The Apocrypha (White vs Matatics)

Okay, if I could have your attention, we are ready to start. The mic's not on.

Is it on? Is the mic working now?

No. No. There we go. There we are. Testing, testing. Well, we want to welcome everyone to the second debate between our

Roman Catholic friend Jerry Matitix and our Evangelical Protestant friend,

Reverend James White. My name is Kevin Offner, and I'm on staff with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at Harvard and MIT, and I've been asked to moderate for this evening.

Our topic tonight is the question, Is the Catholic Old Testament canon correct?

That's the question that they will both be discussing tonight. Jerry Matitix will be defending that and saying that it is, and Reverend White will be saying that it is not.

Well, let me say a few words of introduction about both of our panelists here tonight. James White has a

B .A. in Bible from Grand Canyon University and an M .A. in Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary, and he is currently the director of Alpha and Omega Ministries.

Jerry Matitix is a nationally known Catholic apologist who has his degree from the

University of New Hampshire and has a Master's degree from Gordon -Conwell Seminary up on the North Shore here, north of Boston.

Now, the way the debate will be run tonight is very much exactly as it was last night, that each panelist will be given 25 minutes for an opening statement, and then

Jerry Matitix will start. You can see that I was told to do this about 20 minutes ago.

Jerry Matitix will start off with 25 minutes, and then Reverend White will respond for 25 minutes with his opening statement, and then

Jerry will have 5 minutes of rebuttal, and Reverend White will have 5 minutes of rebuttal, and then they will once again have 5 minutes each, and then

Jerry will have 30 seconds to frame a question to Reverend White. Reverend White will have 2 minutes to reply, and then

Jerry will have 2 minutes to rebut the reply, and then it will be reversed. 30 seconds, 2 minutes, 2 minutes.

Then we'll have 15 minute closing questions by both. And then finally, we will have a time for discussion from the audience as well.

I guess one thing I would like to say before we start here is our desire here is to really hear the panelists and not primarily each other, so I would just ask all of us to be respectful to each of the speakers, and let's, whichever side you're on, let's have the integrity to give both people a full shot at giving their answers, okay?

So we'll start with Jerry Matitix on the question, Is the Catholic Old Testament Canon Correct?

Jerry, you have 25 minutes. Good evening, and welcome back for the second night of these debates, and I would like to ask you to join with me, please, in prayer.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Father, again, we pray, as we did last night, that we would submit our thinking completely to your sovereign lordship over our life, which you exercise for Jesus Christ, the

King of all the world. We pray that our opinions might be submitted to his judgment, and that your spirit and your sacred scripture would have full sway over our consciences and convictions.

We pray that we would be willing to correct our errors so that we might embrace the faith in its full integrity, that we might believe all that you have revealed, that we might have the fullness of the word of God bearing fruit in our lives.

In this we pray, in his name, amen. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I love scripture, and from the time that I came to a conscious faith in Christ as a freshman in high school, a 14 -year -old, in response to a

Billy Graham booklet that I was reading while pushing a shopping cart through a grocery or a supermarket, and came to hear the good news about Jesus Christ for the first time,

I have wanted to have the fullness of the scriptures, as I said in my opening prayer, bearing their fruit in my life.

I also love Protestants. I was one for a number of years. I respect their love for Jesus Christ, their desire to be faithful to scripture, their desire to be biblically based, and I want them to have, as I want the same thing for myself, the fullness of the written word of God to bear its fruit in their lives as well.

The third thing I'd like to say is that I therefore find it rather grievous but necessary to say that Protestants, unfortunately, have, because of their insistence on following a mere human tradition, a tradition flowing from those that are not guided, unfortunately, by the

Holy Spirit, to do the very thing that scripture forbids. Scripture is quite clear that God forbids us to tamper with its fullness, its integrity, that we are not to add to or subtract from the word of God.

And Protestants, I'm going to argue tonight, perhaps not intentionally, certainly not intentionally, I would hope, but nonetheless, tragically, unconsciously, against their own better intentions, in fact, subtract from the word of God.

The books 1 and 2 Maccabees, Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, with its appendix to the letter of Jeremiah, and some passages found in the books of Esther and Daniel are excluded by Protestants from sacred scripture.

And they do so on the basis of a fallible human tradition. The fallible human tradition of the

Jewish people who rejected the messianic claims of Jesus Christ and therefore rejected the covenant grace that God offered them through his incarnate son.

And the fallible human tradition of Luther, who resurrected the arguments of the Jews against these books.

I find the combination of the Jews and Luther rather odd one, considering Luther's rather well -documented anti -Semitism, but it's kind of an ironic coincidence.

Now we already heard last night from Mr. White in admission that Luther was wrong, at least on one point that Mr.

White was willing to agree, when he said so much for the infallibility of Martin Luther when he referred to Luther as excluding the letter of James from the

New Testament canon. Mr. White further believes that the Jews who rejected Jesus are likewise wrong.

As St. Paul says in 2 Corinthians chapter 3, because they exclude the gospel offered them through Christ, even when they read their scriptures, their minds are veiled.

So they, too, are no reliable guide any more than a man whose fallibility, Martin Luther that is,

Mr. White admits. I would like to ask Mr. White tonight, in the course of the debate, in the course of the interchange back and forth, why he rejects the testimony of Christ's church meeting in authoritative council after council.

And in rejecting that, prefers to it the testimony of the fallible reformer

Martin Luther and the testimony of the fallible Jews, who reject not only these books, but reject the

New Testament canon as well. Jesus warned us in Matthew chapter 15, verses 1 and following, that we should beware the temptation, the danger, however subtle, that we make of no effect, that we nullify, that we cancel out the function of the word of God in our life by allowing human tradition to sit in judgment on it.

In contrast to this, which is exactly what I'm contending Protestants do in rejecting these books, we are commanded in Scripture to follow apostolic tradition.

Paul, for example, in 1 Corinthians 11, says that he passed on to the church those traditions which he himself received.

In 1 Corinthians chapter 11, and in 2 Thessalonians 2 .15, commands them to pass on all the traditions, whether by word of mouth or by letter, which came to them from him, an inspired apostle.

This is precisely what Mr. White and Protestants who hold his position, and all Protestants do, by the way, fail to do.

They fail to follow the tradition of the church that these books, the books found in the

Catholic Old Testament canon, are indeed the inspired, infallible word of God, full of doctrine for our instruction, our proof, our reproof, our correction, our training in righteousness.

I would also like to say that here the irrationality, the illogicality of the

Protestant position is dramatic, and I find completely incomprehensible. I was tempted actually to use the word the intellectual dishonesty of the position because many, many even

Protestants will say that, but I will not use the word intellectual dishonesty tonight because based on Mr.

White's reaction to something I said last night, to which he took offense and for which I apologize, I don't wish to impute to him, to use one of his pet terms, any personal dishonesty.

I'm not claiming that there is any intent on the part of Mr. White, or for that matter any individual Protestant, to be dishonest.

What these Protestants do say is that the position is intellectually dishonest. That is, that it changes the terms of the debate.

That it seems to say one thing and then logically contradicts itself. Why? Let me illustrate, by the way, this inconsistency or whatever you want to call it.

Let's step outside of the debate tonight just for a minute because I want you to see something with some objectivity, and I think it can be better achieved if we look at an issue that we're not dealing with now so we can look at it a bit more dispassionately.

Yesterday, those of you that heard Mr. White and myself debating on the radio, on the W .E .Z

.E. and the Janine Graff show, heard Mr. White charge that the Catholic Church had taught in a couple of councils that it was alright to coerce people to faith, that is, to the

Catholic faith. When I challenged him on that and said that that was in fact not the case, that the

Catholic Church has always insisted that you cannot coerce faith. It's a free act of the human will. You cannot make someone believe anything.

And that to forbid people to propagate heresy, a false faith, as the

Bible itself does in the Old Testament, is not the same as coercing people to faith. Mr. White's response was, well,

Jerry, my faith requires me to evangelize. And so to prohibit my evangelizing is therefore to coerce me to follow a

Catholic faith. In the debate last night, Mr. White insisted that faith was completely exclusive of any activity on our part, any obligations or conditions which we had to fulfill, which evangelism is certainly an example of.

That is an example, to me, of shifting the terms of the debate, of a logical inconsistency in the

Protestant position. On the one hand, there is nothing required of the Protestant. And on the other hand, something is required when it suits the

Protestant's purposes. I think the same thing is going on here, and I'm going to attempt to prove that tonight.

First of all, Protestantism is inconsistent on this issue because the early

Church authoritatively defined the canon of the Old Testament in the way that the Catholic Church does today.

Even Protestants will admit this. The Protestant historian J. N. D. Kelly, in a book, Early Christian Doctrines, a text used throughout evangelical seminars in this country, as we use it at Gordon -Conwell, and throughout the

English -speaking world, said this, quote on page 53, It should be observed that the Old Testament, thus admitted as authoritative in the

Church, and he's speaking of the early Church here, was somewhat bulkier and more comprehensive than the 22 or 24 books of the

Hebrew Bible. It always included, though with varying degrees of recognition, the so -called

Apocrypha, to use the Protestant term, or Deuterocanonical books, to use the Catholic term. The reason for this is that the

Old Testament, which passed in the first instance into the hands of Christians, was not the original Hebrew version, but the Greek translation known as the

Septuagint. Most of the scriptural quotations found in the New Testament are based upon it, rather than upon the

Hebrew. In the first two centuries, at any rate, the Church seems to have accepted all or most of these additional books.

It's inspired to have treated them without question in Scripture. Quotations from Wisdom, for example, occur in 1 Clement and Barnabas, and from Ecclesiasticus in the latter.

Polycarp cites Tobit. The Didache cites Ecclesiasticus. Irenaeus refers to Wisdom, the history of Susanna, Balaam the

Dragon, and Baruch. The use made of the Apocrypha by Tertullian, Hippolytus, Cyprian, Clement of Alexandria is too frequent for detailed references to be necessary.

And even in the fourth century, when there were a few who questioned the status of the additional books, prior to their being formally defined at the councils of Hippo and Carthage, for the great majority, the

Deuterocanonical writings ranked as Scripture in the fullest sense. That's testimony of a

Protestant. Another Protestant that I like to cite is Arnold C. Sundberg, a

Lutheran who did his doctoral dissertation on this very issue, the Old Testament Canon of the Early Church at Harvard Divinity School.

The conclusion that he came to is that the criteria that Protestants use to exclude these books from Scripture are completely useless, because they would exclude other books that Protestants accept as canonical.

In other words, they are not able to hold water. The most important one, he argues, is the suspicion or the contention on the part of the

Jews of the first century in Palestine that these seven books never existed originally in Hebrew, the language of Revelation under the

Old Covenant. On that basis, Jerome, a Catholic scholar commissioned by Pope Damascus to translate from the original

Hebrew and Greek and form a definitive translation into Latin, the Vulgate, balked at including these books.

He was going to his Palestinian rabbi friends for the original manuscripts that they had so that he could complete his work on the

Vulgate, and they said they had no Hebrew originals for these books, the Deuterocanonical books. On that basis, he approached

Pope Damascus and said perhaps these should not be included. Pope Damascus' response was to consult the tradition of the churches, and the answer came back with a resounding unanimity by that point in the history of the church that the churches scattered throughout the

Roman Empire had a constant tradition of including these books in their lectionaries, and that they insisted that the apostles themselves had cited these books as Scripture.

That the apostles themselves had cited these books as Scripture in their preaching and in their catechesis of the early church.

On that basis, Pope Damascus requested Jerome to include them in the Vulgate, and Jerome, as a faithful Catholic, submitted his fallible, individual, personal opinion to the judgment of the church, meeting in council, and included them.

