How did we get the Bible? What factors led to the canonization of what we now call the New Testament Scriptures?

The Old Testament Scriptures had been accepted for thousands of years before the early church began. The Jewish nation had the Scriptures passed down through time as scribes copied the Old Testament. The Jewish scribe took such care with the copying of the Scriptures to the point that if even one mistake was made, the whole scroll would be thrown out and a new scroll would be started. There was no question as to the validity of the Old Testament Scriptures. “When early Christians spoke of ‘Scripture,’ what they meant was the Hebrew Scriptures, usually in the Greek version known as the Septuagint.”[1] The Jewish nation had been spread throughout the known world because of Hellenism and, as a result, lost much of their heritage and the ability to speak and read Hebrew. It was finally a necessity that the Hebrew Old Testament be translated into Greek, which was the common language of that day. The Septuagint was the result of the Jewish diaspora.

The New Testament had a different road to travel, however. Many heresies arose in the early days of the church, the Gnostics and Marcionites to name two, and proved to be problems for the believers. Marcion made a “first attempt” to put together a New Testament, but Marcion was anti-Jewish and the resulting work was a total and complete Gnostic heresy.[2]
The church responded with an “early” canon of Scripture. The Gospels were widely accepted as Scripture, albeit that some accepted three Gospels and others accepted all four Gospels as “the Fourth Gospel was somewhat slower in gaining universal acceptance.”[3] Next, the books of the Apostles and the Pauline epistles were recognized and the core of the canon was established.[4] The Apostles’ Creed came out of the desire to solidify what the church stood for and against.
The remainder of the New Testament canon would be solidified later on in church history, but the beginnings of the canon started with the confrontation of heresy in the early church.

[1] Justo L. Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity. Volume I: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation (New York, HarperCollins Publishers, 1984), 62.
[2] Justo L. Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity. Volume I: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation (New York, HarperCollins Publishers, 1984), 62.
[3] Justo L. Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity. Volume I: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation (New York, HarperCollins Publishers, 1984), 63.
[4] Justo L. Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity. Volume I: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation (New York, HarperCollins Publishers, 1984), 63.