James White - The Inspiration, Canonization, and Transmission of Scripture

This morning, I hope you will turn on the brain, if you've had your Starbucks or whatever it is, and even if not, just pray the Lord will get you going because we have a fair amount to cover this morning.

If I am recalling correctly, and someone needs to help me out here, I have a little bit more than an hour this morning. Do I not? Someone with a schedule? The round table starts at 10 .30, right? So we need to be taking a break.

So I've got a little bit more than that. That's helpful because I have a lot to cover in a short period of time. And some of this, to be honest with you, again, is not the type of thing that you're generally going to be running into within the context of most evangelical churches today because of the desire to avoid challenging people and making them feel, quote unquote, uncomfortable.

I know that that's a real popular idea. And if I could, the gentleman in the back, if I could get a cup of water or something, I'd very much appreciate. I'm a little bit dry up here. I don't subscribe to our cultural idea that a person's feelings are the most important thing on the planet, okay?

I'm just going to be quite upfront about that. When I was in school, I am very thankful that my school teachers, when I was wrong in an answer, they said, that is wrong. You know, when Jesus, we're going to possibly look at Matthew chapter 22, when the Lord Jesus responded to the Sadducees and their question about the woman who had the seven brothers, his response was, well, no, I have a different perspective on that issue.

His response then was, you are, you are wrong. And sometimes it's important to be told you're right, you're wrong, and feelings are not the most important thing on this planet. And the problem is when we think they are, we are hesitant to challenge people, to challenge people to step up to another level.

Now, I'm not saying you have to do that by insulting their mother or saying they're ugly or something like that. There's no reason to do that. But the idea that you're somehow going to hurt people's feelings, if you raise issues that they've maybe, maybe they've never heard of the things you're talking about before.

And so, well, they may feel intimidated. Well, you know what? I am so glad that my seminary professors and my Bible college professors intimidated me. I don't want to go to a seminary where I know more than the guy who's trying to teach me.

I want there to be a quote unquote level of intimidation there because I want to learn. I want to be improved. I want something to happen there. And our society has gotten to the point where we're all just equals.

This radical egalitarianism, you know, we don't practice it, thank you very much, sir. We don't practice it due to the fact that, you know, I don't want to trust just any one of you with my medical surgeries.

You know, I had LASIK a few years ago and I'm very proud to announce that I am not an egalitarian. I think that my LASIK surgeon was the right one to do my LASIK, not one of you guys. Okay, we don't practice it along those lines, do we?

But when it comes to religious things, well, we're all just equal. No, that's not the case. The Bible even warns us that untaught and unstable men distort the scriptures of their own destruction. What does that mean?

That means we need taught and stable men and there are taught and stable men and there's different levels of those things. And so the way that our Western society thinks, to me, is just simply it's anti-Christian and it doesn't work.

Attacks on Scripture from the Jesus Seminar, Critical Scholarship, Islam, and Secularism

And so today we're going to talk about some stuff. There's going to be warning for those of you who are very sensitive to things. There's going to be some Greek on the screen. Now I'm telling you, there's a lot of seminary classes you can take where you just never do anything like that because, well, how is everyone supposed to join in there?

Well, if you're a good teacher, you explain what in the world's up there, first of all. But secondly, there are simply times when you have to address these issues. The enemies of the faith do. If we don't, we're going to be helpless.

We have to be able to address these things. We have to be upfront about these things. So with that as a bit of an introduction, what are some of the attacks upon the scriptures today? By the way, notice, working tonight.

Isn't that nice? No more, I figured out what the problem was last night. We already talked about the Da Vinci Code. If you weren't here last night, I hope you'll pick up the presentation because as of May 16th of next year, you're going to need to know it.

You're going to need to know how to respond to what it says because there is no more effective way of shutting down the proclamation of the gospel than to instill in people's minds the idea that everything you believe about the gospel is a fraud.

It was made up by the Emperor Constantine, who knows how many hundreds of years after the time of Christ. So be prepared for that. Of course, this evening, we're going to hear about the Jesus Seminar.

