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But even if the Muratorian canon removes any doubt that the apostolicity of a writing was the principle for determining whether it was binding on the church, Marxsen rightly warns that we must not misunderstand this in a modern sense as though properly "historical" judgments of apostolic authorship decided whether a writing belonged on the list of authoritative writings. In point of fact, there was simply no available instrumentarium for reaching such judgments. Substantial agreement with a judge's own (unquestionably!) "apostolic" tradition, or long use in the church, including being publicly read in its services, typically sufficed to reach the judgment of apostolic authorship.

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