Ali Ataie – How the Bible was ACTUALLY Made

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.