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

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Apostasy Described Part 3 (Hebrews 10:28-29)

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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.

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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.

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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, that it is 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.

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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.

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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.

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Well, in your God Wrote a Book lesson book, we are in lesson number 13, the

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Septuagint, the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha, and other big words, lesson 13, and last week we looked at the first two of those, the

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Septuagint and the Apocrypha and what that meant, what those things are. The Septuagint is the

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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.

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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

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Septuagint of their day, the Greek translation of the Old Testament. And then the Apocrypha are those writings written between the

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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

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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.

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So today we're looking at the Pseudepigrapha, the Pseudepigrapha. The Pseudepigrapha, and this is number three in lesson 13, the

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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

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Christian church which falsely claimed to have been written by one of the apostles or someone so closely associated with them.

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So they were false writings circulated within the first two to three centuries after the life of Jesus.

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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.

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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 or the

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Pseudepigrapha. And we see that even during Paul's lifetime, there were false writings that circulated claiming to be written by the apostle

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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.

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Second Thessalonians 2 verses 1 to 2, Paul says, now we request you brethren with regard to the coming of our

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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

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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

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Thessalonican church that claimed Paul as its authorship that said the day of the Lord, the judgment had already come.

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And so Paul makes mention of the fact that people were writing even in his own day letters that supposedly came from him.

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So in 1 Corinthians 16, 21, also from the hands of Paul, he says, this greeting is in my own hand,

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Paul. Galatians 6, 11, see with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand.

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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.

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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?

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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,

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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 is a letter from the

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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.

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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

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B under number 3, the Nag Hammadi library. How many of you know what the Nag Hammadi library is?

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Anybody here familiar with the Nag Hammadi library? Is it in Japan? No, it is not. It's close. It's close.

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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.

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This earthenware vessel contained 13 papyrus books made up of 52 different texts and this was located along the east bank of the

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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

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Nag Hammadi library's copies from the 5th century of documents that were written in the 2nd and 3rd century.

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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

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Nag Hammadi library was largely a collection of a Gnostic sect, S -E -C -T, a

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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.

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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.

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So everything physical, all things tangible and physical are bad and everything spiritual or ethereal is good and that was the

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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,

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Paul in the book of Colossians is 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

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Gnostic heresies that he is correcting in that book. In the book of 1st John, John is attacking what he saw as some

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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Christianity and Gnosticism and tried to blend them into sort of a synchronistic Christian Gnosticism and this became quite popular.

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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

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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.

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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

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Gnostic sects that would pop up and they would need of course books that were sympathetic to their

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Gnostic theology. So Gnosticism denied the deity of Christ, they believed that matter was evil so Jesus never came in the flesh.

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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.

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And so one of the Gnostic ideas or theologies was that you needed to have, by the way the word

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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Nag Hamadi Library. So let me give you some examples of the Pyrgophil books. The Gospel of Thomas.

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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

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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

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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.

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And they're going to give this attention to the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip and others because they give us an early first century view of what

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Christianity was really like, an argument that they don't. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John give us an early first century view of what

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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.

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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

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Gnostic sects claimed to be Christians in the Nag Hamadi area were like. They don't tell us anything about first century

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Judaism around the time of Jesus and the apostles or what early Christians believed. So the

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Gospel of Thomas contains 114 sayings supposedly uttered by Jesus. Some of the sayings are found in the

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Gospels, like for instance Matthew 15, 14, if a blind man leads a blind man they both fall into a pit, well the

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Gospel of Thomas saying 34 also contains the same information. There are 13 parables included in the

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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

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Gospel of Thomas are slightly shorter than the Gospels parallels in the synoptic Gospels.

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By the way, if you find a parallel between the Gospel of Thomas and a saying that Jesus said and for instance

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Matthew or Matthew's parables and parables contained in a shorter form in the Gospel of Thomas, does that prove that the

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Gospel of Thomas is inspired? No, it doesn't. What would it tell us?

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Sorry? They're similar? One quoted the other? It would tell us that maybe the author of the

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Gospel of Thomas was familiar with the synoptic Gospels, right? He 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?

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You'd include a little, 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 sounds just like Matthew, those are parables, this must be inspired, that's the point behind that.

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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, familiar in some way with the writings of the

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New Testament. The Gospel of Thomas also contains total nonsense and this is why it's named the

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Gospel of Thomas. So, for instance, saying number 14 says this,

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If you fast, you will give rise to sin for yourselves, and if you pray, you will be condemned.

