02 - History Affects Ecclesiology

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Church History Lesson Number 2. And I actually thought of an issue that I wanted to add to the

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Why Study Church History Lesson material from last week before we move forward.

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But one of the reasons you can add to the Why Study Church History list that I gave you last time was

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I have seen a direct connection between a person who considers and believes important the subject of ecclesiology and the person who has studied some level of church history.

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There seems to be a direct correlation between the two. Someone who has little concern about the history of the church will probably also have little concern about the form, function, worship of the church as well.

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And I think we see that in our day. I think we see that in the fact that we have church hoppers today who move from church to church.

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And their reasons for wanting to be at one church versus another church are primarily based upon color schemes, length of service, and music programs, ease of parking, all sorts of things like that, and have very little to do with the actual intended purpose of the church.

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The solemnity of worship, focus, anything like that is secondary to these other issues.

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And I see a direct correlation because if you know about church history, you at least are aware of the fact that there has been a tremendous amount of attention paid by Christians down through the ages to the form and function of the church.

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In fact, there is a Latin phrase that is very well known in church history that when properly understood, we can accept.

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When improperly understood, we have to reject. But it's extra ecclesiam nulla salus.

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Extra ecclesiam nulla salus. Anyone know what that means? Extra ecclesiam.

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Extra ecclesiam. What's ecclesiam? Has to do with church. Church. Extra, outside, nulla, none, salus.

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Salvation. Outside the church, there is no salvation. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus.

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Now obviously, for example, at the time of the Reformation, this was understood amongst Roman Catholics to mean that God's grace was limited to the sacraments of the

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Roman church, and therefore there could be no salvation outside formal membership within the

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Church of Rome. Now I said that could be understood appropriately. And obviously, we know that theologically speaking, when a person is saved, they are joined to the body of Christ.

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And therefore, there is no salvation outside of the church because we're talking there about the invisible church, or the body of Christ is made up solely of the elect.

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We're not talking about a specific denomination or something along those lines.

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But that was a very common understanding, even in the early church. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus. Outside the church, there is no salvation.

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So obviously, issues of the purpose of the church, the form of the church, we'll see when we get into the period of persecution.

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The greatest schisms that happened during that time had to do with how you dealt with people who had lapsed, because it was so important to be a part of the fellowship of the church.

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And obviously, if Christians down through the ages had had such a high view of the church, the form of the church, the purpose of the church, and participation therein, what's happened today?

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Where the vast majority of folks is like, well, you know, if I get my nose slightly bent out of shape, there's lots of other churches

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I can go to. The church is there to serve me. And the historical understanding amongst

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Christians has been, no, we're here to serve the church. And so I suppose you could still have a knowledge of church history and not care about ecclesiology, but the mindset that would allow you to do that would be those folks in the past had no earthly idea what they were talking about.

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Their priorities are irrelevant to me. I'm the one that has the most important priorities. And that's sort of related to another thing.

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I think a person with a deep rooting and an understanding of how we got to where we are is going to be a person who is much less likely to be blown about by every wind of doctrine, and especially in our day, by the fads that just come blowing through and last for no period of time at all.

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I mean, let me just utter three words as an illustration.

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Prayer of Jabez. OK? Now, anybody not know what the

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Prayer of Jabez was? Really? You were working on your PhD at that time,

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I guess. Prayer of Jabez was this big, huge fad. What was it?

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12 years ago, something like that? Yeah, it's going to be longer than that. Longer than that? Yeah. Shorter?

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You're saying longer, so you're saying shorter. I'm figuring, you know, I don't remember. But this book came out, this guy.

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And the Prayer of Jabez is like one sentence long. And it's about increasing my borders.

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And it was turned into this huge, I mean, there are

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Prayer of Jabez teacups and coffee mugs and t -shirts and those little porcelain big -headed things.

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What are they called? Bobbleheads. Not bobbleheads. The precious moments, little precious, you know.

