How Did the Bible Come To Us?
How did the Bible come to us? Was it passed down through legends and folklore? Has it been copied and recopied so much that the original message is lost?
“All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for refutation, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the one who belongs to God may be competent, equipped for every good work”—2 Timothy 3:16,17 NAB
God wants us to feel confident that the Scriptures are as valid and trustworthy today as they were when they were first written (2 Peter 1:21). He also gives some information on the process he used to get His Word written down in a permanent form.
Where did the accepted New Testament books come from? The process of determining which texts would comprise the Biblical canon (the standard of authoritative and normative teaching for the church) is asserted to have taken place over several centuries. Beginning in the first century CE., Christian communities recognized the authority of texts that they gathered into collections for circulation and use in public worship. Second Peter already suggests a familiarity with the letters of Paul, and goes so far as to place them on par with the Hebrew Scriptures (3:16). Evidence reveals that during public worship Christians in the earliest centuries read from the texts that would become the New Testament, just as they did from the Hebrew Scriptures (