And last night we heard about Dr. Robert Funk, and these are the individuals who are seeking to create a more credible view of Jesus, which means in essence to create a Jesus who is a Jewish peasant who had no concept of his own messiahship, had no concept of his own deity, was not the incarnate son of God, did not say at least 85 of the things attributed to him, did not do any miracles, did not intend to give his life, was not a sacrificial atonement upon the cross of Calvary, and did not rise from the dead.

That is the Jesus that the Jesus Seminar wishes to present to us. Of course, they will say he rose from the dead if you celebrate him, but that would be the same thing as saying we can celebrate Robert E. Lee or celebrate Caesar or whatever if their presence still lives with us.

There's a vast difference between that and literally saying that someone rose from the dead. I know that if I'm facing death, there's a big difference between someone telling me, we'll remember you, and someone telling me you will rise from the dead.

There's a big difference between those two things. They seem to get lost in a lot of the presentations that are made today. Unbelieving critical scholarship might just sound like the Jesus Seminar, but the Jesus Seminar as a group has a specific agenda.

Unbelieving critical scholarship has been around for a long time. It is really, unfortunately, the majority reports, depending on how you define what the majority is supposed to be, it is the stuff that you're going to be presented with constantly that has proven, beyond all doubt, that there really isn't any reason to believe in inspiration.

There's no reason to believe that the scriptures are harmonious or consistent with themselves. There's no reason to believe that, for example, even in looking at something like the New Perspective on Paul, something that some of you may have heard of, you need to realize that the majority of the folks promoting the New Perspective on Paul don't believe Paul wrote the things you think Paul wrote.

They have a much minimized canon of what Paul wrote. They only have six or seven letters that he wrote, and therefore, if he wrote Ephesians, if he wrote Colossians, if he wrote 1st and 2nd Timothy, the entire view of what Paul's theology would be would change, but they don't believe he wrote those things, and therefore, they don't take it into consideration.

Why don't they believe that? It goes back to various presuppositions, various writers, especially the 1700s, 1800s, German critical scholarships, so on and so forth. Very much an issue. Islam. You don't hear much about this.

We've tried to get, we've only been able to get one debate on Islam in the past. It's one I'd recommend to you. I certainly have a goal of next year, the year after that, there's a certain Islamic apologist I wish to arrange a major debate with, but Islam is extremely active in attacking the validity of scripture.

Some of you who follow my blog know that we are still, slowly, working through an extensive series on New Testament textual transmission and Islamic apologetics and the attacks that they make upon the transmission of the text of scripture and upon the accuracy of the New Testament.

Now, whether they have a grounds for doing that in the Quran is arguable, but that's a whole other issue. The point is they're out there, they're very, very active, they know how to use technology like anybody else does, and they are using it.

And so they are very much in the forefront of that kind of, this would be an inter-religious attack upon the scriptures. And then you just have rank secularism, the idea that God has revealed himself.

How silly is that? How silly is it that God would actually, in a form that can be transmitted over generations, it can be transmitted from culture to culture and language to language, the idea that God has said this is right and this is wrong in our secular world is just simply considered to be passé.

People used to believe that, you can't really believe it any longer and be accepted, and we all know how that works within our secular society. Now, obviously, since scripture is the very foundation, it is the heart of the Christian faith.

I mean, once you take the scriptures out, the Christian faith becomes amorphous, an amorphous, jello-y mass. You can turn it into anything you want it to be. It becomes, in essence, a sanitized mirror reflection of yourself.

That's all it is. Look at liberalism in Christianity today. What has it become? Look at the mainline denominations. What do all the mainline denominations, the old mainline denominations have in common today?

They're all dying. Every one of their numbers is in the red and have been for a long, long time. Look at what has happened, for example, to the Episcopalian Church in the United States. Look at what has gone on in regards to such issues as abortion and homosexuality within those churches and what God's word clearly says about such things as Christian marriage and what the nature of Christian marriage is.

