Jesus Unbound by Keith Giles

Author:Keith Giles [Giles, Keith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781938480331
Publisher: Quoir
Published: 2018-06-08T22:00:00+00:00

In other words, the early Christian’s idea of “scripture” looked radically different from ours and, depending on who you were talking to and what time in Church history, you might be surprised what was considered scripture and what was not.

For example, several New Testament books that every Protestant today considers an essential part of the Bible were, at various times and by various Church Fathers, eliminated from the accepted Canon of Scripture. Books like, Hebrews, Jude, Revelation, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John and James were left out of several lists of accepted books of scripture by many church leaders.

Consequently, many other books that most Protestants have never even heard of were accepted by some as Canon like the Didache, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Book of Baruch, Jubilees and the Letter of Jeremiah, for example.

Sometime around 363 AD several attempts were made to establish an official and accepted list of which books or epistles were scripture and which should be eliminated. There was no firm consensus on the contents of that list for several decades, but eventually a group of Christian leaders—whose names the average Christian does not even know—decided for the rest of us forevermore which books were to be accepted and which were to be rejected as scripture.

Today there is still no universal consensus on what is and what is not the “Bible” or Holy Scripture.

Like the early church, depending on who you ask, and where you live, and what Christian tradition you belong to, the book you carry around and refer to as the Holy Bible might look very different from another book from another Christian community that might be called the “Bible.”

I’ve started to wonder, “How do we know those people who decided what was and what wasn’t Scripture got it right?” Furthermore, I’ve started to wonder who gave those men the authority to decide that God was no longer speaking to His people and inspiring them to write down what the Holy Spirit was revealing to them about the nature and character of God?

Why do we so blindly accept the authority of these nameless and faceless men who made these decisions for the rest of us? What if they didn’t really have the authority to make this decision? What if they left writings out, or included writings, in error? How are we so sure that they were inerrant and infallible in their process?

Ultimately, for those who insist on inerrancy and infallibility of scripture, what they are actually trusting in is the “perfection” of those decisions made by a group of people centuries ago about what was and wasn’t worthy to be included in the Bible.

One friend of mine told me that, in his opinion, the Bible we have today is exactly what God wanted us to have and that He made sure we received the true inspired scriptures that we use today. But, if this is so, then I have a few questions, like: Why did God wait nearly 400 years to give the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.