The Canon: The Preservation of God's Spoken Word | James R. White

Apologia Utah

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It is good to be with you. I am on what we call a road trip. I, in 2019,

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I flew 165 ,000 miles. I taught in Durban, South Africa, Johannesburg, Samara, Russia.

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Yeah, it was 28 degrees below zero in January. That's a great time to go to Samara, Russia, by the way. I actually spent about 2 and 1⁄2 months in London during that time traveling and then speaking there as well.

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I can get pretty well anywhere in London on the tube. It's an amazing place to be.

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And I consider myself to have escaped from Melbourne, Australia in December of 2019.

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When you consider how close that was to when things went upside down, that really was somewhat of an escape.

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So I was doing a lot of traveling. And in fact, I was doing a lot of debating that year. I figured it would only take about another year or two years to get to 200 debates.

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And then everything changed, as we all know. And I don't wear face diapers.

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And so I don't fly anymore. And so we were doing stuff online.

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And that's fine. But I could spend the whole evening just encouraging believers with the stories that I've been told from the people that I've been talking to here in Utah, down in southern

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Utah. I spoke at Cedar City last Wednesday, I believe it was. And just getting to see people and shake hands and look at people and hear their stories.

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And so now I have that pretty GMC truck out there that I pull the fifth wheel around with.

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And here we are. It's a little bit different than Heathrow Airport in London.

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But you get to meet all sorts of neat and wonderful people. And you go with where the

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Lord puts you and take advantage of the opportunities that you have. I'm on my way up to Idaho.

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I will leave on Saturday. Heading up there. Going to be up in Moscow doing a bunch of stuff with Doug Wilson.

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We're going to be recording Man Rampant and doing a sweater vest dialogue that we've been doing for about a year and a half, two years now.

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We're also going to be debating each other on the subject of paedo -communion, which is a real interesting subject. But again, demonstrating that you can have deep friendships and yet disagreements at the same time.

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And so we'll be doing that. And then I'll be heading home from there, playing tag with all of the nice big semi -tractor trailers and things like that along the way.

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By the way, I just today had a sign made. And just today,

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I got it taped onto the back of my fifth wheel. And it says, let me see if I can remember it.

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Bible questions? Let's talk. CB Channel 15. Handle Diagnetus.

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And so I'm really going to be interested on Saturday. We installed a

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CB radio. I had a CB radio installed on my truck. Of course, I'm old enough to remember when

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CB radios were really cool. I was on a

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CB radio when I was in probably that would have been like before I was driving my freshman year in high school back in 1977, something along those lines.

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Anyways, but I decided I need one of those things because those trucks, especially when you're climbing hills, sometimes get angry with me.

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So I'm like, what did you want me to do? And so I thought, I wonder how many people would fire up their units and talk to me.

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So I'll let you know. I'll report on my little CB missionary adventures over the next couple of weeks worth of travel.

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But anyway, this evening, I am, as was introduced, one of the pastors at Apologia Church.

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We are planning a church up in Salt Lake City. That's one of the main reasons I come up here. But I've been coming to Salt Lake City for a very, very long time.

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The first time I, in fact, drove up the 15 was in a 1964

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Dodge Dart. No two body panels were the same color. And it did not like driving all the way from Phoenix up here.

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It was running pretty rough by the time we got up here. But I've been coming up here for a very, very long time.

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And in the intervening decades, I have had the opportunity of teaching

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Greek and Hebrew. I have been a critical consultant on the New American Standard Bible translation.

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I do a lot of work in what's called textual criticism, the study of the manuscripts of the New Testament, some of which are on the screen right now.

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So other than being the director of Alpha Omega Ministries and a pastor at Apologia Church and a grandfather, which

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I'm really enjoying more than almost anything else, I am also the professor of church history and apologetics at Grace Bible Theological Seminary in Conway, Arkansas with Jeffrey Johnson, Owen Strand, and some other men there.

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And so that's the background that I bring to us this evening. Obviously, in much of the work that I have done, both in regards to Mormonism as well as debating men like John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg and Bart Ehrman, it has been in the defense of the veracity of the text of Scripture.

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And so, for example, we have on the screen right now some of the fascinating little nuggets of information.

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For example, the one on the bottom left, the two columns, that's the end of 1

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Peter and the beginning of 2 Peter in manuscript P72. And I saw that page during the papal visit in 1993 in Denver, Colorado.

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And I remember the excitement that was mine to be able to read that manuscript.

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It's the earliest copy we have of 1 2 Peter and Jude. So if you've ever read 1 2

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Peter and Jude, then you are looking at the earliest handwritten reference to those materials.

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It's also, this was interesting to me during the Dan Brown Da Vinci Code craze.

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Anyone remember the Dan Brown? Everywhere I went, every airline gate

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I went to, somebody was reading the Da Vinci Code. And then they put the movie out and all the rest of this stuff.

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And it was all fiction, but everybody thought that it wasn't fiction, that it was the real thing. And if you remember the story, the idea was that the deity of Christ had been made up by Constantine and that up to the days of Constantine, Constantine's around 325

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AD. Up until that period of time, everybody thought Jesus was just a regular man and that he was married and all the rest of this kind of fun stuff.

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And during that same time period, I was going around giving presentations. And I would show this particular page because 2

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Peter 1 .1 contains what's called a Granville Sharp construction. It's a special construction in the Greek language.

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And Jesus is called our God and Savior, Jesus Christ, here in P72, right at the beginning.

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It's on the right -hand side of the page there. And the significance of that is this was written between 175 and 200.

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That means 125 to 150 years before Constantine. So much for Dan Brown making millions of dollars off of lies.

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Right next to that is the long, tall, dark little piece of a manuscript. I saw that manuscript.

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I have a picture holding it at Macquarie State University in Sydney, Australia a number of years ago.

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And it's probably from about 275 to 300. It's from the Book of Acts. And the only reason

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I show it primarily is because a friend of mine took me and we met the curator.

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And he got it out. And he and I started talking papyrology and how you date papyrus.

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Anybody know how you date a papyrus? You just walk up to it and say, hey, you want to go out? No, no. Just see if anybody's still awake.

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Most of you just had dinner or something like that. Taco time is sitting there bubbling in your stomach. And all the blood's down there.

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There's nothing up here. So I could get away with saying anything right now. But no, we were talking about dating, how you date papyri and things like that.

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And I could just tell that I had provided a real service to this gentleman.

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Because it was plainly obvious that his wife had gotten tired of that subject about 35 years earlier. And so he was really looking for somebody to have a nice conversation about papyrology with.

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And so we did. Over on the right -hand side is P66. And I like that particular picture.

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Because most of the time, what you see in pictures of manuscripts, and more and more of them are becoming available, thanks to what's called

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CSNTM, the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts in Dallas. Dan Wallace is the head of that. They're going around.

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And they are making high -quality digital photography of all these manuscripts.

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And that's vitally important. There was some stuff that was lost, even in the

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Iraq War and Afghanistan. There's probably been some stuff lost in Ukraine. War destroys manuscripts.

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And fires destroy manuscripts, and floods, and bugs, and everything else. And so it's vitally important that we have high -quality digital photography, super high resolution of these manuscripts.

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So most of the time, all the pages are separated from one another. But here, you can see what the book looked like initially.

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And this is actually the beginning of the Gospel of John. And you can see, notice how the bottom right corner is damaged, as is the upper right corner.

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But the left -hand side is the spine. So you can understand, most of our books, your Bible will probably have the same pattern of wear.

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Because if you put that on a shelf, what's the first thing that's getting hit? It's that outside part of where the pages are.

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The inside part has the whole binding to help protect it. But the outside part does not. And most of your manuscripts will have, your papyri manuscripts, the ancient ones.

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This is from around the year 200. And sometimes, I have people look up at that and go, wow, that doesn't look like it's in really very good condition.

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And I look at them and say, what are you going to look like in 1 ,800 years? It's doing a whole lot better than you will.

