How We Got the Bible: Canon

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Good evening, everyone.
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We are continuing tonight in our study of a survey of how we got the Bible, and tonight is Lecture 2, which is on the subject of the canon of Scripture.
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Before we begin, though, let's go to God in prayer.
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Father God, as we come together tonight for a time of learning, I pray, as I always do, Lord, that you would focus my mind and keep me from error, Lord, that your truth would be on our hearts, our minds, and on my lips, Lord, that it would go into the ears, but not only the ears, but by your Spirit to the mind and to the heart, and that we would recognize the great importance of such a question as we are going to discuss tonight, and that is the question of canon, and I pray, O Lord, that you would move with us and teach us by your Spirit, and Lord, do what only you can do, in Christ's name, Amen.
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We are in Class 2 of 8, and the subject, of course, as we know, is the subject of how we got the Bible, and in Class 1, which was last week, we talked about the subject of inspiration.
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Now, who can give me a definition of inspiration? Okay, that's disheartening.
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What is inspiration, Brittany? Well, the word that's translated inspired does mean God-breathed, that's right.
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It comes from 2 Timothy 3, verse 16, rather, and it means that the Scriptures were breathed out by God, and when we talk about the doctrine of inspiration, we are talking about the fact that we believe that God has revealed Himself in the past, and He has done so through the writing of the Scriptures, that He has revealed Himself in the Bible.
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Now, this class does not focus on inspiration, but we have to at least begin there.
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We're more focused on transmission and translation in this class, but if we don't know what it is we're discussing, then we don't really have a good starting point, so we have to at least have a place to start.
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So last week, we talked about inspiration means that God has given us His revelation, and we talked about inscripturation, which is God giving it through the written word.
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Now, two questions.
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What in regard to inspiration, this is a pop quiz, but we'll do it, we don't have to write it down, pop quiz question number one.
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What is inspired? The writer or the writings? Brittany.
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Yes, the Bible says that it is Scripture that is inspired.
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It says all Scripture is given by inspiration of God or is breathed out by God.
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It never says Paul was inspired or Peter was inspired or Luke was inspired, even though we might apply that term to them in a generic sense, we would say the Scripture is what is inspired by God.
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Those men being the medium by which it came, but the inspiration was, when we talk about the doctrine of inspiration, it's talking about the documents, not the men.
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Second question is what is inspired, the autographs or the copies? Marina.
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The autographs.
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Now, what does autograph mean? That's right.
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The original writing is what we say is inspired.
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If you read the document for our church, for instance, our statement of faith, which I should have brought with me tonight because I mentioned it last week and I didn't have it last week either, but it does say that we believe that the Bible is inspired and inerrant in the original autographs.
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We use that phrase very specifically.
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Now, that does not mean that we don't believe that the copies that we possess today are true.
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We do.
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We trust that God has preserved his word, but the act of inspiration does not pass down with each generational copy.
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The act of inspiration was a miraculous once in time event where the book was inspired and then after that, we moved to a different doctrine and that is the doctrine of preservation, not the doctrine of inspiration.
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The difference between how we trust what we have versus how we trust what was given is what was given was given by inspiration and what we have is by preservation, the doctrine of preservation.
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So, it's just we have to make our distinctions and make sure we understand our categories because as we're going to see in class four and five, when we get to textual variation, we have to ask the question, well, what about that? And was God involved even in the mistakes of the scribes? And so, those questions we will deal with at that time and talk about what that means.
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But tonight, we are going to be looking at the second doctrine on our study.
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As we said, there are four steps in the revelatory process.
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The first step is inspiration.
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The second step, which is our focus of tonight, is canonization, canonization.
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Now, steps three and four will take much more time because tonight, we're doing the canon.
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Next week, we begin three weeks on the subject of transmission.
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So, for those who are taking notes, don't have it.
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The third is transmission and the fourth is translation.
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Our last two weeks will be dedicated to the subject of translation.
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But this is how, you remember what I said last week, Moses to me.
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God inspires the writing to be written.
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God uses the people of God to recognize what is written.
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We're going to talk about that in a moment, to discover what was written.
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That's canon.
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That writing is then transmitted down through the ages through handwritten copies, which is an amazing feat.
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And then those books are translated into languages that people can understand.
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That's the process.
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That's how the Bible goes from Moses to me.
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So I want to read a quote here.
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This is from Dr.
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Norman Geisler, speaking on the subject of canon.
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Canonization, he says, inspiration indicates how the Bible receives its authority, whereas canonization tells how the Bible receives its acceptance.
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There's the difference.
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They may want to write that down.
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That's a key distinction.
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Inspiration is about authority.
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Canonization is about acceptance.
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It's one thing for God to give the scriptures their authority.
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It's quite another for men to recognize that authority.
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And Paul ends in his book, the Moody Handbook of Theology, says this, if the scriptures are indeed inspired by God, then a significant question arises, which books are inspired? Historically, it was important for the people of God to determine which books God had inspired and which ones were recognized as authoritative.
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And so that's what the subject of canon is about.
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The word canon, as we will see, means the standard.
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So what is the standard? Our outline tonight is threefold, as it normally is.
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We're going to look at three questions.
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Number one, what is canon? Number two, we are going to look at determining versus discovering canon.
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That is a huge distinction that we will see.
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Thirdly, we are going to look at apocryphal writings.
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And that will be based upon how much time we have, because there's a lot in that subject that we can deal with, but we'll deal with as much as we can, as time allows.
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By the way, just out of curiosity, did all of you do your reading this week? Did you find it helpful? Were there any questions that came out of the reading? Well, good.
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This, gentlemen, my new guys, this is the book that we have for this class.
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This is the textbook.
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These are optional books that we recommend, but this is the one that the readings come out of.
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So later on, if you want to come take a look at it, it's up here.
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So did you guys find it easy to read? It's pretty well written, right? I think he writes at a very good level for just about anybody to be able to understand, and it's good, solid, factual information.
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All right, so let's start with our outline tonight.
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First question is, what is canon? Well, let's talk first about the meaning.
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The original meaning of the word canon can be traced back to the ancient Greeks who used the term in a literal sense.
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To them, a canon was a rod or a ruler which was used for making measurements.
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So one might call it a measuring rod, similar, if not quite different from what we might call a yardstick.
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So a canon was a standard of measurement.
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It was, in fact, it was a standard.
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And this literal meaning provided the basis for the later extended use of the term, and the word eventually was extended to mean a rule or a standard about anything.
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Anything that had a standard or a rule was called the canon of that thing.
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Recently, as you all know, I'm kind of a nerd when it comes to science fiction and things like that, and recently I heard somebody reference the canon of Star Wars.
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And I thought, well, that's weird to use that term in regard to Star Wars.
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But what it meant was, what was the real story and what were the stories that had been put aside? And you say, well, none of it's real because it's all fake.
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But what they meant was there's a standard in the movies and everything else is not the standard, right? So did Luke really do this or did Leia really do that? But it's just funny to hear the word canon outside of the normal use of scripture.
