Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Lost scriptures I was reluctant to write my first trade book, Jesus the apocalyptic prophet, see previous post, and had to be dragged into writing my second. I just wanted to devote myself to technical scholarship, but, well, I yielded in the end, and I'm glad I did.
[00:00:18] My second trade book ended up being two books. I had agreed to write about the heretical forms of Christianity and their scriptures, but then my publisher, Oxford University Press, talked me into not only doing that lost Christianities, but also an accompanying anthology of texts, lost scriptures. Once again I was reluctant, but I lost out again and again. Im glad its been the better selling of the two books, to my great surprise here, ill explain what it contains, taken from the introduction to it from Oxford University Press in 2003. This will take two posts.
[00:00:55] General introduction even though millions of people worldwide read the New Testament, whether from curiosity or from religious devotion, very few ask what this collection of books actually is, or where it came from, or how it came into existence, or who decided which books to include, on what grounds, and when.
[00:01:16] The New Testament did not emerge as an established and complete set of books immediately after the death of Jesus, many years passed before christians agreed concerning which books should comprise their sacred scriptures, with debates over the contour of the canon, that is, the collection of the sacred texts that were long, hard, and sometimes harsh.
[00:01:37] In part, this was because other books were available, also written by christians, many of their authors claiming to be the original apostle of Jesus yet advocating points of view quite different from those later embodied in the canon.
[00:01:51] These differences were not simply over such comparatively minor issues as whether a person should be baptized as an infant or an adult, or whether churches were to be run by a group of lay elders or by ordained priests or bishops or a pope. To be sure, such issues, still controversial among christian churches today, were at stake then as well. But the alternative forms of Christianity in the early centuries of the church wrestled over much larger doctrinal questions, many of them unthinkable in most modern christian churches, such as how many gods there are 12 12, 30 whether the true God created the world and whether instead it was created by a lower inferior deity whether Jesus was divine or human, or somehow both whether Jesus death brought salvation or was irrelevant for salvation, or whether he ever even died.
[00:02:45] Christians also debated the relationship of their new faith to the religion from which it came, Judaism. So should christians continue to be Jews? Or if not already Jews? Should they convert to Judaism? What about the jewish scriptures? Are they to be part of the Christian Bible as the Old Testament?
[00:03:04] Or are they the scriptures of a different religion, inspired, perhaps by a different goddess.
[00:03:11] Such fundamental issues are, for the most part unproblematic to christians today, and their solutions as a result appear obvious. There is only one God. He created the world. Jesus, his son, is both human and divine. His death brought salvation to the world in fulfillment of the prophecies made in the Old Testament, which was also inspired by the one true God.
[00:03:32] One of the reasons these views now seem obvious, however, is that only one set of early and Christians christian beliefs emerged as victorious in the heated disputes over what to believe and how to live that were raging in the early centuries of the christian movement.
[00:03:48] These beliefs and the group who promoted them came to be thought of as orthodox, literally meaning the right belief and alternative views, such as the view that there are two gods, or that the true God did not create the world, or that Jesus was not actually human or not actually divine, and so on, and came to be labelled heresy or false belief and were then ruled out of court.
[00:04:15] Moreover, the victors in the struggles to establish christian orthodoxy not only won their theological battles, they also rewrote the history of the conflict. Later readers then naturally assumed that the victorious views had been embraced by the vast majority of christians from the very beginning, all the way back to Jesus and his closest followers, the apostles.
[00:04:36] What then of the other books that claim to be written by these apostles, the ones that did not come to form part of the New Testament? For the most part they were suppressed, they were forgotten, they were destroyed in one way or another, lost, except insofar as they were mentioned by those who opposed them, who quoted them precisely in order to show how wrong they were.
[00:04:57] But we should not overlook the circumstances that in some times and places these other writings were in fact sacred books, read and revered by devout people who understood themselves to be christian.
[00:05:09] Such people believed that they were following the real teachings of Jesus, as found in the authoritative texts that they maintained were written by Jesus own apostles.
[00:05:22] Historians today realize that it is oversimplified to say that these alternative theologies are aberrations because they're not represented in the New Testament.
[00:05:32] For the New Testament itself is the collection of books that emerged from the conflict, the group of books advocated by the side of the disputes that eventually established itself as dominant and handed the books down to posterity as the christian scriptures.
[00:05:49] The triumph did not happen immediately after Jesus death.
[00:05:52] Jesus is usually thought to have died around 30. Cedar Christians probably began to produce writing shortly afterwards. Although our earliest surviving writings, the letters of Paul, were not made for another 20 years or so, around 50 to 60 CE. Soon the floodgates opened, however, and Christians of varying theological and ecclesiastical persuasions wrote all kinds of books. Gospels recording the deeds, words, and activities of Jesus, accounts of the miraculous lives and teachings of early christian leaders, acts of the apostles, personal letters, epistles to and from christian leaders and communities, prophetic revelations from God concerning how the world came to be or how it was going to end, for example, revelations or apocalypses, and so on. Some of these writings may well have been produced by the original apostles of Jesus, but already within 30 or 40 years, books began to appear that claimed to be written by the apostles who which were in fact forgeries in their names. See, for example, two Thessalonians. Two. Two.
[00:06:57] The practice of christian forgery has a long and distinguished history. We know of gospels and other sacred books forged in the name of the apostles down into the Middle Ages and on, in fact, to the present day. Some of the more ancient ones have been discovered only in recent times by trained archaeologists or rummaging locals, including gospels allegedly written by Jesus close disciple Peter, his female companion Mary Magdalene, and his twin brother Didymus Judas Thomas.
[00:07:25] The debates over which texts actually were apostolic and therefore authoritative lasted many years, decades, even centuries. Eventually, by about the end of the third christian century, one group emerged as victorious.
[00:07:41] This group was itself internally diverse, but it agreed on major issues of the faith, including the existence of one God, the creator of all, who was the father of Jesus Christ, who was both divine and human, who, along with the Father and the Holy Spirit, together made up the divine Godhead. This group promoted its own collection of books as the only true and authentic ones and urged that some of these books were sacred authorities. The New Testament to be read alongside and at least as authoritative as the Old Testament taken over from the Jews.
[00:08:15] I'll continue from here in the next post.
