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

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This morning, I hope you will turn on the brain if you've had your
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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I know that that's a real popular idea. If I could, gentleman in the back, if I could get a cup of water or something,
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I'd very much appreciate it. 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?
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I'm just going to be quite upfront about that. When I was in school, I am very thankful that my school teachers, when
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I was wrong in an answer, they said, that is wrong. You know, when
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Jesus, we're going to possibly look at Matthew chapter 22, when the Lord Jesus responded to the
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Sadducees and their question about the woman who had the seven brothers, his response was, well, no,
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I have a different perspective on that issue. His response then was, you are, you are wrong.
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Sometimes it's important to be told, you're right, you're wrong, and feelings are not the most important thing on this planet.
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The problem is, when we think they are, we are hesitant to challenge people, to challenge people to step up to another level.
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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.
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Well, you know, you know what? I am so glad that my seminary professors and my
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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.
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I want there to be a quote unquote level of intimidation there because I want to learn.
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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.
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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,
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I don't want to trust just any one of you with my medical surgeries. You know,
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I had LASIK a few years ago, and I'm very proud to announce that I am not an egalitarian.
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I think that my LASIK surgeon was the right one to do my LASIK, not one of you guys, okay?
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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.
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The Bible even warns us that untaught and unstable men distort the scriptures of their own destruction.
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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.
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And so the way that our Western society thinks, to me, is just simply, it's anti -Christian and it doesn't work.
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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 these things.
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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?
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Well, if you're a good teacher, you explain what in the world is up there, first of all. But secondly, there are simply times when you have to address these issues.
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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.
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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?
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By the way, notice, working tonight. Isn't that nice? No more,
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I figured out what the problem was last night. We already talked about the Da Vinci Code. If you weren't here last night,
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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.
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It was made up by the Emperor Constantine who knows how many hundreds of years after the time of Christ.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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Robert E. Lee or celebrate Caesar or whatever if their presence still lives with us.
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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.
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There's a big difference between those two things. They seem to get lost in a lot of the presentations that are made today.
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Unbelieving critical scholarship might just sound like the Jesus Seminar, but the Jesus Seminar as a group has a specific agenda.
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Unbelieving critical scholarship has been around for a long time. It is really, unfortunately, the majority report, 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.
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There's no reason to believe that the scriptures are harmonious or consistent with themselves. There's no reason to believe, 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
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Paul wrote the things you think Paul wrote. They have a much minimized canon of what
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Paul wrote. They only have six or seven letters that he wrote, and therefore, if he wrote
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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.
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Why don't they believe that? It goes back to various presuppositions, various writers, especially the 1700s, 1800s,
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German critical scholarships, so on and so forth. Very much an issue. Islam. You don't hear much about this.
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We've tried to get, we've only been able to get one debate on Islam in the past. It's one
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I'd recommend to you. I certainly have a goal of next year, the year after that, there's a certain
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Islamic apologist I wish to arrange a major debate with, but Islam is extremely active in attacking the validity of scripture.
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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
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New Testament. Now, whether they have a grounds for doing that in the Quran is arguable, but that's a whole other issue.
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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.
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And so they are very much in the forefront of that kind of, this would be an inter -religious attack upon the scriptures.
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And then you just have rank secularism, the idea that God has revealed himself. How silly is that?
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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.
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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.
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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
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Christian faith becomes amorphous, a morphous jello -y mass. You can turn it into anything you want it to be.
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It becomes, in essence, a sanitized mirror reflection of yourself.
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That's all it is. Look at liberalism in Christianity today. What has it become? Look at the mainline denominations.
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What do all the mainline denominations, the old mainline denominations, have in common today? They're all dying.
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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
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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
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God's word clearly says about such things as Christian marriage and what the nature of Christian marriage is.
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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.
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It's still going to happen eventually. Apart from the Christian scriptures, there really is nothing to the
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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.
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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
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Christians say that Jesus Christ is the only way to God. He says, it's fine for us to say
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Jesus is the only savior for me, but for me to say Jesus is the only savior for you is simply obscene.
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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.
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But if God has spoken, then it is not only not obscene, it is absolutely necessary to honor
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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.
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Now, that kind of apologetic, that kind of defense involves both positive and negative aspects.
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Positively, serious believers who desire to engage the culture directly and powerfully must not only master the content of the
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Bible, which is hard enough as it is. I mean, I don't want to 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,
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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.
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Anybody, any Southern Baptists that will admit it here? Okay. Two. Wow, that's good.
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Okay, all right. The quarterly material that you'd use in the Sunday school class always drove me nuts.
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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.
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You just couldn't do it. Even mastering the content of the Bible is pretty rare in evangelical churches today.
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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.
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But not only must we master the content of the Bible, but we must do what most preceding generations did not need to do.
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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
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Word of God says. We must know far more about the transmission, preservation, canonization, and translation of the
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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.
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Most evangelicals don't know the difference between the transmission and translation of Scripture. They do not know what's involved with that.
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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.
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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.
