The story of how we got the New Testament is quite similar, though the
time frame is compressed. Instead of taking a thousand years or more for
spoken stories to give way to writing and then to widely revered status,
the process takes about a century for Christians. The earliest followers
of Jesus didn't immediately write their stories, apparently because they
expected Jesus to return soon. They urgently spread his teachings in
person, by speaking.
The first New Testament books were probably not written by Jesus'
disciples, but by missionary-minded, circuit-preaching Paul. Scholars
estimate that Paul's earliest letters of encouragement to young churches
he had founded were written about 20 years after the death of Jesus. The
rest of the New Testament was written throughout the remainder of the
first century, roughly A.D. 50 to 100.
Christians had long respected the Tanakh (Jewish Scriptures) as God's
Word. But they also recognized that the message of Jesus, contained in the
Gospels and other writings, was an essential part of God's revelation to
human beings. Christians, however, didn't formally agree on which books to
include in the New Testament until after Marcion, a Christian leader in
the early A.D. 100s, proposed a short list: the letters of Paul and the
Gospel of Luke-all of which he had edited to reflect his belief that Jesus
was not human and could not really suffer.
Over the next two centuries, Christians debated which books should be
included. Many had been written, including about 60 of questionable
content and authorship. By 367 A.D., most church leaders agreed to accept
as authoritative only the 27 books they believed were written by
apostles-ministers who had actually seen Jesus, including the original
disciples and Paul. The first known list of these books appears that year
in the Easter letter that an Egyptian bishop, Athanasius, sent to his
churches. He was the first on record to use the word canon-which
originally meant "measure"-to describe the officially recognized books of
the Bible. Church leaders decided that no other books should be added to
the canon.
