We’re continuing our series in how the Bible came about. Yesterday, we saw that the New Testament books are simply the writing down of the church’s existing authoritative teaching: the words, deeds, death, and resurrection of Jesus – and their theological interpretation – compiled in the Gospels and applied to God’s people in the epistles. (You really need to read yesterday’s post first for this one to make sense.)

The reason I stress this is because many people have a misunderstanding of the process of how the New Testament came to be. Like the Torah, it wasn’t a case of the church sitting down a few centuries after Jesus and saying, “OK, let’s sit down and make this Bible thingy we’ve been meaning to get around to. Let’s take a vote: what’s in and what’s out?” They ended up having four gospels because the committee couldn’t agree on which one.

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