How the Biblical Canon Took Shape

Imagine opening an old box that has been passed down through your family for generations. Inside are letters, photographs, journals, receipts, newspaper clippings, and handwritten notes. Some of the letters have been carefully preserved. They have been read at family gatherings, quoted by grandparents, copied for younger generations, and treated as important pieces of the family’s story. Other papers are different. They may still be interesting, but no one ever treated them with the same importance.

Years later, someone decides to organize the collection. They place the most important family documents together, arrange them, and perhaps even bind copies into a book. That person made real decisions. But did that person suddenly make those letters important? Or did the collection recognize an importance those writings had already carried for generations? That distinction gives us a helpful way to approach another major question about the Bible.

In our last Theological Thursday post, we asked how so many biblical writers could contribute to one connected story. But there is another question hiding underneath that one. Who decided which writings belonged in that story? The Bible did not fall from heaven as a finished book with Genesis on page one and Revelation at the end. Its writings appeared across different periods of history.

So who chose them? And more importantly: Did church leaders create the Bible by choosing the books they preferred, or did the biblical collection take shape through a longer process of recognizing writings that were already being treated as Scripture?

The Bible Did Not Begin as One Bound Book

Today, we can walk into a store and purchase a Bible with one cover, spine, and table of contents. That can make us forget that the Bible did not begin that way. The writings we now call the Bible originally existed separately. The books of the Old Testament developed within the history of ancient Israel and Judaism. Later, the New Testament writings emerged within the earliest Christian communities. Paul did not finish a letter to the church in Corinth and then place it into a completed New Testament. Luke did not finish his Gospel and slide it between Mark and John. These writings circulated individually. Paul’s letters began to be collected. The four Gospels came to be read together. The texts were read, copied, shared, carried from one Christian community to another, and sometimes gathered into smaller collections. The churches were diligent to take care of texts they considered especially important.  Long before Christians had a bound New Testament, they already had writings they regarded as authoritative. The collection came later.

What Does “Canon” Mean?

The word canon can sound complicated, but the basic idea is simple. When Christians speak about the biblical canon, they mean the collection of books recognized as Scripture. The important word there is recognized. That does not mean human judgment disappeared from the process. People had to ask questions, compare writings, copy books, preserve them, discuss disagreements, and make decisions. But early Christians generally did not understand themselves as giving ordinary books divine authority simply because they voted for them. They believed some writings already carried an authority that Christians were responsible to recognize.

Imagine a teacher judging a music competition. While the judge decides which performance receives first place, he does not create the performance. The quality being evaluated already exists. The question about the biblical canon is similar. What did early Jewish and Christian communities believe they were recognizing? And why these writings instead of others?

The Old Testament Story Started Before Christianity

We should begin with an important fact. Christians did not invent the Old Testament. Jesus and the earliest Christians inherited sacred Jewish writings that existed before the Christian church. The Torah, the Prophets, the Psalms, and other Jewish Scriptures were already being copied, read, taught, and treated with religious authority.

The exact history of the Old Testament collection is more complicated than saying that every Jewish community everywhere had one identical table of contents from an early date. Scholars continue to discuss when the boundaries of the Jewish collection became fully settled, and ancient Jewish communities used overlapping but not always identical collections of authoritative writings. That complexity also helps explain why Christian traditions today do not all have identical Old Testament collections. Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Bibles differ over several books.

Those differences are worth exploring more closely, but for our present question, one point is especially important:

The Christian church did not begin by inventing an Old Testament. It inherited a body of Jewish Scripture that was already part of the religious world of Jesus and His earliest followers.

For Christians, the next major question concerns the writings that eventually became the New Testament.

How Did New Testament Writings Begin to Stand Out?

The first Christians were not waiting for someone to publish a New Testament. They were preaching about Jesus, forming churches, teaching new believers, and sharing the testimony of those connected to the earliest events of Christianity. As writings began to circulate, some were received much more widely and consistently than others.

Several considerations became important. One was a writing’s connection to the apostles and the earliest witnesses of Jesus. The apostles held a unique place in early Christianity because they were connected to Jesus and the first generation of Christian testimony. A writing associated with that earliest apostolic witness carried a very different claim than a document that appeared generations later using an apostle’s name. A second question was what the writing taught. Did it agree with the basic message about Jesus that churches believed they had received from the apostles?

Early Christians also considered how widely the writing was being used. A book read across churches in different regions carried a different kind of weight than a text known only within one small movement. Age also mattered. A writing that could be traced to the earliest Christian period had a stronger claim to preserve apostolic testimony than one that appeared much later.

We should be careful here. Early Christians did not all sit down with a printed checklist labeled “Requirements for New Testament Admission.” The process was much more organic than that. These are better understood as the kinds of questions visible in the way Christians received, discussed, accepted, or questioned particular writings.

Christians Did Not Agree About Everything Immediately

If church leaders simply wanted to create a Bible and pretend there had never been any uncertainty, church history gave them a very strange way of doing it. They preserved evidence of their disagreements. By the early fourth century, the church historian Eusebius described some writings as widely recognized and others as disputed. Among the disputed writings he mentioned books such as James, Jude, 2 Peter, and 2 and 3 John. Other Christian writings were known and valued but were placed into different categories.

These disagreements show that early Christians were not simply accepting every writing that claimed Christian authority. They were making distinctions, questioning some books, comparing their claims, and deciding which writings deserved to be received as Scripture. Over time, many of those disagreements became more settled.