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And I'm sure the painter of light guy, before he croaked, probably did some Prayer of Jabez thing, because Thomas Kinkade, yeah,

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Thomas Kinkade, Prayer of Jabez stuff. I mean, it was just all over the place. And people get caught up in these fads.

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But I think you're going to be less caught up in fads if you know something about church history and realize there's nothing new under the sun.

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And a movement that, in church history, only lasted 10 years is a blip.

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It's a nothing. It's irrelevant. And almost nothing lasts 10 years anymore.

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And so I know one thing that studying history has done for me is that I just don't, it's a little bit harder to get me all excited about the newest thing.

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Give it 50 years, it might be relevant. But it gives you that long view to be able to see things.

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We're looking at the Prayer of Jabez now. It's really easy to see these things with glasses on. If I take my glasses off, you can get away with stuff like that with the glasses on.

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I will notice that happening. So anyway, I think that is another element to add to the why study church history type thing.

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Now, when you talk about studying church history, you immediately face the question, when did the church begin?

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And there are all sorts of different answers to that, depending upon your theological framework. I mean, it's not a simple question to answer, because it depends on how you identify the church.

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And are we talking about the New Testament church in the sense of Pentecost onward, spirit poured out upon the church, fulfillment of Joel 2, post -cross type situation?

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Or how do we understand the relationship of that body to the elect beforehand?

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And this gets you into covenantal theology and the various forms of covenantal theology. And obviously, the dispensationalist has a whole different view of all of that and relationship with the church to Israel and all sorts of things like that.

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But if we look historically at how church history has been studied, in general,

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Acts is seen as the first history of the primitive church.

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And so basically, Pentecost, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the completion of the work of Christ, death, burial, resurrection, ascension to heaven, and then the coming of the

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Holy Spirit, this then becomes the ground of where we then take off from there in studying the church.

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And we get Acts to fill in that first portion up to all the beginning, maybe, of the seventh century, somewhere in that time period.

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Seventh century. Seventh decade. Somewhere in that time period. And then after that, depends on how you date some other books in the

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New Testament. If Revelation is a much later work, John, exile,

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Patmos, maybe in one of the later periods of persecution, all the way toward the end of the first century, you'll get a few, you know, the letters to the churches,

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Ephesus, things like that. You can sort of derive a little something, a little light from that.

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But pretty much outside of that, we are dependent upon external sources for our knowledge at that particular point in time.

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And as anyone knows who has studied history, it's a complicated thing.

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Historiography, how you do history, you bring all sorts of different lenses to the subject.

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We tend to interpret things through our present lenses, which causes distortion, especially when looking at the ancient period.

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We have significantly less written material than you would have for 1965.

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So the methodologies you're going to use are going to be different. You have to bring in archaeology.

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You have to look a lot more at culture and things like that, because you don't have the hard data to look at.

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And when we look at the subject of the Christian church, especially in those first, up until AD 313, where you have what's called the

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Peace of the Church, or the end of imperial persecution, it's a persecuted movement.

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It's a despised movement. And so some of our resources have been destroyed, burned, people killed and murdered who might otherwise have been able to provide us with more literary remains that we could have utilized to know more about history.

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And so I recognize that there are all sorts of questions that we're sort of assuming a certain process in how we approach church history.

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And I'll make reference to some of these things. For example, we talk about the first church history.

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Anybody know who, outside of Acts, anybody know the first famous church history? Eusebius' church history.

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And vitally important document, early mid -portion of the 4th century, vitally important because it's our only source for certain things.

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Like there's an early church father by the name of Papias. We don't have a scrap of what

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Papias wrote. Then how can we know anything about him? Because people back then did have what

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Papias wrote. And for some reason his writings haven't survived, but they quoted him. And so we have at least some idea, but then of course we have to hope that they quote him correctly.

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And then there were heretics in the early church. And a lot of their stuff was burned too, sometimes by Christians.

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And so most of what we know about the Gnostics, we know from them being quoted by Christians who are opposing them.

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Well, when you're opposing somebody, sometimes you're not as fair and accurate as you could be.

