Toward the New Testament Canon as Fourth-Century Invention

Abstract

Scholarship on the New Testament canon regularly relies on criterial and reception-historical methodologies to antedate the Christian scriptural collection well before its first advocacy as a “rule” of scripture in the 39th Festal Letter of Athanasius of Alexandria (367 CE). Pushing back against these narratives and associated tendencies, this article prefers a functional or forensic approach to the institution of a twenty-seven-book New Testament and highlights evidence demonstrating how the Athanasian episcopal canon was amplified, amended, and accepted in the Christian East and West in the decades following its promulgation. Against suggestions that the canon existed as early as the second century, this handling of data on the New Testament, a scriptural instrument set forth with authoritative and exclusionary intentions, fits the guidelines of creative discourse and historical redescription so as to credit Athanasius, in the fourth century, as the inventor of the canon regnant into the present day. Among other foci, tracing the fortunes of a subcanonical category of books shows the potential for new histories of familiar canonical evidence that may ensue, especially those that plumb the possibility of dissent to the Athanasian scriptural boundaries or augment our awareness of the place and value of such an established standard within institutional, monastic, academic, imperial, and even so-called heretical contexts in and beyond the fourth century.