The canon of the Bible is the collection of recognized books that make up our Bible. There are 66 of them according to current count, but because the book of Psalms officially contains five books and not just one, we must count a total of 70 books in our Bible. More on that later.
Christian tradition
According to tradition, the compilation of the canon was not completed until the second half of the fourth century (source: Wikipedia). In other words, only centuries after the apostles had written down their words were the writings gathered and arranged into the collection of books we now call the Bible. A rather unreliable situation, therefore, because during those hundreds of years, all sorts of things could have gone wrong.
The word completed
Scripture teaches in Colossians 1:25 that Paul completed the word of God. We have already seen that this means that he added the final revelations to the word. But it has another meaning. Paul also ensured that the Scriptures were gathered together. The Hebrew Tanakh, our Old Testament, already existed, of course. To it, Paul, in collaboration with others, added the books of the New Testament, arranging and compiling them into a perfect and consummate unity.
I want to show that Paul, but also Peter, emphatically emphasize that they took on this task. Paul, together with several others, ensured that we have the word of God: complete and in a composition similar to that which the apostles themselves gathered and arranged.
Apostles
Paul and Peter were apostles. Apostle is a Greek word meaning delegate. They were Christ’s representatives (Gal. 1:1, 1 Pet. 1:12) and appointed with a mission (1 Tim. 2:7), which they fulfilled. It is therefore perfectly logical that they, as the foremost apostles, took on this task and brought it to a successful conclusion.
Only Scripture
In these blogs, I want to go beyond human traditions and traditions and show that Scripture itself declares that the apostles gathered the Scriptures, and that this was not done hundreds of years later by church councils.