Every week that you walk into this church you hear me say something that actually begs a very big question that deserves to be answered. For example, I am going to tell you right now to take your Bibles, or your smart phone, or your tablet and [Turn to II Timothy 3]. Then as we do every week we read a passage from the Bible. This particular passage says this, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” (2 Timothy 3:16-17, ESV)
When those words were written sometime in the second half of the 1st century the only scripture that was known to the Apostle Paul who wrote these words at the time was the Hebrew Bible or what we call “The Old Testament.” It would be almost a century after the death of Jesus, before the concept of a Christian Bible would begin to emerge. It would be almost 3 centuries later that the first full Bible was bound together, but this book forms the basis of everything we talk about every week.
We do beg the question, “Why this book? What makes it so special? How did we get it? Why should we trust it? How did some books get in and some books not and who made the decision?”
Many people just think that these decisions were made by some kind of elected church council who basically selected these books on their own personal whim. Others believe these books just happened to be collected without any special qualification by which they would be judged worthy to be included in scripture. Neither of those ideas would be correct.
The question remains, “Why this book?” Why these 66 books within this book? Why not 65 or 67? How did these 66 makes the cut and who decided they made the cut?
We are beginning a series of messages today that we are calling “Unearthing Truth.” In this little 3-week series we are going to be answering questions like, “How did we get the Bible? Why should we believe the Bible is reliable? What are some specific proofs that the Bible, indeed, is reliable in every area that it touches?” More specifically, today we are going to deal with what is known as the “canon” of scripture.
Every book has a text, but not every book has a canon. Only a book like the Bible, which is in reality a collection of books, has a canon. The word “canon” comes from a Greek word which literally means, “reed.” Back in biblical days a reed was used kind of like a straight ruler is used today. It was used to measure something. So a canon denotes a straight rod, or a rule, or the criteria by which something can be measured to see whether or not it fits a particular category.
The Bible is actually a book of books. It is a collection of books into a single book, which is why it is called “The Bible.” The English word “Bible” comes from the name of the papyrus or byblos reed that was used for making scrolls and books. Because they were made from byblos reeds, books came to be known as “Bibles.” The writings of the Old and New Testament have been considered so sacred and so special that they have been given the unique name of “The Bible.”
The question remains, “Why should this book be the Bible? Why should the church accept this book as the Bible? Actually, the question comes down to this – Did the Bible give birth to the church or did the church give birth to the Bible? Our Key Take Away will answer the question – The Bible is God’s truth revealed to and received by the church
A few weeks ago a young man came up and asked me a question, believe it or not, that no one had ever asked me before in my ministry. He said, “I have a question I would like to ask you. How did we get our Bible?’” I laughed and told him I was going to do a series answering that question. Today, I am going to give you the answer. We are going to do it by asking three questions.
I. What Is The Bible?
As I have already stated the Bible is a collection of 66 books united by a common theme. The amazing thing about the Bible is it was written over a period of 1500 years, by more than 40 different authors, living on 3 different continents (Asia, Africa, and Europe) and that these books should be collected, agreed upon, and accepted as the Word of God is something only God himself could have done. That is why there is one thing anybody can agree on – there is no other book in the world like the Bible.
The Bible is divided into two parts - the Old Testament and the New Testament. The word “testament” means “covenant” and in the Bible a covenant refers to a divine promise. Even though they are distinct, they are not contradictory. Contrary to popular opinion there is no difference between the Old Testament God and the New Testament God. You need to understand this, because the Old Testament is not out of date and the New Testament is not Plan B. There is certainly a division in time between the Old and New Testament (in fact there is a gap of about 400 years between them), but there is not a division in theme.[1]
The Old and New Testaments are like two sides of the same coin. They are like two halves of a sentence – they both go together. A good way to remember it is this –
The New is in the Old concealed
The Old is in the New revealed
There are several other things to remember about the Bible. First, in the version that we have the 66 books are not arranged in chronological order. Some books that you read later than other ones are actually written earlier than the ones that come before it. The bookend books (Genesis and Revelation) are placed exactly where they need to be, because one talks about how everything began and one talks about how everything is going to end.
Also, they were not all written in the same language. Most of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew and most of the New Testament was written in Greek, but some of the Bible was written in Aramaic.
Another thing to remember is not all the books are the same kind of books. Some books are purely history. Some books are law books or legal books laying down the kind of laws that the people of God will live by. Some books are poetry. Some books are music. Some books are straight forward teaching. Some books, like the Gospels, are biography. Much of the New Testament is personal correspondence (letters written from an individual to a church) and parts or all of some books are prophecy.
