Loading...How did we get our books of the New Testament, and what do we know about the ones that were “left out”? Here I continue my Introduction to my book Lost Scriptures, as started in my previous post.
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When was this New Testament finally collected and authorized? The first instance we have of any Christian author urging that our current twenty-seven books, and only these twenty-seven, should be accepted as Scripture occurred in the year 367 CE, in a letter written by the powerful bishop of Alexandria Egypt, Athanasius. Even then the matter was not finally resolved, however, as different churches, even within the orthodox form of Christianity, had different ideas — for example, about whether the Apocalypse of John could be accepted as Scripture (it finally was, of course), or whether the Apocalypse of Peter should be (it was not); whether the epistle of Hebrews should be included (it was) or the epistle of Barnabas (it was not); and so on. In other words, the debates lasted over three hundred years.
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When paul mention people doing miracles( total 3 times if i am not wrong) he says that miracles were done throw the holy spirit he also lost the tings that the holy spirit preduses and making blind see is not one of them mayby he means that salvation and the works of the holy spirit are miracles but if so wouldnt he say it?
I”m afraid I’m not sure which passages of Paul you have in mind.
If I am remembering correctly from Misquoting Jesus, it was codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus that most closely represent original text. A few questions: 1) Is that a correct summary? 2) If so, where can one find these texts (are they in your book Lost Scriptures?) 3) how closely does the new Revised Standard version follow those texts?
Thanks!
Yes, in broad, general terms that’s right. But textual scholars looks at all the evidence, not just the one or two that seem over all better than others. You can’t find their texts unles syou read Greek but I suppose they are entirely online now. And yes, all modern translators take them very seirously as superior witnesses, but no one relies only on them for their traslations. They often have mistakes in them.
It’s too bad that most pastors and priests don’t pass some of this stuff along to their parishioners. I think it would be beneficial if they did. I was never exposed to much of it, even in Bible classes and certainly not as a fundamentalist, until I stumbled across this blog. I do remember one elderly Episcopal priest though, who when I was asking him theological questions about the Bible remarked, “It’s just a collection of books.” That stuck with me.
Its a double edged sword. Having been raised as a fundamentalist at home, I had an adverse emotional reaction to my mainline pastor exposing us tweens to the JEDP theory and doubts about Jesus miracles in our membership class back in the 1970s. That class unintentionally pushed me further into fundamentalism (critical thinking skills are still not strong at that age).
Hi bart does jesus prophecy his suffering for sins in 1 corinthians 11 (This cup is the new covenant in my blood) or is this ment in a methaforical sence. Was this later added to paul or was this a tradision?(that did not come from peter)?
Yes he does. And it was originally in Paul. that doesn’t mean it was something Jesus originally said.
I submitted this to the podcast so apologies for repeating it here, but y’all said this was a faster way to get answers lolol:
You either outright stated or at least heavily implied that the gospel Papias has to hand that he believes was composed by Mark doesn’t seem to be our Gospel of Mark despite Papias being a major source for the ultimate attribution of that text to Mark. I’ve read the Papias fragments as collected in Dennis MacDonald’s Two Shipwrecked Gospels, and I tend to agree with you that his description of the text sounds nothing like our Mark. But MacDonald and other scholars (as well as presumably Eusebius and other church fathers who used Papias to lay out their claims for the second gospel’s authorship) take it for granted that Papias is writing about the same text that we call Mark. What is the evidence for and against that identification?
People simply assume it’s our Mark because it’s always been assumed. Papias mentions a Mark and since we have a Mark it must be our Mark. My point is that when you look at what he actually says about *Matthew* it’s nothing like our Matthew: he says it’s a collection of Jesus’ sayings written in Hebrew; ours is a narrative Gospel written in Greek. I don’t think he has *our* Matthew in mind; if he does, he doesn’t know anything about it. If that’s the case of one of the two Gospels he mentions, why should we assume that it’s not the case with the other?