Podcast: How Were the Books of the Bible Chosen? (Michael Kruger)

July 10, 2023 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Who Decided What Should Be in the Bible?

In today’s episode, Michael Kruger walks us through the history of the canon and responds to common questions and misconceptions people tend to have related to our Bibles, how they were formed, and what it means for our faith.

Canon Revisited

Canon Revisited

Michael J. Kruger

Exploring the history of the New Testament text from a theological perspective, Michael Kruger helps Christians understand the facts behind their faith and the legitimacy of the New Testament Scriptures.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSS

Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:05 - Common Responses to Challenges against the Validity of God’s Word

Matt Tully
Michael, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Michael Kruger
It’s good to be with you.

Matt Tully
Today we’re going to talk about the Bible and more specifically this idea of the canon—this concept of canonicity. It’s something that some Christians might be familiar with that idea, but for others they might not have ever even heard that word thrown around before, but it’s an important concept. Before we jump into questions of how we came to get this book that we call the Bible—What was the process that brought it to us? How can we be confident in it?—I wanted to highlight a more basic, or at least personal, question that I think is really important. It’s one that you highlight in your book. The real question that I think each of us has to wrestle with at a more fundamental level is, How do I know these books are truly God’s word? That is the more fundamental question. Do you remember when you first started wrestling with that question as a younger person, presumably?

Michael Kruger
Yeah, I do. I remember it vividly. In fact, it was very formative for me, and some will have heard the story before. I came face to face with canon issues as an undergraduate, at least at a detailed level, when I was at UNC Chapel Hill in a religion class. The professor was saying, Hey, you can’t trust this collection of books.

Matt Tully
This wasn’t a believer?

Michael Kruger
No. This is a secular religion class, and he argued that the canon is filled with forgeries, pseudonymous works (people pretending to be people they’re not), books written very late and are unreliable and many of them filled with fabrications. So he called into question the whole canonical enterprise. That professor was Bart Ehrman, and many people will recognize that name now as one of the most prolific authors out there now critiquing the Christian movement. At the time, of course, he had not written all those books. I didn’t really know what he would become.

Matt Tully
How old were you at the time?

Michael Kruger
Eighteen or nineteen.

Matt Tully
Did it shake your faith? What language would you use to describe those challenges?

Michael Kruger
Yeah, it did. It sort of rattled my theological and spiritual cage, so to speak. I was a committed Christian at college. I’d grown up in a Christian home. I was doing my best to live a Christian life at a big secular university. But it quickly became apparent to me that I didn’t have answers to the questions he was raising and I didn’t really know what to do with it. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say it was a crisis of faith, but it was definitely a fundamental challenge that I had to deal with. And I was watching other Christians in the class deal with it, and there were all kinds of reactions. Some were pretending it wasn’t happening and kind of putting their head in the sand and saying, I’m just going to pretend this isn’t happening. Others were quite willing to hear it and believe it and then chuck the faith, because they’re probably just looking for a reason to do it. And then there were others who were looking to do this hybrid, like, Well, maybe I can believe everything I believe and then also believe what scholars are saying and kind of mash them together. And so there were all kinds of reactions, and so I knew I had to do something to come up with some answers.

Matt Tully
Let’s talk about those three reactions that you witnessed that I think all of us can either think of examples of or we can even, if we’re attuned to ourselves, we can sense temptations in some of those different directions in our own hearts. Speak to the person for whom the tendency was to put their head in the sand and not really want to have to face the challenges. How prevalent do you think that is?

Michael Kruger
Oh, I think it’s very prevalent. And I think it’s not only prevalent in individuals but I think it’s prevalent in a lot of Christian culture. I think there’s a wing of Christian evangelical culture that’s maybe a little bit anti-intellectual, is a little bit scared of going too far down the academic path. Maybe they think, We don’t need to have any answers to that. We just have to believe.

Matt Tully
Just have faith.

