pre-Constantinian era that was producing standardized New Testaments. The lack of centralization was not seen as a problem, but rather a catalyst for sharing the message of Jesus with the nations. There was no attempt to keep the New Testament in one official language since that would have slowed the progress of sharing the message (Matthew 28:19–20). Syrian scribes, Italian scribes, Egyptian scribes, Armenian scribes, Ethiopian scribes, and many other scribes were translating and reproducing the books of the New Testament freely, each in their own language and separated from the other scribes by culture and by thousands of miles. We have many of their manuscripts still today.

The wide variety of copies of the New Testament ensured that no textual tradition could be substantially changed without others noticing. In The Da Vinci Code, the fictional Professor Teabing claims that Constantine “embellished those gospels that made [Jesus] godlike,” meaning the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.^[71] If so, the pre-Constantinian form of those Gospels should have been significantly different from post-Constantinian Gospels. Köstenberger and Kruger respond to the possibility of embellishing the Gospels:

The textual tradition of the New Testament, therefore, has a stubborn quality about it. Although a scribe can change an individual manuscript (or an individual reading), changing the overall textual tradition is much more difficult than one might think—the fact that there are so many other copies in circulation makes this virtually impossible to do.^[72]

Indeed, scholars have identified many manuscripts of New Testament books from the second and third centuries, and they pose no threat to Christian orthodoxy. On the contrary, since Christian scholars awoke to the importance of early manuscript evidence in the late nineteenth century, most Christian Bible translations have shifted to prioritize second-century through fifth-century manuscripts over later medieval ones. There does not seem to have been any significant changes in the New Testament text before and after Constantine, illustrating how the fourth century’s orthodoxy was a continuation of the earlier textual tradition.

Constantine does not appear to have been a decisive factor when it comes to the canonical books of the New Testament. In their discussion of the New Testament canon, Bible scholars John D. Barry, Rachel Klippenstein, and Carrie Wolcott confirm Constantine’s lack of influence over the canon:

Although Constantine’s influence at the Council of Nicea in AD 325 is often cited as a major force in finalizing the New Testament canon, the evidence does not support this. Constantine, as emperor, did convene the council, but he had no direct authority over the outcome of the council, and the records of the council’s decisions contain no mention of the New Testament canon.^[73]

Where, then, did the idea of Constantine’s influence over the New Testament canon come from? The idea of the canon being determined by Constantine at Nicaea comes from a legendary account written nearly 600 years after the council itself.^[74] In other words, the account is highly suspect.

The New Testament books we know today, and the orthodox churches who preached them, appear to have found their popularity without Constantine’s help. He was not a decisive factor in the canon’s definition. The evidence is clear that the New Testament canon was accepted at an early stage through factors outside political or religious coercion.

Next, we will examine the reasons why the non-canonical books did not enjoy the same status and why they were rejected and mostly lost to history until their recent rediscovery.

Four Reasons Why the Lost Gospels Were Left Out of the Canon

In another article on this site, I argue for the canonical books’ pedigree as first-century documents written by Jesus’s handpicked disciples or those who were closely associated with those disciples. Those arguments stand on their own, but we will set them aside for the time being. In this section, we will investigate why the books of the canonical New Testament are different from those that were left out and why those differences should lead to the rejection of the lost gospels as authentic witnesses to Jesus’s teachings.

The Most Important Ancient Criterion for Canonicity: Apostolic Authority

Among the surviving writings of the first three centuries after Jesus, the simplest and most important criterion for the authoritative status of a book about Jesus was demonstrable proof of authorship or approval by one of Jesus’s apostles. When we survey the terrain of canonical and non-canonical works about Jesus, it appears that everyone—orthodox and Gnostic heretic alike—agreed that a connection with the apostles was the key to a work’s acceptance.

Elsewhere in another article, I have discussed how we can know who wrote the New Testament books. However, that article only covered the list of twenty-seven books of the accepted New Testament. What about the other books that were not included in the New Testament? How do we know that Jesus’s apostles did not write them?

We notice something very interesting when we start looking at the non-canonical books. Many of them attempt to attach themselves to one of Yeshua’s apostles, in line with the criterion described above. Yes, even these authors of the non-canonical books understood that the test of authenticity was whether one of Yeshua’s apostles wrote the book. Non-canonical books that tied themselves to apostles or family members included the following:

The Acts of Peter The Acts of Peter and the Twelve Apostles The Acts of Philip The Acts of Thomas The Apocalypse of Paul The Apocryphon of James The Prayer of the Apostle Paul

The Gospel of Mary The Gospel of Nicodemus The Gospel of Philip The Gospel of Thomas The Letter of Peter to Philip The Protoevangelium of James The Apocryphon of John

We find these works in the Nag Hammadi Library, an extraordinary literary discovery from 1945.^[75] Most of the works found at Nag Hammadi, dating to roughly the third to fifth centuries CE, were either previously unknown or were known only from sparse references elsewhere.

By claiming to be Yeshua’s apostles and family members, the authors of these books asserted that Yeshua gave their books authority in matters of doctrine and practice. Thus, these works claim to have the same authority commonly accorded to the books in the New Testament. Why was a connection to an apostle so important for these non-canonical works?

In a section called “The Great Commission,” the Gospel of Matthew offers the earliest justification of the criterion of apostolic connection (first century CE). Matthew recorded Yeshua issuing the following commission to his disciples: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations… teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matt 28:19–20). Yeshua claimed to have the power to issue this kind of command: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (v. 18). Based on these words, Matthew portrayed Yeshua’s disciples as having the highest kind of approval to go and tell the world who Yeshua was and what he taught. Other canonical New Testament passages indicate that Yeshua’s disciples (also called apostles) were understood by Jesus’s followers to have a special authority to teach (Acts 2:42, John 14:26, Acts 4:31–33, 16:4, Galatians 1:1, 1 Timothy 2:7, Titus 1:1).

It should not be seen as problematic to cite these canonical passages to make this point because even the non-canonical books accepted the unparalleled authority of Jesus’s apostles, and the cited works pre-date the lost gospels. Apostolic authority seems to have been a non-controversial and non-sectarian opinion in the first four centuries. So then, if the non-canonical books claimed to have apostolic authority and authorship, why were they excluded from the New Testament? Here are four reasons:

Reason 1: The Non-Canonical Books Could Not Demonstrate Apostolic Authorship

If Yeshua’s apostles were the origin of all authoritative teaching for followers of the Messiah, then anything claiming to be from Yeshua’s apostles must be continuously connected to them with a demonstrable historical chain of living memory. No unbroken chain of memory means no canonical status. Let us explain what we mean by “living memory.”