In their original form, the books had no chapter or verse divisions. These slowly evolved over a period of about 700 years and the first complete Bible to have chapter and verse divisions was the Geneva Bible published in 1560. At least, when we refer to “The Bible” you have a basic understanding of the book we are talking about. Now we come to the greater question.
II. Where Did The Bible Come From?
Because there are two testaments we have to deal with how we got both of them. Obviously, we must begin with the first testament. How did we get the Old Testament?
From the biblical evidence we believe that Moses wrote the first five books of the Old Testament and he began to write about 1450BC. By the time of Moses, human writing was highly developed. Archeologists have discovered writings on stone called “inscriptions” and on clay tablets using a wedge-form of writing called “cuneiform.” He wrote these books in his native language of Hebrew, probably writing them on animal hides that were rolled up into scrolls.
By revelation, God spoke to Moses and by inspiration, Moses wrote what God wanted him to write. For example, we read in Exodus 24:4: “And Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord.” (Exodus 24:4, ESV)
When God authorized the writing of a manuscript and the people of God recognized it as being from God it was carefully preserved.
We read this in the Book of Deuteronomy: When Moses had finished writing the words of this law in a book to the very end, Moses commanded the Levites who carried the ark of the covenant of the Lord, ‘Take this Book of the Law and put it by the side of the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, that it may be there for a witness against you.’” (Deuteronomy 31: 24-26, ESV)
All that Moses had written was carefully placed in the Ark of the Covenant. In effect, it is the first library we read about in the Bible.
As Israel’s history continued additional books were added to the books of Moses. The writing of all of the Hebrew Scriptures would not be completed until 420 BC with the Book of Malachi. These scriptures were later divided into a three-fold division (the law, the prophets, and the writings).
But there was a problem. Skins wear out and scrolls dry up, so during the following years a special group of priests called “scribes” was founded. Their sole responsibility was to make new copies of the scriptures as the older copies wore out. Eventually, rather than copying the scriptures on other animal skins, it would be copied on papyrus. These copies would be rolled up in the form of a scroll.
The question arises, “How do we know the copies are as reliable as the original autograph?” Special rules were adopted directing the scribes in exactly how they were to copy the scriptures. For example, whenever they would come to the covenant name of God which we know as “Yahweh” or the English translation “Jehovah” they were required to wash their hands, use a special brush or pen dedicated only to writing that name, and then wash their hands again after finishing writing that word and using another pen to continue writing. They were so careful to copy the words exactly they even devised a special means to count the number of words on a single panel to determine if the text had been copied accurately.
That raises another question, “What was done with the older manuscript which was called the ‘exemplar’ once a new copy had been made?” No one had the authority to destroy it, because they believed it was the Word of God so their solution was to place the manuscripts in clay jars and then bury them. Most of us have heard of one of the greatest archeological discoveries in history, in 1947, when a clay jar containing the oldest extant manuscript copies of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament were discovered that were about 1000 years old. What is amazing is the entire Book of Isaiah was found in those manuscripts and compared to the English version we have in our Bible today is 99% exactly the same.
That still raises another question, “How do we know that the Old Testament that we have is the Old Testament that they wrote?” We know it, because it is the same Old Testament that Jesus quoted from. When Jesus referred to the Old Testament, He used that same threefold division.
“Then he said to them, ‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.’” (Luke 24:44, ESV)
But that raises still a bigger question, “Why should we accept the Old Testament as God’s Word?” The simple reason is this – because Jesus did. Jesus quoted verbatim from the Old Testament nearly 40 times from 13 different books. He accepted without question that its history was reliable. It was the only body of teaching, which He ever gave His approval. He acknowledged it alone had complete and total authority on every subject it addressed, even saying, “The scripture cannot be broken.” (John 10:35, ESV)
In short, He made it crystal clear that He accepted the entire Old Testament as being the Word of God.
What do we know for sure about the Old Testament? First of all, our Old Testament is based on the same Hebrew Old Testament that was written and accepted by the Jews. Secondly, it is the same Old Testament that Jesus used and affirmed as the unbreakable Word of God.
What about the New Testament? There is a contrast between the amount of time it took to write the Old Testament and the time it took to write the New Testament. It required nearly 1000 years before the Old Testament was completed. It only took about 50 years for the New Testament to be completed. We believe a disciple named John, somewhere around 90 A.D., completed the final books of the New Testament.