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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.

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For what goes into your mouth will not defile you, but that which issues from your mouth is that which will defile you."

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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 a man, comes out of the heart, and the heart is desperately wicked and deceitful.

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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.

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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.

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That stuff is nonsense. Saying number 45 says, if you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.

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You know what that means? Yeah, somebody in the back just shook their head like, what? Now see, if you were one of the

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Gnostic elites, you would know what that means. You guys in the cheap seats, you don't necessarily know what that means.

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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.

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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.

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For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven, close quote. There's transgenderism in the second century, right?

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Saying number 22, Jesus saw infants being suckled, he said to his disciples, these infants being suckled are like those who enter the kingdom.

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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.

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Now that's just gibberish, is it not? But not to the Gnostic. That's not gibberish.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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?

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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Christians, and that simply is not true, because what they do represent is the beliefs of an apostate, heretical, unorthodox

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Gnostic sect. That's what the gospel of Thomas represents, not the beliefs of the first century

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Christians. You want to know what first century Christians believed and taught about the person of Christ, you read Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

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If you want to know what some Egyptian Gnostic sect, some heretical apostate group out in the middle of the

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Egyptian desert believed about the person of Christ, then you read the Gnostic gospels. All right, how about the gospel of Philip?

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

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They are 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.

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That make sense to you? Yeah, if you put me alone in a room with a year's supply of heroin,

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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.

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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.

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The gospel of Philip quotes some phrases from the gospels, including indicating that it was written after the gospels and were written and widely circulated.

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So again, the gospel of Philips, the similarity in some wording only indicates that the canonical gospels,

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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.

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The gospel of Mary contains nothing about the life of Christ. It contains mystic teaching attributed to Mary Magdalene.

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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.

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And the gospel of Mary portrays Mary Magdalene as a favorite of Jesus, possessing more knowledge and insight than the apostles.

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The Apocryphon of James, apocrypha means hidden or secret as we talked about last week.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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You see the page that lists the pseudepigraphal writings? The next page?

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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

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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

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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

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Twelve, the gospel of Barnabas, Bartholomew, Hebrews, Marcion, Andrew, Matthias, Peter, and Philip.

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

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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?

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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.

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All right, so we have all of these other gospels.

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What makes our four set apart, what makes them unique? They're written by apostles or people closely associated with apostles.

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Matthew and John were both apostles. Mark associated with Peter and Luke associated with Paul, so we have basically gospels authenticated by Matthew, Paul, Peter, and John, those four apostles.

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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.

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Matthew was 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.

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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

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AD for Luke. Actually, the gospel of Luke probably would have been written while Paul was two years in Caesarea under Felix and Festus before he was shipped off to Rome.

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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.

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Well, during that two years, Luke would have been there with Paul in Caesarea and had access to all the eyewitnesses,

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

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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

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He began to do and to teach. I mean, Luke talks about his study and his research into these things as a historian.

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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

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Lord Jesus Christ, you have all four of those gospels being written, probably in that order, Mark, Matthew, Luke and then

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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.

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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

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Jesus while He walked the face of the earth? We're supposed to exchange the gospel of Thomas for Matthew, Mark, Luke and John?

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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.

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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.

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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

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Christian church, ever, ever. They were accepted on a wide scale by a Gnostic sect that lived in the

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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.

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Yes? Mm -hmm.

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Well, remember, these are gospels or writings that claim to have been written by an apostle or someone close to an apostle.

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But they were written in the second and third century. So they're not written by Peter, nor are they written to the Hebrews or by the

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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.

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All right? Did you know that… Yes? Do what act as a group?

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The books? I don't know that. No. Yep. Yeah. Very good.

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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.

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Yeah. Every good lie has an element of the truth. Yeah. Right.

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The devil never comes out with full error, 100 percent error, because then you can identify it. He takes the skin of the truth.

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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.

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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.

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He comes to us looking as if it's the truth. That's how you deceive people. Yes? No, we do not know authorship.

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No. If the real author of any of these is known, I don't know which one it is. Okay? Yes?

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Yeah. Yeah.

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Yeah. It does. Well, it appears to be the truth, but his lie attracts a lot of people. That's why the way is narrow and the road is broad and it leads to destruction.

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Jesus said that. Yes? Would Irenaeus have known about the

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Gnostic writings and who wrote them? He may have. Yeah. People at that time may have known who wrote them.

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Not that I know of. No, not been preserved that I know of. Yeah. All right, you also have multiple books of Acts.

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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.

