The New Testament by 100 AD?!

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CastingCrown

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Hey everyone!

First time poster here… 👍

I’ve been exchanging emails with an Internet acquaintance who is a Protestant. So far the discussion has gone well and has been grace-filled.

We have been discussing the origins of the Bible and he’s come out with the following:

"All the scrolls were gathered together in Antioch a little after 100 A.D…The Vaudois in the Piedmont valley of the alps is where true believers of Christ dwelled and also translated the bible into Latin which is called the Old Latin Bible or the Common (Vulgate) Bible which spread all the way to England before 200 A.D. (way before Jeromes Latin Vulgate in 405 A.D.) "

:confused:

I’ve since discovered that this is a typical KJV-Only argument of the Jack Chick variety. It is also an attempt to neatly get around the problem of concluding that the Catholic Church assembled the Bible. I’ve trawled the KJV-Only websites to try and work out where this theory comes from and what evidence there is for it, but so far I’ve drawn a blank.

So does anyone know on what they base this? Is there any shred of truth in his statement? For example, is there a book list from Antioch of this era with the 27 books listed? Did this Vaudois community exist in isolation from the Catholic Church?

As I see it, there are some real problems with this theory:
  • The time frame on this is * incredibly* tight to get books such as 2nd Timothy and Revelation back to Antioch by 100 AD.
  • Why does it appear that the Antiochean church didn’t decide to share this canonisation of Scripture with the wider Church? It was an influential church!
  • If it were such an easy thing to do, why did the rest of the Church argue for many years over books like Hebrews and Revelation?
  • The Bishop at this time would have been St. Ignatius. Does that mean you accept his teaching on the Real Presence and Episcopal Hierarchy as well?
Cheers,

CastingCrown
 
To me this sounds a lot like the Trail of Blood theory held by some Baptists. This theory holds that the Baptists can trace their church history directly back to the apostles. Their church existed separate from and independently of the Catholic Church for all of history. In the course of time the Catholic Church grew to be very powerful and started to persecute the “true” church forcing them underground and into hiding and to keep the teachings hidden. The argument follows that some true Baptist teachings can be seen in some groups declared to be heretical by the Catholics such as the Donatists. More importantly for this thread the Trail of Blood Baptists link themselves to the Waldensians and Albigensians that were mainly active in the south of France and northern parts of Italy. The geography links up nicely with the path your Protestant friend says the books of the Bible initially took.

You mentioned St. Ignatius of Antioch, perhaps he would say about his writings about the church hierarchy and the Eucharist that they were later additions inserted by Catholic apologists and that Ignatius really didn’t write that stuff or believe it.

In reality I think it would be difficult for the canon to have been in a final form that early after the death of the Apostle John. Certainly by that time there were many books, such as the writings of Paul, that were accepted at divinely inspired, but there were other groups that held to a canon with more or less books. Some early Christians thought the Didache was inspired or others held that Clement of Rome’s letters to the church there may have also been inspired. There were also questions about the inspiration of things like Hebrews and Jude and Revelation that persisted for some time.

Also, those regions mentioned by your friend weren’t Christianized for several centuries after the death of John. I would find it hard to believe that a proto-Christian group existed in that region of Europe at all prior to then.

So I just think a lot of what you mentioned is highly improbable and I would just trust your instincts and stick to what you know and what can be verified by history.

ChadS
 
\"All the scrolls were gathered together in Antioch a little after 100 A.D…The Vaudois in the Piedmont valley of the alps is where true believers of Christ dwelled and also translated the bible into Latin which is called the Old Latin Bible or the Common (Vulgate) Bible which spread all the way to England before 200 A.D. (way before Jeromes Latin Vulgate in 405 A.D.) "\

**Apparently your friend is ignorant if he even uses the wrong terminology.

The old Latin versions are collectively called the Vetus Italica, not Vulgate. I say “versions”, because there were many of them floating around, inconsistent among themselves, and the OT was only partially done, and translated from the LXX rather than the Hebrew.

It was because of the numerous Latin versions that Pope Damascus commissioned St. Jerome (already known as the best Biblical scholar in the Latin Church) to translate the entire Bible from the original languages into Latin.

He started to use the classical idiom, but received a heavenly messenger asking him, “Are you a Christian or a Ciceronian,” so he deliberately used the common, or Vulgar Latin, hence the name. It was very much the “Good News for Modern Romans” of its time.

The Latin liturgical texts, such as the Gloria and Pater, reflect the Vetus, btw, and NOT the Vulgate.**
 
catholicapologetics.info/apologetics/protestantism/wbible.htm

You might this information valuable.

Basically you have historical evidence on your side.

“It is a fact of history that the Council of Carthage, which was held in 397 A.D., mainly through the influence of St Augustine, settled the Canon or Collection of New Testament Scriptures as we Catholics have them now, and decreed that its decision should be sent on to Rome for confirmation.”

This is quoted from the article I linked. If this person wants to say the NT was “all set” around 100A.D., then the burden of Proof is on them.
 
