II. Where Did the Bible Come From?

Ladies and Gentleman of the Jury, allow me to welcome you back to our ongoing sermon series, “The Case for Christ: The Trial of a Lifetime.” I invite you again to consider the evidence that’s presented to us today, the evidence for the truth about Jesus so that we may understand the truth of the Christian faith and see what evidence there is for what we believe about Jesus.

Last week we were examining the Christian Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke & John to understand their trustworthiness and to learn how to distinguish them as faithful and creative retellings of Jesus that are not propaganda, but are reliable testimony.

But this week we have to ask the next question in the case and that is: Even if there were true stories about Jesus written down in the Gospels, how did we get our hands on them? It’s been an awfully long time since they’ve been written down. How have they been preserved? And how have they been selected? Should we have, perhaps, more books in our Bible than we do? Should we have perhaps less?

We are going to get our case started today by listening to this week’s charge.

Bailiff: In the case of the people vs. Jesus, the people charge that it is impossible to know anything about Jesus based on the Bible because the Bible has been corrupted through 2000 years of transmission and translation. The Bible was manipulated by the powerful and we only read what they wanted us to believe.

Now once again, I regard that as a serious charge. And it is not one that we are making up. This is a charge that people are actually making, only most famously and recently in the fictional work, the Da Vinci Code, published a few years ago, along with the recently released movie. But this is not a new idea. And furthermore, the charge has some plausibility that we need to consider and evaluate.

Have you ever played the game, Telephone, the game where one person whispers something into another person’s ear and they whisper it on down the row until it gets to the very end? If we were to play that here and I were to whisper something to someone in the front pew, and it was passed all the way to the back of the room so that by the time it got to the last person the information would no longer be first-hand, it would be more like 100 th –hand. And inevitably what happens in this game is that what you hear at the end of the pipeline sounds nothing like what was originally whispered at the front of the pipeline. And we play this game sometimes to illustrate how gossip works or how first-hand information is so much more reliable than information that you have second or third-hand, let alone all the way down a very long line.

So, is the Bible like that? Is that how we got it? Somebody wrote this stuff down; they spoke into the pipeline 2000 years ago and now its been handed down and copied and re-copied and translated and re-translated and handed down some more so that now we’ve heard it at 2000 th-hand, or more. Is the Bible like that game of Telephone? How can we be sure that we’re getting the right thing out of the end of the pipeline? Can we even be sure that we have the right person at the front of the pipeline? Or have the contents of the pipeline been manipulated and corrupted, as the charge says, so that the powerful or some committee or some council had a vote that decided what should be put in, and what should control the flow of the input so that we can’t even trust what went in? And even if we could trust what was put in, how can we trust what comes out if the line is that long? Two thousand years is a really long time.

To answer these questions we have to say something about how the Bible really came together. And as I tell you the story of how the Bible came together, I’m going to come around to two main themes that you should probably hold onto. These two themes are Age and Diversity. Age and Diversity.

As we start talking about where the Bible comes from, we should first ask just briefly about the Old Testament because it comes first and it’s the easiest answer. There is very little debate about what belongs in the Old Testament or where it came from. By the time Jesus came around, this thing had already been set for a hundred years or more, since the last books of the Old Testament had been written. It had already been translated into another language because they already knew what all of the things were that needed to be translated. We have copies of the Old Testament that date back to before the time of Jesus and copies that date to one thousand years after Jesus and they’re almost exactly identical. So it has been very well preserved; there is just not a lot to talk about there.

The New Testament is a lot more complicated, however, for the simple reason that the first Christians had no New Testament. Imagine you’re one of the followers of Jesus and you see Jesus get killed, raised again, taken up into heaven, and there you are. There is no Gospel of Matthew, there is no letter of Paul to the Romans, there is just you following what Jesus taught you. You are a witness of his resurrection and you worship God. Well, after awhile, these Christians who were in this situation decided that they should write some of these things down. And some of it was just functional. If you’re Paul, Peter or John and you’re leading some churches that are planted all over the Mediterranean world, you’ve got to write some letters back and forth to help continue to teach them something or maybe to deal with some crisis they’re having. So you’re Paul and you write a letter to Rome, Corinth, or Galatia and now we have those letters called Romans, Corinthians, and Galatians. Or you’re Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John and you start writing down the things that happened in Jesus life. The Christians began to realize, “We should get this stuff down on paper (or papyrus as the case was) so that we can hand it down to future generations.” They wrote down first especially the story of his death and resurrection, but also the miracles he performed, the parables that he taught, everything from Jesus life. So they began writing all this down.

