There are also letters and apocalypses – that is, books purporting to offer revelations from God in the same way as the Book of Revelation – claiming to come from various apostles, but they are also from the late second century at the earliest. There were indeed a good many gospels besides the four now in the New Testament, but they were almost all much later in origin than the canonical ones, the sole possible exception being the Gospel of Thomas – a collection of Jesus’ sayings that includes some not now in the New Testament. Like so many conspiracy theories, Brown’s is fatally flawed. The mood was summed up in the 39th Festal Letter of bishop Athanasius, in 367 AD, which listed exactly the books that now form the New Testament as the only ones to be accepted and believed. Thus the turning point for the Christian faith lay in the second half of the fourth century, when ‘orthodox’ bishops tendentiously excluded ‘heretical’ writings from the Christian biblical canon, at councils such as Laodicea (363 AD), Rome (382 AD), and Hippo (393 AD). Until then, he asserted, Christian scripture had been much more of a free-for-all. In particular, he claimed that the Church authorities conspired to suppress many gospels that presented Jesus in very human terms and had a positive view of the body, in favour of an altogether more ethereal idea of Christianity and its founder. How did the individual letters and gospels come to be regarded as holy scripture, alongside the older corpus of the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible? In The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown popularised the theory that it was not until the fourth century that the Church decided what was to be in the New Testament, selecting from a vast body of gospels and other books that had been written by Christians of various persuasions. Petersburg. Photo by Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty Images. Found in the collection of the State Russian Museum, St.
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In ‘New Testament times’, there was no New Testament.Īcts and Epistles of the Apostles, c.1410. A generation or two of Christians thus managed without a written record of Jesus.
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Until then, the stories about Jesus and his sayings must have circulated orally. The gospels were not written till later still, probably in the 70s-90s AD. They had the Scriptures of Judaism – what is now called the Old Testament – but they had no writings of their own until Paul started to write to the churches he had founded, some time in the 50s AD, a couple of decades after the crucifixion of Jesus. It is easy to forget that the earliest Christians did not yet have the New Testament.