Who decided what was included in our modern Bibles?

Those 66 documents, 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament,

are known as the canon of scripture.

By the time of Jesus there was strong agreement among God's people

about which Old Testament documents should be recognized

as God's word and it's a list that matches the Old Testament that we have in

our Bibles. How do we know that the Old Testament in our Bibles is the same as the one Jesus

refers to? Well God commanded that his words be publicly preserved

in the Tabernacle and later in the temple so that there would be no doubt about what

God's words actually were.

The Jewish historian Giusefus tells us that the documents preserved in the temple which make up the contents

of the Protestant Old Testament were indeed the books that were recognized by the Jewish people as God's

word with divine authority.

So for these and many other reasons, we can be confident that our Old Testament lines up with the scripture Jesus recognized as authoritative.

Some traditions, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox for example, include additional books in their Old Testament.

But Jesus and the other Jews never accepted them as divinely inspired and part of the canon.

They themselves put those apocryphal books in a different category from the recognized Hebrew

scriptures. Now, who decided which books were included in the New Testament. I think sometimes people imagine that the contents of the New Testament were decided by a rabble of power-hungry factions with murky motives, each of which had a vested interest in certain books

being included or omitted.

But in reality, our Bibles are comprised of books that the early church acknowledged as already bearing God's fingerprints.

The early church didn't willfully declare certain books to be from God, they just recognized what was already apparent.

What signs identified to the early church that a book belonged in the New Testament?

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