Bible, Canon of the

The word "canon" derives from the Hebrew term qaneh and the Greek term kanon, both of which refer to a measuring rod. It designates the exclusive collection of documents in the Judeo-Christian tradition that have come to be regarded as Scripture. The Jewish canon was written in both Hebrew and Aramaic, while the Christian canon was written in Greek.

Theology and Criteria of Canonicity The historic Christian belief is that the Holy Spirit who inspired the writing of the books also controlled their selection and that this is something to be discerned by spiritual insight rather than by historical research. It is felt that statements in the writings themselves (such as 1 Cor 2:13 ; 14:37 ; Gal 1:8-9 ; 1 Thess 2:13 ) would cause local churches to preserve them and eventually collect them in a general canon.

A number of criteria were involved in the church's choice of the books it acknowledged as genuine and used in worship services. Irenaeus and other authors of the first three centuries, who wrote against heretical movements and their literature, reveal some of the criteria that the early church used in evaluating its literature.

• The basic criterion of acceptance was apostolicity: Was a document written by an apostle? Books known to have been written by apostles were eagerly embraced and churches that knew the legacy of books written by men who were not apostles, such as Mark and Luke, accepted them as well. But other churches, which were not familiar with this legacy, were hesitant to receive such books, especially those that did not contain the name of an author, such as the Gospels, Acts, and Hebrews.
• A second and related question, then, was asked. If a book was not written by an apostle, is its content apostolic? This was an early problem with Revelation, because its theological content was difficult to discern. Tertullian valued Hebrews highly, but thought it was written by Barnabas.
• A third criterion was the claim to inspiration. Does the author claim inspiration? Some did not.
• A fourth question was: Is it accepted by loyal churches? This was a very important consideration. What was the attitude of the church in the city to which it was originally written?
• People of every generation have inherently asked about each book of the Bible: Does it have the "ring of genuineness"? The testimony of the Spirit was important. In the Old Testament canon there were questions about Esther for a period of time because it does not contain the name of God. Many questioned Revelation in those early years because it did not have this "ring of genuineness."

The Old Testament Canon Although Christians include both Old and New Testaments in their canon, Jews do not accept a "New" Testament and repudiate the identification of their canon as the "Old" Testament. The proper designation for the Jewish Bible is Tanak, an acronym constituted from the initial letters of the three divisions of that canonLaw (Torah), Prophets (Naviim), and Writings (Kethubim).

The terms "obsolete" and "aging" are used in Hebrews 8:13 with reference to the Jewish covenant. However, early church writers before the latter part of the second century do not use the terms "old" and "new" to designate two different covenants. They considered the second covenant to be a continuation of the first. It was new in the sense of fresh, not in the sense of different. Even in the third century, authors such as Clement of Alexandria and Origen used the expression "new covenant" to refer to the covenant rather than to the documents containing it.

There are also important differences in the content and order of the early canons. Extant Greek Old Testament manuscripts, whose text is quoted often in the New Testament, contain apocryphal books. But the Hebrew Old Testament canon recognized by Palestinian Jews (Tanak) did not include the fourteen books of the Apocrypha. Since the Hebrew Bible was preferred by the Reformers during the Protestant Reformation in their struggle against the Catholic Church, whose Bible contained the Apocrypha, translators of Protestant Bibles excluded the Apocrypha. Thus Protestant and evangelical Bibles duplicate the content of the Hebrew Bible (the current thirty-nine books).

However, the arrangement of books is that of the Latin Vulgate, from which the earliest English translations were made, including the first English translation by John Wycliffe. Even though the New Testament was written in Greek, Protestant and evangelical Bibles do not embrace either the content or the arrangement of the Greek Old Testament. Greek Old Testament manuscripts typically preserve the Alexandrian order, which arranged books according to their subject matter (narrative, history, poetry, and prophecy). Apocryphal books were appropriately interspersed into these categories. The arrangement of the books in the Hebrew Bible is different from both the Greek and the Latin.