Is it that We "Know" that the New Testament is Mt, Mk, Lk, Jn, letters of Paul etc. or We've Been Told it is so?

[Secret Alias]

Why do people pretend that the canon is some "thing" passed down from the first Christians to us. The canon was arranged for us by second and third century intermediaries. It's like go to college to get a job. Is it so or have been just told so?

[andrewcriddle]

The canon is by definition what the Christian community canonized. Whether they got it 'right' whatever 'right' means in this context is another matter.

Andrew Criddle

[Secret Alias]

Right but once this is acknowledged, once we bypass the implicit arguments of the propaganda that the Holy Spirit guided the production of four gospels and that the hostility between Paul and Peter in Galatians was smoothed over in Acts, then it is a much further chronology, it demands necessarily more time to get to where the orthodox develop their canon to where the Marcionites develop theirs. In other words, one can pretend that the Marcionite "all Paul" canon is a "reaction" to the formation of the orthodox New Testament, but clearly it was the other way around. The orthodox couldn't find one gospel which developed the "harmony" they desired so they need to stack Matthew, Mark, Luke and John against one another to define what was "acceptable" within the religion, what positions were "allowable," rather than the Marcionites who clearly - rather than corrupting orthodox original texts - simply preserved a first century tradition of Paul.

[Peter Kirby]

IMO it is an interesting question why the NT canon didn't get Matthew+John or Luke+John. It feels like there was a moment in the mid second century where this could have been the direction taken. Both Matthew and Luke are written to be complete gospels in and of themselves, not with a side eye to being placed alongside one another (although I guess you may not agree with that SA). Arguably they both tried to make redundant the earlier synoptics, notably at least Mark, so someone who had Matthew or Luke no longer really needed Mark, other than as a kind of luxury item.

Why are there 3 "synoptics" in this canon?

[Secret Alias]

Celsius seems to indicate perhaps that there was a threefold canon at one point. The addition of John seems to have been done at a very late period hence the existence of the Alogoi especially at Rome. There seems to be a connection between Victor's original cutting off of the churches of Asia Minor and the Alogoi. The appearance of Zephyrinus and Callistos seems to have relegate the Alogoi to outsiders and so the fourfold canon appears at the end of the second century.

[Secret Alias]

I think John had a special place in the canon. Irenaeus "proves" that Jesus lived to forty nine by means of John. I think the chapter headings of John were used to measure out the proper chronology of the synoptics so that the entire canon, as a fourfold gospel volume, was codified by John. I think at some point Irenaeus may have appealed to John as the originator of the fourfold canon where his chapter headings were an index to the entire multi-year chronology. Of course the idea was ultimately ignored (as all Irenaeus's ideas get thrown under the bus) because it belies the canon as a revision of older traditions (why would John be sitting there "marking up" three different versions of Mark essentially to lengthen Jesus's life to be an "elder"? It makes explicit the time delay in the idea). Even though there are chronological acknowledgements that John was later the popular notion from the four winds analogy was that the "winds/spirits" blew from one source AT ONCE. Information was slow to get to people back then. One could imagine a delay in reception of the texts. Hard to explain Irenaeus coming along in 195 CE with essentially a Johannine "correction" of Mark and two corrections of Mark. That's the gist of Celsus's criticism (perhaps gleaned from Marcionite objections). Celsus said essentially the Christians wrote a gospel and then corrected the gospel three more times.

[Secret Alias]

So we have to imagine that Celsus is telling us that there was Mark (presumably), then there must have been Matthew as a correction of Mark (Papias), then Celsus tells us (and Luke seems to tell us) there was a threefold canon of Mark, Matthew and Luke. I don't think either Luke or Celsus is telling us Luke was ever used as a stand alone text replacement for Mark or Matthew. And then the fourfold canon. I know I am crack brained but is Clements appeal to two different lengths of Mark really out of place here?

[Peter Kirby]

I know I am crack brained but is Clements appeal to two different lengths of Mark really out of place here?

Remind me of the reference?

[Secret Alias]

The Letter to Theodore. What is the difference between Matthew and Luke being expansions of Mark and Mark making an expansion of Mark?

[Peter Kirby]

Sure, okay. The idea that an author could be behind more than one version of the text is not foreign to the ancient world (or the modern world, we call them "editions").