Later scholars have sometimes claimed Morton Smith forged the Secret Gospel of Mark; he claimed he *discovered* it.  Which is it?  Here I continue with my account of how he said it all happened.  In my previous post I indicated that in 1958 Smith was catagaloguing the books of the library of the monastery of Mar Saba near Jerusalem, when he found a book that had a text written into its final (blank) pages.  It was allegedly a letter of Clement of Alexandria, a famous theologian and ethicist who lived and wrote around 200 CE. Smith immediately recognized that it was a letter we did not have before.  And here is how I discuss what he did next, in my book Lost Christianities (Oxford University Press, 2003). ****************************** On the spot, Smith decided to photograph the three pages that contained the handwritten copy of Clement’s letter, but chose to hold off translating the entire text until later, reasoning that if some such treasure had turned up, there might be more where that came from; given [...]

With this post I conclude my thread on how we got the canon of the New Testament.  In the last post I began to talk about how having a canon affected the way people read the books of the New Testament.  Even though there are important *differences* among the various books, when they are all put between the same two covers, people read them as if they were all saying the same thing.  Here I pick up right before I left off…. ****************************** There are, for example, four Gospels, each presenting a different understanding of Jesus’ words and deeds.  The thirteen letters assigned to Paul contain inconsistencies and incoherencies (especially between the ones he actually wrote and those produced in his name later by others).  The alleged writings of James, Peter, John, and Jude also present distinctive messages, sometimes at odds with the others. But when all twenty-seven books were canonized into a single book, the statements of one writing came to be read in light of another, forcing readers (almost always unsuspectingly) to think [...]

I am nearing the end of this thread on the formation of the canon of the New Testament.  Rather than going into all the ins and outs of the process, I have been laying out the topics that I hope to address in a book on the matter down the road.  I say down the road because it is not the very next book I plan to write, but the one *after* the one I now plan to write.  I like to think ahead. Here I talk about when the decisions were finalized (were they?) and what the major significance of “closing” the canon was.   A Final Consensus? Many (most?) people imagine that the canon, in the end, was decided by a vote at one of the major church councils, such as the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE (as propounded by that inestimable authority, Dan Brown, in The Da Vinci Code).  But the question of the canon was not even Blog members get five posts like this every week.  Memberships start at $2.99 [...]