Lesson 11: Defining and Defending the Canon, Part 1

Okay, so if you are here for the first time or if you don't have one of these workbooks with you, we have a few extra ones here, so raise your hand if you need one of these or two of these,

I'll bring them to you. Oh, Rick will bring them to you. You just raise your hand. So if you need a workbook, raise your hand.

We have one over here. All right, let's begin with a word of prayer before we begin.

Oh Father, we are so grateful for your word. We know that you have worked in history and through your people and through all of your providence to deliver to us your inspired, infallible, and inerrant word.

It is trustworthy, it is true, it is light to our souls and to our hearts, and we just thank you that we can have the confidence in your word and that you have preserved it for us.

We pray that you would help us today to think clearly about how it is that you have preserved that for us, as that you would use this time and our study and this lesson to instill in us the confidence that we ought to have in your truth and to worship you accordingly and that we would love you accordingly and submit our lives to the truth of your word accordingly.

May you be honored here today as we study and think and be glorified here through this time of teaching, we pray in Christ's name, amen.

All right, we're going through the study of God wrote a book. I announced last week that we would be resuming that. We have divided that study that you find there in your notebook into three different sections.

The first section dealt with basically the theology of scripture where we covered, and this was the doctrinal section where we covered the doctrine of inspiration and inerrancy and infallibility and what those mean as well as the promises in scripture that God has given to us that he would preserve his word.

And it's not that we question if God has spoken, we don't question whether or not scripture is the word of God, it is the word of God.

We're not defending any of that in this series of lessons that I've been teaching. Instead, what we're really doing is assuming that God has spoken and then we're answering the question, how has he preserved scripture for us over the last 2 ,000 years?

Since God has spoken, not if God has spoken, but since God has spoken, how has he preserved, how has he worked to preserve his word?

And how has he given us the scripture? And then we looked a little bit at the structure of scripture and the writing styles and materials.

This was kind of the second set of sessions that we did which really dealt with the structural or the textual issues of the

New Testament. We looked at the structure of scripture, how it is divided into Old Covenant and New Covenant. We looked at the different writing styles of scribes and people who transmitted and copied scripture for us.

And then we looked at the books that were written and how they were written and copied and eventually circulated and circulated widely.

And we understand that when God makes a covenant with his people, he gives to them a revelation that accompanies that covenant.

We saw that with the Old Covenant in the Old Testament. And so we have reason to expect that if there's going to be a

New Covenant, if God has inaugurated or initiated a New Covenant, that that New Covenant would also be accompanied with a section of covenantal writings which we call the

New Testament. And then we looked at the doctrines of apostolic authority. We saw that the apostles were the vehicles of divine revelation and their writings were treated and read and used as if they were authoritative in the very word of God.

And thus apostolic writings were cherished and collected and copied and then circulated. And then in that second section that dealing with textual issues, we covered textual variants, the inevitability of them, the types of variants that were made, mistakes that were made in the copying process.

And then of course through all of that, we asked the question, has God preserved his word even in spite of the various copying mistakes that were made and the different textual variants that were made?

And the answer to that of course is yes, he's did that through widespread circulation, the sheer number of the volume of copies that were made and the rapid distribution of those documents across the wide geographical area.

And then we looked at an example of that which was the Dead Sea Scrolls and we saw how God had preserved that and that discovery, how it shines the light on the preservation accuracy of the

Old Testament. So that's where we've come so far and those are the two major sections of the study that we've looked at so far, the doctrinal section and the textual section dealing with the textual transmission of the

New Testament. And now we come to the third one which is the canonical section dealing with canonical issues of the

New Testament. And I apologize that we've had sort of breaks between these three sections.

The last time we were in this study, we were, that was before Thanksgiving so it has been a little bit a while, it's been a couple of months that I haven't been teaching this but Lord willing we have five to seven depending on how this works out, lessons in the last part of this and then we'll be done with this study.

So we are in lesson 11 in your notebook, lesson 11, defending or defining and defending the canon of scripture.

This section, so in your notebook, find your spot there if you can. Find my notes.

Lesson 11, defining and defending the canon. Now some of you are probably wondering what is a canon? Is it a big metal thing that they put on pirate ships that shoots large caliber ammunition with black powder?

What is a canon? It's not that, how many of you know what I mean when I use the phrase the canon of scripture?

How many of you understand what I mean by that? Pretty good, pretty good cross section there.

Or when we talk about something being a non -canonical book or a canonical book.

Or when we use the reference or the phrase the canon is closed and not open. We're talking about, it's a theological term that we're using, we refer to the canon of scripture.

And this introduces us to a subject that most Christians simply don't give a lot of thought to and unfortunately the enemy uses this to attack us frequently.

In fact, years ago, do you remember the Da Vinci Code when that came out? How many of you saw the movie,

The Da Vinci Code? Okay, a couple people. Nobody, nobody else, just a couple people?

