the new testament canon

February 6, 2026 · 1 min read

wake: 0900
sleep: 0319

meals:

  • breakfast: cashews
  • lunch: steak rice miso soup
  • dinner: steak tofu rice blended berries

3 kinds of intelligence in fiction (youtube)

  • high effort: character solves a genuinely hard problem and audience later sees why it worked
  • low effort: character succeeds because writers say so
  • excused low effort: superpower, divine powers

Jesus should fall into bucket #3 since he is God, but doesn't because he has high-effort intelligence

examples:

  • tax to Caesar
  • healing on sabbath
  • authority of John the Baptist

some notes on the New Testament

  • The Gospels were written roughly 20–60 years after Jesus’ death, placing them firmly in the 1st century AD,
  • The earliest physical fragment is the John Rylands Fragment (a piece of the Gospel of John), dated 117–138 AD—only a few decades after the original writing
  • Ignatius of Antioch and Clement of Rome quoted Matthew, Mark, and Luke in letters written around 95–110 AD
  • 3 criteria for a book in new testament
    • apostolic: was it written by an apostle or someone in direct contact with apostle
    • orthodoxy: did the book's teaching agree with Torah and apostolic oral tradition, Gnosticism were rejected bc they contradicted christian beliefs (body is evil spiritual is god)
    • widespread church use: was it used across Mediterranean

links