Who decided what should be in our Bible: scheming Christians in a smoke-filled backroom; the ancient version of an ambitious bishop like Cardinal Richelieu; hard-eyed fanatics rejecting any books that did not accord with their ideas? Did they---whoever they were---pick and choose the books they liked, leaving inspired books out? Or maybe a council like the first one in Nicaea in 325 took it on itself to choose the books. Or (less cynically) maybe the Holy Spirit miraculously preserved just these 66 books. Who decided and did they have any idea what they were doing? Can Christians of the 21st century be sure that we have the right Bible?
The Bible that we do have has been around a long, long
time. In this study we’re going to dig
deep into the historical record and find out how the Bible was formalized into
a canon, and whether we have the right books today. We’ll decide if the mysterious “they” had the
authority to select the books they did, and whether they included some books
they shouldn’t have. Or left some out
that should’ve been in. We’ll figure out
when this happened, and who did it.
Knowing the who, what, and when of our Bible is critical to
our confidence in it. The Bible claims
the authority of the creator God, and we rest our eternal souls on its words:
we’d better be sure that we can rely on it, and that it didn’t gain its
authority just because somebody, somewhere, sometime, decided that it should be
so.
Next time: who’s shooting at whom, anyway?
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