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015 | Canon of Gospels | Understanding the Canon
566 Plays5 years ago
Now entering the New Testament, this episode discusses the questions surrounding reliability, timing, and authorship of the gospel accounts. Are the gospels our only way of knowing Jesus lived? What about secular testimony and connection to eyewitnesses? We discuss gnosticism and why certain “gospels” were excluded from the canon in this first of a two-part episode series on the NT canon!
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Transcript
Introduction to Faith and the Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Verity. I'm your host, Felicia Masonheimer, an author, speaker, and Bible teacher. This podcast will help you embrace the history and depth of the Christian faith, ask questions, seek answers, and devote yourself to becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ. You don't have to settle for watered-down Christian teaching. And if you're ready to go deeper, God is just as ready to take you there. This is Verity, where every woman is a theologian.
Transition to the New Testament Canon
00:00:30
Speaker
Welcome back to the Verity Podcast, friends. I'm delighted that you're here and that we get to talk about the New Testament. We have spent the last three episodes in the Old Testament, and now we get to move on to the canonization of the Gospels.
00:00:45
Speaker
Now you guys, like all the other episodes, there's so much information I wish I could share with you that I have to distill down into less than 30 minutes. And so this is a super high level view of how the Gospels came to be canonized and some of our questions about that process.
00:01:01
Speaker
But I am going to leave some of this information for when we do some episodes on errors in the Bible, as well as another episode on the Apocrypha and the Gnostic Gospels and why those aren't included in the standard Protestant Bible. So we will have whole episodes on those topics. Don't fear if you're like, wait, I wanted more information about that. I am planning on doing specific episodes on those topics as well.
Interconnectedness of Old and New Testaments
00:01:29
Speaker
So, the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
00:01:35
Speaker
We're all familiar with these as the primary accounts that we know who Jesus is through. These tell us how he lived, how he died, the miracles he worked. Everything that we base our faith on really starts and ends with the Gospels. Now, obviously, we have all the history in the Old Testament. And if you haven't listened to the previous three episodes, please go back and listen to those because you can't have the New Testament without the Old Testament.
00:02:05
Speaker
Just like you can't have the New Covenant without the Old Covenant, which is what Testament originally meant and the meaning of it was to portray covenant.
00:02:15
Speaker
We need to understand both to capture the power of what's happening in the Gospels. And then of course the epistles in the New Testament and the accounts like Acts and Revelation are building on the foundation that the Gospels laid and the Gospels are building on the foundation of the Old Testament. This is a two-part epic, a whole Bible two-part epic and we're just now entering the beginning of the second half of this epic.
Skepticism and Authenticity of the Gospels
00:02:44
Speaker
Okay, so we're going to start just by asking our really basic question, are the Gospels reliable testimony? And honestly, a lot of people today, liberal scholars, they don't think that it is.
00:03:01
Speaker
And I am going to read you a quote from Bart Ehrman, progressive scholar, who is a skeptic. And quite frankly, he doesn't think that the gospels are trustworthy. He says that they were written 35 to 65 years after Jesus' death, not by people who were eyewitnesses, but by people living later.
00:03:23
Speaker
After the days of Jesus, people started telling stories about him in order to convert others to the faith. Stories were changed with what would strike us today as reckless abandon. They were modified, amplified, and embellished, and sometimes they were made up. Another scholar compared the Gospels to playing telephone over the expanse of the Roman Empire, but with thousands of participants from different backgrounds and with different concerns.
00:03:48
Speaker
And so basically what they're saying is, no, the gospels aren't reliable testimony. And this is the exact message that I received when I took my progressive Christianity class last summer. So for those who don't know, I enrolled in a local progressive Christianity class at a United Methodist camp. This is a very liberal United Methodist camp, though not all Methodists hold to that kind of progressivism.
00:04:16
Speaker
And in taking this eight-week course, these were the exact kind of things that we were being taught. We were being taught that this information in the Bible isn't reliable. It's been changed and edited. They were also saying things like, well, you know, Jesus never wanted to create a church. He never wanted for people to create a new religion.
00:04:38
Speaker
And while there is some truth in that, in that his goal was for the Jews and the Graphedan Gentiles to know him as Messiah, so Messianic Judaism. But as the conflict between Christians and Jews grew in the first and second centuries, there's a lot of persecution by the Jews toward the Christians, and then later on from the Christians toward the Jews
00:05:07
Speaker
that connection between the Jews and the Christians quickly dissolved and Christianity became its own, if you will, religion, even though Jesus' intention, and I believe what the intention still today is, was for both Jews and Gentiles to follow the Messiah.
