Scripture: The Very Word of God, Part 2

This series of posts was originally developed as a Sunday School lesson that I taught on August 28, 2011.

The Nature of the Bible:
What is the composition of the Bible? What “physically” makes the Bible the Bible?
The Bible generally accepted by most Protestants, including us Southern Baptists, is divided into two main parts: the Old Testament and the New Testament, with a total of sixty-six “books,” thirty-nine in the OT and twenty-seven in the NT. Other groups include a collection of works called the Apocrypha, but as Protestants do not hold that these books are a part of the canon.[3]

A “canon” is a rule of measurement, or in this case an authoritative list. Our belief is that the canon was not chosen by the church, but rather those books in our canon set themselves apart because of their spiritual authority.  The Old Testament is generally divided into three main sections: the Pentateuch, the Prophets, and the Writings. The Old Testament had definitely reached canonical status by the time of Jesus and the beginnings of Christianity. The canonicity of the New Testament was achieved by certain tests. The early church did not “choose” what books were to be in the NT, but rather applied a series of criteria to books that were already being used in the churches to determine a list of these authoritative books in order to keep out false teaching and error. The three criteria are:

    1)  Conformity to the “rule of faith” – that is Christian truth that was recognized as standard teaching in the churches. It was important to keep out false teaching so that believers would not be led astray in their beliefs.
    2)  Apostolicity – that is, were these books written by the apostles or people close to the apostles, such as Luke and Mark?
    3)  Widespread usage in the churches – Were these books widely and continually accepted and used by churches everywhere?

The books that we have in the New Testament fulfill all of these criteria, whereas other works, such as the Gnostic gospels – i.e the Gospels of Thomas, Mary, etc – do not. They were written years after the apostles and those directly in contact with the apostles had died. They were not accepted throughout the whole church, and they did not conform to what the apostles had taught and passed down. Therefore, they were not authoritative, and not to be included in the canon.

The Bible then is a collection of works written by different authors over a long period of time. To name just a few, there is Moses, David, Luke, Paul, and John. The Old Testament was written over several centuries. The New Testament was written within a period of about 60 to 70 years.  The books that make up the Bible also belong to different genres. By this we mean that some are histories, some are laws, some are poetry, some are letters (of encouragement and teaching), and some are prophecy. Some books contain multiple genres. Some critics of the Bible use this information to say that the Bible is merely a library of stories, written by different men at different times. Merely this and nothing more. However, we have to stand and say an emphatic “No, it’s not!”

We believe that there is a “metanarrative” – a big story – that runs throughout the Bible. There are several themes, all a part of “the bigger picture,” that says that Bible is one big story: the sinfulness of man, the holiness of God, the need for man to be redeemed, the coming of the Messiah (the Christ) and Redeemer, God’s activity in and love for the world.

The Scriptures themselves attest to this in its descriptions of itself. How does the Bible describe itself? We'll take a look at that next time.

NOTES:
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_canon    NOTE: I did not get my information in the lesson from this source, but I believe that it does a decent job of presenting you a little more information on canon and it does provide avenues for you to continue your search. Always remember, though, that you MUST take Wikipedia articles with a large grain of salt, and never rely on it as your only source. It's a good starting point, but you must always dig deeper! Much of this information on canon came from class notes, with reference to Carson and Moo's An Introduction to the New Testament.