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History of the Bible

This is the third time I'm writing this page on the history of the Bible.

There's so much to say, and I can't seem to get it outlined. The facts just don't distribute themselves into neat boxes, neither by subject nor chronologically. (I'm done with the whole page now, and I'm very happy with how it turned out!)

So let's try this. I'm going to list the various subjects concerning the history of the Bible—some related, some not related—in bullet points with links to more complete explanations further down the page.

• Definitions You'll Need
• How Did a Writing Qualify as New Testament Scripture?
• The Gospels
• The New Testament Canon (lists)
• Did the Apostles' Churches Have a Set Canon?
• Interesting Facts from the History of the Bible
• Paul's Letters
• General Epistles (Hebrews through 3 John)
• Hebrews

Definitions You'll Need

Canon

Canon literally means "rule," and in the history of the Bible it is used to refer to the list of books that are accepted by a church as Scripture. It is not to be confused with "cannon," a large weapon.

Apocrypha

Apocrypha literally means "hidden," but it was used in many ways even in ancient times. Jerome himself applies it to both non-canonical and deuterocanonical books. Today it's either used in general of all books that have had a claim to be in the Scriptures but are currently rejected, or it's used of the specific books contained in the Roman Catholic Bible but which are not in the Protestant Bible.

Deuterocanonical

Deuterocanonical literally means "second canon." It originally was meant to denote a class of books that were between the canonical and non-canonical books. In other words, they were "somewhat" inspired or authoritative, but not fully so. Now the term has come to be almost synonomous with "apocrypha," meaning a long list of books that have been accepted as Scripture at some time in the past but are not now.

How Did a Writing Qualify as New Testament Scripture?

What I'm about to say is disputed by most books addressing the history of the Bible.

I'm going to say it anyway, as I don't believe that any of them have presented anything but conjecture for their opinion, while the evidence for my position is so overwhelming that anyone familiar with pre-Nicene Christianity could come up with it on his or her own.

The New Testament Scriptures were chosen solely on the basis of being written or approved by an apostle.

Most books on the history of the Bible admit this is one of the criteria, but they add several others, usually having to do with how the early churches felt about a book. It is clear, however, that how churches felt about a book had everything to do with whether it was apostolic!

Maybe a good way to put it would be to say that to the early church, the apostles were inspired and anything they wrote or said was authoritative to the church. No one else had such authority, so the New Testament was an attempt to collect anything the apostles had written or approved of.

This page is going to be long enough without a lot of quotes. I want to refer you again to Craig Allert's excellent book, but it seems to me that at least a couple quotes from the early Christians would be in order here:

Here Eusebius, who is discussing the New Testament canon, discusses whether Hebrews is "the work of an apostle" as thought it is synonymous with whether it is accepted as Scripture.

He then discusses the four Gospels, tying each of them to an apostle by quoting Origen, who wrote a hundred years earlier, around A.D. 225:

Without running through the many quotes that address this issue, which would be impossible on a page like this, let me tell you simply that everything I've read on the development of the canon from the 2nd and 3rd centuries is just the same as this. Apostolicity is all that matters.

This only makes sense. The idea of early Christians in the history of the Bible was that it was their job to preserve "the faith once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude 3) and never add to it ...

The context, difficult to show in a short quote, makes clear what we could assume anyway, which is that "those through whom the Gospel has come down to us" are the apostles, and it is they who have handed down the Gospel to us in the Scriptures to be the ground and pillar of our faith.

The writer of Hebrews says almost the same thing as what Clement says here. Hebrews 2:3-4 speaks of those who confirmed the great salvation first mentioned by the Lord Jesus.

Because the church understood that Christ had committed the Gospel to the apostles, they preserved everything that had the apostolic stamp of approval as God-inspired truth.

The Gospels

Why does the history of the Bible include just 4 Gospels? Why are they called Gospels? Why were other gospels, like those of Mary Magdalene and Thomas, rejected?

We have very little insight into Christian usage of the Gospels before the mid-2nd century. Justin Martyr mentions around A.D. 150 that the "memoirs of the apostles" were read in Sunday church meetings (First Apology 67). He also specifically mentioned that these memoirs are called Gospels (ibid. 66), and he quotes extensively from the synoptic Gospels.

