How We Got the Bible

The Bible Under Attack in the Modern World

The Bible today is the object of a great deal of discussion in our nation. A couple of years ago, the then President Reagan had a bill passed in Congress that declared, I believe it was 1983, to be the year of the Bible.

There was a great deal of discussion about the Bible then. But at the same time, there has never been a period of time in the history of our nation, maybe even the world itself, where there has been more incredibly false information circulating concerning the history and nature and teaching of the Bible.

Atheists, of course, you would expect, especially the rather militant and radical ones, to be utilizing the newfound methods of information transfer, computers, and laser printers, and all the things that are available to us today, to get their message out that the Bible is nothing but an ancient book that is full of incredible contradictions, is terribly ugly in its violence and in its immorality, and should be wiped from the remembrance of the American people.

That should not surprise us, but it certainly is going on and is becoming much more prevalent as time goes by. And most of us are aware of the fact that in various cultic groups, there is a great deal of falsehood taught about the Bible, because in a cult group, you are going to have some authority, some person's beliefs being presented as truth from God, and when those beliefs are contradictory to the Word of God, you've got to do something with the Bible.

You've got to get rid of its authority somehow. So whether, for example, in Mormonism, you add other books of scripture and then actually teach your people that the Bible has been mistranslated and that we don't know what it originally said, and there are missing books and things like this, or whether you go along with the witnesses and have what is in reality a completely higher authority to the Word of God, that is, the governing body, who can then mistranslate the Word of God into their new world translation and change things and thereby change the teaching, we know that this is how it works amongst the cults.

But what a lot of Christians are not aware of is how, within our seminaries, all across this land, even those that used to be known as being very conservative, the Bible is presented as being very little different than any other religious book.

It is a book that came from men, we are taught. It is a book that has the errors and mistakes of men in it, and we must look at it in that way and must treat it in that way. We must think of the Bible as being errant in its statements concerning scientific subjects, historical claims, and to have errors in regards to specific places and names of people.

And yet, despite the errors we are told, a religious word speaks through to us, a message gets through to us, and that is the important thing we are told. Now, many times, Bible-believing Christians who have been raised in churches where this is not the perspective are surprised and even shocked upon encountering someone who has this view of the Bible.

And yet, I would like to tell you that if you believe that the Word of God is God-breathed, as 2 Timothy 3 .16 says, that it is inerrant, that it is infallible, or any of these other ancient terms, you are in the vast minority, even amongst those who would identify themselves as being part of the Christian church.

Recently, I spoke with a man who is high up in the scholarly field of Biblical research and Biblical scholarship. This man is the head of a group called the Jesus Seminars. His name is Dr. Robert Funk.

And here is a man who truly is a scholar of Biblical languages and other languages and things like this. And yet, the idea that the Bible was anything other than just simply a collection of repeatedly edited and changed documents that are not historical but are mythological in character, the idea that anyone could not believe the Bible that way was considered to be just archaic and so far behind the times.

No one who is enlightened could possibly believe such foolishness, I was told. And so, if we are going to go out into our world, and we are going to minister to the atheist, or minister to the cultist, or even, yes, minister to those who call themselves Christians, and yet do not believe that the Word of God is the source of their authority, then we need to do some examination on our own to know why these people believe the ways they do, and to have an answer to give to them.

The Bible's Own Claims About God's Word

And so this evening we look at the topic of the Bible. The Scripture says, I will bow down toward your holy temple and will praise your name for your love and faithfulness. For you have exalted above all things your name and your word.

Psalm 138. The Proverbs writer said, Every word of God is flawless. He is a shield to those who take refuge in him. Do not add to his words, or he will rebuke you and prove you a liar. Proverbs 30, verses 5 and 6.

The psalmist cried out, Your word, O Yahweh, is eternal. It stands firm in the heavens. Psalm 119. And finally that passage that we know so well, Isaiah chapter 40, verse 8. The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever.

I believe those statements. And I don't believe them with a kind of faith that turns my mind off to the history and text of Scripture. But I believe that the facts concerning the Bible, and where it came from, and how it came to us, and the form that it is in today, line up with the teachings of the Bible concerning its own nature.