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That happens. And with certain finds from the last century, such as at Nag Hammadi or Aksarynkes in Egypt, we found a lot of Gnostic writings that then cast a whole lot of light upon that time period, at least upon Christian writings that were responding to Gnosticism and things like that.

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So the sources that we use and things like that, we'll have to make mention of those things. But what

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I want to do today is, if we just jump in to the time period after the

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New Testament, or right toward the end of the first century, we have a problem.

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What's the world like? What's the context into which the

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Gospel is going? And very often people just sort of dive into that and import misapprehensions and misunderstandings to fill in the gaps.

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And the result can be a distorted understanding of what was going on in the early church. Let me give you an example.

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I left home early this morning just so I could stop by the office. I thought I had one of these at home, but I didn't.

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Well, they're not quite as important as they used to be because I don't have them on my iPad and my phone and everything else anymore.

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But this is probably one of the most formative, important documents in the first three centuries of the

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Christian church. And most people have never even held one, looked at one, or anything else.

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Now, my Greek professor pronounced it septuagint. Most people say septuagint.

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It's hard to say septuagint quickly. But the septuagint, I'm going to pass this around, take a look at it.

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The septuagint is the Greek translation of the

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Hebrew Scripture. So it's simply the Greek version of what we call the

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Old Testament or I think is honestly probably a little better identified on our part as the

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Tanakh. Tanakh. I think we all need to know what that is if you want to.

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Tanakh or T -N -K. I've mentioned it before.

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What does that stand for? Anyone know? Yes, sir. Torah. Nevi 'im and Ketuvim.

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The Torah, the Torah, the spell different ways.

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Nevi 'im, plural, and Ketuvim. I could have used a

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V there. Law, prophets, writings. So it's a three -fold canon of the

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Old Testament. Jews refer to it as the Tanakh. They don't appreciate when you call it the

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Old Testament because they don't believe there's something beyond that, obviously. So when you hear someone referring to the

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Tanakh, they're referring to what we would call the Old Testament, the law, the prophets, and the writings.

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Well, too fast, huh? I could have left it a little longer.

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There you go. Yes. This has the apocryphal books in it as well. Yes, it does.

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Sometime around 250 to 200, the

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Septuagint comes into existence. Now, did it come into existence as a bound volume with leather?

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No. Later, primarily

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Christian writers, but I assume they got this from sources, quoted a particular source, a particular letter, that told the story of how the

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Septuagint came into existence. The story is told, and it differs from the different versions, that 70 or 72

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Jewish scholars got together. And again, there's different versions of this.

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Sometimes it's just the Pentateuch, but eventually it became the whole thing. I'm just giving you the general story.

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They all went into separate locations, caves, and translated the

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Tanakh into Greek from the Hebrew. Like I said, some of them were just talking about some of the older stories, just the five books of Moses, but eventually it was the whole

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Septuagint. And when they came back out and compared them, guess what?

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They were pretty close. No, they were word for word the same. Word for word the same.

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And obviously, what was this meant to communicate? That it was a divinely provided, basically divinely inspired, translation of the

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Old Testament. Now, as a result, for many in the early church, especially in primarily

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Greek speaking areas, especially in places like Egypt, Alexandria, places like that, for Christians for the first few hundred years, what you're looking at there was the

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Bible. Because remember, the New Testament is still being written. It's written in the first hundred years. And then one of the first, and we're going to cover the canon.

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I'm just giving you background information here. One of the first canon lists we have is from around 185.

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It's called the Muratorian Fragment. And it contains about 85 % of what we have today.

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There are a few disputed books. For example, everybody knows the most disputed book of the

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New Testament is? The Book of Revelation. Which is why we have fewer manuscripts of the

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Book of Revelation than any other New Testament book. Like I said, we'll talk about canon later on.

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It's a vitally important issue, and you'll probably end up learning more about it than you ever wanted to know. But it's still,

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I think, one of the key apologetic issues in our day, and I do not know why it is not a regular subject of regular preaching, other than most preachers don't have a clue where the canon, the scripture came from either.