The authors of the canonical New Testament books penned their books for the purpose of oral recitation in a congregational context (i.e., Colossians 4:16, 1 Thessalonians 5:27, Revelation 1—3). This makes economic sense: Since papyri and parchments were so expensive to copy, people would have heard religious books read aloud from a single copy in congregational settings, rather than reading personal copies in privacy like today. In the era we are discussing, all religious learning was communal, in a congregational setting with shared liturgical history. Given the shared economic reality of book production, it is likely that any other religious books, such as the lost gospels, would have been written for a communal context as well.

The second-century documents that speak to congregational practices also indicate that religious instruction was delivered through the public reading of holy books. Because such instruction came from books, each congregation needed to discern whether each book was authentic or not based on its connection to an apostolic source. Pre-Constantinian accounts indicate that a book’s “canonical status” revolved around whether they were deemed appropriate for public reading in a congregational setting. Their criteria were as follows:

Canonical: It is read in the congregations.^[76]

Helpful but Non-Canonical: It is read in the congregations but not for doctrine.^[77]

Rejected and Non-canonical: It is not read in the congregations.^[78]

The tradition of each congregation determined these three categories, that is, what had been acceptable for reading in a particular congregation since its founding. In the period that we are discussing, specifically the second and third centuries, the founding of the congregations was within the reach of only a few generations. For example, some second-century congregations had still-living members with memories of the apostles and their teachings, especially in those congregations founded and visited by the apostles themselves in Judea, Asia Minor, and Rome.^[79] Each of these communities had decades of accepted liturgical practice of reading from certain books in their services. They knew which books had been used for decades and which ones had only recently appeared. All an inquirer had to do was consult the books that had been continuously read in the services to be able to trace them back to an apostolic source. In addition, during the early and mid- second century, elders like Polycarp (ca. 70–156 CE), a disciple of John, could be consulted for the list of the books that had been read since apostolic times (as well as theological orthodoxy).

As a hypothetical example, suppose a book claimed to be written by an apostle but was never quoted (to our best knowledge) by anyone before 160 CE, nor was read in continuous congregational liturgy (to our best knowledge). In that case, that claim of apostolic authorship is unlikely. How could an authoritative and apostolic book go unnoticed and unquoted for a century after the death of Yeshua’s apostles? If an apostle wrote a book, why would he not have delivered it to a congregation for public reading and copying? Which is more likely—that the apostles buried the book in a time capsule, only to be found 100 years later, or that someone else forged the book in their name in 160 CE? The latter is likely the case.

Similarly, what if someone came into town in 160 CE Asia Minor (where the apostles Paul, John, and Philip began congregations a century earlier) and started telling everyone that he had a “lost gospel”? The first thing the congregation members would do is ask the elders in their congregations if they have ever heard of such a book. If not, they would check with the congregations in the towns nearby. Maybe they would even write to their regional bishop. If all of them said, “Nope, never heard of it. No one has ever read that book in the congregations,” then what should the congregation members do? They should conclude that the book has no connection with the apostles and they would not give it legitimacy.

This line of argument is especially relevant to the second century when there were believers who had personally known Yeshua’s apostles. They had a living memory of what the apostles said and taught, within just a few generations. These second-century believers could instantly tell when something was written in an apostle’s name but was not actually from him. The old-timers in the second-century congregations could say, “I knew John, and he never wrote or taught that.” This living memory is precisely what we have in Asia Minor and the school of congregational leaders who were discipled by Yohanan (John) and his disciples.^[80] We have writings from Papias, Polycarp, Justin, and Irenaeus from this school, each of whom sought to preserve what had been handed down to them from their teachers.

If a demonstrable connection with an apostle is an essential criterion for canonicity, and the apostles are now all dead, then there can no longer be any canonical innovation. New books claiming authoritative status must be automatically disavowed because the apostles’ earliest followers did not have any knowledge of those books. Either the apostles and their associates had to publish their books to their followers in their lifetimes (becoming canonical), or else the books written in their names were forgeries (becoming non-canonical).

This is a major dividing line between the canonical New Testament and the lost gospels. Whereas the New Testament books have a chain of demonstrable continuous usage from the late first century through the second,^[81] the lost gospels show up late in the second century, from within schismatic communities, without any previous quotations or commentaries that tie them to the era of the apostles. They are the kind of book in our 160 CE scenario above that would have been disqualified from its first appearance.

Reason 2: The Non-Canonical Books Failed to Match Accepted Teaching

A secondary way that books were authenticated in the early congregations was the degree to which the books adhered to previously accepted teaching, known as “The Rule of Faith.” Here again, innovation was expressly rejected. If the apostles did not teach it, then the teaching could not be from Yeshua. In the late second century, church father Irenaeus explained The Rule of Faith:

As I have already observed, the Church, having received this preaching and this faith, although scattered throughout the whole world, yet, as if occupying but one house, carefully preserves it. She also believes these points [of doctrine] just as if she had but one soul, and one and the same heart, and she proclaims them, and teaches them, and hands them down, with perfect harmony, as if she possessed only one mouth. For, although the languages of the world are dissimilar, yet the import of the tradition is one and the same. For the Churches which have been planted in Germany do not believe or hand down anything different, nor do those in Spain, nor those in Gaul, nor those in the East, nor those in Egypt, nor those in Libya, nor those which have been established in the central regions of the world.^[82]

Irenaeus claimed there was an inherited body of teaching with a coherency that was uniform throughout many congregations of the East and the West in the second century. If any book were to appear on the scene with teachings that were unsupported or contradicted by the accepted teaching, then the book was rejected. This criterion resulted in the rejection of many books that claimed authoritative status. Many of the rejected books have evident Gnostic influence, and they include unusual and unbiblical teachings that place them outside the coherent body of teaching accepted by Jesus’s earliest followers.^[83] Some examples of unusual or contradictory teachings in the non-canonical books include the following:

The Gospel of Thomas: Jesus supposedly taught: “If you pray, you will be condemned; and if you give alms, you will do harm to your spirits” (Thomas 14). Nakedness leads to redemption: “When you disrobe without being ashamed and take up your garments and place them under your feet like little children and tread on them, then [will you see] the son of the living one, and you will not be afraid” (Thomas 37). Pantheism or panentheism^[84] is affirmed: “Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there” (Thomas 77). Women need to transform into males: “For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven” (Thomas 114).^[85]

The Gospel of Philip: It advocates a Gnostic dualism: “Light and darkness, life and death, right and left, are brothers of one another. They are inseparable. Because of this neither are the good good, nor the evil evil, nor is life life, nor death death.”^[86]

The Apocalypse of James: Jesus supposedly taught James that he would not be able to understand the heavenly powers until he casts away “this bond of flesh which encircles you. And then you will reach Him-who-is. And you will no longer be James; rather you are the One-who-is.”^[87] This passage advocates Gnostic soul-flight, whereby the soul ascends through powers in the heavenly realms, and panentheistic unification with the infinite that is foreign to the Bible.

