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Loading...One of the questions I get most often is about the canon of the New Testament. I got the question yesterday, after a lecture (on some other topic). The question is actually a series of related questions: We have twenty-seven books in it. Who decided? On what grounds? And when?
I’ve dealt with these matters on the blog before. Maybe it’s time to do it again!
The first thing to emphasize is that the most common answer one hears to these questions is completely wrong. My sense is that people have this answer because they read it someplace, or heard it from someone who had read it someplace, and that someplace was one place in particular: Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code! (If you don’t know, I wrote a book explaining the historical mistakes in Brown’s book, Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code. It was a particularly fun book to write. Some of the mistakes were real howlers…) Contrary to what Brown says (and claims is a historical fact, and NOT part of his fiction!), the canon of the New Testament was decidedly not decided at the Council of Nicea in 325 CE. It was not even discussed there. We have records of what they discussed. This was not on the agenda.
Relatedly, the matter was not decided by the Emperor Constantine, who,…
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Mr. Ehrman, I have a question that is wholly predicated upon the idea that, if the NT books are marred with discrepancies, that means they could not be “orthodox”. So, with this notion in mind, I would like to ask you:
Do you think that the church fathers, who eventually mapped out orthodoxy, were well aware of all the yawning discrepancies in the New Testament books, and still wanted to serve them as god-inspired-“orthodox”? Because that would make them not that well-intentioned.
Or did they genuinely believe there were no discrepancies in them? Because that would make them not that brilliant, I guess!
Or is there a third option I’m not considering here? Because that would prove I’m not that brilliant, after all!
P.S.: This would be my question for September’s Q&A session, but it looks like we’re not getting one of those, so…
Yes, some church fathers (e.g., Origen) talk about discrepancies, and unlike you they did not think this meant the books were not orthodox. Others believed there were no discrepancies. Those who accepted discrepancies had various ways of dealing with them. Origen, for example, thought that contradictions and mistkaes were inspired bythe Spirit.
Wow, that’s very interesting, really! In regard to the “orthodox” nuance, I put it that way bearing in mind the etymology of the greek word: if something has discrepancies, then it can’t be coherent. If it’s not coherent, it can’t be *the* “right belief” – assuming we agree that a “right belief” should be something very specific, not fuzzy at all and discrepancy-free.
Saul Paul had a successful plot that gave its recipients a heroin like effect with daily & weekly booster doses, relatively similar to contemporary Pentecostal rituals💒.
His success lead the plot recipe to be trendy📈 with more individuals copying same technique going after bigger success. E.g. IPhone vs rest of smart phones in our era.
Now after many years, you have a pool of left over books📚, all used during a trendy era & you need to filter them down because even though lots of them were used at the time, the version used by current leader had to be the authentic collection as a purpose of unification.
1*Would you agree with this probable scenario?
For a critical mind 🤔, this is a great explanation to reverse engineer the collection process of NT books but for the person of faith who turns to scriptures for guidance, inspiration, support & meditation like effect. His common answer would be that the Holy Spirit guided the fathers to the right books?
2*How would you dialogue with such mind to indicate no supernatural involvement?
Sorry, I’m having trouble understanding what you’re saying.
What criteria for canonicity did the Acts of Peter fail?
It wasn’t widely known or used or early or written by an apostle. It was never really a conteder.
“Now that this book is over 30 years old, it really needs to be updated, although I am not sure who could do so with the kind of erudition and scholarly authority that Metzger himself brought to the task. ” – You.
“I can say it ain’t gonna be me….” – Darn.
Yeah, that was my thought. 🙁
Randy New MA Theology Student writing…..Nice, succinct article above. Thank you for the book recommendations. I will definitely check those out. Hope your blepharoplasty went well. I cannot imagine those fine UNC-Chapel Hill students asking you to chase a rabbit not related to the lecture at hand :). You mention “the powerful bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius, who in the year 367 CE wrote a letter to the churches in his jurisdiction.” QUESTIONS: 1) Some of the newer “canonization” books pose the question ‘what role to Marcion play? [Cut OT; chose Luke only; and snipped Paul to the bone] 2). What ‘power’ did Athanasius actually have? Is Athanasius just sharing ‘his’ opinion as an ‘overseer’ of Alexandria? 3.) As a historian do you believe that the canon was ‘closed’ before this time ; at the time of Athanasius’ Festal Letter; or should the canon have included the Didache ; Shepherd. When I first read JB Lightfoot’s Apostolic fathers I was struck by his footnotes which show quote after quote of what we later call the NT.
