We have twenty-seven New Testament books in our Christian Bibles. More properly, we have twenty-seven historical records, accounts, and letters about Jesus the Christ and his church at work through the Holy Spirit in the first-century world. These, together with the Hebrew Scriptures before them, are the self-attesting Word of God for the church (Belgic Confession 5; Westminster Confession of Faith 1.4).

But how did the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments come to hold binding authority for the church? Theories swirl about the formation of both testaments, but Professor Emeritus of Reformed Theological Seminary, Charles E. Hill, has written a book which focuses upon the New Testament and stands out as a wonderfully technical and succinct introduction to the topic. Hill’s book entitled Who Chose the Books of the New Testament? dives into the controversy.

This volume is part of a larger series by Lexham Press called “Questions for Restless Minds,” a collection of multiple volumes that discusses the big perennial questions about faith and life for the college-aged audience. When life’s tough questions are asked and the Christian faith is put upon the judicial stand of our cultural mind, D. A. Carson, the series editor, asks, “How shall you respond?” (xii) This volume gets straight to the point regarding our God-given New Testament and is an excellent source for those wondering about this delicate and complex topic.

Crackpot Theories

The foundational question comes down to authority. Those who question the books of the New Testament and the process of their canonization derive the authority to deny this process by their own self-made authority. The problem is, self-made authoritarians have no evidence to back their claims.¹ Hill recognizes two ways in which the doubters question the status of the twenty-seven books: the political and the practical. “One important thing the political and the practical approaches have in common is that they both perceive the process of selecting the books of the New Testament as the collective act of the church, pure and simple” (33). The result is a seemingly human-centered, arbitrary process.

This is not how the books were “chosen,” however. Hill ably sorts through the issues and evidence, debunking faithless theories and revealing the cracks within the skeptic pot. The thought of Bart Ehrman and the earlier work of Walter Bauer are some such distillers of poison. To sum up their position regarding the first few centuries of the early church, Hill says, “In this period we are more to speak of Christianities than of Christianity” (7).

Political

The solvent for the church’s canonical problem will come through the strong and orthodox Constantine—so say the skeptics like Ehrman. The argument goes that there were a number of different “Christianities” until the “proto-orthodox” gained enough steam, along with the added bonus of Constantine’s power complex, to dominate. The proto-orthodox “was neither a self-evident interpretation nor an original apostolic view. . . . Indeed, as far back as we can trace it, Christianity was remarkably varied in its theological expressions” (66, fn 6).² That changes in the fourth century as the porto-orthodox becomes the Orthodox. As Hill notes this kind of reasoning fundamentally assumes, “It’s the winners who write the histories” (7).

This kind of thinking will not do. Hill nails the target: “Seeing things through the prism of politics and power, our new cultural myth constructs the story of the Bible’s formation as a series of epic struggles over what books would be included in the canon (the group or list of books functioning authoritatively as Scripture in Christian churches)” (9). Bauer writes in the early to mid-twentieth century and Ehrman in the early 2000’s. This language of power dynamics is still much used today, especially in academia. This breeds a “conspiracy mentality” where the victorious orthodox rewrite history, “making it look like their views had always been the majority views of the church. Not only did they rewrite history but they must have colluded to wipe out traces of the actual history” (11). For the conspirators, however, the evidence is completely absent (12–9).

Practical

The other solution to the selection of the New Testament books is determined by what is most practical, which is rather subjective. Pragmatic concerns of varying churches are in view: what is most edifying, useful for instruction, and geared towards the local needs of worship (24). The problem with the practical model is the geographical arbitrariness of the matter. What one church found useful may not have been as useful for another church elsewhere. A subjective localized church-based criteria cannot determine the universal church’s canon.

Autopistoi

Contrary to these worldly methods and reasoning, Hill declares,

Our confidence in the Scriptures ultimately rests not on human testimony, even the testimony of the church, but on the testimony of God himself by the Holy Spirit, speaking in the Scriptures. The Scriptures are autopistoi––self-authenticating, self-attesting, and this extend[s] to the question of canon as well. (34)³

The answer then to the doubters discussed above is that Christians—the church—recognized and received the twenty-seven books of the New Testament (42–3). As Kostenberger and Kruger observe, “[T]hey are being read, used, and copied by early Christians because of what they already are—covenantal documents.”⁴ The New Testament did not suddenly appear with nothing before it; it follows in covenantal connection with the Old Testament as foundationally binding over the church.⁵ The twenty-seven books of the New Testament canon were not selected and chosen, but instead formed the church, the body of Christ.

The early church received these writings as Scripture, the very Word of God: “. . . As it is written.” All the early church fathers through the centuries speak this way about the New Testament canonical books (43–52). “They speak rather of accepting and passing on what had been passed down to them from the apostles, Jesus’ commissioned witnesses, those entrusted with the faculty to speak by the Holy Spirit in Jesus’ name” (53). The Scriptures are constituting documents for Christ’s Bride because they are from God.

This work from Charles Hill is a must have for anyone interested in the topic of Scripture, revelation, and an understanding of the history of how we got our Bibles. Hill’s intellectual clarity of the subject matter will keep any reader glued to the pages of this booklet, and anyone who reads through it will be primed and ready to answer the critics of Holy Scripture with great confidence and zeal.

Notes

1. For a few detailed examples, some of which Hill also discusses, look at Andreas Kostenberger and Michael Kruger, The Heresy of Orthodoxy: How Contemporary Culture’s Fascination with Diversity has Reshaped our Understanding of Early Christianity, (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010), 23–101.
2. In this footnote, Hill cites Bart Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2003), 176.
3. See also Michael Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books, (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), 88.
4. Kostenberger and Kruger, The Heresy of Orthodoxy, 124.
5. Kostenberger and Kruger, The Heresy of Orthodoxy, 109. See also Christopher Seitz, The Character of Christian Scripture: The Significance of a Two-Testament Bible, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011); Meredith Kline, The Structure of Biblical Authority, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1997).

© Charles Vaughn. All Rights Reserved.

Charles E. Hill, Who Chose the Books of the New Testament? (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2022).

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Post authored by:

• Charles Vaughn

  

  Charles lives in San Diego county with his wife and four covenant children. He has a B.A. in Biblical & Theological Studies from Regent University and an M.A. in both Biblical and Theological Studies from Westminster Seminary California. Charles works as a Junior High history teacher at a Christian school in Escondido, CA.

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