Lesson 11: Defining and Defending the Canon, Part 4

Kootenai Church

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Angels and End Times Part 5 (Daniel 11:36-40) | Adult Sunday School

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If you'll come on in and find a seat, we will get started. Can you blank the screen,

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Peter? Alright, let's go ahead and pray.

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Father, we would ask for clarity this morning in our thinking and in our understanding and in the communication of Sunday school and in worship.

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We give our time to you and ourselves to you. We're grateful for the chance to gather around your

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Word this morning and as your people to rejoice and to fellowship with one another and to enjoy our worship and our fellowship with you as well.

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We pray that our time here would be spent profitably and that you would use this information to equip us to give an answer to those who are critical of the

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Christian faith and help us to appreciate how it is that you have worked through history to give us your Word and to preserve it for us.

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So, we ask your blessing here upon this time in Christ's name, amen. Alright, we are in lesson 11, defining and defending the canon, and I would just reiterate that I didn't intend for this lesson to be four lessons long, but that's the way it worked out.

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But today, we are going to finish it, even if we just say we're done and we're moving on to the next lesson next week.

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So, we're talking about canonicity, and again, just to review the idea of a canon or the definition of a canon is a list or a mark of books that themselves form the rule of faith and practice.

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The word canon simply means rule, and when we use it to describe Scripture, we're talking about a canon in two senses.

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Number one, the list or the rule of books that fit on that list of what we consider to be authoritative divinely given documents, and then second, we use the term canon to refer to the

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Scripture as the canon, which is the measure itself of our life and faith and practice.

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And we have… I would just reiterate one thing from previous lessons that we need to keep in mind as we move forward, particularly today, and that is that when we speak of a book having a canonical value or a canonical status, a belonging in the canon or being part of the canon, we're not saying that that book is conferred canonicity or conferred authority by anything or anyone other than God and the fact that He has written the book.

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So, again, when God wrote the book, that is when it became authoritative and canonical. Even if nobody knew that that book existed, the moment that Paul penned that before he even put a letter into the hand of Titus or Timothy or Trophimus, whoever he was sending the letter with, from the moment that it was penned and there in the process of inspiration and that completed product, is itself canonical.

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It's authoritative. It's divinely given. So even though nobody else in the world might have known that that document existed, it was canonical.

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It was authoritative because God wrote it. And so that's what confers a canonicity on a book. So today we're looking and we're in Roman numeral number seven, which is in your notebook criteria for canonicity, and we want to change that to qualities of canonicity, qualities of canonicity because Luke… What do

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I say? Obviously, both of those books were written by Luke. And then we have Hebrews written by… we don't know whom.

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And then we have Jude and then we have James. Yes? Oh, did

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I say non -canonical? Sorry. Not written by an apostle. Yes, thank you for correcting that. I didn't say they were… I said they were non -canonical.

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That's not what I meant. They were non -apostolic in terms of the person who we think wrote them.

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And I say that of Hebrews even though there are early lists of canonical books that include Hebrews with Paul's writings, and there are people throughout church history, including early church fathers, who viewed

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Hebrews as one of Paul's epistles. Sometimes the book of Hebrews has been found lumped in with other epistles of Paul by Romans, 1

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Corinthians, Galatians, etc. Hebrews is kind of collected alongside of Paul's writings because many people viewed it to be written by the apostle

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Paul. I don't believe it was apostolic because the author of Hebrews refers to the apostles as them and they rather than I or us or we.

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So he doesn't classify himself as an apostle in chapter, I think it's chapter 2 verses 3 and 4.

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He doesn't classify himself as an apostle. So that tells us that it was probably written by or was written by a non -apostle.

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So we have non -apostolic books, that is books written by non -apostles, but there's a way of lumping in or including those books as canonical even though they weren't written by apostles because I say the criteria is not necessarily that an apostle himself wrote it, but that an apostle himself either wrote it or authenticated it.

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So it could be apostolic not just in terms of its authorship, but also in terms of its content.

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So let's talk about Luke for a second. Luke and the book of Acts were both written by Dr. Luke whom

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Paul picked up on his second missionary journey in Acts chapter 16, somewhere before he landed on the fills of Macedonia and had the conversion of Lydia in Philippi.

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It's right there, it's in the middle of chapter 16 where all of a sudden the narrative of the book of Acts goes from they and them and he to us and we, there's a switch that happens there.

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And so since Luke was a Gentile, most people believe that's when Paul met Luke, Luke was converted and Luke joined

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Paul's traveling team in Acts chapter 16. So Luke was a traveling companion of the apostle Paul and was with Paul all the way to the end.

