One More Reason Why We Can Trust the Bible

 

One More Reason Why We Can Trust the Bible

This weekend, we discussed a number of reasons why we can trust the Bible. After all, “the Bible tells me so,” doesn’t mean a whole lot if we can’t trust it. Sadly, due to technical issues, we were unable to use many of the images I’d prepared, and I had to omit an entire section from my notes. So below are the images from this weekend as well as a section on how the Bible was put together.

Pastor Eric

Text	Number of manuscripts	Years between original and earliest known manuscript
Plato’s Republic	7	1,200 years
Caesar’s Gallic Wars	10	1,000 years
Homer’s Iliad	643	500 years
The New Testament	5,600 in Greek (24,000 total)	Less than 100 years (Gospel of John - 30 yrs)

The picture above shows the 63,779 cross-references in the Bible. The white bars along the bottom represent each Bible chapter, Gen. 1 - Rev. 22. The line’s color shows the reference’s distance from the other. A cross-reference is a scripture that references another scripture. Had the Bible been written by one person or at one time this would still be amazing; however, the Bible was written by 40 authors over the span of 1,500 years on 3 different continents.

Question: How did the Church determine which books should be included in the Bible, and which ones omitted?

One argument that people use to undermine the trustworthiness of the Bible has to do with how the early church determined which books to include in the Bible. After all, there were other supposed gospels and writings that were floating around out there when the Catholic Church convened a council to determine the Books of the Bible. So how do we know that the 66 books that we have in the Bible are the right ones?

It’s a fair question. In fact, there were several councils to discuss this topic, including the Council of Rome (382AD) and the Council of Carthage (397AD) in which they affirmed the 66 books that make up the Bible. However, it is misleading to suggest that they arbitrarily chose the books to include. For one, the Old Testament had already been universally accepted as scripture long before Jesus was born. As for the New Testament books, the councils did not arbitrarily pick which books they felt were inspired. Rather, they merely affirmed the authority that these texts had already been given within the Christian community from the earliest days of their writing. The 27 books of the New Testament had been passed around, treated as scripture, used in the early church's worship services. And all of the texts were either written by the apostles or by someone who was closely connected to the apostles. The only book that even remotely deviates from that is the book of Hebrews, because we’re not sure who wrote Hebrews. And there was some discussion during the councils about this, but eventually they decided to include Hebrews as well, because it had been treated as scripture by the early church, so they affirmed the same.

But what about the so called Gnostic Gospels? Why didn’t the councils include them? Because they weren’t even written during the time of the early church. They were written in the 300’s and we have no idea who the authors were. It would be like someone showing up today and saying, I have a fifth gospel. Mary Magdalene wrote it and you should include it. We’d dismiss that person’s claim on the spot. Likewise, the councils had no problem saying, “There is no comparison here. These 27 texts were both penned by the earliest believers and they were treated as scripture by the early church, so we’re going to simply affirm their authority as scripture, not arbitrarily pick which ones we like and ignore the rest.”

So that's how the books of the Bible were decided upon.