I used to think that the early church must have came into being with the Bible in its hands. I just assumed that they had, at least after a few short years of existence, a finished Old and New Testament compiled into one book just like we have today; all books completed and agreed upon as God’s divinely inspired and authoritative Word. The reality seems to be that it took a little big longer that.
Old Testament Variation
When it comes to the Old Testament there are those who would argue that the OT as we know it, the OT of the protestant church, had come together and found its final form as early 300-165 BCE.[1] The biggest problem with such early dating is the early church itself who’s collections of sacred writings seemed to be quite a bit broader than what we have today. While there was clearly some OT literature that the whole Christian church was agreed upon from the beginning as being authoritative (i.e., the Pentateuch), there was still some fluidity in terms of a complete and fixed list of sacred OT books.
Take for example Origen of Alexandria, a Christian scholar from the 2nd century. While Origen recognized the majority of our OT books as authoritative, he also states in his writing that it is not good to set before the reader either Numbers or Leviticus,[2] and at the same time recommends a number of deuterocanonical (or apocryphal) books for the Christian’s diet.[3] Or look at Augustine, who is arguably still the most influential voice in the church since the apostle Paul. Augustine’s OT list was made up of 44 books total, including (like Origen) deuterocanonical books such as Sirach, Tobias, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees and so forth.
There are many more examples that could be given, but maybe these two are sufficient to show that while the church Fathers generally agreed that there were inspired and authoritative OT books, there remained through the early centuries variation as to which books those were exactly.[4] As Lee McDonald writes in his classic study, The Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon, “If there was a precise list of authoritative and inspired OT books handed on by the apostles stemming from Jesus, then the early church has lost it. There are simply no references to it anywhere.”[5]
New Testament Was Not Much Different
When it comes to the New Testament, as early as NT books were composed and beginning to be placed alongside the OT Scriptures the similar kind of variation or fluidity showed up. Marcion, a Christian theologian in the 1st century, is the first person known to have published a list of NT books. His list included the Gospel of Luke, Romans, 1–2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians Philippians, Colossians, 1–2 Thessalonians, and Philemon. Of course, Marcion’s list must be taken with a grain of salt given the fact his anti-Jewish ambition was to separate Christianity from any OT and Jewish influence and/or tradition. Nevertheless, he produced the first known NT list of books for the church. In response to Marcion and the damage that his biblical list did, Justin martyr, a 2nd century Christian apologist, worked to recover the OT to the status of Scripture and as a Christian book, while also in his writings paving the way for the gospels to be recognized as Scripture as well. Picking up where Justin left off, Irenaeus, a 2nd century Greek Bishop, made the first clear designation of Christian writings being Scripture and of being a separate collection from the Old Testament. Though even in doing so he never quite defined precisely what the boundaries of that New Testament were.
While Marcion was arguably the first to produce a list of NT books, a 3rd century Bishop named Eusebius was the first to set forth a list of authoritative NT books closest to the 27-book list that we have today. In an attempt to give an account of which NT writings were being used in churches in his time, Esusebius produced his NT list, made up of what he called 1) universally acknowledged books 2) disputed books, and 3) spurious books.[6] Acknowledged/accepted books were the four gospels, Acts and fourteen epistles of Paul, 1 Peter, 1 John and Revelation. In the disputed category were Hebrews, James, Jude, 2 peter, 2 and 3 john and Revelation again. Finally, listed as spurious were several NT apocryphal books like the Acts of Paul, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Apocalypse of Peter, the Didache and then again Revelation.
Again, to quote McDonald, this time regarding the NT scriptures, “The Christian books that eventually received this normative status were not the same for all the churches and even when there was general agreement the authority of the literature was not acknowledged at the same time by every church.”[7]
Life Without a Finished Bible
Much, much more could be said about the process and timeline of the OT and NT books coming together to take the final form of the Christian Bible that we know and cherish today. Nevertheless, one thing is hopefully clear enough from this small collection of examples: that the early church did not immediately have a fixed and closed list of authoritative Scriptures. Now, to Christians who have had the finished form of the Bible in their hands their whole lives, this fact can be a little bit mind boggling. For many of us it is hard to imagine following Christ without the full and complete Bible as we know it. We feel like we would be lost without it. But for the early church, this was their reality.
Of course, it’s not that in those first few centuries that the church had no authoritative texts, but again that there was fluidity or variation in terms of which books were authoritative. Still, this begs the question for 21st century western Christians whose faith is built upon the Scriptures, how did the early church function without a completed Bible?
Well on the one hand, you don’t miss what you never had. It is probably safe to say that the early church was not consciously longing for the finished Bible. And in fact, it doesn’t even appear that the early church was that worried about or interested in figuring out which books belonged in the Bible until heresies began to emerge.[8] But on the other hand, and more importantly the early church as a whole seemed to understand well that final authority rested in the person of Christ. Their foundation was the news of his life, death, and resurrection as well as his teachings which were already being orally taught and passed on. Hans Von Campenhausen rightly states that early Christianity was not “a religion of the book,” because they didn’t have a precise and finished book. Instead, he writes, early Christianity was “the religion of the Spirit and the living Christ.”[9]
People of the Person
I say all of that to say this: there is a lesson there that I believe the modern-day church needs to continually be reminded of. With the unparalleled privilege of having the Bible in our hands comes the unseen temptation to elevate the bible higher than Jesus himself. We can foster such a passion for His Word and become so focused on His Word, that at times we can miss Jesus and become a people of a book instead of a person.
But the value of Scripture is never just Scripture in and of itself. Rather it is that it proclaims to us through both the OT and NT, the life death, resurrection and teachings of Jesus, the son of God, in whom eternal life is found. Without that, our Bible is just books and letters. And to the degree that we study the Scriptures without Jesus as the interpretive lens and the final goal, we remain like the Pharisees to whom Jesus said, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life” (John 5.39-40).
Please don’t mishear me, I am not trying to encourage you to be less passionate about Scripture. Actually, I hope I am encouraging you to be even more passionate and devoted to Scripture. But in that passion and devotion may we never lose sight of who the Scriptures are about. May we love the Bible; cherish the Bible; study the Bible and always thank God for the unbelievable privilege of having His words and revelation preserved for us in the Bible. But may we never forget the aim of the Bible, that is to take us to Jesus in whom all ultimate authority truly rests.
[1] William Sanford LaSor, David Allan Hubbard, and Frederic Wm. Bush Old Testament Survey (Grand Rapids: Eardmans, 1983); David N. Freedman, “The Earliest bible,” in Backgrounds for the Bible (ed. M. P. O’Connor and D. F. Freedman; Winona Lake, Ind,: Eisenbrauns, 1987); Roger. T. Beckwith The Old Testament canon of the New Testament Church and its Background in Early Judaism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985).
[2] See: Homily 27 on Numbers.
[3] Lee. M. McDonald The Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1995), 111.
[4] To some degree this variation remains to this day, particularly between the canons of the Protestants and Eastern Orthodox.
[5] McDonald, Christian Biblical Canon, 129.
[6] Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica
[7] McDonald, Christian Biblical Canon, 9.
[8] Exploring the Origins of the Bible (Edited by Craig A. Evans and Emanuel Tov; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), 204.
[9] Hans, Von Campenhausen. The Formation of the Christian Bible (Translated by J. A. Baker. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972), 62-63.