Against Shawn McCraney, Problems Surround the "Infallible" Word

: Some problems posed by the infallible word

An inconsistent history
The idea of the perfect, infallible, inerrant Bible that stands alone on its own accord without modern revelation or apostolic authority is a creation of modern necessity. Pastors jousting for congregations against pastors from opposing doctrines had to be able to claim some authority for their followers to cling to. There were no Apostles left, had not been for centuries and there was no historical claim to any Priesthood outside of the Papacy. Seeing how the protestant churches had all split from the Catholic Church, claiming it to be heretical, any attempt to claim authority from the Catholics was out of the question, so the Bible had to be their authority, despite the fact that the Bible never claims to be.

It is interesting to note that nowhere in the New Testament does Christ or any of his Apostles suggest any need for a uniquely Christian cannon. Rather all the Apostles’ needed to teach the gospel was embodied in the books they already possessed. Harnack points out: “we notice that at first neither with St Paul nor the others is there any demand for a new document. Why not? Just because they thought that they possessed it already in the Old Testament, in those prophetical passages to which they gave the widest compass. By introducing into the ancient Scriptures themselves the distinction, indeed the opposition, between the Law and the Gospel, by finding this distinction in all those passages which speak of something “new,” of a new Covenant, of a First and a Second and the like, of an extension of the Covenant to the Gentiles, they felt that they already possessed the written document of the new message of salvation, the authority they required”[1].

Some of the earliest Christian apologists make no reference to a Bible in their defense of the Christian faith. For example: “The most important apologetic work of the primitive Church, Tertullian’s Apologeticum, gives in reference to Christ only an historical sketch, which would necessarily have been understood by heathen to proceed from official “Acts of Pilate,” while the Gospels are as good as ignored.”[2] Never was the argument made by the earliest saints that God had delivered unto them a new Bible to stand as the foundation of the church, in fact all of their defenses of the faith and correction of the saints use the Old Testament as that foundation. Harnack notes that “the Old Testament would have perished in the Church as it did among the Gnostics, if the book had not been so indispensable for Apologetics. So long as the truth of religions was measured by their age the apologist simply could not do without the Old Testament”[3]

Justin Martyr, in his apologies also never makes any mention of a perfect, all governing Bible. Justin only references “the memoirs of the Apostles”. Again quoting Harnack: Justin, indeed, with a certain Christian assurance, speaks not only of “our doctrines,” but also of “our writings” (Apol., i. 28) side by side with the Old Testament, but as yet he knows nothing of Scriptures of the ‘new Covenant’… But he knew—and this is the second point—of a practice, in use in the Churches, of reading aloud in public worship the “memorabilia of the Apostles” (the Gospels) or the “writings of the prophets.”[4]
It is entirely possible that Justin had the gospels but did not know them as such as the Gospels are themselves anonymous. The author or Mathew does not identify himself, nor does Luke or Mark, says Harnack: “We must conclude that these titles…have been added at a later date. Thus the original titles have been lost or rather have been deleted…Yet we can trace these titles back to the middle of the second century. This fact and the similarity
of their form make it certain that they proceed from the person who first brought together these four books and bound them in one. Consequently this did not happen (as in the case of the Acts) when the twofold New Testament took form, but at an earlier date.”[5] It is important also to know that if the names of Gospels had been set before AD 200 Mark and Luke likely would have been attributed to actual apostles like Peter and Paul.[6]

The memoirs of the Apostles were not the only texts read to the early Christians as official teachings. We know for sure that the epistle of First Clement was received as official teaching by the Christians in Corinth and “it was then distributed to other parts of the Christian where it was read with favor”[7]

Crisis of the Faith
It is also important for any Christian to understand that the Bible, more or less, was born out of crisis. Long before the Bible as we know it existed the Marcionites and the Gnostics possessed the first uniquely Christian cannons. Both Christian groups and their cannons were condemned by what became the Orthodox Church. The Marcionites, because they rejected the connection of Christ to the Jews had to create their own official body of scripture. To the Marcionites their cannon held all authority in its appeal to the Gospel of Luke (critically edited by Marcion) and the Pauline epistles.

