Is the bible inerrant?

Faith & Science Conversation
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So using the very terms that Augustine himself used, and making direct quotes from him with all relevant context, is “immensely misleading”?

And next you’ll be telling me that it would be “immensely misleading” to claim that Luther believed in “justification by faith alone”, since the term justification is used differently today, given the new perspective on Paul, modern debates about justification, etc. :roll_eyes:

Respectfully, I completely and vehemently demur. I reserve the right to describe the beliefs of ancient and medieval theologians using their very own words.

Moreover, I completely reject the idea that what Augustine and Luther meant by inerrant is somehow completely or categorically different than what modern adherents (say the signatories of the Chicago statement) meant. The modern statement with all its affirmations and denials is thorough, specific, and detailed, and I don’t doubt that Augustine and Luther may well have disagreed at various points.

Nonetheless, I find the claim that what they meant by “inerrant Scripture” to be “completely different” than what a modern inerrancy adherent means by the term to be preposterous.

Augustine’s own statement is extremely close to what I, and most of my inerrancy-affirming friends, would state. I totally reject the idea that his terms mean something “completely different” than what I believe, given how perfectly his statement sums up my own perspective…

It is from those books alone of the Scriptures, which are now called canonical, that I have learned to pay them such honor and respect as to believe most firmly that not one of their authors has erred in writing anything at all. If I do find anything in those books which seems contrary to truth, I decide that either the text is corrupt, or the translator did not follow what was really said, or that I failed to understand it…it is only to the canonical Scriptures that I owe such a willing submission that I follow them alone, and believe of them that their authors were not in error anywhere at all in them.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Hence I’d be curious as to how, exactly, you perceive this kind of absolute affirmation of total and complete inerrancy, with nothing whatsoever written that is contrary to truth, to be “totally different” than what modern adherents to inerrancy essentially affirm, when I find it a near perfect summary of my own beliefs?

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I personally don’t think the Bible is as univocal as some claim. I think a lot of that univocality is just our interpretation of Scripture, taking it in one direction. Some of it may be forced. I think the Gospels agree on major things like Jesus is Lord but there are plenty of non-canonical Gospels that do that and the Gospels seem to have a lot of disagreements as well. I think the Bible is polyvalent, multi-vocal and reflects the human sin and outlook of its authors in many places. Its composition, its dissemination and its canonization were all done by fallible, sinful humans. I can also believe the Holy Spirit played a role in this. That doesn’t make scripture perfect or infallible. It makes it “useful.” Only God is infallible, not a human book made by a human publisher, that was translated by a bunch of scholars after a ton of other scholars reconstructed the best and earliest versions of text (in their opinion) that a bunch of scholars in the early church generally came to agree were inspired hundreds of years after Jesus (in many cases based on faulty reasoning). Not to mention the human authorship of the works themselves. I can accept through Faith and personal experience that the Bible in general is God-breathed or life giving because God uses it to teach us about Jesus, lead us to salvation and a proper way of life. I don’t find the text inerrant. I don’t find the manuscripts inerrant. I don’t find the canonization process inerrant. I don’t find the translations inerrant. I don’t find our interpretations inerrant. I don’t find our doctrines of Scripture to be inerrant or infallible. The only thing inerrant and infallible is the God who uses Scripture. This is really why the Catholic Church appeals to me so much. Because without its authority passed from Jesus to Peter to the Church, so much is lost. I can’t really see how to maintain that “Scripture” without the Church.

At the end of the day I think modern sola scripture is intertwined with inerrancy and I also think how many Christians defend canonization is as well. We have this imagination that all these books teach the same thing. Rather, pious imagination makes all the books teach the same thing through selective readings and uncritical harmonization. There are certainly overarching themes and we can imagine Jesus as the fulfillment of a whole bunch of stuff in the OT that may or may not have originally applied to him, or a bunch of events that may or may not have happened as described (first passover, the whole Exodus etc). It’s very clear that the NT authors and Jesus saw himself as the fulfillment of Jewish hopes from the scriptures.

