Something is said to be authentic when it is recognized to be the real thing. When studying the subject of the canon, a natural question arises: How did God's people recognize the real thing, the authentic word of God? In other words, how did they recognize which books were the canon and which books, though they might be useful and edifying, were not the canon.
God's people were able to recognize the word of God because God's own people recognize the voice of God (John 10:4). This is not to say that any individual believer should be the final testimony about the authenticity of a book; that was the responsibility of the people of God acting as a community. The books inspired by God are self-authenticating; they radiate divine authority, and God's people recognized this in the canonical books.
Having said this, it is an historical fact that there was not always total agreement among individual believers about every book of the Old Testament. For instance, the book of Esther was questioned for a time because it does not directly mention God, and Ecclesiastes was questioned because of its apparent pessimism. When all is said and done, three tests finally confirm the inspiration and, therefore, canonicity of a book.
Prophetic Ministry
The first test of canonicity concerns authorship. The prophets spoke and wrote the word of God for the people of God. So in recognizing a book as canonical, the people would ask: Was the book written by a prophet of God? The books that were written by the true prophets were recognized as the authentic word of God. (See Hebrews 1:1 and 2 Peter 1:19-21.)
The Prompting of God's Spirit
It was the Holy Spirit's ministry to prompt the people of God to recognize God's voice in the words of the prophets. The second test, then, is whether the community of God's people recognized the book to be the word of God. When they did, the book was accepted as canon.
The Statements of Jesus and the New Testament Writers
The final and conclusive test for the Christian is the teaching of Jesus and the New Testament writers. By the first century A.D., when Jesus walked on the earth, the Jewish people recognized as their canon the 39 books of our Old Testament. Jesus endorsed the canon in several ways:
1. Though Jesus disagreed with the Jewish leaders about many other things, he never disputed with them over the canon.
2. He quoted with authority from many books from this canon (for example, Matthew 24:15 and Luke 4:8).
3. Jesus refers to the Scriptures as "the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms" (Luke 24:44-45), referring to the three-fold division of the Scriptures used by the Jews at that time. ("The Psalms" is the first book of the division often called "the Writings.")
4. Jesus described the span of Old Testament history as the time from "the blood of righteous Abel" (recorded in Genesis) to "the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah" (recorded in 2 Chronicles) (Matthew 23:35). If the Old Testament story is told chronologically, it begins with Genesis and ends with the events in 2 Chronicles.
The writers of the New Testament books quote or allude to most of the 39 Old Testament books as authoritative. This is further evidence that they accepted the verdict of the Jewish community that these books were canonical. We can have full confidence that the Old Testament canon, the 39 books of our Old Testament, is the authentic word of God.
