An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part VII (The New Testament - A Collection of Religious Pamphlets)

There's a lot different ways that people look at The Bible. There's the view that it's inerrant and infallible. That view can be applied to the originals (which no longer exist) or can be extended to the modern texts. Typically those who hold the "inerrant and infallible" position believe that there are translation errors that once corrected will reveal what was in the original. It can be viewed as allegorical and metaphorical. It can be  viewed literally. It can be viewed as containing historical accuracy, or that the historical sections are not as important as the theological lessons being taught. Protestants say they believe in sola scriptura, scripture alone, while Catholics believe that the scriptures must be mediated by Church leaders. Various churches claim to understand what The Bible really means and encourage or browbeat others to "just read The Bible" as if its message was self-evident. 

For a book that so many believe is self-explanatory and will reveal its truths if you simply read it, there are certainly a myriad of opinions about what it actually means, not to mention disagreements about what it actually says. "True believers" will accuse those who interpret it differently of simply being wrong, or more pointedly, as "not Christians" or even being inspired by Satan. They look to an mythical idyllic time, written down in The Acts of The Apostles, where there was a clear, bright line between the truth and lies, between orthodoxy and heresy. When the difference between those who "opposed Paul" or those who the early church branded as heretics and those who adhered to The Bible was as clear as day. 

Except back in those days there was no Bible.

Yes, parts of what became the New Testament were circulating around, and the Tanakh, in its original Hebrew as well as the Greek translation known as the Septuagint, was long established, but the concept of a unified collection of writings that would be consider scripture on par with the Jewish scriptures was an idea whose time had not yet arrived. In addition, there was broad disagreement among Christians regarding a whole range of beliefs about the nature of Jesus, about what his death and resurrection accomplished, about how Christians should behave, whether non-Jews could become Christians, the afterlife, the resurrection, the Kingdom of God and anything else that you can imagine. All of those people were Christians and they all believed that they were following the teachings handed down from Jesus through his apostles. But nothing written down and there was no central authority to ensure there was uniformity of belief. Even in the documents that eventually made it into the Bible there are indications, sometimes quite explicit, that not all Christians believed or taught the same thing. 

It was this disagreement that caused, not only contradictions and variances between the different books of the New Testament but contradictions and variances within some of the books.  Keep in mind that there was no central authority as we understand it today for many decades—plenty of time for competing opinions to grow roots and accumulate adherents. The belief that Jesus' teachings were passed down unchanged from him to his apostles to their followers in an unbroken chain is a myth. We know for certain of several distinct "Christianities" that existed in the early centuries after Jesus that were eventually defeated or subsumed by what became the Catholic Church. Even then there were arguments among the leaders and theologians of a supposedly united church. These differences, and the majority response to them, contributed to what became "canon of scripture". If you know what to look for you can see where certain passages were written as a response to these "other Christianities", as well as changes to the text for similar reasons. 

Major early divisions among Christians included Ebionites, who believed that a convert to Christianity must follow Jewish Law and practice; Marcionites, a sect that viewed the God of the Old Testament as a different and inferior God than the God of Jesus in the New Testament; and various types of Gnostics. Marcionite Churches competed successfully with Orthodox/Catholic Churches, lasting at least into the fifth century with its ideas surviving in various forms for centuries longer. Divisions even within what became Catholic Christianity centered around the nature of Jesus. Was he a mortal man? Was he actually raised physically from the dead? Or was it a "spiritual" resurrection? Was he God? If so, in what sense was he God? (I'll be addressing the permutations of Christology in another post). These disagreements manifested themselves in the contradictions in the New Testament. 

An article of faith among many people is that at some point in the history of Christianity certain books, or selections within books, were "taken out" of The Bible. Each of the books that eventually made it into the Bible, as well as the many that did not, all had their separate history. The authors of each book each had their own spin on what Jesus' message was, what stories confirmed that message, as well as Jesus' nature, salvation, sin, you name it. Since they were spread by believers manually writing out each manuscript, errors crept in. Some deviation from the originals occurred simply due to human error, some due to the copyist making changes by "correcting" what they thought were previous errors, and others due to intentional changes made in order to insert the copyist's opinion in the text. 

Eventually the leaders of the faction that became the Catholic Church*  decided that they needed an approved list of books that would make up the "canon of scripture". It went through several permutations before assuming the form we have today in the fourth century.** A number of books that had been in circulation were not included in the newly formed Bible, many of them are lost to history, but some survived in whole or in part. So, while no books were removed, definite decisions were made regarding what would be included. 

One way I look at the books of the New Testament, in addition to being biographies and pastoral letters, is similar to political pamphlets, pushing their own agenda and refuting those of their opponents. The minority, or losing, theologies were branded heresies and their writings (mostly) destroyed. History is written by the victors. In the case of Christianity, the victors were the faction that became the Catholic Church. 

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part VIII

* The churches known as "orthodox" at this time were not separate from the Catholic Church centered in Rome

** There were a number of books in the Greek translation of the Old Testament that were included as part of Catholic Bibles, these apocryphal, or deuterocanonical, books were not included in Protestant Bibles post-Reformation.