Everything about The Muratorian Fragment totally explained
The
Muratorian fragment is a copy of perhaps the oldest known list of the books of the
New Testament. The fragment is a seventh-century
Latin manuscript bound in an eighth or seventh century
codex that came from the library of
Columban's monastery at
Bobbio; it contains internal cues which suggest that it's a translation from a
Greek original written about 170 or as late as the fourth century. The fragment, of which the beginning is missing and which ends abruptly, is the remaining section of a list of all the works that were accepted as
canonical by the churches known to its anonymous original compiler. It was discovered in the
Ambrosian Library in
Milan by Father
Ludovico Antonio Muratori (1672 – 1750), the most famous Italian historian of his generation, and published in
1740.
The text of the list itself is traditionally dated to about 170 because its author refers to
Pius I,
bishop of Rome (142 - 157), as recent:
» But Hermas wrote The Shepherd
very recently, in our times, in the city of Rome, while bishop Pius, his brother, was occupying the chair of the church of the city of Rome. And therefore it ought indeed to be read; but it can't be read publicly to the people in church either among the Prophets, whose number is complete, or among the Apostles, for it's after their time.
Some scholars have also dated it as late as the fourth century, for more detail see the article in the
Anchor Bible Dictionary.
Bruce Metzger has advocated the traditional dating.
The unidentified author accepts four
Gospels, the last two of which are
Luke and
John, but the names of the first two are lost in the lacking beginning. Also accepted by the author are the "
Acts of all Apostles" and 13 of the
Pauline Epistles (but not the anonymous
Epistle to the Hebrews, 1 and 2 Peter, or James). The author considers spurious the letters claiming to have
Paul as author, and that claim to be written
to the Laodiceans and
to the Alexandrians, specifically said to be: "forged in Paul's name to [further] the heresy of
Marcion."
Of the
Catholic Epistles, the author accepts the
Epistle of Jude and says that two epistles
bearing the name of John are counted in the
Catholic Church; and the
Book of Wisdom, "written by the friends of
Solomon in his honour." The two epistles of
John however are not identified further by the author, and there's no reason to assume that the
John of the first letter is the same as that of the second - the church even officially regarded the canonical epistles of John as being by two different authors (whom they named
John the Evangelist and
John the Presbyter, respectively). The
Apocalypse of Peter is mentioned as a book which
some of us won't allow to be read in church, though it isn't certain whether this refers to the
Greek Apocalypse of Peter or the quite different
Coptic Apocalypse of Peter, the latter of which, unlike the former, was
Gnostic.
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