“It comes as a bit of a shock to most people to realize that the Church has not always had the New Testament. But the Christian Scriptures did not descend from heaven a few years after Jesus died. The books that eventually came to be collected into the sacred canon were written by a variety of authors over a period of sixty or seventy years, in different places for different audiences. Other books were written in the same period, some of them by the same au¬thors. Soon thereafter the Church saw a flood of books also allegedly written by the earliest followers of Jesus, forgeries in the names of the apostles, pro¬duced for decades, centuries even, after the apostles themselves were long dead and buried. Virtually all of this other literature has been destroyed, forgotten, lost. Only a fraction of the early Christian writings came to be immortalized by inclusion in the sacred canon.”[1]

“Hard evidence about the ‘historical Jesus’ is scanty. The Bible’s gospel accounts of Jesus’s life and words-the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – were written sometime between 65 and 100 CE, thirty-five to seventy years after his death. By that time, their raw material, stories then circulating about Jesus in oral or written form, had no doubt been shaped by the psychological and rhetorical needs of his followers. (The letters of Paul – New Testament books such as Philippians and Romans – were written earlier, beginning around twenty years after Jesus’s death. Unfortunately, they say almost nothing about Jesus’s life and very little about his words.)

The book of Mark is generally considered the most factually reliable of the four gospels. It was written around 70 CE, roughly four decades after the Crucifixion. That’s a long lag, but it offers less time for the accrual of dubious information than the roughly five decades available for Matthew and Luke or the six or seven decades for John. What’s more, during Mark’s composition there would have been people sixty or seventy years old who as young adults had personally witnessed the doings and sayings of Jesus and knew his biographical details – and whose recollections may have constrained the author’s inventiveness. This population would shrink during the decade or more before other gospels took shape, expanding creative freedom.

Certainly as we move through the gospels in the order of their composition, we can see the accumulation of more and more dubious information. Mark doesn’t give us anything like ‘the plain unvarnished truth,’ but his story is plainly less varnished than are later accounts. (The actual name and identity of the author of Mark, as with the other gospels, is unknown, but in all cases, for convenience, I’ll call the authors by the names of their books.)

Consider the problem of Jesus being from a humble village, Nazareth. The Hebrew Bible had said that the Messiah would be a descendant of King David and, like David, would be born in Bethlehem. Mark never addresses the question of how ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ could have been born in Bethlehem. But by the time Matthew and Luke were written, an answer had emerged – two answers, even. Luke says Jesus’s parents went to Bethlehem for a census and returned to Nazareth after his birth. In Matthew’s version, Jesus’s parents just seem to live in Bethlehem. How then would Jesus wind up in Nazareth? Through an elaborate side story that has the family fleeing to Egypt under duress and then, upon leaving Egypt, deeming a return to Bethlehem dangerous, and settling in ‘a town called Nazareth.’ This contradiction between Luke and Matthew suggests that in this case, Mark, the earliest gospel, is the place to find the awkward truth: Jesus of Nazareth was Jesus of Nazareth. (Mathew 2:23) John (1:46-49) solves the Nazareth problem in yet another way.

…

Indeed, by the time of John there has been a general change in the tenor of Jesus’s miracles. In Mark, Jesus didn’t do miracles ostentatiously, and sometimes he even took pains to perform them in private. (An answer to critics who .noted that few people other than Jesus’s followers claimed witness to his miracles?) In John, Jesus turns miracles into spectacles. Before raising Lazarus from the dead-something Jesus does in no other gospel-he says Lazarus’s illness was ‘for God’s glory, so that the son of God may be glorified through it.’ Moreover, the miracles are now explicitly symbolic. When Jesus heals a blind man, he says, ‘I am the light of the world.’ (Mark 5:37, Luke 8:51, John 11:4 & 9:5)

A fairly immodest claim – but John’s Jesus is not a modest man. In no previous gospel does Jesus equate himself with God. But in John he says, ‘The Father and I are one.’ (John 10:30) Christian legend and theology have by this point had sixty or seventy years to evolve, and they are less obedient than ever to memories of the real, human Jesus.

All of this suggests that if we are going to try to make a stab at reconstructing the ‘historical Jesus,’ even in broadest outlines, Mark, the earliest gospel, is the place to start. There, more than in any other account of Jesus’s life and sayings, the number of plainly awkward and barely varnished facts suggests at least some degree of factualness.”[2]

A good and reliable source to understand, how the New Testament came about is one of the chapters of Dr. Maurice Bucaille’s famous book, the Bible the Quran and the Science. The chapter is titled the Four Gospels: Sources and History. It can be read online, here I am copying a page or so from the beginning:

“In the writings that come from the early stages of Christianity, the Gospels are not mentioned until long after the works of Paul. It was not until the middle of the Second century A.D., after 140 A.D. to be precise, that accounts began to appear concerning a collection of Evangelic writings, In spite of this, “from the beginning of the Second century A.D., many Christian authors clearly intimate that they knew a. great many of Paul’s letters.” These observations are set out in the Introduction to the Ecumenical Translation of the Bible, New Testament (Introduction à la Traduction oecuménique de la Bible, Nouveau Testament) edited 1972[23]. They are worth mentioning from the outset, and it is useful to point out here that the work referred to is the result of a collective effort which brought together more than one hundred Catholic and Protestant specialists.

