2.21 Battle for the New Testament I: Earliest Times

History in the Bible

Garry Stevens

History, Christianity, Judaism, Bible, Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 693 Ratings

🗓️ 13 May 2018

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Christians in the first two centuries did not have a sacred canon of books. In this first of four parts, I discuss what the earliest church fathers Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp and Papias were reading. Marcion spurred the Jesus-clubs into action.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Gide. I'm Gary Stevens.
0:08.0	And welcome to the second series of the History in the Bible podcast.
0:13.1	More of the history in more of the books in all the Bibles.
0:19.9	Episode 2.21.
0:22.9	Battle for the New Testament Part 1, earliest times.
0:27.5	In the last episode, I concluded my outline of the historical background of the birth of Christianity,
0:35.2	with the death of the last Sion of the House of Herod.
0:39.6	In this and the next episode, I wanted to explore the origins of the sacred documents of the
0:46.3	Christians. The great compendium of Christian sacred scriptures is, of course, the New Testament.
0:55.1	That this compendium exists at all is a peculiarity.
1:00.4	The compulsion to acquire a collection of sacred texts was a Jewish idiosyncrasy.
1:08.1	No one else in the ancient Middle East or the Roman Empire had the least inclination to do so.
1:13.6	No Roman or Greek or Assyrian or Egyptian or Babylonian ever averred that some books contained the truth about their religion.
1:24.6	They had no creeds to proclaim the true nature of the gods, no precise
1:31.9	definitions of faith, no such thing as orthodoxy or heresy. What you believe was your own
1:40.0	business, but how you worshipped was a matter for public gossip.
1:47.0	The New Testament we have today consists of four Gospels, 13 letters attributed to Paul,
1:55.0	eight letters attributed to other apostolic figures, a history, the book of Acts, and an Apocalypse, the book of Revelation.
2:03.6	That makes 27 books.
2:06.6	Mercifully, Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants have the same books in the same order in their respective libraries.
2:15.6	As so often, the Odd Man Out is the collection used by the Ethiopian Orthodox.
2:23.3	This includes another eight books.
	...

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