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Sometimes it's just a translation issue. Sometimes it has to do with the underlying Greek and Hebrew text. You go, oh, do
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I really have to learn about that stuff? 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 would find to be something of our passion.
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Now, I'm not saying you have to be like me. I recognize I'm weird. Okay, my Greek teacher recognized early on,
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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.
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And I remember when we got our first Greek New Testament, have you ever seen a Greek New Testament? It was the UBS third back then, that's dating myself now.
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Third corrected, anyway, so 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?
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Don't worry about it. I remember looking at that page the first time, and I looked at those notes down at the bottom, and I remember putting my hand up and I said,
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Dr. Baird, what are these notes down at the bottom of the page here? He says, those are textual variations.
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I said, what's that? Well, that's where the Greek manuscripts differ from one another where they read.
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You liberal. What do you mean they differ from one another?
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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?
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I've 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.
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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.
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Most Christians go, hmm, I wonder what that means. Well, you know what?
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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.
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If you never want to say anything to anybody about the Christian faith, then you don't have to worry about that stuff.
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And then the enemy of our souls doesn't have to worry about you. Because a silent Christian is no challenge to him.
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But if you want to open your mouth, 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Can't I just pray and God will open my eyes to what all this means? What did Paul say to Timothy?
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Study to show yourself. Prepare yourself. Work. It takes that four letter word called work.
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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.
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And if access results in responsibility, folks, what about us?
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I mean, I have my little palm pilot here. I have eight or nine
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English translations, multiple translations in other languages. I have the Hebrew text. I have the Greek Septuagint.
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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.
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All that kind of access right there, who's going to be held responsible for that? The information's available to us.
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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.
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We have to know about this stuff. It's not an issue that we can ignore anymore.
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Negatively, do the advanced communication technology, attacks upon the faith, can be spread with great rapidity and ease.
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Anybody can put up a website. And anymore, as long as it's on a website, somebody's going to cite it.
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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,
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I'll tell you, 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
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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, studying of the
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Quran should not be primary to the studying of scripture. Unless you're starting a church in Provo, Utah, study of the
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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.
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Not if you want to be able to have any type of an impact. And so we have to be wise.
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We have to ask, literally sit down and take inventory and go, okay, this is where I'm going to be ministering.
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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
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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.
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Now, last night, Dr. Renahan talked to us about the nature of scripture as theanoustos,
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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.
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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,
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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.
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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.
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So much of the wackiness we see in the church today. We see churches that, where are the elders?
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Where is the God -ordained order of the church in these places? Well, they don't think they have to do that.
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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.
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And so they feel free to, in essence, massage the message, change it, make it fit some other context.
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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.
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Because if you start with the presupposition that God has not spoken, that there is nothing fundamentally different between the
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Gospel of Matthew and the fourth surah of the Quran and the Bhagavad Gita and third
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Nephi, they're all the same thing. They are all the same thing.
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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.
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And my opponent this evening does. And that's what we're going to have to discuss. That's what determines all the methodologies that are going to be applied to those
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New Testament texts. That's where they start. So many Christians, all they do is they read the summaries of what the
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Jesus Seminar says and they go, that's silly. How can you not believe
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Jesus rose from the dead when Paul said, if Jesus be not raised and your faith is in vain, oh, that's all I need to think about that.
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You don't think these folks have read Paul? I've told everyone who will listen.
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I honestly believe my opponent this evening is 20 points above on the IQ scale anyone else
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I've ever debated and this is my 57th debate. One of the best speakers and writers
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I've ever encountered. You don't think he's read Paul? You better believe he's read
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Paul and you're going to see those of you who go on the cruise and don't worry, we're going to record it. Those going on the cruise and we have the debate, you're going to see that what he's going to say is, of course
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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Greek to get a master's of divinity. And for a lot of folks, it's like, yeah, why not?
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I've taught Greek since 1995 and they only give me 15 weeks to do it.
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I've always felt horrible about that because the last thing I've ever wanted to do is teach someone to hate a language
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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.
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But anyways, to handle the word of God aright is to honor the word of God.
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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 has called them to do.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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We don't worry about what the context is, let's not worry about the historical situation. We're going to be in John 8, but we're not going to talk about the feast and the background.
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This is boring. We're just going to read one passage about Jesus being light and then we go, how do you feel about that?
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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,
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Bob? How's your company going to be functioning on this project anyway?
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Not real well, huh? We don't honor God when we engage in that kind of activity. I'm not going to, and this is, by the way, you've heard my reputation, he's really mean.
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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.
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You know, it's like when you're a parent and you talk to your kids and you tell them to do
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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.
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And normally the stuff they don't want to do gets isogeeted out, and the stuff they want to do gets isogeeted in.
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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
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Word of God. Sound exegesis. The supremacy of scripture over other contenders, the
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Book of Mormon, the Koran, 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
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Jonestown. If you just simply accept the idea that what you have is revelation from God, there's no way to stop a
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Jonestown. Yes, there is. Because if God is God, he's going to be consistent in what he has said.