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And so that's actually John 1 .1. I used that one, too, because in the beginning, it was, word was with God, word was

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God. And there you have that long before Constantine, as well. I like taking shots of Dan Brown just for the fun of it.

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And the last one up there, over on the left -hand side, the red -colored one, may well be, most people think, it is the earliest portion of the

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New Testament we possess. So in other words, in real life, it's about the size of a credit card.

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And imagine this with me for just a moment. You've got a guy in the early 1930s in a basement in London.

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And he is shuffling through little pieces of papyri that have been brought to England from Egypt.

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And if you look at it, you can see all you're getting is the middle portions of words on a couple of different lines.

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So you don't really have any way of coming up with a context or anything like that. So to be able to figure out what this is means you really know your stuff.

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You can read. Most seminary graduates would not be able to read what's on the screen right now.

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The reason for that is that for the first 900 years of the transmission of the text of the New Testament, it was written, as you can see, as a single line of capital letters, no spaces between words, and almost no punctuation.

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Think about that. In fact, when you get to the end of the line, you just simply start the next line. You don't even worry about where you break. So the words can be broken at really interesting and unusual places.

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And so that's what you have here in what's called P52, which is the manuscript on the left -hand side.

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And what's fascinating to me about P52, when it was discovered, it was sent to the leading papyrologists of the day.

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Three of them put it at around the year 125, and one said it was about AD 95 in the first century.

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Now, when you date a papyrus, you go 25 years each way. So it's a 50 -year date range.

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So P52 has been dated as early as 125, which is extremely early because of what it is a manuscript of.

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It's from John 18, verses 31 to 34 on this side, 37, 38 on the back side.

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Now, why is that significant? Well, because if you lived in the 1870s, German scholarship had convinced everyone that the

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Book of John was written probably around the year 175. It had nothing to do with anyone who knew

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Jesus, because it had such a high view of Jesus that had to be due to an evolutionary process over time of a gradually increasing view of Jesus.

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And so German scholarship was absolutely convinced that the Gospel of John had been written about 175, until you find a fragment of it from 50 years earlier.

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That sort of ruins everybody's day, and lots of books get thrown in the trash, which is good.

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But, and it is ironic to me anyways, that this, if you think about what

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John 18 contains, this is Jesus' discussion with Pilate, where Pilate asks him, what is truth?

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And here, the earliest fragment of the New Testament that we have comes from a book like that.

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Now, just with me for a moment, please realize, we have portions of the

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New Testament, vast majority of the New Testament, in those first 100 and 200 years.

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By the way, the book that is the Gospel that is the earliest attested and most attested is

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John, not Mark, and the book that has the least attestation in the manuscripts, which makes sense because the nature of the book is the

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Book of Revelation. Book of Revelation struggled for acceptance in the canon, that makes sense, we'll talk about that a little bit more later on.

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And so we only have two papyri copies of the

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Book of Revelation. And what's really interesting, just in passing, I'll just give you this information, you can use it to amaze your friends over the weekend as you're getting together with folks in the church or whatever, you can say, hey, did you know this?

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And they're gonna look at you like, wow, you are really sharp. If you'd want people to look at you and think that way, then great, you can use this.

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But the two earliest papyri manuscripts we have, now, a papyrus doesn't necessarily contain the entirety of a book.

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Obviously, P52, that's not all of John. That's all there is to it, there's nothing more. But what it does tell us in 125 is that John chapter 18 was just like John chapter 18 is in later manuscripts as well.

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So it's an important witness along those lines, even though it's a very small fragment. But in the two papyri of Book of Revelation, we do have

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Revelation chapter 13. And what's in Revelation chapter 13? Well, what's in Revelation chapter 13?

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If we were to stop any guy riding by the road out here on a

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Harley, okay? And we were to ask him, what's the number of the beast?

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He's gonna go, 666 right there, you know, right? Everybody knows 666, right?

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Well, what's interesting is, that's in Revelation chapter 13. And what's interesting is in the two earliest papyri manuscripts of the

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Book of Revelation, it's 616, 616.

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Now, I don't know if any of you are old enough to remember, I remember when people were very, very strongly arguing that the beast was

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Henry Kissinger. Anyone remember when the beast was Henry Kissinger? Now, the amazing thing is

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Henry Kissinger is still alive. He's 147, but he's still alive. It's astonishing that he's still around.

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But everybody has added up somebody's name to 666, right?

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Every time there's a presidential election, you know, Hillary's name added up to 66 and Obama's name added, somebody,

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Trump, it doesn't matter who it is, they all add up to 666. So what if it's 616?

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And Dan Wallace at Dallas Seminary, this is his joke, so I blame him for it.

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He says, he thinks the number of the beast is 666 and 616 is the number of the neighbor of the beast.

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Think that one through. Now, some of you are laughing because everybody else is, but you have no idea why that was funny at all. I know you because I knew my mom.

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That's how my mom got through all jokes. And then two weeks later, Jim, I got that joke. Yeah, that's good, that's good,

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Mom, that's wonderful. So anyways, by the way, 666 and 616 are just Greek and Hebrew versions of the name

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Kaiser Nero, just so you know. That's what that's about. But that may challenge your eschatology one way or the other.

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Anyhow, so why put these up here other than me being able to get you to tell you some stories?

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And I like people, you look at the bottom of the page in your Bible and it says certain manuscripts say this and certain manuscripts say that.

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How many of us have ever seen any of those manuscripts? I like to be able to show folks, these are what some of those manuscripts look like.

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And in fact, here are some of the later manuscripts.

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For example, on the left -hand side there is a closeup of a section from John chapter 14 in Codex Sinaiticus.

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And Codex Sinaiticus is a, when it was discovered anyways by Count von Tischendorf. How many of you know who

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Count von Tischendorf was? How many of you have ever heard the name of Count von Tischendorf? Marley, have you heard of Count von

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Tischendorf? No. Okay, all right. I just want everybody to know Marley's my friend and if I get too tired to finish up,

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Marley's gonna come up and tell you about Frozen. So there you go. That's how we'll finish off.

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So anyway, Count von Tischendorf, what a fascinating, you would think a

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German scholar looking, publishing a Greek translation, the

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Greek translation of the Old Testament and traveling the world looking for manuscripts. He really believed that the

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Bible is the word of God. And he really believed that eventually they would find earlier and earlier manuscripts would help them to defend the

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Bible against German rationalism. But what most people don't realize is that in all probability, it was

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Constantine von Tischendorf that was the model for someone that you all probably know a whole lot better than him.

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Remember any movies back in the 1980s about someone looking for ancient treasures? A guy named

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Indiana Jones? He was modeled after Constantine von Tischendorf. Didn't know that, did you?

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Now, now you know. And Codex Sinaiticus was found by von

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Tischendorf. And it's a really funny story. I've got to tell you it quickly. He had found some ancient material there and it's called the

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Monastery of St. Catharines. To even get into the monastery, you have to go up over the wall in a basket, all right?

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And they, obviously their library was incredibly ancient and just amazing.

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And when he first visited, he found one of the monks taking some fragments to the kitchen to be burned in helping to cook food.

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And when he looked through it, he realized these were ancient fragments. And so he sort of freaked out.

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Well, you shouldn't freak out when you're visiting a monastery and the monks never get out. And so they sort of clammed up and like, okay, this is a weirdo.

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And they wouldn't really tell him much more about it and things like that. And so he kept coming back and he kept visiting.

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And it was years later that he's come back. And again, he still hasn't found anything.

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And it's the last night he's gonna be there. And so he had published an edition of what's called the

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Greek Septuagint. The Greek Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Old Testament done about 250, 200 years before Christ.

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It was the Bible of the early church. And so the monk that was the steward who was taking care of him, who would take him to his room and provide him with food and the guy that got that dirty job, he gave him a copy of the

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Septuagint as thanks for helping to take care of him during his visit. And the monk started looking at it and goes, oh,

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I have one of these. Oh yeah? Yeah, let me show it to you. So he takes him to his cell. And he reaches up into the closet and he pulls out this large volume wrapped in red cloth.

