09 - Epistle of Barnabas

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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It has been quite some time since we were together, and it's good to be back.

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So I was going to say it's a little warmer here, but this week, it's a little bit weird. I'm not sure what's going on.

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It's not nearly as hot as normally would be this time of year.

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I'll take it. We'll live with it. Won't blame too much about it. But I want to continue the church history section because, well, if you let it go too long, people start forgetting what you said the last time.

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So that's why we are pressing forward with the church history section, even though we'll also be working on concluding over the next couple of weeks in the

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Sunday morning and Sunday evening services the study of the Holiness Code, God's law, that we've been doing for quite some time.

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Hope to be able to wrap those things up fairly quickly. Last time we were together, we have been reading through, actually, if I recall correctly,

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I read all of the Didache last time. And so we're looking at the apostolic fathers.

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We're not, obviously, going to be able to look this carefully at all of Christian history because the apostolic fathers only take up one volume of the 28 in the

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Hendrickson set, and that's a very limited set in and of itself. So if we were to try to read all that stuff, we would never actually finish anything, and there would be no reason to do so.

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But obviously, the earliest examples of Christian literature we have is somewhat important to have an idea of.

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So we've looked at Clement of Rome. We have looked at the

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Didache. The next we're going to look at is called the Epistle of Barnabas, the

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Epistle of Barnabas. I'll be fairly brief with this, but I want to start off by making sure you understand the difference between the

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Epistle of Barnabas and the Gospel of Barnabas.

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Now, neither one of them probably has anything to do with Barnabas, the associate of Paul.

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We don't know who the author of the Epistle of Barnabas is. It's an anonymous work, but that's what it's been identified with over the past few hundred years since we've had manuscripts of it available to us.

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But the Epistle of Barnabas dates to around AD 120. It's probably from Alexandria, Egypt.

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It seems to draw from the Didache, so it's sort of a little bit after that. It's a moralistic treatise, just as the

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Didache was a rather basic, it's not a theological work, it's more of a moral work.

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And so you could easily criticize the

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Epistle of Barnabas for being somewhat on the shallow side, not really showing an in -depth familiarity with a fully

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New Testament understanding of things. We'll see some statements in it that are of interest to us, but it's not the most, what

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I would say, beneficial book. It was very popular in certain areas. But we have good reason to believe that it goes back to that early period in the

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Church. What has often happened is that people will confuse the

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Epistle of Barnabas and what's called the Gospel of Barnabas. Now, the Gospel of Barnabas is, at best, a 13th century, probably later, but we'll be generous and say 13th at the earliest, probably a couple hundred years later than that, but very, very late forgery that is a treasure trove of wild -eyed anachronism.

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And of course, an anachronism is in a book that pretends to be a historical work from the first century.

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If you have all sorts of elements present in the story that did not exist in the first century world at all, that's called an anachronism.

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And I've mentioned it before, but let me mention it again. The Middle Ages, many, many people, even in the elites of society, suffered from what we would call a systemic anachronism.

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During the medieval period in Europe, there would be entire areas where you would never travel more than seven miles any one direction from where you were born.

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And so your world was very small. Your educational level was very limited.

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And many people believed that the world had always been the way that it was now.

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And this explains why you see so many medieval paintings of biblical stories.

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And everyone's dressed like medieval peasants in Europe. And so David lives in a castle, and he looks like a knight.

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And you would think that, well, they were just making a statement. No, they actually thought that as far back as their parents and their grandparents and great grandparents knew, this is how life was and always had been.

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And so documents could be forged. Forgery has, sadly, a lengthy and long history in the history of mankind and in the

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Christian church as well. And we'll look at some of the more famous of those forgeries that had long -lasting impacts, the

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Nation of Constantine, the Pseudo -Isidorean Decretals, et cetera, et cetera. But there were periods of time where things that would look to us as so obviously fraudulent, we're looking at it with Western critical eyes.

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And those Western critical eyes have a history. And so there were books that, from our perspective, people naively accepted as authoritative and as genuine that give clear and obvious evidence that they were anything but.

