How the New Testament Came to Be

I loved reading the works from the 35th annual Brigham Young University Sperry Symposium, titled How the New Testament Came to Be. I love history, and this book was full of it. I have never really known anything about the first centuries A.D., but because of some books I have read recently, I am becoming very familiar with the names of the Apostolic Fathers. I also learned more about the history of record keeping among the ancient Jews and early Christians.

Kerry Muhlestein dedicates an entire essay to the evolution of writing, particularly how it influenced sacred record keeping. I especially enjoyed reading about the first books that came to be, called codices. A codex originally usually consisted of wax tablets in between two boards. A writer would basically take notes on these tablets, then write the full-length document on a scroll. He could then "erase" what was written on the wax and re-use it. Eventually they started including parchment, where they could write on both sides of the paper, forming something similar to our modern-day books.

Carl W. Griffin and Frank F. Judd Jr. wrote about the principles of textual criticism. In this essay they discuss the difficulty of finding original biblical quotes due to scribes adding "clarifying" statements, and also due to scribes deleting parts that they didn't feel were correct. They emphasize that we believe the Bible, not only as it is translated correctly, but also as it is transmitted correctly.

Gaye Strathearn talks about the book of Matthew. Of the many interesting things mentioned, I really liked the idea of thinking of the Gospel writers the same way we think of the Book of Mormon. Why did Matthew choose to include the things he did? Of all the things the Savior did and taught, why did Matthew choose to include only the instances we now have recorded? Thinking of the Bible this way puts it in an entirely different light for me.

Finally, I really enjoyed the essays by both Eric D. Huntsman and Lincoln H. Blumell. They talked about scribes and how scribes were used in the first century AD. I especially enjoyed reading about how Paul's epistles both conform and differentiate from generic epistles of that time period. In Paul's epistles, we get clues about the use of different scribes, which would explain the different language used in the various epistles which are all attributed to Paul.

Reading this book shed a lot of light on how we have received the New Testament. I am grateful for those early Christians who preserved the words of Christ and His apostles. Although it has not been passed down in its purity, I feel a great debt of gratitude to those who did all they could to give us the knowledge we have today of the earthly ministry of the Savior Jesus Christ.