00:05:26
Speaker
So when you read these skeptic scholars talking about how these documents aren't trustworthy, that can cast doubt in the mind of any Christian. But as I say often, we shouldn't be running away from our doubts and our questions. We should be pressing into our questions. We should be pursuing answers about
00:05:50
Speaker
What were the Gospels written for? Who are they written by? How do we know that we can trust them? Which is the whole purpose of this series as a whole. So a little bit about the Gospels, and we're going to build on this foundation a little later in this episode, but
00:06:05
Speaker
Most of them are dated between 60 and 100 AD or a common era, and they aren't the earliest documents that we have.
Historical Context and Dating of the Gospels
00:06:15
Speaker
Some of the earlier New Testament documents are actually Galatians and Thessalonians. So what Paul was writing to these churches would have preceded the actual Gospels that we have in hand, and we'll talk about why that is in a minute.
00:06:29
Speaker
Now, when we're looking at this dating and we're going, okay, this is quite a bit after Jesus lived, you know, that seems like a while to wait to write about his life if he's such a significant character. I mean, how long did it take to write a biography of certain presidents, you know, 10 years, 15 years? Why aren't we keeping a biography of Jesus?
00:06:51
Speaker
Well, it's a valid question, one that we really should dive into. But in order to understand it and really get our answer, we have to understand the culture in which the Gospels were written, in which Jesus lived. Nathan Fanokio has a great term for a problem I see, especially among progressives, but conservatives have this problem too.
00:07:12
Speaker
It's called chronological snobbery. It's the idea that we are so modern, we have everything figured out, we know better, and our westernized, quite frankly, Greek way of understanding the world is the only way. It's the only way that things can be done. And so we have no respect or understanding for how these ancient cultures operated.
00:07:35
Speaker
In our age of technology, we assume that something can't be circulated reliably unless it's written down. But how's that working for us, you guys? Fake news? Clearly you can write things down that aren't true, too. And so this chronological slash cultural snobbery that we have
00:07:54
Speaker
is because of our Greek influence and it ignores and actually it's not just Greek influence because the Greeks had an oral tradition and oral culture too. It's really more about us living in a modern era but especially in Middle Eastern culture, oral tradition was normal.
00:08:12
Speaker
And a lot of people were not literate. I believe it's as much as half of the population in the Roman Empire was not literate at the time of Jesus and the apostles. Oral tradition was the norm. They were accustomed to passing things down orally. And so Timothy Paul Jones writes that one orator, one Roman orator, actually said, for my own part, I think we should not write anything, which we do not intend to commit to memory.
00:08:43
Speaker
So how do we know that these oral stories about Jesus, the documentation of what he did, how do we know that that's accurate since it was written down later? How do we know that the oral tradition that got it to that point is reliable? Well, there are three.
00:08:59
Speaker
Guards, if you will, for oral tradition. The first is community accountability. These stories, these accounts, they weren't shared just in private. They weren't shared to just one person. They were shared in communities. And this would have been the norm back in the Old Testament in the transmission of Torah. Note that Moses, Joshua, Ezra, they are reading the law back to the people, but they were also told, people were told,
00:09:28
Speaker
talk about the law when you sit down and when you stand up and when you go out and when you come in, teach your children. That was an oral tradition. It was passing down the truth of God. And I think a great visual example of this is actually in the movie, The Nativity. So this movie is a live depiction of the Christmas story. It's one of my favorite movies that came out probably 10 or 15 years ago.
00:09:54
Speaker
And there's a scene in that movie where they're telling the story of, I think it's when God and Moses meet on the mountain.
00:10:05
Speaker
It might have been Elijah, but I think it was Moses. And she's telling them the children this story and saying, you know, there was a great wind and it shook the mountain and all the rocks fell down, but the Lord was not in the wind and they all said it together. And then they continue telling the story.
00:10:27
Speaker
This is an example of the kind of oral tradition that would have been going on. And if you study Jewish culture at all and understand how much of not only Torah, but of the Mishnah and of Talmud that are being committed to memory, you would understand that this was normal. This was normal. It was achievable. It was expected. It was
00:10:52
Speaker
community accountability. And so on that note of expectation, the second guard against untruth was the expectation of memorization. People were expected to memorize these things. And because of the accountability of community, you couldn't just change the story. Have you ever tried to tell
00:11:12
Speaker
a plot line from a movie. You've got three friends standing together. You're telling one about the movie. And if you veer off the actual plot of the movie and just threw in some stuff that wasn't in the movie but your friend had seen it, they'd say, no, no, no, that's not how it goes. This is what happened in the movie.
