Church History

• Our Bible is an inspired canon of the 39 received books of the Old Testament and the 27 books of the New Testament.

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The combined 66 books of the Old and New Testament form the orthodox belief which was founded upon the inspired moving of God among man and creation. What were the events and movements that were influential in the recognition of the canonical books? Furthermore, what methodology was used by the applicable individuals and councils that deemed these 66 books the inspired Word of God? In her work titled, “The Establishment of Christian Orthodoxy of the Holy Bible”, Kathy McFarland gives us a very in depth understanding of the foundation of orthodoxy and the establishment of canon.

I will begin by reviewing her thought about the foundation of orthodoxy. McFarland states, “Both Christians and pagans were shocked by the heretical ideas that were developing by the late second-century. Irenaeus, a Christian author who represented the 'mainstream', non-gnostic Christianity, wrote a book attacking Gnosticism because it denigrated the material world, removing the ability for God's active interest from being expressed, and separated the God of the Old Testament from the God of the New. Tertullian agreed with Irenaeus that the Christian faith originated with Jesus and established a standard which belief could be tested.

As Tertullian put it in his Prescription against the heretics, "It is clear that all doctrine which agrees with the apostolic churches - those moulds and original sources of the faith - must be considered true, as undoubtedly containing what those churches received from the apostles, the apostles from Christ, Christ from God. And all doctrine must be considered false which contradicts the truth of the churches and apostles of Christ and God. "This apostolic principle became extremely important in later centuries as the orthodox standards of faith were established. Now we have an understanding of the foundation of orthodoxy, I will now delve into McFarland thoughts on the establishment of the canon.

“Christians possessed the writings by the apostles and their disciples that they believed expressed the rule of faith in written form by the time of Irenaeus and Tertullian, Most of the local churches within the Roman world agreed to which writings should be included in the NT canon by the second century; however, this agreement was not formalized until the third council of Carthage in 397. Most scholars believe that the New Testament canon was completed by A. D. 100, if not earlier. They would read these writings in the practice of their faith as they met, and thought of these writings as equal to the writings the Jewish Scripture.

The Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament), was in the Canon as the New Testament began to be added over a period of 400 years. The basis for including a book in Scripture was apparent within the process of declaring the Christian Canon, and required that each addition be prophetic, authoritative, authentic, life-transforming, widely recognized as the Word of God and reliable.

Those declared inspired were of two basic categories of both eyewitness accounts of the Messiah (the Gospels), and letters from key witnesses written to various groups of believers (the Epistles). Concentrated effort was made to establish the authoritative collection of inspired books of the Bible into the Canon during the fourth century; however, there had been earlier attempts to list the acceptable books. The Muratorian Canon had listed all the books of the Bible except for 1 John, 1 and 2 Peter, Hebrews and James around A. D. 180, and the Syriac Version of the Canon lists all of the books except Revelation in the third century.

The apocryphal writings were seen as less than inspired by the fourth century, and many of the books previously held in high regard were beginning to disappear, as the formal establishment of Canon began. Both the East and the West Churches established their Canons in the fourth century on the criterion of maintaining a connection to the apostles or their immediate disciples in the collection of writings.

Athanasius of Alexandria listed the complete 27 books of the New Testament for the Eastern Church, while Jerome listed just 39 Old Testament books with our present-day 27 New Testament ones for the West Church. The resulting Vulgate Bible, translated by Jerome to Latin, was used throughout the Christian world. The Synods of Carthage confirmed the 27 books of the New Testament of our present day Bibles in 397 and 418.

• We have taken a look into the thoughts of Kathy McFarland. Now let’s take a journey into the mind of Sam A. Smith, the author of “Important Truths About the Bible, Part 2: How and Where Did We Get Our Bible? Smith makes the following observations about the canonicity of the books of the Bible: Canonicity refers to a book’s status, as to whether or not it should be regarded as divinely authoritative (inspired) and thus worthy to be included within the canon (the group of writings recognized as the Word of God).