The problem is the Jewish canon was probably net set until the end of the 1st century. The MT doesn’t have all the books the Septuagint did. Some scholars like Augustine and others wanted the wider Greek canon and others like Jerome favored the Hebrew (MT). What this tells me us Canonization in many parts was messy, not cut and dry as @St.Roymond seem to think it was. Christians argued over these works for centuries and still do today. There are at least 4 different Christian canons today with a lot of overlap. Heck, even Luther “doubted the canonicity of Hebrews, James, Jude and the Apocalypse of John” in the 1500s. Today, maybe we should question works like the Pastoral and 2 Peter. Maybe they should be apocrypha?

I personally don’t think we have a more reliable “witness and voice of the original apostolic teaching” than found in the Gospels and Paul but I think most of the NT comes from second and third generation Christian writings in a language different from Jesus’s own and that there were competing views of Jesus in the early Church. I also think the names affixed to the Gospels are largely incorrect and that the early Church mixed up their order of composition. They also included a lot of books that they probably thought were written by apostles but are now recognized to be later works using apostolic authority to bolster their own views. In today’s world we would call this process forgery.

That is false. The canon was not fully established for centuries and the canon that was generally established has a bunch of works not written by who the Church thought them to be written by. The fourfold Gospel was becoming largely established by the end of the second century. But there were other Gospels (like Thomas) widely used by Christians. Gospels (some lost that come from the late first century and 2nd century before the canon was established). The Muratorian canon (which does have some differences from our canon) cannot be firmly dated enough to tell us anything certain about the state of the canon in the 2d century. Scholars such as Sundberg and Rothchild have cast enough doubt on a 2d composition as to render judgments based on it entirely hypothetical. Even if 2d century, it omits Hebrews, James and 1 and 2 Peter and includes the now rejected Apocalypse of Peter and Wisdom of Solomon (rejected by Protestants). Not to mention it accepts a bunch of works that are pseudonymous.

This is oversimplifying. As I noted to Knor, Luther in the 1500s “considered Hebrews, James, Jude, and the Revelation to be “disputed books”, which he included in his translation but placed separately at the end in his New Testament published in 1522; these books needed to be interpreted subject to the undisputed books, which are called the “canon within a canon.”” Canonization is far more messy than you claim and there were significant disputes over some books for hundreds of years.

The devil is in the details. Let’s look at 2 Peter, a Greek text almost certainly not written by an unlettered Galilean fisherman who spoke Aramaic, and probably the last NT work written.

–There is no clear mention of 2 Peter in the 2nd century.
–Even if the Muratorian Canon was a 2d work and not a 4th century forgery, it does not include 2 Peter.
–Its first reference is by Origin in the first half of the third century and in the very first reference to it on record, he puts it in the “disputed” category.
–Eusebius in the early fourth century agrees with Origin.
–First manuscript is 3rd to 4th century.
–Jerome notes many who doubted it in his time by he accepted it.
–Athanasius’s Festival letter (367CE) accepts it.
–Churches in the 5th century still reject it.

–2 Peter incorpates the small book of Jude.
–2 Peter is probably dependent on the Apocalypse of Peter.
–It probably dates from 150-200CE (after the apocalypse pf Peter)

It was refreshing to see two conservative scholars like Bird and Wright say the following:

“Postulating the apostle Peter as the author of this letter feels to us like pushing a big rock up a steep hill; the indications of post-Petrine authorship appear overwhelming. It seems to be a pastiche of so many parts of the New Testament—mentioning Paul’s letters, echoing episodes from Matthew and John, incorporating the polemical sections of Jude, and making deliberate connections back to 1 Peter.”

Yet the Church included it in the Canon as apostolic most likely because they incorrectly thought Peter wrote it. As far as I am concerned, the Canon is not even set today. Mostly set would be fine, unless one is a full fledged Roman Catholic that believes Jesus handed Peter the keys and established the Church and gave it continuous authority, I cannot remotely see how the canon is etched in stone. This is purely a faith position like inerrancy and so many other things. I’m starting to see why Wayne Grudem argued as he did more and more.

