What did Christians do before the Bible?

The most sold book in the history of humankind, starting at the creation of everything [Music] to the incarnation of the God-man, Christ, and ends with the end of time as we know it. What did Christians do before these vital books of the New Testament were written and compiled? How did they discern between the false teachers and the true apostles that knew Christ and preserved his teachings? Who decided that these books are in the Bible and not these? The true answer to these questions has largely been unknown in the West over the past centuries. But the truth has been preserved and can still be found today, just as it was 2,000 years ago.

When we speak of the Bible, we speak of a collection of books. The earliest of these existed in oral form long before they were written down, but attained a written form many centuries before the birth of our Lord. The latest of these books were written many years after his resurrection. The very latest, probably as late as the end of the first century, some 60 or more years after the resurrection. The former, of course, comprises the Old Testament, and the latter, the New Testament. When St. Paul speaks of scripture, it is to the Old Testament that he refers. Few of the New Testament books had even been written yet, and complete agreement in the church as to which books comprise the New Testament was yet several centuries off. The church existed for nearly 500 years before anything identical to what we now call the Bible could have been printed.

Curiously, nonetheless, the notion common amongst many Protestants is that Catholics have a different Bible from that which they acknowledge, and therefore, presumably, Orthodox Christians. This question, "different Bible," is likely to be one of the first to arise in any fundamental conversation between Orthodox Christians and Protestants.

The books of the Old Testament are quite varied in character and have discrete histories. Generally speaking, they fall into four broad groups: The books of the law, the history books, the prophets, and the books of wisdom. It might be interesting to note in passing that the first disagreement concerning the table of contents of the Old Testament long predates the Christian era. The Samaritans were distinguished from the Jews by their refusal to acknowledge as scripture any books other than those of Moses and the Pentatuk. Most of the books of the Old Testament were written originally in Hebrew or Aramaic, or a mixture of the two. There is, however, a whole group of books which are an exception, having been originally written or at least only known to us in Greek. These books are usually called the Apocrypha, or "hidden books," which is a complete misnomer, as there is nothing hidden about them. They were an integral part of the Greek text of the Old Testament as it was in use at the time of our Lord. Many quotations from the scriptures—the Old Testament—in the books of the New Testament are identifiable from this Greek text. Nowhere, of course, do any of the New Testament books make any distinction between the various books of the Old Testament. It is of all this material that the Holy Apostle Paul writes when he says, "All scripture is given by inspiration from God." It must be said that any volume which claims to be the Bible and yet does not contain these books is at best an abbreviated or experiated Bible, and at worst, an outright misrepresentation. It would be tedious and unnecessary to list all of the books in question. But the quickest way to determine whether a volume at hand is complete is to check the table of contents for the two best-known books: the Wisdom of Solomon and Ecclesiastic, not to be confused with Ecclesiastes. All these books formed part of the original text of the King James Version of the Bible and are simply deleted from the text in Protestant printings.

Concerning the table of contents of the Old Testament, there was little serious discussion in the early church. The apostles and the fathers alike consistently used the text of the septuagen. They frequently cited their writings passages which existed only in the Greek edition, or in which there is a significant difference in sense between the Greek and the Hebrew editions, as is frequently the case in the Psalms and even more so in the book of Jeremiah. This was no less true of the other Jews of the time of our Lord. These apocryphal books came to be an issue not for the Christians, but for the post-resurrection Jews. They, in many cases, clearly prophesied concerning our Lord and so were an embarrassment to those who refused to accept his divinity. Consequently, they were officially barred from the Jewish cannon and the scriptures at the Jewish council of Gnia at the end of the 1st century AD, 60 or so years after the resurrection. The Protestant reformers of the 16th century chose to accept the authority of this Jewish council in preference to that of the apostles and the fathers. It makes no sense that they should object to these books on the same basis as that of the rabbis of Jamnia. The answer to the question—the puzzle—is quite simple. The books, some of them, also make quite evident prophetically the special role of the Theotocos, the mother of God, the Maiden Mary of Galilee, in God's plan of salvation. Numerous passages from them are cited quite effectively by the fathers in discussing the church's understanding of the role of the Theotocos. Consequently, the reformers simply opted to get rid of the books they disliked, using the pretext provided by the rabbis that the books did not exist in the Hebrew text. Martin Luther did not quite have the courage or the pretext to continue the pattern and delete the Epistle of James, which flatly contradicts his teaching that salvation is by grace alone. But he did attempt to rearrange the order of the books of the New Testament, placing this epistle at the very end. This revisionism, however, unlike the other, was not generally accepted.