1. It’s actually a question that’s been asked for a very long time! 2. Athanasius didn’t have the authority to decide the canon for the entire church; his letter indicates which books should be read as Scripture by the churches in his control in that part of Egypt 3. The canon was not “closed” with that letter. My first published article (a term paper I wrote for Metzger) showed that at the same time, in Alexandria, Didymus the Blind consider yet *other* books canonical (e.g., the Shepherd.) Lightfoot was an amazing scholar, btw.
Ok “it ain’t gonna be me” — so you’re saying there’s a chance?
Do we have records on the individual cannons of the 7 Early Churches? You’ve discussed the faults of Gospel Harmonization, and this seems analogous.
So, last night’s rabbithole was the Wiki on the Church of Laodicea.
Please may I may go woo for a second? (religion is woo, right?).
My screen name is Serene, but the Sufi guru who gave me that yogi name, years ago, used *Cyrene* as the spelling. Have had Cyrene, that spelling, up forever on soc media.
At that *Sufi community (dude had lineages, but it was New Agey study of all religions) there was a rickety 4 shelves of paperbacks. One was on Edgar Cayce. I do 11+ apple fasts, to the amusement – but not the buy-in – of other yogis.
Decade later, I subscribe to the readings. Out of the 14k readings, my birthdate is shared (repeatedly) with someone who incarnates with dude often. As his sister in two lifetimes: Cayce and Lucius, leader of Laodicea. (There’s more commonalities, including a lookalike statue).
Idk why I never saw this before. but last night I noticed he’s also called
Lucius
of
Cyrene
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_of_Cyrene
Whenever the four gospels are mentioned, they are in the same order, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. No matter who mentions them. In English at least they are in that order.
How did this order start? Is it the same in other languages?
They actually don’t occur in that order in many manuscripts. We have them in that order because when they were first printed they appeared that way. Matthew, for what it’s worth, was often thought to be the first Gospel to be written; Mark was a condensation of it; John was known to be last. And this tradition may have affected things.
Prof. Ehrman, I have a two part question regarding Jesus. With the roman town of Sepphoris being so close to Nazareth I was wondering (1) if Jesus would have been able to speak Greek or at least some Greek in order to be able to do business in the town and (2) if Jesus did speak some Greek, is there evidence to show that his teachings may have been influenced by Greek concepts or ideas that he could have been exposed to while in Sepphoris?
These are good questions. It seems hard for many modern people to imagine, but as it turns out there is zero evidence that Jesus did business in Sepphoris or indeed ever went there. There is also no good evidence to think that he spoke Greek. The idea that he was broadly influeced by the Greek culture of Sepphoris is a modern idea, so far as I know. It’s interesting that in the NT Jesus never visits the large cities until he goes to Jerusalem at the end, and Sepphoris itself is never mentioned.
Assuming Jesus did not speak Greek, is there word he would have used in Aramaic which is similar to the Greek work “hypocrite”?
Since “hypocrite” is only used once in Mark (7:6 “He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me;”) and then more often in Matthew and Luke, is it possible that “hypocrite” was something added during the oral telling of stories after his death?
That’s a great question. I don’t know! (But most of the “hypocrite” sayings — e.g., Matthew 23 — are almost certainly not from Jesus himself)
Thank you Prof. Ehrman. Why do you think Jesus never visited cities except for Jerusalem? Was it because it was easier to convert followers in rural areas?
I mean that he is mentioned as visiting numerous places but never the two cities in the region, Tiberias or Sepphoris. The strikes me as significant.
So is it the opinion of most scholars that the Hellenistic concepts that appear to have crept into jesus’s dialogue in the gospels (“Hades” etc) are the result of these being written by Greek speaking Christians outside of Palestine?
He doesn’t use “hades” often, but yes, when it does, I think it goes back to the Gospel writers or their Greek sources (e.g., the Rich man and Lazarus)
Interesting. Was Hades always a loaded word in hellenistic Greek? Was it almost always attached to Greek mythology and or did it always have a negative connotation? Or did it also have a neutral meaning like sheol as well?
It was generally thought of as fairly neutral — it was just hte place souls went when they died. (In my book Heaven and Hell I express doubts if Sheol actually meant that; it appears to mean the same thing as “grave”)
Hi Dr Ehrman!
