As stated last post, the Church has a bloody past and they are known for covering up things through bloodshed. In this article I would like to talk about a topic that is very close to Christian hearts. That is our Beloved Holy Bible.

Topic Discussed:
Is the Bible complete or the "real" Bible?

As stated in the Da Vinci Code Jesus was thought of as a prophet, a great and powerful man, but a mortal nonetheless. Now this part is true, Jesus was thought of as a teacher, or another powerful prophet of Elijah. That was how many of the early Gospels depicted Jesus as a teacher or as a powerful prophet. Even one of our modern day Gospels Mark 4:35   The disciples woke him and said to him, "Teacher, don't you care if we drown?" Notice how they say teacher and not lord, even after Jesus rebukes the wind and calms the sea, he is still teacher. In Luke Jesus' own mothers and brothers think he is insane, they grasp him and say that he does not know what he is doing. They think of him as man they do not think of him as divine.


As I said earlier many bibles were written were Jesus was man and not divine. There were over 100 gospels written about Jesus. Yet only four were published, hmm thats weird that only four were accepted when even Mary, Jesus' mother's gospel was not even accepted. This is where the Bible gets "mingled with", where the Church stepped in and decided what Gospels were worthy of being accepted. This whole transformation was going on when emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. There was a council of bishops appointed the job of deciding what really is the Catholic faith as discussed in the next paragraph.

This council was called the Council of Nicaea, sound familiar from the Da Vinci Code? Well this is an organization that historically existed and was given the task of choosing the standards of the Catholic faith.  This was the first general council in the history of the Church since the Apostolic Council of Jerusalem, which had established the conditions upon which Gentiles could join the Church. In the Council of Nicaea, “the Church had taken her first great step to define doctrine more precisely in response to a challenge from a heretical theology.” The writings and teachings of early church fathers presented even greater challenges for the Church in defining exactly what was considered the heretical theology prior to the First Council of Nicaea. Early Christian apologist Justin Martyr clearly presented his earlier teachings on the logos (Jesus relationship to Father) in the Dialogue with Trypho (Dialogue with Trypho, 56). The resolutions in the council, being ecumenical, were intended for the whole Church.

They set certain guidelines for which a gospel must contain to even be considered. We do have a document called the Muratorian Canon ... which tells us that one of the criteria for deciding whether a book is scripture or not is whether it can be read in the church. Now, this seems to be rather a circular argument, because you probably don't read it in the church unless you think it's scripture, but there seems to be something about suitability for public reading during worship, that's one criterion. The churchmen who argued about these points of what's in and what's out... [also] wanted to say if we know a book was supposedly written by an Apostle or by a follower of an Apostle, this gave it some authenticity. This was an attempt to say, "We're as close back with eyewitness reporting as we can be." (Contibuted by Elizabeth Clarke and PBS)

Now with the choosing of the Gospels there where some politics involved. Antioch had a special affection for the Gospel of Luke. We don't know that for a fact, but this is certainly an element in the development of the gospel canon. So as the centers got together and wanted to share fellowship and shared their readings, it would have been important for them to recognize one another's principle texts. There may also have been some theological issues that were being debated, and the use of certain texts in connection with those debates probably played a role in the recognition of those texts as authoritative. We know that that was the case with the Gospel of John; by the end of the second century there was a faction among the Roman church leadership that rejected the fourth gospel and said, "We ought not have it." They thought that perhaps there was a portrait of Jesus that compromised his humanity. And so the insistence upon the full humanity of Jesus would have been an issue in the acceptance of John as authoritative. So there were both some political and also some theological reasons that no doubt played a role. And then there were various other gospels that were not included within the fourfold canon that probably did not have the sponsorship of a major church, or had some feature to them that was particularly problematic from a theological point of view.(Contibuted by Elizabeth Clarke and PBS)

In conclusion, the Gospels were mainly chosen from a viewpoint of Jesus being divine. Also politics were involved as they are with anything in our current day. We know that there were many gospels that were not included .Yet from the chosen gospels we don't even know who the real authors are. This leaves a big gap between the gospels of Jesus that are more historically correct and might even be more detailed and with our current day gospels that display the teachings that the Church wanted us to know about and that kept Jesus divine.