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The Acts of Philip, the Acts of Thaddeus, there are epistles there. The letter attributed to our

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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.

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Apocalypses? What's the plural of apocalypses? That's a good question.

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I don't know. You proofread everything I say. No? Got nothing for me?

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The Apocalypses of Peter and Paul, Thomas, Stephen, Second Apocalypse of James, Misos, Dostoios, the last three were found at Nag Hammadi, and then your other works,

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The Secret Book of John, Traditions of Matthew, and The Dialogue of the Savior. And Norm Geisler and Nix in their book,

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From God to Us, has a detailed description kind of of each one of these Gnostic writings and pseudepigraphal writings.

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So that's a collection of all kinds of books written and many of them found in the

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Nag Hammadi library. It 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.

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Yes? 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?

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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

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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.

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They try and take the canonical Gospels and push them to as late a date as they possibly can. And they say the

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Gospel of John probably was not even written in the first century and probably not even by John.

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Probably it was written by a disciple of John several decades after John would have died because it has this exalted view of Jesus.

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And so what they need is, they need the passing of time between the ending of the apostolic era.

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They need a whole bunch of time in there before this notion that Jesus was God could creep into Christianity.

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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

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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

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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?

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They've made those two Gospels contemporary. And then the argument about authorship and canonicity is up for grabs, and I totally reject that.

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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.

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And there's no good evidence that the Gospel of John was written any time after 70, sorry, 90

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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

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A .D. So that puts John as a very young man during the life of Jesus, which he probably was in the 20s, something like that.

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And that makes him a very old man by the time he died and writing the Gospel of John very late. But there's no doubt it was written by John the

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Apostle. There can be no doubt about that. But what skeptics try and do is they try and question the dating of the canonical

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Gospels, and then they try and rework the Gospel of Thomas to make it much earlier. And by doing so, they try and move them close together in order to...then

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they become contemporaries and then it's up for grabs. Which one of them do we choose? That's part of the shell game of dating those

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Gospels. But these pseudepigraphal writings, I don't know of anybody who would date them earlier than the 2nd century, any of them.

31:34

Any other questions about those? All right, under letter E, why do we reject the pseudepigrapha?

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We talked about why we reject the apocryphal writings. Why do we reject the pseudepigrapha as canonical?

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Number one, they do not meet the criteria for canonicity, and I don't know why I left such a big space for the word canonicity there in your notebook, just in case you have to write big.

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They do not meet the criteria for canonicity. They're not written by apostles, they're authenticity, they fail on that, they're not orthodox, they have no authority, they were not accepted widespread by the

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Christian church, so they do not have those qualities of canonical God -inspired books. Number two, they contain false doctrine, errors, and inaccuracies.

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It is not difficult to spot the false doctrines in these pseudepigraphal writings when you compare them to the

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New Testament Gospels and the Epistles. And number three, these books have never enjoyed even moderately widespread acceptance by the people of God.

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These books have never enjoyed even moderately widespread acceptance by the people of God. Again, to reiterate, the

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Nag Hammadi library and the pseudepigraphal works, they were accepted by a little sect of people, a

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Gnostic sect of a heretical group that believed unorthodox things regarding Jesus.

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They didn't believe what the New Testament taught about Jesus, otherwise they would have embraced the canonical books of the

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New Testament that were written by the apostles. Yes? Yeah, good question.

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Discovered in 1945, is there reference to these books prior to that? I don't know that there is any reference to these books prior to 1945.

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Yeah, I don't know about that, I'd have to do some more reading on that. When we talk about, well,

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I'm going to get to this in the objection here in just a second, so I don't want to jump ahead of myself. Are there any other questions about what we've covered so far?

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Let's deal with this objection that is at the end of our lesson here. Archaeologists have recently discovered the lost books of the

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Bible which show us that we don't have accurate information in our Bibles about Jesus and His teachings. That's a claim.

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It gets regurgitated out of the pit of hell every Easter, every Christmas time, that gets regurgitated right out of the lowest circle of hell, put out on the headlines and circulated on social media.

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Recent discoveries, discovered the lost books of the Bible, and these show us that we don't have all the information or accurate information about Jesus and the teaching of the apostles.

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How do you answer that from what we've studied so far? They were rejected?

34:38

Yep. These books were rejected. Couldn't we also point out that in, well, let me back up, what

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I want you to identify sometimes is that in objections that people raise, there are all kinds of hidden assumptions in the wording of the objection, okay?

