The canon: which books are Scripture

A measuring rod

The last lesson called Scripture the word of God. But which books does that mean? Open a Bible and one of the first pages lists them: in a Protestant Bible, sixty-six books, from Genesis to Revelation. Who drew up that list, and why these books and not others?

The list is called the canon, from the Greek kanōn (κανών), a straight rod for measuring, and so a rule or standard. Paul uses the word in that sense when he blesses "all who walk by this rule" (Galatians 6:16). In the second century Irenaeus called the summary of faith the church had received from the apostles the ‘rule of truth’, and by the fourth century the word had come to mean the list of books the church received as Scripture. The canon is the measuring rod by which the church tests its faith.

The Scriptures of Jesus and the apostles

Jesus already had a Bible. After his resurrection he spoke of everything "written about Me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms" (Luke 24:44). Many take these as the three parts of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Law, the Prophets and the Writings, with the Psalms standing for the third.

Jesus also spoke of the righteous blood shed "from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar" (Matthew 23:35). Abel's death is told in Genesis. The stoning of Zechariah son of Jehoiada in the temple courtyard is told in Chronicles (2 Chronicles 24:20-21), which in later Jewish order usually comes last. So many interpreters hear in Jesus' words the martyrs of the whole Bible, from its first book to its last. Who this Zechariah was has been discussed since ancient times, as Jerome's comments show Jerome, and how settled the order of the books was in Jesus' day is uncertain, so the point is a suggestion rather than a proof.

Paul counted it Israel's great privilege that "they have been entrusted with the very words of God" (Romans 3:2). Soon the apostles' own writings were standing beside those words.

For the Scripture says, "Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain," and, "The worker is worthy of his wages."

1 Timothy 5:18

The first saying is Deuteronomy 25:4. The second matches, almost word for word, a saying of Jesus in Luke 10:7. Many interpreters conclude that a word of the Lord is being quoted here as Scripture beside the law of Moses. Second Peter goes further and sets Paul's letters beside the rest of the Scriptures.

Our beloved brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom God gave him. He writes this way in all his letters, speaking in them about such matters. Some parts of his letters are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction.

2 Peter 3:15-16

Matthew Henry draws the lesson that the twisting of some readers "is no reason why St. Paul's epistles, or any other part of the Scriptures, should be laid aside" Matthew Henry.

How the church recognised the New Testament

No council sat down one day and chose the New Testament. The churches read the apostles' letters in worship and passed them on to one another (Colossians 4:16), and over several generations they discerned which writings carried the apostles' witness. Three questions mattered most.

Traces of this process survive. The Muratorian Fragment, an early list usually dated to the late second century (some date it to the fourth), allows that the Shepherd of Hermas may be read, but not publicly in church, because it was written after the apostles' time The Muratorian Fragment. Around 325 Eusebius sorted the books into those accepted everywhere and those disputed, placing James, Jude, 2 Peter and 2 and 3 John among the disputed books, though known to most Eusebius, Church History 3.25. The Easter letter Athanasius of Alexandria wrote in 367 is the earliest surviving list to name exactly the twenty-seven books we have; he called them "fountains of salvation" Athanasius, Festal Letter 39. The Council of Carthage in 397 confirmed the same New Testament for the African churches Council of Carthage.

Different Old Testaments, one New Testament

On the Old Testament the churches still differ. The books in question are Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and the additions to Esther and Daniel.

The Catholic Church and the Orthodox churches receive these books as Scripture. They point out that the books belonged to the Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint, widely used in the early church; that many Fathers quoted them as Scripture; and that ancient lists such as Carthage's include them. Catholics call them deuterocanonical, and the Council of Trent defined them as canonical in 1546 Council of Trent, Decree on the Canonical Scriptures. The Orthodox, following the Septuagint, receive a few more, and Orthodox writers describe the standing of these books in somewhat different ways.

Protestant churches hold that the Old Testament Jesus and the apostles received was the Hebrew Bible entrusted to Israel. They count it as thirty-nine books and call the others the Apocrypha, though they differ in how they use them. The Church of England's Thirty-Nine Articles, citing Jerome, say of them that "the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine" Thirty-Nine Articles, Art. 6. Luther's German Bible printed them in a section of their own between the Testaments, as books not equal to Scripture yet good to read Luther, Preface to the Apocrypha. The Westminster Confession is stricter and treats them as no more than other human writings Westminster Confession, ch. 1.

The traditions also describe the church's part differently. Protestants usually say that the church recognised a canon God had given: Scripture's authority rests on God, its author, not on the church's testimony, and some liken the church to sheep who know their shepherd's voice (John 10:27). Catholics and the Orthodox agree that the church did not invent the canon, but teach that the church, guided by the Spirit, also received authority to discern and define it, because Scripture and the church that handed it on belong together.

For all these differences, Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Christians receive the same twenty-seven books of the New Testament. Our Bible is a gift, read, copied and guarded by generations of believers, and the point of learning its history is to receive these books as the word of God. For more on how the Bible came together, see How did we get the Bible?, and on the writings left out, What about the 'other gospels'?.

Practice