WHO..decided the Bible canon?

by gumby 65 Replies latest jw friends

bluesapphire

WilliamPenn said:
I am not saying that these books are anymore right than the present canon but What does the Church fear of this other books?
Blue Sapphire replies:
"I don't think they do fear. I think you think they fear though. If you think they fear, then you tell me why".
And I have a question for you BlueSapphire
Why DON'T you think they feared it?
I'm not picking on you, but you already asked WP to show you WHY and I want to compare your feelings with his.
I shouldn't have said I didn't think they feared. What I meant was that, from the Catholic standpoint, Jesus entrusted Peter with the responsibility for His Church.
So from the beginning, the Church was concerned with passing on the truths that were taught by Jesus. They were NOT entrusted with passing on things that were not true.
So, in establishing the canon, of course they were only going to include books which contained truth in them.
The Church had a responsibility to pass on ONLY truths. They would have been negligent if they hadn't "feared" (if that's the word we want to use) passing on things that were not true.
quote: WP
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Who was the God that decided these books are in and those books are out?
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Is it your contention then that "God" decided which books were in or out? It is my contention that God did this through an organization.
I would like to see WHAT made each of you believe the way you do.
I believe the Bible is true (not "factual" but true) In believing this, I must acknowledge where we got the Bible from. There is no escaping what organization is responsible for passing it on to us. Whether or not there was a literal global flood, a literal Adam and Eve, etc. etc. is irrelevant to me.
God wanted to communicate to us. He had to communicate in the world view of the people to whom he was communicating. So I can believe in evolution and the Bible. Catholics are not "literalists" like the fundies. Anyways, got off on another tangent didn't I....
quote:WP
The only reason why they were not excepted is because they did not support their doctrines.
Bluesapphire quote:
BINGO. Which is exactly why they also make the claim that it is their responsibility to interpret those books in light of orthodoxy.
So Bluesapphire, you are saying there were OTHER doctrines out there but the catholic church was intrusted by God to decide that for all of us .
Why were their OTHER DOCTRINES?
How would the Catholics KNOW which was heresy and which was real? They weren't there! Did God guide them?
Actually, they WERE THERE. That's my point. That from the beginning there was the truth and there were untruths. The whole reason for establishing a canon was to preserve the truth and to distinguish it from the untruths.
If you do research on the early heresies you will see the "other doctrines" and you can judge for yourself whether you believe what they taught was truth.
The Catholic Church's goal was to preserve what Jesus taught to his Apostles. He spent three years with them and not everything he said to them went down in print. They taught others and so on and so on. Anything that was to be included in the canon might not be exhaustive but it at least couldn't be contradictive.
I'm so tired and i'ts 11:20. I hope I made at least a little bit of sense. Sometimes I don't know how I sound. If I sound illiterate, please excuse me. I'm just really sleepy.
Where does this Holy spirit that is supposed to "guide us in all things".. come in? Is he also in co-hoots with the Catholic church and they work together? We get the Bible from the Catholics, read it, believe in it, and the Holy Spirit does his job?
Jesus promised to send the Holy Spirit who would "lead and guide" into all truth. Do you think Jesus kept his promise? I do. I think the Holy Spirit lead and guided the Church and helped the Church to preserve the original teachings of Jesus. If I didn't believe this, I would not only not be Catholic, but I wouldn't be Christian either.
Bluesapphire Quote:
The Church has many manuscripts of non-canonical writings which you are talking about in its possession. And there are others in the Brittish Museum. Just because the Church didn't hand deliver them to you doesn't mean it tried to suppress them.
Why do they keep stories of heresies? Or are these OTHER books heresies? Thomas, the maccabee's etc.?
Maccabbees 1 and 2 are both included in the Catholic canon and were included in the Greek Septuagint - the bible that Jesus used. It wasn't until Luther that the Christians first began to exclude them.
To be honest with you I haven't read all of the Gospel of Thomas so I don't know all of its contents. But I know that FOR SURE if it wasn't included in the canon, it was because it didn't fit the criteria. Maybe it's author wasn't proven to be a disciple. Maybe it was written later. Maybe it contained teachings which were NEW and not the original ones of Jesus.
Maybe none of these things are true about the Gospel of Thomas. The thing I do know is that from the beginning, there were books which were accepted and read in the meetings of the Christians. Thomas wasn't one of them. It was NEVER on anyone's list as far as I know.
The Church has always been very careful. It wouldn't introduce some new book. The books that were included were books accepted by most as inspired. Various ones took longer to be accepted but they were fully accepted by the time the canon was established.
I'm really tired. Good night.
If they are not heresies....why aren't they part of the bible?
Not all books that were true (not heretical) made it into the bible because one of the criteria was that it had to be written by a disciple of Jesus. The writings of the post-Apostilic period are considered beneficial but not inspired. They are what we call the "Tradition." They are part of the revelation of God because they help us understand the canonical books.
gumby

