The Apocrypha (White vs Matatics)

Debate Format and Opening Remarks

Okay, if I could have your attention, we are ready to start. The mic's not 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 University of New Hampshire and has a Master's degree from Gordon-Conwell Seminary up in 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.

Jerry Matitix: The Catholic Old Testament Canon and Apostolic Tradition

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 through 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. Amen. In the name of the Father, Son, and 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 cart, 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 of 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 a 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 an 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 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 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 WEZE and the Gene Graf show, heard Mr. White charge that the Catholic Church had taught in a couple of councils that it was all right 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 should be 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 as inspired, and to have treated them without question in Scripture.

Quotations from Wisdom, for example, occur in 1 Clement in 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 4th 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 used 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 1st 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 Damasus 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 Damasus and said perhaps these should not be included. Pope Damasus' 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 Damasus 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 12, 46, 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 ax 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 Jurgen's The Faith of the Early Fathers where the Council of Rome established the current Catholic canon in 382 AD. 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 councils 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-take 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 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 Koran must also be the word of God because it claims to be, or the Book of Mormon, or Mary Baker Etty's Science and Health of the Kid of 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 hoax 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 it, 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 ipsa 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 3, verse 15.

Mr. White is going to need to offer us more than his personal private assurance that 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 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 several and seven thousand 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. 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 are 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. Origin, 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, 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 2nd 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 Polycarp's 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 AD 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 Ezra, 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 who the Jewish people were. Prior to the coming of Christ, we're talking about God's people here.

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 400 and 500 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 Apocrypha books.