What is interesting, Sundberg points out in his thesis, and other Protestants as well, who argue that the

Catholic church has been right on this, and Protestants have been wrong, is that in 1947, when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, the

Catholic canon was vindicated. Because we found Semitic originals, either in Hebrew or in Aramaic, the two languages that God wrote the

Old Testament in, Semitic originals for several of the Deuterocanonical books in the fourth cave at Qumran.

As a result, Sundberg argues, the whole argument against including them in the canon falls to the ground.

Sundberg also points out that Luther revived the Jewish desire to exclude these books from the canon for purely doctrinal and apologetical reasons.

He was losing a debate on the issue of whether Purgatory was taught in Scripture or not, and when his opponents hammered relentlessly away at him with the verse from Sacred Scripture found in 2

Maccabees 1246, it is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from their sins.

Luther, as a desperate dodge, and these are Sundberg's words, by the way, not a revival of the words that I was using last night, grasped at the straw of the ancient

Jewish caveat against the inclusion of these words. As a result, Luther set a precedent that Protestants have followed ever since.

In order to rob the Roman Catholic Church of a powerful and, in fact, undeniable proof text for Purgatory.

Sundberg argues that that is not responsible, intellectually honest scholarship.

It is having an axe to grind and taking the Procrustean bed of our

Protestant beliefs and stretching Scripture or lopping it off at the angles so that it fits our preconceived notions of what the

Word of God should, in fact, teach. What I find inconsistent about the

Protestant rejection of the testimony of the Church, for example, at the Council of Carthage, and actually even before that at the

Council of Hippo, and even before that at the Council of Rome in 382. You can read the Decree of Damasus in a standard reference work like William Juergens' Faith of the

Early Fathers, where the Council of Rome established the current Catholic canon in 382 A .D.

The same council which Protestants point to as closing the New Testament canon, the Council of Carthage in 397 and Hippo in 393, included these books as well.

This is what I find inconsistent. The very source of Mr. White's conviction that we have a

New Testament, that we have a body of documents coming down from the Inspired Apostles and their

Inspired Associates, the Church Council's meeting at Carthage and Hippo, these same councils give us the

Catholic Old Testament canon. If Mr. White is going to indict these councils with the ability of erring, with unreliability in their formulation of the parameters of the

Old Testament canon, then to be logically consistent, he raises the doubt as to whether or not the

New Testament is in fact the collection of books that God designed us to have. Now, Protestants who, in my opinion, would be more logically consistent, intellectually honest, whatever term you prefer to use, someone like R .C.

Sproul will admit, in his five tape series, critiquing Roman Catholicism, that Protestants, if they are going to be true to their principles, only have, and these are

R .C. Sproul's words, a fallible collection of infallible books.

In other words, we cannot be sure that we might have inadvertently excluded infallible books or included fallible books.

That means that Protestants who seek to defend the inerrancy of the books in the canon may be chasing a will -o' -the -wisp.

They may be attempting to harmonize Matthew and Luke, when in fact one of them is perhaps not inspired.

I would go further, and I would say that Mr. White, if he rejects the testimony of the early church fathers, that as they met in these councils and concluded the canon, if he rejects their testimony, then he has absolutely no basis for knowing, for example, when he gets up in his church and preaches from the

Gospel of Matthew that he is indeed reading from a book and preaching from a book that is written by Matthew.

The Gospel of Matthew is anonymous. There is no ascription of its authorship in the book itself.

There is a tradition coming to us through the church fathers, a tradition ratified in dogmatic decrees emanating forth from these councils that it was in fact written by Matthew, the

Apostle of Christ, and therefore inspired and authoritative, even if it were actually named as the letters of Paul are.

This would not, of course, prove that they do come from Paul, since there were pseudepigraphal works, that is forgeries, works purporting to come from authors that in fact did not, circulating in abundance throughout the first several centuries of the church.

Spurious Gospels, Epistles, other books purporting to be Acts of various Apostles, and several

Apocalypses. Unless you're simply going to take the say -so of the book and therefore say, well, the Quran must also be the

Word of God because it claims to be, or the Book of Mormon, or Mary Baker Eddie's Science and Health with Key to the Scripture, then you must recognize that all claims to be

Scripture are not in fact self -authenticating. There must be some external testimony confirming that these indeed did indeed come from inspired men.

Mr. White therefore finds himself in an ambivalent and indefensible position.

Because on the one hand he wants to accept this testimony and on the other hand his very

Protestant principles force him to reject the testimony of the early church fathers as an unreliable source as to what in fact

Jesus and the Apostles taught because he indicts the early church fathers and in fact his teachings of several councils with error.

Mr. White, in other words, as Protestants in general seeks to have his cake and eat it too.

And I argue that this just isn't fair. It isn't fair to you, the audience. It isn't fair to me.

It isn't even fair to the Protestants who perpetrate this unfortunate and unconscious hopes upon themselves.

Because we need to know what the Word of God is. As I said last night, the

Word of God is our lifeline to the God who alone can save us.

If we throw the contents and the boundaries of the Word of God into confusion or doubt, then we rob people of the certainty of faith which they need to be sons and daughters of the living

God experiencing that peace and joy that Mr. White commended to us, to our consideration last night.

So I need to ask Mr. White to articulate for us tonight whether or not we should listen to the

Church and its councils or not. Was the Council of Rome right or wrong in establishing the

Catholic canon in 382? Was the Council of Carthage right or wrong in the Council of Hippo? Was the canon when it was confirmed by Pope Innocent I in 405

A .D. right or wrong? When the Council of Nicaea, the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, an ecumenical council, confirmed these canons, was it right or wrong?

The Council of Florence in 1441, all of these preceded the Council of Trent, and I take the time to mention that because many

Protestants think that the Council of Trent was the first time that these books were imposed upon the consciences of Christians as being inspired and authoritative.

Trent simply reaffirmed and reiterated a teaching which the Protestant reformers, so -called, had thrown into question by their own subjectivity.

Now, Mr. White might argue that we don't need the testimony of the early church.

We don't need to listen to councils. We don't need to listen to church fathers. He might seek refuge in some sort of subjectivism.

He might say, look, Jesus says that my sheep hear my voice.

And so as I, James White, read the book of Esther, I know that God is speaking through it.

And when I read 2 Maccabees, I know that God is not speaking through that. The problem with that position is that this is not apologetics in any sense of the word.

It is simply what we call in logic an ipse dixit. It's true because I say it's true.

I have no way of proving it to you. I have no way of empirically demonstrating it to you. I simply tell you that I feel good about this conviction

I have, this feeling I have, this strong personal opinion that I have that this book is indeed inspired and therefore canonical.

The problem is we have Jehovah's Witnesses with equally strong convictions, and Mormons with equally strong convictions, and atheists with equally strong convictions, and modernists both in liberal and both in Protestant and Catholic camps with convictions that Paul couldn't have written

Ephesians, and John couldn't have been written by John, and the list is endless. If we're simply going to stand around in a huge Mexican standoff and say, well, this is what

I feel, and no, this is what I feel, then we cannot engage in any effective demonstration, in any reason to defense of the

Christian faith as Peter commands us to in 1 Peter chapter 3, verse 15. Mr.

White is going to need to offer us more than his personal private assurance that these, some books are inspired and some books are not.

He's going to need to show us through arguments, through evidence, through history, and yet what bin is he going to go to to dig this evidence out of?

A bin that he himself places a huge question mark over because he considers it mere human tradition?

The tradition of a fallible church? Mr. White, in other words, and every Protestant who follows his position ends up, unfortunately and perhaps unintentionally biting the hand that feeds him.

The hand that gives him the New Testament. The hand of the church, meeting in council after council, that hand gives him, the same hand gives him the

Catholic Old Testament canon, which he rejects. He bites the hand. He indicts it with the possibility of having taught us error in this point and therefore attacks and subverts the confidence that we can have that the

New Testament canon is indeed correct. This is why Protestantism and I say this in all, with all due respect and I want to reiterate something too here and something that I've said many times.

This is not a beauty contest between Protestants and Catholics. We're discussing two systems here.

Not the individuals who hold it. I have often used the analogy of Catholicism being a full 100 cents of a dollar, the fullness of the

Christian faith. And Protestantism of whatever of its 7 ,000 stripes, Lutheranism, Presbyterianism, whatever, as being maybe 60 cents on the dollar or 85 cents on the dollar or 90 cents on the dollar, depending on how close they are to Catholicism.

So an individual Protestant may have only 75 percent, 75 cents of the dollar and yet he may do more with the truths that he has, the borrowed capital of Catholicism, than the

Catholic does who has the whole dollar stuffed in his pocket and doing absolutely nothing with it. So I'm not here arguing that Protestants are somehow inferior

Christians per se to Catholics. We're not judging individuals here. We're talking about whether these two systems are coherent.

Whether they are logical. Whether they are intellectually cogent and honest. And either accept an authority or reject it, but don't play a double standard.

That is what Protestantism, I think it is undeniable, does. Now, there is more that I would like to say.

I could argue that the criteria that Protestants use to accept the canonicity of the

Old Testament books that they do accept apply equally well to the

Deuterocanonical books. The New Testament writers allude to references in these books.

I will admit that there is no place where they quote a Deuterocanonical book and say, as Scripture said, but that criterion is faulty.

Because by that same criterion, many Old Testament books that Mr. White would accept would have to be excluded. There is nowhere in the

New Testament, for example, that the New Testament writers cite the book of Esther and say, as Scripture said, if Mr.

White is going to be fair, then he has to say, I have my doubts about the canonicity of Esther. No, the

Apostles used a version of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, which included these books.

And so the tradition of the Church, that the Apostles taught them this, and the evidence that the

Church repeatedly accepted these as canonical, which has been reiterated in these various councils, stands to prove, and this is my contention, that the

Old Testament canon of the Catholic Church is correct. Because if it is not, then the

New Testament canon is no more correct. And we are left without a sure word from God.

If we're going to accept the New Testament, we must accept the Old. And I would encourage people, therefore, to be intellectually consistent, intellectually honest, and to submit their personal, private, fallible opinions to the teaching of Christ's holy, apostolic, authoritative

Church. Thank you very much. I must say, it's somewhat amazing how

I could have been unfair to you before I even had a chance to address you as yet. I don't know exactly how that works.

In the Council of Trent, after listing the apocryphal books that Jerry has already read to you, we read,

If anyone does not accept as sacred and canonical the aforesaid books in their entirety, and with all their parts, as they have been accustomed to be read in the

Catholic Church, and as they are contained in the old Latin Vulgate edition, and knowingly and deliberately rejects the aforesaid traditions, let him be anathema.

Let him be separated from the Church and the fellowship of the Church. That is a position that Jerry is called upon to defend this evening.

Jerry is not called upon to attempt to define my position before I define it. He is called upon to defend the position that the

Roman Catholic canon of the Old Testament Church is the only possible correct canon.

Now I would like to ask you to come with me and to listen to the most modern scholarship that is available today on these subjects.

A number of the sources that Jerry cited actually are dependent upon, for example, the work of the last century,

H .E. Ryle, and do not take into account the newest materials, for example, Beckwith's monumental work, the

Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church came out in 1985. Let's look at, for example, the second century. Jerry has asserted to us that the

Protestants are going against the universal, unanimous tradition of the Church. My friends, that is completely and totally wrong.

There were numerous early Church Fathers that rejected Jerry's position, and I guess we'll just have to define them out of existence to say that there is a unanimous position on this issue.

Let me mention a few things to you. First of all, there are a number of writers, let's go to the second century. Shall we?