So let's look at that. We begin looking somewhat at the nature of the book itself. We're looking at a book, a single collection of 66 books, written by about 40 different authors over a period of about 1500 years.

Now, on the screen, we are looking at a very broad guess at some of the latest dates for various sections of Scripture. Latest dates. For example, Pentateuch at 1440 BC is approximately the date of the conquest, the exodus and conquest of Canaan.

So I'm obviously assuming Mosaic authorship of this material. The material says Moses wrote it, and I'm assuming that to be true. We'll discuss some of the claims about that later on. Joshua and Judges follows a period down to around 1000 BC.

Psalms and Proverbs cover David, and periods of time after David, Solomon, go maybe down to 800 BC. And certain of the Psalms may be later than that. There's no question about that. Certain of the Psalms could be as late as 500 BC.

Isaiah's prophecy coming around 700 BC. Jeremiah, probably the latest, about 500. We know that he is carried away into Egypt in the 580s. So 500 is actually rather late. It would probably be more like 550, 540, I'd say.

Ezekiel around 500 as well. 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles. And then the Minor Prophets ending around 400. Then you have a period of silence between 400 years before Christ and then the coming of Christ.

Actually, it's over 400 years. You have the Gospels and Acts, I believe, being written prior to the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD. Depending on a particular piece of manuscript evidence known as 7Q5, a scrap of a Greek manuscript that was found amongst the Qumran findings, which may be, and I feel it is, but we can't prove beyond question, which may be of the Gospel of Mark, which, if it is, would date that particular manuscript to 50 to 55 AD, which is incredibly early.

We may have that earlier date for Mark. But let's benefit of the doubt, Gospel and the Acts, 70 AD. The Pauline Corpus, that would be the writings of Paul, 64 AD, is one of the best guesses as to when he died, 64 to 68, somewhere around in there.

The General Epistles, Hebrews, and works like that, 66, Peter, I'm using sort of Peter as the watchword there because that's about when he died. Then I have a question mark after Revelation because I don't know if Revelation is that late or not.

I like a pre -70 date, but there's a lot to argue for a date around 95. But no matter how you look at it, the Old Testament is written over a period of about 1 ,100 years and the New Testament only over about 55 years, a period of time.

So there's obviously a difference there in how long it took to put the two books together. But here you have a basic breakdown of some of the time periods you're looking at for the writings of the books in our Bible.

Authorship, Scholarship, and Naturalistic Assumptions

Now what about the claim that the Old Testament books were written far later than their claimed authorship could allow? And what of those scholars who date various New Testament books late in the 2nd century?

It is very common, and in fact I would say at least 80 of Old Testament scholarship, and I'm taking in the entire spectrum here, in the world today would deny Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. Now, realize what that means.

The Pentateuch claims to be written by Moses. The Pentateuch itself says these are the words of Moses. But 80%, at least, of Old Testament scholarship in the world today would say no, it wasn't written by Moses.

In fact, most of that scholarship would place the final editing and what they would call redaction of that material down around say 500, 600. A lot of people identify Deuteronomy being written somewhere around the time of Josiah, around 600 B .C.

That would be your very common claim. It started with real earnest about 200 years ago. Before this, it was just utterly unknown. But about 200 years ago, people started toying with this idea and it's now become the prevalent idea, the prevalent teaching.

And the claim of those books to be written actually by Moses is called, well, one of the famous phrases is a pious fraud. Or as Dr. Gerhard von Rath in his commentary on Deuteronomy in the Westminster Commentary Series says, a fiction.

It is simply a fiction that Moses wrote these things. Well, what about that? And what about those people who say that 2 Peter is written maybe 150 years A .D.? Or it used to be very common, only 100 years ago, to pick up a book and find where someone would say that John was written as late as 200 or 300 years after Christ.

Of course, archaeology has sort of caused a little bit of havoc with that, as we'll see later, but that certainly was very popular to do. What about these things? Well, without going into point-by-point refutation, I would just point out that such claims are based upon preconceived concepts of what the Bible should be in those scholars' opinions.

