Where Your Bible Came From

Words to Know

Anonymous — with no author’s name attached.

Manuscript — a hand-copied text. We have thousands, and none of them are originals.

Canon — the official list of which books belong in the Bible.

None of this is controversial among people who study these texts, including devout ones who teach at seminaries.

It is simply not preached.

Go deeperWhy your pastor learned this but does not preach it

There is a plain reason for that. If the man in your pulpit went to a mainstream seminary, he learned all of this in school. But he stands up once a week in front of people who pay the bills, who are burying their parents and raising their children, and who came in for comfort. Manuscript history is not comfort. So it stays in the footnotes, where it has always been, and everybody stays comfortable.

Nobody signed the gospels.

Open your Bible to Matthew. The title says The Gospel According to Matthew.

Now read the text itself. Nowhere does the writer say who he is. He never says I. He never claims to have been there. The same is true of Mark, Luke and John.

All four are anonymous. The names were attached later.

By the middle of the second century there were many gospels going around, and different congregations read different ones. A bishop in Gaul named Irenaeus, writing around the year 180, is the earliest person we know of who names these four and insists that these four are the right ones. ¹

Matthew was a tax collector who followed me. Mark was remembered as Peter’s helper, Luke as Paul’s traveling companion, and John as the disciple I loved. Every name is a name close to an apostle, and a book with an apostle’s name on it outranks a book without one.

I am not saying anyone set out to deceive. The people who attached the names were sorting a mess. But the names settled an argument, and settling it was their job.

Here is when they were written, and why.

The earliest is Mark, around the year 70, about forty years after I died. Matthew and Luke come in the eighties or nineties. John is last. ²

Here is how anyone can say that. In the year 66 my people rose up against Rome. In the year 70 a Roman army under a general named Titus broke into Jerusalem and burned the Temple to the ground. ³ Mark has me warning that not one stone of that building will be left on another (Mark 13:1–2), and Luke adds armies surrounding the city (Luke 21:20). A man who has just watched that happen writes about it differently from a man who has not.

Go deeperThe war's length, and the Temple's loss

The war itself lasted four years, from 66 to 70. And the Temple was not just a building on a list. It was the center of the nation's life, the place where my own brother worshipped, and it never came back.

Matthew carries the same warning too, not just Mark and Luke.

The war also tells you why anybody wrote the gospels. For forty years there was no need, because the people who had heard me were alive and you asked them. Then the war came and the city was gone. The men and women who had eaten with me were dying of old age.

When the people who remember start dying, somebody gets out a pen.

Paul’s letters are older than the gospels.

The oldest Christian writings are the letters of Paul, from the fifties. The explanation of me was written down before the account of my life was, by twenty years or more.

Paul did not write books. He wrote letters to small groups he had started, about fights over food or money. Each letter was read out loud, the next town wanted a copy, and in time somebody gathered them into one set. Now a note Paul dashed off about a quarrel in one port town is being read aloud in cities he never saw, as the word of God. ⁴

And he is not there to say that one was about Corinth.

Go deeperHow Paul's letters traveled, and who read them

Paul planted those groups himself: a stay in Philippi, another in Thessalonica, each one leaving behind a batch of new believers with no scripture of their own. When trouble came, over money, over food, or over who was in charge, he sent a letter back by a trusted courier, on foot or by ship, along the roads and sea lanes Rome had built for its armies.

Somebody read it aloud to the whole group, because most of the people listening could not read for themselves. Paul even tells one congregation outright to make sure everybody hears it (1 Thessalonians 5:27). By the time these letters were gathered into one set, they were reaching people who had not even been born when Paul wrote them.

They copied each other, and you can see it.

Read the same story in Matthew, Mark and Luke. Try the paralyzed man let down through the roof (Mark 2:1–12, Matthew 9:1–8, Luke 5:17–26). In long stretches they are word for word identical, in the same order. That is what copying looks like. Almost all of Mark shows up inside Matthew. ⁵

Mark came first, and there are two signs of it. Mark’s Greek is rough, and Matthew and Luke tidy it. And Mark leaves in things that are awkward for me. In Mark, I could not do deeds of power in my hometown (Mark 6:5). In Matthew that becomes I did not do many there (Matthew 13:58). The embarrassing bits shrink as you move forward. They never grow.

So when someone tells you four independent witnesses agree, you now know that at least two of them were working from the third.

Go deeperThe logic behind dating Mark first

You can check this yourself in about ten minutes with a Bible open to all three gospels side by side.

The obvious objection is that the direction could run the other way, that Mark had Matthew in front of him and cut it down. Here is why almost nobody thinks that. Writers clean up rough prose; they do not take a clean sentence and rough it up on purpose, so the rougher Greek almost certainly came first.

The same pattern shows in how my own students look. In Mark they are thick-headed again and again. In Matthew they come off noticeably better. A man copying from Matthew with the text open in front of him has no reason to work harder to make his own teacher's students look worse.