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But the worldview behind that, that critically analyzes such things, would have existed amongst the

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Greeks and Romans in the past. But in the medieval period, so much of that classical learning was lost that these books ended up having an impact.

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Now, the Gospel of Barnabas, the only people that take it seriously, promote it, make reference to it, think that it's relevant, are

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Muslims. Because it was plainly written by a former

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Christian who became some kind of Muslim, even though even the perspective that it presents is not orthodox

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Islam. So this alleged Gospel of Barnabas has huge armies of hundreds of thousands of people clashing in Palestine, when

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Palestine was the armpit of the Roman Empire. Titus and Roman legions were the largest army that ever marched through there during that period of time.

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And they were nowhere near a quarter million men or anything like that. So they've got these huge armies.

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And the whole teaching of the Gospel of Barnabas identifies Muhammad as the

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Messiah. The Quran never does that. Islam never does that. But it has all sorts of prophecies of the coming of Muhammad and all the rest of this kind of stuff.

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And it's just so plainly a work of wild -eyed fiction that, as I said, no one, not even a serious

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Muslim historian, believes that it's actually historical. But many

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Muslims who aren't historians have run across it in various forms. And so they will promote it and say, well, here's.

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And again, you'll find anything on the internet. And people will believe anything on the internet.

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But this will be one of the examples of, well, there were hundreds of Gospels that didn't get included in the

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Bible. And they were voted on at the Council of Nicaea, or this one

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Muslim that put up a video about how they put all these Gospels in a room at the

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Council of Nicaea and closed and locked the doors. And when they came back in the morning, only the four canonical

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Gospels were still on the table. And all the rest had been knocked on the floor. And that's how they decided what the Gospels were, which manuscripts had been knocked on the floor, this kind of stuff.

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And this was a story made up about 800 years after the Council of Nicaea.

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There's absolutely no historical evidence. I mean, one thing you better know at the end of this series is that the

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Council of Nicaea, oh, Gary's not here, which was in 325

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AD. You all are going to be undefeatable in the church history category of Jeopardy someday.

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As long as the daily double is the date of the Council of Nicaea, we're all going to do well.

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The Council of Nicaea had nothing, absolutely positively nothing, to do with the canon of scripture.

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It wasn't discussed. It didn't come up. There were no decrees. There was no nothing. And yet, if you embrace internet scholarship, whatever that oxymoron actually indicates, that's the conclusion you come up with.

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You could Google it right now on your phone, Nicaea plus canon with one N. And you'd probably come up with Nicaea plus canon with two

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Ns, too, to be very honest with you. But you'll probably find article after article after article talking about how they had the

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Gospel of Barnabas, but they rejected it. And this is a very, very common belief.

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And you can understand why, if that's what you've been taught by your imam, your mullah, whatever else.

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You've probably never run across a Christian who's never even heard of it, let alone could give you any discussion of it. And so we must distinguish between the

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Epistle of Barnabas and the Gospel of Barnabas, which is a much, much later, fraudulent, anachronistic work of abject silliness.

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Now, back to the Epistle of Barnabas, we will eventually meet a gentleman in a few weeks by the name of Clement of Alexandria.

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Not Clement of Rome, Clement of Alexandria. And he's a rather important figure, though one that, to be perfectly honest with you,

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I can't see a whole lot of positive to say. But he was a teacher in Alexandria, and he claimed that the author was the same

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Barnabas who accompanied Paul. This is extremely unlikely, but it also gives us more reason to think that this was a primarily

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Alexandrian work and was popular in that area, Alexandria, Egypt, of course, containing one of the largest libraries of the ancient world, which, sadly, we must admit, was eventually destroyed by Christians.

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Destruction of the library? I don't remember off the top of my head. I'd have to look it up.

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So I imagine already someone's Googling the destruction of the library. The epistle, now, one of the things we do need to discuss is the development over time of the split between the synagogue and the church and the eventual development of truly anti -Semitic, anti -Jewish doctrines and beliefs within the

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Christian church. We see in the New Testament the split taking place.

