Who Chose the New Testament?
The Story of how our New Testament was put together!
Who decided which books should be in the Bible?
The Bible did not fall from heaven, land in our laps, complete with charts, notes, and a table of contents. The Bible is a book that was formed and fashioned over the course of two millennia. While the Bible is venerated as the Word of God by many faith communities, it only came into existence because it was authored and authorized by those very same communities of faith. But how did this happen?
In the early church, a book that was thought to possess a sacred quality might be labeled as “scripture,” whereas a collection of scriptures amounts to a “canon.” What we call “canonization” is the process by which a collection of sacred books first emerged and then later came to be accepted as the universal standard of faith and practice for the Christian churches. Canonization thus refers to the formation of the Christian canon comprising of the Old and the New Testaments.
The formation of the Christian canon transpired through a particular process, while much of it can be attributed to divine providence, it was also a very human process. The making of the canon was a matter of authors writing books, those books being edited, circulated, collected, until they were finally ratified as the officially recognized list of sacred writings that Christians held to be authoritative for life and doctrine.
The Christian canon is partly an inheritance of the sacred texts esteemed by first century Jewish communities, the writings which now comprise the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. But the Christian canon is also comprised of specifically Christian texts about Jesus, the beginnings of the church, and writings attributed to the apostles and their associates. It is these writings which make up the New Testament as we have it today.
It is the origins of the New Testament as a canonical collection that will be the focus on this post as we delve into the complex and sometimes strange story of the making of the New Testament canon.
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