Ali Ataie – How the Bible was ACTUALLY Made
AI: Summary ©
The speakers discuss the history and confusion surrounding the Christian title, including the church's stance on the Bible and the use of "monster" in Christian writing. They also mention the use of "weed" in Christian writing and the importance of Christian gospels in their writing. The transcript highlights Jesus's death as a loss to the world and the church's use of "monster" in the Bible as a way to confirm or deny historical events.
AI: Summary ©
I do wanna ask how did the Trinity
come to be theologically,
and how did the Bible become canon? I
heard that there were 30 gospels, 26 of
which were thrown away and 4 were kept.
Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John. It's a really
interesting question that requires substantive study of Christian
history. You know, it's interesting, most people don't
know this, but the Christian canon was not
definitively and officially closed till the 16th century,
the Council of Trent. This is a 1000
years after Islam. The first Christian bishop who
suggested that these present 27 books should be
the only books to be read was Athanasius
of Alexandria, who was actually the Bishop of
Arius. So Arius and and Athanasius were both
at Nicea and Athanasius won through vote. But
his letter in 367
of the Common Era, it's called the 39
Thestal Letter, he was the first one who
said, just read these 27 books from Matthew
to Revelation, our present canon. But that's just
one man's opinion,
basically. And, you know, Bart Ehrman did his
dissertation on Didymus the Blind, who was another
scholar in Alexandria, a contemporary of Athanasius living
in the same time in the same city.
And Didymus the Blind's canon was different than
Athanasius. People think that Athanasius settled the canon.
No. He didn't he didn't do that at
all. There was massive difference of opinion into
the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th century as
to what books should be included definitively and
what what books should be excluded. I mean,
there was a synod at Hippo in 390
3, right, but this was a minor council.
It's not an ecumenical council. So everyone at
this time was basically Catholic, the Puerto Orthodox
had become Catholic, a minor council is not
binding upon the Christian world, only an ecumenical
council. And that didn't happen until 16th
century.
And contrary to popular belief, the Council of
Nicaea had nothing to do with with the
canon, the New Testament canon. They did not
deal with the canon. I think this rumor
comes from Dan Brown or something, the Da
Vinci Code or something like that. There are
Christian apologists who will insist that the canon
was settled in the 2nd century, and this
is just completely inaccurate. And you had early
church fathers quoting from, yeah, Matthew, Mark, Luke,
and John, but they also quoted from other
things as well. I mean, Sarafian, one of
the church fathers at the time, he actually
believed the gospel of Peter was authentic and
endorsed it. But then later on said, no,
actually, it's it's heresy. Denimas the blind, as
I said earlier, he didn't accept. 2nd Peter,
he thought it was a total forgery. He
included in his canon, the Shepherd of Hermas,
the Epistle of Barnabas. They're very, very interesting
books. I mean, the Epistle of Barnabas, I
mean, you talk about antinomianism.
And the Epistle of Barnabas is also in
the Codex Sinaiticus, which is the oldest complete
New Testament in existence.
It's dated like 350 of the Common Era.
And its canon includes the Epistle of Barnabas.
And this person, Barnabas, who wrote this, and
this is not the gospel of Barnabas. Muslims
get these Muslims get these things confused completely,
completely different. The epistle of Barnabas, actually, the
author says that the Jews completely misunderstood
all of the dietary restrictions in the Torah,
and that when god said, don't eat pig,
he means to say, don't hang out with
people who are pigs. That's what it means.
You you you've always been allowed to eat
pigs. And then when he said, don't be
like the, hyena,
it's because the hyena can switch its gender.
So don't be like a man one day
and a woman like another. Don't be gender
fluid. This is what he says, the the
author of the epistle of Barnabas. And then
he says something really interesting about the weasel.
I won't I won't talk about what he
says about the weasel. But he accepted that.
I mean, whoever wrote the Codex Sinaiticus,
probably a committee, maybe Eusebius
of Caesarea,
because Constantine
commissioned some Bibles. This could have been maybe
one of them. So it seems like this
was part of the Christian canon. So if
you read the gospel of Luke, Luke has
a preamble, and people should read that preamble.
