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of a “New Testament,” an assemblage of holy writings that added to, or even replaced, accepted Hebrew writings, emerged in the second century CE. As with the Hebrew scriptures, there are human fingerprints all over the decision making that led to the compilation of the New Testament. Most biblical researchers presume that other early Christian writings existed, including other letters by Paul, but they were lost or even discarded. Modern scholars also suspect that the New Testament authors had access to a collection of Jesus’ sayings, a king of first-century Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations or Quotations from Chairman Jesus called “Q” (back to alphabet letters for Bible writers!). From the German word quelle, for “source,” this “Q” document exists only in theory; no such a collection has ever been found.

More controversial is another set of ancient Christian writings that have been found. These include other “gospels” that were written later than the accepted New Testament books. Most of these “other gospels,” which later came to be called the “Gnostic Gospels,” were rejected by the early church authorities as illegitimate (see page 342). In 180 CE, Irenaeus, a Greek bishop and powerful leader of the early church, wrote that heretics “boast that they posses more gospels than there really are.” The early Christian community was not one big happy family. There were deep divisions over very basic questions of what to believe. Groups such as the “Gnostics,” a word for a loose collection of early Christians who believed they had access to secret wisdom or knowledge (gno sis is Greek for “knowledge”), were very much at odds with other Christians over questions of the nature of God, Jesus, and evil. Another group, called the “Montanists,” after their leader, Montanus, claimed direct inspiration from the Holy Spirit. The conflict between the church fathers and these “heretics” led to some nasty fights over exactly what constituted “God’s Word.”

One of the first men to conceive of a “New Testament” as the scriptural foundation for the new church was Marcion of Sinope in Asia Minor (c. 80-155), a renegade Christian leader of the second century. Although not formally called a Gnostic, Marcion was excommunicated for his view that Jesus’ teachings were radically different from those of Jewish tradition, and he established his own church in 144. He further distanced himself from the “orthodox” Christians by appointing women as church leaders. Marcion rejected the view of the punishing, wrathful God he found in the Hebrew scriptures. As Elaine Pagels explains in her book The Gnostic Gospels, “Marcion was struck by what he saw as the contrast between the creator-God of the Old Testament, who demands justice and punishes every violation of his law, and the Father whom Jesus proclaims—the New Testament God of forgiveness and love. Why, he asked, would a God who is ‘almighty’—all powerful—create a world that includes suffering, pain, disease—even mosquitoes and scorpians? Marcion concluded that these must be two different Gods.” (p. 28) Marcion’s collection of Scriptures included only an edited version of Luke and ten of Paul’s letters, which he also edited in order to remove references to Jewish scriptures. For all of his actions, Marcion was denounced, and largely in response to his “canon” an official “orthodox” Christian canon was produced that emphasized the sacred standing of all four Gospels as well as thirteen letters attributed to Paul.

In 367 CE, Athanasius, a Christian leader in Alexandria, listed all twenty-seven books of the existing New Testament—more than three hundred years after Jesus died. His canon was widely accepted and approved in 382 CE by Christian leaders in Rome, now the center of a legalized and “official” Christianity. When the prominent Christian writer and theologian Augustine (354-430 CE) weighed in and gave his nod to this list, it was accepted by the North African churches. By about 400 CE, most Christian churches recognized the New Testament as it is known today. But there were rebellious splinter groups