Go to the second century of the Christian era. There are a number of writers in this period, even some whose writings are extensive and contain many quotations from the

Old Testament, such as Justin Martyr and Theophilus of Antioch, who never refer to any of the books of the

Apocrypha at all. Secondly, there are two books of the Greek Apocrypha, and I'm talking about the

Greek Apocrypha here, 3rd and 4th Maccabees, which are never referred to by any writer. Three of the books,

Judith and the first two books of Maccabees, are little used and only as historical sources without any suggestion whatsoever that they are, in fact,

Scripture. Even in the early 3rd century, the learned Hippolytus never refers to Judith, though he uses both 1st and 2nd

Maccabees as historical sources. Fourth, two of the books, Tobit and Ecclesiasticus, are used only in the

East. The first Western writer to refer to Tobit is Hippolytus, though he never refers to Ecclesiasticus.

Origen, for example, twice refers to doubts about the most popular book, and that being the book

Wisdom. He recognized that it was not accepted by everyone, it was not a unanimous position that it was, in fact, inspired, and hence, when making one point, for example, says, he quotes from it and then says, well, but since many people do not accept that,

I'll make my point from another book, I think it was 2 Samuel that he referred to. Another issue, until the final years of the 2nd century, there is only one isolated example of any of the books being treated as Scripture, which is polycarb to use of Tobit.

One. Not a unanimous, one. In the earliest Christian Septuagint manuscripts, which are extant, the papyri up until the

Peace of the Church in A .D. 313, the only books of the Apocrypha to occur are Tobit, Ecclesiasticus, and Wisdom.

Remember, Jerry has to prove that all of the books that are a part of the canon defined by the

Council of Trent were unanimously accepted that that is the correct canon. Not just some of them, not just one or two of them, but all of them, to make his point this evening.

Melito of Sardis, an individual who was not very well known, even in the last century, because of his position they took in the

Quarter Decimant Controversy, Melito of Sardis inquired to Palestine concerning what books constitute the

Old Testament canon. Now, obviously he wouldn't do this if there was a unanimous apostolic tradition, as has been referred to already.

But he inquired to Palestine, and he discovered that the Palestinian canon did not include the

Apocryphal books. And hence, he taught a person who appealed to him as a Christian leader that there were only the 24 books.

Now, how can it be that he would inquire to Palestine if what Jerry has said is true? And does it follow then that Melito is anathema?

Does it follow that Melito, because he rejects this, is anathema? I guess it must be. Theodotion, for example, here is a man who is well aware of the

Greek Old Testament, he is well aware of the issues, but not a single one of the manuscripts, the extant manuscripts of his version of the

Old Testament contains the Apocryphal books. Why not? Well, it seems very clear that he did not include them in his canon.

Now, Jerry gave you a number of citations. He, for example, cited J .N .D. Kelly, who again is not working with the most modern textual evidence on these issues, of supposed citations of the

Apocryphal books. I'd like to give you a quotation from Dr. Beckwith on this. When one examines the passages in the

Early Fathers, which are supposed to establish the canonicity of the Apocrypha, one finds that some of them are taken from the alternative

Greek text of 1 Ezra, or from additions or appendices to Daniel, Jeremiah, or some other canonical book which are not really relevant, that others of them are not quotations of the

Apocrypha at all, and that of those which are, many do not give any indication that the book quoted is regarded as Scripture.

Now, I'd like to point out that Jerry began by saying, well, look, they're just going back to this fallible human tradition of the

Jewish people. I'd like to remind you of who the Jewish people were prior to the coming of Christ. We're talking about God's people here.

Okay? We're talking about God's people here, and I would like to assert to you that, A, the canon of the

Old Testament was closed 200 years before Christ. That Christ and the Apostles used the canon that had been decided upon by God's leading of the people in the

Palestinian area, that they never use the books that Jerry wants to bind upon our consciences as Scripture.

Not once. He admitted he could not provide us a Scriptural reference to the Apocrypha as inspired

Scripture. He could not do that, and I believe the reason for that is the Jewish people did not know that.

Thirdly, in the history of the Christian church, the individuals, the church fathers who knew the most about the

Jewish backgrounds, rejected the Apocrypha. Jerome, Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, Melito of Sardis, Gregory of Nazianzus, and I'm going to give you a number of others as we go along, who all are anathema, according to the

Council of Trent, because they rejected these things. Why did they reject these books as Apocrypha?

Well, they were the ones who had the most knowledge of the Hebrew canon of Scripture, and hence they held that Hebrew canon of Scripture.

In fact, even Augustine, who accepted the Apocrypha books, argued, out of ignorance, that Jesus ratified the

Hebrew canon of Scripture. He was not aware, not knowing the Hebrew text itself, that by doing so, he was undercutting his own position, because the

Hebrew canon of Scripture did not include the Apocrypha. Did not include the Apocrypha. Jerry said to us that, well, you see, what happened is the early church used the

Septuagint, and since the Septuagint contained the Apocrypha, therefore the early church was using the Apocrypha.

That is a position that is no longer tenable in scholarly circles. You see, the only editions of the

Septuagint that we have that contain the Apocrypha were produced by Christians. We know this by noting that, for example, those manuscripts contain odes after the book of Psalms that are based upon the

New Testament. Obviously, therefore, those editions of the Septuagint were produced by Christian people, and they come from four and five hundred years after the time of Christ.

The simple fact of the matter is, when you go to the Jewish sources, you discover that the Jewish canon, the canon of the

New Testament church, was not and did not contain the Apocryphal books.

In fact, A .C. Sundberg, who he quoted, A .C. Sundberg's thesis was primarily against the idea that there was a separate canon, the

Alexandrian canon that existed in Egypt. He decimated that and, in the process, even made the statement that the early church would have accepted the

Palestinian canon, even had there been an Alexandrian canon, and we know what the Palestinian canon was.

It's the canon that is a part of Protestant Bibles, not the Roman Catholic Scriptures as they are presented to us today.

Now, I'd like to look, for example, at what Josephus said. If you look at Josephus' own words, and I'll read them to you in your hearing, he says,

For we have not an innumerable multitude of books among us, disagreeing from and contradicting one another as the

Greeks have, but only twenty -two books which contain the records of all the past times which are justly believed to be divine.

Now, the Jewish people used two numbers, twenty -two and twenty -four. There were twenty -two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and so Josephus' use of the term twenty -two was very, very popular, and as you look at what those twenty -two books included, they do not, they do not include the

Apocrypha. Anytime you hear someone using the terms twenty -two and twenty -four, and there were numerous references, and we'll get to as time allows tonight, twenty -two and twenty -four, that is an evidence, as Milito of Sardis did years after Christ, that that individual is not accepting the

Apocryphal books as being a part of Scripture. In fact, Josephus gives us the following information.

It is true our history hath been written since Artaxerxes very particularly, and that would be in reference to many of the

Apocryphal books, but hath not been esteemed of the like authority with the former by our forefathers, because there hath not been an exact succession of prophets since that time.

This is an issue that's going to come up over and over again, and that is even the Apocryphal books recognize that there has been no succession of prophecy in Israel since the closing of the canon in Malachi.

That is even in the Apocryphal books themselves as we will see. Now modern scholarship recognizes there's no reason to believe that Josephus' canon is something new.

He's writing in the first century, primarily, he's referring to periods at that time, and there is no reason to believe that his canon is new.

In fact, as modern research has shown, he's referring to a canon that goes to as early as 200 years before Christ.

We also have ancient traditions and other sources from Judaism. For example, coming from the

Mishnah and the Talmud, we have these words. The robins taught the order of the prophets is Joshua and Judges, Samuel and Kings, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, Isaiah and the

Twelve. The robins taught the order of the hagiography is Ruth and the Book of Psalms and Job and Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the

Song of Solomons and Lamentations, Daniel and the Scroll of Esther, Ezra, and Chronicles.

That gives us 19 books plus the 5 books of the Pentateuch, the 24. This is an ancient tradition going even before Josephus, that this was, in fact, the canon of the

Jewish people and the canon that Jesus Christ and the Apostles would have used. I have another quotation for you.

If, as the Tanniatic literature maintains, not just the Law and the Prophets, but also the hagiography belonged to the temple collection,

Josephus refers to those books that were laid up in the temple. I continue the quotation. And by the end of the temple period had belonged to it for such a long time that it was no longer permitted even to bring in fresh copies of the books, let alone copies of fresh books, how can this be reconciled with the current belief, the current belief of the scholarship that was presented to you by Mr.

Matitix, in fact, that the hagiography were not formally recognized as canonical until the Synod of Jamnia, some of you may have heard of that, held after the temple had been destroyed.

Point being, the canon was fixed and stable and established 200 years or more before the time of Christ.

It's interesting that 2 Ezra, or 4 Ezra, does not occur in any of the Septuagint manuscripts.

As has been said, any book which does not occur in the Septuagint manuscripts has very little claim to have belonged to the canon of the

Hellenistic Jews. It was mentioned that the main argument against the canonicity of the

Apocrypha had to do with their not having been written in Hebrew Aramaic. That's not the main argument whatsoever.

There are far better arguments than that. But in regards to that issue, as to the

Semitic originals of any of the Apocrypha being included in the canon of the Palestinian Pharisees, it must be borne in mind that some of the

Apocrypha, notably 2 -4 Maccabees and much if not all of Wisdom, did not have

Semitic originals. Notice that Mr. Matitick said that some of the books had been found Semitic originals, probably but were composed in Greek.

However, even among those books of the Apocrypha which were composed in Hebrew Aramaic, the only ones which there is the slightest evidence to suggest were reckoned canonical by any of the

Palestinian Pharisees or Ecclesiasticus and Baruch. None of the others have any of those credentials that would be needed.

Now, if these books were in fact a part of the canon of God's people at one time, it is very interesting, as Ludwig Blau has pointed out, that there is absolutely no dispute amongst the

Jews concerning those books. No dispute whatsoever in regards to their canonicity.

If they had once been considered canon and were removed, there would have been disputes. If someone was trying to make them canon to Scripture, there would have been disputes.

But there are no such disputes and it is hard to resist the inference that no such events can possibly have taken place in the history of the

Jewish people. Notice also that in regards to the citations that Jerry has asserted are found amongst the early

Christians, that when you examine the full scale of them, we note that the mere adoption of the language of a book does not indicate that the individual adopting that language means the book itself is canonical.

In fact, if Jerry were to follow his own reasoning there, he would have to believe that First Enoch is canon in Scripture because, of course,

Jude recognizes it in his own writings and that is not included as being one of the canonical books in Roman Catholic theology.

This concept of the cessation of prophecy in Jewish thought is extremely important. Notice the

Babylonian Talmud says, Our rabbis taught since the death of the last prophets, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, the

Holy Spirit of prophetic inspiration departed from Israel. So the

Jewish people believed the Holy Spirit of inspiration had left. Therefore, since both the

Palestinian Jews and the Jews in Alexandria believed that canon books of Scripture had to come through prophecy, therefore, from their perspective, there could have not been any more inspired books at that period of time.

Other citations from Jewish sources. Rabbi Samuel Bar -Inya said in the name of Rabbi Ahab, the

Second Temple lacked five things which the First Temple possessed, namely, the fire, the ark, the urim and thummim, the oil of anointing, and the

Holy Spirit of prophecy. The Holy Spirit of prophecy. And it's interesting to know, as I've already said, that the apocryphal books recognize, for example, the prologue to Ecclesiasticus, recognizes the three -fold canon of the

Jewish people, the law, the prophets, and the writings. But never, ever, ever did the apocryphal books have any place in those three places.

In that three -fold canon. Never once. Here you have someone recognizing that they are writing after that time period.

And what do we not see in the book of Maccabees over and over again? The idea that there is no longer a succession of prophets in and amongst the people of Israel.