What do Wright and Bird base this on? What the vast majority of scholars know, these arguments they summarized below:

  1. The reference to Paul’s letters being on par with the ‘other scriptures’ presupposes the collection and acceptance of Paul’s letters as authoritative scripture, while the comment that ‘ignorant and unstable people’ distort them implies a contest over Paul’s literary legacy between proto-orthodox and ‘heretical’ groups—both of which might be thought to take us forwardinto the mid-second century at the earliest.56

  2. The second chapter of 2 Peter incorporates a large section of the epistle of Jude; this might be thought odd if Peter, the apostle, was the author.57

  3. The writer seems to draw on the gospel of Matthew concerning the 58 transfiguration and the gospel of John regarding Peter’s martyrdom.

  4. The author calls himself Syme􏰁n rather than Sim􏰁n; which might be a deliberate allusion to James’s recognition of the validity of Peter’s testimony at the apostolic council of Acts 15, which is the only other place in the NTwhere Peter is called Syme􏰁n.59

  5. The style of Greek and mode of argument in 2 Peter is markedly different from that in 1 Peter. Notwithstanding some spasmodic replication ofwording and themes from 1 Peter into 2 Peter,60 stark literary differencesremain.61 The rhetorical style of 1 Peter is elegant and measured, but the style of 2 Peter has been labelled, somewhat colloquially, as ‘Asiatic Greekon steroids’.62 First Peter is full of scriptural language, while 2 Peter is filled with greco-roman words for deification (‘become divine’), moral discourse (talk of self-mastery and virtue), and even pagan terms like ‘Tartarus’ (theunderworld).63 Second Peter includes fifty-seven hapax legomena (words not found elsewhere in the New Testament). And, as for the tone of voice, ‘2Peter is bellicose as 1 Peter is irenic’.64

  6. The language and theology of 2 Peter more closely resembles Christian vocabulary and phrasing in the second century than the first century.

  7. Second Peter is not explicitly mentioned by anyone until Origen65 in the third century; the first manuscript to contain it is page1296image10611888|12.005641x14.25669872, dated to the third to fourth century.66

  8. Eusebius indicates that many in the ancient church doubted the authorship and antiquity of 2 Peter.67

For thoroughness, they do go on to say:

This does not mean that 2 Peter is a ‘forgery’. It is more probable that 2 Peter is what Richard Bauckham calls a ‘transparent fiction’, whereby an author might use the device of pseudepigraphy, inherent in the ‘testament’ genre (as in the largely Jewish Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs), in order to be a faithful tradent of apostolic tradition. Eventually, however, the later gentile church did not recognize or accept the conventions of Jewish literature, and appealed to apostolic authorship rather than apostolic content to justify 2 Peter’s inclusion in the canon at a time when other late (and often heretical) books were being excluded.

If the later Church knew 2 Peter was not actually written by Peter but was a work written possibly well over 100 years after he died, it would have never been included in the canon. The same is probably true of the Pastorals and several other works. This mixup underscores just how messy canonization was in reality.

I waver between being a good Catholic and accepting their full canon and being a liberal Protestant that would probably keep about half the books of the NT (4 Gospels and at least 7 letters of Paul but probably a few more and a few other works) as full fledged scripture with the rest being secondary works useful for faith. It would be a lot easier if the Bible did fall from heaven.

Vinnie

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I think the issues some are raising is that Augustine statements come with a vastly different hermeneutic than most read the Bible with today.

Pete Enns quotes Graves in this article article:

Augustine operated with a theology of Scripture that led him to interpret the Bible differently from most Christians today. To be specific, Augustine read Scripture in a figurative way that often does not correspond to modern literalist methods of interpretation.

