Intro to the Little Letters

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I'm going to be doing something a little bit different for this series of lessons.
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I'm going to be having a screen.
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I've been doing this in the academy, and it's worked out fairly nicely to help people keep up with what I'm saying and also to take notes.
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I don't know how many of you are interested in actually doing that, but this is going to be hopefully to help you do that.
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But as I said, I guess it's been now a couple of weeks ago that my series of lessons that I'm going to begin tonight is on the subject of what I call the little letters.
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This is the four books of the New Testament that only comprise one chapter each.
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And my goal, even though I would say it's a lofty goal, my goal is to try to do all of this before the end of the year, because I think that we'll be able to do 2nd and 3rd John within a few weeks, and then Jude will take us several weeks, and then Philemon we may be able to do in a couple of weeks.
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So if that all, at the time that I have in my mind adds up, and if Anne and I stay on the same setup that we have now, then it may work.
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We may be making some changes.
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We've been talking about some Wednesday night changes and things that may work a little better.
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But as far as if we keep on the trajectory we're on now, this will probably take me through Christmas.
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Tonight we're going to be looking at the introduction to the little letters.
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The introduction is the authorship, the dating and the themes that are in these books.
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Now, if you've ever opened a study Bible or if you have a study Bible, you open it up to the first page of a book.
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It always talks about the author and sometimes it'll give you the historic setting or the context, and it usually gives you the themes.
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If you have a MacArthur study Bible, it even gives you interpretive challenges, which I've always thought was helpful in the MacArthur Bible.
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He addresses in the introduction, here's some places where this book has some difficulties in interpretation, which I, you know, back, especially when I was first starting to learn, I had my MacArthur Bible and it was very helpful because often when I was teaching through a book, I would go to those interpretive challenges and I would look at them.
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So that's really what tonight is.
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Tonight we're going to be looking at the, in a sense, an introduction to these four letters.
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And why did I choose these books? Well, these four all consist of only one chapter, which makes them the shortest books of the New Testament.
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They also tend to be among the most neglected.
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Would you agree? You look like you maybe don't agree.
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What do you think, Ms.
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Wilma? I would say second and third John, honestly, if I asked you right now, raise your hand, tell me what it's about.
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That's what I mean.
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Now, if I asked you to tell me what Romans is about, you might could give me at least something.
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But if I say, what is second John about, who's it even written to? That's why I say they're neglected.
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You read over them.
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In fact, a lot of the commentaries I've been looking at, second and third John, they don't even get their own attempt.
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They're stuck in with first John.
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You'll get to the commentary and it'll be commentary on first, second, third John.
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That's why I left first John out, by the way.
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I didn't do first John in this because, one, if I did first John, that would take at least a year, maybe could have done it in eight months, but it would have taken the lion's share of the time.
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And then when we got to second and third John, the focus would have been gone.
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We'd have been so focused on what we learned in the five chapters of first John, and so I didn't want to do that.
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And also, it's important to understand, and I'm going to mention this later, but these are not sequels.
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It's not like Star Wars, where you have to watch the first one to understand the second one.
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You know, you can start with second John because it's a different level.
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It's a different letter to a different audience.
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It's not as if you have to have first John to read second John or third John.
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And so we know the word of God is profitable.
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The whole word of God is God's word.
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And so we're going to be looking at just these one chapter books.
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It's actually only 78 verses.
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The next several months is going to look...
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That's all that these books contain.
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Second John is 13, third John is 15, Jude is 25, and Philemon is 25.
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Now, I think that adds up to 78.
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I don't do the homeschooling when it comes to math.
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That's Jennifer's department, so if I got the math wrong on that, I will concede that that was my mistake.
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What did he say? Am I right? Okay, all right.
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And as I already said, I kind of jumped ahead on this screen, but why not first John? Many commentators put first through third John together as a group.
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First John tends to overwhelm the study, and it's important to note that these are not sequels.
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They can be studied independently.
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So like I said, tonight we're going to be looking at the authorship of the books.
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We're going to look at the dating of the books, and we're going to look at the themes of the books.
