HOW DID THE BIBLE COME IN EXISTENCE?

In the one-hundred-year period extending roughly from AD 50 to 150, a number of documents began to circulate among the churches, including epistles, gospels, memoirs, apocalypses, homilies, and collections of teachings. While some of these documents were apostolic in origin, others drew upon the tradition the apostles and ministers of the word had utilized in their individual missions.

For more than 300 years of Christianity, there was no definitive compilation yet into a single book of these ancient documents like what is known to the world at present. From the beginning it was expected that certain of these documents would be read in the public gatherings of the church, though there were disputes and questions over the authenticity of certain documents like the Letter to the Hebrews, Letter of James, Second Letter of Peter, Second and Third Letters of John, Letter of Jude and the Revelation, known as the Antilegomena. At that time, these materials were accepted by some local churches and others did not. However, because of the increase in the amount of documents being circulated (whether authentic or not), the Church found it necessary to discern and choose which of these materials are inspired by the Holy Spirit. How was it done? Below is the timeline of the compilation of the Holy Bible:

ca. 285-132 BC: The translation of the Old Testament books from Hebrew to Greek known as Septuagint (LXX) by the 70 Jewish scholars for the Jews in Diaspora in Alexandria. This is the Old Testament version used by the apostles and early Christians.

50-150 AD: The writing of the New Testament books and the circulation of other apocryphal documents.

96 AD: Some letters of Paul were known to Clement I, bishop of Rome, together with some form of the “words of Jesus”; but while Clement valued these highly, he did not regard them as “Scripture” (“graphe”), a term he reserved for the Septuagint.

100 AD: The hypothetical Council of Jamnia, held in Yavneh, was a Jewish council at which the canon of the Hebrew Bible had been finalized. It was proposed to have excluded the seven books of the Old Testament which are part of its Greek version, the Septuagint. These books are regarded by the Church as inspired and are known as the deuterocanonical.

130-140 AD: Marcion of Sinope, a bishop of Asia Minor who went to Rome and was later excommunicated for his views, was the first of record to propose a definitive, exclusive, unique canon of Christian scriptures. He taught that there were two Gods: Yahweh, the cruel God of the Old Testament, and Abba, the kind father of the New Testament. Marcion eliminated the Old Testament as scriptures and, since he was anti-Semitic, kept from the New Testament only 10 letters of Paul and 2/3 of Luke’s gospel (he deleted references to Jesus’ Jewishness). His gospel is called the Gospel of the Lord.

145-163 AD: Justin Martyr, an early Christian apologist, mentioned the “memoirs of the apostles”, which Christians called “gospels” and which were regarded as on par with the Old Testament. In his works, distinct references are found to Romans, 1 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians, and possible ones to Philippians, Titus, and 1 Timothy.

160 AD: Tatian the Assyrian, an early Christian theologian, composed a single harmonized “Gospel” by weaving the contents of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John together along with events present in none of these texts. The narrative mainly follows the chronology of John. This is called the Diatessaron [“(Harmony) Through Four”] and it became the official Gospel text of the Syriac church, centered in Edessa. He rejected Paul’s Letters and Acts of the Apostles

185 AD: Irenaeus, bishop of Lugdunum in Gaul, in his Adversus Haereses, denounced various early Christian groups that used only one gospel, such as Marcionism which used only Marcion’s version of Luke, or the Ebionites which seem to have used an Aramaic version of Matthew, as well as groups that used more than four gospels, such as the Valentinians (A.H. 1.11). Irenaeus declared that there can’t be either more or fewer than four, presenting as logic the analogy of the four corners of the earth and the four winds (3.11.8).

ca. 200 AD: Origen Adamantius, early Christian theologian, accepted 22 canonical books of the Hebrews plus Maccabees plus the four Gospels but Paul “did not so much as write to all the churches that he taught; and even to those to which he wrote he sent but a few lines.”