Why is this important to modern Christians who possess a modern Bible? It is important because “The idea and the realization of a new, sacred, specifically Christian collection of writings, in addition to the Gospels, appears first among the Marcionites and the Gnostics…”[8] The rise of “heretic” Christian churches more or less forced the “orthodox” church into a position of having to create a standard cannon that could be utilized to refute competing congregations. The Bible we find in by 367 ad possess books that influenced both the Gentile anti-Old Testament Marcionites and the Jewish Christian Ebonites. It is a compromise that is capable of refuting the abuse of scripture by these and other groups like the Gnostics. In all “as an Apostolic-Catholic compilation it was constructed as a means of defense rather than of attack.”[9]

The Battle over St. Paul.
Why do the works of Paul make up so much of the new cannon? Is it because the works of Paul made up the only available corpus of works in the hands of the primitive church? Are the works of Paul more important in the eyes of the Lord than the collected writings of other Apostles? Or was it something else? We already know that the gentile Christians all gravitated to Paul as their authority. It is also known that Old Testament was difficult for the once pagan gentiles to sympathize with; so much so that the gentile heretics of the time rejected the Old Testament.[10] The gentiles loved Paul and the notion that salvation as a thing of grace, they dismissed the works of the Law as espoused by Mathew and James. Furthermore: “Marcion (about 140) regarded Paul as the only true apostle, and the older apostles as Jewish perverters of Christianity” [11]

Marcion was a second-century evangelist who with “Salvation by Grace alone” Christianity garnered to himself large congregations in the Mediterranean and Asia Minor.[12] Marcion’s reverence for Paul was second only to Christ. According to Marcion; Paul was seated on the right hand of the Christ and the Christ on the right hand of the Father. To Paul, Christ had revealed that the Law was unnecessary for salvation, salvation was to be found in Christ alone, thus Christians must abandoned the Law entirely and forget the Old Testament.

Did the gentile Heretics reverence for Paul effect the compilation of the New Testament? Of course it did for why should the orthodox leaders: “lag behind the heretics in reverence for St Paul?”[13] We must not think for one minute that the Orthodox Christians were going to let the heretics lay claim to the teachings of Paul. We know that distinctly Marcionite readings were adopted into the orthodox Pauline texts and that the orthodox churches accepted heretic prefaces to the Pauline epistles. These heretic corruptions of the New Testament were found in the codex Fuldensis[14] and in manuscripts of later centuries, all Marcionite. The consistent interpolation of heretic readings in the orthodox cannon: “…shows the influence of the Marcionite collection of the epistles upon the formation of the ecclesiastical collection.”[15]

The four-fold cannon and its fallout

The creation of the official Christian cannon did not solve the Christological problems of the early church. The Bible was, in reality, not the unifying force modern pastors present it to be. Of the creation of the new cannon Harnack states: “the Church was in a sense forced to take this step, and the step was not altogether to her advantage. We see this indeed quite clearly in Tertullian’s treatise, De Præscript. Heret. The existence of the New Testament in itself and as a collection of equally authoritative books presented great difficulties to him in his polemic; for how could one prevent false interpretations, and how much there was in these writings that, taken literally, was actually questionable and had now to be justified by laborious interpretation (so with Irenaeus, but the embarrassment is specially noticeable in Tertullian)”.[16] With the cannon in place there was no way to prevent various false interpretations. The church now not only had to refute the heresies of other Christians but it also needed to protect its own cannon from corruption. All in all the church had to over come the usages and variations that would arise amongst their own congregations. According to Harnack: “In the second century there was a fair amount of correction of the text of the Gospels even in orthodox communities.”[17]

The problems of various interpretations had to be resolved. For unless the proponents of the Orthodox discipline could put forth a uniform understanding and application of their new cannon the church would continue its fractured existence, says Ehrman: “…people realized that having sacred text is not the same things as interperatating it. In order to reach unanimity about what text meant, there needed to be certain textual constraints imposed from the outside, rules for reading, accepted practices of interpretation, modes of legitimating and the like. The mater became increasingly important as different teachers from different theological persuasions interpreted the same text in different ways and then appealed to these texts to support their points of view”[18]

