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Gnosticism, in essence, was demonstrably diverse and only loosely connected by an overall philosophical framework. As a result, or perhaps because, of this diversity, Gnosticism never formed its own church or groups of churches.
The Heresy of Orthodoxy
Thus, the Muratorian Fragment does not appear to be establishing or "creating" a canon but is expressly affirming what has already been the case within the early church.The Heresy of Orthodoxy
Thus, any suggestion that the church creates the canon, or that the canon is simply and solely the outcome of a long period of "choosing" by the established church, would not only unduly reverse the biblical and historical order but would have been an idea foreign to the earliest Christians.50 This is why the early church fathers speak consistently of "recognizing"51 or "receiving"52 the books of the New Testament, not creating or picking them.53 In their minds, scriptural authority was not something they could give to these documents but was something that was (they believed) already present in these documents—they were simply receiving what had been "handed down" to them.The Heresy of Orthodoxy
In the end, the New Testament canon is not so much a collection of writings by apostles, but rather a collection of apostolic writings—writings that bear the authoritative message of the apostles and derive from the foundational apostolic era (even if not directly from their hand). The authority of the New Testament books, therefore, is not so much about the "who" as it is about the "when." It is about the place of a particular book within the scope of redemptive history.The Heresy of Orthodoxy
Jude classifies the heretics as "people . . . relying on their dreams" (v. 8), that is, mystics who claimed to enjoy privileged access to esoteric knowledge.The Heresy of Orthodoxy
the "Bauer thesis": the view that close study of the major urban centers at the end of the first and early second centuries reveals that early Christianity was characterized by significant doctrinal diversity, so that there was no "orthodoxy" or "heresy" at the inception of Christianity but only diversity-heresy preceded orthodoxy.The Heresy of Orthodoxy
What used to be regarded as heresy is the new orthodoxy of the day, and the only heresy that remains is orthodoxy itself.The Heresy of Orthodoxy
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