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You say, are we going to get through that in the time that we have allowed? Maybe.
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But I think so.
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I think so.
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So let's look first at the authorship of the little letters.
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Real quick, who wrote second and third John? But does it say that? No, it doesn't.
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It says the elder.
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If you look at second John, it says the elder to the elect lady.
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That's how it introduces itself.
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And third John as well.
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So it doesn't identify John.
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We're going to talk in a little while about why we believe it's John, but it doesn't say that.
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Okay? So second and third John, the identity of the author is the elder.
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Jude identifies himself as the brother of James.
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And Philemon identifies the author as Paul.
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Philemon is not by Philemon.
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Philemon is to Philemon.
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Just like first and second Peter are to, or rather first, second Timothy are to Timothy, but first and second Peter are by Peter.
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So it can get a little confusing because sometimes the name of the book refers to the audience.
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Sometimes the name of the book refers to the author.
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That can get somewhat confusing.
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When it's Paul's letters and it's the name of a person, it's the recipient.
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First and second Timothy are to Timothy.
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Titus is to Titus.
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Philemon is to Philemon.
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But first and second Peter are by Peter.
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So just give you that, give you that information.
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All right.
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Who is the elder? This traditionally has been understood to be John, the apostle John.
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However, this is not stated in the text.
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So we use what is called internal and external evidence.
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Now for a thousand points, which are worth nothing, uh, what is internal evidence? Okay.
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That's right.
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That's right.
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Uh, internal evidence is evidence that's found in the text.
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So we can read Paul's letters, even in English.
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And we know Paul didn't write in English.
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Paul wrote in Greek, but we can read Paul's letters in English and we can determine a certain style.
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That is what is called Pauline or some people say Pauline.
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It's Paul's writings.
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And if you read Romans and then you turn around and read John, the gospel of John, you see a totally different style of writing.
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Some people believe that God's, uh, inspiration of the text was sort of like a, like a Holy Spirit fax machine.
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And the people just kind of began to have sort of like a, uh, automatic writing situation where they were just the facts and the facts was, you know, getting spit out through the writer.
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That's not how we believe inspiration happened.
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In fact, if you're unfamiliar with the doctrine of inspiration and inerrancy, one of the things that we talk about when we talk about that doctrine is how it is that God inspired the text.
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How did he do that? He used the agency of the human author.
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Therefore, we can identify John's writings as opposed to Paul's writings or as opposed to Peter's writings.
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In fact, one of the big controversies in the history of the text of scripture is why is it that first and second Peter seem like they're two different authors? There's a lot of debate about that because there's two different styles of writing in those two letters.
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And that's why a lot of people don't believe Peter wrote second Peter.
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I do.
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Don't throw stones.
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I do believe second Peter was written by Peter, but it is much different, particularly in Greek.
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There's different use of language.
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It just seems to be odd that there's these two things, and it does cause some people to question.
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In fact, one of the things that we have to look at not only is internal evidence, we look at external evidence.
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All right, Mike, you got the first one.
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So for another hundred points, what's external evidence? That's right.
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That's right.
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And I have something I want to read.
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Extra biblical or external evidence, which is extra biblical evidence, as you said, includes extra biblical writings, historical documents, archaeological findings.
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And regarding 2 John, Clement and Dionysius both quote from it and identify quoting from John.
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So they tell it.
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They give us an idea who the elder is because they say, this is John, and they quote from that book.
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As does Cyprian, who specifically quotes verse 10.
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He votes.
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He quotes what we would call verse 10, and he identifies it as being from John.
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That's a piece of external evidence.
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Irenaeus quotes it, though it appears Irenaeus thought based upon his quote that it was part of 1 John and understand how the books were.
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They didn't have chapter and verses at that point.
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The chapters weren't done until hundreds of years later, and the verses were even later than that.
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So what they had was they had these books scrolled together.
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So when they opened up and they were reading the letter of 1 John, they might read right into 2 John, not realizing that they had broken that plane of going from one book to another.
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But it's still, he's quoting it as it is John, right? So we see that from Irenaeus.
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And the external evidence for 3 John is similar.