Once the scriptures go, once the authority of scriptures go, it's only a matter of time. It may take longer, it may take a shorter period of time, it all depends, doesn't matter. It's still gonna happen eventually.

Apart from the Christian scriptures, there really is nothing to the Christian message. We just simply have our hero and everybody else has their hero and I like my hero better than your hero, but your hero is just as good as my hero.

That's in essence what you're left with and it is interesting to note that my opponent this evening has said that he finds it simply obscene when Christians say that Jesus Christ is the only way to God.

He says it's fine for us to say Jesus is the only savior for me, but for me to say Jesus is the only savior for you is simply obscene. It is highly offensive and there is no basis for that. Well, if God has not spoken with clarity, if God has not given us an inspired word, then he's right, that is obscene because we're making our personal opinion the standard for other people, but if God has spoken, then it is not only not obscene, it is absolutely necessary to honor God and to honor what he has revealed to us to say those kinds of things.

We are called to contend vigorously, agonizamai, to agonize for the once-for-all delivered to the saints faith. Now that kind of apologetic, that kind of defense involves both positive and negative aspects.

Positively, serious believers who desire to engage the culture directly and powerfully must not only master the content of the Bible, which is hard enough as it is. I mean, I don't wanna pick on anyone who's here, but I figure if you go to any place and my son's in the back saying, go ahead and pick on me, I'm used to it, dad.

I'm not doing that, but when I was in a Southern Baptist church a number of years ago, the quarterly that we used, anybody, any Southern Baptists that'll admit it here? Okay, two, wow, that's good. Okay, all right.

The quarterly material that you'd use in the Sunday school class always drove me nuts. You cover the entire book of Romans in like eight weeks. How do you do that? It was always so very flimsy, so very shallow, and you had 20 minutes to cover the whole thing.

You just couldn't do it. Even mastering the content of the Bible is pretty rare in evangelical churches today. I mean, if you really become intent upon studying the Bible, people will look at you like you're just a little bit off your rocker.

But not only must we master the content of the Bible, but we must do what most preceding generations did not need to do. Generations in the 1800s did not have to do what we have to do. They did not have to contend with what we have to contend with in regards to cultural ideas that are directly opposed to what the Word of God says.

We must know far more about the transmission, preservation, canonization, and translation of the Bible than ever before. And you need to know what the differences between those are. And let's face it, folks, most evangelicals don't.

Most evangelicals don't know the difference between the transmission and translation of Scripture. They do not know what's involved with that. We pick up our Bibles and we always assume that they've had gold or silver edges, and they've had red letters, and they've always been the form that they're in today.

And that's simply not the case. And we have to be aware of that and why that is, why there are differences in translations. Sometimes it's just a translation issue. Sometimes it has to do with the underlying Greek and Hebrew text.

You go, oh, do I really have to learn about that? Well, first of all, I would think we'd want to. I would think that would be something that we would find to be interesting, something that we'd find to be something of our passion.

Now, I'm not saying you have to be like me. I recognize I'm weird. Okay, my Greek teacher recognized early on. Dr. Baird had me for seven straight years, and he had hair at the beginning and he didn't at the end, and I'm not sure if there's a direct correlation there.

But anyways, he recognized by the second year that I had this fascination with textual criticism. And I remember when we got our first Greek New Testaments, have you ever seen a Greek New Testament? It was the UBS third back then, that's dating myself now.

Third corrected anyways, I'm not that old. And I was only, about two of you in here got that joke. And all the rest of you are going, what are you talking about? Don't worry about it. I remember looking at that page the first time, and I looked out those notes down at the bottom.

And I remember putting my hand up, and I said, Dr. Baird, what are these notes down at the bottom of the page here? He says, those are textual variations. I said, what's that? Well, that's where the Greek manuscripts differ from one another where they read.

You liberal. What do you mean they differ from one another? What are you talking about? I think you're trying to destroy my faith. I didn't say that in class, of course, but these are the thoughts running through the back of my mind going, differences between manuscripts?

