Recognized (Putting the Bible In Its Place #3)

It seems fitting for Throwback Sunday that my opening story comes from 2003.

I had the joy that year of watching a young man come to know Jesus. He was a deep thinker with a lot of questions, and he was not going to take the leap simply because other young adults around him were following Christ, or because there was a church on every block. He would only do it if he became genuinely convinced Christianity was true.

But once he made that decision, he changed.

He had been an offensive lineman in college — a big guy — and when he gave his life to Jesus, he suddenly had a heart and a smile to match his size. He simply could not help telling people about Jesus. It radiated off him.

After college, without football, he started putting on weight and did not like it. Some guys at work were doing a triathlon, so he decided to sign up to stay in shape.

And then he realized he did not know how to swim.

So he joined a pool, jumped in, and after two laps understood he was in serious trouble. He asked whether anyone there could coach him, paid his money, and they assigned him an instructor — a woman in her twenties.

It became obvious fairly quickly that the two of them had feelings for each other.

And because he was a new believer, he simply could not stop talking about Christ. Rather than finding him strange, she was drawn to him — and drawn to this idea of Jesus.

She had made a series of decisions she regretted and had been through some difficult relationships, and she had concluded there was no way God could ever love someone like her. But the way he talked about Jesus — the way he talked about grace — opened something up in her.

And Then One Day Everything Changed

He showed up for a lesson and she had pulled back emotionally. He could feel it. Here he was thinking she was about to become his girlfriend, and instead she was withdrawing.

So he asked. And eventually she admitted that someone had given her a book that cast doubt on the whole of Christianity.

The book claimed there were other books that should have been included in the Bible but were deliberately left out — that there had been backroom politics, that certain writings were suppressed. And it wrecked the faith that had been quietly growing in her.

Because he did not want to give up on her, he decided he had to read it himself.

And suddenly this man — only months into his own faith — found himself stretched and shaken, wondering whether he had bought into the biggest lie ever told.

When he and I talked, I asked what the book was.

It was The Da Vinci Code.

Why That Book Mattered

Anyone here heard of it? A number of you have.

It came out in 2003, written by Dan Brown. In its first five years it sold over eighty million copies, was translated into forty-four languages, and became a major film in 2006.

It follows an academic named Robert Langdon — a symbologist — who gets pulled into a murder mystery at a famous art museum. Along the way the story claims that clues hidden in famous artwork reveal that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, that they had a child, that this bloodline continued into a European royal dynasty, and that certain books were intentionally excluded from the Bible by church authorities because including them would have undermined their power and disrupted the narrative they wanted.

When Dan Brown was asked where the plot came from, he said it was essentially his own spiritual journey — that it is not really a work of fiction so much as a parable. Instead of a murder in a museum, it was him reading and studying over the years, and he wanted a form in which to share what he had concluded.

Which led someone to ask about his religious background. He described being raised in the church and being quite religious as a boy. Then in eighth or ninth grade he began studying astronomy and cosmology and the origins of the universe, and he went to a minister and said he did not understand — he had read a book describing an enormous explosion at the beginning of the universe, and here was a text saying God created the heavens and the earth and the animals in seven days. Which one was right?

And the answer he received was, in effect, that nice boys do not ask that question.

Why Can’t Nice Boys Ask That Question?

That is my question.

Are Christians so afraid that some question will come along and topple the entire thing? Is Christianity so fragile that in order to protect it, we cannot allow certain questions?

If so, I want no part of it. I do not want to belong to something so brittle that a single question dismantles it.

I want to be part of something so robust that you can throw any question at it and find that it still stands.

Now, we are not going to answer his eighth-grade question today about the origins of the universe. But we are going to answer his questions about the canon of Scripture.

How did the books in the Bible get there? How do we know we can trust them? Are there books that should have been included but were not? Are there books in there we should not be reading? And if so, does that mean Christianity is fake, or at least weaker than we thought?

My hope is that as we look at how the Old and New Testaments came together, it will shore up your faith if you follow Christ — and if you are a spiritual seeker, give you confidence that you can genuinely discover God by reading the Scriptures. So that when you read about Jesus, his life, his death, and his resurrection, you will know it is not a myth created to push an agenda, but a true story meant to change your life.

The Text: 2 Timothy 3:16–17

“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”

Two weeks ago we spent considerable time on just the first two words: all Scripture. What we did not do was ask what the totality of all Scripture actually is — because we knew we would do that today.

The word for that totality is canon. Not the kind you fire — that is spelled differently. This comes from a Greek word meaning measuring rod or rule.

