The Real Issues With Rome

Why I’m Responding to the Farmer-Stuckey Conversation

Well, greetings. I'm going to try to make this, I was about to say as short as possible and I realized, complete lie. I'm going to try to be concise. Let's put it that way. For those who don't know me, we're going to put this out on our normal feeds, but I'm really hoping that this video will be viewed by a lot of folks that are not a normal part of Alpha and Omega Ministries, don't watch the dividing line.

And so let me just very, very briefly, why would I provide a response to the discussion that took place between George Farmer and Elie Wiestecki in regards to Roman Catholicism and Protestantism? I did my first formal moderated public debate with a group called Catholic Answers, well-known Catholic apologetics organization.

In August of 1990, St. Cyprian's Roman Catholic Church in Long Beach, as I recall, I believe it was August 16th, 1990. Since then, I've done about 35 or 36 moderated public debates with Roman Catholic apologists.

Jerry Matitix, Patrick Madrid, Father Mitchell Packer, we've done five debates over the years. And written a number of books on the subject, Roman Catholic Controversy from Bethany House Publishers. So we've been dealing with the subject for many decades.

And everything in that discussion has been covered in the debates we have done over the years. And these are not 45 minute debates, they are moderated public debates, some of them over three hours in length each.

When Jerry Matitix and I debated the papacy during the papal visit in 1993 in Denver, Colorado, we did three and a half hours, two nights in a row. So that was seven hours on the papacy just in that one particular context.

So I've been engaging the subject for a lengthy period of time. And as such, when I listened to the conversation, I felt the need to minimally direct people to resources, to where they could maybe get a little more information.

Every generation has to deal with these issues. The vast majority of so-called Protestants are Protestants of tradition and taste, not of conviction or knowledge. And a Protestant that does not know why they're a Protestant is just a convert waiting to happen.

That's all there is to it. And so many Protestants today are far away from the Reformers. They do not have nearly as high a view of scripture, for example, as the Reformers had. And as such, it's very easy for them to be brought into feeling the need for something more than just scripture.

And so I felt it would be useful if we utilize the resources we have here. I am sort of an itinerant speaker at the moment. I don't fly anymore. I drive. And so I am literally in a studio that we have built in the front of an RV.

And I thought, you know what? Got electricity, got the internet. Let's do this. Let's do this. So I will try to be succinct. However, if you want more information, if you go to AOMIN .org, A-O-M-I-N .org, you'll find links there to our YouTube channel and our Odyssey channel.

And you will find a large majority of those debates are available online, as well as numerous dividing line programs. For example, we'll touch briefly on veneration of saints and angels and prayers to Mary and the saints.

And I debated Patrick Madrid on that subject many years ago. And then Patrick did a follow-up discussion of that. So we did a follow-up discussion of the follow-up discussion that went even more and more in depth.

And so there's very often on any one of these subjects, for example, Sermon 131 from Augustine, where he's fighting with the Bishop of Rome and rejecting the Bishop of Rome's conclusions and forcing the Bishop of Rome to back down.

That's a subject we've gone deeply into on the dividing line as well. And there are archives of the dividing line on sermonaudio .com to go back to the late 1990s. And so there are thousands of hours, not only on the subject of Roman Catholicism, but Islam, Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses, textual criticism, church history.

I should, I didn't introduce myself for those of you who don't know me. Not only am I the director of Alpha Omega Ministries, I'm one of the pastors at Apologia Church in Mesa, Arizona. I am professor of church history and apologetics at Grace Bible Theological Seminary.

And I've authored about 24 books or contributed to 24 books. And one of those includes their own Catholic controversy. So if you are interested in that subject, again, more information there. So what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be playing only audio, trying to do video, just way too much for me to do right now to be able to get it done this evening.

So I'll be playing audio. And let me mention, I will be playing the audio at 1 .2 speed. I always mention that just so that people don't get upset that you're editing things. No, I'm just making it a little bit faster so we can get through it a little bit quicker.

I listened to it at 1 .8 to 2 .0. So 1 .2 is actually rather slow when you get to it. All right, let's start off with this that sort of began the discussion.