Okay, good, about half a dozen. It's not a sin to say you saw that. I almost watched it for research purposes.

But several years ago when The Da Vinci Code book came out, the allegations or charges that were made in The Da Vinci Code were really designed to capitalize on the ignorance of both

Christian and non -Christians in the area of biblical canonicity and how we got the

New Testament. So a lot of the allegations that were made and the charges about secret councils of bishops that approved certain books and disapproved of other books and that brought in and got rid of teachings that they didn't like out of the

Gospels and purged the Gospels of those and some grand conspiracy. It was great fiction. I used to tell people, it might make good fiction, but it's like the

Piercing the Darkness or This Present Darkness, Frank Peretti's novels. They might make good fiction, but they're horrible theology. Same thing with The Da Vinci Code.

The Da Vinci Code really capitalized on the ignorance of Christians on this biblical issue of canonicity. How many of you have heard of the

Gospel of Thomas? Probably a lot of you. The Gospel of Judas, the

Gospel of Peter. Do you realize that there are more Gospels than just the four Gospels in your New Testament?

There are more Gospels than just those four that were written? How do we know, and this is, or let me ask you another question.

How many of you have heard reference to the lost books of the Bible? Lost books of the Bible. About every,

I don't know, year, 18 months, two years or something, National Enquirer will run that old headline, right?

New lost books of the Bible found. And they're usually referring to some Gnostic Gospel or some pseudepigraphal work of the early church.

And they refer to these as the lost books of the Bible. So here's the question that we're gonna be addressing this week and next week,

Lord willing. How do we know that our Bible contains all that it should have in it? We should give some thought to these questions.

How do we know that our Bible contains all that it should have in it? Are there lost books of the Bible? What about the lost books of the

Bible? What about the Gospel of Thomas and Peter and the Gospel of Judas? What about the other religious books that were written around the same time as the

New Testament? Who decided which books belong in the Bible and why? And was there some grand conspiracy involved in the selection of the books that we have today?

Why do we accept these 66 books, 39 in the Old Testament, 27 in the New Testament, why do we accept those 66 books and not the other books that might compete to be included in our

New Testament? Really, dozens of others that might compete to be in our New Testament.

Why do we trust only a few men who lived hundreds of years after the apostles to decide which books belong in the

Bible? It's a good question, isn't it? Why do we trust a few men who lived hundreds of years after the apostles to decide which books belong in the

Bible? And why would they have made that choice? And on what criteria would they have made that choice?

What are the criteria that they used to determine this? Now, I wanna tell you if any of those questions has shaken you or caused you to say to yourself, yeah, that's a good question, why did we do that?

How did that happen? I want you to understand that even in asking the questions that way, I'm not gonna answer those questions right now, but I want you to understand that even in asking the questions that way,

I have front end loaded, I have preloaded a whole bunch of presuppositions into the question itself.

Things that I have assumed to be true even in asking the question. The presuppositions are bad. For instance, why don't you

Christians accept the lost books of the Bible? What is the presupposition behind that question? That there are lost books of the

Bible, right? That there are books that were once in the Bible that were since taken out or lost to history.

That's the assumption behind the question, right? Why should we trust a few men who lived hundreds of years after the apostles to determine, trust them to determine which books belonged in the

Bible and which books didn't belong in the Bible? Can anybody identify the presupposition that I front end loaded into that question?

What's that? Just trust? Haven't I presupposed that that decision was made hundreds of years after the books were written and not when the books were written?

Just in asking the question? I presupposed that that process took hundreds of years and that nobody knew which books belonged in the

Bible or out of the Bible until hundreds of years had passed. I've also presupposed in asking that question that there was actually a small group of people who made that determination and not the entire church that made that determination.

See, so sometimes even in asking the question or raising the objection, you have to look at what is behind, what's the presupposition behind the objection that the people are raising there?

And is that biblically or historically accurate or true? Well, that's what we're gonna look at today. So I'm gonna give you just a general overview of this subject matter and I think it's gonna take,

I'm certain it's gonna take two weeks to do this. But I'm just gonna be giving you, I'm gonna try and keep you out of what

I call the chloroform layer of this subject matter which is where we get up into something that all of us fall asleep, including the person who's presenting it.

So I'm gonna keep it out of the chloroform layer into something that's really simple and easy for us to digest and to understand and to kind of present a very basic approach to this issue of canonicity.

If you wanna dive deeper into this, I recommend a few books. And eventually at some point in the next five to seven weeks

I'm gonna put together a list of resources on all of the subject matter that I would recommend. It's not yet in your notebook, but you could put it in there if you wanted to keep it.

But The Canon of Scripture by F .F. Bruce is a good one. F .F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture. From God to Us by Norman Geisler and William Nix kind of gives a good overview of some of the issues that were gonna be addressed in a bit more detail.

And then I would recommend, there's two separate books by a man named Michael Kruger, and I think, and his last name is spelled

K -R -U -G -E -R, Kruger, Michael Kruger. Anything by Michael Kruger on this subject is worth whatever you have to spend in order to get the book.

