The Biblical Canon: Its Origin, Transmission, and Authority

Lee Martin McDonald is a specialist scholar of biblical canon formation, and this history works directly from the documented historical evidence for how the Old and New Testament canons actually took shape, tracing the named disputes over specific disputed books, the deuterocanonical works among them, rather than presenting canon formation as a single settled event. That evidence based, dispute by dispute method is the book's real evidentiary basis. Use it for established historical facts about how and why different Christian traditions diverge over which books belong in their biblical canon; a claim about a specific tradition's own current doctrinal reasoning for its canon needs that tradition's own statement addressed directly alongside this history.