With the advent of the life and times of Jesus Christ and the host of new revelations from God it was only a matter of time that we would expect that this new revelation would find its way into written form. Christianity and its band of new believers, many of them Jews, were already quite familiar with having revelations from God written down through the Old Testament. Köstenberger & Kruger sum up the “bookish” nature of the early Christians well when they say: “At its core, early Christianity was a religion concerned with books. From the very beginning, Christians were committed to the books of the Hebrew Scriptures and saw them as paradigmatic for understanding the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth.”1
God’s relationship with His people was covenantal and required it to be written down. So, it is no surprise that the new revelations and teachings of Christ would be written down and copied and re-copied fairly shortly after they were given in order to give the new Christians their covenantal book.
Köstenberger and Kruger paint a beautiful picture of how the New Testament covenant drove the concept of a written canon. According to them: “The religious world of Judaism had already anticipated the reality of another future covenant whereby Israel would be redeemed: ‘Behold the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.’” (Jer. 31:31).2
Köstenberger and Kruger go on to share: “Certainly any first-century Jew, when confronted with the term ‘covenant’ (berith) in Jeremiah 31, would have understood that term within his own historical and biblical context – a context patterned after the treaty covenants of the Near Eastern world. Thus, there would have been clear expectations that this new covenant, like the old covenant, would be accompanied by the appropriate written texts to testify to the terms of the new arrangement that God was establishing with his people.”3 Thus, we can see that the New Testament canon is clearly a covenantal document.
It now makes so much sense that as early Christians began to recognize that Jesus Christ came to redeem men from their sins and institute a new covenant that written documents had to follow in order to spell out the terms of this new covenant. This concept of covenant accompanied by a written canon was very familiar to the people of national Israel. Thus, it should not come as any surprise that first-century Christians expected, very early on, to have a set of written documents accompany the new covenant that Jesus Christ was ushering in. It is exciting to understand this concept and to know that an early additional canon was probably expected to be written as soon as Israel knew that Jesus was the fulfillment of (Jer. 31:31).
And just as the Old Testament was meticulously written down and copied many times over by Jewish scribes we would expect Christian scribes to do the same thing. Early Christian scribes were given the awesome task of being “Keepers of the Text.” As with Old Testament scribes these New Testament scribes would not only be meticulous in their work but also sense the reverential nature of their work. While it is true that only the original penmen of both the Old and New Testaments were divinely inspired, these scribes were a unique profession of men who took their craft very seriously. (See my devotion, “Scribes” from November 4th for more details on the work of this special class of people.)
So not only did the New Testament canon have to be written down since it was, like the Old Testament, a covenantal document, but we can have great confidence that the New Testament we possess today, with the exception of very minute variants, is the same New Testament penned 2,000 years ago.
In a future devotion we will discuss why, as Christians, we accept only the sixty-six canonical books that make up our Bible of today as divinely inspired – no more, no less.
1 Andreas J. Köstenberger and Michael J. Kruger, The Heresy of Orthodoxy (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2010), p. 180.
2 Ibid., pp. 111-112.
3 Ibid., p. 112.