Misconceptions about the Bible: Do We Have the Right Books?

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This is not an account of Jesus's life.

00:02

The Gospel of Thomas is not.

00:03

It's a set of sayings.

00:04

There is no other New Testament book, except for maybe if you push it, James, that looks anything like this.

00:12

It is not of a genre that is familiar to the New Testament.

00:34

Welcome to Conversations with a Calvinist live stream edition.

00:38

Tonight, I am joined by my two good friends, Jake Korn, the tag king, not calling you the Inquisitor anymore, I'm calling you the tag king, or both, I'll call you both, just whatever strikes me.

00:53

And of course, my very dear friend, Matthew Henson, the tech romancer slash not yet Calvinist.

01:03

Slash not yet Calvinist.

01:05

There we go.

01:05

Almost Calvinist.

01:06

Almost Calvinist.

01:07

He is like 3.14 point.

01:11

That's the pie point.

01:15

Yeah.

01:16

Well, good evening, everyone.

01:17

We are here tonight to talk about something that we have been we have been discussing for weeks, the subject of misconceptions about the Bible.

01:27

And as many of you are familiar with, as you, if you've been listening to the program, we've been getting more interaction from people in comments and things like that.

01:35

And what happens when you begin to get interactions with larger groups of people, you tend to run into some really bad arguments about the Bible.

01:43

And so what we're doing tonight is we're just going to address some of the more common misconceptions that we have had, that we have heard about the Bible.

01:52

Some of these are going to be about the canon that refers to what books belong in the Bible and what books don't belong in the Bible.

01:59

Some of these are going to refer to what the Bible teaches on certain subjects, misconceptions about, you know, what the Bible says on a certain topic.

02:09

And some of it's going to be about the history and reliability of the text of the Bible that we own today.

02:17

And so we have taken the opportunity to reach out to many of you, and many of you do follow us on social media.

02:24

We've got Jake, his tag groups and Matthew's tag groups, and they have reached out and received a handful of really good questions and misconceptions.

02:35

And we're going to just sort of go down the list and we'll do it for as long as we want to, as long as we feel like people are paying attention.

02:43

And then if it gets to the point where we have more than we think is going to take care of one show, then we may come back in a couple of weeks and do a misconceptions about the Bible part two.

02:54

I also want to use this as an opportunity to shamelessly plug one other show that I did.

03:00

Several months ago, I did a show about a man who had done a TED talk on the Bible, where he had worked for Jeff Foxworthy's program, The American Bible Challenge.

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And he came on to his TED talk to basically say that the Bible is unreliable and historically inaccurate.

03:21

And I challenged what he had to say.

03:25

And I quoted from some sources and sort of not necessarily debunked what he had to say, but I addressed what he had to say and gave some what I consider to be reasonable answers.

03:35

And so this isn't just something that we've just started thinking about.

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This is a subject that comes up all the time.

03:42

I remember years ago, we had a fall festival at our church and we had asked everyone to not dress in any spooky costumes or anything.

03:53

Well, a couple of girls from the neighborhood who were not members of the church came to the church dressed as devils and like devilish devils at that.

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And I had an opportunity to sit down and talk to those girls.

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And I remember one of the things that they said right out of the gate when I began to talk about the Bible was you can't trust the Bible.

04:12

The Bible came to us like the telephone game where this person said this to this and this person said that to him.

04:18

And what we have is 2000 years of he said, she said, and no real history.

04:26

And so, again, these are things that we have dealt with for years and years.

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And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to kick it over to Jake, who has been so gracious as to compile the list.

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And I'm going to get him to ask him to go ahead and give us his thoughts on the subject and give us our first question.

04:45

Awesome.

04:46

Yeah.

04:46

So before I kick us off, I wanted to give a shout out to my boy, Brantley McDonald, who hooked me up with this really cool shirt.

04:55

Everyone should go check out 1689.com, 1689.com.

05:00

It's a really cool website for us for foreign Baptists.

05:03

Eventually, I think it's going to grow into a great repository of churches and resources and information about the 1689 confession.

05:12

So please go check it out.

05:13

It's awesome.

05:14

Yeah.

05:14

So this is a topic that comes up for me.

05:16

It comes up a lot in my ministry as an army chaplain.

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You're getting soldiers from all kinds of walks of life, and they like talking about the Bible.

05:26

They might not necessarily want me to talk about Jesus, but they like talking about their ideas about the Bible.

05:31

And it's very similar.

05:32

And I get a lot of, oh, yeah, well, you guys just picked the books you wanted to be in there.

05:38

You don't want them to read the Gospel of Thomas and so on and so on.

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And so for me, as what I find to be my favorite pillar of the Reformation, the basis of our faith, Sola Scriptura, we need to know where our Bible came from, and we need to know how it was assembled, what's in it.

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And we as Christians need to love our Bibles.

06:04

And so this is a big piece of that.

06:07

So to kick us off, let's start with this one.

06:11

Who gets to say what the Bible is? Very good question.

06:19

All right.

06:19

Well, he hasn't got to speak yet.

06:21

So because I know that he is a repository of much good information, I'm going to ask Matthew to give us a little bit of a history on the subject of canon, if you don't mind.

06:34

I didn't tell you I was going to do this, but I knew this was going to be one of our first questions.

06:38

So if you would just tell us, because that's really the question.

06:40

Who gets to decide what books are in the Bible? Because obviously these books exist.

06:44

Obviously they exist in one sense.

06:46

They exist outside of Scripture in the sense that there's 66 individual books.

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But someone at some point said, well, these are the ones that God inspired.

06:55

OK, so how do we know? Well, yeah.

06:59

So when we say the Bible, we mean really it's more of a Christian library, right? Because the Bible is a collection of works written across 1500 years, something like that by dozens of different human authors or I'll say human writers with one divine author.

07:17

That's what we believe.

07:19

So how did we get the Bible and who decides what the Bible is are overlapping questions.

07:25

So Christians differentiate between two major sections of the Bible called the Old and the New Testament, the Old Testament being written primarily in Hebrew and the New Testament being written primarily in Greek.

07:36

The Old Testament books.

07:39

Our law, most canonicity issues, most authority issues are generally clarified by I think most.

07:50

Let's say most simply clarified by looking at the words of Jesus.

07:54

So when Jesus is disputing with the religious leaders of his day, they are quoting authoritatively sections of the law or the prophets to one another.

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Now, Jesus does not quote from every single Old Testament book that is not recorded in the New Testament.

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However, the big ones, Genesis, Exodus, Isaiah, Hosea, a couple of minor prophets.

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Joel is quoted at Pentecost as a few others like that.

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And no one ever stops and says, actually, Jesus, we don't think Isaiah was actually canon.

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It was just an understood thing that the Pharisees of the day, the people with whom Jesus was disputing did not have any problem with him.

08:34

Well, okay.

08:34

They had a problem with him quoting some of the texts and applying them to himself.

08:38

But the question of canon, did God say this was never really.

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It was never really disputed.

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And, you know, if you're a religious leader who's trying to nitpick Jesus to death, if you can go after him on canon, you would.

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And they never did that.

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They went after him on all sorts of other things, but they never did.

08:55

The New Testament is a little bit different.

08:57

Now, again, it's all God speaking, but the New Testament canon is just a little bit different in the sense that the New Testament is the record of the apostles primarily.

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And an apostle is someone who had a bodily, an encounter with the resurrected Jesus.

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And if you had that and you wrote something as an eyewitness account, then what you have written was considered authoritative.

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So the canon line in the New Testament is, did an eyewitness of Jesus write it or vouch for it? Those are the two sort of tests that we would look at for does it make it into the New Testament? So that's a historical answer.

09:39

Ultimately, as a question of authority, though, and I'm going to use some language from some of the works we're going to talk about tonight, there are a bunch of books in the world.

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God did not write all of the books, but God did write some of the books.

09:55

And so the canon simply is a reflection.

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It's sometimes called an artifact of revelation.

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It is the result of what happens when God speaks.

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When we're done with this podcast, if you were to transcribe it, there would be a record of the things we said.

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That is the canon of this podcast.

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And anything that is outside of that is not the canon of this podcast.

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And we, as the authors, get to define that.

10:17

So ultimately, God gets to decide.

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God decides what the canon is.

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And then it is up to us to look at the history, the text, all these other things, acceptance by the church, and all of that increases our confidence.

10:32

But ultimately, we cannot appeal to a higher authority other than God spoke.

10:36

Yeah, I think what you're saying is, you know, it's in contra answer to the idea that the Catholic Church decided what the canon was.

10:49

And what we're saying is, no, God, as the author, decided the canon.

10:53

We discerned what recognized was.

10:56

Yeah.

10:57

And that, like, it's a, as Kruger will say, it's a bottom up approach.

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The way you would discern God's will on any topic, except what we have in our favor is what Jesus said about it, like you said, and then what the apostles said about it.

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So it's really a key distinction that is the basis for most of what skeptics today, I think, want to hang their hat on because of this postmodern age.

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What is postmodernism trying to do but unravel the authority, unreliable authorities of men? Well, we're saying this doesn't come from the authority of men.

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It comes from the authority of God, who knows very well what his canon is.

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And you can look about its own statements about itself.

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I mean, Peter says men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

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Paul describes the scriptures themselves as God breathes.

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In the first couple of verses of Hebrews, the writer of the Hebrews says, long ago and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers through the prophets.

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And then in these last days, he's spoken to us through his son, Jesus Christ.

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But there's a recognition that God spoke in Hebrews 1.

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And yet in 2 Peter, it says men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

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It gives you this twin idea that it's men speaking, but it's God speaking.

