2 NEW TESTAMENT CANON PART 2
QUESTION 2. NEW TESTAMENT CANON PART 2
THE TESTIMONY of Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis (now- Pamukkale), about the New Testament. He lived in ~70-150 years. Wanting to study the life of Christ in more detail, he met with those who themselves communicated with the apostles, writing down their testimonies. Fragments of his five-volume book "Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord" have come down to us. From it we learn that Apostle Matthew wrote his Gospel in the Hebrew dialect (in Aramaic), and the evangelist Mark wrote his Gospel based on the speeches of St Peter, pronounced at different times (so there is no chronological order in it). Papias also knows the 1st epistle of Peter and 1 John and the Apocalypse. The other books are not mentioned in the fragments that have come down to us.
The appearance of various heresies in the 2-3 century forced the Church Fathers to make a list-a canon of New Testament books, so that heretics could not add fake writings to them and then refer to them.
The "Muratori Canon" is the oldest of the lists of New Testament writings, discovered by L. Muratori in the early 18th century. A 2nd-century manuscript, it describes the Gospels of Mark (end), Luke and John, these numbered as the third and fourth. It is obvious that the first in the list, in the beginning of the manuscript was the Gospel of Matthew. The list includes all the books of the New Testament, with the exception of 1st and 2nd Epistles of Peter, the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Epistle of James. In addition to this, the canon includes the apocrypha "Apocalypse" of Peter, and, strangely, the Wisdom of Solomon. The following is a list of books that are not recognized as canonical: The" Shepherd "of Hermas, the" Epistles of the Apostle Paul " to the Laodiceans and Alexandrians, and a number of heretical writings.
In the 4th century, Eusebius of Caesarea (like Origen in the 3rd century) divided the New Testament books into generally recognized, controversial and false. Among the first: 4 Gospels, Acts of the Apostles; Pauline Epistles, 1 John and 1 Peter, the Apocalypse. Among the disputed, but mostly accepted: the Epistles of James, Jude, and 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John. The fake ones include: "The Acts of Paul", "The Shepherd", "The Apocalypse of Peter", "The Epistle of Barnabas", "The Teaching of the 12 Apostles (Didache)" and again the Apocalypse, which some people rejected, and others did not. Also "The Gospel of the Jews".
In the 4th century, the canon of the New Testament was practically formed, but among the Churches of the East (Jerusalem, Syria, Egypt) the authenticity of the Apocalypse remained in question, and in the West (Rome) - the message of the Apostle Paul to the Hebrews, mostly because of the difference in the style of these texts from the other books of the apostles John and Paul. Thus, Cyril of Jerusalem considers 26 books canonical, except for the Apocalypse ("the 4th Catechumenical word").
St. Athanasius of Alexandria divided the holy scriptures into canonical, edifying and heretical. In the "39th epistle on holidays", he refers to the first 27 books of the modern New Testament and writes that no one would dare to add anything else to them. Among the edifying ones are "Shepherd", "Didache".
The point at which the history of the formation of the New Testament canon was laid by the Council of Carthage was in 419, which approved 27 books of the New Testament.