Michael Kruger
And then when someone expresses doubts or questions, you sort of bury it. You’re like, We’re not allowed to ask those questions. You’re not allowed to express those doubts. And so that is very much out there. And I imagine people listening to this podcast would say maybe they grew up in a church like that, because we probably still know churches today that are like that. So yeah, people have that as Christian culture, and then individuals carry it to places like university settings where, when they come across a problem, they say, Well, you know what? This is separate from my faith. I don’t have to answer this because my faith is one thing and this is another thing and I’m going to keep them in in two different worlds.

Matt Tully
So what’s wrong with that answer that gets thrown around a lot and that seems like it’s true to some extent—the idea that you just have to believe? The Christian religion is fundamentally about trusting in God and trusting in what he said in his word, so when it comes to questions of the Bible’s origins and why it is that we can know that this is truly God’s word, we ultimately just have to accept that.

Michael Kruger
Well, it’s partly true. One of the reasons that line gets used so much is because it’s partly true. There is a reality of the fact that of course you take what you believe on faith. You don’t know everything. There are a lot of mysteries. There are a lot of things you can’t solve. And so we all agree that you have to trust in certain things you can’t see. The problem in the way it’s used most of the time is that people almost give the impression that when you say Just believe they mean even if it’s against the facts and even if it’s against the truth. And we’re never called to do that, and we’re never called to think that that’s true of Christianity, as if Christianity is something that we blindly follow despite the fact that it’s so lacking in historical credibility. That’s not the argument. And so we would say, Yeah, of course you just believe; but you don’t believe in spite of the facts or contra to the facts. But we believe the facts fit with what we believe. And so it’s not one or the other; it’s both. We believe, yes; faith is fundamental, yes; but there’s also a consistency we expect to find when we look at Christianity and compare it to the evidence we have.

Matt Tully
Another one of the types of people that you mentioned was the person who just abandons their faith altogether. What’s the issue there behind that, and what would be your response to that response to a challenge along the lines of the Bible’s credibility?

Michael Kruger
This is common, too, in evangelicalism. There are people (that we’ve already discussed) who don’t want to deal with these problems because they think that it's separate from what religion does, and then the second group is a group that’s probably been teetering on the edge of unbelief for years. Maybe they’re just hanging by a thread and maybe they believe because their parents pressured them to, or they follow Christ at church because it seems like everyone else is doing it. Maybe they were just in it culturally with the Christian movement. But as soon as you give them one sliver of reason not to be a Christian, they’ll jump on it. The motives are multidimensional. In college one doesn’t have to think very long for what the motives might be. There may be a sense in which that gives them some liberty to live how they want to live in their college years, perhaps. but regardless of the motive, the reality is that some people are looking for a reason to doubt the faith. And here’s what’s unfortunate about it: as soon as someone hears an objection from someone like Ehrman or others, if you’re in that posture, you just assume that he’s right. You just assume that there’s no counter argument. You just assume, Well, hey, there it is. All I need is a reason. Boom. I have the reason and now I can move on with my life. And I think that’s also intellectually irresponsible. It sounds extremely intellectually sophisticated to say, I’m abandoning the faith for intellectual reasons. But what’s actually happening is that’s not what they’re doing; they’re abandoning the faith for one quick glance at one intellectual claim, not actually doing the hard homework to find out if that claim is true. And so again, it’s a little bit of a denial of the evidence, but it’s also a different way of putting your head in the sand.

Matt Tully
That’s what I was going to say is it feels like those could be very linked together where if someone’s experienced a church culture where questions were discouraged, where there wasn’t any effort to give intellectual responses to some of these other arguments and instead the response was to just believe, they might not even be aware of some of the more robust ways that Christians through the centuries could respond to those kinds of critiques.

Michael Kruger
So one of the things that I noticed in that time period and have noticed ever since is a lot of Christians assume if they don’t have an answer that there’s not an answer. And that’s an unfortunate reality. They assume, Well, if I can’t answer the objection, there must not be an answer to the objection. And, of course, if you just think about that for more than thirty seconds you realize that doesn’t make any sense. Even if you don’t have the answer, why would you think there couldn’t be an answer—especially if you’re nineteen and at a college? What does a nineteen-year-old know about church history or biblical studies or the history of the canon? Hardly anything. And so to say, Well, because I don’t personally, at nineteen, don’t have an answer, therefore, there can’t be one is a little bit of a crazy thing to say. But people do effectively make that argument.

