THE FORMATION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT | 1515
the rest of the New Testament ( including Acts ) is manifestly less important . The third category , books scarcely cited at all , contains most of those which later decisions and decrees affirm to be noncanonical ; even in the earliest period none of them is cited even so often as the books of the second class .” 8
By focusing on how often books are cited , we can understand the three answers outlined above as three phases of New Testament canonicity that correspond to the chronological positions given by Zahn , Harnack and Sundberg . 9 The history of the New Testament Canon framed in these phases focuses on the function of Scripture in the early church .
In the first phase , the core of the present New Testament was already beginning to be treated as the main Chris tian texts . The identification of these core texts was completed before the end of the first century . Technically speaking , it was not a fixed Canon , but it would be equally inappropriate to say there was no core collection of writings .
In the second phase , during the second and third centuries , certain other documents began to be cited more often , suggesting — but not explicitly acknowledging — their addition to the core collection . In studying this phase , one still cannot clearly distinguish between those documents in the New Testament and those outside it . Instead , the distinction is between documents cited often , documents cited little and books discouraged from use . While the core had ceased to grow , the thought of forming a fixed collection had still not appeared . ( Thus , a canonical / noncanonical distinction is misguided at this point .)
In the third phase , during the fourth century , lists of canonical documents proliferated , giving very strong indication that the church was thinking about a closed Canon . But we must realize that to speak even here of a closed Canon is difficult because some documents that appear on some of the lists are not in the present Canon . Further , a few documents that are in our present Canon are absent from some lists . 10
Rather than conceiving of a closed New Testament in the second century , to which the church appealed for its sole source of teaching , this three-phase paradigm forces us to consider how the church judged and appropriated the writings it included in the New Testament Canon . We can talk of an authoritative body of Chris tian Scripture in the first century , but we cannot claim that that collection of writings was closed even into the fifth century .
Consistent with this focus on the function of Scripture , New Testament Canon historians have employed a rubric called the criteria of canonicity — that is , the qualifications that documents needed to meet for inclusion in the Canon . This is not to say that there was an explicit list of criteria to which the early church referred and through which each document was screened before being included in or rejected from the Canon . The criteria are a retrospective means for us attempt to understand why certain documents came to be valued above other documents in the early church . This rubric derives from examining the writings of the church fathers and their use of these documents . We must avoid the temptation to view these criteria as hard and fast rules , and it is difficult to rank them in importance because they were not invoked with great consistency or rigor . Rather , they operated interdependently or concurrently — not independently or sequentially . Further , some churches and leaders gave different weight to certain criteria , which explains why some documents took longer to gain universal acceptance in the church .
8 John Barton , Holy Writings , Sacred Text : The Canon in Early Chris tian ity ( Louisville : Westminster John Knox Press , 1997 ), 17 . 9 John Barton , Holy Writings , Sacred Text : The Canon in Early Chris tian ity ( Louisville : Westminster John Knox Press , 1997 ), 18 – 24 ; A . C . Sundberg , Jr ., “ Towards a Revised History of the New Testament Canon ,” Studia evangelica 4 , no . 1 ( 1968 ): 452 – 61 . 10 Bruce Metzger , The Canon of the New Testament ( Oxford : Clarendon Press , 1997 ), 305 – 15 .