WHAT ELSE COULD 1 TIMOTHY 3:15 MEAN?  

It calls the Church the pillar of truth.  Jesus predicted it in Matthew 16 and 18 and it began at Pentecost.  

Many of the well-known and respected Protestant Biblical scholars say and believe that before there was a complete Bible, there was a Church that existed. 

The Church existed before the Bible was complete!

The Origin of the Bible: A Guide for the Perplexed reflects the Old Testament was not complete in the time of Jesus. If you read pages 87-120, you will see that while there were scriptures in the time of Jesus there was no complete Old Testament canon and debates went over several centuries among the Jews and later even Christians. In the "The Canon Debate: On the Origins and Formation of the Bible" volume you will see the current status of the Old Testament by James Sanders on pages 252-266. The New Testament canon continued also to be debated for centuries (see the article by Harry gamble on pages 267-294, chapter 17.   Read the whole chapters I pointed you to and you will see that there was no completed Bible in the time of Jesus.

Dr. Lee Martin McDonald's book Before There Was a Bible: Authorities in Early Christianity Before There Was a Bible: Authorities in Early Christianity declares that It took centuries for the churches to recognize and receive all of the books that we have in our Bibles.

It was the Church that decided what would be in the Bible. From that point of view, the Church comes before the Bible.

According to a scholarly commentary, The Paulist Biblical Commentary on page 1462:

"Now, in 1 Tim 3:14-16, the next step is taken: the church itself with its episcopal order is proclaimed as "the pillar and bulwark of the truth" (v.15). The church is the "house of God," that is, God temple (cf. 1 Cor 3:16-17; Eph 2:20-22).  The "church of the Living God" (v.15) proclaims and celebrates the "mystery of our religion"...The church is a result of God's will to save, and is the promoter and mediator of God's saving truth." 

The Church is the pillar and foundation of the truth because, before the Bible came, there was a church that existed. That's the point Dei Verbum makes.

Dei Verbum and similar documents also insist, as does Irenaeus, that there is continuity between the preached Gospel and the texts of the New Testament.

"But in order to keep the Gospel forever whole and alive within the Church, the Apostles left bishops as their successors, "handing over" to them "the authority to teach in their own place."(3) This sacred tradition, therefore, and Sacred Scripture of both the Old and New Testaments are like a mirror in which the pilgrim Church on earth looks at God, from whom she has received everything, until she is brought finally to see Him as He is, face to face (see 1 John 3:2)."

See Dei Verbum about the relationship between Church and Scripture. This is a very important document, crafted by a committee in which Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, served.  It shaped many of the subsequent pronouncements by the Pontifical Biblical Commission. It also bore fruit in the papal document Verbum Domini, issued by Benedict XVI around 2008. That is also worth reading and thinking about.

1 Timothy 3:15 clearly identifies the “church of the living God” as the “pillar and bulwark of the truth.” It is using an image that Catholic Christians no doubt agree with and that is also quite compatible with the point made in Dei Verbum. The Church and its preaching of the gospel is the foundation on which the written scriptures rest.  It is also the community within which we read our sacred texts and it is that community context that provides a frame of reference for understanding those texts.

Also, the church and councils recognized which books were being used and named them so as to distinguish them from other works circulating at that time.

“The first councils certainly to speak on the subject of the canon were in North Africa: Hippo (393) and Carthage (397 and 419). They were under the influence of Augustine, who regarded the canon as closed: "For the canon of the sacred writings, which is properly closed" ( Civ. 22.8)” (The Canon Debate, Lee Martin McDonald and James A. Sanders, pp. 319-320)

"In 397 the Council of Carthage confirmed the twentry-seven books of the New Testament canon."(The New Testament in Antiquity: A Survey of the New Testament within Its Cultural Context, Burge, Cohick, and Green, p. 451)

If we examine those books written by Protestant biblical scholars, we will learn a lot. They put the facts in their books because that want to be historically accurate.  

The date of the Council of Carthage that established an early list of the canon of biblical books was August 28, 397.  It was a gathering of Latin-speaking bishops from all over western north Africa, and reaffirmed for the whole North African Church a list already published at the local synod of Hippo in 396.  Ther African councils of the fourth and fifth centuries were important, and have been edited and published by Charles Munier in 1974, as  Codex Canonum Ecclesiae  Africanae (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 149). Chapter 16 of the Synod of Carthage of 397 is the one with the list of Biblical books.