In this video, Grace@Work leader Cortney Alexander discusses exactly when we got the Bible.
It’s sometimes said that the Bible didn’t exist until hundreds of years after Jesus’ resurrection. The story often goes that some church leaders eventually got together and picked which books they liked and excluded others they didn’t like as much. This idea has been promoted in recent years by some popular movies and novels. But since these movies and novels are works of fiction, it’s not surprising that they’re better at telling a good story than a true story.
This misimpression is a problem because it gives people the idea that if Christians didn’t have the Bible for a few hundred years, then maybe the Bible isn’t actually so foundational to the Christian faith. Much could be said to correct this misimpression, but we’ll focus on two points.
First, the claim that the Bible didn’t exist for hundreds of years after Jesus overlooks that the Old Testament was completed and recognized as Scripture by the Jewish people hundreds of years before Jesus. The Old Testament was the Bible of Jesus. And after Jesus’ resurrection, the Old Testament continued to be the Bible of the early church. Even after the New Testament was written, it did not render the Old Testament irrelevant. Paul said that “all Scripture . . . is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16-17). With that in mind, it’s not surprising that the New Testament cites the Old Testament thousands of times. So even before the New Testament was written, the early church had a set of authoritative Scripture—the Old Testament.
Second, the claim that the Bible didn’t exist for hundreds of years after Jesus overlooks the mountain of evidence that the final book of the New Testament was completed within several decades of Jesus’ resurrection. These books quickly began circulating among the churches in the Mediterranean region either individually or in groups (such as Paul’s letters). This transmission of Scripture was no small accomplishment in a day without scanners or email. Each copy had to be handmade and physically transported across land and sea.
No Christian gets to “pick” what constitutes Scripture and what is not. That’s because Scripture, while written by men, is breathed out by God (2 Tim. 3:16). So people merely recognize the Scripture that God has revealed. While it took longer for a few New Testament books to gain unanimous recognition as Scripture than others, these were the exception rather than the rule. It’s also important to understand that no book from the New-Testament era gained consensus acceptance as Scripture only to later be excluded from the Bible.
While movies like the Da Vinci Code allege that certain “gospels” were unfairly excluded from the Bible, these books are excluded for good reason. None of them has a credible claim to have been written in the first century. Thus, while they often carry the name of an apostle or other prominent follower of Jesus, they were certainly not written by those people. Nor is there evidence that any of these alternative gospels was ever accepted by the early church. And that is for good reason, because many such books were not Christian in nature, but instead attempted to co-opt Jesus into a different religion called Gnosticism.
If you read these books, you can often get a pretty good idea why they didn’t fool Christians in the early church. For example, the Gnostic book that probably gets the most attention today is the so-called gospel of Thomas. But those who argue that the Gospel of Thomas should have been included in the Bible often don’t bring up the last verse of that book: “Simon Peter said to him [referring to Jesus], ‘Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life.’ Jesus said, ‘I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.’”
Given that the early church already had a New Testament that provided a very high view of women—including saying that they female believers inherit eternal life just as males do—it isn’t surprising that they didn’t think the gospel of Thomas had anything to offer, much less consider it to be breathed out by God.
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