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The immunity necklaces that you're wearing guarantee that you're gonna stay in this game for at least 10 more minutes. Which cannot be said for the other 18 of you. We're gonna divide into two tribes with nine members each. That's 18 people. There are 20 of you. Two people.

will not be selected to be on a tribe. Two people will get on a boat immediately and be sent home. Ian and Jolanda, you will make the first picks, alternating between men and women. Each time you choose a person, that person will choose the next member of the tribe. Ian, because you were first to the beach, you will select first. You're picking a girl. - Okay. Katie. - Jolanda, you're picking a guy.

Bobby John. That's a clip from Survivor, one of the most political reality TV shows there is. To my shame, beyond that clip, I've never seen it. But director Mark has the box set on constant rotation. They're picking teams using the typical schoolyard pick. Two captains taking it in turns to choose their teammates.

Perhaps that brings back uncomfortable memories for some of us, being picked or not for a soccer or cricket match. I was always picked for soccer and never for cricket. And what made it more complicated is that it sometimes wasn't about whether you were any good at the game, although I was hopeless at cricket. What really mattered was whether you were friends with the picker.

Like so much in life, being picked for the team was often about schoolyard politics and favoritism. This is how some of us imagine the Bible came together. Pick the stuff you like, leave out the stuff you don't, don't focus on merit, pay attention to the politics. Famed Oxford professor Richard Dawkins put it like this.

A chaotically cobbled together anthology of disjointed documents composed, revised, translated, distorted and improved by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries.

So how did the Bible actually come together? Who were the captains of the team and who were their mates? And what politics influenced the decisions?

I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics book 2084, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity by John Lennox.

Every week we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, culture or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we'll be trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out. Music

The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven. I beg your pardon? The Bible is a product of man, my dear, not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book. Okay...

We're doing a reading from Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, a best-selling novel released back in 2003. Director Mark is playing Sir Lee Teabing, a fictional British royal historian. Producer Kayleigh is playing Sophie Neveu, who, for the purposes of this section of the book anyway, is just finding out about a number of explosive church secrets. Here in the script, they've asked me to apologise that they're not real actors. I think they're great.

Jesus Christ was a historical figure of staggering influence, perhaps the most enigmatic and inspirational leader the world has ever seen. Understandably, his life was recorded by thousands of followers across the land. More than 80 Gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John among them.

Who chose which Gospels to include? Ah, that's the fundamental irony of Christianity. The Bible as we know it today was collated by the pagan Roman Emperor Constantine the Great. The Bible as we know it was finally presided over by one man, the pagan Emperor Constantine. I thought Constantine was a Christian. Oh, hardly. No, he was a lifelong pagan who was baptised on his deathbed. Constantine was Rome's supreme holy man.

From time immemorial, his people had worshipped a balance between nature's male deities and the goddess, or sacred feminine. But a growing religious turmoil was gripping Rome. Three centuries earlier, a young Jew named Jesus had come along, preaching love and a single God. Centuries after his crucifixion, Christ's followers had grown exponentially and had started a religious war against the pagans.

But we can at least agree that the conflict grew to such proportions that it threatened to tear Rome in two. So Constantine may have been a lifelong pagan, but he was also a pragmatist. And in 325 anno domini, he decided to unify Rome under a single religion, Christianity. Christianity was on the rise. He didn't want his empire torn apart. And to strengthen this new Christian tradition.

Constantine held a famous ecumenical gathering known as the Council of Nicaea. And at this council, the many sects of Christianity debated and voted on, well, everything from the acceptance and rejection of specific gospels to the date for Easter to the ministry of the sacrament and, of course, the immortality of Jesus. I don't follow.

Masha, until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by many of his followers as a mighty prophet, as a great and powerful man, but a man of the mass, immortal man.

Some Christians held that Jesus was mortal. Some Christians believed he was divine. Not the Son of God? Not even as... The twist is this. Because Constantine upgraded Jesus' status almost four centuries after Jesus' death, thousands of documents already existed chronicling his life as a mortal man.

To rewrite the history books, Constantine knew he would need a bold stroke. From this sprang the most profound moment in Christian history. Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which admitted those Gospels that spoke of Christ's human traits and embellished those Gospels that made him godlike. The earlier Gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and burned.

That's Mark and Kaylee with a little bit of help from Hollywood's adaption of the book. Calling Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code a bestseller is an understatement. I mean, you can call yourself a bestseller nowadays with 20,000 books sold. But this sold 80 million copies.

And the Da Vinci Code contributed to a renewed interest in and skepticism of the historical basis of Christianity. There was an explosion of conspiracy theories and so-called expose documentaries on the life of Christ, the hidden gospels, and the other church secrets after the Da Vinci Code's publication. And almost 20 years later, the intrigue is still alive and well. So let's go to the fourth century. Let's go to Emperor Constantine, who...

Let's just say becomes a Christian in 312, legalizes Christianity. And then, so the story goes, called a great council in Nicaea in 325, told them which Bible texts they should have. I'm sorry. So the story goes, which particular story is this?