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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.
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Only the Christian God's capable of doing those things. The supremacy of scripture, oh, that is considered to be such a terrible thing.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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But I need to talk to you about the canon this morning and, oh my goodness, and then
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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
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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
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Bible study on the canon of scripture? Got one freak over here.
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Did you go to my church? Oh, okay. All right. Very rare.
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Very rare. And so when we did a debate on Long Island year before last on the
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Apocrypha, I look out over the audience and I can tell when folks are just going, boy, you know, this is a subject
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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.
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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.
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That is, they sort of look back upon the history of the church, look back upon the intertestamental period if we're talking about the canonization of the
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Old Testament, for example, Roger Beckwith's book, The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church. Very scholarly work, very excellent on that.
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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.
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And we can look at this particular fragment over here and that gives us this type of information.
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And finally you get into the 4th century and you have these discussions going on and you have
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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.
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And you have these councils and some councils Augustine was in charge of and so you had the
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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.
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There's all sorts of good stuff about there. Out there, I'm not sure if Brother Webster is here today,
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Bill, are you hiding someplace I can now see? He was here last night. Bill Webster has, Bill Webster and David King have written a three -volume set of books called
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Holy Scripture. It's on the subject of Sola Scriptura. And Bill's written extensively on the issue of the
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Apocrypha and the canon of the New Testament in the various councils and things like that.
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He was sitting right back there last evening. And so all that stuff is very important.
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That's fine. But if we go back to what I said earlier about Scripture as Theanustos, God breathed.
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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.
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It's a theological one. But the vast majority of sources do not approach the subject from a theological perspective.
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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
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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.
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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
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Christ came and to do what Christ did as the early church confessed in Acts 4, 27 -28.
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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
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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
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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,
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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.
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And that's dangerous. And so I want this morning to ask you to walk through with me, and if you have my book,
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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 better to come up here and present it yourself.
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I saw that you were shaking your head, would you like to do that? No, okay, I didn't think so. Okay, I'm not moving ever again, not while he's talking.
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Alright, we know what a canon is. It is a rule, it's a standard against which something is judged.
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It had a different meaning earlier than that, but that's what it came to mean at the time that we are discussing it.
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The Protestant canon contains 66 books. Now, as Dr. Renahan mentioned to you last night, if you're studying
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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
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Old Testament, depending on how you joined things together, sometimes attaching it to the number of Hebrew letters, and so on and so forth.
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But we just simply enumerate that as 66, dividing each of the minor prophets out, so you have 39 and 27.
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As you know, the Apocrypha adds a certain number, and again, it depends on how you, you know, is
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Belle and the Dragon separate from Daniel and all the rest of that stuff, and how you put everything, Jeremiah and Baruch and la -da -la -da -la, about 74 approximately, depending on how you add things together and so on and so forth.
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The Protestant canon contains 66 books. Now, we know that the issue of the
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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
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Chronicles. If you've ever picked up a Hebrew text, you'll 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.
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But without the addition of the Apocrypha books, that's what we have in the Protestant canon. But how was that determined?
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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, you know, 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,
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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've got to write it all out, and Matthew gets in 7 to 4, and then we put
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Mark out there, and Luke, and Revelation, man, they had hanging chads on that one, and it was real tight and it was real close.
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That's the idea. The fact is, that never happened. No one anywhere ever did anything even remotely like that.
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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.
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Long before Hippo and Carthage in 393 and 397, Athanasius, as I had mentioned, his 39th epistle letter in 369 had specifically given the
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New Testament canon. There was no voting going on there, there was, there wasn't, well we just got back, we had our own little local synod here, and we all voted, and this is the books we came up with.
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Never happened. So how did it happen? How was the canon determined, and notice there's a difference between determined and developed.
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Determined and appeared, I mean, we can look at the historical aspect, and we can look at the intertestamental period, and we can look at Josephus, and we can look at what books were laid up in the temple, and there's all this important stuff we can look at intertestamentally, and then we can look at the same thing in regards to the
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New Testament, and we can see these various canon lists that appear in fragments of this writer or that writer, and we can trace the history, but still the question is, how did we end, how do we know that these are the books, and that Clement isn't, or the
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Gospel of Thomas isn't, or the Gospel of Peter isn't, or the Gospel of Mary isn't, or the
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Shepherd of Barnabas, or Beru, all these, how do we know? That's the question.
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Theologically, how do we know? A vital distinction, in fact, often lost when this topic is discussed, and this to me helps at least to establish the theological aspect of a discussion of the canon.
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God creates canon by inspiring some, and if your vision isn't overly good, that is italicized, some writings, and not other writings.
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Now that's not the most amazing statement ever made, but we need to understand why I said it.
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Not everything that's written is inspired, but something's inspired, therefore a canon exists.
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Example, when I write, when I started writing about 1988, once my first book came out called
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The Fatal Flaw, a canon of my writings existed. I did not have to sit down and say, the canon of the writings of James White, I didn't have to do that.