The creation of the four gospels themselves in many ways polarized the primitive church. Many Orthodox Church leaders rejected the Four-fold Gospels and instead sought out one uniform testimony. There is evidence to show that the complier of the gospels regarded the compilation to be a provisional thing; “if this history was meant to be read regularly at public worship, alternative readings from other accounts must have led to serious misunderstandings. Neither is it true that no one took offence at the plurality of Gospels or felt the differences in their accounts…constant attempts were made in the Church to force the troublesome plurality into an artificial unity”[19]

There were leaders who combined the four Gospels into one authority’s gospel. Both Julius Africanus and Tatians harmonies were accepted as simply “the Gospel”. Tatians harmony was wildly popular among the eastern churches and was written to replace “the Gospels of the separated” or the four-fold Gospels. Tatians harmony had a huge impact on the churches that fell outside the Romanized Christian circles of Europe: “In these last days, von Soden, senior, and others with him, have asserted that this work must also have played an important rôle in the very early history of the Greco-Latin Churches, seeing that it has had an extraordinary influence upon the text of the Gospels in these Churches; but one can only say that this hypothesis still lacks confirmation. Still so much must be allowed—this book was not intended to be confined only to the Syrian Churches, it was meant to serve the Church as a whole, and in this intention it was not altogether unsuccessful. Again, we hear from St Jerome that Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch, also composed a Gospel Harmony (about A.D. 180). Unfortunately we have no knowledge of its details; still we may conclude that Theophilus, like Tatian, felt that the arrangement of four Gospels was something that was only provisional.”[20]

At no point during this period is the idea of the infallibility of the New Testament espoused by Christian leaders. If the Bible had been seen then as modern evangelicals see it now Julius Africanus, Tatian and Theophilus of Antioch would have been seen and condemned as heretics for altering the text of the “infallible word”, such was not the case.

Lastly our view of the Bible differs starkly from the view of those Christians who lived as the Bible evolved. In the eyes of those who possessed the new faith, distinct from the Pagans and the Jews, the books of the old covenant became second tier after the life of Christ says Harnack: “Naturally the Old Testament… while its essential equality with the new Canon, as shown in prophecy and through the employment of allegorical interpretation, was recognized, yet from a second point of view it was regarded as inferior. This is at once clear from the works of Irenaeus the first ecclesiastical author that operates with the two Canons. The Old Testament as “legisdatio in servitutem” has become inferior since the appearance of Christ.”[21]

Bible Content Variations
The years preceding the Romanization of the Church many of the Christian churches scattered across the map compiled their own collections of scripture.[22] Just what constituted scripture was debated from group to group; there was no unity of doctrine in the post apostolic period. Tellingly in an ancient letter ascribed to Peter, he writes to James stating: “some from among the Gentiles have rejected my legal preaching, attaching themselves to certain lawless and trifling preaching of the man who is my enemy. And these things some have attempted while I am still alive, to transform my words by certain various interpretations, in order to the dissolution of the law; as though I also myself were of such a mind, but did not freely proclaim it, which God forbid!... But these men, professing, I know not how, to know my mind, undertake to explain my
words, which they have heard of me, more intelligently than I who spoke them, telling their catechumens that this is my meaning, which indeed I never thought of. But if, while I am still alive, they dare thus to misrepresent me, how much more will those who shall come after me dare to do so!”[23] Granted the letter is Jewish-Christian Pseudepigrapha attributed to Peter, still it shows just how aware the various Christian sects were of the perversions of doctrine from community to community and the need to follow correct doctrine.

In the post apostolic period each of the various Christian churches recognized the need to possess correct doctrine as a means of obtaining salvation. Each felt the need to be right and therefore were all in conflict with each other. For example the Jewish Christian Ebonites felt the need to keep Jewish law in tandem with the teachings of Christ. A view that seems to be born out by the Mathew chapter 5: 17-20 with the fact that Christ exhorts his followers not only to keep the Law but to exceed the zealous Pharisees in their observance. In no place does the Lord condemn the keeping of the law, rather the Jewish leaders and taken to task for not keeping it properly. Another man is told to keep the law if he is to obtain eternal life. (Mat 19:17)

