Season 2 · Episode 27
Full episode description
The New Testament has twenty-seven books. Four are gospels. One is an history. Thirteen are letters attributed to Paul. One is an apocalypse. The remaining eight are the catholic letters, the books that won inclusion despite real and durable doubts about their authorship, their authority, or their fit.
This episode walks each of them:
- the Letter to the Hebrews, attributed to Paul for centuries but stylistically and theologically unlike any Pauline letter. Origen of Alexandria wrote that only God knows who wrote it. The case for inclusion came from the theological argument the letter made about the Temple, an argument the church needed
- the Letter of James, attributed to the brother of Jesus, with a portrait of faith and works that stands in tension with Paul. Martin Luther called it an epistle of straw
- the First Letter of Peter and the Second Letter of Peter, where the first is widely read and the second is almost certainly pseudonymous, written generations after Peter’s death
- the three letters of John, written by the Johannine community against fellow Christians who denied that Christ had come in real flesh, contested by the Christianity that won
- the Letter of Jude, the shortest book in the New Testament, which quotes from the Book of Enoch as if it were scripture, even though Enoch did not make the canon
- the slow process by which all five were accepted, region by region, with eastern and western churches arriving at the same list only in the fourth century
These are the canonical books. The next episode walks the books that did not make it, including some that arguably should have.
Not from tradition. From evidence.