ABSTRACT
The religion of Protestants was the religion of the book, and that book was the Bible. Yet it is one of the defining paradoxes of early modern Protestantism that its elevation of the written record of divine revelation to totemic status stimulated an explosion of scholarship that would ultimately serve to forge a critical discipline that could be mimicked and manipulated to undermine the sacred text it had been designed to protect. The New Testament canon was the exclusive body of texts written by the apostles or their companions, inspired by the Holy Spirit, that provided a selfsufficient guide to Christian belief and practice and had, according to orthodox tradition, been preserved through the ages by divine providence. It provided one of the arenas of biblical discourse in which this paradox unfolded.