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And hence, they don't want to talk about it. And yet, all of our young people are going off to university and getting their faith shredded.

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I keep pointing at you because you're a university professor. I'm sorry, but just get used to it. I'm going to use you as the example.

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Well, not only that, he's a historian too. I mean, you put it all together, and it's a bad thing.

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But, see, God can save anybody. So... Wow. See, I'm having fun here.

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He teaches history. The first class I ever taught on the graduate level is history. I've taught church history in Ukraine. This is going to sort of be fun to get to do this.

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But, anyway, back to the Septuagint.

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What was I saying about the Septuagint? Oh, yes, the canon. They so revered the

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Septuagint that it became the authoritative text. And where it differs from the

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Hebrew, and it does, they accused the Jews of changing their scriptures to try to hide prophecies of Jesus.

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And when the Latin Vulgate came out, when Jerome translated the Latin Vulgate at the end of, you know, right around 400 -ish, a little after that, well, he started before that, but finished sections of that.

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Anyway, there were, I mentioned riots in Carthage, I've mentioned this to you before, because it differed in minor details from the

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Greek Septuagint, and the Greek Septuagint was the Bible of the early church. And the

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New Testament, as I said, Muratorian Fragment 185, you do not have a full, exactly as we have it today, listing of the canon

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New Testament until Athanasius, you probably have the

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Septuagint, or something close to it with you there. Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, his 39th

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Festal Letter, sometime in the 360s, is where you have an exact listing like we have today.

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So the New Testament was coming into its own during that time period, just as there had been a period of development in putting the

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Tanakh together prior to the coming of Christ. Like I said, we're going to cover canon later. But the point is, that was the

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Bible of the early church. And how did that get to be?

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Well, let's think about something. Who was the greatest person of history in the 4th century before Christ?

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And there really isn't any argument about this. Did you have a question? Yeah, while other people are googling that.

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No, no, no. The Septuagint. Is it true that Jesus and the

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Apostles, they were according to the Septuagint or not? Because this is what

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I heard. And I checked it out a couple of times. And it differs, the

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Septuagint and the Hebrew Scriptures. In other words, they were according to the

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Septuagint. At least 85 -90 % of the time, when the

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New Testament writers, whether it's the Gospel writers or the Apostles, quote from the

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Old Testament, they quote from the Septuagint. Now sometimes there's no difference between that and the Hebrew.

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But when the Septuagint differs from the

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Hebrew, almost always they quote from the Greek Septuagint. The only difference is in Isaiah, when

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Isaiah saw the glory of God. Yes, Isaiah, uh -huh, uh -huh. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.

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That's a very important text. Mm -hmm, mm -hmm. Yep, yep, so that's it.

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One more thing. Yes. You do not have to know Hebrew. If you know

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Greek, you've got your Hebrew in the Septuagint. Well, that's true.

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That's true. Of course, I think you're a tad bit biased along those lines, personally. But I, as one who has taught

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Greek many times, so am I, but I've also taught Hebrew. So it is important, I think, to have the

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Hebrew, but as far as what language I use far more often than the other,

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I use Greek far more often than I use Hebrew because so many, even of the Old Testament issues, go back to the

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Septuagint. You have an advantage. Yep, you do. You do. Notorious bet. Notorious bet. Okay, so who was the greatest figure?

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Alexander the Great. No question about it. Middle of the 4th century

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B .C. He drives the Persians out of Greece.

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He expands the Greek realms. He dies at 33 years of age.

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I mean, he does this as a 20 -year -old mainly. And the impact that this has on the ancient world, at least the ancient

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Mediterranean world, is incalculable. Because when we talk about the

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New Testament, for example, there are people who promote the theory that, well, there are some radical people who promote the theory that the entire

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New Testament was originally written in Hebrew. And then there are others who would say, well, the

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Gospels were written in Hebrew, and then the other was written in Greek, or whatever. The reality is, every book in the

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New Testament, without any question at all, was originally written in Greek. We can tell that by its language.

