Let’s Start a New Religion

Picture, if you will, a world in which you have founded a new religion. It does not matter whether the religion is about peace and love or the collection of unusual cabbages. What matters is that you will not write any of the holy books for this religion. Who would you allow to write your new Bible?

I was actually surprised to find out there was controversy over what should be in the Bible. I mean, duh, it’s the Bible. It is what it is. Ah the sweet innocence of youth. I was soon to discover that even today there are people who want to eject traditional books from the canon or insert other ancient works. There are even those who think we can still be writing books that could be added to the Bible.

The faithful today will defend the traditional canon by discussing the process by which it was formed and expounding on the criteria the church fathers used to determine which books were authoritative. But let’s take a different approach: If you were starting a new religion, who would you let write your official holy scripture?

You’re too busy teaching people to reach enlightenment through cabbage to write books, but you’ve taught several students very carefully. You’d trust them to write about your teachings, wouldn’t you? And if you taught them well, their students should at least be capable of summarizing your teachings.

What about people who never met you or even one of your students? Would you trust them to write your scriptures? What if they pretended to be one of your students; how do you think we could sniff out the pretenders? Most likely their writings would differ from those of your actual students; they’d be inserting their own ideas among yours.

Is there anyone else you would trust to write the official works that will guide your followers for generations to come? I can’t imagine who else I would give that privilege to.

So how do we apply this to the Christian scriptures? We trust the writings of the students of Jesus. Peter and John spent more time with Jesus than anyone else during his ministry. Paul got a special intensive from Christ. I guess the early church assumed James spent enough time around his brother and the apostles to be trusted; I think that’s fair. And then their students? All they did was record what they said Jesus taught.

And they sniffed out the fakes by focusing on the discrepancies. Your Jesus says women have to make themselves male to be saved? That’s not our Jesus. Straight to the garbage with that one.

This is essentially the formula the church used. Why aren’t Clement’s writings scripture? For the same reason John Stott’s writings aren’t; he wasn’t trained by Jesus. Why isn’t Thomas in the Bible? Different Jesus.

This still leaves the question of authentic authorship; that’s another matter entirely. But once we’ve decided who we think wrote these works, the question of canonicity should be easily settled.

And that’s why we can trust the canon we have. It was not a case of a bunch of stuffy old men sitting down and deciding whose writings they liked and whose they didn’t. It was simply a matter of figuring out whether the people who wrote had sufficient authority. The apostles told others what they heard and saw and what the Holy Spirit had helped them to understand (John 14:26, 16:13). By following those who were the first to follow him, we follow Jesus.


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