Seventeen Questions About the Bible in Your Hand

The Bible in a Christian’s hand is the Word God appointed for His church: sixty-six books, given through prophets and apostles, received by God’s people because they heard His voice in them, kept through a multitude of copies, and carried into English by faithful translation. Two War Journal entries make that case at length and with sources: The Word Given answers why these books, and The Word Kept and Carried answers why this copy. What follows is the short form: the questions a son, a friend, or a video will put to a father, each answered in the few sentences he can say at his own table, with the long answer linked.

The books

1. Who decided which books are in the Bible?

God did, by speaking them through prophets and apostles. The church recognized His voice in those writings and said so, first by reading them in worship, later by listing them when disputes arose. A list records a recognition, and recognition is what a witness does with a fact. (The Word Given, “Who decided.”)

2. Did Constantine pick the books at the Council of Nicaea?

None of the twenty canons of Nicaea (325) concerns the books of Scripture. They concern clergy, discipline, the lapsed, and church order, and the council’s doctrinal work was Arius. Constantine later asked Eusebius for fifty copies of “the sacred Scriptures” for the churches of his capital, a copying order that names no books. Irenaeus had already written, a century and a half before, that the Gospels can be neither more nor fewer than four. (The Word Given, “The Word the apostles gave.”)

3. What about the Gospel of Thomas and the other lost gospels?

Thomas is a collection of sayings with no narrative and no cross. Eusebius says that no church writer in the succession ever used it, that its style differs from the apostles’ writings, and that its teaching departs from theirs. The four Gospels were received together, as four, by the second century, and the church said why: they came from the apostles and those who walked with them. (The Word Given, “The Word the apostles gave.”)

4. The Bible was written by men.

It was. God breathed it through them: “All Scripture is God-breathed” (2 Timothy 3:16 LSB), and “men being moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God” (2 Peter 1:21 LSB). Inspiration describes what God did through the men who wrote. (The Word Given, “God gives what He speaks.”)

5. Jesus never wrote anything.

Jesus appointed witnesses and promised them the Spirit: “He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you” (John 14:26 LSB). Every word of His in the Bible came through the men He sent, and He said of them, “The one who listens to you listens to Me, and the one who rejects you rejects Me” (Luke 10:16 LSB). (The Word Given, “The Word the apostles gave.”)

6. The church took centuries to decide.

The core (the four Gospels, Acts, Paul’s letters, 1 Peter, 1 John) was received across the churches from the earliest witnesses we have. The edges (Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, Revelation) were received in some regions before others, and the questions were argued in the open, on the evidence of what the apostles had left, into the fourth century. That is the pace of recognition, and Part 1 shows why recognizing was the church’s whole part. (The Word Given, “The Word the apostles gave.”)

7. You got your Bible from the Catholic Church.

The Old Testament came from Israel, to whom “the oracles of God” were entrusted (Romans 3:2 LSB), and the New Testament was received by the churches of the first four centuries, before Rome’s later claims about itself existed. The Council of Florence listed the wider Old Testament in 1442, and Trent, in 1546, after the Reformation had begun, was the first to bind that list with an anathema. Rome’s own greatest controversialist, Bellarmine, wrote that the church “only declares which book is to be held canonical.” (The Word Given, “Who decided.”)

8. Luther removed seven books from the Bible.

Luther printed those books in his 1534 Bible, in a section headed Apocrypha, with the note that they are “useful and good to read” though not held equal to Scripture. That is where Jerome had left them in the fourth century, and Rufinus after him, books the church may read, with no standing to settle doctrine, and where Cardinal Cajetan, a Roman cardinal, left them two years before Luther’s Bible appeared. He removed nothing that Rome had yet defined with an anathema. (The Word Given, “The Word Jesus held.”)

9. The Septuagint had the Apocrypha, so the apostles’ Bible had it.

The great Greek Bibles of the fourth and fifth centuries contain those books, and they disagree with each other about which ones. The first-century Jewish writers we can check give no canon that contains them, and the apostles, who mark their Old Testament quotations with “it is written” and the like, never mark a line from those books that way. A library and a canon are different things, and the apostles also read Greek poets. (The Word Given, “The Word Jesus held.”)

