The Canon
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Many claim today that the Gospel of Thomas, one of several ancient documents discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi in Egypt, should be considered as valid as the other four gospels we currently have in our Bible. It is a document which claims to contain sayings of Jesus, some which are not included in the canonical gospels. Should it be included in our Bibles as the inspired word of God? If not, why not? After all, some books that are now in the Bible were disputed, such as Hebrews and 2 Peter and Revelation. The canonical books that were disputed gave internal evidence of being inspired...
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So were there a lot of different versions of Christianity early on, and did our version just happen to win out by luck or by force? If we found another type of early "Christianity", does that mean we must change the way we believe?The view that there were different types of Christianity in the early church has been put forth by a number of scholars, including Bart Ehrman and Elaine Pagels, as well as popular books like The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown. They teach that there were many diverse beliefs about Christ in the early church, and the official version of Christianity we have today won out only...
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How do we know the early church chose the right books to be in the Bible? Let's look at the New Testament. We have twenty seven books of the New Testament that comprise the canon, that is, books believed to be divinely inspired by the Holy Spirit of God. But how did they come to be chosen and collected? Did a group of church leaders sit down and just arbitrarily pick out books they liked and declare them canonical? What criterion was used to include a certain book as part of the Bible? The need to define the canon became more important in the second century, when many heresies and false...
© 2012 Vince Latorre, The Bible Can Be Proven