Matt Tully
What do you think is behind the popularity of authors and scholars like Ehrman—books like the ones he’s written—where they do seem to enjoy a certain cultural cachet and a popularity that then maybe makes it easier for a Christian on the edge to read and embrace?

Michael Kruger
Well, this isn’t a new phenomenon, right? If you write a book defending the truth of the Gospels, it’ll sell a couple copies. If you write a book saying that everything you’ve always believed is wrong, it’ll sell a lot of copies. And I think there are lots of reasons for that. Part of it is just the conspiracy theorist in all of us. We always resonate with this idea that, Wow, what if everything I thought was true is wrong? What if the established religion is all a lie? What if these things never happened and we’ve been duped? We all fall into the trap of thinking that maybe we could just rewrite history, and maybe someone’s finally told us how it can be done. So I think there’s a proclivity in human nature for that. It’s always harder to defend the Gospels than it is to tear them down. And if you’re going to sell books, tearing them down is the way to do it. I always joke with my students—I know that in order to sell books you need to tear down the Gospels because I don’t do that in my books and I know they don’t sell nearly as good as other people’s.

10:32 - Questions about Canonicity

Matt Tully
Let’s jump into this particular issue of canonicity. This relates to this topic of which books we consider to be God’s word—which books are part of our Bibles. But tell us a little bit about the word canon. It might be a word that we’re not familiar with in this context. What does that word actually mean, and what’s the history there?

Michael Kruger
The first thing to get straight is just how to spell it. My students make this mistake all the time. Canon is typically spelled in most people’s minds as c-a-n-n-o-n, and that refers to the cannon that you put a cannon ball inside and light a fuse and shoot down your medieval enemy and knock down their castle or something like this. That’s the word cannon. The canon we’re using here is, of course, c-a-n-o-n, with just one “n” in the middle. And that canon word is historically a word that just means standard or rule. And it occurs even in the Bible. It refers to some ultimate measuring rod, so to speak.

Matt Tully
So it’s kind of a generic term for a standard or rule?

Michael Kruger
Yeah, exactly.

Matt Tully
It’s not inherently about this thing that we call the Bible.

Michael Kruger
No. But in Christian circles most people will hear it and it’ll be something related to the biblical canon, which is which books are our standard? Which books are our rule? Which books do we turn to? And so when you talk about the canon, you’re talking about the ultimate standard for what Christians follow. And so the term though, as you pointed out, historically was just a generic term that just meant some ultimate measuring standard. But we’ve used it historically and theologically as a reference to the biblical collection. And by the way, we didn’t make that up in the modern day. That was true even in the early church. We see scholars use the term by the time of the fourth century—even in the early fourth century. And arguably, Eusebius is the first one to do this, where he uses the term canon as a reference to the biblical collection.

12:14 - Misconceptions about the Canon

Matt Tully
That’s a great segue into what I wanted to talk about next, which is common misconceptions that you’ve encountered among Christians, and maybe even non-Christians, about the idea of the canon and canonicity. You mentioned one of them—that this is like a newfangled idea that was developed maybe in the Reformation or something like that, but this concept of a canon of books actually exists. What are some other misconceptions that you’ve encountered?

Michael Kruger
Oh, wow, so many. In fact, I’ve spent a substantive amount of my scholarly work dealing with misconceptions on canon that have been circulating around. I’ll mention a couple. Probably the most famous is this idea that the canon was decided at the Council of Nicaea under the pressure of Constantine.

Matt Tully
A politically motivated kind of thing.

Michael Kruger
Exactly. So the narrative runs something like this: for the first few centuries of the faith, no Christians knew what to read. Everybody was reading their own books. There was no decided collection that you could turn to. Everybody had a varied collection. Some were reading this and some were reading that. And then only in the fourth century, Constantine, with this political pressure, decided, We really need a canon, so I’m going to force my own—

Matt Tully
To unify my empire.

Michael Kruger
Exactly. I’m going to force my own preferences to bring everyone together, and I’m going to banish the books I don’t like and accept the books I do. And thus, voila, there’s your canon. And so it’s construed as a purely human construction, a purely political event.

