Lesson 13: Septuagint, Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, and Other Big Words Part 2

If you're going to join us for adult Sunday school class, please come into the sanctuary here and find a seat. Alright, let's pray before we begin. Father, your word is true and it is clear. Your word is a precious treasure to us, and it is what we hunger for as your people.

We long to be fed from your word and to know the truth and to know you as you have revealed yourself in Scripture. And we're just grateful that you have not only given to us your word, but we're also grateful that it is inerrant and inspired, that you have preserved it for us, that you have kept it and kept it pure, and we are grateful for that.

We pray that you would help us to see today how it is that you have done that and to be able to evaluate other writings from the same time period in light of truth, help us to understand how it is that you have preserved your word so that we may give you honor and glory for that great work that you have done.

As your people, we praise you and we thank you and we ask your blessing upon this time and our study here this morning in Christ's name.

Amen.

Septuagint, the Apocrypha, and the Pseudepigrapha

Well, in your God Wrote a Book lesson book, we are in lesson number 13, the Septuagint, the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha, another big words, lesson 13. And last week we looked at the first two of those, the Septuagint and the Apocrypha and what that meant, what those things are.

The Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Old Testament that was completed before the time of Christ. It was the Old Testament Bible of Jesus and the Apostles. It is what is quoted most of the time in the New Testament when the Apostles quote Scripture either in their writings or in their speaking, they're quoting from the Septuagint of their day, the Greek translation of the Old Testament.

And then the Apocrypha are those writings written between the Old Testament, the end of the Old Testament time period and the beginning of the New Testament time period. The Apocrypha refers also to the collection of books that has been canonized by the Catholic Church in the 1500s and they accept them as Scripture and Protestants, of course, reject those books as Holy Scripture and we talked about last week why.

The Meaning of Pseudepigrapha and False Authorship

So today we're looking at the Pseudepigrapha, the Pseudepigrapha. The Pseudepigrapha, and this is number three in lesson 13, the Pseudepigrapha means false writings, the Pseudepigrapha means false writings and this refers to those writings which were circulated in the first two or three centuries of the Christian Church which falsely claimed to have been written by one of the Apostles or someone so closely associated with them.

So they were false writings circulated within the first two to three centuries after the life of Jesus. So these are writings that were written after the time of the Apostles, so we're talking about the year 100 to 300, in that period of time, those first couple of centuries there.

Writings which claimed to have been written by the Apostles or by somebody closely associated with the Apostles and we refer to those as the false writings of the Pseudepigrapha. And we see that even during Paul's lifetime there were false writings that circulated claiming to be written by the Apostle Paul himself.

He makes mention to this, he makes mention of his own signature and how that was the denotation in all of his writings of that which he had written. Second Thessalonians 2 verses 1 to 2, Paul says, now we request you brethren with regard to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together to Him that you be not quickly shaken from your composure or be disturbed either by a spirit or a message or a letter as if from us to the effect that the day of the Lord has already come.

That's second Thessalonians. So Paul makes mention there of them being disturbed by a letter that claimed that it came from him, as if there was this letter circulating in the Thessalonican church that claimed Paul as its authorship that said the day of the Lord, the judgment had already.

Come.

And so Paul makes mention of the fact that people were writing even in his own day letters that supposedly came from him. So in 1 Corinthians 16, 21, also from the hands of Paul, he says, this greeting is in my own hand, Paul.

Galatians 6, 11, see with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand. Colossians 4, 18, I Paul write this greeting with my own hand. Second Thessalonians 3, 17, I Paul write this greeting with my own hand and this is a distinguishing mark in every letter.

This is the way I write. And Philemons 19 says, I Paul am writing with my own hand. He said that quite frequently, didn't he? Did you ever notice that as you read through the New Testament epistles? Paul makes mention in his actual, his authentic, legitimate letters that he wrote, Paul makes mention of the fact that he was writing with his own hand and he said this is the distinguishing mark.

There was something about Paul's writing that the early church was able to look at and identify this as a letter from the Apostle Paul. Well, there were other letters circulating in the time that bore Paul's name.