So he has two books on this subject that I can find. Canon Revisited, Canon, C -A -N -O -N, not

N -N -O -N. Canon Revisited, and the second book, The Question of Canon. Both of those by Michael Kruger, K -R -U -G -E -R.

There's also a course that he teaches if you want a bit more detail. And there's a course he teaches that is available on Credo Courses, C -R -E -D -O

Courses. I got it for free, and I downloaded the whole thing and I'm listening to it.

If you can get on there, I'm not sure what they charge for. It's a video and audio course with curriculum, 50, 60 bucks, something like that.

But if you get on Credo's list, eventually you'll sometimes get emails for free courses.

I happen to pick his up for free. And I don't even know what the name of the course is, but just look for Michael Kruger. I think he's one of the best people on this subject.

A good, solid reformed guy, doctrinally sound. He deals with issues of canonicity. All right, let's define the word canon.

This is number one. After all of that introduction, this is number one. What do we mean when we speak of canon? The Greek word is kanon.

And the Greek word kanon meant a rule or a ruler or a rod. And not a ruler in the sense of one who rules over men, a potentate, but a ruler in the sense of something that you would use as a measuring stick or a rod by which you might measure something.

The Hebrew word kanah is meant a measuring rod. So it was a rod, a kanon was a rod, especially a straight rod used as a rule or a ruler to measure something.

Think in terms of your yardstick or your tape measure or a ruler. We use the word ruler, right?

That's what the word kanon meant. It came to be used, that word came to be used in a figurative sense in the early church.

For instance, we find the word, that Greek word in Galatians 6, 16, where Paul says, and those who walk by this rule, this kanon, peace and mercy be upon them and upon the

Israel of God. And there Paul is talking about a standard or the ruler or the measure, those who walk by this measure or by this rule.

So that word was used then in the early church figuratively to describe the standard by which one would walk.

If you wanted to measure something, you say, how long is that? Don't you have to have some standard? You have to have some unit of measurement, right?

By which you might know if this pulpit is two feet wide or 22 inches wide or three feet wide. If I say this is eight feet wide, doesn't that presuppose that there is some unit of measure, some standard by which we could put eight of these one foot units next to here and see if it truly is an eight foot wide pulpit?

Right, that's the idea of a ruler. It's the standard of measure. And so it was used that way. And so the definition in terms of New Testament books is the list of writings acknowledged by the church as documents of the divine revelation.

That's F .F. Bruce's definition. The list of the writings acknowledged by the church as documents of the divine revelation.

And so when we speak of the canon of scripture, that's what we're talking about, the list of authoritative books. So you say, why would the word canon come to be used of a list of things?

Or why would the word ruler be used as a list of things? There's sort of a double meaning to this word when we speak of the canon of scripture.

The word was first used in this sense by Athanasius, who was the Bishop of Alexandria in 367

A .D. He referred to the rule or the ruler, the canon of scripture. So canon in Greek or the canon in Greek would have a series of marks like a modern day ruler.

Doesn't your modern day ruler have a series of marks on it? Right, 1 16th, 1 8th, 3 16ths, 1 quarter, and that's as far as I can go from memory.

Okay, doesn't it have a series, a list of marks on your ruler? Well, if you stood that upright and you used that marks as a series, a mark, or a series of marks, it came to be used of a list.

That's a list of marks. And so that series of marks could be used as a list. And so canon came to be used to refer in the general sense to any series or list of things.

That is the sense in which it's used when we speak of the canon of scripture. When we talk about the canon of scripture, we're talking about a series or a list of what?

Of scripture, of the books that we consider to be inspired. That's the canon. So on our list, there are 66 marks to our canon.

There are 66 hash marks, and we put Genesis through Revelation on those 66 marks. That's what we refer to as the canon of scripture, that list of books that we consider to be authoritative.

And eventually, that word, canon, came to be used of scripture as a whole so that we refer to scripture as the canon.

So when we talk about what is the canon of your religious faith, we would say the scripture is the canon.

Genesis through Revelation, that book is our canon. It's the rule by which we measure life and godliness. It's the rule by which we determine what is true and right, what is revealed, what is false, et cetera.

That's the ruler. That's the standard. It's also the list of books that we include as given by divine revelation.

That becomes the rule. That becomes the list, our 66 books. Now, if you ask a Mormon, what is your canon of scripture, what would they say?

They have a different canon, don't they? Instead, they have a Bible, King James Bible, so far as it's translated accurately.

They always have to put that on there. There's never a worry about Doctrine and Covenants of Pearl of Great Price being translated accurately, but they would include scripture as part of the canon, but they would also have to include the later revelations, quote -unquote, later revelations of Jesus Christ, which would be the

Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price. Was there a fourth one? Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price. No?

Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price. Anyway, you get the idea. They have a different canon than we do, a different list of authoritative documents.