10. Jude quotes the book of Enoch. Why is Enoch out?

Jude quotes a true sentence from Enoch, as Paul quotes true sentences from Aratus and Menander (Acts 17:28; 1 Corinthians 15:33). Quotation and canon are different things, and by the other rule Aratus would be Scripture. Jude’s use of one sentence does not by itself make the whole book Scripture, and Tertullian, who argued for Enoch, admitted that some rejected it because it had no place in the Jewish canon. One church, the Ethiopian, does receive it, which is why the argument has to rest on more than Jude. (The Word Given, “The Word Jesus held.”)

11. The Jews only closed their canon after they rejected Christ, so why trust their list?

The shape of the collection, the Law, the Prophets, and the other books, is attested before Christ in the prologue to Sirach (about 132 BC). Jesus Himself names it as “the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms” (Luke 24:44 LSB), Josephus, writing before the first century closed, counts twenty-two books that Jews held as trustworthy, and Paul names the entrusting in Romans 3:2. Israel’s unbelief did not revoke God’s deposit to Israel, any more than it revoked His promises. (The Word Given, “The Word Jesus held.”)

12. 1 Timothy 3:15 says the church is the pillar of the truth.

A pillar holds up what is set on it. The foundation is “the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the corner stone” (Ephesians 2:20 LSB). The church upholds the truth before the world, which is why Paul wrote the letter: to tell the church how to conduct itself. The letter governs the household. (The Word Given, “Who decided.”)

13. 2 Thessalonians 2:15 says to hold to oral tradition too.

Paul tells the Thessalonians to hold what he taught them in person and by letter: one teaching, two deliveries, from the same apostle to the same church in the same generation. The verse names no unwritten teaching that survives outside Scripture and no body appointed to keep one. Anyone who claims a binding apostolic teaching that exists outside Scripture must produce it and show that an apostle taught it. (The Word Given, “Who decided.”)

14. Which church received the canon? What if a man is not in one?

The church that received the canon is the people of God across the ages, from the Levites who carried the book beside the ark to the congregations that read Paul’s letters the week they arrived. It received the Word before any living man joined a roll and will hold the Word after every living man has left one. A man’s standing in a body is a question for the elders of that body. The canon does not wait on it. (The Word Given, “Who decided.”)

The copy

15. There are four hundred thousand errors in the New Testament.

Variants, counted across more than six thousand catalogued Greek witnesses, so the number is large because the copies are many. Most are spelling, word order, and slips that the next manuscript corrects. Fewer than one in a hundred, by Daniel Wallace’s count, both change the meaning and have a real claim to be original, and no article of the faith rests on any of them. Bart Ehrman himself wrote that his position “does not actually stand at odds with Prof. Metzger’s position that the essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.” The bracketed passages in a Bible are the church telling the reader the truth about the hardest cases. (The Word Kept and Carried, “The brackets in your Bible.”)

16. We do not have the originals.

No original manuscript of any book of the Bible is known to survive. What survives for the New Testament is a body of copies, early, many, and overlapping, that lets the church test its wording in public and name the few hard cases, and none of those cases touches a doctrine. God promised that “the word of our God stands forever” (Isaiah 40:8 LSB), and it has stood, in the multitude of witnesses. (The Word Kept and Carried, “What God did.”)

17. The King James is the only real Bible.

The King James translators said the opposite in their own preface: “the very meanest translation of the Bible in English, set forth by men of our profession… containeth the word of God, nay, is the word of God,” and they put alternative readings in the margin on purpose. They worked from the printed Greek editions of their day. God has since put older and more numerous witnesses into the church’s hands. The Word is preserved in the multitude of witnesses, and no single edition holds it alone. (The Word Kept and Carried, “The Word in your hand.”)

Truth That Withstands

Every one of those answers is a fact a father can check, and every one of them leaves the ground where Psalm 78 puts it. God established a testimony and commanded fathers to teach it. He entrusted it to Israel, spoke in these last days in His Son, sent witnesses and taught them, kept the testimony through more copies than any one fire could reach, and carried it into the tongue a father reads. The church’s recognition of the books, the church’s honesty about the brackets, and the church’s labor over translation all serve that confidence the way a witness serves a fact. The confidence itself rests on the faithfulness of God, “That they should set their confidence in God And not forget the deeds of God, But observe His commandments” (Psalm 78:7 LSB).