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Men writing, God speaking.

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And that's the beauty of the divine and the human nature of scripture.

12:25

Absolutely.

12:26

And I just want to jump in, as was already mentioned, Michael Kruger.

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There are two books that I brought with me tonight.

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I don't know how well they'll be able to be seen.

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This one's a little shiny.

12:37

This is called Canon Revisited by Michael J.

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Kruger, establishing the origins and authority of the New Testament books.

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I believe this was the one that came first, because the second one is called The Question of the Canon.

12:54

This one's in paperback.

12:56

And both of them are hugely useful on this particular subject.

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And they deal with some of what both of you had mentioned specifically.

13:08

The way that people often fail to make note of this is that this is a theological question.

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As in addition to a historical question, most people only look at it from a historical perspective.

13:22

From a historical perspective, there was not a church council that recognized the canon until the fifth century.

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So we could say that the idea of canon didn't wait 500 or 400 years, but the church, speaking authoritatively, speaking council-wise, this did not happen early on.

13:54

And one of the reasons that even this issue came up was that there was a heretic named Marcion who believed that the Old Testament God was evil.

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And so the first collection of books was Marcion coming and taking out portions that he didn't like.

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He didn't like the Old Testament God.

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He didn't like the New Testament references to the Old Testament God.

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And I did a sermon years ago called The Marcians Are Coming.

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Sort of like the Martians are coming.

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You know, the Martians.

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And because I think today we have the same problem.

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We have people who want to remove the portions of God they don't like.

14:38

Yeah, unhitch the Old Testament.

14:40

We're going to get into that.

14:41

Yeah, but that's a Marcion quality, in the sense that you're following the same attitude.

14:48

And Marcion was, of course, condemned as a heretic.

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But outside of Marcion, we also have something called the Moratorium Canon.

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This is the oldest extant listing of New Testament books that we have.

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Of course, certainly there would have been more earlier than this.

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We just don't have access to that.

15:10

Of course, archaeology may unearth something at some point that goes back further.

15:16

But what's interesting about the Moratorium Canon, what I like to point out from a historical perspective, is that it included only the four Gospels.

15:23

It included Acts.

15:24

It included the writings of Paul.

15:26

Where it differs from what would later become recognized as, and I love what Jake said, discerned.

15:33

Not determined, but discerned.

15:35

What would later be discerned.

15:37

That there were a few books that were still being debated in the second century.

15:42

Books like the Shepherd of Hermas, and the Epistle to Barnabas, and I think Clement is also in the Moratorium Canon.

15:54

I'd have to look it up to see.

15:55

But it's interesting that the heavyweight doctrinal writings, and I'm not discounting at all Revelation, because of course it was still being debated in books like that, but Paul's letters, the four Gospels, they were really not ever up for debate.

16:15

These were the Bible, and like I said, if somebody, I don't think we have the authority today to say, I'm not going to accept third John, right? But it's not as if somebody was questioning the authenticity of Romans, right? It was questioning some of the general epistles, and of course, Revelation, which I always say, I'm kind of glad they at least gave Revelation a second look, because it is a book with ten-headed monsters and stuff.

16:44

I mean, it's not as if it's just, it's an apocalyptic letter that, and there's an Apocalypse of Peter that I think is also in the Moratorium Canon.

16:56

So there's more than one Revelation in that sense, apocalyptic writing.

17:01

So I just wanted to throw that out as a historical perspective.

17:03

When somebody says, well, I think the Gospel of Thomas should be included.

17:07

The Gospel of Thomas never included.

17:08

It was never considered by the church.

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It was never, it wasn't in the Moratorium Canon.

17:14

I don't even think Marcion accepted it.

17:16

It's like nobody thought this was gospel.

17:20

And I just happened to bring up a copy of it, because I always love to read this.

17:24

When somebody brings up the Gospel of Thomas, I always love to read saying 114.

17:28

This is saying 114 from the Gospel of Thomas.

17:31

Simon Peter said to them, let Mary go away from us for women are not worthy of life.

17:36

First of all, I don't know why this is so popular with modern leftists.

17:45

Let Mary go away from us for women are not worthy of life.

17:48

Jesus said, look, I will draw her in so as to make her male so that she too may become a living male spirit similar to you.

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But I say to you, every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.

18:00

Guys, I can say with all authority of heaven and earth, Jesus ain't never said no nonsense like that.

18:08

That is garbage.

18:11

It's not anywhere close.

18:13

There's nothing close.

18:15

I'm preaching through the Gospel of Mark right now.

18:18

There is nothing to be compared between the Gospel of Mark, which is a picture of the life of Christ set to a very quick pace, going from Christ beginning his ministry to the gospel in 16 short chapters.

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There's nothing close between that and the Gospel of Thomas.

18:35

I didn't mean to run away, guys.

18:37

I just felt like I need to.

18:38

But I think we've begged a bit of a question that we probably need to get into, which is in reference to the Gospel of Thomas.

18:46

So let's consider the Gnostic Gospels separately from what we might consider as the Deuterocanonicals and the Apocrypha.

18:55

We need to talk about those.

18:56

But all of those books that when people say, either the Roman Catholics come to us and say, well, you didn't include, you know, Judith and Tobit, or the postmoderns come to us and say, you didn't consider the Gospel of Thomas.

19:10

By what standard? Hey, we have a bell.

19:14

Can we definitively say that those don't belong? I mean, it's one.

19:18

It's a nice thing to be able to say, right? That, well, you know, we're not going to consider the Gospel of Peter because it has Jesus, you know, standing as tall as Godzilla and the cross talking to him.

19:29

But, well, I mean, the book of Daniel has crazy visions as well.

19:34

And we consider that.

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So by what standard are we considering some and not others? And that, I mean, really that that's what's going to matter to people.

19:44

But sorry, pause.

19:45

Let me back up.

19:47

Because what you said, Keith, is that this is a theological distinction.

19:51

So I love talking about this stuff.

19:53

I do.

19:53

I think evidences matter.

19:55

I think the science and the history of text criticism matters.

19:59

I'm a big fan of text criticism.

20:00

OK, I'm not like our our Texas Receptus only friends.

20:03

However, I will say I believe that the majority of people who do come with all of these misconceptions of the Bible, they do so because they're in willing but suppressed disobedience and sin.

20:18

They don't want to hear the voice of the shepherd.

20:21

They are not seeing the plain truth.

20:23

OK, so I mean, I truly believe that there is a spiritual aspect to this.

20:27

So someone someone says, I don't trust your Bible because you don't have the Gospel of Thomas.

20:32

What I really hear is I don't want to submit to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

20:36

That's a perspective that that I hold.

20:39

Now, does that mean that we we don't have to have an answer for the Gospel of Thomas? Well, no, we do need to have an answer.

20:45

But ultimately, to my friends out there watching this, when you're dealing with this apologetically, I would advise you to put on your precept goggles first and then let's get into the evidences.

20:57

But you're not going to win anyone on the evidences.

20:59

You're going to win them by the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

21:02

OK, so how do we, Keith, say let's let's take the Gnostic Gospels first.

21:10

On what by what standard can we say those don't belong? OK, are we asking for a theological or historical? Because I do think that we have to consider at least something that Matthew said earlier, and that is the question of timing.

21:25

You know, when you when you see something saying it's written by Peter, like you said, you know, the Gospel of Peter or whatever.

21:31

These these are generally accepted to be long after the death of the apostles, where the the writings of the New Testament that we have in our Bible are all fit within the time frame of the lifetime of the apostles, therefore having apostolic authority.

21:47

And so if I say Peter was second century, third century, this is way it's obviously pseudepigraphal.

21:54

So I think that so there's two measures of time that matter, right? One, what is the earliest manuscript evidence we have of this thing? When do we have an actual ink to papyrus right in the Gospel of Thomas? I think you're looking at late second century is the earliest you have.

22:11

So, you know, one hundred eighty hundred ninety years after Christ or whatever that math works out to be.

22:18

I don't want to stop you just for a second.

22:20

I do know that there are some within the Jesus Seminar who have tried to force it into the first century, like 80 to 90 within the first century.

22:27

I'm not I'm not saying I agree with them.

22:28

I'm just saying somebody from the comments may come in and say, well, there are some, you know, like John Dominic Croson, who would who would argue it's earlier.

22:35

I don't believe I have to look at that evidence.

22:36

I don't think that's the consensus opinion, even among liberal scholars, though, not doesn't think it is so.

22:43

So that's the first timing that matters.

22:45

The second timing that matters is, well, maybe we don't have that manuscript, but is it mentioned earlier? Did somebody else write about it? So, for example, a lot of how we can find evidence about the Old Testament canon, we actually get from nonbelievers, right? We get from the writings of Philo and Josephus.

23:04

We learn a lot about the Old Testament canon.

23:06

Well, the same can be said of, you know, did we hear about the Gospel of Thomas from someone else? And we don't.

23:15

What we do know is it was a standard and practice of the Gnostics to write pseudepigraphy.

23:21

So that means right under the name of somebody else, because as you're trying to peddle your wackadoo fanfic of Jesus, right? You're not going to write, hey, this was the Gospel of Sam the baker.

23:36

You're going to put someone's name in there that carries some weight.

23:39

And this is actually something that was done a lot back then.

23:43

It was almost a genre of popular literature, except these guys were doing it probably for a distinct cultic theological agenda, right? So we don't hear about it earlier than the late second century.

23:58

We just don't.

23:59

And what matters with that is it's not connected to the apostles, right? Because what does Paul say? That the foundation of our faith stands upon the apostles and the prophets.

24:10

That's right.