How then could these books be considered to be inspired? When we look to other sources, for example,

Philo. Philo, the great Alexandrian Jew. H. E. Ryle said, there is no appearance in any of them of a definite quotation of the apocrypha.

If these books were considered apocryphal by these people, were considered inspired by these people, why no quotations of them?

And C. F. Horniman also said, the profound silence of Philo about all the apocryphal books is extremely relevant to any discussion of their inspiration in regards to how they were viewed by the

Jewish people. Now, that means that even the canon of scripture that was used by the

Jewish people in Alexandria did not include as inspired scripture the books of the apocrypha.

But as we see, for example, in 1 Maccabees, I'll give you the references. 1 Maccabees 4 .46, 9 .27,

14 .41. The idea was that the inspiration of scripture had already ceased.

Had already ceased. You don't find that in any of the canonical books, do you? Do you have any references in the canonical books to the idea that prophecy no longer exists?

That God is no longer speaking to his people Israel? Not at all. Not at all. Now, let's look at some of the information regarding the

Septuagint upon which Jerry based some of his comments. As I mentioned, the Septuagint manuscripts that contain the apocryphal books are

Christian in origin. They came from the Christian people and they came from a period of time when the apocryphal books were becoming popular.

And again, we see this direct correlation between an ignorance of the

Jewish backgrounds, which of course led to some gross and terrible things in the history of the church, the murder of Jews wholesale during the crusades, etc.,

etc. That ignorance of the Jewish backgrounds, that is what brings forth the belief that the apocryphal books are in fact inspired.

When individuals take the time to go back and ask, what is it that the Jewish people of old believed, and what was believed by Jesus and the apostles, which should be what we're concerned about tonight.

Which should be what we're concerned about tonight, they discovered that these books were not in fact inspired.

And it's interesting, if we want to go to some of the earlier manuscripts, for example Codex Vaticanus, does not include the book of Maccabees in it.

What does this indicate to us? Well, it's one of those pieces of information, one of those facts that we need to examine.

And as Jerry has admitted, it is the undeniable truth that the New Testament does not quote from the apocryphal books or ascribe any authority to the apocryphal books.

What then should be our authority? What then should be our authority? That's what I would like to know.

Now I have with me here a letter. A letter written by the great

Athanasius. Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria. Athanasius writing prior to any of the councils that Jerry cited.

Any one of them. His 39th Festal Letter dated in 367. Here is

Athanasius. Jerry has, as I really honestly expected him to do because I think this is the only real position the

Roman Catholic can take, has said we need to appeal to the ultimate authority. We need to appeal to the infallible church.

And we need to have this infallible authority to tell us that these books are scripture. And he has asserted there is this unanimous tradition.

This unanimous tradition regards the inspiration of these books. And in fact he seemingly wanted to paint me as saying that I'm not going to deal with the early church.

That the early church isn't going to be something that I'm going to reference or appeal to. And yet here we have a man who from the

Roman Catholic perspective stands in the line of apostolic tradition.

In fact we know Athanasius, the man who stood almost alone at periods of time as the sole defender of the

Nicene faith. Remember? Five times driven from his seat. Even while the

Roman Catholic Bishop in Rome as Jerry would say, being a

Roman Catholic, I wouldn't say he was a Roman Catholic in the modern sense of the term, but the Bishop of Rome at this time is making concessions to the

Arians. Athanasius prefers to be driven from his seat and live in exile rather than deny the deity of Jesus Christ.

The full honor and glory of Jesus Christ. This same Athanasius in 367 writes to the churches.

Every year he would write his festal letter and here in 367 he says there are then of the

Old Testament 22 books in number. For as I have heard, it is handed down that this is the number of the letters among the

Hebrews. It seems that this Bishop of Alexandria didn't have any problem in recognizing that God had worked with the people, the

Jewish people in regards to the can of the Old Testament. And then he gives the books.

And what's missing from the books? The Apocrypha. And in fact he goes on to say in the 7th section of his letter, for the greater exactness

I add this also writing of necessity, that there are other books besides these not indeed included in the canon, but appointed by the fathers to be read by those who newly join us and who wish for instruction in the word of godliness.

And what books is he talking about that are not included in the canon? The Wisdom of Solomon, the

Wisdom of Sirach, Esther, Judith, Tobit, and that which is called the Teaching of the Apostles, and the Shepherd.

Some of both the Old and New Testament Apocryphal works. But the former, that is the ones who came before my brethren are included in the canon.

But these books, the books of the Apocrypha, are not. Now let me ask you something.

Why is this? Why do you have Athanasius coming under the anathema of the

Council of Trent? Is it not due to the fact that there was no unanimous position as Mr.

Matitix has asserted? Is that not why Jerome said the things that he did?

Is that not why even Origen himself recognized, for example, in regards to the

Book of Wisdom, that it is a book which is certainly not esteemed, authoritative by all, end quote?

And regarding Tobit, he says, since they of the circumcision speak against the Book of Tobit as canonical, he knew it was not canonical.

And hence went to other sources to demonstrate that. And isn't it interesting that those students of Origen, let me give you some of them,

Cyril of Jerusalem, Athanasius, three keen students of Origen, other parts of the world,

Hilary, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Rufinus, all have a twenty -two book

Old Testament? What happened to the unanimity that we are told actually exists in regards to the inspiration of these books?

I don't believe any unanimity exists despite the claims that it does. So what do we have?

My friends, the Bible is extremely important. The canon of Scripture is extremely important. And we should not lightly allow that into the canon which does not have the authority of the people of God under the

Old Covenant who specifically rejected it, nor does it have the authority of the

Lord Jesus Christ himself, the apostles of Jesus Christ, and many of the early fathers, including men like Athanasius.

Why should we allow those things into the canon when there is so much to speak against them? And how can someone such as those at the

Council of Trent stand before us and supposedly infallibly state, infallibly state, that those that would reject these traditions are anathema, cut off from the body of Christ?

Mr. Matitix has to prove to us that every one of those books that he cited are in fact inspired

Scripture. And I guess to do that, he's going to have to also explain why.

Why is it that the early church does not stand behind him on this, not the primitive church, not the

New Testament, not Athanasius, not Melito. Why? Why are these individuals under the anathema of Trent?

Well, you might say, well, they're not under the anathema of Trent. It's only from now on that they're under the anathema of Trent. The point is they, as leaders in the church, taught a canon of the

Old Testament that differs fundamentally from that which Mr. Matitix is presenting to us this evening.

Why is that? I do not believe that simply talking about other things is going to prove that the

Old Testament canon is in fact the correct canon that we are to follow today. I do not believe that the unanimity claims exist, and I do not believe that these books are inspired

Scripture. Thank you. Mr.

White, I'm not going to let you get away with the things that you got away with last night. I'm not going to let you get away with grossly misrepresenting the position of your opponent.

If you want to debate the Catholic position, then debate it. Don't debate a straw man. You said 12 times, and after that I gave up keeping count, that I had stated in my opening statement that there was a unanimous consensus, and you used the word unanimous 12 times, and after that, like I said,

I stopped counting. I never once said that. I began by reading a quote from J.

N. D. Kelly's book that admitted that there were some people, there were a few who questioned the status of the books, but the vast majority, the great majority, for the great majority of the

Deuteroconical books ranked Scripture in the fullest sense. So, I am not claiming, nor did the

Catholic Church ever claim, that from the word go, everyone agreed on all of these books.

That criterion doesn't apply to the New Testament either, Mr. White, if you yourself know, if you're going to be honest with this audience.

You are going to have to admit to this audience that the very Church Fathers that we've been talking about did not unanimously agree on the 27 books of the

New Testament. Some of these books were in doubt. Books like James and 2

Peter and 2 and 3 John, the Apocalypse. It was a gradual growing consensus that was finally crystallized in the

Council's meeting in the end of the 300's and 400's. That was my contention, that by the time we have a consensus and therefore certainty among the

Churches as to the contents of the New Testament, at that exact same time, we have agreement on the

Old Testament. For Mr. White to reject one, well, excepting the other one, is grossly logically flawed, to put it mildly.

His statement therefore, quote, has to prove that all of them, not just one, not just two, all of them were unanimously used by all the

Church Fathers is absolutely absurd. That puts a burden upon me that he himself would be unwilling to shoulder if he were up here defending the canon of the

New Testament to a hostile audience today. No one can prove that and no one claims that it can be proved.

He says that every time you have a reference to 22 books it excludes these deuterocanonical books.

Mr. White, I can't believe that you have the temerity to stand before these people and read the

Festal Letter of St. Athanasius, the 39th Festal Letter in 367, which begins, the

Old Testament consists of altogether 22 books in number, and not read the list! People have different ways of combining books together.

That's why some are 22, some are 24, and these lists are not consistent. St. Athanasius himself in this very list says that the

Old Testament contains he says, and then the Prophets, the 12 counted as one book, then

Isaiah, Jeremiah, along with it Baruch, Lamentations, the

Letter of Jeremiah, these are included in his 27 books. So Mr. White's statement that everyone who says there's 27 books to know more excludes the deuterocanonical books is just not a truthful statement.

I'm not claiming that he was being deliberately untruthful, but he was being at least very sloppy.

Athanasius, I can't decide in his understanding of the early church whether he was a good guy or a bad guy.

Here he's this great champion in Mr. White's attempt to use him against the Catholic position before it had been crystallized in the

Council of Carthage. He doesn't mention all the books, we admit that. But the same Athanasius was a bishop exercising

Episcopal powers that Mr. White would say are found nowhere in the New Testament. So is this guy a good guy or a bad guy?

Cyril of Jerusalem in his catechetical lectures also includes Baruch and the

Letter of Jeremiah. The very man that Mr. White said is so in touch with the Hebrew canon.

So does Jerome in his letter to Rufinus include the additions so called by Protestants to the book of Esther and Daniel.

I didn't say Mr. White that you're not going to deal with the early church at all. I said that you will use it selectively and inconsistently.

So it's again erroneous for you to say that. You said that J. N. D. Kelly is not working with the most modern scholarship. Says who?

I mean it's easy to make a statement like that. J. N. D. Kelly is simply quoting church fathers.

The fathers whose writings have been absent for quite some time. It sounds like we've somehow lost their writings.

He also grossly misrepresents the Catholic teaching on anathema and saying that all these people writing back in the early centuries are now anathema because the

Council of Trent said that these things are fixed. Anathemas don't work retroactively Mr. You know better.

Before something is dogmatically defined it is legitimately up for grabs. There was a time in which there was some uncertainty and some dialogue as to which book should be in.

But once it's solemnly defined by council then you can't go against it. The Jews were still disputing not 200 years before Christ but afterwards books like Esther etc.

I've got to stop and we'll continue it later. In his opening statement

Jerry referred to Jerome's talking with Damasus and in regards to Damasus supposedly referring to the tradition of the church he used the terms and I quote, unanimous tradition end quote.

That is what I was referring to. It's all on tape we can go back and look at it if we'd like. Secondly then when he represented what

I said that Jerry's going to have to prove that these books were then when he represented me he said used by all the fathers.

I didn't say that. I said considered inspired by all the fathers. So let's try to keep that accurate.

Now let's go back to Athanasius. No I didn't read the whole letter. It's two pages long and it's fairly lengthy but let's note yet again something that I had said earlier in the debate and I guess it got missed.

Quote, when one examines the passages in the early fathers which are supposed to establish the canonicity of the

Apocrypha one finds that some of them are taken from the alternative Greek text of Ezra which is 1st

Esdras or from additions or appendices to Daniel, Jeremiah or some other canonical book which are not really relevant.

