Saturday, February 20, 2010

Bible Canonization

A big issue that has made me feel like the Catholic church *has* to be the church that Christ established is around the canonization of the Bible. Something that no one in the CoC ever even attempted to adequately explain to me was where the Bible came from - not the individual books, but the entire Bible. How was it accurately compiled and canonized? The closest thing I ever got to an answer was someone claiming that one of the apostles (presumably John) had to have lived long enough after the time of Christ, probably two or three hundred years, to collect and compile all of the books of the Bible. (I can only assume that this was a difficult task, as the CoC teaches that the church almost immediately went apostate and the small remnant of the "one true church" - aka forefathers of the CoC - was stuck hiding out from the evil Catholic church).

It seems to me that this is something that most CoCers won't touch with a ten foot pole - I think they like to believe that a few years after Jesus died, the Holy Spirit dropped a couple hundred bound copies of the KJV on the doorsteps of the churches at Corinth, Ephesus, Philippi, etc. and then completely disappeared. Yes, I'm being a little snarky, but they do completely ignore the fact that the Bible was, in fact, canonized by the Catholic church. It is completely illogical to me that God would leave this task to any group but the church that Christ established.