People kind of just I mean, they read
it quickly and get to the sort of
meat of the issue, the heart of the
story as it were. But Luke says that
it seems like a good idea for him
to write a gospel because poloi, the Greek
poloi means many have undertaken this. Many there
were many gospels. That's what he says. At
his time,
Luke is writing, according to most historians,
confessional and non confessional, he's probably writing around
80, 85, something like that, maybe 90. And
by that time, there are many gospels written
about Jesus.
Now what are these gospels? What is he
talking about? From a Christian confessional perspective,
he could only be talking about basically Mark
and Matthew,
and that's about it. Right?
But that's that's not many because Luke says
he says himself in Luke chapter 6 that
when Jesus came to the to Peter and
he said, cast your net, he says there
were so many fish in the net that
the nets were going to break. And the
word he uses there is polloi. It was
polloi fish. That means there were 100 of
fish in this net. So gospels
does not mean 2 gospels.
Yeah. It means
possibly dozens of where are these gospels? These
are lost to history. We don't know where
they are. Every so often, some Bedouin or,
you know, he's in a cave somewhere in
Egypt or in
Jordan or something like that. I mean, that's
how the Dead Sea Scrolls was discovered. The
Nag Hammadi Library. The Nag Hammadi Library contains,
I mean, these are 4th century documents, but
scholars believe that they're copies of 1st and
second century Christian gospels, the gospel of Thomas.
Many scholars date that to the 1st century
or right around the time John wrote his
gospel. It's a contemporary with the gospel of
John. And the other thing is how did
how did they actually pick the canon? How
did the Christian, the early church fathers, how
did they determine the canon? Well, basically, if
something was proto
orthodox according to them, if it was in
agreement with their theology, then they would attribute
it to an apostle. Right. Even if the
book is anonymous,
for example, the gospel of Matthew is anonymous.
Whoever wrote Matthew did not identify himself. But
the early church fathers, they they like this
gospel. So they said, okay. Fine. You know,
Matthew wrote it. Matthew is a disciple. But
then you look at something like the gospel
of Thomas, which is written around the same
time, according to many scholars, late 1st century,
and the author identifies himself explicitly
as Thomas,
a disciple, as an apostle,
because it didn't jive with the proto orthodoxy
of the church fathers. They said, this must
be a forgery. Wow. So they decided what
was true about Jesus and then use that
as a criteria to
confirm or deny anything that was written about
Jesus. That's that's very interesting. So Like the
go like the gospel I'll give you another
example. The gospel of Peter, according to many
scholars, late 1st century, maybe early 2nd century.
I mean, right around the time Acts was
written, maybe the gospel of John was written.
The gospel of John again is anonymous.
The gospel of Peter
explicitly
claims itself to be authored by Peter, but
was considered to be I mean, like I
said, Sarapion accepted at one point, then he
went back. Because the crucifixion scene is is
is strange. It says that when they crucified
Jesus, he was silent as if he felt
no pain. And they said, well, what's going
on here? What happened? Was Jesus' soul maybe
raptured up into heaven? Are they crucifying sort
of an empty shell of a body? So
they didn't like that, because Jesus has to
suffer for our sins, right? His pain is
our gain, as it were. Eventually, that gospel,
which explicitly
is authored, whoever wrote this gospel said, I'm
Peter, that's rejected. But the gospel of Mark,
which is anonymous,
is accepted, and Mark is a student of
Peter according to the court of orthodox. That's
very, very interesting. I mean, to be fair
to Mark and Matthew, they were written fairly
early maybe compared to some of the other
ones. I think maybe the comparison is so
minimal that, for example, like, what you mentioned,
the gospel of Thomas, the Jesus seminar, they
compiled the book called the 5 gospels, and
they included the gospel of Thomas. And they
were voting on every verse that Jesus allegedly
said. They were voting on the probability of
him actually saying that. So they included that.
And as a historical document, that might actually
lead to some of the things Jesus did
say historically speaking. So I think that that
is very interesting.