Exploring My Strange Bible - Making of the Bible Part 3 - A History of New Testament Manuscripts and English Translations

Episode Date: August 23, 2017

This last episode is about the manuscript history of the New Testament, as well as a short history of English translations. In the second half of this lecture, we talk about the process and the dynamics at work in collecting the books of the bible into the “canon," a technical term referring to the authoritative collection of the biblical books.

Tim Mackey, Jr. utterly amazing and worth following with everything that you have. On this podcast, I'm putting together the last 10 years worth of lectures and sermons where I've been exploring the strange and wonderful story of the Bible and how it invites us into the mission of Jesus and the journey of faith. And I hope this can be helpful for you too. I also help start this thing called The Bible Project. We make animated videos and podcasts about all kinds of topics in Bible and theology. You can find those resources at thebibleproject.com. With all that said, let's dive into the episode for this week. All right, this is the third of a three-part series on the making of the Bible. I did this series of lectures all in one night.

It was a Friday night event at a church that I worked at for a number of years. It was super fun to pack it all in together, but man, what a fire hose. So here, at least on this podcast, you get it in three different doses. This last episode is about the manuscript history of the New Testament, which is really different than that of the Old Testament. Just the way that the manuscript spread, the amount of manuscripts and so on, and then also the history of manuscript discoveries, the history of our English translations beginning back before the King James, but the effect of the King James and the modern debates about English translations, so, so fascinating.

So we'll talk about that, manuscript history of the New Testament. And then the second half of this lecture is going to talk about the process and the dynamics at work in the collection of the books of the Bible into wholes, what Bible nerds call the canon with one N, C-A-N-O-N, not like pirate canons, but a canon meaning a collection, a measured collection. So how did the collection process of the biblical books take place? And again, I'll at least give an overview of that. Hopefully this whole lecture series has been giving you some new categories to think about where the Bible came from and what it is and what the implications of that are. We'll just

keep exploring that in different series that we do in the future on this podcast, but hope this one is helpful. Here we go. This will be kind of familiar, how we're tracing together the timeline here, similar to what we did for the Hebrew Bible. And there's a couple of things that make the transmission story of the New Testament distinct from the Hebrew Bible, though, and that is this concept here. And if you read any, again, I've given some recommended readings, some of which are on the table at the end of the New Testament handout, and they'll develop this idea. So the Jesus movement, read through the book of Acts, and by the end of the book of Acts, it's gone from 120 people in an upper room in Jerusalem

to thousands of people, Jews and non-Jews, all over the ancient world, spreading as far as Rome, right? That's where the book of Acts ends. And, you know, Paul is in Rome in house arrest, but living in a nice place with a patio. And he's talking about Jesus freely to people. And so, you know, the next 200 years of the Jesus movement, the theme is growth and spreading, growth and spreading, growth and spreading. And so with that growth and spreading, the New Testament is spreading too. Because everywhere that a missionary or apostle or people go to start a new Jesus community, they're going to take copies of the scriptures with them, of the Greek Old Testament and of the forming books that we have in the New Testament as well. And so a big part of the copying history of the New Testament

has to do with the first real urban centers of Christianity. And so there's kind of four main ones in terms of places where Jesus' movement became large and a large established urban center. So Alexandria, Egypt, Antioch, and Syria, in a number of different cities in and around Asia Minor. And a lot of these cities are the cities that Paul wrote to, like Ephesus and Colossae and so on, and then also, of course, Rome. Think of how this works here. So the Jesus movement starts here, and then very quickly it spreads so that the main centers where there's the most numbers of Christians copying the New Testament and so on are in these places here. Now just think about how this is going to

go within 100 or 200 years. If you have a group of copyists who are working, you know, copying New Testament manuscripts here, copying them here, and then they're getting sent to go plant churches here in North Africa and so on, and these people are getting sent here and so on, this actually helps us in terms of reconstructing the history of the development of the New Testament. Because let's say a group of scribes end up here, and you have one copy that's maybe the model for the others, and there's like a mistake or an error or a difference in that copy. Then that's going to get spread over around here to these manuscripts from this part of the world. Where's that error not going to be? Where is that difference not going to be?

