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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 27

The History of the New Testament

The History of the New Testament.

The New Testament also has a history. At first, the early Christians had no sacred books beyond the Old Testament; and they wanted none. Besides, the various schools or parties which all too soon arose looked with suspicion upon any attempt to erect a new canon or add to the old. In very early times, however, gospels and epistles appeared—good bad and indifferent; and it would naturally come to be a duty to sift these, and set up a kind of authoritative standard of appeal. When was this done? It is extremely difficult to say, but it is certain that the earliest Christians relied very little on any written word beyond the Old Testament, and that, outside of that, they had no such feeling as we have respecting inspired and uninspired, canonical and uncanonical books. Two other things seem certain—that the original writings are all lost for ever, and that no copies known to us carry us beyond the fourth century. In fact, the more we know the more we seem to be driven to the conclusion that we shall never have a really perfect text of the originals, and that we shall never know by whom the Gospels, in their present form, were written. It is, however, a fact that between the second and fourth centuries it was a common thing for books of Scripture to be mentioned with more or less approach to a list of accepted books, and that in the second century a list of canonical books existed, very similiar to our own. Beyond this, nearly everything is conjecture, except that at least 100 years lie between the death of Jesus and the dawn of the idea that there could be a page 11 New Testament, final, authoritative, and inspired. Even so late as the year 332 the Emperor Constantine had to order a list of sacred Christian books to be made; and still 100 years later Augustine felt it necessary to labour for some settled adjustment of the canon.

Bearing in mind, then, the history of the books that compose the Bible, is it going too far to say that the theory of its unity and infallibility is as irrational as it is arbitrary?