How We Really Got the New Testament.

I am finding that many people these days entertain wild misconceptions about how the New Testament was originally put together.  They seem to adhere to a fictitious but very powerful narrative.  It goes like this: 

Shortly after Jesus died his followers rejected his nice, simple, peaceful teachings and began twisting, adulterating, and doctoring his original words to fit their own biases and agendas.  But there were other secret Christians who did keep Jesus’ real teachings and wrote other books containing them.  When the Church decided which books to include in the New Testament, they threw out and violently suppressed the nice ones and kept the bad, doctored ones.  The only criterion the Church used in this decision was what preserved the privilege, prestige, and power of the evil Bishops who were in charge.  

On the one hand, in service of this narrative, scholars dedicate themselves to ripping apart the text of the gospels in an attempt to mine from it the “original” words of the “historical Jesus,” separating them from the “less authentic” material added later by his followers.  

On the other hand, at the same time, some of these same scholars lift up a collection of recently discovered writings that they insist preserve Jesus’ original teachings. 

The facts are quite different.  In reality, in deciding which books would be included in the New Testament the early church used a much wider set of criteria.  These criteria were: 

1. “Apostolicity.”  In our time this means that a book has a pedigree going back to the 1st century and the preaching of the original witnesses to Jesus.  In other words, it is old.  It had been used and commented upon for a long time.  
2. “Catholicity.”  The Church felt that, to be canonical, books had to have more than a merely local interest.  They had to have been accepted, shared, and used by the wider church.  
3. “Orthodoxy.”  The books chosen for inclusion had to agree on the basic Christian story, even if there were differences, sometimes pretty wide, in emphasis, interpretation, and detail.  
4. “Traditional use.”  The Church did not value novelty.  They trusted the books that had been profitably used by Christian congregations for the previous three centuries.  If books were found to be of such value that people had them copied, disseminated, and commented upon across the known world, they met these criteria.

In other words, the Church chose the books that were already being widely used by Christians.  There seems to have been a pretty broad consensus about them.  There were a few books that were argued about for a while.  But the list agreed to in the 4th century or so was more or less the same as the earliest such lists we have, from a 200 years before.

The church excluded some books from the canon that they still continued to use, only not as Scripture.  There is a book called “The Shepherd,” by an early Christian named Hermas.  There are letters by Barnabas and Clement of Rome.  And there are even non-canonical gospels like the Infancy Gospel of James, or the one attributed to Nicodemus, that the church kept in a secondary category.  They met some of the above criteria for canonization, but not all.

Then there were books that met basically none of the criteria.  They were not witnesses to Jesus, but clearly written in the 2nd or 3rd century.  They were not commonly accepted, but only used by a small number of Christians.  (The fact that these Christians tended to think of themselves as better and more spiritual than everyone else didn’t help.)  And finally, what these books taught was often radically different from what the rest of the New Testament says.  For instance, the New Testament believes, with the Hebrew tradition, that the creation is the good product of a good Creator.  But many of these books said creation and matter were evil products of an evil demigod.  So they didn’t make the cut.  We call the writers of these books “Gnostics.”

So it is emphatically not true that the Bishops sat down in the 4th century with a stack of books and determined, by a corrupt political process designed to enhance their own power and suck up to the Emperor, the books that would be in the New Testament, then violently suppressed all other books.  

If that were the case, we would not have the New Testament we now have, which is an inherently and essentially anti-imperialist document.

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