The Right Books: New Testament & Apocrypha

In the last unit the first witness gave us the Old Testament — the Hebrew Scriptures, recognized over centuries and already settled when Jesus read from them. Now the same witness finishes its testimony. Two questions remain. First, how did the New Testament come to be recognized as Scripture? And second, what about the extra books some Bibles carry between or within the Testaments — the Apocrypha? The same principle we learned still governs everything here: the canon was recognized, not conferred. No council made a book Scripture; the church discerned the books that were already the breathed-out Word, as an assayer certifies gold he did not create. We will watch that discernment at work in the New Testament, where the true books stand out plainly against later counterfeits. Then we will take up the Apocrypha honestly — not with a slogan, but by laying the real case on both sides and saying where this course stands and why. This is a place where sincere Christians have long disagreed, and we will treat that disagreement with the candor and the respect it deserves. The second half of the first witness begins.

The New Testament books were recognized by marks, much as the Old Testament books were. The first mark was apostolic origin: a book carried authority if it came from an apostle or from a close associate who wrote under apostolic authority — Mark standing with Peter, Luke with Paul. The second was antiquity: it belonged to the apostolic age, not to a later century. The third was orthodoxy: it agreed with the rule of faith and with the Scripture already given. The fourth was universal use: it was received and read across the churches, not in one corner only. And beneath them all was the self-authenticating voice of God, which His people learned to know. The core was never in doubt — the four Gospels, Acts, and Paul's letters were received from the first. A handful of books were discussed for a time — Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, Revelation — the ones the early church called the antilegomena, the "spoken against." But these too were received. As early as about AD 170 the Muratorian Fragment shows a functioning list, and in 367 Athanasius names all twenty-seven.

How Early Is the New Testament Evidence?

Some scholars date several New Testament books relatively late, but the evidence deserves to be weighed rather than assumed. Acts ends with Paul alive in Rome and does not tell of his death, Peter's death, Nero's persecution of Christians, the Jewish war, or the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in AD 70. Since Acts is the second volume of Luke's work, some scholars have argued that this silence fits naturally with an earlier date for Acts and therefore for Luke. Silence by itself cannot prove a date; an author may stop where his purpose is complete. But the omissions are still worth noticing. They remind us that an early date for important New Testament material is a serious historical possibility, not merely a devotional preference. The safest conclusion is cumulative: dates should be judged from all the evidence, and skeptical assumptions should not be allowed to settle the question before the evidence is heard.

Why These Four Gospel Names?

The four Gospels do not begin with modern title pages saying, "I, Matthew," or "I, John, wrote this book." That fact has led some to call them anonymous. Yet the ancient Christian tradition consistently associates them with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and we do not possess an early competing tradition in which the same four books circulate under four different names. That matters. If the Gospels had circulated anonymously for generations across widely separated churches, we would reasonably expect some confusion when names were finally attached. Instead, the traditional identifications are remarkably stable. This does not settle every question about authorship, and Christians should not claim more than the evidence allows. It does show, however, that the familiar names are not simply arbitrary labels invented in a much later age. They belong to the early history of how these books were received and transmitted.

When the Councils of Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397 listed the twenty-seven books, they were not voting books into inspiration. They were recognizing what the churches had already been using for generations. This is the same truth we met with the Old Testament: a council can no more make a book Scripture than an assayer can make metal into gold. It certifies; it does not create. It is important to say this plainly, because people sometimes claim "the church decided the Bible at a council in the fourth century," as though the books had no authority until then and might have gone another way. They had authority from the moment God breathed them out. The councils were the church acknowledging, formally and together, what the Spirit had already made plain in the life of the churches — the books that had been read, preached, copied, and obeyed since the apostles. The stamp came late; the gold was always gold.