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There are quotes from the book, people saying this is John.
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So that's one of the reasons why we believe the elder is referring to John.
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He's also the only one of the disciples who lived to an elder age.
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He's the only one who lived a long, old life.
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Most of them died martyr's deaths at not young ages, but younger ages.
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And John was the younger of the apostles, so he lived longer and outlived his contemporaries.
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All right.
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Now, I do want to take a quick side note, and I know I don't have a lot of time for side notes, but I like side notes.
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This is sometimes called an excursus.
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I write that in my notes, the term excursus.
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Well, yeah, it's a rabbit trail.
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You say what you want, Mike, I'm going to call it what I want.
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Mike calls it a rabbit trail, I call it an excursus.
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But the excursus is, why does authorship matter? And here's the answer to that.
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It's important to understand that not all books in the New Testament were received by the church with the same level of confidence.
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If I told you right now that there are books in the New Testament that some of the early church did not recognize as being legitimate, would that surprise you? It shouldn't, because when we think about the early church, understand there were a lot of writings that were claiming to be from God.
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And if they would have accepted everything that was written as being from God that claimed to be from God, we would have all kinds of books that are not legitimate.
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So the early church did not simply accept just because Paul says, I'm writing on behalf of God that Paul is.
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And when I say Paul, I'm talking about for those who are listening by recording, I'm talking about Paul Turner, not the apostle Paul.
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But if Paul Turner wrote the epistle of Paul Turner to the church at Laodicea, then that doesn't mean that that book is from God.
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And so there were actually four categories of books.
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When you look historically, there are actually four categories of books that we can identify that the early church had to deal with.
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The first is called the the homo legumina.
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Yeah, that's a weird name.
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Homo legumina, which means they were accepted by everybody.
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There was the antilegumina, and that means that they were questioned by some people disputed.
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There was the pseudepigrapha, that was the ones everybody rejected.
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And then there was the apocrypha, and those were the ones that some accepted, but were not ultimately accepted by the whole.
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Give you a few examples.
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OK, antilegumina, let me back up.
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I'm sorry, hit the wrong button.
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The antilegumina, homo legumina, the first one, books accepted by all.
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How many of your books in the New Testament do you think everyone accepted pretty much universally? Take a guess.
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Half, what did you say? How many of the books of the New Testament were universally accepted pretty much immediately? You said four? She said first four, you said half.
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The answer is actually most of them, about 20 of the New Testament books didn't have any dispute at all.
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That would include the four Gospels, Acts, all of the writings of Paul.
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In fact, the writings of Paul were the first ones to be collected and sent out as a group.
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It was called the Pauline Corpus.
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It was the first group of the New Testament books that were sent out as a group.
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Then you had the four Gospels that were put together and sent as a group.
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Remember, they didn't have codices like we had.
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They didn't have books.
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They had scrolls and they would put them together and they would send them out as a group.
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Well, the writings of Paul were the first group that were sent out to the churches as a whole.
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So we have 20 of the 27 books were not really disputed.
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That's great.
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But now let's step back and say, OK, which ones were under dispute? Hebrews.
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Anyone guess why Hebrews? Doesn't tell us who wrote it, right? We're talking about authorship, right? It doesn't say who wrote it.
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Now, you've made a face.
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What was it? Paul.
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OK, well, I don't think Paul wrote it, but we could debate that another time.
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But that was the question, right? People, I believe Paul preached it, I believe Paul wrote it or Luke penned it.
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I think Luke penned Paul's sermon, but I think it is Pauline for sure.
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And the Pauline Corpus that was sent out, remember I told you the books that were sent out that included Hebrews, they included that along because the early church did see that as a Pauline writing.
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But looking back at it, I have some issues we talk later, but but the issues Hebrews was a disputed text because it didn't identify the author.
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James was a disputed text.
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Which is surprising because James was very primitive or primitive.
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Can't think of the word.
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Preeminent.
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Thank you.
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Thank you.
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He was preeminent in the church.
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He was a he was a pastor in Jerusalem.
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He was the brother of Jesus.
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We see this in Galatians chapter two.
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He's called Jesus's brother.