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And he lays it down. He pulls the cloth back. And von Tischendorf is looking at Codex Sinaiticus, which was written around 325

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AD. Now, this would be the earliest manuscript of the

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New Testament known. So von Tischendorf, having learned his lesson and having matured, sort of goes, oh, yeah.

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Hey, that's really interesting. Mind if I take it back to my room and just sort of thumb through it a little bit, take a look at it?

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Yeah, okay. So he goes in, closes the door. Now, this is my interpretation, okay?

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I cannot prove this historically from the historical documents, all right? But this is what von

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Tischendorf did. But silently, because you're in a monastery, okay?

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Because that's the way you need to do it. And he did not sleep that night. And it wasn't just the

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Old Testament. It was the whole Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. Now, there were some parts missing.

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It's 1700, it's old. It's really very old at this point in time, okay? And so the next morning, he asks if he can buy it.

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And they say no. And how it eventually ends up in London, where I saw it in 2005 in the

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British Museum, is a long and sordid tale involving czars and backroom deals and all sorts of other stuff along the lines.

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But it's all online today. If you go to codexsinaticus .org, you can zoom in on the text like that and see the different handwriting styles and things like that.

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The one in the middle in the blue is Codex Vaticanus, which is in the Vatican Library. It's contemporaneous with Sinaiticus.

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And the one on the right is Codex Alexandrinus. I've seen both Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus in the flesh.

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When I walked into the viewing room at the British Museum, I was stunned.

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I was the only one in the room. There was nobody else there. And there's Codex Sinaiticus. There's Codex Alexandrinus. Over here, there's a

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Tyndale Bible, original 1611. And I forget, I think maybe a Wycliffe translation behind me. Millions and millions of dollars worth of astonishing things.

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And they're just under glass and nobody else around. I thought, this is really dumb. Someone's gonna walk in here and blow everything up and we're gonna really miss this stuff.

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So anyway, these are the manuscripts.

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You'll notice they look a whole lot nicer. And that's because this is done after the

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Peace of the Church, after 313 AD, Christianity becomes a religio licita, a licit religion.

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And so you can have professionals do the copying without risking their lives and so on and so forth. And so you can see the quality of the manuscripts that are produced after that point in time.

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But anyway, so, oops. The Unbelievable Radio Program in London, you discussed the - Cease and desist, sir.

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I'm gonna need to use this. So we've got, this will be the only video clip I play.

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Well, no, there's one other. But we're gonna go old school and I'm just gonna hold the microphone over the speaker.

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That's how we'll get the audio. In 2009, you can see

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I look a little bit different there. In 2009, I debated Bart Ehrman.

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Bart Ehrman is the leading English -speaking critic of the

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New Testament in the world today, really. He did his PhD under Bruce Metzger at Princeton Seminary back in the 70s.

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And we did a debate on the reliability of the New Testament. You can watch it on YouTube. And during the cross -examination,

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I asked him a question based upon the fact that I had spent months and months and months listening to his presentations and listening to his classes and reading all of his books and everything else.

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And he did absolutely none of that in regards to me, which is not unusual at all.

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But I asked him a question and I want you to listen to the leading critic of the reliability of our

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Bible, well, at least of our New Testament. Listen to what he says about the

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New Testament. I did not expect him to say this, but here's where it came. That's not what

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I wanted to do. All right, let's try this again and hit the right button this time. On the Unbelievable Radio Program in London, you discussed the length of time that exists between the writing of Paul's letter to the

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Galatians and the first extant copy, that being 150 years. You described this time period as enormous.

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That's a quote. Could you tell us what term you would use to describe the time period between, say, the original writings of Suetonius or Tacitus or Pliny and their first extant manuscript copies?

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Very enormous. Sorry, ginormous would be a good one? Ginormous. Ginormous, okay. Ginormous doesn't cover it.

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The New Testament, we have much earlier attestation than for any other book in antiquity. Did you catch that?

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Now, Suetonius, Pliny, these are Latin historians writing contemporaneously with the

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New Testament. And so, we know when they were writing, because they tell us when they were writing.

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But on average, any work that's contemporaneously in the New Testament, the first manuscript copies that we have, so the first physical evidence we have of that book averages between 500 and 900 years later.

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Okay? Remember I told you about P52? How, what was its date? 125, from John.

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So, that's within 100 years, less than 100 years. But for all these other books, the average is between half a millennium, 500 years, and 900 years, almost a full millennium.

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And so, I asked him, would you compare the two? Ginormous. And then he says, the

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New Testament has much earlier attestation than any other book of antiquity.

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And he's the leading English -speaking critic of the New Testament. I think that's very important for us to keep in mind, because unfortunately, in the vast majority of universities and college settings, you don't hear that part.

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You hear all about the unreliability, the possibilities of change, but you don't hear this part. And I think that's an important thing to keep in mind.

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Now, let me just do a, this is the summary screen from an hour -and -a -half presentation

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I do on manuscripts and variant readings, and I explain how variant readings arise and all the rest of this stuff.

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I'm gonna summarize it real quick, because we still have to talk about the canon, too. So, there's a lot of stuff.

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All of this is just simply to whet your appetite, to get you thinking, to get you some, hopefully, much more in -depth way of thinking about these things than what's normally, commonly going on in our society today.

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How many variants are there? You'll hear people from, you know, Bart Ehrman will say, 400 ,000 to 500 ,000 variants in the

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New Testament. There's only 138 ,200 words in the New Testament. So, if you've got 400 ,000 variants, 500 ,000 variants, that sounds like three variants for every word.

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That's not what that means. They won't tell you that's not what that means. And people will repeat that, and religion reporters, oh, my goodness, where do we grow religion reporters today?

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I mean, it's gotta be a very dark, secret lab someplace to get religion reporters, because the things that they will repeat uncritically are just astonishing.

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But that's the kind of stuff that you're gonna hear. And I remember when my daughter went to Glendale Community College, briefly, after she graduated from high school.

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She had a vile, nasty, anti -Christian testimony from a teacher in a philosophy of religion class, or something, introduction to religion class, or something.

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Just a nasty, nasty guy. And she tried to endure it, and eventually, she'd been to all my debates and stuff.

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Someone just recently tried to insult her on Twitter. Does anybody know

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Sheologians? My daughter, Summer and her? Okay, a few of you know. She's been going at it for quite some time now.

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And someone tried to insult her on Twitter recently. They say, oh, you know that Summer Yeager is

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James White's daughter. The apple didn't fall very far from the tree on that one. And I'm like, yeah, that's exactly right.

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That's exactly right. So she eventually, you know, he made some dumb statement about the languages of the

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New Testament that she knew wasn't true. And so she challenged him on it. His best response was to Google it, which tells you.

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But the point is that these kinds of professors are all over in the public educational system.

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And so they'll throw these numbers out, and they'll say there's 400 ,000, 500 ,000 variants. You know what, they're right. You know what the vast majority of them are?

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In the English language, unless you're from Mississippi or Georgia, you are supposed to say an apple, right?

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They say apple down there. But we're supposed to say an apple. You're supposed to put that N in there.

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Greek had the exact same thing. It's called the movable new. You're not supposed to have two vowels crammed up against each other.

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And scribes really struggled with that. Well, that doesn't mean anything. It doesn't impact the meaning of the text at all.

32:25

So there's a large number of them are movable news. And in fact, 99 % of the scribal errors that have taken place in the transmission of the text of the

32:34

New Testament, you could not explain to someone if they did not read Greek. They don't impact the meaning of the text at all.

32:43

Now, there are about, it depends on how you break it down, but there are about 1 ,500 variants that do impact the translation and could be original.

32:58

So for example, if you have a manuscript, if you have a reading in a manuscript from say like 1 ,300 years after Christ, and it's the only manuscript that has this reading, and no other

33:12

Greek manuscript contains it, and none of the translations that were made, because remember, the

33:18

New Testament was translated into Latin, Sahitic, Coptic, Boheric, all these other languages in the first couple of hundred years after it was written.