Don't worry Lying Eyes.
By the looks of your pic, your have plenty of time to find what your after.
I was really afraid of 'losing my religion'...and still am... but not as bad as at first.
I believe in God. I question the bible and the God it describes and much of it's history. To QUESTION thing's pertaining to God does NOT mean you are betraying him.
If it is the Bible in which you and I find is true....then do not feel you NEED to be CATHOLIC OR ANYTHING ELSE!
The Bible teaches that it is GRACE from God by believing in his Son that SAVES us. Not being in any group.
Try starting with the book of ROMANS to find out How we are to inherit salvation.
Good luck
gumby

This is for BluSapphire when you get up in the morning since you weenied out on me.LOL
Quote:
I believe the Bible is true (not "factual" but true) In believing this, I must acknowledge where we got the Bible from. There is no escaping what organization is responsible for passing it on to us. Whether or not there was a literal global flood, a literal Adam and Eve, etc. etc. is irrelevant to me.
I believe the Bible is true.../... Whether or not there was a literal global flood, a literal Adam and Eve, etc. etc. is irrelevant to me.
Say what? Could you explain these two comments?
It's 11:20....I'm go'in to bed too. Good night
William Penwell

bluesapphire, I am not going to get into who is right or wrong. Whether yopu can justify what the early Church did in the persecution and suppression of the Heretics as they called them.
...The notion of Orthodoxy, which is only the flip-side of the notion of heresy, [developed in the second century]. So heresy which... simply means [in Greek], a choice, and is most commonly used to talk about a philosophical school, now takes on a negative connotation for the Christians. [It] first of all implies a schismatic group, a choice, which is different from the mainstream,... and then secondarily, [implies] people have wrong ideas, people who think wrongly about this or that, notably about the identity of Jesus Christ. The other side of that, of course, is our side, which has orthodoxy, that is, right thinking. The great controversies of the 3rd, 4th and 5th centuries, which create what we will know as orthodoxy, and in the west, Catholicism, emerge from this very drive to create a a unified body of opinion.
The Catholic Church believes themselves to be the only truth but again as history shows, the early Christian movement was very diverse. It just happens that after much fighting they were the ones that came out the victors.
We tend to think of the success of Christianity in the second and third centuries just on the eve on really when it becomes the prominent religion in the Roman Empire as if it were just one form of religiosity, when in fact the opposite is true. Christianity was extremely diverse during this period, and we probably ought to think of it as a kind of regional diversity; that is, the Christianity of Rome was different than Christianity in North Africa in certain ways, and that was different from what we find in Egypt, and that different from what we find in Syria or back in Palestine. We have, in effect, different brands of Christianity living often side by side, even in the same city. So, it's a great deal of diversity.
One of the first things Constantine does, as Emperor, is start persecuting other Christians. The gnostic Christians are targeted, ... and other dualist Christians. Christians who don't have the Old Testament as part of their canon are targeted. The list of enemies goes on and on. There's a kind of internal purge of the church as one Emperor ruling one Empire tries to have this single church as part of the religious musculature of his vision of a renewed Rome.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/why/legitimization.html
From the book Honest to Jesus.
The culmination of the missionary work of Paul and others occurred later, when the Emperor Constantine issued the edict of toleration in 313 C.E., which acknowledged Christianity as a legitimate religion for the first time. Later, in 381 C.E., the Emperor Theodosius adopted Christianity as the official religion of the sagging Roman Empire. In 325 C.E., Constantine summoned the leaders of the church to Nicea, a suburb of Constantinople (modern Istanbul), to adjudicate controversies among warring factions in the ecclesiastical world. He presided at the council himself, although not yet a Christian. The first form of the Nicene Creed (it was later expanded), which contained the formulations of that council, was intended to unify the various parties. Constantine saw to it that the vote was unanimous by banishing the bishops who did not put their signatures to the creed. There was now an official statement of correct beliefs, an orthodoxy, to which everyone had to subscribe. Those who did not became "heretics"- dissenting parties.