So we have a certain list of authoritative documents, so when we speak of the canon of scripture, we are using it really in two ways.

We are saying, first, this is our list of authoritative documents. Second, we are saying that scripture itself is the standard by which we measure everything else.

So when we call scripture the canon, we're saying it is the unit of measurement, it is the yardstick, it is the ruler, it determines, we put everything up against that to see how does it measure up.

Scripture then becomes the authority by which we measure all other things in the same way that a ruler becomes the authority by which we measure the length of something.

Does that make sense? Okay, so we're using, canon has sort of a double meaning there depending on how we're using it, but it always refers to scripture.

So it refers to the list of books as well as the fact that scripture itself is the measuring rod by which we measure everything else.

Now, there were three concerns in the early church which led to the need to officially recognize which of the writings the early church determined to be or the early church regarded as authoritative.

And there were three different types of concerns. Letter A, this is number two, theological concerns.

Letter B is ecclesiastical concerns and then C is political concerns. And I think this is going to absorb the rest of our time here today.

Before we get on to this section, are there any questions that you have regarding what we mean when we refer to the word canon?

Yes, Cornell. Book of Mormon, yes, that was it.

Nobody else said that. Everybody look around at me like I was stupid for even suggesting there was a fourth one. Yes, Book of Mormon.

I don't know how I forgot that one. Let's speak to the Mormon church, it's understandable. All right, are there any other questions or comments that don't make me look stupid?

Any questions or comments that I can leverage into making myself look intelligent? No? Okay. Number two, the need to define the canon.

Did you have something you wanted to say publicly or are you just going to laugh at me, that's it? Okay, first, theological concerns.

There was, after the time of the apostles, and let's say, no, we can actually say that during the time of the apostles, there began to be writings, there came to be writings that claimed to be apostolic in origin.

Can you think of an example, even during the New Testament, of that?

Paul said to the Thessalonians, is it in 2 Thessalonians?

Do not be alarmed about what you have heard as if, in a letter from us, he refers to a letter that somebody had sent to the

Thessalonian church that had talked about the day of the Lord, and Paul, that seems to suggest that there were writings out there that were being sent to Christians under Paul's authority, as this came from Paul, but they weren't really apostolic, they didn't come from Paul.

We certainly know that after the, toward the end of the first century, and after the end of the first century, 100 AD, that there were writings that began to circulate that were false writings, written by people who claimed to be apostles, and claimed to be prophets, and these writings began to circulate amongst heretical groups, and there's an excellent early church example of this in a man who is known as Marcion, Marcion, M -A -R -C -I -O -N, and in order to appreciate the problem that the early church faced, or the difficulty that the early church faced, you just have to study a little bit about the life and the ministry of Marcion.

He was born in 100 AD at Sinope, and he was a huge fan of the

Apostle Paul, huge fan of the Apostle Paul. Paul was his man crush, so anything that Paul wrote, anything that Paul said, anything that Paul believed,

Marcion was all in on the Apostle Paul, and he ultimately concluded that Paul was the only apostle who accurately communicated the truth that Jesus delivered, and that Paul was the only apostle who preserved the teaching of Jesus in its purity.

Marcion is the first person that we know of who published a fixed collection of what he called

New Testament books. Now, let me be clear, Marcion is not the first person to publish a list of New Testament books.

Marcion is the first person that we know of who published an official list of New Testament books.

So what did Marcion, we're gonna return to that here in just a moment. What did Marcion teach? Here were some of Marcion's teachings. He believed that not only the

Old Testament law, but that the entire Old Testament itself had been superseded by the gospel, and that the gospel was something that was completely new, not something foreshadowed or pictured or even promised under the old covenant in the

Old Testament, that the gospel itself and the teaching of Jesus was something entirely new, as if God took the entire

Old Testament and that old covenant, and he just wiped it away, it had no meaning, he just started from scratch something entirely new.

So we would say that the New Testament is really the fulfillment of the old, that the old foreshadows and portends the new, and that the new really is the fulfillment of that and the accomplishment and the zenith of all of that, the conclusion of it.

Marcion would have said the gospel is something entirely new, so all the Old Testament needs to be ditched. He would say, and he taught, that the law and the prophets made no preparation for Christ whatsoever, but that anything in Paul's writings that might suggest any kind of Old Testament origin for a

New Testament teaching, that anything in Paul's writings that suggested a connection to the Old Testament must have been added by a legalistic

Judaizer who was trying to corrupt Paul's writings. So he maintained that all of the other apostles, all of them, all corrupted the teachings of Jesus by adding admixtures of legalism into the teachings of Jesus, and he distinguished between the

God of the New Testament and the God of the Old Testament, saying that they were two different deities with independent existence, that the

God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament were two independent and separate deities with independent existences.

So he would say, well, it was the God of the Old Testament. That's not the same as the God of the New Testament. That's a modern -day, there's a modern -day form of Marcionism that kind of teaches the same thing.

