Lesson 11: Defining and Defending the Canon, Part 2

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Lesson 11: Defining and Defending the Canon, Part 3

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Father, we are thankful that we have this place to meet, that You have provided that for us, that You have given us a free country to live in, that we are able to be here and fellowship and worship with such freedom and such enjoyable fellowship.

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We're grateful for Your Word, which guides us and gives us truth in all things, and we are grateful that You have not only inspired

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Scripture, but that You have preserved it for us over thousands of years, that we may have

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Your holy and true Word. And it is in the light of Your Word that we see light and that we see truth, and we pray today that You would help us to understand how it is that You have preserved this and how

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You have worked in history to give us Your Word. And may we appreciate that, and may we love it in You, thus

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You even more, we ask in Christ's name. Amen. Alright, well we are continuing our series on how

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God wrote a book, and today we're still in Lesson 11, Defining and Defending the Canon, so if you have a workbook and you want to join us in your workbook,

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Lesson 11, Defining and Defending the Canon. And while you're finding your place, I'll just review what it is that we looked at last week.

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We first described what canonicity is when we speak of something being part of the canon or left out of the canon, or something being canonical or non -canonical, we're referring to that list of books which we regard to be authoritative and inspired

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God -given Scripture. And so the word canon simply would refer to a rule or a stick by which you might judge something or measure something, it's the measure of something, and so a list of books like the marks on a ruler would be considered the books that are authoritative, and that list of books which we consider, which we call the canon, thus becomes the measuring rod by which all other things are judged.

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And that was the definition of canon, then we described last week some of the concerns that raised, some of the things that happened that raised the need to determine, or at least to decide what a canon was and to determine what books belonged in that canon.

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And we looked at the theological concerns, you had early church heretics like Marcion who embraced some books and rejected other books and even reject part of books in order to sort of keep his false teaching going.

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Then we looked at the ecclesiastical concerns that arose, which books do you regard as authoritative to govern your worship as a church?

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Which books do you use for the evangelization of the pagans? Which books do you translate into other languages to evangelize people?

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Which books do you preach out of and teach out of and read publicly? And so there was that ecclesiastical,

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I'll get it, I'm going to get it concern. Third, there was the political concerns, so you had the persecution of the early church.

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Really persecution started around 63 AD and just spread and grew in intensity until Constantine, the rule of Constantine and his conversion in 312.

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And the persecution of Christians raised the need again to make the decision or at least to know what books are authoritative.

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What books am I going to die for? What books am I going to hand over to authorities? What books am I going to work to preserve and to copy and to hide from those who want to burn scripture?

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Those are the concerns, theological, ecclesiastical and political that plagued the early church that raised the need to determine and to know which books were scripture and which books were not.

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Cornell, after Sunday school last week, pointed out something that I hadn't thought of and I should have mentioned this, but this is a good point.

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That decision, I shouldn't say it that way, that determination or that understanding of which books are authoritative and which books are not, the defining of the canon, the figuring out of what is canonical, that happened as a result of heretics, persecution and the oppression of the state.

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And I want you to remember that those were horrible things that happened to Christians, horrible things that happened inside the church, but it was the horrible things that happened to Christians and inside the church that really caused the church to crystallize this in their own view and understanding.

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And a lot of the defining doctrines of our Christian faith were defined and codified in the context of heretics who were plaguing the church.

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And when we looked at some of the early church heresies in that series we did on early church heresies, we saw that, that the rise of a heresy made everybody say, okay, what is it that we actually believe about this?

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And out of that would come a counsel and a confession and some sort of an understanding of those doctrines and a clarification.

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It was those horrible things that happened to the early church that really drove the clarification of what is canonical and what is non -canonical.

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All right, so we're at number three, Roman numeral number three in lesson 11 there. Why did this universal recognition take so long in the early church?

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Because we looked at last week that it was not until in the years 300 and 400 that you have sort of this public list being produced of what is

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Scripture and what is not Scripture, which books we're dying for and which books we're not dying for. Why did the recognition of the 27 books of the

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New Testament not happen instantaneously in the church? That's one of the questions. Or at least the recognition of it universally not happen within the early church.

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And there are three reasons for this, and first of all, you have the geographical diversity of origin.

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You have books written from all kinds of different places. For instance, Jerusalem was the home, was the place of writing the book of James, Galatians was written in Antioch, 1

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Peter was written in Rome, and 1 Corinthians was written in Ephesus. So you have a lot of New Testament books that are originating from all over the

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Roman Empire in all these various locations. It's not like there was one central hub where all of the apostles got together and wrote their books and then copied them and distributed them amongst the people.