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But basically what it means is, what's the standard? What is the right thing versus the wrong thing or the almost right thing, right? What is the standard? That's what canon means.
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And in regard to the Bible, the canon refers to the scripture, the authoritative scripture.
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F.F.
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Bruce says this, when we speak of the canon of scripture, the word canon has a simple meaning.
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It means the list of books contained in scripture, the list of books recognized as worthy to be included in the sacred writings of a worshiping community.
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In a Christian context, we might define the word as the list of writings acknowledged by the church as documents of divine revelation.
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So, in simple terms, the canon is the list of books.
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If you open up your Bibles to the first part of your Bible, you'll see a list of books.
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What's interesting though, and this must be immediately recognized, is that list was not put together as part of the Bible.
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We were not handed down a Bible with a list at the front that says, these books are in and these books are out.
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So, what we have, and this is important, and not everybody likes what I'm about to say, so buckle up.
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R.C.
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Sproul said it first, so if you don't like it, take it up with him.
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He's with the Lord, but you can...
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He said, what we have is an uninspired list of inspired books, because the list did not come down on a golden plate from heaven.
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The list was not given to us by Isaiah or Luke or Paul, right? So, the list itself is not inspired, but the books themselves are.
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So, the subject of canonization is the subject of trying to discern how that works, and you have all been in conversations, I'm sure, if you've ever done any evangelism or if you ever had a family over for Thanksgiving that maybe you disagreed with politically or religiously, somebody somewhere said, well, what about that Gospel of Thomas? And why isn't that the 28th book of the New Testament, right? We've all been there.
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We've all had to face the question of canon.
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Now, in the early church, the term canon, in reference to the books of Scripture, developed within the early fathers, but it was not used with a clear application that we know of until the year 367.
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367 is the first time we see the term canon used, and it was used by Athanasius.
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And if you want to look up the reference to what I just said, that's in F.F.
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Bruce's book, The Canon of Scripture, which I do not have up here, but it is in his book nonetheless.
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So, that's the first time the term, I'm not saying that's the first time we had a canon, just understand the term standard or measuring rod being applied to Scripture, was applied to Scripture by Athanasius in the year 367.
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So, that begins to raise the question, and the question is, when did the canon happen? When did we receive a canon? And this question is not so easily answered because we have to step back and further define what we mean.
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And I want to make a recommendation right now.
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This book is called The Question of Canon by Michael Kruger.
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It is a little over 200 pages, so it's not a terribly difficult read, but this book asks and answers that question much more thoroughly than I will be able to in class.
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I will summarize as best I can, but if this portion of the class intrigues you, I would recommend this book.
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And it is in your syllabus as one of the recommended readings.
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He also has a book called Canon Revisited, which is more like a school textbook.
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It's a hardbound blue book.
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It's on my shelf at home.
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I recommend anything Michael Kruger writes just about, I recommend anyway.
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But these books specifically on the canon will help you.
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If this is a subject after tonight's class, you want to dive into more deeply.
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But one of the things that Dr.
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Kruger discusses in this book is that when we talk about canon, we're talking about the list of books.
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We know what the definition is, but that definition can be further outspread to three different concepts.
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The first is what is known as ontological canon.
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The second can be referred to as functional canon.
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And the third is what we would call exclusive canon.
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So let's for a moment talk about the meaning of these terms.
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When we talk about the phrase ontological, does anyone know what ontological means? Ontos means being.
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Ontological means pertaining to something's being.
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So like when we talk about the trinity, we talk about the ontological trinity.
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God is one in essence, three in persons.
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And those three persons are co-equal, co-eternal, and distinct.
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That's ontological.
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We talk about your ontological makeup.
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What makes up Billy Ray, right? Billy Ray is made up of body, soul, and spirit, right? So that's the ontological Billy Ray, right? So ontological means essentially what makes something what it is, the being of something.
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So that's number one.
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And this is referring to the fact that when God inspires a book to be written, as soon as that book is completed, as soon as the last jot or tittle is put in that book, that book is immediately part of God's ontological canon because God inspired it.
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You understand what I'm saying? God knows what he wrote.
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And so this refers to that canon that God knows for certain, right? And Dr.
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James White describes it like this.
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He says, I have written a certain amount of books, but I haven't written all books.
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So when I write a book, as soon as I'm finished, and the last period goes in the book, and it goes to the publisher, and it's published, it becomes part of my canon, what I have written.
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I'm the same way.
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I have written three, I have four books.
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I've written four books in my life.
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One is about karate.
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Nobody cares about that.
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And I've written three books in regard to church.
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I wrote one book called The Biblically Functioning Church.
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I wrote one book called God in Three Persons, a doctrine of the Trinity study.
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And I wrote a book on speaking in tongues, which I don't recommend you read.
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It's not very good.
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But I wrote it.
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It was very young.
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I was very young.
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It's not even really a book.
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It's more like a pamphlet.
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But I did have it published, because I wanted to do it.
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So of the four works that I have written, I wrote them.
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Therefore, I know what I wrote, right? Ontologically, I know.
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Now, Billy Ray knows me pretty well, and we've been friends for years.
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Our children played together.
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His kids were in my karate school.
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We've known each other, know our wives.
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Our wives are friends.
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But you don't know everything I've written.
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You probably didn't know just until two seconds ago that I wrote a book on speaking in tongues, right? So you didn't know the canon of my writing.
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But I did.
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So I revealed that to you, and now you have the knowledge that I have, because I gave it to you.
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But the point about ontological canon is the point about the canon is established ontologically when the book is written, because God is the author.
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You understand? So this one is very important, because later, when we start talking about what the church's part in this is, the church doesn't determine what is the canon.
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God determines what is the canon.
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The church discovers what God has determined.
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You see, in Roman Catholicism, it's different, because if you talk to a Roman Catholic, they'll say, we determine what books go in the Bible.
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Historically, one, that's not true, but also it's not even looking at it from the right perspective, because we don't have the authority to determine what God wrote.
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All we can do is discover what God wrote, and there's a big difference between determining and discovering something.
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It's sort of like this.
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Who discovered the law of gravity? Sir Isaac Newton.
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But he didn't determine the law of gravity.
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He discovered it.
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He didn't determine it.
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That's the difference here.
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So ontological canon deals with God knows what he wrote, and as soon as he wrote it, it was canon.
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The second is what we call the functional canon.
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The functional canon is in regard to what books are in use at a certain point of time.
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So I'm going to just put, well, this marker doesn't work, so I'm going to get another one.
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Say in use at a point in time.
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So if we look at the history of the New Testament church, we will see that the first hundred years was when the inspiration took place.
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Actually, if you want to really nail it down, it was somewhere between 45 and 70, possibly out to 85 if you really want to push it to a late date, but we're looking at a period of between 40 and 50 years of inspiration, God giving his word, it being written.
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Canon is formed in the sense of ontologically, right? But as far as being, this is the age of inspiration.
