How Did the Bible Come Together?
How did the Bible as we have it come about? Why are certain books in the Bible, while others were left out? What was the process of collation, by which someone, somewhere, decided what should be in it? These were questions I was asked at the beginning of a conference for which I was the featured speaker last Saturday (March 1, at Waverley Abbey); to my shame, I failed to leave enough time in the Q&A session at the end to cover them, so here’s my penance: an immediate blog article! If you were with me at Waverley, and one of those who asked such a question but this doesn’t answer it, please email me!
The starting point for these questions is that in the case of both the Old Testament and the New Testament it took, in our terms, quite a long period of time. Communications then were not what they are today, so things moved slowly. In both cases, oral traditions preceded anything being written down. Though in one sense it is correct to speak of the Jewish and Christian religious traditions as concerning “a people of the Book,” a phrase that reflects the value placed on their sacred texts, there were significant periods of time, including the first few centuries of Christianity, when there was no fixed, authorized canon. Still less did all synagogues or emerging churches have a copy of all of the writings that eventually came to be canonized (some would have had just a few, or even none). It must be remembered that before the invention of the printing press, everything had to be copied by hand, by professional copyists called scribes. This made it both time-consuming and expensive. Sola Scriptura in relation to personal faith (everyone having their own copy of the Bible) became a thing only from the Protestant Reformation and then only gradually thereafter until modern times (until now, when most Christians have at least one Bible, if not several versions, and the rest close at hand at biblegateway.com).
What Christians know as “the Old Testament” was essentially finalized in its current form by the time of Jesus. Christianity adopted the books in the Hebrew Bible as its own, recognizing the special status they held for the Jewish community. The Jewish text is organized slightly differently from the Christian text, being spoken of in three parts: the Law (Torah), the Prophets, and the Writings (sometimes, the Psalms, though it includes more). We see this reflected in how Jesus referred to it, such as: “In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 7:12) and “Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms” (Luke 24:44). So, too, we see such references in Acts. Note that the Law (Torah) is not just the commandments; it’s the first five books of the Old Testament, which includes a lot of narrative as well.
Both eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic church traditions include within their canonical Old Testament a group of writings known as the Apocrypha. These are works that are valued in Protestantism but not recognized as inspired in the same way.
A further complication is the Septuagint (or, LXX)—the Greek translation of the Old Testament from around 200 BCE. This came about largely as a result of many Jews living outside of Israel no longer being Hebrew speakers (Greek being the lingua franca of the day in the Mediterranean region) and therefore wanting their sacred texts in their own language. Commonly when Old Testament texts are cited in the New Testament, it’s the Septuagint version that is in mind. This matters because there are some notable differences between the Greek and the Hebrew. It’s often worth doing a side-by-side comparison of an Old Testament text in an English Septuagint translation,[1] not least because that will likely be reflecting how a New Testament audience would have understood it. As Pelikan recommends, “The Septuagint should not be the only place to look for the meaning of a word in the Gospels or in Saint Paul, but it definitely must be the first place to look.”[2] Undoubtedly the existence of a Greek version of the Old Testament alongside the Greek New Testament assisted the church in pairing them together in what became the Christian Bible.
All-in-all, then, these factors do slightly compromise what evangelicals mean by sola Scriptura—“the Bible alone”—and in discussion of its authoritative status.[3] How might we handle the different definitions of what’s included in the Bible (other than taking the rather-too-easy route of “We’re right, they’re wrong)? Perhaps one way of thinking of it is like when a pebble is thrown in a pond; the strongest ripples are right at the centre, and they progressively fade the further they move away, until they’re still discernible but very faint. To apply that imagery to our question, those canonical books that everyone agrees on are the strongest ripples nearest the centre. Protestants can draw their boundary rope around those as the "inspired” texts, while still (one hopes) being generous enough to recognise that some further ripples are evident beyond and that it’s not unreasonable for our Catholic and Orthodox brethren to draw their boundary rope for the “Word of God” a little wider.
When it comes to the New Testament, we should start by saying that so far as the early church—and those whom we now call the New Testament writers—were concerned, “Scripture” meant “the Old Testament” (in the various component parts to which it was referred by Jewish people—see above). Save for an allusion in 2 Peter 3:16, none of what we now know as the New Testament was initially thought of as Scripture in that sense, though of course it became so. When the New Testament speaks of “the Word of God,” it means Jesus himself (John 1:1), the message about Jesus (1 Thessalonians 2:13), or what God (or Jesus) says or commands (John 10:35; 17:17). Speaking of the Bible as the Word of God is a post-biblical development (which as we said at the beginning of the chapter does not always help things). When the well-known 2 Timothy 3:16 said, “All Scripture is inspired by God/God-breathed …” it meant “the Old Testament” which constituted the church’s Scriptures at the time (though there is no reason for us not to extend that principle to the New Testament).
In relation to the vast majority of books that now comprise our New Testament, these were generally recognized as inspired texts through custom and practice in the early church well before any formal consideration of canonical status. “Canon,” by the way, simply refers to a “ruler” or “measure”—by which to rule or measure one’s life and beliefs. The criteria that were used by the church fathers who finally pronounced on the formation (and closure to “new entrants”) of the New Testament in the 4th century were (i) those books’ existing recognition as inspired texts, widely circulated as such within the Christian community, (ii) their association with one of the original Apostles, and (iii) that they reflected sound doctrine. There was some peripheral debate about some that were ultimately included in the group of 27—and some that were left out—but there was an overwhelming consensus.[4]
[1] Various translations are available online, or to download as a PDF, and in printed form, such as The Lexham English Septuagint (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2019), and A New English Translation of the Septuagint (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
[2] Jaroslav Pelikan, Whose Bible Is It? A History Of The Scriptures Through The Ages (London: Penguin, 2005), 66.
[3] A further factor is the Vulgate (the fourth-century Latin translation of the Bible), when Latin had replaced Greek as the lingua franca of the day. It was for many centuries the standard version in the West, even more so than the King James. The first English translation, Wycliffe’s Bible, worked from the Vulgate. Modern Bible translations reflect Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic texts and refer to the Latin only for comparison purposes. A recently revised version of the Vulgate (1979) continues to hold semi-official status as “the” Catholic Bible.
[4] Those that were being questioned into the fourth century, but ultimately included, were Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and Revelation.