Why the “1500 Years of No Christians” Question Misrepresents Protestantism

And the discussions have gotten interesting because my husband planted a seed in my head that won't go away. And I would not yet describe me as being in a place where that seed has fully bloomed. But it is a question that I am struggling with as somebody with Protestant beliefs.

What he essentially said to me, he was also formerly Protestant, and now he's a Catholic, was, do I believe that in the 1500 years following Jesus Christ, leading up to Martin Luther, Staples, and Cecil, that nobody went to heaven?

So essentially, Jesus saved us. And then for about 1500 years, nobody went to heaven until Martin Luther, Staples, and Cecil and corrected things. I don't believe that. I struggle with that question. And it has been something that I have been sitting with for a very long time, of course, because that would almost imply in my mind that.

Martin Luther is the Savior and not Jesus. And so as I struggle... Okay, so Candace tells us, and so let me just address Candace. Candace, that's not what the Reformers believed. That's not what Martin Luther said.

When Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses, the castle church door at Wittenberg, no one would have noticed it. If someone had been walking by, they wouldn't have even noticed he was doing it, because that was the bulletin board of the local community.

Wittenberg was a rural city, so if anybody's walking by, they probably had a cow with them. And about the only conversation would have been, good morning, Father Martin, good morning. That would have been it, because the 95 Theses were written by a Roman Catholic priest, Martin Luther.

He was still a Roman Catholic, and he wasn't trying to start a Reformation. And he was actually just trying to get a debate going for the University of Wittenberg. Debates back then were the equivalent of modern football games.

And so he was just trying to help get Wittenberg on the map. And his concern expressed in the 95 Theses was a concern that he wasn't the only one that had. The doctrine of indulgences that he was focused upon there was embarrassing to many people.

Everybody knew the money was simply going from Germany to build St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. And they knew it was a horrific abuse of the grace of God. It was actually after this, when Martin Luther debated a brilliant man who became Luther's enemy throughout his life, Johann Eck, at the University of Leipzig, that Luther was forced to think through the issues for the first time.

Eck accused him of being a Hussite. And Jan Hus, a hundred years earlier, had been burned at the Council of Constance for believing in things like sola scriptura and justification by faith. And Luther came to understand during the debate, when he went to the library and looked up stuff on Hus, that he was a Hussite and that Hus had said many evangelical things.

And this forced Luther to start thinking about not just the message that he had come to understand, which was justification by faith, that we are justified by grace through faith alone and not through the sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church.

But now, Eck attacking him made him start understanding the supremacy and the primacy of scripture, hence sola scriptura. But this took time to develop. And none of the Reformers, not Luther, not Zwingli, not second-generation Reformers like Calvin, would have ever dreamed of saying that there were no Christians between the apostles and Martin Luther.

Not even the Mormons say that. And the Mormons are far outside Christianity by any stretch of the imagination. Even the wildest fundamentalist Baptists, who have Baptists going all the way back, hiding in caves, but not known to church history, even they wouldn't say that.

So the question, I don't know why the question's even said. I think of numerous early church fathers that I have tremendous respect for, disagreements with, yes, but tremendous respect for. I think of Bishop Fulgentius of Rusk.

You're talking into the, now we're getting the 5th and 6th centuries and the transition period into the medieval period. And these are people whose writings are filled with great wisdom. And we're plainly believers in the Lord Jesus Christ.

So it's not even a fair question, because it's not what the Reformers taught. It's not what quote-unquote Protestantism teaches, whatever that means anymore, let's be honest. And by the way, I hate that term.

It actually just historically comes from the Holy Roman Empire. And it was the basis upon which some of the electors in the Holy Roman Empire objected against Charles V's actions as Protestants, as Protesters, as the minority.

That's where it came from. It really didn't have anything to do with protesting Roman Catholic beliefs or anything. I know everybody says that, but those are the facts anyways. And so these are things that we have to keep in mind when we hear these types of questions.

And we need to recognize that particular question just is not a valid question because it misrepresents our position rather fully. So by the way, when you all see me looking down over here, I have a program called Audio Notetaker, and I have marked various things.

I could have marked much more, but I wanted to try to make this something we could actually get done this evening. The Pope and the authority of the Pope.

And I know that this is even a debate within Catholicism, but the infallibility of the Pope. Who the Pope is, of course, the argument is that the Pope goes all the way back to Peter, which I don't believe.

