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The Gospels that Didn’t Make the Cut. The New Testament recognized by most Christians today comprises 27 books accepted as authoritative, or canon. But what made some writings canonical and others not?
- Tobit, written 225-175 BCE. This book tells the story of two Israelite people, a blind man named Tobit living in Nineveh and a woman named Sarah, living in a city called Ecbatana.
- Judith, written about 100 BCE. Judith, a Jewish widow, attracts and seduces an Assyrian general besieging her city. Having ingratiated herself with him, she waits until he is drunk and then decapitates him, saving the capital Jerusalem from total destruction.
- Esther, written around 115 BCE. Although the Hebrew version of Esther is canonical, the Greek translation adds six sections to it. Esther is the story of an Israelite woman who saves her people from an anti-Israelite Persian plot.
- Wisdom of Solomon, written around 50 BCE. This book centers on the importance of Wisdom as related to humans and to God. It may have influenced the famous prologue of the Gospel of John, with wisdom replaced by the “Word.”
Athanasius’ NT list contains the twenty-seven books of the present canon arranged in order, four gospels, Acts, Catholic Epistles, Pauline Epistles, and the Apocalypse of John. Hebrews is included among the epistles of Paul.
Dec 1, 2022 · The non-canonical gospels are a collection of ancient texts that were not included in the New Testament canon. These writings constitute about a third of the Christian Bible and contain a number of different gospels, or accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, as well as other writings that provide additional information about the ...
- Separating Fact from Fiction
- Early Canonical Lists
- Qualities of Canonicity
- The Fuzzy Edges
- The Canon Chose Itself
- Sources and Further Reading
There’s a common storyline about the early church, promoted by skeptics and popularized in books like The Da Vinci Code, that goes something like this: At the beginning of the church, there were diverse brands of Christianity, none of them more orthodox than any other. Likewise, there were various documents floating about, many of them as popular a...
The Festal Letter of Athanasiusfrom 367 AD contains the earliest known list of all 27 New Testament books, and only those books. But it is far from being the earliest canonical list. Origen, writing over a century earlier around 250 AD in his typical metaphorical style, compared the apostles to priests blowing trumpets around Jericho to herald the ...
What criteria did the early church use to recognize whether a book was inspired by God, and therefore part of the canon of Scripture? In broad terms, there were three: Apostolic authorship. Jesus commissioned his apostles to testify about his life, teaching, death and resurrection. In Greco-Roman culture, an apostle was a messenger who spoke with t...
None of this process happened overnight, with sharp, clear boundaries between what was recognized as canon and what was not. It took time, and there were fuzzy edges. A handful of the shorter New Testament books were disputed for a while, likely due to questions about their authorship. At the same time, a few writings of the Apostolic Fathers, the ...
Contrary to the urban myth promoted in popular novels and on the Internet, the New Testament canon wasn’t decided at the Council of Nicea in 325 AD by politically driven church leaders in collusion with the Emperor Constantine. In fact neither the Council of Nicea, nor the Emperor Constantine, nor any other church council, had anything to do with t...
Michael J. Kruger is Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina. His website, Canon Fodder, from which the material for this article was drawn, offers a wealth of resources, written at a popular to intermediate level, about the development of the New Testament canon and the histor...
A visual timeline of which books were included in the Biblical Canon throughout early Christianity. From the oldest list of New Testament books to modern-day Canons.
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May 1, 2021 · Why were they not included in the Canon? Simply because they failed the criteria used for recognizing canonical books. They were not written by apostles or their associates; they were not recognized by the early church; and they contradict the rest of Scripture in many aspects.
