Note: This is part one of a two-part series on the Antilegomena, or “disputed” books of the Bible. This article examines the books that the rabbis and church fathers narrowly agreed were divinely inspired in the Old and New Testaments, respectively. Part two will look at the books that rabbinic and church authorities narrowly rejected.
Everyone has favorite books of the Bible — and most people have least favorite books, too. So it should come as no surprise that the people who compiled the canons of the Old and New Testaments had their own opinions on the matter.
I’ve written before about how, for the most part, these canons formed organically, based on the most commonly used and agreed-upon books. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t some contention.
In the long (centuries-long, in fact) process of discerning which texts were genuinely inspired by God; which were not inspired, but still spiritually edifying; and which were spurious and even dangerous, both the Old and New Testaments had some close calls. These are known as the antilegomena — Greek for “spoken against,” or “disputed” — and this is their story.
Or rather, the first half of the story — the books that ultimately got included, by the skin of their teeth. Stay tuned for the second half — the books that almost made it into the Bible — coming soon.
The Establishment of Biblical Canon
The Bible didn’t spring out fully formed, plopped into the lap of the temple authorities or apostles. That’s not God’s way. (This is the God who made the universe gradually, over seven “days,” and who came to earth as a baby and lived and grew and wandered about for 30 years before he began his ministry.)
What we now know as the Bible developed gradually, over many centuries, and required faithful Jews and Christians to carefully analyze and determine which books qualified for inclusion in Holy Scripture — even, in some cases, when they wished they didn’t!
The Old Testament Canon
With a few exceptions, such as the five books of the Torah and Jeremiah/Lamentations, each book of the Old Testament was written by a different author (sometimes several authors), sometimes hundreds of years apart from one another (roughly 1400-400 BC, though many of these dates are disputed).
Over time these books (or scrolls) became unified into a canon: a widely agreed-upon collection of writings deemed to be inspired by God. In the case of the Old Testament, this matter had been largely settled by the time of Jesus, though in (at least) two different forms.
Jews in the Holy Land, who spoke Aramaic and could still read Hebrew, used all of the books now contained in Protestant Old Testaments.
Outside of Judaea, Greek-speaking Jews across the Roman empire relied upon the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that also contained a variety of books written in the intervening (“intertestamental”) period. These became known as the Apocrypha or Deuterocanon, and are included in Catholic, Orthodox, and some Lutheran and Anglican Bibles, but not used today by Jews or most Protestants.
The New Testament Canon
The books of the New Testament were compiled in a much shorter time frame than the Old Testament. The earliest books were written down around 50 AD, and they were mostly all completed by the early 2nd century.
In those early years after Jesus’s resurrection, most Christians passed on the Gospel orally, or occasionally through letters (many of which made their way into the New Testament). It wasn’t until later, as the first generation of apostles passed away, larger communities started to form, and believers began to realize it could be a long wait until Christ’s second coming, that they began compiling these stories and letters into books (or codexes) to preserve them for the long haul.
When deciding what to include, there were some disagreements (that lasted for decades or even centuries), but they ultimately played it safe, falling back on two primary criteria: 1) whether the book could be plausibly connected to a disciple of Jesus who knew him directly (even, in the case of Paul, post-resurrection); and 2) which books were most widely in use by church communities throughout Christendom. This wasn’t a simple popularity contest: if the Spirit was leading these communities, they reasoned, it would lead them generally to the same core texts.
There were, however, some texts that many Christians — bishops, priests, and theologians — did not want to include, for various reasons. And there were some they thought were very useful for personal study, even if they didn’t qualify for inclusion in the Bible — just as we believe today.
Books That Barely Made It Into the Old Testament
By the time of Jesus, the Old Testament was well established — but there were still a few books that that the rabbis were suspicious of, and only grudgingly included. These include Esther, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, and surprisingly, Ezekiel.
Esther
One of the most hotly contested books both by the rabbis and, much later, by the Protestant Reformers, Esther almost wasn’t included in the Old Testament for one reason above all: it is the only book in the entire Bible that never once mentions God. There was also some doubt about the historical veracity of the story, which didn’t line up with other historical records.
Despite these concerns, the rabbis of the Great Assembly of the Second Temple period (post-Babylonian exile) ultimately determined Esther was worth including as an undeniably powerful narrative of cultural unity in the face of injustice and oppression.
Ecclesiastes
Ecclesiastes paints a stark picture of reality as being fundamentally hevel — a Hebrew term usually translated as “vanity,” “futility,” or “meaningless,” but most literally meaning vapor or smoke. Some authorities worried this borderline-nihilistic perspective would confuse or corrupt readers.