And really just the structure and the authority of the Catholic Church.

Sola Scriptura Versus Sola Ecclesia

Okay. So here, Alibeth was asked, what's your hangups? What are the main problems you have with Roman Catholicism? And so it started off, and every debate I've done, when you push far enough, it will come back to Sola Scriptura.

And what we need to recognize is that 99 of the time, Rome has a positive claim it itself is making, but they don't want to put that one out for examination. They want to put the onus on everybody else to prove their ultimate statement.

And then if they feel they successfully refute that, then their ultimate statement becomes the default. Let me say something. I believe in Sola Scriptura. Scripture is the sole infallible rule of faith for the Church, because it is the only example of Theanustos, God-breathed revelation, in possession of the Church.

Since the Church is a bride of Christ, she wants to hear the voice of Christ. The only place she has the voice of Christ is in Scripture. So the nature of Scripture is what makes it absolutely unique.

There is nothing in tradition or in Church teaching that is Theanustos, that is God-breathed. That is very, very, very important. So forgive me, had to take a just a brief break there to take care of something around there.

So anyways, we're talking about the issues of what Sola Scriptura is and what it is not. And what you need to understand is that Roman Catholicism has a positive position. I call it Sola Ecclesia, the Church alone.

And I say, no, no, no, no, no, wait a minute, it's a three-legged stool. Please listen, think with me for a moment. In Roman Catholicism, what is the ultimate authority in determining what is and what is not Scripture?

The Magisterium of the Church. In Roman Catholicism, who has ultimate authority for interpreting what is in Scripture? The Magisterium of the Church, headed by the Pope. In Roman Catholicism, who has the ultimate authority determining what is and what is not tradition?

Now, I recognize in Roman Catholic theology, you have a sacred tradition, and underneath that, you have oral tradition and Scripture, written tradition. But who gets to determine what is and what is not?

Magisterium of the Church. Who gets to interpret that tradition? Magisterium of the Church. So you don't have three legs, you have one leg. The Church determines what is and what is not Scripture, and what Scripture does and does not mean, what is and what is not tradition, and what tradition does and does not mean.

That's sola ecclesia. That's your ultimate authority. You can't question that. There's no way around it. I remember very clearly, back during John Paul II's reign as Pope, one year he'd put something out to keep the conservatives happy, and next year, something to keep the liberals happy.

And I pointed out that one of the encyclicals that he released was in contradiction to something a Pope had said, officially, hundreds of years earlier. And a certain Roman Catholic apologist, I remember very clearly, said to me, James, you have no right to interpret what the Church has written before.

Only the Church gets to interpret that. So you can look back at Boniface's statement, unum sanctum, and you can know exactly what he meant, exactly what the context was, exactly what the language was, and what it meant to everybody in that day.

But only the Church gets to interpret that. And so if the Church says, nope, that's not what they meant, then you just simply have to go, okay, that's sola ecclesia. And that they will not defend, but that is what they will always argue.

And no matter how hard they try to argue against that definition, they'll end up proving it. Just listen to it. Like I said, go back and listen to the debate I did with Jerry Matitix, where I was asking him.

One clip from the first debate we did on Long Island has sort of always stuck in my mind. We were talking about the bodily assumption of Mary. I'd never said that phone's name. And I was trying to get him.

We were talking about the bodily assumption of Mary. And I was saying to him, okay, who in the first century believed in the bodily assumption of Mary? I don't know. I don't have to give you who in the second century, who in the third century?

And finally he said, James, I don't have to show you that every single person believed in the bodily assumption of Mary. I said, Jerry, I'll take just one because he couldn't give me just one. And I would give him early church fathers to contradict his position.

Well, that's not tradition. Oh, so when one early church father says something that agrees with Rome, that's tradition. But when they disagree with Rome, that's not tradition. Who gets to make that decision?

The church does, of course. That's how it works all the time. Sola Ecclesiae is the position, and they'll never lay it on the table, but it's always supposed to be the default. Once I attack Sola Scriptura, then you're to default back to this position.

And that is a major, major problem. But I'm already violating my just play it and give sources rule. I knew it would. Let's press on. Sola Scriptura. Where in the Bible does it say Sola Scriptura? Yes.