That's Dr. Chris Forbes. For decades, he was Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at Macquarie University, which has one of the largest and most respected ancient history departments in the Southern Hemisphere.

Chris specializes in Greco-Roman history and literature, as well as the New Testament and early Christianity. Yes, you caught me. It's Dan Brown, Sir Da Vinci Code. But let's just go with this story because it's so good. And he decided which gospels to go in. He decided the rest of the New Testament and then forced everyone to go with his texts because, of course, this was a power document. He wanted a new text for a new people, for a new empire. How much of that is true? Almost nothing.

Really almost nothing. There was a guy called Constantine though, right? Yes, there was a guy called Constantine who was emperor who legalized Christianity. Yes, he convened the Council of Nicaea in 325.

Constantine the Great was Roman Emperor from 306 to 337, but in the year 312 he announced his allegiance to the God of the Christians, following a remarkable victory over his imperial rival Maxentius in the Battle of Milvian Bridge just outside of Rome.

I reckon we should do a whole episode on Constantine because he was so pivotal in the history of the West and he's also the subject of so many misunderstandings. Anyway, one thing that is true is that in the year 325, a dozen or so years after his conversion, Constantine called a council of Christian bishops in Nicaea in modern day Turkey.

The purpose of the six-week talk fest was to put to bed the teachings of a guy called Arius, who most bishops considered to be heretical and dangerous because he said Jesus wasn't God, just a bridge between humanity and divinity. This question of what books were in the Bible was not even discussed at Nicaea. It simply wasn't on the agenda.

The writings of an Egyptian theologian by the name of Arius were discussed at Nicaea, but he hadn't written a gospel. He'd written theological treatises that nobody thought were going into the Bible at all, not even him. So the whole idea that it was Constantine who determined what was in the Bible is an utter historical myth, and no serious historian takes it for a moment.

Dan Brown, of course, wasn't the first to suggest the New Testament was created at the Council of Nicaea, three centuries after Jesus. The French Enlightenment philosopher and atheist, Voltaire, tells the story in his famous 18th century philosophical dictionary. According to Voltaire, the Council of Nicaea placed all the different Christian books on a church altar, prayed for God's decision, and miraculously, a bunch of books remained and a

Voltaire didn't exactly make this up, but he was happy to promote the story. He was actually retelling the story in a source called the Synodic Invitae, which was composed around the year 900, more than half a millennium after the Council of Nicaea. Given we have such plentiful sources from the time of the Council, no one today, in history departments anyway, takes the Synodic Invitae story seriously.

Dan Brown seems to have followed Voltaire, who in turn followed a spurious late source instead of the direct sources we have for the Council of Nicaea. I would take what you said and change one small element, and that is the words, because they were pretty much all wrong.

That's Dr. Michael Byrd, Mike, a colleague of mine at Ridley Theological College in Melbourne, where he is the New Testament scholar and academic dean. He's the author of a ridiculous amount of books, including his latest one with N.T. Wright, The New Testament in Its World. He might just be the most published New Testament expert in Australia today. That's a wonderful conspiracy theory that Constantine, along with a shrewd,

sherry of bishops sherry being the collective uh noun for a group of bishops the sherry of bishops imposed this sort of top-down imperial order and this set of scriptures and dogmas on a diverse pluralistic and inclusive roman empire to become this horrible thing called christendom

But it really is a load of nonsense. So if it wasn't Constantine, how did we get the Bible in the form we know it today?

I should point out that in this episode, we're just talking about the creation of the New Testament, the second part of the Bible, which covers the life and death of Jesus and the early Christian church. The New Testament is made up of 27 individual books written by about 10 authors in the second half of the first century. This second part of the Bible is only authoritative for Christians. Our Jewish friends accept the first part of the Bible, the Tanakh or Old Testament, but not this second bit, the New Testament.

You might hear people talk about the biblical canon. This word canon has nothing to do with weaponry. This canon has just one N in the middle. It's the Greek word for territory or ruling principle.

Sometimes it's used for a measuring stick, sometimes for a geographical border or fence, and sometimes for an intellectual principle. It's a very flexible word. The New Testament canon is just the collection of documents which Christians consider inbounds, containing the authoritative content for the Christian faith and life.

We begin with the easiest part of the canon, the four biographies of Jesus at the front of the New Testament. That's Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, known as the canonical Gospels, and the letters of Paul. There was no clear definition of what constituted authority. They were being read from when they were first written. They were being read aloud to congregations. That's how they were probably first, quote unquote, published, by being read aloud.

And the sayings of Jesus were being treated as authoritative in the letters of Paul. That's absolutely clear. He doesn't quote them very often, but when he does, it's as the Lord said. And Lord has a capital L on it, though not in Greek. Lord has the sense of authority on it, clearly. So they were being read aloud and used as sources of authority there.

as soon as they were written. But the evidence beyond what I've just suggested doesn't come until the second century. I think probably the earliest known example is where Justin Martyr, a Christian philosopher teacher working in the city of Rome, talks about the public reading of the memoirs of the Apostles.

