How the Bible Was Chosen: Canon Explained by Anna Kitko

who decided which books belong in the Bible and how. I know that I've fallen down a couple rabbit holes and seen the book of Enoch, what are they hiding?

I have Anna Kitko as my guest today and she is the expert to speak on this. Canon is a discussion of what is authoritative.

If you were in the first century, they would go, what do you mean choose? Like we identified our shepherd.

Okay, so how do we know when the God's breath is present? Was it written by an apostle?

It also has to be in agreement with previous scripture. The third one, it had to have been received by believers everywhere.

Where God determined to be silent, I determined to be silent as well. Hello, hello, welcome to Biblically Speaking.

My name is Cassian Bellino and I'm your host. In this podcast, we talk about the Bible in simple terms with experts,

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Thank you so much for listening. Now let's get to the show. Hello, hello. My name's Cassine Blino and I'm your host today of Biblically Speaking.

This is gonna be an episode that you're gonna want to listen to because I can bet that you've asked this question.

Who decided which books belong in the Bible and how? I think we've all wondered that. I know we know of other books.

Why aren't they included? But who sat down and picked out all of the books that we read today? And are there reasons why other ones weren't included?

I know that I've fallen down a couple rabbit holes and seen the book of Enoch. What are they hiding? We're gonna get answers today.

We're gonna break down how these books were chosen, why certain books were excluded, and what do we do about those other books that other sects of the religion follow?

Today, I have Anna Kitko as my guest today and she is the expert to speak on this.

You're highly credentialed to talk on biblical canon. You hold a Master of Arts in Biblical Studies from Reformed Theological Seminary.

You have a Master of Science in the Psychology of Coercive Control from the University of Salford Manchester in the

UK. Basically, your areas of specialty are Christian apologetics, neurochemistry, cults, and new religions,

PTSD, and religious environments. I can't wait to have you back on to talk about cults, but we'll get there when we get there.

Welcome to the show, Anna. I'm so glad that you're here. Thank you so much. It's really exciting. I love shows that are focused on these topics and I just think it's awesome.

I can't wait. So how did you, like why did, cults, neurochemistry, biblical, religious studies, how do you know so much about biblical canon?

Yeah, I have an obsession with studying the Bible and I just went ahead and leaned into it instead of treating that level of OCD and I just kind of like maximized it and then made it my entire identity.

I just, I really love studying this stuff. I like answering questions and especially I tend to scrutinize a lot.

I was, I'm an apologist at heart and my spirit wants to ask these questions and so to anticipate questions that I just assume everybody else has too is really liberating for me and comforting to me.

So just to have like this dynamic to just really be able to scrutinize is wonderful and life -giving. Amazing.

Yeah, I mean, I absolutely relate to that, to have questions that I'm sure everybody else is asking, like how did we choose these books?

Did you, it was beyond kind of your studies or was it more of like part of your academics?

Like how did you start understanding just the history of this as a whole? It's definitely a part of my academic study but the truth is is that my father was a church history teacher and growing up I fell in love with church history because it was just like a part of my entire family dynamic and everything would boil down to discussions of like theology and where in the scriptures or something like, we never said apologetics formally but we were doing it all the time and I took that background for granted for sure because I was reading church history, actual textbooks and dissertations in high school just because I needed something interesting to talk about and I always picked those things.

So I was enraptured by the historical content and of course canonization is really just a clarifying of exactly what happened, where and why.

So a giant church history study. Absolutely, okay, so let's get into it. So biblical canon, just for some, there's an episode out there where somebody's talking about canon and I'm like, hold up, what is canon?

So how would you simplify biblical canon and what it is and kind of who chose it? If we could just like wrap this up in a nutshell and then we'll dive deeper into it.

Canon is a discussion of what is authoritative. So what do we point to as more than just a discussion of guidelines?

It's more than that, it's more than humans talking, it's the Lord breathing and giving us guidance and that's different than other historical books that are just documenting what happened.

So like if Anna just wrote a dissertation, that's just Anna talking versus if you're reading the gospel of John, which is

John the apostle speaking as well as the Holy Spirit speaking through him in a way that is something we can anchor to and we can point to as timeless.

Well, interesting, so the difference is like some is historical works and the other is God breathed.

Yes, exactly. Okay, so how do we know when the God's breath is present?

Yes, wonderful question. So for the most part, when you look at the history of these things, these issues come down to what were the entirety of the body of believers?

So for the Jews first with the Old Testament and then the Christians and the Jews for the New Testament, what did they all identify together as their shepherd's voice?

So even the question of like, how did we choose these books is a weird question to orient ourselves with in history because if you were in the first century, they would go, what do you mean choose?

Like we identified our shepherd, we all agreed that that definitely is our shepherd and we went with it and the apostles indeed and the leaders all were like, no, this is always what we've done.

Those books over there have always been separated. Like we have known our Lord this whole time and we've identified him.

So it's not about like getting a whole pile of books together and being like, well, I like these or I don't like these and more about what were the timeless elements that had carried through every single generation?

Interesting, I mean, when you read the Old Testament, everything seems so spread out. So if we could like lock down a timeline on this, when was this really occurring?

Because it seems like, I mean, the Old Testament, it's almost like archaic. I mean, you're just kind of like living it and then they mentioned the annals of the kings so often and then at that point, we have lots of silence.

And so when, if I could lock down a time period when the biblical canon was chosen,

I think it's like the Council of Nicaea, is that correct? So close, what we kind of point to is

Athanasian Creed, which happens in 367 and that moment is a moment where we have the empire is united, the

Roman empire is united, Christianity is no longer persecuted, the Edict of Milan had passed in 312.

And so we have this moment of like, hey, we really need to know exactly the emperor is asking to translate what are actual authoritative scriptures into the language of the empire.