24:10

And so if there is an apostolic offering and now, you know, our Roman friends will be like, oh, so you do care about the apostolic succession? Well, I care about those apostles, the big apostles that don't exist anymore.

24:21

And they didn't hand their badge to anybody when they died.

24:26

Right there, say so, as those who, as Matthew said, had seen, experienced the bodily risen Christ and been sent by him personally, their warrant carries the same authority as Christ.

24:39

Yeah.

24:41

Okay.

24:42

I was going to say just this last Sunday night when I was starting the history class for the academy, I talked about the first century being broken into three parts.

24:50

You have the life of Christ, first 30 years, and then you have the next 30 years, which is essentially the apostolic church, birth of the apostolic church.

24:58

Then, of course, after AD 70, you have the fall of Jerusalem and then the beginning of the early church fathers.

25:03

We see Ignatius and others coming in to play at that point.

25:06

So the point is we see in the early church writings, quotations of these books.

25:14

So it's not as if we just have the books themselves.

25:17

We have early Christians who are citing these books as authoritative.

25:22

They're citing them as scripture.

25:23

Even the Didache cites the scripture as scripture.

25:29

And so it's not as if they had to wait until the fourth century or the fifth century or whenever the councils happened to say, this is God speaking.

25:36

They knew it.

25:38

It was recognized.

25:40

Go ahead.

25:40

I didn't mean to speak over you, Matthew.

25:42

No.

25:42

Yeah.

25:42

Just to echo that, I mean, when you get into the fourth century, you have conversations and conflicts over Arianism, the deity of Christ, the core doctrines of the faith.

25:52

No one's citing Thomas.

25:54

No one is saying, yeah, I'm going to stake my claim on Thomas.

25:58

No one's doing that.

25:59

And if you've ever to the listener, if you've ever heard, I encourage you, go read the gospel of Thomas.

26:04

I mean, it is sci-fi fanfic Jesus, basically.

26:09

But there's a lot of sayings in there.

26:11

I was just scrolling through them here, and I read in preparation, but I was just scrolling through them here.

26:15

There are direct quotations from the gospel, the legitimate canonical gospels in here, right? So like the work of Satan is always to mix truth with a lie, you know, so like saying whatever, 70, I don't know, 65 is he said there was a good man who in a vineyard, he leased it to a tenant farmer.

26:33

So they might collect that out of the parable of, oh, I'll send my son.

26:36

And then, you know, they'll respect him.

26:37

Then they killed him.

26:38

What are you going to do? Oh, he's going to come and kill them.

26:40

That's in there in its entirety.

26:42

So it's like, oh, well, this must be legitimate.

26:43

And then it's like, no, it very much isn't.

26:45

The other thing is, this is not an account of Jesus's life.

26:49

The gospel of Thomas is not.

26:50

It's a set of sayings, okay? There is no other New Testament book, except for maybe if you push it, James, that looks anything like this.

27:00

It is not of a genre that is familiar to the New Testament.

27:04

It is not a, now the gospels themselves are not chronological accounts.

27:08

The authors arrange things to make a point, but they're tellings of the life of Jesus.

27:12

And then Paul's epistles and John's epistles and Peter's epistles are usually addressing direct points or bits of theology.

27:20

And then you've got your apocalyptic literature.

27:22

This is literally just a list of sayings.

27:23

I mean, it's, it's, it's a list of one to five sentence fragments.

27:28

It doesn't fit the New Testament canonically.

27:31

It's never cited authoritatively by anyone trying to really make a theological point.

27:35

And the other thing is, and you guys correct me if I'm wrong, it was not discovered until 1945 in Nag Hammadi.

27:42

Nag Hammadi.

27:42

Yeah.

27:43

So the Nag Hammadi is a collection of Gnostic writings, which came out at the same time.

27:47

We found the Dead Sea Scrolls because we had archeological access to the Middle East as the Western world, which we didn't before.

27:53

Yeah.

27:54

And they were discovered by Muhammad Ali.

27:56

Yeah, actually.

27:58

Not, not, not the Muhammad Ali, but yeah.

28:00

Super common name in the Middle East.

28:02

I do.

28:02

Yeah.

28:03

I've met a lot of Muhammad Ali's.

28:05

So then you have to deal with the question of, did God leave his church with a portion of his revelation unknown for 1900 years? I find that who you ask.

28:17

Yeah.

28:17

I find that hard to believe.

28:18

And the, and the last thing I'll say is on a theological point, Keith is preaching through Colossians right now, I believe on Sundays.

28:25

Is that right, Keith? Yep.

28:27

Colossians and first John and a number of the other New Testament works that are not before canonical gospels are dealing with the greatest enemy of the church faced up until Arianism.

28:38

And that is called Gnosticism.

28:39

So we've kind of touched on it before a little bit, but Gnosticism was a secret knowledge, secret society kind of thing.

28:46

We don't have time to go into it now, but there, there is nothing that is closer to the work of the devil himself in the first couple of centuries, the Gnosticism, because especially like Valentinian Gnosticism is, it was specifically designed to create a counterfeit Christianity that looked just like it and mixed in some sayings, but not quite.

29:06

The, the gospel, the Gnostic gospels, the Gnostic writings have key theological contradictory points that cannot be harmonized with the new Testament because they don't have the same author.

29:17

So that's, that's the other reason.

29:19

And you make a great point, right? In the new Testament, there are more warnings against false teachers than there are our commands to love.

29:25

Yep.

29:26

And because these things are pernicious and we're seeing very similar issues today.

29:31

And Paul, Paul was dealing with this when he wrote to the Colossians or, and I am as a supernatural list in the sense that God can, can do this.

29:43

Paul was under inspiration, writing prophetically about an issue, the Colossians would face soon.

29:49

So either they were already dealing with this, or you can say, well, there's no evidence of that.

29:53

And I go, fine.

29:54

God was preparing them for 50 years from now when they were, were you listening to my sermon Sunday? Did you hear what I had to say? No, I didn't.

30:00

Well, I actually, Morna Hooker is a, she wrote an essay arguing that there, that, that it wasn't actually an issue that they were facing, but rather that it was something that was prevalent outside.

30:11

And when Paul was warning them for that.

30:13

So that's, I don't know if you had heard the message.

30:17

The official Gnosticism doesn't kick off till later, but we do call it a proto Gnosticism during the time of Paul, which has a lot of the same similar markings.

30:25

Yeah.

30:25

Well, I would, my argument, and again, I know this isn't about Colossians.

30:28

I think, I think Gnosticism is, is, is apportioned in Colossians.

30:32

I think, I think it's syncretism is really the issue that Paul is mainly dealing with because it's Gnosticism along with Jewish mysticism and all kinds of worship of angels and all kinds of other stuff.

30:40

So we see, we see sort of a synchrist, syncratic view of everybody's bringing in their own thing.

30:47

Everybody wants it to be, it's just like today.

30:49

Everybody wants their views to be validated.

30:52

Exactly right.

30:53

Paul says, nope.

30:54

So, so we, I think, I think gospel, Thomas gospel, Peter are easy to deal with.

30:58

Here's one that's a little bit more difficult that people like to talk about a lot.

31:02

Can I stop you real quick? I just want my show now.

31:05

I just want, I want to correct myself.

31:07

I said fifth century earlier, but just, I just, I had to, I had to know it's a council of Hippo and the council of Carthage, both affirm the same, the 27 books that was 393 and 397 respectively, which would have put them in the fourth century.

31:22

So I said fifth century.

31:23

Again, somebody is going to come on and say, he said fifth century.

31:27

He doesn't know what he's talking about.

31:28

Although we should talk about Carthage later, because that is more about, we have issues with Carthage with the deuterocanon, but we'll, we'll get to that.

31:37

So, so backing up.

31:38

So we, we did Thomas and Peter easily dealt with and, and, and any of those books that I think have a much later provenance.

31:45

Here's what, that's a little bit more difficult.

31:47

That comes up a lot in my ministry, the book of Enoch, which is quoted by Jude.

31:53

Right.

31:54

It's super interesting.

31:56

As far as Christian fanfic goes, I think it's fascinating.

31:59

So the argument you'll hear a lot, which I think it's easily dealt with, but it comes up is if it's quoted in the Bible, that means it should be considered part of the Bible and go, all Cretans are liars.

32:14

Well, I mean, okay.

32:15

That's just fact.

32:16

Yeah.

32:17

So the listener in the book of Titus, Paul, Titus, right.

32:24

Yes.

32:24

Yeah.

32:24

It is Titus, isn't it? Now you're making me question myself.

32:27

Yeah.

32:27

Okay.

32:27

Keep talking.

32:28

I'm looking too far away.

32:30

It's one of the pastoral epistles.

32:32

Uh, hang on, uh, uh, yeah, Titus one 12.

32:42

Okay.

32:44

You should have just stayed with it.

32:45

You should have been confident.

32:46

I knew it was well, Hey, I want to be accurate.

32:48

I knew it was a pastoral epistle.

32:50

I've been reading anyway.

32:51

Sorry.

32:52

Not always right, but never in doubt.

32:53

There you go.

32:56

So, uh, the new Testament in brief, in the snarky response about all Cretans are liars.

33:01

The new Testament authors very often quote extra biblical data to make points sometimes.

33:07

So yeah.

33:07

Yeah.

33:08

I think of Paul in Athens quoting quotes, one of their own poets, um, in him, we live and move and have our being or something like that.

33:16

And, and so the new Testament authors using an outside source.

33:23

Doesn't that doesn't, uh, that doesn't bother me at all.

33:26

And in fact, I think there's a time maybe in one of the pastorals where, um, Paul actually, it's a, he says, you have, you've heard it said, or as it is said, and he attributes a quotation to Jesus that we don't actually have anywhere in the gospels.