How do you understand Matthew 6:25-34 ? I thought that Jesus wanted his followers to live in such a way that they could usher in the kingdom on earth (before God himself brought it), thus, i am confused by eschatological implications here? (I feel like I’m mis-reading though)
Thank you!
Jesus did not think people could induce God to send his kingdom by how they behaved. But he did think taht the way they behaved would affect whether they entered the kingdom once God did send it.
So in Matt 6:25-34 why are food and clothing not important to Jesus, when in passages like the parable of the sheep and the goats, those things are very important in the here and now?
Thank you!
You shouldn’t worry about whether you have enough; but if you have more than enough you should give to those who don’t…
Hi Dr Ehrman!
What does Jesus mean in Luke 13:1-5 ? Why does he get asked this question about the Galileans and what should we learn from his responses?
Thank you!
You’ll need to summarize teh passage so other blog members will understand waht you’re asking about.
Ah sorry! Luke 13:1-5. So a group of people come up to Jesus to ask if he heard about Pilate contaminating some Galileans’ sacrifices. Jesus asks if these Galileans were worse sinners because they had suffered this way… evidently the answer is no (an idea parallel to that In the book of Job, when the friends incorrectly think that sin warrants suffering). Jesus concludes by saying that if you do not repent, you will perish because you are just as sinful.
I have heard a pastor use this verse to prove the point that we are all inherently damned and that no sin is worse than another.
Is this what Jesus is implying here?
No, I don’t think that’s what the passage is about. It’s about peole who assume that those who suffer horrible fates in life (especially in how they die) are less righteous than others. Nope, bad things happen to everyone.
I suppose that claiming that a book was old and written by an original apostle could increase its appeal to a wider audience and get its viewpoint into the mainstream. Did that happen often and how did the early Christians evaluate a book’s authenticity? Presumably they would not have the modern tools that scholars have today.
Yup, a lot. That’s why there are all these other gospels, epistles, apocalylpses, and so on, all written in apostles’ names. I talk about that in my book Forged.
Thanks for this post. The application of these criteria is clearly problematic and raises many questions.
1. How was antiquity determined?
2. Even if Matthew, John and Peter are accepted as authors, most the the New Testament books were not written by members of “The Twelve”, which according to the Gospels were the Jesus-appointed “apostles”. And why did the Christian church accepts Paul’s “self-serving” claim that he was appointed by the invisible Jesus as an apostle (which makes him the 14th to be supposedly appointed)? And why does the modern Christian church still make this claim of apostolic authorship as its strongest argument for accepting the 27 books when those to whom authorship was attributed – Mark, Luke, Paul, etc. were not the original eye-witness apostles?
3. Doesn’t widespread acceptance depend upon what all the local congregations got told by their leaders to accept? So, political allegiance and influence ultimately determines catholicity!
4) Doesn’t the criteria of orthodoxy raise the same question? If Jesus or God were silent and didn’t tell people, what is orthodox, then orthodoxy is determined by which group has the political power to determine what is orthodox. I understand that I am preaching to the choir.
Yes, these are decidedly not objective criteria that could be or were applied scintifically. 1. They could tell if a book had been around for a long time if ealrier authors quoted it. 2. Apostles were not just the twelve. “Apostle” ususally referred to a first-generation Christains who had been sent by Christ on a missin. 3. Yup, eventually. But some books were simply read a lot more than others. 4. Yup, it’s a sweet irony, not lost on historians.
Appendix IV of Bruce Metzger’s The Canon of the New Testament had the list of canons I had been trying to find for a long time.
While Athanasius was the first known to have named the 27 book canon, people after him disagreed with it – particularly the Revelation of John.
Synod of Hippo Regius in North Africa in 393 was the first council to accept the 27 book canon, which I found interesting because it was 13 years after Emperor Theodosius I had named Christianity the official religion of the Empire in 380. It also (as far as I can tell) permanently canonized the controversial Revelation of John.
Good! As it turns out, the Synod of Hippo didn’t have any authority to canonize anything. IT was very much a local affair. And Revelation continued to be debated after that.
“It is worth stressing that this first list of OUR 27 books came nearly 300 years after most of these books were written”. Do we know how they preserved this list for so many years and the early church bishops/fathers, were always in agreement with this list?
Athanastius’s letters were copied over the years and so we still have the list.
