Ok, so I just got through watching a National Geographic Special about the “secret life” of Jesus while I re-installed windows, and I’m not very happy. I probably shouldn’t ever, ever watch anything like that, but I just didn’t turn the channel. I don’t have a problem with the fact that they bring up different theories about Jesus’ life, but they almost always slant the facts to make their theory seem like “reality” to the normal viewer. If I didn’t know better, I would have walked away from the program thinking that Jesus was just a completely misunderstood human teacher. All the god parts were added later by people who were too shocked to realize that their teacher had been killed. Unfortunately, almost all these theories are based on “lost” books of the Bible.

Despite that long introduction, I just wanted to list a few facts about the canon.

  • The decision of what went into the Bible was a process, not one made at any one “council”
  • Because canonization is a process, the Bible wasn’t slanted to “fit” any one person’s views.
  • Very few of the “new” Gospels that are found are actually “new”. Most have been known about for centuries.
  • The Early Church Fathers mention many of the “lost books” as innacurate and faulty.

Thanks for listening. I’ll try to cover each of these points in their own posts shortly.