concern anyone trying to reconstruct the origins of Christianity
from the New Testament texts: their ‘historical reliability’. This
topic has been much discussed, but it is worth reiterating here a
few salient points on a number of interrelated questions about
these texts: their authorship and date and how their theological
significance has a bearing on their utility as historical sources.
It is important to appreciate how the New Testament came
into existence and why it contains specific texts and not others.
The New Testament was not put together in the immediate after-
math of the events that much of it seems to describe: the activities
of Jesus and early Christian leaders such as Paul. Instead, the texts
that make up what is called the New Testament canon were only
agreed upon gradually over a number of centuries. Indeed, the
first securely datable list of the twenty-seven books that modern
Christians regard as scripture was not set down until the mid-
fourth century;^2 up until that time (and afterwards too) there
circulated many other gospels, acts, letters, and apocalypses (see
chapter 5). Why were they excluded from the canon while other
texts made it into the New Testament? The reason was that the
New Testament texts were deemed – after much debate – to repre-
sent certain truths. But their truthfulness was not dictated on
grounds of historical reliability, even if it is now generally agreed
that most of the texts included in the New Testament were, in
fact, written earlier than those other writings that were excluded.
Rather, the decision as to what was true or not was made
according to judgements of the emerging institution of the church.
Determining the truthfulness of a text partly depended on how
widely it was used by Christian communities as scripture. Much
more important, however, were theological considerations, where
a text’s truth was judged according to the extent that it was an
‘orthodox’ (literally ‘right belief ’) representation of those
Christian teachings that were regarded as normative by the early
Church (Metzger 1987: 251–4). That the books deemed to be
canonical were filled with orthodox teaching was attributed
by early Christians to one factor above all: the biblical authors’
writings were believed to have been inspired by God through
SOURCES AND THEIR INTERPRETATION1
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