The Gospels, later to become official, i.e. canonic, did not become known until fairly late, even though they were completed at the beginning of the Second century A.D. According to the Ecumenical Translation, stories belonging to them began to be quoted around the middle of the Second century A.D. Nevertheless, “it is nearly always difficult to decide whether the quotations come from written texts that the authors had next to them or if the latter were content to evoke the memory of fragments of the oral tradition.”

“Before 140 A.D.” we read in the commentaries this translation of the Bible contains, “there was, in any case, no account by which one might have recognised a collection of evangelic writings”. This statement is the opposite of what A. Tricot writes (1960) in the commentary to his translation of the New Testament: “Very early on, from the beginning of the Second century A.D., it became a habit to say “Gospel’ meaning the books that Saint Justin around 150 A.D. had also called “The Memoirs of the Apostles’.” Unfortunately, assertions of this kind are sufficiently common for the public to have ideas on the date of the Gospels which are mistaken.

The Gospels did not form a complete whole ‘very early on’; it did not happen until more than a century after the end of Jesus’s mission. The Ecumenical Translation of the Bible estimates the date the four Gospels acquired the status of canonic literature at around 170 A.D.

Justin’s statement which calls the authors ‘Apostles’ is not acceptable either, as we shall see.

As far as the date the Gospels were written is concerned, A. Tricot states that Matthew’s, Mark’s and Luke’s Gospels were written before 70 A.D.: but this is not acceptable, except perhaps for Mark. Following many others, this commentator goes out of his way to present the authors of the Gospels as the apostles or the companions of Jesus. For this reason he suggests dates of writing that place them very near to the time Jesus lived. As for John, whom A. Tricot has us believe lived until roughly 100 A.D., Christians have always been used to seeing him depicted as being very near to Jesus on ceremonial occasions. It is very difficult however to assert that he is the author of the Gospel that bears his name. For A. Tricot, as for other commentators, the Apostle John (like Matthew) was the officially qualified witness of the facts he recounts, although the majority of critics do not support the hypothesis which says he wrote the fourth Gospel.

If however the four Gospels in question cannot reasonably be regarded as the ‘Memoirs’ of the apostles or companions of Jesus, where do they come from? …”

“When students are first introduced to the historical, as opposed to a devotional, study of the Bible, one of the first things they are forced to grapple with is that the biblical text, whether Old Testament or New Testament, is chock full of discrepancies, many of them irreconcilable. Some of these discrepancies are simple details where one book contradicts what another says about a minor point-the number of soldiers in an army, the year a certain king began his reign, the details of an apostle’s itinerary. In some cases seemingly trivial points of difference can actually have an enormous significance for the interpretation of a book or the reconstruction of the history of ancient Israel or the life of the historical Jesus. And then there are instances that involve major issues, where one author has one point of view on an important topic (How was the world created? Why do the people of God suffer? What is the significance of Jesus’ death?), and another author has another. Sometimes these views are simply different from one another, but at other times they are directly at odds.

In this chapter I will talk about some of the important and interesting discrepancies of the Bible that emerge when it is examined from a historical perspective. Since my specialty is the New Testament, I will be dealing with the kinds of problems that are found there. But you can rest assured that very much the same problems can be found in the Old Testament as well-in fact, even more so. Whereas the New Testament, consisting of twenty-seven books, was written by may be sixteen or seventeen authors over a period of seventy years, the Old Testament, the Jewish Scriptures, consist of thirty-nine books written by dozens of authors over at least six hundred years. There is a lot of room for differing perspectives, and if you look for them, you will find them in droves.”