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In fact, I want to put that on the board.
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So from a time period standpoint, let's say this is Christ.
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There's a period of time between Christ and the first book written, which is between 45 and 49.
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It's either going to be James or Galatians.
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One of those books comes first, and it's going to be around that time period.
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If it's James, it's possibly 45.
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If it's Galatians, it's more like 48, 49, but somewhere in that period of time.
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The last book to be written, we could argue, Revelation most likely.
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I do believe it has a nice little bookend on the end where it says, don't add or take anything away from this book, which I think does apply to all of scripture, even though contextually it's only referring to Revelation itself.
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I do think it has a expanded application where we could say God has finished his Revelation, don't add or take anything away from it, right? And so the dating of that, I believe it was about 66, 67.
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Some people believe it was all the way to 85.
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But we'll just say by 100, the ontological canon is complete.
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Now, you might have a question in your mind, and I wouldn't mind if you did.
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The question might be something of this effect.
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What about the Old Testament? You haven't mentioned the Old Testament at all.
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Good question.
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A couple of reasons why I haven't mentioned the Old Testament.
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The Old Testament, while there are books that are debated in the Old Testament, as we're going to see later, the Jewish community had recognized and understood what was scripture by the time of Christ.
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And we know this because Christ actually pointed to those very scriptures and called men accountable to those scriptures.
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And he said, have you not read what God wrote, indicating that this was God's word? So when it comes to the Old Testament scriptures, if you believe Jesus, as we as Christians do, then we believe that the Old Testament canon was complete and recognized by the time of Christ.
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And it's the same canon we now possess.
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The Palestinian canon is the same 39 Old Testament books that we have, even though they numbered them different.
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They numbered them at 24, because they don't have 12 minor prophets.
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They have one book of the prophets.
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They don't have first and second kings.
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They have kings.
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If you start bringing it all down, you get to 24 rather than 39.
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But it's the same books.
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You say, but what about all those books in the Catholic Bible? The Catholic Bible does include 12, depending on how you number them, again, 12 to 15 books that are known as apocrypha.
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And we're going to get to that in the third part, because there are books that the Jewish people did not recognize.
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But they were included in something called the Latin Vulgate.
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And the Latin Vulgate was the Bible of the Western Church for 1,000 years.
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And therefore, they were considered to be part of scripture by the Roman Catholic Church.
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But they were not accepted as part of the Palestinian canon.
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And Jerome did not want to include them in the Vulgate when he wrote it in the fourth century.
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So just to, I think this is a much bigger deal for New Testament than Old Testament.
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But there is an answer to the Old Testament question.
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Yes, sir? OK.
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But then it's Catholic? Sure.
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I don't want to get too far off my subject, though.
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So if this is, OK.
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Let's not talk about that right now, OK? Not that I don't want to answer your question, but that's not part of what I'm doing.
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So we'll get back to that.
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We'll talk about it when it's just you and me, OK? All right, so 45 to 100, we're dealing with the ontological canon.
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Now, does anyone know when the first time we get an actual list that is the same list that we have today? No? Same list that we have today is here, 367.
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Same guy I mentioned earlier, Athanasius, has that same list.
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So that's 367 is way out here, right? So we have between 100 and 367.
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And I have heard people say, well, the Bible wasn't in use for 300 years after Christ.
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Or we didn't have a Bible for 300 years because the first time we even have a list is almost 400 years after Christ.
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This is where the subject of the functional canon comes into play.
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Because even though there was not, up until this point, a universal recognition of the canon, the books were already being used within the church as authoritative books.
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The books were already being recognized as authoritative in this time.
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Therefore, we refer to them as the functional canon.
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They are functioning as scripture.
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The first list that we are aware of, now you might say, didn't you just say it was here? No, I said this is the first list that's exactly like ours.
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This is the first list.
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It's the 27 that we have.
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But there are lists that precede that, that we can go back into history and find, that the church was still discovering, remember when I used that word, still discovering what God had written.
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And the oldest list that we have would fall into the category of functional canon as what's known as the moratorium fragment, which was written somewhere around 170 to 200.
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So between 170 and 200, we have a fragment known as the moratorium fragment.
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And here's what's interesting about the moratorium fragment.
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20 of the 27 books that we have are in it.
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But there were some that were not included in that particular list.
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The books that were not included were Hebrews, James, 1 Peter, 2 Peter, 3 John.
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And there were books that were included that we no longer include, such as the Shepherd of Hermas and two letters that were attributed to the Apostle Paul but were not written by him, the letter to the Laodiceans and the letter to the Alexandrians.
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So we have some books that were included, some books that weren't.
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And here's basically what we call these things.
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And these are big words.
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You don't have to.
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If you want, I'll just make you a copy of this, because these words are a little hard to even say, much less write.
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So I can make a copy.
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But we have what's called as homo legomena.
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Homo legomena is books that everyone accepted.
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And I think those books are really important for us to consider, because the books that everyone accepted without controversy were all four Gospels.
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No one ever debated whether or not the Gospel of Thomas should go in or any of those things.
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And people knew they existed.
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But the four Gospels were never debated.
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In fact, the four Gospels were universally accepted.
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And I don't remember who did it.
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But one group actually combined the four Gospels into a one harmonious book.
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And it has a name.
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And for the life of me, I can't think of it right now.
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But it means the, I'll look it up.
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But it puts all four in a harmonious storyline.
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So you have the one story from all four books.
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So the four Gospels, Acts, and 13 letters of Paul, not debated.
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In fact, we have some evidence that the first grouping of books to ever be combined together and sent out as a grouping of books was the 13 letters of Paul.
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So we have the Gospels, the 13 letters of Paul, and the Book of Acts.
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But there were some books that were not recognized.
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What were those called? The books that were not recognized are called the antilogomena.
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So you have the homologomena.
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Everybody recognizes them.
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And then you have the antilogomena.
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That's the books that some disputed.
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And again, don't try to write it off my bad pronunciation.
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I'll give it to you later.
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The antilogomena included Hebrews.
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Why do you think it included Hebrews? Yeah, there's no one knows who wrote it.
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Now, some attribute it to the apostle Paul.
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And there is some historical evidence for that.
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Because when I mentioned earlier that the first listing of books that ever was sent out was the writings of Paul, they included Hebrews in that.
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So there were those who believed that Paul wrote Hebrews.
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I don't, but there were those who did.
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So Hebrews was one that did not receive universal acceptance right away.
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Some of the smaller letters, as I mentioned earlier, 3 John, again, very small, seemingly personal letter.
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Revelation did not receive universal acceptance right away.
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Can anybody want to guess why? Because it's about like 10 headed monsters and stuff, man.
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It's got all kinds of stuff in it that people read it and they were like, whoa, this is pretty serious stuff.
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So you have also Jude was not accepted universally because Jude references a pseudepigraphal work called Enoch.
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If you ever read the book of Jude, it references a book called the book of Enoch.