Well, the doctrine of... Okay. So where does it say Sola Scriptura? Okay. That's a fair question, especially if you understand what Sola Scriptura is actually saying. What's the claim? We're not saying that there is a phrase that says Sola Scriptura, but we are saying that there is a positive teaching that demonstrates that Scripture is absolutely unique in having ultimate authority for the church, and that the church possesses nothing else that can be made equal to it or superior to it.

And in fact, I would suggest to you, everyone who tries to come up with something that's just equal to it, ends up presenting something that is superior to it. So let me refer everybody to the extensive discussions we have presented on this, not only on the dividing line, the large number of debates that we have done on this subject.

I think the best debate on Sola Scriptura that we did was with Father Mitchell Pacwa in 1999 in San Diego. And the main reason for that is, aside from the fact that Mitch Pacwa is probably the most conservative Jesuit on the planet, Mitch Pacwa is a man of honor.

He does not engage in cheap debating trips. And so it was an honest conversation. So for example, during the cross-examination in that debate, I asked him, Father Pacwa, can you give us any words of Jesus that the Roman Catholic Church has dogmatically defined that are not found in Scripture?

No, we never defined anything like that. Any words of the apostles that has been dogmatically defined as having been said by the apostles by the Roman Catholic Church that are not found in Scripture? No, nothing there.

And that's what he said. He's very honest about that. That's why, again, I recommend highly the five debates. There are only three of them on video. Two of them were recorded on video, but the other side wouldn't ever let us have them and wouldn't put them out themselves.

So the Mass and Justification by Faith is only available in audio on sermonaudio .com as well. But we have addressed the subject of Sola Scriptura over and over again. There is an extensive discussion in the Roman Catholic controversy, my book on Roman Catholicism, and in my book Scripture Alone.

That's what it's all about. So much discussion of what Scripture Alone does and does not mean, because there is a great deal of misrepresentation of Sola Scriptura by Roman Catholic apologists. That's just a fact.

I'm sorry that it's that way, but it is. But fundamentally, what we are saying is the Church only possesses one body of divine revelation that is God speaking, and that is Scripture. Tradition is not God speaking.

The Pope is not God speaking. And therefore, it intrinsically, by its nature, has a unique authority that cannot be eclipsed, that cannot in any way, shape, or form be put under the authority of someone or something else.

And that there is nothing in tradition, there is nothing in church councils, that can in any way equal Scripture, or can be said to be necessary for the interpretation of Scripture. Fundamentally, Scripture is God speaking, and therefore is absolutely unique.

And so if God is, if as Peter said, who was not a Pope, he called himself a fellow elder, as Peter said, men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. That cannot be said of anything else.

Rome's gotten pretty close to trying to claim those things, Vatican I, stuff like that. It's gotten pretty close to trying to say, yeah, that's what we're doing too. But that is not a biblical perspective in any way, shape, or form.

I've only done two clips. This may take a while.

I just want to be clear. Scripture itself does not say Scripture alone, right? That's the point. It does not say at any point in Scripture that Scripture alone is to be utilized as.

The sole basis for faith. Yes, but I'm saying that that's not the establishment,.

Or that's not the intention. Okay, so he wants, I'm reminded when Roman Catholics argue this way, of when Muslims say, well, Jesus never said, I am God, worship me. Well, he came awful close, and in fact, said things that without question teach his deity, he accepts worship, but they say you have to have those exact words.

And so if the argument is, well, but Scripture doesn't use the phrase sola scriptura, and I simply say, scriptura is unique, that makes it sola. And now you simply have to argue, well, what makes something authoritative for the church?

And it's pretty obvious that it's God's revelation, God's speaking. It's real clear that Jesus, for example, in Matthew chapter 22, when arguing with the Pharisees, the Sadducees, well, he argued with the Pharisees, then he argued the Sadducees, because the Sadducees saw that he had just refuted the Pharisees.

So he's doing a lot of argument in Matthew chapter 22. And in Matthew chapter 22, he refuted the Sadducees, who, by the way, we'll get to it briefly here later on, George was confused. He confused the Sadducees and the Pharisees.

