Chapter 3 - Tim Mast

This chapter talks of the modern Canon and how it was decided which books should be in the modern Bible. This topic always comes up when some researcher finds another of the 'lost books of the Bible'.

I read a great article once talking about this topic. He addressed if from two ways. He said that we must believe that either a) the Bible is the inspired word of God or b) the Bible is the collected works of the Church. Basically, we have to either believe that God exists or he doesn't.

In the first case, God exists and the Bible is his inspired Word. If this is the case, we can rightfully assume that He wants to keep his Word intact and will take steps to ensure that this is the case. In this case, there can be no 'lost books' because the Bible is being protected by God and none of the books could ever become lost.

In the second case, we can argue from a standpoint that God doesn't exist. This is helpful when speaking to non-believers because we can avoid the entire topic of God's existence for this conversation. In this case, the Bible is simply the collected writings of the Church. In this scenario, the Church is the one that decided what gets in and what doesn't. Anything that doesn't fit with what the Church believed at the time of the assembly of the canon is thrown out. In this case also, it is hard to argue that a book of the Bible was 'lost'. It might be that the church didn't include it because it didn't represent what they believed, or it might be that the church at the time of the canon didn't know about the existence of the book. In either case, the book is not included in the Bible because the Church said that it doesn't belong. So a book can't be 'lost' because it was never included in the first place.

The example that the author used was the idea of someone writing their memoirs. The author might right down everything they can possibly think of. Then, the author goes through his notes and throws out things that are not good representations of what he believes. A person going through the trash later cannot claim to have found something of significance regarding the beliefs of the author. Anything in the trash, by definition, is not something that the author believes. In the same way, the fact that there were writings about 'church-stuff' at the same time as the books of the Bible doesn't mean that these books were 'lost'. This same old tired argument comes up every 15-20 years when some academic rediscovers the 'Gospel of Thomas' and the mainstream media trots out the tired lines of a lost book of the Bible being rediscovered.

Either argument is effective, but, being a Christian, I know that the first one holds true. The Bible exists in its current form because a sovereign Lord protected it to deliver His Words to his children. And that's why we're having this conversation today.