a place here. The point is this, that when Hone or any one else speaks in terms which suggest that our New Testament is the result of a selection made by a council of the Church or any similar body, from among a number of competing books which might just as well have been included in it as not, he is very much astray.
Yet, as is usually the case, there is a grain of truth underlying the fallacy. There were a few books which attained a measure of recognition and eventually lost it.
Let us say that the best external test of the canonicity of a writing is whether or not it was read in the public worship of Christian congregations which were in communion with the generality of other Christian congregations. We know that there were such congregations, or churches, all over the ancient world, and that there were others which were not in communion with these, but could be labelled as adherents of some teacher whose doctrine differed from that of the majority—were he Marcion, Valentinus, Montanus, or any other.
Now what books do we find, outside those of the New Testament, which we can be sure were so used by what we will call normal or Catholic Christians? The best evidence we can get, apart from definite statements by early writers (of which there are not many), is that of our oldest manuscripts of the complete Bible, made for public use. One of these, the Codex Sinaiticus, of the fourth century, adds to our books the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas. Another, the Codex Alexandrinus, of the fifth century, adds the Epistle of Clement of Rome to the Corinthians, and what is called his Second Epistle, which is really a sermon by another person unknown. We are definitely told that the First Epistle was read in many churches.
Then (turning to some facts we gather from other sources) the ‘Muratorian fragment’ (late in the second century?) tells us that the Revelation of Peter was received, not unanimously, at Rome: and a fifth-century Church historian, Sozomen, records that in his time it was read annually on Good Friday in some churches in Palestine.
A manuscript at Constantinople, which perhaps was copied from a supplement to a large Bible, gives us, tegether with the Epistles of Clement, Barnabas, Ignatius, and
