How We Got the Bible: A Concise History of Scripture’s Journey to Us
Click on the image to ORDER Kingdom Revolution (eBook & Paperback) from Amazon today!!
You probably open your Bible without thinking much about it. You flip to whatever book you need—maybe Psalm 23 or John 3:16—and the page falls open right to where you want it. The text is there, formatted nicely, with verses numbered and sectioned off. It feels like the Bible has always been exactly this way.
But here’s what might surprise you: the Bible you’re holding right now went through a centuries-long process of selection, debate, and verification before it looked anything like what you see today. Scholars, theologians, and church leaders didn’t just decide arbitrarily which books deserved to be “in” the Bible and which belonged “out.” Instead, they recognized what their communities had already been treating as authoritative Scripture—holy texts that carried the weight of divine authority.
This history is both fascinating and reassuring. It shows us that the books in your Bible weren’t chosen randomly or manipulated by power-hungry church officials. Instead, they emerged through a careful, sometimes messy process that actually validates why we trust them today. Understanding this process can deepen your confidence in Scripture itself.
Let me walk you through how we got here.
ORDER MY NEW BOOK TODAY FOR $9.99 (eBook)
The Old Testament: A Gradual Closing
Here’s something that surprises most people: the Old Testament canon wasn’t finalized all at once. Instead, it developed in three distinct phases, much like watching your church’s library grow over decades as trusted books proved their worth.
The Torah Comes First
The first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) achieved recognized status early. These books, called the Torah or “Teaching,” were likely established as authoritative by around 400 BC.¹ How do we know this? The ancient sources hint at it. The Book of Nehemiah describes a priest named Ezra bringing the Torah back to Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile, and later writers refer to “the law of Moses” as the accepted foundation of Jewish faith.²
Think of it like this: if you had a trusted source you relied on for years, someone whose judgment you’d learned to respect, you wouldn’t need an official announcement that they were trustworthy. Everyone already knew. The Torah occupied a similar position in Jewish life. It was the authoritative collection, the measuring rod for everything else.
The Prophets Take Shape
Over the next two centuries, the Prophets (the historical books Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings and the prophetic writings Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the Twelve Minor Prophets) gradually achieved the same authoritative status. By around 200 BC, Jewish communities were treating these books as scriptural, reading them in synagogues alongside the Torah, and citing them with the same weight.³
What’s telling about this period is that a book called Daniel was written around 165 BC.⁴ Although Daniel contains prophetic material, it was placed in the Writings section of the Hebrew Bible rather than in the Prophets section. Why? Because scholars believe the Prophets collection was already locked in by that time.⁵ This shows that once a section of Scripture achieved canonical status, new writings were placed elsewhere rather than being inserted into an existing section. Daniel is absolutely part of the Bible you read today; it’s just classified in a different section. This reveals the careful, organized thinking behind the canonization process.
The Writings: The Longest Debate
The third section, the Writings (or Ketuvim), which includes Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Chronicles, and the five scrolls, took the longest to finalize. These books weren’t universally accepted until somewhere between 100 and 200 AD.⁶ Some of them were debated longer than others. Even into the second century AD, rabbis argued about whether certain books like Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes truly belonged in Scripture.⁷
Here’s what this reveals: the ancient community was careful. They weren’t reckless about what they declared authoritative. When in doubt, they debated. When consensus wasn’t clear, they waited. This doesn’t sound like arbitrary power-grabbing. It sounds like communities taking seriously the question of which texts genuinely carried the authority of God.
An Important Correction About Jamnia
You may have heard about a “Council of Jamnia” (or Yavneh) that supposedly formally closed the Hebrew Bible around 90 AD. This has been repeated in many books, but modern scholars have largely abandoned this idea.⁸ There’s no solid evidence such a council ever happened. What we do know is that by the late first century, the majority of Jewish communities had already accepted the same 24 books as authoritative.⁹ The council story is what scholars call a “pious myth”: a story that made historical sense, so people repeated it without realizing it wasn’t actually true.
The real story is messier and more organic. Different Jewish communities came to recognize the same books as Scripture through shared use, discussion, and the natural consensus that emerged over generations.
The New Testament: A Slower Process Than You’d Think
Now here’s where the New Testament canon becomes even more interesting. Unlike the Old Testament, which was formed within a single Jewish community, the New Testament emerged across multiple scattered Christian communities. These communities spoke different languages, were separated by thousands of miles, and had no central authority dictating what counted as Scripture.
The Early Writings Circulate
When Jesus died around 30 AD, his followers had no intention of creating a new Bible. Most of them expected Jesus to return very soon, to wrap up history and usher in the kingdom of God. Inspired by the resurrection, they told stories about Jesus orally, shared them in gatherings, and wrote letters addressing practical problems in various churches.
The earliest writings we have are Paul’s letters, probably written between 50 and 65 AD.¹⁰ These letters were written to address specific problems in specific churches. He wrote to a quarrelsome church in Corinth, a struggling church in Galatia, and a church dealing with persecution in Thessalonica. Paul wasn’t thinking, “I’m writing Scripture.” He was solving problems. And yet these letters were valued so highly that churches began copying them and sharing them with other churches.
