Transcription
Your Bible is missing seven books. That was the line I heard from a colleague of mine some months ago. We work together and would often strike up public debates before our colleagues over lunch. We discussed many divisive topics such as baptism, grace and works, the apostolic succession, and praying to Mary and the Saints. Most of which were refuted with ease.
However, my friend had a trump card, a topic I hadn't yet explored: the truth behind the origin of our 66-book Bible. It's something I'd never really considered. Growing up in the faith, I always trusted God's word to be true, but I never questioned where it came from or how it was compiled. What if there were books we were missing, or books that don't belong in God's true word?
I started to wrestle and was challenged even further when my friend told me that our 66-book Bible is actually seven books short. Confused, I questioned him, and he confidently affirmed that Martin Luther, our hero of the Reformation, was the one responsible for removing the books. This, coupled with the fact that for the first time he had seemingly swung the crowd into his favor, sent me on an unwavering quest. I must be certain of the 66-book Bible that I believe, and I wouldn't stop at anything to prove my friend wrong. So, after months of research, this is the true and historical story of how we compiled our 66-book Bible.
I need to make a quick distinction. My friend and I likely have opposing views on what he actually believes the Bible is. Is it an authorized collection of writings, or is it a collection of authorized writings? One view says that the church gives the books their authority as scripture, whereas the other view says the books themselves already have the authority; we just need to figure out which ones they are. And in our pursuit of uncovering these authoritative books, I found myself starting with the New Testament, of all places.
The reason I started there is because there's much less debate over the 27 books written in the first century, because they all have specific traits and author qualifications that set them apart from other historical documents. However, there are some funny stories. 85 AD, a dude named Marcion of Sinope published the earliest version of the New Testament we have on record, but the guy had some wacky doctrines that eventually got him into some trouble. He believed that Jesus was a new, separate God sent to Earth. He was different from that vengeful God of the Old Testament. He also believed that Paul was the only true Apostle, which makes sense when you learn his canon contained 10 of Paul's letters and the Gospel of Marcion, an edited version of Luke's gospel. It wasn't long before the nut job was kicked out by the early church fathers for, well, a bunch of reasons.
Now, this little guy may seem insignificant, but he forced the early church to respond with a New Testament canon of their own. 180 AD, a compilation of 22 of the 27 New Testament books, dubbed the Muratorian Canon, was formed. Discovered in a Northern Italian library, it seemed to be the first serious crack at pulling the New Testament scripture into one document. This means that within 150 years of Jesus' death, give or take, the majority of the New Testament we have today was widely accepted and affirmed by the early church.
There were four main criteria the fathers looked for when searching for God's word: One, was it authored by an apostle or someone close to an apostle? Two, is it accepted by the body of Christ? Three, does it contain consistent doctrine? And four, does it contain the moral and spiritual values that reflect the Holy Spirit? The books compiled presented a unified depiction of Jesus' atoning work on the cross. However, the canon wasn't perfect. It was missing six books that we now accept to be canon and included two books which we don't find in our modern Bibles. To their credit, they did reject four other historical works, two of them because they were forged letters of Paul from our old friend Marcion.
313 AD marked a huge year for the Christians, as the Edict of Milan under the Roman Emperor Constantine officially decriminalized Christianity, meaning for the first time in its history, Christianity became legal. And also meaning that the early church fathers could finally gather together and form a united canon and communicate the truth easily throughout the rapid expansion of the early church. But here's where I want to pause, because we haven't yet discussed the Old Testament canon, the book on which this entire debate is hinged.
450 BC, a book was compiled called the Tanakh, the first Hebrew Bible used by the ancient Jews. But there were only 24 books included, and they were split into three sections as follows: The Torah, which included the Law of Moses; Nevi'im, which included much of the Old Testament narrative books like Samuel and Kings, as well as the Prophets. The 12 Minor Prophets were read as one book; and the Ketuvim, which included the wisdom and poetry books, as well as a few narrative and prophetic books too. The question is, though, what was special about these books and how did they earn their spot in the ancient Hebrew Bible?
The Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, are easily the least disputed due to primarily the early Jews' high regard for such text as scripture. The first hearers truly believed the Torah was God's word, and therefore it became binding. Within the Torah, God tells Moses how more books will be added to the Old Testament canon. He will quote, "Rise up a prophet like you," and that God himself will quote, "call to account anyone who does not listen to my words that the prophet speaks in my name." He even gives a simple qualification to distinguish between true and false prophets: "If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message that the Lord has not spoken." With that binding word from God, the prophets of old, such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Daniel, secured their place in the Hebrew canon, proving their legitimacy by the fulfillment of their prophecies in God's name.
Now, this all sounds pretty reasonable, but ladies and gentlemen, this is where it gets interesting. 393 AD, thanks to Christianity now being legal in the Roman Empire, the Synod of Hippo took place, a gathering where early Christians hoped to establish an official biblical canon for the early church to use. Their New Testament was identical to our modern-day collection of 27 books, but the Old Testament wasn't so simple. Now, it would make sense to simply take the Tanakh as the Old Testament, since this is the text the ancient Jews recognized as God's word, then you've got all of God's word in one place, right? But instead, we see something quite different.
This new canon contains 33 books. You may notice some name changes right off the bat, but what jumped out to me was the seven books I've never seen before. Turns out, there's a gap in the Jewish timeline, four centuries in fact, where the history is seemingly missing. Well, these additional books fill that time period and recount accurate historical narrative and teaching from the time. They were included in the canon primarily because of their inclusion in the Septuagint, the first Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, compiled during those centuries of silence. This collection of books was considered the first official Catholic canon, and in 397 AD, at the Council of Carthage, it was reaffirmed and sedimented as the established canon, binding over the church.
So, the question now is, why does our current Bible have only 66 books and not 73? Was my work colleague right in saying that our Old Testament is incomplete? Well, for the next 11 centuries, the Catholic Church would continue to expand, using certain teachings from these additional books, such as Tobit and 2 Maccabees, to make a lot of money, specifically the selling of indulgences, a way to redeem a dead loved one from judgment by paying money to the Church. Of course, this income helped fund the unbelievable Catholic parishes and churches we see today. During the construction of St. Peter's Basilica, a prominent marketing slogan was pushed by the church to sell indulgences, reading: "As soon as the coin into the box rings, a soul from purgatory to Heaven springs."
It wasn't until 1517 AD where a man named Martin Luther said, "Enough was enough." Amidst ruffling some Catholic feathers with his 95 Theses, Luther reviewed the Catholic Bible, which was written exclusively in Greek or Latin languages, which most common folk in Germany couldn't even understand, and proposed his own canon. In 1522 AD, he assigned the seven additional Old Testament books to a section called Apocrypha and determined them to be useful, but not scripture. He also kept Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation at the back as disputed books, but still included them as the biblical canon.
With the chaos and disruption of control caused by the Reformation, the Catholic leaders were forced to respond, and in 1545 AD, they held the Council of Trent, an attempt to repair the damage done by Luther and his reformers. They re-read the books Luther removed and assigned them a new title, Deuterocanonical, attempting once again to affirm them in scripture. They also affirmed the doctrine of faith plus works to earn salvation and established that both the Bible and church tradition hold equal authority to each other, seemingly a desperate pendulum swing reaction to save a crumbling empire.
My work colleague would argue that Luther removed those seven books based on his personal preference alone, simply because they didn't align with his own theology. But that is not true. There were four main reasons why they weren't included in Luther's Old Testament: One, they weren't in the original Hebrew Old Testament, meaning they weren't accepted as scripture by the Jews of Jesus' time or the early church fathers. Two, they contradicted the doctrine of salvation by faith alone, which is proclaimed strongly throughout the New Testament. Three, the historical basis for their inclusion wasn't as strong as the pre-established canon of the Tanakh. And four, the New Testament never affirms any of these books as scripture.
So now that the 66-book canon was confirmed, the only thing left to do was to order them in a convenient manner. The Old Testament is split into law, history, poetry, Major Prophets, and Minor Prophets, and the New Testament is split into gospels, history, Paul's letters, General letters, and prophecy. So, if I had my time again and I was questioned on the authority of the 66-book Bible that I believe, I'd confidently respond by sending them this video and running away. All love to my Catholic brothers and sisters out there. God bless.
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