My name is Chris.

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.

But I sort of see one thing.

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.

They were authentic.

And there was all these other forgeries.

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.

Everybody knows it.

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.

Hey, just a small note.

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.

Actually, it was in the 4th century.

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?

367.

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

That's a long time. 330 years.

A lot can happen in 330 years.

And as it turns out, a lot did.

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.

We can only know so much about them.

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

Because they didn't win.

They lost.

Were these people heretics?

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

I don't think so.

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.

And a lot of authors obviously realized that one of the best ways to get attention to a book was to put the name of an apostle or major church figure on it, or sometimes a prophet from the Hebrew Bible.

Books of Enoch are quite famous, for example.

But we have frequently all sorts of books in the names of people like Paul.

Scholars just call this pseudepigrapha, and it was everywhere.

So when you start to look at early Christian writings, you realize how much was written in the name of somebody else, how much of it was essentially forged.

Now, that's a bit of a modern concept, and I think we have good evidence that most people didn't see pseudepigrapha as forgery.

But nonetheless, for our purposes, let's use that word, that they're forged.

And guess what?

The people creating the canon fell for it, because scholars are pretty much in agreement that at least some of the books in the New Testament were not written by the people they claim to be written by.

This is true of 2 Thessalonians, which I already mentioned.

It's true of Timothy, both 1st and 2nd Timothy.

It's true of Titus.

It's true of 2 Peter, which is almost certainly not written by Peter.

And 1 Peter, which is probably not written by Peter.

It could be the case with Colossians.

It could be the case with Ephesians.

And it could, and I would say probably, is the case with the letter of James, which is written in fantastic Greek and seems unlikely to have been written by the brother of Jesus, who was apparently from Nazareth.

When you look at the books in the New Testament, there are some that are ongoing conversation, but there are quite a few that scholars are pretty certain are not actually written by the person that they say they're written by.

And that means one thing.

That means that pseudepigrapha actually works.

It means that the people who created the biblical canon actually got fooled by some of these authors.

And we can see in some places, they actually have discussions about whether or not letters are actually who, like they obviously knew about this problem and they talked about it.

But nevertheless, we know that at least some of the books that got into the canon were not actually written by the people they claim to be written by.

And if you come to me and say that the canon needs to be the inspired word of God, and some of the books are actually lies, to me, that's a problem.

The third problem that I find really interesting is that there were books that in the 2nd and 3rd century were used as scripture that didn't actually make it into the canon.

So if we actually look at the 2nd and 3rd century and church fathers and we see what they were quoting, they do quote a lot of canonical books.

Don't get me wrong.

They quote our four canonical gospels all the time.

A lot of church fathers love the letters of Paul, but they do also quote other things.

Justin Martyr in his dialogue with Trifo says, Wherefore also our Lord Jesus Christ said, In whatsoever things I shall take you in these I shall judge you.

Wonderful saying of Jesus, but it's not actually from our gospels.

He's quoting some other gospel.

And check this one out. 1st Clement 23, 3 says, Let this scripture be far from us where he saith, Wretched are the double-minded which doubt in their soul these things we did here in the days of our fathers also.

And behold, we have grown old and none of these things have befallen us.

Whatever he is quoting there, we don't know, but it is not in our canonical Bible.

So what do we see when we look at 2nd and 3rd century writers?

We can actually see that they quoted a lot of stuff that was not eventually considered scripture.

But in the 2nd and 3rd century, they considered it scripture.

And I think what it shows us is not like, oh, there were these secret books that everyone knew about.

It was actually like they predominantly use the books that did become canon, but they saw other books of scripture too, because they didn't have the idea of a canon.

The canon was an artificial construct that was forced back onto history.

There is even a famous quote in Jude that's taken directly from something called the Book of Enoch, which was super popular in the 1st century, 2nd century, and eventually fell out of favor.

The fourth problem is that not all the canon was recognized at once.

So I would say that by the end of the late 2nd century, there was agreement among the proto-Orthodox church, which is the church which would eventually win, that there was some agreement that it was the four gospels that we currently have and the letters of Paul.

There was a lot of agreement around those.

One of the reasons why there was agreement on those pretty quick is because there was a different canon.

So in the 2nd century, there was a Christian figure called Marcion.

And Marcion is often considered to be agnostic.

That label has like so many problems with it, but for now we'll use it.

So he basically believed that Jesus came to rescue us from the evils of the Jewish God.

And Marcion apparently had his own canon.

So apparently Marcion had his own version of a Book of Luke and his own version of Paul's letters.