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So how do we know which books the early Christians used in the liturgy?As Valeriy Alikin of St. Petersburg Christian University explains,“Christians began to read apostolic epistles in their gatherings at the latest from the middle of the first century onwards.” At the end of his first letter to the Thessalonians, Paul instructs,“I adjure you by the Lord that this letter be read to all the brethren”(5:27). And after the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, the leaders of the Church send Paul and St …

As the number of Christian books grew, so did the need for the Catholic Church to discern which were truly authoritative, which were merely helpful, and which were positively harmful. This resulted in a process that gradually clarified which books did and didn’t count as Scripture.The guiding principle for Christians was Jesus Christ himself, so the question became which books he would consider authoritative. Since he presented his ministry as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, this …

He who devotes himself to the study of the law of the Most High . . . will be concerned with prophecies . . . and penetrate the subtleties of parables; he will seek out the hidden meanings of proverbs and be at home with the obscurities of parables. -Sirach 39:1-3Early in his exploration of the writings left by the Church Fathers, St. John Henry Newman discovered that the primitive Church approached evangelization and Christian initiation in a completely different way than we do. Newman saw that …

Critics of the New Testament often claim that the names of the authors of the Gospels were added after they had already been in circulation in the Church. Instead of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, they say, the real authors were anonymous Christians who relied on hearsay and legend rather than eyewitness testimony. But is there evidence for this claim? First it should be noted that even if the earliest copies of the Gospels did not contain the names of their authors that would not disprov …