Ten Basic Facts about the NT Canon that Every Christian Should Memorize: #7: “Early Christians Often Used Non-Canonical Writings.”

Full blog series can be found here.

For Christians struggling to understand the development of the New Testament canon, one of the most confusing (and perhaps concerning) facts is that early Christian writers often cited from and used non-canonical writings.   In other words, early Christians did not just use books from our current New Testament, but also read books like the Shepherd of Hermas, the Gospel of Peter, and the Epistle of Barnabas.

Usually Christians discover this fact as they read a book or article that is highly critical of the New Testament canon, and this fact is used as a reason to think that our New Testament writings are nothing special.  The literary preferences of the earliest Christians were wide open, we are told.  Or, as one critic put it, early Christians read a “boundless, living mass of heterogenous” texts.[1]     

Because this fact is used to criticize the integrity of the New Testament canon, then all Christians should be keen to learn it.   While the fact itself is true—early Christians did read and use many writings not in the canon—the conclusions often drawn from this fact are often not.

When scholars mention the Christian use of non-canonical writings, two facts are often left out:

1.       The manner of citation.  It is important to note that while Christians often cited and used non-canonical literature, they only rarely cited them as Scripture.  For the most part, Christians were simply using these books as helpful, illuminating, or edifying writings.  This is not all that different than practices in our modern day.  A preacher may quote from CS Lewis in a sermon, but that does not mean he puts Lewis’s authority on par with Scripture itself.

A good example of this phenomenon is the use of the Gospel of Peter by the church at Rhossus at the end of the second century.  Scholars often appeal to this story as evidence that early Christians had no established gospel canon.  However, there is no evidence that the church there used the book as Scripture. 

When we ask the question about which books early Christians cited most often as Scripture, then the answer is overwhelmingly in favor of the books that eventually made it into the New Testament canon.

2.       Frequency of citation.  Another often overlooked factor is the relative degree of frequency between citations of New Testament books and citations of non-canonical books.   For example, scholars often appeal to Clement of Alexandria as the standard example of an early Christian that used non-canonical literature equally with canonical literature.   But, when it comes to frequency of citation, this is far from true. 

J.A. Brooks, for instance, has observed that Clement cites the canonical books “about sixteen times more often than apocryphal and patristic writings.”[2]  When it comes to gospels, the evidence is even better.  Clement cites apocryphal gospels only 16 times, whereas, he cites just the gospel of Matthew 757 times.[3]

In sum, Christians need to memorize this simple fact about the New Testament canon: early Christians used many other books besides those that made it into our Bibles.  But, this should not surprise us.  For, indeed, we still do the very same thing today even though we have a New Testament that has been settled for over 1600 years.