How the Bible Was Formed: A Zondervan Digital Short

By Gregg Allison

Derived from Gregg Allison’s magisterial Historical Theology, this digital short provides a concise but thorough history of how both New Testament and Old Testament books were identified as Scripture and incorporated into the final canon. Attention is paid to differences between the Catholic and Protestant canons and to debates about the inclusion of apocryphal books. The equivalent of a series of lectures on Scripture’s formation, with extensive footnoting for further reading, this digital short provides a one-stop reference resource on a foundational matter of Christian doctrine and worship.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zondervan
• Release date: Jul 3, 2012
• ISBN: 9780310496144

Gregg Allison

Gregg Allison (PhD) is Professor of Christian Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky where he teaches systematic theology.  Previously he served on Cru staff at the University of Notre Dame and overseas in Italy and the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland. He is a pastor of Sojourn Community Church, and is the theological strategist for Sojourn Network, a church planting network of about thirty churches. He is the author of Historical Theology: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine; Sojourners and Strangers: The Doctrine of the Church; and Roman Catholic Theology and Practice: An Evangelical Assessment.

Book preview

GENERAL BIBLICAL REFERENCE

HOW

THE BIBLE

WAS FORMED

GREGG ALLISON

AN EXCERPT FROM HISTORICAL THEOLOGY

Contents

Cover

Title Page

How the Bible Was Formed

Copyright

How the Bible Was Formed

How has the church come to believe what belongs in the Bible and what does not belong?

STATEMENT OF BELIEF

The church has historically believed that a specific set of writings — called the canon of Scripture—composes the Old and New Testaments. This list of divinely inspired and authoritative narratives, prophecies, gospels, letters, and other writings that make up the Word of God developed in the early church. The canon of the Protestant church differs from that of the Roman Catholic Church. The Protestant canon is composed of sixty-six books, while the Catholic canon is more extensive. It includes the Apocrypha, extra books in the Old Testament (e.g., Tobit, Judith), and additions to certain Old Testament writings as found in the Protestant Bible (e.g., additions to Esther, Bell and the Dragon). Evangelical churches follow the Protestant canon.¹

THE CANON IN THE EARLY CHURCH

From its beginning on the day of Pentecost, the church considered the Hebrew Bible to be the Word of God (2 Tim. 3:16–17; 2 Peter 1:19–21). The writings that composed the Jewish Scriptures—now called the Old Testament—were fixed and had been so for several centuries prior to the coming of Jesus Christ. The eminent Jewish historian Josephus (AD 37–100) noted: From Artaxerxes [464–423 BC] to our own time the complete history has been written, but has not been deemed worthy of equal credit with the earlier records, because of the failure of the exact succession of the prophets.² Thus, although other writings (e.g., 1 and 2 Maccabees, a history of the Jews in the second century before Christ) were in circulation among the Jewish people at the time of the early church, none of these had been inserted into the canon of the Hebrew Bible and recognized as part of the authoritative Word of God. Indeed, the canon of the Jewish Scriptures had come to a close at the time of the writing of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther (435 BC). No other writings had been — nor could have been — added to the Hebrew Bible in the intervening period, because divine inspiration of the prophets had ceased.

What did the Hebrew Bible look like? Josephus noted twenty-two divinely inspired books in the Hebrew canon: the five books of Moses, thirteen prophetic books, and four books containing hymns and precepts.³ Later Jewish reckonings of the Hebrew Bible typically listed twenty-four books distributed in three divisions: the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings.⁴

This Hebrew Bible, with its fixed canon, was the Bible of the early church.⁵ Although it contained obvious differences in order and grouping from the Old Testament with which today’s church is familiar, all of the books that we consider to be canonical were present and together composed the Word of God for the Jewish people—and the early church.

Following the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ, together with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost to initiate the church, a new phase of revelation began. While relying on the authority of the divinely inspired Hebrew Scriptures, the church was conscious of being the recipient of new truth concerning the person and work of Jesus Christ and the Christian mission in the world.

The ultimate source of this truth