Some
Christians, in large measure because of their genuine love for the Bible,
have declared that there can be no more authorized scripture beyond the Bible.
In thus pronouncing the canon of revelation closed, our friends in some other
faiths shut the door on divine expression that we in The Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-day Saints hold dear: the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Pearl of Great Price, and the ongoing guidance received by
God’s anointed prophets and apostles. Imputing no ill will to those who take
such a position, nevertheless we respectfully but resolutely reject such an
unscriptural characterization of true Christianity.
One
of the arguments often used in any defense of a closed canon is the New
Testament passage recorded in Revelation 22:18: “For I
testify unto every man that heareth the words of … this book, If any man shall
add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in
this book.” However, there is now overwhelming consensus among virtually all
biblical scholars that this verse applies only to the book of Revelation, not the whole Bible. Those scholars of our day
acknowledge a number of New Testament “books” that were almost certainly
written after John’s revelation on the Isle of Patmos was
received. Included in this category are at least the books of Jude, the three
Epistles of John, and probably the entire Gospel of John itself. Perhaps there
are even more than these.
But
there is a simpler answer as to why that passage in the final book of the
current New Testament cannot apply to the whole Bible. That is because the
whole Bible as we know it—one collection of texts bound in a single volume—did
not exist when that verse was written. For centuries after John produced his
writing, the individual books of the New Testament were in circulation singly
or perhaps in combinations with a few other texts but almost never as a complete collection. Of the entire
corpus of 5,366 known Greek New Testament manuscripts, only 35 contain the
whole New Testament as we now know it, and 34 of those were compiled after A.D. 1000.