And what he does is he asks Jerome to do this and Jerome very appropriately says, oh, there are 66 books that have been codified through the history of the church as identified as the word of God.

So I'm only gonna translate those. And that was part of how that discussion happened.

It had nothing to do with like the Council of Nicaea determining which books were allowed and which ones weren't.

In fact, the Council of Nicaea is more focused on the nature of Christ. So we have some little micro debates that happen at the like around that, like, oh, well, but these other books are really helpful like the

Didache, for example, which is the teachings of the apostles. But Jerome truly and Eusebius and the other side of the empire agreed that no, we really need to separate out the ones that are across the board universal for all believers to use versus the ones that are helpful and beneficial for the different areas of the empire.

And so that's where we get that sort of thing. The Muratorian Canon is a little bit earlier, that's 175

AD. That's when you start seeing sermons from local preachers and bishops saying, yeah, confirming those were the books that we use.

So the 66 books of the Old and New Testament that we know today and that we have in our Bibles today. So they came together and they were deciding kind of what fit the criteria because that was like the chosen breath and like kind of what you were saying at the beginning, like they've been using these books for forever.

What was like the criteria that these two, I wanna say like Jerome and you were saying like, how could we refer to these like empire?

It's like, these were leaders, like who were these people that were deciding? These were like massive leaders in the world of like translation and hermeneutics and who the emperor was going to.

So Constantine was going to say, hey, you guys are representatives of, and are agreed upon representatives of the empire.

Like, what are you doing? How do I navigate this as an emperor? And if we extrapolate their principles, it basically boils down to three things that identify what makes something the word of God.

Number one, was it written by an apostle? Somebody who specifically walked with Jesus or one of the people who walked very closely with the apostles?

So they had to have been there. It also has to be in agreement with previous scripture.

So there cannot be any contradiction, which means how does it fulfill prophecy in brought up in the

Old Testament, for example, how does it continue the story? So when we look at like how the

Old Testament is oriented in Judaism, we have a different orientation of the books. It's the same books, it's just that they're ordered differently.

The end of the Old Testament ends basically with a genealogy of what the

Messiah is going to look like, which is part of the reason why Matthew opens with a genealogy that's continuing it. This was a continuation of the

Old Testament, not a new thing necessarily. So it had to be consistent with the previous books.

That was a second criteria. The third one, of course, was it had to have been received by believers everywhere as this is what we use.

So it couldn't be hyper, hyper controversial a text. And I'm sure we'll talk about controversial texts later, but the point is, is that the scriptures that we have, really, it's actually quite boring.

They're the ones that weren't debated. That's, it was obvious that they were written for this reason and in agreement with previous words from the

Lord through the prophets, like you bring up through Moses, the writing of the Pentateuch, all those things.

And then of course the documentation through the history of the kings. So many questions, but okay. Getting into that, like, this is gonna be so great because I'm like, okay, got to follow up on that.

Let's do it, yeah. Okay, so when it comes to the criteria of it makes sense, it goes along with it, it kind of connects, it leads right into it, like that's very high level.

But is there, like surely like there was some disagreements and like widespread use.

Like everyone agreed that those were the books they were using. Was that like across the board or was there someone like, I don't know,

I've been living at Enoch. I've been living, I've said it a lot of time at Enoch guys, please don't take that one out.

There were different lists, but not like you would imagine different lists. So it was like the 66 books minus maybe 3

John. And instead they had a letter called the Shepherd of Hermas, which was very well circulated at the time.

Or they weren't sure about Hebrews, they just kind of like kept it over here because they weren't entirely certain who exactly wrote it.

Was it Paul? Was it Luke? Was it Barnabas? It's helpful, but I'm not sure what to do with it yet. So I'm gonna kind of leave it off of our normal reading structure.

But if you're imagining, we're imagining what books were permitted to be used in a worship service dedicated to Yahweh as opposed to just study on your own.

To study on your own, tons of things were available. A lot of the Apocrypha, which I'm sure we'll discuss was available.

But what were you allowed to use in a worship service that was dedicated entirely to Yahweh? It was only the books on the

Muratorian Canon list and then from their Athanasian Creed. So that's like a gap of about 150 years.

Those lists agree completely. So it's all, it's what we have in the New Testament. And so, yeah, there was a little micro -debate.

It's like, what do we really need with 2nd and 3rd John, right? Maybe Titus and the people in Crete had

Titus' letter, but not 2nd Timothy's. But they would get it because they were still being copied and moved over.

The Edict of Milan really changed everything because we didn't have to hide anymore. And we didn't have to hide our letters from Paul anymore.

That was gonna be my other question of like, why then? Why were they so cool with kind of like a whole library of literature to pull from?

And then at this moment, around the 300s, they were like, we should probably lock this down. We should lock this down.

There were riots going on in the empire and Constantine had united both sides. Yeah, Constantine had united both sides,

East and West. They were functioning together. That didn't look like it was gonna last very long, but Constantine had been successful.

And so for the first time in a long time, we had a unified empire and the debates that were occurring, the riots were boiling down to what type of Christian are you?

Do you believe in that Christ was just a man or do you believe that Christ was a God man? And so the

Nicene Council was really to try to lock down, hey, as leader, as emperor,

I need you to really codify this stuff so that I can make it across the board for the empire. So this is like a legislative concern.

And that's where you get the Council of Nicaea as well as the request of, I want a Bible and I want it to be just the word of God.

That was Constantine. And so he went, of course, to Jerome to say, give this to me and leave out the things that are not authoritative.

And that's what Jerome did. And that's the Bible we have today. And prior to this, if you were an apostle and you were out preaching for the last 300 years post

Jesus' death, you just had your collection of literature that you liked. Like you just lived with Isaiah and you lived with Hebrews and lived out of the

Torah. Yes, we have like a Bible. Right, right, right. Not necessarily. By that time, you had the quote, what was called the

Quatrain Gospel, which was Matthew, Mark, Luke and John bound together so that you could carry the Gospels with you. But you would not have necessarily had a copy of every single one of Paul's letters.

