Who decided which books made it into your Bible — and did they get it right?

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  Marco1mo ago

  Easy to say 'don't be scared of it' when you have a seminary degree. When you're a regular person in a regular church and someone shows you Bart Ehrman on YouTube and it makes your whole foundation feel wobbly — it's not as simple as 'just engage the history.' Some of us don't have the tools and the church hasn't given them to us.

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• E

  Elena1mo ago

  I went to a very conservative church my whole childhood and they basically acted like the Bible fell from the sky in its current form. When I got to college and found out about the canon debates and the Council of Nicaea and everything, it felt like a betrayal. Like why didn't anyone TELL me this. That's not a small thing to hide from your kids.

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• SM

  Sam M.1mo ago

  I've read every comment in this thread and what strikes me is that the people most certain in either direction — the ones who say 'Spirit guided it perfectly, end of discussion' AND the ones who say 'human politics corrupted it completely' — both seem to be avoiding the actual complexity. Most of church history lives in the uncomfortable middle. Maybe we should too.

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• Y

  Yuki1mo ago

  ^ this is the real problem. churches have created a generation of biblically illiterate people and then act confused when they can't handle the slightest historical challenge. that's not the questioner's fault. that's a systemic failure of discipleship.

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• LR

  Liam R.1mo ago

  Nobody is actually talking about the most important part of this question which is: if you're a Protestant with Sola Scriptura, your entire system rests on Scripture being the final authority — but you needed a pre-Reformation, non-Protestant Catholic/Orthodox consensus to even identify what Scripture IS. You literally cannot have your theology without borrowing authority from a tradition you claim doesn't have authority. That's not a gotcha, that's a genuine theological problem that Protestants need to sit with.

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• A2

  Alex 211mo ago

  my grandma used to say the Bible is like a letter from someone who loves you. she didn't know anything about councils or canons. she just read it every single day and it changed her life. I'm not saying the scholarly questions don't matter. I'm just saying whatever was in those pages did something real to a real person and I watched it happen. that's not nothing either.

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• N_

  Nina _x1mo ago

  I was agnostic for 12 years. The canon question was one of the things that kept me from faith. What actually brought me back wasn't an argument — it was the sustained, lived witness of a community of people whose lives looked genuinely different because of this book. I still have questions about canon formation I can't resolve. But I decided the questions don't have to all be answered for the reality to be real.

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• R_

  Ravi _x1mo ago

  The canon question is the one my atheist coworker throws at me every single time and I've never had a satisfying answer. I just say 'the Holy Spirit guided it' and he stares at me like I said magic. Anyone have an actual argument here that doesn't just assume what it's trying to prove?

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  Alex1mo ago

  I teach Bible at a Christian high school. What kills me is that most Christians think of this question as an attack on their faith when it's actually one of the most fascinating questions in the history of Western civilization. The preservation and transmission of this text through empires and persecutions and debates is remarkable regardless of where you end up theologically. Lean INTO the history. Don't be scared of it.

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• M

  Maya1mo ago

  ok I'm gonna be that person — can we acknowledge that for 99% of Christians throughout history this was not a live question they were losing sleep over. Peasants in medieval Europe, slaves in early America, grandmothers in rural Korea — they encountered the text and God met them there. The Western intellectual obsession with resolving every epistemic question before permitting faith is its own kind of arrogance.

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• J

  Jordan1mo ago

  To the person above — Nicaea didn't actually settle the canon, that's a common misconception. Nicaea was primarily about Christology (the Arian controversy). People keep conflating it with later councils because Dan Brown happened.

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• Q_

  Quinn _x1mo ago

  The Ethiopian Orthodox canon includes 1 Enoch and has for over 1,500 years. The Coptic church has a different canon too. Western Protestants act like their 66-book canon is the obvious universal Christian answer when it's actually one tradition among several. A little humility about the historical particularity of your specific tradition wouldn't kill you.

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  Elena1mo ago

  I've been a pastor for 22 years. I've had this conversation hundreds of times. Here's where I land: the criteria used — apostolic authorship or connection, widespread and consistent use across geographically separated churches, doctrinal coherence with what was already accepted — those aren't arbitrary. They're actually pretty rigorous for the ancient world. The process was messy, yes, but 'messy process' doesn't equal 'wrong outcome.'

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• J9

  Jordan 921mo ago

  If you disagree with the canon that's been settled by essentially all major branches of Christianity for over a millennium, I want you to tell me specifically which book you'd add and make the actual case for it. Because it's very easy to cast doubt on the process in the abstract. It's much harder to argue that the Shepherd of Hermas or the Gospel of Philip actually belongs in there alongside Romans. Put your specific claim on the table or the critique is just vibes.

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• Q

  Quinn1mo ago

  I want to push back on the framing of this whole debate. Even if you grant that fallible humans made the call — so what? God has always worked through fallible humans. Moses was a murderer. Paul was a persecutor. The fact that the process was human doesn't automatically disqualify the result from being Spirit-led. Why do we assume 'human involvement' equals 'compromised outcome'?

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  Taylor1mo ago

  Paul quotes Greek poets in Acts 17 too. Quoting something doesn't equal canonizing it. I quote C.S. Lewis sometimes. That doesn't make Mere Christianity the 29th book of the New Testament.