I've heard people say that. You can't trust the God of the Old Testament stuff. You got it all wrong. God and the God of Jesus, Jesus came and accurately communicated to us the truth, and that had nothing to do with anything, any of the

God of the Old Testament. So Marcion, because of his view of Judaism and the Old Testament scriptures and the

Old Covenant, he would have said, to borrow the vernacular of a modern false teacher, that we needed to unhitch the

Old Testament from the New Testament. That's Andy Stanley's language. That's a form of Marcionism, that we just need to just unhitch and disregard all of the

Old Testament. We just have the New Testament. That's Marcionism. Marcionism was an early form of Gnosticism.

Gnosticism believed that the God who created the material world was different from the God with whom Jesus spoke, and the God of Jesus was good and kind and merciful and gracious and willing to forgive, and the

God of the Old Testament was a different God, an angry, vengeful, almost a pagan deity.

So whatever happened to Marcion? Now Marcion cropped up in the New Church, and you can imagine that he would instantly find common ground with a lot of Christians in the first century.

Why? Paul's my man, right? You're gonna find almost a ready audience amongst

Gentiles for this idea that we need to forget the Jews, forget the Old Covenant. Here's the Apostle Paul. Brand new gospel, brand new teaching.

This is great. Paul's my man. I've got Paul's writings here, and I affirm the authority of Paul. He would have instantly found some common ground with a lot of Christians.

So whatever happened to him? The leaders of the church in Rome found his teachings to be unacceptable, and so Marcion withdrew from the church in Rome and started his own fellowship.

It survived for a few generations. Growth in Marcion's church came only by conversion since one of the teachings of Marcion was absolute celibacy by all of the members of the

Marcion church. Absolute celibacy. Now that's a hard sell. Right, you wanna join our movement?

Yeah, you like Paul. I like Paul. Tell me, what does this involve? Well, celibacy. I don't know, that's a hard sell.

See, the only opportunity you have to grow your fellowship is converting people to your way of thinking since you're not, and this was part of Gnosticism, the idea that anything physical was bad, only the spiritual was good, and therefore any physical desires or the fulfillment of those physical desires was a bad and evil thing in and of itself, and even within marriage, this was not something to be enjoyed or participated in, and so, of course, you have no kids being born in Marcion's church, and eventually became all old people and died away.

That was Marcion's movement. Now, what did Marcion publish? I mentioned earlier that he was the first person that we know of who published a list of what he considered canonical books, even though in Marcion's day, the word canon wouldn't have been used in that sense, probably.

But what did he publish? He published an edition of the Greek New Testament, which he considered to be inspired. He called it

Gospel and Apostle. Gospel and Apostle was the name of his book, and that referred to its two component parts.

The Gospel was an edition of the Gospel of what? Which Gospel, because it's singular, not

Gospels and Apostles. It's Gospel, singular, and Apostle, singular. So, obviously, we could probably guess what

Apostles' writings were in there, right? Paul's, right. Which Gospel do you think

Marcion included? Any guess? Sorry, what? Luke, it was

Luke. Why Luke's Gospel? Yeah, Luke was Paul's traveling companion.

Paul's fingerprints are all over the Gospel of Luke, as it were. Luke is a very Gentile -oriented Gospel. It mentions

Jews. Luke's a very Gentile -oriented Gospel, and, of course, it was written by Luke, who was Paul's physician and traveling companion.

And, of course, Luke is somebody that Paul mentions in 2 Timothy. So, but,

I should say, but Marcion purged the Gospel of Luke of all the elements that he deemed to be incompatible with his understanding of truth.

And so, he viewed those purged sections as inserted by Judaistic scribes. For instance, the birth of Jesus in Luke's Gospel was omitted.

Why? Because Marcion believed that Jesus came by supernatural descent out of heaven, just like he left.

Why would Jesus have to come from supernatural descent? Because anything that comes from supernatural descent being related to childbirth or being in the womb of a mother, these things were material, and, therefore, they were evil and dirty and bad.

And so, he purged the Gospel of Luke of that aspect, the birth narrative of Jesus. Marcion found the whole idea of conception and childbearing to be disgusting, which, of course, explains his ban, or his promotion,

I should say, of celibacy. And so, what was the response of the, oh, no, no.

So, that was the apostle section of it, Luke. Let me talk for a moment about the apostle section of his book, or his list of books.

Out of the, the apostle contained 10 of Paul's letters instead of 13, 10 of Paul's letters.

The pastoral epistles were missing. First Timothy, Second Timothy, and Titus, they were all missing from Marcion's apostle.

But that is probably because Marcion didn't have access to those books, not because he viewed them as non -canonical.

He just wouldn't, he just didn't even know, probably didn't know, we can't know for certain, but likely, Marcion did not know that those books even existed, so he didn't have access to them.

And he handled Paul's writings the same way that he did Luke's writing, in that anything that appeared inconsistent with his beliefs, he removed.

