Let's start with a quiz.

Who was the first person to list the 27 books of the New Testament in the biblical canon?

Was it A. Augustine of Hippo.

B. Constantine the Great.

C. Athanasius of Alexandria or D. Ireneus of Leoneus.

The answer is C. Athanasius of Alexandria in the year 367 AD, although some

might argue that origin replicated this list a century earlier. I think there could be something to that.

But if we assume Athanasius' list, the question is, were Christians prior to the

fourth century completely lost when it came to which books made up the New Testament? How did we

get our Bibles today?

So we're really talking about the question of the canon of scripture.

And when we say canon, we're not thinking about the thing that goes boom.

That's spelled with two ends.

But the word canon means law or rule by which something is judged.

It's used in reference to a collection of sacred books, accepted as genuine, and in the case of Holy Scripture, truly inspired by God.

So the books that are truly inspired. The canon of Scripture, those 66 books, which Christians

take to be God's word, didn't just fall out of the sky. And so how did we get them? Well,

there's basically two main theories out there. The first is that the canon was determined by man,

whether by a group of people like the church or individuals like Constantine.

The second is that the canon was decided based on certain criteria within the text itself.

And so let's take a few moments to unpack these.

First, this idea that the canon was created by people. Some more secular

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