How Can You Know We Have the Right Books in the Bible? Any study of the canon must eventually ask how Christians know which books belong and which don’t. Michael J. KrugerEven a brief reflection on the nature of the Bible reveals that it is not like most other books. Rather than being written at (generally) the same time, in the same place, and by a single author, the Bible presents us with a diverse collection of books, authors, time periods, cultures, languages, and theological emphases, all gathered into a single, unified volume. Such a unique book raises some unique questions. Why should we think these particular books are the right ones? Why these 66 and no others? And how could Christians even know such a thing? Is it just a blind leap of faith? Here we come to one of the most fundamental aspects of the study of the canon—and one that is often overlooked—namely, whether Christians have sufficient grounds for knowing which books belong and which books do not. Now, I say this is an “overlooked” question precisely because most studies of the canon tend to be concerned with other matters. Typically, such studies have dealt with what we might call historical questions about the canon: when books were received, how long the canonical process took, and when it was finalized. And these are all important questions in their own right. Even so, the epistemological questions cannot be ignored. Merely cataloging when and how the canon developed does not tell us whether we have the right books. And if we have no basis for knowing whether we have the right books, then our confidence in biblical authority can quickly be shaken. So, let us consider three complementary attributes that all canonical books share—attributes which tell us that these books are given by God. Divine qualities If we want to ascertain whether a book is written by a particular human author, it would be natural to take what we know about that author—style, tendencies, personal characteristics—and look for those qualities in the text. We might say we are looking for the “marks” of that author. The same is true with a divine author. Theologians, from the earliest days of the Christian movement, have argued that God’s own qualities or “marks”—Latin indicia—should be evident in any book that ultimately comes from him. Examples of such qualities in God’s word would be beauty and excellency (Ps. 19:8; 119:103), power and efficacy (Ps. 119:50; Heb. 4:12–13), and unity and harmony (Num. 23:19; Titus 1:2: Heb. 6:18). Get new articles and updates in your inbox. Leave this field empty if you're human: John Murray makes this precise argument: “If . . . Scripture is divine in its origin, character, and authority, it must bear the marks or evidences of that divinity.”1John Murray, “The Attestation of Scripture,” 22. In other words, through these divine qualities, Christians recognize the voice of their Lord in the Scriptures. As Jesus himself declared, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them and they follow me” (John 10:27). At this point someone might object that this whole scheme sounds awfully subjective. “I don’t see these divine qualities,” he might say. “And if these qualities are really there, then why do so many people reject the Bible?” “Didn’t early Christians disagree to some extent over which books had these qualities?” But, the objection overlooks the point that not everyone can reliably recognize these spiritual qualities due to the noetic effects of sin (Rom. 3:10–18). Theologians have argued, therefore, that one must have the help of the Holy Spirit—the testimonium spiritus sancti internum—to rightly see the word of God for what it is. Thus—and this is an important point—the divine qualities of Scripture are not just the subjective creation of our minds. No, these qualities are really, objectively in the Scriptures. It’s just that one must have their eyes opened to see them. By way of illustration, one might say that the unbeliever is spiritually tone deaf. He thinks he can hear whether something is “on key,” or “off key.” And when he listens to God’s word, he definitively rejects it as “off key.” But, when he does so, he assumes the problem lies with the Scriptures and not his own hearing. On the contrary, the Scriptures themselves say the opposite: “The natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God . . . he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14). Corporate reception Even though a believer can ascertain whether a book is from God from the divine qualities of the book itself, that is not the only way to know whether a book belongs in the canon. We can also look to the way the church, as a whole, has responded to these books throughout the ages. Put differently, the testimony of the Holy Spirit doesn’t work just on an individual level, but primarily operates at a corporate level. And if the Spirit is at work among God’s people collectively, then we can look to the consensus of God’s people (both in the present and the past) as a reliable guide to which books are from him. As Herman Ridderbos argued, “Christ will establish and build his church by causing the church to accept just this canon and, by means of the assistance and witness of the Holy Spirit, to recognize it as his.”2Redemptive History and the New Testament Scriptures (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1988), 37. RelatedWhy Are Protestant and Catholic Bibles Different?John D. MeadeDid Nicaea Really Create the Bible?John D. MeadeThe Bible Jesus ReadJohn D. Meade Now, a couple of clarifications are in order. First, saying the consensus of the church is a reliable guide to which books are canonical does not mean the church is infallible. No, we are merely saying the church reliably responds to the divine qualities of these books by the help of the Holy Spirit. Indeed, we might say that the divine qualities were so compelling, that, in some sense, these books imposed themselves on the church. Second, just because the Holy Spirit is at work in the church does not mean the church’s consensus around these books is instantaneous or absolute. Sometimes we have an overly “pristine” expectation about the way God works in the world, as if the Holy Spirit would produce immediate agreement around books within 72 hours of being written. But history is not typically so tidy. Just like any doctrine, sometimes there is disagreement. And it takes time to work things out. But, eventually, the