I know that in the land of secular leftism, there are many myths, and those myths survive because they circulate in an echo chamber. But this is the Wintery Knight blog, and on this blog, we go back to the evidence. So what’s the myth? “The list of authoritative books of the Bible was determined hundreds of years after they were written”. Is that true? Let’s take a look at the data and see.

So, the allegation is that before 325 AD, people were using the canonical gospels equally with the forgery gospels like Judas, Peter, Mary, Thomas, etc. Then there was a church council that whittled down that list of equally valid sources to just the 4 gospels we recognize today. But did it really happen like that?

So, before we look to a scholar, I want to take a stab at this, and say what I would say if someone asked me this question. So, the first thing that came into my mind is that you don’t need a church council to tell you which books of the Bible are authoritative, you just have to look at which books the earliest church fathers are quoting. And they are quoting the gospels.

Here is a snip from a conversation between Frank Turek and J. Warner Wallace, and here’s what Wallace says:

So, I write in this new book, Person of Interest, I reached out to David now that Norm has passed, and he had some great people who he was working with on this, and I cited them in the case notes of this book. And you can see it in the book. It’s illustrated. Every church father who precedes the Council of Nicaea, and how many books, how many gospels, and how many letters are quoted by that particular church father. There’s a graphic for this, and you can see them all standing with the numbers of gospels they quote, and the numbers of letters they quote. And then I went through, I did the research, and he has compiled numbers. David and his associates have compiled numbers on how many…so this is a much more accurate. So, here’s what we know. And this is what I talked about in the book. It turns out that about 87% of the Gospel of Matthew is quoted by the early church fathers prior to the Council of Nicaea. About 935 verses. 66% of Mark, about 435 verses are quoted by these same church leaders. But 86% of the Gospel of Luke, 990 verses quoted by these church leaders. And 97% of the Gospel of John, about 859 verses that are quoted by these early church fathers.

So, if you go by that standard of who are the early church fathers quoting, it’s the 4 canonical gospels. And by the way, if you are looking for specific reasons why some “gospels” were not included, I would look at the Michael Licona chapters of Lee Strobel’s “The Case for the Real Jesus”. And there is an audio book!

But I also found this article over at Canon Fodder (Michael Kruger’s blog), that had more.

He writes:

First, we don’t measure the existence of the New Testament just by the existence of lists. When we examine the way certain books were used by the early church fathers, it is evident that there was a functioning canon long before the fourth century.  Indeed, by the second century, there is already a “core” collection of New Testament books functioning as Scripture.

Second, there are reasons to think that Athanasius’ list is not the earliest complete list we possess. In the festschrift for Larry Hurtado, Mark Manuscripts and Monotheism (edited by Chris Keith and Dieter Roth; T&T Clark, 2015), I wrote an article entitled, “Origen’s List of New Testament Books in Homiliae on Josuam 7.1: A Fresh Look.”

In that article, I argue that around 250 A.D., Origen likely produced a complete list of all 27 New Testament books–more than a hundred years before Athanasius. In his typical allegorical fashion, Origen used the story of Joshua to describe the New Testament canon:

But when our Lord Jesus Christ comes, whose arrival that prior son of Nun designated, he sends priests, his apostles, bearing “trumpets hammered thin,” the magnificent and heavenly instruction of proclamation. Matthew first sounded the priestly trumpet in his Gospel; Mark also; Luke and John each played their own priestly trumpets. Even Peter cries out with trumpets in two of his epistles; also James and Jude. In addition, John also sounds the trumpet through his epistles [and Revelation], and Luke, as he describes the Acts of the Apostles. And now that last one comes, the one who said, “I think God displays us apostles last,” and in fourteen of his epistles, thundering with trumpets, he casts down the walls of Jericho and all the devices of idolatry and dogmas of philosophers, all the way to the foundations (Hom. Jos. 7.1).

As one can see from the list above, all 27 books of the New Testament are accounted for (Origen clearly counts Hebrews as part of Paul’s letters). The only ambiguity is a text-critical issue with Revelation, but we have good evidence from other sources that Origen accepted Revelation as Scripture (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6.25.10).

So, if you ever hear someone saying that the authoritative books of the Bible were not decided until the 4th century, then there are a couple of ideas of how to respond to that.

Many people today would never think to post anything critical of LGBT. That includes many “conservative” Christians and even many popular Christian apologists. But, I have to speak about these things, because I have to defend the Bible on every point where it disagrees with the culture. It doesn’t make me feel good. It doesn’t make me popular. But it has to be done.