People were writing them saying this is from Paul or they would refer to letters that were written by Paul. And so Paul needed a way to certify or authenticate what letters actually came from him. Most of the pseudepigraphal writings that we have, these false writings, come from what is referred to as the Nag Hammadi Library and this is letter B under number 3, the Nag Hammadi Library.

How many of you know what the Nag Hammadi Library is? Anybody here familiar with the Nag Hammadi Library? Is it in Japan? No, it is not.

It's close.

It's close. In December of 1945, a peasant digging for fertilizer unearthed a large earthenware vessel. Now, I don't know why peasants are digging for fertilizer and why there were earthenware vessels buried where he thought there was going to be fertilizer, but that is what happened.

This earthenware vessel contained 13 papyrus books made up of 52 different texts. And this was located along the east bank of the Nile in Upper Egypt, so close to Japan. Near the town of Nag Hammadi. The documents were from sometime in the 5th century and they had been written sometime in the 2nd and 3rd century.

But the copies of these, the Nag Hammadi Library is copies from the 5th century of documents that were written in the 2nd and 3rd century. So they're not original documents, the Nag Hammadi Library, they're copies of ones that came from the 2nd and 3rd century.

And the Nag Hammadi Library was largely a collection of a Gnostic sect, S-E-C-T, a Gnostic sect. Now, if you know anything about Gnosticism, then you know that one of the teachings of Gnosticism is that anything physical is bad, anything spiritual is good.

So they had this radical dichotomy where they believed that God could not, of course, become a man and dwell among us because if God became man, then he would be in human flesh and that would be a bad thing.

So everything physical, all things tangible and physical are bad, and everything spiritual or ethereal is good, and that was the Gnostic religion. Of course, this had all kinds of implications for theology.

Even in the New Testament, you see references to the seed ideas of Gnosticism even in the 1st century. Paul, in the book of Colossians, he's using some Gnostic language in order to attack Gnostic ideas about fullness and being full, and so he uses the term fullness all the way through the book of Colossians to refer to certain Gnostic heresies that he is correcting in that book.

In the book of 1st John, John is attacking what he saw as some Gnostic tendencies when he says that the word of life which came and dwelt among us, we have handled him, we have seen him with our own eyes, we have heard this one.

He's referring to Christ who dwelt and came amongst us and says that anybody who denies that Jesus Christ came in the flesh is the Antichrist or an Antichrist. John was dealing with those Gnostic ideas even in the 1st century.

Well, by the time you get into the 2nd and 3rd century, the Gnostic theology and Gnostic tendencies had reached full bloom and they had implemented and woven themselves into the fabric of life in that day so that there were so many expressions of Gnostic thinking and so many expressions of Gnostic sects all over the place that there were many who had taken Christianity and Gnosticism and tried to blend them into sort of a synchronistic Christian Gnosticism, and this became quite popular.

You see, by the way, the same thing happening in our own day in some ways with Gnostic ideology and thinking as Christians try and blend a lot of the worldly thinking with social justice and critical race theory and intersectionality and Marxism and all this stuff gets blended together and so you have people who are saying that this is Christianity and they're kind of teaching some of these new ideas rather than keeping firm in the faith regarding Christianity and its teachings and essential doctrines, they begin to blend this with whatever the spirit of the age is.

Well, Gnosticism was the spirit of the age in the second and third centuries, came to full bloom and affected everything, philosophy, religion, theology, it just worked its way into everything. And so you had these Gnostic sects that would pop up and they would need, of course, books that were sympathetic to their Gnostic theology.

So Gnosticism denied the deity of Christ, they believed that matter was evil so Jesus never came in the flesh, Irenaeus wrote this against the Gnostics, he says, quote, every one of them generates something new day by day according to his ability for no one is deemed perfect who does not develop some mighty fiction, close quote.

And so one of the Gnostic ideas or theologies was that you needed to have, by the way, the word Gnostic comes from the Greek word gnosis which means to know and the basic premise of Gnosticism is that there is a higher level of knowledge that is available to a select few and elite.

All of us down here in the cheap seats, or up here in the cheap seats I guess if you go down, those are the expensive seats, but all of us up here in the cheap seats that don't have this enlightened view of humanity and nature and theology that we're cut off from that knowledge.