church reached a consensus. By the first century, it seems there was a wide consensus on the Old Testament books, and by the fourth century, it seems there was a wide consensus on the New Testament books. Authoritative authors The third attribute that all canonical books share is that they are authored by God’s authoritative agents. After all, not just anyone could write a book from God. That individual has to be empowered by God’s Spirit to be his mouthpiece. Generally speaking, the Old Testament was regarded as being written by “prophets,” and the New Testament was regarded as being written by “apostles.” In fact, we see these two divine agents—prophets and apostles—pop up in a number of early Christian texts. For example, Peter calls his audience to listen to precisely these two sources: “Remember the predictions of the holy prophets and the commandment of the Lord and Savior through your apostles” (2 Pet. 3:2). We have good historical evidence (which cannot be explored here) that the books in our Bible can be traced either directly to apostles/prophets or at least to a historical situation where that book could reasonably retain the teachings of an apostle/prophet. For example, we accept the Pentateuch (first five books of the Bible) as from God because we believe Moses was the author. Likewise, we accept books like Romans and Galatians because we think the apostle Paul was the author. And we even accept anonymous books like Hebrews because we have good reasons to think the author received his information directly from apostles (Heb. 2:3–4; 13:23). Conclusion There are multiple ways, therefore, to know a book is from God. Some people may know by apprehending the divine qualities within a book. Others may know by looking to the consensus of God’s people through the ages. And others may know by considering the identity of the human authors themselves. It should also be observed that these three attributes are complementary and mutually reinforcing. If a book has one attribute, then it will have all three. For example, if a book is composed by a divinely inspired prophet, then it will certainly contain divine “marks” within it and will also (in due time) be recognized and received by God’s people by the power of the Holy Spirit. Thus, if we ever have doubts about one of these attributes (say, a book’s authorship), we have two other attributes that provide reassurance. In the end, we can have great confidence about the books in our biblical canon. Christians are not taking a blind leap of faith when we affirm that these are the right books. God has given us a way to know—indeed, multiple ways to know—that these books are from him. Notes1John Murray, “The Attestation of Scripture,” 22.2Redemptive History and the New Testament Scriptures (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1988), 37.
Two Reasons There Are Variants in Our Copies of the Bible For historical and theological reasons, we shouldn’t be surprised that the Bible’s manuscripts have differences. Peter J. GurryTo err is human; to forgive, divine” is surely the most famous line of the English poet Alexander Pope. Written when he was only 23, the first line presents a truism that explains why our English Bibles have notes about differences in our copies of the Bible. We can take an example from the venerable King James Bible. At James 2:18, the text says, “shew me thy faith without thy works” but the margin records that “some copies read, by thy works.”1Thanks to the discovery and study of older manuscripts than were available in 1611, most translations today print “without works” with enough confidence not to give a note. For more textual notes in the KJV, see here. These same types of textual notes were found before the King James and, of course, they have been used by all major translations since. But why do we have variants at all? There are essentially two answers to this question. The first answer is historical and tends to be one that Bible translators need to think the most about. The second is theological and tends to be one that regular Bible readers are most interested in. Historical The historical reason for variants goes back to Pope’s quote. Humans make mistakes. And, until the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, all copies of the Bible had to be made by human hands. Copying by hand is hard. It takes not just hand-eye coordination but something more like hand-eye-mind-finger-pen-ink-and-parchment coordination. And the Bible is a BIG book. In the original languages, it consists of about 300,000 words in the Old Testament and 140,000 in the New Testament. New Testament scribes were sometimes paid by the line and one early copy of Paul’s letters required 1,000 lines just for Romans. With so much to copy, it’s no wonder scribes made mistakes. We might be tempted to think that the printing press eliminated human error in Bible production. But it didn’t. The “Wicked Bible,” for example, is a printing of the King James Bible from 1631 where a typesetter’s error changed the sixth commandment to “thou shalt commit adultery.” (The result did not go over well with the powers-that-be.) The arrival of the printing press did mean, however, that, for the first time, you could have hundreds of copies that all preserved the same mistakes at exactly the same place on the page. In this way, mistakes were easier to contain. Two things are important to know about the mistakes that scribes made. The first is that the majority were accidental—a slip of the pen, a confusion of letters, an accidental omission—things like that. Not all were, of course. Some differences show clear signs of deliberation. Certainly, in the case of larger differences like the longer ending of Mark or the additions to the book of Esther, we are dealing with something much different than a slip of the pen. But many mistakes are ordinary and easy enough to find and fix. The second thing to know is that the copying of the Bible was not a long process of introducing more and more errors so that by the end we couldn’t hope to get back to the original. In other words, it was not like the telephone game we played as kids. The reason is that scribes not only made mistakes, they also corrected them. They knew firsthand that copying was hard, and they could check their own work and even the work of their predecessors. This is why some of our most important Bible manuscripts—especially on the New Testament