New Testament.

        Hippolytus is also significant for his testimony, to the New Testament as understood at Rome in his day. He gores no list of New Testament books (unless, as some have thought, the Muratorian Fragment is a translation of something from his pen), but a close examination of his writings, or such parts of them as survive, gives us a fairly clear picture. His New Testament was not particularly different from that of his teacher Irenaeus. He accepted the Four Gospels as scripture and acknowledged thirteen letters of Paul, but not Hebrews. His famous Roman contemporary Gaius held the same view of the Pauline collection. Hippolytus also accepted Acts and three Catholic letters — I Peter and I and II John. The Revelation of John completed his New Testament, making a total of twenty-two books.

        But Hippolytus knew numerous other Christian writings from the first and second centuries, among them Hebrews, the Shepherd of Hernias, the Revelation of Peter, and the Acts of Paul. He is the first Christian writer to reflect II Peter, and he must have known James and Jude at least slightly, for he once quotes the first verse of James with the words, “As the saying of Jude in his first letter to the Twelve Tribes proves.”[85]

        With Hippolytus the curtain falls upon Greek Christianity in Rome. He was a Puritan in morals and in discipline, sternly opposing a series of Roman bishops on both practical and doctri issues. He worked in a time of conflict with laxity, venality, and heresy within the church and proved himself a stalwart in the fight, struggling valiantly to hammer out Christian views of morals, practice, doctrine, and interpretation. Little that he accomplished can be considered final, of course, but he made a substantial contribution to Christian development. Further discoveries will undoubtedly increase our knowledge of him and his times and works, at least four-fifths of which, and perhaps much more, seems at present to have been lost.