There is no physical evidence of such later dates, nor for this idea that someone wrote this and used somebody else's name to give it more credence. Such scholars usually allow a naturalistic philosophy.

That is, they approach the Bible as simply being any other religious book. They don't approach it on the basis that it itself claims for itself. They use a philosophy that is utterly opposed to Christian belief and biblical teaching, and that predominates and therefore determines their conclusions.

When we actually begin to examine the reasons why these claims are made, we find there to be very little or no evidence in support of what these individuals are saying. Now, with that little bit of a background, let's next move to the next section, which talks about linguistic issues, that is, the languages of the Bible.

I'm going to pass around to those of you here this evening two volumes. One is called Biblia Hebraica. It is the Old Testament in Hebrew. The other is called Novum Testamentum Grecki. That is the New Testament in Greek.

I just passed them around for your edification. You get a chance to look at what the script looks like if you're not familiar with it. The Old Testament was written in the Hebrew language. Now, the Hebrew language is very ancient.

It is a very concrete language. That is, when Hebrew says something, it says something. It's not very flowery. It's pretty straightforward. It's a verbally oriented language, that is, the language that is based upon verbs primarily.

In fact, your nouns normally come off of a verb. Hence, there's a lot of action involved in it. Being very ancient, it doesn't have a whole lot of room for a lot of nuances of meaning. There are 12 chapters in the Old Testament that are written in a very closely related language known as Aramaic.

Same script as the Hebrew language, but a different language, a very closely related language, however. There are about 12 chapters in the Old Testament written in that language. The New Testament was written in Greek.

Koine Greek. Koine meaning common. It was simply the common language of the day. When Alexander the Great conquered the known world, he took with him the Greek culture. The Greek language went with. Therefore, in that day, most of your people, especially if they're involved in any type of commerce, would have the ability to speak more than one language.

A person in Palestine would probably be able to speak Aramaic or Hebrew. There's a lot of argument over which one it was. And Greek as well, especially if they're involved in any type of commerce. Your Roman soldier would be able to speak Latin while in Rome.

And also Greek as well. For example, back in the 1930s, we found just a whole stash of papyri, not in Alexandria, but in Egypt, that had been preserved in the dry climate there. And a lot of them were letters from Roman soldiers back to their wives back in Italy or Rome, and a lot of them were written in Greek, in the Greek language.

It was simply the common language of the people of the day. And so the Koine Greek, the common Greek of the people, was the perfect language in which to write the New Testament, because it would be addressable to everyone.

A Galilean fisherman could write a letter to the people at Corinth, if he wished to, and there would be communication. There would be the ability to communicate because of the language. And so the New Testament was written in Greek.

Now, what about those who say that we can't read these languages anymore? Believe it or not, there are people who are under the impression, I have spoken to many of them, that no one knows what these languages said anymore, that we can't read them.

That's just simply untrue. It's just simply untrue. Ask the Greek students amongst us this evening that are taking the Greek class. You can read Greek. It's just a very painful process of learning how to do it.

You just need to be aware that there are people who actually feel that it was a language that no one could read. Some people believe it was a Holy Spirit language, and it's the only time it ever appeared in the world, and no one else can ever read it.

And how they think we got translations of it, I don't know, but you will encounter viewpoints like that. What about Aramaic originals in the New Testament? There are those who claim that the New Testament, or sections of the New Testament, depending on the person to whom you're speaking, were written in Aramaic originally, then translated into Greek.

Now there are some who claim this only for the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and sometimes John. Some who are really conservative would say just Matthew, because we have some evidence of someone mentioning a Hebrew version of Matthew.

I would not argue forever and a day, or very strenuously, against the possibility of Matthew having produced an Aramaic or Hebrew copy of his Gospel. But the fact is we have none of these. It would have been utterly illogical to write John.

