Who Chose the New Testament Books? Politics, Praxis, and Proof in the Early Church C. E. Hill1 I. POLITICS A. Introduction: Encounters with the Cultural Myth In the ongoing interaction of Christianity with its surrounding culture, the issue of “How We Got the Bible” has become one of the flashpoints of our day. The popular narrative that has sprung up and taken root has become so often repeated, so widely adopted, and its explanatory power has become so effective, that it could probably now qualify as one of our cultural myths: a grand story that serves to explain for a culture a set of phenomena important for its self-understanding. Such a grand story must be simple in its broad strokes, but have enough historical correspondence to make itself plausible to great numbers of people. Why is such a story about how we got the Bible needed as part of our cultural mythology? That Christianity and its Bible have played a […]