The four Gospels were written in the latter half of the first century.¹¹ Mark probably came first, then Matthew and Luke drawing on Mark and other sources, and John writing independently. Again, these weren’t presented as “official Scripture.” They were simply the accounts that communities treasured and used in worship.
The Core Canon Emerges Quickly
Here’s the surprising part: by the mid-second century, the core of what we call the New Testament was already widely recognized. Christians in different regions, even those without direct communication, were treating the same books as authoritative. The four Gospels and Paul’s letters were already standard.
How do we know this? One piece of evidence is the Muratorian Fragment, a list discovered in the 1700s and dated to around 180 AD.¹² This ancient list affirms 22 of the 27 books we recognize today in the New Testament. Another witness is Irenaeus, a bishop writing around 180 AD, who defended the idea that there must be exactly four Gospels and no more and no less.¹³ He argued this wasn’t arbitrary; it was how the churches had always operated.
Notice what’s happening here: the church isn’t creating authority. It’s recognizing what already has authority. Different Christians in different places had already decided these books mattered. The early church leaders were just articulating what their communities already believed.
The Troublesome Seven
But not all New Testament books were immediately accepted everywhere. Seven books took longer to be universally recognized: Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 John, 3 John, Jude, and Revelation.¹⁴ Different regions had different opinions. Some churches in the East were uncomfortable with Revelation’s apocalyptic imagery. Some Western churches were uncertain about the authorship of Hebrews and therefore hesitant about including it. James raised questions about faith and works.
This wasn’t because these books were secretly heretical or suspicious. It was because they weren’t as widely circulated, they weren’t as clearly apostolic, or they seemed to address questions that different communities debated differently. But even these disputed books weren’t rejected. They were just slower to achieve universal acceptance.
The Role of Heresy
Something important happens in the second century that speeds up the canonization process: heresy. A man named Marcion showed up in Rome around 140 AD with his own version of Christianity.¹⁵ He had his own scripture list: just one Gospel (a modified Luke), ten of Paul’s letters, and absolutely nothing from the Old Testament. Marcion’s challenge forced the church to ask clearly: What are our authoritative texts, and why?
This is actually healthy. When someone challenges your foundations, you have to articulate them. The church didn’t close ranks arbitrarily in response to Marcion. Rather, they looked at what they’d actually been using, citing, and teaching from, and they said, “These are our authoritative books.”
The Official Lists Emerge
The first complete list of the 27 New Testament books we know today appears in a letter by Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, written in 367 AD.¹⁶ But this wasn’t Athanasius creating the canon out of thin air. He was documenting what had already been accepted. By his time, the debate was essentially over. The disputed books had been accepted, and the rejected books (like the Gospel of Thomas or the Shepherd of Hermas) had been set aside.
Why This History Matters to You
I know this might seem like ancient trivia, but here’s why it actually transforms how you read your Bible: the canon wasn’t imposed from above. It emerged from below, from communities who discovered through use and experience which texts genuinely carried the authority of God.
Your Bible didn’t get “decided” by power-hungry church councils. Instead, Christians across the empire—people separated by distance, language, and culture—came to recognize the same books as authoritative. What are the odds they’d all agree on the same texts unless those texts actually had something special about them?
Think about it: if the canon was just a political power play, you’d expect competing canons to persist. You’d expect the Eastern church to have a completely different Bible than the Western church. You’d expect competing lists to survive as competing authorities. But that didn’t happen. Despite their differences, Christians came to the same conclusions about which books belonged in Scripture.
Here’s something else this history clarifies: the Bible is both human and divine. It was written by humans, copied by humans, debated by humans, and canonized by human communities. But those human communities were guided by something bigger than themselves. The books that made it into the canon are there because they genuinely felt authoritative to Christians across time and space—they felt like the Word of God.
One More Thing to Know: Translations Matter
As a final note, it’s worth knowing that not every Christian tradition has the exact same Bible. Catholic and Orthodox Bibles include what Protestants call the “Apocrypha”—books like Sirach, Wisdom of Solomon, Maccabees, and others. These books are valuable and contain real biblical history, but they’re recognized differently by different traditions.
This doesn’t undermine Scripture’s authority. Rather, it shows that the canonization process was genuinely thoughtful. Different Christian communities came to different conclusions about a handful of books, and those conclusions were based on solid reasoning about authorship, date, and reliability.
If anything, this complexity shows integrity. The early church wasn’t careless. They debated hard questions. And while not every community reached identical conclusions about the Apocrypha, they reached almost total agreement on the 66 books that appear in all Protestant Bibles.
Reading Scripture with New Confidence
The next time you open your Bible, I want you to notice something. The books you’re holding didn’t get there through a political conspiracy or arbitrary decree. They got there because Christians across centuries, across continents, and across different languages and cultures recognized something in these texts that felt like the voice of God.
The Torah’s authority wasn’t voted on. It was experienced. The four Gospels weren’t chosen by committee. They were chosen by communities who found them most reliable and true. The Epistles of Paul weren’t mandated by Rome. They were treasured and copied and shared because they spoke to real problems with real wisdom.