He flip-flopped them. He said the Pharisees denied the afterlife Sadducees affirmed. It was the opposite of that. But because they did that, they were arguing with Jesus, and gave the story about the woman who had had seven brothers, the Levite law.

And when Jesus refuted them, he started off by saying, you do not know the scriptures nor the power of God. He says, have you not read what was spoken to you by God saying, I am the God of Abraham, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?

He's not the God of the dead or the living. His refutation was, I am the God, not I was the God. But most people don't catch what it is Jesus said. He said, have you not read what was spoken to you by God?

Think about that. Normally, have you not read would be followed by what? What I wrote to you. But then he quotes words from 1400 years earlier. So to you, or if you said, have you not heard what I spoke to you?

They said, have you not read what I spoke? Have you not read what I spoke to you? Hmm. Jesus holds men accountable in his day for words that were written down 1400 years earlier, as if God has spoken them directly to them.

There is nothing else like that. Nothing. There is no tradition. There is no church authority that can even come close to that view that Jesus has. That scripture is God speaking. It's God's words. It's God's speech, and it has ultimate authority.

The Trinity, Papal Infallibility, and the Limits of Roman Catholic Epistemology

Okay, we continue with the citations.

Of the reformers. I don't think the contention of the reformers, because I understand you believe that it's a circular argument. It's necessarily in the same way that the Trinity isn't, that we don't see Trinity, but we both believe in the Trinity.

And so we understand. Okay, now here's where I have to say to Allie Beth, this made me cringe just a little bit. The Trinity is a biblical doctrine. I've written a book called The Forgotten Trinity. My entire thesis was, we believe this because we believe all the scriptures.

We believe soul scripture and total scripture. You'll believe the doctrine of the Trinity. The Roman Catholic argument has always been that you need to have the church to believe in the Trinity. And so I'm extremely sensitive to any compromise on that subject where you say, well, you know, the Trinity is not founded.

Actually, it is. It's forced on us. The Trinity teaches plainly the truth that there is one true God. It teaches plainly that there are three divine persons identifying each as Yahweh, and then it distinguishes between those divine persons.

That is the doctrine of the Trinity. Those are the three biblical doctrines that create the doctrine of the Trinity itself. And so I think we need to be very, very careful that when we talk about sola scriptura, we are focusing first and foremost on the nature of scripture, its uniqueness, and hence its authority in the church.

And the Trinity is a biblical doctrine forced upon us by the Bible. The terminology is used to express biblical teaching to people so it will be understood. But the doctrine itself is very, very, very much a biblical doctrine.

But the irony of that argument is you kind of have already linked it to the next point, which I was going to make, which is that you could argue that papal infallibility is not explicitly defined in scripture in the same way that scripture itself is not defined in scripture in the same way the Trinity is not defined in scripture.

And as a result, you could say, OK, so there's him doing that. There's the Roman Catholic. And no, papal infallibility is not found in scripture as the doctrine of the Trinity is found in scripture by any stretch of the imagination.

And not only that, the early church didn't believe any of that either. So it is impossible to establish that scripturally. And believe me, hey, again, go listen to the seven-hour debate with Jerry Matadix on the papacy.

Listen to the three-and-a-half-hour debate with Mitch Pacwa on the papacy. We've dealt with these issues for a very, very long time. And I would direct people to those resources for more in-depth.

But there is a fundamental distinction between the biblical necessity of the Trinity and the utter biblical bankruptcy of any concept of the papacy and certainly papal infallibility. Two debates on that subject as well.

One with Roberts and Jennus and one with Tim Staples. So look those up if you want to get into those.

OK, but you're using an argument selectively because you're saying in this circumstance, it applies where scripture alone must be the only argument. But on the flip side, where you're talking about papal infallibility, this, however, does not apply.

I could argue, which I will do, that you could deduce from scripture that papal infallibility is actually defined in scripture.

Now, ironically, I think the vast majority of Roman Catholic apologists and scholars would recognize papal infallibility is not defined in scripture. They might try to come up with some type of syllogistic argumentation, but it's going to be very extended.

And the idea that that was actually apostolic teaching, just from a historical standpoint, is just absurd. And an exegetical standpoint is absurd as well. But it's very hard to get Roman Catholics to debate these things.

