Upon watching History Channel’s “Banned from the Bible” I’m wondering why it is that people always endeavour to complicate things.
The documentary tries to give answers to why certain books did not make it into the Christian canon. The ideas that these people come up with astounds me. Why complicate it so?
There are three basic principles to remember when thinking of the Christian Bible.
Firstly, Christianity resulted as a metamorphosis out of Judaism. Like a caterpillar and butterfly, they might look very different, but in essence they are the same thing. The latter is merely the fruition of the former. Christianity is the fulfilment of the religion of Abraham, Moses and the Hebrew Prophets. Therefore, the Old Testament books of the Christian Bible, are in fact books from the Judaic religion – the Torah and the Tanakh. The Torah (or Pentateuch) being the first five books of the Bible, also known as the five books of Moses. The Tanakh is the rest of the primary books used in the Hebrew religion and usually called the Old Testament in the Christian tradition.
For this reason, any books written later in history and not from this Hebrew origin (i.e. from the Tanakh) is by default considered fraudulent. It makes very much sense that such fake books would not be included in the Old Testament section of the Bible, for they are not of the orthodox Hebrew origin. For example the text “The Life of Adam and Eve”, written a couple of thousand years after Moses wrote Genesis, is clearly not authentic.
Secondly, the New Testament books are collections that were written shortly after the earthly ministry (life, death and resurrection) of Jesus and the apostolic church (the very first generation or two of converts). The authors of the New Testament scriptures were primarily eye-witnesses and these texts therefore eye-witness accounts and teachings based there on.
Therefore, any books that came afterwards, after these disciples (known as apostles or saints) died, are considered unauthentic accounts of what happened. These apocryphal books may have the names of disciples attributed to them (e.g. the Gospel of Thomas), but it is well accepted that these texts only came into existence many years, often centuries, after the life of Jesus on earth, or the life of his disciples. Such later texts were not included into the Christian canon for the obvious reason that their origin is questionable.
Thirdly, the Biblical texts (Old and New Testaments) are in discourse with each other and they are all basically retelling the same themes that was set down in the Torah. There is an internal harmony in their motifs, often merely building out, clarifying, extending the same ideas. For example the Torah tells about the fall of man into sin, and God's promise to save man from sin, through the sacrificial death of the innocent "lamb". The New Testament Gospels retells this narrative as God saving sinful mankind through the death of the "Lamb of God", which is in fact God-Incarnate, i.e. Jesus the Christ. Any book which themes are wholly different than the rest of the Bible is clearly not part of the same discourse and such books were not included in the Christian canon.
And just in case you wonder how the possible inclusion or exclusion of a text from the Canon will influence Christian doctrine, well...not much. Sound Biblical doctrines are never based on single texts, but on a “cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1), i.e. many texts throughout the canon. Consequently, these extra-biblical books doesn’t shake the sound doctrines of the Bible, since good biblical doctrine are based not on isolated ideas, but a combination of mutually affirming and balancing teachings.
1 comment:
Wow...I am somewhat confused about your analysis. The books of the New Testament were NOT written by witnesses to these events. Even the earliest books were written approximately 70-100 YEARS after Christ's death. Further, extensive research by the world's leading experts found that these "banned" books were also written at approximately the same time the New Testament books were written not AFTER.
As far as making things MORE confusing...if you read the bible, there are many, many inconsistencies, such as the birth story. I think THIS is confusing! Many books have been found over the ceturies. Many have been found during THIS century and due to advanced scientific technology can now actually be verified, authenticated, and experts can tell when they were written. Again, many of these lost books were subjected to rigorous scientific testing and concluded to indeed be written at the time the books that "made it" to the were written. It now appears there were many, many different sects of Christianity during the first centuries after Christ died, and these different sects used many, many different biblical books.
In the second century, somwhere around 1200AD, the "Church", meaning the high leaders, decided Christianity needed to be Orthodox. In order to do that, they chose the books that seemed to be most consistent with each other (although if you read these books you will still find contradictions). They also used books that aligned with THEIR OWN ideas of what it meant to be Christian. In doing this they could declare a unified or Orthodox Christianity had been reached.
I personally think that these books add MORE and provide more of a carification of what we are reading. Moreover, the inconsistencies in the New Testament we know today is but another example of the danger of reading the bible as literal...word for word. So Mark said it happened this way and Paul said it happened that way in no way refudiates the STORY or moral they try to teach, but rather show that a literal reading of the New Testament is not only ill-advised but impossible!
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