This Thanksgiving season I want to give you one, solid piece of scholarly evidence that we can indeed trust our Bible’s in an age of doubt and cynicism. The Muratorian Canon is the earliest official list of books in the New Testament preserved in totality to date. It’s one of the most important artifacts of biblical scholarship and history we have today. It’s date is very old – 175ad to be exact. Twenty two of the twenty seven books of the New Testament are listed in it. Only Hebrews, James, 1-2 Peter and 3 John are omitted. Cynics say, “see, at least some of the bible is not trustworthy, five books were not in that list.” Why were these books omitted if we have them in our Bible now?

Hebrews – there was uncertainty about authorship. To this day, we do not know for sure who wrote it, but the book was later considered authoritative, and contained helpful, correct doctrine and thus included in the Bible.

James – there was uncertainty about apostolic authority. Though James became bishop of Jerusalem, and was the half-brother of Jesus, there was debate as to his status as an actual Apostle. Later, we have recognized that James was considered an Apostle by most of the early church and therefore, the book was included in the Bible.

1 Peter – the part of the list that contained 1 Peter was torn. However, 1 Peter was highly likely to be considered canonical early on along with Paul’s epistles.

2 Peter- There were stylistic differences between it and 1 Peter. We recognize this difference still today. However, greater research has shown that there is viable evidence to accept 2 Peter as written by Peter (or he orally gave it to his amanuensis to record) and thus it was worthy to be in the Canon.

3 John – Only two letters of John known at the time. At the time, there was only two letters of John that were known about in writing and in oral circulation. Later discoveries found a 3rd letter. Thus, it was included in the canon because the Apostle John wrote it.

By the standards of archeology, it is amazing to have 82+% of the books in the current New Testament agreed upon by the end of the second century AD. As one can see above, under careful examination and research, these five books were included since the time of the Muratorian Canon. The full New Testament we have today was universally canonized in 393ad. It is also worthy to note that a few books that were listed in the Muratorian Canon (ex. Apocalypse of Peter), were later rejected by this same careful examination and research. Thus, the current list of books included in the New Testament has remained the same ever since! This is just one reason we can have confidence that the Bible is trustworthy. May this little blog give you another reason to be thankful to our amazing Bible-forming, and Bible-preserving God this thanksgiving season. Amen.