ca. 200 AD: The periphery of the canon was not yet determined as of this time. According to one list, the Muratorian Canon (named after Fr. Ludovico Antonio Muratori who discovered it at the Ambrosian Library in Milan in the 18th century), which was compiled at Rome, the New Testament was comprised of the 4 gospels; Acts; 13 letters of Paul (Hebrews is not included); 3 of the 7 General Epistles (1-2 John and Jude); and also the Apocalypse of Peter. Each “city-church” (region) still has its own Canon, which is a list of books approved for reading at Mass (Liturgy).

ca. 215 AD: Titus Flavius Clemens (Clement of Alexandria), an early Christian theologian, made use of an open canon. In addition to books that did not make it into the final 27-book New Testament but which had local canonicity (Barnabas, Didache, I Clement, Revelation of Peter, the Shepherd, the Gospel according to the Hebrews), he also used the Gospel of the Egyptians, Preaching of Peter, Traditions of Matthias, Sibylline Oracles, and the Oral Gospel. He did, however, prefer the four church gospels to all others, although he supplemented them freely with apocryphal gospels. He was the first to treat non-Pauline letters of the apostles (other than II Peter) as scripture-he accepted I Peter, I and II John, and Jude as scripture.

ca. 300 AD: The Alogi, an early Christian group, rejected the Gospel of John (and possibly also Revelation and the Epistles of John) as either not apostolic or as written by the Gnostic Cerinthus or as not compatible with the Synoptic Gospels.

300 A.D. The Old Syriac was a translation of the New Testament documents from the Greek into Syriac. In the Coptic Versions, Coptic was spoken in four dialects in Egypt and the materials were translated into each of these four dialects.

ca. 303 AD: The making of what is currently known Codex Claromontanus canon (named after the town of Clermont-en-Beauvaisis in France from where it was procured by the Calvinist scholar Theodore Bezza in the late 16th century), a page found inserted into a copy of the Epistles of Paul and Hebrews, has the Old Testament, plus Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, 1–2,4 Maccabees, and the New Testament, plus 3rd Corinthians, Acts of Paul, Apocalypse of Peter, Barnabas, and Hermas, but missing Philippians, 1–2 Thessalonians, and Hebrews.

330 AD: Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, recorded his own New Testament canon which includes the holy quaternion of the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the epistles of Paul, the epistle of John, the epistle of Peter, the Apocalypse of John, the epistle of James and that of Jude, also the second epistle of Peter, and the second and third epistles of John.

331 AD: Roman Emperor Constantine I commissioned Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, to deliver fifty compiled Scriptures for the Church of Constantinople. Athanasius (Apostolic Constitution 4) recorded Alexandrian scribes around 340 AD preparing the Canon for Constans. Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus are among of these ancient compilations together with the Peshitta and Codex Alexandrinus.

350 AD: Cyril, bishop of Jerusalem, included in his Catechetical Lectures (4.36) the Gospels (4), Acts, James, 1-2 Peter, 1-3 John, Jude, and Paul’s epistles (14), but listed the Gospel of Thomas as pseudepigrapha.

360 AD: The making of the so-called Cheltenham/Mommsen Canon (named after German classical scholar Theodor Mommsen who discovered it in 1886 from a 10th-century manuscript belonging to the library of Thomas Phillips at Cheltenham, England), which contains the 24-book Old Testament and 24-book New Testament that provides syllable and line counts but omits Hebrews, Jude and James, and questions the epistles of John and Peter.

363 AD: The Synod of Laodicea was one of the first synods that set out to judge which books were to be read aloud in churches. It canonized 22-book Old Testament and 26-book New Testament (excludes Revelation).

367 AD: In his Festal letter, Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, gave a list of exactly the same books as what would become the 27-book New Testament canon, and he used the word “canonized” (kanonizomena) in regards to them. He also listed a 22-book Old Testament and 7 books not in the canon but to be read: Wisdom of Solomon, Wisdom of Sirach, Esther, Judith, Tobit, Didache, and the Shepherd of Hermas.

374-377 AD: Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis, listed the following canon in his Panarion 76.5: Gospels (4), Paul’s epistles (13), Acts, James, Peter, 1-3 John, Jude, Revelation, Wisdom, Sirach.

