Selling over 80 million copies, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code ignited a worldwide controversy. It advanced the claim made by some skeptics that the Bible is a purely artificial collection of books, perhaps tainted by conspiracy and power plays of powerful religious figures, backed financially by the Roman Emperor Constantine. (AD 272-337) Here’s how one passage of The Da Vinci Code reveals the plot:
“Who chose which gospels to include?” Sophie asked.
“Aha!” Teabing burst in with enthusiasm. “The fundamental irony of Christianity! The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great.”
The DaVinci Code is a work of fiction. It is as nearly fictitious to believe that in early Christianity there was a massive array of documents which vied for attention and authority of the church. A powerful group of bishops, as the story is told, gathered under Constantine and put a swift stop to it all by publishing a list of the letters they liked and systematically wiping out any dissent. Consequently, the church was left with a set of writings chosen with an arbitrary and politically controlled process.
How can we be confident that the sixty-six books of the Bible are the ones God wanted? How did the Bible come to be formed? The process used for discerning which books would be included in the Bible is known as canonization. Canon comes from a Greek word meaning “rule” or “measuring stick,” referring to the writings which became the “rule” or “measuring stick” of Scripture.
Old Testament Canon
The process of establishing an authoritative canon of the Old Testament began with Moses (approx. BC 1440):
So Moses wrote down this law and gave it to the Levitical priests, who carried the ark of the covenant of the Lord, and to all the elders of Israel…After Moses finished writing in a book the words of this law from beginning to end, he gave this command to the Levites who carried the ark of the covenant of the Lord…
Deuteronomy 31:9, 24-25
Starting from Moses, the books of the Old Testament (OT) were written and collected for the next thousand years, ending with the prophet Malachi. (BC 420) The thirty-nine books of the OT were well established by the time of Jesus. The Savior, himself, declared:
For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.
Matthew 5:18
In addition, the first-century Jewish historian Josephus (AD 37-100) offers a list of OT books accepted by the Jews which matches our current collection. He writes, “For although such long ages have now passed, no one has ventured neither to add, or to remove, or to alter a syllable.”
There are other layers of evidence, as well. What is key to recognize is that the writers of the New Testament (NT) frequently quote the OT without any dispute over the boundaries of the OT canon. In fact, there is no instance anywhere that a NT author cites a book as Scripture that is not in our current thirty-nine book canon of the OT.
New Testament Canon
As in the OT, when the books of the NT were accepted, Christians did not select them with a choosing finger but received them with an open hand.
Over and over again when the early church fathers wrote about which books were included, they used language such as “we received” and “these books were handed down.”
Greg Gilbert, Why Trust the Bible?
This point is vital. They did not “choose” which books to canonize from a large group of undifferentiated books. Rather, each generation began with a group of authoritative books that they had inherited from the previous generation and which that generation in turn had inherited from the generation before them all the way back to the apostles themselves.
The writers of the NT claimed to write with a God-given authority. John declares in his gospel:
The man who saw it has given testimony, and his testimony is true. He knows that he tells the truth, and he testifies so that you also may believe.
John 19:35
Paul insists that his words were “the word of God:”
And we also thank God continually because, when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as a human word, but as it actually is, the word of God, which is indeed at work in you who believe.
1 Thessalonians 2:13
By AD 68, the year Peter was martyred by Nero, there were a group of letters which were already acknowledged as Scripture on par with the OT, itself:
…just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.
2 Peter 3:15-16
Similarly, Paul writes around AD 63, citing the gospel of Luke as Scripture to Timothy:
For Scripture says, “Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain,” and “The worker deserves his wages.”
1 Timothy 5:18
Papias, a leader in the early church, writing as early as AD 110 gives evidence that the apostle John accepted Matthew, Mark and Luke as Gospels, as well as writing one of his own.
After the apostles died, there was a core collection of books functioning as Scripture. This is given historical confirmation when in 1740 a writing called the Muratorian Fragment was discovered. It revealed that most of the NT books were already recognized and accepted as Scripture perhaps by the middle of the second century by the church. This document can be traced back to an apostolic connection.