But if you could be sort of incorporated or initiated into the sect, into the inner circle, you could get the private revelations, you could get the secret meaning of things in the text and the Spirit would reveal these things to you.

That information was not available to everybody, it was only available to a select few. They were the ones in the know, in the gnosis, the Gnostics. They had the knowledge that nobody else had. That was the basis of Gnosticism.

Well, you see a lot of this ideology and theology come out in some of the writings of the Nag Hamadi library. So let me give you some examples of the Pigraphal books. The Gospel of Thomas, you see the Gospel of Thomas makes headlines, I know, I'm picking on Thomas.

The Gospel of Thomas makes headlines almost every year around this time, around resurrection time because right about, probably in about a month from now when Christians, Orthodox Christians and we who are in the Christian faith begin to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ, you're going to see some headline or some documentary on the History Channel that is going to give a lot of time and attention to the Gospel of Thomas and some of these other Nag Hamadi writings.

And they're going to give this attention to the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip and others because they give us a early first century view of what Christianity was really like on an argument that they don't.

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John give us an early first century view of what was Christians really believed. The Gospel of Thomas does not. The Gospel of Thomas was written long after the events of the life of Jesus by people who weren't even apostles and were not eyewitnesses.

So they don't give us any new information about what early Christianity was like. They do give us a lot of information about what the Gnostic sects claimed to be Christians in the Nag Hamadi area were like.

They don't tell us anything about first century Judaism around the time of Jesus and the apostles or what early Christians believed. So the Gospel of Thomas contains 114 sayings supposedly uttered by Jesus.

Some of the sayings are found in the Gospels like for instance Matthew 15, 14. If a blind man leads a blind man they both fall into a pit. Well the Gospel of Thomas saying 34 also contains the same information.

There are 13 parables included in the Gospel of Thomas which find parallels in the Gospels. Even though the parallels in the Gospel of Thomas are the parables, the parallel parables in the Gospel of Thomas are slightly shorter than the Gospels parallels in the synoptic.

Gospels.

By the way if you find a parallel between the Gospel of Thomas and a saying that Jesus said and for instance Matthew or Matthew's parables and parables contained in a shorter form in the Gospel of Thomas, does that prove that the Gospel of Thomas is inspired?

No, it doesn't. What would it tell us? Sorry? They're similar. One quoted the other. It would tell us that maybe the author of the Gospel of Thomas was familiar with the synoptic Gospels, right? Might have borrowed some of that material.

If you want to craft a deception to get people to believe that what you are writing is legitimate, what would you do? You'd weave a little bit of truth in there, right? You'd weave some things in there that Christians are familiar with so if they're reading it, they would say, oh yeah, that's true.

Now that sounds just like Matthew. Those are parables, right? This must be inspired. That's the point behind that. So the similarity in itself does not identify it as an inspired document. That similarity just shows that the author was similar in some way or familiar in some way with the writings of the New Testament.

The Gospel of Thomas also contains total nonsense and this is why it's named the Gospel of Thomas. So, for instance, saying number 14 says this. If you fast, you will give rise to sin for yourselves. And if you pray, you will be condemned.

And if you give alms, you will do harm to your spirits. When you go into any land and walk about in the districts, if they receive you, eat what they will set before you and heal the sick among them. For what goes into your mouth will not defile you, but that which issues from your mouth is that which will defile you, close quote.

Now some of that sounds eerily similar to some things that Jesus said, right? Not what goes into a man that defiles him, but what comes out of man, comes out of the man, comes out of the heart. And the heart is desperately wicked and deceitful.

That sounds eerily similar to something Jesus would say as well as if you go into a city and they receive you, then eat what is set before you. But Jesus said something very similar to that when he said if they won't receive you, then kick the dust off of your feet and walk and go on to the next city.

So there, you can see some parallels. But what do we make of this statement? If you fast, you'll give rise to sin. If you pray, you'll be condemned. And if you give alms, you will do harm to your spirits.

That stuff is nonsense. Saying number 45 says, if you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. Do you know what that means? Yeah, somebody in the back just shook their head like, what?