What is the way forward? This short biography makes it clear that many modern assumptions about the Bible are incorrect. The Bible did not encourage slavish conformity. In the Jewish tradition especially, as we saw with the story of R. Eliezer, not even the voice of God could force an exegete to accept another person’s interpretation. From the first, the biblical authors contradicted each other and their conflicting visions were all included by the editors in the final text. The Talmud was an interactive text that, properly taught, compelled a student to find his own answers. Hans Frei was right: the Bible has been a subversive document, suspicious of orthodoxy since the time of Amos and Hosea. The modern habit of quoting proof-texts to legitimize poli­cies and rulings is out of key with interpretive tradition. As Wilfred Cantwell Smith explained, scripture was not really a text but an activity, a spiritual process that introduced thou­sands of people to transcendence. The Bible may have been used to back up doctrines and beliefs but that was not its chief function. The fundamentalist emphasis on the literal reflects the modern ethos but is a breach with tradition, which usually preferred some kind of figurative or innovative interpreta­tion. (This is an over-simplification; over the centuries, the Christian apologists have always emphasized the literal truth of the Bible at least to the masses).  There is, for example, no single doctrine of creation in the Bible and the first chapter of Genesis was rarely read as a factual description of the origins of the cosmos.  (Another over-simplification and re-writing of the history of time of Galileo Galilei).  Many of the Christians who oppose Darwinism today are Calvinists, but Calvin insisted that the Bible was not a scientific document and that those who wanted to learn about astronomy or cos­mology should look elsewhere.We have seen that different texts have been used to support entirely opposed programmes. Athanasius and Arius could both produce quotations to prove their personal beliefs about the divinity of Christ. Because they could find no defin­itive warrant in scripture to decide this matter, the fathers found theological solutions that owed little to the Bible. Slave­owners interpreted the Bible one way, the slaves in quite another. The same applies today in the Christian debate about ordaining women to the priesthood. Like nearly all pre­modern documents, the Bible is a patriarchal text. Opponents of feminism and women priests can find a host of biblical texts to prove their case, but some of the New Testament authors had very different views and can be cited to show that in Christ there was neither male nor female and that women worked as ‘co-workers’ and ‘co-apostles’ in the early Church. Hurling texts around polemically is a sterile pursuit. Scripture is not able to provide certainty on this type of ques­tion. This is also the case with the question of scriptural violence. There is indeed a great deal of violence in the Bible far more than there is in the Qur’ an. And it is unquestionably true that throughout history people have used the Bible to justify atrocious acts. As Cantwell Smith observed, the Bible and its interpretation must be seen in historical context. The world has always been a violent place and scripture and its exegesis has often fallen prey to contemporary aggression. Joshua was presented by the Deuteronomists fighting with all the ruthlessness of an Assyrian general. The Crusaders ignored the pacifist teachings of Jesus and signed up for an expedition to the Holy Land because they were soldiers, wanted a militant religion and applied their distinctively feudal ethos to the Bible. The same is true in our own time. The modern period has seen violence and slaughter on an unprecedented scale and it is not surprising that this has affected the way some people have read the Bible.[3]

In general, among Christian denominations, the New Testament Canon is an agreed-upon list of 27 books, although book order can vary.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Church has a few additional books in its canon: Jubilees, Book of Enoch, 4 Baruch along with three books of Meqabyan that are unique to their canon.The Peshitta excludes 2-3 John, 2 Peter, Jude, and Revelation, but Bibles of the modern Syriac Orthodox Church include later translations of those books along with the Letter of Baruch (sometimes included as part of 2 Baruch). Still today the official lectionary followed by the Syrian Orthodox Church (with headquarters at Kottayam (Kerala), and the Chaldean Syriac Church, also known as the Church of the East (Nestorian), with headquarters at Trichur (Kerala)) presents lessons from only the twenty-two books of Peshitta, the version to which appeal is made for the settlement of doctrinal questions.The Third Epistle to the Corinthians and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs were once considered part of the Armenian OrthodoxBible, but are no longer printed with modern editions.THE ROLE OF THE ORAL TRADITIONSThe four canonical gospels were written 35-65 years after the crucifixion mostly borrowing from oral traditions and possibly some written materials that we no longer possess.  This is a very long time for the oral traditions to change.  This is like trying to write at the turn of the century about the great depression in USA, or World War II, without haveing any written accounts or photographs.  Prof. Bart Ehrman explains in a Teaching Company course:

“Even though the earliest traditions about Jesus go back to eyewitnesses who observed the things he said and did, they were circulated by word of mouth for several decades before being written down in the Gospels. The time between Jesus’ death and the first accounts of his life was 35 to 65 years. During that time, Christianity spread to major urban areas throughout the empire. People converted to this new religion when they heard about the spectacular words and deeds of Jesus. But given the rapid growth of the religion in so many areas, the people spreading most of these tales were necessarily people who had never seen these things happen or who had even known someone else who had.

As a result, the traditions about Jesus were modified in the process of transmission, and some traditions were apparently made up-as Christians tried both to convince others of the importance of Jesus and to understand him in ways that seemed theologically significant. Evidence to suggest that the traditions were modified is provided by the Gospels themselves. As we will see through a careful examination of Jesus’ death, as recorded in Mark and John, and of his birth, as recorded in Matthew and Luke, discrepancies in the tradition indicate that the stories were being altered (and in some instances created) to suit the occasions for which they were told.”[4]