The New Testament Canon — a Response to (or Questions for) Jeremy Armiger
Medium writer Jeremy Armiger is doing good work on the origins of Christianity. In particular he has focussed recently on the establishment of the New Testament canon, part 1 here, and part 2 here. He treats as an authoritative source The Canon of the New Testament by scholar Bruce Metzger.
At the beginning of part 2, he criticises Richard Dawkins for saying that various other gospels could easily have been included, but were excluded “more or less arbitrarily”. Dawkins named the Gospels of Thomas, Peter, Nicodemus, Philip, Bartholomew , and Mary Magdalen. As far as I’m aware, and I’m willing to be corrected, these might loosely be called Gnostic gospels.
What follows is not intended to be a criticism, rather an invitation to further discussion and clarification. I would like to draw Armiger’s and other readers’ attention to the following.
In The Mysteries of Jesus (Sakina Books, 2000) Muslim writer Ruqaiyyah Waris Maqsood wrote that “there was a time when the official NT included such material as the subsequently abandoned Epistle of Barnabas, the Epistle of Clement, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Preaching of Peter, the Didache (or Teaching of the Twelve Apostles), the Apostolic Constitutions, and even the Sybilline Oracles” (p202).
Of the Shepherd of Hermas she writes that that there are “obvious similarities here with the angelic guidance given by the angel Gabriel to the prophet Muhammad”. “The book was accepted as inspired scripture until the time of the Council of Nicaea (325 CE), when it was banned because it did not teach the Trinitarian doctrine” (p113).
She names other versions of the New Testament, and concludes therefore that we have the result of a victory of one party over another, which would be something similar to what Dawkins was claiming, inappropriately as Armiger explains.
This list of books is obviously different from the ones Dawkins mentioned. I therefore invite Jeremy Armiger to offer his thoughts on these texts, and challenge Maqsood’s version of events, if he (or Metzger) is able to do so. I don’t have Bruce Metzger’s book, so would be interested to know if he includes them.
Do other readers have any thoughts?
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