John obviously was not written in Hebrew or Aramaic. To write to the people at Ephesus in Aramaic would be absolutely silly, because no one there is speaking the language, etc., etc. This viewpoint is a very fringe element in scholarship, and, in fact, you may need to be aware of the fact that there are certain groups that have really altered doctrinal positions on the basis of guesses at what the Aramaic originally said, assuming that there was an Aramaic original in the first place.

So keep that in mind. There is a small possibility for Matthew, maybe Mark, but it is just that, a very small possibility, and no way of saying that those were the originals, or whether there was just maybe two copies made in two different languages.

So Greek and Hebrew are the languages of the Scripture. Now what about authorship? Many books in the Bible you may have noted, or maybe you didn't note, make no claim to specific authorship. Even some of the prophetic books themselves that claim to be these are the revelations of such and such a person do not simply come out and say, and such and such a person is the one who wrote them down.

Then you have other books, like we don't know who the chronicler was, who wrote 1 and 2 Chronicles. Was it just one person? Was there a group of people? We simply don't know. There are other books that do make specific claims concerning authorship.

The Pentateuch, Moses. Certain of the Psalms, David. Obviously in the New Testament it becomes much more clear. Luke, Acts, Luke. You have Paul and the Pauline epistles. Peter and Peter's writing. John and John's writing.

But we need to remember that we shouldn't be over-defensive in forcing the issue in saying, well, Joshua is written by Joshua. Joshua never claims to have been written by Joshua. That doesn't mean it's inaccurate.

That doesn't mean it's not from that time period. Let's not make claims the Word of God itself doesn't make claims for itself. I think that's an important thing to remember. Now, we've already mentioned that modern scholarship rejects Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, moving the date from about 1400 BC to about 600 BC.

Even the Pauline authorship of, say, Ephesians and the pastorals is rejected by a large portion of modern scholars. Many of your, if you went even into good, solid Christian bookstores and picked up an introduction to the New Testament today, many of them that you would encounter would present theories that Ephesians was a letter written much later than, say, Philippians, the others, after Paul's death, simply utilizing his name.

And why is this said? Because the theology presented in it is so advanced that obviously couldn't have come from the early church. Or what about the pastorals, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus? Well, this structure of the church did not evolve until much later, we're told, so obviously these letters could not have been written so much later.

Now, if you're thinking with me and you're listening, you hear the basis of those statements. The basis of the statement is a presumed concept of what the early church thought about Christ and believed.

It must have been more basic than Ephesians. I mean, we can't really think that these early Christians had this clear a concept of Christ and his work. I mean, they had to think about it. I mean, you see what we're getting at now?

Now we're talking about they couldn't have had the Holy Spirit to teach them or they couldn't have had revelation or anything like that. And Timothy and Titus, well, the church couldn't have existed that way at first.

That had to have evolved over time. You see, the assumption, the background always is that you don't have anything supernatural going on here. You've got to explain this in naturalistic terms. And so if we're looking at any just old group of people, we know they start off one way and then eventually evolve into having more structure and higher theology and things like this.

And so with that thought, these scholars then go back and make these claims. Is there any physical evidence to support them? No. It is simply a preconceived worldview. It's a concept that then determines exactly what they say.

But I'll tell you something. Unless you're in an extremely conservative seminary or Bible college, if you disagree with that, you might as well try teaching creation science at ASU. It ain't going to go over too well.

Because just as there is a preconceived, and I would say religious commitment to evolutionism among scientists, amongst quote-unquote New Testament scholars, there is almost just as strong a commitment to these naturalistic theories about how the Bible came about.

Okay? So let's keep that in mind. Now, after authorship, we then ask the question, well, who put all this stuff together? That is, what about the canon of Scripture? The canon of Scripture. What does canon mean?

Canon simply means a rule or a standard. A rule or a standard. So when we talk about the canon of Scripture, what we are talking about is the listing of the authoritative books. I mean, these were not the only books written in the world before 100 A .D.

There are obviously a whole lot of other books floating around. So who determined, or how did anyone determine, what books ended up in this collection of books, in the canon list? That's what the discussion here is.

