Some words are like neighbourhood children—they're vaguely familiar, but most of us couldn't really say where they belong. For many people, "Canon" is a word like that—we recognize that it's probably something important, but saying just what that is may be a bit harder. Canon comes from a Greek word for a measuring stick—in its most precise meaning, calling something canonical says that it is an established standard of comparison. In English, the other meanings of canon are slippery. It's a poetical word, whose overlapping meanings involve things like symmetry, beauty, and great value. Something canonical has been refined, polished, purged of unnecessary elements until it is perfect. A musical canon is a piece in which interlocking themes form a complex and pleasing pattern, where tensions are built up and triumphantly resolved at the ending. A lot like the Bible, actually. The Old and New Testaments are known as the canon, in all these senses: it's a harmony and also a yardstick; it's precious above all other books, and we have to be careful and attentive in handling it.

The Bible is not a single book, but rather a library of several dozen, written in three languages between 1900 and 3000 years ago, and drawing on traditions and sources older still. It contains many very different types of literature that must be read in different ways. Eyewitness reportage jostles with traditional tales, moral advice, prophetic oracles, sacred poetry, and apocalyptic visions. From all these different angles, it has only one theme: the magnificent history of God's salvation of the human race from our own folly and evil. All these diverse elements, each read in its appropriate way, fit together to form a remarkably harmonious whole. 

All the Scripture was in circulation by 100 AD. By 150-170, the list of authoritative New Testament books was uniform throughout the Mediterranean world, and was the same as our New Testament with the omission of 2 Peter.[1] Developing the idea of the canon and officially fixing which books belonged to it took a few hundred years more. The canon was formalized authoritatively in about AD 400 by Church councils. The argument broke out again in the 16th century, when the Protestant churches declared about 18 percent of the Old Testament to be noncanonical. We all agree on the New Testament canon. But how did we reach that agreement? And what exactly is scriptural authority in Christianity? Before we can get to those questions, we have to settle the texts themselves.

We do not possess the original manuscripts of the sacred books, but we do have a very large collection of more or less damaged copies of various ages. Some are in the original languages and some have been translated, for example from Hebrew into Greek or from Greek into Syriac, and there are some significant textual variations. The first item is thus to establish just what each ancient author wrote, as far as possible. 

Fortunately we are in excellent shape to do this. Besides the huge volume of manuscripts—far more than for any other ancient text, and far closer in date to the originals—we have the science of textual criticism. Textual critics, by laborious and detailed comparisons of the thousands of manuscripts, can nearly always establish what the original text said—so that in effect we possess the originals. The obscurities that remain are mostly due to rare words that occur only once or twice in Scripture and are unknown from other sources. The footnotes to the Revised English Bible translation, a good modern version, list only 144 obscure words or phrases in the whole bible, mostly minor. From a doctrinal point of view, there is little problem with the remaining textual obscurities, and thus we owe these critics and translators a huge debt of gratitude. almost comparable to the one we owe the scribes and monks who copied and preserved the manuscripts themselves.

There are a few other issues having to do with apparent later changes, which also have little doctrinal impact. An example is the story of the woman taken in adultery (Chapter 8 of St. John's gospel), which has been accepted as authentic Scripture but may have been added to the manuscript at a later date. This does not mean that a mistake has been made. The Christian concept of inspiration is not that the Bible was dictated by God to a secretary who mechanically transcribed what he heard. Rather, the inspired authors and editors wrote under the pressure of the Holy Spirit, who ensured that the authors' words were attuned to God's thoughts, and the form we have (perhaps emended) is the canonical one. The Bible thus has something of the divine-human character of Christ Himself, which is peculiarly fitting, since Jesus Christ is the Word of the Father made flesh.

Our faith in Scripture depends primarily on the person of Christ. He exhibited devotion to the Old Testament as accepted in Jerusalem in His day; `For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.' (Mt 5:18, RSV) He used it: his response to Satan's tempting him in the wilderness was to quote Deuteronomy 6 and 8: ``He answered, `It is written: Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.''' (Matthew 4:4) Even his cry of desolation on the cross was from Psalm 22.

