The Bible has long been a central part of the Christian faith. We read it each week in worship, we listen to a message based on its teachings, and we hear segments of it read at weddings and funerals. It can be hard to imagine what Christianity would be like without the gospels or the letters, but for the early Christians that was a reality.

For almost 400 years Christian worshiped, lived, celebrated, and praised God without the Bible. The books we know as the bible were not “dropped from the heavens” in one complete volume written neatly in the King’s English. More than 1,500 years separate the writing of Genesis and the writing of the Book of Revelation. Additionally, no letter or gospel in the New Testament was written until at least 45 A.D., with many not being written until after 70 A.D. It wasn’t until 397 A.D., close to 400 years after the death of Christ, that the list of books we know as the New Testament was officially canonized as part of the Bible.

Many Christians would have lived and died without ever reading or even knowing about the New Testament. This makes you wonder how they could be Christians without the Bible.

The answer is fairly simple: they learned from the people that wrote the Bible or from people that learned from those early apostles.

In the same way as we listen to sermons today, early Christians would listen to teachings too. However, their teachings may not have been based on texts as much as oral teachings. Their teachers were connected with someone who learned directly from Jesus.

We know from various writings of the time that early Christians practiced their faith much as we do today. They had moments of teachings, shared communion, sang hymns, prayed, and practiced baptism. They would occasionally read scripture, but only from what we would call the Old Testament. Eventually they began to read the letters of Paul and the other apostles aloud, but it was many years until these letters were accepted as part of scripture.

In fact, when Paul talks about the scripture in 2 Timothy 3:16-17, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work,” he wasn’t referring to the New Testament. Much of it wasn’t even written yet! The scripture he was referring to was what we would call the Old Testament.

So, while it might be foreign to us to practice our faith without the Bible, those early Christians, who still had the authors of the letters and Gospels to teach them, were able to practice their faith even without a reading from the gospels on Sunday morning.