Matt Tully
As an exercise of power.

Michael Kruger
Yeah. It’s viewed as something that is part of any human culture. Of course, humans are going to pick some standard they prefer, and it’s no different when it comes to the Bible. And so it just makes it all very human and not divine.

Matt Tully
So, I’m sure a lot of Christians listening right now have heard that exact argument in some religion class, and they didn’t know how to respond. What would be your brief way of responding to that charge?

Michael Kruger
This sounds trite and I don’t mean it as such, but the response is it’s just factually not true. The Council of Nicaea had nothing to do with the formation of the New Testament canon. We don’t see any evidence for that at all. Nicaea, as most people realize if you recite the Nicaean Creed, has more to do with the best way to express the divinity of Jesus. By the way, it’s the best way to express it; it wasn’t to decide the divinity of Jesus, as if it was up for grabs. It was the best way to articulate it. And then the other reason is that Constantine had nothing to do with this. Constantine was not even really the major player in Nicaea anyway. And so it’s just simply not true. The other thing I’ll add to it is that the Christians had a functioning canon long before Nicaea. I make this case in my book Canon Revisited and in other places as well, which is that there was what we could call a “core canon” really by the middle of the second century that Christians seemed to be well settled on, even if there was some ongoing debate about the periphery of it.

Matt Tully
Someone’s response could be, That’s fine. I see it wasn’t the place this happened. They’re wrong on that. But the basic point still stands, this idea of which books should be included in the Bible was fundamentally a human decision that someone had to make or some group had to make. Therefore, why should we trust that it’s actually reflecting the true collection of God’s word?

Michael Kruger
That’s partly true. Did humans at some point affirm what they believed was true about these books? Well, yeah. But does that make it a human construct? And so what theologians have typically been careful about is the way you phrase that. You don’t say that humans created the canon or made the canon or built the canon, but rather recognized the canon. And that’s an important word, because the word recognize implies that something already exists before you see it, and you don’t make it true, but you simply observe that it’s true. You observe that it’s already there and already a reality. And so when someone says it’s a human construct, I’m like, well, you’ve got to be more specific about what you mean by that. Because for humans involved, well, yeah, because they have to recognize these books. But by merely recognizing these books, does that mean suddenly that the authority is all on you and not the books? No. Think about someone recognizing that Jesus is the divine Son of God. If someone says, I’ve come to believe that Jesus is the divine Son of God, you don’t say, Well, you’ve created him in your mind, or You’ve given him authority he doesn’t have. No, you simply recognize what’s already true about him.

Matt Tully
What’s the earliest list of biblical books that we have access to?

Michael Kruger
The earliest list we have is what’s called the Muratorian Canon, probably around 180 of the second century.

Matt Tully
And what books were included in that list?

Michael Kruger
About twenty-two out of our current twenty-seven. That would include the four Gospels, the book of Acts, thirteen letters of Paul, and then a handful of other smaller books like 1 Peter, 1 John, Revelation, etc.

Matt Tully
You said twenty-seven. I’m assuming you’re referring to just the New Testament. But where’s the Old Testament in this whole discussion?

Michael Kruger
Thus far we’ve been mainly talking about the New Testament, but the Old Testament canon, we would argue, was settled prior to Jesus even coming. And so Christians basically affirmed what their Jewish forefathers had already received and affirmed. And so we could talk about what evidence is there in the first century that Christians recognize what we call the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament. And there are a number of layers where you can show that. One of the most famous places, of course, is the list in Josephus, and then a familiar list also in Philo—both first century Jewish writers—and there’s earlier evidence beyond that that’s in what we call intertestamental writings. So, I think there are good reasons to think that the Old Testament canon was fairly settled. And so for Christians it wasn’t about figuring it out; it was about building up on it and then asking the question, Well, did God give a second stage of revelation?
Did God give additional books? And if he gave an additional covenant, which we argue is the new covenant, then we would expect additional writings to go with that covenant.

Matt Tully
You mentioned that this early canon included twenty-two of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament. What were the five books that it didn’t include, and what should we make of the fact that they aren’t listed that early? Should that make us doubt them a little bit or wonder if they are truly part of this thing called the New Testament?