Now, first of all, I think the primary authority to which we must look here is to the Lord Jesus Christ. I believe the Lord Jesus will determine for us if we believe that he is Lord, if we believe that he is God in human flesh, then we are going to probably take his perspective on the canon as being probably the best.

That might sound rather profound, but it is. Unfortunately, it is something that is missed in the majority of scholarship today. Jesus looked to the Old Testament Scriptures as the very word of God, and we'll look at that a little bit later on and discuss the specifics of that.

He accepted the canon that was his at that time there in Palestine, which is the same canon we have today of 39 books of the Old Testament. We'll see that in a second as well. Now, if that's the case, then let's look back and ask, well, how did the Old Testament canon come into existence?

Well, Josephus tells us that by 200 years before Christ, the Palestinian canon of 39 books was fixed. No miracles attended that said process, but it was obviously guided by God himself. In fact, Josephus said in Against Apion, 1 .8, It is true our history has been written since Artaxerxes, very particularly, but hath not been esteemed of the like authority with the former by our forefathers, because there hath not been an exact succession of prophets since that time.

And so Josephus is telling us that there was a period of time that came where the Jewish forefathers recognized that God was not speaking in the way that he once had. In fact, in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin, we read, Our rabbis taught, since the death of the last prophets, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, the Holy Spirit of prophetic inspiration departed from Israel, yet they were still able to avail themselves of Bathkol.

Bathkol means a secondary, a divine voice, a secondary rank to prophecy. God was still with his people, but he was not any longer giving scripture or prophecy. So here even the Jewish people themselves say there was a stop, there was a change.

God stopped his revelation at this point. Now, we don't have any angels coming down with golden indexes saying these are the 39 books. We don't have any voices out of the heavens. We don't have any thunderbolts zapping someone who attempts to put book number 40 in.

We don't have any real big meetings of let's get everybody together and take a vote. Let's take a poll and publish it in the newspaper. You don't have any of this happening. And yet, when the Lord Jesus comes, he never has a debate with the people around him, the Pharisees, the Sadducees that are opposing his work about what is and what is not scripture.

So how did it happen? God simply led his people. Now, their recognition of a book as scripture did not make it scripture. I will pound this point. They are simply recognizing the inherent authority that is there because of who wrote the book ultimately.

I'm going to emphasize that point over and over again. Now, you have these 39 books coming together over a period of approximately 200 years from the writing of the last of them. Well before that time, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy are viewed as scripture.

Many of the Psalms are already viewed as scripture. They are already together, but they are collected and put together over this period of time by the people of God. Not in a miraculous, we don't see anything miraculous going on.

To the human eye, it looks simply like a process of time. And yet, it has the stamp of approval of the Lord Jesus Christ. As we will see later on, Jesus recognizes the work of God in that process. Now keep that in mind, because if that's how the Old Testament comes into existence, that is a process over a period of time, not attended with a bunch of miracles and things like that, but God's people simply led by God to recognize God's words, then maybe that should tell us something about how the New Testament is going to be formed.

In fact, we will discover it is exactly that. What is the process in the New Testament? Within less than a century, most of the New Testament books were recognized, for example, in the Muratorian Fragment from the year 186.

I believe in the notes that I have provided to you, I have provided to you the entire text in translation of the Muratorian Fragment from the year 186. Now I'm not going to read all of that, obviously, but what we see when we look at this is that here we have a list of the books that are authoritative in the year 186 in this particular locale, this particular writer.

Now there is some question about how it should be translated. At one point, there is the possibility that both of the letters of Peter are referred to, but we just can't tell. What we do have already at this period of time, and remember they didn't have fax machines, they didn't have UPS to deliver copies here, there, and everywhere.

We're copying everything by hand right now. There's going to be a period of time that's going to be taken between a book that is in one particular area becoming popular in another particular area, just simply from the time it takes to copy books and transport them and things like this.

In 186 we have the four gospels, Acts, the 13 Pauline letters, which began to circulate as one body extremely early. In fact, I would say that the first elements of this are recognized in 2 Peter. That's how early, in my opinion, that took place.

