How Was the Canon of Scripture Formed?

Question 1073.

The canon of Scripture, the settled collection of sixty-six books that make up our Bible, did not come together the way many people imagine, as though a committee somewhere sat down centuries after the events and voted particular books into existence. Understanding how the canon of Scripture actually formed reveals something wonderful about God’s providence in preserving His Word, rather than a story of institutional power deciding what counted as Scripture.

My settled position is straightforward: the canon of Scripture was recognised and received by the church, not conferred or created by it. Authority resided in the books themselves because they were genuinely God breathed, and the church’s role across history was to acknowledge that inherent authority rather than to manufacture it.

How the Old Testament canon took shape

The Old Testament canon of Scripture was substantially settled well before the time of Christ, reflecting the Hebrew canon recognised by the Jewish community and confirmed by Jesus’s own usage. Jesus refers to the whole span of Old Testament revelation, from Genesis to Chronicles, in Luke 11:50 to 51, using language that assumes a settled, bounded collection rather than an open, still developing one. He tells the disciples on the Emmaus road in Luke 24:44 that everything written about him in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled, again assuming a recognised threefold division of an already settled canon.

This matters enormously for how we regard the Apocrypha, the additional books included in Roman Catholic Bibles. These books were never part of the Hebrew canon received by Jesus and the apostles, the New Testament nowhere quotes them as authoritative Scripture, and they contain theological statements, including prayers for the dead and the idea of earning atonement through almsgiving, that sit at odds with canonical Scripture. Their formal inclusion in the Roman Catholic canon came only at the Council of Trent in 1546, as part of the Counter Reformation response to Protestant challenges, many centuries after the events themselves.

How the New Testament canon of Scripture formed

The New Testament canon of Scripture developed through the recognition of books that bore clear marks of apostolic origin or close apostolic connection, doctrinal consistency with the wider body of Christian teaching, and widespread reception across the early churches. This was not an instant process. Peter himself refers to Paul’s letters as Scripture in 2 Peter 3:15 to 16, showing that some New Testament books were being recognised as authoritative even within the apostolic period itself.

A handful of books, including 2 Peter, Jude and Revelation, generated genuine discussion before the wider church arrived at settled consensus, and I regard this as evidence of responsible seriousness rather than institutional imposition. The councils that eventually confirmed the canon of Scripture, at Hippo and Carthage in the late fourth century, were formally recognising a consensus that had already substantially emerged through generations of use, reading and reception across the churches, not creating that consensus from nothing.

Why the church could not have conferred the canon

This distinction between recognising and conferring authority matters theologically as much as historically. If the church’s approval were what made a book Scripture, then Scripture’s authority would ultimately rest on the church rather than on God, which inverts the relationship the New Testament itself assumes, since the church is described in Ephesians 2:20 as built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, not the other way round.

The canon of Scripture, properly understood, is a list of authoritative books, not an authoritative list of books. That distinction, though it sounds like wordplay, carries real theological weight: it means the books carried their authority from the moment they were written, and the church’s later recognition, however important historically, added nothing to an authority that was already fully present.

What this means for confidence in our Bible

Understanding how the canon of Scripture actually formed should increase rather than unsettle a believer’s confidence in the Bible they hold, a confidence explored further in a companion article on whether the Bible is really God’s word. This was not a late, arbitrary or politically motivated process, whatever some popular sceptical accounts suggest. It was the outworking, across generations, of the church testing books against apostolic origin, doctrinal soundness and consistent reception, arriving at a settled sixty-six book canon that has remained unchanged across the Protestant tradition ever since.

I would point any believer troubled by claims that other gospels were unfairly excluded to examine those documents themselves, most of which were written generations after the apostolic period, carry no credible connection to apostolic authorship, and contain theological content markedly different from, and often contrary to, the New Testament’s own teaching. Exclusion, in those cases, reflects sound judgement rather than suppression.

What the extended Gnostic and apocryphal gospels lack

A recurring popular claim suggests that other gospels, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Judas, and similar documents from later centuries, were suppressed by an institutional church protecting its own power, and that the canon of Scripture would look very different had these documents received fair consideration. Examined on their own historical merits, the case for including any of these documents in the canon of Scripture is exceedingly weak. Most date from the second century or later, generations after the apostolic eyewitnesses had died, and their content reflects Gnostic theological categories, a secret, elite knowledge available only to initiates, a low view of the material creation, and a Christ who teaches hidden wisdom rather than dies as a substitute for sinners, that stand in sharp tension with the earliest, well attested apostolic testimony.

The canon of Scripture excluded these documents not because church councils feared their content but because the documents themselves failed the ordinary tests already applied consistently to every other candidate: apostolic origin, doctrinal continuity with earlier apostolic teaching, and reception across the wider church rather than a narrow sectarian following. This was sound historical and theological judgement, not the suppression of inconvenient alternatives.

How the canon of Scripture compares with other ancient religious collections

It is worth noting how unusual the canon of Scripture is when compared with the sacred collections of other ancient religious traditions. Many such collections grew through centuries of accretion with no clear process of testing or verification, absorbing later material without any serious attempt to distinguish authentic early tradition from later invention. The canon of Scripture, by contrast, shows a church that took seriously the question of which documents carried genuine apostolic authority, engaging in real, sometimes lengthy debate over marginal cases rather than simply accepting whatever circulated under a plausible sounding name.

This careful process is itself part of the evidence for confidence in the canon of Scripture we now hold. A collection assembled through careless accumulation would show far less internal coherence and far more doctrinal inconsistency than the sixty-six books we actually possess, which cohere remarkably well despite having been written across many centuries by a wide range of human authors.

The canon of Scripture and the ministry of the Holy Spirit

Behind the human process of testing and reception, I hold that the Holy Spirit was actively at work guiding the church toward recognising the canon of Scripture God intended it to have. This is not a claim that individual church leaders were infallible in their judgements, since genuine debate over marginal books shows they were not immune to uncertainty. It is a claim that God, who inspired these particular books in the first place, did not leave His church without the Spirit’s guidance in recognising what He had given, working through ordinary historical processes rather than bypassing them.

This confidence in the Spirit’s superintending work behind the canon of Scripture is what ultimately settles my own mind on this question, more than any single historical argument taken alone. God who breathed out His Word was not going to leave its recognition to chance, and the settled, coherent sixty-six book canon we now hold bears the marks of exactly that providential care.

A question worth asking about missing books

Some believers ask whether any genuinely apostolic writing might simply have been lost, a letter of Paul mentioned but not preserved, for instance, in Colossians 4:16. It is possible some occasional apostolic correspondence did not survive, but this does not threaten the completeness of the canon of Scripture itself, since Scripture nowhere promises that every letter an apostle ever wrote would be preserved as part of the permanent, authoritative deposit given to the whole church. What was lost, if anything was, evidently was not intended by God to form part of that lasting foundation, which remains complete in exactly what has come down to us.

So, now what?

Hold your Bible with settled confidence rather than nervous uncertainty about how its sixty-six books came to be included. The canon of Scripture reflects God’s own providence in preserving and confirming His Word across history, working through, not around, the ordinary processes of writing, circulation, testing and reception.

If you want to go further into this question, I have written a companion piece on why our Bible contains exactly these sixty-six books, which develops the internal marks that set the canonical books apart from every rival collection.

Knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

2 Peter 1:20 to 21