How did the church get the Bible — and is it really the word of God?

The Old Testament was established over a period of more than a thousand years. By the time of Jesus Christ the list of books was already fixed. The New Testament was written entirely within the lifetimes of people who knew Jesus — the early church fairly quickly agreed on which were the 'inspired' books which now form the New Testament. As a matter of history, there is not much disagreement as to what constitutes the historic 'canon'.

But this begs the question — on what basis should we now today accept that these books and no others are the 'word of God', and what should we do with the claims of recently discovered books to be 'inspired'?

What it is

The Bible is made up of 66 books written by a wide variety of authors over a space of more than a thousand years. Some of the books are fairly clearly the work of a single author, such as the letter to Philemon. Others are clearly compilations — these include Psalms and Proverbs. Others are not clear cut — we don't know if the historical books of 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings and 1 and 2 Chronicles were compiled each by a single editor, or written down as they went along (like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle), or some combination of these. Academics have argued that the five 'books of Moses', Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy were written by four or more authors and skilfully knitted together at a very late date — although the evidence for this is hardly compelling (except to other academics). Be that as it may, the argument about whether or not a particular book was 'inspired' by God has never depended on working out who actually wrote the words down.

The Christian concept of inspiration — God breathed

In the Christian understanding, God enabled certain people at certain times to write exactly what He had in mind, and then ensured that it was preserved and adopted into the 'canon'. In the same way that God works through people for other purposes, how they wrote bore all the marks of their own personalities and cultures — but as not simply a product of their personalities and cultures. In this way, the two classic texts of the New Testament on the subject come together: 2 Timothy 3:16-17: "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work." and 2 Peter 1:21 "prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit."

People sometimes argue that if these are the only texts we have, then the concept of inspiration is actually quite insecure. In fact all these texts are doing is summarising the Old Testament picture, which is expressed at length in Psalms 19 and 119.

How do we know which books are inspired?

Christianity begins and ends with Jesus Christ. Ultimately we can argue over details, but if someone is not willing to accept Jesus Christ as their final authority, they are not in any sense a Christian. Click here if you want to look at the question of who Jesus really was.

If we begin by assuming nothing more than that the four Gospels are reasonably reliable historical documents (something more than amply demonstrated in a large number of ways), then we come quickly to the conclusion that Jesus Christ considered the inspiration of the Old Testament as it was then known to be a completely settled thing. He refers to them again and again as the word of God, and at one point (Matthew 5:17-18) makes it absolutely clear that his purpose is to fulfill the 'Law and the Prophets', which was the term by which the Old Testament was then known. Although you could argue that some of the references might have been inserted later, if you take away all of the references that Jesus makes to the Law and the Prophets, there is almost nothing left. In other words, the only way of pushing forward the theory that Jesus somehow did not accept the Old Testament canon is by denying all the evidence that there is.

Without going into the process by which the Old Testament was drawn together, we can confidently say that Jesus attached his personal credibility to the claim that it really was the Word of God. Of course, if Jesus was nothing more than a good man, his credibility does not count for much, but, in that case, there is no Christianity. If Jesus was, as he claimed, the Son of God, then his affirmation is absolutely watertight.

What about the New Testament?

Clearly we cannot apply the same reasoning to the New Testament — it is fairly certain that no part of it was written until after Jesus's death. The intellectual basis for accepting the New Testament depends on authority Jesus gave to the eleven remaining apostles (and subsequently also to Paul) to transmit his teachings. This authority is made explicit in several places. Crucially, the apostles had already begun to refer to other apostolic writings as 'scripture' in the same way that they referred to the Old Testament — for example in 2 Peter 3:16.

There are two things which link all of the New Testament books. First, they were all either direct recordings of the life and teaching of Jesus and the early church (the four Gospels and Acts) or written by the apostles (all the other books of the New Testament). The only exception to this is Hebrews, where we do not know who actually wrote it. Second, they were all written within living memory of Jesus Christ, and before the death of the last of the apostles, John. They were therefore open to direct challenge by the apostles themselves, and by other people who remembered Jesus — including enemies of the Christian faith who would have been keen to exploit any inconsistencies.

So which books?

The Christian church did not formally meet to agree the canon of the New Testament until much later — in fact, the idea of formal meetings of this kind to agree creeds and canons is something that does not happen at all during the lifetimes of the apostles. By the time that these kinds of definitions were being made, the canon had 'emerged' — the Church fathers accepted, without embarrassment, that certain books had come to be accepted as canonical, while other books were simply regarded as 'very good'.

Is this secure?

If we were saying no more than that tradition decided which books were canonical and which were not, we would not be saying much at all. But, in fact, the early councils which looked at these things did nothing more than ratify what was already accepted because there are very clear and obvious distinctions between the canon as we now have it and other candidate books. We can easily apply the same tests that they applied. In fact, Christians have been applying these tests for centuries, and coming up with the same answer: when we only accept eyewitness accounts of Jesus and the early church, and writings of those considered by the early church to be apostles, then we are left with the books of the New Testament and no others.

Does it add up?

The most remarkable thing about the Bible is not the human process by which it came to be written and accepted, but what it actually says. Consider — at least thirty authors writing in three different languages over a period of more than a thousand years, on a topic which is easily the most controversial topic known to man. What are the chances that they will together create a book which can be interpreted consistently as putting forwards the same message? None whatsoever. Even ten people from the same theological or philosophical school will disagree when they write their books, even if they were all in the sam class and knew each other well. To a very real extent, the proof of the reliability of the Biblical canon is in its consistency. But, equally, what are the chances that people writing over such a period in a pre-scientific age will produce a book that contains no scientific errors? (Leave the creation and evolution debate for a moment — since the picture presented in Genesis is, by comparison with all other ancient creation stories, virtually identical to the evolution picture). None whatsoever. As a comparison, Philo, who was from the same culture and wrote at the same time as the New Testament writers, begins his work with a discourse on the four elements, earth, air, fire and water, which the ancients believed accounted for all the forms of matter. We now know the four elements theory to be wrong — but every work that discusses the natural world from the time of the Greeks to the end of the middle ages refers to it. Every work, that is, except for the Bible.

What about recently discovered 'additional' gospels, such as the Gospel of Thomas?

In 1945 local peasants found thirteen leather-bound books (codices) near Nag Hamadi, in Egypt. On investigation, these were found to contain Gnostic writings from around 390 AD, written in Coptic but probably translated from Greek originals. The most famous of these is the so called "Gospel of Thomas", made popular by Dan Brown's fictional work "The Da Vinci Code". There are all kinds of arguments in circulation about whether or not the Gospel of Thomas is 1st century or 2nd century (which would rule it out automatically from the canon), and about whether it is consistent with the other Gospels. However, we can cut through all of this argument as far as the canon is concerned — until its rediscovery in 1945, there is no record of anyone ever suggesting that there were any other accounts of the life of Jesus which should be included in the canon than the four Gospels as we have them now. Furthermore, the Gospel of Thomas presents itself as "secret" teachings of Jesus — an idea which has no parallel in any of the other concepts of Christianity. In fact, Jesus's command to his disciples at the end of Matthew was to teach disciples everything he had commanded them.

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