Gide. I'm Gary Stevens. And welcome to the second series of the History in the Bible podcast.

More of the history in more of the books in all the Bibles.

Episode 2.23.

Battle for the New Testament, Part 3, The Reformation.

In the last episode, I pursued the long and winding tale of how we arrived at the current collection of books we now call the New Testament.

It was a protracted process, one that operated behind closed doors.

All we know is that by 400 or so, when the Empire was falling apart,

both Greek East and Latin West, had agreed on the same collection of 27 books.

But that's only one part of the story of how the New Testament was made.

Sure, everyone had agreed on which books were holy and which not.

That was the first step.

The next step was to decide on the contents of each book.

The ancients squabbled long and hard about which books to include in their new canon. They

were a lot more relaxed about the contents of each book. A good analogy would be the modern attitude to Shakespeare's plays.

Say you get invited to see a production of Shakespeare's Taming of the Hedgehog,

an engaging comedy about a socialite's attempts to woo her pets into submission.

You might raise your eyebrows in puzzlement. No such

play. Think I'll give it a miss. How about Titus andronicus? Fine. You would not give a

rat's batuti about which scholarly text of the play the company used. This line of the play

is present in some of Shakespeare's editions,

but not in others? Who cares? It's still Titus angonagus, right?

The idea that somewhere out there is the one true original of each book of the New Testament,

...