Just a few years later, his disciple Tatian composed a harmony of the Gospels called The Diatessaron. Thus, by A.D. 165 the history of the Bible leaves no doubt that the 4 Gospels were known and accepted in the churches. In 185, Irenaeus says there are exactly 4 Gospels, and he names them (Against Heresies III:11:8). Irenaeus was old by that time—he sat under Polycarp's teaching—and he indicates there has been only those 4 Gospels for as long as he can remember.

It's hard to tell how much earlier writers in the history of the Bible quoted the Gospels. There are Gospel quotes, but they could have been quoting oral tradition (or "Q"; see text box below), and there's no specific reference to any of the Gospels by name before the mid-2nd century.

The New Testament Canon

In the 2nd century comes the earliest list of accepted books in the history of the Bible, the Muratorian Canon. It is very similar to our New Testament, and it dates from around A.D. 160. It leaves out Hebrews and James and adds in the Wisdom of Solomon and the Shepherd of Hermas. It says the Revelation of Peter is questionable.

Really, at this early a date in the history of the Bible, the agreement between the Muratorian Fragment and our current canon is astounding.

As the history of the Bible progresses, both the quotes of the early Christians and the lists they compiled get closer and closer to our 27 New Testament books. The first list exactly to match is by Athanasius in 361. However, even as late as A.D. 395 or so, Augustine says there are books accepted by all churches and books accepted by only some.

Right about that time, however, the matter began to be settled. Synods in Rome, Hippo, and Carthage all addressed the issue, but the fact that there were repeated synods shows that none of these carried universal authority (Catholic Encyclopedia).

In fact, nowhere in the history of the Bible did any council ever establish with universal authority what books should be in the canon, and to this day the canon of the various Eastern Orthodox Churches have varying canons, though most have the same New Testament.

Personally, I think the growing usage of Jerome's Latin translation settled the matter in the west, where Latin was spoken. It used the 66 books that are in the Protestant Bible, and it had the 7 apocryphal books in a separate section.

The Council of Trent—which met from 1545 to 1563— was the first authoritative council in the history of the Bible to set a canon. Of course, they only had authority within the Roman Catholic Church.

The Orthodox churches still use even more apocryphal books than the RCC, including books like 2 Esdras and 3 and 4 Maccabbees.

Did the Apostles' Churches Have a Set Canon?

The churches before Nicaea did not have a canon. They had books they called Scripture and which they believed were inspired, but the list varied from church to church, and the books were not bound together in one book, like our Bible is.

They quoted from more books than we do, commonly referencing books like Ecclesiasticus and Tobit (which are included in the Roman Catholic Bible), the Wisdom of Solomon, and the Book of Enoch (which is only in the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible).

There are some books, however, that are in our Bible but were rarely quoted or only quoted in the East or West. These are Hebrews, James, 2 John, 3 John, Jude, and Revelation. In fact, to this day the "Assyrian Orthodox Church of the East" Bible ends at 1 John.

Interesting Facts About the History of the Bbile

The history of the Bible shows that there are a lot of books quoted by the early churches that we don't use much anymore. Some of them are very interesting:

• The Book of Enoch: This book's pretty bizarre, but interesting to read. It was well-known to the early Christians. It's quoted in the New Testament (Jude 14-15). It has the first description of Hades, a description which matches the story of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:22ff. It also describes the giants of Genesis 6 and a lot of other interesting things. It's one of the more important books in the history of the Bible.
• The Martyrdom of Isaiah: Ever wondered who was sawn in half, as mentioned in Hebrews 11? It was Isaiah, and this book tells the story.
• The Book of Jannes and Jambres: Paul mentions Jannes and Jambres in 2 Timothy 3:8. This book is no longer extant, so we don't know what it says (very sad).
• The early churches used the Septuagint (LXX) for their Old Testament. It's likely the apostles did, too, which explains the difference between NT quotes of the OT and the actual verses we have in the OT of our modern Bibles.

• One not true part of the history of the Bible is the story that the Dead Sea Scrolls backed up the Masoretic text of Isaiah. That story came out in 1947. In 1948, however, it was retracted. The retraction didn't get as much Christian press as the original story, and so the 1947 story has been repeated—falsely—among Christians for over 60 years now.
• More interestingly, the Dead Sea scroll of Jeremiah backs up the LXX text, which, as mentioned, is seven chapters shorter than our Masoretic Jeremiah.

Paul's Letters

The history of the Bible gives strong testimony to Paul's letters, but there are some that are doubted even by Christian scholars.

Those that demand conclusive evidence limit Paul's true letters to just a few. For the most part, though, scholars accept 10 of Paul's letters, the exceptions being the pastoral letters: 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus (and Hebrews, which almost no one thinks was written by Paul).

