An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XII (Revelation Decided By Committee)

How did The Bible become The Bible? Did a committee of early Christians get together, divide up the responsibilities of what to cover? "Paul, we need you to cover some of the doctrinal issues, and address the fact that Jesus hasn't come back yet; James, your assignment is to balance up Paul's focus on faith with an alternate focus on works; John, lay off the magic mushrooms for a bit and write up an end of the world scenario, and Matthew, Mark & Luke, can you guys do some biographies, and damn it, keep it consistent we don't want a bunch of contradictions". No, as we've seen, a number of Christians took it upon themselves to write letters to other Christians, pen biographies of Jesus, compose "apocalypses" describing the end times or the heavenly realm, or just put together a little something to let people know that those other guys weren't "real" Christians. There was an incredible number of these writings circulating around Christian communities. Different churches favored different books and for three centuries there was no widely agreed-upon canon (i.e. the authorized, divinely-inspired collection of books of The Bible). 

One of the reasons there was no consensus canon of the New Testament was that for the first three centuries, and possibly after, there was no central authority. The various cities and regions operated more or less autonomously. As a virtually illegal sect, Christians weren't building big, beautiful buildings, but were meetings in homes, likely led by whomever owned the house they were meeting in. Eventually leadership became institutionalized and overseers (the title "bishop" comes from the Greek episkopos - i.e. "one who watches over") came to hold authority over whole cities. In the early days there was a many varieties of Christian. The previous installment listed a few "heresies regarding Jesus' nature, but there were many more regarding the purpose of his death and the kind of life a Christian should be living. Local leaders early on attempted to define Christian doctrine, meeting in councils to reach consensus. Eventually that consensus began to resemble the main doctrines of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches and the minority opinions were pushed out and suppressed. As Christianity became legalized and preferred, not only did Roman Empire-wide councils become easier to hold, but the Bishops of the main cities of the Empire as well as cities important to the early Church, Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria in Egypt, viewed themselves as "leaders of leaders" and attempted to exercise authority over the assemblage of bishops. Finally there was something close to a central authority and and the work of deciding what would be considered divinely inspired began. 

Occasionally you'll hear talk about some nefarious plot to "take out" offensive books from The Bible, to remove anything that elevated women for example. The other day I heard somebody talking about how the Emperor Constantine edited the Bible at the Council of Nicaea to conform it to his beliefs. None of that is true. There was nothing to "take out" of The Bible because there wasn't a Bible! There were decades of arguments about what was to be considered inspired "scripture". Some books that most of us have never heard of, like The Shepherd of Hermas, and the Didache were in the running for years while others that are in our Bible, like I & II Timothy, Titus, Hebrews, I & II Peter, all three Epistles of John and Jude were all considered to be not in The Bible. The book current day fundamentalists love so much, Revelation, was a long shot and was the last one to be canonized. Centuries later Martin Luther re-examined some of the canonical books and had his doubts about some of them. 

One of the doctrines of the early Church that horrifies Protestants is Apostolic Succession, the doctrine that Jesus passed on to his apostles his spiritual authority and his true teachings and that the apostles in turn passed those things on to their successors, who passed it on to their successors all the way to the present. The reason a Protestant would be horrified is that the core doctrine of the Protestant Reformation was "scripture alone", that the opinions of Church leaders must be subordinate to the Bible. Remember that in those early days not only was there no Bible, but there were dozens of competing "scriptures". Somebody had to decide what Gospels were the Gospels, what Epistles were the Epistles etc. In order to have a unified Christian Church somebody had to take the bull by the horns, claim the authority to decide (whether that authority was real or not) what The Bible would be. As it is there are numerous contradictions and inconsistencies in what we have, imagine if all those apocryphal books were held as equal to the canonized books and there was no "written in stone" scripture? We think that we have a confusing multitude of denominations now? Christianity would never have survived without a central hierarchy. 

Christians today like to believe that today's Bible was without controversy accepted by the early Christians, that its divine source was obvious while the apocryphal books were just as obviously not inspired. 

The real story is a lot messier.

Part XIII