The 13 Pauline letters, Jude, 1 and 2 John, and the Revelation, leaving Hebrews and possibly both letters of Paul, depending on how we translate it, as well as James outside the list. That is three books not recognized this early.

That's all. Now if we think about the entire canon of Scripture, what does that mean? Well, that means by the end of the 2nd century, at least in this locale, of our Bible, have you ever noticed, ever taken your Bible and just taken the number of pages that is Old Testament and compared it with the number of pages that is New Testament?

Ever notice something fascinating? Three quarters of your Bible is Old Testament! How many of us spend three quarters of our time in the Old Testament reading the Old Testament? Please don't put your hands up.

Thank you. Obviously Old Testament canon, no question. Gospels and Acts is another 15%. The Pauline Corpus, 7%. 97 of your entire Bible is already done and closed. There's no argument going on over these things anymore.

You're talking about 3 where there's any argument amongst people right now. Now we'll see the relevance of that in just a few moments. Now, the recognition of the authority of the books is passive. That is, the books have authority because of their authorship, not because they're placed in a canon list.

The church does not give authority to the Word of God. The Word of God has authority because God is the author of the Word of God in the final sense. He is the source. And the early church fathers, for example, who write concerning this issue, never give us an inkling of an idea that by their recognizing these works as scripture, they somehow had some authority they were giving to these books.

They never had that idea. And yet today we are told, for example, by Roman Catholics, that the church, the Roman Catholic church, canonized the scripture and gave authority to the scripture by recognizing the scripture in the canon.

And that simply is untrue. That is not what happened. Besides that, the Roman Catholic church, as we know it today, is nowhere on the scene anywhere near 186. In fact, you don't have the first person claiming the name of Pope in Rome until 607, A .D. 607.

That's a long ways down the road, folks. So, what were some of the tests utilized by the New Testament church? Because there are other books that were running around. In the 2nd century, everybody starts writing all sorts of neat and wonderful books.

The Gnostic Gospels, for example, are just wonderful collections of stories about Jesus' youth and things that the real scriptures didn't tell us about. Well, somebody decided, well, I want to fill in the gaps.

And so we have stories about how Jesus, when he was a little child, would make clay pigeons and then make them come alive and they'd fly away. Or when he'd be playing a game with his friends and they'd break the rules, he'd strike them dead.

You know, all sorts of weird and wacky things like this appearing in the 2nd century. The church rejected those. Why? Well, because they didn't pass the tests that were utilized. For example, apostolic authority.

Did an apostle or someone associated with the apostles write this work? Someone who was close to the Lord Jesus Christ? What about antiquity? That's the main reason the Gnostic Gospels got zapped right off the bat was because it was recognized that hey, these were just recently written.

We remember who wrote this one. Remember that guy? Oh yeah, sure. They did not go back to that period of time when the apostles were alive. Orthodoxy. Is it consistent? Is it consistent with the Old Testament?

We have the Old Testament on the authority of Jesus Christ. Does this contradict God's revelation? Is it orthodox? Does it teach the correct thing? Inspiration. Does it speak with authority? Does it speak from the Spirit of God?

And acceptance by the churches. That is, is this something that churches have accepted as scripture for a long period of time? Or is this some new thing that was only accepted in one little corner of the area?

So these were the tests that were utilized. And I am glad that the New Testament church took seriously the issue of recognizing God's work in scripture. Can you imagine where we'd be if they didn't? Now, please, don't second guess me.

I recognize that God was behind this whole thing and God made sure that this happened. But we can look at these other books and they're available. You can find the other books here, there, and everywhere that are still from that time period that people wrote.

And if you read them, you will recognize very quickly the spuriousness of them. They are so utterly different than what we have in our New Testament. Now, what about the claim that a bunch of men got together one day and voted on what books would and what books would not be in the Bible?

I cannot tell you how many times I've heard that. I've heard it from atheists. I've heard it from Mormons. I've heard it from agnostics. I've heard it from every perspective you can think of. Well, what happened is the Council of Nicaea, I remember one atheist on the radio said, well, what happened to the Council of Nicaea?

