Blog (1) Madelaine Crabtree

Reading about the formation of the group of books that make up the Bible has opened my eyes in several different ways. First of all, I did not realize that Christianity was so extremely varied in different geographical locations and from different people’s perspectives from the very start. I had always assumed that Christianity had started off with a very specific set of ideas, practices, traditions, and rules, and had grown to vary over time as it spread across the globe and as humans’ understanding of science and religion evolved. The picture I would use to represent this phenomenon would have been a pyramid, with the time containing Jesus’ life and those years immediately around his death, that’s where all the “pure” and “true” ideas about Christianity would be contained, and present day as being the base of the pyramid, so as to represent the spreading out and differing interpretations that occurred over time as the knowledge spread vastly across the globe. For some reason, even with very little background knowledge in the field of Christianity, I was so vain as to assume I knew what had gone on, all because I had been forced to sit through church and Sunday school in my formative years. However, I was very pleased to be proven wrong and learn that the Bible as we know it today was not written right after Jesus died and that the formation of the Canon was a long and varying process.

After reading this chapter I am quite skeptical as to why each text is included in the Bible and why others are not. How can anyone really be sure of what Jesus actually said and how accurately his words were recorded when the fragments of scripture that have been discovered are copies of copies of copies of the originals? It also seems quite interesting that so many books were added to Marcion’s original fixed canon which contained only “a form of Luke and ten truncated letters of Paul.”¹ I am still not entirely clear as to why this was enough for some but not for others. I like learning about this process of creating the canon because I feel as if it affirms my feelings of doubt and skepticism when it comes to upholding the words of the Bible as absolute, and sometimes literal, truth.

1. B. D. Ehrman, The New Testament (3; New York; Oxford; 2004), 13.

Ehrman, Bart D. The New Testament. Third Edition. New York: Oxford, 2004.