The "pick and choose" approach to the scriptures has proved to be the normal method of Western interpretation. We can see the logical consequence of such proceedings today. A thousand and more Protestant sects each claim to be based on the Bible and the Bible alone. Each claims to accept the Bible as the inspired word of God. Each quarrels with the other as to what the Bible says. Why? Quite simply, because the approach to the scripture is what is called the "proof text method." [Music] Those portions of scripture which happen not to support or even flatly contradict one's already established belief are either explained away or ignored. Just as the reformers simply threw away a whole collection of books of the Old Testament which they found troublesome.

To dwell too long on this matter of the apocryphal books of the Old Testament, however, could be very misleading, because in some significant respects, it is entirely beside the point. Because in order for these issues to be meaningfully or intelligently addressed, it is first necessary to understand and accept that certain things happened in a certain order at certain times, and that, at least to a meaningful extent, we can determine what these were. We must admit that the church existed on the Monday after Pentecost, but that at that point none of the books of the New Testament yet existed, and most of them would not be written for yet another 20 or more years, and few, not until nearly the end of the century. If we, or those with whom we discuss the faith, deny the existence of this history, refuse to admit facts as part of divine truth, then we really have nothing to discuss in this video at all.

In the first weeks, months, years of her existence, the church had no written documents whatsoever, except the books of the Old Testament as indicated earlier. The events of the Gospels were related from one believer to another by word of mouth. Those who came to accept the faith heard them from the believers. This was entirely in keeping with the culture in which the church lived, which was above all else an oral culture. Relatively few people were able to read, let alone write. And so they heard the word of God, and they kept it. The Holy Apostle Paul insists upon this matter when he says, "Therefore, brethren, stand fast and hold to the traditions which you have been taught, whether by word or our letter."

In due course, as the church began to spread beyond her place of origin in Jerusalem and Galilee, communications between the local churches became necessary, and letters were written. Some of these were of such great importance to the understanding of the faith that they began to be read in church along with the scriptures—the Old Testament. But copies existed initially only in the local churches to which they had been addressed, although in time, in many others as well. [Music] As travelers moved from one place to another, they carried handwritten copies of the letters for the edification of other believers. [Music] Some of these letters were written by the apostles. But there were others written by other believers as well. Eventually, some of them came to have the character of what we now call "open letters," addressed to the church as a whole rather than to any particular congregation. These are the universal, or Catholic, or general epistles.

[Music] As the church spread, it also became necessary to commit the central core of the events of our Lord's life and his teachings to writing, to provide a written gospel for those who came to the faith far from the little, out-of-the-way province of the empire in which the Lord had lived and died and rose again. [Music] So it was so that the four written Gospels came into being. But this came to pass only after the gospel had been proclaimed and passed from one believer to another by word of mouth, by tradition handing on for many years. It is readily apparent upon comparison that no one of the written Gospels contains the entire story. As the Gospel of St. John concludes, "There are also many other things which Jesus did." If they should be written everyone, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. To be sure, all that is essential of the Lord's life and teaching is to be found in the Gospels, but not all that is desirable or helpful to our salvation. Neither any one nor all four of the Gospels together were written to be absolutely exhaustive and final. Were that the case, of course, we would have no need of the rest of the New Testament, nor the Old Testament either. Though there have been many heretics who have claimed such outrageous foolishness.

The Revelation of St. John the Theologian, more properly translated "the Apocalypse," and the Acts of the Apostles are, of course, special cases. The former is agreed by most scholars to have been written by St. John near the end of his life. It is the only book of the New Testament concerning which there was a significant disagreement in the church. There were parts of the church for several centuries in which it was not accepted as part of the scriptures. We'll talk about this more later on in the video. The Acts of the Apostles, written by the evangelist Luke, could not have been completed any earlier than AD63, as it refers to St. of Paul's imprisonment at Rome which continued into that year. So the complete picture that we have is that of a growing body of church literature throughout the first 70 years of the church's life. Some of these books were originally known in only one or a few local churches. Others more rapidly gained a widespread audience. What was considered scripture in a particular local church was that which was read at the church's service, along with the books of the law and the prophets and the psalms from the Old Testament.