The Gospel of Mary: One of Jesus’s female followers, Mary Magdalene, recites a teaching she heard from Jesus about soul-flight (a Gnostic concept). When she is done with her teachings, Jesus’s disciples Andrew and Peter speak up:

But Andrew answered and said to the brethren, “Say what you (wish to) say about what she has said. I at least do not believe that the Savior said this. For certainly these teachings are strange ideas.” Peter answered and spoke concerning these same things. He questioned them about the Savior: “Did he really speak with a woman without our knowledge (and) not openly? Are we to turn about and all listen to her? Did he prefer her to us?”^[88]

After Andrew and Peter express doubt about Mary’s previously unknown esoteric teaching, the Gospel concludes by saying that Mary’s recollection of Jesus’s teachings should be trusted more than Andrew and Peter’s. The author of this Gospel knew that its teachings were unorthodox and this perspective is represented in this scene by Andrew and Peter, but the author encouraged his readers to accept the innovative teachings, as represented in the reading by Mary.

These brief vignettes of lost gospels illustrate doctrinal reasons why the books were rejected: They were odd at best and regularly contradicted by biblical teaching at worst. The early Jesus-followers who knew what they had been taught from the elders in their congregations could tell that these non-canonical works were illegitimate. The books failed the Rule of Faith.

Reason 3: The Non-Canonical Books Rejected the Hebrew Scriptures

The second and third centuries saw a shift of influence within the communities that followed Yeshua as Messiah. That influence shifted from Jewish believers to Gentiles and from Judea to the nations. With those shifts came a major fissure that separated the canonical books from the non-canonical ones: Their acceptance or rejection of the Hebrew Scriptures.

No one can deny that the Jesus movement originated in Judea in the first century, with Jews as the first hearers, followers, and writers of Jesus’s message. In fact, the entire canonical New Testament, with the possible exception of Luke, was written by Jews. The Jewish origins of the Jesus movement can be known without being dependent upon any of the canonical New Testament Scriptures; Roman, Syrian, Greek, and Talmudic accounts of the Jesus movement place its origin in Judea. Moreover, the Apostle Paul’s writings, which were likely the earliest of the canonical books of the New Testament to be written,^[89] illustrate a deep love for the Jewish Bible (Romans 1:1–3, 9:1–5; 2 Corinthians 6:16–18). The very concept of “Messiah” is drawn from the Jewish Scriptures, and the New Testament authors consistently claimed that Yeshua was the fulfillment of those Scriptures (Matthew 5:17, 8:17, 1 Peter 1:10–12). By one scholar’s count, the New Testament quotes the Tanakh 224 times with an introductory phrase like, “As it is written.”^[90] Without the Hebrew Scriptures (Tanakh), the New Testament would not exist.

Likewise, no one denies that the early Jesus movement, initially centered in Judea, quickly spread throughout the Gentile world and Jewish Diaspora by the end of the first century CE. Then, by the second century CE, Gentile followers of Jesus greatly outnumbered those of Jewish background. This trend was noticed as early as the 50s CE by Paul (Romans 9—11), but Gentile dominance over church leadership accelerated after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE and the Jewish mother congregation that existed there.

Coinciding with a transition of influence from Judea to the nations came an unfortunate temptation to disassociate Jesus from the Hebrew Scriptures. A minority of Gentiles previously unfamiliar with the Hebrew Scriptures and unattracted to its laws and stories started to see anything Jewish—including the Scriptures—as antiquated and obsolete. The second century heretic Marcion was emblematic of this view. The majority of Gentile Christians knew that a rejection of the Hebrew Scriptures resulted in the destruction of the New Testament as well, so they fought back to defend the Hebrew Scriptures.

Kötenberger and Kruger write, “Gnostics severed any connection between Jesus and the God of the Old Testament…. Gnostics thought that the Old Testament God was inferior and evil and that Jesus was radically different from him.”^[91] This would have prevented them from accepting the canonical New Testament authors, all of whom venerate the Hebrew Scriptures as the inspired words of God. Thus, the Hebrew Scriptures became a battleground among Gentile followers of Jesus. Those who accepted the Hebrew Scriptures accepted the canonical New Testament books built upon them; those who rejected the Hebrew Scriptures tended to reject the canonical New Testament books as well—or produced edited de-Judaized versions of the New Testament, as with Marcion.

We have good reason to believe that many of the books in the Nag Hammadi discovery—the lost gospels—rejected the Hebrew Scriptures outright. For example, consider this section from The Second Treatise of the Great Seth, found at Nag Hammadi, where the Gnostic savior attributes the Hebrew Scriptures to the deception of the Hebdomad,^[92] the Gnostic lesser heavenly emanation of the ineffable God:

Abraham and Isaac and Jacob were a laughingstock, since they, the counterfeit fathers, were given a name by the Hebdomad… David was a laughingstock…. Solomon was a laughingstock, since he thought that he was Christ [the Son of David], having become vain through the Hebdomad…. The twelve prophets were laughingstocks, since they have come forth as imitations of the true prophets. They came into being as counterfeits through the Hebdomad…. Moses, a faithful servant, was a laughingstock…. For they had a doctrine of angels to observe dietary laws and bitter slavery, since they never knew truth, nor will they know it. For there is a great deception upon their soul making it impossible for them ever to find a Nous^[93] of freedom in order to know him, until they come to know the Son of Man.^[94]

Similarly, the Apocryphon of John, found at Nag Hammadi, associates the created world’s chief archon (deity) with adultery and deception. The author interacts with Genesis in ways that are best described as subversive. For example, the author, speaking as the Gnostic savior, claims that the evil archon commanded Adam to refrain from eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but Adam had a divine light from the savior inside him telling him to do otherwise. The Gnostic savior praises Adam for disregarding the archon and eating the fruit.^[95] He claims, “It is not the way Moses wrote (and) you heard.”^[96] Likewise, the Apocryphon attributes the flood of Genesis 6 to the evil archon. Noah is able to escape the archon’s evil plan, not by entering an ark, but by entering into a mystical place of light sent to him by a higher divinity. The author explicitly quotes from Genesis 7:7 only to deny it ever happened.^[97]

Subversive interaction with the Tanakh in this fashion makes it likely that these books were far removed from Jesus’s Jewish context. Their lack of respect for Jewish thought is another reason to mark the non-canonical books as inauthentic witnesses to Jesus’s life and teaching. Jesus was a faithful, religious Jewish man who spoke highly of Judaism and the Scriptures of his people; the non-canonical books often did not do this.

Reason 4: Many Non-Canonical Books Exclude Themselves by Criticizing Canonical Books

Textual expert Bruce Metzger made an important observation about the non-canonical gospels: “Even a casual acquaintance, however, of the apocryphal gospels and their credentials will prove that no one excluded them from the Bible; they excluded themselves.”^[98] How did they “exclude themselves”? Often, the non-canonical gospels made condemning and judgmental remarks about the mainstream accepted books of the New Testament.