Why are they not relevant? They are not relevant because we are dealing there not with separate books like Maccabees.

We are dealing with the fact that in the Greek many of these books not things like Maccabees or Tobit but something like Baruch's book or something like that are combined in the text with other works, some of the additions actually inside the text not as an appendices but inside the text.

So if you are reading the Greek text you do not even see where there is a division between the two things.

And so when he for example mentions Athanasius, gracious sakes I'm assuming everyone is aware of that.

I'm assuming everyone is aware of the fact and again if Jerry would appeal to the most modern work that has been written on this subject in an extensive format, that is

Beckwith's work on the Old Testament and New Testament church, then he would be aware of the fact that that is something that is brought out very clearly.

But the fact remains that the books that Jerry says are inspired where is

Maccabees and Athanasius? It's not here. Did he know about the book? Of course he knew about the book.

Of course he knew about the book. But he does not include it as inspired. No effort to attempt to hide something.

The simple fact of the matter is this individual did not believe that it was inspired. I'd like to point out that B .F.

Westcott in his work The Bible and the Church noted that there was a learned tradition which persisted throughout the

Middle Ages. A tradition which excluded the apocrypha from the Old Testament even though the popular

Bible embraced them. That tradition continued on. It wasn't something that Luther just sort of cooked up one day and decided well let's just come up with this idea and go after that.

Now Jerry said that we can't figure out if Athanasius is a good guy or a bad guy. I'm not sure why that is.

Any of us who know the New Testament know that there are bishops, there are elders, there are the overseers of the flock and we've got no problem whatsoever with that concept.

It's certainly a part of in fact Jerry often mentions that he was an ordained minister and so he would know that we certainly don't have any problem with the concept of those people being in the church.

Now secondly, Jerry went on to say well, Mr. White said we were not using the most up -to -date scholarship.

Well, the simple fact of the matter is Jerry himself pointed out that some of the sources he was using such as J.

N. D. Kelly are sources that have been used standardly for a long, long time. And they are. There's no question about that.

But the sources that I'm talking about and referring him to for example Beckwith's book was published in 1985 which was only one year before Jerry goes into the

Roman Catholic Church and hence would be after the period of at least his undergraduate training and maybe even a fair portion of his seminary training.

And so I'm simply suggesting to you that those reference works that appeal to scholarship prior to that time are going back primarily to H.

E. Ryle's book that comes from the end of the last century. And a lot of things have happened since then.

A lot of things have happened so we need to go to the original scholarly sources rather than things that are secondary that are just quoting what is very popular.

Now in regards to anathema, again I think my point is fairly clear. It's sort of like when

I said so much the infallibility of Luther. What I meant was we don't claim Luther was infallible and what the

Roman Catholic has to do is they're claiming that they are infallible. It's okay to admit a mistake on somebody's part.

Same thing regards to the anathema. The point is the Council of Trent declared an anathema upon anyone who would reject these traditions.

And yet we find many in the very early church that if they held their position today, they would be what?

They would be anathema. Is that what Jerry's telling us? That these individuals who held that position, if they were alive today would be anathema?

That they would be separated from the church? I don't believe that's a position that holds consistently at all. My time has expired.

Mr. White, there's a difference between somebody not being aware of something because the church hasn't articulated with the magisterial force of its teaching authority and someone being alive today in your speculative scenario and being stubbornly resistant to what the church teaches now.

And for you to impugn the integrity of these men to say that if they were alive today they would still be rejecting the tenancy of these books is something that's purely gratuitous on your part.

If you want to debate your ability to somehow extrapolate and know what Athanasius would believe today when he would have the benefit of subsequent councils, you're welcome to, but I don't have the ability to engage in this sort of construction of a make -believe world and try to figure out whether Athanasius would be a

Catholic or Protestant on this particular issue if he were alive today. Mr. White seems to say that Beckwith's book is this is it.

This is the 1985. This is the definitive work. Anybody who didn't have this book to read before then just didn't seem to have access to the truth of God on this matter.

I think that's really putting too heavy a burden to bear upon one particular book, even though I do have the book and I did read it before I went into the

Roman Catholic Church in 1985. I've also read F .F. Bruce's The Canon of Scripture, the other major evangelical book, and I find them possessed of the same logical flaws that Mr.

White's presentation is as well, not to mention the factual errors again. He says that the canon was closed 200 years before Christ.

Where's the proof for that, Mr. White? Why is it that Jews at the end of the first century were still disputing the so -called antilogomena, the books that some were speaking against?

Esther, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Ezekiel, Proverbs. There would have been no disputes if the canon was closed.

Where's the proof that Jesus walked around with this closed canon in his head and the apostles as well?

There's no canon in the New Testament. That's the point, and if that's Mr. White's only inspired and absolutely reliable source, then he cannot know for sure what the

Old Testament canon is because it's not cited in the New Testament. There is no list in the inspired pages of the

New Testament of what books indeed compose the Old Testament. He says that some fathers didn't use all of these books.

Granted, I've said that repeatedly. There's a growing awareness, as there is of the New Testament books.

If Mr. White is going to say, because Athanasius didn't include 2 Maccabees, therefore we shouldn't, well then he would have to cite other church fathers who didn't accept 2

Peter and Jude and Revelation and say we shouldn't either. This is sloppy arguing. This is inconsistency.

What then should be our authority was a question that Mr. White asked a couple of times. That's what I'd like to ask him.

What is our authority for knowing what are the contents of God's inspired scripture tonight?

Is it our individual opinions? Is it R .T. Beckwith? Is it the next book that will roll off the press next year or next decade?

Or is it the church of Jesus Christ to whom is entrusted the custodianship of God's holy word and faith?

This is the authority that Mr. White seems to reject and I don't know what he's going to put in its place.

Mr. White says that the absence of unanimity disqualifies these books as canonical. And I'm arguing based on the evidence from the church fathers that if that's the case then prior to these councils the

New Testament must also have several disqualified books in it. He mentions this three -fold division into law prophets and writings prior to Christ saying this proves the canon was closed.

No it doesn't. It simply says that there were these three divisions or departments law, prophets and writings. But it does not say anywhere exactly prior to the coming of Christ which books are included in these three divisions and it doesn't say this is the canon so that we can know before the time of Christ that the books of the

Jews except it's canonical today are indeed based on it. He says you know who are the people of God?

Who are the Jews? They were the people of God Mr. Mattis. Let's remember that. But we're not talking about the

Jews prior to the coming of Christ. We're talking about testimonies reading from rabbis after the

Jews reject Jesus Christ. After they reject the New Testament. Are these the authority that Mr. White wants to hold up to us to determine the canon of the

Old Testament? That seems very inconsistent and unchristian to say the least. Why follow this idea of the

Palestinian Jews that inspiration had left off? As a Christian you know better tonight. The spirit of prophecy had not died.

John the Baptist was a prophet. No greater prophet strove the earth and for the Jews to reject him and to reject

Jesus based on some idea of a closing of the age of prophecy is absolutely unchristian.

I don't accept that as any kind of valid line of argument for rejecting the inspired character of books written after the time of Malachi.

Because I don't follow the theology of the Jewish people who rejected my Lord, rejected his apostles, rejected the

New Covenant as somehow normative for me in deciding this issue here tonight. I think they are inadmissible as evidence for that very reason.

Mr. White I think playing a game with you to attempt to use those over against the authority of the church when it meets in councils like Hippo, Carthage, Florence, and Trent.

I've got three seconds left but I'm done. First of all

I would say that in regards to Athanasius' Festal Letter that was in his context the closest thing that could possibly even be created to the anachronistic concept of magisterial force in his day.

He as a bishop was writing to the churches and what he writes is something that is very different than what Mr. Matitix would have us to accept this evening.

In regards to closing the Jewish canon out, Mr. Matitix says, what's the evidence of that? Well I gave you a whole lot of it beforehand very little of it has

Jerry even begun to comment on. But I would like to note that first of all he says that even a hundred years after Christ there were disputes about the

Jewish books themselves. However it's interesting to note that again Modern Scholarship notes that looking back over all this evidence one notes that with the exception of three short books

Ruth, Song, Songs, and Esther the canonicity of every book of the Hebrew Bible is attested, most of them several times over.

And in regards to this Council of Jamnia as some people put it, an examination of it demonstrates that it was not an issue where all the

Jewish people were coming together to confer on whether these books were or were not canned scripture there is evidence they were considered canned scripture hundreds of years before this it was actually more of a debate like we're having this evening amongst various rabbis and there was in no way shape or form a question in regards to the whole

Jewish people removing those books. Those books were laid up in the temple as I tried to say earlier and laying those books up in the temple as Josephus talks about many times indicated that they could not be changed.

I'd like to give you another piece of evidence Aquila, whose rabbinical credentials are completely unquestionable in producing his translation of the

Old Testament accepted in the Jewish Bible at that date the five disputed books that Jerry was just mentioning in regards to Jewish people.

Another piece of evidence that the canon of the people was indeed something that was very wide and was in fact very closed.

Now in regards to the New Testament there's one of the problems in having short debates like this is you can barely get into all the areas.

Remember what the Lord Jesus said when he talked about the canon of scripture? He said well he didn't talk about the canon of scripture.

I believe that he did in a number of places. First of all, remember Luke? Luke talked about the fact that the Lord Jesus talked with the disciples after his crucifixion.

He opened their minds to understand what was written of him in the law, the prophets and the writings. Again, Mr. Mattox cannot show you one single example anywhere amongst the

Jewish people where law, writings and prophets includes the Apocrypha. Not once. Here the

Lord Jesus opens the minds of his disciples concerning those things written in the scriptures about himself and he doesn't do it from the books that Mr.

Mattox would tell us are inspired. In fact, as he himself has admitted, Jesus never quotes those books as inspired but,

Mr. Mattox has said, but he never quotes from Esther either. But Esther and the other books that he doesn't quote from are included in the canon of scripture that he argued with his opponents with and you'll never find a word of argument amongst them concerning the extent of the canon of scripture.

Not once. Instead, Jesus says to them, search the scriptures they testify of me and the scriptures we know that he would be referring to are the scriptures of the

Protestant Old Testament not the books of the Apocrypha. Remember in Matthew when he's talking about the blood of the prophets?

The blood of the prophets from when? From Abel to Zechariah. Where is that recorded?

Well, if you know the order of the Old Testament canon of scripture and there's a lot that goes into this, there's an entire discussion of this in many of the scholarly works you know this is talking about from Genesis to 2

Chronicles and 2 Chronicles is the last in the order of the books that is found in most of the manuscripts of the

Hebrew Old Testament. Many people feel, and I agree with them, that this is an indication of the Lord's part of the extent of the canon that was available to him.

There are numerous scholars who accept that position as well. And so I believe that there is evidence that can be examined from that point.

Mr. Mattocks then said that I said the absence of unanimity disqualifies the book what I'm trying to communicate is the absence of unanimity disqualifies

Jerry's opening statements. Where he claimed this concept of this unanimous tradition quote unquote that Damasus refers to that establishes the authority of these books.

I do believe very clearly that the evidence that I have already presented to you, the evidence that comes from the

Jewish sources that were not simply and this is one of the things again I attempted to emphasize the traditions that I cited to you were ancient ones they predated the time of Christ.

They were not recent opinions they were those which predated the time of Christ. They are the ones that establish the extent of the canon long before the

Christian period. And it's very interesting to me. I didn't have an opportunity had to leave my subject sitting over there that has the apocryphal books in them.

But it's very interesting. Mr. Mattocks got very engaged in saying prophecy didn't end.

1st Maccabees says it did. And if it's unchristian then I guess he just called it an unchristian book.

They understood that God was no longer speaking them in the way he had in inspired scriptures. Thank you.

