I found it quite fascinating that there is an Italian guy named Luigi Cascioli who was suing the Catholic Church back in 2006 for inventing the story of Jesus....
http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/anderson.cooper.360/blog/2006/05/how-do-you-prove-jesus-existed.html
I don't necessarily believe that they did exactly that, but I think they took a real man and turned him into something he never claimed to be while changing the core of his message. That being said, now to the main point of this thread....
On another thread entitled "Scriptural Proof of a Paradise Earth", I made this comment:
"...the New Testament was deliberately compiled to make it appear as if Jesus fulfilled all those prophecies [in the OT]."
"clarity" then said,
Would you expand on this further? Maybe a link. Thanks.
So, I have been wanting to answer this, and I figured it deserved a thread of its own. Now I know it's altogether likely that this has been discussed at length on this forum, and I tried the search feature but I don't know if I used the right words because I didn't get the results I thought I would get. Anyway, I think that this subject is critical and I would like to gather as much information as possible from the very many scholarly people here.
In all honesty, it was probably a Tony Bushby article or book where I first read that idea of the church putting the NT together to make it "fit" the OT, and I do understand that Bushby has no credibility here and for good reason, but I don't think that discredits every single thing the man has said. However, I do believe I have seen it elsewhere, and most importantly, this is the conclusion that I have reached in my own mind after examining the evidence that I have been able to find so far.
So to answer clarity's question, there are a number of great books out there on this subject that are often mentioned here, by Bruce Metzger, Bart Ehrman, etc., but I would like to start off by quoting from what I believe to be a phenomenal mind-blowing book, "Jehovah Unmasked" by a former JW turned Gnostic, Nathaniel J. Merritt.
Sorry about the formatting.
Chapter Two
The New Testament Mutates
And Evolves
The fact that Catholic Church leaders in both its Roman
and Byzantine halves selected by vote which books would
become the New Testament, will come as a shock to
many Protestant, Evangelical, and Fundamentalist Christians.
(For the purposes of this book, "Fundamentalist"
means someone who believes the Bible is inerrant and
infallible in the original autograph manuscripts. That it is
wholly the work and word of God, the Truth in all it affirms)
Most give no thought as to who said the New Testament
books are the right books. Nor do they even ask if
perhaps some of the right books were left out of the canon.
All mainstream Christians of the western world, whether
Protestant, Evangelical, Fundamentalist, Pentecostal or
Charismatic, share the same canon of New Testament
books selected and approved by the Catholic Church. They
use the Catholic New Testament whether they are Catholic
or not. I am not referring to the Latin Vulgate, but to
the canon of the New Testament itself, the list of New
Testament books.
The New Testament did not drop out of the sky. Most
Evangelicals and Fundamentalists know that, but they
treat the New Testament as though it did drop out of the
sky. Nor did the New Testament canon, the official list of
books, pop into existence in an historical vacuum. Most
Protestants, Evangelicals, and Fundamentalists, though,
are willfully ignorant of the historically verifiable process
by which the books were selected. Although most non-
Catholics have a vague unspoken notion that "spiritual
osmosis" is how the New Testament books were selected,
that is demonstrably untrue. Finally, the Bible lacks a divinely
inspired table of contents. However, Evangelicals
and Fundamentalists unthinkingly take it for granted that
the New Testament does have a table of contents inspired
by God.
The truth of the matter is that the current New Testament
books made their way into the canon after a period
of about four hundred years. During that time the Catholic
Church held a number of councils in both the Eastern
(Byzantine) and Western (Roman) halves of the Empire.
These councils were convened to decide, by vote, which of
the dozens of gospels and epistles available to the church
hierarchy would be regarded as Scripture.
There was very little agreement among Christians and
their leaders for hundreds of years as to which Christian
writings are "scripture" and which are not. For example,
the books of Hebrews, James, Philippians 1 and 2 Thessalonians
1 and 2 Peter, Jude, the Gospel of John, 2 and 3 John, and
Revelation were long rejected and deemed spurious. The
Gospel of John and Epistles of John were disputed because
they were too Gnostic for many Catholics, Revelation because
it was too weird. In fact, during the first four hundred
years of Christianity, every book now contained in
the New Testament was considered either heretical or a
forgery at one time or another by some segment of the
Christian church.
In addition, the Catholic Church considered a vast
number of other books as Divinely inspired, but later rejected
many of those books. A mere handful of these are:
the seven Letters of Bishop Ignatius, the First and Second Epistles
of Clement to the Romans, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd
of Hermas, the Teaching of the Twelve (the Didache), the
Epistle of Polycarp, the Acts of Paul, the Apocalypse of Peter, the
Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Gospel of Matthias,
the Acts of Andrew, Paul's First Epistle to the Colossians, Paul's
Epistle to the Laodiceans , and many others. Some of the
books mentioned above, that once enjoyed status as Divinely
inspired, are still in existence. Others have disappeared
completely, and are only known by historical references
to them. Penguin Books publishes an excellent
paperback edition of a number of these books, titled
Early Christian Writings.