It became clear to them pretty early on that they should start collecting this material. There is evidence already in the writings of the New Testament that people had this urge, something that I’m calling “early canon instincts.” When I talk about canon, you might think of a piece of artillery that shoots off of a pirate ship or something, but this is an ancient technical term that means a measuring stick, a reed that they used as a ruler. When you have a standard of text that is your standard collection, the one by which everything else is measured , you call that a canon, a measuring stick of sorts. So now we sometimes talk about the canon of the New Testament. Well, they had these instincts that they should start to gather this stuff into a canon to be sure of what they had. For example, there are two references that I’d like to mention here, the first is in 2 Peter 3:15-16 where Peter is writing a letter to one of the churches with which he is involved, and he refers to some letters that Paul wrote, and he’s telling them not to fret about the return of the Lord and to be patient. In fact, Paul wrote the same thing in his letters and Peter sympathizes with us that some of Paul’s letters are difficult to understand. But he warns that people will sometimes twist that material to their own destruction, just as they do with “the other Scriptures.” They are already starting to regard these witnesses to Jesus and words of the Apostles, like Paul’s letters, as Scripture on a level with the OT, which was their Bible.

Also Paul, in 2 Timothy, probably one of the last letters that he wrote from prison, is writing to his junior colleague in Ephesus, named Timothy. And he is writing to ask Timothy to send a visitor and to have him bring along some things. He asks for his coat, apparently it’s cold in prison, and he asks also for his codices and his parchments. Bring my books and the codex, which would be an anthology of Paul’s letters. They are already starting to collect, not just one letter to Galatia, one to Thessalonica, one to Rome, but they’re collecting all of these letters realizing that this is a body of witness to the Lord Jesus, the mini seeds of a canon in the process of formation. When you fast forward just a little bit into the second century, into the 100’s, we have evidence already very early that this process had moved a long way and without much controversy and had moved along by a sort of obvious process.

There is a list that has been discovered by archaeologists that dates to about AD 150, maybe 200 at the latest. And it lists there the books that the Christians were reading, that they were using in worship - what they were using as their New Testament. It lists the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke & John. You know, sometimes we look back and ask about the other gospels that we hear about, the gospel of Judas that we hear about in the news, the gospel of Mary that they talk about in the Da Vinci Code. But they’re all written much later, even later than this whole list. So, people weren’t fighting about those because they either hadn’t been written yet or they were just the reflection of the beliefs of other communities that formed further down the road that were trying to project their own beliefs back onto Jesus. Those other “gospels” can tell us things about what some groups believed, but they don’t tell us much at all about Jesus. Matthew, Mark, Luke & John-- the early Christian church just recognized those pretty universally as the four Gospels. It also lists the book of Acts, it lists the thirteen letters of Paul just as we have them now, it lists the letters of John, it lists Jude, it lists the Revelation of John, and interestingly enough it also makes mention, not in quite the same way, but it does mention another book called the Revelation of Peter, which we don’t have in our New Testament now. And the writer of this list says that this book is something that Christians disagree about. Some people read it in church and some don’t read it in church.

The point of all of this is to show two things. One, there is very wide substantial agreement on 90-95% of the things that we have in our New Testament. Almost all of what we have today was already the common practice. All of the churches recognized this because it was just obvious to them. And there were smaller disagreements about other matters. The reason that I say that this was obvious to them is that the nature of this list and other witnesses like it is that of observation, not legislation. No one is saying that these are the books that you must read if you are a Christian in a Christian church. The tone is much more that these are the books that the author has observed Christians reading when they gather for worship. It’s just what everyone knows clearly to do.

The point of this, and mentioning the disagreement about the Revelation of Peter, is to indicate how obvious it was to them that the vast majority of the substance of the New Testament was just there and everybody was using it. So much so that they had to be forced from outside influences to even bother to start making votes about this sort of material. There were some false teachings (perspectives called Marcionism & Montanism) that made the Christians say, “Ok, what really do we believe, what are the books that we’re really going to use from here on. Maybe we need to set up some boundaries so that everybody knows perfectly clearly instead of just regarding it as self-evident.” There were also the overlooked influences of persecution. When the Roman police come knocking at your door and say, “Do you have any Scriptures, hand them over to be burned or we’re going to kill you”, you have to know what you’re going to die for. It’s a practical matter. You might hand over your book of daily devotions, but you might not hand over the gospel of Matthew. So the Christian church wanted to come to some sort of agreement about this. What are the things that if I’m a faithful follower of Jesus, I’ll really stand up and defend, and what are the things that aren’t on that level?

