Firing Back – “What do you know about the canon?”
The good, bad, and ugly—selected comments below are from FB posts, emails, and the mega-bestselling book, The DaVinci Code:
“Does it trouble you to know that those who determined what is supposed to be Scripture were not necessarily as ‘inspired’ as those who wrote it?”
“Sounds really interesting John. I always wondered why mss like Shepherd of Hermas and the Didache did not make it into the canon while others like 2 Peter did make it in.”
“I’m more ignorant of HOW the Scrips were canonized than I even want to admit.”
“There’s nothing in the Scriptures themselves about canonization.”
“We have a collection of manuscripts of varying quality. Binding them all together in one book as if they had but one voice is absolutely ludicrous.”
“I appreciate all what you are doing . . . I will follow these weekly blogs.”
“I am one of those Christians that would respond with ‘The leaders of the Church got together in a council and decided which books would be in the Bible.’ So, I’m looking forward to this study!!”
“The average Christian has probably never addressed this question.”
“The canon has nothing to do with the bible. It is the adopted creed of the catholic church.”
“When they saw the curse at the very end of Revelation, didn’t they worry they would all be cursed?”
“I haven’t suggested removing books – only reclaiming the books which were ‘purged’ by fundamentalists.”
“In fact, the original version of the KJV also had the apocrypha (KJV-only people won’t tell you that!)”
“Personally, I wouldn’t have a problem if either the church or the canon changed as long as Jesus is lifted up.”
“Challenges to the canon of scripture is one of the big new stories of Christendom . . . . We will see a very different church and eventually very different Bibles if this trend runs to its conclusion.”
“Catholic apologists use the canon as the means of bolstering their hegemony on Christian authority. ‘If you accept the church’s canon why not accept her doctrine?’”
And from the mega-bestselling book The DaVinci Code (2003 – 80 million in worldwide sales, translated into 44 languages, made into a movie 2006 (excerpts from Chapter 55, pp.230-236):
“The Bible is a product of man, my dear. Not of God.”
“More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John among them. Who chose which gospels to include?”
“The fundamental irony of Christianity! The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great. . . . [at] a gathering known as the Council of Nicaea.”
“Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that made Him godlike. The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and burned.”
“Fortunately for historians . . . some of the gospels that Constantine attempted to eradicate managed to survive.”
“What I mean . . . is that almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false.”
Lastly, as one FB poster asserted: “God was in charge and used human means to accomplish it . . . plain and simple.”
As we shall see in the weeks ahead, it wasn’t that plain or simple to those going through the canonization process.
What do you think?
For “Tidbits” from our weekly Bible study group discussing this topic, please check my blog on Tuesday afternoons over the next several weeks and the Blog-Archive.