380 AD: The redactor of the Apostolic Constitutions attributed a canon to the Twelve Apostles themselves as the 85th of his list of such apostolic decrees: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John; the fourteen Epistles of Paul; two Epistles of Peter; three of John; one of James; one of Jude; two Epistles of Clement; and the Acts of the Apostles.

382 AD: The Synod of Rome (presided by Pope Damasus) started the ball rolling for the definition of a universal canon for all city-churches. It listed the New Testament books in their present number and order.

ca. 382 AD: Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus (Jerome), a Roman presbyter, was commissioned by Damasus I, bishop of Rome, to revise the Vetus Latina (“Old Latin”) collection of Biblical texts in Latin then in use by the Church. Once published, it was widely adopted and eventually eclipsed the Vetus Latina and, by the 13th century, was known as the “versio vulgata” (the “version commonly-used”) or, more simply, in Latin as vulgata or in Greek as ß?????ta (“Vulgate”).

385 AD: Gregory of Nazianzus, bishop of Constantinople, produced a canon in verse which agreed with that of his contemporary Athanasius, other than placing the “Catholic Epistles” after the Pauline Epistles and omitting Revelation. This list was ratified by the Synod of Trullo of 692 AD.

inter 386-388 AD: John Chrysostom, bishop of Constantinople, was the first (in his Homilies on Matthew) to use the Greek phrase “ta biblia” (the books) to describe both the Old and New Testaments together.

393 AD: The Synod of Hippo Regius in North Africa accepted the present canon of the New Testament.

394 AD: Amphilochius, bishop of Iconium, in his poem Iambics for Seleucus, nephew of St. Olympias, discussed debate over the canonical inclusion of a number of books, and almost certainly rejects the later Epistles of Peter and John, Jude, and Revelation.

397 AD: The third Synod of Carthage, which refined the canon for the Western Church, sent it to Innocent I, bishop of Rome, for ratification. Its list is similar to the present canon of scriptures. In the East, the canonical process was hampered by a number of schisms.

ca 405 AD: Innocent I, bishop of Rome, in ratification of the canon defined by the Synod of Carthage, sent the list of the sacred books to Exsuperius, Gallic bishop of Toulouse, which was identical with that of the Ecumenical Council of Trent.

419 AD: The fourth Synod of Carthage reaffirmed the canon defined by the previous synod in its present number and order (similar to the Ecumenical Council of Trent).

551-62 AD: Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator, Roman statesman and writer, in his Institutiones Divinarum et Saecularium Litterarum, omitted 2 Peter, 2-3 John, Jude and Hebrews.

787 AD: The Second Ecumenical Council of Nicaea, which adopted the canon of Carthage. At this point, both the Latin West and the Greek / Byzantine East had the same canon. However, the non-Greek, Monophysite and Nestorian Churches of the East (the Copts, the Ethiopians, the Syrians, the Armenians, the Syro-Malankars, the Chaldeans, and the Malabars) were still left out. But these Churches came together in agreement, in 1442A.D., in Florence.

1199 AD: Innocent III, bishop of Rome, banned unauthorized versions of the Bible as a reaction to the Cathar and Waldensian heresies. The synods of Toulouse and Tarragona (in 1234 AD) outlawed possession of such renderings. But there is evidence of some vernacular translations still being permitted while others were being scrutinized.

ca. 1245 AD: Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury, and Hugo Cardinal de Sancto-Caro, dominican titular bishop of Santa Sabina, developed different schemas for systematic division of the Bible. It was the system of Archbishop Langton on which the modern chapter divisions are based.

1380 AD: The first English translation of the Bible was by John Wycliffe, the founder of the anti-Catholic group named Lollardy. He translated the Bible into English from the Latin Vulgate. This was a translation from a translation and not a translation from the original Hebrew and Greek. Wycliffe was forced to translate from the Latin Vulgate because he did not know Hebrew or Greek.