They also disagree, and you can see that too.

Read the four accounts of the morning at the tomb (Mark 16:1–8, Matthew 28:1–10, Luke 24:1–12, John 20:1–18). You will find one woman, or two, or three, or several. You will find a young man, or an angel, or two men, or nobody at all. The women stay silent, or they run to tell.

Go deeperWhat each gospel says at the tomb

Line them up side by side and the differences are concrete, not vague. In Mark, three women go, and inside the tomb sits a young man in a white robe (Mark 16:1–8). In Matthew, two women go, an earthquake shakes the ground, and an angel comes down out of the sky to roll the stone away in front of them (Matthew 28:1–10). In Luke, several women go, and they meet two men in dazzling clothes (Luke 24:1–12). In John, Mary Magdalene goes alone in the dark, finds the stone already moved, and runs to fetch Peter (John 20:1–18).

I am not doing this to wreck your Bible. I am doing it because you were told it is a perfect transcript, and it is not, and it never claimed to be.

That demand, that every word be exactly correct in every detail, was written up in that form by two professors at Princeton in 1881. Christians honored these books for eighteen hundred years before anybody put that particular demand on them. ⁶

The gospels are four communities remembering a founder, decades later, in another language.

Go deeperWhat that standard was actually answering

That demand is younger than your grandmother's church, and it did not come from nowhere. It was an answer to the science and the history of that same century, not a rule the church had always kept.

Read the gospels that way and they are a rich and human record. Read them instead as a flawlessly dictated document, and the claim breaks the first time you compare two pages.

Two famous passages were added later.

We have no originals of anything. They were written on papyrus, and papyrus rots. A text survived only if somebody copied it out by hand before the old one fell apart, and then somebody copied that copy. Do that for three hundred years, by lamplight, and tired hands skip lines and slip notes from the margin into the text. None of that is wickedness. And so the copies we have differ from each other in many places. ⁷

Go deeperHow copying errors actually happen

Here is exactly how a hand-copied text drifts. Papyrus is made from a reed, and in a damp climate a single copy can wear out within one lifetime, which is why the copying never stopped.

A tired copyist skips a line because the line above it happened to end in the same word. A word gets written the way it sounds, after two different words come to sound the same. A man who knows Matthew by heart, copying Mark, lets his hand smooth Mark's wording toward the version he already knows, without noticing what he has done. Somebody had once written an explanation in the margin, and the next copyist assumed it had fallen out of the text, so he copied it straight back into the text itself.

There are two you should know about, because you probably love both.

The first is the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53–8:11), the story of let him who is without sin cast the first stone. It is not in the oldest manuscripts. In some copies it turns up at a different point in John, and in one family of copies it turns up over in Luke entirely. ⁸

I am not telling you that story is untrue to me. I am telling you how it got where it is.

Go deeperHow the story entered the margin

The fact that it moves is itself the clue. A story that wanders like that between manuscripts is a story people loved and told out loud for a long time before anyone wrote it down, until finally it was noted in the margin of a gospel, and a later copyist brought it in off the margin and onto the page itself.

The second is the last twelve verses of Mark (Mark 16:9–20). The oldest copies of Mark end at verse 8, with the women running away frightened and telling nobody. People could not stand it, so somebody wrote a better ending.

We know that because there is more than one. The manuscripts hand us several different endings. ⁹ If Mark had written an ending, there would be one ending.

Go deeperThe scenes borrowed for Mark's long ending

Look closely at what makes up that added ending. The manuscripts do not agree on it either: a short version exists, a longer version exists, and one family of copies even stitches an extra passage into the middle of the long one, which is what a hole looks like after people have taken turns trying to fill it.

The long ending borrows my appearance to Mary Magdalene, two disciples walking in the country, the eleven at a table, and a final sending-out, lifting every scene from Matthew, Luke and John rather than inventing anything new. It also includes the promise that believers can pick up snakes and drink poison safely, a promise none of the borrowed gospels contain.

I want to be careful here. I know some of you come from churches that take those verses in Mark very seriously. I am not making fun of anyone. I am telling you where that sentence came from, and what you do with that is yours.

Now go look at your own Bible. Almost every modern translation has a bracket or a footnote at both places saying the earliest manuscripts do not have these verses.

It is already printed in your Bible. You have just never had a reason to read the small type.

Nobody handed down a Bible.

For the first two hundred years a congregation had whatever somebody had carried to them, perhaps a gospel or two and a handful of Paul’s letters.

And there were more books than the ones you have. Congregations read the Shepherd of Hermas, a long book of visions, and a letter sent under the name of a man called Clement. Both are bound inside our oldest complete Bibles, as though they belonged. ¹⁰

Go deeperThe other books early churches read

They were not alone. Congregations also read the Didache, a short handbook on how to baptize somebody and how to eat together, and some read a Gospel of Peter or a Gospel of Thomas, which is not a story at all but a list of sayings.