Michael Kruger
I think it’s important just to recognize that when people say there were disputes over the canon and controversy over the canon, it really depends on what they mean by that, because for the bulk of the canon, there was really no meaningful dispute over it. Twenty-two out of twenty-seven were fairly established. So when they say there was disagreement, they mean just over a handful. And the books we have in mind here are books like 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and then maybe James. And you’ll notice right out of the gate that these are mostly very small books. And this is part of their explanation, that it takes longer for the smaller books to find a firm home in the canon just because they’re used less often. They’re quoted more infrequently, and people in one part of the empire may not know about that book yet, even though it may be prevalent in another part of the early Christian movement. And so it’s going to take time for the historical dust to settle. What I always tell people is if it took a few centuries to get the kinks worked out in some of these smaller books, why does that bother you so much? I always find it interesting what people’s expectations are. I say, What would be good enough for you to not be bothered? Is it that you expect the canon to be received in like forty-eight hours or two months? Do you expect zero disagreement and absolute consensus within eighteen days? What is enough? And you realize that most people have never thought through that. They never have actually asked, What historical circumstances was the canon given in, and what would be a reasonable historical pattern for seeing it develop over time? And what I point out to them is that, actually, what you should be shocked by is not that there was ever any dispute over these smaller books, what you should be shocked by is there was so much unity around the core so early .

Matt Tully
That might get to the broader question about misconceptions, because I think that people, maybe even without knowing it explicitly, this idea that the canon had to develop over time is perhaps in and of itself kind of an unexpected idea. Do you ever get the sense that some Christians have a bit of a This book just must have come down from heaven in its complete form?

Michael Kruger
I say this to my students all the time that because we haven’t done such a very good job in our churches of explaining the origins of the Bible, when you talk about a book like the Bible as divinely inspired and from God, if you never explain the origins of the Bible, people do get the impression—maybe it’s not as crass as that—but they do get the impression that the Bible is something that was dropped directly from heaven. There are other religions that argue stuff like that. Famously, of course, the Mormon’s claim that the Book of Mormon was lowered from heaven on golden tablets by the angel Moroni.

Matt Tully
Which feels kind of nice and clean.

Michael Kruger
Yeah, it’s very simple and neat. It’s what you might expect, actually, if you’re making it up—some nice, tidy little system for that. But God decided, in his own providence, to deliver these books in real time, real space, real history, and there’s some messiness associated with that. There’s some process associated with that, but that just reminds you that the Christian religion is genuinely historical. And here’s my concern about the church: I think the church has looked at the Bible as divinely inspired in such a way that it’s almost gnostic. It’s like it doesn’t have any real existence in the real world. It’s almost this disembodied Bible that was lowered from the sky. And I want to remind people, no, God gave it in a real incarnational way, so to speak, in the real world. And that’s going to explain a lot of the things that maybe are bothersome to us.

21:11 - The Importance of Church History

Matt Tully
You raised this broader question of church history. And obviously, history is one of those things where there are obviously people that we know, including many of the listeners for this show, that would say that they love history and that they’re history buffs. But there are a lot of people who probably would say they’re not too excited about history and they don’t want to spend a lot of time thinking about it. And yet it seems like an appreciation for history is pretty important for understanding this thing we call the Bible. Speak to that a little bit.

Michael Kruger
When it comes to the evangelical movement, it’s not a new observation to say that evangelicals are rather disconnected from church history. I think there are few that would dispute this.

Matt Tully
Do you think that’s changing?

Michael Kruger
I think it’s changing. Historically, if you ask an evangelical what they knew about church history, they would probably start with the book of Acts, and then they would move to the Reformation, and they would make a few observations there, and then they would skip to the present. And that’s about the extent of it. This goes back to, perhaps, the way we train and educate in our churches. But it’s an unfortunate reality because when you’re divorced from that, you do get this rather simplistic and maybe even overly sanitized vision for what church history is. And what evangelicals need is a good dose of the way it really went down. So yeah, we need more effort on that front. And I do think it’s changing though. There’s been some great examples in recent years of much more attention to the patristic sources.

Matt Tully
Those are the early church fathers.

