The Canon #11

“Who decided which books belong in the Bible?” is one of the most common questions raised about Scripture’s authority, often accompanied by the suspicion that the canon was settled by political maneuvering at a late church council choosing among equally valid options.

The Argument

For the Old Testament, Jesus himself refers to a threefold body of authoritative writing — “the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms” (Luke 24:44) — corresponding to the Hebrew Bible’s traditional divisions, indicating that a recognized Jewish canon was already substantially settled in his day, not invented later by the church. For the New Testament, the process was less a single top-down decision than a gradual recognition, over the first few centuries, of which books already bore the marks of apostolic origin and had already achieved widespread use in worship across scattered churches. Internal evidence shows this recognition happening early and organically: Peter refers to Paul’s letters as “Scripture” alongside the Old Testament (2 Peter 3:15-16), and Paul quotes Luke’s gospel and calls it “Scripture” in the same breath as Deuteronomy (1 Timothy 5:18). Church councils like Carthage (397) ratified a list that mirrored what was already in nearly universal use rather than imposing a novel selection.

Common Objections

Popular claims, amplified by novels like The Da Vinci Code, allege that competing gospels were suppressed for political reasons at the Council of Nicaea (325); this is not historically accurate — Nicaea’s business was the deity of Christ, not the canon, and books like the Gnostic gospels were already widely regarded by churches as late (mostly second-century and later) and theologically incompatible with apostolic teaching well before any council addressed the matter formally. A more serious and lasting disagreement concerns the Old Testament Apocrypha (Tobit, Maccabees, Wisdom, and others): Catholic and Orthodox Bibles include these books as canonical or deuterocanonical, while Protestant Bibles, following the Jewish canon and the Reformers’ judgment, exclude them — a real and long-standing difference between traditions rather than a settled matter.