One of the things that really gets me about Christians, especially fundamentalists, is their reliance upon the books of the New Testament. It's as though they feel these books are irrefutable, that they depict the Truth, and that they have always been the same.
And yet, the first compilation of writings that were similar to what we know as the New Testament weren't put together until around the year 180. Similar collections were done in other locations over 200 years later.
Some people believe that these collections were made in order to have all the gospels in one handy volume, but the fact of the matter is that they were put together in order to perpetuate uniformity. There were lots and lots of different Christian writings circulating around. Many of these were repressed, many others were destroyed. All of these were original Christian views, every bit as legitimate as those that survive today.
Even by the year 450, it was reported by Theodore of Cyrrhus that there were at least 200 different gospels circulating around his own diocese!
And then there were the edits. With every new translation, the Church changed the messages of the books. These "revisionists" were lambasted by the Roman philosopher Celsus, when he said, "Some of them, as it were in a drunken state producing self-induced visions, remodel their Gospel from its first written form, and reform it so that they may be able to refute the objections brought against it."
In fact, such revisionists even exist today. There are versions of the bible that have deliberately changed the meaning of the original languages. Anyone who states, for example, that "Thou shalt not kill" should be "Thou shalt not murder" is a revisionist, because the original Hebrew certainly doesn't imply murder. Then there are those who don't revise the actual texts, but give "interpretations" that are anything but clearly stated in the verses.
The point to all this is that no one alive today knows what all the early Christians wrote. So much of what they said was lost or destroyed, and what we have now remains only because of the political purposes of those in charge of the Church over a millennia and a half ago.
The problem is that so few Christians know the history of their own religious texts. They rely on the truth of books that, at best, only paint part of the picture. And that part isn't even original. No original copies of any biblical book survive. For all we know, the documents of the bible could bear little resemblance to what their authors wrote.
So why should anyone regard them so reverently?