33:41

And so that suggests to us that Paul was aware of some other type of tradition that God did not see fit to preserve.

33:49

And so we don't have it, but Paul quotes it.

33:51

Well, so I don't have a, I don't have any, I don't have any problems saying, well, it's quoted.

33:55

Therefore it must be scripture.

33:56

That's that's silly.

33:58

Yeah.

33:59

And, and a few months ago, well now quite a, quite a many, quite a many months ago.

34:06

That's not a way to say that.

34:07

I'm sorry.

34:08

Many much months, many much.

34:10

I was doing a series on the small letters in the new Testament.

34:16

So I did, um, third, second, third, John, Jude, Philemon.

34:19

I just did all the one chapter letters as a series, um, which was a little odd, but it just worked out.

34:25

And I remember this coming up in my preaching on this, uh, on the, on, on Jude, I ended up going and doing a little bit of research on, on, on Enoch.

34:34

And it is, as you said, it as, as fan fiction or whatever you want to call it.

34:39

It's, it's interesting.

34:40

And it does bring up a lot of questions about how one would interpret Genesis six.

34:47

Um, because that, that becomes the, the, really the issue.

34:50

And, and I don't know if you deal with this Jake, but I know that's one of the things that I, because I, I go to a place called set free every, every Thursday morning, I go and preach to a group of men at set free.

35:00

Uh, it's, it's, it's men who are in recovery from, uh, various issues of life.

35:06

And, uh, usually there's about 60 guys that are living on site and going through this recovery slash discipleship program.

35:13

And I preach there every Thursday morning.

35:15

And every time there's a new guy comes in, he's got something he wants to talk about.

35:19

And, and a lot of times it's the Nephilim it's the, it's the, you know, and, and Enoch is often cited.

35:27

Um, and, and there's a, there is an interesting, um, I don't know if you guys, I think I brought him up on the show before, but, uh, the, the unseen realm, Michael, um, yeah, uh, you know, he gets into a lot of this stuff, a lot of the, the very kind of weird supernatural stuff.

35:46

But if somebody were to argue with me, well, Enoch is to be in the Bible.

35:50

I think my, my first question is, is do we have any, and, and correct me on this, but I don't believe there's any, uh, any instance where the, the Jews held it as scripture.

36:01

And, and so we have to, I think with the new Testament, we, and Matthew alluded to this earlier with the new Testament, we have a little different paradigm than the old Testament because the old Testament, we have Christ who literally came into the world and confirmed, you know, have you not read what God said? The law, the prophecy, God spoke these things and, you know, the gospel or, or, uh, as I say, the gospel of Thomas Enoch, it was not included.

36:28

And therefore, um, just because it's cited in, and, and, and my point there is Enoch is Enoch is a, uh, an older source.

36:37

It would be, it would, it would predate the gospels.

36:39

It would predate Christ.

36:40

And if it were to be considered scripture, I think the Jews would have recognized it as such and they don't.

36:46

So, yeah.

36:46

Yeah.

36:46

So what is, what is it doing in Jude? I think it's a pop culture reference that his audience understood that, uh, he uses because it's at top of their mind and it's apt to his discussion.

37:00

And, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

37:02

Um, I wouldn't take it so far as to justify using pop culture references, like some churches today with their at the movies series, but, you know, but I, but I did reference radiator Springs last week.

37:14

Okay.

37:14

And if you, and if you can tell me what radiator Springs is either one of you.

37:19

Uh, no, I don't think I remember it.

37:21

And the movie cars, um, there, the city that, that, that was bypassed by the highway was called radiator Springs.

37:28

It used to be a bustling city.

37:30

And then the highway pass it by, I was talking about Colossi Colossi in the fifth century, BC was a very metropolitan place, but there was a route trade route that was bypassed it and ultimately turned it into a less metropolitan area.

37:43

Yeah.

37:43

Yeah.

37:43

Yeah.

37:44

Okay.

37:44

So, so I used a, I used a reference to the movie cars.

37:48

I think there's a wisdom, right.

37:50

In, in using references and overusing them, relying on them.

37:54

Yeah.

37:55

Um, my preference is to illustrate the Bible with more of the Bible.

37:59

And I do that because one, I want to increase biblical literacy in my people.

38:04

And two, it's a more reliable source than anything I've got.

38:08

But sometimes, you know, you just, you find that good reference and we see Paul do it and we see Jude do it.

38:15

And I think it's okay.

38:16

So, so, yeah, I don't think the book of unique is a big deal, but it's another one that comes up.

38:20

But now what do we tell our Roman friends when they say, well, you Protestants, you got seven less books than we do.

38:29

How do we answer them? Well, it's, if it's an old, I mean, if it's the Deuterocanon, so to the listener, that would be first and second Maccabees, Tobit, um, Judith, Judith.

38:42

Yeah.

38:43

Yeah.

38:43

Yeah.

38:45

Which is a righteous name.

38:47

Yeah.

38:47

It's pretty sweet.

38:48

Yeah.

38:48

If I start a metal band, it's either going to be that or something from the Silmarillion.

38:52

There you go.

38:54

Yeah.

38:54

Um, so the, the question is, uh, what, so they're making a positive claim of canonicity.

39:01

So actually they need to defend their claim.

39:03

Um, so I, I don't actually need to defend the counterpoint.

39:07

I can't prove a negative.

39:08

Here's what I can say that would undermine most claims in that nature.

39:13

Um, they, uh, they are never once quoted in the new Testament.

39:18

It is written, or you have heard it said, or anything like that.

39:22

Now, granted that is not exhaustive.

39:24

There are other books in the old Testament that are not quoted, but you are missing that you're missing that biblical, um, you're missing that new Testament evidence.

39:32

You're almost, there's a, there's a, there's a minor point that I would make to that.

39:36

Sure.

39:37

Which is Jesus celebrates Hanukkah.

39:43

Which comes from Maccabees.

39:44

Okay.

39:45

There's a point where Jesus celebrates the festival of lights, which I think you could count as a reference to the book of Maccabees, or you could use it as a reference to the historical event that is recorded in the book of Maccabees, which is a very fine historical book with some mythology in it.

40:03

Doesn't make it inspired scripture.

40:05

Yeah, absolutely.

40:06

And you know, the thing is Jesus, if, if, if the new Testament has evidences of people knowing about these books, then that's fine.

40:14

They're never quoted authoritatively.

40:16

Yeah, you're right.

40:16

I'm sorry.

40:17

It's okay.

40:17

Sure.

40:18

You could never make the case that Jesus thought of Maccabees and Isaiah on the same level.

40:23

No.

40:23

Well, not from the scripture.

40:24

You certainly can't.

40:25

I was just being cheeky.

40:26

Sure.

40:26

I understand.

40:27

Yeah.

40:27

You couldn't do that.

40:28

The second thing.

40:29

And, and again, it's, it's on, it's on Rome to prove the claim they have a burden of proof here.

40:36

I love that.

40:37

Like we were talking about earlier with Carthage, right? People will say they'll point to the council of Carthage is this is the moment that our Canon was officially.

40:45

Now your, your Dan Brown conspiracy folks will say it was Constantine at Nicaea that decided the Canon.

40:51

They didn't even talk about that issue there now, but, but you can point at Carthage because they did actively confirm what they considered at that time, their Canon.

41:01

But my answer is, well, that's great, but I reject their authority.

41:05

So yeah.

41:06

Yeah.

41:07

What do I care? I'm denying that it exists.

41:12

Yeah.

41:12

They were doing a lot of crazy things by the fourth century.

41:15

And to be clear, Rome did not officially dogmatically define the Canon until the council of Trent and the counter-reformation.

41:23

So there are councils that said that, but Rome did not make it a day feed a dogma until Trent.

41:29

Yeah.

41:29

It's in the 1500s.

41:31

Yeah.

41:32

Listen, I'm not against the idea of, of the Christians getting together, especially as early as Nicaea and saying, Hey man, we've been under Roman persecution, hiding in catacombs for the last 200 years.

41:44

We've only been able to get our hands on two gospels, one Pauline epistle in James.

41:50

What do you got? Oh, you got Hebrews.

41:53

What is that? Let me see.

41:54

And there was this like Pokemon card swap because they were living in active persecution for hundreds of years.

42:01

They didn't all have a full Bible that was bound together by Jeffrey Rice.

42:07

Like they had what they had.

42:09

So like, there's nothing wrong with the concept of after Constantine said, Hey guys, you can now be a Christian and not be killed by the government for it of Christians coming out and saying, bro, I'm hungry for scripture.

42:22

I know there's more letters out there.

42:24

What do you got? That is very different than a top-down approach of Constantine saying, well, I want to justify my theological position.

42:33

So my rule is stronger.

42:35

So you will pick these books on this basis, which is a myth and didn't happen.

42:39

And that's different than Carthage, which is later after the church has been more established in a, a, a unified, you know, organizational structure at that point, there was more of a top-down authoritarian view deciding this is what we're saying is canon.

43:00

Because the, that difference of 150 years or whatever the span is between Nicaea and, and Carthage there, a lot happened in Christianity in that time and space, because now they're allowed to walk the streets and be Christian.

43:13

And, and so that historical moment matters a lot.

43:15

Yeah.

43:16

The last thing I would say on the Deuterocanonicals, which means second canon.

43:21

So listener, just chew on that one for a minute.

43:23

We call them the Apocrypha.

43:24

The Rome gets a bit testy about that and calls them the Deuterocanonicals.

43:28

Again, I don't, I don't know how you have a second canon, but be that as it may, that's how it's referred to.

