Who Decided What Would Be in the Bible & When? – Canonicity
It’s a question you hear often. And it’s one that I wrestled with for a time. “Who decided what books would be in the Bible and what would not? How did they decide? When?”
I surrendered to Christ later in life. It was a radical shift in everything I had ever studied and believed up through my university years. Up until that time, I never gave the Bible a serious thought. But God changed that. One big question I had pertained to the biblical canon. Why these 66 books? What about “all the other books”? The Apocrypha? Pseudepigrapha? The Gospels of Thomas, Peter, and Judas? Why didn’t they make it in? Says who? People told me things like, “Yeah, a bunch of guys in the fourth century got together and decided what to include and exclude from the Bible. You can’t really trust it.” I didn’t know what to think.