In Front | Apostolic Fathers on the Authority of Scripture

The Hebrew Bible was the Bible of the early church. It was “Scripture.” The New Testament was also authoritative, but in the first three-and-a-half centuries of Christian history, it was referenced in a different way by Christians than the Hebrew Bible.

In the “Apostolic era” (roughly AD 95-150), there are very few explicit quotations from New Testament writings. Of any apostolic father, Polycarp of Smyrna demonstrates the most familiarity with New Testament writings. His sole surviving letter includes 112 biblical references, about 100 of which are from the New Testament. This work “contains proportionately far more allusions to the writings of the New Testament than are present in any other of the Apostolic Fathers.” Even so, in only one of those approximately 100 references does Polycarp refer to this material as “Scripture.”   

But according to Bruce Metzger, the absence of the term “Scripture” in reference to content that would later appear in the New Testament does not mean that these traditions were not authoritative in the apostolic era. Rather, “these reminiscences tend to show that an implicit authority of such writings was sensed before a theory of their authority had been developed—in fact, before there was even a consciousness of their authority.”

Just as we saw with the canon, the authority of the New Testament books was something that asserted itself. It was read, quoted and taught as “Scripture” long before that term was used to describe it officially.

Source of quotes: Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development and Significance, 1992, pp. 39-41, 43, 48-49, 57-60, 62, 73.