So like the Galatians would have been heavy with Galatian material and less so with Colossian material.

They would have gotten it. But at this time in the early centuries, it was all based on how quickly they could get information to one another.

Because of course we don't have, you know, we don't have chat GPT back then. We don't have podcasts to let people know that there are other letters.

And, you know, people are still dying and people are still hiding and people are still being killed over having this documentation.

I mean, just like the widespread coordination that this must have taken that, you know, I can only imagine that there is some village or some area or some tribe that's been using a text.

And maybe this is like a Gnostic text thing where like, we'll get into this. I'm like, well, they've been using this text, but it wasn't included in the canon.

But to them, it was very central to it. I don't even understand how you would like coordinate, you know, like this is when

Jerome is making the decision. How do we get, like, how do you even know that Jerome is doing this so you can ensure that the literature that you're using is being included?

Yes, and I'm sure by, I can, I'd have to look at how many manuscripts there are, but actually one of the things that's really interesting about this time period is that one of the proofs for which things were the word of God and which ones weren't by identifying the people, identifying their shepherd is by the documentation of what were they willing to die over and what were they willing to risk dying over translating.

And if you look at the distinction between non -canonical texts and canonical texts, the canonical texts are astronomically higher copy rates, like insane.

Like there's no question about what they found the most important versus like the Shepherd of Hermas that was not that widely translated.

Like, what were you willing to die over? You were willing to die over your letter from Paul to Ephesus but you were not willing to die over this extra, the

Bell and the Dragon, for example, which is an apocryphal text. So that's, if you look at, if we ever get into manuscript evidence, that's one of the things that helps us identify this.

It's really self -evident. We'll get into it, okay. Okay, so when it comes to the books not being included, it wasn't worth dying over.

It wasn't central. It wasn't something widespread agreed on, but it was still being used in the pilgrimages.

I don't even know if that would be like the right word for it that people were using. No, that's fine. Because it was supportive. Yeah, helpful.

From a Jewish perspective or historical perspective. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Okay. So before we go any further, as a

Christian, like what is a healthy headspace we should have when it comes to like the books of Enoch? Is it something where, like how do we kind of hold it in both hands that it's a text worth studying but it's okay that it wasn't included in the

Bible? Yeah, so like a lot of historical documents, we have people kind of filling in the gap.

I mean, we are humans. We are documenting what we find important and every human has an experience that's going to demonstrate different importance levels.

Just like we have systematic theologies, they're all simultaneously truthful, but their emphasis is on different things.

The same is true of writing historical books. So when we get to what is a really interesting time period called the second temple period, this is the time period of silence.

This is the time period like the Messiah has not come yet. And one of the things that is happening is that the dynasties that are in charge at this time are rapidly becoming more and more and more corrupt in a really terrifying way.

And so lots of leaders for the Jewish people began simply trying to preserve texts out of fear that they would lose them again.

Because if you remember back - What time is this? So this is gonna be like the 250

BC on up into 50 AD. It's like second temple period.

So this is like texts. Yeah, this is when a preservation emphasis came over the people.

And this is where we get things like putting things in jars and putting them in caves in Qumran, right?

And we're like, oh, why are they doing that? There was a concern for preservation and the heavy emphasis on that because the world was changing so rapidly.

The Septuagint was translated in 250 BC. And the idea there was that we need to be able to speak to these massive civilizations in a way that they can understand.

And so we're gonna take the Hebrew and we're going to translate it using our best translators into Greek.

And then we'll be able to go from there. Anyway, that's the emphasis. It's like the world is changing too rapidly.

We have to save our material. The idea though was that this time period and Enoch in particular,

Enoch and the Book of the Watchers, which is the first books of Enoch, there are three. The Book of the

Watchers is the famous one because it's so fun and interesting and it helps fill in gaps about the Nephilim and what's going on in Genesis 6 and like all that fun stuff.

Those were all the verbal traditions that were being passed down as like the fill in the gaps.

Hey kids, this is what you need to know about this time period. Yes, there are questions that we can answer about these things and this is what has been passed down to us.

But the most important thing that you need to get out of this is enter Genesis, enter what

Moses decided to document. And then what's been emphasized for the people for them to learn and be able to identify their

Messiah. So the Bible is not an exhaustive analysis of the entire planet. It is the story of the

Messiah and our ability to be able to identify him. So that's hence why we need all these extra books to study and to learn and to remark from and to get some context for.

So Enoch's one of those. Okay, I'm glad that you touched on that because I wanna talk about the failed books, the books that didn't make it into the canon.

What kinds of writings are those? Is it all like Watcher, Enoch, Nephilim stuff or like what else is included in the stuff that we don't even know about because our pastor has never brought it up?

So like in a second temple period terms, that would be things like the book of the wars and the book of the angels.

And these are like, what was happening? Was there a civilization that predated

Adam and like what was going on in the angelic realm? This is the kind of stuff that you're gonna listen to people who are really into following Michael Heizer's work.

They're gonna be really into reading this material. It was also - I'm really into Michael Heizer's work.

Me too, me too. That's me. Yeah, no, he did excellent work. It's really fascinating. He took really high level academics and made it accessible to lay people.

And I always love that when the theologians do that. So props to him. But when it comes to that kind of stuff, just real quick.

So that how it was happening, how do we say like, okay, that didn't make it into the canon so it must not be true, but then there are writings of watchers and angels and all of these like very,

I don't wanna say like sinister, but like supernatural things that didn't make it to the canon. So you're like, okay, well, that was just like fantasy.

Or we like, no, that was real. It just like, wasn't part of the Messiah's story. Yeah, so we don't know exactly what to do with it because we don't necessarily have those.

