Recommend-a-blog (34)

It’s been many years since I struggled with the issue of the New Testament canon.

I was never in any doubt that the NT was God speaking, or that we had an accurate record of Christ’s life and its implications in our hands today (or, for that matter, that the NT provides unshakable authority for the entire OT canon). My difficulty, seeking to serve the Lord by teaching the Word in my mid-twenties, was finding the best way to explain my confidence in scripture to younger believers.

Somehow, shrugging and invoking divine providence just didn’t feel adequate.

I’m much more comfortable dealing with the question today. Reading F.F. Bruce’s The Canon of Scripture definitely helped. (It’s available as an audiobook now.) Much later, it occurred to me that a canon that left out large numbers of divinely inspired books is not a major problem for Christian apologists, even if we assume that is actually the case. And our Apocrypha-lypso series (list in left sidebar near the bottom of this post) tries to answer the question “What makes scripture scripture?” in 13 instalments. (The wrap-up post gathers all my metrics for canonicity in one place.)

Other excellent resources on the subject exist, but Greg Koukl’s recent post at Stand to Reason entitled “The New Testament Canon: Which Books and Why?” is among the clearest and most compact explanations of how the NT canon came together that I’ve come across. (It’s long for a blog post, but a whole lot shorter than reading F.F. Bruce.)

Koukl starts with an appalling quote from Dan Brown’s 80 million-selling The Da Vinci Code, some version of which has rocked the confidence of more than a few less-firmly-grounded Christians, going on to demonstrate that Brown’s characterization of the birth of the NT canon is a “complete fabrication”. He then dispels the myth that the Bible is the creation of the Roman Catholic Church, distinguishes between the concepts of recognition and determination, and provides helpful sections on apostolicity, orthodoxy and catholicity (universality), footnoting it all for those interested in digging further.

If you have a young Christian or new believer in your life who is working his or her way through the issue, Greg’s post is an excellent place to start.