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Most people today receive their first Bible as bound Holy Scriptures selected for them when coming affixed together under that title in a book they have purchased at the bookstore. We call this the Bible. Many Protestants are also aware of the fact that in choosing a Bible that they must avoid the shelf labelled "Roman Catholic Bibles," because these are designed to promote Catholic beliefs and they also contain some books that many do not even receive as Scripture; primarily the ones we refer to as belonging to the "Apocrypha."
Answer for yourself: Why do we reject these books?
Very few of us have even read them. In fact, many Christians have not read all of the books which they do consider to be Scripture. Here is the hard facts of the matter. It is evident that most of us receive certain books and reject others not because we have personally evaluated them and their contents in any way, but because we trust that someone else has evaluated them and decided rightly concerning this matter, so that all scripture and nothing but scripture is between the covers of our Bibles. This is so reassuring until you begin to study for yourself the selection of these books contained in our Bibles and those who made such decisions centuries ago. The real question then becomes huge in magnitude.
Answer for yourself: Who has made this decision regarding which books are to be included and excluded from our Bibles, and were they really competent to decide upon Sacred Scripture for all of us? How do we know they made the right decisions?
Answer for yourself: Could it just be possible that Christianity evolved and took historical form as the result of a corruption of high wisdom already extant, and not as a promulgation of new light and wisdom previously unknown? Could it just be, amazing as it might sound at first to many uneducated concerning these matters, that the books which are contained and altered in our Bibles today, were chosen by the few in order to foist upon the many the popular acceptance of nothing more than the corruption of a more exalted understanding and truer wisdom contained in many records and books which were unfortunately not included in our Bibles but revered highly by the many who in ancient times followed "the Christ" before the emergence of Roman Catholicism and their Bible in the 2nd through the 5th century?
When we go to the store we find Bibles which have been published by publishers, of course, such as Nelson and Zondervan, but most of the publishers are connected with Christian organizations which have commissioned these versions: Bible societies, church councils and associations, and so forth. These have arranged for certain books to be included or excluded, according to the traditions of their member churches and denominations. These traditions go back to the founding fathers of the denominations, and ultimately to the ancient Catholic Church.
Few if any Christians are aware that their New Testaments were in a constant state of flux until almost the 4th century. In the year 367 an influential bishop named Athanasius published a list of books to be read in the churches under his care, which included precisely those books we have in our Bibles (with the exception he admitted Baruch and omitted Esther in the Old Testament). Other such conflicting lists that disagreed with Athanasius had been published by others, as early as the year 170 C.E., although they did not all agree. Critical to such lists is the criteria used by these early Church Fathers in the decision of which of these early books should be called Scripture. Romanist apologists, though, insist that it was through the initiative and intervention of the Roman church that we have the Bible as we know it today. Their reasoning is that the church caused the New Testament books to be written, so the church is above the books of the New Testament (she being their originator). Roman Christianity insists that it was her that recognized the books of the New Testament, that makes her the sole possessor of those same books. At the most, she may be credited with insight and discernment, but not with the ownership (and sole right to interpret) the Scriptures. Scholars who have studied this matter closely have concluded that the lists of books in our New Testaments today are not the ones in the first New Testament of Marcion but are merely ratifications of the decisions of the majority of churches from earliest days.
The process of canonization was complex and lengthy. It was characterized by a compilation of books that Christians found inspiring in worship and teaching, relevant to the historical situations in which they lived, and consonant with the Old Testament.
Contrary to popular misconception, the New Testament canon was not summarily decided in large, bureaucratic Church council meetings, but rather developed very slowly over many centuries. This is not to say that formal councils and declarations were not involved, however. Some of these include the Council of Trent of 1546 for Roman Catholicism (by vote: 24 yea, 15 nay, 16 abstain), the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563 for the Church of England, the Westminster Confession of Faith of 1647 for Calvinism, and the Synod of Jerusalem of 1672 for Greek Orthodoxy.
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia article on the Canon of the New Testament: "The idea of a complete and clear-cut canon of the New Testament existing from the beginning, that is from Apostolic times, has no foundation in history. The Canon of the New Testament, like that of the Old, is the result of a development, of a process at once stimulated by disputes with doubters, both within and without the Church, and retarded by certain obscurities and natural hesitations, and which did not reach its final term until the dogmatic definition of the Tridentine Council [Council of Trent]."
Answer for yourself: And when was the Council of Trent? 1546 C.E. (A.D.).
In the first three centuries of the Christian Church, Early Christianity, there seems to have been no New Testament canon that was universally recognized.
One of the earliest attempts at solidifying a canon was made by Marcion, c. 140 AD, who accepted from the ancient Wisdom those teachings and texts which later we find exist in what we call today the Gospel of Luke, originally what many believe originally was the Gospel of Marcion. Added to this Marcion, in giving us the First New Testament which was Gnostic and Metaphysical to its very core, included ten of Paul's letters, while rejecting the Old Testament entirely. Marcion and Paul were both "Gnostic Christians" and the first New Testament could well be described as a Gnostic New Testament. The great archeological find of Nag Hammadi has preserved many gospels comparable to the Gnostic Christian beliefs concerning "the Christ". Over time Marcion's canon came to be rejected by Irenaeus and after his official denouncement of this earlier Gnostic New Testament Marcion's canon was then likewise rejected and dismissed by a majority of Christians but not by all which can be seen by the study of the next 5 centuries and the conflicts between the earlier Gnostic Christianity and the later emerging "literal" and "historical" Roman Catholicism. Adolf Harnack in Origin of the New Testament (1914) argued that the orthodox Church at this time was largely an Old Testament Church (one that "follows the Testament of the Creator-God") without a New Testament canon and that it gradually formulated its New Testament canon in response to the challenge posed by Marcion and the earliest Metaphysical and Gnostic Christians.
