What determines the canonicity of the books in the bible?

Answer 1

The canonicity of The Bible means the "right for that book to be a part of the inspired 66 books of the Bible."

God is the one that determines if a certain book should be a part of the Bible.

What gives evidence is what the book contains. It should be in harmony with the other books of the Bible. All 66 books are.

Answer 2

The Old Testament books included in the Christian canon are basically those books that had already attained a level of acceptance during Jesus' time. Protestants do not include in their canon certain pre-Christian works written in Greek, but Catholics accept some of these works. These Greek works are called the Apocrypha.

The canon of the New Testament was only progressively established. Most Christians follow the list defined by the mid-fourth century bishop, Athanasius of Alexandria, one of the Church finest, and most significant, bishops.

We can look at the books of the New Testament, and compare them with the Christian books from around that time, and from this we can see why the current list of books are accepted as canonical. There is a consistency of message in the New Testament books that gives us confidence that they were either written by Apostles, or by those who had a close connection with the Apostles.

Nevertheless, it is open to believers to challenge the canon of scripture. For example, Martin Luther had problems in accepting James, since the teaching in this work seemed to conflict with his understanding of the working of God's grace. However, today, most Christians do not have any trouble in accepting that James has a proper place in the canon.

As time goes on, we are becoming more and more confident that the historical books of the New Testament (the gospels plus Acts) were written quite close to the events they described, and that they have an eyewitness quality to them. Who would want to remove them from the canon?

Turning to Paul's letters, some years ago there was a strong challenge to the authenticity of a number of these, but support for this proposition is declining. In my opinion, effective answers to such challenges are available for all of Paul's letters, except for 1 Timothy and Titus, which were probably not written by Paul, but still may justify their place in the canon on other grounds.

If you want to read more on this, you can see my blogs, "Origins of the four gospels," and "Acts of the Apostles - An historian's perspective."