And almost certainly what he means is the Gospels that we know. It's not absolutely clear that he must mean that, but it seems extremely likely. Justin Martyr was one of the first major public advocates for the Christian faith. He was a trained philosopher who bumped into Christians and found himself convinced that Jesus Christ was the great logos, the animating and intellectual principle all Greek philosophy was searching for.

He went on to write defences of the Christian faith, one that took on Jewish criticisms of Christianity and another that sought to demonstrate that Christianity outdid the best Greco-Roman philosophy and would be a positive benefit to the empire. Along the way, he gives us one of our earliest descriptions of a church service. On the day called Sunday, there is a gathering together in the same place of all who live in a given city or rural district.

The memoirs of the apostles, or the writings of the prophets, are read as long as time permits. Then, when the reader ceases, the president in a discourse admonishes and urges the imitation of these good things. Next, we all rise together and send up prayers.

Certainly by the first quarter of the second century, we know that the four Gospels are being read together. Strangely enough, one of our earliest evidences for this is the longer ending of the Gospel of Mark.

Now, if you ever pick up your Gospel of Mark, you might know that there's a little bit of difficulty of where it ends in your English Bible. There'll be some part that's put in brackets. Now, there's, in fact, four different endings for the Gospel of Mark. Mark was somewhat neglected in the manuscript tradition. He's not well as attested as Matthew and John. So he was kind of like, you know, the poor cousin out of all the Gospels. But if you look at the longer ending of Mark, where someone, we think, has tried to...

you know, fill in the blanks from what they think or how they think Mark should have ended. But that longer ending of Mark seems to make reference or use as material from all four gospels, obviously Mark, but it seems to know of parts of Matthew, parts of Luke, John, and even Acts. So the longer ending of Mark, which we know was in the first or maybe second quarter of the second century, attests to the existence of the four gospels.

So that's one good thing. We also have someone like Irenaeus writing in the 180s saying we have four gospels because four is a crack-a-lackin' good number. You know, there's four sides to a square, four corners of the earth, there's roughly four seasons, four's a good number. Irenaeus was the Bishop of Lyon in Gaul, what we call France, in the mid to late 2nd century.

Actually, he's awesome, if you've never read him. His main thing was that God loved his physical creation and intends to redeem not just our spirits, but our bodies and the heavens and earth themselves. His target was the so-called Gnostics, who denigrated the body and creation in a really un-Jewish and un-Christian way.

Anyway, he has this weird thing about the number four, four corners of the earth, the four winds and the four gospels. It's more poetry than argument at that point. But he provides pretty clear evidence that reading four gospels in church was the standard, the canon in the century immediately after Christ.

And then you have some other things like the anti-Mastro Knight prologues, kind of explaining what each gospel is about and how it took on its distinctive shape. And similarly, you have the Muratorian canon too. Now, a few debates about the debating of them. Me again, sorry to interrupt, but Mike is such a nerd. He expects all of us to know about all of these arcane documents.

The Moratorium Canon is just an ancient Latin manuscript discovered by a bloke called Moratori that lists the books of the New Testament as they were known at the time of the Moratorium Canon around the late second century. It names the Gospels, Acts, most of Paul's letters, and then raises some questions about other texts which didn't get in. The anti-Marcionite prologues are just little introductions that appear in a bunch of our ancient manuscripts of the Gospels.

They tell you what you're about to read, a bit like some modern gospels, actually. Anyway, they make clear that the gospels have authoritative status in these very early centuries. The other thing I need to mention that Mike references in a second is what's called the apostolic fathers.

Man, oh man, I love these. They sit on my desk bookstand permanently, and I've brought them into the studio for a little show and tell. Guys, there's your Apostolic Fathers. Yeah, exactly. Well said. Hayley, you can read that just because you're very special. Basically, the Apostolic Fathers are letters of Christian leaders in the century immediately after the Apostles.

There's Clement, Ignatius, Didache, Papias, and a bunch of others. They don't make a claim to be canon or scripture, but they frequently quote from the Gospels and from Paul's letters as truly authoritative stuff. They are, if you like, the earliest commentators on the New Testament documents.

But certainly in the second century, I think, and in the earliest decades of it, we have this evidence of a coming together of the four Gospels, and they're then soon after being treated as Scripture. So you've got the Gospels being quoted in the sub-apostolic writings, or what we call the apostolic fathers, people like Ignatius of Antioch.

The Didache, although the Didache could be dated, you know, maybe earlier than Matthew or that type of thing. You've got the letters of Clement, particularly 1st Clement, and a few other places. So you find either quotations of an oral tradition or, I think more likely, actual quotations of the Gospels themselves. Now for Paul's letters, called the Pauline Epistles. They make up 13 books of the New Testament.

Paul, formerly Saul, was a one-time persecutor of the early Christians. In the year or so after Jesus' death, he made it his personal mission to bring to ruin the followers of this recent false messiah. But in the year 31 or maybe 32, while setting out to arrest Christians in Damascus, he encountered the one whose memory he'd tried to destroy. He writes in the book of Galatians that the risen Jesus appeared to him.