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You might be in the city of Jerusalem and not know for a decade or two decades that Paul wrote a book to the Ephesian church.

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It might take 20 years for you to even see a copy of that, and that's difficult for us to understand it, but that's how the ancient world was.

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That's how writings happened 2 ,000 years ago. You might be in the city of Rome and not even be aware that there is a

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Gospel of Matthew written to Jews. Why? Because it doesn't get circulated, it doesn't get copied, it never landed in your church.

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So the geographical diversity of the origin of the books is one reason why an official kind of recognition or a universal recognition took so long.

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Second, there's the geographical diversity of destination. In other words, books were written to people in all kinds of different locations.

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Not like the entire New Testament was composed in one location and sent to a people group in another location.

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You had these books not only originating in different locations, being written in different locations, but they were being sent and distributed to various locations as well.

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Philippians was written to the Macedonians. Romans was written to Rome.

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First Peter was sent to Western Asia. Revelation was sent to Eastern Asia. Galatians was sent to the city of Galatia.

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Titus was sent to an island. So the geographical diversity of the places to which the books were written.

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And then third, the diversity of the recipients. You had different groups of people. Some books were written to just one person.

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Paul wrote 1 Timothy to Timothy, and 2 Timothy to Timothy, and Titus to Titus.

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Matthew was written to the church at large. James was written to the scattered believers.

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First Peter had a geographical location in mind when he wrote to the saints who were scattered out,

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Bithynia and all those regions mentioned in the introduction to 1 Peter. You had individual churches to whom books were written, like the

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Thessalonians, the Corinthians and the Philippians. And then Luke wrote his book to one person as well, right? One of the

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Gospels was written to just one person. Who was it? Theophilus. Right? Acts was written to Theophilus.

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I think I mentioned this before, but do you realize that a quarter of the text of your New Testament was written to one guy, Theophilus, that we know virtually nothing about?

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That's wild, isn't it? Not one quarter of the books, but one quarter of the text of your New Testament was written to one man of whom we know virtually nothing, other than his name is

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Theophilus, and he had some sort of a title called the Most Excellent Theophilus, at least when Luke wrote the Gospel of Luke.

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So Norman Geisel writes this, with such a geographical diversity of origin and destination, it is understandable that not all the churches would immediately possess copies of all the inspired

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New Testament books. Add to this the problems of communication and transportation, and it is easy to see that it would take some time before there was anything like a general recognition of all 27 books of the

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New Testament canon. And yet all of those difficulties notwithstanding, the early church compiled collections of whatever books they did possess, and whatever other literature they could verify, and they copied it and circulated it widely.

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All right. Let me, I need to diverge from our notes here for just a moment, because what

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I'm about to give you is not necessarily in your notes, so don't try and follow along at this point. Let's answer this question.

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We've got to answer this question before we can move on. Who determines if a book is canonical? Who determines if a book is canonical?

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I'll give you a second to think about it, and then I'm going to go ahead and take answers whenever you want to give me an answer.

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Remember, there's no such thing as stupid answers, just stupid people giving answers. So you can go ahead and give me an answer, and even if it's wrong,

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I will gently correct you. Who determines if a book is canonical? Who determines if a book belongs in the

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New Testament? Peter? God. God? That's one answer.

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Ultimately, He would, right? He wrote it. Okay, any other answers?

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Various councils, that's another possibility. Individual Christians, does the church have a role in determining which books are canonical?

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Does the church have a role in that? Which church would have a role in that? Nobody wants to say anything.

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You truly are scared that you're going to give us what you think is a stupid answer, right? All right, let's look at a couple different views real quick in order to sort of introduce this.

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Let's look at a couple different views that people have offered for who or what determines whether a book is canonical.

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The first one is that the church confers canonicity on a book. The church confers canonicity on a book.

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This is the view of the Roman Catholic Church. They would say that the church is the ones who determine whether a book belongs in the canon or not.

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Now, they were in agreement with us Protestants for roughly 1 ,500 years of church history until in the mid -1 ,500s when they adopted a whole other chunk of books and determined that they were canonical, those books known as the

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Apocrypha. So the view of the Roman Catholic Church is that the church itself has the authority to say which books are in and which books were out.

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And they would look through church history and they would say that's exactly how it happened. Constantine and the early popes that succeeded

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Peter and those bishops, they had councils, they had determinations, the church had the authority. They said Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and not the gospels of Barnabas, Peter, Mary, and Martha.