33:29

And those are really important because they can tell us a lot about what manuscript they were translated from, what kind of manuscript they were translated from and what it originally read.

33:39

So if you have a manuscript that has a unique reading and there's no versional support for it, there's no earlier manuscript support for it, it's from like the year 1300, that doesn't have any possibility of being original because it's left no history and it's left no trace of its reading in history.

33:57

There's actually an example of such a reading. That's really interesting because it was in a manuscript that a man by the name of Desiderius Erasmus used, and we may get to Erasmus later on, but Erasmus was a

34:14

Dutch humanist scholar who printed and published, not printed first, but printed and published the first Greek New Testament in 1516, and that was a very important Greek New Testament because it happened to have been picked up by someone by the name of Martin Luther.

34:31

And Martin Luther, in studying that Greek New Testament, it's actually Greek -Latin diaglot.

34:37

It had the Greek on one side and Erasmus' Latin translation on the other. That's when the light started breaking through, when he started recognizing, huh, quonitentium agitate, do penance, but over here it's metanoia te, repent.

34:52

They don't mean the same things, huh? So Erasmus was important, and his work was important, and it's his

35:00

Greek New Testament that pretty much, with only a few changes, ends up being the basis of the

35:06

King James Translation of the New Testament. But one of the manuscripts that he happened to obtain in Basel, Switzerland, in working on his

35:15

New Testament was a manuscript that had a singular reading in Ephesians chapter three, where all of the manuscripts talk about the administration of the mystery of the ages.

35:24

His one manuscript said the fellowship, the fellowship. If you look at your King James, your

35:29

New King James is this day, it says fellowship. All manuscripts, all ancient translations, all commentaries from early church fathers don't say fellowship, but it's in the

35:40

King James, because Erasmus got hold of that one. Now we know that, it can't be the original, but there's where it took place.

35:49

So 99 % inconsequential, there might be about 1 ,500 that we have to deal with, and we do, it is the most thoroughly documented work of antiquity, not only the earliest attestation, it's the best attestation and the most attestation of any work of antiquity.

36:05

Very important, it spread all over the world quickly. There was no controlling authority. I don't care what

36:10

YouTube says. I don't care what movies you track down on YouTube made by someone you have no earthly idea.

36:18

There are so many conspiracy theories, but the reality is the New Testament was written by multiple authors to multiple audiences at multiple times in multiple places.

36:29

So there was never a time when any one group could control the text of the

36:35

New Testament. In fact, the process was the gathering together of the

36:41

New Testament over time. And so if you go to the Chester Beatty Library in Ireland, in Dublin, you'll be able to see

36:53

Manuscript P46, and that is the earliest collection of Paul's major epistles.

36:59

Well, that took some work to do, because when he wrote his epistles, he sent them to places that are a long ways away from each other.

37:08

You know, Colossae is not next door to Rome. And so obviously there was a copying process going on, and eventually a collection process.

37:18

And so what you get are gospel manuscripts with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And then you get

37:24

Pauline collections, and you get collections of like 1st, 2nd Peter, and Jude, P72, which we saw earlier.

37:32

And eventually that all comes together to form the New Testament, but that took time.

37:38

And so in those early years, there was no group that could come along and say, you know, we don't like the doctrine of the resurrection.

37:49

And so we're gonna take the doctrine of the resurrection out, we're gonna put something else in. Does anyone remember, I always struggle with her name,

37:56

I'm sorry, out on a limb,

38:03

Shirley MacLean. Shirley MacLean, okay. I don't know why I struggle with her name, but Shirley MacLean.

38:10

And most of you younger people are going, oh, okay, he's going back into ancient history again. But Shirley MacLean was this actress, and she did this movie about her getting into the new age, and she had a spirit guide, and all the rest of this stuff.

38:27

And she was, you know, in the movie, she was walking along the beach, and her guru is telling her to say,

38:33

I am God, I am God, I am God, and everybody in the United States is in front of the TV going, no, you're not, no, you're not, no, you're not.

38:42

But she would tell people that the Bible used to talk about reincarnation, but they took it out at the

38:49

Council of Constantinople. Now, I like to say that and then stop and look at folks.

39:01

Because we all go, ha, ha. Because we all realize,

39:08

I'm not sure what happened at the Council of Constantinople. So I can't really say, well, that didn't happen at the

39:14

Council of Constantinople, because I don't really know what happened. I didn't know there was a Council of Constantinople.

39:20

See, that's how it works, you see. And so people make this kind of a claim as if the

39:27

Council of Constantinople, which had nothing to do with reincarnation whatsoever, had even had the capacity to make changes to the

39:35

Bible. It was impossible. In fact, by the time of the Council of Constantinople, P52 and P72 were already probably buried in the sands of Egypt someplace.

39:45

You couldn't get to them to change them. So all these theories and, you know, many plain and precious truths have been removed from the scriptures, according to the

39:54

LDS Church. And my Muslim friends are absolutely convinced that all the stuff about the deity of Christ, that was added in at a later time, and so on and so forth.

40:03

There was never a time when this could have happened. And if it happened to later manuscripts, then as we found the earlier manuscripts, there would be these huge differences between them, but there aren't.

40:14

There aren't. So let's keep that in mind as you think about these things.

40:20

This thing is about to rip my ear off. So in a few moments, if it comes off one more time, we're gonna go to this baby, because me and Britney Spears' microphones do not get along really well.

40:33

So I'm not saying anything about whoever normally wears this. I'm not saying you're Britney Spears or anything.

40:39

I'm just saying, you know. Anyways, any later editing would stand out clearly in comparison with ancient manuscripts.

40:48

That's a point that I just made, is if there was this kind of editing process at a later point in time, these earlier manuscripts that we discovered would demonstrate that, and there is no evidence of that.

41:02

So, but who wrote it? Much of modern scholarship based upon skeptical deconstruction.

41:09

Now, deconstruction has become a real popular phrase in our society now. It's used primarily as a synonym for apostasy.

41:18

But it's been around for a while, and in essence, what

41:25

I would say as I look at modern scholarship is, whatever we conclude, it can't be what the faith has always said it is.

41:34

And I experienced that in seminary when I went to, when I did my first master's degree.

41:40

We were poor as church mice. And just so happened that our first child came along right as I was looking at going to seminary.

41:48

So that shot down moving anywhere to go to seminary. And so there was one seminary in Phoenix for me to go to,

41:57

Fuller Theological Seminary. Now, Fuller today is so far off to my left that I wouldn't even be able to see them, but they were pretty far off to the left of me back then, though they were much more conservative in the 1980s than they are now.

42:11

And I experienced this. I saw this firsthand. It is a fact that in much of modern scholarship, whatever you, when you have any type of controversy about authorship or anything in the

42:29

Bible, the one answer that will not be considered by people on the left is the answer that Christians have had down through the history of the church.

42:37

That's the one it can't be. And you won't even, you won't even take a look at it. And I can tell you in my debates,

42:43

Bart Ehrman never read a word of anything I said. John Dominic Crossan wouldn't have known where to find anything that I had ever said.

42:51

He was a, by the way, John, I told John Dominic Crossan that he was my favorite heretic, and he sort of liked that.

42:58

He was just a nice little Irish monk, and we just loved on him.

43:04

We took him on a cruise, actually, and we debated on the resurrection on the cruise. But all of us

43:09

Christians in the group, we just treated him, just loved on him. He didn't know what to do with us, because we were just completely weird to him.

43:16

I mean, we were like aliens from another planet. You come out of a cell where you spent the entire 1960s studying the

43:24

Gospels, and you run into a bunch of evangelical believers, like, who are these people? It was pretty weird.

43:29

Anyway, but none of these people ever even bothered to read anything that we had to say.

43:35

And the vast majority of the time when I encounter people on the left, they've never even read entire tomes of scholarship on the right on the very subject they're addressing, because they're absolutely convinced we have nothing meaningful to say.

43:49

We study their stuff all the time. They do not listen to the other side. So when people say, oh, the vast majority of scholars say, that's meaningless.