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So it's surprising.
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But it was among those that were not immediately received.
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Some people think that that's because of Paul's focus on works.
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But I think that's sort of reading back into history.
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I think that didn't really become an issue until around the Reformation times.
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I don't think that was the reasoning, but it was among the disputed books.
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Second and third, John, because they were so personal.
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They were like personal correspondents.
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They didn't read like Romans or even first John that has the theology, the heavy emphasis on theology.
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Jude, because it references extra biblical literature, it references the book of Enoch, it references some kind of weird stuff.
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And we get there.
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We're going to talk about the fact of Moses fighting over the or the fighting over the body of Moses, the angels fighting.
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It's like it's got weird stuff in it.
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And Revelation, the last book of the Bible to receive universal acceptance by the church was Revelation.
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And you say, I wonder why.
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It's got ten headed dragons.
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It's got all kinds of stuff in it.
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It's stuff that people looked at and they're like, this is really wild.
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We look at it and we say, why? Why would anybody ever question this? But we're looking at it from our perspective and go back to their perspective.
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And so the pseudepigraphical books, those were books like Gospel of Thomas.
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Thomas didn't write it.
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They knew Thomas didn't write it.
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No doubt.
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Pseudepigrapha means false, a false name written under a false name.
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Pseudo meaning false.
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Pseudepigrapha meaning false name.
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So that happened.
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And what do we have? You guys have heard of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, right? Or the Gospel of Judas.
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If you've never heard of those, they are like huge among New Testament scholars who are on the left because they want to be held up as this is the same as the Gospel of Matthew.
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What's the Greek word for that, Church? Bologna.
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It's absolutely Bologna.
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Those are written second, third, fourth century.
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They're nowhere near the same authentication as the Gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
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Nowhere near the same level of authority or even the right time period.
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Mary Magdalene would have never written the crazy stuff that's in the Gospel of Mary Magdalene.
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Neither would.
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And if you've never read the Gospel of Thomas, that's your homework.
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It's crazy.
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Go home and read that nonsense because you'll I mean, you know it.
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You read it and you read the word of God and you see this silly thing.
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And you say, how could anybody believe.
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That that is supposed to be God's word, that's why they didn't.
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It was just rejected by everybody.
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It's not God's word.
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And then, of course, the apocryphal books there, you guys know the Old Testament apocrypha, Maccabees, Bell and the Dragon, that stuff.
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That's the Roman Catholics hold to that.
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Did you know there's a New Testament apocrypha? Most people don't.
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There are books that some of the early church recognized that did not receive full acceptance by the church.
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One of them is the Epistle of Barnabas.
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It's a great book.
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If you've never read the Epistle of Barnabas, I would encourage you to read it.
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But it's not scripture, but it's history and it's good writing.
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And it tells you it gives you a picture of that time period.
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The Didache, the Didache is a wonderful writing.
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It was like an early church manual.
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In fact, I use the Didache when I'm arguing against when I'm arguing the subject of baptism, because the Didache actually tells how the early church practiced baptism.
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They would fast with the person being baptized before they were baptized.
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And then when they baptized them, they would baptize them.
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And what the Didache calls living water means water that's running like a stream.
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It says, but if living water is not available, then still water is OK.
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And if there be not enough water to immerse them, then pouring was acceptable as a substitute.
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But it was not the primary mode.
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But again, this book goes all the way back to the first century.
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This is one of the oldest church manuals that we can look at.
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We can say this is how the church did things 2000 years ago.
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Is it scripture? No.
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But it was one of the early what we call apocryphal New Testament books.
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So having said all that, I know that was a wild excursion.
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Maybe that's just what I want to talk about tonight.
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But but to me, I think it's important because understanding this, when we talk about Antigona, we're talking about books that were spoken against and we know why these books were spoken against and included in that are the books we're going to be studying.
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Three of the four, three of the four being Second, Third John and Jude.
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Now, authorship of Jude.
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There are many Jews in scripture.
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Jude is the same as Jude, Judah or Judas.
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So when we we think of like Judas Iscariot, it's the same it's the same name.
