The Impetus of the New Testament Canon

What is it about?

Chapter 1 of Levi S. Baker, Why a New Testament? Covenant as an Impetus for New Scripture in Early Christianity, Texts and Editions for New Testament Study 19 (Leiden: Brill, 2025). The present volume aims to fill a gap in NT research by explaining a phenomenon within the NT documents themselves. Texts like 1 Tim 5:18 and 2 Peter 3:15–16 reveal that within the first hundred years of Christianity, it was natural for some early Christians to receive other Christian writings as “scripture,” suggesting that they have a shared authority alongside the OT. This phenomenon could be called an early “scripture consciousness,” or more preferably a “canon consciousness.” Chapter 1 introduces the research problem and offers a taxonomy of representative research on the impetus of the canon: the Second-Century Crisis model, the Fourth-Century Crystallization Without Impetus model, and the Early, Internal Impetus model. Additionally, this chapter outlines the study’s assumptions, definitions, limits, and research methodology. The three critical assumptions that are defended are a date for 1 Timothy and 2 Peter within the first hundred years of Christianity, that the term γραφή connotes a written text, and that 1 Timothy and 2 Peter exhibit a canon consciousness.

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Photo by Tim Wildsmith on Unsplash

Photo by Tim Wildsmith on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Recognizing this early Christian canon consciousness presents two implications. First, if NT authors are receiving contemporaneous documents as authoritative scripture alongside the OT within the first hundred years of Christianity, then the common assertions about the non-necessity of the NT seem problematic. No matter the length of time until the culmination of the canonical process, it seems perfectly natural for at least some early Jewish Christians to refer to a collection of Christian writings as “scripture” alongside the OT. Thus, rather than assessing the canon’s “necessity” from a fourth-century vantage point, this evidence demands an evaluation of the impulses within the first century. Only then can a determination of the canon’s “necessity” be made. Second, this early elevation of a body of Christian texts must rest on some prior theological or historical justification, and, therefore, a search for the impetus for the NT canon is not only justified, but also historically and theologically necessary. What would motivate early Christians Jews to receive new scriptures as authoritative alongside their received “Old Testament” Scriptures? This is not primarily a question of which books comprise this early Christian canon or when it was closed, but rather a question of why the early church might see a need for a NT canon at all. Yet as this volume’s literature review demonstrates, for various reasons in both past and current scholarship this question receives little attention, even though practitioners of the three major models of the NT canon’s development (while disagreeing over the definition of canon) frequently demonstrate an openness to a first-century canon consciousness. Additionally, scholars across all three models often envision the acceptance of written, NT scriptures and their placement alongside the OT as originally impeded by several phenomena. For all these reasons, current NT scholarship must provide an explanation for impetus of the NT canon. In the remainder of this volume, Baker provides one, arguing that that a significant factor that led to the early acceptance of NT writings as scripture alongside the HB was the connection between covenants and covenant documents. Specifically, given the covenantcovenant document pattern in the HB, since early Christians believed that Jesus had inaugurated the new covenant, they received some of their early writings as the documents of that covenant, to be held alongside the documents of the old covenant (the Hebrew Bible).