Early Christianity

The testimony of the apostles is valid because they were first hand witnesses to Jesus' life and were blessed with the gift of the Holy Spirit to guide their teachings. If the apostles can be trusted then so can their interrupter. There are many religious scholars who attest to the fact that the source of the Gospels like Mark and Luke are truthful and to be taken as factual.There is also unity found in the bible based on many scriptures echoing each other. This means the authors were all guided by the Holy Spirit to make sure there was a cohesive message. While there are other ways to look at the New Testament, the Catholic/Orthodox Paradigm provide sources that seem to bring pieces together to see why Jesus is the source of all authority and therefore validating the teaching of the New

The gospels provides us with four different, yet not conflicting, stories of the birth, life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John gives these accounts and are called the synoptic gospels. Each one of these gospels have a key verse, main people they are ministering to, or how they look at Christ. The Gospels displayed that Jesus was the promised Messiah of the Old Testament and that laid the foundation for the teaching of the rest of the New Testament. A complete understanding of the life of Jesus Christ is gained as all four accounts agree with each other much like taking testimony from four different eye witnesses standing on four corners of an intersection where an accident has happened.

Many scholars claim the New Testament is not reliable for many reasons. Some claim that the Bible is not reliably transmitted because it's like the telephone game. Others say that the Bible has been copied so many times there is no way it's accurate. When examining documents like the Bible, we can find out it's reliability by asking some fundamental questions. Was the document written close to the events it describes? Is the document able to be corroborated by multiple external sources? Has the document been reliably transmitted or copied? If we answer yes to these questions, we determine the document is reliable.

did, both during Jesus’ lifetime and afterward. In his book, The New Testament: A Historical

Around 200 BC, the Old Testament was translated from Hebrew, the language of the Jewish people, into Greek. This translation enabled the common people to read and understand the Scriptures. After Jesus’ resurrection, the apostles wrote down the account of Jesus’ life and ministry in the Gospels. They wrote in Greek because it was the common language of the people. The letters written to the churches that sprang up all over the world were also written in Greek. As the years progressed the common language shifted from Greek to Latin. As a result, the common people could not read or understand the Scriptures in Greek. Therefore, Athanasius decided to translate the Bible into the common language of the people. Since Athanasius’ translation

Much of the New Testament talks about the life of Jesus, and these books were written by Jesus' disciples. The original texts that made up the Bible are gone or lost, and have been copied various times to preserve the teachings.

The Christian Bible consists of all the Jewish Hebrew texts but they are arranged in a different manner so it makes a total of 39 books that are together known as the ‘old testament’. The Christian New Testament consists of 27 books that contain early Christian writings (Hayes 3). The Protestants count a total of 39 books, Catholics 46 while the Orthodox Christians count up to 53 books as part of their Holy Bible (Just). For Christians, the New Testament takes precedence over the Old Testament (read Hebrew text) and they use the reading of the New Testament to confirm the text of the Old Testament. For Jews however the Hebrew text is the supreme scripture and they rely on it fully for their religious understanding (Gravett, Bohmbach, Greifenhagen

Initially, communities of early Christian believers were able to choose their own leaders; however, as centuries passed, the practice of having secular rulers choose appoint church leaders became routine. These appointed leaders were eventually able to establish permanent institutions, which not only expressed Christian values, but also drew from many Greco-Roman Traditions. The creation of Nicene Creed and the establishment of the Roman Catholic Church and the Byzantine Christian (Orthodox) Church allowed the Christian church to expand and thrive.

