Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Authors, Authorities and who Gets to Write the Bible By Bart Ehrman I provided a very brief overview of key aspects of how we got to the canon of the New Testament, these 27 books and only these 27 in my previous two posts.
[00:00:18] Now I want to move into a deeper discussion found in my book Lost the Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, which was published in 2003 by Harper One.
[00:00:29] This was the second trade book for general audiences that I wrote and it's the one that launched my career writing books for non experts.
[00:00:36] The book is about the various forms of Christianity in the first several centuries that includes Ebionites, Marcionites, various kinds of Gnostics, various kinds of Proto Orthodoxy, and so on, and the books they used as their authoritative sacred texts. Toward the end of the book I have a chapter on how the orthodox canon emerged out of that message. I will be exerting parts of that book here. This will take a few posts.
[00:01:03] So far as we can tell, all the Christian groups of the period came to ascribe authority to some written texts, and each group came to locate that authority in the status of the author of the text.
[00:01:15] These authors were to be closely connected with the ultimate authority, Jesus himself, who was understood to represent God.
[00:01:23] Different groups tied their views to apostolic authorities in different ways. The Ebionites, for example, claimed to present the views advocated by Peter, Jesus closest disciple, and by James, his brother.
[00:01:36] The Marcionites claimed to present the views of Paul, which he received via special revelation from Jesus. The Valentinian Gnostics claimed too to represent Paul's teachings as handed down to his disciple Theudas, the teacher of Valentinus.
[00:01:50] And so it went on.
[00:01:53] The Proto Orthodox claimed all of these apostles as authorities Peter, James, Paul and many others. But not all of the books used by the Proto Orthodox churches were actually written by apostles or in some cases even claimed to be.
[00:02:07] The four gospels that eventually made it into the New Testament, for example, are all anonymous. Nowhere do their authors claim to be apostles or companions of Jesus.
[00:02:18] These books are instead written in the third person about Jesus and his companions. None of them contains a first person narrative such as one day when Jesus and I went into Capernaum.
[00:02:30] Why then do we call them Matthew, Mark, Luke or John?
[00:02:34] Because sometime in the second century, when Proto Orthodox Christians recognized the need for apostolic authorities, they attributed them to the apostles to Matthew and John, and to close companions of the apostles. That would be Mark, the secretary of Peter, and Luke, the traveling companion of Paul.
[00:02:52] Most critical scholars today have abandoned these identifications the books are anonymous. They're written by highly educated Greek speaking and writing Christians near the end of the first century, rather than the illiterate and lower class Aramaic speaking peasants who were Jesus actual disciples.
[00:03:11] Other books that came to be accepted as authoritative were not anonymous, but were homonymous. Written that is, by a person with the same name as someone famous in Christian circles.
[00:03:22] Whoever wrote the book of James, for example, gives no indication that he is James, the brother of Jesus.
[00:03:27] Quite the contrary, he says nothing about a personal tie to Jesus at all.
[00:03:33] The book was later accepted as apostolic, though on the grounds that he was the brother he never claimed to be.
[00:03:39] As it turns out, James was a very common name in the period. As many as seven are found just within the New Testament, two of them disciples. That would be James the son of Alphaeus and James the son of Zebedee.
[00:03:50] So too the name John.
[00:03:53] Whoever wrote the book of Revelation was called John, but he does not claim to be John the son of Zebedee, who was one of Jesus apostles.
[00:04:01] In fact, in one scene in the book, the prophet John has a vision of the throne of God surrounded by 24 elders who worship him forever. This is Revelation chapter verse, verse 4 and verses 9 to 10.
[00:04:14] This is usually taken to refer to the 12 patriarchs of Israel and the 12 apostles.
[00:04:20] But the author gives no indication that he's seeing himself. Probably then this was a different John. The book is homonymous, later accepted by Christians as canonical because they believed that the author was in fact Jesus earthly disciple.
[00:04:35] Yet other books are neither anonymous nor homonymous, but but flat out pseudonymous, written in a false name by someone claiming to be famous, knowing full well he was not. They're forgeries.
[00:04:47] Included in this group is almost certainly two Peter, probably the Pastoral epistles of first and second Timothy and Titus, quite likely the Deutero Pauline epistles of two Thessalonians, Colossians and Ephesians, and possibly one Peter and Jude.
[00:05:01] But why claim to be someone that you are not?
[00:05:05] Precisely to get your views heard.
[00:05:07] And these authors views were heard, and not just heard, but accepted, respected, granted authority included in Sacred Scripture. An outcome probably beyond their wildest dreams.
[00:05:20] Were any of the books that eventually made it into the New Testament actually written by apostles of Jesus?
[00:05:26] Critical scholars are fairly unified today in thinking that Matthew did not write the first Gospel, or John the fourth, or indeed the three anonymous letters called first, second and third John, or that Peter did not write Second Peter and possibly not First Peter.
[00:05:41] No other book claims to be written by one of Jesus earthly disciples.
[00:05:46] There are books written by the APostle Paul, of course, 13 that go by his name in the New Testament, at least seven of which are accepted by nearly everyone as authentic.
[00:05:56] If then by apostolic book we mean book actually written by an apostle. Most of the books that came to be included in the New Testament are not apostolic.
[00:06:07] But if the term is taken in a more broad sense to mean book that contains apostolic teaching as defined by the emerging Proto orthodox church, then all 27 pass muster.
[00:06:19] Odd how so much of history involves defin.
