Resources > Ask Jeff How can we trust the reliability of the Scriptures? Posted by CCC CyberMinistries on May 3, 2006, 09:02

How can we trust the reliability of the Scriptures?

Were there other authentic sources or gospels that were discarded in the process?

Here’s a quote from the book. One of the characters in The Da Vinci Code says, “The Bible is a product of man, my dear, not of God. History has never had a definitive version of the book. The Bible as we know it today was collated by the pagan Roman Emperor Constantine the Great in 325 AD.” This questions the Scripture. How did we get it? How do we know we can trust it?

If you were going to explain where the Bible came from could you do it?

Now some would say, the Bible came from God...and that is accurate, but still you can explain beyond that.

You don’t have to do it. I’ll take a shot at it.

Jesus would travel from place to place and he would teach. His teaching struck a chord. It changed lives. It did something in people. Consider this classic comment from the gospel of John when Roman guards tried to explain why they didn’t arrest Jesus. They said, “No one ever spoke the way this man does.”

Of course, back then people didn’t have tape recorders; people didn’t go to the Sermon on the Mount and get big notebooks that said “Sermon on the Mount” on the outside and fill in the blanks.

Initially, Jesus’ life and teachings were not written down; they were passed on because they were remembered and retold.

I can’t even remember what three things I went to the grocery store for if they’re not written down. I’ve hit an age where sometimes I’ll walk into a room in the house, and, when I get there, I can’t remember why I walked into the room. So we wonder, “How could you remember things accurately if they weren’t written down?”

Here’s kind of an early learning fact for us: In the first century, people were living in an oral culture.

We’re used to being inundated by words. We get newspapers, stuff on the Internet, and so on.

But what percentage of the people could read and write in the first century?

In a book called Excavating Jesus, a scholar by the name of John Dominic Crossan cites a study that says that in the ancient Mediterranean Basin, “Our best guess is that the literacy rate was about 5 percent.”

In ancient Israel, the best guess is it was about 3 percent.

That means that when Jesus was teaching people, probably only about three out of one hundred would have been able to read the Old Testament Scriptures for themselves.

At night, they didn’t sit around reading, and obviously they didn’t sit around watching television or playing computer games. They sat around a fire and told stories and shared wise sayings. They would even recite genealogies. It was the way they got a sense of tribal identity.

We still have some remnants of that. If you’ve been around kids, you know how they often have a favorite book. You can read it to them every night … read it to them a hundred times. You get sick of it after a while! So one night you’re in a hurry, or you’re just tired of it, and you decide you’re going to skip a page or a paragraph, and what do they do? They revolt! “No! You’ve got to read every word, every page.” They know the story.

 In Jesus’ day, imagine a culture where that’s all that people knew. They were just as bright as we are, but most were not literate. They knew the stories of Jesus’ life and teachings, and were very well equipped to preserve them.

And that’s one of the reasons why Jesus tells so many stories. Scholars estimate that about 80 percent of what Jesus taught was either in story form or in a kind of structure featuring parallelism designed to enable people to remember easily what he said and to repeat it.

After several decades of this, the eyewitnesses to Jesus’ life began to age, and they were going to die. By this time the church was expanding rapidly. There were a lot of false teachers who could distort what Jesus taught. Church leaders recognized that they needed to write down Jesus’ story—his life and teachings—so that it would outlive them, and so that, in a uniform way, it could be spread to churches around the world. That’s probably why and how the Gospels were written.

Over time, other documents about Jesus were written as people talked about him.

This is what we would expect.

Some of them are what are called Gnostic gospels.

(There is a boatload of info on this on the website)  Gnosticism was a form of thought, loosely a form of religion, that emphasized a lot of secrets and concealed information and whether or not you were on the “inside”—part of the Illuminati.

These Gnostic gospels had stories in them about Jesus that were wildly divergent from the kinds of things that we read in the New Testament Gospels.

The early church leaders realized that they needed to have criteria that would help them decide which documents—which gospels—should go into what became known as the canon. This is a good word for us to know. It comes from a Greek word that means “the norm, the standard, the rule.” They wanted to know, “Which books ought to be canonical? Which books can we trust? Which books are reliable?”

Church leaders developed essentially three criteria to evaluate these different documents:

• First criterion: Does this document have roots connected to one of the apostles? Was it written by an apostle or by a student or associate of one of the apostles?

The four Gospels that we have in the New Testament meet this requirement. Matthew is associated with Matthew, also known as Levi the tax collector; Mark was a student of Peter; Luke was known as the “beloved physician,” a good friend of the apostle Paul; and John is the gospel connected to the disciple John. (By the way, the other books in the New Testament, such as the letters of Paul or the letters of John, meet the same criteria.)

It is important to understand that most scholars would agree that all these books were written within maybe thirty to sixty years after Jesus died. In other words, they were written while there were still eyewitnesses around who could challenge every word that was in them. They had to meet the task of being read by people who were alive when Jesus was around, and who would be able to say, “No. I was there,” if something was inaccurate.

The Da Vinci Code talks about how there were many other ancient books about Jesus’ life and suggests that maybe the church was trying to cover them up.

 In reality, essentially all of these books were written much, much later.

In some cases, they were written centuries after Jesus—after that eyewitness generation. They were often given fictitious and misleading names like the “Gospel of Mary” or the “Gospel of Peter,” even though they were written centuries after Peter or Mary had died.

(The titles of the books themselves lets you get a hint of the agenda)

• Second criterion: To be included in the canon, the contents of the book had to be consistent with the kind of teaching that Jesus did. There’s one other account of Jesus’ life that’s also quite old. It was probably written about fifty years after the gospel of John, the latest of the New Testament Gospels.

Some of you may have heard of the “Jesus Seminar.” It’s a group of people who get together and vote on whether or not Jesus said most of the things attributed to him in the Bible. They have argued that the “Gospel of Thomas” ought to be taken more seriously. Here’s one of the reasons why it wasn’t. I want to read for you the very last part of the Gospel of Thomas, and you decide how consistent it is with the teachings of Jesus:

Simon Peter said, “Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life.” Jesus said, “I myself shall lead her in order to make her male so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Aren’t you glad that this didn’t make it into the Bible? Doesn’t that sound a little weird?

This leads to the third criterion that was generally applied.

• Third criterion: In order for a book to be included in the canon of Scripture, it had to have widespread influence in churches in Israel, in Asia Minor, in Rome, and so on, and had to have continuous acceptance and use by the church at large.

It took some time, and there were a few books where the decision was very difficult, but the Gospels and other books that are included in the New Testament are the ones that fit these standards.

The DaVicni Code also suggested that it was at the Council of Nicea, called by Constantine that decided what books would be a part of the New Testament

However, if you read history…

                Of the 20 different rulings made at Nicea, none of them dealt with the contents of the New Testament

So the idea that we have the New Testament Gospels today because Constantine put them together in 325 AD for political purposes is way off the mark.

The reality is that by 325 AD when councils were pulled together to talk about important questions (which they sometimes were), in a sense they were formally recognizing the authority of these Scriptures that had already been guiding followers of Christ for centuries.

There is a lot of evidence of this.

More than one hundred years before Constantine, a man by the name of Origen said, “The four gospels,”—and he goes on to name them—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—“are the only undisputed ones in the whole church of God throughout the whole world.”

That’s a quote from at least a century before Constantine and the Council of Nicea. A great New Testament professor, William Barclay from Edinburgh, once wrote, “It is the simple truth to say that the New Testament books became canonical because no one could stop them from doing so.” They had that power to them.