In any of the others. So they're all going, you know, again, you try and write out, copy out anything, you're going to make some mistakes of spelling, word order, you might skip a line or something. But the beauty of this organic spreading nature of the early Jesus movement is that there's manuscripts being copied everywhere. And it makes a horribly difficult puzzle to figure out. But it also, because it's so complex, it means that there was never anybody, a group of old men in white beards, like doing this in a room by themselves, trying to trick everybody else. Like that story doesn't exist in the history of the Bible. So

this thing's public, it's spreading everywhere, and that helps us as well as creates complexity and problems. So here's our four, you like that animation there? I kind of went through an animation phase in PowerPoint where I animate everything. I don't do that anymore. It takes too much time, but I used to do it. So we've got our four main copy centers here

in these first centuries. The early 300s are a really important set of decades for the history of early Christianity. Namely, there was a Roman emperor, one of the first Roman emperors, to engage in widespread, systematic persecution and execution of Christians and suppression of Christians. What this means is that there's going to be unique differences or additions or whatever errors are gone on in one place won't necessarily be in another. So let's look at some examples of this. So again, these are what I would call profound differences in the manuscripts.

So to you, they may not be profound, but these are, you know, about the most significant as it gets. So go to 1 John chapter 5 with me. This is actually probably the most significant one in the entire New Testament. If it bugs you, the other ones won't bug you because this one's the most significant. Chapter 5, verse 5. Who is it that overcomes the world? Only he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God. He is the one who came by the water and the blood, Jesus Christ. He did not come by water only, but by water and blood. Now, it is the Spirit who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth. For there are three that testify, the Spirit and the water and the blood,

and these three are in agreement. There's a lot of discussion among commentators. What is John talking about here? Is water an image of baptism? And is blood an image of the crucifixion? And then we testify to the truth of Jesus through baptism and through the Lord's Supper. Is that what he's getting at here? So, you know, you have to unpack the symbolism. But if you look in verse 8, you're going to see a footnote somewhere in verses 7 and

8. You see? Does anyone have a footnote there? So essentially, there's a footnote that there are some late manuscripts of the Vulgate, which is a Latin translation, but it was based on some Greek manuscript somewhere, and they insert all of what you have there in the footnote into the text. So let's read verse 7 and 8 with the addition. For there are three that testify, the, go down to the footnote, there are three that testify, the, go down to the footnote, there are three that testify in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and these three are one. And there are three that testify on the earth, back up,

the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three are in agreement. What's just happened right here? The Trinity. Yeah, it's very nice. It's very nice. So he said, so we've introduced a contrast, three in heaven, the Father, the Word, the Spirit, three on earth, the Spirit, the water, and the blood.

So this addition happened in one set of manuscripts in Latin, and one's connected to the Asia Minor tradition, the manuscripts that come from the Asia Minor tradition, eventually made their way to Rome. And so you can say, oh, here's an addition, but it was clearly, in addition, meant to help interpret theologically what's going on here. in addition, meant to help interpret theologically what's going on here. But we can isolate it. It's in one text tradition. It's not in the others. It's not original.

Shouldn't be there. Discussion's over, you know? So it may bug you that some scribe put that in there. Again, so we could debate, similar to Jeremiah, is this malicious tampering? Are we introducing an idea that's not found anywhere else in the New Testament? No, the Trinity is found and presupposed in lots of places in the New Testament. But for one reason or another, somebody got creative and added this line, but we can totally spot it. To me, this is an extremely profound difference. An example from the book of Acts. So this is a feature of the text history of

the book of Acts, that the manuscripts connected to what's called the Western manuscripts, which again are Asia Minor, some Asia Minor manuscripts. The book of Acts has, you know, maybe a handful, dozen, many dozen little additions, just like the one we're about to read. many dozen little additions just like the one we're about to read. So here's how it reads in most of our English translations. This is from the chapter of where Stephen, he's appointed as a spokesman for the gospel, and there's a bunch of people arguing with Stephen, but they could not stand up against his wisdom or the spirit by whom he spoke. Then they secretly persuaded some men to say, we have heard Stephen speak words of blasphemy against Moses and against God. There are a handful of manuscripts in the Western, this Asia Minor tradition, that have an extra line to the story of his. This is the way

it reads in those manuscripts. They began to argue with Stephen. They couldn't stand up against his wisdom or the spirit by whom he spoke because they were refuted by him with boldness. Therefore, when they were unable to confront the truth, they secretly persuaded some people to say, we've heard Stephen. So what have we done with the additional material here? We've just made Stephen more awesome, right? We've just made Stephen, you know, more bold, and we've made his opponents more stupid or something.

So you could say this is a minor narrative embellishment. Does the truth of the story hang on this? No. Does this unpack from the story anything that wasn't already there? No, not really. It's added. We're airbrushing the painting or something here. I guess we'd say photoshopping these days. People airbrush. Photoshopping the store. So, you know, whatever the scribe thought, he thought he had the prerogative to do that.

