I’ve begun reading The Canon of Scripture by F. F. Bruce. The logical place for a book with that title to start is with a definition* of the word canon, and so it does. First, it’s not a really big gun. That would be a cannon. Scripture is, of course, a really big gun—the big gun—of religion and theology; but that’s besides the point.

   The word ‘canon’ has come into our language (through Latin) from the Greek word kanōn. In Greek it meant a rod, especially a straight rod used as a rule; from this usage comes the other meaning which the word commonly bears in English—‘rule’ or ‘standard’. We speak, for example, of the ‘canons’ or rules of the Church of England. But a straight rod used as a rule might be marked in units of length (like a modern ruler marked in inches or centimeters); from this practice the Greek word kanōn came to be used of the series of such marks, and hence to be used in the general sense of ‘series’ or ‘list’. it is this last usage that underlines the term ‘the canon of scripture’.
   Before the word ‘canon’ came to be used in the sense of ‘list’, it was used in another sense by the church—in the phrase ‘the rule of faith’ or ‘the rule of truth’. In the earlier Christian centuries this was a summary of Christian teaching, believed to reproduce what the apostles themselves taught, by which any system of doctrine offered for Christian acceptance, or any interpretation of biblical writings, was to be assessed. But when once the limits of holy scripture came to be generally agreed upon, holy scripture itself came to be regarded as the rule of faith. For example, Thomas Aquinas (c 1225–1274), says that ‘canonical scripture alone is the rule of faith’. From another theological perspective the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), after listing the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments, adds: ‘All which are given by inspiration of God, to be the rule of faith and life.’ These words affirm the status of holy scripture as the ‘canon’ or ‘standard’ by which Christian teaching and action must be regulated. While the ‘canon’ of scripture means the list of books accepted as holy scripture, the other sense of ‘canon’—rule or standard—has rubbed off on this one, so that the ‘canon’ of scripture is understood to be the listof books which are acknowledged to be, in a unique sense, the rule of belief and practice.

—F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (InterVarsity Press, 1988), 17–18.

That is what the canon is. If Scripture is to be our “rule of faith and life,” it behooves us to know how it is that we came to recognize our Bible, in its present form, as the Word of God. And that is what this book is about.

F. F. Bruce titles a chapter in in his book, The Canon of Scripture, “The Old Testament becomes a New Book.” By this he means that with the coming of Christ it became a Christian book. Its meaning was illuminated so that it was no longer understood as merely a Jewish book, but as a book explicitly about Christ. And the Apostles plainly stated that this was so.

   According to the Acts of the Apostles, the early preaching of the gospel to Jews and God-fearing Gentiles was regularly marked by the appeal to the fulfillment of Old Testament scripture in the work of Jesus. It is to him, Peter assures Cornelius, that ‘all the prophets bear witness’ (Acts 10:43). When Philip is asked by the Ethiopian on his homeward journey from Jerusalem to whom the prophet is referring as he describes the suffering of the Isaianic Servant, Philip does not hesitate: ‘beginning with this scripture he told him the good news of Jesus’ (Acts 8:35). The impression given in Acts is confirmed by Paul: ‘the gospel of God . . . concerning his Son’, he says, was ‘promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures’ (Rom. 1:1–3), and throughout his exposition of the gospel in the letter to the Romans he shows in detail what he means by this. Thanks to the illumination thrown on them by their fulfilment in Christ, the ancient scriptures became a new and meaningful book to the early Christians. The prophets themselves, we are assured in 1 Pet 1:10–12, had to search hard to find out ‘what person or time was indicated by the Spirit of Christ within them when predicting the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glory’; they had to learn that their ministry was designed for the generation which witnessed the fulfillment of what they foretold.
   Various figures of Old Testament expectation were now identified with Christ—the prophet like Moses (Deut. 18:15–19), the son of David (2 Sam. 7:12–16), the servant of Yahweh (Is. 42:1, etc.), the righteous sufferer (Ps. 22:1, etc.), the stricken shepherd (Zech. 13:7), and others. It is not simply that a number of texts out of context are given in a Christian significance: the New Testament interpretation of a few Old Testament words or sentences actually quoted often implies the total context in which these word or sentences occur. Moreover, different New Testament writers will quote different words from the same context in a manner which suggests that the whole context had been given a Christian interpretation before those writers quoted from it. It has been pointed out, for example, that from Ps, 69:9 (‘zeal for thy house has consumed me, and the insults of those who insult thee have fallen on me’) the former part is applied to Jesus’ cleansing of the temple in John 2:17 and the later part to his patient endurance verbal abuse in Romans 15:3. While no one is likely to maintain that the one writer has influenced the other, ‘it would be too much of a coincidence if the two writers independently happened to cite the two halves of a single verse, unless they were both aware that at least this whole verse, if not any more of the Psalm, formed part of a scheme of scriptural passages generally held to be especially significant’. This implies something more substantial in the way of primitive Christian exegesis than a chain of isolated proof-texts of ‘testimonies’.