side of things—often have corrections. Near the start of Romans 4, the original scribe of Codex Vaticanus (4th c.) accidentally wrote verses 4b–5a twice because of the repetition of words. A later scribe caught the problem and fixed it by not re-inking the duplicated text. (Image: Vat.gr.1209, f. 1448) They didn’t always get it right, of course. Sometimes a scribe’s “fix” made the problem worse. One scribe using Codex Vaticanus certainly thought so. The exasperated note he left at Hebrews 1:3 reads, “You untrained and unskilled man—leave the old reading, don’t change it!”2ἀμαθέστατε καὶ κακέ, ἂφες τὸν παλαιόν, μὴ μεταποίει. The note is found on folio 1512. But, overall, scribes worked hard to do a faithful job with the task at hand—even if they didn’t always succeed. So, the first reason we have differences in our manuscripts is because copying by hand is hard. Theological This historical answer is simple enough. It’s also true of all works published before the printing press, not just the Bible. But Christians often wonder if the Bible shouldn’t be different. After all, if God violated Alexander Pope’s famous principle with the Bible’s authors (so they didn’t err) why didn’t he do it with the scribes who copied them (so that they too didn’t err)? RelatedA Newly Digitized Bible Reveals the Origins of the King James VersionTimothy BergThe Day the Bible Became a BestsellerJeffrey KlohaThe Bible Jesus ReadJohn D. Meade The answer can’t be because he wasn’t able to. Surely God could have if he had wanted to. (Although we should admit that keeping thousands of copyists from error over thousands of years would be an even more impressive miracle than keeping the authors from them.) The simple answer is that we have errors in our manuscripts because God never promised to keep them out. The Bible teaches that its authors were inspired (e.g., 2 Tim. 3:16; 2 Pet. 1:21); it nowhere teaches that scribes who copied them were. This is actually right in line with God’s normal way of working. He usually seems to follow up his extraordinary acts (what we call miracles) with his ordinary ones (what we call providence). Take the feeding of the 5,000. Jesus miraculously feeds thousands of people from just five loaves and a few fish. That’s extraordinary. But we can be confident that the way that this miraculous food was ingested and then digested was anything but miraculous. Likewise, Mary’s conception of Jesus was certainly extraordinary; her actual pregnancy and delivery of the baby were presumably ordinary. In the same way, we shouldn’t be surprised that God’s extraordinary work of inspiring the Scriptures was followed by the ordinary process of copying it—variants and all.3This point comes from C.S. Lewis who writes, “Miraculous wine will intoxicate, miraculous conception will lead to pregnancy, inspired books will suffer all the ordinary processes of textual corruption, miraculous bread will be digested. The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events into that pattern.” Miracles (New York: HarperCollins, 1974), 95; emphasis added. What about when Jesus says, in Matthew 5:18, that “not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished”? Isn’t that a promise that the text would be perfectly preserved even down to the letterstroke? From the context, the answer is clearly no. We know the metaphor is about Scripture’s full authority and not about copying because the next thing he says is a rebuke, not to scribes, but to anyone who “relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same” (Matt. 5:19; cf. Luke 16:17). The authority of Scripture is certainly one reason why Christians care about differences in the manuscripts, but that doesn’t mean the differences invalidate Scripture’s authority. The authority of Scripture is certainly one reason why Christians care about differences in the manuscripts, but that doesn’t mean the differences invalidate Scripture’s authority. One reason they don’t is because, despite our use of the term “error” when talking about scribes, we should not confuse scribal error with theological error. It is rare that scribal error results in something approaching a theological error. In James 2:18, for example, the difference in the KJV text and the KJV margin affects how James makes his point about faith and works but it doesn’t change his point that faith without works is dead. As Christians, we certainly care about Scripture even in the details, but we would be wrong to conclude that because there are variants in some details, the Scriptures have no authority as a result. In fact, because scribes did such a faithful job overall; because they left us so many manuscripts; and because we have careful principles for identifying scribal mistakes, our confidence in the text as we have it is remarkably high. That’s why the differences in modern English translations are far more often due to differences in translation philosophy than they are to textual differences. Many important variants can be found in the notes of our modern Bibles—just like they were in the King James Bible. Conclusion In the end, we have two reasons why there are differences in the manuscripts of the Bible, one historical and one theological. The historical reason is the same as for all other ancient literature: copying by hand is hard and scribes made mistakes. The theological reason is because God never promised to keep scribes completely free from error. We should not commit God to promises he never made. In the end, we can be extremely thankful for the countless unnamed scribes who did their work—not always perfectly—but, overall, faithfully. We can also be thankful for God’s ordinary providence at work in their copying so that we can have confidence in God’s enduring word. Notes1Thanks to the discovery and study of older manuscripts than were available in 1611, most translations today print “without works” with enough confidence not to give a note. For more textual notes in the KJV, see here.2ἀμαθέστατε καὶ κακέ, ἂφες τὸν παλαιόν, μὴ μεταποίει. The note is found on folio 1512.3This point comes from C.S. Lewis who writes, “Miraculous wine will intoxicate, miraculous conception will lead to pregnancy, inspired books will suffer all the ordinary processes of textual corruption, miraculous bread will be digested. The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events into that pattern.” Miracles (New York: HarperCollins, 1974), 95; emphasis added.