The Simultaneous Rise of Christianity and Its Texts

While the modern Bible and Christianity are highly organized and institutionalized today, such a situation was not always the case, and much variety and disorder necessarily preceded the present state of order. The early Christian movement as it was in the first century CE was disorganized for a number of reasons, such as physical separation and doctrinal differences, and the latter of these was due in no small part to the multitude of texts circulating and being written at the time. As Timothy Beal states in The Rise and Fall of the Bible, Christian writing was broad, varied, and perhaps most interestingly, contemporary.

Naturally, the many Christian texts of the time were being written by authors of different beliefs and backgrounds, so they reflected different ideals as seen in the now-canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, versus texts like the Gospel of Thomas, a sayings gospel which lists 114 sayings of Jesus, making it a different genre of Gospel entirely. While many variations on the life and times of Jesus and company existed, we must understand that they were not and could not have been considered scripture. They were being written right and left by mortal hands, and seemed to contradict some message of the last. Instead, because Christianity, at that time “the Jesus movement” as Beal calls it, still considered itself a form of Judaism, texts like the Torah, some of the Prophets, and perhaps Daniel and some Psalms would have been considered scripture (99).

The texts which we now consider the New Testament, on the other hand, were still making their way. Paul’s letters were merely letters. The various Gospels and Acts were trying to find their ways as histories and explanations. The early groups would not have had access to all of the texts as they were being written either, and the texts they could access were often used to write newer ones more in line with what the writers believed to be true, just as the author of Luke readily admits at the beginning of his Gospel. Like the Lukan author, many of these writers were concerned with the idea of composing an “orderly account,” not having the divine truth revealed to them (Luke 1:3).