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We see strong language used by the apostle Paul of those who were opposing his ministry, of those who were seeking to hinder the proclamation of the gospel and the warning of God's judgment.

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We see all of those things. And those things are true. You can't talk about those things in New Testament theology anymore almost anywhere.

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What was the date? It's various. It happened many times.

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So there's a dispute over which time it was really fully destroyed, anywhere from the 1st century

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BC to the 7th century AD. Well, there was a specific incident.

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I'll have to look it up, where the prompting of the destruction was from Christian preaching.

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So the other possibilities are fire from Julius Caesar and then another one.

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Yeah, so evidently there are numerous times. But there was at least great damage done at one point in time due to some monastic influences.

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You see similar types of things like that happening today when a certain mullah, a certain imam preaches a sermon on a

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Friday. If there's violence on a Friday, it probably came after the sermon at the local mosque.

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And people went running out in their zeal to do something. In 391

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Theodosius. Well, there you go. Well, Theodosius, of course, is the one that officially proclaims the

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Roman Empire to be a Christian empire. So there have been many times, even during the

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Reformation, where religious zeal has been combined with an attack upon monuments of culture, whether they be libraries, works of art, statues.

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Many a statue has met its end after a Sunday sermon, let alone after a

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Friday kutbah in a mosque. It's part of history. It's part of the reality.

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Anyway, Alexander, back to the Jewish situation. There is a strict line, however, between the biblical teaching of the fact that there has been a hardening of the people of Israel, et cetera, et cetera.

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That's not anti -Jewish. That's a recognition of what God has done in his just judgment.

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And you see Paul as a Jew of the Jews, and he would give his life for his people and wish to be separated from Christ, Romans chapter 9.

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That element of passion for the people of Israel, unfortunately, becomes lost in later generations.

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And in the Epistle of Barnabas, we find a distinct anti -Jewish polemic, but it does not partake of the anti -Jewish heresies of later second century, where people began to reject the authority of the

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Old Testament or reduce the authority of the Old Testament to only a matter of allegorical things and things like that.

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But it is a step in that direction. It is sub -biblical. And it's sub -biblical stuff that eventually gives rise to anti -biblical stuff.

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You don't go straight from biblical to anti -biblical. There's a process. And so you degrade, you lose balance, and then that eventually gives rise to that which is directly opposed to biblical teaching.

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But we have often been, I think, rightly criticized for not noting the presence of what we would call anti -Semitism, not only in the history of the church, but even in the thoughts and beliefs of men that we have great respect for.

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When you realize that part of the Inquisition, part of the Crusades included tremendous physical persecution of Jewish people, when you realize that at the

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Reformation, we had to, there basically was no knowledge of the

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Hebrew language left amongst Christian people, because that was considered the language of the heretics.

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Even learning Greek was considered dangerous, because that was the language of the heretics, the Eastern Orthodox. The documents that we can obtain from the papacy in the medieval period giving just absolutely absurd credibility to some of the most wild and insane theories of Jews being behind, well, everything.

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If a disease broke out, the Black Plague was due to the Jews, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, they were just a scapegoat for blaming everything by many, many people.

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And even the Reformers, especially Luther in his later life, he was, in his earlier life, he was, again, when we get there, we'll discover the many

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Martin Luthers. You have to distinguish all the different Luthers. And that's why there is no such thing as Lutheranism.

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Most of modern Lutheranism is actually Melanchthonianism, his successor,

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Philip Melanchthon. But even if you try to define what

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Luther taught, are you talking about the Luther from approximately 1516 to 1525, the

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Luther from 1525 to, say, 1535, and then the

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Luther from 1535 to his death in 1546? There's a lot of differences on many, many issues, especially religious liberty.

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We'll definitely watch a video eventually. There are a couple of great church history videos.

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Some of you have seen them many times before, and some of you have not. But when you compare watching

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Martin Luther heretic, where he's standing for Charles, and I can do no other, here

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I stand, God help me, and we're all like, oh. And then you watch the radicals.