So, by the time they get around to taking final votes, it is almost AD 400 and there are complete lists before that time. They voted on the 27 books that we have at the Council of Hippo in AD 393. That vote should be thought of more as a rubber stamp. Imagine the process if the United States had a constitution that everybody just knew was obvious and they hadn’t bothered voting on it and congress just started using it, and the courts based their opinions on it, and they had discussions about what was constitutional or unconstitutional and then somewhere around the year 2006 we would take a vote to recognize this as the official United States Constitution. We would all look at each other like, “Ok, we already know that, but I guess if you want to vote on it, that’s fine.” That’s what these votes about the Bible are like. After using this stuff and assuming it for 200+ years they would vote on it. For the New Testament, we have this list already from AD 150, maybe 200, demonstrating the early use of these books. Its obvious, everybody knows it, and even more than the U.S. Constitution example, they’re actually reading it in church every Sunday and they say, “Ok, these are the 27, lets have an official vote,” and they rubber stamp these books.

I tell you this story of the formation of the New Testament to emphasize three important points, two of which are the themes I already said to keep in mind, age and diversity. First of all, we have these witnesses from very early on, like this list I mentioned and there are others that bear witness to what was happening, what were Christians reading, what was the canon, so to speak already at the very beginning, so that any talk of a debate about what belongs in the New Testament was really over before it started. You’ve got people really close to the source who are putting the information into the telephone game so we can be confident that we have reliable people putting the material into the telephone. So, contrary to the charge that we heard this morning, we don’t have to worry about it being corrupted by some council that somebody convened much later to decide that we’re only going to read the books that support some particular agenda or we’re not going to read the books that say some particular thing about Jesus, because the body of testimony was already established very early.

Also, there is an uncontrollable diversity in the process. There were churches all over the place reading this material, so much so that they could only list it, not legislate it. So, for the church in Rome, the church in Jerusalem, and the church in Alexandria it would be like us having churches in St. Paul, Los Angeles, Chicago, and White Bear Lake and all over the place. If some committee got together somewhere and held a vote and then came back and said, “You know what, you Christian churches, you should stop reading the gospels of Matthew and Mark and all of that stuff that Paul wrote.” If we bothered to answer at all, we would say, “No! We’re not going to do that!” If some council had tried to convene in the year 400 to vote on what belonged in the New Testament when you had already been reading it for 250 years, what kind of control would that vote really have? There is uncontrollable diversity in the process. So, not only do we have the right person on the front of the line, but we actually have about 100 lines so that it is impossible for anybody to have manipulated who was putting the material into the pipeline to start with or manipulate how it got transmitted. There is uncontrollable diversity of process.

That kind of wildness in this process is really problematic if you’re, for example, running a political campaign because you want one communication director to tell everyone what to say so that everyone stays on message. That was the famous story of the 1992 election, to say, it’s the economy stupid, it’s always the economy. But when you’re trying to make sure that not one person manipulates the whole process, but that there is evidence of the real truth, you want that kind of uncontrollable diversity so there are lots of people getting on the phone line and passing it down.

And finally, the benefit of all of this is not only that this vote business is not really true, but it would cause more problems that it would solve. If we only trusted the New Testament because some official delegation got together and voted on it, then ask yourself, who would have the real authority? The voters, right? Not the material. That’s why, in theory, the United States has government of the people, by the people, for the people. We’re supposed to be able to vote them in and vote them out so that the real authority lies with the voters. So, if the church had to vote on the New Testament, then it’s a council who votes and demonstrates who has the authority, not what is in fact historically true. So, to my mind, I’d much prefer the fact that the whole church had this organic, natural, obvious process than that we had to have some controversial vote about it.

But that still leaves us with the other problem, and that other problem is this; we may have had the right people on the phone at the beginning, and maybe nobody could intentionally corrupt the process, and maybe we have witnesses who were very close to the events telling us about them, but it’s still been a really long time. How can we know that what was put in came out 2000 years later? Sometimes we suffer from the misunderstanding that the Bible that we read in the year 2006, the NIV or the NRSV or whatever, is something that was translated and handed down from the people who were translating in 1950 and the people who did the RSV, for example, in 1950 translated from the people in 1900 and it was just passed down over and over and over again like that. And we imagine that we just have these copies that are multiple generations old. Just like when you try to copy an audiotape 1000 times, it would sound like gobbledygook. Well, do we have the stuff that went in at the beginning or just a depleted copy?

