Here is a note I posted on facebook at the end of the school year. It received little attention except by my Catholic friends. I have learned a bit more since writing this, but it is still worth posting:
Dearest Brothers and Sisters in Christ:
Finals week is a crazy time, I know, but maybe some of you are done with finals and have time for reading Facebook notes and enjoying other relaxing pastimes. I doubt, however that this will be a very relaxing note to many of you. I don’t know, maybe if I smoooothe my text a tad, taking triple alliteration tactics to the max… ahem. Never mind that. As I was going to say, I want to get some stuff out there that may be a little controversial. Mainly, I want to know what you think about some things I have been thinking about.
In my journey of searching for the truth on issues concerning Catholicism, I have learned a lot about the differences that we have (that is, my particular Non-denominational Bible-Christian upbringing vs. Theirs). I know that many of you who are not Catholic will have objections so strong to the Catholic faith that no discussion will turn you from what you believe. That is fine–that is not my intention. I, however, have come to question certain things that I have always believed. Now don’t be too alarmed, I still believe “there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved” –Jesus. But as I have tried to discuss these issues with my closest family and friends, I almost always get angry responses if any at all. I am writing in hopes that you will take my questions to heart and I will be glad to hear what you all have to say.
Here it goes:
How do we know which books are in the Bible? I never did question this as a child: I took it by faith. I trusted that, because my parents taught me that the bound volume we called the Bible was indeed the Word of God, it must have been. As I grew up, my faith in that truth was only strengthened by the contents of the book itself. The truth contained in it helped me to understand my purpose in life. The stories in it let me know I wasn’t alone. The challenges in it showed me my shortcomings and pressed me to be who God wanted me to be. That is why I believed the Bible was God’s word, and these reasons will always be evidence to the authenticity of scripture.
For this reason I had no real reason to question anything about the Bible–until I discovered that the Catholics, about whom I was taught nearly nothing, had “extra books” in their Bible. I naturally wanted to find out why their Bible was different. And as I discovered many things about the story of the Bible’s making, (all of which I will not cover here) it was not just the historical evidence, but the questions themselves which bore evidence that there was something about my belief in “scripture alone” which was lacking. If I believed there was no authority over Christians except scripture, how did I really know that all of the books of my Bible were really inspired by God, since the Bible did not list which books were to be included in the cannon (“rule” or “standard”) of scripture? And if the Bible itself were to have named the books to be included in its cannon, what witness would that be? For Jesus said: “If I alone testify about Myself, My testimony is not true.” John 5:31 As it is, the Bible itself does not bear witness to Sola Scriptura in that it does not even list which books are to be considered scripture; nor does the Bible claim to be the sole authority of Christians. Therefore it must be necessary that something outside of the Bible had authority to define what the Bible was. But what had such an authority and where did it’s authority come from?
Now since I changed my major to History, (bye bye engineering) I happened to acquire a very non-catholic history book that tells a little bit about the formation of the Bible. It says that although the core of Christian scriptures was decided by about the year 200 AD, all of the books of the Bible were not finally decided until more than 300 years after the death of the last apostle. That means that the Church, well after the apostolic age, still had the authority to decide which books were inspired by God. I found this significant because there were many books at the time that claimed to be inspired but were not accepted into the cannon, and there were many books such as Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and Revelation who’s inspiration was contested. Even further, it is interesting to note that at the deciding of the books of the new testament, the deuterocanonical books (the “extra” books that Catholics have in their Bible) of the old testament were included in that list of Divine Scripture. So I say that all to ask you: How do we know which books are in the Bible?
