Andy Stanley and the New Testament in the Early Church

Andy Stanley’s Claim That the New Testament Did Not Exist for 400 Years

Hey, a really quick ScreenFlow video here, it has to be really quick. First of all, I'm in my hotel room in Nashville, Tennessee, so it has to be quick for two reasons. First of all, I'm in a hotel. Ever tried to upload video on hotel wireless?

Not a pretty thing. Secondly, they're doing the tornado thing around here, so maybe we just have to do it quickly because of that. Anyway, it also has to be quick because of the subject matter, I was directed to a video clip by someone who knows who he is, troublemaker that he is, and it's from Andy Stanley saying something sort of weird from something called History's Mystery, which I think was recorded on Easter.

Let's take a look at what he has to say.

Did you know that for 300 years after Jesus was crucified, really more than 300, but we'll be conservative, for 300 years there was no Bible. Nobody got together and had Sunday school classes. No one stood up in front of a group like this and said, turn to Ephesians or turn to John or turn to Matthew.

They had no New Testament for really more like 400 years. The phrase New Testament, first time it appeared was 250 years after Jesus was crucified. Well, that's interesting.

The Early Church and the Function of Scripture Before the Canon List

Didn't have a Bible for 400 years. So, what were they quoting all that time that Athanasius was debating with Arius in the preceding century when they were talking about civilianism? What were they quoting all that time?

I think that maybe what he's trying to say is that the final form of the New Testament is toward the end of the 4th century in the sense of an official, quote unquote, canon list, but somebody really needs to send Andy Stanley, Dr. Kruger's new books on the subject of the canon because this is just a complete misapprehension of how Scripture functioned in the early church.

The fact that the Old Testament was normative and well known what its extent was and that the New Testament Scriptures from the time that they were written likewise functioned in that way, even during the period of time where there would be some areas in the early church that didn't know of all of Paul's writings or Hebrews.

There was differences in East and West regarding the book of Revelation, the book of Hebrews and things like that. But especially as we see in the early papyri collections of books, the gospel manuscripts, in other collections such as Paul's books gathered together around 200 AD.

New Testament Collections in the Early Church

You have some of the general epistles put together, P72, also around 200 AD. Obviously people were having Bible studies and they were looking up texts of Scripture and all you have to do is read the early church fathers and they're saying, as Paul said and as Peter said, and they're quoting these books.

So I don't know how many thousands of people attended this lecture. I guess it's supposed to be a sermon but it's really not meant to look like one. But they all were told something that really doesn't make any sense and that really misleads them and gives them an idea that just simply isn't true.

Why Stanley’s Claim Misleads Christians About the New Testament

And unfortunately this kind of thing is, well, it's just all too common these days and we need to try to bring some correction when we possibly can. So if somebody has Mr. Stanley's ear, they might want to maybe provide some correction for him on that because it really didn't make a whole lot of sense what he said and could cause a lot of people to wonder about the reliability of the New Testament, where it came from, how we got it, and this is the kind of thing that is really a problem these days given what we're up against with people like Bart Ehrman and others.

So anyways, thanks for watching the ScreenFlow and we'll hopefully, hopefully I'll be here in the hotel long enough to upload this, given upload speeds on ScreenFlow. Thanks for watching.