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The canon came into existence by the fact that I wrote a book, and then
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I wrote a second, and then a third, and I've written or contributed to, I think, 23 so far.
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And so you could sit down, and I think there's on my webpage, on my personal page, there's a list there of the books that I've contributed to or written, and that's the canon.
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Now that does not have to exist for the canon of my writings to exist. The canon comes into existence by the fact that I have written something.
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Now, I'm the only one who infallibly knows my canon. I'm the only one.
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My wife doesn't know the canon infallibly. My son back there doesn't know the canon infallibly.
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He hasn't been there as I've been writing everything. In fact, when I first started, if I started writing in 88, he was two.
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And all Dad had to say was, I wrote that. And he'd go, sure, fine, whatever, you know. They're trusting it, too. Nobody knows but me.
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Maybe I have a ghostwriter someplace. Maybe I've been copying some poor guy that I've got trapped in my basement someplace, and I only feed him a little bit of food, and I'll give you more when you're right under the book, and, you know, silence of the lamb author or something,
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I don't know, something really weird going on. Who knows? But I'm the only one who knows infallibly. Why?
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Because I'm the one who wrote it. I know what I did and did not do. Okay?
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So when I talk about the canon, canon then is a part of revelation itself.
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It is an artifact of revelation, not an object of revelation. What I'm saying is, the canon is not the 28th book of the
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New Testament. If you make the canon a separate revelation, not a part of it, that naturally comes into existence.
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As soon as Moses, however he did it, whatever form he used, starts in the beginning, the canon of necessity comes into existence.
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It doesn't have to be written as a separate revelation. It comes into existence because God revealed his truth, and he did so with clarity.
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So that's what I'm saying here is, it is an artifact of revelation, not an object of revelation.
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It's not something separate. This one consideration alone completely changes the nature of argumentation one must use to respond to claims regarding the canon, if we recognize what the canon actually is.
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It's not a statement of the church. It's not, nowhere does the New Testament teach,
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I am going to imbue the church with the power to create a canon. New Testament doesn't say that.
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Now, man's knowledge of the canon is passive, not active. What do
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I mean by that? When I talk about knowledge being active or passive, my knowledge of my canon of writings is active.
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Why? Because I wrote it. I created that canon by my action.
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I didn't have to write a separate canon, but when I wrote the certain number of books I've written, I created the canon, my knowledge is active.
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Everybody else, your knowledge of the canon of my writings is passive. You take that knowledge in.
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You didn't do it. You didn't create it. Even if you're someone who suggested a book title or something like that, you're still not creating the canon of my writings.
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My knowledge of that is active, yours is passive, and we come to the canon of Scripture. Man's knowledge of necessity has to be what?
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It has to be passive. We're the recipients. We don't tell God what to write. We don't tell God how to write it, when to write it.
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That's what God chooses. He chooses the people through whom to act, etc., etc. And so our knowledge of the canon is passive, not active.
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Man or church does not create canon, but seeks to recognize it. God's knowledge of canon would be what?
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It would be active, because He's the one who inspired it. Now, keeping those things in mind, we have two views of canon, which we will designate canon, and there's a little superscript 1 there, and canon 2.
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Canon 1 is the canon as created by God's act of inspiration. Canon 1 is the canon that comes into existence of necessity as an artifact of revelation by the fact that God has inspired some books, but He has not inspired all books.
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That's canon 1. Canon 2 is the canon as passively recognized by God's people.
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And we need to remember, that took place in two parts. A lot of folks forget about the intertestamental period.
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We look at one Bible, and we see that as one thing, and so in our minds, the canon issue is always after the last book of the
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New Testament, whichever one that was, in the order of writing. And we just sort of figure, well, okay, all the canon issues are going to be in the early church.
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No. In fact, the means that God uses to bring His people to a recognition of what
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Scripture is and is not in that intertestamental period is extremely important, because that becomes the paradigm that then we also see taking place after the writing of the
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New Testament. Have you ever noticed, you don't have any arguments between Jesus and the
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Pharisees about what is and what is not Scripture. How easy would it have been when
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Jesus just skewers these guys to the ground, you know, Matthew chapter 23, or the various debates that take place, where they're just left going on and on and on and on.
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How easy would it have been for one of them to go, well, we didn't know that was
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Scripture. I've had that happen a bunch of times. Well, how do you know that's Scripture?
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How do you know that's God speaking there? Doesn't happen in the New Testament, does it? No. Even though there were various and sundry people out there, there were, you know, false messiahs running around out in the desert and so on and so forth.
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In all the debates that we have going on between the Pharisees and Jesus, the scribes and Jesus, and how many times did
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Jesus say, is it not written? Is it not written? Is it not written? And then he uses that to go, bam!
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And the people are going, it would have been so easy to go, well, that's not
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Scripture. They never do it. Something happened in those 400 years.
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Something happened to where they all went, yeah, that's what the Scriptures say.
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Something happened. What happened? What happened? How did it happen?