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Instead, they said that those books are canonical and these books are in and those books are out that the church makes that determination. So that's the first view.

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The church confers canonicity. Here's the problem with that view. How does the church know which books are canonical and which books are not?

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Yeah, especially the Roman Catholic Church, how would they know which ones are canonical and which ones are not?

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But let's just lay aside the identity of the theological convictions of the church itself and just ask what is the problem, what's one of the problems with the church being the one to confer canonicity?

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How would they know which books are canonical or not? They would have to have what? They'd have to have the

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Holy Spirit. Wouldn't they have to have some sort of criteria to know which books are canonical and which books are not?

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They'd have to have some sort of a list, right, of if a book meets these qualifications, then we would know whether or not it belongs in the canon.

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Who would determine that list? Go ahead.

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You would have to have this. The question is, is this question not somewhat dealing with the theological underpinnings of who's making that determination of what is canonical, and it certainly would.

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But if you're going to say that this book belongs in and that book belongs out, then you have to have some sort of a list of qualifications, right, qualities that you're looking for in a book that's canonical.

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Okay, so how do I know which qualities that I choose? The only answer that the

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Roman Catholic Church can offer is that the church would determine what the qualifications are by which the church determines which books belong in the canon.

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In other words, if I'm holding in my hand a copy of the Gospel of Matthew and I say, how do

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I know that this book is canonical? The church would say, with a view that the church confers canonicity, they would say, well, the church has conferred canonicity.

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Canonicity is something that we say belongs to this book. It's a quality or a title, an authority that we put upon that book, and by that we know that it is canonical.

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So what gives the church the authority to confer canonicity? That's another question. What would give the church the authority to confer canonicity?

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The Roman Catholic Church would say, well, Scripture gives us the authority to confer canonicity. So the next question, which

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Scripture gives you the authority to confer canonicity? And if you're saying that that is the authority, that's the authoritative

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Scripture that gives you the authority to confer canonicity, how do you know that that Scripture is authoritative? Well, because the church has determined that it's authoritative, and you can see that we're on a big circle, right?

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The church says it's authoritative, and by that authority we are able to confer canonicity, and we confer canonicity upon that book, which gives us the authority to confer canonicity.

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That's how that goes. That's one of the problems with that view. So ultimately, this view places the church above Scripture as the judge to what is canonical and authoritative and what is not.

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That's the fundamental problem with that view of canonicity. It places the church, be it a council or a pope or bishops or whatever it is, above Scripture as the one who judges and evaluates whether something is canonical or not.

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Here's the second view, that the early Christians chose the books. That the early

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Christians chose the books. You can say, we'll go back to the first century, we're not even waiting until the third or fourth century, and Constantine and the

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Council of Nicaea and these other councils were just going to say that the early church, the first century

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Christians chose which books belonged in and which books belonged out. Okay. What criteria did they use?

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How did the early church do this? Did the early Christians vote on it? Did they take a vote in Corinth?

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Okay, we got a letter from Paul, who votes that this is canonical? Is that how they worked?

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And we got another copy of a letter that Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, let's vote if this is canonical. Let's get the church at Thessalonica, the church at Corinth and the church at Colossae together and vote on whether this collection of books is canonical or not.

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Did they do it by vote? Did they do it by a consensus? Well, everybody seems to agree that that's true, so we're just going to go kind of along with the flow.

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Most Christians believe these books are canonical, so we're just going to go along with it as well. Or did they do it by use? Did they somehow determine which books are most used?

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You know, everybody's reading Matthew, but nobody's reading the Gospel of Barnabas. Everybody loves the Gospel of Luke, but people aren't really hot on the

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Gospel of Thomas. So I guess the ones that are used most, those are the ones we're going to view as canonical. So the view that the

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Christians, the early Christians in the first century determined or conferred canonicity upon books, one of the questions that has to be asked is what criteria did they use and what gave them the authority?

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Who is the authority that confers this canonicity upon books? See, we're coming back to an authority issue.

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What determines the criteria by which we acknowledge certain books as inspired, authoritative, or not?

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In each of these views, we're doing the same thing. We're placing something above Scripture as that which determines what is canonical and what is not.

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The third view is that there are certain qualities of canonical books. And so we need to find out what these qualities are and then we can historically look at all of the potential books.

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We can line up Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Thomas, Barnabas, Peter, Paul, this other

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Gospel, Gospel of Mary, we can, the Gnostic Gospels, we can line them all up and we'll just ask which of this collection of 27

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Gospels that were written in the first 300 years of the church, which of these 27 have these qualities?

