DCHindley

Yes, while I was not aware of exactly which NT books were included in the old Syriac canon, I had noticed that 1 Pet and 1 Joh were indeed the only ones cited.

I tried to Google the matter of whether this 22 book NT canon is based on mss evidence or other evidence (statements by church fathers, etc), but the detail is rather sketchy. Maybe I am looking in the wrong places.

I am also interested in other non-canonical books included in ancient mss, especially how they were originally grouped. Trobisch notes that until relatively late in the transmission history of the Byzantine text, the order was slightly different, with Acts grouped along with the General epistles, and Hebrews between 2 Thes and 1 Tim. Our current NT order is based on the later Byzantine text tradition, and not on the ancient witnesses.

Do you have any suggestions for further reading?

DCH (on break)

andrewcriddle

You certainly ought to read Metzger's The Canon of the New Testament (or via: amazon.co.uk)

Google Books

Andrew Criddle

DCHindley

I hadn't checked my personal library for a good while (been in boxes for about a year and before that hadn't had a lot of time to devote to it since mid 2003), but that's not one I have. Have Metzger's _Text of the NT_ , but ...

The Google Books excerps make it seem a bit stuffy. I'll have to pop into the library in about a week to return the books I borrowed on Josephus recently, and I'll check it out.

I swear I've seen it somewhere: a catalogue of each major early codex and/or canon list, along with a list of the books contained in them, in their original order.

Metzger selectively chooses his examples to make his points, but I don't always know what he might have left out (unimportant to him, but perhaps not to me). The gaps in the excerpts on google books were exactly where the interesting parts would have been.

Bummer.

DCH

DCHindley

I might have been thinking of Kurt & Barb Aland's _Text of the NT_ as this book does provide a couple charts of the books of the NT contained in the major NT papyri and uncials. However, it gives no indication of their original ordering or whether any other books were included such as Ep. of Barnabas or The Shepherd of Hermas.

DCH

Ben C Smith

For sheer wealth of information the classic by Westcott (available on Google Books is hard to beat. This is 1881 stuff, of course, but the evidences themselves have not changed all that much since then.

Ben.

ETA: I recommend downloading this tome as a PDF file to read it; the Google Books reader is a little clunky.