With regard to the Synoptic Gospels, do we have 2nd Century examples of arguments assigning then-anonymous texts to specific apostles? E.g., this text must have been written by Mark, the companion of Peter because of [some set of reasons].
These texts were circulating anonymously, and Irenaeus (ca. 180 CE), at least, namesthem Matthew, Mark, and LUke. No one before that did, so far as we know..
Do we know how familiar the early church leaders were with what we would now consider the Apocryphal books of the New Testament? In other words, were these books considered non-authoritative because they were obscure, or have they been obscure because they were considered non-authoritative? (Presumably at least some of these books came into existence only after the canon was basically set.)
Different fathers knew different books, and sometimes talk about them (e.g., Irenaeus in 180 CE). The canon in part was designed to denigrate their authoritative status.
Great work Bart. I really appreciate this blog, your books and YT videos. A very interesting area.
Thanks.
When was the NT finally compiled? Was there a selection committee and was the selection on consensus basis? Was there an agreement on the way the present NT should be compiled? May I know if you happen to have the names and status/positions of those who decided on the final selection?
Since NT form the foundation of Christianity, was there a religious ceremony asking God for guidance for the final selection? Was there a kind of criteria list or some kind of divine guidance to reject the books of apocrypha?
All of that is what I tried to explain in my post.
Was there a kind of criteria list or some kind of divine guidance to reject the books of apocrypha?
If there was, how would anyone know? And who cares what orthodox leaders thought? One man’s heresy is another man’s doxy. Just look at all the confusion here. The cure is authoritative practitioners. They do exist..
Hi Dr Ehrman!
When Paul speaks about “works of the law” is he only speaking about those practices like circumcision or is he also referring to ethical laws?
Thank you!
He doesn’t differentiate between laws, but every time he refers to “works of the law” he appears to be referring to laaws that make Jewish distinctive as Jews (circumcision, kosher, sabbath, etc.)
Yes the da Vinci code is responsible for a lot of early Christianity misinformation. I was reading an article the other day where an author listed the da Vinci code as a book that was so bad that it went beyond the old dictum of ‘it’s so bad, it’s good’ and was just really bad. But perhaps that is a little unfair.
Do any early sources debate whether “John” really could be have been from an eyewitness, seeing as it is so different from the Synoptics? For example, how could the other three gospel writers and/or their sources have missed the raising of Lazarus? Or do the early sources all readily accept John?
They all accept it.
Are we able to tell whether three gospels associated with Jewish Christianity (I think they’re Nazoreans, Hebrews and Ebionites) would, if we had at least big chunks of them, have value in understanding the historical Jesus? Or don’t we have enough information about them to say even that?
My understanding is that we have only fragments or references to them in the writings of Church Fathers.
Are there estimates of when they were written? If they were products of those who were arguably the earliest Christians, it seems likely to me that they were written no later than the canonical gospels.
It’s hard to say, obviously, since we have just snippets. the Gospel of the Nazoreans appears to be much like Matthew; Ebionites may be an old Gospel harmony of the other Gospels with legnedary material thrown in, and Hebrews appears to have a kind of Gnostic tinge. If you want to read what we have, with an introduction to each book check out my book The Other Gospels.
Your clarity of thinking!!!
Ok I’d be interested in a Bart edited/annotated cannon. I’m the first to say that, right?
I have to tab between Bible books and stuff that my curiosity takes me too, and pasting the name plus “Bart Ehrman” in quotes into Google. Yes, I’ve read about 2/3 of your laypipl books.
The algo would be valuable (criteria turned into logic trees, with analog-type sliders). I just ran across a paleographer pre-AI, a woman, who likely found the same scribe copying both a Samaritan doc at Masada and an Essene one at Qumran.
Ah, I’ve been having an Essene week!! My insight this morning is that “Nasi,” meaning “Prince” is a word part of Nazarene because they are dedicated to incarnating the Prince of Peace of Isaiah 9:6.
I understand that you may not find the Nazarenes and Nasorean to be the same, and I respecc.
but what if?? Epiphanius says Nasorean Essenes don’t follow some “Book of Moses” — is that the Pentateuch?
What are your thoughts on the Samaritan Pentateuch? What if the cannon Bible has a big Pharisee addition that Nazarenes would have considered a forgery?
It would be worth seeing what scriptures James/First Church of Jerusalem held high.