From the moment of that revelation until his death about 30 years later, Paul devoted himself to promoting Christ, establishing small communities of converts in the towns he visited, we call them churches, and staying in contact with them through letters in which he answered their questions and helped them learn how to live in this world as believers in Jesus.

When is our best earliest evidence that people took Paul seriously as an authoritative writer on behalf of God? Well, Paul's letters seem to come together as a collection, maybe in the post-70s period. So when there's, you know, the destruction of the temple and

in Jerusalem and there's a kind of a big reorganization of Judaism and Christianity and Christian groups seem to start developing their own distinct identity which is kind of umbilically related to ancient Judaism but becomes various distinct in a number of ways you know believing in Israel's God but also believing that anyone Jews or Gentiles can be part of God's people through faith that type of a thing and one of the leading advocates of that view was of course the Apostle Paul so he becomes

Outside of the Holocaust, the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in August AD 70 was the greatest Jewish tragedy in history.

Jewish freedom fighters had tried to throw off the shackles of Roman rule. In the year 66, Rome responded with massive force. Four years later, they took the Jewish capital and destroyed the famous temple, which was larger than most big stadiums today. Over the next 10 to 20 years, emperors kept on commemorating this victory on their coins throughout the empire.

It deepened the breach between the pagan Greek and Roman population and the Jewish population. But it also sped up a kind of parting of the ways between Jewish Christianity, which was the original Christianity, and Gentile or non-Jewish Christianity. Paul's letters have been addressed mainly to Gentile Christians, and so they come to be really important.

So he becomes incredibly popular, particularly amongst Gentiles or non-Jewish Christ believers. And you see the veneration of him and his writings fairly quickly. One Clement clearly quotes from several of Paul's letters. And One Clement could have been written as early as about 70 AD, but most people put it in the 90s.

So by the 90s, the church in Rome, which is where Clement lives, has copies of some of Paul's letters that he knows. And I suspect he doesn't even have to look them up to quote them. He's got them in his head.

Certainly when you get to someone like Ignatius of Antioch, writing about 115, 117, he has a very high view of Paul, as well as Peter and the other apostles. Then you get into other writings as well in the second century. One of my favourites is the Epistle to Diognetus, which is very much bringing together a whole bunch of themes and quotations from Paul's letters, as well as other places, such as the Gospel of John and that type of thing, and sort of doing a creative synergy with them.

And various authors as well. Again, to focus on that chap Irenaeus, he's another one who seems to be very much devoted to Paul and his letters. So Paul's writing... It's important to emphasise here that the apostolic fathers, like Clement, are quoting from Paul's letters really early in the life of the church. In the case of Clement, we're still in the first century, 30 to 40 years after Paul. So we're getting our first indirect evidence.

of the first century documents being reasonably widespread. And it becomes clear that, for example, churches, if they had a letter from Paul, were quite willing to write a copy and swap it with the church next door, next town. And this sort of thing began to happen completely unsystematically. If you've got a copy, would you send us one? And we'll send you a copy of our one. That was happening almost certainly in the first century, demonstrably in the second century.

So the Gospels and the Book of Acts are in. Paul's letters, almost all of them, they're in. And not just in, they're in really early. They are widely regarded as ruling Christian texts within decades of the Apostles.

But there are about 10 other books in the New Testament that we haven't dealt with yet. How did they get picked, if picked is the right word? And what about the other stuff that didn't make it in? There's heaps of stuff left on the cutting room floor. Even a few books that call themselves gospels. And they have a very different story of Jesus to tell. So is the church hiding something?

This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today. He's a

And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.

Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith, he's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.

You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions.

68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.

It pushed his family into financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.

There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash help.

and make a tax-deductible donation to help this wonderful organisation give people like Turat a second chance. That's anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Undeceptions. Find out after the break.

An early Christian manuscript, including the only known text of what is known as the Gospel of Judas, has surfaced after 1700 years. The text gives new insights into the relationship of Jesus and the disciple who betrayed him, scholars reported today. That's Director Mark reading the opening of a New York Times report from 2006 about the discovery of the Gospel of Judas.

In this version, Jesus asked Judas, as a close friend, to sell him out to the authorities, telling Judas he will "exceed" the other disciples by doing so.

The discovery in the desert of Egypt of the leather-bound papyrus manuscript and now its translation was announced by the National Geographic Society at a news conference in Washington. The 26-page Judas text is said to be a copy in Coptic made around AD 300 of the original Gospel of Judas, written in Greek the century before.

Terry Garcia, an executive vice president of the Geographical Society, said the manuscript, or codex, is considered by scholars and scientists to be the most significant ancient non-biblical text to be found in the past 60 years.

In 1945, a collection of manuscripts was uncovered in the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi, 500 kilometres south of Cairo. The 13 codices, books, were found in a storage jar buried underneath a boulder.

Bizarrely, the man who made the discovery, whose name was Muhammad Ali, I kid you not, took the priceless documents back to his home where his mother burned some of the pages as fuel for her bread oven. Fortunately, they were soon viewed by an antiquities dealer and then eventually made available for scholarly assessment.

