John Barton: Holy Writings, Sacred Text

The topic of the New Testament(NT) canon and its formation is a topic that cannot be simply or easily approached as John Barton makes quite clear in his book Holy Writings, Sacred Text. Barton provides the reader with the briefest of glimpses into some of the issues regarding the formation of both old and new canon that many textbooks seem to neglect. Ultimately, Barton provides the reader with a historical study directed to questions of the early church regarding the canon and its development. His first chapter deals with the question of dating, as in, when can we say the early church had a fixed canon? In his second chapter he deals with Marcion and his influence on the formation of canon. Thirdly Barton talks about the relation between both testaments in this one Bible that we have. Next he asks how various books were considered to be holy, what made them holy and how were they different from texts that were not holy. Finally Barton addresses the question, if a book is in the canon, what does that mean regarding the writing. Throughout the book Barton attempts to obfuscate certain issues which have been made somewhat elementary, while also clarifying certain issues which have become obfuscated.

            In his first chapter Barton delves into the contemporary question, “How and why did the Church come to accept as authoritative Scripture a New Testament containing no more and no less than twenty-seven books, and to place this alongside either the Hebrew or Greek Scriptures renamed the ‘Old Testament’?”(2) To this question Barton provides three primary answers. First, Theodor Zahn argued that the NT was more developed more spontaneously than intentionally. Ultimately Zahn is identifying at least the early beginnings of the NT canonization as a very early conception, late first or second centuries. In response to Zahn’s opinion, Adolf von Harnack and later Hans von Campenhausen developed an understanding of NT canonization in some way shape or form being forced by the second century conflicts with Marcion. Thus for Harnack and Campenhausen, the time frame for canonization is placed more mid-late second century. A third approach is posited by A.C. Sundberg in which Sundberg explains the necessity of distinguishing a book of scripture and a book of canon. Since many books could be considered to be scriptural but not necessarily canonical, whereas any book that is canonical will already be considered scriptural. Sundberg thus places the NT canonization much later than either Harnack or Zahn in the third or fourth century. However, none of these positions helps one towards understanding how various books came to be considered as part of the canon, only when. From this understanding, Barton continues his inquiry by delving into the way the early church understood the books which eventually developed into what we now call the NT canon.

            Marcion has been considered a major character in the development of Christian canon. If we are to understand the way that the early church came to appreciate and understand the books which are now accepted as part of the canon, it is helpful for us to understand the canon in light of the early church’s opposition. Ultimately, Marcion proposed a NT of a compilation of Paul’s writings and an edited form of Luke/Acts as the Church’s canon. Furthermore, he concluded that the Old Testament(OT) should not be apart of the Christian canon. At first glance many would assume that Marcion must have taken some particular liberties in coming to his conclusions. However,  Barton points out that Marcion’s decisions were more likely due to his zealous conservative approach to both the OT and the writings which now comprise the NT canon. Whereas the OT was distinctly Scriptural and could not be altered in any way due to their status as Scripture, the NT texts were however fair game for editing and redaction because they were not yet considered Scriptural but rather important historical texts defining the beliefs of Christians. Marcion therefore most certainly understood the OT as scripture, but a scripture that had little or nothing to do with the God revealed to the church in Jesus. On the other hand, Marcion did not understand the NT texts as having the status of scripture. This leads Barton to understand Marcion as a key figure not in terms of forcing the early church to sketch out a list of books to include in the NT but in terms of pushing the church to maintain the Christian church’s attachment to the OT.

            Barton continues in the next chapter to hammer out the question of how the NT texts came to be considered as Scripture and what their relationship to the OT books were. Here Barton underlines the unsatisfactory division of books being either canonical or noncanonical. There was no doubt that a new revelation had surpassed the old revelation, and as the generations grew older and the new authoritative books such as the gospels and the epistles also grew in age, so they became to be addressed as a type of new ancient scripture. The inherent relationship between the two testaments is understood by Barton to be one of prophecy and fulfillment. As Jesus has now fulfilled the first testament expectations, so those expectations become valid in the community of believers. Thus the NT became to be understood as scriptural in the same way that the OT was scriptural, but for different reasons than originally assumed. The two testaments developed as scriptural authority for the early church in a mutually validating progression. Why are the books in the NT considered scriptural? Because they are understood as fulfilling the prophecy set out in the OT. Why are the books in the OT considered scriptural? Because they are understood as containing the prophecy that has been fulfilled in the NT.