Like those categories are like really solid platonic Western civilization.

Let's put everything in a category and have it make sense and everything has a box. And back then that really wasn't a thing.

So for them, it was more like, what do we need to know about history to understand ourselves?

And I can use this material, this material that I think considered historical and still go, yes, but the details might be off.

So like, for example, in Maccabees, which is part of the Apocrypha, there are a couple of numbers that don't make sense.

They actually contradict themselves on the level of military influence the

Maccabees had. Like both can't be true at the same time. So we know that there was an oops that somebody documented it.

Their memory did not, it was not accurate. We don't know which one is accurate, but we know that it's not

God because God doesn't make mistakes like that. So we go, okay, a war happened.

It was a big deal. We don't know exactly what the numbers were. And we know that this is very helpful information in order to explain the dispositions of the people when we enter into first temple or a first century

Christianity and their concerns about what the Roman empire is going to look like and what the Messiah is going to look like a military general.

That would be, that would make sense if you had come from this background. So we're using all of this information to extrapolate a fuller picture of what actually occurred because historical analysis now is so robust and we really want accuracy.

We want to get as close to like movie quality information as possible. Back then they were less concerned with that.

It was more about emphasis and necessary information to understand self as opposed to what would be a textbook that would apply to everybody, which is what makes it difficult.

It's fun to read, but like, what do you do with it? No, I was just about to say like, what do you do with it, Anna? Like, how do you take like the books of the wars and the books of the angels and the

Nephilim? Are we like, okay, yeah, that was happening in like these tribes and sure they were giants, but like you just, it just fades out.

Or is it like, oh, that time period they wrote differently than us. So it's probably a little bit of like dreams and fantasy and fiction.

I mean, I know I keep asking this like black and white question, but it's like, what do we do with that?

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Take a breath, slow down, and dwell in the good things. Now, back to the show. What do we do?

We are free to engage with the text, and I would recommend if you do engage with the text, try to only take in to your own headcanon, headcanons here, like make whatever's true for you, take into your headcanon only the details that correlate with scripture consistently.

So if you're looking at this issue and you're studying it academically, because remember, we don't have that many people in academics studying that question, like what you're asking for, which things correlate directly and consistently with the rest of scripture across the board.

We still need people to figure that out. That's how much developed theology hasn't been done yet.

It's good to know where the gaps are. Yes, so for people in the audience that are like, what do I study? Boy, do we have some doozies.

So you take that and you only take into your headcanon the things that are consistent with scripture. Past that, my rule of thumb, and this is just Anna's rule of thumb, take it or leave it, where God determined to be silent,

I determined to be silent as well. So it's interesting and it's helpful.

And if it clarifies some things for you and it edifies you and it moves you towards the Messiah, go for it.

Study away. If you notice yourself actually becoming obsessive and kind of strange and people are like turned off and kind of scared and like, why are you obsessing over giants and we can't figure all this out and you start to like unravel and you're not being edified and encouraged as a believer to go out into the world and accomplish the great commission, take care of those who are poor in front of you and all those things, then we're actually doing damage to our spirit, obsessing over it.

And maybe the Lord had that in mind when he decided to not include those details. I think that's like a really, thanks for that vibe check,

Anna. I mean, I appreciate you saying that because I can see myself being somebody that can fall down a rabbit hole of the wars and the angels of the

Nephilim. And now we're not even studying scripture and now I'm playing God and deciding, well, that just seems more true.

They got it wrong. The thousands of years got it wrong, but I, Cassian, it sounds right to me.

So I'm gonna choose, you know, like I think that's a really good just personal boundary to have. And I think some people are maybe unwilling to admit that like they are playing

God when they're like, no, Christianity got it wrong. The book of Enoch or whatever it might be.

You know, I'm just speaking from what I've seen on the internet, but that's some good, yeah.

Cause it gets into that like realm of like, what are they not telling us? But you know, the enemy works really swiftly there.

Yeah. You mentioned the Apocrypha and we've talked about the Apocrypha on the show, but for me and for anybody else who hasn't listened to some of the episodes, what is the

Apocrypha? The Apocrypha is a series of books that have been seen as very helpful historical books that have been used a lot by the members of the body of Christ.

And they are considered separate, a separate category. So not the word of God, but still really helpful.

Like if you're gonna start anywhere, start here, that kind of stuff. And this is like - Kind of like supplemental reading?

Supplemental reading would work out really well. But it's not in the Bible. It's not in the Bible, but like things like they're extra, like there are sections of Daniel that they're like, oh, also here's some other stories about what happened while Daniel was around.

That's Belle and the dragon. You know, like we have, we have these Judith who is this really incredible figure.

That's, it's very helpful. It's deeply biblical. It's just not the word of God. And you can tell, like when you read it, you're gonna sit there and be like, oh, this doesn't, this sounds like somebody telling me a story.

This does not sound like it belongs in the scriptures. It's super obvious. A lot of these texts are hyperbolic in their writing style.

And that's one of the identifiers. Like you can tell almost immediately, like I'm listening to somebody who's just really excited about telling me something they know versus this is a really true, authoritative,

I need to hang my hat on this. I need to meditate on it. You know, it's more of like, like a sermon riff sort of situation, but still beneficial.

Oh, okay. Cause I think I was just like, well, who wrote the Apocrypha that like, you know, we have all these like credited sources that we can hang our hat on.

And then there's this group over here, this person over here, or this collection, like this time period. I don't even know like what

I'm asking now is like who wrote the Apocrypha that everyone's like, it start there, but it's not gonna be included in the canon.

Like what was, how did that develop? We don't know who wrote it. That's part of the problem. Oh. Yeah, we don't have a full.