—F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (InterVarsity Press, 1988), 56–57.

It is an unfortunate fact that the church today often gives the Old Testament second-rate status. This ought not be, and, to borrow a phrase, “from the beginning, it was not so.” First century Christians lived with the expectation of the fulfillment of Old Testament prophesies. Many of those prophesies, they knew, had already been fulfilled in Christ; others were yet to come. The Old Testament, they knew, was the story of the Christ.

That the Old Testament prophecies were ‘mysteries’ whose solution awaited their fulfilment in the New Testament age was axiomatic in the early church. Occasionally the word ‘mystery’ itself is used in this sense . . . ‘To you’, says Jesus to his disciples, ‘the mystery of the kingdom of God has been given, but to outsiders all these things come as riddles, so that they see without perceiving, and hear without understanding; otherwise they would turn back and receive forgiveness’ (Mark 4:11f.).
   In the Pauline writings one aspect of the gospel—the manner and purpose of its communication to the Gentile world—is treated as a ‘mystery . . . which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to Christ’s holy apostles and prophets in the Spirit’ (Eph. 3:4f.). That the Gentiles would place their hope on the Son of David and rejoice in the God of Israel was affirmed in the Old Testament, as Paul emphasizes in a series of quotations in Romans 15:9–12, but how this prospect would be realized and what its implications would be could not be appreciated until the Gentile mission was launched in the apostolic age.
   The individual New Testament writers have their distinctive interpretive methods. Matthew records how this or that incident in the life of Jesus took place ‘in order that it might be fulfilled which was spoken through the prophet’ (Matt. 1:23, etc.). Paul sees the partial and temporary setting aside of Israel as clearly stated in the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms as he finds the ingathering of the Gentiles adumbrated there. The writer to the Hebrews sees the priestly and sacrificial order of Israel as an earthly ‘copy’ (ineffective in itself) of the heavenly reality which was perfected by the work of Christ. John the evangelist portrays Jesus as giving substance to a number of Old Testament motifs—the word, the glory, the tabernacle; the bread of life, the water of life, the light of life. In the Apocalypse may be seen what has been called ‘a rebirth of images’ from the Old Testament and other ancient lore, some of which might have been thought unadaptable to a Christian purpose, yet all pressed into service to depict the triumph of Christ. However differently the interpretative tradition is developed by those writers, the core of the tradition is common to all: Jesus is the central subject of the Old Testament revelation; it is to him that witness is borne throughout.

—F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (InterVarsity Press, 1988), 59–60.

With the incarnation of Christ, the Old Testament had become Christian book. What had previously been a mystery was now disclosed. But not everyone got it.

[T]his Christian book, as it was to the church, comprised the holy scriptures of the Jewish people. Even the Septuagint version, which the Gentile church took to its heart, was in origin a Jewish translation. When the law and the prophets were read week by week in the synagogue, whether in the Hebrew original or in the Greek translation, they were understood in a Jewish sense, according to the ‘tradition of the elders’. Jews and Christians had the same sacred book, but that did not serve as a bond of unity between them.
   As Jews heard the scriptures read, they learned that every male child had to be circumcised when he was eight days old if he was to be reckoned a member of the people of God. They learned that every seventh day was to be observed as a rest day, and that certain other days throughout the year were to be specially set aside for sacred purposes. They learned, moreover, that the flesh of certain animals was not to be eaten, because they were ‘unclean’, and that the flesh even of ‘clean’ animals might be eaten only under certain stringent conditions—for example, both their fat and their blood were forbidden for food. These restrictions were so binding that any infringement of them imperilled one’s membership in the chosen people.
   Christians—even, to an increasing degree, Christians who had been brought up to observe these regulations—soon came to adopt a relaxed attitude to them. In the new order inaugurated by Christ circumcision was irrelevant. The keeping of the sabbath and other sacred days was not obligatory but voluntary. As for food-restrictions, Jesus was recorded as having once given a ruling which meant, in effect, that all kinds of food were ‘clean’ [Mark 7:19].
   Yet the text of scripture had not changed: what had changed was the Christians’ understanding of it in the light of their Master’s teaching and achievement. It is easy to appreciate how Jews, who did not share the Christians’ estimate of the person and work of Jesus, found this playing fast and loose with the divine commandments an incomprehensible and totally deplorable proceeding.
   Christians, on the other hand, who found such luminous testimony to Christ and the gospel in the same scriptures, wondered how Jews could read them with such lack of comprehension. One explanation was that a ‘judicial blinding’ prevented Jews from seeing what was so plain to Christians. Paul uses the story of Moses’ face, which shone with reflected glory after he had been in the presence of God, so that he had to put a veil or mask on it (Exod. 34:29–35); in Paul’s application of the story, the veil is somehow transferred from Moses’ face to the minds of the synagogue congregation ‘whenever Moses is read’, so that they cannot see ‘the glory of God in the face of Christ’ (2 Cor. 3:7–4:6).