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Well, keep that in mind as we consider this. Canon 2 is a canon that is passively recognized by God's people, now listen to this, led by God's Spirit over time and beyond geographical boundaries.
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Disputes about Canon 2 do not in any way destroy the existence of Canon 1 any more than doctrinal disputes prove there is no objective revelation of doctrinal truth.
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Now what does any of that mean? Well, if you think that the canon in toto is created by the church, you're going to have to invest in the church the authority to create that kind of thing.
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And then you end up with a real historical problem, because no church ever did that. Not only that, but you're then left with a tremendous amount of confusion.
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Because that's why I was asking if Bill was here, as Bill has documented, the conclusions drawn by various ascendery church councils in the past, not about the
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New Testament, but specifically about the Old Testament, they vary from one another. In Roman Catholicism, for example, we're told that Rome defines the canon of the text.
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Well, when did Rome do that dogmatically? April of 1546. If you need to have a dogmatic definition of the scriptures to be able to use the scriptures, what in the world were people doing up until 1546?
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And some Roman Catholics would answer that by saying, depending on the church. Well, you go back and read the early church fathers and you don't find that that's exactly how they were arguing at all.
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Look at Athanasius defending the Nicene Creed when Arianism became ascendant after the Council of Nicaea. It doesn't work that way.
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But you are required to, in essence, extend inspiration beyond the canon itself so that you end up with an inspired canon.
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When you keep that in mind, though, when you keep this distinction in mind, however, God has a purpose in giving scripture.
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What did Paul say about the Old Testament scriptures and the New Testament church?
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Did he not say these things were written for what? For our instruction.
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For our edification. These things were written and even the people, what does
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Peter say? Oh, those holy men spoke from God, but you know, they long to look into these things, but we're the ones who've come to see that this was about Christ and these things were written for us.
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What an amazing thing to say. That these men of old, faithful men of old, they had written these things and yet now only in the fullness of the revelation of Christ do we really see what this was all about and what
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God was doing and what he was pointing to in the Messiah. And remember the disciples walking along the road to Emmaus and the
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Lord has to open their hearts to see how the scriptures, law, prophets, the writings, had all testified of him.
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If God has a purpose in giving his word and in preserving it for the church so that it will function for us, it will be for our instruction, it will be for our guidance, then surely the identity of what is and what is not is a part, is going to be just as much a concern in God's work and the extension of God's power as the preservation of the text of the scripture.
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He's going to preserve the text and he's going to lead his people to recognize it.
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Now notice, you don't need to have angels coming down from heaven. You don't need to have what
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I call the golden index syndrome, where you need to have it all chiseled out on a golden plate or something like that.
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If in the Old Testament you didn't have any angels coming down, no matter what their name was, a couple of you got that joke, not very many, but a couple of you did.
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You don't have any indexes appearing in the sky over, you know,
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Mount Hermon or something like that. You have what looks from us, our perspective, to be a very natural process.
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The people of God, all across restored
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Israel, recognizing what God had given them in the prophets. They lay those books up in the temple.
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They even recognized, by the way, in the intertestamental period, the Jews even recognized that the voice of God had left
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Israel, that God had become silent, that something was coming and it had to be big in the person of the
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Messiah for many. But God used what would seem to us to be less than spectacular means.
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And yet, well I'll illustrate this with a story. Back in 1993,
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I believe it was April, I did two debates at Boston College in Boston against a former graduate of Gordon -Conwell
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Theological Seminary, who at the time was a doctoral student at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.
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He never did complete that work, but to Jerry Matitix, who had converted to Roman Catholicism along with Scott Hahn.
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We did two debates at Boston College, one on justification and one on the apocrypha. And Jerry and I had sort of quipped that we might need to distribute no -dos during the apocrypha debate to keep the snoring level down low enough that we could record the debate.
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And in reality, it ended up being a much hotter debate than the justification debate. Because at the end of the debate,
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I stood up and I said, I got up to the podium and I said, the
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Book of Mormon is the Word of God. And then I stood there. And the audience was primarily monks, and they're all looking at me like, boy we knew this guy was weird, now we have documented evidence.
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And I said, Mormons believe that and they believe that by an argument of authority.
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We have a prophet and he says so. And what we've heard this evening from Mr. Matitix is, the Old Testament canon of the
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Roman Catholic Church is correct because we tell you so. It's an argument from authority.
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And I continued on from there. And so boy, the audience questions at that point got really, really interesting. It was quite an interesting evening.
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But I had been on WEZE radio with Mr. Matitix the week before in studio.
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Those of you who have read my book on Mary have read the story about what happened during that time. And then we were supposed to be back in studio after that debate, but then they canceled it.
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Well, little known to us, they uncanceled it. Thought they had told us, hadn't. And so I think the next day or the day after, we're tooling around out in Southbridge, Massachusetts, which is a long way from Boston.
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You can barely tune in WEZE. We just happened to turn it on and there's Jerry Matitix in studio and they're wondering where I am.