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And if they have those qualities, then we'll set those aside, those are canonical and the others are not. What is the problem with that approach to canonicity?

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Differing opinions, what are the criteria? And how do we determine what the criteria are?

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What is the authority that is outside of Scripture that tells us what is Scripture?

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That's the problem with that view. Who determines what that standard is and by what authority?

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Now note, I want you to know something, canonical books will all have certain qualities. They will all have apostolic authority, they will all be living books, they will all be inspired, they'll be inerrant, they'll be preserved, they'll have certain qualities that all canonical books will share.

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But the question is, what makes those books have those qualities?

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Do we look for those qualities? Do we know that those qualities exist because of some authority outside of Scripture?

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And then once we find those qualities in a book, we say, okay, that one belongs in our Bible. And when we don't find those qualities in a book, that one doesn't belong in our

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Bible. So are those qualities something that is outside of Scripture? These things, inspiration, authority, inerrancy, et cetera, those qualities mark the books because they are canonical.

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For instance, widespread acceptance of a book in the early church did not make it canonical.

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Its canonical status made it widely accepted. I want you to understand the difference between these two things.

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When we say that this book was widely accepted amongst Christians, okay, that's not what makes it canonical. We don't say if it's widely accepted, that makes it canonical.

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It was widely accepted because it was what? Because it was authoritative, it was Scripture. That's why it was widely accepted.

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So with all of these competing views of how we determine what books belong in and what books belong out, the problem with all of them is that we are appealing to a standard outside Scripture to determine what is

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Scripture. So we come back to the question, who determines if a book is canonical? It obviously can't be the church because that would suggest that the church is a higher authority than Scripture.

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It obviously couldn't be the early Christians because that would suggest that the Christians themselves were an authority over Scripture. And it obviously can't be because they have certain qualities because then that would suggest that those qualities themselves, which we determine outside of Scripture, then become the standard by which we see them as Scripture.

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Thomas, the second answer,

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Scripture identifies itself as Scripture, as the

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Word of God. It does, but there are other books that also claim to be the Word of God. So that has to be, we talked about this before, that's a necessary condition.

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Scripture has to say that it is from God. Any book that is from God would tell us it's from God, but that's not, it's a necessary condition of Scripture or canonicity, but it's not a determining one because the

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Book of Mormon also claims to be from God, the Koran also claims to be from God, the Bhagavad Gita also claims to be from God. So that's not sufficient.

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It has to be there, but it's not enough to determine canonicity, okay? So now we're back to your canonicity, now back to the workbook in Lesson 11.

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Who determines what is canonical? Another way we could say it is, who determines what is authoritative?

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That's actually a better way of asking the question because it removes the presuppositions that there's something outside of Scripture that we measure

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Scripture against. Let me ask the question this way. When does a canon come into being?

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And we've talked about a canon, a list of 66 books, 39 Old Testament, 27 New Testament. So here's the question.

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When does a canon, a list of books, when does a canon come into being?

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Was there a canon before God inspired a single word of Scripture? Did a canon exist?

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Is this hard to answer? Did a canon exist before God inspired a single word of Scripture?

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So there was no written revelation, no divine written inspiration whatsoever. None of the 66 books, was there a canon at that point?

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Sorry, what? In God's will, there was, but in terms of, if you lived back then, you said, okay, what books are authoritative?

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What belongs to the canon? That would have been a nonsensical question, wouldn't it? So who, did a canon exist before God wrote a book, a single book of Scripture?

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The answer to that is no. What brought a canon into being? When God wrote a book, the canon came into being.

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Let's assume, because I think a case can be made, that Job was the first book of the Bible written, the oldest book that we have, okay?

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When whoever wrote Job, wrote Job, how many books were in the canon? One. Now, in the mind of God, he had 66 planned, but at that point, there was one book in the canon.

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There was one authoritative book given by divine inspiration that was inerrant and infallible.

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What determined that that book was in the canon? It goes back to Peter's question at the beginning of all of this mind wrestling that I've asked you to do.

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God determined that that book was in the canon. And how did God create a canon? By writing that book.

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When that book was written, there was one book in the canon. There was one book that was divinely authoritative, inspired, and inerrant.

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So God is the one who determines which books belong in Scripture and which books do not belong in Scripture.

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How does he determine that? How does he create the canon? By inspiring books, right?

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So Sub -Job was the first one written. Let's take the

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Pentateuch, Moses' five books, Moses writes Genesis, let's assume they were written in this order.

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Genesis, and then he writes Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and then Deuteronomy. Now we have how many books in the canon? The five books of Moses plus Job, we have six books in the canon.