00:11:29
Speaker
That accountability is what was happening here in the community of faith. And the expectation of memorization was also ingrained in them as people.
Eyewitnesses and Oral Traditions
00:11:39
Speaker
And then the third guard here was the connection to eyewitnesses. The eyewitnesses were still alive while the truths about Jesus, life and resurrection and miracles were being circulated.
00:11:52
Speaker
It's ridiculous to think that people would be falsifying accounts of Jesus' life and actions while eyewitnesses were alive. 500 people witnessed his resurrection, and they were still alive when Paul was writing. See 1 Corinthians 15.6. This idea that we can't trust the Gospels because they weren't written down fast enough really holds no water.
00:12:17
Speaker
Now, as for the existence of Jesus at all, so let's say we're just kind of starting from scratch here and people are like, well, I don't even know if he really was there because all we have are these gospels and, you know, how can I trust the gospels because they're clearly biased towards Jesus. We actually have a couple of interesting texts from secular writers on this.
00:12:38
Speaker
One of them being Tacitus, who's a Roman historian. He wrote this in his Annals. This was written between 115 and 117 AD. So we're still less than a hundred years from Jesus' death.
00:12:52
Speaker
And he says, therefore to scotch the rumor, Nero substituted as culprits and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius by sentence of the procurator Pontus Pilatus. And the pernicious superstition was checked for a moment, only to break out once more, not merely in Judea,
00:13:20
Speaker
home of the disease, he means the religion, but in the capital itself, where all things horrible or shameful in the world collect and find a vogue. So Tacitus had no respect for Christians as you might have gathered from this particular quote, but it does tell us that he believed that Jesus was a living real person.
00:13:40
Speaker
He happened in history. He existed in history. He just happens to think that Christians are ridiculous clowns and you know has no respect for them. So let's move on to a Jewish historian. We talked about Josephus in our last episode.
00:13:56
Speaker
And Josephus is making a return here as we talk about Jesus' life. Now, Josephus was not a follower of Jesus, he was a Jew, so he was not a Messianic Jew, did not believe that Jesus was the Messiah. And he says, about this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man, for he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks.
00:14:25
Speaker
He was the Messiah. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing amongst us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him. On the third day he appeared to them restored to life, for the prophets of God had prophesied these and countless other marvelous things about him, and the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.
00:14:49
Speaker
Now, some scholars have questioned the authenticity of this passage, particularly his claim that Jesus was the Messiah because of other things that Josephus has written that make us think he didn't actually believe that Jesus was the Messiah. But it can be made, and Paul Wegner says, a case can be made, however, based on the evidence of Josephus' diction that we have here a core of authentic Josephan statements that may have been reworked by early Christians.
00:15:16
Speaker
So while the nature of Josephus' original statement is conjectural, Bruce argues that it is plausible that Josephus bears witness to Jesus' date, his being the brother of James the Just, his reputation as the miracle worker, and his crucifixion under Pilate as a consequence of charges brought against him by the Jewish rulers. So what they're essentially saying here is,
00:15:37
Speaker
The idea that Josephus believed that Jesus was a messiah is really conjecture. It's possibly an edit, probably an edit that was added, but that he existed and lived is not. And we have this confirmed by the completely secular anti-Christian Tacitus. Okay, so we know not just from the Gospels, but from secular writers that Jesus was a historical
Criteria for Gospel Canonization
00:16:02
Speaker
person. And that's just two examples. There are definitely more.
00:16:05
Speaker
I think all of us have been at a women's conference where we were told, you are a beautiful daughter of the Most High King. And it's true. But it's not the whole truth. The beauty of being God's daughter has some backstory and it's left out in a lot of messages preached to women.
00:16:24
Speaker
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00:16:41
Speaker
I'm going to talk about pursuing the truths of who God is and who we are in relationship to Him, how to study scripture, how legalism, shallow theology, and false teaching keep us from living boldly as a woman of the Word. I'm so excited to put this book in your hands. You can grab your copy on Amazon or for more information, head to my website FeliciaMasonheimer.com and click the book tab.
