‘More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John among them.”Who chose which gospels to include?’ Sophie asked.

‘Aha!’ Teabing burst in with enthusiasm. ‘The fundamental irony of Christianity! The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great.’

‘I thought Constantine was a Christian,’ Sophie said.

‘Hardly,’ Teabing scoffed. ‘He was a lifelong pagan who was baptized on his deathbed, too weak to protest. In Constantine’s day, Rome’s official religion was sun worship – the cult of Sol Invictus, or the Invincible Sun – and Constantine was its head priest. Unfortunately for him, a growing religious turmoil was gripping Rome. Three centuries after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, Christ’s followers had multiplied exponentially. Christians and pagans began warring, and the conflict grew to such proportions that it threatened to rend Rome in two. Constantine decided something had to be done. In 325 AD, he decided to unify Rome under a single religion. Christianity.’¹

OK, I’d better stop there before I get struck down by God (or by Rod!) for perpetuating lies. In case you didn’t recognise it, that was an extract from Dan Brown’s bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code. I can tell you, however, that with the exception of the year of the first Council of Nicea (325 AD), not a single one of Brown’s ‘facts’ in that extract checks out.

Brown raises an interesting point though. As he pithily observes just a page earlier:

‘The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven… The Bible is a product of man… it has evolved through countless translations, additions and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book.’²

If, as Brown rightly points out, “the Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven” then how exactly did it arrive? If it’s a “product of man” then where does God fit in to the equation? Who decided what should or shouldn’t be in the Bible? If it has “evolved through countless translations, additions and revisions” how do we know that what we call the Bible is the same as what was originally written?

The Bible: work of man or of God?

It is true that all of what we call the Bible was, originally, written by men. In that sense it is a “product of man”. Why then do we call it the ‘Word of God’? The answer has to do with what we call ‘inspiration’.

Inspiration recognises the role of the Holy Spirit in producting the Scriptures. Specifically, inspiration refers to the supernatural guidance of the writers by the Holy Spirit which resulted in every word being accurate and reliable in the original manuscripts. When we talk about the authorship of Scripture, we recognise dual authorship. God wrote the Bible using human authors.

This is not the same, however, as the way a boss might dictate a letter that a secretary then types. There are places in Scripture where this sort of thing happened³; in most cases the style and selection of words reflect the personality and background of the writer. Consider, for example the four Gospels:

• Matthew was a Jewish tax collector, who was most impressed that Jesus was the King of the Jews – hence his Gospel begins with a royal genealogy.
• Mark, a young disciple of Peter, mirrors his mentor’s activism in his writing – hence his Gospel is liberally scattered with the words “straightaway” and “immediately”.
• Luke’s Gospel is more methodical, reflecting his education and his historical interest and integrity.
• John’s Gospel, written by one “whom Jesus loved,” seems to be obsessed with love for Jesus and his love for others.

Though each of the four Gospels reflects a different style and a different perspective, they do not contradict each other. Instead, they harmonise to give us the fully inspired, accurate record of the life of Christ.

Whilst it may seem paradoxical to examine the Bible’s credentials based on what it says about itself, the question must be asked: if the Bible truly is the Word of God, what greater authority can we refer to? Let us consider, then, some of the Biblical statements about the nature of the Bible:

• “For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” (2 Pet. 1:21)
• Moses acknowledged the source of his writings: “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.” (Deut. 29:29)
• At his trial, Stephen recognised the Scriptures as the revelation of God. After citing the teachings of Moses, Amos and Isaiah he continues, saying, “‘You stiff-necked people, with uncircumcised hearts and ears! You are just like your fathers: You always resist the Holy Spirit!'” (Acts 7:51)
• Speaking of Paul’s letters, Peter writes, “Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom the God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.” (2 Pet. 3:15-16) In Peter’s eyes, therefore, Paul’s letters are on the same level as the Old Testament Scriptures.
• “From infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” (2 Tim. 3:15-17)

The Bible: who decides what’s in and what’s out?

Some religious groups today accept the Bible as on of their religious books but they also accept other so-called “revelations from God”. For example the Qur’an testifies to the Scriptures as being of God, but then goes on to add to them:

Allah! There is no god but He, the Living, the Self-Subsisting, Eternal. It is He Who sent down to the (step by step), in truth, the Book, confirming what went before it; and He sent down the Law (of Moses) and the Gospel (of Jesus) before this, as a guide to mankind, and he sent down the Criterion (of judgment between right and wrong).⁴

Similarly, the Mormons supplement the New and Old Testaments with the Book of Mormon, purportedly a translation of a set of golden plates delivered to Joseph Smith, Jr. by an angel in 1827, and translated by him before being returned to the angel in 1829.

