7 Things I Wish Christians Knew About the BibleSýnishorn

HOW THE BIBLE WAS PUT TOGETHER

The process of canonization is complicated because nowhere does any book in the Bible tell you which books should be in the Bible! There is no “Thou shalt regard Genesis to Revelation as canon and spurn those books named 1 Enoch, the Gospel of Peter, and Acts of Andrew” or anything like that. Consequently, different biblical canons developed over the centuries, and different canons are still used by various religious communities all over the world.

Christians largely inherited the Tanakh/Old Testament from their Jewish heritage as followers of Jesus. However, the church largely preferred the “Septuagint,” the name we give to a family of Greek translations of the Old Testament. The Septuagintal texts sometimes differed in wording from the Hebrew texts (quite notably in places like Jeremiah). In addition, many writings from the “Apocrypha” (more on that below), like Tobit and Judith, which do not appear in the Hebrew Bible, do appear in Christian versions of the Old Testament in Greek. It was not until Jerome in the fifth century that Christians strove to bring their Latin Bibles more closely into alignment with the Hebrew text and canon by translating directly from them, rather than relying on the Septuagint for the Old Testament as had largely been done in the past.

From the Greek apokryphos for “hidden,” the so-called Apocrypha refers to a number of books written by Jewish authors that were widely read by Jews and Christians but were regarded as of questionable authorship or having dubious origins. This is why Jews omitted them from their canon and why Christians eventually assigned them secondary status.

The New Testament is the testimony of the apostles to Jesus: who He was, what He did, why He died, how He was raised from the dead and exalted to the Father’s right hand. The New Testament contains a diversity of authors and genres, but if we were to assign a single theme to its contents, it would be this: God is in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. The God of creation, the God of Israel, has made himself known in the person and work of Jesus of Nazareth. And this Jesus, whom the Romans crucified, is Lord and Messiah. He died for our sins and was raised to put us right with God, and salvation is found by placing faith in Him.