But we have not yet touched on the fact that within this rich climate of the oral tradition of the church and the new books which spoke of salvation, there were also other books, quite a number of them, in fact. Some of them were written even during the same time in which the books of the New Testament came to be. Others were written shortly later. These books, however, should not be confused with the inauthentic books written in the second and third centuries by various heretics who attributed their forgeries to the apostles in an attempt to authenticate their heretical teachings, such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Essen Gospel of Peace, and various others. Some of these other books may indeed have been written by the apostles themselves, such as the Epistle of Barnabas, the Apostolic Constitutions. Others were written by other members of early Christian church or by the immediate successors of the apostles in the governance of the church, such as the Shepherd of Hermas, the Epistle of St. Ignatius. Some of these books were regarded as scripture, exactly on par with the Gospels and the other books of the New Testament as we now have it. The earliest indication we have that any of these books—both those we now regard as the New Testament and the others—were regarded as scripture, is evidence of their use in the worship of the church and of their citation in the writings of the church fathers.

[Music] The early decades of the church's life were preoccupied with missionary activity and persecution. If it occurred to anyone to make a written table of contents, we have no indication of it. The earliest known list comes from about the year AD130, and it is known as the Murritorian cannon. Portions of the work have been lost, but it is apparent that it includes the four Gospels and most of the Epistles of St. Paul, as well as various other books. But doubts existed in portions of the church concerning the Epistles to the Hebrews, the Epistle of Jude, the Second Epistle of Peter, the Second and Third Epistles of John, and the Apocalypse. It is not until the year AD 369, with St. Athanasius's festal epistle for that year, that we can find a table of contents for the New Testament which corresponds exactly to that which we now accept. For 336 years, the church had been living, growing, developing under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. And only then would it have been possible, though not even yet with universal acceptance, to print the Holy Bible as we now know and accept it. This, of course, is already four decades after the Council of Nika, after the creed had been written, and after the church, as many Protestants would have it, had been finally and ultimately corrupted by St. Constantine. [Music] [Music] [Music] What? [Music] [Music] Well, it's a very somber and sad scene here at the church where hundreds of people are gathering inside and outside, uh, to mourn the loss of Father Danielle Soy. [Music] [Music] The formal lurggical worship of the church at this point in history is already well defined and is so similar to that of the Orthodox Church today [Music] that a believer transported in time from then to an Orthodox church service now would find himself completely at home. [Music] What can one make of this? We now have to come back to this momentarily. But first, we need to conclude the history of the table of contents.

[Music] Only 5 years earlier than St. Athanasius's epistle, the council of Leosia prmulgated a list of the books of the New Testament which was identical, except that it did not include the Apocalypse. It was not for quite some time yet that there was truly universal agreement as to the books of the New Testament. And it was yet to be another thousand years before there would be a single book identical in contents to what we now call the Bible. It was the life of the church throughout the first 70 or so years of her existence which, guided by the Holy Spirit, gave rise to the written text which were to comprise the New Testament. And it was the continuing life of the church for more than another 300 years which was required to refine and define the exact contents of the scriptures.

[Music] Thus, it is pointless and misleading, and even dangerous, to discuss the scriptures apart from the life of the church. If the scriptures as we know them could only come into existence through the action of the Holy Spirit upon and in the church over a period of hundreds of years, then obviously the rest of the experience of the church during those same centuries, and subsequent ones as well, is of vital importance to their understanding. But what is this church? It is the same church which was founded by our Lord, governed by the apostles in the earliest decades, later guided and shepherded by their successors, the bishops. It is the same church which suffered persecutions for 300 years, which finally attained freedom under the reign of St. Constantine, which, by the guidance of the Holy Spirit, defined the meaning of the scriptures as it confronted the perpetrators of the various heresies. It is the same church which in the holy councils wrote the Nyine creed, summarizing the very essence of the faith and the scriptures, which in these same councils wrote the cannons which are the guidelines even to this day for its life. This is the same church which teaches us to venerate the saints and their relics. Inspired by the Holy Spirit, the church learned how to celebrate the Holy Liturgy, the Lord's Supper, with dignity and splendor long before the time at which we can identify a final agreement concerning the contents of the Bible. And so we are forced, if we confront the facts with honesty and integrity, to one inescapable conclusion. It is only through the church that we have access to the Bible at all. And it is likewise to the church that we must turn for its understanding. This classic riddle is very much to the point here.