And I seen those little, you've got them in your English Bible. Most of your little English Bibles have those little teeny tiny four point font thing. It's almost like you're trying to hide it. You know, like it's a blemish on the page unless you put a magnifying glass on it.

Oh, look at that. It says some manuscripts say this, and some manuscripts say that. And most Christians go, hmm. I wonder what that means. Well, you know what? We need to know what that means. The day when you could go, eh, someday is past unless you want to keep your mouth shut all the time.

If you never want to say anything to anybody about the Christian faith, then you don't have to worry about that stuff. And then the enemy of our souls doesn't have to worry about you because a silent Christian is no challenge to him.

But if you want to open your mouth, if you want to say something, if you want to say the word of God has some relevance in our culture today, and in fact has some relevance to that other person who you're sitting next to on the plane or whatever, then we need to learn these things.

And it's funny, most of us have jobs anymore where our bosses will hand us, when was the last time, how many of you in the past year had an upgrade on the computer system at work and you had to bring some stinking huge manual home that was the most boring thing ever written on the face of the planet, and you had to master that thing because that's just your job to do it.

A lot of us have to do that, right? More and more of us have to do that. Even people who aren't necessarily in IT and professional computer areas, computers are a part of our lives. We have to spend a tremendous amount of time learning how to use these crazy things.

But when it comes to the Bible for some reason, well, you know, that doesn't sound very spiritual to me. Can't I just pray and God will open my eyes to what all this means? What did Paul say to Timothy?

Study to show yourself. Prepare yourself. Work, it takes that four-letter word called work. And you know what? There's no generation, no generation that has had more access to the history and to the Word of God and to its context and to all the rest of it than ours.

And if access results in responsibility, folks, what about us? I mean, I have my little Palm Pilot here. I have eight or nine English translations, multiple translations in other languages. I have the Hebrew text.

I have the Greek Septuagint. I have the Greek text. It can parse. It has all the lexical sources on it, all sitting right here, along with Bunyan, Calvin, Edwards, Spurgeon, all of my books, all of it sitting right here.

All that kind of access right there. Who's gonna be held responsible for that? The information's available to us. There are people in this world who would give anything to be sitting where you're sitting right now.

We are a blessed people, but with blessings come responsibilities. We have to know about this stuff. It's not an issue that we can ignore anymore. Negatively, do the advanced communication technology, attacks upon the faith, can be spread with great rapidity and ease.

Anybody can put up a website. And anymore, as long as it's on a website, somebody's gonna cite it. Doesn't mean that there's any reason to cite it. It doesn't mean that there's any meaningful background to it, but boy, I'll tell ya, the heretics have learned that the internet pays.

And they will use it to spread their attacks upon the faith and their own particular perspectives, familiarity with the arguments used against the faith by Muslims, atheists, secularists, cultists, while secondary to knowledge of the Bible itself is still vitally important.

Don't get me wrong. I am not saying you should be spending the majority of your time unless you're going on a mission to Saudi Arabia, the studying of the Quran should not be primary to the studying of scripture.

Unless you're starting a church in Provo, Utah, study of the Book of Mormon should not be primary to your study of the scriptures. But if you're going to either place, you can't be ignorant of those things.

Not if you want to be able to have any type of an impact. And so we have to be wise. We have to ask, literally sit down and take inventory and go, okay, this is where I'm going to be ministering. This is what I'm going to be doing.

What do I need to do to be prepared to be a sharp instrument in the hand of the Spirit of God in the context in which God has placed me? It's just a necessary thing. We have to do that in our context today.

Scripture as God-Breathed and the Foundation for Authority

Now, last night, Dr. Renahan talked to us about the nature of scripture as theanoustos, God-breathed. And the fact that that is foundational, in my opinion, in any discussion of scriptural authority, any discussion of the transmission of the text of scripture, the canon of the text of scripture, the role of scripture in the church today, the role of scripture and tradition, hence all discussions that are inter-religious with Roman Catholicism, Mormonism, Islam, whatever it might be, in determining our apologetic methodology and how we will defend the faith, how we will even defend the existence of God.

