Concerning our little discussion about the New Testament we’ve been having over the past of couple of days, here’s the big takeaway I want you to get.
While it is true that towards the end of the 1st century A.D., the Gospels and Paul’s epistles were being circulated among the various messianic congregations sprawled throughout the Roman Empire, they were NEVER CONSIDERED HOLY SCRIPTURE!
Heck, they weren’t even considered to be on the same level as the“Old” Testament Apocrypha.
They were only considered authoritative in the sense that they provided practical rules and regulations about how to deal with a variety of different matters that arose in the church.
That’s it!
They were really viewed no differently than how you might view your particular church or synagogue’s rules and regulations.
Here’s what you should know.
Whenever we examine the records pertaining to the generation of church leaders who took control after the original Apostles, in every circumstance without exception their Bible was ONLY the Hebrew Bible or what Christianity calls the “Old” Testament.
In fact, this holds true even if they were using a Greek version of the “Old” Testament.
And it didn’t matter whether that church leader was an ethnic Jew or an appointed gentile church leader.
The only Bible the early church knew of was the TANAKH (the Hebrew Bible).
Got it?
Now you may be thinking…
…if that’s the case (and it is), how in the world did the status of the New Testament reach the level of Holy Scripture on the same level as Torah?
Well, this is where we have to examine the writings of Origen, Ignatius, Papias, Clement and other gentile church leaders.
According to them, by around the first part of the 2nd century A.D., many of the churches located in Rome began reading out loud portions from the Gospels and the Epistles during the worship service alongside the Torah portions (kind of like how they do it in Messianic congregations today).
Understand that it was already a firmly entrenched custom that the Torah be read during worship service.
However, over time, alongside the Torah portion, parts of what has become the NT canon were also being read.
There’s nothing wrong with that per say.
But what happened was that while the first or even second generation of the church would never have dared to consider the Epistles or Gospels to be God-breathed Scripture, it seems like the later generation started to give the Apostolic writings more and more weight.
Why?
Simply because as I just said during the worship service, portions of the New Testament were being read alongside portions of the Hebrew Bible.
This was just how tradition evolved from the days of the early church and that’s where we’re at today with the New Testament mistakenly being held up by those who don’t know any better as Holy Scripture on the same level as Torah.
It’s time to put these books in their proper place.
The New Testament does NOT have the authority to supersede what is written in Torah and it never will.
Leave a Reply