Q: Who decided which books should be included in the Bible—both Old and New Testaments?
A: The Old Testament was completed long before the Christian era. The first five books of the Bible were written by Moses before the Hebrews entered Canaan. They were known collectively as the Law and were considered to be the inspired Word of God by all the children of Israel because Moses’s role as a prophet and mouthpiece for Jehovah had been confirmed by supernatural events which they and their children witnessed.
As the writings of the prophets and the sacred histories of the Jews enlarged, the Law of Moses was used to test every other claim of inspiration—written or oral. Isaiah exhorted his hearers to test messages by the standard of the Law: “To the law and to the testimony, if they speak not according to this word, there is no light in them.” Isa. 8:20. (The testimony here is the Ten Commandments, spoken by God and recorded in the Law of Moses; see Ex. 40:20.)
Prior to their captivity, the Jews neglected their sacred writings and even killed prophets sent by God. However, those who returned to rebuild Jerusalem and the temple prized the sacred writings. It is very likely that Ezra and Nehemiah helped in compiling these Old Testament writings to nurture this remnant. However, no one person was put in the position to decide which books should be included since prophets claiming to speak for God were tested by the foundation of inspiration instituted by Moses. Thus, the Old Testament was in place and uncontroverted before the Christian era. Jewish historians, such as Josephus, attest to this fact.
Jesus often quoted the Old Testament as a basis for His teachings. Matt. 22:37–40. After His ascension, the apostles continued to show how the prophecies of the Old Testament had been fulfilled in Jesus. As a result, the early Christian church upheld the Old Testament as authoritative. Matt. 5:17–19; 21:42; 22:29; Mark 10:6–9; 12:29–31.
The New Testament was built similarly to the Old Testament. The early church viewed Jesus’s words as equal in authority to the Old Testament since they believed Him to be the Messiah, the Son of God. 1 Cor. 9:14; 1 Thess. 4:15. For about two decades after the Cross, the messages of Jesus were shared by word of mouth. But as the church grew, the apostles realized a need to record His words and did so through the gospel accounts and epistles (letters). 2 Peter 1:12–15. Thus, began the development of books that, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, would become the New Testament. These writings were esteemed on the same level as the Old Testament because their authors were also recognized as spokesmen for God who had seen the Old Testament prophecies fulfilled with their own eyes.
The early church continued the Jewish practice of reading sacred writings aloud when meeting for worship. Within the first few centuries after Christ, early church writers documented apostolic books that came to form the New Testament, while rejecting writings that were inconsistent with history and the rest of the Scriptures, such as the Apocrypha. Many believers memorized these writings and were keen to discern writings and teachings not in harmony with them. In this way, the Scriptures remained authoritative, instead of the church having authority over the Scriptures.
But by the fourth century AD, Constantine’s national, or Catholic, church began resorting to church councils to distinguish heresies from accepted doctrine, and a heretic from the true child of the church. The first council to address the list of authoritative books in the New Testament was the regional Council of Laodicea (ad 364). Several more church councils took up the question of authority, including the Councils of Rome (382), Hippo (393), and Carthage (397). But considering the way in which the true Scriptures had been preserved up to this point, these councils merely recognized what early Christians had already established as authoritative in the Old and New Testaments.
Did these church councils give us the Bible, as many claim? As the early Christian church emphasized, both Testaments have the authority to validate themselves. The Old Testament books were authoritative because of the prophetic role of their authors and their establishment within Judaism by the second century BC; and the New Testament books had immediate authority in the way that they faithfully witnessed to the events surrounding Christ’s time on earth. The church preserved their consistency by acknowledging that fact. We can safely say then that the Bible received its authority from God, not man.
For a more in-depth explanation of this topic, see the article “Who Decided Which Books Should Be Included in the Bible?”
