I would like to study epistemology, but I don't know where to start. I think; therefor I am. Somehow that has never quite resonated with me.
My First Scholarly Encounter with the Canon of the New Testament
September 10, 2025
Bart Ehrman
So: I’ve started to work on my next book (or books, depending on how things go), on how we got the canon of the New Testament. Why these 27 books? Why not others? Who decided? When? On what grounds? etc.
I started thinking about this issue already as an 18-year-old in Bible college, but at that point had the traditional theological answers for it that are still being published regularly by evangelical scholars as if they are “news” (!). We saw it as a divinely directed event with an inevitable outcome in which the inspired books were the ones that were included simply because they were the ones recognized as being inspired by God.
When I went to Princeton Seminary, for my Masters and then PhD, it was primarily to work with Bruce Metzger, because he was the world leading expert on ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. He was also the foremost scholar of the day on the formation of the canon of Scripture (and published the still authoritative account of it, over four decades later). And the very first PhD seminar I took was with him on the formation of the canon; the paper I wrote for that course was my very first academic article to be published. And so now that I’m at the end of my career (I have just 35 years to go), I’ve decided to return to one of my first loves.
That graduate seminar that I took with him, my first semester in my PhD program, was exhilarating, and in some senses life changing. To be sure, most of the work we did for the seminar was difficult and detailed. Every week we had to translate from Greek or Latin an ancient “canon list” – that is, a list of books that this or that author thought should be considered canonical scripture – lists and discussions of canon from the church fagthers Origen, Eusebius, Athanasius, and so on, along with other texts: the Muratorian Fragment, Codex Claramontanus, etc.
One of the students in the course, as it turns out, was a Greek orthodox priest studying for a PhD. He obviously knew Greek extremely well, better than any of us (except, of course, Metzger). At the beginning of each class, this student and Metzger would discuss each of the Greek texts we had translated for the week, specifically in order to correct the mistakes of the edition we were using when it came to the Greek accents! (Every Greek word has one or two accents on it, and these accents are to be made following rigorous and sometimes rather obscure rules….)
One of the assignments for the class involved a kind of group project. There was an important German book on the NT canon that had never been translated into English. Metzger thought it would be great to have an English translation of it, if not for publication then at least for the library. And so he paired us off in twos and gave each of our groups a chapter of the book to translate; he would then put the book in the library system for future students. Great idea.
The only problem is that some of the students did not have very good German yet. And the bigger problem was the guy I was matched up with was one of them. He was a really interesting student and bright. But he was from an eastern Asian country, and his German wasn’t very good. Worse, his written English was not good either. But we pulled it off and it was all for a good cause.
We each had to write a term paper for the class. Here is where the story gets a bit long and involved. As I was saying, I wanted to work with Metzger because I wanted to become trained in reconstructing the original text of the New Testament given the fact that we don’t have any of the originals, but only copies made later, usually many centuries later, all of which are filled with mistakes. This field is divided into a large number of subspecializations (some scholars work on classifying our various Greek manuscripts, others are experts in one or another of the early versions – Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Armenian, Georgian, etc. etc. – others specialize in methodologies used to reconstruct the original text etc. etc.).
The area I wanted to do my dissertation in, eventually, was one that had not been worked on very extensively or at least very competently, in my judgment, to that point. That was the use of Patristic evidence for reconstructing the NT text. By “Patristic” I mean the writings of the church Fathers. There were lots of church fathers, and they often quoted the text of the New Testament at length. In theory, one can extract these quotations and determine, to a limited extent, what the father’s manuscripts of the NT must have looked like, an important procedure since we do not have their manuscripts, but only their quotations of the text.
This kind of study is highly valuable for textual critics, because if you can reconstruct a father’s manuscripts of the NT to some limited degree, you can determine what kinds of changes had been made in his time and place to the text – i.e., you can localize the variant readings otherwise known only in manuscripts whose date and location you may not know. And so you can know more or less exactly the time and place that certain changes had been made in the text.
In my first stages of my first semester, while I was taking the canon seminar, I broached with Metzger my interest in this subfield for my PhD dissertatoin, and he immediately suggested that I consider working on the quotations of the NT in the writings of Didymus the Blind. Didymus was an important church father who lived in Alexandria Egypt in the fourth century, some of whose writings had been discovered in 1945. They were still (then in 1981) in the process of being published. No textual critic had done an exhaustive analysis of his text, and so that was a wide open field for me to work in for my dissertation.
This relates to my canon class, that same semester. I had already started reading through the writings of Didymus: there were many volumes, in Greek and unfortunately there were no English translations, but there were some in German). And in the course of my reading I had already discovered that Didymus appeared to accept as canonical scripture several books that did not come to be included in the NT canon.
This was highly significant. The reason: it was Didymus’s contemporary – Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria – who was first to give our list of 27 books as the books to be considered Scripture, and no others. Didymus lived at the same time, and even more significant, in the same place! Yet he appeared to have a different set of books (slightly different) from that of Athanasius.
Some scholars had long maintained that the list of Athanasius, made in a letter that he sent to his churches in 367 CE, was the END of the process of determining what the canon would be. But I could show, now, with the writings of Didymus, that the canon decisions had NOT yet come to an end. Even after Athasius’s letter, there were obviously different opinions, not only in other parts of Christendom, but even in the very city where he was bishop, among leading Christian leaders and teachers there. Didymus, for example, appeared to accepts as canonical 1 Clement, the Shepherd of Hermas, and the Letter of Barnabas.
I thought this was highly significant, and so I wrote my term paper for Metzger’s seminar on the issue. He liked it very much, and urged me to publish it. He suggested that I try the leading journal in Europe that deals with Patristics, Vigiliae Christianae, I revised the piece, sent it off, and it was accepted for publication. This was my first serious publication, “The Gospel Text of Didymus,” in 1983 – well over thirty years ago now.
And that was the beginning of my serious interest in the canon, an interest I very much still have and am eager now to indulge at length over the next couple of years.