The Gnostic Apocalypse of Peter, for example, has Jesus prophesying that his first followers would originally accept his Gnostic teachings, but that later generations would reject Gnosticism. In other words, a non-Gnostic faith in Jesus is corrupt, according to the Gnostic Apocalypse of Peter:

For many will accept our teaching in the beginning. And they will turn from them again by the will of the Father of their error, because they have done what he wanted…. And they [orthodox Christians] will cleave to the name of a dead man, thinking that they will become pure. But they will become greatly defiled and they will fall into a name of error, and into the hand of an evil, cunning man and a manifold dogma, and they will be ruled heretically.^[99]

The Gnostic Jesus continues, casting scorn on the leaders of orthodox congregations:

And there shall be others of those who are outside our number who name themselves bishop and also deacons, as if they have received their authority from God. They bend themselves under the judgment of the leaders. Those people are dry canals.^[100]

Elsewhere, this work denies that Christ died on the cross, only an evil substitute who looked like him (Apoc. Peter 82.17–83:15). The reference to a dead man who makes people pure is likely a reference to the New Testament teaching that the death and resurrection of Yeshua leads to the forgiveness of sin (e.g., Romans 5:10). This is the heart of the New Testament’s teaching about Yeshua. By rejecting this teaching as “error,” and calling those who teach it heretical rulers, the Gnostic Apocalypse of Peter has drawn a line in the sand. The author of this work does not want anything to do with the canonical New Testament or those who teach it.

Many other non-canonical books of the second century and later repudiate the accepted New Testament books. For example, The Book of the Resurrection of Christ by Bartholomew rejects the idea of Yeshua’s resurrection and treats Yeshua like a superhero riding through the cosmos on a chariot.^[101] Another, The Gospel of Bartholomew, says Yeshua vanished from the cross miraculously.^[102] The rejection of Yeshua’s death and resurrection automatically rejects the entire New Testament and falls under harsh condemnation in 1 Corinthians 15:17–19, which Paul wrote long before these Gnostic works.^[103] The famous Gospel of Thomas also appears to be the product of a fringe cult that had separated itself from all other Jesus followers. The Gospel of Thomas is disconnected from the Jewish world Yeshua lived in,^[104] rejects the covenantal benefits of circumcision,^[105] and rejects the future resurrection of the dead.^[106] These teachings put Thomas in a separate class from the first-century Jewish works included in the New Testament.

In light of these findings, the non-canonical books are not in the New Testament because they did not want to be in it. The canonical New Testament was a threat to their existence as peddlers of esoteric, Gnostic, anti-resurrection, and innovative theologies. These books should not be placed on par with the first-century books that made it into the canon, as if they are equally valuable options; no, they were direct competitors or attempted detractors that could not coexist simultaneously. If the New Testament books have demonstrable historical, linguistic, and apostolic credibility, which they do, then such credibility negates the authority of the non-canonical books.

Conclusion: The Non-Canonical Books Were Rejected for Good Reasons

When we look at the evidence of the second and third centuries CE, we find no justifiable reasons to assert that the creation of the New Testament canon was based on a conspiracy to hide the truth. The lost gospels that were not included in the New Testament were left out of the New Testament canon for good reasons. However, such a statement may sound suspicious in a pluralistic society where every view must be given airtime. Popular critics like Dan Brown and scholars like Bart Ehrman stoke that suspicion’s flames.

The conspiracy theory of “diversity precedes orthodoxy” envisions the theologically orthodox party of the church conducting a focused effort to clamp down on the lost books by destroying them and forging their own origin story. This position is historically untenable. Jewish followers of Yeshua and Gentile Christians were persecuted by Roman officials until 313 CE and had no authority to coerce anyone or destroy their books. Before the fourth century, church leaders could only excommunicate those who accepted the lost books and write against such schisms and heresies. Church authorities had the power of the pen but had no political or legal authority. Once someone was kicked out of a mainstream church, he could simply go start his own cult church, which many, like the Nag Hammadi Gnostics, did.

Orthodox followers of Jesus wrote at length against the many heretical teachings of these offshoot groups. The heresies of the time are preserved early in extensive writings by Jesus’s followers,^[107] hardly the practice of those seeking to cover up alternative views. However, these schisms were not fair fights. For example, it was not a 50/50 toss-up between accepting The Gospel of Matthew and The Gospel of Thomas in the New Testament. The authors of the “lost books” were aware of the overwhelming popularity of the “accepted books,” and many sought to undermine them to prop up their own credibility.

Some of the “lost books” have been found through the accident of archaeology. Many of them were unknown before the findings at Nag Hammadi in 1945. These discoveries are interesting, but they should not reformulate our understanding of the origins of faith in Jesus. These books were late (second century and later), were produced by schismatic Gnostic communities, and were at odds with the New Testament’s widely accepted Gospels and Epistles. They give us a historical understanding of the debates going on between Jesus-followers and the pseudo-Christian cults of the second, third, and fourth centuries, but they have no influence over what the New Testament canon ought to have been.

Once we look at the early evidence and find early, widespread acceptance of the books in the current New Testament, we see that there is no contest. The historical evidence leads to the conclusion that the books of the New Testament are the most ancient, the most accepted, the most widely used, the most quoted, and the most Jewish books of them all. As Bart Ehrman admits elsewhere in his writings,

If historians want to know what Jesus said and did they are more or less constrained to use the New Testament Gospels as their principal sources. Let me emphasize that this is not for religious or theological reasons—for instance, that these and these alone can be trusted. It is for historical reasons, pure and simple.^[108]

We find it fitting to give Ehrman the last word in this article.

Further Reading

Bauckham, Richard. Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony. Second Edition. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2017.

Bird, Michael. “Why the Lost Gospels Did Not Make the Canonical Cut”

Bock, Darrell. Breaking the Da Vinci Code. Thomas Nelson, 2004.

Bruce, F. F. The Canon of Scripture. Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1988.

Greenwald, Michael R., “The Canon of the New Testament” in The Jewish Annotated New Testament, Second Edition, 2017. Pages 695–99.

Hill, C.E. “Why There Are Just Four Gospels in the Bible.” Text & Canon Institute.

Klippenstein, Rachel, John D. Barry, and Edward J. Herrelko III. “Pseudepigrapha, Old Testament.” Edited by John D. Barry, David Bomar, Derek R. Brown, Rachel Klippenstein, Douglas Mangum, Carrie Sinclair Wolcott, Lazarus Wentz, Elliot Ritzema, and Wendy Widder. The Lexham Bible Dictionary. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016.

Kruger, Michael J. Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012.

Miller, Jeffrey E., and John D. Barry. “Pseudepigraphy in the Early Christian Period.” Edited by John D. Barry, David Bomar, Derek R. Brown, Rachel Klippenstein, Douglas Mangum, Carrie Sinclair Wolcott, Lazarus Wentz, Elliot Ritzema, and Wendy Widder. The Lexham Bible Dictionary. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016.