So what we have is like lost information. So this idea that like, okay, we have these groups whose job was to preserve material that they found deeply beneficial, like the

Essenes. This is where we're gonna get a lot of the jars of clay that are preserving all these scrolls.

What are the Essenes? I don't know what that is. Yeah, the Essenes were a group of Jewish authorities. So you had like the, the

Sadducees, you had the Pharisees, and you had the Essenes. And the Essenes are probably the group that John the

Baptist belonged to. And all of his emphasis on purity and involving the purification, right?

So the Essenes would always purify themselves every morning. And the idea is John the Baptist was at the river doing that because he was doing the purifying ritual that the

Essenes engaged in. They're the most esoteric. They're the most mysterious of the group.

They love to hang out in the desert by themselves and be hermits and just meditate on texts.

Like they're like the awesome Victorian library ghosts of the first century. Like that's the kind of vibe you're going for.

Anyway, they had collections, libraries and libraries of collections and things that they really, really valued. And a lot of those things are what are in the

Apocrypha. Got it. But like who wrote them? We don't know. We just know that they were really, really, really important because they preserved them.

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Thank you so much. Now back to the show. Who's using the Apocrypha today?

Primarily academics, as well as Roman. Yeah, the Roman Catholic church still holds the

Apocrypha in very high regard. That's due to some, let's call it some drama in the 16th century with the council of Trent.

That really wasn't that big of a deal until we got to Martin Luther and Martin Luther was like, oh, we need to go ahead and actually have a codified word of God that is just the word of God for our people.

And so I'm going to issue one in the lingua franca of my day, which was a German, a proto -German.

And the Roman Catholic church was like, well, you can't do that. What you're teaching goes against a lot of the traditions that we've developed out of a bunch of these historical books and out of our own revelation, our own personal revelation.

And your idea of sola scriptura being the critical component is a problem for us. And so after Martin Luther did this, the council of Trent takes off and that's like 1545 to the 1560s.

It was a big, long thing where they determine we're going to put a stamp and the stamp is going to be deuterocanonical, which means the inter -canon.

And we're going to include the apocrypha, that's the other word for deuterocanon. We're going to include all those texts in the same

Bible structures. You're going to have an Old Testament, you're going to have an apocrypha and a New Testament bound together.

And all of it is authoritative. Yeah, but that was way later.

That had nothing to do with the first century or anything having to do with that. That doesn't happen anymore, or does it within certain groups?

So I happen to be a Lutheran. And so this like back and forth between Roman Catholics and Lutherans still goes on to this day, like no question.

But primarily what I'm seeing now in like the academic sphere, if you're going to be a religion major in college, you're going to be asked to carry like an

NRSV with an apocrypha. And it's so that they can make reference points because it's still beneficial to explain what was going on in the world in between the

Testaments. But it's mostly an academic endeavor and the Roman Catholics mostly use it.

The Eastern Orthodox do use it, but in my experience to way less a level.

And then past that for study in general, the apologists obviously are using it on the regular. Is the apocrypha supposed to represent like a specific time period of like no biblical canonical books being written?

It's supposed to kind of be like representative texts during like this more silent period? Like a gap. Some of them are, but not all of them.

Oh, okay. Yep, some of them are like what was going on in the gap. Yeah, that's like Maccabees.

Oh, but it wasn't pointing towards the Messiah, like it wasn't worth including. It wasn't worth including back then in a way that was authoritative, certainly not, no.

Okay, so is this the same as Gnostic texts? No, the

Gnostic texts have more, those are like the lost gospel vibes, so like the gospel of Thomas and the infancy gospel of Christ and the gospel of Peter.

Those are more Gnostic texts. Those are the guys who went off and wrote personal revelations that they received in the desert well after the apostles were dead.

So very, yeah, very, very different. They were just claiming they were doing a process which was very normal back then, which it wasn't supposed to be fraud.

They weren't necessarily intending it to be fraudulent. They were intending it to honor the apostle. They believed they were receiving a revelation about.

And so they did what was called, a lot of big words today, pseudopigraphical, which just means

I'm going to give credit to the apostle I want to give credit to, and I'm not gonna take any for myself.

And so I'm gonna say this is the gospel of Thomas, even though it was received by Bill in the desert in the 300s.

Oh, okay. Does that make sense? It does make sense, but it makes me think like, surely we had people after the apostles die have revelations that were worth writing about and did have authority.

So what made these specific ones Gnostic? So these ones were Gnostic because they altered major theological norms like the nature of Christ, whether or not he was sinless.

So that's like the infancy gospel of Christ, for example, Jesus strikes people blind out of anger and he throws rocks at children and then resurrects them and then kills them again and then resurrects them again just for fun.

So it's like really obviously, no, this does not comport at all with the character of the scriptures.

And the Gnostics, if I may be so bold as to be critical, they already were not interested in being consistent with the rest of revealed canon.

Like that's not their vibe. They were interested in focusing on the development of creation and having this constant evil versus good balance going on.

So a lot of yin and yang, this is like the urge and the demi -urge is what they're teaching. Their theology was not really interested in maintaining any type of orthodoxy.

Whereas the leaders of the church at the time were super, super concerned with that because the empire was expanding so rapidly and they wanted to make sure

Christ could be identified accurately. Interesting. So these Gnostic gospels or Gnostic texts are the same as lost gospels?

Those are one of the same? Functionally speaking, yes. And what time period are these being written?

I think the earliest that I've seen is third century. So it's like two fifties ish. And I think that's the gospel of Thomas, if I'm not mistaken.

And how - The rest of them are way later. Oh. Yeah, way later, way later.

And some of them are straight fraud. So there's a gospel of Mary Magdalene that was written in the 1900s.

Oh. And it was total fraud. Yeah, and it got exposed as such. So there are things that still come up that make it onto like CNN specials that they don't then turn back around and go, ah, sorry, that was written on a

Xerox printer and we missed it. That's not vellum. You know, things like that. Happens all the time.