On the contrary the Marcionites followed the Paul and felt that the need to keep the works of Jewish law was superfluous. The Marcionites adhering to Romans chapter 3 and Galatians 2:16 taught that man was not justified by the Law of Moses but righteous faith in Christ. While the Marcionites discounted the Old Testament and held that the wrathful God of the Jews was in no way compatible with the love filled Jesus of the Christians, they are in some manner comparable with our modern evangelicals who discount the works of the Law and preach salvation by grace alone. The call goes out “look to Jesus, look to his word and love, salvation comes by the saving blood of Jesus if you will only accept him as your redeemer”, but which Jesus? Is it the Jesus who proclaims the importance of keeping the law “jot and tittle” of Mathew or the salvation by grace Jesus of Paul. This situation may seem trivial to us, yet the fact remains that neither of these Christian post apostolic groups had a New Testament and both had very different views of the role and mission of Jesus Christ. The followers of Marcion had a cannon of scripture and the Ebonites had their own, both were Christian, neither had the Bible.

The Jewish Christians believed in keeping the Law with the teachings of Christ, the Marcionites believed that Jesus had come to save people from the Law, that the Jewish God of the Old Testament was different from the Jesus of Paul. In a very real sense in the eyes of the righteous Marcionites the Jewish Christians worshipped a “different Jesus”.

The doctrine of Bible infallibility was debunked before evangelical Christianity ran with it and long before the LDS claims that scribes had altered the text of the Bible over centuries. The idea of an infallible, inerrant all governing Bible was unheard of in early Christianity. For example Ignatius writes concerning doctrinal jousts: “…I have heard from some who say: unless I find it written in the originals, I will not believe it to be written in the Gospel. And when I said, it is written; they answered what lay before them in their corrupted copies.”[24] Here Ignatius admits that even a century before the standardized cannon existed there were corruptions of scripture. The doctrinal texts have never been infallible.

The renowned German theologian Adolf Von Harnack notes that: “Indeed, in the first century, even among the Jews, the Old Testament was not yet quite rigidly closed, its third division was still in a somewhat fluid condition, and, above all, in the Dispersion, among the Greek-speaking Jews, side by side with the Scriptures of the Palestinian collection, there were in circulation numerous sacred writings in Greek of which a considerable number became gradually and quite naturally attached to the authoritative collection”[25] Elsewhere Harnack points out that still by 200 AD: …”attempts were even made to smuggle new chapters and verses into some of the ancient books of the Canon”[26].
Harnack notes that it was church leaders like Tertullian who moved to include the book of I Enoch in the Old Testament Cannon[27]

The Apocalypses of the New Testament: when Tradition trumps Prophecy

In the earliest years of the cannon the Book of Revelation was not the lone prophetic vision of the Christians. We know of two other texts which Christians utilized and recognized as prophetic vision that were included in the cannon. These texts are the Shepherd of Hermas and the Apocalypse of Peter. These two texts are distinguished from Revelation in that their focus is on the ethics required for entry into the kingdom described by John. [28] It is also important to know that both Hermas and Peter are easier to read than Johns revelation. The Sheppard of Hermas includes explanations for all of the imagery of the vision, so to an extent does Peter in explain the torments of the wicked. Both of these texts are vivid in their description of wickedness and their associated punishments, this is especially true of Peter.

Peter, as far as is known is the first Christian text to document and detail the journey through hell and served, in part, as inspiration for Dante’s Divine Comedy[29]. It is possible that the explicitness of these texts caused them to fall out of favor with an increasingly Romanized church. Both Peter and Hermas condemn many of the things that were seen as status quo among the gentile nations. John on the other hand is vivid in its imagery but leaves the interpretation to the reader, hence it is, and has been, a playground for philosophers and bandits.

The author of the Muratorian fragment[30] states: “We also accept Apocalypses, but only two, those of John and Peter; yet the latter is rejected by a minority among us.[31]” Muratorian fragment was written in the second century, and it is important because the author does not reprove the minority who reject the Apocalypse of Peter, rather he simply shows that they disagree. There is not mention in this ancient text of the perfect inerrant Bible being the foundation of the faith, if the author was of this opinion surly he would have taken those who rejected the Peterine text to task.
Elsewhere the author rejects Shepherd of Hermas as a part of the cannon, arguing that it should not be in the cannon because it was too recent. None the less Hermas was included in various Christian cannons[32].

