Shot Out of the Canon

Ok, everyone, haul out your textbooks and fire up the search engines; we're diving into material that is not widely available like the Bible is. Let's talk about the "Early Church".

Now, the "Early Church" is an extremely broad topic, so I'm going to narrow it down a bit for this discussion. If there are other aspects that you'd like to explore, let me know and we'll create a separate blog entry for it. The particular topic I want to focus on right now is the writings and teachings of people that were present during the first hundred or so years after Jesus' death and how we respond to these teachings.

Let me set the stage a bit. Jesus, when He ascended, left behind a group of Jewish men known as "The 12 Apostles" (although there were only 11 of them left). In Mark 16:15, He says to them, "Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation." So these guys go out and start making more disciples. This group starts growing and growing and eventually becomes known as the Christian "church". At some point around AD 45, about 15 years after Christ's death, the group of people following the oral teachings of the Apostles is really too big to manage by such a small group of disciples, so they are inspired to start writing this stuff down. This way, the church doesn't stray off track while the diciples are away.

So, out of this time period, a number of books, letters, and various writings are generated by a number of different people. Some of these people were direct eyewitnesses, like Matthew and John, some were people who interviewed eyewitnesses, such as Luke, while still others were people who came to the movement through different means, like Paul and his conversion.

Now, once written, these books and letters would circulate from church to church. And as time went on, more writings appeared. The problem was that, as time passed, the people who were direct eyewitnesses died and some of the new writings started to stray away from the original teachings.

So, a problem faced the Church; of all this written material and oral traditions, which ones were true to the teachings of Jesus and which ones had strayed off the path? It made sense to collect all the trustworthy writings together in one book, like the Jews had done with the Talmud, but which ones? The debate raged on for a long time, with several groups and individuals over the years taking a stand on which writings should be included and which ones should not. Finally, between 1545-1563, the Council of Trent met (for 18 years! And I thought meetings at work took forever!) to hammer out the set of books that you will get if you walk into a bookstore and buy a Bible off the shelf.

But the question remains, what do we do with the stuff that was left out? Beyond that, what do we do with the ideas that were never actually written down, but passed down by word of mouth over 2000 years, like an extremely long version of the game 'Telephone'?

Growing up in a Protestant background, I developed an attitude of "If it's not in the Bible, then it's not trustworthy. Any oral tradition cannot be relied on; it must be discarded." However, I've discovered a weakness in my logic. Here it is: The Bible, as we know it today, was assembled by a group of men. Let me restate that. A group of men made the decision on which books were included. The key question to ask, here, is how did these men make that decision? What was their guide? It's not like they could use the Bible as their guide; it wasn't fully formed yet.

Are the writings of other people that didn't make it in still useful for learning about God? What if one of those non-Biblical sources teach something that isn't discussed in the Bible? How do we trust it? Who's trustworthy and who's not?