At this time we'll have Mr. Mattocks will have 30 seconds to frame a question for Mr.

White. Mr. White will have 2 minutes to respond and then Mr. Mattocks will have 2 minutes to respond to Mr.

White's rebuttal. And then that will be reversed. 30 seconds 2 minutes, 2 minutes. So Mr. Mattocks.

Mr. White, on the issue of the canon if you could clarify for us please. I'm still very confused as to what your authority ultimately is.

Could you explain to the audience what you are proposing to them? Let me give you a couple of examples just to make it specific so we're not lost in a lot of fog.

Why should we accept the book of Esther for example as scripture today for Christians?

And for that matter why should we accept the gospel according to Matthew? Just comment on those for example please.

Well that's an extremely large question. First of all, I believe that God has worked with his people. I think an examination of history shows us that there were no special incredible events that brought around the canon of the

Old Testament. God worked with his people. God is the one who creates canon. Men do not create canon. God creates canon by inspiring scripture.

He worked with his people, the Jewish people, so much so that as I have asserted the canon was recognized and known amongst them by the time of Christ.

The Lord Jesus I believe gives his authority to that. The apostles themselves follow that. They never go outside of that authoritative scripture and defining it as scripture and using it as authority.

I believe the exact same process takes place in regards to the New Testament. God works with his people. The early church fathers did not in any way, shape, or form view themselves as having canonical authority.

They did not in any way, shape, or form view themselves as being able by any supposed apostolic authority to define canon authority.

They saw themselves as the passive recipients of the revelation of God that was given to them. They did not in any way, shape, or form do as hopefully you don't do, but as some

Roman Catholic apologists have done and described themselves as the mother of the Bible. Instead they recognized as the bride of Christ.

They listened to Christ speaking in his word. So in regards to Esther and asking a specific question one more time, it was one of the books that was laid up in the temple.

Laid up in the temple long before the time of Christ. Jewish tradition did not allow those books to be changed or to be altered in any way, shape, or form.

Josephus gives us a tradition that goes long before that, as does the Mishnah, that these books were considered canonical.

They were part of the very canon that the Lord Jesus cited from, and from which the apostles drew their beliefs and their teachings.

And those early church fathers such as Melito, Athanasius, and Jerome, who were aware of those facts, were aware of the

Jewish backgrounds, did not accept the apocryphal books as inspired, but they did, many of them, accept

Esther as inspired, and therefore I accept it as a part of that very scripture that has been very lovingly entrusted to us by our

Heavenly Father. You see my brothers and sisters, he really doesn't have an answer.

There's no real answer to the question, the rock bottom, bottom line question, how can you know that Esther is in fact inspired?

First he seeks refuge in this false dichotomy between God and man. God determines canon, men don't determine canon, but Mr.

White has been citing council after council and letter to letter of the Festal Letter of Athanasius as somehow determining canon.

I think this is an equivocation of terms, which is what we call it in debate. In other words, human beings are engaged in an activity here.

They are attempting to understand the limits of the canon, and to say that human beings don't do this doesn't make any sense.

God does delegate his authority to people on earth, and the question is where is that authority properly exercised?

Among the Jewish people, the rabbis that Mr. White quotes are all rabbis whose works are only extant in the post -Christian era.

We don't have these books existing prior to the time of Christ. What about bishops, individual bishops?

Are those his authority? No. He wants to use Athanasius since Athanasius does not include all the

Deuterocanonical books as some sort of argument against the Catholic position. But the Catholic Church, Mr.

White, has never taught that a letter from one bishop is somehow magisterial in the sense in which an ecumenical council or some binding definition from the

Bishop of Rome is. So you can't say, hey, that's magisterial, and then on the other hand turn around and deny some magisterial force.

As a matter of fact, I could show you letters and treatises by Athanasius asserting Catholic doctrines that Mr.

White rejects. So I think that his use of Athanasius is again, somewhat equivocal here.

Damasus did not say that there was a unanimity from the word go, but simply by that time, you see, there was a unanimity in the

Church. And so at that point, Jerome could have confidence to include these books. And that's the authority, the councils that had been met by that time.

Jerry, I simply will ask you a very, very simple question. Would you please explain to us why, if these books are inspired and they are so important, that we do not find, as you said, a single citation of them by the term scripture in all of the scripture that we agree upon?

Well, first of all, the first part of my answer would be that I do not accept anymore, although I once did as a

Protestant, this unbiblical idea that everything that the early Church believed somehow has to be reduced to writing in sacred scripture.

There's nothing in the New Testament that leads you to presuppose that. Nowhere does it say that everything the apostles taught would be committed to writing.

So the fact that they don't quote these books as scripture doesn't prove they didn't accept them as scripture. That's a logical fallacy on the part of Mr.

White. Mr. White seems to also have an incredible ability to know exactly what Jesus said on the road to Emmaus, for example.

He cited the passage in Luke 24. He said, hey, Jesus said, beginning from Moses and all the prophets, but we don't hear the words of Jesus in that passage.

They're simply a summation of the fact that he addressed the two men on the road to Emmaus and that he referred to the law, the prophets, and the writings.

I already agree, the Church already agrees that there's that threefold division, but what books fell into those categories,

Mr. White doesn't know. But wow, Mr. White, you must have been there on that road because Mr. White said, Jesus didn't quote from a single one of these

Deuterocanonical books. How do you know that, Mr. White? How can you claim that kind of omniscience and infallibility?

I would argue, and I would contend that you have no basis for making that kind of claim and attributing an opinion to our

Lord Jesus Christ that you have no basis, in fact, to back up. My point would be that the apostles and Jesus Christ himself could indeed have used many of these books and that we do have statements in the early

Church Fathers that they did and they taught them to do this very thing. And if we're going to reject the reliability of these

Church Fathers by the time they're meeting in these councils, then we have to reject their reliability on the New Testament as well.

I accept these books simply because the Church, meeting in authoritative council, after the pattern in Acts 15, guided by the

Holy Spirit, resolves this issue for Christians. Of course, all the little jabs about omniscience and all the rest of that little silly stuff aside,

I'm not claiming omniscience. What I said was Jesus quoted from the Law, the Prophets, and the

Writings. I've challenged Mr. Matiticks, and those of you who are listening closely know that he has never taken up this challenge, to demonstrate that the apocryphal books were ever, ever, ever considered to be in there.

The simple fact of the matter is, modern scholarship demonstrates that the books he says he's read say it, so he should have been aware of this.

There is not a shred of evidence to support his contention. I did not say that I knew what Jesus said. I then wanted to say that nowhere in the

New Testament does Jesus ever quote from the apocryphal books.

And the question I asked was, if these books are so important, and these are, you know,

Esther is not exactly the size of Isaiah. Have you read it recently? You know, it's not extremely long, you know?

So we can understand why Esther might not be quoted. Isaiah is quoted a whole lot. Have you read the apocryphal books?

Some of those books are pretty long, aren't they? And if they're so important, why do you not find

Jesus quoting them? Why do you not find Paul quoting them? In fact, if the New Testament teaches what

Mr. Mattock says it does in regard to things like purgatory and stuff like that, why don't you quote from the passage of Maccabees that he cited?

It's not there. Why? Because the simple fact of the matter is that we know what the canon was in Palestine at this time.

It's not a matter of dispute. It really isn't a matter of dispute. We know what it was, and it didn't include the apocryphal books.

There is no evidence of dispute amongst Jesus and his opponents amongst the

Jews in regard to this matter, and the reason they are not quoted is because they did not accept them as scripture.

You cannot assert they are scripture and say Jesus and the apostles backed that up.

You can talk all you want about councils, Mr. Mattocks. You can talk all about that you want. I prefer Jesus and his apostles to councils because I know councils have erred.

I know they have erred, and therefore I will go with what Jesus and the apostles had to say rather than councils. Everybody having a good time tonight?

Yes? We will close this debate with each speaker being given 15 minutes for a closing statement.

Mr. Mattocks will go first, and then Mr. White will get his 15 minutes, at which time we will formally end the debate.

You will be free to go. You'll have a few minutes of break, and then for those who would like to stay around, we'll have a few minutes afterwards for you, the audience, to be able to ask the speaker some questions.

Mr. Mattocks, your closing 15 minutes. I want us to all lay aside, including myself, the intensity of our feelings about this just as much as possible during the next 30 minutes so that we can listen to what we ourselves are saying and that you can listen carefully and calmly.

Ask God to assuage your emotions and to look at this with the seriousness which is do it because the issue tonight is an extremely important one.

It is nothing less than the integrity of the Word of God that is at stake. Jesus says that man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

To fail to have anything less than the fullness of the Scripture that God intended his people to be instructed by is to fail to have a complete blueprint for building the

Kingdom of God, the Church, according to God's own intentions. And that is why there is confusion, division, and disharmony among those that name the name of Jesus Christ.

This situation has got to be intolerable to you, to me, to Mr. White, as it is to our

Lord Jesus Christ himself. And we have got to achieve something here tonight. Even if Mr.

White and I can't achieve it, I'm hoping that you and your heart and your mind can achieve some resolution of this issue so that you can start being a part of the solution and stop being a part of the problem.

There is a problem in the world today. There is confusion and conflict among Christians.

Should we ordain women or not? Should we baptize babies or not? Is abortion okay or not?

Is artificial birth control okay or not? These are issues that Protestants disagree with each other among and with the

Catholic Church upon. And on and on it goes and we cannot allow this anymore. Now that's not all due to disagreements over the extent of the canon.

Some of it is due to also our failure to come to terms as to what the authority is for understanding the

Word of God. But the issue is one of authority tonight. And I have asked Mr. White, and I will look and listen intently during his 15 closing minutes to see whether or not he can explain to us exactly what our authority is for knowing the right contents of the

Old Testament. First of all, the authority cannot be the New Testament.

I am willing to stipulate for the sake of the argument and sincerely that the New Testament is the inspired infallible

Word of God. Mr. White and I agree at least formally on that. But I would argue that Mr.

White, first of all, has no basis for that faith. He has no way of knowing that these 27 books,

Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, all the way through the book of Revelation, indeed come to him from the Apostles. There is only one source of information about those books and their authorship, and whether they are authentic or not, ladies and gentlemen, the early

Church Fathers. A group of evidence that Mr. White rejects as being sufficiently authoritative to be binding upon the consciousness of Christians.

Even when these Church Fathers meet in council, as Mr. White just said, they can err. The Catholic does not believe that.

Because the Catholic believes that Jesus Christ promised he would not leave us orphans.

Orphans are children who don't have a Heavenly Father who can instruct them as to what, in fact, they are to do. Oh, we have the inspired scriptures,

Mr. White says. But he's arguing in circles like a dog chasing his tail. He says, we're not left orphans because we have the

Bible. Mr. White, you need to show us how we know what the Bible is. If we don't have a church that can tell us this gospel is from Matthew, and this gospel purporting to come from Thomas, in fact, is not.

This Acts of the Apostles is written by Luke, and therefore authentic. This one purporting to be written by Peter or Paul is not.

The Church assembled in the power of the Spirit in Acts chapter 15, pronounced a declarative, dogmatic binding decree saying it seems good to the

Holy Spirit and to us. Notice not the either -or dichotomy. It's God and not man, therefore, folks.

Or it's man and therefore we're leaving God out of the picture. No. It's God working through His Church. That's what the

Incarnation is all about. God becoming man to save us through His assumed humanity. And the

Church is the extended body of Christ through which He continues to teach so that, as He says in Luke 10, 17 referring to the emissaries who sent out to His earthly ministry, whoever hears you, hears me.

Folks, if we don't have a Church through which Christ speaks with infallibility and trustworthiness, then we have no contact with Jesus Christ at all.