Responses to Bart Ehrman

Craig, William Lane Craig, 6-part video lecture: Parts one, two, three, four, five, six

Köstenberger, Andreas J., and Michael J. Kruger. The Heresy of Orthodoxy: How Contemporary Culture’s Fascination with Diversity Has Reshaped Our Understanding of Early Christianity. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010.

Various authors and responses at Always Be Ready Apologetics Ministry

Wallace, Daniel B., ed. Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament: Manuscript, Patristic, and Apocryphal Evidence. Text and Canon of the New Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic & Professional, 2011.

Wallace, Daniel Wallace, Response to “Misquoting Jesus”: The Gospel According to Bart

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Roberts, Alexander, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, eds. The Apostolic Fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus. Vol. 1. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1885.

Robinson, James McConkey, Richard Smith, and Coptic Gnostic Library Project. The Nag Hammadi Library in English. 4th rev. ed. New York, NY: E. J. Brill, 1996.

Sahaba. “Caliph Uthman.” HaqIslam (blog), November 13, 2011. https://www.haqislam.org/caliph-uthman/.

Schäfer, Peter. Two Gods in Heaven: Jewish Concepts of God in Antiquity. Translated by Allison Brown. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020.

Scholer, D.M. “Gnosis, Gnosticism.” In Dictionary of the Later New Testament & Its Developments, edited by Ralph P. Martin and Peter H. Davids, 400–412. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, November 24, 1997.

Segal, Alan F. Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism. Reprint edition. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012.

Shapiro, Marc B. The Limits of Orthodox Theology: Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles Reappraised. Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2004.

Sommer, Benjamin D. The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Stokes, G.T. “Libellus Synodicus.” In A Dictionary of Christian Biography, Literature, Sects and Doctrines, edited by William Smith and Henry Wace, 3:712–13. London, UK: John Murray, 1887 1877.

Tripolitis, Antonía. Religions of the Hellenistic-Roman Age. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002.

Vincent of Lérins. “The Commonitory of Vincent of Lérins.” In Sulpitius Severus, Vincent of Lérins, John Cassian, edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, Vol. 11. New York, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1894.