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Now, certainly, Mark, Matthew, they contain what are called Aramaisms, which demonstrates the person that was writing lived in a culture where there were

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Aramaic elements to it as well, and so it's not pure classical

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Greek from Athens. But the reality is that Matthew wrote in Greek, even though Papias said he originally wrote in Hebrew.

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Matthew wrote in Greek. It's not a translation of Hebrew into Greek. You can tell when that happens. And, obviously, like when

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Paul writes to the church at Colossae, what language is he going to write in? It's just silly for him to write in Hebrew, because they don't read

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Hebrew in Colossae, or even Aramaic for that matter. They're Greek speakers.

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Why? Alexander. Alexander. Alexander spread the

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Greek language and culture all around the world, and while Rome, in a sense, followed on his coattails, and while much of Roman culture was

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Greek culture, Latinized. Anybody ever studied

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Greek mythology, the Greek gods? Zeus is the leader of the

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Greek pantheon. Who does he become for the Romans? Jupiter. Almost every single

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Greek god has a Roman name, because basically they just adopted it, just sort of borrowed it and moved on.

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And so form of government, literature, eventually the rise, in our context, of the synagogue, and the form of the synagogue, and the worship in the synagogue, central to the church's missionary methodology in the apostolic period.

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Where does Paul first go in every city he goes to? The synagogue. Because he's got a base there of people who already possess the scriptures.

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And then once he's got a group from there, and they turn, the division has taken place, then he goes to the

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Gentiles. But where did all that come from? And why is it that Paul could write in one language and pretty much know that that one language is going to be understandable all over the place?

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Alexander. And so Greek, now Greek doesn't stay identical,

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I mean there was 400 years between Alexander and the time of Paul, for example, and so there'd be some changes, some evolution during that time period.

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And modern Greek differs from ancient Greek, just as modern English differs from the earliest forms of English and things like that.

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But those languages that had much wider dispersion, like Greek, tend to remain more stable than languages like English, which is really cobbled together from a bunch of different languages.

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If you've ever studied the background of the English language, you know that we borrowed from everybody, and not overly consistently either, because that's how languages develop.

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So at the time of the New Testament, what was the cultural situation called that allowed for travel and commerce across the

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Mediterranean and around the known world at that time? The Pax Romana, which means the

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Peace of Rome. And you could, you know, if there were civil wars or other kinds of wars going on all over the place, those create barriers, they create borders that you might not be able to pass if you're a

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Christian missionary. But in the days of Paul, he wanted to go all the way to Gaul, which would be today our western portion,

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Spain, France, we would call today, all the way that direction, because he wanted to see the gospel go all across the known world.

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Now, how could he do that? Well, because Rome was in charge of all of it. He's a Roman citizen, so he gets to go where he wants. And there's commerce, there's, you know, we were just reading an axe.

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And what kind of a ship did they get on? An Alexandrian ship that was taking grain from Egypt up into Europe to sell, etc.,

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etc. There was far more commerce, travel, education, literary output during the

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Pax Romana than there would be during what we call the Dark Ages or the

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Feudal Period in Europe, where for a period of time, for a couple hundred years anyways, the average person in Europe would not travel more than seven miles any one direction from when they were born, from where they were born their entire life.

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That makes for a pretty small world. Makes for a pretty small world. Very little travel, very little commerce.

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People develop the concept of anachronism. You go, what? How do you develop a concept of anachronism?

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Ever seen medieval paintings of Bible scenes? Ever seen someone, say, around 1100, paint a picture of what

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David would have looked like? How do they paint him? He's riding around on a horse in armor and he lives in a feudal castle.

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Because from their perspective, everything had always been as it was now. The idea of development, the idea of change.

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This is why, for example, forged books became such an important element in the development of modern

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Roman Catholic theology. Because there was a famous book called

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The Donation of Constantine, which allegedly, it was Constantine giving basically the keys to the city of Rome to the

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Bishop of Rome. So it was foundational to the development of the Roman papacy and the concept of the

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Pope having this type of primacy and stuff like that. Well today, for us, it's so obviously a fraud.