43:58

The vast majority of scholars don't study the vast majority of scholarship. You couldn't keep up with it even if you wanted to.

44:06

So be careful when people use argumentation like that. If Christians believe something down through history that makes it wrong, modern men are so much wiser and insightful than the ancients ever could be.

44:16

That's just an absolute given. How could you trust anyone who didn't have an iPhone? I mean, seriously.

44:22

How could anyone have any knowledge of the world without an iPhone? Oh, I just got a text message.

44:28

Oh, well, boy, our attention isn't really all that good. Would you agree with me that plucking people's toenails out without use of anesthesia would be a really good way of dealing with text message spammers?

44:47

Thank you. I'm thinking about making a move toward that.

44:54

It was bad enough when they called you, but now when they text you, like, really? And especially when they don't even have your name.

45:00

You know, they use somebody else's name. It's like, anyway, sorry. We continue on.

45:07

The earliest documents attach particular authorship to the Gospels, though the books themselves do not identify their authors.

45:14

You know, you could argue a little bit with John on that one and some things like that. But the earliest documents, the earliest material we have outside of the

45:24

New Testament identifies the four Gospels as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and does not recognize any other

45:32

Gospels. You know, people today would say, oh, there are all these Gnostic Gospels and we'll look at some of them later on. The reality is those had extremely small distribution and not amongst

45:42

Orthodox believers that had any belief similar to what you find in the New Testament at all.

45:49

The Pauline corpus has shrunk a good bit in modern times, resulting in far -reaching theological consequences. What do I mean by that?

45:55

Well, Bart Ehrman only believes that seven of Paul's epistles are genuine. So can you imagine what happens if you're writing a commentary?

46:06

Even if you're writing a commentary, he does believe that Paul wrote Romans. But if you're writing a commentary on Romans and you don't believe

46:16

Paul wrote Ephesians, can you see how that's gonna impact your interpretation of Romans?

46:23

Many times Christians will come up to me, I went to the Christian bookstore. Are there such things as Christian bookstores anymore?

46:29

Do you have a Christian bookstore around here? No, no, see, see? That used to, man,

46:34

I'll tell you, the world has changed. Okay, back in the horse and buggy days, we had

46:41

Christian bookstores and people would go and they'd buy a commentary and they'd start reading the commentary and it's like, where are they getting this stuff?

46:50

What? And people don't realize that so much of what is written today is written from a perspective of breaking the text apart and not viewing it as a harmonious whole in any way, shape, or form.

47:06

In other words, what you get in the commentary is gonna be very different than what you get from the pulpit most of the time. And that bothers people.

47:14

And this is one of the reasons for that. So what is the basis of denying apostolic authorship of various books like Ephesians and Colossians?

47:23

Or one of the real obvious ones is everybody says, well, look at 1 and 2

47:30

Peter. There is no way that Peter is the author of 1 and 2

47:35

Peter, why? Well, you might be able to sort of detect it a little bit in a good, consistent

47:42

English translation. But the reality is if you translate 1 and 2

47:47

Peter from Greek itself, they are nothing alike. They are radically different.

47:56

One of them is just filled with complex participial constructions and the other one has almost none at all.

48:03

And it's like, so scholarship says, see, clearly, 2 Peter is a apocryphal work and it's pseudepigraphal.

48:12

It says it's Peter, but it's never that Peter, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that is what's taught in the vast majority of Bible colleges and seminaries.

48:20

And so that's what you end up with in the vast majority of pulpits as well in large number of denominations.

48:28

The problem is, while Peter certainly would have been familiar with Greek, you sort of needed to know at least enough

48:37

Greek to get by, to be a fisherman. I mean, if a Roman soldier came by and yelled at you in Greek, you need to know what he was yelling.

48:42

That'd be a good thing. And you say, wouldn't the Roman soldier be yelling in Latin? No, he'd be yelling in Greek. Greek was lingua franca of that day.

48:50

He may have known Latin if he came from Rome or something, but many of the

48:56

Roman soldiers didn't come from there and the universal language of the time was Koine Greek. And so, but he probably wouldn't have been real good at writing it.

49:05

And so if you read his epistles, in one of the two epistles, he specifically mentions the guy he's dictating it to.

49:13

Even Paul mentions his amanuensis, his scribe. They're not writing it themselves.

49:19

Now, Galatians may be the one exception to that rule because Paul says, "'See with what large letters

49:28

I'm writing to you.'" Now, was it a large letter or that he was writing in large letters because he seems to have had some problem with his eyes and this was such an emotional letter, he's writing it himself possibly.

49:42

But even he mentions some of the people who were his scribes. So if Peter is dictating the letter, is it possible that Peter dictated the letter in Aramaic and left it to the scribe to render it into Greek?

50:02

Now, if that happened, at what point is inspiration the issue?

50:09

You see, because remember, 2 Timothy 3 .16 does not say that men were inspired by God, does it?

50:19

What does it say? All scripture is theanoustos.

50:25

It is God -breathed. It's the scripture that's God -breathed, not the author. And Peter himself says that.

50:33

He says, no prophecy of scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation.

50:39

The prophet wasn't sitting around going, "'I need to get a revelation today. "'I need to come up with something today "'and

50:44

I'm just thinking about this, that.'" Okay, I think it's coming, okay. All right, here we go, and starts writing.

50:52

He says, no prophecy of scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation, but men spoke from God as they were being carried along by the

51:03

Holy Spirit. Men spoke from God as they were being carried along by the Holy Spirit.

51:11

So what does our term inspiration mean? Unfortunately, that's a

51:16

Latin term that means to breathe into. That's not what it means. That's not what the Greek, because it's not God taking men's words and blowing something special into it.

51:26

It's actually, when you're speaking, you hold your hand in front of your mouth, you feel the breath from your speaking. That's what it's saying scriptures are.

51:32

It's God speaking. And so when you keep that in mind, you can have variation.

51:41

You have variation between Paul's letters. Philippians is different than Ephesians.

51:49

Romans is different than Galatians. They're still Paul's style, but you can tell that he's in a different mindset.

51:59

I mean, Philippians is an epistle of joy. Galatians is not. And so you can see that in that type of a context, and you keep that in mind.

52:08

Now, in general, why do they deny authorship?

52:14

Word usage studies are cited first. That is, well, notice that if you take the genuine epistles of Paul, and then you compare the words used in writing 1 and 2

52:28

Timothy, there are major differences, and so we don't believe Paul wrote 1 and 2 Timothy. Now, think about that for just one second, because that's the kind of argumentation you will get on graduate -level courses, and everyone in this room should be able to see right through it.

52:43

Should be able to see right through it. Think about it. If you're writing a letter, like Romans, to a church where you know not only is it gonna be read in the capital city, but it's gonna be copied and distributed all over the

52:59

Roman Empire, because it's there in the capital city. Lots of Christians would come visit

53:04

Rome. They find out Rome has this epistle from him. They make copies, and they take those copies back to their churches.

53:12

All right? So you know this is a really important letter that I'm writing.

53:19

Now, compare writing to your dear son, Timothy. It's not being written to a church.

53:27

It's being written in light of your suffering, your persecution. 2 Timothy says, my time's up.

53:36

Do you use the exact same vocabulary when you write to a friend in an email that you would use in writing a formal theological paper for public reading?

53:46

Of course not. And yet, that's the argumentation. And because it's taught from the professor who's got all the degrees, everybody goes, hmm, sounds good to me.

53:57

Okay, I wanna pass this class. So all right, here we go. And when I would challenge that kind of stuff, very often you'd realize the professors hadn't been challenged on that kind of stuff before.

54:08

Should be. In general, word uses studies decide first, however, in reality, form criticism based upon individual theories about the situation in the early church form the foundation of most skepticism about, say, the authorship of the pastorals or the rejection of eyewitness testimony in the

54:23

Gospels. So Bart Ehrman will not only mention word study usage, but Bart Ehrman has a theory of what the early church looked like, and it's different than what the church looks like in 1 and 2

54:38

Timothy. Therefore, 1 and 2 Timothy could not have been written by Paul, they're written at a later period of time because of Bart Ehrman's theories as to what the church looked like.