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In fact, I believe it is in 2 Timothy chapter 4 where Paul talks about Luke being with him. Luke is one of his friends right there at the very end.

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Others had forsaken him, but Luke was with him. I think it was Luke, is that right? Now that I say that it doesn't sound right, but I think it is right.

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I say a lot of stuff that doesn't sound right necessarily to me, but the beloved physician, yeah.

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Okay, so then we've got Luke in Acts and then Hebrews. Hebrews is apostolic in its content and Hebrews was accepted as an apostolic book early on.

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Some people believe that the apostle Paul spoke Hebrews or preached the message of Hebrews and that it was written down by someone else, somebody who transcribed it or took the manuscript of that message and began to circulate it, sent it out to the

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Hebrew Christians. Jude and James, Jude was a half -brother of the Lord Jesus Christ, so was

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James. James was a leader in the early church in Acts, in the book of Acts, in the early chapters there.

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He was a leader in the early church, particularly the church that was in Jerusalem, so he kind of had an apostolic ministry to Jews in Jerusalem in the early years and he worked alongside

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Peter and John, so obviously one who was part of the apostolic circle, even though he wasn't a capital A apostle, he was part of the apostolic circle.

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So his letters would have been accepted as authoritative and we could say the same thing for Jude. Did I leave any out with that list?

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Okay, so we have divine authorship, either authoring, the apostles either authoring the books or authenticating the books and certifying the books, and they were accepted as apostolic not just in their origin, the person who wrote them, but also in their content.

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If somebody knew in the early church that something was pseudepigraphal, that it was written under a false pretense or a false name, then it was instantly rejected.

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It's not like Christians, and again we need to reiterate this, it's not like Christians in the first century just took any book about Jesus and any writing that mentioned

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Jesus or Christianity and embraced it as part of canonical writings or Scripture. That's not how they viewed it.

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They only viewed those things written by or authenticated by apostles as authoritative. And so if they knew that something was a false writing, it was rejected and anyone who was known to have composed a work explicitly in the name of an apostle was disciplined from the church.

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So apostolic origin or authorship was the standard in the early church.

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Number two, letter B. Before we move on, are there any questions about that? We covered a lot of stuff there. Letter B is authenticity, and all of these are going to start with an

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A. So authorship, letter A and letter B is authenticity. It had to have an authentic date or an apostolic date.

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It had to be written during the first century. So writings of a later date would have been disqualified on the face of it,

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Prima Facie. It would have been disqualified. Something originated in the second century, they would say, well obviously that can't be apostolic.

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It couldn't have been written or authenticated by an apostle, therefore that writing would never have been embraced by the canon.

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Basically by the middle of the, or by the first part of the second century, all Christians would have known that anything that originated after the death of the apostle

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John, anything that originated, whether it was a gospel or a letter supposedly written by an apostle, it would have been rejected, out of hand, without any question.

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And it had to have also not just an authentic date, that's number one, but also an authentic doctrine. And this was the orthodoxy test.

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It had to have apostolic doctrines. So Paul's writings were known early on. His books were widely circulated early on, particularly in Gentile churches.

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And so all the questionable books would have been compared to the apostle Paul. Remember Peter, toward the end of his life, somewhere around 61 to 63

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AD, when Peter wrote a second Peter, he referred to Paul's writings as scripture. He lumped them in, talked about Paul's writings, which they distort as they do the rest of the scriptures, including

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Paul's writings in that group of canonical authoritative books on par with the Old Testament text.

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And so even in the early, even in the first century, the Christians would have held

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Paul's writings up as a standard to which, by which everything else would need to be judged. It would need to comport with Paul's doctrine of the sacrifice of Christ and Paul's moral teachings.

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It had to have aligned itself with Paul's teachings concerning Christ and the gospel, etc. And anything that didn't line up with Paul's doctrines, or Paul's writings, would have been rejected by the church.

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And by the way, do you know that, do you notice how remarkable it is that all four of our gospels which we embrace as canonical and authoritative records of the life of the

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Lord Jesus Christ, all four of them are anonymous. Have you ever noticed that? None of those four gospels begin the way that Paul would have began one of his letters.

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There's like Matthew, an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ, called by Jesus Christ Himself. I write to you these things that are authoritative and by the hand of the

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Lord. There's no claim in Matthew regarding that. Neither John. John just begins, in the beginning was the

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Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. And you've got to piece together these very, very subtle clues that John weaves throughout his gospel to even tell who it is that wrote the gospel of John.

