The Canon of the Bible

Like many other folks, I adopted the teachings of Herbert Armstrong without any meaningful background in the history of the formation of the Christian canon. Looking back, of course, the absence of that background now underscores just how tenuous the foundation of my entire belief system really was. After all, I began my pursuit of the "truth" with the acceptance of a collection of documents as authoritative (the basis for all that followed) without knowing much about their origins, or how they came to be regarded as "THE Bible" that my grandmother had read to me as a small child (and Herbert Armstrong professed to understand as no other).

Even so, my first inkling that my background might be insufficient came to me fairly early on in terms of my indoctrination into Armstrongism. As a teenager who was already actively being considered as a prime candidate for baptism (and potential material for Ambassador College in Pasadena), I remember purchasing a copy of The Jerusalem Bible and questioning my local elder (and spiritual mentor) about its contents. "Why doesn't our Bible have these additional books?" I asked. Without answering my question, the elder took the book (never returning it) and warned me about the dangers of falling into confusion and error. Of course, that experience should have been a tremendous red flag, and I should have pursued the answer(s) to my question. Unfortunately, I was afraid of losing "the truth," scuttling my chances for baptism, and losing my place in the wonderful world tomorrow; and I immediately dropped the matter!

However, after leaving the Worldwide Church of God, my intellectual and spiritual curiosity got the better of me, and I returned to the question which I had so unceremoniously abandoned when I was a babe in the faith. In short, I began to ask the questions that I should have investigated on the front end of this venture: Who wrote the Bible? How did all of those documents come together as our Bible? Who decided which books would be included? How could we be sure that those documents were inspired and authoritative? Were those documents really inerrant? What about the inconsistencies which I had noticed over years of studying the book? And, if the Bible really was the foundation/source of my faith, weren't the answers to those questions pretty important?

Sure, I had read the notes in various study Bibles through many years of studying the Scriptures, but it was only now that I really began to allow myself to absorb what scholars had to say about the formation of the Judeo-Christian Canon. A friend gave me a copy of Nelson's Quick Reference Bible Handbook (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1993) as a gift, and I read: "The word canon means a 'rod' - specifically, a rod with graduated marks used for measuring length. Since the fourth century A.D. the word has come to be used for the collection of books officially recognized by the church as the Holy Bible. Every book in the canon was considered authoritative but not every authoritative book was in the canon." And the paragraph which followed that one was a real eye-opener: "Differences still exist in the order and content of the Old Testament. Both Catholic and Protestant Bibles follow the order of the Vulgate, a Latin translation of the Bible produced about A.D. 400. However, the actual number of books in the Protestant Bible follows the Hebrew Bible, while the Bible used by the Roman Catholic, Greek, and Russian Orthodox Churches follows the Vulgate's content by including the 'extra books' known as the Apocrypha/Deuterocanon." I finally had my answer to that long-ago question about The Jerusalem Bible.

It was about this time that I also read Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism by Bishop John Shelby Spong, and I realized just how little I actually knew about the book which I had studied and claimed to follow all of my life! I began to understand why some folks rejected the Bible. And I finally came to understand that there was an extensive history behind the formation of the canon, and that the Bible was a much more complex book than I had ever imagined before. Moreover, it became clear to me that the doctrine of inerrancy was unsustainable, and that literalism had actually twisted/distorted my understanding of Scripture.

It was shortly after these revelations that I actually began to read some of those "other books" of the Bible - the ones which Protestants and Herbert Armstrong rejected. Indeed, the first two books in this category that I read were I and II Maccabbees. Sure, like many Armstrongites, I had read extensively in the writings of the early Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus; but it was only after reading those "apocryphal" books that I truly began to understand what had happened between the close of the Old Testament and the opening of the New Testament. In understanding the impact of the Greeks on Judaism, the origins of the Pharisees and Sadducees, and how the Romans and Herod came to be the overlords of the Holy Land, I found that I now understood the New Testament in a way that I never had before (even after years of study and Herbert Armstrong's "guidance").

Now, I could see why many Christians saw spiritual value in a Deuterocanonical book like "Wisdom." Indeed, I began to wonder how anyone could not find value in a passage like this: "The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment shall touch them. They seemed, in the view of the foolish, to be dead; and their passing away was thought an affliction and their going forth from us, utter destruction. But they are in peace. For if to others, indeed, they seem punished, yet is their hope full of immortality; Chastised a little, they shall be greatly blessed, because God tried them and found them worthy of himself. As gold in the furnace, he proved them, and as sacrificial offerings he took them to himself. In the time of their judgment, they shall shine and dart about as sparks through stubble; They shall judge nations and rule over peoples, and the LORD shall be their King forever. Those who trust in him shall understand truth, and the faithful shall abide with him in love: Because grace and mercy are with his holy ones, and his care is with the elect. (Wisdom 3:1-9)

As my search for answers intensified, I read more about the formation of the canon and came to realize just how significant of a role that humans had played in that process! Indeed, I came across statements about its formation like the one penned by Dr Roy Hoover in his article How the Canon Was Formed, where he wrote: "The first list of 'canonical' books that names the same twenty-seven writings found in our New Testament appears in the Easter letter of Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, Egypt, in 367 C.E. He names them in a different order, to be sure. Even so, the first list that agrees with ours was a long time in coming."