We have no firm information about who originally owned the books or about why they were hidden in this way sometime in the 4th century. Some have speculated that the collection was being protected from an inquisitorial church eager to stamp out alternative gospels. There's zero evidence for that. It's more likely that these leather-bound books

a precious commodity in antiquity, were just being hidden from thieves or invaders or the elements. After years of wrangling between collectors and museums, the codices are now kept safe in the beautiful little Coptic Museum of Cairo. They are classified by scholars as Gnostic Gospels,

because they all seem to follow a similar pattern of Jesus whispering some secret knowledge, gnosis is the Greek word for knowledge, to one of the apostles while the others weren't listening. So it's whispering to Judas or whispering to Philip or whispering to Thomas or whatever. The main part of the secret knowledge is that the God of the Jews, that is the God of creation,

sucks. And by listening to these secret teachings contained in the document, your spirit can escape this material world, this physical body, and rejoin the highest spirit, the true God of the universe. It's got more in common with Hinduism than Judaism, which is why most scholars think they're not very good sources for understanding the historical Jesus centuries earlier.

We know the names of at least 30 other gospels, but usually the names are all we know. As in most of them, we don't have even a single quote from them. Sometimes we have a few quotes. There are only three or four that we have any extensive textual material of. But it is not, I repeat, it is not because Constantine or anyone else gathered them up and burned them.

it would appear to be because they simply weren't widespread to start with. They were minority documents. What I love doing with students, I get them to read the Gospel of Thomas, the very last verse, verse 114. That's where Peter goes up to, I think it's Peter goes up to Jesus and says, Lord, tell Mary to depart from us hence, for she is a woman and not worthy of eternal life. And Jesus says to Peter, Peter,

You leave her be. If she becomes male, she can be saved.

So it's these sort of esoteric sayings like that. Now, the Thomasine Jesus is not talking about salvation through gender reassignment surgery. I mean, this is a very deeply symbolic view that maleness is regarded as the original creation and femaleness is a kind of privation or a kind of atrophy from pure maleness.

It's that kind of worldview that's being bought into and given a somewhat layered and metaphorical description. And when people heard stuff like that, and then they thought about the faith that they were taught by their parents, the sort of hymns they sang to Christ, the sermons they heard, they realized to themselves, one of these things is not like another.

So this was a very much a different Jesus, not part of the text, the traditions, the faith that people heard about or were nurtured on. Now, that said, what we can say about the other Gospels, that they were the attempt to imagine or create a version of Christianity that people thought was going to fit better in the Greco-Roman world. So they wanted a Jesus who was less Jesus, sorry, less Jewish and maybe more platonic.

They wanted, in some senses, I think, to turn Christianity into a Greco-Roman religion that was a little bit more palatable in the ancient world. And you can understand for various reasons why they might want to do that. But the verdict of the church largely was that those other Jesus books existed.

Even if they had one or two good things in them, we're mostly out of bounds. And they're not where we should be finding our testimony of the apostles to Jesus and finding the order and the essence and the meaning of our faith. But was that just a theological and political prejudice to exclude them then?

It was definitely a theological prejudice because in the eyes of the majority of the church, this was a different Jesus with a different gospel addressing a very different problem and coming to a very different solution. How do you pick between these two Jesus narratives? This takes us to the heart of how the early Christians decided what was in and what was out.

Generally, the reason books were included or excluded from the canon was whether they could be tied to an apostolic author or an apostolic associate. So someone like Paul, Peter or John Mark like that, you know, John Mark being an associate of Peter and Paul, whether they were orthodox, whether they kind of, you know, were orthodox.

could be aligned with the rule of faith, you know, the basic summary of the Christian story of, you know, of God, Jesus, the church, that type of a thing.

And whether they were actually used universally, you know, and were they used and read in worship around the church Catholic? You know, could you take a copy of the Gospel of Matthew and go from North Africa all the way to Dalmatia, you know, from Spain all the way to Mesopotamia? And would people know the book you were referring to? Would they have the same sense of belief and the authoritative status attributed to that book? That was largely the basis.

in which certain books were decided to be in and certain books were to be decided to be out of bounds. It was more about a developing consensus than a kind of top-down imposition. I think consensus is the right way to describe it. There simply isn't a push from the top to define what's in and what's out. There's a push from beneath to say, this is what we've always used.

One thing to keep in mind, Mike says, is that plenty of early Christians were open to finding the voice of Jesus in other texts. They were really hungry to learn.