Now see, if you were one of the Gnostic elites, you would know what that means. You guys in the cheap seats, you don't necessarily know what that means. But the elite, they would know what that means and they would be able to read the Gospel of Thomas and give to you its true sense, its true meaning.

Simon Peter said to them, let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life. Jesus said, I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males.

For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven, close quote. There's transgenderism in the second century, right? Saying number 22, Jesus saw infants being suckled. He said to his disciples, these infants being suckled are like those who enter the kingdom.

They said to him, shall we then as children enter the kingdom? Jesus said to them, when you make the two one and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside and the above like the below and when you make the male and the female one and the same so that the male not be male nor the female female and when you fashion eyes in the place of an eye and a hand in the place of a hand and a foot in the place of a foot and a likeness in the place of a likeness, then you will enter the kingdom, close quote.

Now that's just gibberish, is it not? But not to the Gnostic. That's not gibberish. To the Gnostic, they can make that sound like that is profound wisdom right out of the mouth of Solomon because they have the knowledge that nobody else has.

Now what is ironic is that quote unquote scholars today will tell us that the gospel of Thomas is a reliable gospel from the early days of Christianity and that the gospel of Thomas really should guide our understanding and interpretation of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and the early documents of the Christian faith, that the gospel of Thomas is more reliable than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

That's what scholars today want you to believe. But you as a believer in Jesus Christ can obviously tell the difference between the gospel of Thomas and the gospel of Matthew, can you not? Can you not see the qualitative difference between the gospel of John and the gospel of Thomas?

If you can't see the qualitative difference, you do not have the Spirit of God. It really is that simple. These are not gospels that are in any way in competition for canonicity with Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

So these quotes from the gospel of Thomas, this is typical of the kind of nonsensical and enlightened nature of Gnostic writings because you had to have that higher knowledge in order to tell what they really meant.

The four gospels predated Thomas by at least a hundred years and some skeptics claim that the gospel of Thomas represents the beliefs of the early Christians and that simply is not true because what they do represent is the beliefs of an apostate, heretical, unorthodox Gnostic sect.

That's what the gospel of Thomas represents, not the beliefs of the first century Christians. You want to know what first century Christians believe and taught about the person of Christ? You read Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

If you want to know what some Egyptian Gnostic sect, some heretical apostate group out in the middle of the Egyptian desert believed about the person of Christ, then you read the Gnostic gospels. How about the gospel of Philip?

The gospel of Philip does not claim to be the teaching of Jesus and most of it is very esoteric like this for instance, quote, light and darkness, life and death, right and left are brothers of one another.

They're inseparable. Because of this, neither are the good good nor evil evil nor is life life nor death death. For this reason, each one will dissolve into its earliest origin but those who are exalted above the world are indissoluble and eternal, close quote.

Does that make sense to you? Yeah, if you put me alone in a room with a year's supply of heroin, I could not come up with anything like some of this stuff. It's so esoteric and out in the ether that you just wonder how anybody came up with this.

Well, this would make perfect sense if you were part of a Gnostic sect and you're taught what these higher meanings of this nonsense is about. The gospel of Philips quotes some phrases from the gospels including indicating that it was written after the gospels and were written and widely circulated.

So again, the gospel of Philips, the similarity in some wording only indicates that the canonical gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, which are in our New Testament, that these were widely circulated and had gotten around enough that they had influenced some of the language of people who wrote gospels after the canonical gospels were written.

The gospel of Mary contains nothing about the life of Christ. It contains mystic teaching attributed to Mary Magdalene. Supposedly it was Mary who roused the disciples to action and courage. Supposedly they were the secret things that Jesus gave to Mary that she passed on to His disciples.

And the gospel of Mary portrays Mary Magdalene as a favorite of Jesus, possessing more knowledge and insight than the apostles. The Apocryphon of James, apocrypha means hidden or secret as we talked about last week.

The Apocryphon of James claims to be a secret revelation to James, the brother of Jesus. It does not quote from the gospels, but does demonstrate a familiarity with the parables in the gospels. It claims Jesus stayed with the disciples for 18 days after the resurrection instead of 40.