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Footnotes

1. Keren Heller, “Meet the Elite Group of Authors Who Sell 100 Million Books,” The Independent, December 28, 2016, sec. Culture, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/meet-the-elite-group-of-authors-who-sell-100-million-books-or-350-million-paolo-coelho-stephen-king-dan-brown-john-grisham-a7499096.html. ↑
2. Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (New York, NY: Doubleday, 2003), 231. ↑
3. Brown, 231. ↑
4. Brown, 234. Nag Hammadi refers to the ancient books unearthed in the Egyptian town in 1945, many of which are gnostic and other quasi-Christian texts that were previously lost to history. Brown’s claim that the Dead Sea Scrolls contain gospels about Jesus is false. However, the Nag Hammadi books do contain books about Jesus which purport to be gospels about him. This article will address many of them. See here for an extensive article on the Nag Hammadi Codices: John D. Barry and Mark S. Krause, “Nag Hammadi Codices,” in The Lexham Bible Dictionary, ed. John D. Barry (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016). ↑
5. Brown, The Da Vinci Code, 234. ↑
6. Brown, 234. ↑
7. Bart D Ehrman, Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code: A Historian Reveals What We Really Know about Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Constantine (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006). ↑
8. Ferdinand Christian Baur, The Christ Party in the Corinthian Community, ed. David Lincicum, trans. Wayne Coppins et al., Early Christianity and its Literature 29 (Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2021); Wilhelm Bousset, Kyrios Christos: Geschichte des Christusglaubens von den Anfängen des Christentums bis Iranuaus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1913); Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971). ↑
9. Andreas J. Köstenberger and Michael J. Kruger, The Heresy of Orthodoxy: How Contemporary Culture’s Fascination with Diversity Has Reshaped Our Understanding of Early Christianity (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010). ↑
10. Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2014), Ch. 8, Kindle. ↑
11. Bart D. Ehrman, Forged: Writing in the Name of God–Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2011), 218. ↑
12. See Ehrman, Forged, chaps. 2–6. ↑
13. After spending multiple chapters discussing second century CE and later forgeries, toward the end of Forged, Ehrman hedges his bets with an equivocation: “It is almost impossible to say whether the people who made up and passed along these stories [in the New Testament] were comparable to forgers, who knew full well that they were engaged in a kind of deception, or whether they, instead, were like those who falsely attributed anonymous books to known authors without knowing they were wrong. My guess is that most of the people who told these stories genuinely believed they happened. Even so, we should not say that these storytellers were not involved in deception. They may not have meant to deceive others (or they may have!), but they certainly did deceive others. In fact, they deceived others spectacularly well.” Ehrman, Forged, 239–240. This is an important admission. Up to this point in Forged, Ehrman led his audience to believe that the New Testament gospels could be guilty by association with later forgeries of indisputable illegitimacy and deception. On the contrary, it is not so easy to call the canonical gospels intentional forgeries. One would wish that Ehrman would begin his book with this admission. ↑
14. “The New Testament and Its Inconsistencies,” Jews for Judaism, June 22, 2009, https://jewsforjudaism.org/knowledge/articles/the-new-testament. ↑
15. Asher Norman, Twenty-Six Reasons Why Jews Don’t Believe in Jesus (Los Angeles, CA: Black White & Read, 2008), 145. Norman seems unfortunately unaware of the voluminous production of books in Greek by Jewish authors during the Second Temple Period, including the Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, the works of Philo and Josephus, Aquila’s translation, and others. ↑
16. See Alvin Plantinga’s works on warrant, including his handling of the “Gettier problem,” which challenged the age-old definition of knowledge as “justified true belief.” Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000), 156–59; Alvin Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2015). ↑
17. Canonization: The process by which a book comes to be recognized as holy and from God. ↑
18. For overviews of Gnosticism, see Ilaria Ramelli, “Gnosis-Gnosticism,” in Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity, ed. Angelo Di Berardino and James Hoover, trans. Joseph T. Papa, Erik A. Koenke, and Eric E. Hewett (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2014); Christoph Markschies, Gnosis: An Introduction, 1st edition (New York, NY: T&T Clark, 2003); Antonía Tripolitis, Religions of the Hellenistic-Roman Age (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), 119–42; D.M. Scholer, “Gnosis, Gnosticism,” in Dictionary of the Later New Testament & Its Developments, ed. Ralph P. Martin and Peter H. Davids (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, November 24, 1997); Irenaeus of Lyons, Against the Heresies, ed. John J. Dillon, trans. Dominic J. Unger, vol. I, 5 vols., Ancient Christian Writers 55 (Mahwah, NJ: The Newman Press, 1992). ↑
19. For these books, see the Revised Standard Version (RSV) Bible. ↑
20. For example, 1 Enoch, 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, and many others. For these books, see James Hamilton Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 2 vols. (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1983–1985). ↑
21. Montague Rhodes James, ed., The Apocryphal New Testament: Being the Apocryphal Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypses (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1924). ↑
22. James McConkey Robinson, Richard Smith, and Coptic Gnostic Library Project, The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 4th rev. ed. (New York, NY: E. J. Brill, 1996). ↑
23. For example, paying the Fiscus Judaicus tax to the Roman state, a tax levied only on Jews, enabled their religious toleration. Also, it helped when Judea was not in rebellion against Rome, unlike 66–70 CE. ↑
24. For example, Roman governor Pliny the Younger, in his letter to Emperor Trajan (dating between 98–117 CE), wrote, “In the meanwhile, the method I have observed towards those who have been denounced to me as Christians is this: I interrogated them whether they were Christians; if they confessed it I repeated the question twice again, adding the threat of capital punishment; if they still persevered, I ordered them to be executed. For whatever the nature of their creed might be, I could at least feel no doubt that contumacy and inflexible obstinacy deserved chastisement. There were others also possessed with the same infatuation, but being citizens of Rome, I directed them to be carried thither.” Pliny the Younger, Letters, Vols. 1 & 2, ed. W.M.L. Hutchinson, trans. William Melmoth, Loeb Classical Library (New York, NY: Macmillan Co., 1931), sec. 10.96. ↑
25. Baur, The Christ Party in the Corinthian Community; Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity. ↑
26. Ehrman: “Scholars have long held that the view of Christ in the Gospel of John was a later development in the Christian tradition. It was not something that Jesus himself actually taught, and it is not something that can be found in the other Gospels. In John, Jesus is a preexistent divine being who is equal with God. The earliest Christians—Jesus’s disciples, for example—did not believe this.” Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, chap. 7. ↑
27. This position was made famous in the nineteenth century by Baur, The Christ Party in the Corinthian Community. Bousset made a similar claim, saying that later Hellenistic believers constructed the idea of Jesus’s divinity, which was not present among Jesus’s Jewish followers. Bousset, Kyrios Christos. ↑
28. Ehrman: “In John’s Gospel we are not hearing two voices—the voice of Jesus and the voice of the narrator. We are hearing one voice. The author is speaking for himself and he is speaking for Jesus. These are not Jesus’s words; they are John’s words placed on Jesus’s lips.” Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, chap. 7. ↑
29. This is the approach taken by the radical Jesus Seminar, whose members take votes on which sayings of Jesus are authentic in their view. ↑
30. Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003), 520. Hurtado did not hold to his position. ↑
31. Ehrman writes, “The Christ of Nicea is obviously a far cry from the historical Jesus of Nazareth, an itinerant apocalyptic preacher in the backwaters of rural Galilee who offended the authorities and was unceremoniously crucified for crimes against the state. Whatever he may have been in real life, Jesus had now become fully God [at Nicaea].” Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, chap. 9. ↑
32. Ehrman does not make the same mistake as Brown by making Constantine the decisive factor in changing public opinion in favor of Jesus’s divinity. Ehrman acknowledges that “the vast majority of Christians agreed with” the affirmations of the Nicene creed before it was articulated at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. However, in his narrative, he points to Constantine as the one most responsible for the Nicene orthodoxy, for he was able to enforce acquiescence or banishment to dissenters. Ehrman, chap. 9. ↑
