Name: How did we get the New Testamant? | Problems w/ NT Canon
Uploaded: 2025-04-01T17:30:17.000Z
Duration: 19 min 16 s
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In this video, I want to talk about six serious problems with the biblical canon.

I have a Master of Divinity and MA in Theology and a PhD in Christian Origins.

And in today's video, I want to talk about the biblical canon.

If you don't know, the canon is essentially just kind of the authoritative books that a church tradition agrees should be in their Bible.

And even today, if you look at churches around the world, a lot of churches have different books in their canon.

I was raised as a Protestant in North America, so I just kind of took it as a given that if you want the inspired Word of God, when we talk about that, we're talking about 66 books of the Bible.

When people talk about problems with the Bible, I mean, a lot of people talk about manuscript traditions and text criticism and how we have so many copies of copies that there are problems with, potentially problems with the manuscript tradition.

The thing that struck me way more when I went to study early Christianity was the problem of canon.

And even now when I see people talk about the canon, I normally kind of see two things.

And admittedly, I'm watching more YouTube videos here than anywhere else.

I just saw it recently in a Wes Huff Joe Rogan interview, where you kind of get this attitude like, well, everybody knew that the books we have were the right books.

But no, these were the right books that, you know, link back to the apostles and to the historical Jesus.

So that's kind of one side of the argument.

And on the other side, I see a lot of kind of sensationalists like, oh, this was the book that Jesus really wanted you to read, but it got banned.

Or this was the true Bible and it got banned.

And I think the truth, as usual with biblical studies, lies somewhere in between these two opposing, almost like ridiculously opposed peers.

When you study the canon and the history of the canon, which is just basically saying, when we look at which books got into our Bibles, there wasn't just a recognition of like, oh yeah, these are the most accurate books.

So we just put them in the Bible to protect from all those other bad books out there.

The process of developing canon was complicated.

It was kind of like riddled with power dynamics.

And it certainly was the case that one group won the decision for what got to be included in our canon.

I'm going to talk about all of these things in this video.

So this video, I'm calling it six problems with the biblical canon that you need to know about.

I'm editing the video and I forgot to mention, this is mostly going to talk about the New Testament.

And there is an entire other discussion about the Hebrew Bible canon.

But for this video, just focusing on the New Testament.

I want to start with a couple of background observations and just some comments on the data that we have, because it's important to understand this.

First of all, there are entire Christian groups that have been almost entirely lost to history.

We have brief mentions in some of the church fathers about first and second and third century Christian groups that eventually disappeared.

We, in most cases, don't know anything about what those groups actually thought about themselves.

We occasionally know about what they believed from church fathers who were riding against them.

And sometimes we get really lucky and we find some other early Christian writings, usually in Egypt, from the sands of Egypt, because that's where manuscripts tend to be preserved over 2000 years.

But even with this evidence, I want to say that most of early Christianity is a mystery to us.

The other thing that's important to understand is there was more diversity in early Christianity than in all of modern Christianity.

That if you look at every single Christian alive in the world today, this might be an overstatement, but I think it checks out.

Somebody can call me to account in the comments if you want.

If you look at every single Christian tradition in the world today, you will see more uniformity in the church today than there was in the first century of Christianity.

The second background thing you need to understand is that the word heretic got applied to a lot of these Christians retroactively.

Unfortunately, in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th century, it was easy for church fathers to write and call people heretics.

And all we have, and for a long time throughout history, that judgment was kind of accepted.

It seems pretty obvious to me when you study early Christianity that virtually any group you have in the 2nd or 3rd or even 1st century saw themselves as legitimately following the teachings of Jesus.

Any Christian group that you could find believed that they had the truth to some extent.

So just because later writers called them heretics doesn't discount the fact that they genuinely believed they were following the teachings of Jesus or of God.

The final background thing I want to say right at the outset that I can't get too much into, but there was a huge Greek bias in the canon.

So if we say that the canon of scripture is made up of the books God wanted us to read, apparently God wanted us to read Greek because there were lots of books in other languages, but most notably for our purposes, Aramaic.

We have records that there were at least some Aramaic Christian writings, including at least one Aramaic gospel, which was the language Jesus spoke, but we don't actually have that, nor do we apparently need that if God was behind the canon.

So when did the early Christians have a Bible that looks like our Bible?

Well, it wasn't in the 1st or 2nd or 3rd centuries.

The first inclination we had of a Bible that looks pretty much exactly like the Bible that most Protestants use today was in 367.

We have a letter of Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria, and basically he gives us in this letter a list almost identically matching our canon.

One note, it's an Old Testament note, Hebrew Bible note, but he didn't include the book of Esther in the canon.

But otherwise, the canon of Athanasius looks exactly like our canon today, if you're a Protestant.

But it took about 330 years to get to that point, from the death of Jesus to when Athanasius wrote, am I doing my math right?

Yeah, so 330 if we assume Jesus died around 30.

So here are the problems that I have with how that canon came to be.

The first and most obvious problem, and it's an old adage that history is written by the winners.

And this is certainly true in the case of canon too.

As I kind of said at the outset, there were a lot of early Christian groups who have been completely erased from history.

In the 4th century, Constantine converted to Christianity.

Christianity became the religion of the empire.

Everything else was either stamped out or forgotten.

So the glimpses that we do have of Christianity before that time are almost always obscured by either a lack of evidence or looking at it through the lens of somebody who won history and what they had to say about the people who lost.

But just to give you an example, there was a group of Christians in the 1st century and probably 2nd century called the Ebionites.

The Ebionites probably came from the Hebrew word Evyon, which means poor.

We only know about them from their opponents, but we know that they spoke Aramaic.

We know that they considered themselves followers of Jesus.

But we also know that they didn't believe in the virgin birth.

In fact, they believed that Jesus had followed the Jewish law so perfectly that God had essentially adopted him as his son.

And they believed that they were also supposed to follow the Jewish law.

And apparently, they didn't think too highly of a certain guy named Paul who went around telling people that they didn't actually have to follow the law at all.

Now, apparently, the Ebionites had something that looked kind of like our Gospel of Matthew, but was written in Hebrew or maybe Aramaic.

So imagine with me trying to look back through history to these 1st century Christians.

Were they heretics as they were later described?

Because they just thought they were following Jesus.

And in fact, an Aramaic group from Palestine that probably had some connection, they actually claimed to be connected to both Peter and James, the brother of Jesus.

To me, these actually have a pretty good claim to have some authentic teachings of Jesus.

But why don't we have their Gospel of Matthew?

Because in the 1st century, they had different beliefs than what came about in the 3rd century?

So this is always the first and biggest problem when we're addressing this question, that there were so many groups of people who considered themselves Christians who were just frankly either forgotten or erased by history.

Second, let's get into something a little more controversial here.

The second thing is that the wrong books made it into the canon.

If you read very closely 2 Thessalonians 2 verse 2, you will find a really interesting warning to watch out for books that claim to be from Paul but are not actually from Paul.

Now, the really wild thing is, is that most scholars think that 2 Thessalonians was probably not actually written by Paul.

And this kind of illustrates the problem, that in the 1st centuries of the Christian church, we had an explosion of writings.