Nothing shows the strength of the true canon better than the counterfeits set beside it. Around AD 140 a man named Marcion cut the Scriptures down to a truncated canon, throwing out the Old Testament and most of the New, keeping only an edited Luke and ten of Paul's letters. The church rejected him. Later came the Gnostic "gospels" — Thomas, Judas, and others — writings of the second century and after, put out under apostles' names they did not belong to, teaching a different religion. These were never widely received; they simply do not carry the apostolic ring. Set the Gospel of Thomas next to the Gospel of John and the difference is not subtle. This matters for our confidence. The church did not invent a canon to win a power struggle, choosing books to prop up its authority; it recognized the genuine apostolic books and declined the pretenders. The counterfeits are real, and they are obvious — and their very existence throws the authentic books into sharper relief.

Now to the harder question. The Apocrypha — the books Catholics and the Orthodox call the deuterocanon — is a group of writings such as Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and First and Second Maccabees, along with additions to Daniel and Esther. They appear in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles as Scripture. They appeared in the King James Bible of 1611, printed between the Testaments. And they are absent from most Protestant Bibles today. So the question is real and specific: do these books belong in the canon? Here we must be careful to name what kind of question this is. It is not like the resurrection of Christ, which no true Christian doubts, or the deity of the Lord, which the faith has always confessed. It is a genuine and old disagreement among Christians who love the same Savior. So we will not settle it with a slogan or a sneer. We will lay out the real case for including these books, then the reasons this course does not, and we will do both fairly.

Let the other side speak first, and at its strongest. Those who receive the Apocrypha point out that the early church's Bible was the Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint — and that the apostles themselves quoted it, not the Hebrew, in many places. The Septuagint, as it was copied by Christians, came to include the deuterocanon; the great fourth-century codices bind these books right in with the rest of the Old Testament. Many of the Church Fathers quoted them and drew on them. The books were read in worship for centuries. And in 1546 the Council of Trent affirmed them formally as Scripture. The argument, at its heart, is one of continuity: the church received these books from the beginning and read them as part of her Scriptures, so who is the later Reformer to remove what the ancient church kept? That is a serious case, made by serious Christians, and it deserves to be heard without caricature before we answer it.

Now our answer — and notice first what we do not say. We do not claim that Jesus explicitly refuted the Apocrypha; He gave no list and no such refutation exists, and to pretend otherwise would be straining a gnat. But several things together lead us to the Hebrew canon. Where Jesus marks the edges of Scripture, He marks the Hebrew Bible: its threefold shape (Luke 24:44) and its span "from Abel to Zechariah," Genesis to Chronicles. Using the Septuagint does not settle the matter, for using a translation is not endorsing every book later bound with it — the codices that include these books are fourth-century Christian volumes, not a fixed canon of Jesus' day, and the King James printed the Apocrypha too without treating it as canon; Philo, an Alexandrian Jew, used the Septuagint heavily yet never cited these books as Scripture. Allusion is not canonization: Jude alludes to Enoch and Paul quotes pagan poets, yet none of these is Scripture. And Jerome, who made the Vulgate, called the deuterocanon "ecclesiastical" — good to read, but not for establishing doctrine. That lower tier held for a thousand years, until Trent, reacting to the Reformation, made it dogma in 1546. So we hold the Hebrew thirty-nine — honestly, without pretending the question was never open.

The first witness has finished. Its testimony is that the Bible you hold — sixty-six books, Genesis to Revelation — is the canon the church recognized as the breathed-out Word of God. The Old Testament is the Hebrew Scriptures Jesus received; the New Testament was recognized by the same marks and stands clear against every counterfeit. The Apocrypha, whatever its worth for history and devotion, was held for centuries in a lower tier and was not received as the doctrine-establishing Word — and we say so with respect to the brothers who hold otherwise, for this disagreement is old and real, and it is not the same thing as doubting the gospel. When you open your Bible, you are holding the right books. Now the witness changes. It is one thing to have the right books; it is another to have the right words within them, carried faithfully across the centuries of copying and translating. To that question — the text and its transmission — we turn next.