Yup, you’re the first. but it ain’t happenin’, I can assure you. I’m afraid I don’t have any expertise on the Samaritan Pentateuch, but we have evidence of the Pentateuch from before when there were Pharisees, so they could not have forged it.
Do you think “give us this day our daily bread” in the Lord’s prayer is a somewhat flawed translation? I’ve read Greek scholars say that the grammar (tense or mood or something like that) supports something more like “feed us even today with bread from the future eschatological banquet.”
It has to do with the Greek word for “daily.” No one can say for certain if that’s what hte word means — it doesn’t occur before this in Greek literature. So one has to take a stab at it. The paraphrase you suggest may be stretching it a bit though.
Dr Ehrman,
1. Which is the earliest copy of 39th festal letter in record present today? Is it possible that it was forged as well by later scribes to give credibility to the 27 NT books?
2. With no quality control possible in 2nd and 3rd century, how can we be sure that Gospel of Matthew which was read in Alexandria was word to word same as the Gospel of Matthew being read in Antioch or Rome? With same beginnings and endings?
3. How and when were the 4 NT Gospels named? Would YOU have named them differently?
1. I don’t know; there’s solid historical evidence that it’s authentic (this is the view that began then to be dominant_ 2. We can’t be, at all. 3. They are first named by Irenaeus around 180 CE.
Hi Bart,
Do you have any thoughts on the “Hebrew Gospel”? The main questions that come to mind are: was there such a thing? If so, what happened to it? If not, why did anyone spread stories about it?
Thanks.
There’s a medieval translation of the Gospel into Hebrew, yes. It still exists, but it’s not ancient.
Let me clarify.
I wasn’t asking about medieval translations, but about various reports in much earlier sources e.g. the Papias testimony about Matthew organizing the oracles in the Hebrew language, Irenaeus’ report about Matthew publishing among the Hebrews a written gospel in their own language while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome, and so on.
About the supposed Hebrew document mentioned in these and other reports, I want to ask: was there such a thing? If so, what happened to it? If not, why did anyone spread stories about it?
Thank you.
No, there does not appear to have been such a thing. Later Christians told stories about it to emphasize that Matthew really was very ancient, written by an inhabitant of Israel soon after the death of Jesus, writing, therefore, in Hebrew.
It has long been a sticking point for me about the 30-60 year time lag for the accepted gospels to emerge after the life of Jesus. And this is especially so about those who claim they have complete faith (used advisedly) in gospel details of dialogue & historical reliability. Just today I heard yet another apologist talk up the tradition of oral/aural preservation & transmission among the ancients. Maybe so regarding the teaching to illiterate students of established past wisdom & folk stories but how could this method have worked among Jesus’s disciples? At the end of a day they would need to sit around recounting, repeating & memorising the activities & words of Jesus (which they heard just once), and to have kept doing that for ALL this material for min 30 years before pen was put to paper? Is that how it would have happened? They got word perfect such extended monologues as the sermon on the mount & that complex prayer in John 17? (And who was eves-dropping on that prayer anyway?) Prof Ehrman – can you see/explain some plausible mechanism which overcomes my objection?
If you want to see a full discussion about oral traditions and memory, built on an evaluation of actual scholarship by anthropologists and psychologists and historians, and applied to the histoircal Jesus — that’s what my book Jesus Before the Gospels is about.
Thankyou very much. I will enjoy chasing that up.
Hello professor Ehrman? How’s it going? I hope u are going good! So, my question is , what was the necessity to create a Canon?
When there were so many Christian books in circulation all claiming to present the true view of the faith (many of them with very different views), Christians had to decide which ones to accept as authoritative and which ones to rule out of court.
One of my biggest criticisms of religions is that I don’t know of any that are making an honest search for truth. Along with that they show little if any progress toward greater truth. They’re basically defensive of old/existing beliefs. Guardianship of alleged divine revelation probably explains some of that.
Do you know of any Christian denominations or other religions engaged in an honest search for truth? Perhaps liberal Protestantism or particular congregations thereof? Maybe Unitarians–but my impression is they support the individual’s search for truth rather than pursue a collective search. Certain kinds of Buddhism are very open to modern science. Hinduism is sometimes said to be trying to be a universal religion by assimilating other religions.
There’s always the American Humanist Association. And I suppose most colleges and universities come closest to being institutions engaged in an honest search for truth.
