Canon of the New Testament.
In dealing with the Canon of the New Testament we find the area of inquiry much narrower and more sharply bounded and the sources of evidence more abundant as well as closer at hand; nevertheless, the debate has not been less but even more stubborn and acrimonious.
Earliest Stage.— Proto-Christian preachini, as it appears in the earliest litera ture, was essentially missionary (a predigt, says Norden, 1913), the propaganda of a new universalistic, in contrast to the Jewish particularistic, Monotheism ("the mon otheistic Jesus-cult," Deissmann, 1912), the "Eternal Gospel," °Fear God and give Him glory" (Rev. xiv, 7). Though directed to the whole Roman pagan world, "a light to lighten the Gentiles" (Luke ii, 32, Matt. iv, 16, Acts xiii, 47; xxvi 23), its prime ob ject the overthrow of idolatry, it proceeded from the Jewish Dispersion, its inspiration was the thousand-year-long struggle that Is rael had waged for the One God against the surrounding hosts of Polytheism, its apostles (missionaries) were in general liberal-minded Jews or Jewish proselytes full of zeal for their pearl of great price, their new-found faith in God, and their common armory and arsenal of arguments was the Law, the Prophets, the Writings, the three-fold Canon of Hebrew Scripture, as it was then taking final and per manent shape in the teaching of Rabbis and in the service of the Synagogue. An evangelist like Paul or Barnabas might indeed deliver a philosophic discourse against idolatry, after thee of that on Mars' Hill (Acts xvii, without allusion to Scripture, but on grappling in closer combat he would nearly always have recourse for proofs to the liter ature of Monotheism, the well of religion un defiled, the authoritative Books of the People of the Living God. So Tatian tells us ((Ad dress to the Greeks,' c. 29) that, having found one demon (heathen god) here and another there instigating to evil, he chanced to light on certain "barbaric writings* (of the Jews), too old to be matched with opinions of Greeks and too divine to be matched with their er rors, which declared the government of the universe to be centred in One Being. It is obvious, indeed, that the new religion would naturally and almost unavoidably adopt these sacred volumes as their own standards in their high debate, and, accordingly, we find early Christian literature richly laden with quota tions from Scriptures (graphai); though by no means always either accurate or relevant, such citations and reminiscences show how completely Christian consciousness was domi nated by the Hebrew Bible.
But comparatively few could extort its meaning from the Hebrew text, and, accord ingly, recourse was had to the Septuagint or some other translation. Of the 350 citations
in the New Testament from the Old, about 300 lean toward the Septuagint, away from the Hebrew. Hence it was natural, if not inevi table, for the proto-Christian to look more kindly upon "outsiders" than did the Pales tinian Jew, since he found them not only en listed but actually inscribed among the trans lated Scriptures °that defiled the hands." As already noted, we find works like Enoch and the Assumption of Moses, though lying far on the borders of the Apocrypha, still cited in Jude (xiv, 9), and several of these °extraneous works" established themselves fixedly in the Tridentine Canon,— about which sufficient has been said.
Christian Scriptures.— We may conclude, then, that the natural Canon of the early Christian was that of the Jews, not in its nar row Palestinian-Hebrew, but in a wider Alex andrian-Greek form, which not only made room already for numerous "outsiders," but also opened the door for admission of other works to be born hereafter of the world-wide religious fermentation and deemed worthy of place among the worthies of old. Yet it was centuries before any product of the new Faith could make good its claim to such recognition. Everywhere in our present New Testament the term Scripture(s) refers to the Hebrew Canon, as well as in the Apostolic Fathers, who attest and represent usage in the first half of the 2d century,—with one apparent exception: In 2 Peter iii, 16, we read: "even as our beloved brother Paul . . wrote unto you; as also in all his epistles ... as also the other scriptures . . ." Here it seems plain that Epistles of Paul are spoken of as °Scrip tures," such being the force of "other" ("re maining," loipas). However, the exception is only apparent, for this 2 Peter is recognized with practical unanimity (in spite of Zahn) as a pseudepigraph dating from (say) 170, though there is no sure proof of its existence before the beginning of the 3d century (Har nack, 469), and moreover as proceeding from some source in Alexandria, where, from the looseness of prevalent con ceptions concerning the Canon, the term "Scriptures" would find easier and earlier ex tension to Pauline Epistles than it would else where. The famous verse does not, then, rep resent apostolic or even sub-apostolic, but, at the earliest, patristic apologetic usage, after the middle of the 2d century. Nor is the weight of its witness increased by the fact that the author impersonates "Symeon Peter, servant and apostle of Jesus Christ" who had died a century before.