There are two different ways of treating the fact that any given book of the New Testament Canon is first quoted as authoritative Scripture and as the work of its commonly reputed author by a later writer of known date and recognised authority. You may say that the said book is thereby recognised as canonical and as authentic either not before or as early as such and such a date. In the former case the endorsement of tradition is regarded as an innovation, in the latter as an explicit regularisation of previous, but inarticulate, practice.
1 Encyclopedia Biblica, vol. i.: ‘‘ Christian, name of”.
The former interpretation of such facts has the advantage of appearing to appeal to what is apparent and to nothing else. But it involves axioms which require to be proved. We must suppose that the Canon was definitely fixed by authority and was not a thing of gradual growth. And, if we are to argue from the silence of ec- clesiastical writers, we must ignore the fact that many of them are no longer extant and postulate for them an interest in such matters as canonicity equal to our own. In fact it seems more reasonable to allow ourselves the exercise of a sober imagination in dealing with the evidence. In the case of 1 Peter at all events there is no sign of any attempt to force a new forgery upon the acceptance of the Church. It contains no innovation of doctrine such as might need the support of Apostolic authority.
The Epistle, then (we may say), is used by Irenzeus as early as the third quarter of the second century. Behind Irenzus in all probability there lies a period, in which the idea of the New Testa- ment Canon grew up and in which its contents were gradually reduced for reasons which appeared to those in authority to be adequate. Of that period we certainly do not know everything. All the Gnostics whom Irenzeus has pilloried are represented only by fragments and summaries of their doctrines contemptuously preserved by their opponents at a later time. But, even so, it appears that the Gnostics in their efforts to elucidate the philosophy of the Christian religion and to advance to something higher than the somewhat pedestrian and commonplace theology of the ordinary ecclesiastic laid stress upon Scripture. And in so far as they tended to relegate the Old Testament to a definitely inferior place in the development of true religion they necessarily devoted themselves to the writings of the Apostles—the Scriptures of the New Testament. Inevitably the Gospels, which contained the sayings of Jesus, and the works of St. Paul occupied the first place in their estimation. The Lord and the Apostle exercised an authority to which the Church must bow. So the Gnostics applied themselves to New Testament exegesis—not always for the purposes of theological controversy. The controversies, which ensued upon the deductions they drew from such exegesis, led to the delimitation of the Canon and there is a strong presumption in favour of the traditional view of the books which survived the’ ordeal. 1 Peter is not a book which was likely to be much to the mind of daring thinkers who could discriminate between the different degrees of inspiration latent in different sayings of the Lord and who were determined to be done with Judaism. The Gnostics professed to be wiser than the Apostles—Irenzeus their posthumous conqueror