My view is that most denominations and the people in them are seeking the truth — or honestly think they have found it. I’m not saying they are completely sincere in their quest always. And I might disagree with them. OK, I usually do. But I almost never think that it is because of duplicity.
Dr. Ehrman: Do you agree with Bruce Metzger’s assessment of how we got the Canon, or do you have disputes with his methodology and ideas in his book? I found his book a DEEP and Difficult read, but quite enlightening and informative!
It is chock full of facts, names, and dates, and is an invaluable resource. I would have written it very differently, but no one could match his erudition.
What gender, if any, is the Holy Spirit imagined to be? Neuter seems inappropriate for a Trinitarian person. We already have two males. Isn’t the Hebrew word for spirit feminine-though not in the sense that all spirits are females? And isn’t Lady Wisdom/Sophia an OT precursor of the Holy Spirit? I also recall a prominent Catholic writer saying that, in practice though not in doctrine, the Church had given Mary the importance that rightfully belonged to the Holy Spirit.
If the Holy Spirit is female perhaps Jesus could be thought of-some of the time-as the only begotten son of “both” of the other two Trinitarian persons. I often seem to hear that the Trinity shows that God is a “community” fused together by love. What better image than a family: a woman and man whose love for each other begets a child whom both love and who loves both of them in return.
Finally, wouldn’t this resemble Augustine’s notion-though two of the roles would be switched-that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the overflowing love that the Son and the Father have for each other?
It depends whom you ask. Many see the Spirit as male; some insist on female, and some go with neuter.
In the parable of the sheep and goats, Jesus say that the sheep are those who feed the hungry, clothe the naked, take care of strangers, etc. “Whatever you have done for these least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you have done for me.” I’ve heard it argued that by “these brothers and sisters of mine” he is talking about other Christians, or a special group of Christians (Jehova’s Witnesses believe that is the Anointed Ones, the 144,000 spoken of in the Book of Revelation). You seem to believe that it means everyone who is hungry, naked, a stranger, etc. – that it is a universal declaration, not one limited to one group. How would you argue against this other view?
I don’t see how the nations of the earth can be judged for how they treated the Christians when there weren’t any Christians in most of teh nations of the earth.
What do you make of this, dear friend Bart?
1) Catholic criteria.– In summary we can highlight three objective criteria that guided the Church to recognize which are the inspired writings of the NT: apostolic origin, orthodoxy and catholicity. First of all, the criterion of apostolic origin. Those writings dating back to the circle of the apostles or their close collaborators (Matthew, Luke) were considered canonical. The canonicity of Apc and Heb was disputed precisely because it was doubted whether such writings should be considered the work of Saint John and Saint Paul respectively. A second criterion was that of orthodoxy, which belongs to the “sensus fidelium” of the first centuries; that is to say, the conformity of the writings in question with the authentic preaching and with the authentic announcement about Christ, his life and his message. And the third criterion was that of the catholicity of the writings: the books that all or almost all the Churches considered inspired, as their liturgical use testified, were included in the canon; on the other hand, those accepted only by isolated churches were excluded from it.
It’s pretty much what I was saying.
2) Protestant criteria. – Protestants, by dispensing with the authority of the Magisterium, found themselves without a fixed and secure criterion when establishing the biblical canon. This led to the so-called “criteria question”; that is to say, in front of the objective criterion of the Tradition and the Magisterium of the Catholic Church, they developed other subjective criteria. Thus, for example, Luther classified the New Testament books according to the importance they give to the message of Redemption and the harmony that they keep with the Lutheran thesis of “justification by faith alone”; and for this reason he rejected the Letter to the Hebrews, the Letter of James, that of Judas and the Apocalypse. For Calvin, the criterion of canonicity was “the secret witness of the Spirit” and the “public consent” of the Christian people.
The canon was more ore less decided 1100 years before there *was* Protestantism.
Hi Bart,
Thanks for this interesting post.
A question (not really related to the post): I read a lot that during the time of Jesus there were many other jewish people who claimed to be the messiah as the anti-roman sentiment was high (I can’t think of a specific reference for this now but have read it in few places). Do we know of any such people (jewish and not pagan like Apollonius of tyana) who claimed to be the messiah (contemporary to Jesus)? do we know about their fate (also crucifixion)?
thank you!