So here is the definition I am working with: the canon is the collection of books recognized by the church as having divine authority to speak into all matters of life and doctrine. It is the document God has given us against which we measure our lives and our beliefs.

Protestants — which is what we are — hold that there are 39 books in the Old Testament and 27 in the New, totaling 66.

But why 66? Why not 67, or 65? Why do Catholics have 73 in their Bible, and Eastern and Russian Orthodox churches have 79? Why did God not give us a nice round 100?

To answer that, we have to treat the two testaments separately — because they came together in different ways, and the reasons we trust them differ.

The Old Testament

The quick answer to why Protestants hold to 39 Old Testament books: because that is what Jesus and the first-century Jews had.

It is a bit more complicated than that, and we will get into it. But that is the short version.

The Tanakh

The Jewish Scriptures are called the Tanakh, which is an acronym for Torah, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim.

The Torah is the Law — the first five books, which Christians call the Pentateuch and believe were written by Moses.

The Nevi’im is the Hebrew word for Prophets. In our English Old Testament we have the Major Prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah, and the Minor Prophets like Hosea, Joel, and Amos — minor not because they matter less, but because their books are shorter. But the Jewish arrangement also counted figures like Samuel as prophets, so books we file under history they filed under prophets.

The Ketuvim is the Writings — historical books like Ezra and Nehemiah, and poetry and wisdom books like Psalms and Proverbs.

These three sections were written across roughly eleven hundred years — Genesis first written around 1400 BC by Moses, and the collection completed with Malachi around 430 BC.

What about the Talmud?

The Jewish people also had the Talmud — but they never regarded it as authoritative. It was not canon. It functioned more like commentary on the Tanakh. When a rabbi wrote his understanding of a passage, it might be recorded there, and that collection helped them interpret the Tanakh. It also preserved rituals, traditions, and historical records.

And in the Talmud a theme emerges around a man named Ezra — who wrote the book bearing his name, and possibly Nehemiah as well, since the two are closely linked.

It is believed that around 435 BC — just five years after Malachi finished writing — Ezra and a body called the Great Synagogue began determining which books were authoritative and gathering them into the Tanakh.

There is genuine scholarly debate about whether that account is accurate. But what is not in dispute is that by the time Jesus and the first-century Jews appear, the Tanakh is what they had, and they believed it was God’s word.

Jesus affirms it

Jesus affirms the Tanakh directly. In Luke 24, shortly after his resurrection, he appears to the disciples in a closed room and says that everything written about him in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.

In one sentence he names all three sections — Torah, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim — and says the whole thing is God’s word and that all of it points to him.

Last week we saw that over three hundred prophecies pointed to Jesus and that he fulfilled them, at odds so remote they are effectively impossible. And now here he stands, resurrected, before disciples who watched him die — telling them this was written about for thousands of years and has now been fulfilled in him.

A harder passage

He affirms it again in Luke 11, in a much harsher setting. He is rebuking the Pharisees and scholars, largely for hypocrisy, and says that the blood of all the prophets shed from the foundation of the world will be charged against that generation — from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah.

People often assume God is severe in the Old Testament and gentle in the New. So why is Jesus saying something this hard?

Because these leaders spent every day studying Scripture and claimed to believe the Tanakh was God’s word. And that same word, as Jesus just said, points to him — prophesying his coming, his death, his resurrection. He is God incarnate. And despite the Tanakh pointing to Christ, the leaders of his day were rejecting him.

So Jesus says: you are rejecting me — the one who created you, who loves you, who is going to die for you.

But for our purposes today, notice what that phrase does. From the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah.

The Hebrew Scriptures were structured differently than ours. We have 39 books arranged as Pentateuch, history, wisdom, major prophets, minor prophets. They had three sections — and they combined books we have since split. They had no First and Second Samuel, just Samuel. No First and Second Kings, just Kings. Ezra and Nehemiah were one book. By that arrangement they counted 22 books, and some believe that was intentional, since there are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet.

Abel dies at the hands of Cain in Genesis 4 — the first martyr. Zechariah dies in 2 Chronicles 24 — and given where that book sat in their arrangement, he is the last prophet killed.

So in that sentence, Jesus is saying from the first page to the last. He affirms the entire Tanakh as God’s word.

And so the content we have today — though structured differently and counted differently — is essentially exactly what they had then.

What About the Apocrypha?

The word apocrypha means hidden.

Christians believe there were four hundred years between Malachi and the coming of Jesus in which God did not speak. But writings were produced during that period. Some believe those writings were genuinely from God but had been hidden and later brought to light, and that they can still teach us.