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Who determined that those books were canonical? God determines it. The church doesn't determine it.

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Christians don't determine it. See, Christians do not determine or fix. We do not confer authority on a book.

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The church of God, true Christians, recognize which books God has written. We don't determine whether something is canonical.

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We discover whether it is canonical. God is the one who determines it by writing the book. We discover that it is what it claims to be.

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We discover that it is the Word of God. We recognize it as authoritative, not because we confer authority on it, but because God Himself has written it, and therefore it is authoritative.

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Yes? Isn't it love? Yeah, God determines

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Himself which books are going to be in there. That's why I say in the mind of God, when Job was written in the mind of God, there were 66 books that would eventually be considered canonical.

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But at the moment before Job was written, there is no canon, there are no canonical books. There's just Job.

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And whatever God speaks is authoritative and binding and inerrant and infallible and inspired.

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There's no way of getting around that. And so when God writes a book, it is what it is, even if nobody recognizes it.

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So now the next question is, if Paul wrote a book, but those who received it did not recognize it as authoritative, does that nullify its canonicity?

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If Paul writes a book, and then he sends it to somebody, and they say, this is just Paul, it's just his ideas, patriarchal, sexist

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Paul, not wanting women to preach and teach, that's just Paul as we might expect, and toss that in the trash, we don't even recognize that as authoritative.

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Would their reaction to that book nullify its inspiration, inerrancy, and infallibility? Would their reaction to that book therefore make it non -canonical?

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Or is it canonical regardless of how the people who receive it, receive it? It is canonical regardless of what they do with it or how they receive it.

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Why? Because the people receiving it don't determine whether or not it's canonical. The person who writes it does not determine whether or not it belongs in Scripture.

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God himself determines what belongs in Scripture. God determined the canon, we discover the canon. It's up to the church of God to simply look at the books and say, because I have the

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Holy Spirit of God in me, this is inspired Scripture, and this is not inspired Scripture. All I'm doing when

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I'm wrestling through this issue is I'm applying, I'm doing the same thing regarding Scripture that we do in every other area of life.

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So if I ask you, is it okay for women to preach in a public assembly of men? What would we go to to answer that question?

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Go to Scripture. Is abortion okay? What do we go to to answer that question? Scripture. Is homosexuality acceptable?

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What do we go to to answer that question? Scripture. How should my house be structured? Who's the authority? Who makes the decisions? How am

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I to treat my wife? How is my wife to treat me? Where do we go to to make these decisions, to find this information? We go to Scripture.

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All we're doing with the issue of canonicity is we are looking at Scripture to determine the question, how do

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I know what is inspired by God? To what source do we go to that is higher than Scripture to make that decision?

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We can't go to the church, we can't go to Christians, we can't go to some standard outside Scripture. What do we do? We go to Scripture. Yes? I have a question.

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Okay. How does the conversation change or how would we approach the conversation if we're dealing with an unbeliever who maybe doesn't recognize

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Scripture or is picking issues with which books belong in and which books belong out? Since our way of determining, since our way of discovering canonicity,

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I almost said determining there and that was the wrong word, since our way of discovering canonicity or recognizing what book is authoritative in Scripture has to do with the testimony of the

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Spirit of God within me, I have an insight, I have the author living in me. And so there is a subjective element by which we read,

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I read the Gospel of Barnabas and I say, no, this is not the work of the Holy Spirit. I know that because I have the

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Holy Spirit living within me. There's a subjective element to this. So if I'm dealing with an unbeliever and they're saying, how do you know which books belong in Scripture and which books don't belong in Scripture?

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I would say to them, the means by which I know this are because God Himself has determined which books belong in Scripture.

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He has promised to inspire that, to preserve it inerrant and infallible and to preserve it for His church forever.

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So what do we have in Scripture are these 66 books which God Himself has written and He has preserved and Christians, those who have the

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Spirit of God have recognized this for centuries that this is the case. So I don't expect an unbeliever to be able to understand what books are canonical and which books are not canonical.

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Now most objections to the canonicity of certain books are going to go back to, well, you also have the Gospel of Barnabas and you have the

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Gospel of Matthew, how do you know which one belongs in there? And then you could just put it right back in their lap and say, have you either read the Gospel of Barnabas or the

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Gospel of Matthew? Have you read them in full and studied through both of them? And most unbelievers who raise issues regarding canonicity have never read any of the non -canonical books.