But good for us that he was in one place and one time and we can spot his activity and recognize that it's not a part of the original. So essentially what's going on here then is that in this time period, these first basically 200 years of the New Testament, it's similar to that period that we have for the Hebrew Bible. It's complicated, but that's okay. We should expect it to be complicated because there's people involved. God bless the people who have done hard work in the rest of this time period

to sort out what was done during this complex period. And that, for me, is the fascinating detective mystery of the story of the New Testament. So we're going to power through this. You guys ready for action? So here's what happens essentially in 300, and here's how I used to animate power plant here. Here we go, watch. There's a guy named Diocletian. Okay. There was a Roman emperor named Diocletian who began systematically actively suppressing the Jesus movement and killing lots of Christians, burning churches, and burning their copies of the New Testament. And so what essentially happened is there were a large number of churches in Asia Minor that escaped or that

were not subject to these persecutions by Diocletian. So just a quote here to spell this out. Persecution of the Christians by Diocletian was characterized by the systematic destruction of church buildings and any manuscripts that were found in them were publicly burned. Church leaders were required to surrender for burning all holy books in their possession. I just, I mean, you were just sitting now reading the stories of people who are in these kinds of situations. This is not a new thing in the history of Christianity. The result then was a widespread scarcity of New Testament manuscripts, which became acute then when the persecution ceased. Does that make sense? They're saying, so once the persecution's over, diaclation passes,

new emperor embraces new policies, then we need to copy the New Testament like mad, right? And so, when Christians could again engage freely in missionary activity, there was a tremendous growth in the size and number of new churches, and so there followed a sudden demand for large numbers of New Testament manuscripts in all the provinces. This growing need could only be met by large copying houses, and so any text used as the exemplar, and by that they mean the foundation text that a bunch of copies were made off of,

in such a copying center would naturally be widely distributed and have great influence. Does that make sense, what they're saying here? So as it goes, it was a group of texts that we can now locate to the tradition of one copying center in Asia Minor. locate to the tradition of one copying center in Asia Minor. And this became the form of the biblical text that got spread all over the world as Christianity. And then literally over the next 12 centuries, it spreads west, right, to Celtic Christianity in the 700s when missionaries go to Ireland and so on. And then it spreads throughout Europe, the conversion of the tribes and so on, Germanic tribes and so on. And the copies throughout Europe. The conversion of the tribes and so on, Germanic tribes and so on. And the copies of the Bible being made into Latin and everything,

all comes from manuscripts based on one group here. So 1516, a guy named Erasmus. Anybody heard of him before? He's kind of an important figure in pre-Luther, but pre-Reformation. He was a scholar, and he tried to compile the first scholarly edition of the New Testament. And he had access to a few hundred biblical manuscripts, which seemed amazing at the time, right?

No one ever tried to do this before. But we now know all of the manuscripts he found were basically, he was getting lots of manuscripts from this one chain of tradition here. So he based his text entirely on these things here. This is now called the majority text. So think, 1,200 years, this one tradition of text is being copied and copied. How many copies of this are going to be existing today?

The majority, which is why it's called the majority text. So you can't count numbers when you're doing New Testament text studies, because the majority are going to be these texts right here. And they're the majority because these were the only ones that people had for a really long time. So here's a picture of Erasmus' edition, and got Latin over here, the Greek text over here, and then a lot of crazy medieval Gothic art. The tradition goes forward. People begin to use Erasmus' text as the scholarly edition that all further editions should be based on.

Just a few years later, a guy named William Tyndale, who speaks English, later a guy named William Tyndale who speaks English, and he has a passion that not just priests and scholars should be able to read the Bible in Greek or in Latin, but that everybody should be able to read the Bible in their own language. So what does William Tyndale do? He does something that's illegal. So he translates the Bible into English, right? And his life is endangered for it and so he produced the first english translation from the best greek and hebrew manuscripts that they had so here's from the gospel of john so f y r and then s this is how s is r in classic german so the first chapter if you look at the beginning, isn't that fast? Isn't that great? In the beginning was that word, and that word was with God, and God was that word. The same was in the beginning with, spelled with a Y. Isn't this great? There you go. So early 1500s English. So this English translation has had an enormous amount of influence on English translation

still today. So how Tyndale phrased things into English began then when it influenced the next major English translation that became the dominant English Bible for the last 400 years or so, which is the King James Version. But can you see, again, what are all of these based on in terms of New Testament manuscripts? Just one manuscript tradition. And how widely read is the King James Bible? Really, really, really widely read, even still today. And so here's the page from an early edition of the King James. They attribute the letter of the Hebrews here to Paul, even though it doesn't say that anywhere. So here's what this comes down to, is that we're talking about a well over 1,000 year period of time that the New

Testament is being passed on and translated now, but based off one manuscript tradition after the Diocletian persecution. So, lo and behold, we enter a new age when the British Empire, when the sun never sets on the British Empire. And so that's essentially when modern archaeology took off, was it was modern British people going into all these places that they've now conquered and begin to dig up ruins. Essentially, that's the history of modern archaeology took off was it was modern British people going into all these places that they've now conquered and begin to dig up ruins. Essentially, that's the history of modern archaeology. You have all these British scholars cruising around the world going into ancient monasteries or ancient mosques or churches and so on and just digging out old manuscripts.

