Zengirl wrote:About 200 years after Jesus was alive, there weren't just four Gospels and the other books that make up the New Testament, but dozens of Gospels and Letters, all with different interpretations of events, and all jockeying for position and influence.
I know that, but it's irrelevant, because the four canonical gospels in the NT are the earliest known gospels, all written in the 1st century, while the other gospels that were excluded were written latter, and sometimes much latter, and were already recognized at the time as being inauthentic and unreliable by the early christian community (like all the forged latter of Paul, which some of them still made into the NT).
Gradually, a consensus evolved about what was scripture, but behind the scenes various Bishops were working hard to suppress or discredit any bits they didn't like and saw as heresy (for example the Gospel of Mary Magdalene).
The so called "Gospel of Mary Magdalene" is a 5th century text, why should they've canonized a contemporary book as a scripture? The early christians were very concerned with questions of authenticity, they wanted to include only the books that originated from the the circle of the disciples of Jesus and Paul, and so the many books that they've excluded were know to be written much latter as forgeries or expressing views that weren't related to the earliest church in Jerusalem, again nothing to do with politics or the rich.
It's true that many alternative brands of christianity were eventually declared 'heretical', but the point being that the new testament books were written in the time when christians were persecuted by the authorities, before christianity became the official religion of the roman empire, and so the bulk of the new testament was accepted as scripture long before the theological debates about official dogmas and what should be included in the NT.
The information that was left out was not crazy cults and sects, but Gospels that those powerful, rich decision-makers didn't like (eg women holding positions of power equal to men in church, even though Jesus himself had women as Gospels, priests, and teachers, etc).
This is your personal interpretation as a non-christian (I suppose), you shouldn't present your personal value judgment as historical facts, because christians would say just the opposite, that the early church fathers were inspired by God and did the right thing to preserve and protect the original teachings of Jesus from heretics.
In 312 AD the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and suddenly now it was the religion of the most powerful man on earth. He commissioned fifty Bibles to be written, which put pressure on the decision makers to confirm what was allowed in and what was not going to be included.
Again, this is not historically true. You shouldn't learn history from the Da Vinci Code, the bible was canonized much latter then the times of Constantine.
At this same time, a new technological development helped settle the New Testament cannon and that was the transference of writing on papyrus to animal skin, which made it possible to produce big books. They were finally able to get it all together and locked in to one book Transition from Papyrus to animal skin.
Where's the evidence for that?
- By Good_Egg
- By Fried Egg