The Canon of Truth
Another historical essay
Well, turns out keeping up with weekly posts during mid-terms and the start of Lent is a tall order. So, here is what has been keeping me busy lately—an essay from my History of Christianity to 1517 class. I, for one, oppose the rational skepticism that underlies the course’s material, but I digress.
Another class, Theories of Religion, has me writing analyses and critiques of religious theories posed by figures like Durkheim, Freud, and Marx. To be honest, I’m burnt out on philosophy and modernity when their presuppositions are rooted in the 18th and 19th centuries. Whatever emerges in my writing this Lent will, God willing, be more fruitful than just combating modern perspectives—after all, we become what we behold and that applies doubly to what we fight.
P.S. The Q Gospel is fake!
The prompt: “What were the major factors that influenced the formation of the New Testament canon? What role did the views of unorthodox Christians play in this process?”
Apostolic authority and divine providence guided the formation of the New Testament canon. The result was not a collection of texts; it was a lasting Christian epistemic tradition. For millennia, this tradition distinguished believers from heretics. Diverging epistemic philosophies within unorthodox sects, which contradicted apostolic teachings, made a defined canon necessary. Heretical teachings—propagated by Gnostic sects and figures like Marcion—catalyzed the Church’s formal recognition of the canon. This process established more than a definitive set of texts; it laid the foundation for Christian epistemology.
The Church does not create truth but preserves divine revelation and safeguards it against heretical teachings, seeing them as not merely human error, but genuine dangers to eternal life. Bishop Kallistos Ware explains that the Ecumenical Councils did not attempt to explain the ‘mysteries’ of the faith but rather safeguarded them by defining boundaries against heretical distortions,
“To prevent men from deviating into error and heresy, [the bishops] drew a fence around the mystery; that was all… Heresies were dangerous and required condemnation, because they impaired the teaching of the New Testament, setting up a barrier between man and God, and so making it impossible for man to attain full salvation.”[1]
One of the earliest distortions of divine revelation was the teaching of the Gnostics. Gnosticism is a broad and syncretic movement, encompassing a variety of esoteric teachings that were “propagated by a dozen or more rival sects which broke with the early church between A.D. 80 and 150.”[2] Gnostic thought, expansive as much as it deviated from orthodox theology, was broad and syncretic, constituting Platonic cosmology, Hellenized Zoroastrianism, and Judaism among other Mediterranean spiritual systems.[3] The term Gnosticism is derived from the Greek word gnosis, meaning knowledge, attributed to these sects because of their claim to possess an occult knowledge surpassing the simple faith of the Church.
Unlike the Orthodox Church, which saw creation as inherently good and redeemed through the Incarnation, Gnostics viewed the physical world as not only evil, but the product of a lesser, even malevolent, being—the Demiurge. This epistemic divide marked the fundamental contrast between the two. While the Church saw Scripture unveiling a redemptive history, the Gnostics reinterpreted it through an ahistorical lens:
“the main ingredient which Gnosticism derived from Judaism was a transmuted apocalyptic. Jewish apocalyptic painted a dark picture of the present world as the bone of contention between rival angelic armies, good and evil, and as the expected stage of dramatic divine intervention redeeming God's elect. The Gnostic eliminated any historical or literalist element from this notion and reinterpreted the apocalyptic world picture of Armageddon as a myth either about the origins of the world or about inward psychological experience.”[4]
The Gnostics—by reinterpreting the apocalyptic as symbolic myth and rejecting historical reality—reduced salvation to an individual’s personal enlightenment rather than God acting in time and space.[5] The rejection of historical reality effectively erased the Incarnation’s significance, making Gnosticism a system focused on individual enlightenment ergo a fundamentally different religion than Christianity. This egregious ahistorical reinterpretation reached a climax with Marcion of Sinope in the mid-second century.
Marcion was a member of the Roman Church until his excommunication in 144 A.D. for “propagating a strange kind of Christianity that quickly took root throughout large sections of the Roman Empire and by the end of the second century had become a serious threat to mainstream Christian Church.”[6] This strange kind of Christianity rejected the Old Testament, distinguishing the Supreme God of goodness and an inferior Demiurge—the God of the Jews. Marcion deemed the Septuagint irreconcilable with the Gospels and Epistles, asserting that the Apostles of Christ corrupted His message by presenting Christ as the (inferior) Jewish (God’s) Messiah. This rejection of apostolic tradition formed the backdrop for his own canon, which he edited to conform to his theological framework.
Marcion’s epistemology collapsed under scrutiny, even his own. He could not sustain even his own truncated canon of Luke and the Pauline Epistles,
“Passages that Marcion could regard only as Judaizing interpolations that had been smuggled into the text by false apostles—these had to be removed so that the authentic text of the Gospel and Apostle could once again be available… Marcion undertook to expunge everything from [his canon] which echoed or otherwise implied a point of contact with the Old Testament.”[7]
His approach was fundamentally subjective, imposing his preconceptions onto Scripture rather than receiving the apostolic witness. While the Gnostics claimed that they possessed secret teachings of what Jesus had told the Apostles and from the Apostles transmitted them to the bishops,[8] Marcion denied apostolic continuity altogether, asserting that the Apostles misunderstood Christ’s message. This challenge, along with Gnostic esotericism, prompted the Church to emphasize its authority in determining doctrine. If one could disregard the witness of the Apostles and their successors, then divine revelation itself became the subject to personal reinterpretation.