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All four of the gospels that we embrace as Scripture are anonymous. This is remarkable when you consider the fact that there were other gospels that purported to have been written by Peter and Mary and Paul and Barnabas and others who were eyewitnesses to the

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Lord Jesus Christ. And they named themselves in the books. Now if you lived in the first century and you wanted to write a story about Jesus and you wanted to be accepted as Scripture, what would you do?

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You wanted to pass this off to people and deceive them, what would you do? This is, look,

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I'm Thomas and I'm writing this gospel or my name is Barnabas and I'm writing this gospel. My name is Peter and I'm writing this gospel or Mary, wouldn't you do that?

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Wouldn't you say, I'm Lazarus and I'm writing a gospel about the story of Jesus and weave yourself into that?

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Isn't that what you'd do to try and pass it off as authentic? Well, it's remarkable that all four of the gospels that we accept as authoritative, all of them are anonymous.

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It is as if the gospel writers themselves, the authoritative ones, wanted to step out of the picture and just simply present Jesus. And yet those were the gospels that were embraced by the early church as authoritative, which tells me that the early church, before they embraced

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Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, they would have vetted those gospels very carefully and closely, simply to make sure that they were authentic.

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All right, number C, number C or letter three, however you want to do it, it had to have authority or the quality of authority.

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And this is something that is, again, conferred not by the church. It's not conferred by Christians. It's not conferred by a local gathering of believers.

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It's not conferred by the apostle himself. This is something that is true of a book by virtue of the fact that God wrote it.

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It is authoritative. Now, I just want to take a second to step aside and talk about modern day visions and revelations.

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There are people who say that God is still speaking today, but it's not authoritative in the way that Scripture is authoritative, or it's not inerrant and infallible the way that Scripture is inerrant and infallible.

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See that instantly should tell you that something is askew there. How is it possible for God to speak in a non -authoritative way?

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Does God ever speak and then say, but this isn't authoritative? Yeah, Rick. They admit that.

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Yeah, they'll say Scripture is the only infallible and inspired and inerrant

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Word of God. But I receive personal communications from God that are not infallible,

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I can err, they're not inerrant, and they're not inspired in the sense that Scripture is inspired, and they're not authoritative in the way that Scripture is authoritative.

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So they want to make some break between how God speaks, that on one occasion He can speak authoritatively and on another occasion He just kind of speaks and is really not authoritative or inerrant or inspired.

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You see, that's nonsense. So authority is not conferred by an apostle giving it authority, it is conferred by the fact that God spoke it or wrote it.

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If the author is God, if the one speaking is God, it is authoritative and it cannot err.

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So modern day prophets who say, thus says the Lord, I feel the Lord speaking to me and telling me to say to you this and to say to you that and direct you to do this and to feel

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He told me to do this and then they turn out to be wrong and they're like, well, it's not inspired, it's just the Lord speaking to me. How does the

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Lord speak in a non -inspired way? That is nonsense. That does not exist. God does not speak in a non -inspired, non -authoritative way.

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So it had to have or it did have a quality of authority by virtue of the fact that God spoke it. And to contrast that with a wrong view, we'd say this as well, it's not as if Paul wrote five books and said, now these three,

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Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians, I really like those three. This one that I wrote to the Corinthians, not so much.

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This other one that I wrote to Trophimus, not so much. And so those are lost to history, but Paul picked three of the five that he wrote that month and said these are going to be, these

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I think really have good qualities. These I think will really be a hit for years to come. That's not how the

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Apostle Paul did not confer authority on his books. God did by speaking them, by writing them through the

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Apostle Paul. All right, letter D, it had the quality of being alive.

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And I think this is something that I could develop if I wanted to in a little bit more detail, but I'm not going to this morning. God's word has all the qualities that God himself has.

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In this sense, that God's word is eternal and everlasting, right? It will endure forever.

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God's word is living. God's word is powerful. God's word is pure.

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God's word is true. God's word is holy. God's word cannot err. These qualities that God's word has, these are things that God himself has.

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So when God speaks these things, now obviously not every quality that God has does

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Scripture have, but the qualities that make Scripture Scripture, those qualities are also possessed by God Himself in the sense that He is authoritative and He is inerrant, and He has these qualities because of who

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He is in His being, and therefore His word has these qualities. So if it is

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God's word, then it will be a living document, and it has the quality of being living and powerful and life -changing, and all

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Scripture has this quality. I've read the testimony of people who have been saved reading enigmatic passages of the

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Old Testament about sacrifices and blood or genealogies or just hearing a verse quoted out of randomly out of the

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Old Testament. Even the Old Testament books, yes, the genealogies, they're living. Don't skip over those when you read them, and I'm not suggesting that you try and read every name that is there out loud.