He assumed that all of those things that he disagreed with, anything referencing positively the Old Covenant or the

Old Testament, had to have been inserted by legalistic scribes, Jewish scribes, who were trying to work their

Judaism and their Old Testament stuff into Paul's writings. So what was the response of the church? Well, Tertullian was railed against,

Tertullian, early church father, railed against Marcion in his book, aptly titled Against Marcion.

Now, because of that controversy that you have here, a teacher who becomes quite fashionable early on in the early church, and he is quite in love with Paul and Paul's writings, he accepts one of your gospels, and he accepts at least 10 of the books that you would accept as canonical in the early church.

Can you see the need that there would be for some standard, some official list, by what do we do with this?

Is Marcion's gospel, copy of Luke's gospel, the right one? Or is there another copy of Luke's gospel that is the right one?

If Marcion only includes 10 of those, do we reject three of Paul's other epistles, 1

Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus? What do we do with that? So there came to be this need of establishing some sort of a list, some sort of recognition of what books are in the list and what books are not in the list.

What do we regard as authoritative? And this becomes especially needful when you're dealing with false teaching and false teachers because in dealing with a false teacher, you have to be able to quote from an authority.

So for instance, if you are dealing with a Mormon who has come to your front door, and they're trying to evangelize you into the

Mormon church, and you begin to address their doctrine, there is immediately an inability to communicate between you and the

Mormon missionary because they have an entirely different authority structure. They recognize the church, and they recognize the apostles of their church, and they recognize the

Pearl of Great Price and the Doctrine and Covenants, and what's the other one? The Book of Mormon, also is canonical or authoritative.

So they're gonna quote from their authoritative sources, and you're gonna wanna quote from your authoritative sources, which is the canonical books of Scripture.

And so if you're dealing with a false teacher, there has to be something where you say, what books do we regard as the

New Covenant, New Testament community of saints, God's people, what books do we regard as authoritative? This was the theological concern, especially when dealing with false teachers and heretics like Marcion.

Second, letter B, there were ecclesiastical concerns. And by the way, when I talk about Gnosticism, I did a series,

I'm not even sure if it's on the website anymore, on early church heresies, and we talked about Gnosticism at some length in there, so if you don't know what

Gnosticism is, those should be available on the church website, I think, and if they're not there, you ask me for them if you want them, and I can make copies of them or something and give them to you, but Gnosticism was, you see the seeds of Gnostic theology in some of the

New Testament writings, the book of Colossians, for instance, you can see that Paul is arguing against false doctrine, he doesn't call it

Gnosticism, because the doctrine was there and it was starting to crop up, even though it hadn't kind of come to full bloom yet, it was still, it was there, and he's dealing with issues of Gnosticism in Colossians.

First John, which David is teaching through in adult Sunday school class, when I'm not here and Cornell's not here,

First John deals with that, the very introduction, those things which we have seen, which we have heard, which our eyes have seen, our hands have handled, concerning the word of life, that was a direct affront to Gnostic theology, which taught that Jesus was merely a spirit and had no physical form, and John is addressing those,

New Testament books address Gnostic theology, even, and it's kind of there in its seed form in the early church, well, by the end of the first century, it was a full -blown heresy that was affecting everything.

Okay, letter B, ecclesiastical concerns. Ecclesiastical concerns have to do with church concerns.

Which books should be read in the public worship service? Imagine that you're sitting in the year 100, which books do we read in the public worship service?

Because we have a letter from Clement and we have a letter from Paul. Are these equal?

Which of these books do we pick up and read and make people obey, expect people to obey?

What books do we teach from? We know that the reading of scripture involved apostolic books. 1

Thessalonians 5, 27, I urge you by the Lord to have this letter read to all the brethren. Colossians 4, 16, when this letter is read among you, have it also read in the church of the

Laodiceans. The apostles, Paul particularly, when he was writing his epistles, expected those epistles, when they were received by the churches, to be read and to be obeyed by the church because he had apostolic authority, and Paul wrote knowing that he had apostolic authority.

And so you have to ask the question, which books then do we read in the public worship service? Or which books do we read as authoritative and which books do we regard merely as devotional?

Today we have creeds and confessions that we read. When I preached through the Gospel of John in the early chapters,

I read often from the Chalcedonian Creed. And we have the Apostles' Creed and the Nicaean Creed. So we have creeds and confessions, the

London Baptist Confession, we have all kinds of confessions and creeds and catechisms today that we might use.

But do we regard those as authoritative on the level of Romans? Would we regard the Chalcedonian Creed as authoritative on the same level as John?

Even though I might quote from some of those sources in church or use them in teaching, do we regard them as authoritative?

In the early church, they would have to face the same question. Which books do we regard as authoritative and which books do we regard as merely devotional?

For instance, there was a letter that Clement sent to the church in Corinth that was read for decades, but it was never viewed as scripture.

But it was read and used in the church of Corinth for decades after Paul wrote his letters. And the early church revered the apostolic writings.

