Memorize the Bible

For those interested in my detailed views on the canonization question about which books should be recognized as Scriptural, I am only going to give a short answer in this post without giving detailed book-by-book arguments.

Before giving even a short answer, let me note as I did in yesterday’s post about inspiration that for purposes of this website, my answer does not particularly matter. If you believe that additional books beyond the 66 books of the “Protestant Canon” are part of God’s inspired word, you may do so even though we disagree, and you can do whatever you want to help gain a good working knowledge of them on your own.

This website is focused on the 66 books of the “Protestant Canon”.

As for my short answer, I begin by directing the interested reader to the Wikipedia article entitled “Biblical canon” if they want a reasonably good layman’s introduction to the topic, and of course you can click the links to get more detail.

Regarding the books that Christians generally call the “Old Testament”, and that Jews call the “Tanakh” — though the books are arranged differently — my shortest answer is to note that Jesus referred to this collection when he spoke of “the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms” in Luke 24:44.

A full answer about the New Testament is necessarily more complicated and requires more of a book-by-book consideration — something I will not do here though I might write about it months or years from now.

For a short answer, I note two interesting references in the New Testament that seem to suggest that at least some of the various New Testament books were recognized as “scriptures” almost immediately.

In 2 Peter 3:16, the Apostle Peter is talking about some of the Apostle Paul’s letters (or epistles) and says that some people are distorting them just as they do with “the rest of the Scriptures”.

And in 1 Timothy 5:18, the Apostle Paul has a quote from “the Scriptures” about a laborer being worthy of his wages, and though it’s not absolutely certain, he seems to be quoting directly from Luke 10:7 and/or Matthew 10:10.

Finally — and I don’t have time to give my detailed arguments here — the Apostle Paul in 2 Timothy 4:13 asked Timothy to get “the books, especially the parchments.” I believe that he was referring to his inspired epistles, especially the original copies, because he knew as he drew near to death it would be good for authentic original copies to be collected because they were part of this new collection of Scriptures that we today call the New Testament.

So the bottom line for purposes of this website is that I believe in the 66 books of what is generally called the “Protestant Canon” though users of this website may have other books in mind, whether those are the books of “The Apocrypha” or the additional Scriptures as believed by various Mormon groups or whatever other books. My disagreements with those canons — which are deeply felt but which I won’t argue about here — actually don’t matter here for those who want to use the tools associated with this new website to improve their working knowledge of the Old and New Testament books.