Michael Kruger
Yeah, the early church fathers. If you look at the discussions over Trinity in the last five to ten years, thankfully they’ve been grounded in the fathers, when maybe in prior generations that wasn’t as prevalent. And I think that’s an encouraging sign.

Matt Tully
As we’ve talked about church history and this progressive development of the church’s broad understanding and affirmation of what the canon was, and it’s a pretty important part of this story, but it seems like in that answer there’s the presupposition of a kind of confidence in God’s providential work guiding and directing the church at large on this issue to some extent. Do you resonate with that? Is that a good way to speak about that?

Michael Kruger
Yeah. I think God’s providential oversight of the whole process is a key part of our faith in canon, so to speak, in the sense that, of course, if God wanted to give his people his writings, could we not trust that he could orchestrate historical circumstances so they got a reliable version of those? I think that argument is true in a general way. My caution with that argument is I see people use that argument a little loosely, where that argument is the entirety of our basis for canon. It’s saying, Well, I don’t have to know the details. I don’t have to care about the arguments. I don’t have to read the opposing views. All I have to do is just chalk it up to don’t you believe in the sovereignty of God? Well, I do; and therefore, I think we have the right canon. I don’t want to be dismissive of trust in the sovereignty of God, because that’s really important, but that way of using it is not, I think, the full version that we ought to be seeking.

Matt Tully
So what other factors would you want to include in a discussion of why we can have confidence? Let’s stipulate that they don’t prove in some courtroom context that these are the true words of God, that there is faith involved, but what are some of those other factors that you would point to?

Michael Kruger
In my book Canon Revisited, I lay out what I call the “attributes of canonicity” which every canonical book has. There are three of them, and I think believers can look to any or all of these features to be encouraged that they have the right books. And so I argue in the book that every canonical book has apostolic connections—it pertains to and contains apostolic tradition. Secondly, I argue that these books contain certain qualities internally to them that I think speak to a divine author. And then thirdly, that they were received eventually by the church and its consensus around them. There’s a lot to say about each of those three, but for the sake of this discussion, you could trust the canon for any of those reasons. Just take the last one for a moment. If someone goes, Why should I trust these books are from God? my answer is because God’s people for generations, and we think filled with the Holy Spirit, have coalesced around and recognized these books as being the ones that God is speaking in for thousands of years, that’s a valid argument. It’s not the totality of everything, but I think it’s a key part of why we trust these books. On the flip side, if someone goes, Why should I trust these books? I’d say, We have a reason to think they go back to the apostles and that they contain teaching and instruction from those who were Jesus’s earliest followers and were authorized to speak for him. And so that’s a reason to trust these books.

Matt Tully
So these are reasons to trust versus proof, in some sense. Do you ever get the sense that modern Christians, or just people in general, do we have this obsession with this idea of proof?

Michael Kruger
Yeah, we do. I talk about this in the introduction of Canon Revisited. And even as we’re having this dialogue, my concern isn’t so much some sort of empirical syllogism that the non-Christian can sort of see that it mathematically proves the canon.

Matt Tully
They can’t deny it.

Michael Kruger
When you’re dealing with history, you don’t have that. This isn’t mathematics; this is history. What I want to answer in the book, and what I tried to answer in the book, is do Christians have sufficient grounds for thinking that their belief in these twenty-seven books is reasonable and justified? I make the case that yes, we have excellent grounds for our belief in canon—so much so that I can say our knowledge is what we might call warranted or justified knowledge. This, of course, is the fundamental question Christians are asking: Am I just pretending to know something, or do I have reasonable basis for thinking I can know it? And those three things I laid out are a regional basis for thinking we can know it.

Matt Tully
It seems like a distinction between this idea of a leap of faith, which can maybe at times feel irrational, versus reasonable faith, where it’s a faith, but it’s grounded in good reasons that we can discuss.

Michael Kruger
Yeah. We’re going to argue that the Christian’s basis for canon is not an irrational one, that we’re not just saying, Well, I believe this because I just wish it were true. No, we have good basis for believing it. And not just good; I would argue an excellent and divinely given basis for believing it.

