No Bad Questions Q&A: How Do We Know The Right Books Are in the Bible?

Hey. Pastor Jeff Bradford here from Christ the King Presbyterian Church, and I'm answering yet again this week a question in response to the questions at ctkrally.org email address that we've created for people to wrestle with questions they have around faith.

This week's question goes like this: How do we know the right books made it into our bibles? Last week, we looked at the question of the reliability of scripture with errors, especially in transcription as it passed down over centuries. Can we trust our bibles that way? This sort of builds on the same question. If we have reliable books, how do we know they're the right ones? And this was popularized, of course, by Dan Brown, the Da Vinci Code, and other writings over the last several years. A lot of people asking this question.

The New Testament Canon

So this question really is a question about the New Testament. To be really honest, there's a lot of the formation of our Old Testament that's pretty clear and set apart, and there's not a whole lot of controversy about that. You may have noticed if you pick up some bibles that they have a section called the Apocrypha, or you may have read the pseudepigrapha. Apocrypha books are in a lot of Catholic bibles. Those come from the intertestamental period from the fourth to the first century BC, and they include the books one, two, three, four Maccabees, Judith and Tobit, Ecclesiasticus, the wisdom of Solomon, and a few other shorter books. There's about 60 books called pseudepigrapha that are out there that were written and ascribed to different people in Old Testament history. But none of those books was ever really accepted in by the Hebrew community at the time of Jesus in the centuries before that. The canon—or the selection of what's in our Old Testament—is pretty established.

So this question about what's in the Bible and how do we know it's the right books really focuses on the New Testament and how those books became to be assembled and accepted. I will say that for most of the New Testament, most of those books, it's very clear. There's not been a whole lot of debate around that.

There are seven books that did trigger some debate: Hebrews, because nobody knows who wrote Hebrews. James, because of his apparent contradiction with Paul regarding Old Testament law, and Martin Luther famously contested that. Second Peter, because it's a very different style than first Peter. Second and third John, and Jude were so short but have some stylistic differences from first John or John's gospel. And Revelation, of course, has puzzled a lot of people.

There's always a question: what about the books that didn't make it into the canon? Every couple of years, there's a Newsweek or Time article about the gospel of Thomas or other books like that. There's a book called the Canon Debate that I'd point you to by Lee MacDonald. And he says there are about 30 book lists out there in the centuries right after Jesus' resurrection. And they include the 27 books that comprise our New Testament, and some of them include other books dating from the second century to the sixteenth century AD.

14 of those books are mentioned once. A couple of times, three books are mentioned three times in those book lists: the wisdom of Solomon, the Epistle of Barnabas, and the Apocalypse of Peter. And lastly, the Shepherd of Hermes is listed about five times out of those 30 lists.

But the early patristic fathers starting in the second century began to refer to the New Testament writings as a collective group, a collective authoritative teaching recognized as the canon of scripture. By the late second century, there's a Muratorian canon listed 20 undisputed books in the New Testament plus Hebrews that made it 21. Irenaeus, the church father in the second century, takes it for granted that all Christians celebrate and recognize the four gospels. And then, a lot of the writings that come from the Gnostic period of the church, the third through the fifth century, including the Gospel of Thomas and other writings, were never really significantly considered by the church as a whole.

If you look at church history, you can read the church councils of the third, fourth, and fifth centuries AD. And by that time, there was a real sense of what is established around the formation of the church. And that was widely accepted. There's not a whole lot of smoke and mirrors and backroom dealing that happened in this. It's not really as big a deal among scholars as it is among popular reading and culture.

So it's not really a concern. What you have in your bible are books that have over time clearly been found to be reliable, consistent with one another, obviously challenging in how we read them against one another, but recognized by the church throughout history. So hope that's helpful to you. Keep the questions coming.

I'll try to keep answering one a week. Thanks very much.