In the two thousand years since the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, the world of Christendom has seen incredible changes, including a split with the Eastern Orthodox Church and a Protestant Reformation, accompanied by a rejection of much core ideology. Yet throughout it all, the collection of scripture called the New Testament has remained unchanged and largely unquestioned, even though it was assembled by the same church leaders whose beliefs many now refute. It has always amazed me that as a former Protestant I always accepted the "Catholic's Bible".
Answer for yourself: Do you not see the folly of the collection of these documents by those who are understood by most today to have been blatant idolaters?
To challenge the veracity of the canonical New Testament is, at best, an uncomfortable position; such questions strike at the very heart of most Christians' faith. Nevertheless, we at Bet Emet understand that these sacred writings have come to us only after decades of oral traditions and centuries of scribal rewrites, additions, deletions, and fictional creationism much according to the beliefs of select denominations in the early days of Christianity.
It is only by attempting to study the origins and evolution of the New Testament scriptures that one can hope to discover the true historical Jesus—a worthy goal of any Christian believer.
When reading the New Testament, one is poignantly reminded of how translation, particularly of archaic language, is subject to personal interpretation. It is therefore vitally important that we get as close to the original source as possible. It is therefore vitally important that we get as close to the original source as possible. The oldest surviving complete text of the New Testament is the Codex Sinaiticus, dating back to the middle of the fourth century. The oldest fragments, the Bodmer and Beatty Papyri and Papyrus 52, date back to the second century but only contain bits of the Gospel of John. All of these texts are Greek. This presents a few disturbing problems. If one wants to uncover the truth about a Jewish Rabbi named "Yeshua" he has to look at Jewish sources and not foreign Greek ones.
First, Jesus's native tongue was Aramaic, and even if he knew Greek, he certainly did not speak it to his apostles, many of whom were uneducated fishermen. Without any surviving Aramaic texts, the actual words of Christ are lost forever, mired in a sea of subjective translation by ancient scribes.
Second, we are faced with a gap of as much as three hundred years between the composition of a text and our surviving copies. In a world without a printing press, texts would often undergo drastic evolution through centuries of handwritten duplication. The sooner you face this reality and deal with it by adjusting your religious beliefs to accept only what the Jewish Scriptures had said the sooner you will be able to cast out the leaven of today’s pharisees.
Our four canonical gospels did not begin their lives as the gospels of "Matthew," "Mark," "Luke" and "John." Different groups of early Christians maintained their own oral traditions of Yeshua's wisdom, as writing was a specialized skill and not every fellowship enjoyed the services of a scribe. When written accounts of Jesus's teachings began to circulate (i.e., the theoretical "sayings" gospel Q and the Semeia or Signs source), the independent groups would supplement them with their own traditions about Yeshua, each believing their own versions to be "the Gospel." Eventually, as these expanded writings spread through other communities, some versions were viewed as having more authority than others. It was not until the pronouncement of Bishop Irenaeus (185 C.E.) that Christians began to accept only the four familiar gospels as authoritative, and to refer to them by their modern titles. You may laugh but 4 Gospels were chosen because there were only four winds. That sure sounds like God to me!
The rest of the canon was much slower to develop. For the next two centuries, the four gospels would be coupled with a myriad of different letters, epistles, stories and apocalypses, according to what a particular congregation judged as relevant to their understanding of Yeshua and his message. Catholicism was only one of the dozens of denominations within the early church—Gnosticism was prevalent throughout Egypt, Montanism in Asia Minor, Marconianism in Syria. Eventually, the Catholic church was adopted as the state religion of the Roman Empire, and all other systems of belief were branded as heresies. The West won! Following the Epistle of Athanasius in 367 C.E., the Church finally reached agreement upon which writings were truly authentic and "inspired by God," thus forming the canonical New Testament. Although factions of the Church continued to debate the merits of various books for centuries, and many even used other writings in their liturgy, most uncanonical writings were ordered to be destroyed. In many cases, possession of heretical literature was punishable by death. We are extremely fortunate that many of these texts have survived the millennia, giving us insights into the development of various early Christian traditions. With such a short sketch as to how these "new" documents originated and the authority behind them, any thinking believer should see the necessity to study them in-depth if truth is your goal. Shalom.