SUMMARY This essay, intended as an aid to the understanding of the essential notions of Christian terms, such as canon and Scripture, is limited to an interpretation of the earliest “reception” of the New Testament books as “canonical” and thereby as Holy Scripture. It is not sufficient to have at one's disposal the historical material concerning this problem—gathered and examined repeatedly and here reviewed with many lacunas—what matters is the hermeneutical approach, the neccessary interpretation of the data. We must attempt to discover its coherent sense and draw an understandable pattern of it or at least construct some necessary hypothesis. In order to answer the two main questions arising from the material, viz., 1° Why and how these books have become “canonical” and 2° Why they are considered as Holy Scripture, the author presents a model of interpretation capable of encompassing as many historical dates as possible. In this model the term kanōn assumes a central place. The extrapolation of this term in the given model of interpretation is justified insofar as from the very beginning the Christian reality itself was supposed to have fulfilled the function of a kanōn just as before the end of the second century the Christian faith and the Christian truth have been called kanōn. One may also support the hypothesis that the known expressions, namely, “faith as kanōn” and “truth as kanōn” included not only Christian doctrines but also the concrete existing Christian reality, the same living reality which before the end of the second century has been described as kainè diathèkè. The living kanōn comprised also many writings, such as: letters, memoirs, gospels, apocalypses. During the second century some of those Christian writings were considered as being very typical and representative expressions of the kanōn. Before the end of the second century, again, some of those writings have been identified and explicitly acknowledged as valid and opportune objectivations of the kanōn—of the living reality of the New Testament. It is necessary to stress the “opportuneness” of this acknowledgment since not every acknowledgment of the validity of some objectivations of the living kanōn was equally opportune (Compare the influence of Marcion and Montanus). The choice and recognition of the valid objectivations of the living kanōn and the judgement about the opportuneness of that recognition has been an historical and unrepeatable act of the living Christianity of the late second century. This discovery of the scriptural character of the “canonical” books by the early Church is considered in the here presented model as a second and distinct moment. This intimates a new experience. Seeing her own image mirrored in this “canonical” objectivation had for the early Church the effect of revelation. Since it had the same effect of a providential revealing “hermeneutical double” as formerly already experienced by reading the inherited Holy Scripture (the Tenach), the canonical writings of the New Testament had to be called Holy Scriptures in exactly the same way.