I think at the foot of every single one of those subjects, and some of those subjects are a little bit separated from one another in distance, but at the foot of each one, at the foundation of each one, if we don't start with scripture as theanoustos, God-breathed, as if you hold your hand in front of your mouth, you feel that breath that of necessity comes forth from your mouth as you speak, that is how intimate and personal is the very word of God coming from God's mouth.

If we don't view the scriptures in that way, it is going to make a huge difference as to how we do all of that, including how we worship and how we organize the church. So much of the wackiness we see in the church today.

We see churches that, where are the elders? Where is the God-ordained order of the church in these places? Well, I don't think they have to do that. Why? Because they don't view the scriptures as being God-breathed.

They don't believe in Sola Scriptura and Tota Scriptura, all of scripture. And so they feel free to, in essence, massage the message, change it, make it fit some other context. That is at the foot of all of this stuff.

And we'll see that this evening, that's at the foot of our debate tonight, too. Because if you start with the presupposition that God has not spoken, that there is nothing fundamentally different between the Gospel of Matthew and the fourth surah of the Quran and the Bhagavad Gita and 3rd Nephi, they're all the same thing.

They are all the same thing. Once you start there, you've already answered the question of our debate this evening. The New Testament Gospels cannot be authentic if you start with that presupposition.

And my opponent this evening does. And that's what we're gonna have to discuss. That's what determines all the methodologies that are going to be applied to those New Testament texts. That's where they start.

So many Christians, all they do is they read the summaries of what the Jesus Seminar says, and they go, that's silly. How can you not believe Jesus rose from the dead when Paul said of Jesus be not raised and your faith is in vain?

Oh, that's all I need to think about that. You don't think these folks have read Paul? I've told everyone who will listen. I honestly believe my opponent this evening is 20 points above on the IQ scale anyone else I've ever debated, and this is my 57th debate.

One of the best speakers and writers I've ever encountered. You don't think he's read Paul? You better believe he's read Paul. And you're gonna see those of you who go on the cruise, and don't worry, we're gonna record it.

Those who are going on the cruise, and we have the debate, you're gonna see that what he's gonna say is, of course Paul said, if Christ be not raised, your faith is in vain. But you know what? You can reverse that.

If your faith is in vain, that is you are not making a difference in this world for social justice and equality in this world, then Jesus is not raised. Because of what he thinks Jesus being raised means.

So we have to recognize at the very start that if God has spoken, then what he says has ultimate authority. When God says I am God, he cannot appeal to a higher source to prove that. I was talking with one of the brothers about that this morning.

Vitally important. Centrality of sound acts of Jesus. Oh my. It is so sad that in so many of our seminaries today, there are seminaries that are dropping requirements of studying Greek to get a master's of divinity.

And for a lot of folks, it's like, yeah, why not? I've taught Greek since 1995, and they only give me 15 weeks to do it. I've always felt horrible about that because the last thing I've ever wanted to do is teach someone to hate a language I love.

And 15 weeks once a week is not exactly the way to do that. But I've tried my best and managed to get a few people through that. But anyways, to handle the word of God aright is to honor the word of God.

If we treat our pastors in such a way as to turn them into CEOs, who are always running programs, and they're always running about as if they're the chief executive officer of a large multinational corporation, rather than recognizing that their role is to minister the word of God to us, break the bread of life to us, to do what the word is called in the Bible, when we force them to give us a 20 minute sermonette that's primarily derived from internet sources and not from the exegesis of scripture, we shouldn't be surprised that we end up with a church full of infants.

To handle the word of God soundly, to exegete it, to teach the people to do the same thing by modeling and by instruction is to honor God. You would not want your employees, if you were the head of a large company and you write a lengthy email to all of your employees laying out exactly how we're supposed to do this major project, you would not want your employees applying to your email the type of exegesis that most evangelicals apply to the Bible.

