Francis Watson’s New Article on the NT Canon

A New Testament Studies publication by the eminent Francis Watson on the nature of the New Testament canon has recently been published.  Entitled "Critical Reflections on the Role of the Canon in New Testament Scholarship," Watson seeks to outline the categorical priorities in current New Testament studies and proposes that our present conception of the canon and the boundaries it delineates are problematic for a purely historical analysis. Out of all the discussions about the canon I have read, I have found this article to be especially pivotal in contributing to our understanding of the New Testament collection in modern scholarship.

For starters, Watson prefers to refer to our familiar 27-book New Testament as an "anthology" as opposed to other labels such as "collection." It highlights the nature of the New Testament as being selective in its inclusion and exclusion of other documents and provides those who interact with it a normative guide of value and significance (111-12). He will expand upon this concept later, but settles with the assertion that "anthology is the product of contingency rather than necessity" (112). Watson uses this observation to highlight the problem in modern New Testament studies of retrojecting the concept of the New Testament back into the earlier centuries prior to the oft-called "triumph of Christianity" when the canon began to take shape and resemble its modern incarnation. The efforts of Eusebius and Athanasius were in contrast to the more uncritical readings by earlier believers who accepted the value of works that would eventually find themselves excluded from the orthodox anthology that became known as the New Testament (112-13). 

Watson proceeds to analyse a sample of 150 articles from between 2014 and 2018 (the period of his editorship of NTS) based on their subject matter. He then compares the proportion of focus to the 196 articles published in the 4-year period between 1994 and 1998. Observing declines in gospel-oriented studies (32% to 19%) and increased representation of extra-biblical focuses like non-canonical studies (2% to 8%), reception criticism (0.5% to 5%) and contextual studies (12% to 17%), Watson points out that much of the representation is largely European in origin, skewing potentially global perspectives on the origins of the New Testament. What is more, the categorisation of NT studies in such a way—through creating text-groupings like Pauline studies, synoptic studies, etc.—suggests an implicit stance towards the New Testament as a neutral container for its component texts or text-groupings (114-16). He concludes that this should not be the case and that we have not seen any progress in our understanding of the New Testament as a whole; the historical developments that produced the canon (involving the rejection of material that would later be considered non-canonical) needs to be engaged more seriously (117).

From here, Watson goes into detail about Eusebius' citations of preceding church fathers like Origen, observing that there was an early fourfold distinction between the gospels but that this was not yet integrated into a larger canon as of the second or third centuries (118). Watson spends the next few pages analysing Eusebius' divisions of the New Testament in great detail—information that would be familiar to seasoned students of church history, but is well worth recounting here; the Gospels, Acts, the entire Pauline corpus, 1 John, and 1 Peter are listed as the homologoumena (universally accepted); the rest of the Catholic epistles (James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 & 3 John) are listed among the antilegomena (disputed works); strangely, the Book of Revelation is "precariously poised" between the homologoumena and the antilegomena. Within this analysis, Watson observes that 1 Peter and 1 John appear to be viewed as "appendices" to the Gospels, Acts and Paul by Eusebius who refuses to place them in the same canonical collection. He also reckons that "suspected pseudonymity" is all that Eusebius needed to place a text into the "disputed" category, suggesting that Eusebius simply engaged in behaviour that a modern scholar would do in recounting that a letter is "disputed" without necessarily taking a side in that dispute (118-19). Finally, several apocryphal Acts and letters including the Epistle to Barnabas, the Didache, and the Shepherd of Hermas, consist of the "spurious" works (the notha).

Watson observes that Eusebius' Historia Ecclesiastica is very much concerned with providing a rationale for the decisions leading to canonical structures and, more powerfully, that all of New Testament studies today is based upon these authoritative patristic decisions; it anachronistically presents the canon as fixed in its content and structure (118). He also observes that the distinction between the antilegomena and the notha is fairly relative, with texts in both categories failing to "secure the unambiguous apostolic link that Eusebius believes necessary for canonical status" (120). He suggests one of two aims that Eusebius may have had in mind: (1) to oppose the perspective of having a core set of texts (Gospels, Acts, Paul) surrounded by an indefinite amount of peripheral texts that serve to supplement the core without a fixed limit; or (2) a minimal versus maximal New Testament, where thirty-two books (including the notha) consist of an emerging canon that Eusebius disagrees with. Eusebius would then need to differentiate between the disputed and the universally accepted texts because even the spurious ones are "known to many." This would suggest that Eusebius is not necessarily putting forward his list as a definitive version, but is negotiating the canon himself with his own proposals to counter ones he finds problematic (120-21).

