Canon
Some may not know that there are many, many more Christian writings that are not being included in our Bibles today. There were the letters of Church leaders during the first century who were writing at the same time as when the Gospels themselves were being written down for the first time. Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Polycarp, and Papias. However, these mens' writings were not included in the Bible. Why is that?
There are also works such as The Acts of Peter, which is the only source that mentions Peter requesting to be crucified upside down and arriving in Rome. Despite having been told this information myself, this book, and several others like it were also not included in the canon.
There are also several books in the Bible that were very nearly rejected. Revelation, for instance, was a book that was almost not accepted into the NT. This is a pretty commonly accepted fact even by most Christians. Who decided that these books, almost all of which were written several decades after Christ's death should forever be decided as either "Holy Scripture" or not? Usually we point to the apostles as having a direct line to God and so what they wrote is Scripture. But how do we determine who decided what was authenticity from the Apostles and what wasn't?
The Bible that Protestants use today wasn't officially recognized until the Council of Carthage in 397 AD (though this council also included the Apocrypha included in Catholic Bibles today). However, this wasn't the only council or church at the time declaring what was and wasn't Scripture. The Church of the East in Persia rejected the books 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and Revelation around the year 410. There were several more councils and lists of "accepted books" that have been made over the past 2000 years. These councils would reject books we use today and accept others that are no longer found in our Bibles. The exact Bible that Protestants use today was not decided on until Martin Luther removed certain books from the then accepted Bible in the 1500's, and many churches at the time quickly followed.
So why do we use the books that we use today in the Bible? If we only accept the writings of Apostles, then how can we accept books such as Hebrews that don't even claim apostolic authority? If we accept a larger number of books, then why did we accept the list from Martin Luther and reject every other council's list of accepted books?
Usually Christians will point back to the practices of early first or second century Christians. These Christians almost certainly accepted a larger number of books than we do today, so then why do Christians today not use them? Were the Christians back then incorrect to accept certain books such as the Book of Enoch, Tobit, Maccabees, etc.? What is the foundation being used for believing in the Protestant Bible is correct over other versions of the Christian Bible?
Removed Scripture
There are more than a dozen verses that have been removed in the past 150 years or so from the Bible. Or at least they have been removed from most versions. For example, in the NIV and ESV, you can look at Matthew 17 and see that there is no verse 21. The book skips straight from 20 to 22. The reason for this is that earlier manuscripts of the text have been discovered and these verses were missing from them. It has widely been accepted that many of these verses were added at some point in the text's history, so within the last 150 years, our Bibles have started to remove those verses. Other verses include:
- Matthew 18:11; 23:14
- Mark 7:16; 9:44; 9:46; 11:26; 15:28
- Luke 17:36
- John 5:3-4
- Acts 8:37; 15:34; 24:6-8; 28:29
- Romans 16:24
- 1 John 5:7-8
There are also more phrases in scripture that have been removed, but just not the entire verse.
There are also entire passages of the Bible that we know are not original, but the Bible publishers decide to keep them in the Bible anyways. Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:53–8:11 are the 2 largest passages that we know were not written by the original authors, but for some reason are still included in our Bibles today.
Why do we continue to use passages that we know do not come from the original authors? Are Bible publishers implicitly stating that now the scribes who added these passages centuries later were also divinely inspired like the apostles?
We do not have the original copies of scriptures. The oldest complete NT that have dates to the 4th century, and we only have small fragments that date back to the 2nd century. But we have no surviving copies of any NT books from the 1st century. So if we have discovered that dozens of verses have been added to Scripture, how do we determine what is actually original and what isn't? How can we reliably read any of the Gospels if at some point in the future we discover that entire chapters had been inserted by some later scribe?
Does the Word of God change? At least reviewing the past 200 years or so, the answer has been a resounding yes. So why is that?