And so they're traveling all over the ancient world and lo and behold, what do they find? So some of these guys are just really incredible. Their stories, their great biographies to read, and they were definitely introverts. So I'll just read a couple. This was the guy who found that manuscript. I told the story at the monastery in Sinai, Sinai Peninsula, Friedrich Konstantin von Tischendorf. He says, I have become impassioned to seek and utilize the most ancient witnesses to reconstruct the purest form of the Greek scriptures.

I have dedicated myself to this sacred task, the struggle to regain the original form of the New Testament. Can you imagine what an exciting time that was? Another guy, Samuel Trege. I've devoted myself to a lifetime of meticulous labors upon the text of the New Testament as an act of worship undertaken in the full belief that it will be for the service of God and his church. Unbelievable people. They dedicated their whole lives to this task. And here's essentially, if you like these animations,

so essentially what happens is these guys start traveling the known world and just digging up everything they can. And they're just discovering loads of manuscripts. And many of them are New Testament manuscripts. Now, you can put two and two together here. Can you see where this is going here? So all of a sudden, we have not only the majority text, we're discovering text in Egypt,

text buried in ancient Catholic churches and libraries in Rome. You know what I mean? It's just so exciting. I think it would be exciting in old churches that are in what we call Syria here today. And so essentially, here's the kinds of things that we start finding. So we have our traditional King James of the Lord's Prayer, yeah? Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

For thine is the kingdom, and power and the glory forever. Amen. So how scandalized would you be, you've grown up saying this, that there would be discovered more ancient, more reliable manuscripts, simply don't have the little bit at the end there. Now look at the bit at the end. What is that little bit at the end? This is like Jeremiah chapter 10. It's a little praise. It's a little hymn of praise at the end. Now, here's what this tells us here. This is actually interesting, is that very quickly we know from a document from the early 120s or so called the Didache. It's the earliest form of catechism in the early church,

what early converts were taught. We're told that the Lord's Prayer was basic. Every Christian learns it. You memorize it. This is part of your daily prayer life. It's just the way it went in the early Jesus movement. And you can imagine how in those first century or so that the Lord's Prayer, you're saying it every day, you say it every gathering at your house, church, as a group here together in worship. You can see someone would say, you know, we need a more proper ending to the beginning of the prayer than just deliver us. Let's end it with a hymn, you know.

And then you can imagine a scribe who was raised saying this version of the Lord's Prayer. And then when he becomes a scribe, a scribe of the book of Matthew, and he's copying down, and he's like, wait a minute. This isn't the right version of the Lord's Prayer. It needs the ending that I've learned growing up as a kid. And there you go. In it goes. But it's not original to the text of Matthew. So again, this isn't malicious tampering.

This isn't somebody trying to twist the Bible or something like this. This is an addition that comes to the Lord's prayer and it arises out of the worship life of the church, which is kind of precisely what we would expect, wouldn't it? But for some people, this is deeply scandalous. Don't mess with my King James. Why are these scholars taking out all this important stuff of the Bible? This is deeply controversial in the 1800s and 1900s. Here's just a few pictures of some of these early manuscripts of the New Testament. They're just awesome. So this is the oldest piece of the New Testament that we've got. It's a fragment from John chapter 18.

And by the handwriting, it's dated to the early decades of the second century. So we're batting, you know, 40 years or something here. It's just outstanding. I don't know, I get chills on my spine. That's kind of how awesome is this. Some are much better preserved. So this is a collection of Paul's letter to the Philippians, and then can you see right here there's's a break and then a little heading and then

new things begin. So what that says is pros kolosios, to the Colossians. It's the beginning of the next letter, Philippians and Colossians. So notice this is different. This isn't animal skin, is it? Yeah, this is papyri, which is reed straw that's wet down and then flattened together. papyri, which is reed straw that's wet down and then flattened together. So these early papyri here, and then there's the next main set of manuscript witnesses. This is, again, this is the one that was found in the monastery in Sinai. So we have the entire New Testament represented in some of these early books, codex forms of the New Testament. We have the majority of the New Testament in these early papyri here. This was just an exciting time, I think,

in the history of the church. And so here's where we're at today then, is that a group of scholars led by these two German scholars, Erwin Nestle and Kurt Ahlen, they got together and in the 1960s they started to put together and in the 1960s, they started to put together the state of the art, here's everything we know in one place.