—F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (InterVarsity Press, 1988), 63–65.

Although Christians and Jews were reading essentially the same texts, the message they were reading was quite different. Jewish interpreters became deliberate in excluding interpretations, even those they had previously accepted, that were too Christian-friendly. So with the coming of their Messiah, the Jews were even farther removed from understanding their scriptures than before.

The Bible contains few words more obvious than the phrase “there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9). It always interests me to find fresh illustrations of this ancient truth. Postmodernism, for example, is rich with proofs of this truism. This week I discovered another piece of modern folly that is nothing new. It seems King James Onlyism has ancient roots, reaching back (at least) to the early first century. Many KJVOists scorn any attempt at scholarly textual criticism, claiming that the KJV is not only translated from inspired documents, but is itself an inspired translation. It is therefore unnecessary, and in fact dangerous, to go back to the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts. The early church father Jerome (347–420), in his work of translating the Old Testament, encountered the same attitude in regard to the Septuagint.

[H]e soon became convinced that the only satisfactory way to translate the Old Testament was to cut loose from the Septuagint and work from the original Hebrew—the ‘Hebrew verity’, as he called it. Accordingly, he gave himself to this task and completed the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Latin in 405. This work included a further version of the Psalter, the ‘Hebrew Psalter’, a rendering direct from the original; religious conservatism, however, preferred to go on using the more familiar wording based on the Septuagint.
   For this work Jerome needed to perfect his knowledge of Hebrew, and did not hesitate to rely on the help of Jewish teachers. . . . Jerome’s dependence on Jewish instructors increased the suspicion of some of his Christian critics who were put off in any case by such an innovation as a translation of the sacred writings from Hebrew (with its implied disparagement of the divinely-inspired Septuagint).

—F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (InterVarsity Press, 1988), 88–89.

The Acts of the Apostles is a book that doesn’t quite fit with the other New Testament books. It’s not a Gospel, nor is it a doctrinal treatise like the Epistles. It’s just a bit of history sandwiched in between. That is not to say that it’s any less important than the rest of the Bible (Pentecost, anyone?); it’s just a bit different, and, I think, is probably rather neglected at times.

In the early days of the forming of the New Testament canon, the place of Acts was undetermined. The Gospels had been collected and bound in codex (book) form early in the second century AD. The Pauline Epistles comprised a second, separate collection. The book of Acts brought the two together.

The gospel collection was authoritative because it preserved the words of Jesus, than whom the church know no higher authority. The Pauline collection was authoritative because it preserved the teaching of one whose authority as the apostle of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles was acknowledged (except by those who refused to recognize his commission) as second only to the Lord’s. The bringing together of these two collections into something approximating the New Testament as we know it was facilitated by another document which linked the one to the other. This document was the Acts of the Apostles, which had been severed from its natural companion, the Gospel of Luke, when that gospel was incorporated in the fourfold collection. Acts had thereafter to play a part of its own, and an important part it proved to be. ‘A canon which comprised only the four Gospels and Pauline Epistles’, said Harnack, ‘would have at best an edifice of two wings without the central structure, and therefore incomplete and uninhabitable’ [A. Harnack, History of Dogma, E. T., II (London, 1896), p. 48, n.2.].

—F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (InterVarsity Press, 1988), 132–133.

The first known listing of the twenty-seven books we now recognize as the New Testament is found in the thirty-ninth festal letter (announcing the date of Easter in AD 367) of Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria.

