Anyway, a good book on the topic (here is the online text) is: Where We Got the Bible, Our Debt to the Catholic Church by The Right Rev. Henry G. Graham.Yes, the Scripture is the witness to the action of God in the lives of his people. We refer to it for guidance in matters of faith and morals, but the authority to teach God’s word lies with men–with those in whom he placed that authority.
Church came first. Around 300AD a council was held and a group of books were declared the inspired Word of God. This is the Bible we know today.
Wasn’t Mark potentially a follower of Jesus during His lifetime? The young fella who ran off naked from Jesus’ arrest is often held to be an authorial self-insert. He might, then, have been baptized prior to Pentecost, though we don’t know for sure.
That is an unfortunately simplified view that we need to be careful about asserting.
Correct, I was just trying to simplify it. The OPer was just asking for a distinction between which “came” first. The writings existed, but the concept of the “Bible” really didn’t until after Jesus’s death. Hence, the technical existence of the Bible came after the technical existence of the Church.
Yes
uch: I’d expect an Evangelical/Fundamentalist to make such a statement, but not a Catholic. The Bible is not the Word of God who is Christ Jesus. The Bible is the written word of God, given to men by inspiration of the Holy Spirit.Yes and no. The OT predates the Church and foreshadows Christ in its prophecies and typology. The NT is the writings of certain Apostles and their close disciples written in the first century AD. Yes, the canon was determined by the Church, which is why we have the Bible we now have.
sorry for the error. I can’t believe I said that and didn’t notice my error
Yes and no. The OT predates the Church and foreshadows Christ in its prophecies and typology. The NT is the writings of certain Apostles and their close disciples written in the first century AD. Yes, the canon was determined by the Church, which is why we have the Bible we now have.
.A small slip of the brain. It happens to us all. :tiphat:sorry for the error. I can’t believe I said that and didn’t notice my error
Yes. We have a fuller version of the OT than some of our Protestant brethren because we use texts that the Jewish leaders decided would not be in their canon. But then the Church had different criteria and reasons for setting her canon from theirs.
That’s what happens when I post before I have my coffee.
There was a lot of inspired writings, however, which never made it to the OT. Probably a lot of it was lost as well. Someone had to make the decision on which books to include in the OT, as we know it.
How do you know that there were inspired writings which never made it the Old Testament?
Maybe because they were lost or maybe they were just of very poor quality, among other things? Can you read everyone’s handwriting, for example? Or maybe others just couldn’t decode them. Plenty of reasons why they never made it. Of course, one could argue they weren’t inspired if one couldn’t read them, but still…someone had to decide what went into what we know as the OT. Ever notice the style (broken up into short versicles, etc.) of all the writings. (Compare that against old Church documents or Greek or Roman writers.) Why are they mostly the same, despite all the writers and paraphrasers that put work into them? A lot of originality must have been stripped, though the gist of what they wrote survives in the form of book, chapter, and verse. You do know they weren’t written that way, don’t you? We see only the final product. Or did God give instructions on how to organize the Bible that way as they wrote them, I don’t know?