34:58

Archaeologists have recently discovered the lost books of the Bible. What is the hidden objection? What is the hidden presupposition that is worked into that objection?

35:10

Yeah, the books can be lost, right? That these books were ever lost or accepted to begin with as if they just, you know, the guy traveling with the

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Bible one day, the binding got bad and he loaded up on his camel and that book of Thomas dropped out into the sand and it was lost to all of history until some shepherd boy put it in an earthenware jar and buried it with a bunch of fertilizer somewhere and then we discovered it in 1945, right?

35:34

That's the assumption. That's the presupposition worked into the objection that God cannot preserve

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His Word or He has not preserved His Word. The presupposition is that Thomas and all these other books were accepted as part of the

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Bible at some point, right? That's the presupposition behind that, that they were accepted as part of the

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Bible, that they were assumed to be canonical at some point in the past and that somehow lost to history they just fell out of the binding somewhere along the way and they were lost and now we have recently discovered it.

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That's the presupposition that's worked into that objection and you have to challenge that at the beginning.

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So someone raises this objection, my first question is, how were they lost? How do you know it was lost?

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Didn't somebody have to accept it as found or part of it before it could be lost? Who did that?

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Who lost it? Where was it lost? How was it lost? See, those are all the assumptions that are baked into that objection and you have to challenge the assumption itself because the assumption itself is not valid.

36:36

Yeah, Brian, what's that? As if there was ever any loss to start with, right?

36:44

Yeah, this objection assumes that all these books were accepted as canonical at some point. That is false.

36:50

That's the false presupposition, that's false, never was. These books were never accepted as canonical, ever, ever.

36:59

So what do you mean they're lost? If what you mean by lost books of the Bible is there are some ancient writings that mention

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Jesus from the second, third century, yeah, but that's not the Bible. Those are not the canonical books, right?

37:11

So if your assumption is that any ancient writing that mentions Jesus must be accepted as canonical, then you're right, those were lost books in that sense.

37:21

But you can't assume that and that's not what we mean by canonical and that's not the standard of canonicity or inspiration, just that a book mentions

37:29

Jesus. Yes, Angelica? Yeah, presupposition?

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Yeah, she was mentioning Carl Sagan's show on the cosmos and how there are presuppositions that are worked into that as well.

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Yeah, Mike? Oh, they're on the

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History Channel, if you want to know where the scholars are at. If you dial into A &E or the History Channel, you'll see them lined up.

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They stack them up like cordwood one after another to come in and try and discredit Scripture. That's where you'll find them. You'll notice that on the

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History Channel documentaries that talk about the real story of Jesus, they're not interviewing R .C. Sproul or John MacArthur or Phil Johnson or Justin Peters or Paul Washer or any of the good guys.

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They're not interviewing any of them. They're interviewing some head of a religious department from Stanford University who has his

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Ph .D. in trying to discredit the New Testament or they're interviewing Bart Ehrman or they're interviewing the head of the humanities department at Boston College or something like that.

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They're not interviewing anybody who has done any serious scholarship in these issues. They're religious studies majors that are these scholars.

39:09

Yeah, they're professors of secular universities whose job and whose agenda is to try and rewrite the early history of Christianity in order to make it more palatable and of course in order to discredit the true claims of the

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New Testament. And they always begin with the assumption that we've worked into the objection here, that books can be lost, that God has no ability to preserve it.

39:28

He can write a book or that the assumption that every book that mentions Jesus is therefore legitimate or that there was no idea of canonicity or there was no standard of canonicity or apostolic authorship, that these standards didn't exist, that Christians really for hundreds of years didn't even know which books were in and which books were out.

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These are all of the assumptions that are built into that entire exercise of trying to discredit New Testament books.

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And the agenda is always the same. The agenda is always the same and that is to discredit the 27 canonical books of our

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New Testament, to discredit them and to try and lend credibility to any and everything that isn't in your

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New Testament. That is always the end goal. Oh, sorry,

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PBS, yep, yep, alright.

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So how do we respond to these writings? This is the last question we'll answer, number five. How do we respond to these writings?

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Basically understand the true nature of the writings. Are you going to be lost if you read the Gospel of Thomas? I mean not lost spiritually, you might be lost and like, what does that mean?

40:38

But you're not going to be lost spiritually if you read the Gospel of Thomas. So can you read these Gospels? There's some historical value here in understanding

40:45

Gnosticism, understanding the idea of Gnosticism and what they taught and how this influenced early people of all religions and walks of life as the spirit of the age in the second and third centuries, full -blown

40:58

Gnosticism coming really to its peak at that time. So there's some value in it from a historical perspective.

