Introduction to Bible Canon
The two questions behind this website are "What books comprise the Bible?" and "How do we interpret them?" The interpretation question assumes we can answer the canon question so we'll use the rest of this Home page to survey the issues around knowing what books comprise the Bible.
If you've hung around church for long or grew up attending Sunday school or attended a religious school than undoubtedly you've heard the Bible stories about Adam and Eve, Noah's Flood, the Tower of Babel, David and Goliath, Daniel and the Lion's Den, stories about Jesus and stories about Paul and his missionary journeys. You may have learned these stories online or seen them on TV or watched movies that spoof these and other well known Bible stories like the movie Bruce Almighty.
I learned these stories in Sunday school, relearned them later in youth group and eventually covered them again in depth in Bible College. Being raised Protestant and attending a Protestant Bible college meant the Bible I learned was a Protestant Bible. I was never exposed to the fact that other Christian traditions have other Bibles until I took a class in college with required reading in the Deuterocanonical Books (sometimes called the Apocrypha). The Deuterocanonical books form a "second canon" in the Catholic Bible and are considered equal in status with the other writings in the Bible.
Being confronted for the first time with the realization that there are different Bibles in different Christian traditions troubled me. I was familiar enough with scripture to know the Bible makes certain claims about itself, such as being inspired by the Holy Spirit.
49 Second Timothy 3:16-17
16All scripture, written by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, and for instruction in righteousness;
17So that God's people may become complete, thoroughly perfected for every good work.
63 Second Peter 1:19-21
19We also have a true word of prophecy; you do well when you look to it for guidance, as you look to the lamp that shines in a dark place until the dawn of day, when the sun will shine in your hearts,
20Knowing this first, that not every prophetic writing is made clear in its own book.
21For the prophecy did not come by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke when they were inspired by the Holy Spirit.
The question that arose in my mind was how could I be sure the 66 book Protestant Bible I learned as a child and studied in college was the real Bible. What if the Catholic Bible was the real Bible. The Catholic Bible has the same books as the Protestant Bible plus 6 others. My desire was, "If the Holy Spirit inspired 72 writings, not just 66, I want to be familiar with all 72."
Unfortunately the class that introduced me to the difference between the Protestant and Catholic Bibles did not resolve the question of which if either is the correct canon. With no strong evidence presented for one or the other I turned to prayer to ask Jesus whether I should treat the Deuterocanonical books as inspired by the Holy Spirit. The answer I received was "No." The answered settled how I would study, but it wasn't proof for the Protestant Bible nor something I could defend in public.
Several years passed without any obvious way to prove what I had heard in prayer. Over time I learned about other "Bibles" from other Christian traditions, including the Greek and Russian Orthodox Bibles and the Assyrian Church of the East Bible.
Whenever I read books on the subject of canon they all seemed to say the same things, but none of them seemed to solve the problem in a definitive and defendable way. I'm oversimplifying some, but these books would give reasons like, "because the Church says so" which is the logical fallacy of appealing to authority, or "because it's been this way a long time", which is the logical fallacy of appealing to tradition.
Finally, A Proof of Canon
About three years after graduating from Bible College I was studying the book of Isaiah and realized that each book in the Protestant Bible uniquely matches a chapter in the book of Isaiah. This discovery lead to reordering the books of the Bible based upon Isaiah. In the process of this work on book order I realized that if Isaiah defines the order of the books it simultaneously defines WHAT BOOKS belong in the canon in the first place. For the first time in my life I had a compelling strategy for settling what books really comprise the Bible.
Several years have passed since the original book order discovery and I'm still convinced the work in Isaiah and resulting studies that prove the book order simultaneously prove the canon. There could be other proofs, but I've never seen a strategy as efficient and robust as using a book accepted by all Christian and Jewish traditions to show which set of writings comprise the Bible.
Rather than reproduce the Isaiah study on this website you can read that study at www.biblebookorder.org. There's one page for each of the 66 chapter/book matches in the study. To the extent you agree with the matches you can be confident the 66 books in the study comprise the real Bible, though in a different book order then we learned in Sunday school.
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