The first official church council that was held to attempt
a settlement of the question of the contents of the New
Testament was the Catholic Council of Laodicea, located
in Asia Minor, in 363 AD. This was hundreds of years
after the time of Christ. Over a hundred years longer than
the United States has existed as a nation. It is as if the
United States had declared its independence from Great
Britain in 1776, but did not get around to ratifying the
Declaration until the year 2139. Those who attended this
council consisted of thirty Catholic bishops. Their official
Catholic pronouncement decreed that no non-canonical
books or privately written psalms can be read in the
Catholic church, but only canonical books of the Old and
New Testaments. The list of books they give is the same
as modern Bibles, except it leaves out the book of Revelation.
See The Canon of the New Testament: It's Origin, Development,
and Significance , by Bruce Metzger, published by
Clarendon in 1987.
However, the Catholic laypeople did not universally accept
the decision of this Catholic council, nor did any
other Christians, and the dispute continued. There continued
to be official Catholic Church councils held to decide
this issue, such as the Council of Hippo in 393 AD,
the Council of Carthage in 397 AD, and the Trullian
Council in 692 AD. Somewhere in this time frame the
Catholic Church finally settled on which books it would
and would not accept. Scholars debate and quibble as to
which exact Catholic council settled the issue once and
for all. Athanasius--the Catholic Bishop of Alexandria--in 367
AD listed the books of the NT as we have them today.
However, to this day, various Eastern Catholic
Churches, such as the Coptic Church, the Ethiopians, the
Armenians and Syrians, all have different New Testaments
than the Roman church, and from each other. The
Armenian New Testament contains the book of Third
Corinthians , the Syrian Orthodox New Testament lacks 2
and 3 John , 2 Peter, Jude and Revelation, and the Coptic New
Testament includes First and Second Clement. The Ethiopian
Orthodox New Testament contains the letter of Clement
and four unique books found nowhere else: the Sinodos, the
Octateuch, the Didascalia, and the Book of the Covenant.
How can an arbitrary voting process by a cabal of
Catholic clergyman be regarded in any sense as definitive,
let alone "inspired by God?" How could a conclave of
Catholic clerics "infallibly decide" that some books belong
in the New Testament while others do not belong?
The fact is that many of the excluded books possess as
much or more valid of a claim to historical veracity as the
books that were included. This should cause the reader to
doubt the decisions of the Catholic councils. One can
accept the current canon of New Testament books as authoritative
and reflecting the will of God only if one is
willing to accept the Catholic Church, either Roman or
Byzantine, as authoritative and reflecting the will of God.
The fact is that the New Testament owes its current
canon of books to the decisions of the Catholic Church.
That fact should cause all non-Catholic Christians to reconsider
their blind unquestioning acceptance of the
books of the New Testament, especially since the current
crop of New Testament books suffered editing and alteration
at the hands of the Catholic Church. Writing in
the third century, Origen laments the fact that the manuscripts
of the New Testament continued being altered
even in his day. "It is an obvious fact today that there is
much diversity among the manuscripts, due to either the
carelessness of the scribes, or the perverse audacity of
some people in correcting the texts. Or again due to the
fact that there are those who add and delete as they please,
setting themselves up as correctors." De Principii section
three and Commentary on Matthew. Also, Eusebius, a fourth
century church historian, quotes a second century
"church father" who wrote shortly after the death of the
apostle John: "Small wonder, then, if some have dared to
tamper even with the word of the Lord Himself." Eusebius,
Ecclesiastical History, 4.23.
To eliminate the "heresy" of Adoptionism (the teaching
that the man Jesus became the Christ on the day of his
baptism, the day the Most High God "adopted" him),
Mark 1:11 was changed from "This day I have begotten
you" to "In whom I am well pleased." We know that it
was changed because Justin Martyr in his book Dialogue
With Trypho The Jew (written about 160 AD) quotes this
verse as "Today I have begotten you" not "In whom I am
well pleased." Also, in Saint Augustine's book Reply To
Faustus The Manichean, written about 400 AD,
Augustine quotes this verse as reading "This day I have
begotten you." This is just one example of the many
verses that were altered by early Catholics to eliminate
support for various "heresies."
Of the well over 5,000 handwritten manuscripts of the
New Testament in existence, no two read exactly alike.
"The New Testament is now known, in whole or in part,
in nearly five thousand Greek manuscripts alone. Every
one of these handwritten copies differs from the others.
It has been estimated that these manuscripts and quotations
differ among themselves between 150,000 and
250,000 times. The actual figure is, perhaps, much higher.
A study of 150 Greek manuscripts of the Gospel of Luke
has revealed more than 30,000 different readings. It is
safe to say that there is not one sentence in the New Testament
in which the manuscripts' tradition is wholly uniform."
The Interpreters Dictionary of the Bible, Volume four,
pages 594-59,quoted in Suns of God by Acharya S. Therefore,
all Christians should seriously investigate books rejected
by the Catholic Church; books such as the Gnostic Chris tian
scriptures, for they contain a very different view of
God than the Catholic New Testament.
