Our Lord said, “The scripture cannot be broken,” and, “The scriptures must be fulfilled.”  The apostle Paul affirms that “all scripture is given by inspiration of God.” This sets the highest standard for that which may be termed scripture. If it is scripture, then it is infallible and absolutely may be trusted as a certain rule for faith, practice and moral instruction.

How do we know which writings of men may be counted as holy Scripture? When the apostle Paul and our Lord spoke of the Scriptures, they were speaking of the writings of the Old Testament. A confession of faith of the Waldenses dated in the year 1120 lists the books we now know as the 66 books of the King James translation of the Bible. John Gill says that the books we recognize as being in the Old Testament “entirely agree with Josephus’s account of them.” (Josephus was a Jewish historian.) A. A. Hodge, a noted Presbyterian theologian, wrote, “That the canon endorsed by Christ is the very canon we now possess we know to an absolute certainty – by the Septuagint translation, made nearly three hundred years before Christ; by the Hebrew Bible, jealously guarded by the Jews from the earliest ages to the present time; from the testimony of Philo and Josephus, the great Jewish writers of the first Christian century; and from the earliest Latin and Syriac translations.” Professor Robert Dick Wilson, perhaps the greatest Hebrew linguist who ever lived, said, “I can affirm that there is not a page of the Old Testament concerning which we need have any doubt. We can be absolutely certain that substantially we have the text of the Old Testament that Christ and the Apostles had, and which was in existence from the beginning.”

If the Old Testament books that Christ called “Scripture” were the same books that we now have in our Bibles, then we may be satisfied and assured that they are indeed worthy to be considered Scripture by us. If Jesus considered them as being Scripture, then that settles the matter.

What about the New Testament? How may we know that those 27 books are to be considered Scripture? Jesus told His apostles, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, . . . teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.” What the apostles taught certainly would be important, but the fact that Jesus said, “I am with you alway,” teaches that the apostles had the full authority of the Master in their teaching. When the apostles spoke, Jesus spoke. He was fully “with them” in their teachings. If the apostles had the least regard for Christ, then they never would have represented as Scripture anything that Christ would not have approved as such. If they had represented as infallible that which could be “broken,” then they would have been guilty of perpetrating a fraud and would have been unworthy of the office that they held and certainly could not have claimed that the Lord was “with them.” Apostolic sanction, then, must be evidence of the validity of a book as Scripture.

Of the 27 books of the New Testament, ten were written by men who were chosen by Christ as His apostles, and we need have no doubt as to their authority since we have a direct transcript of Jesus’ words as He conveyed to them divine authority to complete the text of the Scriptures. (Most scholars I have read consider James and Jude to be included in this number.) Fourteen books were written by the apostle Paul. (I include Hebrews in that group.) How do we know that Paul’s writings are to be regarded as Scripture? The apostle Peter said that unlearned men wrested Paul’s writings “as they do also the other scriptures” (2 Pt. 3.16). This lets us know that Peter considered Paul’s writings to be Scripture, and if they were Scripture, then they were given “by inspiration of God.” That leaves only Mark, Luke and Acts (written by Luke) to be dealt with. Mark and Luke were closely associated with the apostles. The Gospel according to Mark was written by John Mark, whom the apostle Peter referred to as “my son” (1 Pt. 5.13). Luke traveled with the apostle Paul, who certainly would have known of his writings and would have rejected them as Scripture if there had been any doubt about them.