Jesus: Man, Messenger, Messiah · 1. Beginnings of Christian Scripture

Nobody handed the Church a table of contents

In short

1.Marcion (c. 144 CE) proposed a canon of one edited Gospel and ten Pauline letters, forcing the wider Church to define its own.
2.The Muratorian fragment lists a canon that does not match the present one.
3.**Athanasius's Easter letter of 367 CE** is the first surviving list of exactly the 27 books now in the New Testament.
4.Revelation, Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2-3 John and Jude were disputed for centuries.

The claim being examined

The 27-book canon is assumed to be original and self-evident.

The Islamic position

Islam's position is that the Injil was a revelation given to Jesus, not a curated anthology assembled by later committees.

Analysis

Ehrman traces canon formation as a process of contest rather than reception: competing Christian groups each had books supporting their theology, and the group that prevailed defined which books were apostolic. The debate over antilegomena ('disputed books') ran into the fourth century, and the Syriac and Ethiopic churches settled on different lists again. What the surviving canon records is the outcome of an argument, not a delivery.

From the Qur'an

Q 57:27

وَءَاتَيْنَٰهُ ٱلْإِنجِيلَ

…and We gave him the Gospel.

Sources

Bart D. Ehrman · Athanasius of Alexandria · Bart D. Ehrman, *Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why* (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), ch. 1, pp. 33-40

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