Welcome to CAF! :wace:

When someone makes a claim such as this, it is really on them to provide evidence to back up their claim if they expect you to take it seriously. It’s not up to you to do their homework for them. Challenging them to find the evidence for it might just awaken them to the fact that there is none. 😉
 
Thanks for your (name removed by moderator)ut guys. Don’t worry, I’m not in the slightest bit convinced by his theory, I’m just trying to work out how to constructively engage him and have some idea of what rabbits he’s going to pull out of his hat when I ask (again) for evidence.

The argument that “well they were persecuted by the evil Roman church” doesn’t really hold much water. For a start, Christianity spent most of its early years under one persecution or another and we have a small library of writings available to us from that period.

Also, we know about many of the sects that have existed because we have the written attacks on them by the Catholic apologists of the time! So even if a given group was persecuted by the Church, you’d at least expect to find evidence of the Catholic Church condemning their doctrines. If the Christians at Antioch were proto-Protestants, wouldn’t they have held some Protestant beliefs? If so, why do we not have a record of the church of Rome defeating that heresy?

Also, isn’t it odd that when the Catholic Church gets together a couple of hundred years later and they reach the exact same list of 27 NT books? From an anti-Catholic perspective, wouldn’t it have been sensible to drop some pesky epistles such as Romans to pre-emptively crush doctrines like “sola fide”? (Not that it teaches that btw)

Lastly, if he wants to claim that Ignatius’ letters are frauds (and I’ve met people who do just that) then he’s going to have to provide some evidence to that effect, rather than just disregarding any historical document that doesn’t fit within his theological system. I’ve spoken with one guy who claimed the entire patristic library was fabricated. This was clearly somebody who had never sat down and tried to read it all (it’s a bit long)… 🤷
 
CastingCrown said:
Thanks for your (name removed by moderator)ut guys. Don’t worry, I’m not in the slightest bit convinced by his theory, I’m just trying to work out how to constructively engage him and have some idea of what rabbits he’s going to pull out of his hat when I ask (again) for evidence.

The argument that “well they were persecuted by the evil Roman church” doesn’t really hold much water. For a start, Christianity spent most of its early years under one persecution or another and we have a small library of writings available to us from that period.

Also, we know about many of the sects that have existed because we have the written attacks on them by the Catholic apologists of the time! So even if a given group was persecuted by the Church, you’d at least expect to find evidence of the Catholic Church condemning their doctrines. If the Christians at Antioch were proto-Protestants, wouldn’t they have held some Protestant beliefs? If so, why do we not have a record of the church of Rome defeating that heresy?

Also, isn’t it odd that when the Catholic Church gets together a couple of hundred years later and they reach the exact same list of 27 NT books? From an anti-Catholic perspective, wouldn’t it have been sensible to drop some pesky epistles such as Romans to pre-emptively crush doctrines like “sola fide”? (Not that it teaches that btw)

Lastly, if he wants to claim that Ignatius’ letters are frauds (and I’ve met people who do just that) then he’s going to have to provide some evidence to that effect, rather than just disregarding any historical document that doesn’t fit within his theological system. I’ve spoken with one guy who claimed the entire patristic library was fabricated. This was clearly somebody who had never sat down and tried to read it all (it’s a bit long)… 🤷
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Those are all great observations. Refuting stuff like that is fairly easy and usually just takes a little knowledge of history and some common sense.

I remember reading something a few years back about the gnostics. They said that pretty much everything we know about the early heretical movements comes from Christian apologists like St. Irenaeus and his works. It was thought that when all the gnostic texts started to come to light and were translated and analyzed that it would revolutionize the way the gnostics were thought of. They turned out to be wrong. It seems that Irenaeus in refuting gnostics and other heretics faithfully represented their true teachings and did not distort anything. When the texts were finally translated all they did was perhaps add a little color to the narrative or add a little more detail, but in no way was the understanding fundamentally changed.

That’s another criticism of the Trail of Blood stuff is how did they manage to stay underground until basically the Reformation, faithfully pass on their teachings, survive generation to generation and leave absolutely no paper trail and not come onto the radar of the Catholic Church?

ChadS
 
I wouldn’t bother trying to refute this. You might show that your are interested and tell him that you would like some convincing primary sources of evidence for this. “Primary Sources” are historically verifiable evidence, such as original documents from the era. And don’t just take his word, make him show you them (or a source where they are such as a University or academic sources), not just say they exist.
 
CastingCrown said:
As I see it, there are some real problems with this theory:
  • The time frame on this is * incredibly* tight to get books such as 2nd Timothy and Revelation back to Antioch by 100 AD.
  • Why does it appear that the Antiochean church didn’t decide to share this canonisation of Scripture with the wider Church? It was an influential church!
  • If it were such an easy thing to do, why did the rest of the Church argue for many years over books like Hebrews and Revelation?
  • The Bishop at this time would have been St. Ignatius. Does that mean you accept his teaching on the Real Presence and Episcopal Hierarchy as well?
Cheers,

CastingCrown
Click to expand...
You more or less refuted the “theory” (more like a false hypothesis) all on your own in the OP! 😃
 
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