Protestants, Evangelicals, and Fundamentalists try to
evade the inconvenient and unpalatable facts of history
concerning the Catholic formation of the New Testament
canon. They attempt this by using the following straw
man argument: "The books of the New Testament are
inherently inspired, hence no church council, Catholic or
otherwise, could confer inspiration upon them." This is a
"straw man" argument because neither the Roman Catholic
Church nor I has ever asserted nor inferred that the
Councils "conferred inspiration" on the books of the
New Testament. Rather, the Catholic Church has always
stated that the books of the New Testament are inherently
inspired, and the Catholic Church was merely the
instrument God used in making manifest which books
were inspired by including them in the official canon, or
list. I do not accept that the Most High God alone inspired
the books of the New Testament, but I do accept
the simple fact of history that the Catholic Church was
indeed the institution that chose the current canon of
New Testament books.
Protestants, Evangelicals, and Fundamentalists, in an
effort to support their "spiritual osmosis" theory of New
Testament canon formation, will point to the writings of
early Christians. In some of these writings are lists of
New Testament books, lists that were left behind by these
early Christians. One such list is the Muratorian Canon.
Evangelicals and Fundamentalists put a lot of stock in the
Muratorian Canon . Such people tell the unwary or uneducated
that the Muratorian Canon lists the identical books as
the current New Testament, and therefore the Catholic
Councils had nothing whatsoever to do with the formation
of the New Testament canon. However, that claim is
an outright lie, a lie told "to further the Cause of Truth."
The Muratorian Canon is the oldest existing list of New
Testament books, but it was written sometime between
the late second century and the fourth century, though
most scholars place it in the fourth century. That means it
does not pre-date the Catholic councils that settled the issue of the
NT canon! Also, it's badly written and was ignored by the
"early church fathers," and even Eusebius demonstrates
no knowledge of it. Furthermore, the Muratorian Canon is
a product of the Catholic Church, which is exactly the point
I am trying to get mainstream Christians to see. In addition,
the Muratorian Canon does not have Matthew or Mark,
nor Hebrews or James, nor First or Second Peter, nor Third
John . It does list the Shepherd of Hermas and The Wisdom of
Solomon . So, the Muratorian Canon does not support the position
of Fundamentalists and Evangelicals. It does not
support their notion of the canon of the New Testament
being settled very early on by a grassroots movement of
the Holy Spirit among the common people. (A fairy-tale
movement that had nothing to do with the Catholic
Church councils) This is what I mean by spiritual osmosis.
There are other early lists of New Testament books that
so-called scholars will point to in an attempt to prove
their "spiritual osmosis" theory of canon formation. What
these 'scholars' purposely do not tell you is that the early
Christians that put together these conflicting lists were
Catholic clergyman, Catholic theologians, Catholic monks or
hierarchs--either Roman or Byzantine--and not "common
folks" at all. Early Church Fathers is their designation, and
that is a Catholic designation.
Also, many modern-day 'scholars' purposely fail to tell
you such lists were not universally accepted, including the
Muratorian Canon , which I have already pointed out.
Lastly, early Catholic writers--the early Church fathers--
who quoted from what we now call books of the New
Testament, also quoted other books they considered inspired
Scripture. Books that are now considered heretical
by mainstream Christendom. That's because there was no
set canon of New Testament books until 393 AD at the
earliest, as we have already discussed. That's why early
Catholic Christian 'fathers' quote from so many books
that were later rejected by the Catholic councils. So, these
early writings support what I am saying, and I am saying
that it took at least several hundred years for the New
Testament canon to be settled upon, and the Catholic
Church leaders meeting in council did it. That's history.
Another tactic mainstream 'scholars' use is to point to
very early handwritten copies of the New Testament,
manuscripts such as the Codex Vaticanus, the Alexandrian
Codex or the Codex Sinaiticus. These manuscripts
are very ancient, and contain, essentially, the current New
Testament canon. However, many such "scholars" fail to
tell you that these manuscripts are Catholic manuscripts
that were handwritten by Catholic scribes. They contain
not only the currently accepted books of the New Testament
but other books as well, books such as the Shepherd
of Hermas , the Epistle of Barnabas, the two Epistles of Clement to
the Romans , and also the Catholic "apocryphal" books of
the Old Testament. Which demonstrates that, when these
manuscripts were being written, the canon of the New
Testament was still in a state of flux. All of which brings
us back to the fact that it took centuries to settle upon the
current New Testament canon, and it was done by Catholic
hierarchs meeting in councils, not by "spiritual osmosis."
The canon did not simply "happen ."
If one wants to speak of a grassroots movement among
the common people, the historical fact is that the common
folk had no books at all. Books were very rare due
to their extreme expense resulting from their having to be
laboriously copied by hand. The printing press was not
invented until 1452. So, obviously, the prevailing belief in
a Christian church in possession of a single, uniform,
New Testament right from the start is an utter fundamentalist
fantasy. At least several centuries passed before the
New Testament books were decided upon, and Catholic
Church councils did the deciding. Dissenting Christians
with dissenting views and dissenting scriptures suffered
persecution and censorship at the hands of the Catholic
Church, just as dissenting Christians do today. However,
even now there is no single uniform New Testament, for
the New Testament of the Middle Eastern forms of
Christianity is diverse. Which of the many "New Testaments"
will you decide upon?