Who wins - in some sense, nobody wins, in the sense that the result of this is schisms and ultimately, some very nasty things in the history of the church, eventually the use of force and violence.... History is always written by the victors; if one wanted to be very cynical about it, one would say "All right, the people who finally managed the most power and the most persuasive abilities win out and they write the history, which defines everybody else as a heretic." and one would have to say there's a great deal of truth in that. [On] the other side of it... is that who wins, finally, is the side that embodies the widest support of people [for] their way of symbolizing Christian truth, and so there's there's a kind of strange democracy involved here. Obviously distorted by imperial power from the 4th century on but nevertheless, a strange kind of democracy involved... It is the usage of the local churches that eventually determines which books will be included in the New Testament, for example, and which will not be included, which point of view about Jesus has the widest support and therefore will also gain political power because there are people in various places that support that. It's a very complicated picture, obviously.
So I respect your right to believe the way you like but to me I could never follow anything that has being based on flimsy and unsubstantiated evidence. As I showed earlier some of the books had being tampered with, Those are the ones we know of but how many more books of the bible have been edited just to support a political agenda by the early church leaders??
Will
"I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning religion and politics a man's reasoning powers are not above the monkey's."
Mark Twain
LyinEyes

Thanks Gumby for the advice. I started reading the Bible the other
nite , I got to Gen. chap. 6 and got well, to put it truthfully,
pissed off. I cant understand God's actions. I can accept that
maybe I am not ever going to understand them, maybe we are not supposed to understand completely. I just want a small grain of
faith, I can build on that. I will do as you suggested and begin reading the book of Romans, I like to read before I sleep. Then in
time maybe I can go back and start from the beginning. I told my hubby tonite , that I still try to pray , not as I should but it is
all I can right now. I hope he is listening to me and gives me just a little help. But I guess, I feel so unworthy of his help, but like you mentioned , it is by grace with get his love and salvation
anyway. Maybe the ball is in my court,,, to accept it and build on it. Again, thanks to all for the intelligent conversation. It does feed the spirtual hunger , I have missed since leaving the borg, but wow ,, this is so much deeper, so much more fullfilling, keep up the great research and thanks for the time you all have put into this.
You are making a difference for a lot of us new ones out of the borg.
bluesapphire

Hey, you must be the weenie because I noticed a whole bunch of typos -- like my forgetting to answer three whole paragraphs of yours -- and fixed it before going to bed.
So you're the weenie
I'll answer your other questions tomorrow. But in the meantime, I have a book I want to send you. Email me your address.
Nite...
gumby

Lying eyes: "keep up the great research and thanks for the time you all have put into this".
You are truely welcome and thank you for the complement.
Now I AM going to bed!
bluesapphire