Many who include them keep them in a separate section labeled Apocrypha. Catholics include seven such books; Orthodox churches include twelve. Catholics also include additional chapters in Esther and Daniel, and Orthodox churches accept those and add a Psalm 151.

So why do Protestants not accept them?

Let me be clear: if you read the Apocrypha, you are not going to hell. It is not evil. There is genuinely useful historical material in there. But several problems keep them out of the canon.

1. Inconsistency with the rest of Scripture

In the book of Tobit there is a section that essentially prescribes a magical practice — it reads rather like assembling a potion. That does not fit with the rest of Scripture.

Tobit also teaches that salvation comes by works, primarily through giving alms — that if you do not give alms you will not reach heaven.

Now, giving to the poor is a very good thing. It is why we support relief work and donate on behalf of every first-time guest who visits. But our salvation is not found in almsgiving. It is found in Jesus and Jesus alone.

Or take Ecclesiasticus, which is deeply misogynistic. It is genuinely shocking to me that anyone counts it as God’s word. It lays the blame for sin entirely on Eve — and I am fairly confident Adam was standing right there. Paul, in fact, places more weight on Adam, since Eve was deceived and Adam was not. Adam knew precisely what he was doing and ate anyway.

And this one genuinely grieves me: that book describes daughters as a loss. I have two daughters. They are not a loss. They are a joy. Women bear the image of God. They are not a loss. That is simply not consistent with the rest of Scripture.

2. Historical inaccuracies

A couple of these books contain historical errors.

Do not misunderstand — First Maccabees is genuinely helpful for understanding what happened between Malachi and Matthew. If you want the history of the Jewish people in that period, and the origins of Hanukkah, go read First and Second Maccabees.

But if God does not lie and sees everything, he cannot breathe historical inaccuracies through human authors. So those books cannot be accepted as canon.

3. No internal claim to be God’s word

Last week we noted that both testaments contain moments where the authors indicate this is God’s word. I admitted then, and admit again, that this alone risks circular reasoning — but it matters that the Bible at least claims it.

Not once in any apocryphal book is such a claim made. In fact, First Maccabees states at least three times that there was no prophet in their day. They were waiting for one. They openly acknowledge that God was not speaking to them.

4. It was not accepted by the Jewish people — or by Jesus

These last two are the strongest to me.

Ezra and the Great Synagogue would have had access to some of this material and did not include it. And by the time you get to Jesus, not once does he quote or refer to anything from the Apocrypha. He refers only to the Tanakh.

And the biblical writers quote the Old Testament over 250 times — and never once quote from any apocryphal work.

So those are the reasons Protestants hold to 39 Old Testament books. Again, I do not think God casts you out for reading them. I simply do not believe they are God-breathed.

The New Testament

Some people believe, as The Da Vinci Code suggests, that the New Testament was assembled like a piece of legislation — a group of powerful men in a smoke-filled back room haggling over what to include and exclude until they had the narrative they wanted, which they then presented to everyone as God’s word.

Many assume that room was the Council of Nicaea in AD 325.

But we possess a fragment written by one of the church fathers that records the 27 books of the New Testament as canon — and that fragment dates to around AD 170. That is roughly 150 years before Nicaea ever convened. There was already a settled sense of what belonged.

How it actually came together

Consider the situation. When Jesus left, the church had only the Old Testament, so that is what they taught from. But they also had apostles who had spent three years with Jesus, and people relied on the apostles’ teaching.

Eventually that teaching needed to be recorded. So Paul began writing. Peter and James wrote. Those writings circulated. But other works were also being written and circulated. Which could be trusted?

A set of requirements emerged.

First, authorship. It had to be written by an apostle — Peter, Paul — or by someone directly connected to one. We have been studying Mark, and Mark was closely tied to Peter, so reading Mark’s account is in a real sense hearing from Peter. Luke traveled with Paul, which is why Luke’s Gospel and Acts were accepted.

This automatically excluded nearly anything written in the second or third century, because the apostles had died, and so had most of those directly associated with them.

It also meant that many of these works were written close enough to the events that eyewitnesses could push back and say, no, that is not what happened.

Second, broad acceptance by the church. You could not have a hidden book suddenly appear. You could not have a small minority of churches championing something while everyone else shrugged and went along to be agreeable. There had to be genuine consensus.

Third, consistency with the message of Jesus and the Old Testament. People sometimes ask why the Gospel of Thomas was excluded — why stop at four Gospels? But the Gospel of Thomas contains a supposed saying of Jesus claiming that a woman must become a man in order to be saved.