For example, in dealing with what appear to be harsh deeds done by God or the Israelites in the Old Testament, Augustine says, “Any harsh or even cruel word or deed attributed to God or his saints that is found in the holy scriptures applies to the destruction of the realm of lust” (On Christian Teaching 3.11.17; transl. R.P.H. Green). Later he says, “But if [a statement in Scripture] appears to enjoin wickedness or wrongdoing or to forbid self-interest or kindness, it is figurative” (On Christian Teaching 3.16.24). This is not the exegesis practiced by many who today cite Augustine for support…

It is not surprising to find all sorts of figurative readings in Augustine, since he believed that “anything in the divine discourse that cannot be related either to good morals or to the true faith should be taken as figurative” (On Christian Teaching 3.10.14).

He goes in to quote Graves again:

Christians today may share Augustine’s belief in the complete truthfulness of what Scripture teaches. But if we imagine ourselves as holding to a “traditional” view of inspiration, then we cannot simply borrow a quotation from Augustine about the truthfulness of Scripture and then ignore the very interpretive methods that made Augustine’s beliefs about Scripture work in the first place. That is historically and theologically incoherent.

Pete Enss himself goes on to say:

As I see it, not only is Augustine deferring to figurative readings in these morally troubling instances of Scripture, but note that his “standard” for deciding what is morally troubling or upright does not come “from the Bible” but from outside of it. He seems to “judge” the Bible by a standard foreign to it, which in much of contemporary biblical apologetics is about as sure a sign of harboring a “low” view of Scripture as anything.

Augustinian truth does not seem to be the same as modern truth. How he read and interpreted Scripture does not correspond to how many or most inerrancy advocates today read and interpret scripture. As Vanhooser said (Five Views on Inerrancy) in an excerpt hosted on Biologos:

A well-versed approach to inerrancy is Augustinian (“faith seeking understanding”) and sapiential in orientation, for it sees truth not simply as information to be processed but as life-giving wisdom: “the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).

Then the question is whether or not Augustine’s statements are all consistent with one another or his methods. There is little reason to assume they always would be. Most of us probably have a lot of inconsistency in our own views whether we admit to it or not.

Vinnie

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It seems to me that all this arguing over the canonization is basically irrelevant if the text itself is not as harmonious as claimed. It is no better than contesting science. The truth is in the reading and no matter how much hermeneutics you force onto it the text is not consistent, either in history or theology. Inerrancy stands or falls on the text itself, not the way it was compiled. its not as if anyone can claim a definitive doctrine or interpretation. For every view there is usually an equal and opposite standpoint. That is not inerrancy…
This is not some treatise or scholarly paper that references and cross references this scholar or that theologian. It matters no whether Augustine or Luther had what view. They do not agree so how can there be any sort of inerrancy?
At the end of the day Scripture is as useful as we make it or take it, but to cling to a notion that is just plain false would seem to be the ultimate folly.

Richard

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  • First define “bible”.
  • State your authority and.or reason for your definition.
  • Next define “errant”.
  • State your authority and/or reason for your definition.
  • Then stand back and be prepared to duck or run.
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That assumes that we can agree on what or who constitutes a valid authority.

eg sola scriptura?

Richard

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  • It assumes no such thing.
  • Define “baptism” and “errant” and state your authority to define those terms and/or your reason for those definitions.
  • And then anybody who reads them can decide whether to accept the definitions or not.
  • Those who accept the definitions are “consenters”; those who do not are “dissenters” and heathen.
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An authority is of no value if it is not recognised. You may as well quote Donald Duck/

Only if you are the authority.

Richard

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  • Or Richard Gillett.
  • Silly.
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Ad hominem should not be a factor in Theology.

Any authority given on this earth is by humans not God. (with a few biblical exceptions)

Richard

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  • Neither should nonsense, but that doesn’t seem to slow you down.
  • You’re just quibbling. Yawn …
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The point is that there is no earthly authority, only consensus.

Richard

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For what is his worth, quoting Pete Enns as an authority carries very little weight with me… Of all theological authors I have read, I have found he and Bart Ehrman to be the most blindly polemical, being extremely selective if not near dishonest with their quotes, making easily verifiably false claims, hand-waving obvious counter-evidence to their pet theories, and in near-fundamentalist fashion, insisting on only one interpretation of a text… i.e…, the one that supports their pet theory, even when obvious alternate legitimate interpretations exist.