- The apostle John died around AD 95.
- The Muratorian Fragment was written about A.D. 150-170.
- Polycarp (AD 69-155), a disciple of the Apostle John, refers to the Fragment himself.
This writing shows a line of connection two generations from the apostles. The early Christians coalesced around the NT books remarkably early. Generally speaking, this core would have included the four gospels, Acts, thirteen epistles of Paul, Hebrews, 1 Peter, 1 John, and Revelation. Books that were “disputed” tended to be the smaller books such as 2 Peter, Jude, James, and 2-3 John. Despite these questions, each of these seven books was eventually accepted.
Disputed Books
Why were some books disputed? Around the middle of the second century there were two categories of letters being circulated among churches:
- letters which were good but not written or authorized by the apostles
- letters which were reported to have been from the apostles but were not
The church needed to clarify which of the books would be part of the canon. To do this they asked two main questions:
Question # 1: Was the book written or authorized by an apostle? The idea was profoundly simple and powerful: Not just anyone could write about Jesus or give Scripture and expect the church to recognize it as such. No, that level of authority was reserved for those whom Jesus himself had specifically appointed apostles and for a select few close companions of the apostles. For example, though Mark was not an apostle, he wrote his gospel from the knowledge he gained out of his companionship and interaction with Peter.
One interesting thing to notice here is how so many would-be Scripture authors, in the second century and beyond, tried to fool the church by slapping the names of apostles and other first-century followers of Jesus onto their documents! (e.g., Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Peter, Letter of Paul to the Corinthians, etc.) Why did they do that? It is simple. They knew they didn’t have a chance of being recognized as authoritative unless they could pass off their books as originating with an apostle or an apostolic companion. So, the church needed to verify that the disputed books had apostolic authority.
Question # 2: Was it from the first century? This was closely related to the first test. To put it simply, in order for a book to have an apostle’s authority, it would have to be old, dating to the first century. No newbies need apply. Books written more recently than that simply didn’t qualify because the apostles were all dead by the turn of the second century. Antiquity, therefore, didn’t assure canonicity, but a lack of antiquity immediately prevented it.
In addition to the questions above, the church also asked how widely had the books been circulated among the churches and did the content square with the received theology coming from the apostles. Because they did this, they were able to weed out bogus contenders.
Bogus Letters
So, with the books that did not make the cut, what are we missing? Here are some examples which will put your fears to rest that you are not missing out on some great inspiration:
The Gospel of James, dated around AD 150, tells of a skeptical woman who doubts Mary’s character-defining purity. Without warning Mary turns red-hot, sends out a flame like the Human Torch and burns the woman’s hand off. Here is the woman’s description:
Woe for my lawlessness and the unbelief that made me test the living God. Look, my hand is falling away from me and being consumed in fire.
Fortunately for her, the touch of baby Jesus is all it takes to restore her lost body part.
The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, not written by the apostle Matthew, claims that the child Jesus visits with his mother in a cave where the holy duo encounter dragons. Here is how it reportedly went down:
And, lo, suddenly there came forth from the cave many dragons; and when the children saw them, they cried out in great terror. Then Jesus went down from the bosom of His mother, and stood on His feet before the dragons; and they adored Jesus, and thereafter retired.
From the Gospel of Thomas we are treated to stories of a mischievous and youthful Jesus who makes clay birds and turns them into real ones. He also lets it be known that he is not to be messed with as he curses and even kills children who try to give him a hard way to go.
I think the early church fathers were on solid grounds to axe these and others like them from the NT canon.
In conclusion, New Testament scholar F.F. Bruce wrote:
The New Testament books did not become authoritative for the Church because they were formally included in a canonical list; on the contrary, the Church included them in her canon because she already regarded them as divinely inspired, recognizing their innate worth and general apostolic authority, direct or indirect.
Story of Grace 