43:34

The Jews never accepted those books of scripture.

43:36

Never.

43:37

And since they predate Christ, that's the standard that mattered.

43:40

Right.

43:41

Yeah.

43:41

I don't have any problem with us looking at, like, if you, if you do any Greek studies, there's a book that's just commonly by common parlance referred to as BDAG.

43:49

Bauer, Art, Gingrich, and Donker.

43:52

I got that out of order or whatever.

43:53

It, it, it's a, it is a tool used to help you understand the New Testament, but it is not Theanustos.

44:00

There's nothing wrong with someone saying, in order to understand the New Testament better, if you have this at your side, it would help.

44:06

There's nothing wrong with saying that.

44:08

Maccabees, the other, you know, we even talked about Enoch, reading that, that's fine.

44:14

You want to have a little bit of understanding about what's going on in certain places, a rebellion and all that.

44:20

That's fine.

44:22

It is not binding upon the conscience of Christians.

44:25

It is not God speaking.

44:26

It is a useful historical document and nothing more.

44:30

That's what it is.

44:31

I want to just add a thought, and I don't, I don't want to belabor this.

44:36

I think you guys gave a great answer.

44:38

I just want to, as I'm, as I'm listening to you and thinking, I think one of the, the confusing things for some people is that, um, the, uh, the Latin Bible did include this as well as the first edition of the King James and included the, uh, the Apocrypha.

44:58

And in fact, that's one of, one of the things I often bring up in King James conversations.

45:02

If I'm talking to somebody who says, well, I'm holding a 1611 King name, King James Bible.

45:07

I said, well, turn to, turn to Tobit, uh, you know, if they do, I'm surprised because genuinely or generally they have a Blaney revision.

45:17

They don't have the 1611.

45:18

So, um, but in regard to that, I want to say this and I hope neither one of you would disagree, but if we do, we can disagree as brothers.

45:28

Um, I, for a thousand years, Western Christians using the Latin Bible looked at those books and understood them as scripture because they were in the Bible that they had.

45:40

And so I don't think that it's damnable if somebody accepts the authority of the Deuterocanonical books, but, but I would say it's not necessary.

45:51

And therefore, as a Protestant, I would say I have no interest in, or I have, I, they have no authority in my life.

45:59

I think what Matthew said is good.

46:01

You can study them.

46:02

You can look at them.

46:02

But if somebody did see them as scripture during that time period where they would not have known better, I don't think that that's, I don't think that we can lay any charge to them for error because yeah, well, I mean, I'm, I'm not, I'm not the judge.

46:18

Uh, I, I, it is my duty to warn, um, right.

46:21

Which is very different.

46:22

I think the standard by which those books are considered is different than a Thomas because they are from the date that they claim to be from.

46:31

Yeah.

46:32

Right.

46:32

We have historical evidence of them, you know, being pre-Christ.

46:36

Um, and so as they walk along with the rest of the books of the Bible through time, until we reach a point where we go, Hey, we, we, we need to downgrade these.

46:46

We've been uncertain about them.

46:47

And, and based off of these standards, we're going to downgrade them.

46:51

Um, what I consider a, a, uh, teacher's responsibility versus, uh, uh, you know, one of the sheep's responsibility, those I do consider to be two different things.

47:03

So, um, I think my opinion is God in his mercy would look at a shepherd in the middle ages.

47:11

Who's, you know, out there in the wilderness and he barely learned how to read just Latin.

47:16

I don't know if his standard is going to be held as high about those books as maybe somebody today who has access to the internet and right.

47:25

And, and, and has a responsibility to research and study and know better.

47:30

Now that's just my opinion.

47:31

I don't have anything to back that up, but essentially I agree with you.

47:36

That's what I was saying.

47:37

I just, I just, I want to be charitable regarding those books much more than I would be with the, the Gnostic texts.

47:43

I'm not charitable with those at all.

47:45

Yeah.

47:45

And again, they're worth reading.

47:47

I think they're fascinating as a snapshot of, of history plus mythology, right.

47:52

Which are things that had to be dealt with in Christ's time, because regardless of what you believe about the content theologically, the folk in the time of Jesus had knowledge of those books.

48:04

And so they're, they're being addressed as well.

48:07

Anytime you read about the zealots or the political nature that Jesus was walking around in very much informed by what you read in Maccabees, that's super important to understand right.

48:17

His claim to King and why the Romans were concerned and so on and so forth.

48:22

Matthew, I cut you off, man.

48:23

I'm sorry.

48:23

It's okay.

48:24

You're good.

48:24

I I'll say this and some people get really upset when you say this.

48:28

I don't think that the Protestant doctrine of solo scriptura is required to be saved.

48:33

I don't think you have to hold to that.

48:35

Now, let me be very, very clear.

48:37

If you do not, you are removing all of the guardrails and subjecting yourself to a potentially damnable heresy.

48:44

Absolutely.

48:44

You are, um, you're giving someone else the keys to the car and hopping in the backseat.

48:48

Um, and that's not a great idea.

48:50

But if someone, someone is not saved by their particular understanding of how scripture functions as a rule of truth, but if you don't have that, um, I'm very doubtful about your ability to discern what truth is.

49:06

So that's, I wanted to throw that out there.

49:08

Okay.

49:09

So we'll take this one more before we kind of move to a separate topic other than issues of Canon.

49:14

So this will be, I think the last one for a minute on the issues of Canon.

49:17

So here's another category of book that we need to deal with as to why it's not Canon.

49:22

So we dealt with the pseudepigraphy, we dealt with the deuterocanon, uh, we dealt with, um, the book of Enoch.

49:29

Um, why do we not consider Testament three America adventures, the book of Mormon to be scripture? Wait, I thought you said we were done with Gnostic books by what standard do we claim that the book of Mormon has no, uh, authority as inspired text? Well, so it's a good question about, does it, there's a question about, are we open Canon or closed Canon? Um, that's a, that's a question.

49:56

And to the listener, what that means is the, the closed Canon person says God is done with special revelation.

50:03

Meaning God is done speaking additional words that are binding on the conscience of all men, generally in Christian specifically.

50:11

God's revelation continues a pace in creation itself, but, but that he's done the open Canon position states that, that God could continue to speak or that we could discover another letter of Paul or something like that.

50:26

And with appropriate historical safeguards, we could say, oh, well, I guess we have more scripture now.

50:31

That's the simplified version of the two positions.

50:33

The problem I have is that, um, Jude and Keith's going to love this.

50:39

Jude has a line in there where he says, he refers to the once for all delivered to the saints faith.

50:46

And I say it that way because the faith once for all delivered to the saints is not grammatically what he's saying.

50:52

He's saying as an adjective, the once for all delivered to the saints faith, if we are going to hold to that, then how is it that a first century Christian or a fifth century Christian or a medieval peasant or someone in Erasmus as day or Keith, Jake, and Matthew can be operating under one, uh, paradigm of scripture under one body of the whole council of God, right? That Paul says we did, he did not shrink to declare the whole council of God to the Ephesian elders, right? How can we function under that regard? And then there's another standard that comes out later in the 1800s, um, that makes a number of demonstrably untrue claims.

51:39

Uh, you know, for example, when people say, well, there's all these contradictions and errors and whatever in the Bible or whatever, most of the time, what they say is the Bible makes a claim.

51:48

So-and-so was in such and such a location.

51:50

And the secular attacker against the Bible says, and we have, there's no evidence that that was there.

51:55

They haven't proven anything in doing so.

51:57

They've just made, they've just made a logical error.

52:00

They have not disproven anything.

52:01

They've just said, we don't see any evidence that the Bible is correct here.

52:05

And again, there's plenty of cases where we do.

52:07

So they haven't presented negative evidence.

52:09

All they've done is in some cases say there's an absence of positive evidence.

52:13

The problem with the book of Mormon is that there is demonstrable negative evidence directly contradicting what is included in the book of Mormon.

52:20

And there are dates where it is said that this happened and we can go to that place and look at the records and know that that did not happen, that there's actual evidence that that is not the case.

52:32

Again, as with the standard with the Gnostic Gospels, there is contradictory information in there on a theological level.

52:40

It is impossible to comport the new Testament with the book of Mormon.

52:43

It's impossible to comport the old Testament with the book of Mormon.

52:46

I'll give you just one example, then I'll turn it over because I don't want to monologue too long on this.

52:50

Isaiah tells us who God is in very specific detail.

52:54

Specifically chapter 41 to 48 or 40 to 48 trial, the false gods.

53:00

God says beside me, there is no other.

53:02

You know, I alone all by myself created before me, there was no God formed and there will be none after me.

53:09

Mormonism teaches polytheism and that men can become God's direct contradiction.

53:14

Not you cannot get around it.

53:15

You can't nuance it.

53:16

It just is what it is.

53:17

So on those grounds, I would reject the book of Mormon.

53:20

Now, just to be specific, some of those doctrines that you refer to aren't actually found in the book of Mormon.

53:25

So some of those doctrines are come from the rest of the LDS canon.

53:29

The book of Mormon really is more specific about about Jesus's America adventure, where there are a few things that are contradictory to the New Testament, but specifically the doctrines that you mentioned aren't found in that book.

53:41

So I just want to be fair.

53:43

Sure.

53:43

So I guess that was sort of wrapping in Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price as well.

53:47

Yeah.

53:48

But see how those were delivered to the LDS church were different than how the book of Mormon specifically was delivered.

53:57

Fair.

53:57

Right.

53:57

Very fair.

53:58

So, so those those came through their living prophet vice, the golden plates of the book of Mormon, which were handed to Joseph Smith for translation.