And that is the form of the New Testament. It's called the Nestle-Ahlen New Testament. And now it's in the 27th edition. So they update it and publish a new edition based on new findings about every five to ten years. And they've just been doing that since the 1960s. So it's very similar here. You can see the text. And then you see all those little squiggles and symbols that are highlighted there.

Those are little footnotes directing you down here. And then this is like reading a phone book or something. You know, it's just like a complex code telling you the types of variants that are in the manuscripts. And again, this is sort of like, this is even more than the Hebrew Bible. I'd say 99% are insignificant. The word the got left out. Greek can spell things in different word order. They don't need word order like we do.

And so the words are in a different order or something. And so most of it has virtually no significant effect on translation and so on. There's some that do, like we saw earlier, but most don't. So that's kind of where we are today. Every English translation that you go to Barnes & Noble's and look at are based off of this Greek text right here. So the reason why the translations are different is different philosophies of translations, not a different Bible underneath it,

something like that. They're all working off this basic text right here. Great, so this is a good time to bring out this handout that's on the front here. How many Hebrew Bibles are there that our English translations are based off of? There's just one. Remember, oh, I didn't put it out there, but it's this guy up here. I showed you a picture of it. There's just one text, one Hebrew Bible that everybody's working off of. How many Greek New Testaments are there that all our translations come off of? So the question is, is why all of the different English translations? And that is what this little thing is about right here. And so essentially, translations, the way it works is a group of scholars get around and they say, we think we need an English translation that just slavishly sticks to

basically trying to mimic Greek and Hebrew in English. It's English like nobody speaks it. But that's okay, because that's what this translation is about. And so the most extreme end of that would be like an interlinear, if you've ever seen that, where it's literally, you see the Hebrew and then the English words underneath it, and it's garbled English. It doesn't make any sense, because Hebrew doesn't have at all the same word orders as English. But then going along down, you see things like NASB. That's the New American Standard. And New American Standard is English as it's never been spoken before.

But it's a translation to do word studies. If you want to read very closely, if you don't want to learn Greek or Hebrew, but read the next best thing, the NASB is a good way to go. A couple down from there, you'll see the ESV. In terms of NASB, then you see the Net Bible, then the ESV. So in terms on the spectrum, the ESV places, I find it to be difficult English. But what they're trying to do is map closely onto the word order

and consistency translations from the Greek and the Hebrew. So for some people, they love that. and consistency translations from the Greek and the Hebrew. So for some people, they love that. The mistake that people make is formal equals more faithful to the text of the Bible. And that's a mistake. That's the philosophical choice driving the translation. So on this end, you'll see instead of translating word for word, one English word for every Greek word, some Greek and Hebrew words are more complex. And so we need like a whole English phrase to

really unpack and communicate what the author was intending. So that's called a dynamic approach. And so you'll get translations that I would say are, they're great for reading on the bus, they're great for reading whatever, and at certain points, they're not the most helpful for studying. If you really want to dig in to study, get a Bible to study Bible and something like that, I would say that's not really what these are designed for. These are designed to help you read as if you're reading the Bible in modern English, which is what most of us are trying to do. So most translations fall somewhere on this spectrum. I tried to put as many contemporary ones as I could.

But again, dynamic doesn't mean less faithful. It does mean that there will be interpretive choices made by the translators as they render into English, but there are also interpretive choices being made by these people too on the formal end. So all translations are going to be an interpretation of some kind. So my two cents about translations is there's no such thing as a bad translation. The best translation, as Chris Olson says, is the one that you actually read. And I encourage people to read multiple translations over the years of your journey. I think it's good to change up every year or so the translation you're reading the Bible in.

Because new language just gets new ideas into your mind in different ways. All translations are a form of interpretation. Because no one language is identical to another. You have to make some choices. We have one Hebrew Bible, one Greek Bible, and a million English versions of it. So what does it mean to say my Bible is God's Word? So does my translation convey the meaning that the author had in mind, and that's what I get from the translation?

