I’m not a biblical scholar, and I don’t claim to be, but here are a few bits of information that I have pieced together that I find interesting. You can believe me or not believe me. I don’t care. If you’re interested, I encourage you to do your own digging. Scholars I would recommend are Bart Ehrman, Elaine Pagles, John Dominic Crossan and Luke Timothy Johnson. Ehrman is an agnostic. Pagles and Crossan are Christians…though not in the conventional sense and certainly not fundamentalist. Johnson is a former RC priest.
Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria is the first person we know of who identified as authoritative the 27 books of the New Testament that we have today and only those 27 books. He listed the books in his Easter letter of 367 AD. That’s over three centuries after the death of Jesus.
None of these books were written by Jesus, and none were written while he was alive. Many think that the four gospels in the New Testament were written by Jesus’ apostles or their associates, but in fact, all four were written anonymously. They were ascribed to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John at a later date.
Most biblical scholars believe that most of the letters of Paul were in fact written by Paul, but not all of them. However, Paul never claimed to have met the living Jesus, and Paul says very little about Jesus’ life or his teachings. Paul claimed to have had a vision of the resurrected Jesus, and Paul was more concerned with his death and resurrection.
Most biblical scholars believe that the gospels were written after Paul wrote his letters. Mark is first (about 70 AD), followed by Matthew and Luke (about 85 AD) and then John (about 90 AD). They were written in Greek. And they are four different stories which many Christians tend to conflate. Jesus’ apostles almost assuredly had nothing to do with the writing of these gospels. They were lower class peasants who spoke Aramaic, and more than likely, they were illiterate. They could have been dead by the time they were written, too. (What happened to the apostles is mysterious. There are a few accounts, but they were mostly written in the 2nd century, and many of the claims are rather fantastic.)
We have none of the original manuscripts. We have none that are believed to date from the 1st century. We only have a few from the 2nd century. Many of those are in fragments. The earliest is no bigger than a credit card. There are more copies that were written later on. These were all copied by hand. …copies of copies of copies. Later in the Middle Ages, there were trained scribes (RC monks working in monasteries) who were more careful about the process, but the earlier copies were slapdash. There are about 5,500 hand written Greek copies of the books of the New Testament. There are so many discrepancies in these copies that scholars can’t count them all. It is estimated that there are between 100,000 and 400,000 discrepancies. Most seem to be simple mistakes, dropped letters or missing pages, but some are suspicious, suggesting that the discrepancies were deliberate.
The earliest anthology that comes close to the New Testament that we have today is the Codex Sinaiticus. (The word “codex” simply means that it’s form is more like a modern book than a scroll.) It dates from the middle of the 4th century, about the same time that Athanasius wrote his Easter letter in which he listed the 27 books, but the Codex Sinaiticus doesn’t conform exactly to Athanasius’ canon. An anthology written in the 5th century called the Codex Alexandrinus still doesn’t conform with the canon we have today.
The canon that we have was formed over a number of centuries, and it contains the books that were generally agreed upon as authoritative by the self-described Orthodox Christians. But there were many other books written by early Christians that the Orthodox group rejected.
The German scholar Walter Bauer came to the conclusion that “Orthodox” Christianity is the version that developed in the early Roman Christian church and that they used their wealth and political influence to demonize and ultimately silence other “schools” of thought.
By all accounts, Christianity remained a tiny religion until the 4th century. And one could claim that Christianity was hardly a single religion because the different expressions were quite distinct from one another. The Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the 4th century. He, of course, was most familiar with the Roman “Orthodox” version, and he is the one who convened the first Ecumenical Council, the First Council of Nicaea. This is the council that gave us the Nicene Creed (later revised) which spelled out the most peculiar doctrine of the trinity. The reason for this was to declare the doctrine the correct, “orthodox” creed and to demand that all others be viewed as heretical. Christianity was declared the official religion of the Roman Empire by Theodosius I toward the end of the 4th century. It’s spread increased rapidly in the 4th century. By then, the apocalyptic movement started by an early 1st century Jewish man had become predominately Gentile and, sadly, often anti-Jewish, going so far as to claim Jewish scripture as their own and characterizing Jewish people as “Christ killers.” It’s ironic that it was the Romans who actually killed Jesus, and it was the Romans who played a significant role in spreading Christianity.
It’s also interesting that Jewish apocalypticism, which was a later development and does not date back to the time before Babylonian captivity, was probably a reaction to oppression from more powerful neighbors. Of course, the powerful neighbor oppressing the Jewish people in Jesus’ time were the Romans. So this is a religion that arouse in response to the treachery of the occupying Roman Empire, the Romans killed the founder, and later the Romans adopted it and facilitated the spread of the religion. It's almost like a historical practical joke.
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