Perhaps you have wondered how the early church knew which books should be regarded as part of the Bible, and which ones should be excluded (like Tobit, Judith, Baruch, the Gospel of Thomas)? Many people mistakenly think that some group of church officials at the council of Nicia in A. D. 325 sat down and voted on which books they thought should be included and that’s how we got our Bible. But that simply isn’t the way it happened. Actually, so far as we can determine, each target group to which a portion of Scripture was addressed immediately recognized it as Scripture on a par with all other Scripture. This is true of both Old Testament and New Testament Scriptures. Note the following examples of how Scripture was immediately recognized as the Word of God by the target audience. Moses’ writings were placed beside the Ark of the Covenant (Deut. 31:24-29).

Daniel, a contemporary of Jeremiah, regarded Jeremiah’s prophetic writings as Scripture (Dan. 9:1-2 cf. Jer. 25:11). Peter recognized Paul’s writing as being on a par with the Old Testament Scriptures (2 Pet. 3:14-16). Church councils only stated the churches official recognition on the books that had long since been received, and denied equal status to more recent, spurious documents. In order to understand how we came to have the specific sixty-six books that are in our Bible we need to look at the formation of the Old Testament and New Testament canons individually. The word “canon” means “authority,” or “standard” by which other things are judged. The word “canon” when used of Scripture refers to the books deemed to be authoritative, i. e. , God’s Word. The Protestant canon contains sixty-six books. The Roman Catholic canon is longer, having added several books in the sixteenth century which were not regarded as canonical by the early church—to which effect Jerome included a notation in his Latin translation. ] Let’s look at the status of the Old Testament and New Testament canons.

The question of which books should be included in the Old Testament is fairly simple and was settled before Christ was born. Note the following. 1) Except for the Sadducees, who only accepted the books of Moses, the Jewish people regarded as Scripture the same thirty-nine books as the Protestant church today (though they had them arranged so that some books now split were combined, e. g. , 1 & 2 Samuel). 2) The Old Testament that Jesus used was essentially the same as the one used today. ) The Old Testament apocryphal books accepted by the Roman Catholic Church in the sixteenth century were never accepted as Scripture by Jesus or the Jewish people; nor did the early Church accept them. 4) Early quotations of the apocryphal books by some church fathers (Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria and Cyprian)–none of whom were Old Testament or Hebrew scholars–occurred at a time when the extent of the Old Testament canon was not well understood (especially by non-Jewish religious leaders), and some may have mistakenly thought that these books had been an accepted part of the Hebrew canon, when in fact they were not.

Concerning the New Testament canon, since the gospels and the letters that were written to the early churches were scattered over the Roman Empire, it took a bit of time for the churches to assess what they had and to weed out common letters from those received as the inspired Word of God. There was very little pressure to do this until suspicious documents began to show up in key doctrinal disputes. Then it became necessary to determine the scope of the New Testament canon.

It is extremely important to understand that the early church did not determine which books would become Scripture; they merely endeavored to recognize which books the churches had already received as Scripture, and to exclude spurious documents. Such tests weren’t arbitrary; they were derived from what the church leaders already knew about the character of Scripture from those books of undisputed authenticity. The following are some of the questions the early church used to assess the status of a document in question.

1) Does the writing claim to be inspired, and is its message consistent with other books of undisputed authenticity? 2) Is the author a recognized servant of God (an apostle, prophet, or early church leader)? 3) Are there good reasons to believe the document was written at the time and by the author from whom it purports to have originated? (In other words: Is it authentic? ) 4) Is the document factually correct? 5) Does the document claim to be authoritative (i. e. , the word of the Lord)? 6) Is the document in doctrinal agreement with other accepted books? ) Is there any evidence of fulfilled prophecy in the document? 7) Does the book have a universal character (i. e. , a message that transcends the local culture and milieu)? 8) Is the message of the document sublime (that is, based on what we know about God from other received books, can we conceive of God saying the things contained in the document)? Don’t get the idea that this exact list of questions was checked off for each and every book or document, but generally if a document was challenged; it was challenged on the grounds of one or more of the issues raised by these questions.