Then I'd say that that is God's Word. And part of it, too, is that, you know, if you've ever read the Bible very long, sometimes things will strike you and the Holy Spirit's doing stuff in you that may or may not be related to the main point in the passage that you're reading. You know what I mean? It might be something else that strikes you or something you've never thought of, you know? And so God's Word works in a lot of ways. It's over and above. It's rooted in the

wording and the meaning of the words, but also over and above what the words are doing. And so I feel totally confident saying the Bible is the Word of God and this NIV, if by Word of God, we have in mind this whole thing that I'm talking about, not the golden tablets view, right? So, and that's usually what people think of when they hear a word of God. A term I have come to use more widely is the sacred scriptures or the scriptures. God speaking through the scriptures. And I find that to be language that tends to communicate a little better to folks. Okay, so just to make sure we're not talking about cannonball canons, the word canon is actually a Greek word spelled in English letters that means rule or measure or list.

So when we're talking about the biblical canon, we're talking about the authoritative list of books that constitute God's communication to the human race. So, you know, a light matter, you know, nothing. of books that constitute God's communication to the human race. So, you know, a light matter, you know, nothing. But that's what we're talking about here, the collection, canon, collection. The authoritative thing, I think that's okay. Let me just summarize what I'm trying to get at here. I think it's very important to recognize that if I'm a Christian, what I know about Jesus is mediated through the scriptures, but it's important to recognize that the Bible isn't trying to draw attention to itself.

The Bible is trying to draw our attention to a person, right, who exists right now, we believe, and who lived and died and rose again. And so Jesus is super clear at the end of Matthew and rose again. And so Jesus is super clear at the end of Matthew that authority does not belong to the Bible in and of itself. Authority belongs to him, to Jesus. And so what this means is that the Bible is one of the ways that the authority of Jesus is working itself out in the world. And what is the authority of Jesus all about? It's about starting a movement of his followers, people who are becoming new kinds of humans. It's about the movement of the gospel. It's about the kingdom of God. And it's about the new thing that's happened in the resurrection that's spreading throughout the human race through the spirit and during the story of the gospel.

That's what Jesus is doing with his authority. The authority of Jesus isn't to bash people over the heads. The authority of Jesus is to spread the message of the healing, transforming power of the gospel and of his resurrection. And so I think this is important, is that the authority of the Bible, we hear that phrase and we think, oh, the biblical canon, it's the list of books that tell me how to behave and that have the power to tell me how to behave. That's what we think of when we hear this word. And in my mind, that is not a biblical view

of authority. A biblical view of authority starts right here. And it's that all authority is in Jesus and his mission that he's commissioned us towards. And so if our view of the Bible doesn't help serve us in this mission, then I think we've gone astray from what Jesus is trying to tell us to do. Does that make sense? So the Bible is not trying to point us to itself. It's trying to point us to the person of Jesus. And so for me, this has been a helpful way to think about all this issue of canon here, and that's why I'm camping out on it,

is that the scriptures are telling us a story, right? And then I've done it right down the line here, tried to summarize the storyline of the Bible. Here we go. And of all the moments in the story, this one for Christ's followers, this is primary, Jesus. Everything revolves around him. Everything's about him, about what he accomplished for us, about what he's doing now in the world through us. So Jesus. Why do we read the Old Testament? Not because it's easy or because I like it.

I read the Old Testament because that was Jesus' Bible, and that was where he discovered who he was, and that was the God he said he came to embody and represent and so on. And so that's why I read the Old Testament, and that's why I read the New Testament, which is about Jesus. So think about this then. Scripture are texts that tell this story right here, right? The authority of the Bible is in the events and specifically in Jesus, and Jesus is the culmination of this story right here. So scripture is things that retell the story or unpack the meaning of the story, like Paul's letters do.

And there are texts that guide the community in living out the story. And in many ways, I think that's what Paul's letters, what Hebrews, what James is trying to do. You've heard the story leading up to Jesus, the Old Testament. You now know the story of Jesus. Paul and Peter and James and John

are guiding the early Jesus communities in how to rightly live out the story of Jesus, how to live out the gospel. So we have all this. This is in the production of the New Testament. What that leaves to question then is once all these guys pass from the scene, Jesus and the first generation of apostles, there were a lot more texts produced in the first century than just the ones that we have in the Bible. And so then there's a discerning process, a sifting process. Which texts that come from this early period are the ones that rightly tell the story? Do you see why I've emboldened underlined rightly? Because there could be a lot of texts out there that have misunderstood Jesus

or that have passed on a version of Jesus' teachings that are distorted, that are not right, or ways of following Jesus that are actually now out of sync with what Jesus would have actually wanted. And so this is the process of discerning the canon right here. Which of these writings are the ones that rightly protect

and preserve the gospel and the story of Jesus? Does that make sense? So all I'm trying to give you is a cosmic map here. This is not, again, about a room of old men with white beards trying to trick everybody here. This is a process the whole church had to go through in those first couple hundred years after Jesus and the apostles passed from the scene. Which texts are going to be the ones that rightly guide? So for the Hebrew