In the end they chose to include it — perhaps because they saw in it, as in Job, an acknowledgment of the inscrutability of God’s will in the face of real human suffering. It remains a book that believers are both powerfully drawn to and sometimes disturbed by.
Song of Songs
Why is there an (at times shockingly explicit) erotic love poem in the middle of the Bible? Jewish and Christian interpreters have wrestled with that question in many different ways.
Some have found in the Song of Songs an allegory for God and Israel, or Christ and the Church, or the Spirit and our souls. More recent interpreters have chosen to interpret it more straightforwardly as an affirmation of romantic yearning and sexual union in human relationships.
It’s easy to see why rabbinical and church authorities were uncomfortable with it — but also easy to see how its rich layers of meaning demanded it finally be included.
Ezekiel
Although Ezekiel was less controversial than the other books in this section, some of the rabbis were suspicious of it because the temple rituals the prophet describes are sometimes at odds with Mosaic law.
There was also — among both Jewish and Christian authorities — some discomfort with the wildly strange imagery of burning wheels and many-eyed beasts. In what would become a pattern for these sorts of apocalypse books, they were concerned about the mystical speculation such outlandish themes might inspire. And not without justification: many apocalyptic sects drew on just these sorts of passages to justify their theologies.
Nevertheless, they acknowledged that Ezekiel’s visions were genuine, and that we would simply have to wait until the “Day of the Lord” to reconcile such concerns.
Books That Barely Made It Into the New Testament
Despite its shorter length and smaller collection of books, there was even greater dispute over what to include in the New Testament — perhaps because there wasn’t a unified authority to make such decisions until centuries after the Resurrection. Most of the “catholic epistles” (i.e., the ones not by Paul) were debated — and Revelation most of all.
Hebrews
As I mentioned above, one of the core criteria for canonical inclusion in the New Testament ended up being association with a named apostolic authority. Early church fathers were therefore hesitant to include Hebrews because of its anonymity.
There was an early tradition of Pauline authorship, but it was widely disputed from the beginning, and today almost no one believes Hebrews to have been written by Paul. Many other possibilities have been suggested, including Priscilla, Apollos, and Barnabas, but none have proved thoroughly convincing.
Nevertheless the letter’s carefully constructed and sound theology earned its inclusion by the fourth century AD.
James
The Epistle of James doesn’t appear in many of the earliest sources, and some of the later church fathers were skeptical of its authenticity. Still, enough believed its authenticity was possible — and were understandably concerned about leaving it out if was indeed by Jesus’s own brother — that it became increasingly accepted as time went on.
Jude
In some ways opposite to James, Jude was commonly accepted by early fathers like Clement, Tertullian, and the Muratorian fragment (the first full list of New Testament canon). But it garnered controversy due to a particular problem: its reliance on the Book of Enoch, which had been rejected from Old Testament canon and even from the Apocrypha.
Enoch described the fall of the angels and their coupling with human women, producing the Nephilim mentioned in Genesis. Despite its formal exclusion from canon, Enoch was immensely popular in the time of Jesus and informed some of the religious thought of the time; indeed, Paul seems to allude to it in 1 Corinthians 11:10. Jude, however, quotes it directly in verses 14-15 and references it throughout.
2 Peter
Second Peter is a curious case because it is stylistically quite different from 1 Peter and features a large amount of overlapping content with the Letter of Jude. Even so, it was never rejected by the fathers (even if some were a bit puzzled by it), and was formally included by Jerome in his Vulgate translation.
2 and 3 John
The first letter of John was never disputed, but there were some initial doubts in the Eastern Church about the second letter, and more about the third. The Latin West accepted them as being from the same apostle, however, so the Eastern Church soon followed suit.
Revelation
Of all the books in the New Testament, Revelation was by far the most contentious, and even to this day is rejected by some Eastern churches, at least for liturgical use. In general (which is to say, as an oversimplification), it caught on more quickly in the Latin West than in the Greek and Syriac East — but there appears to have been a lot of back-and-forth about it until at least the 5th century.
For example, Eusebius (the church historian who chronicled these matters in depth and was a major source for this article) said around 330 AD that Revelation was both accepted and disputed. Various church fathers, councils, and synods either listed or omitted it from their canons throughout the next few centuries.
The hesitation appears to have been caused by a combination of factors, including the vastly different writing styles of this John from the John of either the Gospel or the Epistles — suggesting this was not the apostle John and therefore not able to be trusted, at least as the Word of God (though many fathers who rejected it as canon still believed it was inspired).
