How did we get the Bible?

What the Bible says

The Bible was not written at one sitting. By the traditional reckoning, from Moses to the last book of the New Testament, roughly 1,500 years, kings, shepherds, fishermen, a physician and scholars wrote in different places, languages and genres. Many scholars date much of the Old Testament later, but all agree it grew over many centuries. Yet the Bible itself says these books are not merely human thought.

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for instruction, for conviction, for correction, and for training in righteousness

2 Tim 3:16

Peter says something similar about prophecy.

For no such prophecy was ever brought forth by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

2 Pet 1:21

People wrote, and God spoke. The authors' personalities and styles remain. Luke says he wrote after he had "carefully investigated everything from the beginning" (Luke 1:3). Christians believe God guided the whole process.

Jesus himself named the parts of the Old Testament. After his resurrection he told his disciples:

Everything must be fulfilled that is written about Me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms.

Luke 24:44

The Law, the Prophets and the Psalms are commonly taken as the three parts of the Jewish Scriptures, the Psalms being the largest book of the third part, the Writings; scholars debate how settled that third part was by then. Jesus received them as God's word and read them as pointing to himself.

The New Testament came after. The apostles' letters were written to be passed around. Paul asks the Colossians to make sure his letter is also read in Laodicea (Col 4:16). Second Peter puts Paul's letters beside "the rest of the Scriptures."

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 Pet 3:16

Very early, then, some apostolic writings were already being read with the weight of the Old Testament. Hebrews sums up the whole movement: God spoke through the prophets in many ways. "But in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son" (Heb 1:1-2).

The church's witness

Who decided which books belong, and how? First, the church did not produce the list at a single council. By the middle of the second century the Gospels and Paul's letters were already read in worship in many churches, and judgments about which books to trust grew out of long use. The ancient church asked roughly three questions. Does the book come from an apostle, or from someone close to the apostles' testimony? Does it agree with the faith the church had received from the beginning? Have many churches used it widely?

One spur came in the second century, when Marcion rejected the Old Testament and made his own Bible from an edited Luke and some of Paul's letters. The church judged this an error and had to say plainly what it had received. In AD 367 Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, listed in his Easter letter the twenty-seven books of our New Testament, no more and no fewer Athanasius, Festal Letter 39. Regional councils at Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) confirmed the same list.

Not every New Testament book won the same confidence at once. Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude and Revelation were debated for a long time in some regions. Some critics say the church conferred authority on the books; the churches themselves speak of recognising an authority the books already had, with different accents. Protestants stress that Scripture testifies to itself, confirmed by the Spirit. Catholics and the Orthodox hold that Scripture and the church's living tradition go together, and that the church, guided by the Spirit, discerned and authoritatively fixed the list. Neither side holds that the church stood over Scripture and chose at will.

The extent of the Old Testament is harder. The Protestant Old Testament has 39 books, the same content as the Hebrew Bible (which Jews count as 24). The Catholic Old Testament adds seven books, among them Tobit, Wisdom, Sirach and 1–2 Maccabees, making 46, and the Orthodox accept a few more. Protestants call these books the Apocrypha; Catholics call them deuterocanonical. They were in the Greek Old Testament (the Septuagint) used by the early church, so many Fathers read and quoted them, and Augustine and the North African councils counted them as canonical. Jerome, by contrast, held them useful for reading in church but not for establishing doctrine, and Protestants broadly follow him. The Catholic Church, following earlier lists such as Florence's (1442), defined them as canonical at the Council of Trent in 1546. This essay cannot settle which is right, but all three traditions confess the same Christ.

Matthew Henry summed up the value of the Bible: "The Bible is a sure guide to eternal life" Matthew Henry. The Nicene Creed confesses the Spirit, who "has spoken through the prophets" The Nicene Creed.

In the original languages

"God-breathed" in 2 Timothy 3:16 translates theopneustos (θεόπνευστος), literally "breathed out by God." It says Scripture comes from the breath of God, though not by dictation; as we saw, the authors' individuality remains.

The word for "Scripture" is graphe (γραφή), "something written." In the New Testament it usually means the Old Testament. When Peter speaks of Paul's letters alongside "the rest of the Scriptures," the word is already stretching to cover apostolic writing. "Canon" comes from the Greek kanon (κανών), a "rule" or measuring stick. Many read this to mean that the church did not judge the books; the books had become the measure of the church's faith.

Common objections

"The list was fixed by Constantine and church politicians." There is something in this: councils did involve politics, and the approval of some books was long and contested. But the Council of Nicaea in 325 did not fix the list; its subject was the deity of Christ. The Gospels had been widely read for more than 150 years before that, and the lists converged on nearly the same result in different regions over a long time.

"There were other gospels, and the church suppressed them." Writings such as the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Judas did exist. But most scholars date them, in the form we have, to the second century or later (some think Thomas keeps a few earlier sayings), distant from the apostles' testimony and teaching different things about Christ. The church rejected them by the tests of apostolic origin and the received faith. Someone who does not accept those tests may not be satisfied. Some church leaders did warn against such books, and copies were lost; today anyone can read them.

"After thousands of years of hand copying, the text must have changed completely." The manuscripts do differ, but the New Testament survives in more than 5,000 Greek manuscripts, and so many copies let scholars compare them and recover the original wording. The complete Isaiah scroll among the Dead Sea Scrolls is nearly identical to the Masoretic text a thousand years later Dead Sea Scrolls, Isaiah scroll. A few passages remain uncertain and are flagged in translations; scholars generally judge that none changes a central teaching. See Can the Bible be trusted?.

Going further

The Bible we read in our own language is part of this long handing down. Korean readers received their first Gospels in the 1880s, translated in Manchuria and Japan, and the whole Bible in 1911. God's word still reaches people through translation. Paul thanks God that the Thessalonians received the apostles' message "not as the word of men, but as it truly is, the word of God" (1 Thess 2:13).

Ask yourself: does knowing how the Bible came to be bring me closer to it? How does it sound to me that the Bible is both a human writing and God's word? Have I ever done what the Bereans did, who "examined the Scriptures every day to see if these teachings were true" (Acts 17:11)?

To read further, see Can the Bible be trusted? and How should we read the Bible?.