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So we go zooming back to the house, we get on the phone, and I do the rest of the program by phone with Mr. Matitix and he was still in debate mode.
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I had not pre -planned this question. And this question has been repeated so many times now that I've actually heard it referred to as the white question when people call into Catholic programs and ask the same question of them because they haven't gotten a decent answer yet.
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We were getting ready to go to commercial break and out of the blue, I had never thought of this question before, but the conversation prompted it.
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I said, Mr. Matitix, how did the godly
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Jewish believer know 50 years before Christ that Isaiah and 2
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Chronicles were scripture? And it got about as quiet as it did in here.
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It was silent. Sorry, I repeated myself. Mr. Matitix, how did the godly
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Jewish person know that Isaiah and 2 Chronicles were scripture prior to the coming of Christ, 50 years before Christ?
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How did he know? There was some stuttering and stammering and he said,
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I don't know. And the hostess said, oh, that's interesting, let's go to a commercial break, and then we went on from there.
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Obviously, when we came back from the commercial break, I sort of pressed that issue, but that is a question I've used over and over again, and I used it this morning too.
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How did he know? How did the godly Jewish person know? Now, people have come up with some interesting answers since then, by the way, in case you're wondering.
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Some Roman Catholics have said he didn't know, couldn't have known. No one could know outside of the
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Pope. Now not only historically has that become somewhat silly, but there's this one little problem.
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Jesus held men accountable to the scriptures. Matthew chapter 22, have you not read what was spoken to you by God saying,
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I am the God of Abraham, and not the God of Isaac, and not the God of Jacob, and not the God of the dead and the living. He held men accountable to those scriptures.
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If he held them accountable, there had to be some way that they could know Isaiah and 2 Chronicles are scripture. How did they know?
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Some have said the Urim and the Thummim. The only way that anyone could have known
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Isaiah and 2 Chronicles are scripture, if they went to the high priest, and they obtained the Urim and the Thummim, and they cast the divine dice, and the divine dice told them, yes,
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Isaiah is, sort of the ancient equivalent of the magic eight ball, you know, it is, it is not.
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And so evidently, all those people that Jesus held accountable had, at one point, gone to the high priest and had consulted the
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Urim and Thummim and been told that Isaiah and 2 Chronicles are scripture. That one doesn't work overly well either. I haven't gotten a meaningful response to that question.
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Because from the Roman Catholic perspective, there isn't a meaningful response. And to anyone who is looking for some kind of extra -biblical supernatural revelation that determines the canon, you're not going to be able to answer that question.
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Because there wasn't anything during the intertestamental period that would give you that. But if you believe that God gives the scriptures for a purpose, and part of that purpose is that He will then lead
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His people to recognize what it is, then you don't have a problem with that. You don't need an extra -biblical revelation to know.
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Those texts had been laid up. The people of God had recognized Isaiah and Jeremiah, and they had recognized the prophetic voice therein.
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They hadn't gotten together in some council, and everybody had raised, you know, a hand. They hadn't done the
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UN thing or something like that and passed a resolution. None of that happened. And yet, what did happen was enough for Christ to hold men accountable for knowing what the scriptures were.
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Some people have gotten upset with R .C. Sproul. Because when you ask R .C.
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Sproul, is the canon of scripture infallible, he says, no it's not. But you need to understand what he's saying by that.
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He's saying there is no external biblical authority that is infallible in and of itself, i .e.
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the church. And in fact, I think he's responding specifically there to canon two.
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He doesn't make the same distinction. I don't know if he would, I certainly don't think he'd disagree with what
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I'm saying here. But I think he's referring to canon two, not to canon one. But what he's referring to is someone asking, are the decisions of the councils of Hippo and Carthage infallible?
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How could they be? First of all, they're provincial, even Rome doesn't attach infallibility to them. And secondly, they contain the
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Apocrypha, even though they don't contain the exact same Apocrypha that the Council of Trent had in 1546. That's one of the problems for Roman Catholics who try to point back to them.
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And so you have a problem. He's simply saying no, but I believe that it contains no errors.
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Why? Because God has fulfilled the purpose that he's revealed in the scriptures for why we have the scriptures in the first place.
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You see the distinction between the two. If you don't make the distinction between canon one and canon two, oops, then that doesn't make any, it doesn't make any sense.
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But if you recognize the nature of the canon, then it makes perfect sense. And it's an important distinction to keep in mind.
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The same process over almost the exact same period of time takes place after the writing of the New Testament. The writing of the
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New Testament, a much shorter period of time than that of the Old Testament. But from the cessation of prophetic activity in the giving of scripture, the period of time that you see is almost identical between the
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Old and New Testaments. Same process takes place. Now when you hear people talking about the lost books of the
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Bible, remember last night we read some of the stuff that people propose as being added to the canon of scripture.
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It's interesting they don't, the actual books that people in certain areas did consider to be canonical.
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When you actually read those, they're much less wild, crazy, and zany than what you have in the
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Gnostic Gospels. But you even see in them a recognition of the pre -existence of scripture. When you're quoting scripture, you're probably, and recognizing the apostles are gone, so on and so forth, that's obviously a post -apostolic writing and so on and so forth.