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• M

  Maya1mo ago

  That argument works only if you've already decided God exists and wanted to communicate and was capable of ensuring it. The canon question is exactly what a skeptic uses to question whether you've established any of that yet. You can't use the trustworthiness of Scripture to prove the reliability of the process that gave you Scripture. That's not faith — that's a logical fallacy.

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• K2

  Kofi 211mo ago

  The self-attesting authority of Scripture is the answer. The canon didn't derive its authority from the councils — the councils recognized authority that was already there. Big difference. The church didn't create the canon, the canon created the church.

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• N

  Noah1mo ago

  Studied church history in seminary. One thing people get almost universally wrong is the timeline. By the time of Athanasius's famous 367 AD Easter letter listing the 27 NT books, there was already massive consensus across the church. The councils (Hippo, Carthage) weren't inventing the canon — they were closing a debate that was already 95% settled by usage. The fringe books were fringe because the churches themselves had already been ignoring them for generations.

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• R

  Ravi1mo ago

  'The reception of the whole people of God' — that's a beautiful phrase but historically there was significant dispute at the margins for centuries. Revelation was rejected by major figures in the Eastern church for hundreds of years. Hebrews was doubted in the West. The Shepherd of Hermas was treated as canonical in parts of the church until the 4th century. The 'reception by the whole church' is more complicated than this framing suggests.

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  Reese1mo ago

  Ok can we talk about 1 Enoch for a second because Jude QUOTES IT as Scripture. Like Jude chapter 1 verses 14-15 is a direct quote from 1 Enoch 1:9. If Jude treated Enoch as authoritative enough to quote it, why isn't 1 Enoch in your Bible? Somebody explain that to me.

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  Nina1mo ago

  That's not a completely parallel argument though. Paul is making a rhetorical point to pagans by using their own literature. Jude is writing to believers and treats the Enoch text as prophetic revelation — 'Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied about these people.' That's a different register than quoting Aratus for illustration.

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  Noah1mo ago

  lol 'because Dan Brown happened' is doing work as a sentence

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  Jamie1mo ago

  The 40,000 denominations stat is wildly inflated and is almost always used carelessly. And the Catholic response has its own circularity problem — the Church authenticates Scripture AND Scripture authenticates the Church's authority? You can't use one to establish the other without a logical circle of your own.

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  Drew1mo ago

  ok but 'the council just recognized what was already authoritative' is doing an enormous amount of work there. recognized HOW exactly. by what standard. you keep pushing the question back a step without actually answering it

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  Nina1mo ago

  Because when the result conveniently supports the institution that made the decision, you should at least raise an eyebrow. The bishops who decided what counted as Scripture were also the ones whose authority rested on certain texts being authoritative and others not. That's a massive conflict of interest and acting like it isn't is just naive.

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  Noah1mo ago

  I'm Orthodox and our tradition would say the canon is authoritative precisely because it expresses the mind of the Church — the living Body of Christ across time. It's not the council that makes it authoritative; it's the reception of the whole people of God across centuries. We call this sobornost — conciliarity. The text and the community are inseparable and have never been meant to be separated.

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  Noah1mo ago

  This is why I'm Catholic. The Church came before the Bible. The Church identified Scripture. The Church interprets Scripture. The idea that you can just have the Bible floating in space without a teaching authority to ground it is what gives you 40,000 Protestant denominations all reading the same text and reaching different conclusions. If Sola Scriptura worked, it wouldn't have produced such chaos.

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• Y

  Yuki1mo ago

  the Didache is genuinely fascinating and I wish more churches actually read it but that's different from it being canonical Scripture. 'This is valuable ancient Christian writing' and 'this is the Word of God' are two different categories and we've blurred them.

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  Sam1mo ago

  If you actually believe God wanted humanity to have His Word and was capable of ensuring that happened — then the process by which it happened doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to have been guided. Demanding a pristine, controversy-free transmission process before you'll trust the result is holding God to a human bureaucratic standard that Scripture itself never promises.

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• R_

  Riley _x1mo ago

  The letter from grandma point is beautiful but it doesn't actually answer the question. A letter from someone who loves you is only as trustworthy as the person who delivered it and confirmed it came from who they said it came from. If the postal worker could have swapped the letter, you'd want to know.

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  Taylor1mo ago

  I actually READ the Gospel of Thomas. Significant portions of it. Some of it genuinely sounds like Jesus. Some of it sounds like someone who read the synoptics and was improvising. The ending especially is deeply weird. Whatever it is, it's not the same voice as Matthew or John. I'm not saying that's scientific proof of anything. But there's a qualitative difference that isn't nothing.

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  Theo1mo ago

  Respectfully, that's a testimony not an argument. And testimonies don't establish truth claims. Mormons have powerful testimonies too. So do Muslims. The question is whether there's anything beyond personal experience to anchor this.

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• JK

  Jordan K.1mo ago

  The 'qualitative difference' argument is completely circular. You've been trained your whole life on what the canonical gospels sound like, so anything that departs from them sounds off. That's not a theological test. That's pattern matching to your own prior exposure.

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  Theo R.1mo ago

  Honestly the Didache deserves to be in there more than Philemon. Fight me.

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  Hana1mo ago

  Nope. Hard disagree. The Spirit's guidance isn't circular. It's how God works through history. Full stop.

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