Back in our very first episode of Undeceptions, where I got to hold the earliest manuscripts of Paul's letters, I called this period the Wild West of Christianity. There's lots of texts floating around, and some were more worthy than others, as church leaders soon came to realise. If anything, a lot of Christian authors were quite open to people reading other books. There's a good story about a chap called Serapkin, who was a bishop of Antioch.

in the second, late second century. And he found out one of his churches was using the Gospel of Peter. And he had a cursory look at it. He thought, okay, fine, just use that. That's okay. But then he found out that some people were trying to use the Gospel of Peter to kind of bolster a kind of docetic heresy where Jesus never had a real body. And he kind of went back and says, yeah, okay, now I see where they're coming from. On second thoughts, let's put that one aside.

on the not to read list or not to use in worship. And you can read on your own if you like, but let's not use it in church. So, I mean, that's a good example to say they were reasonably flexible about what about Christians reading other literature and people like Origen and Clement of Alexandria. They're looking for the voice of Jesus wherever they can find it, even if it's in with other gospels. So they're willing to read it.

There were a few books that didn't make it into the New Testament as we know it today, but they were still really, really popular amongst the early Christians. There's the Shepherd of Hermas, the Didache, and the Epistle of Barnabas.

Shepherd of Hermas is written by a Christian elder in the city of Rome, probably in the 130s AD, though it could have been written earlier than that. It's not absolutely clear that it must have been. And it's quite clear that Hermas doesn't think he's writing scripture in any full-blown sense. He is writing a series of visions he claims to have had that talk about the situation of the church in Rome in his time.

And it seems that he writes it over quite a long period and eventually brings out a written version of it. And it was very popular in the early church. And there's one great manuscript of the whole Bible, quote unquote, from the fourth century that has the Shepherd of Hermas in it, but only one that anyone knows of. Now, am I correct in thinking it's actually at the back of Sinaiticus? Yes, that is correct.

So it may be a kind of appendix. Yeah, so they were obviously thinking, not 100% sure about this, but I'd rather like it. Oh, and we know from one of the church writers of the third century that though it wasn't considered one of the books that you read aloud in church, it was one that you recommend to new believers to read for their edification. So it was highly regarded. Okay, so the epistle...

Codex Sinaiticus, by the way, is the oldest complete copy of the Bible. It's from the 4th century and it's beautiful. You can go and play with it at the British Library in London. It is probably the most precious book in the world. Really. Frankly, it's priceless.

Anyway, the Shepherd of Hermas appears in this copy of the Bible, but interestingly, at the very back, even following the book of Revelation, which is obviously there as the last book of the New Testament. This is a pretty good indication that the compilers loved the Shepherd of Hermas, but weren't confident it should be included in the main body of the New Testament canon. The same is true of the Epistle of Barnabas, which is also tucked away at the back of Codex Sinaiticus.

The Abyssal of Barnabas is essentially a sermon. It's a complex sermon of what we would call passages from the Old Testament. To our eyes, it's perfectly weird expositions of passages from the Old Testament and what they spiritually mean. And for a first century or second century AD person, that way of reading Holy Scriptures would have made sense. But to us, it sounds just odd and overly symbolical. So this is a sermon that's been written up as a letter form.

And it was quite popular too, particularly among non-Jewish Gentile Christians. We actually don't know who wrote the Epistle of Barnabas. It was traditionally ascribed to the Barnabas mentioned in the New Testament, who was a colleague of Paul. And that's partly why Christians wondered whether they should hold on to it.

it. They eventually decided it probably wasn't apostolic in this sense, so they left it to the side, even though they allowed it to be read and studied. Every modern scholar agrees they made a pretty good call, because there's no way this comes from a first-century author and colleague of Paul. Then there's the Didache, an anonymous compilation of Christian teachings that might be as early as the year 100.

The Didache is a hard one because various writings tell us that copies of it were widely known in the ancient world. But as far as I'm aware, it was completely lost after the 4th century AD. And it wasn't rediscovered until the 1880s, I think, when one manuscript was discovered. Since then, papyri have been discovered that have quotes from it as well. But it was reasonably widespread, then was lost. And it wasn't lost because people hated it. They didn't. They thought it was great.

I think it was lost because it became less and less relevant, because the Didache is essentially, we would say, the foundation document of a network of rural churches, probably from what we'd call rural Syria. And as the churches became more and more urban, the kinds of issues it was addressing simply weren't as relevant anymore. And its material was gobbled up by various other writers and used, but the document itself became less important and eventually vanished.

What about the other books that do appear in our New Testaments today? The so-called Catholic epistles or general epistles. That's the letters of James, 1 and 2 Peter, 1, 2, 3 John, and Jude. These were letters directed to the whole church, not just to a specific one, say Corinth.

That's why they're called Catholic epistles. It's got nothing to do with the Roman Catholic Church specifically. It just means universal, kathoholos in Greek. The truth is the majority of Christians in the early church weren't exactly on the same page about these letters. What about at the edges of the New Testament? James, 2 Peter, Jude. Yeah. These texts might not have got in, right?

Yeah, around the ages of the New Testament, there was a bit of debate and a bit of argy-bargy. We can say that the four Gospels are very popular. The Pauline Corpus, including Hebrews, of all things, because people thought, oh, well, sounds vaguely like Paul, and there's some mention of Timothy at the end, so maybe it was Paul. So the Pauline letters with Hebrews were popular. So was 1 Peter and 1 John.