I don’t inherently disagree… Truth is not “merely” information to be processed, but also personal, life-giving wisdom. Roger that. but this only argues essentially that for Augustine, truth was more than objective alignment to correct information, it also had to be personal. But again i dont see anything categorically different… the same sentiment could have been made by R.C. Sproul, James Boice, Roger Nicole, or any number of the architects of the Chicago statement.

So no modern inerrantist that i know would disagree with you (or Autustine) there. Biblical truth must be more than raw factual objective information. Copy all. But to establish an actual hard divergence between Augustine’s view of truth and inerrancy and that of modern inerrancy adherents, you’d need to show that Augustine’s view of truth was less, or categorically different, than “information to be processed”. Claiming that he understood truth to be more than “correct information”, while a valuable observation, is irrelevant to this particular point… a contrast between modern inerrantists would be established if you could establish that Augustine argued that truth was not, even in part, “information to be processed”… Not that Augustine (just like modern inerrantists) believed truth was more than objective information to be processed.

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I posted several quotes from Graves via an article on Enn’s site. Then I quoted Enns. This quote from Graves, I thought at least, was the essential gist of my post:

Augustine read Scripture in a figurative way that often does not correspond to modern literalist methods of interpretation.. For example, in dealing with what appear to be harsh deeds done by God or the Israelitesin the Old Testament, Augustine says, “Any harsh or even cruel word or deed attributed to God or his saints that is found in the holy scriptures applies to the destruction of the realm of lust” (On Christian Teaching 3.11.17; transl. R.P.H. Green). Later he says, “But if [a statement in Scripture] appears to enjoin wickedness or wrongdoing or to forbid self-interest or kindness, it is figurative” (On Christian Teaching 3.16.24). This is not the exegesis practiced by many who today cite Augustine for support…

Augustine and many ancient authors were found of both a literal and allegorical interpretation of scripture and there were parts they went beyond sola scripture to reason away. They did not really read scripture exactly as many moderns do but I do believe many of these authors generally trusted the gospels to be mostly history and also thought the self attestations in various works were true. It seems they are closer to modern readers than some liberals readers today would like them to be.

Origin sometime in the early third century already offers us a preliminary Chicago statement:

I do not condemn [the authors of the Gospels] if they sometimes dealt freely with things which to the eye of history happened differently, and changed them so as to subserve the mystical aims they had in view; so as to speak of a thing which happened in a certain place, as if it had happened in another, or of what took place at a certain time, as if it had taken place at another time, and to introduce into what was spoken in a certain way some changes of their own. They proposed to speak the truth where it was possible both materially and spiritually, and where this was not possible it was their intention to prefer the spiritual to the material. The spiritual truth was often preserved, as one might say, in the material falsehood.

Put that on a bumper sticker right next to “The Bible says it, that settles it.”

The Bible: Spiritual truth preserved in material falsehood.

Let’s see how well it sells in evangelical communities and to inerrancy advocates. Augustine likewise goes to the figurative when things get rough. He may be close to modern inerrancy, and definitely has a very high view of scripture, but it’s not the same.

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Not even as much as Newton and Einstein! Paul is talking about the world, Job is talking about a specific individual. Both are compatible with Jesus.

It’s not about guilt, it’s about being flawed. The legal model of salvation can only be pushed so far. Your thinking is trapped in the “original sin” idea and is thus skewed.

“All relevant context” would include everything that Augustine ever wrote about the topic, not just what you feel like including.
Plus, as is common, the terms lose something in the translation and pick up something that isn’t there; beyond that you’re stuffing a modern meaning into ancient words from a different language. The moment you do that you’re already being misleading; when you ignore the conceptual context it becomes immensely misleading.