1442 AD: AD : At the Ecumenical Council of Florence, the entire Church recognized the 27 books. This council confirmed the Roman Catholic Canon of the Bible which Damasus I, bishop of Rome, had published a thousand years earlier. So, by 1439 AD, all orthodox branches of the Church were legally bound to the same canon. This is 100 years before the Reformation.

1448 AD: The Hebrew Old Testament was divided into verses by a French Jewish philosopher and controversialist by the name of Isaac Nathan ben Kalonymus (Mordacai Nathan).

1456 AD: Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg, a German publisher and inventor of a movable type printing, produced the first printed Bible in Latin. Printing revolutionized the way books were made. From now on books could be published in great numbers and at a lower cost.

ca. 1500 AD: The first person to divide New Testament chapters into verses was an Italian Dominican biblical scholar Santi Pagnini, but his system was never widely adopted.

1514 AD: The Greek New Testament was printed for the first time by Erasmus. He based his Greek New Testament from only five Greek manuscripts, the oldest of which dated only as far back as the twelfth century. With minor revisions, Erasmus’ Greek New Testament came to be known as the Textus Receptus or the “received texts.”

1522 AD: Polyglot Bible, in which group of editors was led by Diego López de Zúñiga and funded by Jiménez Cardinal de Cisneros, was published. The Old Testament was in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin and the New Testament in Latin and Greek. Erasmus used the Polyglot to revise later editions of his New Testament. Tyndale made use of the Polyglot in his translation on the Old Testament into English which he did not complete because he died in 1534 AD.

1536 AD: In his translation of the Bible from Greek into German, Martin Luther, a former Catholic monk and priest who became the primary figure of the Protestant Reformation, removed four New Testament books (Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation) and placed them in an appendix treating them as less than canonical as well as the seven Old Testament books (Tobit, Judith, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach, and Baruch plus the additional texts in Esther and Daniel) labelling them as apocryphal.

1546 AD: At the Ecumenical Council of Trent, the Catholic Church reaffirmed once and for all the full list of 27 books. The council also confirmed the inclusion of the Deuterocanonical books which had been a part of the Bible canon since the early Church and was confirmed at the councils of 393 AD, 373 AD, 787 AD and 1442 AD. At Trent, the Church of Rome actually dogmatized the canon, making it more than a matter of canon law, which had been the case up to that point, closing it for good.

1551 AD: Robert Estienne, a French printer and classical scholar, created an alternate numbering in his edition of the Greek New Testament which was also used in his 1553 publication of the Bible in French. Estienne’s system of division was widely adopted, and it is this system which is found in almost all modern Bibles.

1566 AD: Sixtus of Siena, a dominican theologian, coined the term “deuterocanonical” to describe the seven Old Testament books that had not been accepted as canonical by the Protestants but which appeared in the Septuagint; and defined for the Roman Catholics of the terms “protocanonical” and the ancient term “apocryphal” in his work Bibliotheca Sancta ex Præcipuis Catholicæ Ecclesiæ Auctoribus Collecta (Venice 1566).

16th century to present AD: The HOLY BIBLE composed of 73 canonical books (46 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament) based on the infallible decree of the holy Catholic Church. Thus, the great Tridentine Council declared: “But if any one receive not, as sacred and canonical, the said books entire with all their parts, as they have been used to be read in the Catholic Church, and as they are contained in the old Latin vulgate edition; and knowingly and deliberately contemn the traditions aforesaid; let him be anathema.”

The timeline of the development of the biblical canon is the living proof that the holy Bible was not handed down by Christ to His apostles as it is. The Bible did not even come down from the heavens as what it looks like at present. The truth is:

IT WAS THE CATHOLIC CHURCH WHO CHOSE WHICH BOOKS ARE INSPIRED AND COMPILED THEM INTO A SINGLE BOOK WHICH SHE CALLED THE BIBLE. THUS, IT IS THE BIBLE WHICH CAME FROM THE CHURCH AND NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.