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As Jude, the book of Jude or Judah from the Old Testament, that's one of the ways in which English gets it really weird, like James in Greek is Jakob, so we get the word Jacob.
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That's why I don't know if you know Arminius, the Arminianism, Calvinism.
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He's called Jacobus Arminius, but he's also called James Arminius because it's a Latinized version of that name of Jacobus is James.
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And so like what was the name of the leader after Moses, Joshua, what was the name of your savior? The same name it is it's in Hebrew.
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It's same name, Yeshua, Joshua and Jesus are the same name, but we make we separate because of English.
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So Jude, Judah, Judas, it's all the same name.
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Who is this, Jude? I believe it's the younger half brother of Jesus, and I base that upon the fact that he calls himself the brother of James.
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James never identifies himself as the brother of Jesus, but other people do.
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As I said earlier in the book of Galatians, it identifies James as the brother of Jesus.
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And if James is the brother of Jesus and Jude is the brother of James, then if my logic skills are what they should be, if A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C, right? That's the standard of deductive reasoning.
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So if Jude is the brother of James and James is the brother of Jesus, then Jude is the brother of Jesus.
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If the text never says that, you ever wonder why? I don't have a good answer.
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I just wonder if you wonder things I wonder if I were Jesus's brother.
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I think I would have said so, but again, I've never written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
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So, yeah, that's what it is.
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I and I don't doubt that Jude was much more humble than me.
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I agree.
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But that is an interesting note.
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Could be one thing, though, I have because when I taught on James, I did talk about this.
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James doesn't mention that he's the brother of Jesus.
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He mentions he's the servant of Jesus.
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And my thought and again, it's just my thought, it's it's it's my understanding is how I think it is.
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But I'm not saying this is a right or wrong interpretation.
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I'm just giving you my thought.
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I think it does have to do some with humility, but also with the idea of there's no desire to show equality.
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You know, when we talk about brothers, there's some there's a you know, there's a sense in which we're brothers.
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But when he talks about Christ, no, I'm his servant, not his brother.
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I'm his slave.
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The word do loss.
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I'm his slave.
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So I do think there was a humility, a sense in which he is the savior.
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Oh, I thought Andy's going to say something like he looked up at me.
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I thought you were waiting on an addition there.
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All right.
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So we know who wrote second, third John.
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It was John.
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We know who wrote Jude, who wrote Philemon.
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Paul starts with his name.
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Like all of his letters, he identifies himself in the beginning.
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And as stated, Philemon was among the undisputed text, the homo legumina, and Paul and authorship was regularly accepted.
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It mentions Paul by name three times.
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And it has close ties with the epistle of Colossians.
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When we study Philemon, I'm going to show you the crossover with Colossians.
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It's a good, good, good chance that they were written close to the same time.
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Paul uses some of the same language in both books, and it's quoted by Ignatius, Tertullian and Origen as being Pauline.
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So that's the external evidence, which goes along with the internal evidence, which is good internal evidence.
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I'm Paul and I'm writing.
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This is a pretty good.
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Yeah, exactly.
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So you have that.
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It's all right there.
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All right.
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Now we're going to look at themes as we have very little time, but we'll do this under the themes.
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The theme of second John.
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The widespread and the widespread ministry of itinerant preachers in the early church is addressed by the small epistle.
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These ministers would often receive food, lodging and even money from Christians.
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The danger of false teachers was a genuine threat.
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And John wants to ensure that no one cooperates with a person who is spreading error about Jesus next week when we talk about second John, because next week we're going to get into the book.
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I really want to address this question as we study the book.
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How are we to respond when the false teacher comes to our door? Because and I'm not saying you have to answer tonight, but be thinking about that, because that's what we're going to be talking about, because he tells us specifically not to entertain.
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These these people, but but what does that mean, what does that look like in a practical, you know, because we don't have itinerant ministers going around, but we do have boys on 10 speeds who are wanting to tell us about, you know, the Mormon Jesus.
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And we do have these folks that show up on Saturday morning with their awake magazines that want to tell us about the Jehovah Witness Jesus.
