Validity of the Scriptures – Part 1

If you profess yourself a follower of Jesus Christ, and His teachings, you also profess total faith in what we call “The Bible.” I thought it would be fun to post a few blogs over the next couple of weeks on:

• how the bible was made
• how it works
• and why we need it so much.

For some of you this may seem like elementary teaching, for others, some of this information may be new and useful in your walk with Christ.

A quick history of how the Bible became the Bible:

The modern Holy Bible consists of many smaller books combined into one big book. Those books are broken into 2 groups: Old Testament (or old covenant) and New Testament (or new covenant). There are 39 old testament books. The first 5 are those written by Moses (Gen-Deut). The New Testament has 27, the first 4 being the Gospels of Jesus. There are a total of 66 books.

The Old Testament has been passed down very meticulously for many years. The New Testament’s history is shorter. The Old was copied by scribes (professional human copy machines) The New Testament were letters. They were not copied by scribes, but anyone who had the ability to write at the time or parchment or papyrus. Because the Old Testament has a rich history of meticulous copying there is not much debate to its validity. However, the New Testament is another story. Lets Focus on the New Testament for a while.

How 27 letters or books became the New Testament

The first time someone recommended that the various letters written about Jesus should be combined and used as a “testament” was in 367ce by Bishop Alexandria Athanasius. He wrote a letter to the churches he oversaw, stating the 27 books of the modern New Testament become the only books allowed to be in the “canon.” Canon is the cooler word for Bible.

Canon Facts: Here’s where it gets interesting…and maybe controversial.

• We do not have any original copies of the New Testament manuscripts (the original letters)
• We have copies of copies of copies of the original.
• Most copies are hundreds of years removed from the originals
• Earliest copies date around 200ce
• Most mistakes in the copies were orthography (spelling mistakes)
• Comparing all know manuscripts and copies tells us there were probably 200,00 – 300,000 mistakes
• Most of the books or letters were written in the first century of the common era (ce).
• Athanasius was the first person to advocate a common collection of letters to be canonized.
• A council of Godly men in Trent in the mid 16th century set the modern cannon (collection of books and letters)
• By the 5th century most churches agreed on what we read today as the New Testament

So there are some cool facts on the cannon or Bible. But how did the men at the council of Trent decide that the 27 books we have today were worthy of being “The Bible?” There were 4 criteria for canonization:

1. The letter had to be ancient (written around the time of Christ)
2. The letter had to be apostolic (written by an actual apostle or companion of Christ)
3. The letter had to be catholic (not the denomination, but catholic means universal, so the letter had to have widespread usage)
4. The letter had to be orthodox (it had to have common theological characteristics)

On my next blog I will go into more about the “4 rules” and how they shaped our Bible and beliefs today. But, I would love to hear from you! Leave a comment below!! You can also sign up to receive these blog posts in your email inbox by going to the very bottom of our website and typing in your email address. Thanks for reading!