The other parts of the New Testament, some people had some debate about. And in fact, the Syrian church, which was sort of outside the realm of the Roman Empire, they never really accepted the Catholic epistles totally until the 5th century.

which is very interesting. And some people looked at, you know, the book of Revelation and thought, no, this sort of end of the world stuff, you know, it's a, I'm not too sure about that. And some people looked at James and said, yeah, James, is he talking some smack about Paul? What's James all about? And Jude's pretty short and he quotes one Enoch as well. What's up with that?

One Enoch is a Jewish text from about 200 BC. It was really popular amongst Jews of the ancient world. And Jude, being a Jew, Jesus' half-brother actually, quotes it to drive home his message. For none of those documents was it a question, oh, but that's weird stuff.

They were documents that were popular and well appreciated. The question was purely, are but are they in that special category which we're going to read aloud in church to people who don't have any other access? Because remember, many, many people were functionally illiterate. And the only way they would get these documents is by having them read aloud to them.

By the 4th century, we have a pretty clear picture of what the New Testament will end up as. Eusebius of Caesarea was a bishop and historian who wrote a historical account of the first centuries of Christianity. It's called Ecclesiastical History.

It was the first of its kind, and some scholars, like the legendary Arnaldo Mamigliano, think that its careful and systematic use of earlier sources influenced Western historiography, that is, how we responsibly write history.

Anyway, in his ecclesiastical history, Eusebius categorized many of the Christian documents circulating in his day. Some were recognized texts, there were disputed texts, there were spurious texts, and of course, heretical texts.

Eusebius is a late third, early fourth century Christian leader. He became one of the advisors that Constantine decided if he was going to believe in this God and support the work of this God, he'd better have an expert advisor, and Eusebius got to be the man. And Eusebius was also a considerable scholar and writer, and he wrote the first major history of the churches.

which does go back to the first century. What's intriguing about Eusebius is it's quite clear that there is no definitive statement of what books are in in his time, because if there was, he'd quote it. That would settle the issue. But instead, he adds up references to, well, many people say this one is in,

Some people say this one isn't. Eusebius is actually useful from this point of view because he makes a nice, clear four-way distinction. He distinguishes between, number one, the unquestioned books, and that's the Gospels, the Acts, the letters of Paul, the first letter of John, and the letter of Peter. I think he means one Peter. And he said we could add to that the revelation of John. And then there are books that he calls disputed books.

Now, these are books that everyone thinks are great, but it's disputed whether they're in the top category. And he says, you mentioned earlier, the letter of James, the letter of Jude, the second letter of Peter, the second and third letters of John. Those are uncertain. Then he adds there are books that are not genuine. Now, those ones that he just mentioned, which are disputed, we would say ended up in. He's honestly reporting that not everyone was sure at this point. It's amazing how free he is to tell us that.

Instead of nervously trying to, you know, tack down all the tack down everything. Yes. I think it's because the issue isn't a really fierce one in his time. And it's certainly not a matter of imperial policy. Eusebius was a bishop. Remember, he was a leader of the church. Everyone looked to him for guidance on matters, but he doesn't make things neat. He doesn't skew things or hide things. He's really transparent and historical in the way he talks about all this stuff.

There was massive agreement, he acknowledges, about the Gospels, the Book of Acts and the letters of Paul, the majority of the New Testament. And there was some lingering discussion, he says, about the other texts. Then there are books called the Acts of Paul, the Shepherd, that's Hermas, the Apocalypse of Peter, the Letter of Barnabas and the Didache.

And he says the revelation of John, if that view prevail, for as I said, some rejected, but others counted among the recognized books. So the only one of those that actually ended up in is the revelation of John. The others are all ones written in the second century AD or later. Then there are the ones that are positively spurious. And these are the ones which I take it nobody is interested in putting in the Bible for any reason. And he gives a list of those as well.

And there's the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Gospel of the Ebionites, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, various others that he mentions. So when do we actually get the New Testament? When do we have an agreed list of these 27 books? Well, the answer is in the year 397 at the Council of Carthage.

Canon number 24 of the Council of Carthage is a list of the 27 books we think are in the New Testament. And really, there's been no serious argument about it between the Council of Carthage and now. There was one other major council a generation earlier, the Council of Laodicea in 363 AD, which helpfully comments that it recognized the common practice of all the churches and doesn't tell us what it was, which again is a point that it wasn't controversial.

The issue wasn't a red hot one. So there's nothing at Nicaea. Laodicea says, get on with what you're doing. And the Council of Carthage in 397 formalizes it with a list. Okay. So 397. We are more than 300 years after the latest of these texts was written. Yes. Before there's a firm, these 27 and no others.

Why shouldn't people listening go, well, there you go. This whole thing was a schmuzzle. Well, you can choose. You can make it a highly organized conspiracy and throw them out for that reason. Or you can say it's a schmuzzle and throw them out for that reason. But it seems to me those are precisely opposite arguments. It wasn't a schmuzzle. It was consensus.

and the consensus was formed out of the common practice of a widespread number of early Christian churches

and ended up choosing pretty successfully the first and second generation documents, the first century documents, and excluding ones that came later. In other words, the early church systematically culled documents that were way too late to actually have direct memories of what Jesus had been like. As I said to Chris, the process might sound messy,

But it's also so human, so historical. Not at all like the story Voltaire told, where the books are laid on an altar and the books that aren't to be included magically fall off and the books that are to be included just stay there. Nor was it a political process. It was a historical process, as Christians searched to find the voice of the apostles, and so the voice of Jesus.

