Jesus Trusted His Hebrew Canon — Why Can’t Christians Trust Their Christian Canon?

by Anthony F. Buzzard

I trust the New Testament canon because Jesus trusted the Old Testament canon.

First of all, Jesus said, “These are the words I spoke to you while I was still with you. Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses [the first five books], the Prophets, and then the third division of the Old Testament.” (Luke 24:44)

We have, as our public must understand, exactly the same books in the Old Testament as Jesus said, except they’re in a different order. So the order doesn’t really matter, but that is the canon of Scripture from Jesus.

Now I’m arguing from that canon as "Old Testament" to the fact that you must logically have a "New Testament" canon. Jesus then is our model; he believed in a canon of Scripture. So are we going to say then that God gave us the canon of Scripture in the Old Testament, but tough luck—he didn’t give us a canon in the New?

That would be absolutely incredible.

So he must have given us a canon of the New Testament. And so Jesus spoke the words of the New Covenant, which are recorded in the New Covenant Scriptures, and Peter spoke of Paul’s writings as Scripture. Do you remember that one?

I don’t have to worry about the New Testament canon. The fact that some people didn’t like some of the books in the canon—for example, letter to the Hebrews or Revelation of John—the fact is, it’s right there. God absolutely required it, and He saw to it that we’ve got a new canon, a New Testament canon. Without that, how can we be judged by the words of God?

We’re all going to be judged by Scripture. If there’s no Scripture to judge us by, the whole thing is finished. And if we don’t have Scripture, there’s no Christianity.

There’s no "faith once and for all delivered to the saints." In Jude we find that we are all urged to search diligently for that one faith. If you say, “Well, where’s the faith?”—hopeless.

You have to assume on those statements that the faith once delivered is available, and sure it is. It’s available in the canon of Scripture, Old Covenant and New, which God has given us graciously.