The Muratorian Fragment as an Early Canon List

The evidence explained

The Muratorian Fragment survives in a single seventh- or eighth-century Latin manuscript, itself apparently a poor translation or copy of an earlier Greek original. It lists most of the books that would become the New Testament, including the four gospels (the opening lines, referring to Luke as the third book and John as the fourth, are lost, meaning Matthew and Mark are not explicitly named in the surviving text but are generally inferred), Acts, thirteen Pauline epistles, Jude, two epistles of John, and the Apocalypse of John, while explicitly rejecting other works, including the Shepherd of Hermas, which it says was written too recently to be counted among the prophets or apostles, and various texts associated with Marcionite or Gnostic circles.

Most twentieth-century scholarship, following Adolf von Harnack and later Bruce Metzger, dated the fragment to approximately AD 170-200 based on its reference to the Shepherd of Hermas as having been written 'very recently, in our own times' by Hermas, brother of Pius, the bishop of Rome traditionally dated to the mid-second century. This dating, if correct, makes the fragment one of the earliest witnesses to a developing sense of a closed or nearly closed New Testament canon, predating the more famous canon lists of Athanasius by roughly two centuries.

A significant minority position, advanced most forcefully by Geoffrey Mark Hahneman in The Muratorian Fragment and the Development of the Canon (1992), argues the fragment is better dated to the fourth century, on grounds including its treatment of certain books and its possible dependence on later canon discussions. Hahneman's redating, if accepted, would substantially reduce the document's evidentiary significance for early canon formation, moving it from a uniquely early witness to one contemporary with other fourth-century lists. Most specialists, including Metzger and Charles Hill, have continued to defend the traditional late-second-century date, finding Hahneman's arguments suggestive but not decisive, so the matter remains genuinely disputed rather than settled.

Independent of the exact date, the fragment is valuable evidence that early Christian communities engaged in deliberate, reasoned canon discrimination rather than passively accepting whatever texts circulated; the fragment gives explicit reasons for exclusions, indicating a critical process rather than uncontrolled growth of an amorphous body of scripture.