Continous Discipleship - How the Bible Came to Be

Prayer: God our helper, by your Holy Spirit, open our minds, that as the Scriptures are read and your Word is proclaimed, we may be led into your truth and taught your will, for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
                         (from the Book of Common Worship)

The Scriptures, or Bible (from the Greek word meaning book), “manifest themselves to be the Word of God.”  They “principally teach what man is to believe concerning God, and what duty God requires of man.” (from the Larger Catechism, part of the Westminster Standards, 1647) The Bible is made up of 66 books, 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament.

From the many writings from which the Bible could have been compiled, the church, the community of faith, chose the books that we have in our Bible. Early Christians decided that because these particular books proclaim God’s message in a very special way, they should become the canon of scripture. The word canon came to mean rule or standard based on the Greek word meaning reed which was an early measuring device. The books in the canon of scripture measure up according to the church.

Since the early Christian church had only the writings of our Old Testament, when the New Testament refers to scripture, it means the Old Testament.

About 250 years before Christ, a group of Jewish scholars had translated the Old Testament from Hebrew into the common language of that time, Greek. This version, called the Septuagint, contained some books written very late, that are not in our Old Testament. These books are known as the Apocrypha and are not considered holy scripture by Protestants.

The Old Testament was written over a period of a thousand years, probably from about 1150 - 125 B.C. Many of the Old Testament stories circulated for centuries in oral form before they were committed to writing. The current Hebrew canon was closed by the Council of Rabbis meeting at Jamnia in 90 A.D. and again in 118 A.D.

The Christian community began to close its canon at about 200 A.D. While all the books of the New Testament were accepted in principle, Hebrews, James, II and III John, II Peter, Jude and Revelation remained in dispute for a time. By about 400 A.D., the New Testament canon was fixed in the Greek and Latin churches of the Roman Empire.

Jesus himself left nothing in writing. The earliest surviving Christian writings are the letters of Paul. The four canonical gospels were the works of the second Christian generation 70-100 A.D. Mark’s gospel, the earliest of the four, was probably written in Rome about 64 A.D. Matthew and Luke made extensive use of Mark in writing their gospels. There were also a number of other gospels, but they add nothing of significance about Jesus, and in some cases give us fanciful tales of the infancy and childhood of Jesus. The King James Version of the Bible was translated in 1611 and the New Revised Standard Version was completed in 1989.

Prayer: We thank you God for your Son Jesus Christ who is the Light of the World and thus illumines our reading of scripture.  Amen.