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The Bible is a remarkable book. It is actually a library of sixty-six books written by some forty different authors who lived a thousand and a half years apart. Prophets of God in the Old Testament and Apostles of Jesus and their friends in the New Testament not only told us about their experiences with God, but we believe they were inspired to give us the actual Word of God. But the Table of Contents in the front of your Bible wasn’t actually part of any of those books. The modern editors and translators added it. So how do we know which books are supposed to be in the Bible when none of them actually contains a divinely approved list? A list of the books approved and accepted as part of Scripture is known as a canon. The canon—not the Bible itself, but its table of contents, the list of which books were part of it—was created after the fact by the church. Or, more accurately, the church was led to recognize which books God has inspired to lead it to the truth and to reject those which He had not.

How did the churches recognize these books? What criteria did they use? How do we know they got the list right? It would be nice if the last biblical book to be written (Revelation) had included an inspired list, but it didn’t. Why not?

The reason is that Christianity was not primarily based on a book. It was based on a Person, and on the proclamation of the Good News about that Person, made (initially) by the people who had known Him directly. Then, because a book (what we call the Old Testament) was trusted by that person (Jesus) and was understood authoritatively to point to Jesus, it was accepted as Scripture by the early church. And because Jesus was Himself the completion of the revelation of God that had been begun in the Old Testament, He commissioned his closest associates to complete the written record of that revelation by writing the New Testament.

THE OLD TESTAMENT

The early Christians, who were at first all Jews, simply took over the canon of the Old Testament (the Hebrew Scriptures) from Judaism. They did so because Jesus Himself had taught them that those Scriptures “bear witness of Me” (John 5:29) and that “all things which were written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled” (Luke 24:44). He had taught them that the Hebrew Scriptures were inspired and completely trustworthy down to their finest details: “Not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass away from the Law until all is fulfilled” (Mat. 5:18). He had taught them that “The Scriptures cannot be broken” (John 10:35b). So, the earliest Christians accepted the Jewish Bible as Scripture precisely because their faith was in not a book but a Person—and that Person had told them to receive the Old Testament as the Word of God.

All Christians then accept the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament—what Jews call the Tanakh, an acronym for the Hebrew words for the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings—as Scripture. (The Hebrew Bible organizes and numbers the books differently, but it is essentially the same collection of writings.) But there is a handful of additional books known as the “Apocrypha” which are also accepted by the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches: 1 and 2 Esdras, Tobit, Judith, The Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, The Song of the Three Holy Children, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, and 1 and 2 Maccabees. Where did they come from, and why aren’t they accepted by everyone?

A couple of centuries before Christ, Jews living outside of Palestine had lost enough fluency in the Hebrew language to feel the need for a translation of the Old Testament into Greek. That translation was known as the Septuagint for the seventy rabbis who according to legend had worked on it. It contained some extra books, sometimes known as “the Septuagint plus,” which had been written later than the books of the standard Hebrew Old Testament. They were accepted by Hellenistic (i.e., Greek-speaking) Jews, but never became part of the official Hebrew Bible used in the Holy Land.

Because the Gentile Christians who could not read Hebrew naturally used the Septuagint as their Old Testament, some early Christians came to accept those books. But clearly, the Bible used by Jesus when He was teaching in the synagogues of the Holy Land would have been the stricter Hebrew Old Testament—and that would, therefore, have been the Bible He was referring to when He authorized the use of the Old Testament as Christian Scripture. This led church fathers like Athanasius, one of the greatest theologians, and Jerome, the greatest Bible scholar of that day, to distinguish between the Apocrypha and the rest of the Old Testament.

The Old Testament Apocryphal writings, according to Athanasius and Jerome, were good books worthy to be read for devotional purposes, they said, but they should not be used as the basis of doctrine. They continued to be included in Bibles on that basis (though with the distinction often forgotten) until the Reformation. Then the Reformers, concerned as they were with biblical authority, restored the distinction very strictly, which eventually led to Protestant Bibles being printed without the apocryphal books. Printing them as part of the Bible does not exactly encourage people to maintain the important distinction!

The bottom line is that the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament according to the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible are accepted by all Christians as undisputed Scripture. While some accept the Apocrypha, it is best to follow the practice of Jerome and the Reformers and read those books but not treat them as inspired Scripture. That accounts for the Old Testament. What about the New?

THE NEW TESTAMENT

At first, the church’s Bible was the Old Testament as interpreted by Jesus and His Apostles, who were authorized by Jesus to hand on the Good News about Jesus in its definitive form after His ascension to Heaven. An Apostle had to be someone who was an eyewitness of the Resurrection—starting of course with the eleven surviving Disciples. Paul was qualified by having seen the risen Lord on the road to Damascus.