Bible, I'll say this right here, is that the Hebrew Bible has a shape, a three-part shape to it that's different from our English translations, and that's what you see on the bottom of page six there. You have some passages here. This would be a great cup of coffee one morning to read those passages. But essentially, the earliest form of the Hebrew Bible as we know it, it's all the same books that we have in our English Bibles, but it was arranged in a different order. And the biggest bang for the buck is that this is clearly the shape and the order that Jesus himself read the Hebrew Bible in. So in Luke chapter 24, he talks about everything that was written about me in the law of Moses, which is the first part of the collection, the Torah,

the Prophets, and the Psalms. And if you look at the collection, what Jesus is talking about here is the Torah, the Prophets, and the third collection called the Writings of the Ketuvim. But what's the first book in the third collection called the writings or the ketuvim. But what's the first book in the third collection? It's the book of Psalms. So Jesus is saying the entire Hebrew Bible

was written in a way that's pointing towards me. So again, why do we read the Hebrew Bible? Because it's easy, right? Because it's a fun read. No, it's because Jesus believed the story it was telling was pointing towards him. In the Catholic tradition, a group of books that are in Catholic Bibles that are not in Protestant Bibles, and most of us are probably aware of this in some form. And so there you go. There's a list of those extra books there.

These are writings, Jewish writings, from the pre-Christian period and right around the period of Jesus. They somewhat are about the same type of events and story that are in the Old Testament. But here's the basic rundown. They were declared to be a part of the Bible. So they were floating in and around the church, but it was a papal decision to include them in the Christian Bible in 1546. And let's see, were there any significant debates going on in 1546? Well, yeah, Luther was challenging some of the teachings of the Catholic Church,

and lo and behold, some of those teachings were based off of passages in these books. And so this is fully a move of Reformation politics, essentially, for why these books are in Catholic Bibles today. So again, that's my view. You ask someone from Catholic tradition, and they will have a different view, namely that the decision of the Pope was God's word. But that's a different view of authority that Protestants have. The other piece is that neither Jesus or any of the apostles ever quote from these books.

They quote from the Hebrew Bible a lot, but they never quote from any of these books or talk about them as if they are scripture. So there you go. That's in three minutes. That's the canon of the Hebrew Bible. So for the New Testament, there's a few pieces. First of all, when the early Jesus movement is going, is there any New Testament?

That is being written. So what is the Bible of the first generations of Christ followers? It's what we call the Old Testament. And then the stories, the quilt pieces, whatever quilt pieces or letters of Paul that they might have. And so here's what's super interesting, though, about the New Testament.

So we have a passage like this in 2 Peter. This would be mind-boggling to anybody when Peter wrote this. He's writing to a large group of people and he says, bear in mind that our Lord's patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. Oh, great. He's talking about Paul. He writes in the same way in all of his letters. So Peter is aware of a collection of Paul's letters that's floating around. Very early, very early.

Speaking in them of these matters, his letters contain some things that are hard to understand. And if you've ever tried to read Paul, you would say amen to that. Paul's very difficult to read in some places. And he says, those things that are hard to understand,

ignorant and unstable people distort in some places. And he says, those things that are hard to understand, ignorant and unstable people distort just as they distort the other scriptures to their own ruin, to their own destruction. So in other words, Paul, so he's making a different point about people distorting what Paul is saying.

But notice what he's done here in this passage. What are the scriptures he's talking about here? He's talking about the Old Testament right here, the other scriptures. Whose writings has he put alongside the Hebrew scriptures? Paul's letters. Do you see that right there? It's right there. This is in the New Testament itself.

So the New Testament is aware that what's happened in Jesus and the movement of Jesus and the closest circle of followers around Jesus, the apostles, that what they're doing is a new work of God that continues the story of the Old Testament. And therefore, Paul and Peter, their writings, I mean, this would be flabbergasting when Peter's writing this. But there you go. I mean, it's just right there. And this is right in the smack of the first century. And so here's essentially what happens is that as lots of books are out there, there's lots of letters. Remember Paul wrote to the Laodiceans.

And there are discussions in the early church fathers about what types of books are going viral, what types of books are raising to the top in the worship and the spreading of the Jesus movement. And the first one, of course, is that it's connected to the original circle around Jesus of 12, then Paul, who was not one of the 12, and that was a whole matter of dispute, actually, if you read Paul's letters. But a connection, right, to those original apostles. The second one is books that were widespread, continuously working here. They went viral. They went viral, so to speak.

