Course 4: The Committee
Diploma Program · Course 4 · 3 Credits
There is a story most modern readers have absorbed, often without knowing they have absorbed it, about how the Bible came to be the Bible. In the story, a committee somewhere — usually at Nicaea in 325, sometimes elsewhere — assembled the canon, voted on which books were in, and edited the rest into the shape we have today. Dan Brown sold eighty million copies of a novel built on a version of this story. The novel was wrong. So is the story behind it. But the story is wrong in a particular way that most Christians cannot articulate, and the inability to articulate it has done quiet damage for decades.
This course teaches you how to tell the difference between custodial work and authoring. It walks through the diagnostic marks that committee authoring would necessarily leave on a document, tests the Bible against those marks, and then walks through what the actual committees of Christian history did do — which was substantial, careful, and the opposite of what the Da Vinci Code crowd believes happened. The course is for anyone who has felt the skeptic's argument as a quiet pressure they could not answer, and for any believer who wants to know what the bishops at Nicaea were actually arguing about for three months.
How this course is structured. Course 4 is built around one textbook and three assignments. You read The Committee first. Then you complete Assignment 1, which asks you to perform the diagnostic move the book has been teaching you on a popular claim about how Scripture was assembled. Assignment 2 asks you to explain what you have been studying to a friend, in the voice a real conversation would take. Assignment 3 asks you to take the same diagnostic move outside of Christianity entirely, find a place in the world where custodial work has been popularly mistaken for authoring, and walk through it with the diagnostic questions the sheet provides. Three credits. Three assignments. One sustained way of learning to tell who actually wrote a thing.
The Textbook
The Committee
Seven chapters, one sustained question: when a skeptic says the Bible was assembled by a committee, is that claim true, and if it is not true in the way the skeptic means, what is true instead? The chapters lay out the diagnostic marks committee authoring would necessarily leave on a document, test the Bible against those marks, and walk through what the actual committees in Christian history did do.
The Three Assignments
Each assignment is a complete work package: the reading that precedes it, the structure of the work, and the specification for the paper and videos you produce. The three assignments build on each other. Assignment 1 gives you the move on the page. Assignment 2 gives you the move in conversation. Assignment 3 gives you the move outside of the domain the book worked in.
The Document the Committees Did Not Write
Read the textbook. Choose one of three worked scenarios about what councils actually decided and what they did not, and perform the diagnostic move that distinguishes custodial work from authoring. Produce a paper of roughly 1,000 to 1,200 words and a recorded video of ten minutes. Respond to three challenge questions in a second video.
Telling Your Friend What the Committees Did Not Do
The register changes. You are no longer writing to demonstrate a move to an instructor. You are writing as someone who has learned something and is telling another person what you have learned — a real friend, not a catechumen and not a skeptic. Roughly 1,000 to 1,200 words, a ten-minute video, and a challenge response.
The Transfer: Finding Custodial Work Mistaken for Authoring in the Wild
The final assignment. Take the diagnostic move the book uses across all seven of its chapters and apply it somewhere the author did not. Somewhere outside of Christianity entirely. Find a place in the world where custodial work has been popularly mistaken for authoring, walk it through the diagnostic questions, and produce the paper, the video, and the response.