The early Church anticipated these distortions. St. Clement of Rome, writing at the end of the first century, affirmed the Apostles, foreseeing strife emerge concerning the dignity of the bishop, that other men, approved by the whole Church, would succeed in their ministry.[9] This apostolic succession ensured that the truth of Christ’s teaching was not left to private speculation but safeguarded within the life of the Church. “The succession argument carried the implication that the teaching given by the contemporary bishop… was in all respects identical with that of the apostles.”[10] This continuity provided assurance that divine revelation was knowable, preserved through the authority of the bishops, who spoke in the present of things genuinely of the past.[11]
This apostolic authority also countered the fragmentation of Gnostic sects, which frequently modified their beliefs and disagreed among themselves.[12] The Church safeguarded the faithful and their salvific way of life by upholding apostolic tradition. Canonization, seen through this lens, was not a reactionary response but the natural outgrowth of the unbroken transmission of Christ’s teaching through the apostles and their successors.
It was this authority—not esoteric speculation—that determined the bounds of Christian truth. As Metzger explains, “It is nearer to the truth to regard Marcion’s canon as accelerating the process of fixing the Church’s canon, a process that had already begun in the first half of the second century… Marcion forced more orthodox Christians… to state more clearly what they already believed.”[13]
Thus, the canon of the Church emerged from apostolic continuity, providing the criterion for what was accepted as Scripture, rather than subjective interpretations or esoteric frameworks.[14] The Church did not invent doctrine in its canonization of the New Testament but crystallized what it already believed to be divine revelation, safeguarding the faithful from distortions. The Church’s role was preservative rather than inventive—its authority derived from divine revelation, not from itself.
St. Ignatius of Antioch testifies to the early recognition of the fourfold Gospel and the Pauline Epistles in the early second century.[15] St. Irenaeus, by the century’s end, affirms their place in Church tradition: “It is evident that the Word, the Artificer of all, He that sits upon the cherubim, and contains all things, He who was manifested to men, has given us the Gospel under four aspects, but bound together by one Spirit.”[16] The Christians received these texts as apostolic, unified in their proclamation of Christ crucified and prefigured in the Old Testament. This, for St. Irenaeus, constituted the canon of truth: “the formal structure of the harmony of scripture, read as speaking of the Christ revealed in the apostolic preaching.”[17]
The “canon of truth,” which formed the orthodox New Testament, stood in contrast with Marcion’s and the Gnostics’ fabricated texts, “where the apostolic writings are refashioned, on the basis of a different hypothesis, to produce a different fabrication.”[18] These speculative hypotheses engendered an individual reinterpretation of the texts, and, in Marcion’s case, a cause for the erasure of the Old Testament entirely, necessitating the Church’s response to clarify authentic apostolic teaching. St. Clement of Alexandria concisely defines this standard: “The ecclesiastical canon is the concord and harmony of the law and the prophets in the covenant delivered at the coming of the Lord.”[19] This criterion anchored the Church in divine revelation, ensuring that the canon reflected the true Christ—the pre-Incarnate Word and the enfleshed God-man—rather than the distorted versions of Marcion or the docetists.
The New Testament is the fruit of the early Church, which, “fully conscious of its inheritance of apostolic writings”[20] formalized the canon to distinguish orthodoxy from error. The Gnostics and figures like Marcion demonstrated that to depart from this tradition is to fall into epistemic error, distorting divine revelation into subjective speculation. To depart from the Church’s authority is not to leave a human institution, but to abandon the steward of divine revelation. This struggle ultimately crystallized the Christian epistemic tradition, with the canon as its enduring foundation.
Ο ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΕΝ ΤΩ ΜΕΣΩ ΗΜΩΝ! ΚΑΙ ΗΝ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΙ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΑΙ
[1] Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church (London: Penguin Books, 1997), 20.
[2] Henry Chadwick, The Early Church, revised edition (London: Penguin, 1993), 34.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid. 37.
[5] Ibid. 35.
[6] Metzger, Bruce M. The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Formation.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987, 91.
[7] Ibid. 93.
[8] Chadwick, Early Church, 42.
[9] The Early Christian Reader: The Epistles, Stories, and Other Writings of the Earliest Christianity, ed. Luke Smith, trans. Charles H. Hoole (Lindy Press, 2022), 73.
[10] Chadwick, Early Church, 42.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Metzger, Bruce M. The Canon of the New Testament, 99.
[14] Chadwick, Early Church, 43.
[15] John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2006), 62.
[16] Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies 3.11.8, trans. Alexander Roberts and W.H. Rambaut, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Philip Schaff, accessed March 11, 2025, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103311.htm.
[17] John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death, 61.
[18] Ibid. 63.
[19] Ibid. 61.
[20] Metzger, Bruce M. The Canon of the New Testament, 99.