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And Luther and Zwingli are, only a few years later, using the power of the state to murder the

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Anabaptists. And there's a reason for all that, which we'll get into. Sacralism, the state church, which has obviously not developed yet in the sense that it would at the time of the early church, but there is sacralism.

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Rome is sacral. The empire is deeply religious, but it's opposed to the

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Christian faith at this particular point in time. Isn't one big that Christian eugenics and Nazi anti -Semitism, the fact that at least

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Luther, it wasn't based on race, but it was based on their faith?

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Because Luther, though, that's a big distinction, right?

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Yeah, well, certainly the Nazis certainly did not have the worldview that would include the doctrinal element of murdering the

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Messiah and things like that, though they freely used Luther's quotes.

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Unfairly, out of their context, but they did use them. And yeah, there's definitely a difference at that point.

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And of course, even when we call that time period

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Christian anti -Semitism, when we're talking about the papacy, I hope you understand we're using the term now in a very, very, very broad sense and not referring to actual believing

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Christians who are doing these things, who are actually persecuting all sorts of folks. But yeah, there's definitely a difference, a shift in worldview that is taking place post -Enlightenment, and theology and stuff has been separated out from the worldview.

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There's no two ways about that. But the fact remains, you can trace a lengthy, broad stain of ignoring what

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Romans 9, 10, 11 actually says. Because yeah, there's been a hardening, but what does chapter 11 say?

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Don't boast against the branches that were cut off so you could be grafted in or yourself be cut off.

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And yet, that's exactly what ends up happening. And you can find in men who said great things,

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John Chrysostom and others in the early church all the way through to the Reformation, you can find statements that make us blush because of their harshness or their inaccuracy or just the fact that this was an area where a tradition developed over time and it was accepted as a given within the culture over time.

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And a lot of people did not critically analyze those traditions that were delivered to them.

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And so the Epistle of Barnabas, a first step, not a radical step, but gives some indication of that.

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But you don't have the rejection of the Old Testament. But what you do have in Barnabas, which is another reason why we see it coming from Alexandria, is a sense of allegorical interpretation.

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And this is going to eventually be codified by the greatest teacher from Alexandria, greatest in the sense of influence.

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Well, I'll even back off that. Extremely well -known origin, a man who was outlandishly brilliant and outlandishly wrong about almost everything.

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That's the best way to describe him. No one's ever read all of Origen's works as of yet. Vast majority have not even translated.

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He was followed around by scribes who wrote down basically everything he said. Hardly ever slept, which might have something to do with your theology.

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I think God sort of designed us to sleep, biblically speaking. And was just way off on numerous things, and yet was demonstrably and inarguably brilliant.

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One of the only two early church fathers, major early church fathers, that could fluently read both

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Greek and Hebrew. Extremely important in biblical critical stuff. He examined manuscripts and everything.

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But he was Lulu when it came to theology on many issues.

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And he popularizes and then has a huge negative impact on the

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Christian church all the way through to the Reformation, the concept of allegorical interpretation. Where, look, it's surface level meaning, that's for the hoi polloi.

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That's for everybody. If you really want to understand, there's these different levels of meaning to the text. We'll get into that when we talk about Origen.

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But Barnabas gives us that kind of allegorical interpretation of the

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Old Testament, just not as developed as Origen would eventually. There was one quote

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I was, I have, if anyone has seen my green early church father's book,

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I stopped by the office this morning to pick it up, and it's missing in action. So unfortunately, a lot of my notes say, read underlying sections.

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It's not here anymore. Reminds me a little bit of a pastor that we had when

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I was a kid, this pastor who baptized me, in fact, in Charmistown, Pennsylvania. My parents told me, and he's passed on, bless his soul, so I don't have to worry about saying this.

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But my parents told me over and over again that he was just this great preacher. And then his family were on vacation one summer, and they had a flat tire, which happened a whole lot more often with the cars back in the late 1960s than it happens today.

