History of the Bible

1407 Latin Bible

This history of the Bible has an abundance of information, most of it in bullet points. Reading this page straight through could be overwhelming!

I recommend bookmarking this page, then coming back to it and leafing through the bullet points. They're very interesting, and repeated visits will give you time to consider what they mean.

Before you go on. Today we use "The Word of God" interchangeably with the Bible. In other words, you can simply say you "follow the Word," and everyone assumes you mean the Bible. That is not how the apostles and their churches used the term!

Looking for a deeper look at the history of the Bible?

I recommend that all Evangelicals get their hands on A High View of Scripture? by Craig Allert. That's a book by an Evangelical for Evangelicals which looks at issues most Evangelicals refuse to look at.

Are you looking for the best Bible translation?

History of the Bible: The New Testament

Obviously, the first churches started by the apostles did not have a New Testament like ours. Not only was there no printing press, but the New Testament writings weren't completed until at least close to A.D. 90, some 60 years after Jesus' death.

The last New Testament writings would be those from John. It is Christian testimony—especially Irenaeus, who says he got it from a man named Papias who knew John—that says John wrote his Gospel and letters in the A.D. 90's.

The rest of the NT writings are very difficult to date, except a few of Paul's letters. There's just not much evidence with which to work.

Gospels

The History of the Bible: Theories and Guessing

I did a lot of reading in preparation for this page. It's amazing how confidently some people assert their opinions.

For example, one web site argued that the apostle John was surely martyred before the Gospel of John was written. Another web page was able to dismiss that argument with one sentence: "The earliest testimony to John's martyrdom is the 5th century."

I can't give you certain dating and authorship on the NT. The evidence of the history of the Bible on all sides is too scanty and the emotional fever too high. Such a topic deserves an entire web site with a page for every book. Even then, you'll wind up mostly guessing .

The Gospels in the history of the Bible are dated anywhere from A.D. 60 to 120. There are scholars who date them later, but mostly those are jealous modern Gnostics, who wish that gnosticism was actually real Christianity. There really isn't any doubt that the accepted history of mainline Christianity and gnosticism is accurate.

Around A.D. 150 Justin Martyr makes reference to "the memoirs of the apostles," and he quotes all four Gospels. Earlier writers show a knowledge of Gospel stories and sayings, but there's no way to prove they're quoting any of the Gospels directly. They don't say "it is written," when they use terminology that's in the Gospels.

By A.D. 185, Irenaeus says that there can only be 4 Gospels, just as their are only four cardinal directions. His reasons are somewhat exotic—and unbelievable to me—but the point is that the 4 Gospels were definitely the only accepted Gospels by A.D. 185.

Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and others reference other Gospels, such as an unknown Gospel of the Egyptians, which may have been the Gospel of Thomas. It is clear, though, that they no longer considered any but the four we know to be Scripture.

Q

Q stands for Quelle, the German word for source. It is a supposed collection of the sayings—and possibly stories—of Jesus that was used to write the Gospels

Personally, I don't believe there's enough evidence to assume there's a written Q, but my expertise is the 2nd century writings, not the history of the Gospels. That issue is very complicated.

Again, though, the more I read the history of the Bible, the more it looks like there's a lot of guessing. I'm for listening to those to whom the Gospels were committed, the Church.

The Pre-Nicene writers say that Matthew was orginally written in Hebrew (e.g., Irenaeus, Against Heresies III:1:1). I've heard it suggested that the Hebrew version of Matthew is the real Q.

Um, but that's just someone's guess .

Paul's Letters

The history of the Bible gives strong testimony to Paul's letters, but there are some that are doubted even by Christian scholars.

Those that demand conclusive evidence limit Paul's true letters to just a few. For the most part, though, scholars accept 10 of Paul's letters, the exceptions being the pastoral letters: 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus (and Hebrews, which almost no one thinks was written by Paul).

If You Want My Opinion

Our Christian confidence in God's provision and in the churches of the 1st and 2nd centuries allow us to assert that all the New Testament writings are apostolic books—written by apostles or men who knew and heard the apostles.

