THE CANONIZATION
OF THE BIBLE
How the Hebrew Bible Was Preserved
Ancient Hebrews weren’t messing around when it came to preserving God’s word. When something mattered, they wrote it down. And then hid it somewhere safe.
After a few centuries of documenting the works of God, Jews began to refer to their books as the Tanakh.
It's the same content as the Christian Old Testament
—just in a different order.
But Who Picked the Books?
Here’s the twist: no single person did. They were recognized and verbally transmitted over time by generations of believers as God's Words because they consistently proved themselves to be trustworthy, powerful, and holy. And the canonization stayed consistent across centuries.
Wild fact: the Dead Sea Scrolls are 1,000 years older than the Masoretic Text,
the standardized Hebrew Bible Jews and Christians use today. When scholars compared the scrolls to the much-later Masoretic version, they found an astonishing level of accuracy. That means scribes preserved the text for over a millennium.
How the Early Church Curated the
New Testament
As the early Church began to grow, so did its collection of writings. Letters from leaders like Paul were carefully delivered by trusted friends, read aloud in churches, and intentionally copied and shared across communities.
But as the Gospel spread, so did fake news. False Gnostic texts started to run rampant.
To get a feel for what was happening, let’s step into some biblical role-play.
Imagine I'm the Apostle Peter, preaching in Rome:
“I am a witness to the risen Messiah! Write this down and teach it:
Therefore, my brothers and sisters, make every effort to confirm your calling and election. For if you do these things, you will never stumble, and you will receive a rich welcome into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”
The Roman church copies this, sends it on to other churches, and soon thousands are teaching Peter’s words.
But then… a new fringe “teacher” shows up with a very different gospel:
Simon Peter said to them "Let Mary go out from our midst, for women are not worthy of life!" Jesus said: "See, I will draw her so as to make her male so that she also may become a living spirit like you males. For every woman who has become male will enter the Kingdom of heaven."
(Yes—this is an actual quote from the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. Yikes!)
Now imagine you’re a church leader. You’ve been teaching that Peter welcomed both brothers and sisters into the kingdom. And suddenly people are passing around documents that claim Peter wanted to exclude women—unless they somehow became men?
You’d be asking:
“Wait…who wrote this? Where did it come from?
Why does it contradict everything we’ve already been teaching?”
Exactly. And that’s what the early Church had to deal with.
As these fringe texts started circulating, the Church had to separate the credible from the crazy.
Enter: The Canonization.
Contrary to the common skeptical take, the New Testament wasn’t formed by a bunch of power hungry bishops randomly picking their favorite books 300 years later. Canonization was more like an official stamp of recognition on the writings that had already been widely accepted, copied, and taught for generations. It wasn’t inventing Scripture—it was fact-checking heresy.
Counter argument: Some Roman Catholic apologists argue that because the New Testament wasn’t officially canonized for 300 years, the early Church couldn’t have practiced sola scriptura (Scripture alone). The early Church had to rely on tradition as they did not have scripture yet. Not quite..
As shown above, the Old Testament was already canonized
before Jesus was born.
And the New Testament spread like wildfire after the Apostles missionary journeys. We now have over 5,500 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament.
No other ancient text comes close.
Not Homer. Not Plato. Not Caesar.
The sheer volume and consistency of the manuscript record shows that the early Church wasn’t waiting around for an official Bible. They were already reading, teaching, and passing down the same exact texts we have today.
So no, the early Church wasn’t flying relying on tradition alone for 300 years. They were teaching from Scripture. Word for word. Line by line.
As such, formal canonization wasn’t the beginning of the New Testament. It was the Church saying, “Yes—these are the texts we’ve trusted all along.”