The Canon of Scripture | Part 1

A God Who Speaks

God speaks. Through His word He formed the heavens. He breathed out stars. He breathed into man, giving him life. And He did not abandon man—He spoke to him, telling him of Himself. To Abraham He gave a blessing and a promise. To Moses He gave direction and the law. To the prophets He gave warnings and judgments. He spoke to the apostles, teaching the new covenant through Christ. He spoke to the church, guiding them into truth and into grace. And He speaks to us today. Though this telling took many forms through the arc of history, we now have the fullness of God’s words in a Book. We have the immeasurable blessing of having everything we need to know about God contained in His Holy Word—the Bible.

The question is, how do we know what belongs in the Bible? God used human instruments to write His Word. But many have written about God, have claimed to hear from God, and have tried to speak for Him, yet they are not speaking and writing His words. How do we discern what is truly from God? How can we be sure that the Bible we have today, with its sixty-six books, contains all of God’s Word for us, but nothing other than God’s word for us?

We have a word—canon—that encapsulates this idea. It initially came from a Greek word which refers to a measuring instrument, and eventually developed to mean a rule of action.¹ Within theology, it describes the standard list of the universally accepted books of the Bible, those which have been recognized as truly being God’s inspired, authoritative words.

As Grudem says, “The precise determination of the extent of the canon of Scripture is of the utmost importance.”² If we accept anything that is not divinely inspired, we risk requiring something of others that God does not require. If, on the other hand, we reject a section of Scripture that truly is from God, we will not obey God as we ought since we will be missing a portion of His Word. So, we need a standard—the canon—which we can use to gauge what is and is not God’s Word.

Principles of Canon

Two truths frame the discussion of canon. First, “it is essential to remember that the Bible is self-authenticating since its books were breathed out by God (2 Tim. 3:16).”³ That is, each portion of Scripture was fully divine the moment it was written. When we evaluate the canonicity of a writing, we are not assigning divine inspiration to an otherwise ordinary book, we are recognizing those that already are divine. It, because of what it is as God-breathed, is canonical. We cannot add anything to it or subtract anything from it—each word is already fully divine.

The second thing to consider is that, though God’s Words are self-authenticating, man still has to evaluate whether or not certain books are canonical. Questionable writings (such as the Apocrypha or the Didache) must be analyzed to see if they meet canon criteria. In contrast, the divinely inspired writings must be recognized as such. “Some decisions and choices had to be made, and God guided groups of people to make correct choices and to collect the various writings into the canons of the Old and New Testaments.”⁴

The Old Testament Canon

Our discussion of canon rightly begins with the Old Testament. The Old Testament canon has long been established and settled. “From some time before the Christian era, down to the present, the Jews have accepted our thirty-nine books of the Old Testament.”⁵ These books fall into three sections: The Law, The Prophets, and The Writings. The first contains the Pentateuch (Genesis through Deuteronomy); the second Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings (The Former Prophets), Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, The Twelve (The Latter Prophets); the third Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ruth, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, Esther, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles (the Jews counted Ezra and Nehemiah as one book, and they combined the twelve minor prophets into one book. Thus they had twenty-four books instead of our thirty-nine, but all of the same writings are present).⁶ Together these comprised the Old Testament of Jesus’ day.

These three sections were mentioned and supported in a number of Jewish manuscripts before the time of Christ and make many appearances in the Gospels.⁷ The Law is frequently cited by itself (Matt. 5:18, 12:5, 22:36; Luke 2:23-24, 2:39, 16:17; John 1:17), The Law and The Prophets are referenced together several times (Matt. 5:17, 7:12, 11:13, 22:40; Luke 16:16; John 1:45), and all three are found in Luke 24, where Jesus says, “These are the words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms concerning Me [emphasis added].” This tripartite construction is an obvious reference to the three-sectioned Jewish canon—the same as our Old Testament today.

It is noteworthy that, “we have no record of any dispute between Jesus and the Jews over the extent of the canon. Apparently there was full agreement . . . that additions to the Old Testament canon had ceased after the time of Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.”⁹ Jesus, in His indictment of these same Jews in Luke 11, says, “From the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah who perished between the altar and the temple. Yes, I say to you, it shall be required of this generation.” In this statement Jesus gives “a sweep of history from Genesis to Chronicles, the first and last books of the Jewish canon.”¹⁰ He supports the traditional collection of Scriptures, verifying their authenticity as God’s Word.

The New Testament as a whole contains overwhelming support for the Old Testament writings. “The books of The Law are quoted or are called Scripture thirty-two times in the New Testament, The Prophets forty-three times, and The Writings thirty-seven times.”¹¹ Furthermore, each book of the Old Testament is referenced at least once, save Esther, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon (these can easily be affirmed by the arguments given above). The New Testament authors clearly understood that the Old Testament as they knew it (which is the same one we know) was divinely inspired and authoritative—the Word of God.

Again we remember that these Old Testament canon stood for centuries without dispute. We should not doubt that it truly contains God’s words to us. “With regard to the canon of the Old Testament, Christians today should have no worry that anything needed has been left out or that anything that is not God’s words has been included.”¹²

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1. Charles C. Ryrie, Basic Theology: A Popular Systematic Guide to Understanding Biblical Truth (Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 1999), 119.
2. Wayne A. Grudem, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2008),54.
3. Ryrie, Basic Theology, 119.
4. Ibid, 120.
5. John C. Wenger, Introduction to Theology (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1954), 166.
6. Ibid, 166-167.
7. Ibid, 167-169.
8. Grudem, Systematic Theology,57.
9. Wenger, Introduction to Theology, 169.
10. Ibid.
11. Grudem, Systematic Theology, 60.