How Do Humans Know What Books Are Scripture?
That God would reveal himself through words to human creatures (who use words to communicate), is not hard to be seen. Thus, God can know in advance what they will write, authorize certain individuals to speak for him, appropriate their words as his words, etc. Basically, the last four weeks of blogs.
However, the question about how humans came to know which texts of Scripture would be in the Bible, is another question altogether. In fact, each of the writers of Scripture did not know that their works would be compiled into one compendium of books. God however would have known this would take place, and again from the standpoint of his foreknowledge, he could know which books would ‘get in.’
The human side of this question has much more to do with recognition. When the early church was thinking through the question of “what texts will we use as Scripture,” a lot of it had to do with which texts spoke most clearly about Jesus Christ from those Apostles who saw him, or those who spent real time with those apostles. We are getting ahead of ourselves though. Let's start with the Old Testament.
The early church inherited the Old Testament. Something that Jesus himself utilized and gave his stamp of approval on. Therefore, at least from a ‘Jesus’ standpoint, the Old Testament was already settled by his time. We would say that ‘we know which books are in the Old Testament because of Jesus’ (the God-Man) validating which ones were. There is a much larger historical study that could be done considering each text, but for the follower of Jesus, that is one way of knowing.
In reference to the Old Testament though, let’s be clear on one thing. Very little in the Old Testament is a final revelation of who God is or his final intentions for humanity. We must remember that God is maturing his people throughout the centuries that are covered in the Old Testament. They are moving from milk to meat. The people then, had not arrived.
The 27 books of the New Testament, however, were written after the time of Jesus. In historical terms, these documents were rather close to the events they record. However, they still don’t have God in human flesh to weigh in on the matter. He had already ‘ascended’ into heaven. Thus, we cannot settle the issue with his authority, at least not in the sense that he spoke on the matter.
Next week, I will discuss the New Testament a bit and the church’s process of receiving these books and not other books.