How was the canon of Scripture determined?
In The Da Vinci Code, Teabing claims that “History has never had a definitive version of [the Bible].”
This statement, though a misrepresentation, raises the important question of the canon of Scripture.
The word “canon” means a rule or standard and, in the context of Christianity, refers to those books
considered by the church to be authoritative Scripture. When were these books collected and
recognized by the people of God?
We should note, first of all, that the earliest Christians already had a Bible, the Hebrew Scriptures, what
Christians today call the Old Testament (OT). There is solid evidence that by the first century the OT
books we have today had already achieved canonical status. Jesus often quoted from the OT and
referred to it as the “Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms” (Luke 24:44), a description
representing the three sections of the Hebrew canon: the Law, the Prophets and the Writings.” The
Jewish historian Josephus identified this same three-part canon as those books “which are justly
believed to be divine.”
Jesus was recognized by the early Christians as the Jewish Messiah, the fulfillment of God’s promises
made to Israel in the Old Testament. These believers searched the Hebrew Scriptures to discover
prophecies fulfilled by Jesus. Even the name Jesus Christ points back to the Old Testament, since the
Greek term Christos is a translation of the Hebrew Mashiach (“Messiah”), meaning “Anointed One” and
referring to the promised king from the line of David. This is an important point to keep in mind, since
the New Testament writers all look back to the Hebrew Scriptures as the authoritative Word of God and
consider their own writings to describe its fulfillment. By contrast, the Gnostic documents tend to reject
or ignore the Old Testament. We might ask which movement likely arose from the original teaching of
Jesus of Nazareth (the first century Jew!), one that embraced the Hebrew Scriptures or the one that
rejected them?
The established authority of the Hebrew Scriptures gave the early Christians precedent to view their
own foundational documents as authoritative Scripture. After all, the account of God’s promise for a
Savior in the Hebrew Scriptures found its natural complement in the authoritative accounts of its
fulfillment in the New Testament. At a very early date, the four Gospels, the epistles of Paul and other
apostolic writings were collected, copied and circulated as authoritative texts. Already in 2 Peter 3:15-
16 we see Paul’s letters being compared to “the rest of Scripture” (i.e., the Old Testament). Similarly, in
1 Timothy 5:18 Jesus’ teaching from Luke 10:7 appears to be identified as Scripture.
Impetus to define the canon more precisely came in the form of controversy. Marcion, a second century
teacher with proto-Gnostic tendencies, came to believe that the god of the Old Testament was an
inferior god who had created the evil material world. He compiled a truncated canon made up only of
portions of Luke’s Gospel and certain Pauline letters. The church responded with its own canon
discussions. Lists of authoritative Scripture began to appear about this time. The Muratorian fragment,
a canonical list dating from about AD 160, named the four Gospels, the thirteen letters of Paul, two
letters of John, Jude, and the Revelation. About this same time Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, identified a
similar collection, including First Peter. In the early third century, Origen named all twenty-seven books
of our New Testament canon, while acknowledging that six were disputed by some, including
Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and Jude. The first list that is identical to our twenty-seven
New Testament books appears in an Easter letter written by Athanasius of Alexandria in AD 367.
What is important to note is that while there were discussions concerning the exact limits of the canon
continuing into the fourth century AD, the core of the New Testament – and the four Gospels in
particular – attained unquestioned authority by the middle of the second century. Only a few books that
did not make the canon were even mentioned in canon discussions (Barnabas, Hermes, Wisdom of
Solomon), and none of these were the Gnostic writings that The Da Vinci Code claims were the
earliest Christian documents. The claim made by the book – that the New Testament was a large
amorphous body of literature (containing over eighty gospels!) until Constantine and his cronies cut out
the books they didn’t like – is simply false. The four canonical Gospels were firmly established as the
church’s gospels centuries before Constantine and decades before the Gnostic gospels were written.
We will say much more on the relationship between the New Testament Gospels and the Gnostic
gospels, and their respective dates, in Chapter 3, pp. 38-44.
In summary, the church did not remove the Gnostic gospels from the New Testament, because they
were never seriously considered for inclusion in it. This is because these writings had no direct link to
Jesus and his earliest followers and because they taught doctrines contrary to the teachings Jesus
had passed on to his disciples.
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