There is no canon of the Old Testament in the New Testament. So that cannot be Mr. White's authority.

It cannot be a church council, he says, because they have erred. It cannot be the Jewish people because they reject the most important.

He talks about the importance of Esther versus Isaiah. Mr. White, the most important thing of all is that Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of all the prophecies and types in the

Old Testament, whether they're found in Esther or Isaiah or any book. And for people to reject

Christ, as Jesus said, you don't even believe Moses or the prophets, because if you did, you would believe in me,

John chapter 5, verses 39 and the surrounding context. So Mr. White is looking to people who don't understand, as St.

Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3, and do not accept the truth of, as Jesus says in John chapter 5, the

Old Testament. To continue to call these men forth, these rabbis forth as some sort of authoritative witnesses, more authoritative than successors of the apostles, to me seems very logically shaky, to say the least.

To me seems very logically shaky, to say the least. The fact is that these

Jewish men themselves were still disputing the contents of the canon in the first century, and any, any,

I stress any, article on the canon that you could find in any reputable

Bible dictionary encyclopedia, the Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible, the Interpreter's Bible, the any, the one published by International Standard Bible Encyclopedia will tell you that these disputes were still going on.

Was Esther in fact scripture or not? They were troubled by the fact that it didn't mention God anywhere in the book.

Modern scholarship, Mr. White says, that's our authority! Modern scholarship.

Folks, no, modern scholarship was cited by you as the thing that I'm somehow ignorant of.

I'm just not coming up to speed with, because I'm reading J. N. D. Kelley, who is based on 19th century work.

That, first of all, is an absolutely inaccurate statement, Mr. White. That book by J. N. D. Kelley, Early Christian Writings, has gone through numerous revisions, it is fully addressed to The Times, the man is not dead and moldering his grave, ladies and gentlemen, he's still writing books.

He just published recently The Oxford Dictionary of the Popes and various other books, and he's a reputable international authority on these matters.

When he says that the early church's canon included more than the Protestant canon, then you need to at least listen to the primary source documents that he cites.

Kelley's age, even if it were an issue, is not the relevant issue here. Mr. White said instead of dealing with these secondary authorities, let's get back to the primary sources.

Well, R. T. Beckwith is not a primary source, he's a secondary source as much as J. N. D. Kelley is. I've read the book from cover to cover, and R.

T. Beckwith's book is modern scholarship, yes, but it is modern Protestant scholarship.

So is F. F. Bruce's book, and F. F. Bruce admits that the

Jews at the time of Jesus Christ did not have a consensus on the canon. There are

Catholic articles galore that quote F. F. Bruce gleefully because he admits he grants that particular point.

So I'm still not sure where this authority is to which we trust our soul to. I'm not going to trust my soul to R.

T. Beckwith. He has no credentials of infallibility. I didn't say anywhere that just because the

New Testament cites a book that, or I didn't say that the issue is that the

New Testament must cite a book for it to be canonical, and therefore since it doesn't cite all these books, therefore my case falls to the ground.

I've mentioned repeatedly tonight that the New Testament fails to quote as scripture several books of the

Old Testament, even long books, ladies and gentlemen. Long books. And yet it quotes very short little books as well as scripture.

So the argument about how long or short the book is is irrelevant. The New Testament writers quote

Old Testament books when it's appropriate, when it flows into the argument, but simply because we don't have quotations from these books in the writings which have existed down to the present day, doesn't mean they weren't quoted at all.

We have even letters, we know of letters, I should say, that the apostles wrote that have not survived in the sovereign plan of God.

He did not decree that they become part of the canon. Paul, in what we call 1 Corinthians, alludes to a previous letter. And what

Paul did in those letters, or what he did in his preaching, Mr. White does not know. Where is

Maccabees in Athanasius, he said. Well, it's not there. I agree. I admit it.

But individual letters of individual bishops do not determine the canon for the whole church. It's when the church finally meets in these councils.

And these same councils give him the New Testament, which he seems to want to stand on and say there are no disputes about whatsoever.

He says, I don't need councils. I prefer Jesus and his apostles. So do

I. But the Catholic understands on the basis of the promises of Jesus and the apostles that the teaching authority of the church would continue.

The same Jesus who inspired his apostles said he would be with them until the end of the world.

Now the apostles died. Jesus' supernatural presence, guaranteeing that the church can be the pillar and foundation of the truth, ensures that the church can continue to give us the reliable voice of Jesus Christ without distortion when it speaks infallibly in its authentic magisterium.

We have no such promise for Jewish rabbis. We have no such promise for individual

Protestant scholars. Mr. White also referred to the fact that Jesus settles the canon force when he says the law, the prophets, and the writings.

I will repeat. He simply tells us the three divisions. Where does Jesus say, now the law is Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

And the prophets are Isaiah, Jeremiah. He doesn't say that anywhere in scripture. Therefore, Mr.

White and I stand on completely level ground at that point. I can't prove he included those books from what is said in scripture.

Mr. White can't prove that he didn't. And for him to quote

Jesus' statement in Matthew 23 about the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah as giving us the two book ends of the canon,

Genesis to 2 Chronicles, again doesn't prove the point. So that was the first and the last book in the series of scrolls.

Fine, Mr. White, but what books came in between those two? You can't prove that Baruch, for example, was not accepted by Jesus when we know for a fact that Jews three centuries prior to our

Lord Jesus Christ did accept these books as scripture. The Jews who speak of them as scripture in Alexandria, for example, and include them in the

Septuagint. Mr. White says that, listen to the church fathers. They don't all quote all of these books.

I agree. But the same is true of New Testament books. Protestant scholars such as R .K.

Harrison and Donald Guthrie in his International New Testament says we have to admit, if we're intellectually honest, that there are some doubts in the early church about books like 3

John, which are so short, there's not enough internal evidence for you to be able to evaluate the book and to know that it came from an apostle.

Ultimately, he says, we must rely upon the trustworthiness of the church. Now, Mr. White is willing to do that in the case of the

New Testament. Why not in the case of the Old? I do not understand his inconsistency on that particular point.

He says that Athanasius, when I pointed out that he includes

Baruch in the Letter of Jeremiah, included that as part of the Book of Jeremiah. So what, Mr. White?

That's not the issue, whether it was a separate book or part of the book. The point is, he accepted those segments, whether you consider them a segment or part of the book, as scripture, those passages of scripture, and you do not.

So why do you cite Athanasius against the Catholic Church as if it's some reputable authority we should all listen to and heed, and then reject

Athanasius' acceptance of Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah? Modern scholarship can mean many, many different things.

I'm amazed to learn that, I guess, Catholics aren't modern, that, I guess, Catholic scholars have long ago ceased to write, and that the only modern scholarship is

Protestant scholarship. There are books written by Catholics, modern scholarship, books written, for example, by Father Most and others, defending the canonicity and the inspiration of these books.

Why are those not modern scholarship? There are allusions to the New Testament, in the New Testament, to the

Deuterocanonical works, and Arnold Sundberg, a Protestant, lists them by the dozens.

I'll just give you one example. Hebrews 12, 22 through 24, talking about the Spirits of Just Men made perfect, alludes to the

Song of the Three Holy Children, in Daniel chapter 3, verse 86, a passage not found in the Jewish canon, but found in the

Christian canon in Septuagint. I think it really all boils down to this. I think we need to think about this very seriously.

Mr. White, I think, has done a very good job, a very aggressive job, unfortunately, in many points, a very inaccurate job, a way of misrepresenting both the

Catholic position, and indeed the fallacy of the Protestant position. He has told us, I, he says, many scholars feel, and I agree with them.

Well, thank you, Mr. White, for sharing your feelings with us tonight. I respect them. I think you're a fine fellow, and I think that your feelings are worth listening to.

I really do, and I don't mean that as a sarcastic comment, but a very serious one. This man spends a lot of time thinking about the faith, and thinking about the

Bible. And if he says, Jerry, I feel that these books should not be in the canon, I'm willing to consider that.

I'm willing to respect that, and I'm willing to give it the consideration due. But I'm not willing to bank my eternal soul on it.

I am not willing to run the risk of rejecting from sacred scripture, which the church in council after council after council has given, and it has anathematized those who reject these books, and simply follow

Mr. White's or any other Protestant's feelings. And I would encourage you not to do the same. And Mr. White, I would ask you to really open your heart and mind to Jesus Christ, and ask him to give you that confidence as well.

Thank you very much. The book of Mormon is the word of God.

We have a prophet in Salt Lake City that has told us infallibly that it is so. Well, is it?

Well, for about 9 million people in the world today, that's enough. Because they feel they have an infallible authority.

Well, don't you think we need to examine the reality of your authority? Oh no, you can't do that.

As long as you have an ultimate authority, you can't examine that ultimate authority. And so I'm not going to examine the credentials of my ultimate authority, but I am going to accept what he says, and he says the book of Mormon is the word of God, so it is.

I have a way of dealing with such a person. I don't believe the Roman Catholic does. Oh, you may say, well let's look at history.

Yes, the point is, what Jerry has said to us tonight, I think the summary of Jerry's statement is, the apocryphal books are inspired because the church tells you so.

And that's it. Let's not look at what Jesus and the apostles believed. The church has said it, therefore, that's it.

Assumption, Council of Trent, any other councils are speaking for Jesus and the apostles, and of course that is the

Roman Catholic position. But what about if you want to know what Jesus and the apostles taught, and not what people 2 ,000 years later say he taught in his name.

What do you do then? Well, I think the evidence has been very clear tonight. Jerry has said that Jesus promised not to leave his orphans, and that's where the church comes in, and you know what?

Jesus didn't leave his orphans. Jesus never abandoned his church. He did not abandon his church, but that does not make the

Council of Constance right in burning Jan Hus, and that does not make the fourth ladder in Council right when it said convicted heretics shall be handed over for due punishment to their secular superiors, or the latter's agents,

Catholics who assume the cross and devote themselves to the extermination of heretics, shall enjoy the same indulgence and privilege as those who go to the

Holy Land. Jesus' promise to be with his church doesn't make the killing of Christians right, and that's what you've got to believe if you're going to say, well,

Council said it, therefore it must be true. I'm sorry, that doesn't follow. You know, it's interesting, the psalmist in Psalm 119, verse 89, he knew what the word of God was, and he knew it 1 ,000 years before any man in Rome called himself the vicar of Christ.

Before any council ever met. How did he know? Jerry has asked me, Mr. White, tell us what your authority is!

It's the same one that the psalmist had in Psalm 119, verse 89, and if you look for a higher authority, you're looking in the wrong direction.

The wrong direction. Jerry said that I think Jewish rabbis have more authority than the apostles.

No. Actually, that's exactly how I wrote it down, Jerry. I believe that the

Jewish rabbis I was citing know more about what the Jewish people believed in regards to a particular period of time than Mr.

Matiticks or myself did. And obviously you know that I did not cite the

Jewish rabbis as an authority for the canon, I cited them as an authority for telling us what the Jews believed about the canon.

In fact, I would assert to you that I can guarantee you that the Jewish rabbis I cited knew a whole lot more about the

Jewish canon in the first century before Christ than anyone at the Council of Trent. In fact,

I doubt that a citizen of the Council of Trent could have listed you one Jewish rabbi that had anything to do with the whole situation, to be perfectly honest with you.

That wasn't a matter of studying the issues and coming to a conclusion, that was a reaction against the

Protestant Reformation that dogmatically asserted those things in the way they did with the anathema.

Mr. Matiticks brings up the issue of modern scholarship saying that modern scholarship is our authority in regards to ascribing that to me.

