Question of Canon
Description
Preaching Survey of the Year's Best Books for Preachers Preaching's Preacher's Guide to the Best Bible Reference
Did the New Testament canon arise naturally from within the early Christian faith?
Were the books written as Scripture, or did they become Scripture by a decision of the second-century church?
Why did early Christians have a canon at all?
These are the types of questions that led Michael J. Kruger to pick apart modern scholarship's dominant view that the New Testament is a late creation of the church imposed on books originally written for another purpose. Calling into question this commonly held "extrinsic" view, Kruger here tackles the five most prevalent objections to the classic understanding of a quickly emerging, self-authenticating collection of authoritative scriptures.
Already a noted author on the subject of the New Testament canon, Kruger addresses foundational and paradigmatic assumptions of the extrinsic model as he provides powerful rebuttals and further support for the classic, "intrinsic" view. This framework recognizes the canon as the product of internal forces evolving out of the historical essence of Christianity, not a development retroactively imposed by the church upon books written hundreds of years before.
Unlike many books written on the emergence of the New Testament canon that ask "when?" or "how?" Kruger focuses this work on the "why?"-exposing weaknesses in the five major tenets of the extrinsic model as he goes. While The Question of Canon scrutinizes today's popular scholastic view, it also offers an alternative concept to lay a better empirical foundation for biblical canon studies.
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Person
Michael J. Kruger (Ph.D.,University of Edinburgh) is president and professor of New Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina. He is the author of several books, including Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books and The Heresy of Orthodoxy (coauthored with Andreas Köstenberger), Together with Charles E. Hill he edited The Early Text of the New Testament.
Content
Preface Abbreviations Introduction 1. The Definition of Canon: Must We Make a Sharp Distinction Between the Definitions of Canon and Scripture? 2. The Origins of Canon: Was There Really Nothing in Early ChristianityThat May Have Led to a Canon? 3. The Writing of Canon: Were Early Christians Averse to Written Documents? 4. The Authors of Canon: Were the New Testament Authors Unaware of Their Own Authority? 5. The Date of Canon:Were the New Testament Books First Regarded as Scripture at the End of the Second Century? Conclusion Bibliography Author Index Subject Index Scripture Index