You would be offended if they did. What do we do in most Bible study classes? Well, let's sit down and let's read a passage from John. We don't worry about what the context is, let's not worry about the historical situation, we're gonna be in John 8, but we're not gonna talk about the feast and the background, this is boring.

We're just gonna read one passage about Jesus being light, and then we go, how do you feel about that? Let's share together. How would you like if your employees sat down with your email and said, let's take one sentence, how do you feel about that, Bob?

How's your company gonna be functioning on this project anyway? Not real well, huh? We don't honor God when we engage in that kind of activity. I'm not gonna, and this is, by the way, you've heard my reputation, he's really mean, this is why, because I say things like this.

But you know what? No one ever says, I'm wrong about that, because quite simply, everyone realizes, well, yeah, of course. You know? It's like when you're a parent, and you talk to your kids, and you tell them to do X, Y, and Z, and they only remember X, and you never said Y and Z.

They have an amazing ability to isogeet your statements. And normally, the stuff they don't wanna do gets isogeeted out, and the stuff they wanna do gets isogeeted in. It's just amazing how that works, and that's what we do to the word of God, and that's not honoring the parent, and it's not honoring the word of God.

Sound exegesis. The supremacy of scripture over other contenders, the Book of Mormon, the Quran, whatever it might be. One of the issues that's come up this evening is my opponent has frequently said, look, if you don't view the scriptures in this fashion, there's no way we can stop a Jonestown.

If you just simply accept the idea that what you have is revelation from God, there's no way to stop a Jonestown. Yes, there is. Because if God is God, he's going to be consistent in what he has said.

None of these books are consistent with themselves. They're not consistent with history. They're not consistent with the truth claims that they make. Only the Christian God's capable of doing those things.

The supremacy of scripture, oh, that is considered to be such a terrible thing. How dare you say that your scripture is better than someone else's scripture? No, I'm saying my scripture is scripture, and that isn't.

One is God speaking. One is pretending to be God speaking. It's not a matter of better. It's not a matter of a quality issue. It is the fact that one is and one isn't. And if Jesus Christ is who he said he was and he rose from the dead, then we know one is and one isn't.

Now, time to bend your mind a little bit. Not in the sense of trying to explain to you something like Anselm's ontological argument that bends everybody's mind, but I need to talk to you about the canon this morning.

And, oh my goodness, and then I need to slow my watch down because things are moving by very, very, very, very quickly. There are few subjects less understood by evangelical Christians today than the canon of the Bible and of the New Testament in particular.

When was the last time you heard a sermon or a Bible study on the canon of scripture? Got one freak over here. Did you go to my church? Oh, okay, all right. Very rare, very rare. And so when we did a debate on Long Island year before last on the Apocrypha, I look out over the audience and I can tell when folks are just going, boy, you know, this is a subject I've never really thought much about before.

And I just always sort of figured there were this number of books and this is sort of how things were done. But even beyond that, when the brave soul out there takes the time to start doing some reading, the vast majority of even good books on the subject, and I'm not sure exactly why this is, but the vast majority of them that are available to us approach this subject from a purely historical perspective.

That is, they sort of look back upon the history of the church, look back upon the intertestament period if we're talking about the canonization of the Old Testament, for example, Roger Beckwith's book, The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church, very scholarly work, very excellent on that.

Or they're looking at the early church period in regards to the New Testament and they'll do a survey and they'll say, well, we can gain this information from looking at Irenaeus. And we can look at this particular fragment over here and that gives us this type of information.

And finally, you get into the fourth century and you have these discussions going on and you have Athanasius's 39th Festal Letter in 369 and he gives you this canon of the New Testament, which is the same canon we have today.

And you have these councils and some councils Augustine was in charge of, and so you had the Apocrypha being included there and then Jerome rejected those and there was the big debate and all this historical stuff, which is very important, very interesting.

There's all sorts of good stuff out there. I'm not sure if Brother Webster is here today. Bill, are you hiding someplace I can now see? He was here last night. Bill Webster and David King have written a three-volume set of books called Holy Scripture.

