Okay I had a semi debate with a guy in another site that said the New Testament was not written until the Middles Ages and the Rennasiance. Now I’ve never heard this before, and we have documents aging back to the early fourth century ad that have listed the books we still use.
Has anyone heard such a thing? The renisance writing I mean. The guy would not even give me facts, other than “Its known history” no quotes from historians, no web links. I think the guy is out to lunch, I’m sure Cid will grant me at least one responce, and he’s pretty good at this stuff, so I look forward in hearing what people say
I’m not a scholar on biblical history, by any means, but perhaps they were stating that it wasn’t written alltogether until then; individual books were written and used before that, however, all the books were then written down in a single, collected group. They all existed, it’s just that some weren’t written down. I have no idea, really, but it seems like the idea that the New Testament wasn’t around before that is pretty damned silly, since without even an unritten doctine of Christianity, it would be pretty hard for an empire to start on it.
On a related subject, I’ve heard a couple books of the bible weren’t actually supposed to be there wand were written adn created later on in history for political reasons. I’ve heard this on parts of Matthew, Leviticus (well, technically, I’ve heard it was edited heavily), and a few others, I believe. Is there any evidence, because I’ve never really bothered enough to check. I certainly didn’t notice any glaring differences in style, but the bible has been translated so many times those would have long disappaeared by now. . .
The only thing I could think of is perhaps for whatever reason he’s getting the writing of the King James version confused with the compilation of the original Bible itself. The original certainly does go back a thousand years before the Renaissance (don’t know the exact date that a finalized version was agreed upon off the top of my head).
Most of the New Testament was written before 100 - the four gospels a few decades after Christ was born, and a substantial middle portion all written by St. Paul a few decades after that. Revelations was not written till several hundred years later - that’s the book that foretells Armageddon and makes a bunch of weird predictions.
When they say the Bible wasn’t written till the Middle Ages, what they mean is that its structure wasn’t finalized until then. There is a bunch of stuff written that wasn’t decided to be included, for instance, supposedly “The Gospel of Judas”, various stories of a bad guy wizard named Simon Magus who was Simon Peter’s nemisis, and, believe it or not, sort of an autobiographical set of short stories about Mary mother of Jesus when she was a little girl.
The Proevangelium of St. James, yes I’ve read that, as well as the story of Mary’s Childhood, sometimes clumped together with the Proevangelium.
From everything I’ve read, the 27 books were all accepted by councils going back to at least early 300.
The arugments of which book was okay, and which not, rebegan ith the Protestant Reformation, when certain books seemed to undermine their theology. It could mean he means this, but talking to him, he seemed to really think by his words that we did not have ANY books at all, that someone made these up around the 1500 hundreds.
Sorry, I don’t know all that much about Christianity, but I find it difficult to believe that the New Testament wasn’t around in pretty much final form by the first few centuries AD.
If he means the printed word, then yes. Mass production of the printed medium happened around that time but there were certainly hand written copies around then.
Curtis, yes I take every religion seriously, except scientology.
From what he said, they did not exist at all until the 1500s, there were oral words, but nothing at all was written until we had the printing press. The written texts we seemed to have in the past, I do not believe he thinks they existed. Thats what it seemed like to me.
He’s thinking about the Oral Society and the Written Society in very general time spans. Oral societies didn’t write down their history and passed it down through story telling. Until a written language was developed, all societies recorded history and other things verbally. An example would be the Native American tribes.
At the time, the known world was a Written Society. How else would Paul have sent Letters to the Romans and Ephesians without a written language? Up until the development of the printing press, reproductions and translations were done by hand. After the printing press, written languages became mass produced and uniform copies of a particular manuscript could be reproduced in far less time than it took by hand. The first thing to be reproduced was the Bible.
I think he thought history was whatver you wanted it to be, so if you did not believe that the new testament was around until the 1500 then history said it was so, kinda weird.
I think your friend is referring to the Council of Trent (1545-1563), which is when Catholicism agreed on their canonization of The Bible, and otherwise officially solidified their religion after The Reformation’s pressures.
The New Testament was officially canonized over a long period of time.
Based on what I read, I’d say that the Council of Trent made the Bible we know today official (especially for Catholics), but that its various parts were well-known and promulgated well-before then.
While there were other councils that gave the same list as Trent did, yeah, you might have a point here, its too bad he refused to elaborate on the matter.
Those poor Irish monks, among many others, all their work mocked because the world thinks that deny absolute truth even in history is bunk. Sigh