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And so there are questions about these books.
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However, given time, the church did recognize that these actually were from God.
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But it was not something that the church recognized immediately.
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There were also books that were known as pseudepigraphal.
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Pseudepigraphal is probably a term you remember maybe from school, or maybe you were more familiar with the term pseudonym.
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Pseudonym means what? No, that's a synonym.
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A pseudonym was a false name.
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Like if you author a book and you don't want to use your name, you use a fake name, that's called a pseudonym.
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Well, a pseudepigraphal book is a book that uses someone's name, but it's not them.
35:09
Someone who uses someone's name to write.
35:12
And who would be someone that would do that? Well, the Gospel of Thomas was not written by Thomas.
35:19
By the time the Gospel of Thomas was written, based upon history and the type of writing that was done and the location, Thomas was long dead by the time the Gospel of Thomas was written.
35:29
So the Gospel of Thomas is pseudepigraphal.
35:32
It has the name Thomas, but not the true person writing it.
35:37
The Gospel of Mary Magdalene.
35:40
You maybe have never heard of that one, but the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, if I remember correctly, is a fourth century work.
35:46
And unless Mary Magdalene lived to a very old age, I'm pretty sure she didn't author a book 400 years after her life.
35:57
So these are things called pseudepigrapha.
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Let me just give a note here.
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The first few centuries of the Christian era saw the production of numerous fanciful and heretical works that were neither genuine or valuable.
36:12
These books indicate the heretical teaching of the Gnostics, the Docetics, and Ascetic groups, as well as the exaggerated fancy of religious lore in the early church.
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That's a quote from Dr.
36:25
Norman Geisler again.
36:27
Some of these are the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of the Ebionites, and, of course, there are others.
36:35
How many of you ever heard of the Da Vinci Code? You remember when the Da Vinci Code came out? Do you remember what caused the Da Vinci Code to become such a big controversy? Because if you, I have a copy in my office, if you open the Da Vinci Code to the first page, it says all of the facts mentioned in this book are true.
37:02
Even though the book itself is a book of fiction, it argues that all the facts in the book are true.
37:11
But if you actually look at what facts it claims, it claims certain things like Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, they had children, their children became the Holy Grail, and that's what the search for the Holy Grail is.
37:25
It's not the cup that Jesus drank from, but rather it's the offspring of Christ that still exists in the world.
37:33
Fanciful fiction, but nothing regarding reality.
37:37
But they claim that the Gnostic texts are the true Christian story, and that the texts that we have, the 27 New Testament books, are actually false stories about Jesus.
37:58
And the Gnostic texts like the Gospel of Thomas, I would encourage you, go read it.
38:05
If you want to see the striking comparison between what God has written, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and then pick up the Gospel of Thomas, you will see an absolute striking difference.
38:21
One, it's not even a gospel.
38:24
It is not a narrative story of the life of Christ like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but rather it is a list of quotes that are supposed to be from Jesus himself.
38:37
And stories about Jesus's life, some that are so fanciful that they're hard to even make sense of.
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But the greatest quote is the one toward the end, and if you read the Gospel of Thomas, it does say at the end that Peter asks about Mary Magdalene, how can she be saved, because she is a woman, and Jesus said, well, she will become a man.
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And that's how she'll get saved.
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I'll get you the quote later if you want to read it, but it's very awkward, and it also bears pretty discomforting for all the ladies in the room, who now you know, before you can get saved, you have to become a man.
39:19
It is not a work that came from God.
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It was from the mind of the Gnostics.
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The Gnostic teachers and heretics existed even in the first century.
39:31
We see references to them even in the New Testament and the false teachings that they brought in, and they had their own writings and they had their own libraries.
39:41
The Nag Hammadi Library was discovered in the last century, and the Nag Hammadi Library is a trove of books that were found, and they were the Gnostic texts, and this is where many of the books that you hear about today came from that discovery.
40:00
So, we've talked about the ontological canon, that's a canon that comes from God.
40:06
We've talked about the functional canon, that's a canon that's functioning, but it's still not an exclusive canon, and that's where we're gonna get to the third thing.
40:15
What is the exclusive canon? The exclusive canon is one where the church has finally recognized what God has given, and at that point has closed the canon.
40:33
We talk about the phrase closed canon, meaning no more acceptance or rejection, these are the books.
40:44
And I said earlier, it was 367, let me clarify one thing.
40:49
In 363, so four years earlier, right? Yeah, I'm bad at math, so I have to double check.
40:58
In 363, the Council of Laodicea stated that only the Old Testament, along with one book of the Apocrypha and 26 of the New Testament, everything but Revelation, were canonical and to be read in the churches, and it was the Council of Hippo, which was in 393, and the Council of Carthage in 397 that affirmed the 27 books we now have as authoritative.
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So even by the fourth century, Revelation was still being disputed, being debated.
41:25
But by 393, the Council of Hippo, and 397, the Council of Carthage, we see the affirmation of the 27 books by the church.
41:35
So that was a lot of history in a very short amount of time.
41:41
But you understand now what we mean when we talk about ontological canon, that which God knows and gives, functional canon, that which is operating at a particular point in time, we would say prior to the exclusive canon, and the exclusive canon comes and is recognized by the end of the fourth century.
42:06
By the end of the fourth century, the church has discovered, and at that time, made a proclamation regarding the discovery of the canon.
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Here's a few things I want you to remember.
42:35
You may want to put these in your notes.
42:39
When we talk about the subject of canon, it is always important to keep the distinction in our mind that God is the one who determines whether a book is inspired or not.
42:57
Councils do not do that.
42:58
Churches do not do that.
43:00
God is the one who determines if a book is inspired.
43:07
I'll read a quote.
43:08
This is from the book God Speaks to Man.
43:12
The church no more gave, well, nevermind.
43:14
I don't need to read that quote I said earlier.
43:16
Church no more gave us the New Testament canon than Sir Isaac Newton gave us the force of gravity.
43:21
I went ahead in my notes a little, sorry.
43:24
Number two, and this is just reiterating what we already know.
43:27
God determines whether a book is canon.
43:28
Number two, God determines canon immediately.
43:36
And number three, the church discovers what God has determined, making, and this is the point I'm trying to drive to, making the canon, I hate when I run out of board.
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I have so much board, but if I go way over here, people at home won't see it.
43:56
The canon is not an object of revelation.
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The canon is an artifact of revelation.
44:21
The canon is not an object of revelation.
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It is an artifact of revelation.
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And what do I mean by that? Well, we said earlier, God didn't give us an infallible list, right? He didn't send down golden plates from heaven.
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He didn't send us a list.
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But what he did was inspire books.
44:52
And by inspiring those books, by inspiring some books and not all books, he created a canon, and the canon becomes an artifact of what he did.
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So the canon itself is not an object.
45:06
It is an artifact.
45:07
I drew this last week.
45:08
I don't know how many of you remember.
