How do I answer to: "many documents aren't included in the New Testament"?"

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Thyme

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Sorry, I am probably going to be asking a few questions regarding the legitimacy of the Bible, as I am trying to defend it, but don’t have enough knowledge to on my own.

What do I say to the claim that many documents have been left out of the Bible?

Thanks in advance for your time- I genuinely appreciate it.
 
Thyme said:
What do I say to the claim that many documents have been left out of the Bible?

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you say “prove it”.
which documents?
written by whom?
all kinds of documents are not in the bible, like the Manhattan telephone director and my 1978 tax returns. ask your source to be specific and prove to you that certain documents revealed by God have been left out of the Bible by someone with authority–and who would that be?–with evil intent.
 
Hi Thyme,

The difference between the Bible and other documents is that the Bible is the word of God, and other documents are the words of men. The words of men have to be proven to be true using the scientific criteria that historians have developped. The fact that something was written down a long time ago does not mean that it is true, anymore than something that was written yesterday. It must be proven to be true from various independent sources.

Verbum
 
In the NT St John states that not everything Jesus said or did was recorded. St Paul also alluded to this fact. That’s one reason why we, as Catholics don’t depend solely on Scripture for authority but rather on Scripture and Tradition, both integral parts of her own history and both utilized by her in discerning or explaining Gods will.

Other documents, such as Gnostic writings written sometime during the early Church period, were rejected as not being inspired by God, the Holy Spirit thus preventing the Church from falling into error.
 
Could you be talking about documents such as “The Gospel of Thomas” and “the Acts of Peter”?

Although these were called Gospels and such and had biblical sounding names, they weren’t Divinely inspired.

Most of these books were written over a century later and obviously weren’t written by the said authors.

You’ll find a similar occurrence with St. Paul’s writings in the Book of Jude which references the Book of Enoch. The Book of Enoch was not written by Enoch and it was written around the 2nd century BC, over 2000 years after Enoch’s death.
 
Thyme said:
Sorry, I am probably going to be asking a few questions regarding the legitimacy of the Bible, as I am trying to defend it, but don’t have enough knowledge to on my own.

What do I say to the claim that many documents have been left out of the Bible?

Thanks in advance for your time- I genuinely appreciate it.
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I would agree with them – for there are many early documents that are not part of the Bible.
It was several hundred years after Jesus that the canon was established. In those years, lots of things were written. It has never been the case that everything written in a certain time period, by members of either the Jewish (OT) or Christian (NT) congregations, was to be included in Scripture.

Instead, the question is – Who has the authority to establish which writings are to be included in the canon of Scripture?
 
Thyme said:
What do I say to the claim that many documents have been left out of the Bible?
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Here is what you say. The very reason we have a Bible was to codify those writings of truly divine inspiration from other writings which made false claims of being inspired. The original purpose of the Bible was liturgical so that churches would know which writings were suitable for use at the liturgy of the Mass. The biblical canon first proposed by St. Athanasius in 348 AD and subsequently ratified by synods in Rome, Hippo and Carthage in the late fourth century became the basis for the Vulgate of Jerome in 400 AD which was the very first Bible. That Bible canon has been formally defined by the Council of Trent in 1547 as well as Vatican I & II. So those documents left out of the Bible are not divinely inspired and have no place being in the bible. No divinely inspired writing has been left out of the Catholic Bible.
 
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