Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 24:3 (Fall 2020)
Article: Discipleship And The History Of The Bible
Author: John D. Meade

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Discipleship And The History Of The Bible

John D. Meade

John D. Meade is Associate Professor of Old Testament and Director of the Text & Canon Institute at Phoenix Seminary, Phoenix, Arizona. He earned his PhD at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky. He is the author of A Critical Edition of the Hexaplaric Fragments of Job 22–42 (Peeters, 2020), and the co-author of The Biblical Canon Lists from Early Christianity: Texts and Analysis (Oxford, 2017). Dr. Meade has presented papers at the Evangelical Theological Society, the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies, and the Society of Biblical Literature, and the International Patristics Conference in Oxford. He is currently writing a book with Peter Gurry on how we got the Bible with Crossway. Dr. Meade and his wife are members of Trinity Bible Church in Phoenix.

On February 21–22, 2020, the Phoenix Seminary Text and Canon Institute (TCI) hosted its first church conference on the history of the Bible in Phoenix, Arizona.1 The scriptures are the foundation to Christian discipleship, and early Christian bishops taught on them accordingly. In his fourth catechetical lecture “On Ten Points of Doctrine,” Cyril of Jerusalem included an entire section on the divine scriptures, instructing new converts on the identity of the canonical books of the Old and New Testament and warning them about other, apocryphal books. The great Augustine in his On Christian Teaching (2.8.12.24) also included a section on the identity of the canonical books as well as principles for the receiving of the scriptures as canon. There was a day when Christians did not know what books were in their canon and the bishops sought to teach them.2 After exhausting research into the Bible’s manuscripts, early theologians like Origen explained that the church had her scriptures because divine Providence had preserved them for her. Though we might disagree with Origen’s conclusion that the scriptures in Greek

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copies are what God preserved for the church, he leaves a sound example of a Christian scholar who leveraged his abilities to give an explanation for why Christians had received their spiritual books and the particular words contained in those books.

We live in a different day but with no fewer, difficult questions. Questions about the origins of the canon have multiplied as we learn more about the early history of the Hebrew canon and the reception of the Old and New Testament by different branches of Christianity (...