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We have those books. We have Clement. We have the Didache. Some of those books are semi -decent.
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I mean Clement, it shocks a lot of folks, keeps talking about these folks called the elect. Where did they come from?
01:00:00
Hmm. That's odd. And you read Mathetes, he's just called disciple, but his letter to Diognetius, just tremendous reliance upon Paul and a clear understanding of justification and imputation and all that stuff.
01:00:15
It's really neat. There are other books that just stink. You know, Barnabas, Shepherd of Hermas, you know these guys have not even run into the vast majority of the
01:00:23
New Testament and are off in Nana land someplace. But these books exist. We can read them and you look at them and go, wow, let's compare that with Romans, not even on the same map.
01:00:34
They're there. People like to prey upon our ignorance in saying, well you've never even looked at these books, so how do you know?
01:00:42
So it wouldn't actually hurt us to do some review of these things so we can say, well actually I have.
01:00:48
But, going back to this, I realize, looking now at the time, that I had a second portion of this presentation to give on the issue of the textual transmission of the
01:00:59
New Testament. We were going to go over text types and everything else, and the idea of trying to fit that into an hour and 20 minutes was silly to begin with, and I'm not going to get to it.
01:01:08
But that will allow me to do something I was asked to do, and that is to promote a shameless plug.
01:01:17
I do not have any music to play like Michael Medved does for his shameless plugs, but this rather plain looking publication, white and black, yes, we could use some color, but hey, you know, is called, as someone around here calls it,
01:01:32
Arbiter, it's RBTR, Reform Baptist Theological Review, which started, this is the volume two, number two, so this is the fourth edition thereof.
01:01:43
And some of us labor out of love, because that's all we're laboring out of, in writing for the
01:01:51
Reform Baptist Theological Review. I have an article on John Paul II due in just a little over a month that I have not even begun to outline yet, and I write book reviews for the
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RBTR, and I've had a number of articles in it. One was a two -part article on Hebrews chapter 8 and the nature of the
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New Covenant, especially in regards to responding to even a good friend of mine's presentation.
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He's a Paedo -Baptist, I'm a Credo -Baptist, and so we had a review there. That was in the last two.
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And the first article in the current July 2005 RBTR is
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Textual Criticism in the Ministry of Preaching by yours truly. And who is this second article by here?
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The Result of Paul's Preaching in Antioch, someone named Robert Martin, have you ever heard of him?
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And there's another one, the Subjects of Baptism and Confession. Did you just, was this all assigned to, anyways, then we have
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Mike Renahan, James Renahan, Theology on Target, the Scope of the Whole. Have you ever heard of that one before?
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Does Richard Barcellos just call you out of the blue on short notice like all the rest of us? Yeah. So there is a lot of information in here and this particular article would go into specifics about that.
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And then I wrote a book in 1994, which is still amazingly in print, called
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The King James Only Controversy. And in that book I go through the issue, I have to go through the issue of why are there differences in translations, what about the transmission of the text, what's the
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Byzantine text, what's the majority text, what is the eclectic text, and how do you determine these things, and what are those little footnotes in the margins of your
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Bible, and all the rest of that stuff. And do so in such a way that it really is a semi -friendly, most people have found to be semi -friendly, unless you're
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King James Only, introduction to the subject of textual criticism. It's used as a textbook all over the place because of the fact that it introduces it in such a way as to demonstrate why it's important in the pastoral ministry to know these things.
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I mean, a pastor especially has to recognize that when you, well, my interest in writing that book, for example, came from the fact that I had a volunteer in the ministry, and we're going to wrap up here in just a moment, if your
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Starbucks is now causing you other problems other than that the caffeine is over and now it's causing other issues. Hold on a second. I had a volunteer call me one day, and she had been at her church, and the pastor had preached on this statement of Jesus.
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And he preached out of the New American Standard, and she was carrying an NIV. And what really bothered her is the whole sermon was based upon the words of Jesus that aren't in the
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NIV. She didn't notice that they are, they're just in that micro font down at the bottom of the page, but the entire verse of his entire message was in brackets in the
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NASV, and it's not in the main text of the NIV. Now that really, you know, if you're really familiar with the
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Bible and textual criticism, you sit back and go, oh my, oh my.
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But you've got to realize something, that can be extremely troubling to our people.
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We do have a glut of English translations. We have more English translations than we need, there's no question about that.
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If you've been wondering why there's a new English translation coming out every year, there's one simple reason, money.
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And you know why it is? Because Thomas Nelson bought Word, they have the copyrights of the
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New King James Version, they forced everybody to use the New King James Version, including, for example, the MacArthur Study Bible. John MacArthur never uses the
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MacArthur Study Bible, never. You know why? Because he never uses the New King James. He preaches out of the NASV.
