How We Got the Bible

The Church came before the New Testament.

Jesus did not hand the apostles a completed New Testament and tell them to build a Church from it. He established His Church, commissioned the apostles to preach, teach, baptize, and make disciples, and promised to remain with them. The Church was already preaching the Gospel, baptizing converts, celebrating the Lord's Supper, appointing leaders, and settling doctrinal disputes before much of the New Testament had even been written.

Paul's letters were written to churches that already existed. The Gospels were written within the life of that existing Christian community. For the first Christians, the faith was not something they discovered by opening a bound New Testament. They received it from the apostles and from the Church.

So how did Christians know which books belonged in the Bible?

The New Testament does not contain an inspired table of contents. The twenty-seven books do not give us a list saying, "These, and only these, are Scripture." Christians had to distinguish genuinely apostolic writings from other early Christian books and from writings that falsely claimed apostolic authority.

That recognition happened in the life of the Church. Christians asked whether a writing was apostolic, whether it agreed with the faith received from the apostles, and whether it was being read broadly in the churches. Over time the same twenty-seven-book New Testament we use today was recognized and received throughout the Church.

Some books were disputed.

This matters because the process was not as simple as finding twenty-seven obvious books sitting together in the first century. Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and Revelation were questioned in some places. Other Christian writings were highly respected and sometimes read in churches.

Eventually the canon became settled. In the late fourth century, councils at Rome, Hippo, and Carthage gave lists corresponding to the Catholic canon used today, including the same twenty-seven New Testament books accepted by Catholics and Protestants.

Why this mattered to me.

Jimmy Akin makes an important point in The Bible Is a Catholic Book: the Bible is not a book that simply dropped out of heaven already assembled. God gave us Scripture through real people, real history, and the life of His Church. The canon itself has a history.

That forced me to ask a question I had never taken seriously enough: If I trust the early Church when it tells me which writings belong in the New Testament, why would I assume that same Church immediately lost the Christian faith everywhere else?

Why read the earliest Christians?

People might ask, "Why are you reading what the earliest Christians wrote? Just read the Bible." But then I have to ask: why do we listen to preachers explain the Bible? Why do we read commentaries to see how other Christians understand a passage?

If we're willing to hear what a preacher or commentator thinks today, shouldn't we be especially interested in Christians who lived closest to the apostles? They were not inspired and they were not Scripture. But they are extraordinarily important historical witnesses to what the earliest Christians believed Scripture meant.

That is especially important when those witnesses consistently describe beliefs and practices that sound remarkably Catholic.

The Bible and the Church belong together.

I love Scripture. The question is not whether we should trust the Bible. We should. The question is how God chose to give it to us, preserve it, and identify its books.

If God can historically preserve His written Word from error, then He can also preserve His historic visible Church from error. I believe He has done both.

Read the history for yourself. Look at the earliest canon lists. Read the Christians who lived before the canon was finally settled. Then ask whether the story of the Bible makes more sense if Christ left behind only a book, or if He left behind a Church that received, preserved, proclaimed, and ultimately recognized that book as Scripture.