He went on to discuss Paul's writings (the earliest Christian texts extant), and then observed the following about the formation of the gospels: "At an even earlier date other Christians had made collections of Jesus’ sayings and stories about him. The Sayings Gospel Q is just such a compendium of sayings, and the Signs Gospel underlying the Gospel of John is a collection of wondrous deeds ascribed to Jesus. These collections were incorporated into the narrative gospels. The authors of those gospels rearranged the collections of sayings and stories to form continuous stories. Like the letters of Paul, these gospels, along with other writings, were collected by various churches. By mid-second century C.E. a considerable assortment of writings were known to the churches: narrative gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John), at least one sayings gospel (the Gospel of Thomas), dialogues and revelations attributed to Jesus, various accounts of his birth, several accounts of acts of the apostles, homilies, and more. The church was rapidly becoming a literate church. Within a century of Jesus’ death, then, Christians had produced a small but quite diverse library of writings. However, as yet there was no proposal to create an official list, a canon."

Dr Hoover went on to discuss Marcion's canon and the one compiled by Eusebius for the Emperor Constantine. He observed: "The canon was reserved for early works, insofar as their antiquity could be determined. The compilers of the Muratorian Canon had rejected the Shepherd of Hermas, despite its popularity, because it was known to have been composed 'recently.' Some argued on a more colorful basis that gall should not be mixed with honey, honey presumably representing more orthodox works. But none of the canonical lists mentions inspiration as a criterion for determining which writings were to be included in the canon. The reason, apparently, is that since all Christians were filled with the spirit, a claim of inspiration would not have been useful as a way of distinguishing canonical from extracanonical Christian writings. It is often noted that the one writing in the New Testament claiming to be inspired is the Revelation of John, and it is precisely this book that was most often among the disputed nominees for inclusion in the New Testament."

Dr. Hoover concluded: "The fourth-century canon has been durable, but it was not regarded as final and has never been universal. Among Eastern orthodox churches the canonical diversity in evidence before Constantine continued. The Syrian church’s canon, for example, is that of the Peshitta, a Syriac version of the New Testament dating from the fifth century. The Peshitta lacks 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and Revelation. Luther placed Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation last in his translation of the New Testament in 1522, because he had doubts about their claims to canonical status. The Gustavus Adolphus Bible (Stockholm, 1618) identifies these four as apocryphal writings. William Tyndale, 'the father of the English Bible,' placed these same four writings last in his translation of the New Testament in 1526, apparently following the practice of Luther. The Roman Catholic Church did not issue an authoritative statement about the contents of the Bible until 8 April 1546, when the Council of Trent, by a vote of twenty-four to fifteen, with sixteen abstentions, declared the writings in Jerome’s Latin Vulgate version to be the church’s official canon. The Roman Catholic canon differs, however, from the Bible accepted by most Protestant churches: it includes the Old Testament Apocrypha, a series of intertestamental books omitted in Protestant Bibles. No single canon, in fact, has ever been accepted as final by the whole church. For the church universal catholic with a small “c” — the status of the canon today resembles what it was in Eusebius’ day: it is both a matter of consensus and a matter of difference."

Later still, I read things like Bart Ehrman's The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction (Oxford University Press) where he also wrote about the formation of the Old Testament Canon. Ehrman observed that (after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in the year 70 A.D.) the Jewish religion evolved into something very different from what it had been in times past. He wrote: "Eventually, Judaism was to shift away - of necessity - from an emphasis on Temple, cult, and sacrifice to being very much a religion 'of the book.' The sacred traditions of Israel, especially as embodied in Scripture, were to become the focus of the religion as it emerged from the disaster of 70 C.E. That much is relatively certain. The older generation of scholars went further and argued that it was at this council <Jamnia> that the canon was once and for all set. That, however, goes beyond the evidence." In other words, the Old Testament canon was NOT considered to be fixed until after Christians had already begun writing the documents which are now part of what we refer to as the New Testament!

Hence, I would encourage all of the folks who share (or have shared) my background in Armstrongism or other Fundamentalist sects to look a little more deeply into the origins of the book which they claim to revere and follow. You may, like me, come away from your research with a greater appreciation and understanding of the Bible. Even so, I can almost guarantee a few surprises and a little more humility about what you think you know when you are finished!