Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Who Picked Which Books Went into the Bible? | Questions You're Asking | John 14.26

Starting point is 00:00:05 Welcome to 10 Minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. Right now, we are answering questions you're asking. A lot of these are coming from our Facebook page. So follow 10-minute Bible Talks on Facebook. Vote on your favorite questions, or you can just give your own, and you might hear it right here on the podcast. Today, we're asking who picked which books went into the Bible.

Starting point is 00:00:32 Back when I was in high school, a book called The Da Vinci Code came out. And despite the author's very clear explanation that he was writing fiction, many of the ideas in that book have seeped into our shared cultural water. In the book, the main hero comes to discover a secret. And here's the secret that there was this secret counsel of old white dudes who got together a few hundred years after Jesus died to pick which books made it into the Bible. Now, of course, these guys, they picked the books that. consolidate their own power in position. They changed the parts of the books that didn't fit their

Starting point is 00:01:07 personal agenda, and they jettisoned out the books that told the truth about Jesus. You see, the truth about Jesus was that Jesus wasn't really God. He was actually married to Mary Magdalene, and maybe he even had a kid. Now, maybe you've never read or even heard of the Da Vinci Code, but my guess is that you've heard that the books of the Bible were corrupted over time, and that at some point this council of old white dudes picked which books were in and they threw the rest onto the trash heap of history. It doesn't help at all that organizations like the History Channel know that they can make a pretty penny peddling this exact story by having quote unquote experts on their show who have very dubious credentials spreading this exact myth. Now that said, there are some more serious

Starting point is 00:01:53 scholars, people like Bart Ehrman, who've gathered a popular level audience saying similar ideas to what you've heard. And so this is a question that I've had a lot of people ask me during my time as a pastor. How did the books of the New Testament actually become the New Testament? Well, we need to start here. The New Testament is actually a small library of books. I don't know if you ever thought about it that way, but that's exactly what it is. Now, in the time of Jesus, books were kept on very long scrolls, but by the second century, so that's the 200s AD, there was this brand spankan new technology, the Codex. Now, if you saw a Codex, you would think it was a book, and it basically is a modern day book.

Starting point is 00:02:34 There's some differences, but very similar. And we have a lot of evidence that shows that within less than 100 years of Jesus' death, Christians started using codices rather than scrolls. In other words, they were early adopters of this new technology. Now, the question becomes why? Why did Christians adopt this technology so early on? Well, it's because a Codex lets you put your scroll library all into one book. It's a way of saying this diverse collection of letters and narratives, sermons, apocalypses,

Starting point is 00:03:04 this diverse collection, this diverse library ought to be read together. Now, these codices, they were made of papyrus, which unfortunately does not last for very long. So what we have left of these codices are mostly fragmentary remains. Our earliest complete codex actually comes from the early 300s AD. And this codex has what we would call today the New Testament. So the question then becomes, from the time of Jesus' death in 30 AD and the 300s AD when we have this first complete codex, just the first one that history has given us, it wasn't the first one ever, just the first one that's lasted. How did that happen? How did people agree across a wide geographical

Starting point is 00:03:45 area? I mean, we're talking the church spread from Spain to Turkey to Iran to northern Africa. How did the church across this wide geographical area come to agree that this library, what we called the New Testament was the right library. Well, the truth is that there never was a council. There was never a council where people made decisions on the New Testament. There's no back rooms full of white dudes. And just by the way, the early church was actually majority non-white. So there's that. Now, anyone who's been in an organization can tell you that organization-wide decisions happen in two different ways. There are what we'd call top-down decisions. You know, this is when the executive team, they get into a room and they issue an edict to all of the people in the company.

Starting point is 00:04:29 We will do things like this. But there's another way that decisions get made. In fact, it might be the more frequent way. They get made by group consensus. No one comes out and says, this is how you will do it. People just start saying, well, this is how we've always done it. When you ask how it started, no one really knows. They just know that this is the way it's always been. With these kinds of decisions, they're often invisible. You don't even know they're there. until they're challenged. In fact, you don't need to talk about the invisible rule until it's challenged. But when it gets challenged, people will normally rally to articulate the unspoken rule and to carefully defend it. Now, the New Testament is a lot like that. During the first generation of the