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Y 'all should be very thankful for the tires that we have today. Anyway, they had a flat tire, and he had to take stuff out of the trunk to get the spare out.

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Remember how they didn't have donuts and stuff back then. They had real tires. And he left his

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Bible on top of the car when he got done changing the tire, and they drove off.

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And he forgot to grab it. And it flew off someplace, never to be found again. And they said he never preached the same again, because that Bible had all his notes.

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That was his entire library. And he never preached the same again.

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So see? I don't have my early church, I don't have my apostolic father's volume, and I'm just left going, hmm.

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So I guess I'm similar to him. But just one quote here from the

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Epistle of Barnabas. Understand, therefore, children of joy, that the good

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Lord revealed everything to us beforehand, in order that we might know to whom we ought to give thanks and praise for all things.

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If, therefore, the Son of God, who is Lord and is destined to judge the living and the dead, suffered in order that his wounds might give us life, let us believe that the

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Son of God could not suffer except for our sake. Now, why would

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I mention something like this? Well, I'm pretty certain that the reason I had this particular text marked was because, once again,

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I deal a lot with the Muslims. And the Muslims in the Quran have a text, Surah 4, verse 157, which says that Jesus Christ did not die upon a cross, but was raised up to heaven.

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Someone else died in his place is the most popular theory, the substitution theory. And I have said many times that this places the

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Quran against every single source that touches upon the subject of the death of Jesus Christ for the first at least 100 years after it took place.

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And then the first sources you get denying this are Gnostic sources. They are sources where you have a theological reason why they do not believe that Jesus could have died on a cross.

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Because he didn't have a physical body. If he doesn't have a physical body, you can't nail a phantasm, a spirit, to a cross.

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And so it was their rejection of fundamental Christian and even

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Jewish beliefs about the world that led these second -century Gnostics to a rejection of the cross.

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And it has nothing to do with history. It's not anybody saying, well, we know this never really happened. It was for other reasons.

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And so there you have a brief discussion of the epistle of Barnabas. And with that, we will begin, anyways, a shift over to what, to me, is a much more important early church father and one that I will read sections from that is very, very important.

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And that is Ignatius of Antioch. Now, there are two really famous Ignatiuses in church history.

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Ignatius of Antioch dies around 107 or 108 AD. He is martyred.

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Who is the other Ignatius? Ooh, he stopped and asked us a question.

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I need to look back at my phone and look like I am very, very busy looking something up or posting on Facebook.

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I've never heard of any other Ignatius. Sure you have. What was that?

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Ignatius Loyola. That's right. You've heard all sorts of colleges named

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Loyola, Loyola Marymount, et cetera, et cetera.

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Who is Ignatius Loyola? Founder of the Jesuits. Founder of the

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Jesuits. That's exactly right. And so he is a anti -Reformation figure in the 16th century.

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And what percentage do you think, if we were to somehow find a way to pull all the people coming out of ostensibly evangelical churches in the

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United States this morning, what percentage do you think could identify the difference between Ignatius and Ignatius Loyola and put them within 300 years of when they actually lived?

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Tiny, tiny percentage. Tiny, tiny percentage. Yeah, very, very small.

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Very, very small. This room didn't even know it. Pretty much. Pretty much. But we are fixing that.

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That is, that is, that's, we are fixing that. Ignatius is, I think, of the apostolic fathers by far the most important.

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We have, well, first of all, he was the Bishop of Antioch. And Antioch has a long biblical history.

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It was given quite the foundation amongst the apostles and is very, very important.

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He is a martyr. He's martyred under Trajan, the Emperor Trajan. He was condemned to death by the

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Roman authorities. And while traveling to Rome, he stopped twice and wrote a total of seven letters.

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Now, once again, we are introduced here to the later phenomenon of using a famous early writer's name to produce literature that has greater authority than if you put your own name on it.

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And so there are more than seven letters with Ignatius's name on them.

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But the other ones are pseudo -Ignatian epistles written by anonymous people in the hundreds of years after the time of Ignatius.