45:09
I said, if you imagine a circle, and the circle represents all books in the world, all books that have ever been written, and then within that circle, you put a very small circle, and we say that is what God has inspired, this small circle right here.
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God did not inspire all books to be written.
45:28
He did inspire these books to be written, and because he inspired these books to be written, the artifact is the list of books.
45:37
It's not an object.
45:39
It is an artifact.
45:43
So the question is, as we've been talking this whole time, how do we know what books they are? And I wanna propose to you this thought, and I remember I talked about this in a conference I was at a few years ago where I was speaking with some other men, speaking on the dais, and I made this point.
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The question of which books are right or which books are wrong is not as much a historical or practical question as much as it is a theological one.
46:21
The question is not as much a historical question or a practical question as much as it is a theological one, because if God inspired certain books to be written, and God wants his people to know what he wrote, then he would guide his people into that truth.
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That is a theological assertion.
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If God determines what he wrote, and he wants his people to know what he wrote, then he will assure that his people have what he wrote.
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And here's the great thing.
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Up until 100 and something years ago, nobody was really debating what God wrote.
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I mean, you can go back to the time of the Reformation and say, yeah, there was some debate between Luther and some others about James, right? Whether or not James really fit in with the gospel, because did James have the gospel? And you can go back to the first couple hundred years of the church where they were trying to discover what God wrote.
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But during the time between those periods, it wasn't a debate.
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People recognized it.
47:24
Four gospels, four, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, nobody questioned that, whether or not it was the right four gospels.
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And I'll give you a few Bible verses to think about.
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Isaiah 55, verses eight to 11, says this.
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For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways, declares the Lord.
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For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.
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For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but they water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth.
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It shall not return to me void, but it shall accomplish that which I purposed and shall succeed in the things for which I sent it.
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So God says something about his word.
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He says, my word will not return void.
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My word will go out, and my word will accomplish its purpose.
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So God has a purpose in giving his word.
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Therefore, he has the, we have reason to believe that we would know what his word is.
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And here's the interesting thing.
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If you go back to the time of Christ, I mentioned this earlier, when Christ was speaking to the Jewish people, he never once said, hey guys, do y'all wonder if Zephaniah is in the Bible or not? No, he asserted and quoted from those books with the assurance that they not only recognized them, but that they had recognized the right ones.
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Not only had they discovered, but they had discovered the correct ones.
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And he quotes from them, and he points to them.
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Have you not read what God wrote? Very important phrase by Christ, because if you think of what he said, have you not read, oh no, I'm sorry, have you not read what God said? Have you not read what God said to you? So he's saying, this is God's word given to you.
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You have every reason to trust in it.
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This is the books.
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Romans 15 verse four tells us this, for whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the scriptures, we might have hope.
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What was written in former days, this of course being the Old Testament, it was written for our instruction, for what purpose? That through endurance and through encouragement of the scriptures, we might have hope.
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God had a purpose for giving his word.
49:59
1 Corinthians 10 verse 11.
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Now these things happen to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come.
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Paul was talking about the story of Moses in the wilderness.
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He said this was written down for our instruction.
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It was written down for us.
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God wrote, God inspired this to be written so that we would have it.
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Again, I think it's a theological question.
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If God has inspired, he will also ensure that his people have his word.
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1 Timothy 3.16, all scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction and for training in righteousness that the man of God may be competent and equipped for every good work.
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That's the classic passage, we looked at it last week, that it tells us all scripture is breathed out and profitable.
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So here's what we must understand.
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It is God's will that his word be known by his people because he had a purpose in giving it.
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And if he has a purpose in giving it, he has a purpose in ensuring that we know what it is.
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Therefore, we can trust that the scriptures we possess have been supernaturally and providentially preserved by him.
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This is why it's important to understand that councils and committees did not determine the text of scripture, but rather, the church discovered what God had written.
51:35
Now, I do wanna mention a couple things before we take a five-minute break at the hour mark.
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Right before we take that break, I just wanna mention a few things.
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There are some things within the Old Testament and the New Testament that help us to understand why certain books were recognized.
51:56
And when we come back from the break, we're gonna talk about the Apocrypha, we're gonna talk about why they weren't recognized.
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So this will be helpful in making the distinction.
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So even though we say these things don't determine scripture, these are the things that the church looked to and even within the Jewish people looked to these things and recognized the scripture based upon these things.
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Not determining, but discovering these things.
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First, in the Old Testament, it would be recognizing tradition.
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And I know that word is such an ugly word.
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We don't like tradition.
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But the tradition that was passed down from the time of Moses, these books are from Moses, and then those tradition, of course, Joshua and Judges, Ruth and all these things are added in, were recognized by the people as these are the words of God.
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And so as much as we tend to bristle at the word tradition, there is a sense in which tradition played a big part in recognizing what books God had given in the Old Testament.
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There was also the spiritual authority of the books.
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The books were not only traditionally understood as God's word, they were used like God's word.
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They were read in public worship.
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Very specifically, if you remember in the story when Ezra came and brought out the books and read to the people and stood on the platform and the people wanted what? The word of God.
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They recognized this is God's word.
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They were placed in the temple.
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That is another thing that recognized in the Old Testament canon as a distinguishing marker of what was scripture.
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There was a general conviction among the people that these were God's words.
53:57
Again, the passage I just read a little bit, my word will not return void.
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Well, what is your word? This is my word.
54:07
But as far as believers go, Christian believers, the most certain thing we have in regard to the Old Testament is Jesus and the apostles.
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I'm gonna read this.
54:18
This is from Dr.
54:20
Beckwith.
54:20
He writes this.
54:22
He says, for Christians, there was the additional consideration that Jesus himself and his apostles in the pages of the New Testament often refer to the Jewish scriptures in general and to many of the individual books as having authority from God.
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So I've actually said this in conversation with people in regarding the question of canon.
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I say, if you believe in Jesus, you have no reason to doubt the Old Testament canon because Jesus taught from the Old Testament canon.
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The apostles taught from the Old Testament canon.
54:56
But that leads us to the question of the New Testament canon.
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What parameters, what things do we see in the New Testament canon? We're recognizing their discovery.
55:10
Number one was apostolic authority.
55:15
Go through the New Testament books with me very quickly.
55:18
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
55:20
Are all of those apostles? No.
55:23
Two of them are apostles, Matthew and John.
55:27
Two of them are not apostles, Mark and Luke.
55:30
But who is Mark? Mark is actually writing from Peter's memories.
55:35
So oftentimes, if you study the Gospel of Mark, you have to remember Mark is writing from Peter.
55:41
So it has Peter's authority.
55:44
And who is Luke writing? Paul.
55:48
Luke is Paul's associate.
55:50
So Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John have apostolic authority.
55:55
Acts, written by Luke.
55:56
Also, again, same person.
55:59
Then we get to 13 letters of the apostle Paul, who himself is an apostle.
56:04
The most difficult of the books are the books that we don't know the author.
56:08
And so we run to the next book, which is Hebrews.
