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THE DA VINCI CODE Series
Where The New Testament Came From
Adapted from “Where the Bible Came From” Signs of the Times, January 2006
The New Testament canon. The New Testament has three categories of books: the narratives (the four Gospels and the Acts), the letters, and the apocalyptic book of Revelation. Although it took only 50 years to write the New Testament, it took far longer for it to assume the form that it has today. Not until 367 AD do we find extra biblical evidence listing the New Testament books in exactly their present form. The list is contained in an Easter letter written by a Christian bishop, Athanasius.
In the two-and-a-half centuries or so between the completion of the last book of the New Testament and the list of Athanasius, there had been much discussion as to which books should or should not be included in the canon. The Old Testament formed the Scriptures of the earliest Christians. Gradually, however, some Christian writings were placed on a par with the Old Testament,
“not by any decree of a council . . . but by the common agreement of the faithful; the spiritual intuition of the Church came slowly to decide which of its writings should be regarded as ‘canonical.’”
1What brought about “the common agreement of the faithful”? What informed “the spiritual intuition of the Church?” The books discarded from the Old Testament canon came to be called the Apocrypha. A further group of wrongly attributed books called the Pseudepigrapha-was also discarded. The Apocrypha contained history and wise sayings. The Pseudepigrapha contained a lot of magic and little history. As we examine the books discarded from the New Testament canon-the New Testament “Apocrypha”-again we sense the presence of supernatural guidance.
The books included were those accepted as God inspired and proven in their ability to help men and women and to make Christ known. They were acknowledged to have been written by men close to Jesus and involved in the great first century adventure that took the Christian gospel to the limits of the then known world. William Barclay, the noted New Testament scholar, says,
“The ring of sublimity is to be found in the New Testament books. They carry their greatness on their faces. They are self evidencing.”
When Bible translator J. B. Phillips came to compare the New Testament books
“with the writings, which were excluded from the New Testament by the early Fathers,” he could only “admire their wisdom.” He continued,
“Probably most people have not had the opportunity to read the apocryphal ‘gospels’ and ‘epistles,’ although every scholar has. I can only say here that in such writings we live in a world of magic and make believe, of myth and fancy. In the whole task of translating the New Testament I never for one moment, however provoked and challenged I might be, felt that I was being swept away into a world of spookiness, witchcraft and magical powers such as abound in the books rejected from the New Testament. It was the sustained down to heart faith of the New Testament writers which conveyed to me that inexpressible sense of the genuine and the authentic.” 2
The “self evidencing” point comes across most powerfully when one reads the books that almost got into the New Testament but did not; books that were intended by their authors to be accepted, but were not. In the second century, a number of books were written called “infancy gospels.” The four Gospels of the canon provide little detail on the first three decades of the life of Jesus prior to the commencement of His public ministry. These infancy gospels were intended to “fill the gaps.” The so-called gospel of Thomas is supposed to give a record of the infancy of Jesus. The child Jesus, while at play, is represented as creating live sparrows out of clay, and of striking dead a small child who “run and crashed against his shoulder.” Jesus the apprenticed carpenter is depicted stretching wooden beams like elastic and exercising an assortment of magical powers to no practical purpose.
No one could possibly mistake this for Scripture. Indeed, Scripture is self-evidencing. When you compare the Gospels with these books, there is no question as to why some are “in” and others, without argument, “out.” The line is clear-cut. There is no room for debate. Immense care was taken to ensure that the people who had authored the books that were accepted into the canon had known Jesus personally. The hallmark of these men was that they were concerned to demonstrate that the Jesus who did those things in the past is the living Christ who still does things.
In the book of Acts, every single sermon finishes with the fact of the Resurrection. For the New Testament, Jesus is, above all, the living Christ. Because the four Gospel writers were speaking about the living Christ, they gave a vastly disproportionate amount of space to the last week prior to His crucifixion and resurrection. The central concern of the disciples, of Christianity, of Christian theology, is the death and resurrection of Jesus. The books where this was not the central concern were quite simply either not considered or deliberately excluded from the canon.
“We may believe,” says Professor F. F. Bruce, “that those early Christians acted by a wisdom higher than their own in this matter, not only in what they accepted, but in what they rejected.”
“What is particularly important to notice is that the New Testament canon was not demarcated by the arbitrary decree of any Church Council. When at last the Church Council—the Synod of Hippo in 393 AD—listed the twenty seven books of the New Testament, it did not confer upon them any authority which they did not already possess, but simply recorded their previously established canonicity.” 3
In short, the process by which the books of the New Testament came to be accepted was, in all essential respects, the same process by which the books of the Old Testament came to be accepted. Thus these two books—the Bible of the apostles and the Bible the apostles wrote—together came to comprise what Christians accept as the written Word of God, the unifying principle of which is Christ Himself, the bringer of salvation. Thus the Bible, the inspired Word, had its origin, authority, and genuineness in Christ the Incarnate Word.
For more information read David Marshall’s book The Battle for the Bible (Autumn House, 2004). Marshall is Senior Editor of the Seventh–day Adventist Church’s Stanborough Press in Grantham, England.
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1. G. W. H. Lampe, ed., The Cambridge History of the Bible (Cambridge University Press, 1963-1969), vol. 2, p. 42.
2. J. B. Phillips, Ring of Truth: A Translator's Testimony (New York: Macmillan, 1967), p. 95.
3. F. F. Bruce, The Books and the Parchments (Westwood, N.J.: Revell, 1963), pp. 103, 104.
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