There was also the concern, as with Enoch and even Ezekiel before it, that Revelation’s wild imagery and dense symbolism would cause dangerous theological error — as indeed it did, encouraging some such as Montanus to believe the age of prophecy was not yet ended and that individual revelations from the Holy Spirit could supersede Scripture.
Even today the meaning of Revelation and how it should be interpreted is hotly debated among Christians the world over.
Martin Luther’s Antilegomena: Books That Were Almost Removed from the New Testament
Although the New Testament canon had been almost universally established for a millennium before the Protestant Revolution, it was (perhaps amazingly) never formally codified by the Church until the Council of Trent in 1546 — as a direct response to the Reformation.
That gave the reformers an opportunity to reevaluate the authenticity of the canon.
The obvious result of that analysis was the removal of the Deuterocanonical books from most Protestant Bibles (or at least their relocation to the end of the Old Testament, rather than mixed in throughout), since they were not part of the Hebrew Bible affirmed by Rabbinical Judaism. Outside of that major change, they were much more cautious, accepting both the Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament as they had been passed down.
Still, that doesn’t mean they had no opinion on the matter, and Martin Luther in particular — never one to mince words — was sure to make them clear.
There were four books Luther clearly wished he could remove from canon, even if he reluctantly admitted he could not. The list should look familiar:
- Hebrews: Luther had relatively little to say about the Letter to the Hebrews, but was skeptical of its apostolic origins and theological value.
- James: In this preface to the Epistle of James, Luther claimed the book was “rejected by the ancients” — not true, though it was disputed, as we have seen. Nevertheless he also claimed to consider it a “good book,” despite then going on to disparage it as “not apostolic” and declare that it “mangles the Scripture,” opposes Paul with its works-righteousness theology, and nowhere mentions the Passion. Later in life Luther went even farther in his antipathy, reportedly saying he would like to “throw Jimmy in the stove.”
- Jude: Luther again claimed the fathers did not include Jude in Scripture, in this case because it was “undeniably” copied from 2 Peter and “speaks of the apostles like a disciple.” Today, most scholars believe Jude predates 2 Peter (though they do share much of their content).
- Revelation: Luther notoriously despised Revelation. He wrote in his preface that the book was “neither apostolic nor prophetic.” He disdained its reliance on “images and visions,” found the book’s praise for itself (Rev. 22:18-19) suspicious — especially considering how difficult the book’s teachings are to follow — and ultimately decided that “Christ is neither taught nor known in it.”
Despite these characteristically strong and caustic opinions, Luther begrudgingly acknowledged the canonical status of all these books and did include them in his German New Testament — though he did in fact place them in a separate section at the end of his translation, just as he did with the Old Testament Apocrypha.
Conclusion: Wrestling With the Scriptures
As you can see, there was a lot of controversy around which books made it into the Bible in its final form — both the Old Testament and the New. In both cases, the main parts of these decisions took hundreds of years to establish with finality, not reaching fully consistent conclusions until nearly the time of Christ for the Old Testament, and the mid-4th century for the New Testament.
Even then, scholars of deep faith, such as Luther and Calvin, continued to consider and reconsider the canon, making major changes to long-established custom when they removed the Deuterocanon in the 16th century. In some ways those debates persist to this day.
What are we to make of this? Well, I’ll have some more thoughts in Part II of this look at the Antilegomena — but for now I’d like to reflect on just how much God wants to be in conversation and relationship with us — and us with each other. God could have sent the entire Bible all at once (or at least twice, once for each Testament) to one or two people, and there would never have been these centuries of arguments and anxiety around what authentically qualified as Scripture.
But he didn’t. Instead he gradually guided (and guides) not just the writers but the readers, translators, and compilers of the Scriptures, as though asking us to wrestle with them like Jacob in the wilderness and work them out, with fear and trembling, together. Perhaps that’s (in part) what it means for the Scriptures to be alive — because you can’t be in relationship with something static.
Stay tuned for Part II of the Antilegomena, “Books That Almost Made It Into the Bible.” If you want to learn more about the history and content of these and every other book of the Bible, you can try Bible Gateway Plus free for 14 days and get access to dozens of top resources for studying the Bible and deepening your relationship with God’s Word.
Jacob is Editorial Director of Bible Gateway. He holds a Master of Theological Studies in Early Christian Thought from Harvard Divinity School, and a Bachelor of Arts in Religious History from Memorial University of Newfoundland, though with most of his coursework from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. His work has appeared in Ekstasis and in Geez Magazine's "Embracing Darkness" Advent devotional.