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This is like we said that of the Apocrypha as well, there's some value there historically speaking of what these books describe, but just don't fall into the deception that these are in any way legitimate records of the life and ministry of Jesus and the

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Apostles. Understand that the books were written by apostates and heretics and that they are religious in nature, but they're not necessarily edifying.

41:25

So somebody that I heard this one time with, God's Word is your flashlight, you can walk through any man's field, basically meaning that if you know the truth and you're grounded in the truth, you can read a book that is heretical like this.

41:37

You can read those. I mean I didn't endanger anybody's eternal security by reading from the Gospel of Thomas and quoting that earlier, right?

41:44

So can you read these books? Yeah, you could read them. It might be interesting, curious. Go ahead. If you have that kind of free time, but if you have that kind of free time,

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I have some other things that I would suggest that you read. And just understand your relationship to those books, that there is a huge difference between those books and Scripture, and the believer can identify those differences.

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An unbeliever will read the Gospel of Matthew, and it will make as much sense to him as the Gospel of Thomas, okay?

42:12

An unbeliever will read those two, and they will both make equal sense. My pagan relatives, my pagan friends will read the

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Gospel of Matthew, and they're not going to have a clue what any of that means. And they could read the Gospel of Thomas, and yeah, it just sounds like another gospel.

42:27

It sounds like mumbo -jumbo. But a believer will read the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Thomas, and you can tell the difference between those two.

42:34

It's quite evident. Yeah, Brace? Oh, very good.

42:51

So to play a devil's advocate, could somebody make the claim that as Christians, we're claiming that we have an understanding of Scripture because the

42:58

Spirit of God has enlightened us? The difference between that claim, which is 1 Corinthians 2, that by the Spirit of God, we understand spiritual things.

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The difference between that claim and the Gnostic claim is that my claim is that every person who has the

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Holy Spirit has that understanding. The Gnostic claim is that within those who have the Holy Spirit, there are some who have different levels of knowledge.

43:17

So there's different levels of knowledge between us. But my claim, or the claim of Scripture, is that to understand spiritual things, you have to have the

43:24

Spirit of God, and you have to be regenerated, and that the work of the Spirit of God is to give you eyes that can see and a heart that can respond and a heart that can know truth and an ability to know truth, and that this is an effect of regeneration, not of enlightenment.

43:37

That regeneration brings that capacity to know spiritual things, not a special level of enlightenment bringing that capacity to know those special things.

43:45

It is available to everybody who comes to faith in Jesus Christ, that's right. So it is not, in that sense, a level of knowledge that not everybody has access to.

43:53

Well, it is, in that sense, a level of knowledge that not everybody has access to because you have to belong in the family of God to have that. But the method by which you gain that knowledge and the means of that knowledge and that kind of knowledge is entirely different in the

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Christian view than in the Gnostic view. Yes? From my knowledge of the

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NAR movement, which is the New Apostolic Reformation movement, that is a Gnostic, charismatic Gnostic sect of Christianity that believes in private revelations and things of that nature.

44:28

Do they use any of these books? I'm not aware that they do. I could ask Justin about that, actually, and see what he would say.

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But I don't believe that any of them would ever use any of these books. They don't need to when they can just write their own

44:41

Gnostic theology out of whole cloth, really. Why refer something 1 ,800 years ago when you can just fabricate your own stuff in modern day?

44:52

All right. Well, that is our time for today. Next week we will... Yes? Oh, everybody's dying to know.

45:00

Hold on. Here we are. This answers a long -awaited question. Apocalypses.

45:06

That's what I was going to say. That's what she was going to say. Everybody needs to know that. Get that on the recording. That's good.

45:13

Okay. It's not apocalypses or I. Apocalypses.

45:18

Okay. Oh, not apocalypses. Apocalypses. Okay. Good.

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Write it down. All right. Thank you, Google. All right. Let's pray.

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Father, we are grateful for what we have learned and for the fellowship that we enjoy in Your Son. We do thank

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You that by Your grace You have opened our eyes and our hearts to know the truth and to love the truth. We thank You for the Spirit of God which resides inside of all those who are

45:44

Yours and that we can have Him to illuminate the truth in Your Word to us. We're grateful for Your Word and that You preserved it for us again and we just thank

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You for that. May You be glorified through our response to Your truth always. Be glorified also through our fellowship and our worship which is to follow here in Christ's name.