However, despite this historical fact, the holy Church did not claim authorship on those divine scriptures. For her, “God is the author of Sacred Scripture” (CCC 105). And, she added: “To compose the sacred books, God chose certain men who, all the while he employed them in this task, made full use of their own faculties and powers so that, though he acted in them and by them, it was as true authors that they consigned to writing whatever he wanted written, and no more” (CCC 106).

Remember, “the Christian faith is not a religion of the book but of the Word of God, a word which is not a written and mute word, but the Word is incarnate and living” (cf. CCC 108).

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Jesus Christ, the Lord, founded a Church and that Church produced the Bible.

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CATHOLIC BIBLE 101 – The Holy Bible

Where did the Bible come from?

Well, the books of the Old Testament were decided on many years before the time of Christ.

Christ himself read from the Old Testament when he proclaimed that He himself had come to bring liberty to the captives (Isaiah 61:1).

In other words, Jesus was proclaiming that He and He alone was the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies that promised the Jews a Messiah (the Anointed One). The Jews were called the “Chosen People” for a reason. That reason was to make the Word of God (the Bible) known to all mankind, and that through these “Chosen People” the Messiah would be born.

There are many more Old Testament verses that refer to Jesus, which were written hundreds of years before He was born. One such verse is the 22nd Psalm, which refers to someone suffering greatly with people casting lots for his garments and his hands and his feet being wasted, a clear reference to Jesus on the cross. So we see that Jesus is the fulfillment of all of the Old Testament prophecies concerning the coming of a Messiah.

The Jewish leaders of the day, however, wanted a Messiah to come and free them from worldly oppression from the Romans, and didn’t expect a Messiah to come and “just” free them from their sins and bondage to the devil, so they rejected Jesus and had Him crucified.

The New Testament, on the other hand, was not decided upon until the late 4th century, at the Council of Rome, in the year 382. This collection of writings from the first century Christians was determined by this Council to be divinely inspired by God, the real author. Many other writings were considered, but were thrown out by the Catholic Church as not being the authentic Word of God. The interesting fact here is that this means for almost 400 years the Christians of those days had no Bible to refer to.

Therefore, the Church that Jesus Himself had set up had to primarily transmit His Word orally (some rare individual manuscripts did exist, but were mainly limited to Churches, and not considered divinely inspired as sacred scripture until 382 AD), which is the beginning of the doctrine of Tradition. In 2nd Thessalonians 2:15, St. Paul tells us “So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter”. This means that not every teaching in the Church was written down in the Bible, otherwise, St. Paul would not have said “by word of mouth”. One of these traditions is infant baptism.

Some people today reject infant baptism, because they don’t believe that a child has the faith to accept Jesus as his personal Lord and Savior, and therefore can’t be saved through Baptism. This, of course, is not true, because Jesus Himself said, “Unless you have the faith of a little child, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven (Mark 10:15), as well as the fact that God chooses us (at any age He wants to), we don’t “choose” God (John 15:16). So we see that the Tradition of the Catholic Church, which was there at the beginning with Jesus when the Church was formed, is therefore correct on the subject of infant baptism.

Other original traditions of the church, such as praying for the dead in Purgatory and asking saints in heaven to pray for us, are also rejected by other churches. However, these same churches also have a tradition of believing that the books in the bible are divinely inspired, but don’t really know how that tradition came to be, because that fact is not written down in the Bible either.

Sola Scriptura (the Bible alone) is a false doctrine. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that the Bible is the sole authority on religious matters. As a matter of fact, the Bible does say that the Church of the Living God is the pillar and bulwark of Truth (1 Timothy 3:15), which means that the Church is the primary transmitter of truth, rather than the Bible.

When the subject of whether or not one had to be circumcised first before becoming a Christian came up (Acts 15:1), no one “searched the scriptures”, but rather, they had a Church Council in Jerusalem where St. James declared the solution to be straight from the Holy Spirit (Acts 15:28). When St. Peter declared that all foods were now OK to eat, he didn’t “search the scriptures” from the Old Testament to find this out (he certainly would be looking a long time for that!). Rather, God revealed this to him in a DREAM (Acts 11:9)!!

