(This topic was chosen by one of my generous donors on Patreon. Click here to join others in supporting this ministry every month.)
It’s easy to imagine that everyone has always agreed about what belongs in the Bible. Anyone who grew up in a church that wasn’t Catholic may have never heard of any books outside the typical 66 books we’re familiar with. But not only are there some who don’t recognize the 66 books as the complete Bible, but there are many enemies of Christianity who will challenge the very authority of the Bible with claims of it being manufactured in a grand conspiracy or simply a collection of human writings that we give too much attention to.
A single article can’t possibly dig into the entire history of how we got the Bible we use today. However, I would like to give a broad overview of how we got the 66 books we use, and why Christians throughout the centuries have rejected any others.
History isn’t a mystery
The most important thing to understand is that the books of the Bible weren’t chosen at random, nor were they chosen with a specific agenda in mind. Some would claim that a specific group of powerful people came together in a dimly-lit room and conspired together to create the Bible they wanted to send out to the masses. If you remember the “Davinci Code” craze a decade ago, many people still carry the idea that the Bible we have isn’t all that’s out there.
Unfortunately for some, the actual history of how we got our Bible wouldn’t make for a very good Hollywood thriller. Instead, we can look back through history and see God guiding and protecting His word so that we can all see the truth He reveals within it.
All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16)
We can have confidence in our Bible, and what’s contained within it. Followers of Christ throughout the ages have cared enough to make sure that what we have was inspired by God Himself, rather than the thoughts of flawed humans. So let’s briefly look at why we trust the specific books in the Old and New Testaments.
How we got the 39 books of the Old Testament
This one is actually incredibly simple. Our books of the Old Testament are simply what the Jews used throughout history, called the “Hebrew Bible.” The holy words of God that they’d been protecting and preserving were clearly what God wanted Israel to have because they were His words to them. Because of that, we only use what God’s chosen people have been using before Christ came to Earth.
Although we have the same words as the Hebrew Bible, the two are arranged quite differently.
- The Hebrew Bible has only 24 books in it, compared to our 39 in the Old Testament
- Their Bible has books like Kings, Chronicles, and Samuel, while we break them up into 2 separate books (i.e. First and Second Kings)
- Likewise, our 12 “minor prophets” like Jonah and Habakkuk are all combined into a single book called “The Book of Twelve”
- Although our first 5 books of the Bible are in the same order, the rest of their books are grouped together in the categories of Former Prophets, Latter Prophets, and Writings
- Ours is grouped into History, Poetry, and Prophecy
Why the difference? It all comes down to tradition and familiarity.
Before Christ, the Jews had been scattered about. Many wanted to read and understand their sacred book, but fewer and fewer could read it in Hebrew, the original language of the Old Testament. It would be like us wanting to read the New Testament in its original Greek… we simply don’t know the language, and back then few people had the time or resources to learn a new language.
Over time, the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, the language of the day. This Greek translation eventually formed into the most popular and widely-used translation called the Septuagint (also known as the LXX). While various Greek translations didn’t always order the Old Testament into the 39 books we’re familiar with today, the Septuagint did.
As Christianity began to spread, especially within non-Jewish communities, the Greek translation became more necessary for those wanting to learn more about God. Over time, this LXX version of the Old Testament became familiar, and thus was the layout people chose to use.
When we understand history, there’s nothing sinister or suspicious about the Old Testament. The order of the books isn’t inspired by God, but the content within them absolutely is. That’s why our focus isn’t on whether the order is different, but on how amazing it is that we can read the same prophecies that Christ did when He stood up in the temple, or read the same Jewish history that Paul was so familiar with.
We’re confident in our Old Testament because we use the same writings that God has preserved throughout the centuries.
(If you’d like to read a bit more about the Septuagint, there’s a great 2-part series on the Logos blog. Check out Part 1 and Part 2.)
How we got the 27 books of the New Testament
The selection of the New Testament books isn’t as neat and tidy as the Old Testament. There was a lot of confusion and debate in the early church about what was considered “inspired by God,” what was completely made up, and what was simply written by a Christian, but not directly inspired.
Yet despite all the debate from people who criticize the Bible today, the uncertainty of the New Testament gets cleared up when we understand why Christians debated certain books, and how we ultimately concluded the 27 we have today.
