A pastor with a worldwide ministry stands before his 23,000 member church, a number which includes satellite branches. He's teaching that massive number of listeners a myth. But this pastor's influence isn't limited to that number: hundreds of pastors eagerly attend his conferences to learn his message and his methods of church growth.(One of those methods is, "Do not preach verse by verse through a book in the Bible."
He's instructing the 23,000 with a myth he believes is true and he's warning them so they won't continue, as he puts it, to base their faith on the Bible. (!) He doesn't believe that what he's teaching is a myth; he believes that it's the gospel truth and the assembled pastors and his congregation need to know this "truth" so they can instruct their flocks not to base their faith on what they believe to be an infallible Book. As he said,"Good luck with basing your faith on the Bible!"
As he progresses through his sermon, he confidently declares that the church didn't have a Bible for first 400 years of church history. He tells the congregation, "The first century Christians turned the world upside down and they didn't even have a Bible." (You can see how such a statement would downgrade the Bible in the eager and itching ears of the 23,000.)
That sounds good to those eager ears who would, if they believed that declaration, conclude that we don't need the Bible either since they did what they did without one. Summary: they didn't need THE Book, so neither do we and we shouldn't base our faith on what it says.
"They didn't have a Bible?" Really? This pastor is a dynamic speaker, there's never a verbal slip of the tongue or a moment's pause; he can rivet the attention of thousands. So, with his eloquent mastery of the English language and oratorical skills, he is persuading literally thousands of the myth that the early church was bereft of the Word of God and was in that state for 400 years.
Let's examine this myth. The truth is that they did have a Bible and there's a name for that Bible; we call it "The Old Testament." all 39 books. If you go by my large print Bible, they had 1,498 pages of the Bible.
There's something else we need to add: Christ and the Apostles incessantly referred to those 1, 498 pages as the ultimate authority. Jesus quoted from the first 5 books of the Old Testament over 64 times. No need to stop there; if you look at His quoting the Old Testament in Matthew - John you would find that it's 74 times. Then if you combine His direct quotes with His allusions to the Old Testament, the estimate is somewhere between 250-400 times!
He chastised the religious leaders by asking them, "Have you not read . . ." referring to a quotation in one of those 39 books. In Luke 4, Jesus went into a synagogue and read from the scroll of Isaiah, then announcing to the congregation, "This day this Scripture is fulfilled!"
At the Incarnation, Herod the Great wanted to know where the Messiah would be born, the scribes turned in their Bibles to Micah 5:2 and found the answer: Bethlehem.
Fast forward to the Apostles' preaching after the Ascension and we hear them citing the Old Testament in sermon after sermon, so many times that if we take the total number of Old Testament citations found from Matthew 1:1 to the last verse in Revelation, the total is an astounding 845 times! In their preaching, the Apostles would make a declaration and then to prove it, they would quote their Bible, the Old Testament. They would quote the Psalms, Isaiah, Joel et al.
We turn to the Dead Sea Scrolls dated from the third century BC to the first century CE. They contain every book in the Old Testament except Esther and Nehemiah. The scrolls contain almost the complete book of Isaiah!
So, yes, the church did have a Bible all those 400 years.
Another factor in refuting the myth is that during the first century, the Apostles were writing and circulating the inspired books of the New Testament, passing them along from church to church as Paul required in Colossians 4:6.
Then when we look at the writings of the church fathers, we find that they are quoting from various epistles. For example, "The letters of Ignatius, written very close to 107 A.D., quote from several New Testament books. He uses quotes from the Old and the New Testament books.
"Below are some Old and New Testament quotations of Ignatius. For each letter, the chapter is given, followed by the New Testament reference. This is not at all an exhaustive list, just representative of books Ignatius uses.
Letter of Ignatius to the Ephesians in which he quotes from:
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