So another question, which books should be translated into other languages for evangelizing pagans? That's a good question, right?

In the early church, you got the Epistle of Clement and you got the Epistle of Paul to the Romans. Which book do we translate to go evangelize pagans?

If we're gonna take this into Egypt, we're gonna send a missionary to Egypt to evangelize the Egyptian pagans, do we translate as scripture the

Gospel of Clement, or sorry, the letter from Clement, or do we translate the letter from Paul to the church at Rome?

Well, what do you wanna translate? If you're gonna spend your efforts translating and copying something, you're gonna wanna translate and copy what you believe to be scripture.

We do the same thing today, by the way. The Hunts, when they went to Paraguay and started translating the

New Testament, they didn't translate John MacArthur's commentaries on the New Testament into Monhui.

They started with scripture, and once they had worked through sufficient scripture, then they began to translate other study resources alongside of that, but the priority was scripture because it was authoritative.

Another question, which books are to regulate the life of the church? What do we turn to for instruction in doctrine, teaching, church polity, moral issues, et cetera?

And then which books do you preach from and teach from? These are the questions, the ecclesiastical concerns of the early church. There's a lot of books out there, a lot of competing books.

Which ones do we regard as authoritative? Which ones are we gonna translate? Which ones are we gonna preach from? Which ones are we gonna teach from? These are the ecclesiastical concerns.

Before we move on to the last one here, we have a few more minutes. Are there any questions? Nope. All right, we're either in the chloroform layer or I'm just doing a really good job of communicating everything.

Number three, the political concerns. There were political concerns in the early church. The emperor Diocletian, whose name was

Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus, if you, no, no.

He reigned from 284 to 305 AD. And according to Eusebius, who was a church historian,

Diocletian ordered in 303, quote, the destruction by fire of the scriptures, close quote.

Diocletian was persecuting the church. He ordered the destruction by fire of the scriptures. Now, ironically, within 25 years of his edict in 303, the emperor

Constantine, who succeeded him at some point, became a believer and he ordered Eusebius, that church historian, to prepare and distribute 50 copies of the scriptures.

And Constantine then made an official list of those canonical books because when Constantine wanted the scriptures to be, the scriptures to be published or produced for the sake of the church because he was now a

Christian, history is somewhat divided as to how legitimate his conversion was, but he at least was promoting scripture and producing scriptures.

Well, you'd have to have to, Constantine's around 325, 328 AD, so you'd have to ask the question, well then, which books are we regarding, which books is

Eusebius supposed to produce for the church, right? You have to know which one of those is because by 300, you've got all of those pseudepigraphal and apocryphal books.

You've got the books written between the Old Testament and the New Testament that's in the Catholic Bible, the Apocrypha. Then you've got a whole bunch of writings that claim to be apostolic from the first 300 years of church history, the writings of the apostles alongside of the epistles of Clement and the writings of the

Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of whoever and the Gospel of Peter and the Gospel of Barnabas and all of these other books, so which ones do you promote?

Well, Constantine would have to make that decision, so he eventually published a list of the books that were considered at 325 canonical.

Now, here's the historical mistake that many people make. They look at Constantine's publication of that and his production of the scriptures and they say, the pagan emperor

Constantine determined which books are in your Bible. We talked about presuppositions at the beginning.

What's the presupposition behind that statement? That nobody knew which books were authoritative until Constantine published his list.

So the assumption is that until Constantine published his list, there was no official list or nobody knew or the

Christians just assumed all of those books were authoritative. That's what's the assumption. I would look at what

Constantine did and say, already people knew which books were inspired and which books were canonical and all

Constantine was doing is saying, these are the books that are recognized by the church, therefore publish these. Not that Constantine made the determination, but that Constantine recognized what had already been determined a long, long time before that.

Okay, so that is one of the political concerns. Now, when... Okay, so in light of that persecution, let me ask you this question.

When Roman soldiers arrive at your home and want you to hand over the sacred writings because Gaius Aurelius Villanius Diocletianus has ordered the destruction of the scriptures by fire, so when they show up at your house and they order you to hand over the sacred writings or the scriptures and they're

Roman soldiers, they're not Christians, which books do you hand them? The Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon, yeah, they're very good.

Which books do you hand them? You'd have to know which books the church regards as authoritative, wouldn't you?

You wouldn't want to hand over scripture if you can hand over the Shepherd of Hermes or the

Didache or the Gospel of Barnabas or the Gospel of Mary. If a

Roman soldier shows up and they're saying, give us your sacred writings and you say, well, we got the Shepherd of Hermes here and here's a letter from Clement and here's the

Gospel of Mary, here's the Gospel of Barnabas and here's a copy of the Gospel of Thomas. There you go.

They're gonna look at that and say, yeah, old writings, religious, there's stuff about Jesus in here. Yeah, that looks good. And they're gonna walk away and destroy those.