The arguments are difficult to follow unless you devote a lot of time to studying the history of the Bible. Some argue that the pastoral letters don't have Paul's type of reasoning or wording. Personally, I think that if Paul really went to prison, was released, then went to Spain and Great Britain, as the early Christians said he did, then when he returned, he may have been a much different person and used different wording.

I'm a believer in God. 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus have been greatly used by God for 2,000 years now. I don't believe they are forgeries.

There is evidence that is the case. Polycarp quotes both 1 and 2 Timothy in his early 2nd century letter to the Philippians. Since he received a letter from Ignatius in A.D. 107 or 116, his testimony to the history of the Bible is significant.

It's important to point out that skeptics of the New Testament are arguing from what they DON'T know, not from what they do know. We cannot know that Paul wrote the pastoral epistles because evidence concerning their authorship is almost non-existent. However, there's no strong evidence he did not write it.

There's some other things we know about the history of the Bible:

The History of the Bible: General Epistles

The general epistles are those that are not addressed to a specific person or church. Those include Hebrews, James, 1 and 2 Peter, and 1, 2, and 3 John.

No one knows who wrote Hebrews. This was argued about even in the early church.

History of the Bible:
Did the Early Christianity Have a Set Canon?

Now we come to the topic that I most want to cover in the history of the Bible: the "canon."

Um, What's a Canon?

A canon is not one of those things used in the Civil War. That's a cannon.

Canon, for our sakes (there's more precise definitions), means the exact books that are Scripture—and thus belong in the Bible. For us Evangelicals, that would be 66 books, 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the new. Isaiah, for example, is included, but the Book of Enoch is not.

Simply put, the churches before Nicaea did not have a canon. They had books they called Scripture and which they believed were inspired, but it was not a set list of books.

They quoted from more books than we do, commonly referencing books like Ecclesiasticus and Tobit (which are included in the Roman Catholic Bible), the Wisdom of Solomon, and the Book of Enoch (which is only in the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible).

There are some books, however, that were rarely quoted or only quoted in the East or West, which are Hebrews, James, 2 John, 3 John, Jude, and Revelation. In fact, to this day the "Assyrian Orthodox Church of the East" Bible ends at 1 John.

I promised to tell you when I'm telling you something that is controversial among scholars. The history of the Bible is one of them, but it shouldn't be.

There are scholars who wish that the early church had a set canon. There's no evidence for it and lots of real obvious evidence against it.

How We Know the Early Church Had No Set Canon

There's only one list of Scriptural books prior to the 4th century. That's the Muratorian Canon, which is generally dated between A.D. 160 and 170 from internal evidence.
If you'll follow that link, you'll see it's close but not a match for our New Testament.
No one else presents such a list until Eusebius in A.D. 323, which is not an exact match for our Bible or the Muratorian Canon.
The Christian writers of the 2nd and 3rd centuries reference a number of books as Scripture that aren't in our Protestant Bible. A good example is the Book of Enoch, quoted in the New Testament Epistle of Jude and referenced by many early Christians, but there are others as well.
It's interesting to note that—more than a list—there are two manuscripts from the 4th century called the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus. Codex means they're in a book format. Thus, they are "Bibles," the oldest known!
Their Old Testament is the Septuagint (LXX), the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures.
They also contain "apocryphal" books like Tobit, Judith, and Maccabees. What's strange is that Codex Sinaiticus has First and Fourth Maccabbees only, while historians think Vaticanus used to contain all four Maccabees. The Roman Catholics include only the first two Maccabees; most Orthodox churches have all four.
Codex Sinaiticus also includes The Letter of Barnabas and The Shepherd of Hermas at the end of the New Testament. It's unknown whether it had more books after those. The Vaticanus New Testament is damaged, so several books are missing, and a Catholic Encyclopedia I consulted thinks it may once have included First Clement. Scholars think both contained all 27 of our New Testament books.
The first list that matches our Protestant 66 books is by Athanasius in A.D. 361. The Church was pretty corrupt by then, having let in most of the citizens of the Roman empire.
Finally, even as late as A.D. 390, Augustine specifically states the canon is not set: "among the canonical Scriptures he will judge according to the following standard: to prefer those that are received by all the catholic churches to those which some do not receive" (On Christian Doctrine II:8:12).