            In the fourth chapter, Barton discusses what sets scriptural books apart from non scriptural books and why that distinction was important for those determining the Jewish canon and the Christian canon. Chapter four is spent elaborating on the writings being holy objects. That is, the scroll itself which contains scripture is Holy, rather than what the scroll contains or the meaning it is conveying to the reader. Within the OT canon, there are three books which are contentiously apart of the canon, Song of Song, Ecclesiastes, and Esther. They are so contentious because none of them contain the holy name of God, in the form of the Tetragrammaton. Furthermore, Barton also continues to explain the importance of transcription of the text for the Masoretes who wrote out copies of the canon and followed the copying of those texts even in the cases where the text was unclear or in obvious error. For the Masoretes, the transmission of the letters was considered the ultimate concern. Barton suggests that this helps us to understand the importance of a text. Simply because it is a physical object of holiness a text would be accepted by many in the early church and may have been one of the primary factors in defining the boundaries of the Christian canon.

            Finally, Barton ties up his excursion by weighing the topic just previously discussed with the fact that “many people in ancient times were very interested indeed in the meaning of Scripture.”(132) What can we say then regarding the attitude of the early church towards these books which we find in the Christian canon? Barton posits that the first thing we can deduce is that what these texts say, was thought of as important. Secondly, these books were thought of as having importance for the future generations of the church, not just the immediate audience they were written to. That is to say, the historical implications of what is written is significant for all generations. Thirdly, there was a concern for the early Christian authorities that if a text was to be scriptural, it should be seen, to be anachronistic, as being internally consistent. Thus as we see many of the early church fathers attempting to iron out those inconsistencies with an allegorical brush, we can assume that they thought of these books worthy of being ironed out in the first place. Finally, that the readers of the NT texts would attempt to find the ‘hidden’ meaning of a text is another example of how someone from the second or third century would approach a canonical book.

Throughout the book, Barton most certainly achieves his purposes of complicating the issues that arise from questions regarding the development of the canon. It is not a simple question of when did these books begin to be counted as scriptural and when were these scriptures selected as the only texts to be included in the Christian canon. The issue is far more complicated than this and Barton does an excellent job of expanding the issues. Ultimately, Barton has written a book about the ‘black box’ of the Christian canon. The ‘black box’ theory is understood to be a way of taking a very complicated system and explaining it in a simplified way. For instance when people refer to a problem with their car, they might say ‘My transmission is going.’ While a transmission is something in the mechanics of a car that can break down, a transmission is a system of mechanical engineering that effectively appropriates the distribution of power for a vehicle. It is inconvenient for one to try to explain what parts that make up the transmission are failing, often because we do not know or understand the parts which make up a transmission, but also because we rarely care how a transmission works, only that it does in fact work. This is similar to what Barton has done in this book. We as modern readers of the text make assumptions about the formation of the Christian canon primarily because we do not understand the intricacies or are even aware that there are intricacies, and secondarily, because we never thought to care.

Barton has effectively explained that the term ‘canon’ or the questions that arise regarding the issue, when being discussed in many textbooks is simply inadequate for discussing the concerns that surround the process of canonization in the early Church. The question cannot simply be, ‘when did the books which now comprise the NT canon become canonized?’ Rather, the question is, ‘how have these books which are now canonized interacted with by the early Christians to the point that they became canonized?’ Barton furthers the complications by addressing issues already identified within that process of canonization, but readdressing the issues. Marcion for example is a well known heretical figure for any elementary theological student. However, one would assume that he was a heretic because he maintained a liberal attitude towards the necessity of Scripture. The idea that his heresy was the result of a zealous conservative approach to Scripture would never cross one’s mind let alone be the reason that the OT was included in the Christian canon.

However, there are certain instances in which the reader hopes that there is a more complicated explanation. In some cases when Barton addresses the complications, there is a victorious sense of achievement as though finally the reader has uncovered something that illuminates a text and appropriates the understanding of Scripture for her modern mind. In other cases, the way that a problem is worked out by Barton leaves the modern mind wanting, as though surely there must be a better explanation. Surely the books we find in the OT were not simply objects of holiness, but means by which to convey holiness or the meaning of holiness. Surely there is more to the development of canon than objective holiness. But here the reader is addressed with perhaps the ultimate issue in question, for the reader can be just as guilty of over-simplifying an issue as he or she can be of over-complicating it.

Thus in conclusion, Barton’s Holy Writings, Sacred Text achieves exactly what Barton sets out to accomplish. He presents the complicated variables of simplified contexts which should remain complicated, and the simplified variables of complicated contexts which should remain simple. Furthermore, Barton is convincing in his arguments. The reader is left feeling as though those simplified concerns should in fact be more complicated than they are, and that the complicated concerns should be simplified. What is more so, is that the reader leaves the book feeling as though he or she is better equipped to be reading the Christian Bible. Which is certainly no easy accomplishment. 

Barton, John. Holy Writing, Sacred Text: The Canon in Early Christianity. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997.