You know, like, I think I'm learning about this. So it's like, okay, clearly fraud, clearly crazy.

But there are people that don't think that way. There are people that read these Gnostic texts and say, I'm gonna base my religion and my beliefs off of this.

Where do we see those religions pop up across the world? Like presently or just back then? Like what were those religions called?

Sure, sure, sure. Well, any Gnostic -based stuff. Gnostic is kind of a catch -all term in academics for like this time period where different people groups are trying to take over control of who got to represent the

Messiah. And so there was this really heavy concern. That's what the riots in Rome were about when

Constantine was trying to codify things. Was like, okay, if Jesus was just a guy, if he was just like a normal human prophet, then

I can be a normal human prophet too. And I can be the next normal human prophet to give the next revelation to guide the people toward myself and toward control and toward power and dominion and sex and money and all the things that we still see happening today.

So the current, there are modern iterations of this. Of course, we see in our biggest, I would say the most damaging cults in the world.

These are things like the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Latter -day Saints. Really, really big, obvious.

And these would be Gnostically -oriented groups because they do this thing where they say either they bring humanity to the level of Christ or they bring

Christ down to the level of humans. And they begin riffing their own gospel and saying, this is the next one.

So this is the Third Testament. That's what the Mormons do. The Third Testament of Jesus Christ, right?

And we are now Latter -day and we need to follow the current prophet who is whichever head of the

Mormon church is the current prophet. And he gets to riff on his own and the next one will after that. Interesting.

Yeah, we'll definitely touch on that. Okay, gosh. So there were no other texts once the apostles died, no additional texts there.

Once that OG group died, they were like - Revelations is it. Yep. Revelation is it.

It's over. Okay, for some reason, I don't know why I thought they'd be like bringing out some stuff. That's just crazy that everyone's just like, no more.

But you're kind of saying that there were other texts. They were just one of those like, we're not gonna listen to it. It's kind of going off on its own way.

It's not the authoritative word of Christ. Well, it's just like selling books now. I mean, like think about when, what was it called?

The Da Vinci Code. Do you remember that book when it came out? So, and then all of a sudden everybody's really excited.

Well, like there were still authors like trying to make money and use their craft to do that.

And one of the best ways to sell books at this time period while the empire is expanding and Christianity is finally just like,

I mean, it's going wild because there's nothing to stop it. It's like, oh, well,

I have this special revelation about the section of scripture that you don't know about because nobody was actually there to watch the resurrection happen.

And so I was like, okay, well, I'm just gonna let me tell you about it. Here's my version, my story about what happened.

And actually the cross was in there. It animated itself. It's now 200 some feet tall.

It's walking out. It's preaching its own gospel. Like that's all fascinating, right? And that's gonna sell books.

That's the gospel of Thomas. That's literally what happens in the gospel of Thomas.

Okay, yeah. Let's talk about what these manuscripts were holding. So how does like manuscript evidence and then that textual criticism affects the confidence in that canon?

Kind of like what you were just talking about, including authors, you know? There are some authors that we don't know that are in the canon.

Like who wrote Job? Yes, so tradition, the church tradition is that it was

Moses who wrote it down. And so when Jesus in the gospel, same thing with like who wrote

Genesis through Deuteronomy with the exception of the close that was written by Joshua from then

Joshua wrote Joshua. When Jesus says that it was Moses, we go with that it was Moses. And so the church tradition is that Job was documented by Moses, even though it's a story that predates

Moses. But things like, it's church tradition for sure, but it's uncontested. So it's every leader is like, no, no, that's what it was.

It wasn't until the modern era that we start really trying to break things down. And we have things like documentary hypothesis and all that stuff.

Anyway, when we come to this time period, if I'm answering your question correctly, we have these books that are being published that nobody cares to copy.

So that's one of the things that comes out. So we have like tiny little copies of it or like three or four versus we have millions of homilies referencing the

New Testament canon as it sits. So like this really matters because the effort and emphasis by the people of God who weren't getting paid was to continue to reiterate these things.

And they are reiterating them on their own. So it's not like they were all getting together, deciding together, we're only gonna emphasize

Colossians and then went out to do that. They were isolated and emphasizing all together simultaneously.

And the idea is the spirit of God is talking to his people and he is inspiring in them a unified text, which is what we're seeing.

Okay, yeah, that was kind of... Okay, so that's where God kind of steps in because you're like, okay, there must be a reason that someone has just moved in the spirit of like,

I don't know, this one isn't worth my time. I'm not getting paid. This is gonna take months to copy.

And it's just, it's more important that I do Colossians over this other text that I use every once in a while versus this one text that I'm referencing quite often.

Kind of like that would be a very generic way of thinking. Exactly, and although this study canonization, it can be very academic and very scholarly, it is also miraculous and we can never forget that.

The part of the reason for why this book is so precious and why we protect it and why we keep other things from being added to it, like false gospels or like extra biblical information that just so happens to correlate to you becoming a slave to some guy in somewhere in the world.

You know what I mean? Like the people of God care about the young ones, the people who are new to Christianity not being duped and taken advantage of is because this is miraculous and it changes you.

It's inspirational in a way that speaks transcendently. Whereas a book that I would write wouldn't do that.

Might be helpful, but it certainly wouldn't be transcendent and it's not supposed to be. It would be for this time and it would be for how

I could help people now, but it might not be applicable later. The word of God is applicable universally and through all of time.

That's critical. That's a transcendent book now. So it has to be protected. Okay, you definitely know more than me clearly.

So I think it's fair to say for like, well, who wrote Revelation and who wrote Job? You know, like that just wasn't common for me.

