Comments by "Chompy the Beast" (@chompythebeast) on "How Did the New Testament Form?" video.

@preasidium13 Spoiler alert: They were literally all fanfics, even the ones from the second century
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That is a simple myth. The canon was long hacked out before any ecumenical council ever ratified it, and that's what he is discussing here. His is a historical, archaeological, and religious studies-based approach to the question, not a common over-simplification to the point of falsehood that one would expect to find on a Snapple lid or the History Channel
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@ayoubdeedat6225 Sir, this is an academic channel, not a place for sectarian jabs. They're both interesting to a scholar of religion rather than a devotee who limits their education to only their chosen faith
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His argument is that it was not an ecumenical council who forged the canon, they merely ratified what had already been in practice. We put far too much stock into these official councils, when in reality Christianity at this time was very much beyond the control of the Church. It would be another several hundred years before religious authorities had that kind of perscriptive power over the masses
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These councils ratified canons, they did not create them. What a bunch of dusty old men said in their hallowed halls didn't really matter to most Christian communities until centuries later, when the Church had become the de facto political ruler of Western Europe. But even then, outside the West, such canons mattered little
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I know this comment is a few years old by now, but as someone who has no interest in wearing a fedora, I wish people didn't seem to take this (or any) stereotype so 100% seriously
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It's funny how people are interested in the religious beliefs of scholars of religion. I mean, from a sectarian, defensive standpoint, I understand the desire to know what you're dealing with ("What does a ___ know about my religion, anyway!?"), but it's a question that scholars of other fields don't usually have to deal with. Some laypeople were dismissing Reza Aslan's work on Jesus because he had been raised a non-practicing Muslim, for example. Frankly, the "suspicions" of some of the comments in this thread are coming from a different, non-academic place
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That isn't really true, though. Why can only a council decide such things, and why does it matter more that the council ratified something that already existed than the thing existing on its own matters? It's curious how much people seem to think of these things exclusively in legalistic terms, as if any council mattered more than what people were doing, anyway. The Church simply didn't have prescriptive power to tell people what to read like that until centuries later
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