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That would be miserable, but don't skip the genealogies. Don't skip any passage of Scripture because it's all a living document.

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It's all God's word. So it had to have this quality that it is alive, and you sense this, do you not, when you read

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Scripture? The Christian will sense this. You're reading Scripture, and then you realize it's not so much me reading this book, but this book reads me.

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This book knows me better than I know this book, and there is a living quality to Scripture that other books do not have.

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You can read War and Peace or the Adventures of Tom Sawyer and then sit down and read the Book of Romans, and the

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Book of Romans has a quality that no other book has in that list. The Scripture has that living quality that changes the heart of the

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Christian and the believer. It has the capacity to give life when used by the Spirit of God to do so. Scripture is a living book, and letter

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E is acceptance by the church, and we just use the term acceptance there to refer to the fact that Scripture was acknowledged and accepted and recognized by those who were

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Christians early on. They recognized authoritative and inspired writings, and they were able to recognize those books that were not authoritative and inspired.

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You and I have the same… We do the same thing today, by the way. We read through the New Testament. We say these 27 books, there's a living quality here.

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They are alive. They are authoritative. These books are inspired. They are a system. They all mesh together with all of God's revelation from Genesis to the

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Book of Revelation. These books all tie in together. The theme is the same. The glory of it is the same.

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The message is the same. It's all about one person. There's a unity to these books, and then you can step aside and read something that claims to be inspired, whether it's the

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Book of Mormon or Pearl of Great Price or Jesus Calling by Sarah Young, these books which claim divine inspiration.

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You can read those books and say these are not the same thing. How is it that you know that instinctively as a

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Christian? Because you have the Spirit of God living within you, do you not? And if you have the Spirit of God living within you, and you can read those books, and those books will have a certain testimony, a certain resonance in your own heart, where you can read the

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Gospel of Thomas and you say this is not Scripture. A person with the Spirit of God in them would know that, and the people with the

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Spirit of God in them in the first century knew that as well. So it had to be generally accepted among the churches, and it had to be used widely, and these books were accepted among the churches and used widely.

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They were used for Scripture reading and for correction, for teaching, for guidance, for worship, for public reading, preaching, etc.

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We know that because that's the testimony that we've seen in the New Testament itself. Each individual document was ultimately acknowledged as canonical, or each individual document that was ultimately acknowledged as canonical started off with a limited acceptance and a limited use.

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Does that not make sense? Every book that you now have today that is used by Christians around the globe and has been used by hundreds of millions of people over the centuries, every single one of those books started off with a very limited acceptance and a very limited use.

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But they grew over time, did they not? The book of the Philippians, when it started off, when it was first written, what was the scope of its use?

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The church at Philippi. It was a small congregation of people, Lydia, Philippian jailer, their families, and a few other people, a small church in Philippi, but eventually those books, the book of Philippians as well as all of our

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New Testament books, eventually the use of them and the acceptance of them began to spread over time as those books were circulated and recognized by others as authoritative and apostolic, and Christians began to read those books and say, yeah, this is

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Scripture, this is the Apostle Paul. So F .F. Bruce in his book, The Canon of Scripture, says this, if any church leader came along in the third or fourth century with a previously unknown book recommending it as genuinely apostolic, he would have found great difficulty in gaining acceptance for it.

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His fellow Christians would simply have said, but no one's ever heard of it. Or even if the book had been known for some generations but it had never been treated as holy

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Scripture, it would have been very difficult for it to win recognition as such. Does that make sense?

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So books always started off with a local acceptance and a local use and began to be spread.

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But over the course of centuries, people would be able to evaluate newer writings, things that came from the second and third century, things that purported or claimed to be

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Scripture, and if it had not been accepted by the church on a wide scale, then it would have been rejected. They would have never accepted those books because they had never been recognized and spread and used by the church since the beginning.

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That was one of the ways that they would recognize. If it's apostolic, if it's canonical, if it's authoritative, then the whole church would have had access to it, and Christians would have used it as such.

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So this decision to confer canonicity upon books was not made in the third or the fourth century. These books had always been recognized as canonical and authoritative since the moment that they were written, in some circles.