Here’s an example from one of my college English literature courses:

“Do not prevent the children.” That clause, if written in the sixteenth century, does not mean what it appears to today – today’s reader would see it as an incomplete sentence and wonder “Prevent them from what?”, but the sixteenth century reader would recognize that it is a complete sentence.
What’s the difference? Back then, “prevent” meant “go ahead (of)”, today it means “kepp from ”.

It’s different because the modern definition of “error” is not the same as Augustine’s definition. Augustine held that a number of portions of the Bible were what a modern would call “false”, the best example perhaps being that he held the entirety of Genesis 1 to be allegorical because he held that God created everything in a single instance. So Augustine’s definition of “not in error” includes that significant parts of scripture aren’t describing anything even close to reality – a position incompatible with today’s use of “without error”.

That’s because you’re reading your concepts into Augustine’s words rather than asking what he meant. His definition of “error” was completely different, and his definition of “truth” was as well; in neither case did the details of an account matter – the “days” weren’t days at all, to him, so maintaining that they were would be, to Augustine, error (though he conceded that other views work as well, something that today’s inerrantists refuse to grant). I wish I had Augustine’s works in e-form so I could search for specific words, but in essence to Augustine reading Genesis 1 literally constituted being “fleshly” and thus useless.

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That misrepresents the history – the canonization process began the moment two churches swapped letters from Paul that they had received and agreed these should be “read in our churches”. A hundred years after Christ that process was nearly done, having arrived at a list of nineteen books that everyone accepted; the rest were argued about and included seven that eventually everyone agreed to include.

The irony is that in any other matter of ancient literature the evidence we have about the Gospels would be considerd conclusive.

So? Canonization was not a binary matter and Rome erred in ever making it so. If the Holy Spirit didn’t guide the ancient church to fully accept seven of the books that got included, no one gets to overrule that; all Luther was doing falls into the category of honoring what was handed down rather than adding to it. The core of the New Testament was settled by a century after Christ, and the rest continued to be argued about – which if God thought a bad idea would not have prevailed.

And because a major church – Antioch, IIRC – used it for baptismal instruction.
We would have done well to just stick with how Eusebius listed them.

It is, it’s just not binary. The East never really had a problem with that, being content to let different major churches (patriarchates and what today would be called autocephalous) to have differing lists so long as the core was agreed on.

In a class for Augustine that passage was a “Um, what?!!” moment.

That’s just what YEC does – they’re reading the scriptures with “a standard foreign to it”.

Now you’re bringing in another word that would have been understood differently: information. To Augustine, the enumeration of days in Genesis 1 was not information, it was just allegory (and poetry).

That’s a concept that goes right by many today, or is rejected outright (e.g. by YECists). They fail to grasp that “material falsehood” was never relevant to the ancients, they were interested in the source.

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That is just deflecting. An individual is part of the world. Job is not meant as a one off. The point is made very clear. Sin is not the cause of suffering. That works on an individual basis or a global one…

Humanity is not flawed. Opn your eyes. You are doing what the YECs do. You are claiming a reality from Scripture that does not exist. No matter whether it is Original sin or not, we can do good without Christ. People do. So did the Good Samaritan.

The forgiveness of Christ has to be both personal and universal. God forgives sin. Period.

Forgiveness is grace. Grace does not need validation, or acceptance. Grace is.

Richard

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No one in a mainstream Christian group claims that only Christians can do things that are good. Humans are, however, objectively, flawed: “For all have sinned and fallen far short of the glory of God.” is a good summary of that. Absolutely no one is perfect, absolutely no one never sins. I and the tradition that I am a part of hold to the view (I forget which passages support this) that no action by a fallen human is completely free from the corruption of sin; thus no action is perfect enough to merit salvation of its own accord; and that all people are sufficiently corrupted by sin that they would not willingly chose Christ without some influence from God on them.

Again, no one in a mainstream group is denying this. However, that universal forgives is not efficient for those who will not believe.

But, as you seem to hold to Pelagianism, and consider the tradition that I am a part of to come close to being heretical, these statements should not do much more than clarify our view. However, arguing about the general merits of said group would be off-topic here.