The arguments are difficult to follow unless you devote a lot of time to studying the history of the Bible. Some argue that the pastoral letters don't have Paul's type of reasoning or wording. Personally, I think that if Paul really went to prison, was released, then went to Spain and Great Britain, as the early Christians said he did, then when he returned, he may have been a much different person and used different wording.

I'm a believer in God. 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus have been greatly used by God for 2,000 years now. I don't believe they are forgeries.

The history of the Bible provides at least some evidence that the letters are genuine. Polycarp quotes both 1 and 2 Timothy in his early 2nd century letter to the Philippians. Since he received a letter from Ignatius in A.D. 107 or 116, his testimony to the history of the Bible is significant.

It's important to point out that skeptics of the New Testament are arguing from what they DON'T know, not from what they do know. We cannot know that Paul wrote the pastoral epistles because evidence concerning their authorship is almost non-existent. However, there's no strong evidence he did not write it.

There's some other things we know about the history of the Bible:

General Epistles

The general epistles are those that are not addressed to a specific person or church. Those include Hebrews, James, 1 and 2 Peter, 1 and 2 and 3 John, and Jude.

Hebrews is dealt with below.

All the general epistles besides 1 John and 1 Peter have been in dispute through the history of the Bible. Some churches, somewhere, have always rejected them as not genuine.

It seems odd to me that anyone would question 2 and 3 John since they seem so obviously to have been written by the same author as the Gospel of John and 1 John. I'd suggest that in the early days of the history of the Bible they were small and not widely known rather than questioned.

James, 2 Peter, and Jude are always among the questioned books when the early Christian writers discuss the Scriptures.

In the end, Jerome decided to include them in the Latin Vulgate, and that seemed to settle the issue for everyone.

Are those letters really written by James, Peter, and Jude? No one has any evidence to dispute or confirm their authorship.

For me, their teachings are accepted by the churches throughout the ages. Even the early churches that questioned their authorship did not question their teaching. I have no problem treating them as authoritive on that basis even if they are not apostolic.

The General Letter to the Hebrews

Throughout the history of the Bible, no one knows who wrote Hebrews. This was argued about even in the early church. Eusebius says that the church in Rome rejected it as not from Paul, and that some rejected it because Rome did (Ecclesiastical History, III:3). He also says Irenaeus mentioned it and quoted from it in Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching (V:26), but I could not find it in my PDF copy. Then he says that Clement's letter to the Corinthians has many thoughts that are from Hebrews. In fact, there are several direct quotes. For example, Hebrews 1:3-4 is certainly quoted in chapter 36. He says this proves that the epistle is early, which it does. 1 Clement was written in A.D. 95-96 at the latest. He also suggests that Paul wrote it in Hebrew, then either Luke or Clement himself translated it (III:38).

Of course, some of this doesn't make sense. Why would Rome reject Hebrews as not written by Paul while Clement, and overseer and the messenger of the Roman church, quoted from it? This would be especially odd if Clement had translated it from Paul's Hebrew. The puzzle is resolved, though, if Clement did not think Paul wrote it either. He does not cite Hebrews as Scripture, nor give its title. He just uses some of the wording.

Tertullian, though, around A.D. 200, attributes it to Barnabas. He does not cite it as Scripture, but he does use Barnabas as an authority who must have learned his doctrine from the apostles ("On Modesty," ch. 20).

We must also consider the statement in Hebrews itself that suggests it was not an apostle who wrote it. 

In Hebrews 2:3-4 the apostles are spoken of as "them" who spoke to "us." No apostle would write such a thing; not Paul, nor any of the twelve. Instead, they would speak of "us" testifying to Christ's message. It does seem possible Barnabas might write something like that, but Tertullian is the only testimony to his authorship. Barnabas would be apostolic authority enough for the book to become Scripture.

Either was, there was enough testimony that Hebrews was written by Paul or Barnabas, that the book made it into Jerome's Vulgate and thus into our Bibles today. Today, almost no scholars would consider Hebrews apostolic, but modern churches no longer consider apostolicity the only requirement for inclusion in the canon.

Let me add: Like Jude, James, and 2 Peter, the teachings of Hebrews have been accepted by the churches throughout the ages as true. This gives it the authority of the church, even if it does not have the authority of the apostles. The church is, after all, called "the pillar and support of the truth" in 1 Tim. 3:15.