Jesus died for men and women. Ladies, you do not have to become a man to go to heaven. You do not have to become a man for the image of God to be in you. Genesis says male and female he created them. That is flatly inconsistent with Scripture, so the Gospel of Thomas is rejected.

Fourth, accuracy. If God is God, what he records will be historically accurate. The Da Vinci Code leans on the Gospel of Philip for the claim that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married. But the people who actually knew Jesus knew he was never married. That is historically false, so it is rejected.

So the back-room story is simply not what happened

Despite what Dan Brown and other skeptics say, the Bible was not assembled by power-hungry men in a smoky room haggling over a narrative to preserve their control.

It came together remarkably early in the life of the church and has held ever since, with a broad consensus that this is from God — that his Spirit breathed it through human authors, and that we can read and trust it because God assembled it to guide us in all matters of life and doctrine.

But There Were Genuine Controversies

I do not want to paint too rosy a picture. Some books were questioned.

In the New Testament, probably the biggest question surrounded 2 Peter.

Other works had circulated falsely attributed to Peter — written by someone else and stamped with his name to gain acceptance. So when 2 Peter began circulating, some asked whether this was another one. And the language, feel, and style of 2 Peter differ noticeably from 1 Peter, which raised further questions.

But enough churches accepted it. And as they worked on dating, they concluded 1 Peter came earlier in his ministry and 2 Peter near the very end of his life, which could account for the differences. And they saw how accurate and consistent its message was — not only with 1 Peter but with all of Scripture.

Now, hearing that there was controversy makes some people take a step back.

I think it should do the opposite.

Rather than filling you with doubt, that should increase your trust — because it means the early church did not simply accept everything. They did not say, another one from Paul? Wonderful, in it goes. They genuinely weighed these things.

In Acts there is a group called the Bereans. When Paul arrives and begins sharing the gospel, they do not simply nod along. They go back and compare it against the Tanakh, weighing whether his teaching is consistent with what Scripture says about the Messiah. And once satisfied, they believe.

That is what has continued in the church. It has not accepted everything indiscriminately, nor rejected things out of mere distaste. It has weighed them prayerfully, asking whether God truly breathed this through his Spirit into human authors so that he might continue to guide us.

Is the Canon Still Open?

Which raises one last question: is it really finished at 66? Could God add more?

My answer is yes and no — and the no is far larger than the yes.

I say no because I cannot see a reason for God to write more to us. Most pastors, most theologians, and the church broadly share the sense that God is finished writing.

The reason I include a sliver of yes is simply that it is God’s word. Not mine, and not the church’s. So if for some reason God decided he wanted to communicate something further to guide his people, that is his right. He does not have to ask my permission.

But if he did, it would be consistent with what is already there. It would be accurate. And there would be a broad sense across the global church — not one tribe of Christianity, but the whole church — that yes, God is giving this to us.

Honestly, I do not see it happening. I am no prophet, but from where I stand, God has given us exactly what he wants us to have.

Next week we conclude this series. We have seen that Scripture is from God, why it is reliable, and how it came together. Next week we ask why — why did God give us these 66 books? And I hope you will hear that he has a purpose for it, not only for his church, but for you.

Let Us Pray

Heavenly Father, thank you for your Scriptures, for how you assembled them, and that we can trust them. Help us become people of the book.

I pray for the skeptic listening. I fully recognize I do not have the academic pedigree to give an exhaustive defense, and that there are scholars who disagree with me and could make a better case than I can. But open the heart of the skeptic to see that you assembled this — that you put in exactly what you want us to have, that we can trust it when we read and study it, and that we can measure our lives and our beliefs against it.

Create in us a greater hunger for your word. Let us not merely be confident it is your word and then leave it on a shelf. Let us pick it up daily, letting your life-changing words be poured into us, so you can mold and shape us into the image of Jesus.

I recognize that what we have done these past forty minutes was something of an academic exercise — a great deal of it aimed at our heads. So take it and move it to our hearts. Let it grow our faith and our trust in you, so that when we encounter something like that book, we do not waver — because we know you have assembled your word, your letter to us. It is there that we hear about your love and see Jesus, who came to earth, lived a sinless life, and died in the sinner’s place.

So as we look at the Scriptures, draw us to them — and not merely to the pages, but to you: the one who wrote it, the one who breathed it into place, and the one who wants to breathe it into our lives. Open us up to you. Do in us what you want to do through your word, for your glory and for our joy. In the name of Jesus we pray together, amen.