Forming the Bible

"The rule of books"

Shelley calls this chapter "The Rule of Books." Today we take a single bound Bible for granted. In the early church no such thing existed. A congregation might own a scroll of Isaiah, a copy of Mark's Gospel, and a few of Paul's letters. A wealthy church might have more. Books were copied by hand, slowly and expensively. And there were plenty of other Christian writings circulating too: gospels attributed to Peter and Thomas, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Didache, letters by Clement and Ignatius.

So the question "Which books are Scripture?" was a real one. The answer emerged over about three centuries.

The first Bible: the Jewish Scriptures

For the first Christians, "the Scriptures" meant the Jewish Bible, which Christians later called the Old Testament. Jesus and the apostles quoted it constantly. Most early Christians read it in Greek, in the Septuagint. The Septuagint included several books not found in the later Hebrew Bible, such as Wisdom, Sirach, Tobit, Judith and 1–2 Maccabees.

That difference still matters. Catholics and Orthodox include these books in their Old Testament (Catholics call them "deuterocanonical"). Most Protestants, following the Reformers, accept only the books of the Hebrew Bible and call the others the "Apocrypha," useful to read but not Scripture.

Why a New Testament?

Several pressures pushed the church to define which Christian writings carried apostolic authority:

• Worship: Churches needed to know what to read aloud in services, alongside the Old Testament.
• Heresy: Marcion of Sinope's cut-down canon (c. 144) and the Gnostics' secret gospels forced the mainstream to say which books were genuine (see Gnostics, Marcion and the Rise of Orthodoxy).
• Prophecy: The Montanists' new revelations raised the question of whether revelation was still open.
• Persecution: When Diocletian ordered Scriptures burned in 303, Christians had to decide which books they would die rather than hand over.
• Technology: Christians were early adopters of the codex, the book with pages, instead of the scroll. A codex could hold many texts together, which encouraged collections.

How the New Testament canon took shape

How books were recognized

Early Christian writers did not see themselves as choosing books so much as recognizing books that had proved themselves. They used roughly three tests:

1. Apostolic origin: Was the book written by an apostle or a close companion (as Mark and Luke were thought to be)?
2. Catholicity: Was it used widely, across the whole church, not just in one region?
3. Orthodoxy: Did it agree with the rule of faith, the church's received teaching?

By about 180, Irenaeus of Lyon treated the four Gospels as fixed and could not imagine more or fewer. A list called the Muratorian Fragment, traditionally dated around 200 (some scholars now argue for the 300s), names most of our New Testament. It also accepts the Wisdom of Solomon and an "Apocalypse of Peter," and it rejects the Shepherd of Hermas as too recent for public reading.

The disputed books

The core of the four Gospels, Acts, Paul's letters, 1 Peter and 1 John was accepted early and almost everywhere. Other books took longer:

• Hebrews was loved in the East but doubted in the West, because no one was sure Paul wrote it.
• Revelation was accepted in the West but doubted in the East, partly because some groups used it to predict the end of the world.
• James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2–3 John were short, little-used, or of uncertain authorship.

Around 325, the historian Eusebius of Caesarea sorted books into three groups: "recognized," "disputed" and "spurious." His careful survey shows that the edges of the canon were still blurry in the early 300s.

Athanasius draws the line

In 367 Athanasius of Alexandria, bishop of Alexandria, sent his annual Easter letter to the churches of Egypt. In it he listed the books of the Old and New Testaments. His New Testament list is exactly our 27 books, the first known list to match it. "Let no one add to these," he wrote, "or take anything from them." Councils in North Africa, at Hippo (393) and Carthage (397), influenced by Augustine of Hippo, confirmed the same New Testament for the Western church.

Even then, uniformity took time. The Syriac-speaking churches long used a shorter New Testament without 2 Peter, 2–3 John, Jude and Revelation. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church today has a larger Bible of around 81 books, including 1 Enoch and Jubilees. "The Bible" has never been exactly the same everywhere.

Translating the Bible

As the church spread, the Scriptures were translated: into Latin, Syriac and Coptic by the 200s, and later into Gothic, Armenian, Georgian and Ethiopic. In the West, various rough "Old Latin" versions circulated. In 382 Pope Damasus asked the great scholar Jerome to produce a reliable Latin Bible. Jerome went to Bethlehem, learned Hebrew from Jewish teachers, and translated the Old Testament from the Hebrew rather than the Greek. That was controversial. Augustine worried it would unsettle believers. Jerome's translation, called the Vulgate ("common" version), became the Bible of Western Christianity for more than a thousand years.

Scripture and tradition

Notice the order of events. The church existed before the New Testament did, and the church recognized the canon. Catholics and Orthodox draw from this that Scripture and church tradition belong together. The church that recognized the Bible also interprets it. Protestants reply that the church recognized these books because they already carried God's authority, so Scripture stands above the church and can correct it. This disagreement became central in the Reformation, when the slogan Sola scriptura ("Scripture alone") was raised.

Copying by hand

Until the printing press arrived in the 1450s, every Bible was copied by hand. Early Christian copyists were often ordinary church members. Later, professional scribes and monks did the work. Copying was slow and errors crept in. A scribe might skip a line, misread a word, or "correct" a passage he thought was wrong. Today scholars compare thousands of manuscripts to reconstruct the most likely original wording, a discipline called textual criticism.

Some of the great early manuscripts survive. The Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, both from the 300s, contain nearly the whole Greek Bible. Sinaiticus was found at St Catherine's Monastery in Sinai in the 1840s, and it can now be viewed online. Papyrus fragments from Egypt take the text back even further, into the 100s and 200s. A few famous passages, such as the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 8) and the longer ending of Mark (16:9–20), are missing from the earliest manuscripts. Many modern Bibles mark them with brackets or footnotes.