54:09

So I just want to be, I just want to be fair, right? Right.

54:13

So I just want to be fair that we represent them, that we represent them.

54:16

Pastor Jimmy.

54:18

Right.

54:19

But so, so what matters with the book of Mormon, right, is one, it does not come to us in the same fashion as the rest of scripture.

54:27

It comes to us in a completed hidden tablets over time, hidden from us for hundreds of years, as opposed to we can track manuscript to printed Bible.

54:40

Right.

54:40

So two, it fails every test by which we have discern scripture, especially the New Testament.

54:47

Apostolic attestation spread by the early church over time, over space, and theologically consistent with the rest of the Bible.

54:55

It fails all of those tests.

54:57

It does none of those things.

55:01

And Joseph Smith was a liar.

55:04

So that's not a nice way of.

55:07

Well, I mean, he did face criminal charges for charlatanism.

55:13

So that's what I meant.

55:14

That was a nice way of saying it.

55:15

Yeah.

55:16

Yeah.

55:17

So I mean, just on its face, like to be charitable, the book of Mormon is entirely a different category of holy book, even if I were to consider it holy, which, of course, I don't.

55:31

It is categorically different in the way it was delivered to be hand delivered by a divine being is very different than the mode and method of inspiration that we understand as how our Bible was written.

55:44

Yep.

55:44

Can I also just throw up and this may seem inconsequential, and you guys may think that this is just like a childish thought.

55:52

I mean, I just called the guy a liar.

55:54

So I guess I'm just in that mood, but I'm going to throw another thing out.

55:58

Growing up, I remember commercials on late night TV.

56:05

I would spend the weekends with my grandmother.

56:08

She would always let me stay up and watch TV, and I'd watch late night TV, and there would be commercials for the Mormon church, and it was always call this number, and we will send you a free copy of the book of Mormon, another testament of Jesus Christ.

56:27

And that was always the way that it was described in the other testament.

56:31

And even that by itself, and you guys can correct me if you think I'm maybe missing this because maybe I'm wrong.

56:38

I don't even think they are understanding what the word testament means.

56:42

The word testament means covenant.

56:44

We have the new covenant in Christ.

56:46

We have the old covenant, and the scriptures are broken into the old covenant, new covenant scriptures.

56:51

Are they saying that the book of Mormon is a different covenant? No, they're saying they are taking the word testament to mean like a chapter, like another chapter.

57:00

I think they think it means testimony.

57:02

Yeah, and it ain't.

57:05

So again, this just goes back to the, and I know it may seem so inconsequential, but this is my David Copperfield argument.

57:14

No, go ahead.

57:15

I don't.

57:16

Okay.

57:16

When I was several, I think it was a year ago, I did a podcast on David Copperfield.

57:22

I was a magician.

57:23

I used to be a professional magician.

57:24

I worked as a professional magician for three years.

57:28

That was what I did and have a weird background.

57:32

And I loved David Copperfield.

57:34

I still consider him to be one of the best magicians ever.

57:37

Obviously, most people do.

57:38

He's great.

57:39

I've seen him live.

57:40

He's awesome.

57:40

Yeah, me too.

57:41

And what I remember there, I remember the first time I learned to do a trick that David Copperfield did on stage.

57:46

I literally learned it and I could do it as well as he could.

57:50

It was a slight of hand trick.

57:52

I watched it.

57:53

I learned it from the guy who invented it.

57:55

And I can still do it to this day.

57:58

And I remember thinking that once I learned one thing that he did, I knew that the rest of it was not real magic.

58:09

Now, I know that sounds silly because I knew it wasn't real magic.

58:12

But what I'm saying is once you hear somebody tell you one lie, you realize they're a liar.

58:18

Once you see a magician and you know what he did, then, you know, everything else is explainable.

58:23

And I use that.

58:25

And that was my way of explaining false teachers like who's the guy who straightens the legs? The walks.

58:34

Todd White.

58:34

Yeah, Todd White.

58:36

That's an old charlatan's trick where they move the heels back and forth and say, oh, I'm stretching your legs.

58:41

That is proof that he's a liar because nothing else matters.

58:45

That's one thing that he says.

58:47

It's a lie.

58:48

Therefore, everything he says is up for question.

58:51

Yeah.

58:51

And I go back to the testament thing.

58:52

They don't even know what a testament is.

58:54

They don't even know that it's a covenant.

58:55

They're thinking it means testimony or chapter or whatever.

58:58

Therefore, the ignorance is just.

59:00

And I know that.

59:01

I know that seems like such a that's that's a different show.

59:04

I went to college in Utah.

59:06

I could talk on this topic for hours.

59:08

But I think what you're on to is really important.

59:12

And I think it represents either willing ignorance or intentional dissembling.

59:18

Right.

59:19

But like, take the temple, for example, they'll say, well, we have a temple just like the just like the Jewish faith had a temple.

59:25

Well, we know what they were doing in that temple.

59:27

And it ain't what y'all are doing.

59:28

But, you know, it's like maybe in the 1800s, they just thought, well, we don't have a lot of references, and so we're just going to fill it in with what we want.

59:36

Or they willingly knew what it was and they were, you know, changing their mind or changing how they describe that to us.

59:43

So I don't want to get us too far afield on that.

59:46

But but I think that's a that's an important concept that matters.

59:49

Here's one we can touch on real quick just to move us along off of issues of canon.

59:53

We're going to get deeper and deeper in our Bible.

59:56

So now let's talk just a little bit about the table of contents.

01:00:01

Why is our Bible ordered in the way that these books are ordered? And does that have any impact? Because I hear I'll make my argument up front.

01:00:11

I don't like the order that our books are in.

01:00:15

I don't think they should be in that order.

01:00:16

I think it does more confusion for today's audience.

01:00:20

And I don't think the table of contents is inspired.

01:00:23

So I don't think it's heretical for me to say, I think we should change the order that these books are presented in the Bible.

01:00:28

What are your thoughts? Well, I've gone first every other time.

01:00:33

Keith, why don't you take this? I'm sorry, Matthew.

01:00:35

No, go ahead.

01:00:36

You're my guest.

01:00:37

Okay, well, so the Old Testament has three categories of literature, the Torah, the Nevi'im and the Ketuvim, represented by the threefold contraction, if you will, Tanakh, Torah, meaning the law, the Nevi'im being the prophets and the Ketuvim being the writings.

01:00:58

And the Torah is put at the start because while we think that they're, and we're going to get into this in just a minute, it's all God speaking.

01:01:07

The Jews, many of them, especially the Sadducees, for instance, held the Torah to be more inspired than the prophets of the writings, that the law given to Moses was in a special super Bible category.

01:01:22

I would call it foundational.

01:01:24

Yeah, sure.

01:01:24

Said, well, the Sadducees directly rejected most of the prophets and the writings, they held to only the Torah.

01:01:32

It was like red letter edition, Moses style.

01:01:35

Well, yeah.

01:01:35

We're going to get into that.

01:01:37

That's the next question.

01:01:38

I avoided that one because I saw it coming.

01:01:40

Yeah.

01:01:40

So the Torah is put first.

01:01:43

And again, Genesis being at the start of the Bible kind of makes sense.

01:01:46

It means beginnings.

01:01:47

It's the start of all things, as far as we know, and we don't ever go there again anywhere else in the Bible until John one and Colossians one.

01:01:58

Really? I mean, just a couple of places that look back that far beyond that.

01:02:03

So that's why the Old Testament is kind of in its order.

01:02:06

The minor prophets in the Jewish Bibles, all one book.

01:02:10

So all of your minor prophets, your Zechariah, your Habakkuk, your first and second hesitations and, you know, all those were one book for them.

01:02:24

Then they collect a high, make a hiney hoe.

01:02:26

Yeah, exactly.

01:02:28

And then, you know, your major prophets were each a separate book and all that.

01:02:33

But that, you know, they had different numbering schemes in the New Testament.

01:02:37

Okay.

01:02:38

Here is what I have heard.

01:02:39

And this part is unconfirmed.

01:02:41

And I'll make a differentiation when the unconfirmed bit stops, because most of the New Testament earliest witness was to Jews.

01:02:51

It was trying to persuade Jews that Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah.

01:02:56

The book of Matthew was considered by the early church fathers to be the most preeminent of the Gospels because Matthew is such a Jewish work and it spoke directly to the Jews.

01:03:07

And so that is why it was put at the front of the New Testament because they saw witness to the Jews as the most important thing in the first couple of centuries.

01:03:16

Okay.

01:03:16

End speculation.

01:03:18

That's what I have heard.

01:03:20

So the four Gospels are put there.

01:03:22

You have the synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, which follow a relatively similar course and contain relatively similar structures, beginning with birth, ending with crucifixion and resurrection.

01:03:33

And then you have John, which is a very unique Gospel, not probably the latest Gospel, probably the latest.

01:03:41

And John doesn't hide the ball.

01:03:42

He says, these things are written to you so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God.

01:03:47

So John's not hiding the ball here.

01:03:48

I don't think any of the Gospel writers are, but John explicitly says it.

01:03:52

Then you have the first great person who is not writing a Gospel.

01:03:59

You have the writings of Paul, and those are simply ordered in order of length.

01:04:04

Romans is the longest thing Paul wrote.

01:04:06

Then comes first and second Corinthians, Galatians, God eats potato chips, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, right? No, it's General Electric Power Company.

01:04:13

Got it.

01:04:14

Okay.

01:04:14

Yeah.

01:04:15

And then it goes down, down, down, down, down until you get to the smallest Pauline epistle of, of, uh, well, you know, it goes by Lehman.