Nothing happened to the Council of Nicaea. Sorry about that, anyways. A bunch of old men got together one day and they took a vote. And if you got enough votes, then it got in. And if it didn't, then it didn't.

That simply is utterly untrue. The books of the Bible were recognized over a period of time by God's people. Their recognition did not make them authoritative. They were authoritative by virtue of their authorship.

No one man or group of men determined the canon. Besides, we've already seen 90 of the entire Bible was already decided upon long before there were any councils or any church hierarchy to get together and make these decisions and enforce any decisions on anybody else.

The Apocrypha, the Canon, and Other Books Mentioned in Scripture

But, we then ask the question, what about the Apocrypha? What about the Apocrypha? The Apocrypha is a collection of books that is found in the Roman Catholic canon in the Old Testament. The books, it varies in number depending upon whose list you're counting and whether they're counting the additions to, for example, Daniel as being a separate book from books that were just simply completely separate from any other Old Testament books.

But they are a section of books that you will find in the Roman Catholic canon that are written during the intertestamental period. That is, between 400 B .C. and the time of Christ. They are predominantly historical in nature with a good dosage of theology thrown in.

Well, what about the Apocrypha? Well, the Apocrypha books were not recognized as being authoritative by the Palestinian Jews at any time. None of the New Testament writers quote from these books using the introduction it is written or the scriptures say.

They were accepted in North Africa Egypt and in North Africa primarily due to the influence of the Septuagint. The Septuagint. What is the Septuagint? The Septuagint, frequently abbreviated LXX which means 70, is the Greek translation of the Old Testament translated about 250 years before Christ.

There was a large contingent of Jews in Egypt. And the longer you are away from the homeland the harder it gets to speak the language of the homeland when you are amongst people who speak a different language.

And so to make the scriptures available to people who didn't read Hebrew and, we surmise, also to make it available to Hebrews who were no longer reading Hebrew the Septuagint translation was made. The Septuagint translation contained not only the 39 books of the Palestinian canon but the Septuagint translation also contained the books that we identify as the Apocrypha.

This is outside of Palestine. This is down in Egypt, North Africa. Now, since the Septuagint became the Bible of the Christians in North Africa the Old Testament, but it was in Greek since that became their Bible, the one they were most used to and it had the Apocrypha in it that is why there were early Christians who accepted the Apocryphal books as being canonical.

Now, you will notice, for example that Augustine of Hippo which is down here in North Africa accepted the Apocryphal books as being scripture. But Jerome, who is the author-translator of the Latin Vulgate translation didn't.

Why? Because he traveled, actually, to Bethlehem to Palestine and learned Hebrew from the Jews and in so doing discovered that the Jews had never accepted these books as being scripture. And when he looked into the historical aspects he said we shouldn't have either and did not accept them and did not want to translate them and put them in the Vulgate but was overruled and was told to put them in the Vulgate and did.

They were the last things he translated and put them in right at the end. And so they went into the Latin Vulgate and sort of into a canonical limbo, you might say. There wasn't a real firm decree that said these were scriptural books until many, many years later when something called the Protestant Reformation takes place.

And the Lutherans and the Reformed are running around and they utterly reject the Apocryphal books. They go, hey, the Apostles didn't think they were scripture. Jesus didn't think they were scripture.

The Jews didn't think they were scripture. So we don't think they're scripture either. And in response to the Protestant Reformation and the Protestant canon of scripture which was the same canon that we found in Palestine the Roman Catholic Council of Trent makes a direct decree in regards to the canonicity of the Apocryphal books and makes sure that all the good faithful Roman Catholics know they're scripture.

Those Protestants don't know what they're talking about. Okay? Now, what about the fact that the Bible mentions other books that are not a part of the canon? Did you know that? The Bible mentions other books.

For example, the book of Jasher is mentioned in Numbers 21 .14. Joshua 10 .13 and 2 Samuel 1 .18. The annals of Solomon is mentioned in 1 Kings 11 .41. The annals of King David in 1 Chronicles 27 .24.