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It took time for that to be recognized as the recognition of that spread over the course of many years and over the

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Roman Empire. Now there is a question that comes up, and Peter's asked it I think 15 times, and every time he asks it, he says,

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I'm not throwing you under the bus. Every time he asks it, he says, I know I've asked this before, and you said you were going to get to it, and I knew you would eventually get to it.

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Is this where you talk about it, or is this later? And I've always up to this point said this is later. So here's the question. If we found in a cave in a

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Dead Sea Scroll type of a setting where some shepherd boy throws a rock into a cave, and here's the shattering of jars inside of there, if we were to find a book that we knew had been written by the

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Apostle Paul, we could certify that, maybe even the original copy of the

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Apostle Paul, and we were able to translate it and publish it today, would the church be justified in accepting it as Scripture?

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Would we accept it as Scripture? We have a no. Is there anybody who would say that we...what's

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that? As canonical, and I'm using canonical and Scripture as synonyms here at this moment. We have one person or two people who said no.

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Are there any takers that would say this is Scripture, that it should be added to the

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Bible, and we should have 67 books, 28 in our New Testament now? Is there anybody who would say that?

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Why would you not say that? Give me some reasons. You're saying he's sovereign over the timing of it?

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Because of the sovereignty of God, he's sovereign over the timing of those books being added in to recognize, and so he wouldn't add something in later on?

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Yes? If it hadn't been quoted or transcribed, you can say, where was it?

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Obviously lost to history, right? Yep. Okay.

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Did everybody catch that? I'll just repeat that for the sake of those who might be listening. On the no side, we would say that God would never have deprived

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His church for 2 ,000 years of an authentic, genuine, inspired revelation. On the yes side, you could make the argument that God and His sovereignty was waiting until now to reveal that revelation or to make it known to His church.

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Yes, Ken. Okay? If it's to be, then it was.

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The fact that it was discovered and God is sovereign over the discovery of it would mean that we would have to embrace it. Okay?

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Yes? Yes. Is there anything discovered since 1611 that has brought clarity or helped define the text since 1611?

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Other than the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls which helped us to see which dated…we have scrolls now that date previous to anything we had had in 1611.

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Those scrolls only help us to see that the transmission of the text has been faithful over time, but it's not as if some new fragment was discovered that says, oh, this is what

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John 3 .16 should read. That's totally different than how we've read it so far. So, there has been nothing along those lines that would alter the text itself or the translation of the text itself.

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Are filling gaps…no, there was no gaps to fill in. There may have been gaps in our understanding of history or culture or even our understanding of original languages that might have influenced how we would have understood how to translate some things.

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That has developed over time as we learn more about ancient languages in the last 500 years, but not…nothing that would have filled in gaps of Scripture because there's no gaps to fill in in that sense.

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Yeah, Jenny? Yeah, there is that warning at the end of the book of Revelation, it says not to add anything to God's Word.

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Okay, let me add some detail to this question before I answer it. The detail that I would add to this would be we go back to what we started with, and I know it was a year ago, but we talked about our doctrine of inspiration and inerrancy and infallibility and preservation.

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Remember, we spent weeks hammering those out. What does Scripture teach about those things? So if we believe that a document was inspired, is it possible for something that God wrote and inspired, and He inspired it as part of the new covenant, right?

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Remember that Revelation is connected to covenant. If God inspired it as part of that new covenant revelation, does it make sense?

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Is it in keeping with our understanding of preservation and the nature of God that He would wait 2 ,000 years to reveal that new covenant document to His new covenant community?

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Would He wait 2 ,000 years for us to have an understanding of what was before we could know what was in that document which was written to the new covenant community?

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Would God have done that? And I would have to answer, no, He would not have done that. What God wrote and inspired is authoritative and inerrant, and then

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God has worked in history to preserve exactly what He wants to preserve. And we would have to go back to what somebody else said,

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I forget who it was, that not everything that the apostle Paul wrote was necessarily inspired

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Scripture. Paul would have wrote things that were not inspired. Just because he was an apostle does not mean that everything he said and everything he did was inerrant, but it does mean that when writing as an apostle a document that the

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Holy Spirit was working through him, moving through him to author, that that document itself was inspired and inerrant, but not that Paul himself was infallible.

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Paul might have believed that the earth was flat. Paul might have believed that the moon was made out of cheese. I don't know, but all of that is irrelevant.

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But when Paul writes to the church at Rome and he's writing the book of Romans, that's inspired, inerrant, and infallible

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Scripture. And I would argue it is intended for His new covenant community, which is believers,

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Jews and Gentiles. And therefore, God would not, because He has promised to preserve His word for His people,

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God would not deprive His people of that which He intended to give to them, nor would He wait 2 ,000 years to deliver something that was essential for His church for all of His time.

