Do you know where your Bible came from?

By Robin Schumacher, Exclusive Columnist Monday, February 16, 2026

Love it or hate it, no book rocks the world like the Bible.

The Guinness World Records organization says,

“The best-selling book of all time is the Christian Bible. It is impossible to know exactly how many copies have been printed in the roughly 1,500 years since its contents were standardized, but research conducted by the British and Foreign Bible Society in 2021 suggests that the total number probably lies between 5 and 7 billion copies.”

Around 80 million copies are sold each year, with it also being the most translated book in the world, available in hundreds of languages. That’s pretty good for something that was written over a period of 1,500 years and is a compilation of 66 individual works (39 in the Old Testament; 27 in the New) by 40 authors.

You don’t hear the word used much anymore, but Scripture is referred to by theologians as the “canon,” which means “measuring rod,” “standard,” and “rule”. The Canon doesn’t just represent the collection of books that passed tests of authenticity and authority, but practically to believers, it also means that those books are our rule of life, both in this world and the next.

If that sounds heavy to you, it should. Betting your life on what a book tells you signifies that you should have a really good understanding of how it came to be and why you should trust it.

Most of us, though, are in the dark on how the Bible came to be.

And here’s the thing: if you don’t have a good handle on that, you’ll be troubled by the peppering comments skeptics will send your way on the Bible’s construction. For example, in his book The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown puts these words in one of his characters’ mouths: “The Bible did not arrive by fax from Heaven … The Bible is the product of man, my dear. Not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book.”

To that, I say Au Contraire.

How the Bible came to be

Allow me to take a stab at a short-and-sweet version of how Scripture was put together. If you want a detailed understanding of the Bible’s compilation, I’ll direct you to Dr. Neil R. Lightfoot’s work, How We Got the Bible: Factual Answers to Questions about the History of the Bible.

When it comes to the Old Testament, Jesus Himself drew the boundaries around the 39 books that makes it up when He said: “From the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who was killed between the altar and the house of God; yes, I tell you, it [judgment] shall be charged against this generation” (Luke 11:51). Abel’s death is found in Genesis and Zechariah’s in 2 Chronicles, which is the last book in the Hebrew Bible.

Moses is credited with writing the first five books of the Old Testament, which were kept in the Ark of the Covenant for a time (Deut. 31:24). Although challenges to their Mosaic authorship have been made, Scripture itself credits Moses as the author (e.g., Mark 12:26) as well as software analysis that’s shown, from a statistical standpoint, the first five books of the Bible were written by a single individual. 

As other books were written and added, Scripture states that David eventually put them in his treasury (1 Kings 8:6), with them being overseen by the Levitical priests (2 Kings 22:8). The Old Testament was scattered during Israel’s exile in the 6th century but was restored by Ezra who added the remaining texts, which were stored in the ark for the second temple and then meticulously copied.

When it comes to the Old Testament’s divine nature, R. C. Sproul is correct when he says:

“Whether the Bible is actually the Word of God comes down to one thing — the matter of Christology”. What he means is, if Jesus is who He claimed to be (and His resurrection proves that He is, Rom. 1:4), then Jesus settles the matter of Old Testament divinity when He makes statements like, “the Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35) and “sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth” (John 17:17).

And answering critics who claim this is circular reasoning, it’s not; it’s linear. If the writers of the New Testament accurately recorded Christ’s words and events, then the conclusions on the Old Testament’s character naturally follow.

Regarding the New Testament, the official list of the 27 books we have today was officially settled at the Council of Carthage in A.D. 397. However, the majority of the New Testament was accepted as authoritative much earlier.

A first attempt at its compilation was made by Marcion of Sinope in A.D. 140, that had Luke’s Gospel and some of Paul’s letters. Then came the Muratorian Canon that contained most of the New Testament books of today. The final New Testament Canon was first identified by the Church father Athanasius in A.D. 367 and ratified 30 years later.

When the Council’s decision was being made as to what books were canonical, the Church used the Latin term recipemus, which means “we receive” vs. “we decide.” This was done to emphasize that they were not making a text authoritative, but rather recognizing the books as authoritative, coming from God.

If the fourth century seems late for that to have happened, you should know that the circulation and confessed authority of the New Testament was much earlier. Just one proof of the New Testament’s early dating exists in writings from early Christian leaders such as Clement (c. A.D. 95), Ignatius (c. A.D. 107), Polycarp (c. A.D. 110), Justin Martyr (c. A.D. 133), and others.

You can reconstruct the entire New Testament from these early church fathers' citations, except for 27 verses, most of which come from 3 John.  

You also have testimony of early recognition even during the writing of the New Testament itself, such as when Peter refers to Paul’s letters as Scripture:

“And regard the patience of our Lord as salvation; just as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given him, wrote to you, as also in all his letters, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which the untaught and unstable distort, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction” (2 Peter 3:15-16, my emphasis).

St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, completed around A.D. 400, is considered one of the first to contain all of the 66 books we have today. Again, there’s more to the story, but I’m out of room for now.

Again, love it or not, Scripture has earned the first-place prize awarded to it by Guinness for importance and published copies of a book. It’s just one small testimony to what Christians already know: “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever” (Is. 40:8).