A Note on Method and Sources

Every non-canonical text discussed in this book states its own canonical status plainly, in the body of the text itself — never tucked into a footnote where a reader could miss it and walk away thinking otherwise. That discipline runs through all twenty-four chapters, and it is worth explaining here, once, rather than repeating as a disclaimer every few pages.

One section of this book carries a commitment beyond ordinary sourcing care. Chapter 7 states the historical case for excluding and for including the Old Testament's seven deuterocanonical books — Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and both books of Maccabees — at genuine strength on both sides, because a book examining what isn't in your Bible has no honest way to write that sentence while building its case only for excluding what one reader's own tradition holds as Scripture. Millions of readers of this book hold these seven books as canon, received with the same authority as every other book in their Bible; millions of others do not. Both readings of the historical record are defended here by their own best advocates, not by a straw version built to lose.

Quotations from ancient texts in this book are drawn from named, standard translations — the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series, Lightfoot's Apostolic Fathers, Charlesworth's critical edition of the Odes of Solomon, and comparable standard editions elsewhere — rather than reconstructed from memory. Where good translations of the same passage differ from each other, this book says so rather than silently picking one and presenting it as though no other rendering existed. Where a popular version of a quotation or an attribution turned out, on checking, not to match any verified source, it has been corrected rather than left to stand because it was well known or often repeated — the slogan "immanentize the eschaton," commonly attributed to the political philosopher Eric Voegelin, is the most consequential instance in this book, and Chapter 20 corrects the record rather than repeating the popular shorthand. This book also tries to hold its own arguments to the same standard it applies to the texts it examines, and Chapter 22, on the second-century prophetic movement called Montanism, is the clearest case: the popular account ties Montanism directly to the church's decision to close the New Testament canon, and the primary sources do not actually support that link as strongly as the popular version of the story claims. Rather than quietly smoothing that over, the chapter states the correction directly and shows the evidence for it — offered as a model of the book's own standard for testing claims, including claims a reader might otherwise take on trust simply because they are common. A book examining what didn't make it into the canon has no business hiding its own honest corrections.

Finally, this book leaves some questions open rather than forcing a convenient answer where the evidence does not support one — the precise weight of Marcion's role in accelerating (rather than causing) the New Testament canon's closure, the dating of several Ethiopian church-order compilations, and the boundary dating of a small number of Syriac texts among them. These are marked plainly in the text, most often under a heading naming the question honestly, because a book built on examining claims rather than repeating them owes its reader the same treatment when the claim in question is its own.