According to the Baptist Faith and Message, “The Holy Bible was written by men divinely inspired and is God’s revelation of himself to man. It is a perfect treasure of divine instruction. It has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter. Therefore, all Scripture is totally true and trustworthy. It reveals the principles by which God judges us, and therefore is, and will remain to the end of the world, the true center of Christian union, and the supreme standard by which all human conduct, creeds, and religious opinions should be tried. All Scripture is a testimony to Christ, who is himself the focus of divine revelation.”
This is a gargantuan statement—literally life-altering. If the Baptist Faith and Message is correct, the Bible will shape every part of our lives. Yet the Bible is a complex document—written by roughly forty different authors, spanning over 1500 years of history and several ancient cultures, containing sixty-six books, and written in three languages. How can we be confident that when we pick up our English Bible today, we have the real thing? We will seek to answer this question by looking at how the Bible was written, copied, and preserved.
The Writing
In 2 Timothy 3:16, Paul says that Scripture was “God-breathed.” We refer to this as “inspiration,” a word which is used in some translations of this verse. How God did this is not entirely clear, but the Holy Spirit in some way superintended every word that was written to ensure that the end result was exactly what God intended to communicate, while preserving the individual writers’ idiosyncrasies, vocabulary, and style. Peter also addresses inspiration in 2 Peter 1:16-21, using imagery of the human authors being carried like a boat carried along the sea by the wind. In this way, the Scriptures have what we sometimes call dual authorship: each book has a human author, and a Divine Author. But who were these human authors?
The Men
Moses wrote Genesis-Deuteronomy (also called The Law, Torah, or Pentateuch). Scribes, kings, and other men wrote the historical and poetic books, while prophets authored their own books. The Exodus can be dated to around 1446 BC, meaning Moses wrote around this time period. The last books of the Old Testament to be written (Chronicles and Malachi) were likely written by 400 BC. The overwhelming majority of these books were written in Hebrew, but a few portions were written in Aramaic. During the life of Christ some four hundred years later, the composition and authority of the Old Testament seems to have been solidly established.
Apostles and others with apostolic connections wrote the New Testament, largely in the format of letters to churches or individuals. The Gospels were written by both eyewitnesses (Matthew and John) and those with access to eyewitness accounts (Mark, relying on Peter’s account, and Luke, playing the part of investigative journalist [Luke 1:1-4]). The entire New Testament was written between AD 45 and AD 100, with the final book being written by the apostle John within one lifetime of the events of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Unlike the Old Testament, the New Testament was written in Greek.
The Canon
When we consider how we received the sixty-six books in our Bibles that we have today, we are talking about the idea of a “canon.” This term has come into common parlance recently with the expanded universes of popular entertainment franchises such as Star Wars, Harry Potter, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Whether considering something as trivial as these series or something as significant as the Word of God, people want to know what is in and what is out. I do not want to get too deep in the weeds here, but how do we know that the sixty-six books we have are the books that should be included? Paul mentions other letters he wrote that we do not have. Other people with close ties to the apostles also wrote letters around the same time.
How then do we know that we have the right books? We begin with one guiding principle: the people of God recognize Scripture as God’s Word, but humans do not determine God’s Word. This may seem semantic or self-evident, but it is a crucial distinction. This distinction keeps God’s Word as the authority in our lives. No individual or group can vote to change it, even if the vote were unanimous. This places all of God’s people under his Word, not in a position of judgment over it.
The Old Testament was recognized at an early date, with the canon settled by Jesus’ day. Most of the debate surrounding the canon focuses on the New Testament. In determining which books are canonical, three criteria are used. First, the text must possess ties to the apostles. These ties are not required to be direct, but the New Testament letters had to be tied to the apostles and/or Jesus very closely. Second, the text must be conformed to the rule of faith, meaning it had to be orthodox. It could not contradict other New Testament writings or what was revealed in the Old Testament. Third, it had to be universally recognized in some sense. No individual church had the right to determine what should be included; rather, as the letters were circulated, the early church trusted that the Spirit of God would bring unity in opinion as his people corporately recognized his Word when they read it. In the end, the thirty-nine Old Testament and twenty-seven New Testament books we have today are what meet these criteria and are included in our Bibles as canon.
The Result
When we pick up our Bibles, we have an absolute treasure in our hands. What we hold is God’s very Word. We can have confidence that when we read it, we are hearing from God. There is much to be said about understanding it rightly, but we know with certainty that God has spoken and that his Word is not kept secret from us. By his Spirit, he has ensured that every word written is exactly what he intended and has been preserved and recognized by his people for millennia. Read it. Trust it. Depend on it.
Nathan Hunter (BA, Maranatha Baptist Bible College) serves as a lay elder of Oak Park Baptist Church.