00:17:07
Speaker
Now, as we move into talking about how the Gospels were actually canonized, I want to stop and do a quick review on the criteria for canonosity. So three questions that we need to ask when we're thinking about if a book was canon. These are the questions that would have been asked by the early church. Is the book apostolic in origin? Is it connected to eyewitnesses, people who were walking alongside Jesus, who were disciples?
00:17:36
Speaker
Two, is the book used and recognized by the churches? So were the churches actually discussing these books, using them as authoritative, affirming them as scripture? There are certain books that they were not affirming as scripture, which we will talk about when we talk about the Gnostic Gospels.
00:17:53
Speaker
And did the book teach sound doctrine? This is huge. It had to match up with the truths that were affirmed by the church and by the Old Testament. So for example, when we chat about Gnosticism, we'll talk about how Gnosticism denied, sneakily, but still denied, the deity and humanity of Jesus, both being elements in who he was as the God-Man.
00:18:19
Speaker
In the Old Testament and in Hebrew, belief, the physical body was very important. It wasn't like physical bad and spirit good like Gnosticism teaches. The physical body was a component. It was a very important part of being a spiritual person and that the way you lived physically was a reflection of your spiritual values.
00:18:40
Speaker
That's not what Gnosticism teaches. And so the Hebrew understanding of the body as good and as part of God's design, something being redeemed and used by him, something to be submitted to the Spirit, is fundamental to Christianity. And it's Gnosticism that was twisting it. And so a Gnostic gospel would downplay Jesus' humanity,
00:19:02
Speaker
and elevate his spirituality. And so when you have something like that circulating in the church, that's unsound doctrine, it's heresy, and it had to be cast out, kept away from the churches.
00:19:15
Speaker
Now, as we look at these Gospels, how do we know that the early church was seeing the old and new accounts both as authoritative?
Authority of the Testaments in Early Church
00:19:26
Speaker
Because you will hear some people say, well, the early church had the Old Testament as their scriptures and the New Testament wasn't their scriptures.
00:19:32
Speaker
Well, the Old Testament definitely was being used, and originally Christians were participating in synagogues and gathering with the Jews until that split grew too wide for them to be at peace with one another. So they started to gather separately in their homes.
00:19:48
Speaker
But at that point, it isn't like the Christian said, you know, we're done with the Old Testament. We don't care about that. No, they still kept those truths as foundational to their understanding of the gospel because there is no Messiah without the Old Testament, without the Old Covenant.
00:20:04
Speaker
But the New Testament, these new accounts that were being passed down from the eyewitnesses and the followers of the Messiah, were also deemed authoritative. And one sign of this is in 1 Timothy 5.18, in which Paul quotes both Deuteronomy 25.4 and Luke 10.7.
00:20:25
Speaker
And so it's interesting to see how these truths are both being taken. They're taking the Old Testament, they're taking these eyewitness accounts and truths and putting them together and gathering what is going to one day become the Bible. Now, in 1 Corinthians 15, 4 through 7, this is the last thing I want to mention about the canon before we move into a little bit more of a broad look at the Gospels.
00:20:52
Speaker
1 Corinthians 15, 4-7 sums up an oral gospel that was previously received. So we talked about the oral tradition, how important that is to the culture, how normal that would have been, and how the churches would have received an oral gospel.
00:21:10
Speaker
You know, we all know people, even today, who their first exposure to Christ is via the radio. They get saved over the radio, the truth of the gospel through someone's oral presentation of it, right? And then we guide them and we disciple them in the truth of the Word. That's a great example of what was really happening here and the transmission of a consistent gospel.
00:21:33
Speaker
If we heard someone on the radio preaching a gospel contrary to the one we know to be true, we could say, hey, that's not right. We know that's not right. We know what the gospel is. Even without the Word of God, if you've been taught the truth of what the gospel is, you can identify it when it's wrong.
00:21:50
Speaker
And so this oral gospel was received by the church according to 1 Corinthians 15 4 through 7 and I'm going to read you something from Timothy Paul Jones where he made a really interesting case for us.
00:22:04
Speaker
about this particular text. He says in his testimony, so first we're going to read what Paul said. Paul writes, Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures. He was buried. He was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures. And he appeared to Cephas, who was Peter, then to the 12th. Then he appeared to more than 500 brothers at one time. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.