33. For example, Larry Hurtado wrote, “This characterization of the historical process differs from a view preferred by some scholars. In this other, somewhat romanticized picture, the dominance of “orthodoxy” is asserted to have been only a late and coercive imposition of one version of early Christianity that subverted an earlier and more innocent diversity. Indeed, what became orthodoxy is alleged to have been initially a minority or secondary version in most of the major geographical areas of Christianity’s early success. Those who take this view today often cite as the scholarly basis Walter Bauer’s 1934 book, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, which unquestionably has had great influence, especially since its English translation in 1971. Over the years, however, important studies have rather consistently found Bauer’s thesis seriously incorrect. In particular, Thomas Robinson’s detailed analysis of earliest Christianity in Asia Minor, and studies of Alexandrian Christianity by James McCue and Birger Pearson as well, concur that forms of Christianity that became designated “heretical” seem to have emerged characteristically in settings where prior versions of Christianity represented emergent proto-orthodox faith and practice. Moreover, Bauer’s claim that the second-century Roman church was able to impose its own forms of belief and order translocally is not borne out. In fact, about all that remains unrefuted of Bauer’s argument is the observation, and a rather banal one at that, that earliest Christianity was characterized by diversity, including serious differences of belief. Those who laud Bauer’s book, however, obviously prefer to proceed as if much more of his thesis is sustainable. Unfortunately, for this preference, Bauer’s claims have not stood well the test of time and critical examination.” Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity, 520–21. ↑
34. D. A. Carson, “Endorsement,” in The Heresy of Orthodoxy, by Andreas J. Köstenberger and Michael J. Kruger (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010), 2. ↑
35. Baur, The Christ Party in the Corinthian Community; Bousset, Kyrios Christos; Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity; Ehrman, How Jesus Became God. ↑
36. Benjamin D. Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Michael Wyschogrod, “A Jewish Perspective on Incarnation,” Modern Theology 12, no. 2 (April 1996): 195–209. ↑
37. Larry W. Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism, 3rd ed. (New York, NY: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015); Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ (New York: The New Press, 2012); Martin Hengel, Studies in Early Christology (New York, NY: T&T Clark, 2004); Crispin Fletcher-Louis, Jesus Monotheism: Christological Origins: The Emerging Consensus and Beyond, vol. 1 (Eugene, OR: Whymanity Publishing, 2019); Peter Schäfer, Two Gods in Heaven: Jewish Concepts of God in Antiquity, trans. Allison Brown (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020). ↑
38. Alan F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism, Reprint edition (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012); Daniel Boyarin, “Two Powers in Heaven: Or, the Making of a Heresy,” in The Idea of Biblical Interpretation (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2004), 331–70; Daniel Boyarin, “Beyond Judaisms: Metatron and the Divine Polymorphy of Ancient Judaism,” Journal for the Study of Judaism: In the Persian Hellenistic & Roman Period 41, no. 3 (July 2010): 323–65; Daniel Boyarin, “Enoch, Ezra, and the Jewishness of ‘High Christology,’” in Fourth Ezra and Second Baruch, ed. Matthias Henze and Gabriele Boccaccini (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2013), 337–61; Marc B. Shapiro, The Limits of Orthodox Theology: Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles Reappraised (Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2004), 45–70. ↑
39. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, chap. 6. ↑
40. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity. ↑
41. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, 560–1. In these pages, Hurtado discussed the possible counterevidence of the Ebionites, a Jewish-Christian group of unclear origin and identity. He concluded that the Ebionites of Epiphanius’ fourth-century description (Panarion 30.16.5) leave no trace in first- or second-century christological debates and are likely a later phenomenon. Hippolytus’ description of the Ebionites (Refutation 7.6) asserts that they accepted Jesus’s divinity after his baptism, a heretical adoptionist position that still associates divinity with Jesus in some form. ↑
42. These practices include: (1) prayer to Jesus, (2) invocation and confession of Jesus’s name, (3) baptism in Jesus’s name, (4) ritual celebration of “the Lord’s Supper,” (5) hymns sung to Jesus, (6) prophecy in the name of Jesus, (7) and the scribal practice of nomina sacra for Jesus’s name. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, 137–53, 625–7. ↑
43. Hurtado surveyed more than three decades of responses to his work on early views of Jesus’s divinity in Hurtado, One God, One Lord, 135–72. See also Köstenberger and Kruger, The Heresy of Orthodoxy, 77–81. ↑
44. Fletcher-Louis, Jesus Monotheism: Christological Origins: The Emerging Consensus and Beyond, 1:4. ↑
45. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity, 558. ↑
46. Köstenberger and Kruger, The Heresy of Orthodoxy, 65. Emphasis added. ↑
47. Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ, Reprint edition (New York, NY: The New Press, 2013), 7. ↑
48. F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 166–7. ↑
49. L. W. Hurtado, “Muratorian,” in The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, Revised, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1979–1988). ↑
50. F.F. Bruce, Canon, 161. ↑
51. For a full translation of the Muratorian Fragment, see F.F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1988), 159–61. Multiple online translations are available at Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/muratorian.html. ↑
52. This book, listed along books of the New Testament as canonical, was likely produced by an Alexandrian Jewish author during the period of 220 BCE to 100 CE. It was highly influential in the thinking of some church fathers but was rarely accorded equal status with New Testament works, as it is given here. For more on the Wisdom of Solomon, see David A. deSilva, “Wisdom of Solomon,” Dictionary of New Testament Background: A Compendium of Contemporary Biblical Scholarship (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 1268. ↑
53. “The Wisdom of Solomon is included in the Codices Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, and Alexandrinus. It is also included in the Latin Vulgate and Syriac Peshitta, but excluded from the Masoretic Text (Hebrew Bible). Since Wisdom of Solomon is in ancient Greek Bibles that would have been used by early Christians, but is not part of the Hebrew Bible (and as such is noncanonical for the Jewish tradition), it is understood to be apocryphal in the Protestant tradition. The Wisdom of Solomon is canonical for the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Ethiopian Orthodox, and Syriac tradition churches.” Jason C. Kuo and Matthew E. Gordley, “Wisdom of Solomon, Book of,” ed. John D. Barry et al., The Lexham Bible Dictionary (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016). ↑
54. Early church fathers spoke of Matthew writing a version of his Gospel in either Hebrew or Aramaic. Unfortunately, we do not have any literary evidence of this version. ↑
55. Irenaeus Against Heresies 3.1.1, emphasis added. Irenaeus of Lyons, “Irenæus against Heresies,” in The Apostolic Fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, vol. 1, The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1885), 414. ↑
56. Emphasis Added. Bruce, Canon, 176–177. ↑
57. Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 126. ↑
58. Norman L. Geisler, “Nag Hammadi Gospels,” Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, Baker Reference Library (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1999), 520. ↑
59. NHC (Nag Hammadi Codices) II 3, 51:30–86:18. ↑
60. NHC II 6, 127:19–137:26. ↑
61. NHC II 4, 86:20–31. ↑
62. NHC VII 3, 70:14–84:14. ↑
63. “One man perverts the Scriptures with his hand, another their meaning by his exposition. For although Valentinus seems to use the entire volume, he has none the less laid violent hands on the truth only with a more cunning mind and skill than Marcion. Marcion expressly and openly used the knife, not the pen, since he made such an excision of the Scriptures as suited his own subject-matter. Valentinus, however, abstained from such excision, because he did not invent Scriptures to square with his own subject-matter, but adapted his matter to the Scriptures; and yet he took away more, and added more, by removing the proper meaning of every particular word, and adding fantastic arrangements of things which have no real existence.” Tertullian, “The Prescription against Heretics,” in Latin Christianity: Its Founder, Tertullian, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, trans. Peter Holmes, vol. 3, The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1885), 262. ↑
64. These are third- to early fifth-century teachers, not those responsible for the books in the Nag Hammadi Codices. However, the quote illustrates the general tendency for non-orthodox teachers to appropriate canonical New Testament works to teach new doctrines never heard before. ↑
65. Vincent of Lérins, “The Commonitory of Vincent of Lérins,” in Sulpitius Severus, Vincent of Lérins, John Cassian, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, vol. 11 (New York, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1894), 150. ↑
66. Brown, The DaVinci Code, 234. ↑