In AD 367, Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, wrote a letter that contains the earliest surviving list that matches exactly the twenty-seven books found in the New Testament today. Notice what that does not mean. It does not mean Athanasius invented the New Testament in 367. Most of those writings had been read and valued for generations before he was born. His list is important because it shows us a point in history when the collection Christians know today appears together clearly and completely. That is very different from saying one man suddenly chose twenty-seven books and turned them into Scripture.

Did the Council of Nicaea Choose the Bible?

This brings us to one of the most common stories about the biblical canon. You may have heard that church leaders gathered at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 and voted on which books would be included in the Bible. Sometimes the story goes even further. Constantine supposedly wanted a particular kind of Christianity, church leaders chose the books that supported it, and competing writings were pushed aside. It makes for a dramatic story. But the historical evidence does not support it. The surviving records of Nicaea deal with major theological and church-order questions, especially the controversy concerning the identity of Jesus. They do not record the council establishing a list of biblical books. Even writers such as Eusebius and Athanasius, who were connected to the council and later discussed biblical books, give no indication that Nicaea settled the canon.

Later church councils did formally list books recognized as Scripture. Those decisions were important, but they occurred within a process that had already been unfolding for generations. Church leaders were not beginning with fifty unknown books sitting on a table and asking, “Which twenty-seven should we turn into the New Testament?” They were dealing with writings that already had histories. Some had been copied widely, quoted by earlier Christians, and read publicly in many churches. Others had been questioned in certain places, while some appeared much later and never gained the same level of acceptance. The councils helped clarify the boundaries of a collection that had already been taking shape for generations.

What About the Books That Were Left Out?

This is usually where another question appears. What about the other gospels? What about books like the Gospel of Thomas? What about the Gospel of Judas? What about writings sometimes described as the “lost books of the Bible”? Their existence is real.

Ancient Christianity produced far more literature than the twenty-seven books found in the New Testament. Some writings were respected and useful even though they were not eventually included in Scripture. Athanasius himself distinguished between books he regarded as canonical and other writings that could still be useful for Christian instruction. Other writings stood much further outside the beliefs and practices of the churches that traced their origins to the apostles.

So the mere existence of another ancient Christian book does not prove that church leaders arbitrarily removed it from the Bible. We have to ask better questions. When did the book appear? How close was it to the events it claimed to describe? Was it really connected to the apostle whose name it carried? How widely was it known? How did early Christians use it? Was it treated like the writings that eventually became the New Testament?

Those questions allow us to examine the books historically rather than imagining every ancient Christian writing began with an equal claim to become Scripture. We will return to those so-called “lost books” in our next Theological Thursday post.

A Human Process Raises a Familiar Question

Something interesting about the history of the canon is that it brings us back to a question we have already encountered several times in this series. Human beings were involved at every stage. They copied the books, carried them from place to place, read them in churches, debated some, questioned others, created lists, and eventually gathered the writings into recognized collections. Does the fact that this process was so thoroughly human automatically mean God could not have been involved?

If you have followed this series, you may recognize the question. We asked something similar about the Bible’s authors. Christians believe God could communicate through genuinely human writers without removing their personalities or experiences. The canon presents another version of the same possibility.

Christians believe God could work through a real historical process without requiring that process to look magical or effortless. That is a Christian claim. The historical process itself does not prove that God guided it. But neither does discovering a human process automatically prove that God was absent. The question is whether the process gives us good reason to trust the collection that emerged from it.

Recognition Was Not Instant, but Neither Was It Random

It would be easy to tell this story in one of two extreme ways. One version says there was never any uncertainty. Everyone knew all twenty-seven New Testament books immediately, and later church leaders merely wrote down what everyone had always agreed upon. History is more complicated than that. The other version says Christianity was filled with hundreds of equally accepted scriptures until powerful church leaders chose their favorites and suppressed everything else. History does not support that simple picture either. There was significant agreement around many writings very early. There was also genuine debate around some books. There were useful Christian writings that never became Scripture. There were later writings claiming apostolic names that were not widely accepted as authentic apostolic testimony. And over time, the boundaries became increasingly clear.

That is messier than a Bible dropping from heaven with its table of contents already printed. But real history is usually messy. The important question is whether that history can be examined.

It can.

A Fair Conclusion

So who chose the books of the Bible? There is no single person we can point to, on single council where the entire Bible suddenly appeared, and no single moment when every Christian everywhere agreed about every disputed book at exactly the same time. The biblical canon took shape over time. Writings were produced, circulated, copied, read, quoted, questioned, collected, and eventually recognized within Jewish and Christian communities.

For Christians, that historical process does not compete with belief in God’s guidance. It is the means through which they believe that guidance occurred. But even someone who does not begin with that belief can examine the history. 

Perhaps the question is not: Who had enough power to decide what everyone else had to believe?

A better question is: Why did these particular writings come to be received as Scripture while others did not?

That question takes us out of speculation and into history. History gives us something to investigate.

Free Resource: Explore How the Biblical Canon Took Shape

If you want to work through this question more carefully, I created a free companion resource called Who Chose the Books of the Bible? A Guided Reflection Worksheet for Seekers and Believers.

The worksheet will help you think through what Christians mean by the biblical canon, how writings were recognized over time, why some books were questioned, what church councils did and did not decide, and whether a human historical process automatically rules out divine guidance.

Where We Go Next

The moment we say that some writings were recognized as Scripture while others were not, another question naturally follows. What happened to the others? Were important books deliberately removed? Were alternative versions of Christianity suppressed? Did writings like the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Judas once stand beside Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as equally accepted accounts?

That will be our next Theological Thursday question:

What About the Books Left Out of the Bible?

Lost Scriptures, Other Gospels, and Why They Were Not Included

We will look at some of the writings often called “lost books of the Bible,” when they appeared, what they actually say, and whether they were ever serious competitors