00:22:32
Speaker
So when did Paul first learn this oral history? Most likely, Jones says, from Simon Peter, soon after Paul trusted Jesus, so Galatians 1.18. And when did Paul teach this testimony to the Corinthians? That would have happened four or five years before he recorded these words in his first letter to the Corinthian church. Paul's proclamation of the Gospel in Corinth happened in the year 50, and he wrote 1 Corinthians from the city of Ephesus around A.D. 54.
00:23:02
Speaker
And if you want to look at references for this, this would be Acts 18 through 19 and 1 Corinthians 16. So let's think about what this text says about these oral histories. If Paul recorded the testimony in a letter to the Corinthians four years after he first taught them the oral history, if he altered this between the time he first taught the Corinthians and the moment he wrote his letter, the members of the Corinthian church would notice the changes.
00:23:31
Speaker
So Paul didn't change his message in the least. The testimony he recorded in his first letter to the Corinthians was identical to the testimony he had taught them years before. The same message that Paul repeated in city after city as he went across the Roman Empire. This is all according to Timothy Paul Jones.
00:23:51
Speaker
So as people are claiming, you know, the teachings and testimonies are changed and there's no measure of what's okay, no measure that these things were, you know, held accountable, this cannot be true. It can't. It can't hold water when we look at how many people receiving the gospel, how many people were hearing this truth and what was happening in the spread of Christianity. And not just, it's not,
00:24:19
Speaker
The funny thing to me is, when you make an argument like that, you have to then look at the legacy of Christianity over time. We have 300 years later, when we have the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed, they're affirming the exact same things that Paul is affirming here in 1 Corinthians 15. How do you expect that kind of information to pass down all that time and remain consistent?
00:24:46
Speaker
And if we're going to talk 300 years, let's talk 2,000 years. Now we have people affirming these same truths 2,000 years later. And yes, we have a Bible that's now writing these things down, but that Bible came from people who were eyewitnesses to a historical event.
00:25:05
Speaker
Okay, so eyewitness is important. Remember a couple episodes back, we talked about Gary Habermas, the resurrection scholar, who I love, wonderful apologist. He talks about how eyewitnesses are incredibly important to any kind of historical documentation. So same goes for the gospels and all four gospels were written during the lifetimes of eyewitnesses.
00:25:29
Speaker
Now, one of the church fathers, this is in the second century, Irenaeus had something to say about the gospels, and this is his perspective on them. He said, Matthew published his gospel among the Hebrews in their own language while Peter and Paul were preaching and founding the church in Rome. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and translator of Peter, passed down to us in writing those things that Peter preached.
00:25:54
Speaker
Luke, the attendant of Paul, recorded a book in the Gospel that Paul declared. Afterward, John, the disciple of the Lord, who leaned against the Lord's side, published his Gospel while living in Ephesus in Asia. Y'all, this is second-century stuff here, okay? How does it benefit Aranias to have these kinds of details?
00:26:12
Speaker
Now, there are some theories about the Gospels and some debate about what was written first. For instance, Matthew actually incorporates much of Mark, but Irenaeus is saying that Matthew came first and it was written in the language of the Hebrews or Aramaic. So it's very possible that there are actually two versions of Matthew, one that was in Aramaic and one that was written in Greek, which are our only existing copies, and the Greek version of Matthew then contained Mark's witness, so it came later.
00:26:43
Speaker
So when an apostolic text was written, here's what happened. The church counted it as authoritative.
00:26:52
Speaker
This is an eyewitness account of who Jesus was. And proofs of this are in 2 Thessalonians 2.15 and 3.14 as well as 2 Peter 3.15 through 16 which we talked about in a couple episodes how Peter actually affirmed Paul's writings as scripture and held them on the level of the Old Testament. Texts written after the eyewitnesses died were not considered authoritative because no actual witnesses were available.
00:27:20
Speaker
So one of the questions that comes up again from skeptics from our progressive, extremely progressive camps is, well, wasn't the canon just about political power in the church and preserving the church's power? That makes no sense as early as these things were being written.
00:27:37
Speaker
The issues of power came later in church history. So as we move towards the legalization of Christianity after the Diocletian persecution, after the dispersion of the Christians across the nations, you see the legalization of Christianity and that's when things started to get muddy as far as power was concerned because Christians went from being persecuted to suddenly being celebrated and bishops became political figures.