This is a Bible you can trust. Not because it dropped from heaven fully formed, but because it emerged through a careful, thoughtful process of communities recognizing the voice of God when they heard it.
As you continue reading Scripture, remember this: you’re not reading a book that was chosen arbitrarily. You’re reading books that have been tested, debated, translated, and trusted by billions of believers across two thousand years. That’s not ancient history. That’s a living tradition that continues right up to you.
Keep reading. Keep questioning when things are unclear. Keep trusting that the God who guided the earliest Christians in recognizing Scripture is the same God who speaks to you through these pages today.
Footnotes
Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) achieved its authoritative status gradually; the Torah achieved recognition first. See Timothy H. Lim, “How was the Canon Formed?”, Method & Meaning: Essays on Biblical Interpretation in the Eighteenth Century, 2022.
Ezra 7:6; Book of Nehemiah 8:1-12. See also Michael L. Satlow, How the Bible Became Holy (Yale University Press, 2014), 45-47.
The Prophets collection (Nevi’im) achieved canonical status by approximately 200 BC, as evidenced by references in the Book of Sirach (Ben Sira). Craig A. Evans, “The Apocryphal Jesus,” in Exploring the Origins of the Bible: Canon Formation in Historical, Literary, and Theological Perspective, ed. Craig A. Evans and Emanuel Tov (Baker Academic, 2008), 119-121.
Book of Daniel is dated to approximately 165 BC during the Maccabean period. See Stephen G. Dempster, “Torah, Torah, Torah: The Emergence of the Tripartite Canon,” in Exploring the Origins of the Bible, ed. Evans and Tov, 37-40.
The placement of Daniel in the Writings (Ketuvim) rather than the Prophets (Nevi’im) indicates the Prophets collection was already closed. Lee Martin McDonald, The Formation of the Biblical Canon: Volume 1: The Old Testament (Routledge, 2017), 180-185.
The Writings were canonized gradually between 100 and 200 AD. Timothy H. Lim, “How was the Canon Formed?”, 2022; McDonald, Formation of the Biblical Canon, 195-210.
Mishnah Yadaim 3:5 records rabbinic debates regarding the status of Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes. See also James Barker, “The Formation of the Jewish Bible,” Biblical Archaeology Society, accessed April 2019.
Modern scholars have largely abandoned the hypothesis of a formal Council of Jamnia. See Jack P. Lewis, “What Do We Mean by Jabneh?,” Journal of Biblical Literature 32, no. 2 (1964): 125-132; Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (Doubleday, 1997), 39-40.
Josephus documents the 22-book Jewish canon in his work Against Apion (c. 90s AD). See Josephus, Against Apion, 1.37-42.
Paul’s letters were written between approximately 50-65 AD. This dating is supported by internal evidence and early Christian sources. Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford University Press, 1987), 35-40.
The Gospels were composed in the latter half of the first century, with Mark generally considered the earliest (c. 65-70 AD) and John the latest (c. 90-110 AD). Harry Y. Gamble, The New Testament Canon: Its Making and Meaning (Fortress Press, 1985), 38-52.
The Muratorian Fragment, dated to approximately 180 AD, is the earliest known list of New Testament books from a Christian source. It affirms 22 of the 27 canonical books. Metzger, Canon of the New Testament, 305-307.
Irenaeus of Lyon, Against the Heresies, Book III, Chapters 11-12 (c. 180 AD). See also The New Testament Canon Formation, Yale Bible Study (Yale University, 2022), yale biblestudy.org.
These seven books (Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2-3 John, Jude, Revelation) are known as the Antilegomena or “disputed books.” Different churches accepted them at different rates. Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History, Book III, Chapter 25.
Marcion of Sinope (c. 85-160 AD) arrived in Rome around 138-140 AD with his version of Christianity. His challenge to the church’s understanding of Scripture was significant in clarifying canon discussions. McDonald, Formation of the Biblical Canon, 140-145.
Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, provided the first complete list of the 27 New Testament books in his Festal Letter of 367 AD. Athanasius, Festal Letter 39, 367 AD; Metzger, Canon of the New Testament, 318-319.
Recommended Resources on Biblical Canon
If you want to dig deeper into this topic, here are some of the most respected scholarly works on canon formation:
Lee Martin McDonald, The Formation of the Biblical Canon: Volume 1: The Old Testament (Routledge, 2017) – See on Amazon – The standard scholarly treatment of Old Testament canon development.
Craig A. Evans & Emanuel Tov (Editors), Exploring the Origins of the Bible: Canon Formation in Historical, Literary, and Theological Perspective (Baker Academic, 2008) – See on Amazon – Essays from leading international scholars on both testaments.
Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford University Press, 1987) – See on Amazon – The classic introduction to New Testament canon formation by one of the most respected biblical scholars of the twentieth century.
Michael L. Satlow, How the Bible Became Holy (Yale University Press, 2014) – See on Amazon – An accessible scholarly account of how Jews and Christians gradually granted authority to biblical texts.
——
FYI: Some of the links above are affiliate links. If you choose to purchase items linked, I will receive a small commission from that sale.
If you find this blog helpful and want to say thanks, click here to buy Danny Davis a coffee.