He told us to follow godly teaching even if it came from ungodly men: "The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat; so practice and observe whatever they tell you, but not what they do; for they preach, but do not practice.'' (Mt 23:2-3, RSV) Thus we have Christ's oft-repeated witness that the law and the prophets as taught in early first-century Jerusalem were indeed God's word. We also have the word of the apostle Paul: "All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.'' (2 Timothy 3:15-17, RSV) Paul's authority also came from Jesus, and was vouched for by the Jerusalem apostles. So at least some Scripture is inspired by God. The questions are, first, how can we tell true Scripture from false, and second, just what does it mean to be inspired by God?

The good news is that we aren't required to do it for ourselves, as regards the Bible itself. The early Church spread by the dissemination of the Jesus tradition, accompanied by a huge number of miracles and attested by the flames of martyrdom and the witness of saintly men and women. While the apostolic tradition had living witnesses, they were more than enough. It was when the apostolic generation was dying out that it became necessary to collect and codify the tradition, from oral and written sources.

The modern difficulties arise from the recent popularization of second- and third-century Gnostic writings, and fanciful reconstructions of the gospel story, usually involving Jesus marrying Mary Magdalen. The fictional ones won't worry any thoughtful person, but the existence of noncanonical ancient writings that contradict the Scriptures in some points may be more troubling.

To be considered authoritative, a book had to be in agreement with the still-extant oral tradition, which was spread by the travels of the apostles and other early evangelists, and had been treasured up by the churches everywhere. This tradition has subsequently been taken up into the teaching of the Church, so we still have it, but it no longer has a separate existence, so we are no longer in a position to repeat that test The writings of the Church Fathers preserve much of the surrounding discussion, but since the issues were still being thrashed out in their time, they do not always speak with one voice. Thus tradition is still very important as a guide to interpreting the meaning of Bible passages, but it is no longer an independent witness to the basic authority of Scripture.

Besides agreeing with the apostolic tradition, a text had to have been read in the churches for a long period, preached on, and found to be wholesome, in the sense of helping people to know God and not being conducive to self destruction. The results of this test have also been confirmed over and over in the centuries since—changing or disregarding the apostolic teaching is what gets us into trouble.

Thus the New Testament canon was subjected to a large scale clinical test, as well as close comparison with authentic independent tradition, and the witness of prayer, personal sanctity, and miracles. There remained arguments at the margins, mostly over a few of the Pastoral Epistles, but nothing of great doctrinal significance.

The New Testament apocrypha failed these tests. The most famous of these books, the so-called Gospel of Thomas, is a collection of variants on Scripturally-attested sayings of Jesus, mixed with material from a radically pessimistic alien religion: Gnosticism.  The Gnostic groups that produced Thomas and a few other books held to the old Greek idea that the world had been made by an evil god, so that matter and the body were basically bad things that needed to be overcome, and that salvation came by knowledge of esoteric religious mysteries and by severe discipline.   These are not Christian ideas at all.

Judaism and Christianity are not esoteric religions, and never have been.  All the doctrines of the Church are on display to everyone, in plain view. This is not to say that we don't need the Holy Spirit to help us understand them, but their actual content is public and not secret, unlike the Gnostics'. (They also teach that the world and people and the things of the body are basically good, though corrupted.) Other NT apocrypha were well-intentioned but misguided attempts to rewrite the existing Gospels, such as Tatian's Diatessaron, teaching vehicles such as the Shepherd of Hermas, or collections of fanciful popular tales about Jesus, such as the Protoevangelium of James, all of which are still extant. (These last two especially are not bad books at all; they're still read and valued, they just aren't Scripture.) The rejection of these books is not a historical accident, nor is it a matter of gradual selection from a larger group of initially popular books, that could have come out differently. The striking fact is that there is not a single NT apocryphal book that achieved any widespread acceptance as Scripture at any time.

It is important to realize that in the canonical process, the Church did not confer authority on the Scriptures, but rather acknowledged the authority they already possessed as the faithful witness of the Apostles' teaching of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. The Church also did not write the New Testament, in the sense of deciding that they needed a book, forming a committee and sitting down to the job—the writings were already old when the question came up. Since the New Testament is the teaching of the Apostles, on which the Church is based, it is more accurate to say that through Scripture, God formed the Church.