Those are some of the examples of the pseudepigraphal writings. Now, I want you to turn, if you can, to page…what page is it? I don't have the page number here. Just to the end of this lesson, you see the page that has the list of the pseudepigraphal writings?

You see that?

The next page?

All right.

So you'll notice there that there are all kinds of gospels, right? The gospel of Thomas is a favorite one, that's why we spent a little bit of time on this. But you also have the gospel of the Ebionites, the gospel of Peter, the Pro-Evangelium of James, the gospel of the Egyptians, the Arabic gospel of childhood, the gospel of Nicodemus, gospel of Joseph the Carpenter, the history of Joseph the Carpenter, the passing of Mary, the gospel of the Nativity of Mary, the gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, the gospel of the Twelve, the gospel of Barnabas, Bartholomew, Hebrews, Marcion, Andrew, Matthias, Peter, and Philip.

That's a lot of gospels, right? And you say, why were our four chosen? Why are we stuck with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? I mean, we...you mean there's 21 other gospels out there that we could be reading, that Jim could be preaching through?

I spent seven years in the gospel of John. How about if we just start at the top of this list and go through the gospel of Thomas and then work our way down through that? Why are we cut off from such a rich wealth of knowledge and information about the Lord?

There's not enough time for me to preach through that. That's absolutely true.

All right.

So, we have all of these other gospels. What makes our four set apart? What makes them unique? They're written by apostles or people closely associated with apostles. Matthew and John were both apostles.

Mark associated with Peter, and Luke associated with Paul. So, we have basically gospels authenticated by Matthew, Luke...or sorry, Matthew, Paul, Peter, and John. It's four apostles. Not only that, but the four gospels that we have in our New Testament were written in the first century.

Mark written very early, probably within 15 to 20 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus. Matthew probably written next. Luke was probably the third one written. Luke was probably written toward the end of Paul's ministry while Paul was in prison in.

Rome.

That's probably when Luke wrote the gospel of Luke as well as the book of Acts. So you're talking about 60 to 62 AD for Luke. Actually the gospel of Luke probably would have been written while Paul was two years in Caesarea under Felix Infestus before he was shipped off to Rome.

He spent two years in prison there. Two years that Luke just skips over in like one verse. Paul stayed there two years and then this thing happened and he's off again. Well, during that two years, Luke would have been there with Paul in Caesarea and had access to all the eyewitnesses.

Mary and some of the disciples and the people who were there who saw the miracles that Luke.

Records.

That's why at the beginning of Luke's gospel, he says, these things I've carefully researched and identified for you so that you may know the truth concerning Jesus and what He began to do and to teach.

I mean, Luke talks about his study and his research into these things as a historian. And then the gospel of John, I believe, probably written sometime before 70 AD. So within 40 years after the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, you have all four of those gospels being written probably in that order, Mark, Matthew, Luke and then John, all within 40 years.

Now, every year at Christmas and Easter, we're supposed to take those eyewitness accounts and we're supposed to jettison them in favor of the gospel of Thomas or the gospel of Mary. Does that make sense to you?

Something written 200 years later after all of the eyewitnesses were dead by people who had never met or seen Jesus while He walked the face of the earth? We're supposed to exchange the gospel of Thomas for Matthew, Mark, Luke and John?

There's a shell game being played by people, skeptics and critics, who try and pass this off every year as if it's legitimate scholarship. And it's not. We reject these writings for good reason. They're late.

They're Gnostic. They do not represent the first century church or Christianity. They do not represent what Jesus and the apostles taught. They're not apostolic. And they were never accepted on a wide scale by the Christian church, ever, ever.

They were accepted on a wide scale by a Gnostic sect that lived in the Nag Hammadi Valley in.

Egypt.

They were accepted by them, but never by the church at large. That's why we don't accept them as canonical.

Yes?

Remember, these are gospels or writings that claim to have been written by an apostle or someone close to an apostle, but they were written in the 2nd and 3rd century. So they're not written by Peter, nor are they written to the Hebrews or by the Hebrews.

These are writings that originated in a Gnostic sect that claim to have been written by apostles or people closely associated with the apostles.

