The apostles knew that, in many instances, they were authorized vehicles of God’s divine New Covenant revelation, some of which would very likely become the foundation for the church age and thus constitute scripture.

There is a well known and (for evangelicals) well-loved section of 2 Peter (probably the verse most people are actually familiar with) in which Peter describes Paul’s writing as “scripture” (2 Peter 3:15-16). The problem is that this is very strange. At best, it is rare for NT writers to refer to other portions of the NT as Scripture (1 Tim. 5:18 is debated). This has led many to conclude that this section of 2 Peter is so blatantly anachronistic that it cannot be written by Peter.

We can’t deal with the entire issue here, but we can ask the most fundamental question: is it too early (under the assumption that Peter wrote 2 Peter at the end of his life) in Christian history for contemporary writings to be referred to as “scripture” in the technical sense? It certainly is early, but not too early.

First, the idea of a “canon” of Scripture is not foreign to Jesus and his contemporaries. This was disputed among a previous generation of scholars, but most have moved on to the consensus that the NT apostles and prophets inherit a canon-consciousness from their Jewish forebears, regularly referring to the Hebrew Bible as “the scriptures,” which is correlatively described as an “old covenant” (2 Cor. 3:14; Heb. 8:6).

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