I didn't say that, of course. I was simply referring to the fact that many of the things that Jerry has said is based upon theories that, for example, one individual he cited numerous times,

A .C. Sundberg, has absolutely blown out of the water. That's all I was saying. That's all

I was referring to. I was not saying modern scholarship is our authority. It's interesting though, Jerry has liked to use the phrase that the best of Protestantism agrees with him.

I wonder what the difference is between modern scholarship and the best of Protestantism. I'm not sure how those two vary. Jerry then said that I said there were no disputes whatsoever about the

New Testament books. I quoted it again. And yet, Jerry has my book called Answers to Catholic Claims, which has an entire chapter on the early church fathers' discussions about the

New Testament books. I'm not sure how he could say that. He also asserted that the Jews in Alexandria accepted the apocryphal books, and he used that in regards to the citations in the

New Testament about the law, the prophets, and the writings, which we also find in the apocryphal books. Can I ask you a question?

I've asked Jerry over and over again to prove to us, just give us one piece of evidence that any of the apocryphal books were ever in those three divisions of the

Hebrew Bible. And I haven't heard a single answer. You know why? Because no answer exists. But let me ask you something.

If Ecclesiasticus, if it's prologue, cites the law and the prophets and the writings, how can

Ecclesiasticus be a part of the law or the prophets or the writings? Obviously, the writer of Ecclesiasticus is looking back into the past and recognizes those three divisions, and now he's writing a new book.

And now Jerry wants to tell us that's a part of that division? I'm sorry, that doesn't make any sense whatsoever, and you can ask any council in the world to give you authority for believing that's true.

That doesn't make it true. Okay? Then he said there are many allusions to the apocryphal books in the

New Testament. And guess what? There are. There are. But I repeat one more time.

The undeniable truth is that the New Testament never actually quotes from or ascribes authority to the apocrypha.

To any of the apocrypha. Any of them. Not once.

Allusions? Yes. There are allusions to all sorts of things. Paul quotes Eretus the philosopher. Does that mean we should add

Eretus to the canon of Scripture? I should hopefully think not. We should not do that at all. Let's summarize what we've had this evening.

Mr. Mattox takes the affirmative position. Mr. Mattox is here this evening to prove to us that the

Roman Catholic canon of the Old Testament is correct. And what in reality has

Mr. Mattox provided to us as the basis upon which to decide that the Old Testament canon of the

Roman Catholic Church is correct? I would submit to you that he has provided to us only one reason for believing that the

Old Testament canon of the Roman Catholic Church is correct. Because the Roman Catholic Church says so. I didn't think that was in dispute as far as what the

Roman Catholic Church said. The Roman Catholic Church says it's right. And seemingly we're arguing in a circle here.

The Roman Catholic Church says these books are inspired. And because we claim the Roman Catholic Church is the true church, guess what?

That means they're inspired. That seems to be the argument that is being placed before us this evening.

And it's very much the same argument that my friends in Salt Lake presented to me just recently. The prophet says the

Book of Mormon is true. I believe that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints is true. Therefore, the Book of Mormon is inspired.

Can anyone tell me what the difference between those two is? I don't see what the difference is. I really don't. You may say, well, but this is

Jesus' church. Well, the folks in Salt Lake think the exact same thing. That's their idea too.

It is an authoritative argument. Unfortunately, during the Middle Ages that type of argument was backed up with force.

Thankfully this evening, hopefully it won't be. Laughter You know?

If I held the position that I held today in a Roman Catholic country, after the

Council of Trent, I would have been in grave danger. And why? Because I agree with an

Athanasius who rejects Maccabees. Because I agree with Jerome who recognizes these books were never a part of the heritage of the people that Paul talked about in Romans chapter 9, to whom the oracles of God had been given.

That they never ever saw those books as inspired. That Jesus does not ever quote from them as inspired. He never cites it as being

Scripture. That the Apostles, in all the writings that we have, certainly if these books are so important to do, as Jerry has said, and have a bearing upon our eternal salvation, certainly in all the discussions in the

New Testament, there would have been at least one reason for one of the inspired Apostles to have said,

Thus saith the Scriptures. It is written. And then we find something out of Maccabees.

Or we find something out of Ecclesiasticus. But we don't. We don't.

Why? Because I assert to you that as we have seen, and as was recognized by Melito, by Athanasius, by Jerome, by Gregory, by Hillary, these books were not a part of the canon of Scripture that Jesus and the

Apostles used. So let me ask you. If, as Jerry prayed at the beginning of his presentation, it is our desire to know what

God would have us to believe about Scripture, how then do we find out?

To whom do we go? Do we go to a modern organization? Do we go and ask someone today and say,

Well, what is your opinion about this? Or do we go and ask the question,

Well, this friend of mine has asserted that I should believe that these books called

Maccabees are part of Scripture. And in fact has asserted that I should believe in the doctrine of purgatory because of certain passages in there.

Now there's an important issue. There's an important issue. Now how do I know? I'm a

Christian. And so I want to have apostolic authority. Where do

I go? Well, he tells me that I should go to an organization that claims to be able to follow a genealogical path back to those apostles.

Hmm. Alright. There's a number of groups that claim that. Lots of groups that claim that. Well, they say that,

Hey, here's the history and we can go back with this history and there's certain parts of that history like when there were three different popes and the schisms and how a council had to come in to heal the schism and you know there's a lot of times like J.

N. D. Kelly mentioned that there weren't any bishops of Rome and like J. N. D. Kelly says there were times when there wasn't just one bishop of Rome but it was a multitude of elders and there are problems there but they claim that this thing goes all the way back there.

And that's why I should accept what they say about it. But then there's these other groups over here that say they have modern prophets and so on and so forth and they give me this information and they give me that information and gracious sakes if I start looking around for an infallible authority, there's so many competing voices out there, aren't there?

Which one do I listen to? Well, I ask the question, did

Jesus even in those passages that Roman Catholics allege refer to purgatory?

Did Jesus or the apostles cite this as scripture? Did they say it is written?

We all know what the answer to that is. The answer is no, they did not. So has

Mr. Mattox given us a statement from Jesus Christ about the authority of the apocryphal books?

No. He's alleged that Jesus' authority has been given to his church and therefore we must listen to that but he hasn't given us a statement from Christ.

What about Peter? Matthew? Luke? John?

What about Paul? No, we haven't heard a word. We haven't heard a word.

Well, could it be possibly that when they refer to the law and the prophets and so on and so forth, they're referring to the apocryphal and I've given you citation after citation after citation to demonstrate that that is contrary to fact and Jerry hasn't given us any citations that says that these books were ever a part of those things.

He just alleged it but gave no proof of it. And so as Jerry is wont to do when he has the negative position rather than the affirmative position

I'm going to have to ask you has Jerry upheld his position in the debate by saying, well, the

Roman Catholic canon of the Old Testament is correct because Roman Catholicism says so. If that's all we were going to do we could have cut this a whole lot shorter than we've done in two hours.

I don't believe that Roman Catholicism could just simply stand up, assert its own authority and then say these things.

We must look to the apostles and Jesus Christ himself and when we do we find no evidence of the inspiration of these books.

And when we look to the early church, unlike Jerry's initial claims we find a tremendous amount of information that would demonstrate to us that there were a number of the early fathers and interestingly enough, those that knew the

Old Testament best and had connections with the Hebrew Old Testament who said no, no they aren't canon scripture they're not inspired.

And so I do not believe that they are scripture because there is not the testimony of Jesus Christ, there is not the testimony of God's people, in fact the testimony of God's people prior to the coming of Jesus Christ, remember how

Paul described them in Romans chapter 9 those to whom the oracles of God were given.

Great were their privileges. They said no. They said these are not canon scripture.

Jesus never said they were, the apostles never said they were and I do not believe they are either.

Is it important in regards to the infallibility of the church? Yes. Trent defined it and anathematized those who disagree.

We've looked in history and discovered they were wrong. You can't therefore use an infallibility that's just been disproven to substantiate your claim.

Thank you very much. All of us in this room,

Catholic or Protestant to go home and read our Bibles, would you agree both of you? Okay, on that note we are formally dismissed so we will formally end this evening and then a few minutes later those who would like to stay around we will have time for more informal discussion with our panelists.

Thank you all for coming. If we could keep to the general topic of scripture and secondly as was mentioned if you could please make a question rather than a sermon yourself.

The goal is to let our panelists answer as much as possible. And if you could also say who you're asking if you're asking both of them or one of them.

Alright, since the last shall be first let me start at the very back here. This gentleman right there. I have a question for Dr.

White. Not a doctor. Oh, sorry. For Reverend White.

In your closing statement which I think was fantastic I got the sense that you're equating

Catholic reliance on the two councils that define the deuterocanon or the apocryphal whichever way you want to put it as parallel to Mormon reliance on Joseph Smith and Revelation there.

I'd like to ask you something that Mr. McAddox brought up earlier in his presentation.

In marking the Catholic reliance on those two councils, those two councils are the very councils that Protestants rely on in establishing the authority for the

New Testament. And if that isn't the case in maybe 30 words or less tell me where Protestants establish.

In 30 words or less a history of the entire Protestant view of the canon. First of all, I wouldn't use the term mocking.

I use the example because the argument that I hear is an argument from authority. In other words we have the authority to define this, therefore we're right.

And so the point was that there are many individuals, many groups, I'm sorry, that have that kind of we are the authority, therefore we cannot be challenged on this issue perspective.

So I wasn't trying to mock that, I was trying to say I don't believe that a Roman Catholic who is arguing from that type of authority can deal with the

Mormon claim on the same authority because both have an ultimate authority above the scriptures themselves that then define the extent of the scriptures but differently.

In regards to the statement that Jerry made over and over again in regards to the idea that I am in reliance upon a

Roman Catholic council, it's very interesting. Athanasius in the very same festal letter gives the exact same listing of books long before any counselor came along.

As I said in regards and in fact this is in my book, Answers to Catholic Claims, I believe that the New Testament canon follows the exact same route as the

Old Testament canon and the Old Testament canon was closed, completed, and defined without the assistance of any authoritative council, quote unquote.

That is a work that God does amongst his people and it is only authoritative groups that wish to have,

I believe, control over the scripture that assert that you must have some organizational body that then assert control over the canon, either the

Old or the New Testament. I get a response. Yes. I would agree with that gentleman that Mr.

White's last delivery was fantastic, although I would use the word in a somewhat different sense.

I think that Mr. White, despite an undeniable eloquence of that closing summation, which was very good,

I mean I really envied him that achievement, he really misrepresented as he did throughout the debate the exact nature of the

Catholic claim. I never said that we accept this canon simply because the

Roman Catholic Church says so. My statement repeatedly in the opening address that I made was that the very same councils which define the

New Testament canon also define the

Old Testament canon that Catholics accept. And my point, which Mr. White never really addressed all throughout the debate, was that it is logically inconsistent to look at the

Council of Rome, the Council of Hippo, the Council of Carthage, the Council of Florence, the

Council of Trent, as giving us a New Testament canon and ignore or reject what it says about the

Old. If those councils are not his authority for the New Testament, then what is?

He can't claim it's Jesus and the Apostles. They didn't give us a canon for the New Testament.

He might say, well, they didn't quote these Old Testament books, so that helps us to find the Old, but they didn't quote their own books. So, in other words,

Mr. White himself must rely in some sense, however he qualifies it, on these councils.

These councils did the work for him. God did not give these books to him directly. And that is my assertion.

He never addressed the fact, he never answered the question, are these councils reliable or not? If he says, to me, it seems he's lost either way, that's what

I'm contending. If he's not, then I want him to show me now where there is a logical fallacy.

In other words, if he attacks the reliability of the council, then he has no reliable testimony to the New Testament canon.