2. From Stories to Canon - YouTube

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• The oldest materials that we have for Christianity-- and so what the lecture today is going to be about is how did the particular twenty-seven books that came to be the New Testament canon, how did those get chosen?

• They just thought they were writing a gospel or a sermon or a letter or something like that. So when you see the term "scripture" in the New Testament, every time except, maybe, one time

• By whom--who made the decision? When did they make the decision? And what were the criteria they used? Why did they allow some books in and other books not in?

• The oldest written materials of Christianity are actually the letters of Paul.

• Well, the gospels are actually all written after the letters of Paul were written by 20 or 30 years.

• So the oldest material we have are the letters of Paul. And the oldest one of those letters is 1 Thessalonians, probably, dated to around the year 50 or thereabouts.

• Pretty quickly, though, different churches, probably Paul's churches, initially, started sending around copies of Paul's letters. Remember, there's no printing press in the ancient world. 03:58 Whenever your church would get a copy of one of these letters from Paul, you would have scribes, often slaves, because slaves were especially trained to be scribes.

• The letter to the Ephesians looks like it was not actually written to only one church. It looks like it was a circular letter meant to be circulated to different churches.

• And one of the ways we think this-- one of the reasons we think this is because in some of the old manuscripts of Ephesians, "To the Ephesians" is not there.

• Ephesians was written by a different disciple of Paul, and he was using as his model for a Pauline letter the actual letters of Paul, or at least some of them that he possessed and knew of.

• But he was, also, using the letter to the Colossians.

• So some scholars have suggested that maybe the letter to the Ephesians was originally intended as a circular letter.

• Paul's letters actually became so famous and respected, and at least in some aspects of early Christianity, that they were called themselves "scripture."

• The guy who wrote 2 Peter--again, not really Peter, but a writer writing in Peter's name-- talked about Paul's letters as if--and he calls them scripture.

• So already by the time 2 Peter was written, which was much later than the letters of Paul, Paul's letters have come to be regarded by at least some early Christians as scripture themselves.

• So collections of Paul's letters were gradually being made and copied and circulated.

• That's the first development of what you have a collection of what would be considered holy writing among Christians that was more than just the Jewish scripture.

• We also know, though, about oral traditions in Paul's letters.

• We know that there were oral traditions about Jesus. People would tell stories about Jesus in their churches.

• Sometimes, they would tell sayings. So in Romans 12:14, Paul says, "Bless those who persecute you. 07:52 Bless and do not curse them." Now, he doesn't say this is a quotation of Jesus. But it sounds an awful lot like you find in some of the gospels, like in Matthew 5:44. So Paul's saying this, probably, passing this along as a quotation of Jesus.