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They haven't read any of them. They've never done any kind of a comparison amongst them, most of the people you meet on the street. Now if you're talking to the professor of religious studies at Harvard University, he's probably well equipped to talk about the

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Gospel of Thomas because such a Gnostic gospel he would love with all of his being. But your average run -of -the -mill garden variety pagan out on the street who you're witnessing to is not going to be adept at having any kind of conversation like that.

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That help? Okay, so where were we at before we got into that? Do we do number four?

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Yeah, that's what we're working on right now, general considerations, that authority is not conferred upon books by naming them as canonical.

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In other words, there's no authority outside of that which would say, okay, this is canonical and that's canonical because we say so.

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What gives you the authority to say so? Whether you're church, council, or Christians, individual Christians, what gives you the authority to say so?

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In all of those issues we come into a needless circular reasoning with all of the other views.

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I'm suggesting to you that God Himself has determined it, so our arguing in a circle goes right back to God, He determines it, and since He has determined it, and this is why we spent time talking about inspiration, inerrancy, infallibility, and the doctrine of preservation, since God Himself has determined that and He has promised to hand off to us

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His revelation to us and to preserve it for us, we can simply look at what has God done in history to preserve these writings and then we as Christians can say, we recognize because we hear the voice of the shepherd in Scripture.

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This is not private revelations, God whispering in my ear and all that nonsense, we hear the voice of the shepherd in Scripture, we hear

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Him when He calls to us, there is a spiritual reality that is true for those who belong to Him, and that is that we have the ability to tell what comes from God and what does not come from God.

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I don't expect pagans to have that ability, I don't expect undiscerning people to have that ability, but I do expect

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Christians to have that ability. So then the question is, what books have Christians universally recognized as divine inspiration from the very beginning?

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That would be the next question that we ask. And we're asking that question not because that's the criteria that makes it canonical, but rather that that is what

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I would expect from a canonical book. Because the book is canonical, I expect Christians to recognize that throughout history.

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I don't say it's canonical because Christians have recognized that throughout history, that's putting the cart before the horse.

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I'm going to switch those around and say, if something is canonical, I would expect it to be almost universally recognized through church history.

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I would expect the people of God to be able to look at it and say, yeah, this is the voice of God in this passage, in this book. Yes. Yeah, we have the

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Spirit of God dwelling in us, the author is living in us. Yeah, that's right.

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So Sarah Young's book, Jesus Calling, she claims to be giving divine inspiration, she claims that this is the whispers of God speaking to her,

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Jesus talking to her, and she writes these down, one for every day of the year, 365 of these little missives from Jesus.

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And there's no way of escaping the fact that she is claiming divine inspiration because she's claiming that this is the

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Word of God. I read Sarah Young's book, Jesus Calling, and I say, that's not Scripture. I can recognize that as a

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Christian that that's not Scripture. I can read Ephesians, and I can read Hebrews, and I can read the Gospel of John, and I can tell you those are

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Scripture. I recognize it. You recognize it. And so we have this ability, because we are the people of God, we are the covenant community to whom

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He has given the Holy Spirit and His Word, I would assume that there is some sort of an ability in us to recognize what is

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Scripture and what is not Scripture. And we make that determination not because of criteria outside of Scripture, but because of the nature of Scripture itself,

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God Himself has determined this, and He has given those books to us. Are there any other questions?

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Yes, Thomas. Have I just stated that the individuals within the

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Catholic Church who determined what books were in the Bible are not Christians? No, that's not what I was saying. Those people who lived back then,

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I can't know whether they're Christians or not, so that's not my place to judge that. I'm simply saying that the view of canonicity that the church determines what is canonical, that is caught in an endless regressive circular reasoning, and it is not biblical because it makes the church authoritative over Scripture.

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And it is Scripture that creates the church, not vice versa. Scripture creates the church.

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Scripture creates the people of God, regulates the people of God, and therefore it cannot be the church that creates what is

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Scripture. Say that last part again.

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It's possible that they were not Christians. It's also possible that the Roman Catholic Church in 1500, when they had the Apocrypha, had different theological or ecclesiastical reasons for doing so, other than the fact that there had already been a recognized canon for 1500 years.

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And they did have that. They did have a motivation. It was called the Reformation, by which they grabbed all of these other books and said, here's our authority, and we're just going to add these in.

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So whether those people were Christians who did that or not, I'm not determining that. I am saying that in terms of our view of canonicity, we come back to the fact that the canon is a self -authenticating entity.

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The canon exists, whether we recognize it or not, whether anybody likes it or not, the canon exists.