At first, the living voice of the Apostles was sufficient as a guide to understanding the Hebrew Bible and its witness to Christ. As the church spread and not all congregations had a resident Apostle, the first New Testament documents came about with Paul writing letters to churches he was not able to visit at the moment, either dealing with problems or issues they were facing (e.g., Galatians, the Corinthian letters) or giving them systematic teaching (Romans, Ephesians). Churches kept these letters and even shared them (Col. 4:16). By the sixties of the First Century, it is clear that no less an authority than Peter was thinking of them as part of Scripture alongside the Old Testament (2 Pet. 3:16). By the middle of the First Century there were written Gospels. Luke, writing about AD 60, makes it clear that he was not the first to write one (Luke 1:1-4). As the original Apostles neared the end of their lives and realized that Jesus might not return until after they were gone, they became concerned that the church needed to have their teaching in permanent form. So Peter promised to be “diligent that at any time after my departure you will be able to call these things to mind” (2 Pet. 1:15).

As a result of this process, by the end of the First Century the churches were using a collection of such writings by Apostles or those writing under their direct supervision (e.g., Mark, Luke) as Scripture alongside the Hebrew Bible. The Apostolic Fathers are the first generation of leaders after the Apostles themselves: men like Ignatius of Antioch, Clement of Rome, Papias, and Polycarp. In their own writings, they are already citing most of our New Testament, including the four canonical Gospels (and no others) as Scripture. Impressively, they make no argument for the Scriptural status of these works, showing that it had already been accepted without controversy by most of the churches in that day. It is important to know this, because skeptics often point out that there was no definitive list of books accepted by everyone as part of the New Testament and identical to the one we have today until the Fourth Century. But the fact is that for all practical purposes a functioning canon pretty close to the one we use today was in place by the end of the First Century AD.

Why did it take until the Fourth Century for the canon to be completely settled and finally closed? There were a few books for which a universal consensus was slower to form. For example, Hebrews is unlike most of the other Epistles in not stating its author. Was it by Paul or one of his associates? Some people were not sure. Revelation was hard to understand. (It still is!) Second and Third John were so small that they may have gotten lost in the shuffle. Then there were a couple of early writings, such as The Shepherd of Hermas and The Didache that some people considered including. Finally, in 367 AD, Athanasius in a letter is the first to give a list which is exactly the same one we use today.[1] By the end of the century with the acceptance of Jerome’s Latin “Vulgate” translation, the New-Testament canon was closed.

CRITERIA OF CANONICITY

How did the church arrive at our list of twenty-seven New-Testament books? It was accomplished through an informal process of consensus building. We don’t have minutes of the deliberations, and there was no one council where the leaders set down and worked out what the canon was going to be anyway. But there were four important criteria that were used in the sifting process: apostolicity, universality, orthodoxy, and potency. 1. Apostolicity: was the book written by an Apostle or by a close associate of an Apostle working as it were under his supervision, under the umbrella of his apostolic authority? 2. Universality: was the book accepted everywhere and by everyone? (This took the longest to fall into place.) 3. Orthodoxy: did the book teach the Gospel as it had been understood since the beginning, since apostolic times? Did it teach “the faith once delivered to the saints?” (Jude 1:3). 4. Potency: Did the book impress itself on the conscience of the church as coming with the power of the Holy Spirit?

Books that passed all four tests were accepted with confidence. All but a handful of our New Testament books, and no others, had already found such acceptance by the end of the First Century. When there were questions, such as the authorship of Hebrews, universal acceptance took a little longer. But the canonization of a collection of apostolic writings that would become the New Testament was given impetus by the Apostles themselves, as with Peter’s attribution of Scriptural authority to the writings of Paul. The early Christians were the only ones in a position to make the call, and there is no good reason to think they got it wrong. There is simply no other document with a credible claim to having passed all four tests that they could have included. The Shepherd of Hermas and The Didache never claimed to be by Apostles, and the so-called apocryphal Gospels were all written far too late (Second-Century or later).[2]

CONCLUSION

Some people love to ask, “What if we discovered a manuscript of a long-lost Epistle, like Paul’s Epistle to the Laodiceans or the missing letter to Corinth?” Well, what if we did? It would be a very interesting discovery, no doubt; but how could we ever at this distance in time be certain of its authenticity? It is probably too late for any new books to be accepted in any case. The ship of the canon sailed over sixteen hundred years ago. Besides, it is a purely hypothetical question which should not stop us from using the real Bible we actually have, the one that the whole church has accepted as being from God for two thousand years. The bottom line is that we have no sound reason not to accept it too.

[1] F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove , Il.: InterVarsity Press, 1988), p. 208.

[2] For further information on the formation of the canon see Paul Copan, “How Do You Know You’re not Wrong?” Responding to Objections that Leave Christian Speechless (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005), pp. 218-40.

About the Author

Donald T. Williams is a Lecturer at Summit Ministries, Professor at Francis Schaeffer Studies.org, and Past President at the International Society of Christian Apologetics – ISCA