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And I do think this book speaks to a very practical sense in that, but it also speaks to things like ecumenism.
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Ecumenism is this idea that all faiths are supposed to come together without drawing any lines.
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And I think second John draws some pretty major lines and says we can't do that.
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So getting to the theme, that's the theme of the book.
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That's what we're going to deal with now.
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Third John is, again, brief, but it gives us a glimpse into the first century church by mentioning three people.
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We're going to look at these three people.
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We don't know much about them, but we do see them in this text.
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And a few of them are mentioned elsewhere.
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Gaius is commended for being hospitable.
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Demetrius is commended for having a good testimony.
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And Diotrephes is criticized for his selfishness.
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So that's the three names that are mentioned in third John.
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And one of the things that I thought about as I was writing this introduction, it emphasizes the importance of practical righteousness.
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We know that our righteousness is ultimately something that is given to us by the imputation of God when he gives us the righteousness of Christ, whereby I stand on judgment day, having a righteousness not of my own that comes through works, but a righteousness which comes through faith in Jesus Christ that I know.
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But does that mean I should not have a practical righteousness? And by practical, I mean a life that is lived practically for the Lord, I'm so convinced as I preach the last few weeks on Sunday morning, I'm so convinced that we find ourselves in a place.
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Where there's no call for practical righteousness, it's just depend on the Lord, trust in the Lord.
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And it doesn't matter if you have any life righteousness.
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And I just don't see that.
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And I think third John is going to speak to that because, again, it talks about three guys and one of them is a dud in the simplest of terms.
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Yes, I can't answer that right now.
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I did.
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But it's not it's not the same.
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It's not the same audience.
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So I don't think I but I had to go back and look to see if what the connection is there.
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But I so far I haven't made that connection.
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Bunyan uses Gaius in that book, Christianity.
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Oh, I haven't read that.
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Yeah.
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And I know Gaius is mentioned, I think, in Acts as well mentioned as the.
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Maybe it's not.
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I have to look.
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But Gaius has mentioned other places.
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But like I said, we have three guys.
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One of them is a simple enough one to do.
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Yeah.
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And then the theme of Jude, Jude focuses on the seriousness of doctrinal error.
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So we've seen.
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Second, John is going to deal with false teachers, third, John is going to deal with practical righteousness, we get to Jude, and it's going to deal with the seriousness of doctrinal error.
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In fact, you know what I love about Jude? Jude starts by saying, I wanted to write to you about the common salvation that we have.
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I wanted to write to you about the gospel.
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But I am forced to write to you about what he calls the hidden reefs.
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What is a hidden reef, a hidden reef is something that the ship that sailing doesn't see, and it tears the bottom out from underneath it, and he talks about the waterless clouds, he's talking about these people that make themselves something that they're not, and they're these dangerous people.
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And really, Jude is about the dangerous people in the church.
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People who come in and bring false teachings and heresies.
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And then Philemon, Paul appeals to Philemon on behalf of Onesimus, a slave who has now become a brother in Christ.
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This is a private letter, but one which also has value for a public audience.
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Paul writes to Philemon about a sensitive issue and urges him in a way that is both brotherly and pastoral.
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I want to mention this when we get to Philemon, we're going to talk about slavery.
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I think there's some misunderstandings about slavery in the Old Testament and the New Testament that I hope to clarify.
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But one of the things that we see in the text is Paul speaking to a slave master about a slave.
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And we're going to we're going to look more at that when we get there.
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Last thing and we'll close the dating of the little letters.
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When it comes to dating of books, I readily admit my bias.
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I have a particular bias about the dating of the New Testament, I believe and am convinced that the entire New Testament was written before the fall of Jerusalem in nineteen or nineteen, nineteen seventy, eighty, seventy one, nineteen seventy and eighty seventy.
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The fall of Jerusalem happened and it is my.
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Conviction that the entirety of the New Testament was written prior to that, that would mean getting over to the 20, 25 years later, I know, and that's why I'm making this case.
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Actually, the next screen is going to mention that, but we'll get there in a second.
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We are looking at the time of the cross, which would have been when? Somewhere around 30 ish, we don't know, but we have 30 and then 70.
