Banned from the Bible



This video is 1.5 hours in length.

Banned from the Bible is a documentary television series produced by FilmRoos in 2003 for the A&E Network that originally aired on the History Channel as Time Machine: Banned from the Bible in 2003. [1] [2] It aired as a series from late November 2005 through May 2006. Narrated by Christopher Nissley [3], James Karen, and Maggie Soboil, Banned from the Bible tells the stories of the ancient books that have been prohibited from becoming part of Bible canon. The scholarly term for this is Apocrypha. The series was continued with Banned from the Bible II in 2007.
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Anonymous said…
This is nothing new. I have asked several christians about this and gotten the same moronic answers. I have been told not to worry about those books, the don't count anyway. Or if they were meant to be in the bible they would be there. To that I tell them that it was man, better yet the catholic church, who decided which books are apart of the bible. If ti is the word of your god, then who is a man or a church to decide tocensor it, or which books to go by. I get the usual christian anger,and stupid retorts. Just another reason why I am NOT a christian.
January 22, 2008
Anonymous said…
Great piece. The bible (all historical versions) is a total cluster-f**** canon soup of fables and second-hand accounts from different regions and cultures, muddied up with political nonsense. Those first through fourth century church fathers didn't even know of the pagan origins of their own scriptuer stories. What a joke that we are doing things like heart replacement, building a space station, receiving messages from Voyager 1 on the outskirts our solar system, splitting atoms, etc., and many of humanity (even the intelligent) still treasure this ancient foolishness for actual truth. I cannot imagine a creator attempting to speak to his children in such a goofy,controversial, disjointed, geo-centric, confusing way as a bible. Yikes, people are fools.
January 23, 2008
Chuck Wolber said…
You can see a lot of the same message manipulation going on today in politics. These early biblical stories strike me as an efficient way to understand and control the political forces closing in on a populace that was already primed for superstition. The fact that they were co-opted by Constantine is no surprise.

I noted some of the books were considered too recent to be considered actual revelation. I would love to know how the council of Nicaea was able to determine the etymology of these stories.

Overall, there's an emergent theme here that intrigues me. I would love to study it deeper.
January 28, 2008
Jim Arvo said…
Hi Chuck,

You said "I would love to know how the council of Nicaea was able to determine the etymology of these stories."

One word: Eusebius. While Constantine's council at Nicaea did not have a stated objective of forming the Christian canon, that's (in effect) what happened thanks to the work that Eusebius had already put into investigating the epistles and gospels then in circulation. He published his findings in his book "Ecclesiastical History". Eusebius had a number of criteria by which to judge the "authenticity" of the documents, one of which was by vote among the (orthodox) bishops. Basically, all of the documents that were unanimously voted as "authentic" found their way into the NT, plus a few more. What "authentic" meant to the bishops was that it was traceable back to the apostles. How they determined this in the 4th century is unclear to me (hence, such a vote seems highly dubious to me).

Constantine's Bible by David Dungan is an excellent source to learn more about this. I just read it and it's quite fascinating.
January 28, 2008

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