Yes, yes, we’ve all seen the Jim Bakker Story.
This doesn’t seem to be a fair analogy. After all, we have proof that there is a US Mint. If a bunch of extra-terrestrial three-dollar bills starting turning up, and we also found extra-terrestrial four-dollar bills that were known fakes, wouldn’t that raise suspicion about all of the extra-terrestrial currency?
A little background from my Sociology of Religion class:
Prior to this compilation of scriptures into the popular Bible, there was no universal text used by all Christians. Instead the many Christian sects scattered around the Mediterranean taught mostly word-of-mouth tales about the life of Jesus. A few dedicated men from different sects at different times gathered these tales into gospels so as to keep a written record of the disciples’ teachings. So when the new church of Christ decided to gather all these works together in the hopes of compiling a comprehensive ‘Encyclopedia of Jesus’, they had the difficult task of sifting through 300 years of telling and re-telling, deciding which would stay and which would go.
As for the political nature of these decisions, or for that matter the political tone of the gospels, this wasn’t a particularly happy time for Christians. If you read the 4 NT gospels for instance, you’ll notice that they talk about the same life from different points of view. The gospel of Mark for instance carries with it a noticeable undercurrent of anti-Semitic feelings. This was because at the time that this gospel was being written, Christianity was in the middle of a particularly painful split with Judaism, and contrast is a very effective way of generating a group identity. OT Judaism for instance wouldn’t be as concerned with worldly action as it is if it weren’t for their friends to the south worshiping their Cult of the Dead.
The priests who wrote these scriptures were more concerned with establishing the nature of this new religion during the time of social upheaval in which they lived than they were in keeping a historically accurate record of the life of Jesus.
I’m starting to wonder if you are really asking General Questions here, or if you are just looking to bash Christianity without being subject to the debating rigor of Great Debates.
Reasonably close.
Everything that is now included in the New Testament was written by 125. (Different scholars will put the date earlier than that, but that is the latest date that is generally accepted.) The texts were passed around and copied (and occasionally translated to different languages) for many years, but there was a growing understanding throughout that period that certain letters and gospels had more value than others. When Marcinion created a list of acceptable and unacceptable texts (based on his belief that the Jews were damned and Jewish references needed to be expunged from Christian belief), the church fathers reacted by compiling their own lists of writings that were to be accepted. (Marcinion was condemned and the Gospel of Matthew and the Letter to Hebrews were included among the accepted texts.)
As the church spread and was influenced by the cultures of the various places where it took root, there were differences of opinion based either on the local cultures or on the specific teachings of individual leaders or scholars located in those regions.
Often these differences of opinion led to violent outbreaks between factions who held one or another of those beliefs (leading several pius pagans to remark with various levels of bemusement or condemnation on the rather nasty nature of Christianity).
The Council of Nicaea attempted to resolve the various differences and establish a single, common Christianity. Politics? Sure. Where two or three are gathered with an opinion, there will be politics. Casting the whole episode as one of mere power politics does a disservice to the personal beliefs and characters of the participants. However foolish they may look to an uninvolved spectator, they were wrestling with attitudes and ideas that they truly held to be central to their ways of life.
Having wrestled the dogma to the mat (with varying degrees of success) at Nicaea, they then addressed the issue of which Scriptures they would rely on to carry forth the beliefs that they had ascertained that they held. While it is true that the final resolution (with an asterisk) was concluded in 382, it should be noted that the list assembled in 382 was not just a compromise list worked out at a meeting. Every book that made it into the canon in 382 had been deemed Scripture by a majority of commentators since the early third century. In the West, the canon was fairly well accepted by the year 200. In the East, there was more discussion and there were more reservations. The asterisk was that many individual churches in the East rejected either or both Revelation or the Letter to the Hebrews (in a few instances for several hundred years after the Council of 382).
However, aside from the Eastern reservations about those two works, the rest of the canon-to-be was pretty widely accepted for more than 150 years prior to 382 and no book that had been accepted widely before that time was thrown out*, at the last minute, at that council. The Roman Council of 382 was the final, official establishment of the canon, but it did not simply look at a list of books and create a canon out of whole cloth.
Regarding the intents of the various texts, certainly none were written to provide a historical record in the way that we would expect a biography to be written today. They were clearly hagiographic in nature, intended to inspire and exhort rather than to document events.
- There is (was) a letter that was purportedly from Paul to the Laodiceans that Marcinion had included in his canon. This letter was never widely acepted, although it did have a certain currency in some regions for a while. This gets confusing because Ephesus is in Loadicea and there are references to the “Laodicean letter” that may be references to either Marcinion’s or to the Letter to the Ephesians.