And how would they go viral? Missionaries, planting new churches, getting copied, and so on. Books that are being read and re-read and re-read the most. So this is actually pretty important, and I'll just read a few quotes here, so you're not just getting my opinion, but these are reputable New Testament scholars. So Bruce Metzger, he says, what is really remarkable is that though the fringes of the New Testament canon remain unsettled until the 4th century, we'll talk about that in a second, a high degree of unanimity concerning the basic core of the New Testament,

Gospels, Acts, Paul, John, Peter, was attained very early among the diverse and scattered churches, not only in the Mediterranean, but over an area extending from Western Europe to East Asia. How easy is it to get Christians to agree on very many things today? You know what I'm saying? So how amazing is it that spontaneously

across not just the Mediterranean, but in Western Europe and East Asia, the same books are rising to the top among different churches over the most important. Do you see what he's saying here? This is very significant, what was happening in those early centuries. So are they rising to the top in terms of usage? And this is very organic, to come back to the phrase, this is very organic and messy

and spirit-led. And if you learn anything about the spirit in the New Testament, it is very organic and messy and spirit-led. And, you know, whatever, if you learn anything about the spirit in the New Testament, it's that things are messy when the spirit gets involved, and there you go. The last criteria is talked about the rule of faith, and it's essentially this. Do these books represent an aberration from the basic core message of the gospel? Is there anything in this book that just goes a totally different direction? And were those books out there? Totally. Totally.

In fact, those are the books that tend to make all of the headlines here. So these, you know, this is Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, Lost Gospels, and so on. There's a reason why they were lost. There's a reason why they were lost. It's because they were produced by one group down in Egypt that went down a very different road than the core gospel that most of the universal church embraced. And so they died out and they were lost in the sands of Egypt for 1800 years. So there's a reason why they were lost.

They were never in the Bible in the first place. And so this is the misnomer that often gets out there, is why did some people take the books out of the Bible? Have you heard this before? And then it's conspiracy theory, you know, old men in white beards taking books out of the Bible that didn't promote their agenda and so on. It's just total nonsense. It's just, it's not. That's not how it went at all. These were lost because no one read them anymore, because they were an aberration. And so what we have in the New Testament represents books that conformed and were statements of the basic rule of faith or of the gospel.

So here's the bottom line. We'll end with this and then a couple quotes. There was never any official council that decided what was in the New Testament. If there's anything you remember, that's the most important thing. There's no one place did anybody sit down and say, here's what's in and here's what's out. The canon was an organic growth out of the church spreading throughout the ancient world and books being copied and recopied and certain ones over those early centuries rose to the top. And so there was a council in the late 300s that made a declaration of the books that we have in the New Testament today, the ones that we have,

but it's very clear that they're not making anything up. What they're doing is they're recognizing what was already being practiced in all of the churches. Just a couple quotations so you know I'm not making this up. The councils of the church played little part in deciding what was in the canon of Scripture. When councils did speak to the subject, their voice was a ratification of what had already become the common practice of the churches. Does that make sense, what he's saying here? And this guy in particular, again, he does not have a theological axe to grind. He's not an evangelical scholar.

He's a historian, just talking about what we know about these councils. So in many ways, we can just kind of conclude with this. The letters that we have in the New Testament organically rose to the top as the letters that preserve the core statement about the gospel of those closest to Jesus in the first century. And the process was messy, but the product makes all the sense in the world, right? When you read the New Testament, there's lots of differences, but they're all basically doing the same thing.

You know, James has his way of putting things, Paul has his, John the Revelation writer has some really strange ways of putting things, but they all are basically coherent around the death, resurrection of Jesus, the gospel, and so on. So this was super helpful to me. No men in white beards in a secret room. That's basically what this amounts to.

And that the Bible didn't drop out of heaven. The Bible arose out of the mission of God at work in the world and out of the church spreading and growing and spreading. And so the Bible has a very close relationship to the church. It didn't drop down out of heaven. It actually arose out of the history of God's people. And so its messiness, in my mind, is beautiful, because it speaks to what God's doing in the world, which is going to be messy because it involves us. All right. There was, you guys, so many questions left unanswered, but there's value in drinking from the fire hose and just getting the big picture, the overview of thousands of years of

history in the formation of the Bible. I hope there's some new angles, some new ways of thinking about the history of making of the Bible that you haven't thought about before. This is still an active area of research and exploration for me personally. It probably will be until the day I die. And I'm quite happy about that because it's so interesting. So we're going to be talking about these issues more in future episodes of the Strange Bible Podcast. But for now, onward and upward. Thanks for listening, you guys.