27:20 - The Self-Authenticating Nature of Scripture

Matt Tully
I want to speak to one more of those reasons that we can (especially in the Reformed tradition) emphasize, and it’s this notion of the self-authenticating nature of Scripture. Unpack that for us. It sounds like maybe a bizarre, or at least on the surface, it’s unclear what that would mean.

Michael Kruger
In some approaches to canon, you’ll find that people want to validate canon in every way they can without ever really considering the content of the canon itself. And so someone will say, Well, I’ll validate the canon by doing an analysis of the authors, or I’ll validate the canon by doing an analysis of the reception of these books in church history. And those are all important, but what about the books themselves? Is there any reason to think they show evidence of having a divine author? When we read these books, can we see anything in them, in terms of their characteristics and their qualities, that would indicate a divine author? And this is what Christians have argued for generations, and I would argue that even the Scriptures themselves indicate this, that when God speaks he doesn’t need external validation. He gives evidence of his own divine qualities. And I think the Scriptures give evidence of those divine qualities. I unpack this at length, of course, in Canon Revisited. But one of the things I want to point out to the listener is that this isn’t a new idea that we’re making up in the modern day because we’re out of arguments. This is a historic Christian position, that when you read these books you can see the fingerprints of God all over them. And you’ll be interested to know that, and I think people know this intuitively, that when most people convert to Christianity, it’s not because they’ve studied the historical evidences. Most of the time it’s because they’ve either read or heard the word taught, and they recognize that what they’re hearing is the voice of God. If you started saying, What exactly about that word showed you that? They may not be able to put full articulation to it. Something about the beauty of it, the excellency of it, the power of it, the harmony of it, the way it all fits together. They could go down a list, perhaps, but the reality is that when Christ’s sheep hear his voice, they know it and they follow him.

Matt Tully
What would your response be to someone who would come back and say that you’re essentially just begging the question with that line of reasoning?

Michael Kruger
There are all kinds of objections to the self-authenticating view. One of them is something along the lines of what you indicated, which is, Gee, this sounds a lot like subjectivism. It sounds like you’re just seeing things that aren’t there. You’re just wishing they were there, and you’re just relying on your own feelings. That’s not the argument at all. The argument isn’t that I feel really good about these books and therefore, they must be from God. Or, I got this flutter in my heart from the Spirit, and so they must be from God. That’s not the argument. The argument is that these books actually have objective qualities about them, and those objective qualities, when you recognize them, you can see that they point to a divine author. The analogy I give is it’s like you can hear whether music is on key or off key. By the way, being on or off key is objective. Not everyone can hear it, but it is really there. There are some tones and some tunes that are off key and some that are on key. If you don’t have the ears to hear it, you may not be able to tell. And so the Bible is giving off a vibe. Some can’t hear it and some can, but that doesn’t mean it’s subjective. It’s an objective reality about these books that we’re focused on.

30:26 - Can I Trust the Bible?

Matt Tully
Maybe as a second to last question, What would you say to the person listening right now who they would have to confess that they have wrestled with this? This is an issue that they have felt confronted in. They’ve maybe talked with somebody, an unbeliever, who’s challenged them on this, or maybe just in their own study they’ve at times really struggled with knowing can I trust this Bible? Is this really from God? Are there things that are missing or that were added that aren’t actually from God? What encouragement would you offer that person right now?

Michael Kruger
Lots of times when people face those doubts, they feel like, I guess I’m going to either A) Live in complete doubt the rest of my life, or B) I have to go get a PhD, and then I can be reassured. I want to tell them that’s not true. What I love about the things I’ve already laid out and that I would argue the Bible lays out is that you can be assured the Bible’s from God without knowing everything and without having to go get a PhD and study piles and piles of historical evidences. You can, as we’ve already indicated, look into these Scriptures and recognize not only the voice of your Lord in them, but also you can take reassurance that Christians for generations have done exactly the same thing you have. There’s that great unity and harmony of the church throughout the ages saying, Hey, we see in these books our Lord speaking. And so, yeah, I think you can take comfort in that. You don’t have to know everything to take those as good reasons to believe.

31:47 - Could Inspired Scripture Be Discovered Today?

