The word canon is an unusual one; it is certainly not one that we use in daily speech. Canon is the English rendering of the Greek word, κανών (kanon), meaning a rod and hence a standard — imagine a measuring stick. From this sense, it has grown to mean a series or list. From an early date in the Christian era, it has been applied to the books that make up the Bible. When we talk about the canon of Scripture, we are simply referring to the list of books that make up the Holy Scriptures. As to how that list was arrived at, and the integrity of those books, as we now have them, is our present subject.
The Bible is not one large book, but rather, it consists of sixty six books which form the collection that we know. Naturally, we accept that God is the author of all and that they form a harmonious volume. This, however, doesn’t detract from the individuality of the books and their writers. The Bible is divided into two parts: the first being the Old Testament and the second, the New Testament. The Old Testament contains thirty nine books and the New Testament the remaining twenty seven.
These titles, the Old and New Testament, are found in the King James translation of the Bible in various verses (2 Cor. 3:14; Heb. 9:15) and are not entirely without warrant. Nevertheless, we must correctly understand what is meant by the word testament. In English, testament is commonly used in reference to a person’s will — their last will and testament. With the lone exception of Hebrews 9:16-1716For where a testament is, there must also of necessity be the death of the testator. 17For a testament is of force after men are dead: otherwise it is of no strength at all while the testator liveth. (Hebrews 9:16‑17), the word translated testament in the Bible is not used in this sense; rather, it refers to a disposition or agreement. It is especially a disposition between God and man, and, as such, it would be better translated as covenant. A covenant lays out the conditions established by God under which man on earth is to live with Him.3 We will address in more detail the Old and New Covenants, and the Christian’s relationship to them, later in this book. But as for the familiar titles, the Old and New Testament, though imperfect, we will stick with them.
The point at which the Scriptures are divided is not an arbitrary one. The birth of Christ marks the beginning of the New Testament. It is also the point at which the original language of the text changes from Hebrew to Greek. By and large, the Old Testament was written in Hebrew whereas the entirety of the New Testament was written in Greek.
The individual books that make up the Old and New Testaments were written over an extended period of time (more than sixteen hundred years — from about 1450 B.C. to 90 A.D.) and by more than thirty different authors. Some of these men were educated, others were shepherds, farmers, and fishermen. We also find, on the one hand, religious scribes and priests, but on the other, secular kings and civil-servants. Despite the diversity of authorship, and the disparity of time periods, the Bible is far from a heterogeneous collection of conflicting accounts and theology. Although men love to find fault with the Bible there is a simple, coherent understanding of the whole which is entirely harmonious. One doesn’t have to strain at gnats or swallow camels to see the homogeneity of the Scriptures.
Scrolls and Codices
Bound books as we know them did not exist prior to 100 A.D. The technical name for a bound book is codex — the plural being codices. Prior to codices, manuscripts were formed into scrolls. The codex was developed by the Romans around 100 A.D., though the transition away from scrolls (as with the adaption of any new technology) took time. When ancient manuscripts were discovered near Qumran in 1946, scrolls, and not codices, were found. These particular manuscripts, known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, are thought to date from around 250 B.C. to 68 A.D.
Scrolls have distinct disadvantages compared to codices — they aren’t compact, only one side of the parchment can be used, they aren’t especially sturdy, and they are hard to access. A scroll must be read from beginning to end; to locate something in the middle of a text requires advancing the scroll from one roll to the other, a slow and tedious process. A codex, on the other hand, may be opened to a random page at will. Given this, scrolls typically contained just one or two books; any more than this made them just too cumbersome to use. In contrast, a Codex can hold all the books of the Old Testament; or for that matter the books of the Old and the New — the Bible as we know it!
Prior to the use of the codex, the Holy Scriptures consisted of a collection of scrolls. When the Lord read from Isaiah in the Synagogue, He was handed a scroll from such a collection: “There was delivered unto Him the book of the prophet Esaias” (Luke 4:17). Archeological sites, such as those near Qumran, revealed numerous Biblical scrolls intermingled with other texts. The archeological evidence, therefore, leaves room for questions regarding the books which make up the Scriptures. I do not write this to raise doubts in the mind of the reader, but so that we might be fully aware of a situation of which much is made.
As a side note, prior to the codex there was no universal order to the books that make up the Old Testament. That doesn’t mean that there weren’t recognized groups of books. Josephus makes reference to a particular arrangement4 which we will examine shortly. It is similar to one mentioned by our Lord Himself: “all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the Law of Moses, and in the Prophets, and in the Psalms, concerning Me” (Luke 24:44). When codices did appear, the books of the Old Testament were sometimes arranged in differing orders. The Septuagint introduced the Old Testament ordering that we are familiar with in our Bibles; it differs, however, from the arrangement used in the Hebrew Bible of the Masoretes. Whereas the set of books that make up the canon is critical, their ordering is not.