01:04:23

And then first and second, Timothy and Titus, because they're the pastoralist.

01:04:27

And then interestingly enough, Hebrews.

01:04:29

So Hebrews comes at the end of Paul's section in the New Testament, but Hebrews is extremely long.

01:04:35

So if it's Pauline, it should be earlier, but it's not.

01:04:39

So it's kind of put in this wee baby.

01:04:41

If it's Pauline, we'll stick it with Paul.

01:04:44

If it's not, then we'll start a new section.

01:04:46

Exactly.

01:04:46

That's how they did Hebrews.

01:04:47

Right.

01:04:48

And then you have, of course, the writings of John, the writings of Peter.

01:04:51

And then the one exception for that would be John being the author of Revelation, but that book was weird and put at the end.

01:04:58

So that's how the New Testament was ordered.

01:05:00

Generally.

01:05:01

Yeah.

01:05:02

Yeah.

01:05:02

So my issues, one, my main issue is Luke X one book.

01:05:08

Yep.

01:05:08

Should be together.

01:05:09

Yep.

01:05:09

Should be, um, two, we are a chronological people.

01:05:14

We think chronologically, uh, as, as a Western American audience.

01:05:19

And so, you know, normal folk, when they go to read the Bible, if they're reading it, Genesis page one straight through.

01:05:26

And I tell people when they're like baby Christians and they want to read the Bible, I tell them, please don't read it like a novel.

01:05:31

Please don't read it straight through.

01:05:33

Let me give you a curated tour.

01:05:36

Um, but if they, if they do that, they'll be in a pretty good position until they get to the end of, you know, chronicles.

01:05:45

And then they're like, the timeline just goes all doctor who, because it's no longer presented chronologically.

01:05:52

In fact, King's chronicles, obviously there's, you know, there's some cool timey wimey, uh, integral, you know, stuff going on with them, but we're all over the place.

01:06:02

You, you, you get to Esther and then you're jumping back into Psalms and then you're forward into prophets and like to the Jewish audience, it made sense because you had the categories in the Tanakh.

01:06:12

And those three categories were something that how they taught the scriptures and how they meditated on the scriptures.

01:06:18

But how many Christians get lost trying to read, especially the further away we get from the historical events.

01:06:27

So as you're reading minor prophets, for example, and it really matters who Israel or who Judah is at war with during that time.

01:06:34

Yeah.

01:06:35

But you separate that from the events that are happening during that time.

01:06:39

I think the way that our Bible is ordered has led to our culture of taking things out of context.

01:06:44

Why? Because the, the books aren't presented in context, right? Frankly, our table of contents has already set people up to fail because we have presented them out of their contextual order.

01:07:00

How would you order the new Testament? I mean, I would, I would just, just out of my indignancy, I would go, uh, Matthew, Mark, John, Luke X, and then beyond that, I don't think I have any, any problem with the epistles being the way they are, the epistles for being, do you think Galatians was the first written? Yeah.

01:07:23

I don't know.

01:07:25

Probably like that's the popular traditional view, I think.

01:07:28

Okay.

01:07:29

But I don't know how much that matters.

01:07:32

I don't either.

01:07:33

I was just, just curious.

01:07:35

Uh, well, I have, I have some thoughts I had.

01:07:40

Um, I guess we'll let him speak now.

01:07:42

Yeah.

01:07:43

Well, I, I just, I, because I want to speak on that because I do believe Galatians was Paul's first letter.

01:07:49

Um, but let me go back to the old Testament thing first.

01:07:52

Um, I, I pulled up while you guys were talking my, um, survey of the old Testament class that I teach at the Academy.

01:08:00

And I, I, I teach on this specifically because the first class is chronology of the old Testament and how we understand where the books fit.

01:08:09

And, um, I have this written down that I wouldn't say it this way.

01:08:13

So I wanted to make sure I haven't pulled up what I wrote.

01:08:15

Jewish readers today have argued that their ordering allows the book to stand on its own, having prophecy and fulfillment in the nation of Israel being put into exile and then returning after being delivered from bondage.

01:08:29

They say that the Christian ordering placing the prophets later seems to indicate something future to come and the book being incomplete.

01:08:38

And so they argue that we reordered the old Testament for the purpose of pointing to Jesus making a theological point.

01:08:46

Yeah.

01:08:46

So the order I think does in that sense, at least from their perspective, make a point.

01:08:52

Yeah.

01:08:52

And I, I do agree that the best way to understand the books is chronologically.

01:08:57

And so like right now, we, we have a call to worship at sovereign grace.

01:09:03

Every week we read a chapter of scripture.

01:09:05

Sometimes that means that we're really long in the call to worship.

01:09:08

Some chapters are really long, but that's, we do a chapter a week.

01:09:12

And right now we're doing a chronological read through of the minor prophets.

01:09:16

So we just finished Joel and I forget which one's next, but there's a chronological order of the, of the minor prophets and we're doing it for that purpose just to show that it doesn't go Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk.

01:09:31

It doesn't, that's not the order that they were written.

01:09:34

So we're taking it from what we believe the chronological order is.

01:09:38

Now on the issue of, so I agree with you, Matthew or Jake, I think it's good to know what the actual order is.

01:09:47

And I do think that's helpful in discerning what's happening and, you know, how, you know, Jonah and, and, um, Nahum and those things go together regarding Nineveh and things like that.

01:09:58

Yeah.

01:09:59

Now on the new Testament, uh, I am, I am in a minority on the gospels.

01:10:04

I do actually think Matthew was written first.

01:10:06

I know that the common consensus is that I do too.

01:10:10

So, um, so I don't have a problem with the Matthew Mark being the first two.

01:10:14

But I like your thought that Luke and Acts should go together.

01:10:18

Because again, they're intended to.

01:10:20

Yeah.

01:10:20

So, so that, that, that's a good thought.

01:10:22

I never, I never even considered that.

01:10:24

Um, John, of course, the out topic gospels is, is unique.

01:10:29

As we've already said, I, I really do think, um, Galatians doesn't get the attention it deserves because I believe it's Paul's first letter.

01:10:38

I think it deals with the most preeminent issue of his time.

01:10:41

And that was the issue of the Judaizing of the, of the attempt to bring the law into the faith and, and corrupt the gospel.

01:10:47

I really wish Galatians was right after Acts, but I, but again, that's just, it doesn't matter.

01:10:52

That's just my opinion.

01:10:53

Um, uh, and after that, I think the rest is in a gravy.

01:10:57

I think really what matters is, is what I would tell a listener is make sure you have, you know, whoever you're sitting under as your teacher and your elders, like, like, you know, make sure that they, they know what they're talking about.

01:11:09

Right.

01:11:10

And study under some guidance.

01:11:12

Uh, I like a good chronological Bible, but I also like, uh, as the reader grows in maturity that you also are studying history and getting some of these, you know, biblical survey books like casket empty, which is one that we use at Switzerland that I learned at Gordon Conwell, that just helps you to understand the timeline more because we have to protect ourselves from what is so addictive in our culture, which is grabbing the Jeremiah 29, 11, and applying them like a sticker to ourselves.

01:11:43

So making sure that we see the historical context matters.

01:11:47

And that's really right.

01:11:48

That's really less about how your Bible is organized and more about how you as a believer are conducting Bible study.

01:11:55

Are you utilizing your Bible like a pantry where you just open the closet and look around and grab the pieces you want? Or is it a pool that you jump into and submerse yourself? Because it is, it, it's a hole in it's, it is whole and you are not.

01:12:10

That's my thought on that.

01:12:12

Are we ready to move on to the next one? I tell you what, let's make this one, our last one, because we have been going now for quite a while.

01:12:18

We'll turn this into a two parter, maybe be a couple of weeks before we can get to part two, but what's the most, uh, what, what, what's the best ending question you got to end it in this on a, on a high note? Well, I think we should really tackle the one that I think matters the most, which is the concept that you brought up of the red letters.

01:12:34

So as we're talking about the content of our Bible, uh, and I think next time we do this, we'll get into more very specific questions, but we're looking at big picture misconceptions about the Bible.

01:12:44

As we deal with folks about issues, you want to talk about, uh, homosexuality, for example, and people will say, well, I don't see that in the red letters.

01:12:53

And so I don't need to believe it.

01:12:56

I follow Jesus.

01:12:57

I don't follow Paul, right? Are the red letters themselves more authoritative than the rest of the Bible? Go ahead, Matthew.

01:13:09

No.

01:13:10

Okay.

01:13:11

No, no, they're not.

01:13:14

Um, because if we are good Trinitarians, then we believe that God is speaking whether or not, uh, it is the physical incarnated second person of the Trinity walking upon the earth.

01:13:26

Now, granted that's a very unique time.

01:13:28

I don't mean to, to say that that was not important.

01:13:32

As I quoted earlier, the writer of the Hebrew says that in these last days, he has spoken to us through his son, um, whom he, you know, pointed out of all things anyway, um, so that the incarnation is, is incredibly important.

01:13:44

It's, it's the most important event that has occurred in human, in all of history is God becoming flesh and walking among his creation.

01:13:51

And then what happened after that? But, um, Jesus speaking as an incarnate man, which he was fully men and fully God, um, it's still God speaking.

01:14:05

And then in those very red letters, Jesus referring to the old Testament says, have you not read what God spoke to you saying quotes Genesis or other cases quotes Isaiah.

01:14:18

Yeah.

01:14:18

And so at least as far as the old Testament goes, Jesus said, this is God speaking the writer of the Hebrews.

01:14:24

God spoke through to our fathers through the prophets.

01:14:29

That was the mechanism by which God chose to do so.