I got Roberts and Jennus to debate the bodily assumption ones. But just listen to the two debates that we did, I think, in the same year. I think it was 1999 with Tim Staples and Roberts and Jennus. Their defense of infallibility was contradictory to each other.

And their defense of popes who have been condemned as heretics, Pope Honorius, for example, who for 400 years, when you took the papal throne and you became pope for 400 years, you had to anathematize Honorius by name as the Bishop of Rome as a heretic.

You had to do that for 400 years. And Staples and Jennus came up with two completely different defenses as to how that doesn't change the doctrine of papal infallibility, which, by the way, is the greatest example of a useless doctrine that I've ever seen.

Papal infallibility is meaningless. Because if the pope makes a mistake, then he wasn't speaking infallibly. And you can never know during your lifetime whether the pope was speaking infallibly or not.

Honorius proved that. So it's useless. It has no meaning. It has absolutely no meaning at all. But we'll get into a little bit more of that as we go along.

The Canon of Scripture and the Apocrypha

Coming back to scripture, because I want to stay on that one, scripture itself, when was the canon of scripture formed? The first example of the canon of scripture being formed was the Synod of Hippo, right, in 393.

Yes, it's not true. The Muratorian fragment is significantly earlier. Now, he may be talking about a statement of some type of council. But remember something. Local councils are not infallible in Roman Catholic teaching.

And so you have the New Testament canon in the form we have it in Athanasius's 39th Festal Letter. So you're talking about 367, something like that. And but that's not considered infallible, but neither is Hippo or Carthage.

And by the way, there are differences between Hippo and Carthage and the eventual dogmatic definition of Rome that comes over a thousand years later. At the Council of Trent, April 1546, you have the first infallible definition, de fide definition of the canon on Rome's part.

So all of the major Christian doctrines had already been enunciated, hammered out long before there was an infallible canon. This leads to what has become known as the White Question, by the way. And I'm not the one that named it that.

Other people did. But very quickly, I did a debate with Jerry Matitix, did two debates at Boston College in 94, I believe, 1994. And one was on justification and one was on the Apocrypha. I've done a number of debates on the Apocrypha.

And Jerry and I had agreed, man, the Apocrypha one's gonna be a snoozer. Well, it wasn't. It ended up being far more exciting than the justification debate was. And the Monday thereafter, we did a radio program.

And I was on the phone. He was in the studio because of a mistake. But anyway, he was still in debate mode. So we went right back at it. And I asked him a question during, this is on WEZE in Boston. I asked him, Jerry, how could a believing Jewish man know that Isaiah and Second Chronicles were scripture 50 years before Christ?

Because he was arguing you need to have an infallible definition of the canon for scripture to function as a rule of faith, which you don't have until 1546 in Roman Catholicism. And I was saying, no, you don't.

Because Jesus held men accountable to scripture without any infallible counsels to have defined what was the Old Testament canon. So if Jesus could do that, so can we. And so I asked him the question, 50 years before Christ, how could the believing Jewish man know that Isaiah and Second Chronicles were scripture?

It became quiet. I grew up doing radio. And dead air is not a good thing. And so the woman, Janine Graff, I think it was her name, who was doing the interview, she went to break because it got quiet. Jerry just didn't know what to say.

So she goes to break. And I'm like, okay, I'll be interested to see what he says when he comes back. When he comes back, he still doesn't have an answer. Because there is no answer, not from the Roman Catholic perspective.

If you're going to argue that you have to have an infallible counsel, an ecumenical counsel to define the canon of scripture, then the Roman Catholic has a real problem on many bases. For example, Carthage and Hippo had a different understanding of the Deuterocanonicals, the Apocryphal books, than Trent did.

And they just didn't realize it. So they defined different books. There's an excellent discussion of this by William Webster that you can get. Bill Webster's material is great. His three-volume series with David King on Sola Sculptura, absolutely necessary.

You need to have that in your library. Well worth the investment in getting that. So there's differences between them on that level. But beyond that, the idea that it wasn't until 1546 that you could actually have scripture functioning can't work.

And so some of the answers that other people have come up with was, well, the Jewish magisterium, here's the problem. The Jews never accepted the Deuterocanonical books. They didn't accept the Apocryphal books.