56:11
And yet, at the same time, Hebrews, I believe, was written by Luke.
56:18
So that satisfies it for me.
56:21
No, I mean, I don't know who wrote Hebrews.
56:23
I don't think Paul did.
56:24
I think it was a sermon preached by Paul, written by Luke.
56:28
I could be wrong.
56:29
It could have been written by Barnabas.
56:30
It could have been written by Silas and other of Paul's associates.
56:35
But it certainly has.
56:38
And if it was written by Luke, as I conjecture, means Luke wrote more of the New Testament than anyone else.
56:44
But that's true anyway.
56:46
Luke wrote more of the New Testament than anyone.
56:48
Because if you take all of the words from the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts and you add all the words up, it's more words than all of Paul's writings put together.
56:57
Because Luke was just, Luke just wrote the most.
57:00
So if you add Hebrews in as a Luke in writing, then he's by far the longest writer of the New Testament.
57:08
Then you have the later books, 1st, 2nd Peter, 1st, 2nd, 3rd John.
57:15
I skipped James, sorry.
57:16
James, right? Who was James? James, brother of Jesus, right? Not James the apostle, right? But he was the pastor of the Church of Jerusalem.
57:28
And who else was in the Church of Jerusalem? Peter.
57:34
So we have Apostolic Authority.
57:36
So we have James.
57:37
We have 1st and 2nd Peter.
57:39
Peter, obviously we know who he is.
57:42
1st, 2nd, 3rd John.
57:44
Jude, brother of Jesus, early church writer.
57:49
And Revelation.
57:51
Who's Revelation written by? John, yeah.
57:54
So again, Apostolic Authority.
57:56
All the books are associated with apostles.
57:58
They are all written during the apostolic era.
58:02
That's another important thing if someone says, well, I believe the Gospel of Mary Magdalene should be included.
58:07
Well, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene does not fit in the apostolic era.
58:11
We're talking hundreds of years later.
58:17
Orthodoxy.
58:19
All the books share a common theology, a common orthodoxy.
58:28
And lastly, the recognition of the church.
58:33
Though some required the test of time, they all ultimately received recognition from the church.
58:41
All right, well, that is the end of our first hour.
58:44
And I need to take a break myself.
58:46
So let's take five minutes and come back and talk about the Apocrypha.
59:04
Again, I really can't stress for you just how important your reading is with this class because we're just scratching the surface.
59:15
And Dr.
59:16
Lightfoot's book, his section on the canon that you'll be reading this week, which I think are chapters 14 or something, it's way in the back.
59:25
You have to go, he didn't deal with the canon until very late in the book.
59:30
But it's on your syllabus.
59:32
What does it say, Billy Ray, for this week? 14, 15, that's what I thought.
59:36
So when you read this, he still, because the canon isn't really his focus, his focus is more of how the Bible is transmitted, and that's what our focus is, I can't help but just keep saying, read more on this.
59:53
Dr.
59:53
Kruger's stuff is top-notch, and he says things so much clearer than many other people.
01:00:03
All right, so we're gonna take the last portion of the class and we're going to talk about the Apocrypha or the Apocryphal books.
01:00:15
The word Apocrypha has come into the English language from the Greek and basically means hidden.
01:00:25
It was used very early in the sense of something secretive or concealed, but was also used in reference to a book whose origin was doubtful or untrue.
01:00:37
Eventually, the word took on the meaning of non-canonical, and thus for centuries, the non-canonical books have been known as the Apocryphal books.
01:00:48
Yet in Protestant circles, the Apocrypha is the normal designation for those additional books found in the Catholic Old Testament.
01:01:03
So a phrase that you should become familiar with, or a term, rather, is, excuse me, the term Palestinian canon and Alexandrian canon.
01:02:00
There are two traditions regarding the Apocrypha, and the confusion over the Apocrypha centers around these two traditions.
01:02:13
The Palestinian canon contains the books of the Bible that we possess.
01:02:18
The 39 books that we possess are in the Palestinian canon.
01:02:25
39 books, which in Jewish counting is actually 24, but it's the same books.
01:02:39
If you take my Old Testament class, the one that we do in the academy, we actually walk through and show how the numbers play out.
01:02:50
The Alexandrian canon, which arose in Alexandria, Egypt, where the Hebrew scriptures were translated into the Septuagint, which was the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, includes additional books.
01:03:11
And of the 15 books mentioned in the Alexandrian list, 12 were accepted and incorporated into the Roman Catholic Bible.
01:03:24
Let's talk about these books just for a moment.
01:03:26
I have the list here.
01:03:29
You have 15, and like I said, 12 were accepted.
01:03:41
The 15 are the 1st and 2nd Book of Esdras, Tobit, Judith, Additions to the Book of Esther, The Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, or The Wisdom of Jesus, Son of Sirach.
01:03:55
That is not Jesus of Nazareth.
01:03:59
Baruch, The Letter of Jeremiah, The Prayer of Azariah, and The Song of the Three Young Men, referring, of course, to Daniel in the Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
01:04:14
The Book of Susannah, The Book of Bel and the Dragon, The Prayer of Manasseh, the 1st and 2nd Book of Maccabees.
01:04:28
So the list I just gave is 15 books.
01:04:33
The Roman Catholic Bible accepts all of those except for 1st and 2nd Esdras and The Prayer of Manasseh.
01:04:43
And though 12 of these works are included in the Catholic Dewey-Rames Bible, only seven additional books are listed in the Table of Contents.
01:04:51
And you say, well, how can that be if we have 12 additions but only seven are listed? Because many of them are added to books that are already there.
01:05:00
They're added as, like I mentioned, the Additions to the Book of Esther, right? So that wouldn't be another book.
01:05:07
It would be an addition to what is there.
01:05:14
And the Book of Baruch and The Letter of Jeremiah are combined into one book.
01:05:18
The Additions of Esther were added in the Book of Esther.
01:05:21
The Prayer of Azariah was inserted between Daniel 3.23 and 24.
01:05:25
Susannah was placed at the end of the Book of Daniel and Bel and the Dragon were attached to Daniel as chapter 14.
01:05:31
So again, if you look at a Catholic Bible, you're gonna see those additions, those differences.
01:05:39
Now, why would we not accept the Apocrypha as part of the Bible? And I wanna, for a moment, I'm not defending the Apocrypha, but for a moment, I wanna state the case from the other side.
01:05:59
You should always try to be able to make an argument or at least understand the argument of your opponent, even if you disagree, because if you can't understand the argument of your opponent, then you really don't understand the issue very well.
01:06:13
Roman Catholics argue that these books or portions of books were part of the Latin Bible, which was the Bible for the Western Church for over 1,100 years.
01:06:31
And the argument goes that if God didn't want those books in the Bible, then he would have ensured that we didn't have them, which sort of goes along with something I said earlier when I said it's a theological issue.
01:06:43
God knows what he wants us to have, and certainly he would ensure that we have what he wants.
01:06:48
So therein lies that somewhat difficult portion to hurdle.
