Bruce Metzger, the doyen of textual critics in the modern era, died very recently.I was interested to read him this morning saying this in his book The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development and Significance:
Although the fringes of the emerging canon remained unsettled for generations, a high degree of unanimity concerning the greater part of the New Testament was attained among the very diverse and scattered congregations of believers not only throughout the Mediterranean world but also over an area extending from Britain to Mesopotamia. (p. 76)
Of course, it is our postmodern tendency to emphasis the diversity and forget the coherence and unity... or to imagine that such unanimity must only have been achieved by the exercise of a centralised power and the engines of ecclesial bureaucracy.