01:14:32

Uh, Peter men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy spirit.

01:14:37

All of this is God speaking.

01:14:38

And so, uh, we have to either elevate the son above the father in order to say that the, the, the red letters are somehow super authoritative, which is a Trinitarian heresy.

01:14:51

And I want to entertain it.

01:14:52

Um, or we, we have to make some other kind of claim about, about this.

01:14:59

Um, the other thing is that the, the thing, the idea of, well, Jesus never addressed this subject simply doesn't do because, uh, John tells us that if, if you were to record all the things Jesus did, the entirety of all the books in the world wouldn't be able to hold them.

01:15:13

So maybe he did.

01:15:15

Maybe he did.

01:15:16

Perhaps he did.

01:15:17

At some point, uh, Jesus talks about the law and the prophets and the writings, the Tanaka and Luke 24, he says the law, the prophets and the writings all speak of me.

01:15:26

And so he's saying all of this is about me.

01:15:28

He quotes it authoritatively.

01:15:29

He says, God said it, the rest of the new Testament, you, you would destroy any of the other books of the new Testament.

01:15:36

If you took away the foundation of the, uh, of the inspiration of the old Testament, imagine reading Hebrews.

01:15:43

If the author didn't believe all the quotations he's doing are not God speaking because then it's just his opinion, right? Like what, you know, but when he's making references to the old Testament, he's just assuming his readers know what he's talking about, have it as authoritative and he's moving along.

01:16:00

So to the new Testament Christian, if you say, I really want the red letters and those are more authoritative than the other letters.

01:16:06

Understand what you're saying is you're creating two classes of scripture.

01:16:09

The apostles did not do that.

01:16:11

Jesus did not do that.

01:16:13

And so I don't think we should either.

01:16:14

Yeah.

01:16:15

Yeah.

01:16:15

And, and so to just carry that into the new Testament, right.

01:16:19

While I don't believe that Jesus gave a Pope hat to Peter, I do think Jesus gave his authority to his disciples, the authority to speak for him and the same for Paul, the, which we have Peter then saying very explicitly that Paul's writings are themselves scripture.

01:16:39

So they, they carry that weight.

01:16:41

Now it's a different conversation, which we touched on earlier of when did that end? Well, when those apostles died and, you know, Clement would agree with that.

01:16:49

And, and, you know, all the, all of the disciples, direct disciples of those disciples would say that.

01:16:55

But we see in real time, Jesus hand that authority to his disciples who become apostles.

01:17:02

And so the writings of Paul then carry the same authoritative weight.

01:17:08

And when I do discuss this with other people and they just say, well, you know, I just don't believe that.

01:17:13

Then I say, listen, bro, then we're in a different religion.

01:17:15

I'm in a different religion than you are.

01:17:17

I'm not saying you're not saying that's really not for me to determine.

01:17:20

I would warn you that perhaps you might not be but we're not in the same religious system because in my religious system, I have a complete Trinitarian faith and make the argument that Matthew made.

01:17:31

Keith, what do you got? I think there's a potentially more insidious problem.

01:17:41

That's everything you guys said.

01:17:43

I would agree with a hundred percent, but the people that I know in my life that I have dealt with this issue, there was a, there was a, there was more, there was something below the surface.

01:17:53

And that was this.

01:17:55

They saw Jesus as more accepting, more forgiving, and more loving than they saw God.

01:18:10

Come on now.

01:18:11

And so the problem when they were saying, well, I want to look at what Jesus has to say.

01:18:16

I want to look at the red letters.

01:18:17

It wasn't just so much that they were giving the more authority to God.

01:18:20

It was that they had painted a picture of Jesus that they liked better than the picture they had of God or of Paul or of Peter or anyone else.

01:18:30

And it's this, it's this, as Voddy says, you know, the, the, the, the sissified pansy Jesus that we have.

01:18:42

I mean, I'm thinking of a specific person in the history of my church who is gone now.

01:18:47

They're, they're no longer there.

01:18:48

But when I first started, there was this person in the church who, who demanded that we understand Jesus as just this very saccharine person.

01:19:05

He's so sweet.

01:19:06

He's so soft.

01:19:07

He, I remember, you know, what, what's the hint, the Christmas song, little Lord Jesus, no crying.

01:19:15

He makes, what is that? Is that a way in a manger? Yeah.

01:19:18

Well, at the time my associate pastor, his name was John.

01:19:22

He was preaching a sermon and he said, I don't think that that's true.

01:19:25

He said, I think Jesus cried, uh, just like all babies cry.

01:19:29

That's part of how babies grow is they cry and they, they get their lungs working and everything.

01:19:34

And he said, I don't think Jesus was not making noise.

01:19:36

I think he was sounding well, this person flipped out because they said Jesus cried as a baby.

01:19:41

And I remember thinking, yeah.

01:19:44

Yeah.

01:19:45

What picture of Christ do you have? You have the, the iconoclast picture of Jesus with the gold, uh, uh, halo, the, the picture that this, the, the, uh, stained glass, Jesus is not real.

01:19:58

Yeah.

01:19:59

And, uh, it's not biblical.

01:20:01

And so I think that's the Marcionite heresy that you were talking about before.

01:20:04

Yeah.

01:20:05

Old Testament, God, angry new Testament, God's soft, sweet Jesus.

01:20:09

And it ignores Jesus in revelation.

01:20:11

Hello.

01:20:12

Yeah, exactly.

01:20:13

White charger, a sword coming out of his mouth.

01:20:16

Blood of his robe is drenched in the blood of his enemies.

01:20:20

They don't like vengeance on those who don't know God.

01:20:23

That's right.

01:20:23

They don't like that.

01:20:24

Jesus, the red letter people.

01:20:27

I mean, again, DC taught, taught him to sing it.

01:20:29

It's all in the red letters.

01:20:31

Well, well, Jesus warns over and over and over and over again about the dangers of hell of coming judgment of things like that.

01:20:39

I mean, I, I don't, I don't grant the premise, but let's say for a minute that I do.

01:20:43

And I gave you just a red letter Bible, you know, a little pocket Bible that was just red letters.

01:20:48

If you just wait out the number of words that he said, yes, there's a lot of the kingdom of heaven is like this and the kingdom of heaven is like that.

01:20:55

But there was a lot of stuff in there about judgment and death and hellfire and all kinds of things.

01:21:01

Jesus is, in fact, if you look at some of your Jesus seminar people, they would refer to him as a doomsday apocalyptic preacher.

01:21:09

Some of them would.

01:21:10

Yeah.

01:21:10

And, you know, and so like a red letter, Jesus, first of all, reject the premise.

01:21:16

But even if you just had that, it doesn't make him very squishy and kind and all that kind of thing.

01:21:21

Well, and even as you stated earlier in the red letters are quotations of the old Testament and Jesus wholesale accepting that the entire old Testament is about him.

01:21:31

So like, like none of that is applicable.

01:21:33

And so what matters is having a basic doctrine of inspiration.

01:21:38

Your the color of your text is not inspired.

01:21:42

The the chapter and verse breaks are not inspired.

01:21:46

The capitalization of your letters are not inspired.

01:21:49

Frankly, this is tough for some people.

01:21:52

Some of the English translation words that were chosen, those were chosen and not inspired.

01:21:57

What was inspired was pen to paper, Hebrew to Greek or Hebrew or Greek or Aramaic.

01:22:04

Those were the things that were inspired.

01:22:06

And so we just have to be cautious.

01:22:09

And I think it's because humans are superstitious and we prefer the certainty of a superstition over the complexity and sometimes a difficult nature of truth.

01:22:22

And in this case, we have to wrestle with all of scripture.

01:22:26

I say this all the time and all in my thoughts on this.

01:22:29

Sola scriptura is the doctrine that I love, but sola scriptura assumes tota scriptura in it.

01:22:37

It assumes it.

01:22:38

It cannot work without it.

01:22:40

Otherwise, we can make scripture say whatever we want it to say.

01:22:43

All of scripture is inspired together.

01:22:46

Yep.

01:22:47

Amen.

01:22:48

Amen.

01:22:48

It is the whole counsel of God.

01:22:50

Paul tells the Ephesian elders in Acts 20 in the seminal passage on countering false teachers and all that.

01:22:58

Well, in Acts, let's say the seminal passage, he tells them, I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God.

01:23:05

And so if that is something that we want to do, if we want to be like Paul, then we need not shrink from our congregations and our our fellow man and our fellow believer in declaring to them the whole counsel of God.

01:23:17

That is not less than the red letters, but it is more than.

01:23:21

Amen.

01:23:21

Well, before I have you take us home, Keith, I just want to say on a two page document of questions, we got through four lines, correct? So next time we're just going to have to rapid fire these bad boys.

01:23:34

Actually, I'll get a stopwatch and keep time, honestly, if we want to, you know, or if or maybe what we could do and we can talk about this off the off camera.

01:23:43

Maybe we could each take a question and and that way we don't all have to because a lot of us, a lot of what we're saying is similar.

01:23:51

So if we if we, you know, unless we just have to say something, I just have to add this or whatever.

01:23:55

But we could each kind of I've sat on panels before where we did that, where each of us got questions and then move much quicker that way.

01:24:04

Tell us in the comment section what you would like us to do next time.

01:24:07

Yes, please.

01:24:08

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01:24:10

Yeah.

01:24:12

Well, gentlemen, thank you both for being on the show.

01:24:14

And thank you, listener, for sitting with us this during this podcast.

01:24:18

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01:24:21

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01:24:26

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01:24:30

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01:24:38

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01:24:40

My name is Keith Foskey, and I've been your Calvinist.

01:24:43

May God bless you.