Where the book came from
Four Gospels that never name their writers, a canon no single council chose, and a text you can check against a fourth-century page.
8 stopsShallows to deep
The order, and why it is this one
Join anywhere. Each stop carries the route with it, so the foot of every question here offers the next one and the way back to this page.
- Who wrote the Gospels?None of the four Gospels names its author inside the text. The names we use are attributions made by the early church, and how much weight they carry is one of the longest-running arguments in the field.Deepdepth, meaning: Major unanswered questions.Uncertain. Meaningful scientific, historical or philosophical disagreement remains.Read
- Why do the Gospels tell it differently?Three of the Gospels share passages that sometimes agree word for word, and the fourth shares few of them. What the divergences mean has been argued since the second century; who came first and who copied whom was asked by Augustine, and has been argued in earnest since the eighteenth century.Deepdepth, meaning: Major unanswered questions.Uncertain. Meaningful scientific, historical or philosophical disagreement remains.Read
- Who decided which books became the Bible?The New Testament was not selected at a single meeting. The earliest surviving list of exactly the twenty-seven books most churches now read was written in 367, and Christian traditions still disagree about the Old Testament and, at the edges, the New.Deepdepth, meaning: Major unanswered questions.Known. Strongly supported by evidence and broadly established.Read
- What happened to the gospels that were left out?The rejected texts were not hidden. Eusebius names several of them in a work of history, sets them below even the books he rejects, and explains why he is doing it. What is genuinely lost is a different set.Deepdepth, meaning: Major unanswered questions.Known. Strongly supported by evidence and broadly established.Read
- Why does the Christian Bible contain someone else’s scriptures?A second-century teacher proposed cutting the Hebrew scriptures out, and the church refused. That refusal shaped Christianity, and the way Christians then read those texts has a history with consequences.Deepdepth, meaning: Major unanswered questions.Known. Strongly supported by evidence and broadly established.Read
- How close is today’s Bible to its earliest copies?No original manuscript of any biblical book survives. What survives is copies, in very large numbers, and comparing them is a mature discipline whose results are printed in the margins of ordinary Bibles.Shallowsdepth, meaning: Interesting questions with substantial evidence and real uncertainty remaining.Known. Strongly supported by evidence and broadly established.Read
- Why do translations of the Bible disagree?Anyone reading this book in English is reading a set of choices. The choices are documented and several of them change what the passage is about.Shallowsdepth, meaning: Interesting questions with substantial evidence and real uncertainty remaining.Known. Strongly supported by evidence and broadly established.Read
- What do Christians mean when they say the Bible is true?The disagreement is not between people who believe the book and people who do not. It is between traditions with different and published accounts of what kind of claim the book is making, and the differences are checkable.Shallowsdepth, meaning: Interesting questions with substantial evidence and real uncertainty remaining.Uncertain. Meaningful scientific, historical or philosophical disagreement remains.Read