The Old Testament has an even longer and more complicated history than the New. It was originally written in Hebrew over a period of perhaps a thousand years. All our evidence shows that the authoritative books were precisely those of our Old Testament. There was little or no variation in which books were considered to be the word of God, but there was no formally designated canon until the first century BC. A sizable community of Greek-speaking Jews had developed, who needed access to the Scriptures, so a committee of about 70 rabbis collected and translated them, producing the Septuagint (from the Greek for 'seventy'). In so doing, they of course had to select the books that would belong to the collection, and this was the earliest codified canon. The Septuagint also included books available only in Greek, though this was a matter of dispute between the Greek and Hebrew speakers. After the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, the two groups gradually lost touch. The Church, being predominantly Greek-speaking by then, continued to use the Septuagint. A group of Hebrew-speaking rabbis, the Masoretes, produced a carefully-edited all-Hebrew canon that left out the disputed books. Both the Septuagint and the Masoretic collections are still fundamental for translators and advanced students.

The disputed Old Testament books are called the second canon (deuterocanon) by Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, who accept them as Scripture, and apocrypha by Protestants, who generally do not. The Church Fathers argued about them as the rabbis did, but from 400 AD to the time of Luther the whole Church accepted them. Luther applied his own rather arbitrary test: to be acceptable, any book had to support the doctrine of salvation by grace through faith (as understood by Martin Luther). The deuterocanonical texts provide scriptural support for Roman Catholic doctrines that Luther eventually rejected, such as Purgatory (Judas Maccabaeus offers prayers for the dead in II Maccabees 12).

Luther also revived the objection raised long ago by St Jerome, the translator of the Bible into Latin, that the deuterocanonical books were available only in Greek, not the original Hebrew or Aramaic, so their original form could not be established. The Greek version of the book of Esther has significant differences from the Hebrew, and these books have significant proven historical errors, which the others do not, so this is an issue that has to be thought about. For Luther, only the original form of the Scriptural writings could be considered inspired, so he rejected these books. The virulence surrounding this discussion has to be understood in terms of the wars of religion of the 16th century—as in the American Civil War and World War II, people become more and more radicalized as bloody wars continue. This is natural, but has no relation whatever to the rightness of their views.

Atheists have often thrown gibes at Scripture, saying that it was fabricated for the profit of the religious elite, enabling them to fatten themselves by ruling over the common people. Unfortunately there have been many greedy and tyrannical rulers who called themselves Christians. This must be so on both the Christian and atheist views, so it doesn't prove anything one way or the other.  There are excellent reasons to regard the Apostles as truthful witnesses.

In brief, if the apostles and their successors made it all up, this group of social outcasts and illiterate fishermen (plus a rabbi with a previous history of violence) were at once the most successful and the most unsuccessful impostors in history. Successful, because the Church spread with the winged feet of good news, conquering the Roman Empire and spreading to the ends of the earth—but unsuccessful, because with only one exception, all the apostles were murdered, one by one, as a direct result of their preaching. One would need a powerful faith in the nonexistence of God to accept such an account. The books of the New Testament were in wide circulation during the lifetimes of the Apostles and of their first hearers, so there wasn't an opportunity for the stories to 'grow in the telling.'

So our claim that the Bible is the Word of God is reasonable—it depends on nothing more or less than the claim that Jesus Christ is Lord, which at bottom is a testable historical claim, based on His character, life, and works.  The consequences of this view, however, are quite startling. We claim to hold a book containing the self-revelation of the God who made the universe and everything in it, including us.

Once we have such a book, once we have decided that this is the word of God, then we have exactly two choices: to submit ourselves to it, or not. To submit is to align ourselves with God, and not to submit is to rebel against Him. This is the most serious choice in the world, and we must all make it at some stage. The thing that we must not do is to pick and choose bits of it to suit the politics of our day, and make believe that we are submitting to the will of God. God does not change, and he does not contradict himself (as natural theology and reason would agree). A properly nuanced interpretation is of course needed. Reasonable principles can be given that lead to reliable exegesis, and we have the whole Church interpreting with us.

All concepts of God as being loving, forgiving, and involved in the lives of His creatures come from Judaism or Christianity. There really aren't any other loving Gods on offer in any major religion. So let's hang on a moment, before we apply some `higher principle' and edit the Scripture to remove the duties and the judgement, while keeping the loving, forgiving god who lets us do what we want.  In honesty,  we have to face the question of how we know about this loving god, if the Scripture is not reliable, and just where we got this `higher principle' we're using to get ourselves off the hook.  I've yet to hear a serious answer to this question.

[2] i.e. St Paul