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Sharing a letter or book does not indicate anyone saw it as scripture.

  1. There is no positive evidence from anyone at the time this was occurring. You are back reading the Holy Spirit into what happened. That is a theological argument, not a historical argument. I am not misrepresenting the history, you are confusing theological argumentation with historical argumentation. You may be correct but a historian can hardly make academic historical claims about some ethereal spirit that pervades the universe and what It has or hasn’t done throughout history.

  2. There are strong indications many in the early Church expected an imminent return. This is as plain as day in 1 Thessalonians. They didn’t even need new scripture if the first fruits of the general resurrection were evident and Jesus was returning soon.

  3. Many non canonical books also enjoyed wide dissemination (were shared). No one thinks of this as canonization.

  4. Ancients are often said to be inherently distrustful of new things meaning a recently published work is a hard sell as scripture.

  5. Scripture was reserved for the OT in earliest Christian writings. See Metzger The Canon of the NT where he goes through Clemen to the middle of the second century where we finally get the “memoirs of the apostles” mentioned by Justin Martyr. It’s the words of Jesus (and mostly the OT) that have supreme authority for 1 Clement, Ignatiuus, Didache, Papias, Barnabas, Polycarp Shepherd, 2 Clement. I’ll post Metzger summaries of each author in a follow up post so as to not weigh this one down.

  6. In the last quarter of the second century Irenaeus has a 4 fold gospel. He does not even speak for all Christians at the time (anymore than Marcion did) and his provenance is limited. But based on other authors the four-fold Gospel seems to have become prominent ca. 200.

  7. The earliest canon is Macron ca. 140: He had ten letters of Paul (one not in the NT) and either a truncated Gospel of Luke or an earlier Gospel Luke probably used. That Macron’s Gospel was earlier than Luke’s has been revived by a small but significant number of scholars.

At any rate, Macron’s canon is believed to have been the impetus that pushed the Church to start thinking about their own canon as the apostolic era became more and more distant.

  1. Non canonical books from the first century continue to be used by many Christians in the second century. There was no “this is scripture that is not” to be found that early with regard to Christian works. This despite you saying they “arrived at a list of nineteen books that everyone accepted” by the year 130 CE which I dismiss as apologetical exuberance and pious imagination. Did you mean 200 years after?

  2. Non-canonical Christian books and dozens of gospels continue to be written and used all throughout second century. Heck, 2 Peter is most likely dependent on the Apocalypse of Peter.

  3. The Muratorian canon (ca 170 -200) can be reasonably said to include 19-22 NT books. Yet as I noted above, only a few scholars followed Sundberg in the 70s when arguing for a much later dating, but there is wide disagreement today on whether or not its a 4th century forgery. Clare K. Rothschild published The Muratorian Fragment (Mohr Siebeck: Studies and Texts in Antiquity and Christianity, 459 pages). It’s no longer certain to date this to the 2d century and it can no longer hold the weight some apologists lay on it.

That is not true. Critical scholars are not boogeymen out to destroy the Bible. This is YEC and fundamentalist type thinking. Good critical scholars evaluate all works critically.

I disagree. This doesn’t explain why Jesus drank fruit of the vine on the Cross after specifically telling his followers he would not do. Not only that, we learn in John He specifically requested it at the very moment of his death and said “It is finished.” Just before this He is in the Garden and oddly refers to His sacrificial death as a cup 3x and asks that it be taken away. The fourth cup is said to have symbolized restoration and completeness (hint: it is finished).

In a more solid theological sense, in my mind, Jesus drank the 4th cup on the Cross. The narrative sequence practically screams it. The only real problem with it is He says I will drink it with you in the kingdom. But this is less of a problem in quantity than other solutions have. In some sense I expect Jesus thought of His death as bringing about the banquet of Isaiah in a spiritual sense (He was the living bread, bread that was greater than the holy and referred manna). In some sense this probably was drinking wine with his followers in the Kingdom to Him.

