The Bible almost had different books... A 2nd century list shows why (Muratorian Fragment)

👉 Get the Armchair Bible Scholar Emails 👉 https://www.cjcornthwaite.com/armchai... The Muratorian Fragment is often cited as the earliest list of New Testament books — sometimes called the earliest New Testament canon. It's traditionally dated to the late 2nd century (c. 170–200 CE) and was discovered in the Ambrosian Library in Milan by Ludovico Antonio Muratori in 1700, published in 1740. But when you actually read it closely, things get strange. Four books we now consider New Testament — Hebrews, James, 1 Peter, and 2 Peter — are missing entirely. And the section on the Gospel of John spends a surprising amount of energy defending and justifying the gospel, complete with a vision-to-Andrew story that doesn't appear anywhere else. In this video, I walk through the Muratorian Fragment line by line: what books it includes, what's missing, the weird origin story it gives for the Gospel of John, the inclusion of the Apocalypse of Peter and Wisdom of Solomon, the rejection of the Shepherd of Hermas, and the heretics it pushes out (Marcion, Valentinus, Basilides, the Montanists/Cataphrygians). I also touch on the dating debate — most scholars place it in the late 2nd century, but a serious minority (Sundberg, Hahneman, Rothschild) argue for a 4th-century Eastern origin. Topics covered: Muratorian Fragment, Muratorian Canon, New Testament canon formation, early Christian canon, biblical canon history, Gospel of John authorship, Shepherd of Hermas, Apocalypse of Peter, Marcion, Valentinus, Pius I, Hermas, Hugo Méndez, Johannine pseudepigrapha, early Christianity, Christian origins. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Community - https://www.cjcornthwaite.com/community Substack - https://substack.com/@cjcornthwaite Patreon -   / footnotefamous   📱 FOLLOW FOR MORE YouTube: @cjcornthwaite Instagram: @cjcornthwaite Website: cjcornthwaite.com Email: [email protected] 🎙️ FOOTNOTE FAMOUS (MY PODCAST) Conversations with the world’s top scholars of the Bible and Christian origins. 🔗https://www.footnotefamous.com/ OR Listen on your favorite streaming platform ᯤ Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/4lSzQzT... Apple Music - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Audible - https://www.audible.ca/podcast/Footno... ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━