What came first, the Bible or the Church? (Nov. '01)
As you know, the Holy Bible consists of both the Old and New Testaments. The God-inspired author of the first five books of the Old Testament was the Holy and Glorious Prophet Moses the Godseer who lived around 1355-1235 BC. The book authored by the Holy and Glorious Prophet Malachi (the last book in the Hebrew canon of the Old Testament) was written around 400 BC. And the book of III Maccabees (the last book in the Septuagint Old Testament) was authored in the 1st century BC. Unlike the books of the Old Testament, which originated during a period extending over nearly 1,300 years, all the books of the New Testament were written within a period of somewhat less than 50 years (from AD 49-95). The Bible of the first Christians consisted of the Septuagint version of the Old Testament. Later, as the books which now comprise the New Testament began to appear, a local church might also possess a few of the apostolic Epistles and perhaps one or two of the Gospels. But it was not until the fourth century that the Church, through her bishops, began to issue authoritative pronouncements concerning which books were to be included in the canon of the New Testament and which were not. St. Athanasios the Great, in his Festal Letter of AD 367, was the first to name the twenty-seven books, which we now know as the New Testament, as being exclusively canonical.