Matt Tully
One final question—a hypothetical question that I’m sure someone else listening has right now that they would want to ask you this: What if archeologists unearthed—you know exactly where I’m going with this one. I’m sure you hear this every semester from your students.

Michael Kruger
Yeah.

Matt Tully
What if they unearthed some previously undiscovered letter—maybe by Paul—that evangelical scholars looked at and assessed that determined that this seems like it really was written by the apostle Paul. Theologically, it’s consistent with the rest of the New Testament and God’s revelation in Scripture. Maybe it has a few other things that it says that would be brand new though. Would you consider that to be inspired Scripture? Would that be something that you would even entertain? Would you say Christians who did were absolutely right or absolutely wrong? How would you handle that?

Michael Kruger
You’ve just asked the most common question I get, and it’s the most common question I get because of its complexity and because of its difficulty. I’ll begin by saying I’m very skeptical that’ll ever happen. I realize that no one knows what you’ll discover in the sand.

Matt Tully
I was going to say, we’re going to have it locked in though in forever audio. So we’ll have a follow-up once it happens.

Michael Kruger
Exactly. I’m happy to be proven wrong, but I mean statistically, it’s like will you discover life on other planets? I can say I think it’s unlikely, but maybe someday it’ll happen. Who knows?

Matt Tully
But I think these kinds of questions—these hypotheticals that are maybe bordering on absurd—can still help to elucidate the principles behind these kinds of questions.

Michael Kruger
Of course. That’s why we need to have an answer to it, even if we think it’s unlikely. So my answer is I go back and forth. In Canon Revisited I argued that I don’t think we would consider these books canonical if we found a lost writing of Paul and could somehow authenticate it. And part of the reason is because of the way you define canon. Canon is, by definition, a foundational book—a book that the church has received, affirmed, and used as part of its heritage.

Matt Tully
So there is a limited window of time that the canon was being formed.

Michael Kruger
Part of what makes the canon the canon is the history of usage that the church has had for these books and the way that bears out reasons to think they’re from God, because of the church’s historical affirmation of them. But when we have a book that has no historical affirmation, or at least very little, you lose that. And so in Canon Revisited I argued that, therefore, I don’t think they would be considered canonical. But then about every forty-eight hours I flip over to the other side and say, Well, if it is from Paul—how we would authenticate that is another conversation—If it is from Paul, then why would we not consider it part of the canon? So I don’t know if there is a firm answer to that. And I don’t know if we need to have a firm answer to that. I think both sides have their case to be made.

Matt Tully
It seems like, and you’ve made this case throughout our conversation today, that part of the idea of canonicity is you can’t separate canonicity from the idea of the church globally affirming or recognizing in some kind of corporate way the significance and the reality of these books.

Michael Kruger
That’s exactly right. I make a lot of this in my book, Canon Revisited, that there’s a corporate “covenantal reception” that’s so key to what makes canon canon. So we, in our American mindset, tend to individualize it. It’s like, What do I think about the canon and do I know about the canon and do I affirm it? Of course, you eventually have to make up your mind about what you believe, but the canon is not an individualistic issue; it’s a corporate issue that not an individual Christian decides, but that the church decides globally but also historically. And I think that once you realize that, it does take some of the pressure off, so to speak, and it also helps remind you that I’ve got to look beyond myself here, and to have some assurance of what I’m reading.

Matt Tully
That sounds like that’s a fodder for a whole other conversation about the historical tradition and the corporate nature of our faith and the things that we believe. But that will have to wait for another time. Thank you so much, Michael, for spending some time with us today and helping us to answer some questions or at least get some more helpful reasons for why we believe the Bible is what we say it is.

Michael Kruger
Absolutely. Fun conversation.

Popular Articles in This Series

View All

Podcast: Help! I Hate My Job (Jim Hamilton)

January 06, 2020

Jim Hamilton discusses what to do when you hate your job, offering encouragement for those frustrated in their work and explaining the difference between a job and a vocation.

Crossway is a not-for-profit Christian ministry that exists solely for the purpose of proclaiming the gospel through publishing gospel-centered, Bible-centered content. Learn more or donate today at crossway.org/about.