Here is the latest news story from Christian Post:

A same-sex Georgia couple who pleaded guilty to aggravated sodomy against their two adopted sons were recently sentenced to 100 years in prison without the possibility of parole.

Zachary and William Zulock, a wealthy couple who adopted two boys with the help of a now-defunct Christian adoption agency, faced sentences for multiple other charges, including child molestation, sexual exploitation of children and incest, according to a press release from the Alcovy Judicial Circuit District Attorney Randy McGinley.

“These two defendants truly created a house of horrors and put their extremely dark desires above everything and everyone else,” McGinley said.

[…]Judge Jeffrey L. Foster sentenced both men on Dec. 19 to a century in prison, followed by life on probation.

I remember prior to the legalization of same-sex marriage, many people on the secular left put yellow equal signs on their cars, to signal their support for same-sex marriage. And not just famous atheists from Seattle, Washington who like to talk about “objective morality”. Even many “compassionate” Christians put these yellow equal signs on their cars. Big corporations slapped the yellow equal signs on their web sites, too. They signaled support for homosexual behaviors and lifestyles. The people who endorsed same-sex marriage were saying that gay relationships are the exact same thing as opposite sex married couples. And that gay couples should be allowed to adopt children not biologically related to them, just like heterosexual married couples.

Now, if you look in the Bible, you’ll find that God doesn’t see things the same way as “don’t judge” atheists or as “just love everyone” Christians or as big “celebrate diversity” corporations.

Here’s what Jesus says about marriage.

Matthew 19:1-11:

1 Now when Jesus had finished these sayings, he went away from Galilee and entered the region of Judea beyond the Jordan.

2 And large crowds followed him, and he healed them there.

3 And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?”

4 He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female,

5 and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?

6 So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

To be a Christian, minimally, is to be a follower of Jesus Christ. That means that we accept what Jesus teaches, on whatever he teaches about. We don’t overturn the teachings of Jesus in order to make people who are rebelling against God feel better about their rebellion. It is central to the Christian worldview that Christians care more about what God thinks of them than what non-Christians think of them. In fact, Christians are supposed to be willing to endure shaming, blaming, and even suffering, rather than side with non-Christians against God’s authority.

By the way, it’s not the first time that we’ve had stories like this about gay men adopting boys.

Not the first time:

This story reminds me of the Two Gay Dads story that I wrote about previously, where a white female progressive journalist did a fawning story about two gay dads and their new boy adopted from Russia. She titled her article, “Two Dads are Better than One”.  She was so proud of herself for being all affirming, tolerant and compassionate. Same-sex marriage is something to be proud of, she said, because children do better with two gay dads.

But then, the Sydney Morning Herald reported how this example of gay adoption went awry.

Excerpt:

Standing before an American court convicted of the most heinous of child sex crimes, the double lives of Australian citizen Mark J. Newt0n and his long-term boyfriend Peter Tru0ng were laid bare.

[…]Moments later Newt0n was sentenced to 40 years in prison for sexually abusing the boy he and Truong, 36 from Queensland, had ‘‘adopted’’ after paying a Russian woman $8000 to be their surrogate in 2005.

Police believe the pair had adopted the boy ‘‘for the sole purpose of exploitation’’. The abuse began just days after his birth and over six years the couple travelled the world, offering him up for sex with at least eight men, recording the abuse and uploading the footage to an international syndicate known as the Boy Lovers Network.

[…]Evidence before the court revealed the abuse began before the couple returned to Australia. One video is said to show Newt0n performing a sex act on the boy when he was less than two weeks old.

Judge Barker said the pair brainwashed the child to believe the sexual abuse was normal. Newt0n was also said to have trained the boy to deny any inappropriate behaviour if he was ever questioned by authorities.

Newt0n and Truong came to the attention of police in August 2011 after their connections to three men arrested over the possession of child exploitation material came to light. The couple had visited the three men in the US, New Zealand and Germany with their son.

[…]Newt0n and Truong claimed they were being targeted because they were homosexual.

I could show you a dozen examples like that without even trying. Democrat judge in Wisconsin. Duke University administrator. Penn State University coach. USC professor. Head of a Scottish youth organization. San Francisco Human Rights Commission staffer. Same-sex marriage activists. Seattle mayor. Co-founder of g4y advocacy organizations. Designers of education curriculums designed to sexualize children. It’s everywhere and it happens all the time. Children don’t have any rights, only selfish adults have rights. This is the core belief of the secular left. They want to get rid of Christianity from the culture, because Christians side with the children against the adults. They don’t want Christian rules slowing down their pursuit of pleasure. They don’t want Christians to offend them by disagreeing with their actions.