Starting point is 00:05:11 church, the New Testament didn't quite exist. It was being written. It was being created. Those documents were being put together. And they weren't being written necessarily as part of a conscious library. But by the second generation of the church, it was widely known and accepted which documents had special authority as God's Word, and which ones were good books, but not necessarily scripture. And they also knew which documents were dangerous and misleading. It wasn't until the third generation of the church that an anti-Semite named Marcion came along and decided that the true canon should be expunged of anything Jewish. He challenged the unspoken rule, which is that we all know what the books of the New Testament are. He challenged it by throwing out the

Starting point is 00:05:56 entire Old Testament, getting rid of most of the Gospels and a good chunk of Paul's letters, because they were all too Jewish. Now, it's bizarre to me that there are people like Bart Airman who kind of uphold Marcion as a kind of hero. I don't think there's anything heroic about Marcian. He was trying to expunge Jews from the world of Jesus, which is just the height of ridiculously, and it's evil and it's wrong. And the way that he did this was by questioning the book, that he knew most or all Christians held a scripture. He knew the unspoken rule, and he was just the first person to challenge it. Well, as you can imagine, in response to this, Christians started defending why the library of books that everybody had always already accepted as the right library. They're

Starting point is 00:06:37 defending why it's the right library. In fact, we have a fragment of one of these little library lists. The list came from the time of Marcion, and it's called the Muratorian Canon. And if you read it today, you'd realize that that miratorian canon looks really close to a modern table of contents for the New Testament. Now, one of the challenges early on was that certain books were more popular in certain areas, and so it took time to reach total geographical consensus. But by the 300, there was a wide agreement across all Christian groups that the library, which we now today called the New Testament, is in fact the right library. I'm not trying to say that there was perfect agreement across the church at

Starting point is 00:07:19 all times. I'm saying that there was wide agreement and that what differences there were could easily be accounted for by geography. What we have in our modern New Testament is an extremely early Christian library of documents, which all share the same central program and heart of tradition, which is centered on Jesus. And they have been, these books have been considered by most of the church from the very earliest days. They've been considered as God's word. Now, at this point, someone often will ask me, what about the Gospel of Thomas? Let me say a quick thing about that. The Gospel of Thomas was written several hundred years after Jesus died. It was written well after there was already a consensus about the Library. The Library of the New Testament already existed

Starting point is 00:08:02 before the Gospel of Thomas was even written. And when people ask me about this gospel, I always want to say, have you actually read it? Because Thomas's Jesus doesn't match the tradition of Jesus that we see in all of the rest of the New Testament. Thomas's Jesus is an angel, vindictive sexist who sounds more like Plato than Moses. So was it left out? No, it wasn't left out, because it was never in to begin with. It was written after the library was already decided. And the Gospel of Thomas, it actually underlines for us a different problem, that a book written generations after Jesus's death by someone who knew him could never be considered authoritatively scripture. One thing that sets apart the library of the New Testament

Starting point is 00:08:44 from other books is that these books were written largely by eyewitnesses of Jesus or the disciples of Jesus or the disciples of their disciples, so people who had access to the eyewitnesses. The simple fact is that these documents are the most reliable documents that we have today about the early Jesus movement in that tradition. Beyond that, Jesus told his disciples that His Holy Spirit would guide them in this process of writing God's Word. In John 1426, we read this, but the advocate, the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit, Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things, and will remind you of everything that I have said to you. So let's try to summarize what we've learned. The Holy Spirit

Starting point is 00:09:25 providentially guided his church as a total organization to identify from the very earliest stages, the library that we call the New Testament. They identified it as God's Word. It existed by consensus for at least 50 years before it was ever challenged. And after it was, that consensus, which everybody already had carried forward. Our earliest codex from early Christianity is a library of books that perfectly matches our modern New Testament. There was never a need for a big council because the consensus at the time was so universal that you didn't need to have a council to make the point. The only people who challenged it were strange outsiders like Marcian. Moreover, the books of the New Testament, they don't represent a small group's attempt at taking over the church and consolidating their

Starting point is 00:10:13 own power. There is, quite literally, no extent evidence of anything like this ever happening, unless you like good fiction, which I do, in which case I'd recommend Dan Brown. His book's actually pretty fun to read. So today, here's what I want you to do. I want you to thank God for preserving his word for us throughout the centuries, for guiding the authors of Scripture, by his spirit, for guiding the people who came after them to be carriers of the Jesus tradition, to be the people who protected it and made sure that it would be passed down from generation to generation. Thank God for those people so that we, thousands of years later, can still hear the words of Jesus and the words of the first men and women who followed him and believe. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this

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Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Who Picked Which Books Went into the Bible? | Questions You're Asking | John 14.26

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