67. Ustadh Nuruddeen Lemu, “Authenticity of the Quran Part 3: Did Caliph Uthman revise the Quran?” Navgivate Islam, https://youtu.be/-cN9zt4VBXs. Authenticity of the Quran Part 3: Did Caliph Uthman Revise the Quran? (Navigate Islam, 2017), https://youtu.be/-cN9zt4VBXs. His description of the different versions—mere dialect differences that were equivalent in meaning—is different than this description given on another Islamic site, which alleges defective copies: Sahaba, “Caliph Uthman,” HaqIslam (blog), November 13, 2011, https://www.haqislam.org/caliph-uthman/. ↑
68. Sahih al-Bukhari vol. 6, bk. 61, no. 510; quoted in Samuel Green, “The Preservation of the Qur’an and Synoptic Qur’ans,” Answering Islam, accessed May 9, 2023, https://www.answering-islam.org/Green/uthman.htm. ↑
69. Cf. Köstenberger and Kruger, The Heresy of Orthodoxy, 102. “The Bauer-Ehrman thesis insufficiently recognizes that at the core, power was a function of divine truth, appropriately apprehended by selected human messengers, rather than truth being a function of human power.” ↑
70. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity, 521. ↑
71. Brown, The Da Vinci Code, 234. ↑
72. Köstenberger and Kruger, The Heresy of Orthodoxy, 212. ↑
73. John D. Barry, Rachel Klippenstein, and Carrie Sinclair Wolcott, “Canon, Overview of The,” in The Lexham Bible Dictionary, ed. John D. Barry (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016). ↑
74. Libellus Synodicus, dating from the late 800s. “In section 34, the following story is told about the way in which the council of Nicea decided upon the canon of Scripture. All the books, spurious and genuine alike, were placed near the Lord’s table. Then prayer was offered that the inspired books might come to the top and the spurious sink to the bottom, which happened in due course.” G.T. Stokes, “Libellus Synodicus,” in A Dictionary of Christian Biography, Literature, Sects and Doctrines, ed. William Smith and Henry Wace (London, UK: John Murray, 1887 1877), 3:713. ↑
75. Robinson, Smith, and Coptic Gnostic Library Project, The Nag Hammadi Library in English. ↑
76. Justin Martyr on the Gospels, The Council of Hippo, Third Council of Carthage XLVII, Code of Canons of Carthage XXIV. ↑
77. Muratorian Fragment on Shepherd of Hermas, Rufinus on The Shepherd of Hermas and The Two Ways (perhaps the Didache), Athanasius on The Teaching of the Apostles and the Shepherd of Hermas. ↑
78. Muratorian Fragment on some who reject The Apocalypse of Peter. ↑
79. For example, Papias recalls teachings he learned orally that he had heard from those who had personally known the apostles (Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 3.39.3–4), and Melito of Sardis recalls a Johnannine tradition of celebrating the resurrection of Messiah aligned with the Jewish Passover, a tradition passed on from one bishop to the next (Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 5.24). ↑
80. Larry Crutchfield, “The Apostle John and Asia Minor As A Source Of Premillennialism In The Early Church Fathers,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 31, no. 4 (1988): 410–27. ↑
81. For example, the New Testament quotations in the Didache, 1 Clement, and Ignatius’s letters, all dated to the late first and early second centuries. ↑
82. Irenaeus Against Heresies 1.10.2. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, eds., The Apostolic Fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, vol. 1 (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1885), 331. ↑
83. The oddity of a particular teaching is not necessarily a sign of inauthenticity. For example, there are unique, even odd, teachings in some canonical books (e.g. 1 Tim. 2:15, 1 Cor. 11:10). Oddities only become a problem when they contradict a clear teaching elsewhere and the work does not have any record of continuous use in church settings. Both 1 Timothy and 1 Corinthians have evidence of continuous use throughout the second century, and they do not contradict other passages, so their oddities escape falling into trouble under this criterion. ↑
84. Pantheism is the belief that the world is divine. The view espoused by Thomas may rather be a variety of panentheism, most famously taught by the third-century Neoplatonist Plotinus. Panentheism teaches that the world is in God, but that God’s essence goes beyond the limits of the world. For a survey of panentheistic beliefs, see John W. Cooper, Panentheism—the Other God of the Philosophers: From Plato to the Present (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006). ↑
85. Robinson, Smith, and Coptic Gnostic Library Project, The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 138. ↑
86. Robinson, Smith, and Coptic Gnostic Library Project, 142. ↑
87. Robinson, Smith, and Coptic Gnostic Library Project, 263. ↑
88. . Robinson, Smith, and Coptic Gnostic Library Project, 526. ↑
89. “By broad agreement the earliest (or second earliest) surviving document of Christianity is Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians, written ca. 50, that is, less than two decades after Jesus. As an early written source for Christianity it is of special interest to historians. Its text is uncorrupted in transmission and its authorship not disputed. Its dating (50), provenance (Corinth), and destination (Thessalonica) are secure.” Paul Barnett, The Birth of Christianity: The First Twenty Years, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005), 42. ↑
90. “A very conservative count lists 295 separate quotations: 224 direct citations prefixed by an introductory formula; 7 additional cases where ‘and’ connects a second quotation to the one previously identified as such; 19 passages where a paraphrase or summary rather than a definite citation follows an introductory formula (e.g., Matt 2:23); and 45 quotations where the length (e.g., 1 Peter 3:10–12) or the specificity (e.g., Matt 27:46) makes it entirely clear that a reference to the OT is intended. Since many quotations are fairly extended, these 295 actually occupy some 352 verses of the NT. Two hundred and seventy-eight different verses of the OT are cited (some of them several times): 94 from the Law, 99 from the Prophets, and 85 from the Writings.” Roger Nicole, “The Old Testament in the New Testament,” in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary: Introductory Articles, ed. Frank E. Gaebelein, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1979), 617. ↑
91. Köstenberger and Kruger, The Heresy of Orthodoxy, 65. Köstenberger and Kruger, 65. ↑
92. “In the language of these sects the word hebdomad not only denotes the seven angels, but is also a name of place, denoting the heavenly regions over which the seven archons presided; while Ogdoad denotes the supercelestial regions which lay above their control.” George Salmon, “Hebdomas,” ed. William Smith and Henry Wace, A Dictionary of Christian Biography, Literature, Sects and Doctrines (London: John Murray, 1877–1887), 850. ↑
93. The Gnostic term for the divine mind, one of the divine entities in the Gnostic henotheism ↑
94. NHC VII 62:27–64:12. Robinson, Smith, and Coptic Gnostic Library Project, The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 368. ↑
95. NHC II 1, 22:3–21. “The Apocryphon of John.” Robinson, Smith, and Coptic Gnostic Library Project, 117. ↑
96. NHC II 1, 22:22–23, “The Apocryphon of John.” Robinson, Smith, and Coptic Gnostic Library Project, 117. ↑
97. NHC II 1, 28:32–29:16. “The Apocryphon of John.” Robinson, Smith, and Coptic Gnostic Library Project, 121. ↑
98. Bruce M. Metzger, The New Testament: Its Background, Growth and Content (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1965), 101. Quoted in Doug Powell, Holman QuickSource Guide to Christian Apologetics (Nashville, TN: Holman Reference, 2006), 148. ↑
99. Robinson, Smith, and Coptic Gnostic Library Project, The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 374. ↑
100. Robinson, Smith, and Coptic Gnostic Library Project, 376. ↑
101. James, The Apocryphal New Testament: Being the Apocryphal Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypses, 181–87. ↑
102. James, 167. ↑
103. Paul’s condemnation in 1 Corinthians 15 does not mean that the Gnostic views of the apocryphal books just listed were present when Paul wrote circa 54 CE. The Corinthians were not denying Jesus’s resurrection, but rather the future resurrection of his followers. Paul responded that the future resurrection must happen because the Messiah’s resurrection has happened. ↑
104. “The relation to Judaism, especially to Judaism in Palestine from where Jesus came and where the roots of Christianity lie, for the Gospel of Thomas seems loose at best. Even though the sayings of the historical Jesus considered authentic originated in the Jewish environment, the Gospel of Thomas does not seem to have any interest in this original basis.” Uwe-Karsten Plisch and Gesine Schenke Robinson, The Gospel of Thomas: Original Text with Commentary (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2008), chap. Introduction. ↑
105. Gospel of Thomas 53: “His disciples said to him, ‘Is circumcision beneficial or not?’ He said to them, ‘If it were beneficial, their father would beget them already circumcised from their mother. Rather, the true circumcision in spirit has become completely profitable.’” Robinson, Smith, and Coptic Gnostic Library Project, The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 132. ↑
106. Gospel of Thomas 51: “His disciples said to him, ‘When will the repose of ^| the dead come about, and when will the new world come?’ He said to them, ‘What you look forward to has already come, but you do not recognize it.’” Robinson, Smith, and Coptic Gnostic Library Project, 132. ↑
107. See Irenaeus, Against Heresies; Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies; and Origen, Contra Celsus. ↑
108. Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 4th edition (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2008), 229. ↑