For nearly twenty centuries Christianity has had the inspired and authoritative New Testament as its rule of faith and practice. How these twenty-seven books came to be recognized as God’s Word and accepted by Christians is the topic of the New Testament canon. Apart from an established canon, the Church would have little to base its faith upon. Heresies would be rampant, and oral tradition would weaken without a fixed standard against which error is to be measured. If it is true that the Scriptures contain God’s truth, then how is it that Christianity came to have the New Testament consisting of twenty-seven books? Who decided on twenty-seven? Why not just twenty-six? Or twenty-eight? What criteria was used to distinguished between divine voice and human voice amongst the writings of the first century?
Answers to some of these questions and more can be found in my essay, “Now About Trusting the Text: How God’s Word Came to Us“.
In support of early attestation of the biblical record, the Codex Sinaiticus includes the oldest complete copy of the New Testament.
What is Codex Sinaiticus?
Codex Sinaiticus, a manuscript of the Christian Bible written in the middle of the fourth century, contains the earliest complete copy of the Christian New Testament. The hand-written text is in Greek. The New Testament appears in the original vernacular language (koine) and the Old Testament in the version, known as the Septuagint, that was adopted by early Greek-speaking Christians. In the Codex, the text of both the Septuagint and the New Testament has been heavily annotated by a series of early correctors.
The significance of Codex Sinaiticus for the reconstruction of the Christian Bible’s original text, the history of the Bible and the history of Western book-making is immense.
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