But know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. (2 Peter 1:20-21)
The greatest requirement for something to be considered “inspired by God” is the author. We know that all those who truly repent of their sins and ask Christ to save them are given the same Holy Spirit. We also know that we can only speak and understand truth about God because of His work in our lives. However, that doesn’t mean that anything we say should be considered “inspired by God” in the same way, because we can mix our false understanding with the truth of God.
Instead, everything in the New Testament has “apostolic authority.” They are words written by an apostle of Jesus Christ or an eye-witness to Christ who writes under an apostle (in the case of Mark, James, Jude, and perhaps Hebrews). The writers carry the power and authority that allowed them to speak clear truth that contained no error or false understandings. Thus, Christians in the early centuries would only pay attention to those writings that carried apostolic authority.
Of course, that’s not to say that all Christians came to an immediate agreement on which books were inspired. After all, they didn’t have our benefit of being able to trace the various New Testament writings throughout history to see whether they were truly written by apostles, or whether they were created centuries later and somehow found their way into the hands of Christians who assumed they were real.
Thus even early church fathers we love and respect were known to use various writings that we now know weren’t written by apostles. So when Christians finally came together to discuss and debate which books were inspired by God, and thus had authority in our lives, they also had to trace the history of each book.
In addition to a book needing to claim some kind of authorship by an apostle, the 27 books in our New Testament are those that were clearly written in the first century.
Why does this matter?
As we’ll discuss in the next article, there are many “New Testament” writings that claim to be from an apostle, yet it’s clear they weren’t written when that apostle was alive. For example, the “Gospel of Thomas” wasn’t discovered until 1945, and historians are still debating whether it could have possibly been written while Thomas was alive. So despite claiming the correct author, there’s little reason to believe it was actually written by Thomas himself.
God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it? (Numbers 23:19)
Finally, all the books in the New Testament must pass a test that we now call the “law of noncontradiction.” This is the basic understanding that God cannot contradict Himself. God never changes, and thus He won’t say something in one area that is a clear change from what He’s said elsewhere. Understanding this law is absolutely essential for our daily Christian lives, and it’s what guided the formation of our New Testament. Despite many claims that the Bible is full of contradictions, the reality is that every word inspired by God is completely true when it was written, containing no error or contradiction.
(As an interesting note, the law of noncontradiction almost had the book of James excluded from our Bibles. At first glance, James seems to teach that we are saved by our works and faith, which is a clear contradiction of what God teaches everywhere else in the Bible. Even Martin Luther was critical of its emphasis on works and lack of mentioning anything about Christ after the first few words.)
Part of the discussion about the New Testament books also looked at what the early church fathers had used in their writings. It’s been said that if every Bible in existence were destroyed, we could still rebuild it by reading what words the early church quoted in the first few centuries. In other words, we can look at what was written by those who the apostles taught, or those who the apostles’ students taught, and see what writings they knew held authority. Of course, this doesn’t outright prove a book is inspired, but it’s another bit of evidence that gives us confidence in the 27 books we use today.
Recognized, not chosen
That’s a lot of information that only scratches the surface of why we can trust the Bible we have today. Yet despite all the various bits of information, there’s a common theme that runs through every decision Christians have made about whether a book is truly inspired: each book is recognized for the authority and inspiration it already has.
Christians didn’t get together centuries ago and cut things that didn’t agree with their agenda or were considered by many to be inspired. The books included in our Bible have clear marks of inspiration and authority, and nothing more. Those that were rejected, despite how interesting or informative they may be, didn’t have any more authority than a sermon or book written by any other Christian. Valuable, and perhaps true, but not inspired.
In other words, our books of the Bible weren’t chosen over others but were recognized for what they are.
We don’t need to fear those who cast doubts on the Bible. When we understand the care and study involved in determining what books were clearly given to us by God, we can rest in confidence that what we have is what God wants us to have. We can trust that the words within, although they may be hard to understand and even harder to follow, are meant to be our primary source of truth. We know the Bible is meant to guide our lives, and everything within those 66 books has equal authority when we properly understand what’s being said and how it all works together.
So what about the extra books in the Catholic Bible? Or those other books people thought might belong in the New Testament? We’ll tackle those next time.