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And most of the time, they give themselves away through various anachronisms, saying things that Ignatius himself could never have said because such and such thing was not a belief at the time, whatever else it might be.

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But what's really interesting is that back in 1995 or 1996, somewhere around in there, the

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Watchtower Bible and Tract Society put out a series of articles in the Watchtower where they attempted to go through the early church writers and paint them all as Jehovah's Witnesses.

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And this is not uncommon. The Muslims, I'm sorry, the Mormons will do it. Well, the Muslims will do it.

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The Muslims try to make the Ebionites, this group of Jewish, quote unquote,

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Christians, they try to make them the real Christians, and Paul, pervert, everything. Everybody wants to try to turn these folks into something other than what they were.

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And I hope one thing that we do is that we don't try to turn the apostolic fathers into people they weren't, or the early church fathers into people they weren't.

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You recognize the good, you recognize the bad, and you take them for what they were, rather than trying to.

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The silliest thing we could ever do would be to try to turn all these guys into ancient reformed

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Baptists, because they weren't. And we don't need them to be.

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And if you think that we need that, well, then there is a little book you could read called The Trail of Blood, which will be right down your alley, but it's really bad history.

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Anyway, there are landmark Baptists, by the way. The Trail of Blood is one of their favorite books.

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And I was introduced to that in high school. And it's like, oh, wow, we are the original Christians, and apostolic authority, and the whole apostolic procession in the

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Hawaiian Yards, and it's like, then I took church history and went, oops. Glad I didn't mention that in class.

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Anyway, so there's this other stuff out there. And what the

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Watchtower Society did is their entire article on Ignatius was based on pseudo -Ignatian epistles.

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They never quoted the genuine Ignatius. They only quoted epistles attributed to him, which have been rejected by scholarship.

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And the reason for this is fairly simple. He wrote a total of seven letters to the

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Smyrnians, to Polycarp, so an individual, Bishop Polycarp, to the

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Ephesians, Magnesians, the Philadelphians, the Troleans, and the Romans. And at the most, minimally 10 times in those seven epistles, maximally 14 times.

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So obviously, some of it's interpretational. 10 to 14 times, depending on how you interpret some of the texts,

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Ignatius refers to Jesus as God. He plainly, clearly, unequivocally refers to the deity of Christ.

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So what are you supposed to do with Ignatius if you're writing for the Watchtower Society and you believe

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Jesus is Michael the archangel? Well, here is a tremendous example of religious deception on the part of the

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Society. Quote the pseudo -Ignatian epistles. Not where, and even in those, there's not going to be a denial of the deity of Christ.

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It's just that you can find stuff that isn't as high in its view of Christ and pretend that that actually represents the true

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Ignatius. And as long as you can control your people, and especially back in those days, the internet has made it tough on the witnesses, really.

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Cable TV and the internet has changed the Watchtower Society. Someone could do a fascinating doctoral dissertation,

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I'm sure, on the control mechanisms and the evolutionary control mechanisms in tightly controlled cults by looking at the

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Watchtower Society in 1980 versus the Watchtower Society in 2010.

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That's a nice, even number. So what happened in those 30 years? The advent of cable television and the internet.

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Personal computers. Oh, personal computers. It's the digital age arrived.

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And the tight, narrow control that the society functioned under in 1980 controlled what you could watch, what you could read, everything.

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They just simply couldn't keep doing it. And there's information that they could just simply ignore.

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They didn't have to deal with their own history. They didn't have to deal with prophecies they had once made. They didn't have to deal with, they could change.

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They had their own books. And they published all their own books. And after the debacle in 1974, 1975, prophecy, they went back and changed their books to remove the prophecies that were in them.

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That's how much they could control their people. But once they're digitally connected, you can't do that anymore.

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They're going to be running into this information. And so you've got to change how you do stuff. And it really would be a fascinating project to look at what has been the result of that in the past 30 years.

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But they could get away with it back then because they would expect that their readers are going to believe whatever they're told.

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And they're not going to go to the library. They're not going to look up Ignatius. They're not going to run into his genuine epistles. And so they can simply deceive.