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We would have to then argue that these Christians have been without this revelation for all of these years, and now we have something that the previous church in all of its forms never had.

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And that does not comport with our doctrine of inspiration and God's purpose in giving us revelation in Scripture.

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And the fact that the church for all of these years has not known of it, and has not accepted it, and has not used it, that means that it does not have that quality of canonicity, which is that it is recognized by the church at large, because we would have to say that there's more people who have lived who have been

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Christians up to this point than there are Christians alive today, right? Wouldn't you say that? That the church that has passed away is probably larger than the church that exists currently alive on this earth right now.

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Okay, so if that is the case, then you would have to be arguing that most of the people who belong to the church have been without the revelation that God gave to His church, and it has not been used or accepted by most of the church.

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It's been used or accepted by only a small portion of the church, which is us today, in our scenario that I laid out of a book being discovered recently.

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Yeah. No, but I'm not making just a time argument.

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I'm making a usage argument. That book has not been used by the church for all this period of time. The Gospel of Matthew was used by the church from the time that it was written.

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We could say that of all the New Testament books. Now, their spread would have taken a long time. We're not talking about the spread of a book, we're talking about the usage of those books.

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Those books, those 27 books of our New Testament, were written and recognized and used from the time that they were written.

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If we discovered a book today that was written back then, we wouldn't be able to say that of that book. It has not been accepted and used in the church, nor has it been recognized by the church for all these years.

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So we would not be justified in saying, well, this is canonical. Right? Yep.

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So we would...does this mean then that we would strike a match to it and burn it? I'm not suggesting it would have no value.

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I'm saying it's not canonical. There's a difference between it having no value to us whatsoever and not being canonical.

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Because listen, if we discovered a book written by the Apostle Paul, I would want it translated and I would want to read it.

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Now would I preach it? No, I would not. Would I add it in my Bible? No, I would not. But I think it might have tremendous value to us historically, archaeologically, culturally, theologically.

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We could read it like we might of devotional, but we would not and would not be justified in regarding it as Scripture. But we could be regarded...we

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could be justified in regarding it as beneficial. Cornell? Yeah, very good point.

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Yeah. It would have the value, the same value as the apostolic fathers. Yeah, that's a good point too.

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If we did discover something written by Paul as of late, it would not be something that would overturn

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Scripture. It would have the benefit, I think, of helping us understand certain other things that Paul might have written or his word usage.

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It could have other benefits and other blessings to us, but we wouldn't regard it as Scripture. And it certainly wouldn't overturn Scripture. Peter? If it was confirmed that it was written by Paul and it said, this is the word of the

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Lord, hypothetically, because I don't believe this will ever happen,

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I don't believe it can happen because my theology of revelation and my theology of preservation and authority and inerrancy, it precludes this from ever happening.

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But hypothetically, we would have to say that when Paul wrote that, he was not inspired. He might have thought that he was writing an inspired document, but he would not be inspired because it has not been accepted and used by the church for all of his time.

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And it was not known and it was not circulated and it obviously was not copied. If it had been regarded as Scripture by early

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Christians, they would have copied it and it would have been preserved just like our New Testament documents have been. So I would say this is a good example of Paul writing something that was not inspired, maybe even thinking he did, and that is why it has been lost to history and why it should not be accepted as Scripture.

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Yes, sir? A lot of questions here. Go ahead. Yeah, very good.

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You caught me in a presuppositional error there. I said it does not make sense when I critiqued it that way.

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And you're right. That would be me saying, according to my judgment, here are the criteria that it would make, and it doesn't match up to these criteria, which

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I determined when I say it doesn't make sense. So very good. You caught me in a...it was a good way of examining my argument.

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So my argument...did everybody else catch that when I said that? Okay. So you're right.

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It would be wrong to say that it doesn't make sense that God would do this because that would be me saying God has to operate according to what makes sense to me.

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But a better way of saying that is that theologically we cannot make our theology of these things as revealed in Scripture comport with this happening.

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Those two things cannot mesh up. Yes? Nobody's ever...well,

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not nobody, but we... Somebody read them. Somebody has read them.

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Yeah. Who can?

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No, they're lost to history. It's not that those books have been discovered and somebody has read them. It's that they've not been preserved for us.

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We don't know what was in those books. We have no record of those books. There's no record. Those books do not exist.