But what else would we expect from a faith so grounded in history?

Christians believe in a man, Jesus, who we say really lived in the first century. His story is told in a series of historical biographies and historical letters. There are ways for us to test these documents historically, which we've done in previous episodes. Producer Kayleigh says you should check out episodes 7, 10, 12, and 16. They're all linked in the show notes of this episode.

So why shouldn't the process of discovering the sacred texts of Christianity be similarly human and able to be traced through history? Let's press pause. I've got a five-minute Jesus for you. Actually, it's more like three minutes. The fundamental idea behind the Christian canon, the official collection of authoritative texts, was that the church was striving to discover anything with apostolic authority –

If a document was written by an apostle or a colleague of an apostle, and that document was consistent with what the apostles taught, that document was felt to be weighty. It had authority. It's similar to the way you might listen to the official statements of an ambassador, because ambassadors reflect the mind of the sending government. That's the key thought. Christians believed they could hear the voice of Christ, the truth of God, in the teaching of the apostles.

It's quite a different idea of scripture from, say, Islam, which views the Quran as divine dictation, a direct disclosure of God's own thoughts in the first person. I, God, tell you this and that. The early Christians' theory of inspiration was based on the logic that the apostles were charged by Christ to speak with authority on his behalf.

The simple thing I want to point out is that this goes right back to Jesus. The early church didn't invent this because they wanted a new scripture. They knew beyond doubting that Jesus had appointed apostles, a word that's very similar in meaning to our word ambassador. Apostle, apostolos, just means sent one. And it carries the connotation of being sent with the authority of the sender. And

And this notion is everywhere in our evidence. So the earliest gospel, Mark, has the statement in chapter 3 that says, Jesus appointed 12 that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach. I know we associate the word preach with sort of religious activities, but actually the term caruso means an official herald. They were his heralds.

Then there's a reference to this same idea in a completely separate independent source scholars call Q. It's the shared material in Matthew and Luke that isn't in Mark, and it too can be dated very early. In fact, this can be dated to about the 50s.

Here's the version retained in Luke 22. You can find another version in Matthew. Jesus said, It's obvious here that Jesus appointed his 12 as new leaders or judges of God's renewed Israel, just as there were 12 patriarchs at the founding of Antiochus.

ancient Israel. So there are 12 apostles to rule on behalf of the king in the new covenant.

Independent of both Mark and Q is the Apostle Paul, writing in the mid-50s, but actually in this text, he quotes an early creed that most scholars can date to about five years after the events. Paul quotes the creed as saying, Christ appeared to Kephas, that's Peter, and then to the Twelve. The point is, three early and separate sources coincide on this crucial point. Christ himself established a

a select group to be his authorised heralds and judges over the people of God. Now we might not buy any of that, but there's no denying that the early Christian passion to find anything written with apostolic authority and then submit to it as if to Christ himself is an idea you can trace back to the historical Jesus himself. You can press play now. So from a historical point of view, how well do you reckon those Christians did?

at gathering their founding texts. They chose ones that were from the first generations. They chose ones that had been widely quoted by later figures. And they chose ones that they thought were mainstream. And on those terms, they chose well. The New Testament is not a political document. Anything but.

It's a document based on the usage of the early Christians, a people mainly from the lower classes, a people striving to know what they were meant to trust.

It wasn't a bunch of high-powered individuals getting together to pick their favorites. The books we read in the New Testament are the books the majority of early Christians were reading from the beginning, certainly in the case of the Gospels, the Book of Acts, and the Letters of Paul. And it's clear that the majority were reading these books and not the many, many others, because these were the ones closest in time and closest in the message to the people appointed first.

by Jesus. The right captains were chosen for the job, not politicians, but humble learners and teachers. And they didn't really choose the texts they preferred. They discerned as best they could which documents carry the authority of an apostle, the authority of Jesus, and in their view, the authority of God.

As I say, some listeners won't believe any of this spiritual stuff about the authority of apostles, about the notion of a word from God, and that's fine. This episode is really just about clearing up the history and busting a few unfortunate popular myths. The early Christians did a great job of discovering the authentic message of Jesus.

I mean, if you gave a bunch of objective historians today the hundreds of texts we possess from the first couple of centuries of Christianity and asked them to come up with a list, a canon of texts that captured the first century voice of Jesus and his apostles and ones that could be confidently dated to that century, they'd come up with pretty much exactly the 27 texts we find in the New Testament today.

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Next episode, we're talking to the legendary Oxford professor and mathematician John Lennox and a few other experts on the topic of artificial intelligence. It's scary. It's unbelievable. It's hopeful. It's the future. It's the end of us all and much more. See ya.

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