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And it is deception. And it's purposeful. We know it's purposeful because the very sources that they would quote of the pseudo -Ignatian epistles, we can look at those sources.

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And they identify them as the pseudo -Ignatian epistles. And in the very same book are the real epistles with the real references to the deity of Christ and the whole nine yards right there.

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And we also know because of a book that came out, I forgot the year now, called Crisis of Conscience, one of the former governing body members of Jehovah's Witnesses left the

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Jehovah's Witnesses. And he had been involved in doing writing for the governing body.

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And he even tells a story about how the Witnesses, remember their 1914 prophecy?

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They were big on 1914 for a long, long time. They're phasing it out. They're getting smart, though.

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They're doing it very slowly. Instead of just you wake up one morning and everything's changed, they're doing it very, very slowly.

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But they had a prophecy based on Daniel. Well, aren't all date prophecies based on Daniel somewhere?

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But they had this prophecy where 2 ,520 years after the fall of Jerusalem would be when

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Christ returns. And to make that fit for 1914, Jerusalem had to fall in 607

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BC. They say BCE. They use the common era stuff.

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Well, there's one little problem. Every single work on history written by anyone of any religion says that Jerusalem fell on Abugunezer in 586, 587.

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Now, why would there be a 586, 587? Because not everybody measured years

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January to December. So Jerusalem fell to Nebuchadnezzar in 586, not 607.

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So this guy, Raymond Franz is his name, by the way, this guy, and you can still go back.

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I still have the books, the unexpurgated ones, in my library, because they can't get to my library. They can get to theirs.

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They can't get to mine. Wrote an entire article doing nothing but attacking all of the evidence for 586 without ever establishing 607.

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But that's what they produced for their people. And we're talking there are literally thousands of cuneiform tablets in libraries around the world with clear dates on them.

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I mean, there is a clear dating of the succession of Babylonian kings and the whole nine yards. The books are extremely boring to read, but they're very, very, very detailed.

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We know when Nebuchadnezzar lived. We know when he took Jerusalem. I mean, it's as documented as any ancient date can be documented.

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And yet, for years, the Watchtower of Sinai said 607, 607, 607. Now they don't talk about it anymore.

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And eventually, they'll probably publish something that says 586 and get in line with everybody else, because they will have dumped the 1914 prophecy, and so it won't be relevant anymore.

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But this is the kind of stuff, it's out there. It happens. And these cults are willing to change history and alter the facts and alter the quotations, alter the sources.

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But even quote, unquote, Christians did that. As we will see in the medieval period, the greatest period of development in the concept of the papacy took place during a period of time where the most popular sources of quotations from the early church fathers were filled, filled with pure, bogus citations.

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And the papacy, literally, when you look at, for example, I think someone looked at Thomas Aquinas' discussion of the papacy, 98 % of his patristic citations are fraudulent.

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Not because he made them up. The sources that he thought were true had made them up.

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And so in reality, when you think about it, the papacy, as an institution, historically hangs in midair.

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Its entire foundation that developed in the early church and all the rest of that stuff has been washed away.

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The quotes never existed. The early writers didn't believe the things that they later thought they did. And yet, you still got the papacy hanging there, literally in historical midair.

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Nothing underneath it. But it's still there. And the zealous Roman Catholic says, ah, it's the church of 2 ,000 years.

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No, actually, it isn't. So seven epistles.

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We will look at what he's, we're not going to read all seven epistles. But there are some incredible statements, especially of Christology in those epistles.

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But the one last thing I'll say is he went to Rome and he asked all the people on the way, do not attempt to stop this from happening.

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I desire martyrdom. And so that's one of the issues that we'll talk about is the early church and the subject of martyrdom and some of the imbalances that took place there as well.

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So we'll get to Ignatius next week. All right, let's close the work. Father, we do thank you for this time.

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We thank you for the opportunity and freedom we have to consider the history of your working with your people.

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We ask that we would be guided by this. You'd be with us now as we go into worship, as we open your word.