My first reaction to the page is that it says a lot of things but doesn’t support them. It doesn’t say anything about how the author knows these things. Also, there is a confusion between Protestant and Catholic “orthodoxy” that muddles the article as a whole.
Some examples of what I mean are:
While the current list of 27 books has been in place since the 4th century, there is reason to suggest that the canon is not necessarily closed. This viewpoint has been shared by others down through the last 1,500 years – albeit by a small but distinctive minority.
Has there really been a distinctive minority of Catholics questioning the canon for 1500 years? Presumably not since the Council of Trent, so after that, we are talking about Protestants. What evidence is there that, e.g., in AD 800 there was a distinctive minority questioning the canon? It may be true, but none of the evidence is cited, and I do not think the bias of the author is such that I want to take his/her word for it.
How Were Early Writings Assembled into a New Testament Canon? For more than a century after Christ, oral tradition was favored over a written NT. The early 2nd century patriarch Papias stated: “For I did not think what was to be gotten out of books would profit me as much as what came from the living and abiding voice.”
My understanding is that written versions of NT books (either whole or in part) were copied and sent to other Churches, and that, contrary to what is suggested here, there were many copies of many of the individual books in written form by the end of the first century. Of course most people wouldn’t have read them, because most people couldn’t read. But the picture of people handing them on orally for a century or so (which is not stated but is to some extent implied) is not, as far as I know, accurate.
(I realize that I am giving no sources either, because I am not a scholar and am not writing a book on the matter, unlike the author of the web page.)
Finally, all of the concluding comments are problematic, at least for faithful Catholics. The first paragraph is terrible, implying that orthodoxy changed along the road (“came to be perceived as orthodox teaching”) plus that the exclusion of other books has diminished the Faith.
Personally, I wouldn’t support it, unless I knew independently that all of the facts were correct. And if I knew that, I would write my own web page, and cite sources on it. But that’s just me.
–Jen