History of the Bible:
Surprises from the "Bible" used by the Apostles' Churches

I already told you that there was no set "Bible" in the apostles' churches. There were no printing shops to bind scrolls or papyrii together for them.

Prophecy in the Wisdom of Solomon

The Roman Catholic Bible has the book of Wisdom in it, and Protestant Bibles don't. We are missing out on one of the best prophecies of Christ there ever was.

I did some research, and scholars seem convinced the Wisdom of Solomon was written before Christ; only a century or two before, but before. Yet look at this amazing prophecy. I cannot explain why it's not quoted more by early Christians. There are definite seeming references to it in Matthew and Irenaeus' Against Heresies, but for some reason early Christians didn't quote the following amazing passage from 2:12-20:

Let us lie in wait for the righteous man, because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions; he reproaches us for sins against the law, and accuses us of sins against our training. He professes to have knowledge of God, and calls himself a child of the Lord. He became to us a reproof of our thoughts; the very sight of him is a burden to us, because his manner of life is unlike that of others, and his ways are strange. We are considered by him as something base, and he avoids our ways as unclean; he calls the last end of the righteous happy, and boasts that God is his father. Let us see if his words are true, and let us test what will happen at the end of his life; for if the righteous man is God's son, he will help him, and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries. Let us test him with insult and torture, that we may find out how gentle he is, and make trial of his forbearance. Let us condemn him to a shameful death, for, according to what he says, he will be protected.

There are a lot of books quoted by the early churches that we don't use much anymore. Some of them are very interesting; here's why:

The Book of Enoch: This book's pretty bizarre, but interesting to read. It was well-known to the early Christians. It's quoted in the New Testament (Jude 14-15). It has the first description of Hades, a description which matches the story of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:22ff. It also describes the giants of Genesis 6 and a lot of other interesting things. It's one of the more important books in the history of the Bible.
The Martyrdom of Isaiah: Ever wondered who was sawn in half, as mentioned in Hebrews 11? It was Isaiah, and this book tells the story.
The Book of Jannes and Jambres: Paul mentions Jannes and Jambres in 2 Timothy 3:8. This book is no longer extant, so we don't know what it says (very sad).
The early churches used the Septuagint (LXX) for their Old Testament. It's likely the apostles did, too, which explains the difference between NT quotes of the OT and the actual verses we have in the OT of our modern Bibles.

A good example is Matthew 4:10, where Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 6:13, but he adds, " … and him only shall you serve." That last phrase is found only in the LXX.

The LXX, despite all the minor differences, is very similar to our modern Bibles, which are based on the Hebrew Masoretic text. There are two notable exceptions. Jeremiah and Job in the LXX are each about 1/6 shorter than the Masoretic text!

The LXX is the Old Testament of choice for the Orthodox churches. Their "Apocrypha" is larger even than the Roman Catholics "Apocrypha." From experience, I can tell you it's hard to get an Orthodox believer to give you a good list of what books are in their Old Testament. The most notable extra books are 3 and 4 Maccabees and 2 Esdras (which is a very interesting read).

One not true part of the history of the Bible is the story that the Dead Sea Scrolls backed up the Masoretic text of Isaiah. That story came out in 1947. In 1948, however, it was retracted. The retraction didn't get as much Christian press as the original story, and so the 1947 story has been repeated—falsely—among Christians for over 60 years now.
More interestingly, the Dead Sea scroll of Jeremiah backs up the LXX text, which, as mentioned, is seven chapters shorter than our Masoretic Jeremiah.

There's a lot more that could be said about the history of the Bible, but it's more than what one web page can handle.

This page is already pretty intense. If you want to know more, take a deep breath and plunge into A High View of Scripture?.

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