There is no question that the central figure as well as the theme of the entire New Testament is Jesus Christ. The New Testament consists of 27 books all of which were written somewhere between around 50 A.D. to 90 A.D. The first four books are known as The Gospels, which contain the written accounts of the teaching and ministry of Jesus Christ. All the rest of the books interpret His life and teaching and explain how to apply it to daily life.
Jesus died around the year 30 A.D. so at least 20-30 years there were no written accounts called “The Gospels.” In the early years of the church the Christian message was transmitted orally. It was mainly shared through the recollections of the Apostles, (meaning people who had actually been with Jesus and others who had witnessed His life and heard His teaching). So for roughly 10-20 years, you were hearing firsthand accounts of what happened.
Since the Apostles were going to grow old and pass away like everyone else, it became necessary to have written accounts of the life of Jesus, so the facts would not get distorted over time. Some of the Apostles and their associates wrote the accounts that we now know as “The Gospels.” Toward the end of the 1st century these Gospel accounts were gathered together into a single collection called “The Gospel” and roughly about the same time the letters written by Paul and others were gathered together into another collection. Originally, these New Testament books were circulated as single units of composition. Most of them were written on scrolls. Later, these would be collected together and bound together as a single volume known as a “codex.” Even though these books were written before A.D. 100 it took a while for these books to be recognized as scripture. The question is, “How did that come to be?”
Over time certain tests were applied to these individual books to see whether or not they should be recognized as scripture. There were three criteria these books had to meet before they would be affirmed as a part of God’s Word. The first is what we will call – apostolicity.[2] What this means is every book either had to be written by an apostle (that is by one of Jesus’ twelve closest followers) or written during the age of the Apostles (that is before the last of the Apostles had died) so no book in the New Testament is more than one person removed either from an Apostle who spent three years with Jesus or an authoritative eye witness. That would corroborate what was written down. That is why we read in Acts 2:42 that the early church, “Devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching.” (Acts 2:42, ESV)
The second criteria is what we will call “catholicity”. Catholicity has nothing to do with the Roman Catholic Church. “Catholic” simply means “universal.” The books that were accepted into the New Testament were only those books that believers throughout the parts of the world where Christianity had spread were in agreement on the inspiration and the authority of those books and recognized them as divinely authoritative.
The last criteria was “orthodoxy.” In other words, every book had to be faithful to the teaching of Jesus and to the Apostles. They had to be in keeping with the apostolic faith and they had to be doctrinally sound.
Part of their guide to determine this was the Old Testament, because the early church believed that the 27 books included in the New Testament were the documents that best exhibited the continuity between the prophetic role of the Old Testament and their fulfillment in the life of Jesus in the New Testament.
What is important to understand and grasp is this. The church did not give birth to the Bible; the Bible gave birth to the church. The books that are in the Bible are not to be considered authoritative, because they are included in the Bible. They are included in the Bible because they are considered to be authoritative. Though it was a long process that took many years, the Bible as we now have it was finally, totally, and completely bound together in 367 A.D. which again, makes the Bible so unbelievably amazing that a book of books written over 1500 years, in 1800 years, came together as one book that has now been accepted for over 2000 years.
III. Why Is The Bible Important?
Why does any of this matter? If the Bible is just another book it doesn’t, but there are two words we have used already that tells us why it is important. The first is the word “revelation.” It comes from a Latin word which means to “draw back the curtain.” It was a theater term, because only when the curtain was pulled back could you see what was behind it. The authors’ of the Bible believed and said their writings were God revealing himself and the truth about himself, which otherwise we would never know.
The second word is the word “inspiration.” It goes back to the verse that we read at the very beginning where Paul said, “All scripture is inspired by God.” We believe that God used people to write these books, and God used people to collect these books, but in these books we have exactly the books God wanted us to have that contain exactly the information He wanted us to know. As one of the Apostles, himself, Peter, put it, “Knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. (2 Peter 1:20-21, ESV)
To put it another way, God revealed the truth. Humans recorded the truth. The church recognized the truth. Or to put it still one other way. This book was divinely communicated, providentially collected, and spiritually commended.
To this very day whenever a British Sovereign is crowned, as the Bible is place in his or her hands these words are uttered, “This book is the most valuable thing the world affords” and it really is, because it was signed, sealed, and delivered by God himself.
[1] John Blanchard, Why Believe The Bible?, p5.
[2] The following categories are adopted from Craig Blamburg, Can We Still Believe The Bible?, pp. 58ff.