None of this was fringe or secret. The Shepherd of Hermas, written in Rome, sits inside one of our oldest complete Bibles, and the letter of Clement, sent out from the church at Rome, sits inside another, right alongside the books you know. Somebody in each case thought they belonged there.

Here is how the official list, the canon, got made.

• About 140: Marcion, a rich shipowner’s son, comes to Rome with his own Bible: no Hebrew scriptures, one cut-down gospel, ten letters of Paul. The church at Rome expels him in 144, but he has published the first list, and now everybody else has to count their own books. ¹¹
• 303: The emperor Diocletian orders the churches pulled down and the scriptures burned. Which books you hand over to soldiers becomes a life-and-death question, and in North Africa the movement splits over it. ¹²
• 367: Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, lists exactly your twenty-seven books in his yearly Easter letter. It is the first surviving list that matches. ¹³
• 393 and 397: Councils of bishops at Hippo and Carthage, in North Africa, approve the same list for the churches under them. ¹⁴

Go deeperMarcion, Diocletian and the list of books

Marcion himself came from Sinope, a port on the Black Sea, and he had the money to back up his convictions. He had decided that the god of the Hebrew scriptures, the god of law and judgment, was a different and lesser god than the Father I spoke about, so he built a Bible to match: no Hebrew scriptures, and of the four gospels only Luke, with its Jewish material cut out.

The church at Rome did not just expel him. It gave him his money back.

When Diocletian's order came in 303, it was not an abstract threat. Officials went to congregations with soldiers and demanded the books be handed over. Some leaders complied, and afterward their own congregations branded them traitors for it. The split in North Africa was as much about which surrendered books had genuinely been scripture and which had been decoys handed over to fool the soldiers, as it was about who had surrendered at all. A soldier standing in your doorway asking for your books has a way of clarifying very quickly what you actually think scripture is.

All through these years, bishops sorted books by three rough tests. Is it old, and does it come from an apostle or somebody close to one? Is it already read aloud on Sunday in many churches? And does it agree with what the bishops already teach? That last test is the honest one and the ugly one. A book that said something they had decided was wrong was, by definition, a book somebody had forged.

Go deeperThe three tests the bishops used

The first test explains something from earlier in this lesson: it is why the four gospels carry apostles' names and why anything written recently was ruled out on the spot.

The second test worked like a popularity contest with real stakes. A book used in one city alone did not make the list. A book already read out loud in many churches did. In practice, ordinary use had already settled a great deal of the Bible, long before anyone took a formal vote.

Nothing about this came down out of the sky. Men applied tests, and one of those tests was simply whether a book agreed with them.

But do not overstate this. Athanasius did not invent your New Testament. Most of it was long settled before him, by plain use. The four gospels and Paul’s main letters had been read everywhere for generations. The arguing was about the edges, books like Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, Jude and Revelation, and some of them nearly did not make it.

Go deeperWhat Athanasius did and did not do

That yearly letter existed only to announce the date of Easter each year, so scripture was not even its usual subject. Athanasius simply used the 367 edition to also spell out which books belonged, more than three hundred years after my death.

The disputed edge included two more letters than you might expect: both 2 John and 3 John, not just the ones already named.

So the true answer is not God handed it down, and it is not one man wrote a list.

Congregations used what they happened to have. A man they called a heretic forced them to count. An emperor made it dangerous to be vague. Bishops applied tests, and one of the tests was agreement with themselves. One bishop finally wrote it out. Councils signed it.

That is how you got the book on your nightstand. It took three hundred years and it was done by men, in rooms, for reasons.

One verse gets used to settle all this.

Someone will quote you: all scripture is God-breathed (2 Timothy 3:16).

Two facts about that verse. When it was written there was no New Testament to refer to, and scripture meant the Hebrew scriptures. And 2 Timothy is one of the letters most scholars believe was not written by Paul, but composed later in his name. In Lesson 15 I will show you how they can tell. ¹⁵

Check It Yourself

Look up: Mark 16:8, then read on to verse 9.

You will find: a footnote or a bracket in nearly every modern Bible, saying the oldest manuscripts stop at verse 8.

The Short Version

• All four gospels are anonymous. Apostles’ names were added a century later, to settle which gospels outranked the rest.
• Paul’s letters are older than any account of my life, and they spread as copied mail, town by town.
• Matthew and Luke copied Mark. You can see it on the page.
• Two beloved passages were added later, and your own Bible says so in the footnotes.
• A heretic forced the list, an emperor made it dangerous, bishops applied tests, and councils signed off.

Think About It

1. Why would a church not mention the footnotes that are already printed in its Bibles?
2. Does knowing the gospels were written decades later change how you read them? Should it?