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Because it contains anachronisms. They wouldn't have talked like this back then.

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But if you don't realize things have changed, you don't know what anachronism is. Because things have always been the same. And all because of how little people travel from one place to another.

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Because the stability that the Roman Empire gave to the

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Mediterranean basin had broken down. And it collapsed. And so it was an incredibly opportune, providential time that you could not only have the missionary movement all across North Africa, from Portugal, Spain, France, all the way through Greece and Italy, through Asia Minor, all the way around the

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Mediterranean basin. You could travel in that first century because of the

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Pax Romana. And you could communicate almost anywhere. Because while Greek may not have been the primary language in certain areas, it was the

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English of the ancient world. I mean, if you can speak English, almost any place you go, you can find somebody that can muddle along a bit.

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I think most of you know it's the official language of air flight. Anywhere, pretty much.

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And so it sort of functioned in that way. And it allowed then the continuity of the writing of the

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New Testament epistles and things like that, and the distribution of these letters. Now obviously we know that there were early translations of the scriptures in other languages because you may be able to muddle along in Greek, but if your mother tongue is

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Ethiopic or something, or Armenian, or something like that, you're going to want to have it in your own language.

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And so there's all sorts of translations that are done early on, including Latin translations. But the point is that that spreading of Greek culture provided a foundation that allowed the scriptures and the

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Christian message to go all over the world. And as I said, that book, wherever it is, has it gotten to the back yet?

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Okay. That particular volume will become central when we talk about the issue of the canon.

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Because as someone noted, while it's a little bit bigger than ours, it has the apocryphal books in it.

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It does, but there is no one version of the Septuagint.

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It's really obvious. When we look at the Pentateuch, for example, the Pentateuch is very, very well done.

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I mean, top flight scholars who were absolutely fluent in both

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Greek and Hebrew, probably in Alexandria, produced the

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Septuagint. And they did so as a group. It's very clear. It's incredibly high quality.

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The rest of the Septuagint varies a lot in the level of quality of translation.

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No question about it. And as a result, it's pretty obvious that it wasn't one group that just produced the entirety of it at one time.

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The Septuagint was probably one group. But then outside of that, there were probably different versions that came around at different points of time that were eventually collected together, and they have different levels of quality between them.

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And that leads to some issues, for example, in Jeremiah.

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Very different. Even the order of passages is different in Jeremiah. The breakdown of the

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Psalms is different. You always get lost trying to find the proper Psalm in the Septuagint because you forget where the divisions are different, and there's an extra

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Psalm, and stuff like that. So there's issues like that. And the question of the apocryphal books.

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The Jews never accepted the apocryphal books as canon scripture, so why they would have translated them is one of the issues that we have to struggle with.

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Almost all, and some would say all manuscripts we have of the Greek Septuagint are

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Christian in origin rather than Jewish. And when we talk about the apocrypha, we'll see why they started to become popular at a certain point in time, and who was promoting them, and why they were promoted, and so on and so forth.

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But that book right there, incredibly important in understanding how things developed in the early church, and how translations can become extremely traditionally laden.

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In other words, when we get to the Reformation, we're going to, for a lot of Christians it's really weird when you realize, so you're telling me that when, at the time of the

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Reformation, or right before the Reformation, during the Renaissance, you could literally, you had to risk your life if you were a

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Christian, if you wanted to learn the Hebrew language. You were risking being burned at the stake as a heretic to learn

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Hebrew. What happened to get to that point? And if you showed real interest in Greek, you were also endangering yourself.

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Because everybody knew the Jews were heretics, and so were the

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Greeks. Greek Orthodox, Eastern Orthodoxy, they had been disfellowshipped in 1054, the

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Great Schism. And so, if you had a real interest in Greek translation, that might indicate that you're not really, there's this group called the

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Inquisition, you didn't want to run afoul of them, you don't like the IRS, I ain't nothing compared to the Inquisition.