54:47

Well, how would you come up with a theory as to what the church looked like unless you used the Christian documents to tell you what the church looked like?

54:56

But they don't. I'm serious. You're sitting there going, come on, these are credentialed scholars.

55:01

That's the point. That's the point, exactly. So given the nature of Western scholarship which emphasizes the new and the innovative, never the consistent or the traditional, that which breaks down old views is promoted while solid, sound, reasonable defenses of historical views are looked down upon and scorned.

55:23

And if any of you have ever tried to submit a dissertation topic in Western schools, you know that what they want is something new and novel, not something that gives a deeper defense of something we've already believed.

55:37

So the way we do scholarship encourages heresy. That's just the way it is.

55:44

That's just the reality. Solid answers do exist, but they are simply ignored as if they are irrelevant.

55:53

For example, all four canonical gospels give solid, sound, simply irrefutable evidence of a first century origin.

56:01

They come from the first century. And in fact, one of the most fascinating, more recent evidences that helps to, okay,

56:14

Mr. Sound Man, I'm switching. I'm just about to go, ah! Start speaking in tongues or something, and this is a cessationist church, so we can't do that.

56:23

So am I, stop it. We'll just, there we go, all right.

56:32

One of the most fascinating things that has developed recently is you never would have expected this to happen, but the

56:39

Israelis have put together a massive database based upon the bone boxes that have been excavated from graves all around Israel.

56:50

And you see that what the Jews would do is they'd put a body in a sepulcher, and they'd leave it there for a year, and then they'd come back in, and they would collect the bones, and they would put bones in a bone box, and they would inscribe on the box whose bones are in it.

57:04

And frequently, they'd put more than one person's bones into a bone box, because there are only so many tombs that you can have outside of Jerusalem, for example.

57:15

And so someone got the bright idea one day, there's a lot of names on these bone boxes. Why don't we collect all of them and create a database?

57:24

Have you ever noticed how many Marys there are in the New Testament? Ever noticed? Mary and the other

57:30

Mary, and Mary Magdalene, and the studies show that in the first century, if you were standing in the middle of almost any city street in Israel, and it cried out,

57:42

Mary, 40 % of the women would turn around and look at you. But what's fascinating is when you look at the names found in the

57:52

Gospels, and then you look at the Israeli databases for the first century, they're almost perfectly in line.

58:00

Someone writing the Gospels in Rome wouldn't know that. They wouldn't know what names to use.

58:07

So if it was made up someplace else, it wasn't. It was written by the people that were there at that time.

58:14

Fascinating stuff. Indeed, solid arguments can be offered for a pre -70 date for all the

58:21

New Testament writings, and they can. Linguistic studies, historical elements, all support this assertion, yet to be in today, you have to support late dates for their writing and reject traditional authorship.

58:32

If you want to get a job in almost any of the, quote unquote, big seminaries, no one should be able to assert that you are a traditionalist in any way.

58:43

Likewise, every word used to study that says Paul did not write the pastorals can be turned on its head by starting with a different original data set.

58:50

The presuppositions used must be examined, and they almost never are.

58:57

Remember, the vast majority of scholars have never given a second thought to the other side. They haven't, they've never been forced to.

59:04

So don't be intimidated by the vast majority of scholars say, because in my experience, once you press them, and I've done 175 debates with them, you can watch, they are left going, well, but everybody believes that.

59:19

Really? Well, that's why we're debating. Now, let's get into the can of scripture real quick, because I realize

59:25

I'm going long, and I apologize for that, but I blame

59:30

Marley. You told me to say all this, right? Gonna keep the girl watching.

59:41

She's gonna be twitching pretty soon. Is he talking about me yet? No, okay, okay, all right. But why do we have the books in the

59:49

Bible that we do, given the Bible covers 1 ,500 years, and has over 40 authors associated with it, three different languages?

59:57

Lots of other books were written during that time, and they're not included in the Bible. The Bible even makes reference to some of the books that were written at that particular period in time.

01:00:04

Should they be included? It's amazing how many people, when they see that the

01:00:10

Bible makes reference to other books, go, oh, these books are lost. Lost from what?

01:00:16

Why do you think they should have been there? If the Bible is being written today, and Jesus were ministering in Utah, boy, would he find this a weird place, and someone cited an article in the

01:00:33

Salt Lake City Tribune that attacked Jesus' teaching on the Sermon on the Mount, does that make everything the

01:00:39

Salt Lake City Tribune ever printed part of scripture? Of course not. And yet, it's amazing how many people that I encounter, they go, well, look, there's such a book of Joshua, why don't we have that?

01:00:50

And there's all these prophets writings we don't have. Yes, it's an ancient document, do you have any idea?

01:00:56

Do you realize that 99 .9 % of everything humans wrote before the time of Christ has disappeared into dust?

01:01:06

I mean, that's just the reality. Why should you expect to have it? The only reason we've got what we've got is because God wanted us to have what we've got.

01:01:16

It took a miracle to preserve that stuff for all that period of time. The can of scripture, now here's, now, if anybody watched the value line today, sorry, this is where we do repetition, because I actually talked about this because of another issue going on in the church today, but most of you didn't, so you're gonna be good.

01:01:33

The can of scripture is a theological topic that is almost never treated theologically.

01:01:40

When I was in seminary, every discussion of the can of scripture was based on simply looking at history.

01:01:47

Well, the early church used these criteria, and you have the Muratorian fragment from Route 187, and then you've got

01:01:55

Athanasius and his 39th Festal Letter in the late 4th century, and these are the standards that they used and was it written by an apostle or associated with the apostle, and da -da -da -da -da -da, and it was always just a matter of looking at history.

01:02:11

But think about it with me for just a second. What is the canon? Is the canon merely a historical accident, or is that not a theological concept?

01:02:22

If we believe that God inspired the scriptures, did he inspire every book that's ever been written?

01:02:31

I think they're all asleep, I finally did it. They're gone. It's just out like a light.

01:02:38

Did God inspire all books ever written? Did he inspire at least one book?

01:02:45

So if he inspires at least one book, but he doesn't inspire all books, then naturally a canon comes into existence that says that's the one book he inspired.

01:02:57

He doesn't have to sit down and say, here's the canon. If you inspire one book, then the canon's gonna contain one book, and the author's gonna know that canon perfectly, isn't he?

01:03:08

I've written 24 books, or written or contributed to 24 books. And so I remember those processes,

01:03:16

I remember those late nights, I remember those early word processors that I used,

01:03:21

I remember dot commands and monochrome screens. You young people are going, what?

01:03:31

I had to be quiet at night while I was writing, while I was typing my first book, because of the dinosaurs walking by outside.

01:03:41

Marley caught that one, didn't she? Did you like that one, Marley? Okay. So I remember writing those books.

01:03:58

I have an infallible knowledge of the canon of my writings. But I've not written all books. God has inspired only a certain number of works with a certain number of individuals.

01:04:11

And by that act of inspiration, He has created the canon.

01:04:16

Now, I never had to open up a Word document and say the canon of the writings of James White, and put my first book in, and my second book in, and stuff like that.

01:04:26

I didn't have to do that. It was the act of writing that created it. And the canon, since it is speaking of what

01:04:34

God has done supernaturally, if inspiration, if that which is theanustos,

01:04:39

God breathed, is a divine act, then God knows He's engaged in that divine act, because it's an exercise of divine power.

01:04:48

And so it would be just as clearly known to God what the canon is, as that God is the one who parted the

01:04:55

Red Sea. Because that's an extension of His power. He did that, and He did that purposefully, and for a reason.

01:05:05

And so we often approach the issue of the canon as if the canon is just sort of this ancillary thing over here, rather than connecting it directly to the fact that the scriptures are themselves inspired.

01:05:17

And because they are God's speaking, they are absolutely unique. There's nothing else like them. Nothing else like them.