Hi everyone again. Hope you had a nice day today.
WP:
Whether you can justify what the early Church did in the persecution and suppression of the Heretics as they called them.
Are we talking about persecution here? Because I thought we were talking about the canon.
I don't condone evil acts regardless of who commits them. Now back to our current subject....
The Catholic Church believes themselves to be the only truth but again as history shows, the early Christian movement was very diverse. It just happens that after much fighting they were the ones that came out the victors.
I'm sure we all have different perspectives. I'm just sharing my perspective. I believe there is truth. And there is untruth. We can call untruth many things. I have been using the word "heresy" but we can use another word if you want.
If you go and read the Early Fathers, you will see the opposite of what you state is true. From the BEGINNING there was always a commitment to preserving truth. The fact that sects came and went doesn't mean that the truth was diverse. The fact that there were apologies defending truth from the earliest Christian times testifies that the Church was committed to preserving the ORIGINAL teachings of Jesus.
Let me give you an example:
We have the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights. Yet AFTER those documents were in place and after the Revolutionary War which was faught to give men civil liberties the U.S. still had legal slavery. Even until the middle of the last century there was still segregation and blacks had to sit in the back of buses, use separate toilets, etc.
Does that mean that the Constitution is no longer true? Of course not. The Courts always strive to INTERPRET the Constitution in the light of the spirit in which it was written. When laws are passed which are not constitutional, the Supreme Court overrides them. Why? Because they are not true to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
So back to the canon. We start from point A which is Jesus teaching the apostles. Then he commands to teach others all the things he taught them. He promises that the Holy Spirit will lead and guide them and help them to remember everything.
So they go about the business of obeying Jesus and rely on the Holy Spirit. They teach orally at first and then the letters began to be written, the Gospels, etc. There is no official collection or canon yet but there are certain letters which are generally accepted by the majority of congregations. They are circulated and read at Christian gatherings. These writings eventually AUTHORITATIVELY become accepted into the canon BECAUSE they were the ones which were accepted as truth from the beginning.
Had the Church accepted teachings which were new or "schismatic, a choice, which is different from the mainstream" they would not be preserving the truth that was given to the apostles by Jesus.
Another issue is the issue of Jesus and the kind of builder he was.
MT 16:18-19 Jesus says "upon this Rock I will build my Church" and he promises "The gates of hades will not prevail against it." "To you (Peter) I give the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven and what YOU bind on Earth shall be bound in Heaven."
Jesus made a promise here that the "Gates of Hell" would not prevail against his Church. He is building something here -- a Church.
MT 28:20 He says "I will be with you ALWAYS until the end of the age."
MT 7:26-27 He tells us that a foolish man builds his house on the sand but a wise man builds his house on a Rock.
So what kind of builder was Jesus? Did he build a wishy-washy Church that was susceptible to toss back and forth never knowing what was true and what wasn't?
Would he have kept his promise if this were true?
What kind of leader would he be if He didn't fulfill his promise that the Holy Spirit would lead and guide his Church into ALL TRUTH?
If someone doesn't believe in Jesus or the Bible, then these questions have no relevance to them.
But for anyone who does, these questions deserve consideration. Was Jesus a liar? Was he a "foolish builder?" Was he schizophrenic? Was he wishy-washy? Was he incapable?
For me the answer is that he was none of those things. He protected his teachings despite challenges from heretics. He protected the teachings despite persecutions and threats to abolish what he started. He protected them despite evil men corrupting things from within and without. The teachings have been preserved and protected.
Sometimes "diversity" is just another word for "confusion." How much confusion would there be if no one had an AUTHORITY who would interpret the Constitution and Bill of Rights? Imagine if the US was just a place of "diversity" where everyone could interpret laws any way they wanted. There would be no order. It would be a house built upon the sand and be blown away by the wind.
I don't think Christianity would have survived to our day if it had been "diverse."
I really, really wish people would read the early Christian writings for themselves. Like the letters of Clement, for example.
SixofNine

The type of men who decided the Bible canon, were EXACTLY the kind of men who make up the leadership of Jehovah's Witnesses. Same shit, different time period.
bluesapphire

LOL at (((SixofNine))). Believe me I understand what you're saying. Especially being a woman do I know what you're saying.
I don't look up to the MEN though. I look up to the Lord and trust Him.
Or else I would be an agnostic. Some people are comfortable with that. I like being Christian.

WHO..decided the Bible canon?

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