And I personally have devoted enough time to communion and canonization with you and @knor. No need to keep going round and round so I will bow out.

Vinnie

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And here are the Metzger summaries of Christian authors from Clement on stopping just before Justin…

Metzger (Canon): "Throughout his epistle Clement weaves together a great number of quotations from the Old Testament, as well as a few from several New Testament books.6 Those from the Old Testament are frequently introduced by such well-known formulas7 as ‘the Scripture says’ (17 ypatfyr) Xeyet), *s written’ (yeyparrrat), ‘that which is written’ (TO yeypa/x/xevov), and are for the most part made with great exactness from the Greek text of the Septuagint. In the other hand, the few New Testament quotations are made in a different way. Instead of introducing gospel material with formulas of citation that imply a written record, Clement twice urges his readers to ‘remember the words of the Lord Jesus’.

Metzger: The upshot of all this is that the primary authority for Ignatius was the apostolic preaching about the life, death, and resurrection ofJesus Christ, though it made little difference to him whether it w a s oral o r written. H e certainly knew a collection of Paul’s Epistles, including (in the order of fre- quency of his use o f them) i Corinthians, Ephesians, Romans, Galatians, Philippians, Colossians, and i Thessalonians. It is probable that he knew the Gospels according to Matthew and John, and perhaps also Luke. There is no evidence that he regarded any of these Gospels or Epistles as ‘Scripture’.

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

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

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

Metzger: By way of summary, the short Epistle of Polycarp contains proportionately far more allusions to the writings of the New Testament than are present in any other of the Apostolic Fathers. He certainly had a collection of at least eight Pauline Epistles (including two of the Pastorals),3 4 and was acquainted as well with Hebrews, 1 Peter, and 1 John. As for the Gospels, he cites as sayings of the Lord phrases that we find in Matthew and Luke. With one exception, none of Polycarp’s manyallusions is cited as Scripture—and that exception, as we have seen, is held by some to have been mistakenly attributed to the Old Testament. At the same time Polycarp’s mind is not only saturated with ideas and phrases derived from a considerable number of writings that later came to be regarded as New Testament Scriptures, but he also displays latent respect for these apostolic documents as possessing an authority lacking in other writings. Polycarp, as Grant remarks,3 ’ ‘clearly differen­ tiates the apostolic age from his own time and, presumably for this reason, does not use the letters of Ignatius as authori­ ties—even though they “contain faith, endurance, and all the edification which pertains to our Lord” (xiii. 2)’.

Metzger: By way of summary, it is obvious that Hermas was not given to making quotations from literature; in fact, the only actual book anywhere named and quoted in the Shepherd (Vis. ii. 3) is an obscure Jewish apocalypse known as the book of Eldad and Modat.*2 Despite reminiscences from Matthew, Ephesians, and
James, Hermas makes no comment that would lead us to think that he regarded them as canonical Scripture. From the testimony contained in the Shepherd, it can in any case be observed how uneven during the course of the second century was the development of the idea of the canon.

Metzger: By way of recapitulation, the unknown author of 2Clement certainly knew and used Matthew and Luke, 1 Corinthians, and Ephesians. There is no trace of the Johannine Gospel or Epistles, o r of the Book of Acts. And one cannot say more than that he may have known Hebrews,James, and 1Peter. Of the eleven times that he cites words of Jesus, five are not to be found in the canonical Gospels. The presence of these latter, as well as the citation in xi. 2-4 of an apocryphal book of the Old Testament, introduced as ‘the prophetic word’ (o irprxfariKos \6yos), shows that our homilist’s quotations of divinely author­ itative words are not controlled by any strict canonical idea, even in relation to Old Testament writings.

You can consult his work for the full discussion of each if you desire but your claim below is really bad because these authors go to about 120 years after Jesus death: Your statement is extremely misinformed apologetics:

“A hundred years after Christ that process was nearly done, having arrived at a list of nineteen books that everyone accepted; the rest were argued about and included seven that eventually everyone agreed to include.”