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Hello? Hello? He preaches out of the NASV. It was written for the
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NASV, you know why it's in the New King James? It's in the New King James because Thomas Nelson said it will be in the
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New King James, because we're not paying royalties to Lockman. Same thing with the
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Geneva Study Bible that first came out, it was written for the NIV, forced them to put it in the New King James, because the company it was going to be published for went out of business, they were bought by Thomas Nelson, and voila, if you're going to put it out with Thomas Nelson, it's going to be in the
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New King James, because they're not going to pay royalties to somebody else. So the reason all these translations are coming out is that they are being done by the major publishing houses so they can put out study
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Bibles in their translations without paying royalties to Thomas Nelson. So I think
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ESV is who, Crossway, and then you've got the Holman translation, and who put out the
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New Living, it's another,
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Tyndale, they're spending millions on these things, because there's millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars in study
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Bibles. That's why it's happening. It's not that we need them, we've got plenty of good ones.
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In fact, it's causing, I think, some level of confusion, because we have, quite literally, too many.
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It's starting to get silly. We are a blessed people, we have wonderful, excellent translations in English, we've got all of them we need, there's only so many ways you can do this after a while, you know what
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I mean? People ask me about the ESV, and my first response was, it's the New American Standard without semicolons. In the vast majority of places it is, now there are some differences, but in the vast majority of places, you look at it, the
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New American Standard has a semicolon, they put a period. Whoop -de -doo! I mean, we don't need all that, okay?
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That's why it's all out there. When you're preaching, you've got to consult, you've got to have some idea of what your people are carrying.
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You don't want to preach an entire sermon on a passage that's not in the Bibles of a third of the people in front of you.
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And hopefully when you see them going, might give you a clue you made a mistake in your preparation, okay?
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You know, it might be an indication. But those are just some of the things that we really do have to keep in mind.
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I mean, one last story and then we'll take our break. Sometimes I will do something that's a lot of fun,
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I will role -play. And it's really fun when I go into a place that I'm completely unknown, which is pretty much everywhere.
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And if I've not spoken in a church, to go into a
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Bible study class, especially a youth Bible study class, and role -play a cultist.
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We did this at Michael Fallon's church the first time I went to Florida. And we went into a junior high class that had been studying
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Jehovah's Witnesses. And so they brought me in and they introduced me as an elder from the local
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Kingdom Hall. And I got to get up and start talking to the kids.
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Now let me tell you something. The kids were paying an amazing amount of attention for junior high school kids.
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Especially when I called up one of their young guys. Have you ever noticed how dumb we tend to be as evangelicals?
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We take our most immature young people and put them in charge of the even more immature young people.
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Have you ever noticed how we do that? It's really brilliant. And so we bring up, I brought up some student aid type poor guy.
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I had him in heresy within 30 seconds. I turned him into a modalist like that and then just had fun ripping him apart.
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And I will do these, I will do these role -plays. I was at a large, large church in a college career class with one of my students from Grand Canyon College when
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I was teaching there. And I was playing a Mormon. And I brought up the issue of why are there so many different Bibles?
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And of course my student's going, well there's really only one Bible with different translations. Really? Well could
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I ask everybody to read me something? And sure. Well I had looked around the room before we got started. 95 % of them had the
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NIV. How many of you have an NIV here this morning? Go ahead, admit it. Alright.
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Alright, you got an NIV in your lap there? Who's got one open right now that you can get to real quick? Alright. You right there.
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Read me John 5, 4. John chapter 5, verse 4. Who's got an NASB or a King James open?
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Read me John 5, 4. You got it?
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Go ahead. But you can only read it out of the main text.
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There is no John 5, 4 in the main text of the NIV, is there? No. There isn't a numeric standard. You should have seen those students.
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It looked like I had just killed their puppy. And they're not looking at me because they don't like me now.
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They're looking at the guy who brought me in going, you stupid idiot, what are you doing? That was when we decided it was a good time to introduce me as his professor, not as Elder What's -His -Face from the
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LDS. Well in fact, I have a little name tag. When we did Letters to a Mormon Elder back in 1989 or so,
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I had a little name tag. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, Elder Han. Because if you've read Letters to a Mormon Elder, it was back and forth
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Elder Han. The original cover had a picture of that. And I've kept it all these years. So I'm in a white shirt, dark tie, and I've got my name badge on.
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So they have no idea that that's not who I am. But the shock was amazing.
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It shouldn't have been. Now, he knew where to look because we were talking about footnotes. But they're looking and they can't find a four.
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Because it ain't there. We've got to know why that is, especially if you're in any type of leadership position.
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I'm sorry folks, our folks should not be walking up to us after a Sunday morning sermon and stumping us on such basic things.
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They shouldn't be. We owe them. And we owe the Word of God more than that.
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We really do. So, get the RBTR and read that. And I wish
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I had more time to address that, but we've spent as much time as we can. We're going to get set up for our roundtable.
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I believe that we're going to take about a five or ten minute break. And I don't see Mr. O 'Fallon anywhere. But then we're going to try to set up for a little bit of roundtable discussion.