01:05:25

And if you say, well, I think you're getting a little bit beyond yourself here. Think about what Jesus said in Matthew chapter 22, when

01:05:33

He was arguing with the Sadducees, and they were questioning the resurrection, because they didn't believe in the resurrection.

01:05:41

When Jesus responded to the Sadducees, He said, have you not read what was spoken?

01:05:47

First of all, He says, you're wrong. He was not a modern educator.

01:05:56

He said, you are not knowing the scriptures nor the power of God. Now, they would have been very offended by that, but Jesus said it.

01:06:03

So sometimes being loving and being direct are the same thing. And then

01:06:10

He says, have you not read what was spoken to you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham and the

01:06:15

God of Isaac and the God of Jacob? He's not the God of the dead, but of the living. So His whole point, interestingly enough, was that what had been written back in the

01:06:26

Pentateuch in the writings of Moses 1 ,400 years earlier, had been so accurately transmitted to their day that He could base

01:06:36

His argument upon the tense of a verb, because the argument was He is the

01:06:42

God of Abraham, not He was the God of Abraham, okay? Now, that is an accurate understanding of the force of His argument, but in the process, we missed something.

01:06:53

We missed something. Did you hear what I said? And I quoted it correctly.

01:06:59

Have you not read what God spoke to you, saying?

01:07:08

He's talking to Sadducees somewhere around the year 30 to 33

01:07:13

AD. This was written around 1400 BC. There may have been some old men there, but they weren't that old.

01:07:24

Have you not read what God spoke to you? Now, normally, when you say, have you not read, what's the next part of the sentence gonna be?

01:07:34

What I wrote to you. Or if you say, did you not hear what

01:07:42

I spoke to you? All parents know that line. It's sort of secondary. They didn't do it every day, especially with teenagers.

01:07:54

There's no teenagers over there, so we don't have to worry about that. But that's not what Jesus said.

01:08:00

Have you not read what God spoke to you, saying?

01:08:05

He held men in the first century accountable to what had been written 1400 years earlier as if God had spoken it directly to them.

01:08:21

Did you ever catch that? You tell me what Jesus's view of Scripture was. Does He have the modern view of Scripture that we don't really know who wrote these things, and we don't know if they've been transmitted correctly?

01:08:34

No, He didn't. I've never understood why people call themselves Christians and say, I'm trusting in Jesus for my salvation.

01:08:41

But you know, when it comes to His view of Scripture, He really wasn't up to speed like I am.

01:08:48

Huh? What? Think about it. So when

01:08:53

I talk about the canon in this context, and I'm talking about it being inspired and God extending divine power to bring this into existence, is that anything more than what

01:09:06

Jesus Himself believed about the Scriptures? It's not. So the canon of Scripture is a theological topic.

01:09:15

So what is the canon? Well, you know, canon means a rule or a standard against which something is judged or measured.

01:09:21

A canon could be like what we'd call a meter stick or a yard stick to measure things by.

01:09:27

The term came to mean an authoritative listing of books or works by a particular author. The Protestant canon, as you probably know, contains 66 books.

01:09:35

The Roman Catholic canon contains 73 or 74, depending on how you connect books together.

01:09:43

And was not officially made the canon of the Roman Catholic Church dogmatically until April of 1546.

01:09:53

April of 1546. A long time passed before that happened.

01:09:59

That's important to keep in mind. Now, the Protestant canon of the Old Testament is simply the

01:10:05

Jewish canon without the addition of the apocryphal books. So in other words, we know from certain sources that the

01:10:11

Jews had laid up in the temple certain books that made the hands dirty because they were holy.

01:10:19

And the apocryphal books, which Rome has made part of their canon of Scripture, were never laid up that way.

01:10:24

They were actually written during the intertestamental period. But 200 years before Christ, the books that you and I have in our

01:10:31

Old Testament canon were laid up by the Jews in the temple and viewed as being their canonical Scriptures.

01:10:38

How is the canon determined? And that's the big issue. It's in Bible study classes all the time. And I'm just gonna stop right here and let the pastor, who's gonna be doing these studies for the next three weeks, he said.

01:10:50

Three weeks? Yeah. You all just wanna answer these questions later on?

01:10:55

I should just skip over it now? No? In fact, that's why you maybe asked me to do this.

01:11:01

Okay, all right. If you want a more in -depth study, come back and ask these questions.

01:11:09

But this is a very common question, is it not? How do we get these? And why is it 66 and not 69 or 78 or whatever else?

01:11:19

A vital distinction, in fact, is often lost when this topic is discussed. And this is important.

01:11:25

And I can almost guarantee you you've never heard anybody else talk about it before. Unless you've read

01:11:31

Michael Kruger's books or you've watched the presentation that Dr. Kruger and I did at G3 in 2018.

01:11:38

God creates canon by inspiring some writings and not others.

01:11:46

Canon then is a part of revelation itself. It is an artifact of revelation, not an object of revelation.

01:11:56

Now, let me just stop you for a second. Why is this important? Well, if you think that the canon, that is the table of contents in the front of your

01:12:07

Bible, is an object of revelation, then you have to ask who gave it to you.

01:12:15

Who gave it to you? If you say it comes from councils, then councils have the ability to give divine revelation long after the apostles are dead.

01:12:26

You see where that goes? You see what the result of this is? So if you recognize that the canon is an artifact of revelation, it is brought into existence necessarily by the divine act of inspiration itself rather than being an object of revelation where an angel comes down with a golden index.

01:12:53

Who would have thought of that? Now, this one consideration alone completely changes the nature of argumentation one must use to respond to claims regarding the canon.

01:13:07

Man's knowledge of canon is passive, not active. Man or the church does not create canon, but simply seeks to recognize it.

01:13:15

You're recognizing what God has done by giving that divine revelation. You're not trying to create something called canon or canonicity.

01:13:23

The church doesn't have the ability to do that, and the church didn't claim to have that ability in the ancient church.

01:13:29

It's the modern Roman church, and others like that direction that think they have that ability.

01:13:36

Is that the right direction? I don't know which direction I'm facing. That direction? Okay, all right. Well, there's a few people down that direction, too, that, yeah, there's some interesting groups down there, especially in Southern Utah.

01:13:48

Hence, we have two views of canon, which we will designate canon one and canon two.

01:13:54

Canon one is the canon as created by God's act of inspiration. Just in the same way as that when

01:14:00

I wrote my books, the canon comes into existence. I don't have to do anything. It just is, and I know its content perfectly.

01:14:07

God knows the content of his act of inspiration. Canon two is canon as passively recognized by God's people, led by God's spirit over time and beyond geographical boundaries.

01:14:22

Disputes about canon two do not in any way destroy the existence of canon one.

01:14:27

Any more than doctrinal disputes prove there is no objective revelation of doctrinal truth. This is extremely important.

01:14:35

Let me illustrate this. There are disputes about canon two. The early church, for example, struggled with the book of Revelation.

01:14:47

Now, you may go, well, I don't like to know that. Think about it the other direction.

01:14:54

Would you rather have had the early church going, you know, we don't have nearly enough books with 10 -headed monsters and sea serpents and all sorts of stuff like that.

01:15:02

Let's go find some more. Wouldn't you have rather had the church going, are we sure

01:15:08

John was associated with this? What's the actual meaning of this? What's it actually communicating?

01:15:14

Now, I'll be honest with you, if the early church had seen what the modern church has done with the book of Revelation, I'm not sure it ever would have been in the canon.

01:15:21

Oh, Apache helicopters, huh? Oh, well, we have no idea what those are, so out with you.

01:15:28

It was a book that had a meaning at that time. In fact, the best commentaries on Revelation are the ones that are gonna take you deeply into the

01:15:36

Old Testament, because it's filled with Old Testament symbology. That's where it's drawn from. Just take the time to do the work on it.

01:15:43

But the point is, there were disputes. Hebrews, some of the really shorter epistles, and you can understand why some of the shorter epistles would struggle, because they wouldn't be as widely distributed, they wouldn't be as widely known.

