For most of my life, the question “What did Christians do before the Bible?” would have made little sense to me. I had simply assumed that the New Testament was completed during the lifetimes of the apostles and that Christians had always possessed the Bible in something close to its present form.

As I began learning about Church history, however, I realized something I had never considered before: the Church not only existed before the New Testament was completed, but grew, worshiped, evangelized, and defended the faith for generations without a complete Bible. It raised questions for me that I couldn’t easily dismiss. If the Holy Spirit guided the Church during those centuries, what did that mean for everything that came afterward? I found myself wondering why I trusted the early Christians to preserve the faith before the Bible was complete, but not afterward.

In the evangelical environment I grew up in, there was often a hesitancy toward churches that claimed continuity or apostolic succession (Catholic, Orthodox, etc.). That created a kind of cognitive dissonance for me. We were cautious about the authority claims of the historic Church, even while relying on the early Christians who preserved the apostolic faith and ultimately gave us the very Bible on which we now solely relied.

This video from harmony explores some of these questions and helped me think more carefully about what Christianity looked like before the Bible existed as we know it today.