The Muratorian fragment, dated at between 170 (based on an internal reference to Pope Pius I and arguments put forth by Bruce Metzger) and as late as the end of the 4th century (according to the Anchor Bible Dictionary), provides the earliest known New Testament canon attributed to non-Gnostic Christianity (Marcionism) and to mainstream Christianity. It is similar, but not identical, to the modern New Testament canon we have today. Notice that there is no agreement upon its date; it ranges from 170 C.E. to the 4th century where we find Roman Catholicism making significant strides in overtaking and persecuting Gnostic Christianity.
The oldest clear endorsement of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John being the only legitimate gospels was written c. 180 C.E. We must look almost 200 years from the time of the supposed Jesus to find the first quote of Scripture by any Church Father attributed to a Gospel by name. It is almost unthinkable that if these 4 Gospels had been written early then there is nothing but silence and a vacuum in history and no quote from any of these supposedly 4 Gospels found before almost 180 A.D. The parallel between the emergence of the first quote from our current 4 Gospels and Irenaeus' response to the earlier Marcion Gnostic New Testament should give the reader definitely food for thought. Notice if you will the claim made by Bishop Irenaeus in his polemic Against the Heresies, for example III.XI.8: "It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are (four). For, since there are four zones of the world in which we live, and four principal winds, while the Church is scattered throughout all the world, and the “pillar and ground” of the Church is the Gospel and the spirit of life; it is fitting that she should have four pillars, breathing out immortality on every side, and vivifying men afresh."
Lying behind such quotes is a power struggle in religion that few are aware. This comes to light when one becomes aware of the discovery of the earliest Gnostic writings of which similar writings were discovered in 1945 in Upper Egypt. Within these uncovered and recently discovered Gnostic writings we find many sayings known from the commonly known New Testament today, but unlike today, these sayings suggest other dimensions of meaning not in vogue today. Many other sayings from these same discoveries show passages that differ entirely from any known Christian today today. Also, many other passages in these Gnostic writings criticize common Christian beliefs such as the virgin birth and bodily resurrection as naive misunderstandings of deeper Spiritual Truths. We have the admission of Irenaeus that these earlier Christians, whom he described as "heretics", "boast that they possess more gospels than there really are" (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 3.11.9). These Nag Hammadi texts, and others like them, which were circulated at the beginning of the Christian era, were denounces as heresy by Orthodox Christianity and Irenaeus in the middle of the second century. We have long known that many early followers of "the Christ" were condemned by other Christians as heretics, but nearly all we knew about them came from what their opponents wrote attacking them. By the time of Constantine's conversion, when Christianity officially became an approved religion in the fourth century, Christian bishops had prevailed. Possession of scriptures or books denounced as heretical was made a criminal offense. Copies of such books were burned and destroyed and only those buried from sight have lived to see the light of day in which we live today. What we must realize in all of this is that those who wrote and circulated these earliest of Scriptures which were "Gnostic" did not regard themselves as "heretics" but Christians and followers of "the Christ". Most of their writings used what we consider today to be Christian terminology, unmistakably related to a Jewish heritage. Many claim to offer traditions about Jesus that are "secret" and "hidden" from "the many" who constitute, in the second century, the "Catholic Church". These Christians are not called "Gnostics", from the Greek word "gnosis", which usually is translated as "knowledge". As the Gnostics used the term, we could translate it as "insight," for "gnosis" involves the intuitive process of knowing "oneself" in which we are told is the home of the Kingdom of Heaven. Yet to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God; this is the secret of "gnosis" which Rome and men like Irenaeus decried.
It is from this primary power struggle, the Gnostic Christians against the non-Gnostic Christians (proto-Roman Christianity) will we find the foundational disagreement as to which Gospels and Epistles are to make up the final edition of the New Testament; even more once Roman Christianity won the deciding victory over the Gnostic Christians at the point of a sword amazingly they could not agree among themselves which books were inspired and belonged to their version of the New Testament. Let us look at this unbelievable confusion among Catholicism regarding the selection of which books were to be included and excluded from their later anti-Gnostic Bible, disputes that lasted for centuries that culminated in what we have today which we are taught to revere; our New Testament.
Now, let us examine in chronological order this amazing confusion connected to the decisions that were made as to which book are to be included in our New Testament. We will examine this in chronological order of the events and thought of the early Church Fathers concerning what book are to be considered "God breathed" and inspired and which were not. I ask the reader to ask yourself one question when this examination is finished: "How could this be the work of the Holy Spirit of God"? If there was ever a reason to dedicate one's life to the study of their Christian faith in order to find out the "truth" before the "train jumped the track" then the study of the canonization of the New Testament books must rank right at the top.
