Here is the bottom line, at least as far as I see it. God gave to us inspired Scripture, both in forming a Hebrew Old Testament and a Greek New Testament. How did God choose to do this? Did he drop a list out of the sky, telling his people which writings made the cut? The answer is no. So, how did God, in his wisdom, determine what would be the list of accepted, inspired, authoritative Scriptures?
In the case of the Old Testament, God allowed the consensus of Jewish scholars in the fifth and fourth centuries BC to decide what would be in the Hebrew canon. Why did God do this? I cannot give a definitive answer, but I have sufficient faith in the wisdom and power of God to use this process to produce an authoritative inspired text. What I do know is that, in his teachings, Jesus himself essentially put his stamp of approval on our received Old Testament text in that he quoted from nearly all the accepted books, and never quoted from other, non-canonical books.
In the case of the New Testament, God, in his wisdom, used the consensus of the church fathers in the second century to determine the final list of inspired, authoritative books. In this process, we know from what was written that the early church fathers were strongly influenced by those books that the apostles considered to be inspired. As with the Old Testament, I have sufficient faith in the power and sovereignty of God that he caused the correct list of books to be chosen.
Do I know without any possible doubt that Matthew wrote Matthew? No I do not. Do I even know who wrote Hebrews? No I do not. But what I do know is that these books are inspired and authoritative Scripture, because this is the method by which God chose the New Testament canon to be selected. What other means might God have used? Could he have dropped his inspired list out of the sky, landing it somewhere in Jerusalem? This is a silly thought. So, I trust the power of God and I trust that he ultimately determined what entered the New Testament canon.
When I read books which were not chosen, such as Didache or Clement of Rome or the Epistle of Barnabas, I can see right away that these books are interesting, and perhaps even helpful, but their quality does not rise to that of the accepted books. Not even close. Read these for yourself and you will see. Do I know with 100% certainty that Peter wrote 2 Peter? No, I do not. However, the early church fathers believed that this book was apostolic–that it was approved as inspired, and that is good enough for me. Some of the doubts about the Pauline authorship of books like Ephesus are cooked up by skeptics, in my opinion. The level of doubt about the authorship of some New Testament books is largely the result of liberal bias. But, having said that, and being a rather conservative scholar myself, I am prepared to express some doubt about the authorship of 2 Peter, as well as 2 and 3 John. However, this is a non-issue for me in the large picture, because I have sufficient faith in a very wise and powerful God that he was able to keep spurious books out of the New Testament, and he was able to have included those he wanted us to have available as part of the canonical New Testament.
For this reason, I do not feel we are putting our trust in “tradition” in accepting the canon of the New Testament. I believe we are putting our trust in God and in the process he chose to use to create our canon of the New Testament. Yes, the process, in essence, involved the evolution of a “tradition,” but that tradition was guided by God. Both my faith in God and my reading of the accepted Scripture strongly supports this conclusion, at least for me.
Your comments about the history of early Christianity overstates the amount of corruption and heresy in the early church, at least if we are talking about the period up to AD 150 when the canon was essentially fixed. But there was already some drift by that time. However, the same could be said about Jewish teachers and scribes and the selection of the Old Testament, yet Jesus himself approved the Hebrew Bible. In any case, no, we do not accept the traditions of the early church which were not incorporated into the inspired Scripture. We do not trust ideas which were not miraculously inspired, but we do understand that God did miraculously inspire the New Testament. There is a very big and a clear distinction there. You paint a picture which makes it appear to be confusing and uncertain, and there is some legitimate reason you are tempted to move in this direction, but I believe that the correct picture is that God was able to see to it that what ended up in our New Testaments is from him.
God preserved the Bible and the Church. However, humans corrupted the outward church. But Jesus knows who are His, and the true church has always been composed only of those who are truly saved by Christ, but the outward church has always included non-believers, as it did even in the days of the writing of the New Testament, as testified to by both Paul and John.
John Oakes
