With a Name like That

The Muratorian fragment is a unique and critical document. Discovered by the Italian historian and archaeologist Ludovico Antonio Muratori, the fragment represents the thinking of a group of Christians from around AD 170, and specifically their thinking on the issue of the canon.

The fragment is a canon list—a list of all the books that are recognized as Scripture—though it’s not the earliest canon list. We have some other lists in the writings of the church fathers. As they wrote epistles, they would refer to and quote from different books as having Scriptural authority—the four Gospels or Paul’s epistles, for instance. Through these mentions, we can reconstruct the early church’s canon list.

But the Muratorian fragment gives us significant insight not only into the list itself but also into some of the reasoning that went into the church’s process of recognizing the canon. Notice the word we use here. In our view as Protestants, we see this process of compiling the canon as recognizing the books as canonical. The Roman Catholic view is a bit different. The Catholic Church says the church establishes the canon. Protestants say the books are canonical in and of themselves; we simply recognize their canonicity.

Before we even get out of the New Testament, there is some reflection in Scripture on the notion of canon. Peter said there are difficult things to understand in the Paul’s writings, “which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures” (2 Peter 3:16). Peter refers to Paul’s letters as Scriptures. So, even before the ink was dry on Paul’s manuscripts, they were considered holy books, part of the New Testament canon.

The Muratorian fragment contributes to the conversation about canon by providing a list. It’s a fragment, so we don’t have the beginning, but the second sentence reads, “The third gospel is Luke.” It’s probably safe to assume that the missing piece refers to Matthew and Mark as the first two gospels. The fragment goes on to list Acts, a number of Paul’s epistles, and a number of the General Epistles. In fact, twenty-two of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament are listed as canonical in this fragment.

But more importantly, we get some insight into the criteria that the church applied as it sought to determine which books are canonical. The first factor is either Apostolic authorship or an Apostolic connection. It was important to the early church that the authors of Scripture be eyewitnesses to the words and works of Jesus Christ, or associates who could record the eyewitnesses’ experiences. The second factor is content—does the book in question teach in accord with other recognized books and with the received teachings of the Apostles? At one point, the Muratorian fragment says it is not fitting that honey should be mixed with gall, so any book that teaches heresy should be rejected. The third factor may seem a little circular, but it’s recognition. And that is to say that a book is recognized because it’s recognized. But this criterion shows us that a given book has been widely received and read, that it has staying power.

But again, ultimately, a book is canonical because of its own self-claim and because of the testimony of the Holy Spirit through it. The church adds nothing to it. A canon list does not make a book canonical; it simply affirms that it is.