Lesson 3
How We Got the Bible — The Formation of the New Testament Canon
Lesson 3 of our six-week study is designed to deepen confidence in how the Bible came together — and can we trust that the right books made it in? This Sunday school lesson tackles one of the most important and most misunderstood questions in Christian history. From the earliest days of the church, false teachers, Roman persecution, and competing writings created an urgent need to identify which scriptures were genuinely God’s Word. What follows is a summary of how the New Testament canon was formed, tested, and confirmed.
Introduction and Purpose of the Study
Our study is a six-week informational series intended to strengthen the class’s confidence in the Bible as God’s Word before transitioning to a longer “real-life discipleship” study. The aim is not deep theology but historical literacy: helping believers articulate not only what Scripture says but how the book in their hands actually arrived there. The class is encouraged to supplement the lesson by reading the following entries from Dennis’s blog, which trace the story even further back into the prehistory of writing itself.
• How We Got Our Bible – The Story of Canonization
• From Clay to Canon: The Epic Journey of Writing from Cuneiform to the Biblical Record
• Tracing the Journey of Scripture Through the Ages
• James White: But it IS Translated Correctly!
• Standing Firm: How You Can Be Certain the Bible is the Word of God
Can We Trust the Bible? — A Study of the Old Testament’s Origins and Reliability
This conversational Bible study lesson is aimed at helping our members understand where the Bible came from and why it can be trusted. Pastor Joey uses audience engagement, historical evidence, and a dramatic discovery to build a case for the reliability of Scripture.
How We Got the Bible — The Formation of the New Testament Canon
The Problem That Demanded a Solution
After Jesus’ resurrection, an explosion of Christian writings spread across the Roman world — but so did false teachers and heretics. As early as the mid-100s AD, a man named Marcion founded his own church, rejected the Old Testament entirely, and began cutting scripture to fit his theology. Simultaneously, the Roman Emperor Diocletian ordered the burning of all Christian scriptures around 300 AD. Believers facing death needed to know with certainty which books were genuinely the Word of God and therefore worth dying to protect. That urgent need drove the formation of the biblical canon — a Greek word meaning “measuring stick”.
Three Historical Tests for Canonicity
The early church fathers applied three rigorous criteria to evaluate every writing:
Apostolic Authority — Was the book written by a direct eyewitness of Jesus or their closest associates?
Widespread Acceptance — Did the universal church — from Africa to Rome to Syria — affirm it?
Theological Consistency — Did it align with the established, orthodox teaching of Jesus and the Old Testament?
A fourth element undergirds all three: the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. As 2 Peter 1:20–21 states, no prophecy came from human will — men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Spirit. Paul confirms in 2 Timothy 3:16–17 that all Scripture is “breathed out by God.”
The Councils Did Not Create the Bible — They Recognized It
A common skeptical claim holds that powerful men at church councils simply voted the Bible into existence centuries later. The lesson directly refutes this. The three criteria above were applied organically by everyday Christians for over 300 years before any formal council convened. The Council of Hippo (393 AD) and the Council of Carthage (397 AD) — led by figures such as Augustine — did not vote to make books authoritative. They formally listed the 27 books the Christian world had already recognized. The analogy offered is precise: a jeweler does not make a diamond valuable by examining it — he simply recognizes and confirms the value already present.
The Authors Who Passed the Eyewitness Test
The lesson surveys each New Testament author’s qualifications:
• Matthew — A disciple and apostle, a former despised tax collector
• Mark — Not an apostle himself, but a close associate of Peter; his Gospel is essentially Peter’s eyewitness testimony written down
• Luke — A physician who traveled with Paul and had direct apostolic contact; author of both Luke and Acts
• John — An apostle and member of Jesus’ inner circle; wrote five books
• Peter — An apostle; wrote two letters
• James and Jude — Half-brothers of Jesus who initially doubted Him, then became believers after the resurrection
• Paul — Encountered the risen Christ directly; transformed from a persecutor of Christians into the church’s most prolific apostle
• Hebrews — Unknown authorship, but theologically consistent with apostolic teaching
Rejecting the Gnostic Forgeries
The lesson addresses fake gospels that have attracted modern attention. The Gnostic movement — which believed the physical world was evil — produced forged gospels centuries after the fact, attaching apostles’ names to texts those apostles never wrote. The Gospel of Thomas omits the cross and resurrection. The Gospel of Judas portrays Judas as a hero. The Gospel of Peter features talking crosses and giants. All were universally rejected by the early church because they failed every test.
Physical Evidence
The John Rylands Papyrus P52 — a fragment of the Gospel of John dated to approximately 125 AD — provides physical proof that authentic apostolic Gospels were already in wide circulation before the Gnostic forgeries were even composed.