UPDATE: We just posted our interview with Dr. Günter Bechly on the Knight and Rose Show podcast. Subscribe to the Knight and Rose Show wherever you listen to podcasts, and we also upload them to YouTube, Rumble and Odysee.

Lately, when I ask parents and church leaders how a person comes to Christ, the responses I get most often is that people need to be invited into a welcoming community first and foremost. To me, this is a very strange answer. When I think about Jesus working miracles so that people who didn’t believe in him would have reasons to trust him, I don’t see this emphasis on welcoming community.

Along those lines, I found a very interesting faith story at Salvo magazine, written by a prominent paleontologist named Dr. Günter Bechly.

First, let’s see his biography, though:

Günter Bechly, PhD, is a German paleontologist, senior fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, and senior research scientist at Biologic Institute in Washington state. He has written about 160 scientific publications, described over 180 new species, and been advisor for 3 BBC nature documentaries.

Here is the captivating introduction to his faith story:

When atheists hear conversion stories that begin with, “I was a staunch atheist and then . . . ”, they tend to roll their eyes and doubt the claim. However, this is exactly what happened to me. I had been a 150-percent atheist and materialist for almost forty years before I embarked on a spiritual journey that ultimately, after many twists and turns, led me to belief in God and Christianity. I had no life crisis, no epiphany, and no spiritual experiences at all. It was the result of purely rational, scientific, philosophical, and historical arguments that gradually changed my mind as a scientist. Here is my story.

I grew up in a medium-sized town in southwestern Germany, where the Mercedes-Benz factory is located. My parents were both irreligious. My mother was simply not interested in religion, and my father was agnostic. We never talked about religion or God, and we never prayed or visited any church service. My parents pushed to opt me out of religion class in school, which was then still compulsory, resulting in my being ridiculed as the village atheist.

I first saw churches from the inside as a young adult, but it was only as a tourist taking photos.

He had a fabulous career and a dream job in paleontology, but he started looking for answers when he realized the problems with naturalism:

It all started in my late thirties when I became interested in modern physics. I read popular books by Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, Michio Kaku, John Barrow, David Deutsch, Brian Greene, and others. I was fascinated by the weirdness of quantum mechanics and relativity theory, as well as the mind-blowing implications of modern cosmology.

While I had started from a materialist, clockwork-universe perspective, I soon discovered certain implications of modern physics that did not fit well with such an obsolete, 19th-century worldview. I stumbled upon further problems, such as the questions of causality, the ontology of time and space, the status of mathematics, and the laws of nature. This brought me even deeper into metaphysics with issues like the problem of universals, the one and the many, the persistence of diachronic (personal) identity, free will, and the hard problem of consciousness.

I soon realized that materialism is untenable, and I searched for a new worldview that could explain these problems and make sense of the world we experience.

The first step in Dr. Bechly’s journey was investigating evidence for design in the universe, and finding it compelling:

Around this time, I also came into contact with intelligent design theory, though for totally different reasons. I was the project leader for a large special exhibition on evolution at our museum for Darwin Year 2009, which celebrated the double event of Darwin’s 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the first publication of his magnum opus On the Origin of Species. In preparing for this exhibit, I read some books by Darwin critics, because we wanted to refute and mock them.

This did not go as intended. I was surprised that the arguments of the ID theorists were nothing like the distorted picture painted by their opponents. The more I studied ID arguments, the more I became a critic of Neo-Darwinism and an ID proponent myself.

I was still into process philosophy when I embraced intelligent design theory, so my support for ID had nothing to do with religion, but only with scientific arguments. I had come to see that Neo-Darwinism simply fails to explain the diversity and complexity of life and that these are better explained by an infusion of information from outside the system. The information does not have to come from a divine, miraculous intervention, but of course that would be compatible with such a view.

So, he accepts design in the universe at this point, but still doesn’t accept theism, and even further away from Christianity.

But he’s not done exploring:

So I finally decided to check out the belief system that was the last thing I wanted to be true: Classical theism. I had previously read all the New Atheists’ books, but even then, as a non-theist and fan of the authors, I had found them quite shallow and unsatisfying.

He goes on to explain how he explored the arguments for classical theism, and then the specific evidences for Christianity, such as prophecy and the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus. Eventually, he just went for the worldview that answered the questions raised by the progress of science, that also solved the metaphysical problems he had encountered.

You can read the whole thing, if you’re looking for a wonderful testimony filled with lots of apologetics. I wish that this testimony was seen as the “normal” testimony by Christian parents and pastors. Then we would be taking a completely different approach to parenting and church. We would put the emphasis on evidence.