But I remember at the beginning of this conversation, you were like, well, we know that it's meant to be in the canon because we know who wrote it. But I don't, you know, it's not, it's like very clear that John wrote

John and, you know, Luke wrote Luke, but like, I don't know who wrote Revelation. I don't know who wrote

Job. Is that because you simply know more than me? And you're like, well, you know, cause Jesus said that like Moses wrote

Job or is there still some, you know, we don't know. We don't know that yet. What do we, are there like, do we know all the authors of all the

Bible? So this is debated. And if a bunch of my academics were with me, they would be like, well, you know,

I take a stance on this, that we do, we have a significant amount of information to really be pretty confident on who wrote each one.

But if I take my partners, my interlocutors position, and I try to steel man it to say things like, we don't know for certain who wrote

Hebrews because it wasn't signed, right? We don't know for certain, what's another one that I could think of?

Let's say, why does Luke have the information that he has? There's a little bit of a debate there. Was he listening to Paul or was he saying, speaking on his own right?

And he was a Hellenized Jew. Like I take a position there, but the debate on who wrote the

New Testament really isn't that big of a debate. If I take the most unknown position, like we don't know anything, then what we look at is what were the people who were contemporaries to all of these apostles willing to die over?

Because there's an awful lot of hundreds of thousands of people died during this process of circulation, over this process of circulation.

And they say, the author of Hebrews, whoever this person was, they go out and say, hey, here's my letter.

And the people who were around for the feeding of 5 ,000 are still alive. So there's more than enough time with more than enough effort to be able to have all these people go, nope, that's not what happened.

I was there. No, that's not, and they didn't. So the, for example, the quatrain gospel,

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is basically uncontested. I can think of no controversy at all.

And maybe somebody in the comments can bring it up if they do someday, but I genuinely, I don't know anyone who contested this.

This was like nearly immediately accepted. Same thing with Paul's letters. He was around for a while and he was executed under Nero and a lot of other

Christians were too. And it was brutal. And Paul's letters weren't contested. Like it was self -evident that these people really were there.

They really were changed and all these people were still alive. So we have to remember that.

We can look for a protest. Hey, that's not true. I was there. And it's just not there. Okay, yeah, that's a lot.

This always happens in these podcasts where I'm like, huh, whoa, I gotta react and keep posting.

I'm like, okay. Yeah, this is too validating though. You're gonna have to find something wrong with me. We can't, it's not, we can't.

It's not because I'm smarter or know more than you. Definitely not. It's definitely worth a follow -up conversation once I have time to sit with it because I'm sure that there's people with like so many thoughts listening and they're like, ask her this.

Well, comment what those are. We can have a follow -up because this is just like all brand new and like so mind blowing to me.

Okay, so let's talk about some of the disputed books and how they were assessed. So I think we've kind of already touched on it, but just to go back in like in the

Old Testament, what are some of the books that kind of like didn't make it and why didn't they make it? Yeah, so the

Old Testament is really fascinating because the way the Old Testament was documented was primarily verbal.

It was memorized and it was passed down verbally. So it isn't until we get to, we're not sure exactly, but it's gonna be post

Babylonian exile. Most people agree that it's about that time period that they started writing it down in scroll form.

So you've got this big long scroll. So you have this like Jesus when he takes out the scroll of Isaiah, he's going and getting

Isaiah and opening it up and reading from it. And this kind of post exile time period was when we're physically writing things down.

And so we get things like that time period also do it being really interested in preservation. This is where we get the

Dead Sea Scrolls, which date to way earlier than we even realized that they had documentation for like what did the

Bible actually say or the Old Testament, what did it actually say? And what's really fascinating about this is you can pull a physical

Dead Sea Scroll and compare it to, so like Isaiah in the Dead Sea Scrolls versus Isaiah in,

I don't know, 23 AD and they're identical. Nothing had changed over centuries and centuries and centuries.

So transmission was critical for these rabbis and these translators to make sure that they preserve exactly what was said.

That really matters. Cause I mean, to have that, that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world for any other book. It's just the

Bible. So there's your miraculous nature thing. From there came which scrolls were actually worth making.

And we only really have the Old Testament. Like we don't have a debate.

Like this was a unified people group that knew their scriptures and identified their prophets.

We didn't have a competition of prophets. By the time we get to the first century, we do.

We have a whole bunch of competitors for Messiah. And so this becomes a much more Greek oriented problem.

But for the Jews, it wasn't. We really don't have a debate. We have a very clear codified these prophets and this is the last time the

Lord spoke and this is when his spirit left the temple. And this is what it didn't come back when the temple was rebuilt.

I mean, all that stuff, very well -documented. Okay. Not really debated. The cool stuff, the

Enoch stuff that we talked about, that was always kept separate, always. Oh, okay. So even other books within the

New Testament, like Hebrews and Revelation, like how were those books assessed? Because we're seeing, I'm kind of leading into like other, like Protestant, I mean,

Orthodox, Catholic, like I'm part Orthodox, I'm mostly Protestant. And then you kind of mentioned

Catholic. They have different canons. They have different books that they're referencing, but we wouldn't call them

Gnostic. So what do we do with that? Even those books though are considered helpful.

They're part of the Apocryphal texts that we talked about. They're all within the same vicinity.

So if you look at a list of the Apocrypha, what is considered the Apocrypha, the Orthodox crew is riffing out of the

Apocrypha. They're not adding extra. The Roman Catholic crew is taking the total thing and being like, we're going to use this way more often, like in weddings and funerals and in service.

So like the book of Baruch, for example, is going to be used in a sermon. The Protestants are going, that's totally inappropriate.

You cannot use that material in a sermon. We're talking about the word of God only. So it's an emphasis issue.

Does that make sense? But it doesn't change the dogma of what those three sects believe. Yeah, it's just more of a doctrinal issue of like what they're pulling from and how they practice.

Correct. Yeah, we're in the same house. Yes, I mean, and that's part of the problem. You'll see these movements for like ecumenism.