Considering the Muratorian cannon Harnack notes: “…there is question here of three works of prophetic character, two of which he himself allows to stand in the Canon. He thus occupies a position intermediate between two groups in his own Church, one of which would only allow one Apocalypse, while the other would allow three to be read in public. It is noteworthy that, though he does not agree with the former group, their views do not arouse his displeasure; he only states quite objectively their dissent from himself.106 On the other hand, he opposes the claim of the other group and rejects it with restrained and yet unmistakably strong feeling. The only conclusion we can draw is that the new Canon when it was formed contained three Apocalypses”[33]

Here the Christians possessed in their Bibles three books that contained fist hand revelation from the lord, unlike the Gospels which are anonymous texts. So why were they lost? The post Apostolic church rejected two of these prophetic books for the same reason modern Christians reject the idea of ongoing modern revelation, which is that revelation and prophecy cannot be controlled. If tradition is viewed as the mirror by which religion judges its authenticity, then ongoing revelation is viewed as a large and menacing hammer. Tradition can be interpreted and molded depending upon how it is received, revelation must be obeyed. Prophecy, says Harnack, “…may even preserve an honorable place in the Church itself as an ornament of spiritual value, but it can never be of Canonical authority just because in Churches based on tradition this function belongs exclusively to tradition itself and to the official body that administers tradition. These two powers are intimately connected and only perform their function in the absence of a rival authority…According to this fundamental principle almost every prophetic element was eliminated when the new Canon was constructed, about the year A.D. 180, a fact that in itself shows most clearly that the Canon was based on a selection.”

Differing Bibles of the early church

What makes the Bible the Bible? What books are biblical are which ones are second tier. These are questions that were not answered in any unanimous way for more than three centuries after the deaths of the Apostles. It literally took to Romanized organization of the Church to produce a semi-standardized cannon. Almost 250 years after the last New Testament book was penned, in 367 ad are the twenty seven New testament books called the official cannon, and this new set cannon only really applied to the western church under roman influence.

The letter of Polycarp to the Philippians, the Sheppard of Hermas, I clement, Barnabas, II Clement and other texts were all included in multiple New Testament manuscripts. These books, though found in early NT cannons were often not only contradictory but cut by other groups.[34]

The fourth century Codex Sinaiticus and the fifth century Codex Alexandrinus, both considered scripture and both are NT cannon but neither is alike, each contains books the other lacks. These books held as scripture would, by their virtue of possessing differing holy texts (many removed by later Christians who disagreed with the texts), provide differing views of the church and doctrine.

So far as the cannon of the Bible, L.A Maratorian’s cannon[35] (which is the oldest cannon we know of) varied from the cannon of Origen[36] of 210ad. Esuebius’s view of the cannon[37] was again different from the cannon prescribed by Athanasius of 376 AD. Even the cannon put forth by the synod of Carthage was not universally accepted by the ancient Christian world.

In the fifth century the Syrian Christians “closed” their cannon, yet their cannon was different from the cannon of the western church as the Syrian Christians omitted 2 Peter, 2 & 3rd John, Jude and the great revelation of John.

The church in Ethiopia had four books in their cannon that the western church did not accept including: the Book of Clement and the Book of the Covenant. The Copts have also added books to the Bible.

The idea that the Bible is perfect and infallible is again undermined by the fact that even in these last days the Bible is not a uniform document all Christians share in common. For example for many Christians in east Syria the Peshitta stands as official Christian cannon. The modern Peshitta is made up of only 22 books aforementioned from the fifth century.[38]

Modern American Protestants have removed from the cannon the apocrypha while the Catholics include these texts in their cannon in following with the Council of Trent of 1546. This may seem to be a petty issue, however it begs the question, if the Bible is indeed a infallible document where do the protestants get the authority to exclude books that other (and indeed much older) Christian Churches held as canonical?

Are modern Syrian Christians, with their 22 books of the Christian Peshitta less Christian then our modern American Christians with the Bible based on Jerome? Further more are modern Protestants justified in removing the Apocrypha even though these texts are included in the cannon of the Catholic Church which predates the protestant churches? If they are justified where did they get the authority to alter the text of the Bible?