01:15:55

And the first time you run into it, you're like, I've never heard of that one before. And so there's skepticism, and there needs to be.

01:16:02

That's an appropriate thing. But those disputes, and there were disputes in the

01:16:08

Old Testament too. Not so much amongst the Jews initially, but Esther doesn't name the name of God.

01:16:18

And so after the destruction of Jerusalem, it was called the Council of Jamnia, there was some questions about why doesn't

01:16:25

Esther name the name of God? But that was way down the road, that that type of thing took place.

01:16:33

Those disputes do not in any way invalidate the fact that even if we have confusion,

01:16:40

God didn't. And so the next question has to be this one, which I assume is the next question.

01:16:47

So if there is a reason for God to make sure his people know his word, then it would follow that he would exert the same power used to bring the scriptures into existence to bring about that knowledge.

01:16:58

Is there reason to believe God would lead his people to know his word? Well, how about Isaiah 55, nine through 11?

01:17:04

For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there without watering the earth and making it bare and sprout, and furnishing seed of the sower and bread of the eater, so will my word be, which goes forth from my mouth.

01:17:20

It will not return to me empty. Without accomplishing what I desire, without succeeding the matter for which I sent it.

01:17:25

God has a reason for giving revelation. He has a reason for giving revelation. Without accomplishing what

01:17:33

I desire. And notice in the New Testament, Romans 15, four, for whatever was written in earlier times was written for our instruction.

01:17:42

So through perseverance and encouragement of the scriptures, we might have hope. It's written in earlier times, but it's written for our instruction and it gives to us hope.

01:17:51

And in 1 Corinthians 10, 11, now these things happen to them as an example and they were written for our instruction upon whom the ends of the ages have come.

01:18:04

So here you have this concept, this idea. Oops, sorry about that. We're not gonna be doing an apocryphal tonight, sorry.

01:18:11

We have run out of time. So there is reason to believe that God wants his people to know what he has given to his church as scripture.

01:18:24

So I'll close with this. I'll close with a story about the white question.

01:18:30

The white question. And I didn't come up with that. I mean, I came up with the question, but I didn't come up with calling it that.

01:18:40

I'll finish with this story. In, I think it was 93 or 94, I flew back to Boston and I did two debates with Jerry Matitix.

01:18:50

Jerry Matitix was the first ordained PCA minister to leave the Presbyterian Church of America and become a

01:18:57

Roman Catholic. And he and I have debated, I think, 13 times over the years.

01:19:03

I think the last time we debated was at the University of Utah on the,

01:19:08

I think, the Immaculate Conception of Mary or something along those lines. Anyway, we debated the apocrypha and justification by faith.

01:19:23

And one was at the beginning of the weekend and one afterwards. Make a long story short,

01:19:30

I had been, we had been on a radio program on WEZE in Boston. We were supposed to go back on it.

01:19:35

And then we were told at the first debate that the radio program had been canceled. Well, that day,

01:19:42

I'm out driving with my host, we turn the radio on and there's Jerry Matitix on the radio program and they're asking where I am.

01:19:49

But I had been told it had been canceled. We had both been told it had been canceled. So we went racing back to the house and we called in and I did the rest of the radio program on the telephone from a bedroom.

01:20:00

I've got a picture, old black and white picture, actually, of me doing this. They had color back then, but it was a black and white picture.

01:20:08

Yeah, it was one of those things, poof, you know, the smoke and all this. And Jerry is just still, man, he is just still firing on all cylinders.

01:20:19

Jerry never stops debating. His wife, oh my, I just feel for her.

01:20:24

Not only that, she had 14 children, but he just never stops debating. And he had not stopped since,

01:20:35

I had gone on to other things. I live the rest of my life. Jerry doesn't. And so he's boom, boom, boom, boom.

01:20:40

We're going back and forth. And all of a sudden, a question came to me. I'll never forget it.

01:20:47

And I said, Jerry, let me ask you a question. I said, how did a believing

01:20:54

Jewish man 50 years before Christ came know that Isaiah and 2

01:21:04

Chronicles were scripture? And it got just as quiet as it did in here just now.

01:21:13

Now on radio, that's not a good thing. Okay, I grew up doing radio. That's called dead air.

01:21:20

You don't want dead air because people change the channel when dead air comes along, all right? And so it got quiet.

01:21:26

Now, why did I ask the question? Because he was insisting we needed to have the infallible definition of the

01:21:34

Roman church to be able to have scripture. And so I said, okay, then how did the believing

01:21:40

Jewish person know that Isaiah and 2 Chronicles were scripture 50 years before Christ? Got quiet.

01:21:49

The host, a woman, said, well, we're gonna take a quick break and come back with an answer to that question on the backside of the break.

01:21:59

And so off we go off to a commercial. We come back from the commercial. So James, what were you saying to Jerry?

01:22:07

So I repeated the question. Dead air. There is no meaningful response from a

01:22:15

Roman Catholic perspective. In fact, this became known as the white question. And I've heard so many apologists discussing this.

01:22:24

In fact, the amazing thing is, I haven't listened, I haven't bothered to listen to it because this was from almost 30 full years ago.

01:22:32

But last month, Roman Catholic apologists did a program specifically on the white question because they can't come up with an answer.

01:22:43

Because if they say, well, the Jewish magisterium defined what scripture was back then, the

01:22:50

Jewish magisterium rejected the apocryphal books that they've canonized. So they can't go with that.

01:22:57

One interesting answer that was given to me was one guy said, well, you can use the Urim and the Thummim. You can use the

01:23:05

Urim and the Thummim, the dice on the breastplate of the high priest. And so you'd have to go to the high priest and is

01:23:13

Isaiah scripture? Is the second ground? Right. There was a process between Malachi and if you ever struggled to remember which the last one was, just remember the last

01:23:29

Italian prophet, Malachi. Boy, they are asleep. Okay, let's just go ahead and finish this up.

01:23:36

So between Malachi and Matthew, you have about 400 years.

01:23:43

And no angels came down from heaven. No golden indexes were dropped down in supernatural events.

01:23:51

But within 200 years, the scriptures had been laid up in the temple.

01:23:56

And by the time of Jesus's ministry, have you ever noticed something? No Jewish person ever said to Jesus, but that's not scripture.

01:24:04

And he held men accountable to scriptures over the course of about 400 years. When you look at the early church, right around 200 years after the birth of Christ, you have what's called the

01:24:16

Muratorian Fragment. That lists about 87 % of the New Testament. It may be more because it's a fragment. There might be some stuff that's missing.

01:24:23

That's around the same time as the laying up of the books. And then around 360 or so, 367,

01:24:29

I think, the 39th Festival Letter of Athanasius, he's not claiming to create canon. He's just simply writing, as the bishop in Alexandria, he is writing a letter to all the churches specifically about when the date of Easter is gonna be.

01:24:43

But in the process, he said, and by the way, there's lots of books floating around and stuff like that. Here are the books of the

01:24:49

New Testament. And it's the same canon you and I have today. He wasn't saying, I'm defining these, I'm creating it.

01:24:54

No, these are what we've always believed and don't believe any of the rest of that stuff. And it's about the same time period.

01:25:01

And there's no angelic visitors coming down from heaven. There's no golden indexes and no Moroni's or Nephi's or anything like that at all.

01:25:09

Same process. If it worked for Jesus, don't you think his apostles and his church would pretty much have the same experience?

01:25:16

Yeah, exactly, exactly. All right, I went a whole lot longer than I thought, but Marley told me to, so I just,

01:25:25

I had to do it. And so I hope that's helpful to you. I did not have a discussion with you all about how you want to, are you all gonna come up and correct any of my errors and stuff like that?

01:25:37

You were thinking that you've got them written down there. You're gonna be covering them over the next. Not tonight, when you leave. Okay, all right, that's probably, that's a wise idea.

01:25:45

So did you want to, you wanna close the word of prayer? How do you, we didn't discuss how you wanted to do this.

01:25:51

So thank you very much for your attention. About these things.