All right?

Did you know Do what act as a group?

The books?

I don't know that.

No.

Yep.

Yeah.

Very good.

Yeah.

It's a great point. It shows the significance and the widespread acceptance of the canonical gospels, the four gospels that we have, that they would feel the need to attach themselves to that for legitimacy and authenticity.

Yeah.

Every good lie has an element of the truth.

Yep.

Yep. Yeah.

Right.

The devil never comes out with full error, 100 percent error, because then you could identify it. He takes the skin of the truth. He stuffs it with a big lie so that it looks like the truth and smells like the truth and appears to be the truth.

That's why he's an angel of light. He doesn't come at us with a pitchfork and horns and a red tail with an arrow point on the end of it. It's not how the devil presents himself. He comes to us looking as if it's the truth.

That's how you deceive people.

Yes.

No.

We do not know authorship.

No.

If the real author of any of these is known, I don't know which one it is.

Okay.

Yes. Yeah.

Yep.

Yeah.

It does. What appears to be the truth but is a lie attracts a lot of people. That's why the way is narrow and the road is broad and it leads to destruction. Jesus said that.

Yes.

Would Irenaeus have known about the Gnostic writings and who wrote them? He may have.

Yeah.

People at that time may have known who wrote them. Not that I know of.

No.

Not been preserved that I know of.

Yep.

All right.

You also have multiple books of Acts. You have the Acts of Peter and John and Andrew, Thomas, Paul, Matthias, Philip. Matthias, by the way, who was a genuine apostle, genuine disciple. The Acts of Philip, the Acts of Thaddeus.

There are epistles there. The letter attributed to our Lord, the lost epistle to the Corinthians, the six letters of Paul to Seneca, the epistle of Paul to the Laodiceans, and then multiple apocalypses.

Apocalypses? What's the plural of apocalypses? That's a good question. I don't know. You proofread everything I say.

No?

Got nothing for me? The Apocalypses of Peter and Paul, Thomas, Stephen, Second Apocalypse of James, Mesos, Dostoeus, the last three were found at Nag Hammadi, and then your other works, The Secret Book of John, Traditions of Matthew, and The Dialogue of the Savior.

And Norm Geisler and Nix in their book, From God to Us, has a detailed description, kind of, of each one of these Gnostic writings and pseudepigraphal writings. So, that's a collection of all kinds of books written, and many of them found in the Nag Hammadi library.

Kind of gives you an idea of what's out there. You'll notice that there are historical books and gospels and epistles and apocalypses.

Yes.

Dating the Canonical Gospels and the Pseudepigrapha

Do scholars today agree on when these books were written, that they were written in the second and third centuries, or do they disagree on the timing of the writings? That's the question. From what I understand, there's no disagreement as to when these books were written.

I don't think that there's any scholar who thinks the Gospel of Thomas was written in the first century. What they try and do, see, this is the shell game that's played by modern scholarship. They try and take the canonical gospels and push them to as late a date as they possibly.

Can.

And they say, the Gospel of John probably was not even written in the first century, and probably not even by John. Probably it was written by a disciple of John several decades after John would have died, because it has this exalted view of Jesus.

So, what they need is, they need the passing of time between the ending of the apostolic.

Era.

They need a whole bunch of time in there before this notion that Jesus was God could creep into Christianity. And so they say, the Gospel of John probably written around 150, 160, 170. Then they want to take the Gospel of Thomas, and they want to move its date back as early as they possibly can, so that they can get Thomas back very close to John.

And see, if they can do that, they can play a shell game with the Gospel of John, get the dating of the Gospel of John very late, and then they can play a shell game with the Gospel of Thomas, and get the dating of the Gospel of Thomas very early, then what have they done?

They've made those two gospels contemporary, and then the argument about authorship and canonicity is up for grabs. And I totally reject that. Our four gospels were written, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, written in the first century.

They're apostolic, and they're canonical. And the church always knew that they existed, and then there's no good evidence that the Gospel of John was written any time after 70, sorry, 90 A .D. And that's the latest that most conservative scholars who would be in our theological camp would put the Gospel of John, is about 90 A .D.