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God Himself has determined it, and it authenticates itself. It is what it is, and it shines like a light, and believers understand and recognize what that is.

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Yeah. Peter? Is it possible that in the future we could dig up a book that would be added to the canon?

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And I would say, no, because of what we're going to cover next week. We'll talk about it next week. See, I have to assume, there's an assumption that I'm making, and everybody makes assumptions when you're dealing with this issue.

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So people who disagree with me, they have all kinds of assumptions that they make as well. I'm going to put one of my presuppositions out on the table.

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If God wanted us to have a book today that is considered canonical, it would have been given to us 2 ,000 years ago, and it would have been recognized by the church for all this period of time.

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That's an assumption that I make going into it. I don't think that there is some book out there that God has neglected to give to His church for 2 ,000 years, and suddenly it comes on the scene.

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If we discover Paul's second letter to the Corinthians, or sorry, his first letter to the

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Corinthians, we have, 1 Corinthians is actually the second letter Paul wrote, 2 Corinthians is actually the fourth letter that Paul wrote.

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We have a first and a third that have not been preserved for us. Does that mean they weren't authoritative? They were authoritative because Paul wrote them.

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But are they canonical today? If we were to discover one of those in a cave in Africa somewhere, or a modern Dead Sea Scrolls discovery, and we thought, man, this is the

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Apostle Paul, I mean, his DNA is on this, the actual original document, would we consider it canonical?

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Would we accept it and put it into our New Testament as 1 Corinthians and then renumber them, right? 1

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Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, and 3 Corinthians, would we end up doing that? And the answer to that is no, because our belief is that if God wanted that for His church, for His covenant community, it would have been there from the beginning, preserved for us from the beginning.

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Because God has promised to give us an inerrant, inspired, infallible, and preserved revelation.

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That's the presupposition. And I'm bringing reformed presuppositions to this argument.

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God Himself is the authority. He determines this. And if He wanted us to have that, we would have had it forever. So even if we discovered it,

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I would say it's non -canonical, we just, it might be, it's like the Didache. Look, if we discovered Paul's shopping list,

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I need tent fabric, I need thread, I need needles, I need some labels, I need some ink and some dye. If we discovered that and said, dear

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Timothy, fetch me some, and he had a list and then signed the Apostle Paul, would we simply say that because Paul wrote it and we now have discovered it, that it is therefore canonical?

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And would we call it the book of shopping list? And what did I preach from it? Stand up here and say, turn in your Bibles to the book of shopping list.

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We're going to go through Paul's shopping list. Would we do that? Just because he wrote it. No, we would not. And so it's the same, it's the very same thing with the books that we might discover today.

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What God wants to have is there. That is a precept that we bring to this enterprise. All right, any more questions?

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Yes, Jack. If we were in a church that was preaching from the

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Gospel of Thomas, how would we get out of it? How would we realize that that is not canon?

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In the same way that if you're in the Mormon church and you're told that the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price or Scripture, and then

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God saves you, you would soon realize that these are late additions. And in studying those things, you as a believer would have a recognition that these things are not canonical.

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So you would be in this, I put you in the same class as a Mormon who is in a situation where you're being told that these things are authoritative.

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And it might take some time for God to save you out of that, sanctify you out of it. But I believe that He eventually would because those whom

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God saves, He eventually grows and removes them from false doctrine. Yeah, Brian.

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So, Brian says that he's a little uncomfortable when we talk about feelings, even if it's the people 2 ,000 years ago who had feelings.

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Can't we go back to Scripture and say, determine what is canon? That's exactly what I'm arguing is that Scripture itself, the writing of it, the existence of it is its own canon.

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And so we're looking not to our feelings, we're not looking to feelings or counsels or Christians or acceptance or any criteria outside of Scripture.

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We're simply saying God has promised to give us His Word. He has promised to preserve it and He has. Now as Christians, now the role is there is a subjective element to this where we as Christians do have the

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Spirit of God living in us and we recognize what is Scripture. And it's not based upon our feelings because I'm not arguing, and I'm glad you brought this up for clarification,

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I'm not arguing that if I feel strongly that the Gospel of Thomas is a great book, that that makes it Scripture.

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Even if eight billion people felt really strongly that the Gospel of Thomas was Scripture, that wouldn't make it canonical, it wouldn't make it authoritative because God Himself determines that.

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So what I'm actually appealing to is not our feelings or even our subjective assessment of it, I'm appealing to Scripture.

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So then the question becomes, if God has given to us an authoritative revelation, what are the qualities that an authoritative revelation would have?