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We have 70, which would have been what happened, the great event happened in 70.
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Well, all Jerusalem right now, again, I'm not great at math, but I can do this.
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That is a 40 year time period, which I think is very significant because Jesus refers to the generation that's alive when he's giving his pronouncement about the fall.
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Not one stone is going to be left upon another and all those things.
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It's very important because a generation in Jewish culture is 40 years.
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Right.
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And this is 40 years.
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When's the first New Testament book written? They want to venture a guess, the probably the first book of the New Testament written was written between 48 and 49.
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And it was there's two front runners, it was either Galatians.
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Or it was James.
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And some people put James as early as 44, I don't know if I would agree, I'm just saying that depending on who you read, depending on where you look, we're looking at earliest is in the late 40s, possibly mid 40s.
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OK, so that puts it, you know, about a 20 year period between the death of Christ and the first book to be written.
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The vast majority of the books are written in the 60s.
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OK, so this 10 year period is when we get most of Paul's writings and all that.
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You get some over here, you get some in this period.
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But this 20 year period between forty nine and 70 is when you have most of the New Testament books being written.
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If any of them go after, it would be second and third John, who because John lives until the 90s, which is amazing that he lived that long.
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Second, third John could stretch out to here.
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And I don't say that it's impossible, but my conviction, because none of the New Testament books reference the fall of Jerusalem.
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That's one major thing, because it is the turning point in Jewish history, and you would think that if any of them came after that, they would have referenced that, especially the fact that Jesus prophesied that it was going to happen and they witnessed it.
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But none of them wrote about it.
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So I have I have in my heart, I believe that that they were all written.
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There's actually I think it oh, one of the early fathers actually says.
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That the New Testament books were written prior to the fall, I had to get that quote for you guys, I don't have it with me, but there is an early father who references that, but there's another one who says Revelation was written during the during the reign of a later Caesar.
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So there's there's debate among the early fathers about the dating.
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But again, my conviction is they were written before that.
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However, there are those who would say that the letters second, third John came much later.
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Does this matter only in the sense that we look at the context, the context of what's going on? If if if John is right in second and third John prior to to 87, he's probably writing from a different place than he's writing after.
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Where was he at when he wrote Revelation? The Isle of Patmos, right? That's where he received the revelation was on the Isle of Patmos.
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So so depending on where he was, would would win a little contextual information about what he's writing, but not much, not much.
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All right.
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That was a lot, wasn't it? Lot to chew.
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I hope you guys look forward to this.
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Here's my plan.
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Each book we are going to take the same principles I teach in our hermeneutics class.
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We're going to have those same practical principles in here.
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I'm going to have the passage on the screen and we're going to walk through.
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We're going to do observation, interpretation and application.
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We're going to do it as a group.
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We're going to study these books together.
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I will have my notes when I come in, but I want to lead you through the process of how to study.
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And that's part of what we're going to be doing as we go through these books.
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So come next week, ready to begin.
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Second, John.
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OK.
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Everybody looks so excited, everybody looks like you just can't wait, you want to start tonight, I can tell.
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OK, let's pray.
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Father, I thank you for this time that we've had together.
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I thank you for Brother Andy and his teaching and the wisdom that you've given to us in the book of Proverbs.
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And I pray, Lord, that you would show us in the weeks ahead what you would have for us to learn from these books, these little letters and how they may be little in size, Lord, but yet they are still your word and they stand as artifacts of your truth.
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And Lord, they are the truth.
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Lord, let us be submissive to what we learn in your word.
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And I do pray, God, for those folks that even today I've received prayer requests for folks.
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We pray for John and Gloria, who are not well, and we pray for them.
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And we continue to pray for Andrew, the friend of the Gomez's Lord who's facing, dealing with COVID.
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He's still on the the the breathing machine.
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And Father, we pray for your strength and your mercy to be with them and encourage them.
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The Father, as we drive home tonight, please keep us safe.
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Bring us back together on Sunday as we celebrate the Reformation, what you did and the largest back to the Bible movement in the history of mankind in Christ's name.
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Amen.