Let me use an illustration to show how we have age and diversity on our side again. What I’m holding up to show you here is a copy of the Greek New Testament. I know you can’t make out the type from where you sit, but that’s ok. You may be able to see that there’s a break in the middle of the page about halfway down. Every little symbol after that break stands for one manuscript or group of manuscripts from which we translate the New Testament. Let me tell you why that matters. Because all those little symbols mean that we aren’t on the end of the phone line way at the back. We have closed the loop. We have the stuff from the beginning of the phone line. We don’t keep going from the end, making one degenerative copy after another. We have access to sources very close to the beginning. We have age and diversity on our side again. We have lots of ancient witnesses all testifying to basically the same thing.

What does this mean to us? If we’re not on the end of a telephone game, but we really have access to this story, what does that mean? I said it last week and I’ll say it again because there is so much at stake here: This means that the best story in all the world is true. There are lots of other stories that you could believe, stories that people tell you all the time whether you realize it or not, stories of greed, stories of power, and stories of violence. The story of the world is that you are in this game called life for yourself and your own good and you’ve got to get the most out of it you can, and the story of this world tells you that when you look death straight in the eye you have no answer. I don’t want that story to be true. There are stories of other gods that I won’t worship and stories of other truths that I can’t believe. Fortunately, they’re not true. The best story in all the world is true. The story of the God who mercifully saves His people, who sent His son Jesus Christ here to demonstrate His love for us, to forgive us for our sins, to form us into a community of people through whom He wants to change the world, to see the kingdom of God, the restoration of His fallen creation. That story is true and that is the story that I want to be on the same page with.

But when I know that that story is true, it makes me wonder: How am I handing that story down? How are all of us individually and together telling the story? We’re not writing the Bible anymore. Thank God the Bible has already been settled, because it was settled by people who were close to the events and not by us 2000 years later. But I’m sure you’ve heard it said before that you might be the only Bible that some people read, or you may be the only Jesus that some people see. That’s true; when people know that you’re a Christian, everything that you do is telling the story of Jesus to them. By the way that you drive, the way that you handle your finances, the way that you interact with them at work, or across the front yard… your neighbors, your friends. We’re telling them the story of Jesus by the lives that we live and the words that we speak. It’s a sobering thought really.

But there are lots of reasons here to be encouraged also, reasons for me to take hope in the way that Jesus is working and telling his story here in this church. We have people who volunteer with Global Health Ministries, for example, trying to tell the world that they care about them because Jesus cares about them, people who volunteer at Habitat for Humanity; we send thousands of dollars to Feed My Starving Children because we think Jesus would, because we think that is a faithful way to hand down His story. We have people who participate in our monthly Confusion Evangelism outreach events to try and confuse the world by actually showing them the love of Jesus Christ so that they’ll consider believing the greatest story that was ever true. Its also the reason that we as a church tried to tell the story of Jesus to our community in White Bear Lake by putting that huge trailer out front a few months ago that said “Jesus Cares, Help Fill this Truck” as part of our food drive. We were trying to tell the story of Jesus to this city.

But also, we try to tell the story internationally and not just locally. I think, at bottom, this is why Amy and I sponsor children through the organization called Compassion International that you heard about in our missions presentation this morning. And I think it’s why many of you sponsor your Compassion children. Because we’re taking care of them like Jesus wants us to, because we’re telling the story of Jesus and handing it down globally to them and their families and communities. You know what most of the world thinks about the Christian American nation, right? A bunch of Christians just get their own money and bomb everybody else, that’s what Christians do. We want to tell a different Jesus story. We want to pass down the message that Jesus cares about you, cares that you are educated, that you have something to eat and clothes to wear. We want to tell the story of Jesus both locally and globally. Now, you just can’t get around the fact that we don’t always tell the story perfectly, so its always good news and always important that this is the story of Jesus who forgives us and forgives the world. But without passing that story down, nobody ever hears it.

So, I think what this means is; let’s get in the game! Let’s get in that telephone game. In fact, we’re on the loose end of the line now, so let’s put our ear on the end of that line and hear it. Get involved and hear the story because it’s true and its good, Good News. And then also, pass the story on, bring people back around and close the loop for them. Bring them back around to the story of Jesus; let’s hand that story down.

Stephan K. Turnbull
First Lutheran Church
White Bear Lake, Minnesota
sturnbull@firstlutheranwbl.org