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Paul makes mention of those books. So we know that they existed at some point, that the Corinthians received them, that they read them, but they have not been preserved for us.

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So our book of 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians makes reference to two other letters that Paul wrote to them, but those letters have been lost to history.

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So somebody read them at some point, the Corinthian church, and whoever had that had those at those times, but that has not been preserved for us.

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There was somebody else? Yes. So I would use the same argument that I've just used to disqualify

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Paul's writings. I don't believe that God...my doctrine of God's...of God's inspiration of inerrancy and authority and preservation precludes me from accepting the book of Mormon.

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Because I cannot be...I will not theologically believe that God would have a covenant community exist for 1 ,850 years, in the case of the book of Mormon, or a little bit longer than that, that God would have a covenant community exist for that period of time, and they would be bereft of this revelation.

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They would not have access to this revelation, that God would suddenly come on the scene and give brand new revelation for His church as if that were necessary.

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And the way that...the argument for that would also, on the Mormon side, the argument for that would go to the fact that there is something lacking in Scripture that necessitated further revelation, and I deny that out of hand as well.

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Is the warning in the book of Revelation addressing the whole canon of Scripture or the book of Revelation?

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I think...specifically, I think that what John had in mind was this book, the book of Revelation.

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I think that's the context that he has in mind, though I think that providentially, that that warning appears at the end of the last book of our canon because I do believe that probably in the mind...I

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can't get into the mind of the Spirit of God, but my suspicion is that in the mind of the Spirit of God, that is positioned there as a warning regarding all of Scripture.

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So I do think it is appropriate because there's another warning in Proverbs that talks about adding to God's Word, and I think a warning in Deuteronomy, if memory serves, that talks about adding to God's Word, and we have the one in Revelation.

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So always the Lord warns us against adding to Scripture, whatever late fashionable revelation we think is great.

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So that principle stands over all of Scripture, do not add to what

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God has said, do not take away from it or God will curse you. So specifically, I think John is addressing the warnings and the plagues in this book, the book of Revelation, 30 verse 5 and 6,

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Proverbs 35 and 6. Okay, are there any other questions about that?

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We're out of time. We have some questions and objections we'll answer at the end, and I'm just going to zip through these quickly because I've actually sort of woven this...what's

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taken us so long up to this point is kind of weaving some of these objections into what we've done in the last three weeks. So here they are.

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Objection number one, the determination in New Testament books depends upon the decision of a council of men 300 years after the

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Apostles lived. I've heard this, this is Bart Ehrman's critique, most atheists bring this up, this is a very common objection to Christianity and the formation of the

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New Testament. And our answer to that is no, historically, Christians recognized from the moment the books were written what was authoritative, what was divine, what was inerrant.

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They preserved them, they copied them, they distributed them and circulated them widely and they recognized them from the earliest time.

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So the Senate of Hippo in 393 only recognized officially what had been accepted by the church for over 300 years.

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Those Christians didn't go about in the early first century saying, okay, now we've added a book, we've added a book. There was no official list of books kept in Jerusalem.

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So yes, the spread of this information, the recognition of it did take time, that is true, but it's not as if there was nothing regarded as authoritative until 400

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A .D., that's falsehood. These books were regarded as authoritative from the moment that they were written.

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They were recognized by the church somewhere. So objection number two, obviously some early church fathers from different locations questioned the legitimacy of certain books, including

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Hebrews, 2 John, 3 John, 2 Peter, James, Jude and Revelation. Some church fathers did not quote from some of the

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New Testament books. Doesn't this show that some books should not belong in our Bible? And we answered this a little bit last week.

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Just because somebody does not quote from it, does not necessarily mean that they did not regard it as authoritative. It simply means that they didn't quote from it.

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Or because some list left it out, doesn't necessarily mean that they regarded those other ones as non -canonical, it simply means that maybe they didn't even know that those books existed.

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So the lack of...the fact that books were doubted as authentic proves that books were not easily accepted. Their motto was, when in doubt, keep it out.

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It proves that a lot of thought, investigation, analysis and discussion went into accepting books and regarding them as authoritative, and they only accepted the books which they felt met certain criteria or had certain qualities that they knew had been written by God.

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And so they were subjected to incredibly close scrutiny. And I think...I'll read it to you just in case you don't have the quote in your notes.

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Josh McDowell in his book, A Ready Defense, said, Christians today can be thankful that the final formation of the New Testament canon was such a long and difficult process.

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It was so difficult, in fact, that there was heated debate over whether Hebrews, James, 2 and 3 John, 2 Peter, Jude and Revelation were truly canonical.