Teabing started talking to sophie about the origin of jesus and how the Roman Empire took advantage of him. “Jesus Christ was a historical figure of staggering influence … as a descendant of the lines of king Solomon and King David, Jesus possessed the rightful claim to the throne of the king of the Jews”.(303) It is a known fact that Jesus is the descendant of Prophet David and Prophet Solomon which made the Roman fear from the influence Christ had on the public and his many followers and had to take proaction from him. Tea bing then proceeds with explaining to sophie why constantan who was a Pagan collected and picked what was put in the New Testament A.K.A The Bible. ‘'He was a life long pagan who was baptized on his deathbed … Rome official religion

The Bible is made up of a collection of books.The New Testament includes several different genres of literature (Harris,2014). At least four genres consist of, the gospels,historical,letters,and apocalyptic. The gospels are the first genre which appears in the first four books of the bible. Matthew,Mark,Luke,and John gives the accounts of the life of Jesus Christ in different perspectives. The gospels are not like any other type of literature,it is defined by its subject matter,the life of Jesus (Harris,2014).The other books are considered historical texts. Additional books were letters of epistles. The letters by Paul were a major unit of the collection Revelations. There are twenty-seven documents in the New Testament which fits into one

The New Testament is a collection of books which contains the writings concerning the significant events in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. These books appeared after the physical death of Jesus Christ. In this regard, Jesus had left no records concerning him, and all that is written about him depends wholly on what other people have written about him. The first four books of the New Testament are part of the several biographies of Jesus which were written by the end of the first century of the era of Christianity. Then before any of these biographies have been drafted, there were Christian communities which were being instructed through epistles on how to live like Jesus and how to solve their problem like Christians. A good number of these letters were written by a man called Paul. After Paul death, some other new leaders of the Christian movement continued to write letters to the churches to encourage and strengthen them. As Christians grew in number persecution arose, and some letters have been drafted to support them and also to counter the false doctrines. These letters are part of the New Testament. The twenty-seven books of the New Testament were selected from the list of writings in that period (Bruce, 1988)

The evolution of the Bible begins one hundred and fifty years after Jesus’ birth with Marcion of Pontus, a Christian theologian and heretic. He was a faithful Christian but was dissatisfied with the Jewish scripture because he believed that the God in the Old Testament was too harsh and legalistic. The God in the Hebrew Bible was not the same God depicted by Jesus was the God that he believed in. Without the churches consent, Marcion removed all traces of the Hebrew text (the Old Testament) from his bible. Of course, at the time, people did not take well to his alteration but he was a catalyst for the evolution of the Christian bible we know today.

John 14: 26 states but the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you (). This verse is an explanation from Christ about the role of the Holy Spirit in teaching and recalling events that took place during his time on earth. It is through the witness of the Spirit that man can determine the “wheat from the chaff.”() The early church had the writing of the Old Testament but did not have a formal set of canonized books regarding the Messiah to draw their inspiration from. Though they had letters from Apostles there were many heretical writings that were circulating throughout the lands that were teaching doctrine different from those who knew Christ personally. Josephus stated that no one had been bold enough to add, take away, or change the wording in the Old Testament scripture (), this was what the Church was looking for in forming a canon that related to the teaching of Christ; a type of written text that would be foundational therefore no one would want to take away or add to it.

The Old Testament is made up of forty six books while the New Testament is made up of twenty seven books, with a total of seventy three books in all. The Bible was written by forty different authors from all walks of life, who wrote this with the inspiration about God and God’s people. Moses and Apostle Paul were the two main contributors in writing the bible. Moses wrote the first five books in the Bible and referred to it as the Pentateuch while Apostle Paul wrote fourteen books in the New Testament.

The New Testament was canonized over a period of approximately four hundred years (Stotesberg). From AD 50-125, the books which in the end constitute the New Testament were written. Simultaneously, other books, which did not end up being included in the final canon, were produced. These books are the Epistle of Barnabas, the Didache, I Clement, the seven letters of Ignatius of Antioch, etc. (“Development of the Difficult Canon”). As more and more books were written, Christians realized that it was imperative that they gather and consolidate this material before it became lost. Sometime before AD 100, ten of Paul’s letters were gathered and combined into their own canon. The Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) were combined to form another canon soon after the canonization of Paul’s letters. The Gospels and Paul’s letters became the main body of a new group of Scriptures that would soon become the New Testament. Soon Acts, I Peter, I John, and Revelation were inserted into this body of Scripture. Following this, the rest of the books were added to the New Testament (Barker).