30,000 textual variants
The modern Bible is the product of countless hands and pens. Our modern Bible is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. In many cases the text of the Bible itself was altered by scribes of the various contending Christian ideologies. Dr. John Fell, the bishop of Oxford, published a Greek New testament text in which was contained a appendix that outlined textual variants from over 100 other publications and ancient manuscripts in 1675.

Thirty two years later, on June 23rd 1707, John mill of Queens College in Oxford publishes his textual criticism of the New Testament which collected more than 30,000 variant reading among the known New Testament manuscripts.

Other men to document the textual variations in the NT were Richard Bentley of Trinity College in Cambridge, Johann Albrecht Bengel, Johann Jakob Wettstine, Johann Salomo Semler, William Bowyer Jr., Edward Harwood, and Isaiah Thomas Jr. with Rev. Caleb Alexander. All of these men, and many others examined biblical variant renderings and scribal errors before 1800.[39]

More recently a number of Christian scholars have admitted the altering of the Bible over the centuries. There are 5,400 NT manuscripts from the 2nd to 15th century and no two of these manuscripts read alike. Many contain books and epistles that other do not contain. According to Professor Bart D. Ehrman: “I should emphasize that it is not simply a matter of scholarly speculation tp say that the words of the NT were changed. We Know that they were changed, because we can compare these 5,400 copies with one another… Nobody knows for certain how often they (scribes) changed them, because no one has been able yet to count all the differences among the manuscripts…There are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.”[40]

When researchers have been able to compare the scriptures as we have them today with the oldest known fragments and manuscripts they are finding that the two diverge on many key elements of what we call correct teachings, in short our modern Bible contains material the oldest known copies lack. Professor Bart D. Erhman notes: “…the famous words of 1 John 5:7-8, the only passage in the entire Bible that explicitly confirms the Christian doctrine of the trinity- that the Godhead consists of three persons but “these three are one”. Even though the passage is part of the Latin Bible and found its way into the King James versions, it does not occur in any Greek manuscript of the New Testament prior to the fourteenth century… there is no textual scholar who thinks that the passage was originally found in 1 John.”[41]

Elsewhere we find that the famous and dramatic story of the woman taken in adultery found in Johns gospel in the earliest known copies and appears to have been added after the manuscript was written.[42] Also important is that the writing style used in the story is markedly different from the rest of the Gospel. Concerning the woman taken in adultery M.R. James notes: “it is the obvious, and general, view that this story was that the woman taken in adultery, which, is well known, forms no part of the true text of St. Johns gospel, though it is inserted by most manuscripts at the beginning of the eighth chapter. A few manuscripts have it in Luke’s gospel.” [43] Further more, it seems that when the same account is described in the earlier writings of Papias, more sins are attributed to the woman than just adultery.[44]

The Deaths of Christ (the Bible contains two)

Can an infallible book deliver diverging accounts of the self same event? If it does one of the two must be incorrect and the other correct; thus corrupting its infallibility. This is the situation we find in the New Testament books of Mark and John.

In Mark Jesus send two disciples to prepare the Passover meal (Mark 14: 12-13), the meal is prepared and he dines with them for the last supper (Mark 14:17-26). Following the Passover meal Christ is arrested (Mark 14:53). The flowing morning he is bound and taken before Pilate and crucified the day after the Passover meal.

The story in John differs starkly from Mark. In John, Jesus is arrested before the Passover meal, his disciples never prepare it and he never eats the last supper. John18: 12 has Christ being arrested and the cock crowing for Peter the evening before the preparation of the Passover. Verse 28 states specifically that the Jewish leaders who led Christ from Caiaphas to the Hall of Judgment decline to enter the hall “lest they should become defiled; but that they might eat the Passover” (John 18:28). Later John 19:14 states “And it was the preparation of the Passover, and about the sixth hour, and he (Pilate) saith unto the Jews ‘behold your King!” after this pronouncement he is taken baring his cross (17) and crucified (18)

So in Mark, Christ is alive and well on the day of the preparation of the Passover meal, he eats with the disciples and then crucified the next day. In John Christ is arrested the night before the preparation, tried the next morning and killed before the Passover mean is even eaten. Symbolically, Christ is killed the same day as the sacrificial lamb before the Passover.

