Dealing with sola scriptura inevitably lead to this question. Admittedly, I knew very little.
Because I don’t remember a time that I didn’t believe in God or that the Bible was his word, it has always been something that I took at face value with little critique. I never felt compelled to explore this question until recently.
I am probably not the only one.
For the sake of ease, I’m not going to deal much with the Hebrew text. The Jewish scripture was widely accepted from the time of Moses to Christ. By the time Jesus began teaching, the Septuagint, or Greek translation of the Hebrew text, was commonly used. The early church accepted their writing as sacred.
I will save the Deuterocanon for later.
The New Testament is a bit different. It was compiled from diverse sources and locations. After the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D, which included the temple, scrolls were no longer kept in a central location. The Gospels and epistles were written and passed around from church to church.
For example, Paul addressed Galatians “To the churches in Galatia.” Without a map that might not mean much to us but that was a fairly large area. These churches were established by oral teaching. After diverging from the original message, Paul wrote them a letter.
And just like we have false teachers today, they had them too. There were false prophets, false apostles and false teachers writing false letters. The early church was charged with weeding out the bad stuff (See Galatians 1). If something or someone arrived saying things that they knew to be incorrect, that letter, or person, was supposed to be pitched out.
How did they know what was true if they had limited access to written text?
“So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter” (2 Thes. 2:15).
The early Christians were taught with oral traditions and by written words. The sources had a direct connection to Christ and/or the apostles. The only New Testament authors who were not apostles themselves (Mark, Luke, James and Jude) were directly linked to the origin.
If a church received a teaching that was not cohesive with the Apostles, they were decisively instructed by Apostles to get it out (2 Cor. 11, Gal. 1, 2 John).
The whole thing was much more fluid than most Western Christians are comfortable with. There are no books that say, “THIS IS FROM GOD. MUST READ.”
The first attempt at collecting an official church canon was led by Marcion of Sinope (b. 85- d. 160), a heretic who denied the Old Testament God and all things Jewish. What this did was force the greater church to start determining the must read list, or what we call the canon.
The second generation church thus had a good working understanding of what sacred text was.
The earliest known compilation list of sacred writing was by Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria in 367. The 27 Books of the New Testament were formally canonized during the councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) in North Africa.
Around the same time, between 383-404, the church in Rome commissioned Jerome to translate the Bible into Latin. He originally translated it all from Greek, but he later altered his translation of the Old Testament against the Hebrew original. Store that fact for the conversation on the Deuterocanon.
Although the canon was established, the collection, known as The Bible, was not readily available until William Tyndale translated the scripture into English (1522-1523). However, books were expensive and the size of the Bible made common use cost prohibitive. If you wanted to know what the Bible said you had to go to church. Regular people relied almost solely on what the church of their region gave them access to.
What does all this mean to me?
For over 1,500 years most Christians had little to no access to the Bible. The tradition of God’s people, transferred by stories, customs and icons was the only means of knowing Christ. That means something.
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