00:28:05
Speaker
So, sure, at that point, there was a political element there. But the canon was already established by this point. What was authoritative for the Gospel was already in use. We have a list in Athanasius's festive letter of 367 AD that gives us almost an exact replica of today's Protestant Bible in the letter, saying these are the books that we're using. And so,
00:28:34
Speaker
The idea that the canon was just made up to preserve political power also doesn't hold water because it preceded the political rise of Christianity. But how do we know for sure that the canon wasn't about politics, it was about preserving apostolic authority and preserving those testimonies? How do we know? Well, we know by what they excluded from the canon.
Exclusion of the Gnostic Gospels
00:29:04
Speaker
So now we're gonna do a brief, brief discussion of the Gnostic Gospels as we wrap this up. The Gnostic Gospels are things like the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Peter. A lot of them were actually found in a town that is in northern Egypt. And this particular town is called Nag Hammadi.
00:29:24
Speaker
had quite a few of these quote-unquote Gospels. So the Gospel of Philip is another one, the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of the Egyptians, these were found in about 1945. Now, what's Gnosticism? What's a Gnostic Gospel?
00:29:39
Speaker
Gnosticism is a heresy, so it does not line up with true Christian teaching, containing a radical cosmic dualism. The created world is evil and is separate from the spirit world. We must escape the world by possession of a divine spark. In this divine spark the same word is used for this,
00:30:01
Speaker
pneuma as for spirit in the new testament and the way you escape the world by the spirit is through this enlightenment or special knowledge which is called gnosis does this sound at all familiar to you it should because forms of it are parts of the new age movement but other forms of it have actually influenced christianity today you will find a pseudo gnostic christian teaching
00:30:31
Speaker
especially in certain circles of conservative Christianity. And it's this idea that the self is evil because of the fallen nature of man. The body is evil. Emotions are evil. And we must reject all of those things and embrace this
00:30:55
Speaker
Holy Spirit. But that's not what the Bible teaches. We know we are fallen and affected by sin, that we need a Redeemer. But in Christ, God's Spirit is not asking us to separate from the physical body, but for the physical body to come into submission to the Spirit, and for the whole person to be redeemed, holistic, serving the Lord. That is consistent with what the Old Testament teaches.
00:31:22
Speaker
And so Gnosticism could not help but come up with this wild teaching about Jesus not being fully human because to be fully human would be to be evil, right? Because that's their understanding.
00:31:39
Speaker
So Jesus wasn't really, you know, coming in a physical body because the physical is bad. So he was mostly spirit. But we know that the fundamentals of Christianity teach that Jesus was both fully God and fully man. And to redeem man, he had to be both. That's the power of Christianity. So Gnosticism was a heresy that completely undermined this necessary doctrine.
00:32:06
Speaker
Another one is Docetism. This is that matter. It's very similar. Matter is inherently evil. So Jesus only seemed to be a man, but he actually wasn't. And then another later error that came up was Marcionism. Marcion was a rebellious pastor's kid, essentially, who did not like the Old Testament God. So he edited it and took out most of the Old Testament, edited the New Testament to be more palatable.
00:32:36
Speaker
All of these heresies and these changes to the understood gospel motivated the church to start writing down these texts, making sure, hey, you know what? These texts are canon and these texts are not. Because these false teachings were gathering followers and they were a huge problem in the early church for many, many years. Arianism is another one.
00:33:01
Speaker
And so you have the early church fathers, you'll see them going to war with their pens, if you will, to defend the truth of the gospel against false teaching. And narrowing down what books were authoritative and trustworthy was a big part of that.
00:33:17
Speaker
They excluded the Gnostic Gospels. They did not include these in their lists of authoritative books. These were not Gospels that would have been circulated in the Church, especially not in the first century, because many of them weren't written before 140 AD. So by knowing what the Church was excluding from the canon, we can understand that what they were including was something considered trustworthy, connected to eyewitnesses, connected to the Apostles, and rooted in history.
Conclusion and Social Media Connection
00:33:47
Speaker
That's all for today, you guys. I know it's a lot and I love bringing this to you. So we're going to be moving on next time to the canon of the epistles, talking about Paul's letters, James and Peter, and how those were decided whether or not to be canon. But we will be revisiting the Gnostic Gospels in the episode on the Apocrypha and why those books were not considered inclusion into the Protestant Bible.
00:34:16
Speaker
Thank you for joining us for today's episode of Verity. You can connect with fellow listeners by following me on Instagram at Felicia Masonheimer or on our Facebook page by the same name. Also visit FeliciaMasonheimer.com for links to each episode and the show notes.