They were not laid up in the temple. Another resource you need to get, the Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church by Roger Beckwith. It is not an easy read. It is a scholarly read. But you need to track it down.

Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church, Roger Beckwith, goes through the early church in depth and demonstrates that the majority opinion did not accept the Apocryphal books. And then basically demonstrates that you can trace two lines down through history.

The people that knew the most about the Jews and the Old Testament rejected them. The people that knew the least accepted them. But that you can find that the earliest and most primitive sources, like Melito Sertis, rejected the Apocryphal books.

That's going to become important with more of what is being said here.

So by the end of the 4th century is when you have the modern canon of scripture defined. By the end of the Council of Carthages, which were in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th century, which then went on to define what we now term the canon of scripture.

Well, actually, it was not even what we now term to define the canon of scripture, because of course, the Protestant Bible is without the Deuterocanonical books, the Apocryphal books, as the Protestant church would.

And which the reformers themselves removed.

Now, did you catch that terminology? Which the reformers themselves removed. Removed from what? Well, the canon that had always been accepted. That is not true. If that is true, then Pope Gregory the Great was a Protestant reformer.

Because he rejected those books, said they were not canonical. Jerome was a Protestant reformer. Melito Sertis was a Protestant reformer. Cardinal Cajetan, who interviewed Luther, was a Protestant reformer.

Because they all rejected the canonical status of those books. So are they really Protestant reformers? Or is it just simply wrong to be assuming these things? Rome, in response to the Reformation, took the most shallow and least knowledgeable portion of the tradition and canonized it, De Fide, in response to the Reformation.

That doesn't make those books canonical. It doesn't deal with Jerome. It doesn't deal with his arguments with Augustine. It doesn't deal with Gregory the Great's rejection of these things. None of that stuff doesn't deal with that.

It was simply in response to the Reformation. That's not what infallible churches do. And Rome is not infallible.

You're then arguing to say that for 1500 years, you have a canon of Scripture, which has books in it, which themselves are no longer considered canonical. It's just not true.

Again, this is a false view of history. It does not deal with the reality of the fact that there were two traditions. It just doesn't deal with that. And as a result, it's missing the important element of these conversations.

And not even 1500 years, because as I said, the canon of Scripture wasn't actually defined until the end of the 4th century. So you've actually got 1200 years in which a selection of books that were then reformed by the reformers in the 16th century was used by the church.

So again, this is just, it's fiction. It's fictional. Anyone who has done serious study on canon issues and on the deutero-canonicals and on the Apocrypha knows that all the way through Cardinal Cayetan, at the time of the Reformation, the informed opinion rejected them, did not accept them.

And so that's just simply erroneous. There is more I had marked there.

We've made our point. Sure, and so just as a, before I jump into that question, I will just on the Apocrypha. There is, you know, that is a, there are several reasons the Protestant church would argue that the Apocrypha should be removed, right?

And the reason Jesus himself doesn't refer to many books in the Old Testament, doesn't refer to Numbers, he doesn't refer to Chronicles. There's big parts, I think Lamentations is also excluded. So a reference in the New Testament to a book in the Old Testament would exclude quite a lot of the Pentateuch, would exclude them.

Okay, no, it wouldn't. And this is a very bad, very bad argumentation. We know, and again, this is why you really need to get Roger Beckwith's Old Testament canon in the New Testament church. Most people are not aware of the concept of laying up scriptures in the temple.

But the Jews, about 200 years before Christ, laid up the sacred books in the temple. What books did they lay up? The 22 or 24. Now, 22 or 24 is in relationship to the Hebrew alphabet. But it also refers to Hebrew canon.

And you might go, well, nobody has a canon like that. Yes, we do. Protestants do. Because they considered all the minor prophets as one. Lamentations is with Jeremiah. When you add it all up, the books that were laid up in the temple 200 years before Christ were the exact same as we have in the Protestant canon today.

And again, Beckwith does a very good job in laying all of this out. The books that made the hands dirty. The threefold canon. It's fascinating. The Deuterocanonical books and other intertestamental books make reference to the threefold canon.

The law, the prophets, and the writings. That's why you can refer to the Tanakh, the Torah, the Nevi 'im, and the Ketubim. The law, prophets, and the writings. And that division already exists. And it excludes the apocryphal books.