April 11, 2021 Easter 2 Mark 16:9-20

            I don’t plan to preach so much on the actual texts of our gospel reading but to use it as a platform to talk about the Bible in general and its creation.  The diversity we find in the endings to Mark’s gospel is actually a good window into the Bible’s creation.

If you ask just about any Christian how the Bible came to be they’d probably say it is a writing inspired by God.  And that would be a theologically accurate statement.  But if you pressed the average Christian harder you’d find they don’t know much more.

Ask who wrote the Bible and some might give you a blank stare.  Some might be a bit better educated and say it is a collected work from many authors; after all the name itself means a collection of writings.

Ask people when the Bible came to be written and they won’t be able to tell you.

Ask people who decided what was in the Bible and what wasn’t and most people wouldn’t be able to tell you.  Of course you would probably come across a number of cynics who would say that the Bible was created at the order of Roman emperor Constantine; and that he did it to codify Christianity, which helped him to more firmly establish his imperial power.  While that is a very tempting argument many Christian skeptics like to make, it has no basis in reality.

So, who wrote it?  When was it written?  Who decided what’s in and what’s not?  And when did they make those decisions? 

And significantly, who decided the Bible was going to be the absolute authority for Christian beliefs?  If it agrees with the Bible it is probably orthodox, and if it disagrees with the Bible, then it is necessarily heresy?

Let’s get at all of those questions by recognizing a very unfortunate truth about many American Christians’ faith.  Colleagues and I frequently lament that many Christians are highly educated and critical thinkers in most aspects of their life, yet when it comes to faith they revert to a very childish simplicity.  It is like when it comes to faith they leave their critical thinking behind and enter into an almost magical world of fairy tales.  Good is good and bad is bad.  Miracles happen for the good and bad things happen to the bad.  God hears, sees, knows, and shapes all things in one clear consistent grand design.

The problem is that doesn’t translate into reality at all.  The world is immensely complex and sometimes the Bible’s answers seem either simplistic or out of date.  Also, when faith is in the world of this magical thinking even the slightest critical examination makes it crumble.

In recent decades that happens when children grow up and go to college.  They enter the complex world of critical study and their faith just can’t function in it.  They see it for what it has been to them – ancient myths and fairy tales.  At best it slips away as irrelevant.  At worst they scoff at it.

 

One of the things I try to do when teaching confirmation class is to introduce the confirmands to critical Bible study.  I want to move their faith from the concrete operation thinking that was appropriate for their younger years and begin to move them into the critical thinking they are becoming capable of.  Though they’re 7^th and 8^th graders we approach the Bible with the same literary critical tools used at a graduate school level.  Certainly they aren’t mature enough to actually engage the scripture at that level, but at least they can experience the root of critical scholarship in a church setting rather than elsewhere.

The truth is that our scripture, and its origins is a complex and messy affair; just like the endings to Mark’s gospel.  If you want it to be simple and straightforward – as if a divine text fell from the sky one day – then I can’t help you.

However, for those who dare to dive into it, the complex messiness of Christian scripture is, I think, one of its greatest strengths.  The Bible does not bring simple solutions to life’s complex problems.  The Bible will bring its inspired complexity; and faithfully equip you to journey in whatever complex messiness there is in life.

None of the authors of the New Testament wrote with any thought that their writings would be collected with others and become something that would be authoritative for all Christians in all times and all places.  All of the writings in the New Testament originally circulated independently.  And those texts were among many – perhaps thousands of – writings by early Christians.  Most all of them have been lost to history.  However, there are many in existence.  I have this book called The Other Bible which I’ve shown before.  It contains many early Christian writings and writings from other faiths.  They can give a good context of what did not make it into the Bible.  Some of the things in this book are just downright bizarre.  Some are clearly unorthodox.  They help you sense what was really going on.  That was that a consensus began to emerge early on about what Christianity was about.

It appears as if by late in the 1^st century collections of Paul’s writings were being copied and circulated.  By late in the second century you start to see that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John emerging as the accepted accounts of the ministry of Jesus and others are being rejected.  There are loads of other gospels out there.

Even so, countless variations of texts emerged.  As we just saw several major variations to the end of Mark’s gospel were created.   The longest one appears to be from the second century by drawing in parts of Matthew, Luke, and John.

Remember, Christianity at that time was not an organized religion.  It was scattered all around the Roman empire and in nations to the east.  There was little churchwide communication.

Actually it is remarkable, and I consider it to be the work of the Spirit, that most heresies are pushed aside and that despite the lack of communication, a consensus begins to emerge.  If there is any truth to the creation of the New Testament it is that – it just emerged as a consensus over time.  And a long time it was!  We’re talking hundreds of years.  Our nation’s only 245!

The earliest listing of the books of the New Testament that exactly match what we have today is from African theologian Athanasius in the year 367.  In the year 382 we start to get hints of the same in Europe. 

Gatherings of church leaders, often called “councils”, began taking up the issue of what was scripture and what was not.  Most scholars agree though, that these were hardly debates.  They were more ratification of the consensus that had already emerged than anything else.

As to the fables that the emperor Constantine pushed the Council of Nicea to create the Bible in the year 325, they are just that.  Fables.  Don’t believe books like The Da Vinci Code that suggest there were political motives behind the Bible.  Constantine did, however, commission copies of the consensus of Christian scripture to be made and distributed.  Indeed the oldest existing copies of the Bible do begin to show up in the 4^th Century.  The Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus are, I believe, the oldest existing copies of the New Testament actually bound together.  They are for the most part what we have today.

Even so, these councils did not establish hard and fast lists of what is in the Bible and what isn’t.  It is not until the Council of Trent in the year 1546 that the Roman Catholic Church firmly defined what the Bible is.  The Anglican Church made a definition of the Bible with its Thirty-Nine Articles in the year 1563.  For most reformed churches, they didn’t define the Bible until The Westminster Confession of Faith in 1647.  For Eastern Orthodox Churches the Bible wasn’t defined until the Synod of Jerusalem in 1672. 

If you are one who likes to fly the Lutheran banner over your faith, well, it’s the year 2021.  The Lutheran Church, for all its talk about the authority of the Bible and “scripture alone”, has yet to make a formal definition of the Bible.  We just rely on the ancient consensus that emerged.

And once you’ve decided what’s in and what’s out you have to ask yourself what version?  The oldest complete copies of the Bible we have are written in Latin.  But the Bible was originally written in Greek.  Latin’s already a translation away.  And we have no early Greek copies.  We have thousands of fragments in Greek but nothing’s complete.  And do they vary!  There’s variety among the Greek fragments.  There’s variations in the Latin versions.  What was original?  When copies are made of copies are made of copies and these copies of copies are made all over the world you’re sure to get mistakes, and they compound! 

I have the 27^th edition of the Greek New Testament.  At the bottom of each page of the Greek text are lists of the variations between ancient manuscripts.  There are thousands of variations among the ancient manuscripts.  Those who invest their lives in studying the ancient manuscripts think that we have figured out our way back to the original words over 99% of the time, but still not perfectly.  This is the 27^th edition after all!  Not quite perfect as it is, it is considered to be the worldwide authoritative version of Christian scripture.

I believe the Bible did not magically fall from the sky.  I believe it is the work of the Holy Spirit nudging Christians over centuries.  The Bible does not glow in our hands with divine perfection.  Quite bluntly, it is a messy book.  It is the work of God along with humans to bring us to faith.  It is a book that you strive with, wrestle with, understand in some places and are confused by in others.  It does not give simplistic and absolute answers to problems.  Rather it is your guide to relationship with God and with each other.  And in that way it is a sure source of the truth of God and will not lead you astray.