Conclusion
The New Testament canon was not manufactured by institutional power. It emerged organically over three centuries through consistent application of apostolic, universal, and theological criteria — and was finally codified by councils that simply ratified what the body of Christ had already discerned. The Holy Spirit guided the process from authorship to recognition.
Can the Bible be trusted — and does the resurrection of Jesus hold up to honest scrutiny? This video segment captures a refreshingly candid conversation between a skeptical interviewer and Wes Huff, a Christian apologist, designed specifically for people who have never opened a Bible and carry genuine doubts. From the nature of the scriptures themselves to the reliability of ancient memory and the historical evidence for the empty tomb, the dialogue meets hard questions with straightforward, evidence-based answers.
(Our segment finished at 31:18)
Can I Trust the Bible? — Episode 3
The Truth About Christianity
A Conversational Exploration of the Bible’s Reliability
and the Evidence for the Resurrection Overview
This interview is a candid dialogue between a skeptical interviewer — a 33-year-old who describes himself as having passed through a “new atheist phase” — and a Christian apologist, Wes Huff. The conversation covers the nature of the Bible, the reliability of oral tradition, the problem of mythological drift, and ultimately the historical case for the resurrection of Jesus. The tone is honest, exploratory, and aimed squarely at people who have never opened a Bible.
What Is the Bible?
Wes Huff begins by orienting a complete newcomer. The Bible is not a single book but a collection of 66 books, written over approximately 1,600 years, across three continents, by nearly 40 authors, in three languages. The Old Testament consists of the Hebrew Scriptures — the sacred writings of the Jewish people — covering history, poetry, prophecy, and wisdom literature from the time of Moses through the Persian Empire. The New Testament begins with Jesus and records the eyewitness accounts of his life, death, and resurrection.
On authorship, the Christian doctrine of verbal plenary inspiration holds that human authors wrote every book but were “carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:20–21) — meaning the words are both genuinely human and genuinely divine.
Who Decided Which Books Were Scripture?
Wes then raises the obvious question: who chose which books made it in? He explains that the Old Testament canon was effectively determined by the Jewish people themselves long before Christianity. The first-century Jewish historian Josephus argued that Israel’s scriptures were a fixed, numbered set — housed in the temple, corresponding to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet — and that prophetic revelation ceased after the Persian period (around the time of Esther and Malachi). This created the “400 years of silence” before John the Baptist and Jesus.
The New Testament’s 27 books were all written within the first century, placing them within the lifetime of eyewitnesses. The latest candidates — likely John’s Gospel — date to the 90s AD, roughly 60 years after the crucifixion. This gap is actually closer than the biographical gap for most ancient historical figures.
The Oral Tradition Problem — and Why “Chinese Whispers” Is the Wrong Analogy
Wes presses on memory reliability, noting he cannot accurately recall events from 20 years ago. He introduces the concept of mythological drift — the risk that stories change and embellish over time — and addresses it on two fronts.
First, he cautions against chronological snobbery (a term from C.S. Lewis) — the assumption that ancient people were scientifically naive and therefore credulous. He notes that even Mary, when told by an angel she would conceive, raised a scientific objection: she had not met the biological conditions for pregnancy. Ancient people understood how the world worked; they simply lacked modern terminology.
Second, the Chinese Whispers analogy fails because it requires one-to-one, whispered, once-only transmission. The gospel stories were told repeatedly, communally, and publicly — in the presence of people who could verify or challenge them. The feeding of 5,000 people, for example, had thousands of potential eyewitnesses.
The 9/11 Analogy and the Resurrection
Wes then offers a memorable illustration: while he cannot recall details of a card from his grandmother 20 years ago, he can vividly recount where he was on September 11, 2001. Emotionally shattering, historically unprecedented events produce sharp, durable memories — and the disciples’ experience of Jesus’ death and resurrection was precisely that kind of event.
The disciples had followed Jesus for three years, hearing his teachings repeated across multiple settings. When he was publicly executed, they hid in fear — convinced the movement was over, just like every other messianic movement of the era that died with its leader. What transformed eleven terrified men hiding in an upper room into bold public proclaimers of a risen Jesus — who then returned to Jerusalem, the very site of the crucifixion, to make their claim — is the central question the apologist poses.
His answer: they went back because something genuinely happened. A fabricated story does not get proclaimed at the scene of the crime where every witness could refute it. The resurrection, at minimum, represents a catastrophically transformative event in the disciples’ lives — one that drove them to endure persecution for the rest of their days for a message they had every reason to abandon.
Conclusion
The conversation models how to present Christianity accessibly to genuinely curious skeptics — meeting honest questions with honest answers, avoiding insider jargon, and grounding the faith in history, memory, and evidence rather than mere tradition or sentiment.
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