How were the books of the Bible chosen?
The Gutenberg Bible displayed by the United States Library of Congress, demonstrating printed pages as a storage medium. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Even though we think of the Bible as being one book, it’s actually a collection of sixty-six books, and we realize that there was a historical process by which those particular books were gathered together and placed in one volume that we now know as the Bible. In fact, we call the Bible the canon of sacred Scripture . Canon is taken from the Greek word canon, which means “ measuring rod .” That means it is the standard of truth by which all other truth is to be judged in the Christian life. There have been many different theories set forth over the history of the church as to exactly how God ’s hand was involved in this selection process. Skeptics have pointed out that over three thousand books were candidates for inclusion in the New Testament canon alone, and only a handful (twenty-some books) were selected. Doesn’t that raise so