01:06:55
Okay, why did those books exist in that period of time? Well, the books existed in that period of time because of Jerome's Vulgate.
01:07:07
The Bible was translated into Latin very early, around the year 150.
01:07:13
The books of the Bible were translated into Latin, but it was not until later that we get the Latin Vulgate or the standard Bible in Latin.
01:07:22
It comes to us in the fourth century, and that becomes the standard Bible of the Western Church.
01:07:30
Remember how the church divided in 1054? What was the division? Eastern and Western, right? You have the Western Roman Catholic Church, you have the Eastern Orthodox Church.
01:07:43
What is the Eastern Orthodox also referred to as? The Greek Orthodox Church, right? So the Eastern Church used the Greek, but the Western Church used the Latin, all right? So this is the argument from the Roman Catholic Church is this has been our Bible, was our Bible, and has been our Bible since the fourth century.
01:08:08
Who are we to call it into question? Well, the first thing we have to consider is Jerome himself.
01:08:15
When Jerome translated the Bible, when he translated it into the Latin, he argued himself against the inclusion of these books, these additional books, because he had studied the Palestinian canon and discovered that these books were not included there.
01:08:40
They were included in the Alexandrian canon because of the Septuagint, but they were not included in the Palestinian canon, and so he argued for their non-acceptance.
01:08:49
However, because of pressure, they were included, they were translated, they were placed as part of the Latin Bible, and they were part of the Bible for 1,000 years.
01:09:01
It is the reality of history.
01:09:04
However, there has always been a recognition that they were not the same as the rest of the Bible.
01:09:11
They are called in Roman Catholic teaching the deuterocanonicals.
01:09:16
What does the word deutero mean? Second.
01:09:19
Second, that's right.
01:09:20
It's where we like the word deuteronomy means second law.
01:09:23
The deuterocanonical means the secondary canon or the lesser canon.
01:09:30
So even within Roman Catholic theology, they understand these books are not at the same level of the canon.
01:09:38
So that's first thing very important to recognize.
01:09:44
They don't call them apocrypha.
01:09:45
That's a term typically Protestants use because we don't believe that they should be there at all, but they do at least distinguish them as deuterocanonical.
01:09:57
They understand there's a distinction between that which is truly canon and that which these books represent.
01:10:08
And these books do have some important value.
01:10:13
The books of the Maccabees, for instance, are important because they tell some of the history that happened between the Old Testament and the New Testament.
01:10:23
There is 400 years between the writing of Malachi and the writing of Matthew.
01:10:28
And some of the books that are included in that deuterocanonical or apocryphal section are books that fill in some of those historical gaps, such as the Maccabean Revolt and all of those things and what happened during that time period.
01:10:45
And so they do have some historical value.
01:10:50
And I think you should read them.
01:10:53
Some people say, oh, don't read it, it's all devilish.
01:10:56
No, it's historical.
01:10:58
Now, some of them read like biblical fan fiction.
01:11:02
We're gonna talk about that in a moment.
01:11:03
They don't have, again, the same pedigree as the scriptures but they are still worthy of our attention, even though we don't say that they are scripture.
01:11:15
The New Testament has the same thing.
01:11:18
We have apocryphal New Testament books.
01:11:22
For instance, the Epistle of Barnabas.
01:11:26
I read from that two weeks ago on a Sunday morning.
01:11:30
Remember? I was preaching on the subject of the Lord's Day being Sunday and the Bible says very little about that but some of the extra biblical writings of that period talk about Sunday as the Lord's Day.
01:11:44
So I quoted from the letter or the Epistle of Barnabas.
01:11:48
And so that's not Bible but it is written at that period of time, the didache.
01:11:54
It's written at that period of time, therefore it has value.
01:11:57
It has historic merit.
01:12:01
So just because something isn't scripture doesn't mean it doesn't have value.
01:12:06
And this is where the divide comes between the Roman Catholic and the Protestant.
01:12:11
The Protestants do not believe that the Apocrypha is scripture and the Roman Catholic believes that the Apocrypha is secondary scripture, deuterocanonical.
01:12:24
So here are some reasons why Protestants deny the deuterocanonical books or the Apocryphal books.
01:12:36
Number one, this is, I've already said this so I'll say it again.
01:12:42
The Apocryphal books were never included or accepted in the Palestinian or Hebrew canon.
01:12:46
They just weren't.
01:12:47
They weren't part of the Palestinian canon.
01:12:50
Number two, Jesus and the apostles and the New Testament writers never quote from any of those books as scripture.
01:12:59
What's the one term that's usually used for scripture? Thus sayeth the Lord, right? We'll read that phrase and then it'll be a quote from the Old Testament or as was written in the prophets and it'll be a quote from the Old Testament.
01:13:12
We never see that with any application to any of the Apocryphal books in the New Testament.
01:13:18
Have you guys seen that picture where it shows all of the cross references in the Bible? It looks like a rainbow.
01:13:25
It's got all of the Old Testament scriptures and all the New Testament scriptures and it shows every cross reference and it's this massive picture of how many times the Old Testament is cited by the New Testament.
01:13:38
It's just this massive picture.
01:13:40
The New Testament cites the Old Testament over and over and over and over and over again because it's drawing from the authority of the Old Testament to make the arguments from the New.
01:13:50
Think about how Paul makes his arguments in Romans.
01:13:53
He makes his argument of justification by faith based upon the life of who? Abraham, right? He uses Abraham as the authoritative example, but they never use these books.
01:14:04
They never cite them and say, thus sayeth the Lord.
01:14:07
So that's important.
01:14:09
Number three, most of the Old Testament Apocryphal books were written during Israel's post-biblical period.
01:14:20
Now again, this is somewhat debated.
01:14:21
What does that mean? The post-biblical period meaning the writing of the last prophet.
01:14:27
And it's interesting, if you want to get into the question of time, there's a passage in the Old Testament, and I don't have it on my, I don't have it in my mind right now, but it says, it's, I'm sorry, it's not.
01:14:45
It's in the New Testament, but Jesus says it.
01:14:47
He says, from the blood of Abel to the blood of of Zachariah, son of Barakai.
01:14:58
He says that phrase.
01:15:00
And what he's doing there is he's making a marker point.
01:15:03
Because Abel's the first person killed in the Bible, and Zachariah, that person he's referencing, is the last person killed in Chronicles, which was the last book written in the Old Testament.
01:15:15
And he's marking out the points of God's word in that text.
01:15:21
From the blood of Abel to the blood of Zachariah, he's saying, boom, boom, there's this, here's the marker posts of the Old Testament.
01:15:29
Plenty of people died after that guy, but he's referencing what is scripture.
01:15:35
And I get you the verse, I'm sorry, I don't have it off the top of my head.
01:15:38
But that's what we talk about when we talk about the post-biblical period.
01:15:40
The people of God recognized silent times.
01:15:44
There are two 400-year periods of silence in the scriptures.
