Page 631 … the Bible’s evolution
“The early church quoted the New Testament in the same manner as the Old, treating all its writings as God-given words.”
Yes, and the early church also quoted from The Gospel of Thomas, and The Apocalypse of Peter (and even private poems) as part of their “New Testament” – and they did so in the same manner as the they did the Old Testament, and treated all of these writings as “God-given words” as well. Actually, while the practices of the earliest followers of Jesus are indicative of how we are to approach him & his teachings, the earliest beliefs of Paul’s church are not indicative of Jesus’ Life or his Truth or his Way … My dear Friend, like human morality (and indeed humanity itself), the Bible too has evolved over time – and in fact, it continues to evolve through scholarly re-interpretation and even unscholarly re-translation to this very day … There are actually almost as many different versions of the Bible in existence today (with over 105 different “official” translations in English alone) as there are Christian denominations (over 33,000 worldwide, according to the World Christian Encyclopedia), and these Christian sects still cannot even agree on which books are to be included in the Bible and which are not (with the Roman Catholic Bible, the Easter Orthodox Bible, & the Ethiopian Coptic Bible all containing quite a few books that your standard Protestant Bible does not)! Indeed, even the most common forms of the Protestant Bible were in substantial flux until the Council of Trent (1545-1563 A.D.), where the Biblical canon that most of us know today was finally solidified … In addition, consider the following historical facts:
*Around 160 CE Marcion advocated eliminating the entire Old Testament and having Luke be the only Gospel in what remained, though Iranaeus then won out over these “heresies” and the four-Gospel canon began to take shape thereafter …
*In 189 CE the Muratorian Canon revealed that The Wisdom of Solomon & The Apocalypse of Peter had both been added to the officially recognized collection of texts considered to be the Divine Word of God …
*In 325 CE the Council of Nicea first determined that Jesus was begotten by God and not created by man (!) …
*In 360 CE the Council of Laodicea decided that “private psalms should no longer be read [as Holy Scripture] in church” …
*In 367 CE the Council of Athanasius presented the Bible in its modern-day format for the very first time (39 books in the Old Testament & 27 in the New), and this canon was then recognized as “official” for the very first time at the Council of Rome in 382 CE …
*Note as well that the book of Revelation wasn’t officially accepted into the Eastern Orthodox cannon until the early 400’s CE! …
And yet despite this “progress”, there was still rabid debate amongst Christians scholars & theologians as to both the content and the meaning of the Scriptures – debate that went on for centuries, and debate that continues to this very day!
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