It's on the subject of Sola Scriptura and Bill's written extensively on the issue of the Apocrypha and the canon of the New Testament and the various councils and things like that. He was sitting right back there last evening.

And so all that stuff is very important. That's fine. But if we go back to what I said earlier about Scripture as Theanustos, God breathed, what has surprised me over the years in looking at even the best books on the subject, it seems to me the canon is not first and foremost primarily a historical issue.

It's a theological one. But the vast majority of sources do not approach the subject from a theological perspective. I mean, let's face it. If God intends to reveal himself for a purpose, and this again just heads up for tonight, my opponent doesn't believe God's doing anything in time.

I don't have any evidence that he believes that God is active in this world, that he has a decree that he's working out. But if God is active in this world, he has a purpose, he's accomplishing a purpose.

There is a goal in mind for creation and it's his own self-glorification, the final analysis, and it was his intention for Christ to come when Christ came and to do what Christ did as the early church confessed in Acts 4, 27 to 28.

And if it is his purpose that the Scriptures function as a rule of faith, the sole infallible rule of faith for the church, if it's his purpose that the Scriptures function and it's his purpose to build the church, then God would exert and utilize all the power necessary to make sure that the church has the Scriptures and knows what is and what is not Scripture.

And so the canon, that authoritative listing should be approached first and foremost, if we're talking about something that is theanoustos, God breathed, from a theological perspective, but most people approach it first historically and then try to draw a theological conclusion or ramification from their study of history and that's dangerous.

And so I want this morning to ask you to walk through with me and if you have my book, Scripture Alone, there's a whole chapter on this so you can zone out here for a while, take a little snooze, whatever you need to do because you're there, come up here and present it yourself.

I saw that you were shaking your head, would you like to do that? No, okay, I didn't think so, all right. Okay, I'm not moving ever again, not while he's talking. All right, we know what a canon is. It is a rule, it's a standard against which something is judged.

It had a different meaning earlier than that, but that's what it came to mean at the time that we are discussing it. The Protestant canon contains 66 books. Now, as Dr. Renahan mentioned to you last night, if you're studying Old Testament things, you will recognize that they counted the minor prophets as one and they combined various books so that generally they would refer to 22 or 24 books of the Old Testament, depending on how you joined things together, sometimes attaching it to the number of Hebrew letters and so on and so forth, but we just simply enumerate that as 66, dividing each of the minor prophets out, so you have 39 and 27.

As you know, the Apocrypha adds a certain number, and again, it depends on how you, is Belle and the Dragon separate from Daniel and all the rest of that stuff and how you put everything, Jeremiah and Baruch and la, la, la, la, about 74 approximately, depending on how you add things together and so on and so forth.

Protestant canon contains 66 books. Now, we know that the issue of the Old Testament canon is fairly straightforward. The canon that we see in Judaism, beginning with Genesis and their order of the canon ended with 2 Chronicles.

If you've ever picked up a Hebrew text, you will be able to see that if you're starting to look for Malachi someplace, don't turn to the end, and by the way, the end will be the front of the book as far as we're concerned because Hebrew reads the other direction, but without the addition of the Apocrypha books, that's what we have in the Protestant canon, but how was that determined?

For many people today, for Dan Brown and the Da Vinci Code and for lots of folks, the idea is, in essence, the classical smoky room in the back with a bunch of bearded guys, and I guess they wouldn't have had cigars back then, but something else is smoking, I'm not sure what it is, and they put Matthew on the table and all in favor say aye, aye, all opposed say nay.

Okay, now we got to write it all out. Matthew gets in seven to four, and then we put Mark out there and Luke and Revelation man had to, they had hanging chads on that one and it was real tight and it was real close.

That's the idea. Fact is, that never happened. No one anywhere ever did anything even remotely like that. People talk about things like the Council of Jamnia in regards to the Old Testament. It was an academy, it was a discussion, no one ever sat around taking votes and doing things like that at all.