An important concept to remember is that the Bible proceeds from the teaching authority of the church (Matthew 28:19), as opposed to the Protestant model of the church conforming to the Bible. Just as a University uses books to teach, so the Church uses the Bible to teach.

Just as a professor in college interprets for you what your textbook really means, so the Church, through its teaching authority from Jesus himself (“Go forth and teach all nations”, Matthew 28:19), has the mission to teach as well as to interpret Scripture, through its gift of the Holy Spirit. Jesus himself told the early Church that He would send the Holy Spirit to guide it in truth (John 14:26 and John 16:13-14).

Remember, Jesus didn’t write down a Bible for us to read and he didn’t tell everyone to go out and get their own copy and try to figure everything out on their own. Instead, He established a Church (Matthew 16:18) to teach us what we need to know about God, to love Him and serve Him, and to be happy with Him in Heaven.

Another interesting fact is that the Catholic Bible contains seven books of the Old Testament not contained in the Protestant Bible. These books are:

The Wisdom of Solomon
Tobit
Sirach
Judith
1rst Maccabees
2nd Maccabees
Baruch

Additional parts of Esther and Daniel are also not in the Protestant Bible. These books were not written in Hebrew, but in Greek instead. The Catholic Church, through the intercession of the Holy Spirit, discerned that these books were divinely inspired and included them in the Bible in the year 382 AD. at the Council of Rome, under Pope Damasus I. After all, God is not limited by language. Martin Luther, over 1000 years later during the Protestant Reformation, thought that these books were not divinely inspired, and unilaterally threw them out, deriding them as the “apocrypha”.

Luther also tried to throw out the Books of James and Revelation in the New Testament, but luckily was blocked from doing so. He actually called the Book of James an “epistle of straw”. Anyone who wants to start a new church today by deleting books of the current Bible would probably not have too much success, but would probably be labeled as a heretic.

While the Catholic Church truly believes that reading and understanding the Bible is a good and holy thing, she cautions strongly against trying to understand the true meaning of sacred scripture on your own.

After all, Peter warns in his epistle “First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, ” (2 Peter 1:20). And there is also 2 Peter 3:15-16: “And count the forbearance of our Lord as salvation. So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, speaking of this as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures.”

So, the answer is to get a Catholic Bible that contains lots of explanatory footnotes, or even better, get a bible with great commentary, like the Navarre Bible. This will help you when your non-Catholic friends start quoting individual verses from the Bible to you.

The Holy Bible is meant to be read as a whole book in its entirety, and is never to be taken out of context. The false approach of taking individual verses from it to prove a particular point would be like trying to make a car go 70 miles an hour after you have disassembled it into its individual components. In all cases, scripture must be interpreted in light of what the writer was actually trying to convey, & not what we think it means to us personally.

In summary, the New Testament writings were selected in the year 382 by Pope Damasus I and the Council of Rome though the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and the Catholic Church’s authority to teach error-free, through His power.

There is no other revelation by God forthcoming that hasn’t already been revealed in the Bible, or through Sacred Tradition, or through the teaching authority of the Church. There are, however, new insights and understanding of these things, based on the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. The Bible was written in different languages from a different culture, and from a different time in history, so using the Catholic Church as your official interpreter of what the Bible really says and means is the only way to fully comprehend its true meaning.

In no field of learning where a degree is given out, does the institution give everyone a book and have them try to figure it out all on their own – whether it’s engineering, physics, science, Spanish, etc. In each case, the institution (college or University) teaches from the book. It’s exactly the same with the teaching authority of the Church using its book, the Bible.

Trying to figure out all of the meanings of the Bible by ones’ self would be like trying to figure out quantum physics on your own without an instructor.

The Church has been around for 2000 years, and has seen it all. The Church has already figured out all of the meanings of the Bible for us – All we have to do is to learn from the Church what these meanings are. After all, we can’t afford to be wrong on anything when facing Jesus after death.