Bible

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Text, Canon, and Early Versions

For a time, some Christian scholars treated the Greek of the New Testament as a special kind of religious language, providentially given as a proper vehicle for the Christian faith. It is now clear from extrabiblical writings of the period that the language of the New Testament is koine, or common Greek, that which was used in homes and marketplaces.

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Manuscripts and Textual Criticism

Extant Greek manuscripts of the New Testament—complete, partial, or fragmentary—now number about 5000. None of these, however, is an autograph, an original from the writer. Probably the oldest is a fragment of the Gospel of John dated about AD 120-40. The similarities among these manuscripts is most remarkable when one considers differences of time and place of origin as well as the methods and materials of writing. Dissimilarities, however, involve omissions, additions, terminology, and different ordering of words.

Comparing, evaluating, and dating the manuscripts, placing them in family groups, and developing criteria for ascertaining the text that most likely corresponds to what the authors wrote are the tasks of critics. They are aided in their judgments by thousands of scriptural citations in the writings of the early Fathers of the Church and by a number of early translations of the Bible into other languages. The fruit of the labor of text critics is an edition of the Greek New Testament that offers not only what is judged to be the best text but also includes notes indicating variant readings among the major manuscripts. The more significant of these variants usually appear in English translations as footnotes citing what other ancient authorities say (see, for example, Mark 16:9-20; John 7:53-8:11; Acts 8:37). Critical editions of the Greek New Testament have appeared with some regularity since the work of the Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus in the 16th century.

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Precanonical Writings

The 27 books of the New Testament are only a fraction of the literary production of the Christian communities in their first three centuries. The principal types of New Testament documents (gospel, epistle, apocalypse) were widely imitated, and the names of apostles or other leading figures were attached to writings designed to fill in the silence of the New Testament (for example, on the childhood and youth of Jesus), to satisfy the appetite for more miracles, and to argue for new and fuller revelations. As many as 50 Gospels were in circulation during this time. Many of these noncanonical Christian writings have been collected and published as New Testament Apocrypha (see Apocryphal New Testament).

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Knowledge of the literature of the period was greatly increased by the discovery in 1945 of the library of a heretical Christian group, the Gnostics (see Gnosticism), at Naj‘Ḩammādī, Egypt. This collection, written in Coptic, has been translated and published. Major scholarly attention has been focused on the Gospel of Thomas, which purports to be sayings of Jesus, 114 in all, delivered privately to Thomas, one of the 12 apostles.

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The Canon

No clear records are available documenting what determined the church’s decision to adopt an official canon of Christian writings or the process by which this occurred. For Jesus and his followers, the Law, Prophets, and Writings of Judaism were “Holy Scriptures.” Interpretation of these writings was, however, governed by the work, words, and person of Jesus as he was understood by his followers. The apostles who preserved the words and deeds of Jesus and who continued his mission were regarded as having special authority. That Paul, for instance, expected his letters to be read aloud in churches and even exchanged among the churches (see Colossians 4:16; 1 Thessalonians 5:26 ff.) indicates that a new norm for belief and practice was developing in the Christian communities. This norm consisted of two parts: the Lord (preserved in the “gospels”) and the Apostles (preserved primarily in “epistles”).

Tracing the history of the development of the New Testament canon by noting which of the books were quoted or cited by the early Fathers of the Church is an uncertain process. Too much is made of silence. It seems that the earliest attempt to establish a canon was made about ad 150 by a heretical Christian named Marcion whose acceptable list included the Gospel of Luke and ten Pauline Epistles, edited in a strong anti-Jewish direction. Perhaps opposition to Marcion accelerated efforts toward a canon of wide acceptance.

By AD 200, 20 of the 27 books of the New Testament seem to have been generally regarded as authoritative. Local preferences prevailed here and there, and some differences existed between the eastern and western churches. Generally speaking, the books that were disputed for some time but were finally included were James, Hebrews, 2 John, 3 John, Jude, 2 Peter, and Revelation. Other books, widely favored but finally rejected, were Barnabas, 1 Clement, Hermas, and the Didache; the authors of these books are generally referred to as the Apostolic Fathers.

The 39th festal letter of St. Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, sent to the churches under his jurisdiction in 367, ended all uncertainty about the limits of the New Testament canon. In the so-called festal letter, preserved in a collection of annual Lenten messages given by Athanasius, he listed as canonical the 27 books that remain the contents of the New Testament, although he arranged them in a different order. Those books of the New Testament, in their present-day order, are the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John), the Acts of the Apostles, Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Hebrews, James, 1 Peter, 2 Peter, 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, Jude, and Revelation. See separate articles on the books of the New Testament.

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Early Versions

Because the New Testament was written in Greek, the story of the transmission of the text and the establishing of the canon sometimes neglects the early versions, some of which are older than the oldest extant Greek text. The rapid spread of Christianity beyond the regions where Greek prevailed necessitated translations into Syriac, Old Latin, Coptic, Gothic, Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopic, and Arabic. Syriac and Latin versions existed as early as the 2nd century, and Coptic translations began to appear in the 3rd century. These early versions were in no sense official translations but arose to meet regional needs in worship, preaching, and teaching. The translations were, therefore, trapped in local dialects and often included only selected portions of the New Testament. During the 4th and 5th centuries efforts were made to replace these regional versions with more standardized and widely accepted translations. Pope Damasus I in 382 commissioned St. Jerome to produce a Latin Bible; known as the Vulgate, it replaces various Old Latin texts. In the 5th century, the Syriac Peshitta replaced the Syriac versions that had been in popular use up to that time. As is usually the case, the old versions slowly and painfully gave way to the new.

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