How is it, then, that we do not accept these additions? How do we justify the inclusion of the 66 books that we do have? Who decides what is ‘in’ and what is ‘out’?

The 66 books of the Bible form the completed canon of Scripture. ‘Canon’ is a fancy word that comes from the Greek word kanon, meaning a rule or measurement. A canonical book is one that measured up to the standard of Scripture.

Josephus, a Jewish historian during the time of Jesus, states that the books of the Old Testament were brought together during the reign of Artaxerxes Longimanus (464 to 424 B. C.) during the life of Ezra the scribe⁵. In the third century B. C. they were translated into Greek, and compiled into a book since referred to as the Septuagint⁶. (It is this Greek version that gives us the ordering of books adopted in our Bible.)

The New Testament was assembled over time. By the end of the second century, all but 7 of the books we have today (Hebrews, 2 & 3 John, 2 Peter, Jude, James and Revelation) were recognised as being apostolic. By the end of the fourth century all 27 books in our Bible were recognised by all churches, and ‘locked in’ for western churches at the Councils of Rome (382 A. D.) and Carthage (397 A. D.).

The books included were selected on the basis of having been penned by the first generation of Christian leaders i.e. by those whom Jesus appointed (Peter, Paul, John, James etc.) or their immediate colleagues (Mark, Luke etc.)

The Bible: is it accurate?

Have you ever played ‘Chinese Whispers’? It is a game where everyone gets into a chain. The first person whispers a secret message to the second, who in turn whispers it to the third etc. This continues until the message reaches the end of the chain, who then declares the message aloud for all to hear. Depending on the length of the chain and the faithfulness of the individual whisperers, the message often becomes distorted.

The Bible is in some ways like that. Because of the relatively short durability of papyrus and other materials upon which the Scriptures were originally written, the message had to be periodically recopied in order to overcome issues of wear and tear. But how can we be sure that these copyists have not distorted the words they were copying?

Let us return to our game of Chinese whispers. There are 2 things we can do to ensure that we maximise accuracy: decrease the length of the chain; and ensure that our whisperers are accurate in their message reproduction. The first will minimise the number of chances for an error to occur, the second will reduce the likelihood of an error occurring at each transmission.

Similarly, historians develop confidence in the accuracy of a given text (the Bible documents included) by seeking manuscripts for as close to the events as possible (minimising the chain) and by examining the details about how the manuscript came into our hands to understand the copying/transmission methods.

In terms of the first criteria, the earliest Old Testament manuscripts now extant are amongst the much-publicised Dead Sea Scrolls, found at Qumran, in the Judean desert, in 1947. These documents are dated between the middle of the 3rd Century B. C. and the 1st Century A. D., and include portions of the Old Testament. When these were compared with our modern Bibles, the accuracy was clear: what we read today is, in fact, what was written more than 2000 years ago. The earliest New Testament manuscripts are even closer in age to when they were originally written – there is a fragment of John’s Gospel generally dated about 125 A. D., with almost complete New Testament manuscripts dating back to the early 4th Century A. D. In historical terms, this is almost unprecedented – and each new find only serves to reinforce what we already have!

Conclusion

In summary, then, there is no good reason for anyone to doubt the authority and accuracy of the Bible. The impact of the Bible on so many lives, combined with its own testimony about itself, serves to convince us of its divine authorship. The careful consideration of the Canon of Scripture by the early Christians has ensured that we get only what God has inspired and keeps us from being deceived by further ‘revelations’ such as those espoused by Mohammed (the Qur’an) and Joseph Smith, Jr. (the Book of Mormon). The historical evidence suggests that we have received exactly what was written.

Further reading

• Lee Strobel and Garry Poole, Exploring the Da Vinci Code (Zondervan, 2006).
• John Dickson, The Christ Files (Blue Bottle Books, 2006), particularly Chapter 4 “Behind the New Testament” and Chapter 5 “Before the Gospels”.
• John Dickson, “God in a Book: Making Sense of the Bible” in Hanging in there (St Matthias Press, 1991) pp. 26-32.
• Elmer L. Towns, “Understanding the Doctrine of the Bible” in Concise Bible Doctrines (AMG Publishers, 2006) pp. 21-56.

Endnotes

1. Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (Corgi, 2004) pp. 313-4.
2. Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (Corgi, 2004) pp. 312-3.
3. See, for example, Rev 2:1 – 3:22
4. Surah 3:2-3 (tr. Abdullah Yusuf Ali).
5. Antiquities XI.v.
6. Antiquities XII.ii.