01:15:49
The first 400-year period of silence comes between the time of Joseph and Moses.
01:15:57
As far as we know, God did not speak through prophetic utterance between the time of Joseph and Moses.
01:16:04
From Genesis to Exodus, there's a 400-year period.
01:16:07
And as far as we can tell, God did not speak prophetically between the time of Malachi and Matthew.
01:16:14
And both of those 400-year periods preceded the moment of great revelation, first with Moses, then with Christ.
01:16:24
The law came through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
01:16:28
Both preceded by 400 years of silence.
01:16:32
It's an interesting parallel when you look at the two.
01:16:36
So when we say Israel's post-biblical period, we're talking about that 400 years.
01:16:46
Number four, many Jewish and Christian scholars reject the Apocrypha.
01:16:54
Number five, the Apocrypha includes many historical and geographical inaccuracies.
01:17:02
That's another big part of why we don't accept it, is it does include mistakes, just plain errors.
01:17:12
One of the books says Nebuchadnezzar was king of Nineveh, I think.
01:17:20
I may be off on that a little, but there's a point where it names a king as king of this person, it's like not, you missed it by like a mile.
01:17:28
That's not the right guy, not the right place.
01:17:30
And so that's just one of the historical and geographical inaccuracies.
01:17:37
Number six, some of the Apocrypha books teach unbiblical and heretical doctrines.
01:17:43
Most specifically, the doctrine of purgatory is found nowhere in the Old Testament or in the New Testament, but there is a passage in the Apocrypha which is used to support the doctrine of purgatory.
01:17:56
I don't even think that the passage that they use really does support it, but it's the only one that they have and it's in the Apocrypha.
01:18:07
Purgatory is such an unbiblical doctrine all the way around, because it diminishes the work of Christ by far, saying that we have to be purged for our own sins when Christ has died for our sins.
01:18:22
Number seven, the late date for the acceptance.
01:18:28
The Apocrypha was not officially accepted in the Roman Catholic Church until the Council of Trent.
01:18:34
And the Council of Trent, if you're not familiar, was a post-Reformation council, which means it took place in 1545.
01:18:43
Between 1545 and 1563.
01:18:47
The Apocrypha was not recognized as scripture by a council until the Council of Trent in 1545.
01:19:00
Lastly, there is no claim in the Apocrypha that it is the word of God.
01:19:03
So there's just over and over no reason why we should accept it as the word of God.
01:19:09
However, it is still valuable.
01:19:10
It gives information that is useful and therefore we should not simply say that it has no value, but not put it on the same shelf as scripture.
01:19:25
So, closing thoughts, and then I'll take any questions you have.
01:19:29
There were no angelic messengers who brought down from heaven a golden index and said, these are the books of the Bible.
01:19:34
But though that did not happen, we can still trust that what we hold includes the correct, infallible, and complete word of God.
01:19:42
Why? Because it is apparent that God put forth as much effort in assuring that his people would know which books he inspired as he did in inspiring them in the first place.
01:19:52
And aside from a few rare occasions, like God speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai, the inspiration of scripture was not accomplished by great fanfare.
01:20:00
There were not lightning bolt strikes in the room when Paul wrote his letter to Romans, at least not that we know.
01:20:06
Instead, what we have is we have the scripture given, recognized, and passed down.
01:20:15
And we didn't need those things for it to be recognized.
01:20:18
God saw to it that his word would be recognized and not lost.
01:20:24
All right, so we are to the end of the class.
01:20:26
What questions do you have about the subject? I know I ain't that good of a teacher, so.
01:20:37
Yes.
01:20:38
So, you said the apocryphal.
01:20:43
They were included within the Septuagint.
01:20:46
But they were used in other books.
01:20:48
Yes.
01:20:48
How did they? Well, again, the Palestinian canon was well-established long before this.
01:21:01
They knew and had.
01:21:03
The Septuagint is a work of about second century B.C., so the books would have already been recognized.
01:21:09
So we're comparing, at that point, comparing what the Septuagint included, which was not included in the Palestinian canon.
01:21:15
So the Palestinian is older than the Septuagint? Yes, yeah.
01:21:20
Recognized and older, for sure.
01:21:22
Yeah.
01:21:23
We're gonna talk about that some next week, because next week we're actually doing our Old Testament, Old Testament transmission.
01:21:31
We're gonna start the subject of part three, which is transmission.
01:21:35
And we're gonna talk about how the books went from being, from what we would call the era of writing to the Talmudic era to the Masoretic era and that coming down for the Old Testament.
01:21:47
Yeah.
01:21:47
And then recognizing, I think the Septuagint has a lot of value, but there are also things that it creates issues, and this is one of the issues, is it has variant readings from the Masoretic text.
01:22:00
We're gonna talk about textual variation.
01:22:01
We're gonna talk about that some.
01:22:02
And it has things like this, which are the inclusion of the apocryphal books.
01:22:09
Yeah.
01:22:11
All right, anyone else? All right, guys, well, that was a lot.
01:22:17
And I hope that it was at least somewhat helpful for you.
01:22:20
A couple of things to just stick in your mind.
01:22:22
Most important thing about canon is God determines canon, the church discovers canon.
01:22:27
If you get those mixed up, then that's a problem.
01:22:29
If you start thinking the church is the one who determined it rather than discovered it.
01:22:33
Yes, sir.
01:22:37
Yeah, you can go to a Christian bookstore and you can buy a Roman Catholic edition of the Bible.
01:22:45
I think the Dewey Rames is theirs.
01:22:47
And you use that and it has the apocrypha in it.
01:22:52
Interesting historical note, the 1611 King James Bible had the apocrypha in it because, again, it was recognized by the church at that point.
01:23:00
The Western church had recognized it as part of the Latin Bible.
01:23:04
But the Protestants have never recognized that as a part of scripture.
01:23:08
And as I said, the Roman Catholics saw it as a secondary canon, not as part of the scripture, as the complete part of the scripture.
01:23:16
I know you mentioned that the covenant.
01:23:25
And that we would say that's in the mind of God.
01:23:48
Sure, yeah, I wouldn't have any issue with that.
01:23:50
And I would say that, in much like the same way we would say things like the cross of Christ from the foundation of the world, God had determined this.
01:24:00
And so, yes, I would say the canon is in the same category.
01:24:03
Yeah, I agree.
01:24:06
Anyone else? All right, well, let's close with prayer.
01:24:10
Father, I thank you for your word, for your truth.
01:24:13
And I pray, Lord, that now, as we seek to go home and finish our Lord's Day together, that you would keep us safe on our drive and bring us back next week excited to learn.
01:24:22
In Christ's name, amen.
01:24:24
Let me say this before I shut the camera off.
01:24:26
Next week, we have a beach baptism after church.
01:24:29
So we are gonna move the time to five o'clock instead of 4.30.
01:24:33
Give me an extra 30 minutes to get back here and get ready.
01:24:36
So next week's class will be five o'clock instead of 4.30.