Again, we must not hesitate to name the books of the New Testament. They are as follows:

   Four gospels—according to Matthew, according to Mark, according to Luke, according to John.
   Then after these the acts of the Apostles and the seven so-called catholic epistles of the apostles, as follows: one of James, two of Peter, three of John and, after these one of Jude.
   Next to these are fourteen epistles of the apostle Paul, written in order an follows: First to the Romans; then two to the Corinthians, and after these to the Galatians and next that to the Ephesians; then to the Philippians; then to the Colossians and two to the Thessalonians and that to the Hebrews. Next are two to Timothy, one to Titus, and last the one to Philemon.
   Moreover, John’s Apocalypse.

These are the ‘springs of salvation’, so that one who is thirsty may be satisfied with the oracles which are in them. In these alone is the teaching of true religion proclaimed as good news. Let no one add to these or take anything from them. For concerning these our Lord confounded the Sadducees when he said, ‘You are wrong because you don not know the scriptures.’ and he reproved the Jews, saying, ‘You search the scriptures, because . . . it is they that bear witness to me.’
   But for the sake of greater accuracy I must needs, as I write, add this: there are other books outside this, which are not indeed included in the canon, but have been appointed for the time of the fathers to be read to those who are recent converts to our company and which to be instructed in the word of true religion. These are . . . the so-called Teaching of the Apostles and the Shepherd. But while the former are included in the canon and the latter are read [in church], no mention is to be made of the apocryphal works. They are the invention of heretics, who write according to their own will, and gratuitously assign and add to them dates so that, offering them as ancient writings, they may have an excuse for leading the simple astray.

—Athanasius, quoted in F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (InterVarsity Press, 1988), 208–209.

Athanasius lists the canonical books without distinguishing some as deserving higher status than others, as had always been done before. It is especially worth noting that “John’s Apocalypse” (Revelation) is simply listed without comment, as previous church fathers had often listed it, so to speak, with an asterisk.

CONTEXT! That is the cry of many a frustrated exegete when challenged with faulty interpretations of scripture. One cannot hope to interpret any scriptural text properly without a basic understanding of its context, historically, and within the whole counsel of God. F. F. Bruce, concluding his book The Canon of Scripture, writes:

   It is not enough to say ‘the Bible says . . .’ without at the same time considering to whom the Bible says it, and in what circumstances. One sometimes meets people who, in discussing the life to come, quote Ecclesiastes 9:5, ‘the dead know nothing’, as though that were the Bible’s last word on the subject, as though Jesus’ death and resurrection had not given his people a new and living hope to which the author of Ecclesiastes was a stranger.
   Canonical exegesis does not absolve the reader from the duty of understanding the scriptures in their historical setting. Indeed, it reinforces that duty. Each part of the canon makes its contribution to the whole, but that contribution cannot be properly appreciated unless attention is paid to the historical setting of each part in relation to the whole. Historical criticism, rightly applied, is as necessary for canonical exegesis as it is for the exegesis of the separate biblical documents. Each separate document may take on fuller meaning in the context of the wider canon to which it now belongs, but that fuller meaning cannot be logically unrelated to its meaning in (precanonical) context. A study, for example, of the biblical doctrine of election could not be undertaken it there were no Bible, no canon of scripture; but it would be worthless unless it took into account the historical sequence of the relevant subject-matter.
   This is bound up with what is often called progressive revelation. That the biblical revelation is progressive is obvious when one considers that it was given in the course of history until, ‘when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son’ (Gal. 4:4). To call it progressive, however, may be misleading if that adjective suggests that every stage in the revelation is more ‘advanced’ than the stages which historically preceded it. If one thinks again of the doctrine of election, the principle of election implied in God’s call of Abraham, according to the narrative of Genesis 12:1–3, is more ethically and religiously ‘advanced’ than many of the ideas on the subject cherished by some of Abraham’s descendants at later stages in their history. (The principle revealed in the call of Abraham, that some are elected in order that others through them may be blessed, has not always been borne in mind by those who thought of themselves as the elect of God.)
   To adapt words of Paul, the reader of scripture should say, ‘I will read with the Spirit and I will read with the mind also.’ The inclusion of each scripture in the canon of all scripture helps one in the understanding of each scripture, but at the same time, since each scripture makes its contribution to all scripture, the understanding of all scripture is impossible without the understanding of each scripture.

—F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (InterVarsity Press, 1988), 296–297.