We know of some from around his lifetime, various leaders who expected to deliver the JEwish people from their foreign oppressors, though we don’t know much about most of them — e.g. the figures named Theudas and The Egyptian. Later there was Simon bar Kosiba (= Bar Kochba)
In Cathecism of the catholic church the Sacred Tradition is mentioned: “Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture make up a single sacred deposit of the Word of God” https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__PN.HTM
Do you know if this “Sacred tradition” contains any written documents besides Scripture? or is it just a way to say that only the church has the authority to interpret Scripture? Does this mean that the catholic church doesnt believe the bible to be inerrant?
Greetings from Lithuania, really enjoyed your course on new testament on wondrium
The “tradition” refers to all the established views that are not directly in the Bible. Almost all of them would be written about, and some would come in the form of Papal decrees and the like.
Setting aside for the moment your agnostic atheism, wouldn’t it be contradictory for a perfectly good and all-loving God to condemn anyone to eternal torment in hell? Temporary punishment proportional to the wrongdoing might be justified. Even then you’d think that such a God would do mainly those things that helped a person reform. On the other hand, there might be well be some people so evil that there is practically nothing worth preserving. So such a God might just let death be the end of them (possibly after a period of temporary, proportional punishment).
An implication of the above is that such a God would not condemn to hell someone who honestly and thoughtfully doubted or denied her existence.
Besides books like your “Heaven and Hell,” these considerations help me combat lingering fears of hell. I find that I’m able to think much more clearly, rationally, and objectively about what I truly and honestly believe when I’m not worried about going to hell. Being mistaken about God’s non-existence does not have catastrophic consequences. I need not bend over backwards and give every benefit of the doubt to God’s existence.
It wouldn’t be factually contradictory, no. It may not be justified, but that’s a different issue.
This is a little off topic so if you don’t want to respond here I understand. I recently purchased a copy of The Books of Enoch by Joseph Lumpkin. I’m not an expert on Enoch so I just picked a book on Amazon. When i received it I saw that Dr Lumpkin is more of a Theologian than a scholar. I’m concerned about how this will color the translations and commentary. Do you have a recommendation for the Books of Enoch? thanks.
The best translation is the one by George Nicklesburg and James Vanderkam. (Niclesburg also has a large commentary on it in two volumes)
Thank you for the reply! And sorry for my sloppy typos, I should have used a capital letter when writing “Jewish”.
I’m a new subscriber to Scribd.com, and a number of your books are available in audio, ebook, and PDF format. Are these legal? I’m particularly concerned about an expertly produced PDF of your book “Lost Christianities” that’s uploaded to the site. Is this pirating? Based on your posting here, I want to read the book, but not if it’s illegal. If it is, I’ll buy the book on Amazon and cancel my subscription to Scribd. Thanks.
Thanks. (And I was going to act on your email: I read them all, but jsut don’t have a chance to answer them). I’m going to talk to my publishers and see. Surely this is illegal.
Good. Please keep us posted.
Did other religions/cultures have a trinity/triune divinity prior to Christianity?
No, nothing like what developed within Christianity.
Hi, I’m new to the blog so I just had a simple question. I was having a conversation with a fundamentalist Christian & I told him the longer ending of mark was a later addition by a scribe & he replied that Irenaeus quotes the longer ending (200AD)which predates Codex Sinaiticus (350AD) by 150 yrs. What’s the standard argument as to why scholars don’t consider irrenaus quotes authoritative. ?
Decisions about which texts are original are never based purely on the question of the dating of our witnesses. Irenaeus doesn’t quote the entire ending, just a bit near the very end, but and he does say that Mark ahd this at the end of his Gospel; this shows that some manuscripts had it in their texts of Mark around 180 CE or so (at least the one Ireaneus used). But that’s not surprising since most of the textual variants that we know about can be dated back to this period. The argument against the ending involves a large number of factors, including the quality of the mss but even more important internal considerations. The grammar between 16:8 and 16:9 dooesn’t work, thetransition doesn’t make much sense, its writing style is different, and iut uses a number of words not found elsewhere in the Gospel
Do you see this as the earliest evidence of an Orthodoxy being established ? (Galations 2:2-10 ) Where Paul meets with the elders (pillars) of the church and shares the message with Peter, James & John to make sure they are in agreement with one another.
The issue they were discussing according to GAlatians was whether gentile converts to faith in Jesus had to convert to become Jews or not. In the later emergence of Orthodoxy, this was a marginal issue, since most Christians later (because Paul won those debates) said, Abstolutely not!