Wednesday February 26th 2014

The Formation of the Bible

BIBLICAL CANON

NEXT WEEK WE ARE GOING ON A FIELD TRIP TO THE BRITISH MUSEUM!  WE WILL HAVE A BLUE BADGE GUIDE GIVE US INFORMATION ON THE BIBLICAL ARTIFACTS IN THE COLLECTIONS!

Study 8 "God's Amazing Book"
This week we asked the question, "how did we get these books that make up the Bible?"
We all know the Bible didn't fall out of heaven.  We also know that there are some books that have some controversy attached to them - some think they don't belong in the Bible; and other books that are not in the Bible and some people think they should be in the Bible.

Recent years have opened a floodgate of questions about the books of the Bible.  But we can rest assured that our Bibles are just what God intended.

What is the biblical canon?

CANON = the term comes from Greek originally meaning measuring rod, a ruler, the books meet the standard.  From about 170 AD, the church leaders spoke about the Canon of Christian teaching, the canon of truth.

Let’s start with the OT.  The Torah was given to Moses by God.  The other stories, written by divinely inspired kings and prophets, were added soon after they were created, and authorized by the Jews.   About 5 books were disputed for a while - Song of Solomon (human love story?), Ecclesiastes (too negative?), Esther (no mention of God?), Ezekiel (some believe it contradicts the Law of Moses).  Yet most Jewish scholars came to accept these books as scripture.  To their credit, they were cautious enough to raise the questions and do proper examination.

We have 39 Old Testament books in the English Bible.  But the original Scriptures only had 24.  This is because some material was broken up into smaller pieces.  Samuel, Kings and Chronicles were originally one book/manuscript - but it was too long to fit onto a single scroll.  Ezra and Nehemiah were also one book, as was the Minor Prophets.  

After 430 BC and until about 26 AD, nothing more was added to the OT - it was complete.  That began a period called the "intertestament period", a period of silence.

There was a council in 90AD (the council of Jamia) which confirmed the canon - they did not add or subtract any books - just examined and confirmed.

The New Testament!    The OT came to be over centuries. The books of the NT were written all in the last part of the first century, and with an amazing amount of unity, certain texts and books became what we know as authoritative Scripture.  There are 27 books in the NT and of those, 20 have had zero - none - controversy.  There have been disputes, over these 7 books, Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2John, 3 John, Jude, Revelation… there was just hesitation on these particular books.

Why do Roman Catholics have a different canon than Protestants?  The last question has to do with the fact that the early Roman Catholic Church followed a well known bishop's influence (Augustine) in accepting the Apocrypha as canonical.  The other early eastern Christians did not.

Hebrews has been questioned because the author is unknown.  Revelation has been questioned for the same reason.  And yet the books were eventually accepted.  Other books, such as the Shepherd of Hermas and the Gospel of Thomas were rejected.  According to scholars this shows just how careful the church was - they proceeded cautiously and with analysis.  According to one Bible scholar Bruce Metzger, The canon is a list of authoritative books more than it is an authoritative list of books.  The documents didn’t derive their authority from being selected, each one was authoritative before it was gathered together with the others.   He goes on to say that to look at the books now would be like getting academies of musician together to make a pronouncement that "the music of Bach and Beethoven is wonderful" - we know these things are true.

The so called “lost gospels” originated long after the canonical Gospels, and were influenced by a sort of mysticism and Christianity.  Our NT writings were all written with living witnesses, the gnostic/lost gospels were written later by Alternative Christianities/heretical groups rising up.

Some argue that the council of Carthage in 397 determined the books.  But they simply confirmed and ratified the books that had already been authoritative and recognized for the previous 2 centuries.

The books have a self-authenticity that is supernatural.  Some of the books became a common part of Christian worship and therefore organically became accepted use.  

The New Testament has not only survived in more manuscripts than any other book from antiquity, but is has survived in a purer form than any other book - a form that is 99.5 percent pure to the original (Case for Christ)

Around 1227, a professor at the University of Paris divided the Bible into our modern chapter divisions.  This arrangement was then followed in later translations of the Bible and became widely accepted by the 1400s.

It was not until the 1500 that verses began to be numbered.

The first Bible to use both the modern chapter divisions and the verse numbers was the Latin Vulgate edition of Robert Stephanus in 1551.

“other writings”

A whole collection of writings was discovered in Upper Egypt, in Nag Hammadi in 1945.  These writings, although interesting and important, are not able to change the four gospels that we already have and do not fit into the text of the Bible as we know it today. They are not parallel works and were written quite some time after the four gospels of the Bible.  They are different - for example - The Gospel of Thomas reads like a collection of sayings.

If you are interested in these other gospels, go ahead and read them, say the experts, and you will see that they are far removed from Jesus ministry and the eye witness quality testimony and harmony of the other gospels.

How and who decided which books were considered authoritative and which were not (Gosple of Philip, Gospel of Truth, Gospel of Mary, etc).

3 criteria:

1books must have apostolic authority: have been written by the apostles themselves, eyewitness to what they wrote about, or a follower of an apostle.  Mark and Luke were not apostles, but Mark helped Peter and Luke with Paul.

2rule of faith: was the document congruent with the basic Christian tradition that the church recognized as normative?

3was the document used continually by the church at large

There was a high degree of unanimity during the first 2 centuries of the NT.

William Barclay said "It is the simple truth to say that the New Testament books became canonical because no one could stop them doing so."

Bruce Shelley "Church History in Plain Language" writes:

“In one sense, of course, Christians created the canon.  Their decisions concerning the books were a part of history.  In another sense, however, they were only recognizing the writings that had made their authority felt in the churches. The shape of the New Testament shows that the early churches' primary aim was to submit fully to the teaching of the apostles.  In that purpose they shaped the character of Christianity for all time.”  

If you are interested in expanding your Bible translations and editions, get a copy of the Chronological Bible - this lists the books in the order that they happen historically - very different from the order of books we have.  Ours follows a pattern used in the ancient Greek translation of the OT. The Septuagint was completed 2c before Jesus's lifetime! The story goes that 72 scholars met to produce a Greek translation of the OT in 72days - Septuagint became the name attached to this immediately approved and accepted writing of the OT.

As a whole, the Bible is fascinating and frustrating at the same time.  The eclectic collection that makes up the 66 books from Genesis to Revelation is inspired by God, the spiritual explained in worldly ways that we sometimes cannot grasp, holiness written by unholy hands, read by our unholy eye and processed by our unholy minds (paraphrasing from Rachel Held Evans).  For many of us, we love the theme of forgiveness and enemy love in Jesus's teachings, but cringe at the acts of genocide in the book of Joshua and some of the teachings regarding women's roles and slavery.  In fact, back in the 1800s, some Christians used Ephesians 6 to support the institution of slavery, while other Christians used Galatians 3 to support abolition. Only one side seems right to us today.  We managed to work our way around these difficulties to develop a shared sense of right and wrong, in community agreement.  It was not easy, but could it be that God wants us to discuss and grapple with these issues because it's about community, making decisions about faith together.  If God gave us all the answers we wouldn't need to rely on him.

Accepting the Bible is not about being right all the time and being able to interpret every scripture with ease.  It's about loving God, understanding the roots and history of the journey of the Christian faith, and above all:  loving other people - enemy love, unconditional forgiveness, generosity.

The History of the Bible...it’s absolutely massive, incomprehensible, and it’s fascinating.