You'll see the Pope come out and be like, I'm extending the olive branch across the table to the Lutherans and the

Anglicans and the EO guys and the Coptics, and we can all agree, right?

And then everybody's kind of like, uh, kind of, kind of. Like we can have a, yeah, we can have a potluck maybe, but past that, it's still going to be an emphasis problem.

Yeah. Okay, that's a really great way of putting it. One of the last things

I want to touch on are something we've already talked about, but like those other religious texts, like the book of, not just Enoch, but the books used by other religions and traditions, like Mormon, the book of Mormon, and, you know,

Jehovah's Witness texts. You would say that those are more cultic Gnostic texts because from a timeline perspective, it came from a prophet that was post -apostles, post -Jesus with a new revelation that kind of contradicts

Jesus's teachings. Well, for sure. So from an academic perspective, I'm kind of like winking historically at the idea of attaching

Gnostic to Mormon and Jehovah material. Nobody would really say that right now in the academic realm and they would never orient themselves that way.

But the fact that you have clearly picked up on a pattern, which you definitely have, and it's like, thank you, you're really paying attention.

Yes, the pattern is identical to what happened in Gnosticism. So really good job. The concerns of the church with Gnosticism are the same as the concerns of the church now with Mormonism and Jehovah's Witnesses and Christian science and name any of the guys who are coming up with new material and claiming that it's an amendment to the scriptures.

So the Book of Mormon being one of them, the Pearl of Great Price being another, the Book of Abraham being another.

The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, that's the Jehovah's Witnesses. What they have done is actually gone back and instead of adding to the scriptures, they have pulled out from the scriptures.

So they've altered or tweaked and anything that was in the scriptures themselves that gave

Christ any type of divine quality, they've either torn out or altered.

So they haven't - Which books? This is the Jehovah's Witness. So we're looking at the New World Translation, their

Bible is actually an altered Bible. So all the books will be the same, but the content of the books will be different.

The Mormons have added extra material to the Bible. So they haven't altered the scriptures, they've just added to them.

Interesting. Yeah, I mean, people are dying over that though.

Like, would you say that? Like there are Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses dying on that hill or dying on earth over the things that their

Bible says. Absolutely. How do we hold in both hands what they believe, but what's true?

From the best that I can recommend is I go back to, okay, if you really wanna study these things and you're really concerned with what's right, you wanna go back to the original manuscripts and you want to learn

Greek and you wanna learn Hebrew. Because the enemy is going to try to take what is sacred and tweak it and persuade you out of it because this is what is life -giving and he wants you to die.

So if you're really going to be concerned with it, strip everything away, start from brass tacks, just like every other scholar across time has done and go, the

Lord has determined that he was going to have his scriptures preserved in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, Koine Greek in particular.

And so I'm gonna study those languages and really get to know them. That's not as overwhelming as it sounds. I wanna be very clear.

And someday, some very smart person, I hope it happens in my lifetime, is going to add Hebrew, like old school

Hebrew, like the old and Koine Greek to Duolingo and we're all gonna be Bible experts. And I'm like, I'm ready.

I'm so ready. But until then, it doesn't take very long. There aren't that many vocabulary words to learn and you can learn about the immensity that is translation and how beautiful it is and the depth that the scriptures hold in those languages.

And once you do that, you will be immune to anybody being able to preserve or to persuade you out of it or trick you.

Wow, this has been such an intense conversation. I'm definitely gonna have to re -listen back and I'll actually have some deeper challenges for you because I think that this adds a lot of context and color, some timelines and perspectives as far as like the books that we're choosing and why we shouldn't have such suspicions when it comes to the books that are not included.

Thank you so much for providing such a intense outlook on this. If you don't mind, I'd love to know how can people continue learning from you?

I know you're coming back and we're gonna talk about cults in the next show, which I'm so excited for. But when it comes to like your work and learning more from you and maybe anybody listening that's like, well, you didn't ask her this and they wanna ask you it, how can they best connect with you?

For sure. I'm the cult and new religion specialist for Russia Christie which is a global ministry where we place formally trained apologists on university campuses across the globe using that network to give access to the general public to that material because it's hard to be an apologist.

You have to dedicate a great deal of time and you don't make any money and nobody wants to do that except we weird people that love it.

So if you want to access me there, you can go through Russia Christie which just means reason of Christ in Latin. You can also head to the

YouTube channel. I am not as impressive as you are. I don't have a YouTube channel that's like of any note but we make all of our lectures completely free to the general public so that they can access these things.

And then we do public live Q &A on major concerns in practical theology for the people of God.

So you can submit your questions. You can jump on live and ask questions of me. If you can't make it, we've had people all over the world jump on before which is really fun.

And those usually happen once per month in the fall. And then there's a really big controversial topic we try to cover in the spring.

That'll be in March. And those are always live on the channel. You don't owe anything. You don't have to pay anything. There's no subscription.

We're just kind of trying to make it available but you'll notice that I'm not as capable as all you really cool people that do this all the time.

So just heads up, it's boring, but you have access. No, they're awesome lives. I've listened to a couple of them.

I'll link everything in the show notes, but I love your lives. I think I like listen to them while I clean. I think that you do a pretty good job breaking down exactly what you're doing.

Oh my gosh, that's great. I love that visual of like just having, just doing life and doing theology at the same time.

That's awesome. Yeah, past that, my name is very unique. So Kitco, if you just Google it, you'll find me immediately.

Yeah, it is quite easy to Google you. Yeah. Okay, well, can't wait to have you back. Thank you so much.

Everybody go follow Anna Kitco. Make sure that you follow up on everything she's doing because there's more to learn from her and she'll engage with you directly.

But I appreciate you coming on the show. You're always welcome back and I can't wait to have you back. We'll talk soon.