Watson suggests the second century Muratorian Fragment is external evidence for position (2). The list features roughly the same texts, with the Fragment only excluding Hebrews, 1 Peter, and Revelation, and including 2 John and Jude. Appealing to a Syriac stichometric list found in several medieval manuscripts, Watson suggests that Eusebius' version of the canon endured through much of history (121-22). Furthermore, the stichometric list found in Codex Claromontanus (6th century) contains a New Testament consisting of the notha (apart from the Didache). Watson suggests that Eusebius anticipated efforts to expand the New Testament beyond his twenty-one books to include texts like the aforementioned notha when other types of notha are identified as heretical. In his attack against heterodox works like the Acts of Andrew and John, his three major categories merge into one. The key differentiation occurs outside of his identified thirty-two texts, including those he deems as disputed and spurious. He deems it acceptable to read spurious works that are considered orthodox, but texts that enlist apostolic authority in the name of heresy are problematic (123).

The primary issue of canonical criticism emerges for Watson here. First, Eusebius' apostolic criteria for canonicity is one featured in most (if not all) writings found from the universally accepted to the heretically rejected ones. John claims to be written by John; Thomas claims to have been written by Thomas. One these grounds alone, modern canonical considerations are dependent on Eusebius' fairly arbitrary distinction between texts that he selects for his proposal. He notes that, from a purely historical perspective "there is no obligation to follow Eusebius" in his designation of one supposedly apostolic text from another. Watson is critical of this and affirms that "the rationale for this construct merits further scrutiny, with a particular focus on the exclusions it entails" (123). 

I find this statement in his final page to be extremely potent in our quest to unravel the mystery of the New Testament: 

"... New Testament scholarship views its object as stable and self-evident, a neutral container for the various items of sub-collections that comprise it and form the main focus of scholarly attention. One of several early proposals about the contents of the New Testament has been projected back into the late first or early second century, as though the decisions of the later era would correspond exactly to the situation more than two centuries earlier, at the close of the so-called 'apostolic era'. Assuming such a correspondence would be justified only if the twenty-seven favoured texts were known to be inherently canonical, with their pre-existing canonical status simply awaiting formal institutional recognition. Inherent canonicity may be a necessary assumption in some theological and confessional perspectives, but from a historical standpoint it is hard to evade the conclusion that texts become canonical only as they are received as such - a contingent rather than a necessary process" (124).

I hold hope that this article will be a point of discussion for canonical criticism for the years to come; we must develop a greater understanding of the nature of the canonization process from a historical perspective and what ramifications these studies will have for theological/confessional standpoints of the Bible. Once more, we are faced with that all-too-pervasive antinomy between pastoral application and scholarly inquiry in Watson's article. His dichotomy between the theological and the historical is indicative of the rising perception of tension between faith practice and critical studies.

Some other points of contention arise in Watson's article. He appears, for example, to assume throughout his argumentation that text-groupings are completely arbitrary and derive almost exclusively from the orthodox disposition of the canon. Undoubtedly there is some truth to this, as the texts selected for the canon had to conform to a level of perceived "orthodoxy" to qualify for selection, thus resulting in the development of groups within the canon. But Watson fails to establish why the phenomenon of text-grouping is necessarily a bad thing. Furthermore, if we were to dispense with the idea that the canon is some kind of neutral container for these texts, what would actually change with the text groupings? We would still have a Pauline corpus and therefore the need for "Pauline studies." All that would happen is a slight blurring of the lines between categories that both ancient and modern writers have established. Not exactly a paradigm shift for the discipline, is it?

Moreover, the tenacious debates about authorship permeate these questions deeply. If 1 Peter is no more authentically Petrine than the Apocalypse of Peter, Watson suggests that the demarcation between the two is undoubtedly arbitrary. However, two problems arise; (1) if traditional authorship becomes demonstrable, what would this change about the development of the canon? And (2), surely by positing the authorship question as an important factor plays directly into the point that the ancient ecclesial authorities were making: if we cannot distinguish between the authentic and inauthentic texts, their decision could be described as "choosy," but if a text really was written by John, Peter, or James, would their apostolicity (and, by extension, canonicity) not essentially be an inherent factor? These are questions that Watson fails to address.

These are merely some personal queries I have about Watson's approach that barely take away from the quality of his argumentation or the main point he is trying to make: the canon has undergone countless modifications through the centuries even after is collation during the fateful events of the fourth century. Whatever theological studies may suggest about the nature of the canon (such as the existence of a Canon 1 and Canon 2), a historical analysis of the process by which the canon came about clearly still leaves much to be desired.