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And we can see those qualities, and I went back to this earlier, like for instance widespread acceptance.

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We don't look and say, is the book widely accepted, therefore it's canonical. We say, it is canonical because God determined it's canonical, and therefore

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I would expect it to have certain qualities. Widespread acceptance would be one of those qualities. Does that clarify that at all?

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Okay. Yes. Number 4B, the church,

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I just wrote this down, the church did not decide upon which books would be in the Bible. The church simply recognized what

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Christians had always believed about certain books for three centuries. So when you go back to the councils in the late fourth century, we're not saying that because they said it's

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Scripture, it's therefore Scripture. I'm saying that these books had always been regarded as Scripture because they were always

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Scripture from the moment that they were written. Authority is conferred upon a book by God, not by the church. So they simply were recognizing what had always been affirmed by Christians.

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And letter C is the absence of a book, and this is maybe a good place to close. I didn't get nearly through half of what

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I thought we were going to do today. The absence of a book from a list is not evidence that the compiler of the list did not view the book as authoritative.

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Let me explain that for a moment. There are people who would go back and they would say, okay, well you go back to the first century, let me give you an example here,

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Irenaeus of Lyons who lived in 125 -200 A .D., he was a student of Polycarp who was a disciple of John the

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Apostle. He wrote the book Against Heresies in 180 A .D. He quoted from every New Testament book except Philemon, 3rd

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John, James, 2nd Peter and Hebrews. Now he accepted Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as authoritative, but Irenaeus quoted from all of our 27 books except for 5 of them, or 5 of them that he didn't quote from in his writings.

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So do we look at that and say, well Irenaeus did not regard those books as authoritative? Would you look at that and say, would you be justified in coming to that conclusion just because you can find an early church father from the first 300 years after the

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Apostles that didn't quote from a certain book or didn't reference a certain book, does that mean that they didn't view it as authoritative? It doesn't mean that at all, does it?

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It just means they didn't happen to quote from it. You'd be hard pressed to find in any of my writings a quotation, any of my published writings a quotation from 1

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Chronicles. It doesn't mean that I don't think 1 Chronicles is a scripture, it just means that I haven't had the occasion to quote from it.

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If you were to judge what this church viewed as canonical by what I preach on a

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Sunday morning, what conclusion would you come to? He really thinks the Gospel of John is canonical and the book of Hebrews, and he must really believe that Ecclesiastes is canonical because he taught that in Sunday school once and preached through it twice in his 25 years of pastoring.

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So you can't judge, you can't go back to the early church and look at what they published or what they wrote and what they said and say that they didn't recognize those certain books.

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They might not have known about those certain books or they might not have had opportunity to quote from those certain books.

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That was what number three there was supposed to be. Alright, are there any questions about that issue?

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We went really deep into something here that I hope got you to thinking along certain lines and kind of laid a little bit of a foundation for what is coming up.

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We're going to talk about what canonical books, what qualities they all have in common and how the early church sort of looked at those books and what they saw in those books.

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Any other questions? We'll do that next week. Yeah? Okay, so what about books in the

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Bible that certain people say should not be? I would say that that is in the same camp as Marcion who did the very same thing. Marcion, to reverse that, remember

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Marcion accepted all of Paul's writings and the Gospel of Luke but none of the other books. So I would say that they've got it wrong as to which books are authoritative and which books are not.

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Yeah, it's just it, you're wrong. You've got the list wrong and you're going against years of church history and understanding of how we got those books and why those books are in there and the fact that you cannot see that Mark is inspired or Luke is inspired is a you problem, not a problem with the book.

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That would be the short answer. All right? Okay, let's pray and we'll finish up.

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Father, we are so thankful again for Your Word. It is trustworthy and reliable and we know that You have worked in history through people, through Your people to not only write

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Scripture for us but to preserve it, to copy it and to hand it down to us. We thank You also that You have worked in Your church, in Your providence just as You have promised to preserve that which

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You have inspired. And You have given us Your Holy Spirit and we recognize what is Scripture. We hear Your voice in the pages of Scripture because of what

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You have written and how You have preserved it. And we thank You that You share this truth with us and that You have preserved it for us. We love

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You and thank You and pray that we might be a people of the book, adequately equipped for every good work and able to give an answer to those who ask us a reason for the hope that is in us.

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We ask these things and we commit ourselves to You in Christ's name. Next week we'll talk about canonicity in the early church.

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Did the early church recognize canon? And did the early church fathers recognize canon?

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And then if we get far enough we'll talk about the criteria or the qualities of canonicity. All right, we are dismissed, thanks.