So in the light of persecution, that's the political concern, in the light of persecution, you'd need to know, already

Christians would need to know which books are authoritative and which books are not. Do you have a question? Who actually would have had copies of anything at that point.

So if we're talking about 300 AD, there was already by that time widespread copying and distribution of New Testament documents and authoritative documents.

Individual members of churches, probably not everybody in an individual church would have had a copy of those things, but somebody in the church,

Christians did collect those books and they used some of them for devotional reading and some of them as authoritative reading in the church.

All right, so if you had a copy of the Shepherd of Hermes and a copy of the Epistle of Clement, you would give them over to satisfy the officials without giving up scripture itself.

And then here's another political concern, if you're gonna be asked to die for one of these books, don't you wanna know which one you're gonna die for?

If you're gonna spend your efforts copying something in a dark cave with the threat of the Roman government overshadowing you with death as the sentence for you copying that book, don't you know which one of those books you're gonna wanna risk your life for?

Are you really gonna wanna risk your life to study the letter from Clement? You're really gonna wanna risk your life to copy the

Shepherd of Hermes? See, those are the political concerns in the early churches that Christians faced persecution.

They needed to know which books do we read, which books do we regard as authoritative, which books do we hand over to Roman officials, which books are we willing to die for, which books do we wanna translate in order to evangelize pagans, and which books do we need to make sure that we preserve for our children and our grandchildren and generations to come?

Those were the theological, the political, and the ecclesiastical concerns that required people to think through clearly what books do we regard as authoritative?

And I would suggest to you that that decision was made long before Constantine ever made his list of what he wanted to have produced and published for the

Christians in the Roman Empire. Now, there were a couple of other considerations. Books were circulated and copied even though no official list was ever published because there was no list given by the apostles, right?

There's no chapter 14 in, no, there's 14 in Romans, a bad example.

There's no chapter 17 in the Book of Romans that says, oh, by the way, here are the list of all the books that I've written, that Paul says that.

Paul makes reference to other books that he wrote, but no apostle ever produced a list of what was to be considered canonical books.

Jesus didn't give a list of books that we should expect. At no point in the Gospels does Jesus ever say, look, I got this guy named

Paul, I haven't saved him yet, I'm going to eventually, he's gonna evangelize a whole bunch of people and here's a list of the books he's gonna write for you guys.

Jesus didn't leave us an official authoritative list. So it fell then to the church to recognize which books were given by God and which books were not.

And it did take a while for there to be a universal recognition of various books in the

New Testament. It did take a little bit, a while by our standards, but not a while by historical standards, right?

Heating up coffee in a microwave takes a while for us. Right, that's, oh, I gotta do that, I wish my coffee hadn't cooled off.

If only I had a mug that would keep my coffee hot all the time so I never had to waste that 90 seconds heating that up again.

So that type of, that's a while for us. But in the early church, for something to take decades before it would be officially recognized and kind of circulated and widespread, that was not a long time in that time period in the ancient world.

All right, that is it for our time. So we just did get to, we're gonna pick it up next week with a discussion about why universal recognition took so long, and then how it is that we recognize which books were authoritative and which books are not.

Yes? When did you save Constantine? Constantine was officially saved in 325

AD, and I'm not gonna make any determination whether Constantine's conversion was genuine or not, but he was supposedly saved in 325

AD, 325? Yeah, now I'm questioning that, just like the Book of Mormon thing.

It was the early third century, or early fourth century, so it was after 300, because 325 was the

Council of Nicaea, and it was Constantine who called that. So he was a Christian by 325, let's just say that.

Right, yes? Okay, so the question is regarding Marcion, when he would take out sections from Paul's writings of the

Gospel of Luke, because they didn't fit with his theology of the Old Testament, did he leave those sections blank and just cut them out, or did he fill them with his own stuff?

I don't think that he filled them with his own detail. I think he just simply omitted that in copying those books and in publishing those books.

So for those books of Paul, it would have been quite prolific, obviously, because the Apostle Paul makes mention of, he quotes the

Old Testament all the way through his books. Must have been much shorter than Paul's originals.

Yeah, it probably would have been. Or if Marcion felt that the Apostle Paul was using the Old Testament in such a way as to disparage the

Old Testament, then he would have included that. It would have been only Paul's glowing references to the

Old Testament that he would have felt the need to get rid of. Yes? 312, that's a better name, yeah, 312.

That's Constantine's conversion? Thank you, 312. Yeah, yeah, in battle he saw a cross and a symbol of a cross in the sky.

He had a vision and said in this symbol or in this sign you shall conquer, and that was his conversion. I don't know, more reliable than many conversions in many churches today,

I guess, but. All right, that's it. Next week we'll pick it up again with this issue of canonicity, let's pray.

Lord, we're so grateful to you for the time that we've had here, and we ask your blessing upon our worship and our fellowship that's to follow, and we pray that you'd help us to remember these things and to put these things deep into our hearts so that we may have an answer to the people who ask us a reason for the hope that is in us.