According to John, the Christ was dead before the account in Mathew even took place.
[1] Adolf Von Harnack, Die Ursprung des Neu Testament (The Origin of the New Testament, p 19
[2] Ibid 21
[3] Ibid 31
[4] Ibid 25
[5] Ibid 45
[6] Ibid ftn 89
[7] Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A historical introduction, 3rd edition, Oxford University Press, P. 453 also see Harnack, Origins of the New Testament, P 25
[8] Harnack, Origins, P. 27
[9] Ibid P. 28 “If the point of view of the compilation had not been anti-Gnostic and Apostolic-Catholic the Acts of the Apostles would hardly have been included, the Johannine Apocalypse would almost certainly have been excluded, and the Pauline Epistles would have stood as a sort of appendix.”
[10] Ibid 70
[11] Philip Schaff, History Vol 1 P.153
[12] Orthodox bishops would warn members of their congregations who traveled east to be wary not to accidentally worship in Marcionite churches. See Ehrman, Lost Christianities p. 109 and ftn 15
[13] Harnack Origin p 40
[14] The codex Fuldensis was written between 541-546 AD and contained the New Testament and one non-canonical Pauline epistle. See Bruce M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament, oxford University Press P 108
[15] Harnack, Origin, p 41
[16] Ibid P. 27 ftn 43
[17] Ibid P. 32 Ftn 51, this opinion is also by Bruce M. Metzger and James H. Charlesworth of Princeton Theological Seminary and the Works of Bart D. Ehrman.
[18] Ehrman, Lost Christianities, Oxford university Press, P. 195
[19] Harnack, Origins, 48-49
[20] Ibid 50
[21] Harnack, Origins P. 31
[22] See Charlesworth, Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Vol 1, Doubleday 1983, Introduction xxiii.
[23] ANF08. The Twelve Patriarchs, Excerpts and Epistles, The Clementia… Remains of the First Age, Schaff, Philip, Edited by Alexander Roberts, D.D. and James Donaldson, LL.D., WM. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, P. 365-366
[24] Ignatius to the Philadelphians 2:20
[25] Harnack,Origin t, p 14
[26] Ibid p.15..
[27] Ibid ftn 4
[28] See appendix for the texts
[29] Ehrman, New Testament, p 477
[30] Discovered in the 18th century in a Milan library, first published in 1740. the fragment is a wonderful example of just how sloppy ancient scribes could be, originally the text is held to have been written near Rome at the end of the second century.
[31] Harnack Origin P. 52 also see Ehrman, Lost Christianities, 240-243
[32] Ehrman, The New Testament, P 474
[33] Harnack, Ibid, inc ftn, Irenæus also, and Tertullian (in his early writings), count Hermas among authoritative works, and thus as belonging to the new Canon.
[34] Ehrman, Lost Christianities P.236
[35] Included were the Four Gospels, Acts, 13 Pauline epistles, Jude, 1 and 2nd John, Wisdom of Solomon, the apocalypse of John and the Apocalypse of Peter. Hermas should also be read for the enlightenment and education of the hearers. NOT included are the books of Hebrews, James, 1 and 2nd Peter, and one epistle of John.
[36] Origen omitted James and Jude from his cannon
[37] Acknowledge books: (books Acknowledged by all as holy) Four Gospels, Acts, 14 Pauline epistles, 1 John, 1 Peter and the Apocalypse of John. (Eusebius includes Apocalypse of John even though it was not universally accepted, History 3.25.1),
Disputed Books: James, Jude, 2nd Peter, 2nd & 3rd John.
Spurious or Forged Books: Acts of Paul, Hermas, Apocalypse of Peter, Barnabas, The Didache of the Apostles, and the Apocalypse of John (Revelation) “If it seems Right”.
[38] See Charlesworth, Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Vol 1, Doubleday 1983, Introduction xxiv
[39] All names and dates from The Text of the New Testament, 4th edition Bruce M. Metzger & Bart D. Ehrman, Oxford University Press, P. 153-164
[40] Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities, Oxford University Press, P.219
[41] Bart D. Ehrman, the New testament: A historical introduction, 3rd edition, Oxford university press P. 485
[42] Ibid P. 484
[43] M.R. James, The New Testament Apocrypha, Oxford, Clarendon Press 1924 P. 2
[44] Ibid, also see Esuebius Eccl. Hist. III 39:17,