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Scripture & How We Got It
Where the Bible came from, which books belong in it, and whether the text can be trusted.
- 1Did a council choose the books of the Bible?No. No council sat down and picked the winners. The books were recognised, not selected: the churches received writings that carried the authority of the prophets and apostles, used them for generations, and the later lists and councils named what was already received. The section of this site called How We Got the Bible works through the documents one by one.
- 2Why does the Bible have 66 books?Because those are the books the people of God recognised as carrying his authority: the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms that Jesus himself named, and the writings of his apostles. Thirty nine books of the Old Testament and twenty seven of the New. The number was never a target. It is simply the shape of what was received.
- 3Why isn't the Gospel of Thomas in the Bible?Because the churches that received the apostles' writings did not receive it. It is a later collection of sayings attributed to Jesus, with no narrative, no cross, and no resurrection, and parts of it teach a view of salvation by secret knowledge that contradicts the apostolic gospel. It was known in the ancient world and set aside on exactly those grounds.
- 4Has the Bible been changed over the centuries?The text has been copied by hand for centuries, and copyists' slips exist and are openly catalogued. But the message has not been rewritten. We hold manuscripts far older than the printed texts, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, and they show a text transmitted with remarkable care. Isaiah's promise stands: the word of our God stands forever.
- 5Who wrote the Bible?People did, and God did, and the Bible insists on both. On the human side it has many authors across many centuries, from Moses to John. On the divine side, Peter says men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit, and Paul calls all Scripture God-breathed. Real writers, real styles, one intention behind them.
- 6How do we know the Bible is God's word?Because the Bible claims it, Jesus treated it that way, and the evidence we can test supports taking the claim seriously. Paul calls all Scripture God-breathed. Jesus said the Scripture cannot be broken, and argued his whole mission out of the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms. Christians receive the Bible as God's word on the testimony of the God-man who rose from the dead.
- 7What are the Dead Sea Scrolls?They are a library of ancient Jewish scrolls, copied between the third century BCE and the first century CE and hidden in caves by the Dead Sea, where they were found again from 1947. Among them are the oldest known copies of the Hebrew Bible, including a complete Isaiah scroll from about 125 BCE, and they show that the text was copied with great care across a thousand years.
- 8Why do Catholic Bibles have more books?Because the Roman Catholic Church counts an extra group of ancient Jewish writings, the deuterocanonical books, as Scripture, and Protestant churches follow the shorter Hebrew canon that Jesus and the apostles used. The books themselves are old and were widely read. The disagreement is about their authority, and it was fixed formally at the Council of Trent in 1546.
Where these lead
The questions these answers open onto, in the neighbouring categories.
Was Jesus a real person?Bible People & HistoryWho was Paul?Bible People & HistoryDoes God exist?God & the Trinity
Review status: in-theological-review. Every Contend page passes a human theological review against the Statement of Faith before it is published as approved teaching. This section is in that queue.