I have heard of books like the Gospel of Peter and the Gospel of Thomas which do not appear in our New Testament. Some books and TV programs claim these were originally accepted by many Christians as inspired books of the Bible but later rejected by leaders like Emperor Constantine. How do we know that the books included in our New Testament are the “correct” ones?

The Short Answer:

To qualify as a book of the New Testament a document must

1: be written by an Apostle or under the leadership of an Apostle 2: be written within the lifetime of those who were eye witnesses to the events of Jesus’ life and 3: must be immediately accepted and used by those early believers as the Word of God.

None of the “extra” books meet a single one of these requirements and it is for these reasons they were never included in the Bible.

The Long Answer:

I have also seen several programs and books that claim certain writings were “left out of the Bible.” Though these books and programs speak very convincingly, they leave out some very important facts. Since I can not believe the authors and producers of these books and programs are unaware of these facts, I can only assume they are intentionally trying to deceive Christians into doubting the Bible.

Before beginning my answer, however, I need to use some terminology. A book that is generally accepted as being part of the Bible is called a “canonical book.” (A canon is a generally accepted rule or law.) The books referred to in the question which some claim should have been part of the Bible are called “extra-canonical” books or “non-canonical” books (extra-canonical means “outside the generally accepted books). To save time, I’m going to simply refer to them as the “extra” books.

Faith, of course, is the main reason why we accept the canonical books as the inspired Word of God. The Word of God not only creates faith in God in our hearts but also leads us to trust the Bible’s own truthfulness and power. However, when challenged, it is good to know how history bears witness to the accuracy of our faith.

Books like the Da Vinci Code make the claim that the canonical books of the Bible were selected by the Emperor Constantine and the Council of Nicea in 325 AD, almost 300 years after the death and resurrection of Christ and that books which fit with Constantine’s ideas were accepted while equally qualified books that did not agree with Constantine were discarded.

What the Da Vinci Code and other books and programs like it leave out is that the Church does not base its acceptance of the canonical books on the events of 325AD.

Rather, as mentioned in the short answer, to qualify as a canonical book in the Lutheran Church, a book must meet three criteria. It must:

1: be written by an Apostle or under the leadership of an Apostle 2: be written within the life time of those who were eye witnesses to the events of Jesus’ life and 3: must be immediately accepted and used by those early believers as the Word of God.

These requirements are extremely important. There were literally hundreds of thousands of witnesses to the events of Jesus life. More than 9000, for instance, had seen Jesus create food for a crowd from only a few loaves of bread and a few fish. There were hundreds of thousands of people who were in Jerusalem at the time of the crucifixion and who would have witnessed the clearing of the temple as well as the healings and miracles Jesus did at that time. He did very few miracles in private. The vast majority of His sermons, also, were delivered in very public places. Even the resurrection had witnesses in the guards at the tomb and the more than 500 people who saw Jesus alive after His crucifixion.

This timing is crucial. We have very good evidence from within the canonical books themselves that they were written in the first century AD. The customs and details, for instance, all agree with what a person writing in the first century would have known and experienced. Early Christian writers also confirm that the last canonical book, Revelation, was completed before 110 AD when John died. That means all the canonical books were written at a time when multiple witnesses to the events themselves could compare what was written to what they had seen with their own eyes. They were the only generation to be able to say, “yes, what is written here agrees with what I saw and heard.” That these early Christians accepted and began to use the canonical books as the Word of God almost immediately is a tremendous testimony to the truthfulness of these books – after all, they were in a position to know whether the facts recorded in the books agreed with reality or not. Their use of these books as Scripture is a powerful witness that the facts in these books did indeed agree with what they knew and had experienced of Jesus’ and the Apostles’ lives.

In fact, the early Christians had such high regard for the canonical books and used them so extensively that had some disaster destroyed all copies of the canonical books themselves before the year 300 AD, we would still be able to reconstruct nearly the whole new testament just from the portions of them that were quoted in the writings of the early believers.

That is pretty good evidence that these books were accepted as Scripture long before Constantine became Emperor or the Council of Nicea was called.

In contrast, no hint of the extra-canonical books appears until at least 180 AD, decades after the last of the witnesses to Jesus’ life had died. They were immediately rejected by the early Church, and with good reason. In many cases they record supposedly “secret” teaching of Christ. It is not terribly surprising that these “secret” teachings just happen to agree with the ideas of the heretical cults that were starting to spring up at that time and contradict the clear and public teachings of Christ and the Apostles. Frankly, they are full of some pretty weird ideas and stories. Further, there are numerous anachronisms in them, things that would never have been done or said in 1st century Israel. It is pretty obvious these books were invented by people who wanted to give their false teaching an air of authority. No reasonable person then or now would have accepted these books as inspired.

To sum it all up, aside from faith, the facts all tell us that the early Church, and later the Council of Nicea, were quite right in declaring the canonical books we have today as inspired and rejecting the others as fiction.

Two notes need to be mentioned here.

1: Questions about the Bible today generally revolve around the New Testament. However, the Old Testament Canon developed in much the same way as the New. The Old Testament books were written by the Prophets or under the leadership of a Prophet and were accepted almost immediately by Old Testament believers as the Word of God. But in addition to this we have the testimony of Jesus Himself who extensively quoted the Old Testament as the Word of God and frequently referred to the books of the Old Testament. We can be confident, then that the Old Testament we have, like the New, is indeed the Word of God.

2: To be fair, there are a handful of books in the New Testament Canon that are called “antilegomena.” “Antilegomina” means “spoken against” or “disputed.” These books were generally accepted by most Christians but a few early believers expressed doubts about whether they should be part of the canon. These doubts were far from strong, however, and are mostly mentioned in passing by early Christian authors.

These books are: James, Jude, Hebrews, (some questioned these because they were not written directly by an Apostle) 2nd Peter, 2nd and 3rd John (a few early Christians expressed doubt that these were actually written by Peter and John) and Revelation (because of it’s odd visions).

Though the doubts were not strong, out of respect for the early Christians who had questions we handle these a little more carefully. No doctrine in the Lutheran Church, for instance, can be based solely on these books. Any doctrine drawn from them must be supported from at least one of the non-disputed books of the canon. This is not a real problem, however, as none of them say anything that is not expressed in the non-disputed books.

In other words, the fact these seven books were doubted by a few in the early Church is really not an issue. In fact, that the early Christian authors were honest in telling us that some had doubts is a strong testimony to the integrity of the early Church. They wanted to make sure that future Christians would have all the facts and knew all the questions they themselves had considered in trusting the books of the canon to be the Word of God. Such honesty and integrity should give us confidence that we do indeed have the correct books that God wished us to have as Scripture.

Nevertheless, because some unbelievers use these doubts of some early Christians to attack our faith in the Bible, it is good for the Christian to be aware of them.

In conclusion, I believe we can be pretty certain that we do indeed have the correct books of the Bible as God intended us to and can read our Bible with confidence that the Bible is indeed the Word of God.

For more information you might want to check out "The Case for the Real Jesus" by Lee Strobel