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But the close scrutiny to which the New Testament books were subjected before being universally accepted as authentic should give readers today increased confidence in the reliability of these books and the things which they reported and taught.

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So again, books were not just accepted. When in doubt, we're not going to regard that as authoritative. Calling something

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Scripture was a very serious thing in the early church. They only did that to books that they knew were apostolic in origin or commissioned by apostles.

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And the third objection, there was no agreement on the canon for over 300 years after the apostles. Is that true or false?

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It's false. Right? Peter and Paul agreed on what was canonical. What they knew about.

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Peter regarded Paul's writings as Scripture. So the earliest known list of canonical books is the

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Muratorian Canon. It's compiled sometime in the second century between 100 and 280. It was discovered by Ludovico Antonio Muratori.

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He was an Italian, if you couldn't tell from all the street names. And he published it in 1740. It lists…it is a list of New Testament books written in Latin.

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It does not list all the New Testament books that we have. It is missing Hebrews, James, 1 Peter, 2 Peter, and 1

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John. Now it's possible that whoever composed the Muratorian Canon did not know that those books existed because 1

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Peter and 1 John were accepted everywhere without question. There was no dispute over those two books and yet the

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Muratorian Canon leaves it out. And so that is evidence that those other books of the

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Muratorian Canon were not necessarily rejected but maybe had been missed or forgotten or lost due to damage.

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So it's possible that the fragment upon which the Muratorian Canon was written was itself damaged and so that those books were simply lost to that fragment.

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In other words that somebody might have written down all 27 books and had them on that list and then that list itself has been damaged over time.

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So the Synod of Hippo and the Council of Carthage only published what had been the standard position of Christians and Christian churches for 300 years.

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Now as Christians sometimes we struggle with this because we like everything instant and so the idea that it might have taken a couple hundred years for these books to be widely circulated and universally recognized, we look at that and we say, man, that's just…how is it possible that God could give a revelation and it not be widely recognized or known about instantly?

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We say that because we're used to something that we write down being able to send that out to a hundred people instantly in email or text or an instant message.

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But that's not how history works and that's not how God worked in history. God worked in history by writing books to various locations to different people.

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Those books were circulated and over time and it did take time because it was the ancient world, not today, where communication and travel are done on a scale and at a speed that was unimaginable to people in the ancient world.

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So it did take time for those books to be even found out about. You might have lived in the first century and died at 90

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AD, 60 years after Jesus died. You might have died an old Christian of ripe age and never even have read the

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Gospel of John because you didn't even know it existed. You might have lived in a place in the Roman Empire where in 90

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AD you had never even read any of John's writings. Or you might have lived in a part of the

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Roman Empire where what Peter wrote or the book of Hebrews you never even saw. You might have died at 90 only possessing or having been exposed to 10 or 12 or 14 books out of the 27 in the

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New Testament. That doesn't mean that those other books are not inspired. It simply means that you were living in a culture and at a time when that was the reality.

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But the fact that those books were not known about or the fact that those books were not circulated everywhere instantly does not mean that they're not authoritative or they're not canonical.

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It just means that God worked in history in a certain way and we don't judge history by our modern standards.

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Instead we look back and say, how is it that God preserved that in history because God worked in history and at that time things took longer than they do today?

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Yeah, one more question or comment and then we'll close. Yeah, the

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Old Testament canon was recognized even at the time of Jesus. So Jesus never quotes from any of the apocryphal books.

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None of the apostles ever quote from any of the apocryphal books. They mention other books that have been written but they don't quote them as Scripture.

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Paul quoted from poets of his own day but he doesn't quote them as Scripture. So we would say

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Jesus and the apostles recognized what the Old Testament canon was. They knew what the books were accepted, what were part of the

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Jewish Scriptures back then. That's something that is known and there was no debate over that.

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So that was a settled fact and we would say that all of the apostles, Jesus and the apostles embraced all 39 books of the

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Old Testament as canonical and there was never any dispute over that in the early church. All right, next week lesson 12, whatever it's titled.

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I don't know what it is. I don't have it here in front of me. But let's pray. Father, we are grateful for this time of consideration and discussion that we have had and we're thankful for how

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You've worked in history. And again, we just recognize that we're not here to try and convince ourselves that Scripture is

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Your Word and that You have spoken authoritatively, but we're here to simply see how it is that You have done so and preserved for us and for Your church,

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Your people, a perfect revelation, Your true Word. And we thank You for it and we praise