It should be apparent that the church long precedes the Bible as an integral collection of books and considerably precedes even the individual books of the New Testament. Thus, it is quite certain that the church founded by our Lord was not based on the Bible. The church created by the Holy Spirit on Pentecost had no Bible as we know it and didn't need to have it to be truly the church. It can be said with some justification that if every single copy of the Bible in existence were suddenly destroyed, the effect upon the church would be minimal. Even though we're assured this will never come to pass because the gates of hell shall not prevail against it, the Bible would not be sufficient to provide what is needed for our salvation. If we doubt the truth of this, we need only to cast our glance over the spectacle of what happens when people attempt to create their own churches based upon their own private interpretations of the holy scriptures. We must then look to the church if we are to have any correct understanding of scripture. St. Peter insists, "No prophecy of scripture is of private interpretation." But we must not accept to find this understanding by acquiring some compendium of the true meaning of the Bible. It is of wisdom, divine wisdom, that we now speak. And this is not to be reduced to a series of sentences and paragraphs and books of merely human writing, inspired or otherwise. No, it is to the life of the church that we must turn if we are to understand the Bible. This life cannot be ours except by participation. We must be saturated in it through the prayers of the church, through reading in the wisdom of the nearly 2,000 years of writings, through the daily life of the Christian community. Apart from this life, there can be no real understanding, but only misunderstanding and perversion. The millennia of the church's history are filled with such heresies as are the shelves of any large library. Wherever man tries to rely upon his own reason rather than upon God's wisdom as imparted in the holy church, heresy is the certain outcome. Separation from the truth.

But where an honest inquirer can legitimately ask, "Are we to find the church?" This question could have been easily answered in the first few years of the church's life. But it wasn't long before there were those who wished to substitute their own misunderstandings for divine understanding. Even in the epistles of the holy Apostle Paul, we can read of such long before the canon of holy scriptures was firm. It was necessary for the church to reject the false teachings of the Gnostics, who taught that salvation was to be attained by knowledge of Aras, who refused to acknowledge Jesus as the son of God, and of many others. And now we have a thousand and more sects claiming to be either a part of the church or the only true church. Nevertheless, there truly is, and never has been, but one church. That church has always been at one with the teachings of the holy apostles and always in genuine historical and spiritual continuity with them. That church first had to define itself as Catholic, as universal, in distinction from the particular or partial understandings of some of the early heretics. [Music] Later it had to define itself as Orthodox, as of the same faith as the apostles and the church throughout the ages, in distinction from those who were heterodox, accepting another faith. From the very beginning, there has been much tolerance for sinners, but none for false teachings, for heresy. "If any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed." Throughout, it is one and the same church. At first, it existed only in the immediate area of Israel, soon throughout the Roman Empire. It then continued to grow and spread for nearly a thousand years, with the falling away of various heretical groups here and there, most of which have faded from existence before the cataclysmic schism which plunged almost the entirety of Europe into the darkness of heresy. The schism which created the Roman Catholic Church. In the west, the continuing decay of the Roman church produced yet heresy upon heresy, the manifold Protestant sex and their offspring. But throughout the rest of the Christian world—all of the Middle East and parts of Asia—the one true church continued to grow and flourish. Today, the true church, the Orthodox Church, is once again present in the West [Music] and submit [Music] For God is with us.

If we are to attain to the end which God intends for us, we must submit ourselves and our lives and our minds to the guidance of the Holy Spirit of the church. Only in the life of the church is it possible for the Bible to be for us the living, life-giving word of God. Torn away from the true church, as a child ripped untimely from his mother's womb, the scriptures bring not life, but death. Only in the church can we become one with our Lord Jesus Christ. He in us and we in him, that we all may be one in him. [Music] with us. Foreign speech. Foreign speech. Foreign speech.