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Well, getting close, but anyway, they didn't have the comfy chair, or the rack, or things like that, like the

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Inquisition did. And so, people actually risked their lives to learn the

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Hebrew language. And we are the beneficiaries of people risking their lives to learn the

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Hebrew language, which then led to the explosion of modern translations and things like that. Why? Because the translation done by Jerome at the beginning of the 5th century had become the translation of the church.

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And the argument was, God's used it in the church for 1100 years.

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Who are you to question its primacy? Who are you to come up with a

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Greek translation? Or who are you to try to correct what the church has used for 1100 years?

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Those were strong arguments. And they carry the day for many people. And so,

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I think it helps us to start getting at least some of the, the issue in understanding history is perspective.

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And it helps us to start understanding a little something about that. There is one other thing, too. Real quick, because we only have a few minutes.

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But, if you have programs like Logos, which they mispronounce

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Logos or whatever, Accordance, Bible Works, Olive Tree, there are a bunch available these days.

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Almost all of them have church history charts and graphs.

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And when you teach history, you have an immediate question you have to answer.

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How do you organize your material? If you do it by subject, then you very often diminish the temporal aspect of history.

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Because the subject may take you, you know, to deal with a particular subject. If I dealt with the development of the

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Doctrine of Purgatory, I have to go back to the 2nd century all the way through the 14th.

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And a lot of things happen during that time period. So, if you do it by topic, the temporal aspect falls out.

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But, if you do it only by time, you are constantly jumping from one person to another person, from one topic to another topic, and one subject is at one point of development, and one subject is at another point of development, and it can be really, really, really difficult to do.

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Every professor, no matter how you decide to do this, you are imposing an artificial construct on history.

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Because, at least one of the things that is useful about the charts, where you will have, you know, this person lived from this period to this period, and this person from here to here, and this person here to here, and this government existed from here to here.

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When you see it all sort of put together like that, you at least sort of gain some perspective in recognizing how certain developments took place during a person's life.

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Or, you know, one person comes along, these depend upon what this other person over here said, but that person dies while they are alive, and they sort of pick up their mantle.

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You know, it sort of helps, and a lot of those programs will have charts like that, and sometimes they are just free.

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History is not the most popular subject in the world, unfortunately. You can tell by how many historians are driving around in Lamborghinis.

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But, Alexis, yes, there you go. Yeah, 98, yeah. With 298 ,000 miles on it,

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I know how that works, yeah. But, sometimes they are free, and it is just a matter of looking for the resources and downloading them.

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They might be useful. I am seriously pondering seeing if we might, just as we, well, of course, those poor

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Synoptic Gospels are going to sit right there, along with the 1955 vintage overhead projector, and will never move again until they are bleached white by the sun, and turn into a pile of dust in that corner.

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Just watch, it is going to happen. This is the Reformed Baptist way of disposing of things.

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It will decay eventually, don't worry about it. But, with that in mind,

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I am seriously thinking about suggesting some books that would be good resources if you really want to dig into things.

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One of them, the most standard church history resource books by far, is

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Bettinson's Documents of the Christian Faith, Christian Church, something like that.

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I don't know if I have ever seen a church history course, at least one that covered the ancient church, that did not have

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Bettinson in it, because it has so many important documents from the ancient church.

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Not a whole lot of discussion of them, just there is a document, let's read it and then we can make the application. I am thinking about seeing how we might be able to put something together like that, so you have some external reading material if you want to go there.

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I realize not everybody can do that, but I am considering doing that. Alright, so there is a little background stuff, especially the

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Septuagint and things like that. We will try to get into the... There is still some background stuff to handle before we can start getting into the

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Apostolic Fathers and things like that. We will be reading a little bit from the Didache and Ignatius and stuff like that.

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We will start getting that over the next number of weeks. Then again, in May I am gone the first two weekends to South Africa and London, so we will try to make some progress.

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Alright, we have gone over time, let's close. Father, we thank you for this opportunity to look back upon the history of the church.

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We ask that we would learn and that we would be better servants of yours as a result. Be with us now as we go into worship.