April 8, 2016 Show with Dr. Charles Hill on “How Do We Know the Bible Is God’s Word? Recovering the Doctrine of a Self-Authenticating Scripture” PLUS “Hidden Gospels: Our Culture’s Quest to Rewrite the Story of Jesus”

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Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, We are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with, and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

Now here's our host, Chris Arntzen. Good afternoon

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming.

This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Friday on this eighth day of April 2016.

And we do have as a guest for the very first time ever on Iron Sharpens Iron, Dr.

Charles Hill, who joined the Reformed Theological Seminary's Orlando campus in 1994 and serves as the

John R. Richardson Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity. He teaches courses on Hebrews, Revelations, and New Testament Greek.

After receiving his Ph .D. from Cambridge University, Dr. Hill taught at Northwestern College in Iowa.

Dr. Hill has significant research interest in the Johannine corpus, New Testament books associated with the

Apostle John, the Gospel of John, the first through third

John, and Revelation. He has also researched and written extensively on several issues related to the early church fathers, particularly early

Christian views of the end times, the canon of the New Testament, and the traditions of New Testament manuscripts.

Dr. Hill's most recent publications include Who Chose the Gospels? Probing the

Great Gospel Conspiracy, and that's from Oxford University Press, and the early text of the

New Testament, also from Oxford University Press. And during his time on the RTS faculty,

Dr. Hill has received several professional honors. He was elected as a

Lilly Theological Research Grants Faculty Fellow for the academic year of 2000 through 2001, and a

Henry Luce III Fellow in Theology for 2012. In 2003, he was elected to the prestigious

New Testament Studies Society, and I can't pronounce this Latin phrase here, since I don't have my glasses on, and as a member of several other academic societies.

Having pursued an undergraduate training in fine art, Dr. Hill worked as a commercial artist before entering theological study.

He and his wife, Marcy, have three adult children and two grandchildren, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first on Iron Trump's Iron, Dr.

Charles Hill. Thank you very much, Chris. And in studio with me again is my co -host,

Reverend Buzz Taylor. Good to be back as usual. And I am going to be announcing throughout this broadcast some special events that Dr.

Hill is going to be speaking at, or one specific event, and a couple of different presentations at this event.

But the event that is being sponsored by the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals is How Firm a

Foundation, the Bible's Authority, Sufficiency, and Clarity. That's going to be held at the

Philadelphia Conference on Reform Theology, and the plenary speakers include

Dr. Hill, Michael Kruger, who has been a guest on this program before, Philip Ryken, who has also been a guest on this program, and Derek Thomas.

So it looks like all of the plenary speakers have been on this program before.

And the workshop speakers include Nathan Conant, David Garner, Jason Halopoulos, Evan Lowell, Richard Phillips, who has been on the program, and Jeff Stuyvesant, amongst others.

And we are going to look forward to interviewing our brother today on some pretty fascinating subjects.

But before we even get into the conference at hand, Dr. Hill, tell our listeners something about Reform Theological Seminary.

Well, before I start on that, I have one small correction to the introduction you gave.

It was very kind of you to do that. But there are now four grandchildren, I'm happy to report.

Oh, praise God. Praise God. We'll blame the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals for my un -updated information.

Yeah, I should get that updated. Well, thanks. Yeah, well, RTS, many of your listeners will know, has been around since, well, 50 years ago now.

It was started in Jackson, Mississippi. And now there are several campuses.

Depending on how you count them, there are three main ones, a couple of other ones that are up and coming. The Orlando campus started,

I believe it was about like 1989. I came in 1994 and have been there ever since.

So, yeah, I'm sure that, again, a lot of your listeners will have known something about Reform Theological Seminary, but it's been a privilege to be there over the years and to have a part in the great work of helping equip people, men and women, to go out and be a part of the function of God's Church and be a part of the

Great Commission. Great. And the conference that Dr. Hill is speaking at is going to be held at the

Proclamation Presbyterian Church in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

I don't know if I'm pronouncing it, being a new Pennsylvanian, a lifelong New Yorker. I don't know if Bryn Mawr, do you know if that's the correct pronunciation of it?

I think it's Bryn Mawr. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I'm not sure exactly when they started, but this year they're actually having two venues for the conference.

And the one I'm speaking at is actually in Grand Rapids. Oh, okay, that's right. I'm looking at that now.

That's Bryn Center, Michigan. Yeah. Yeah. And if anybody would want more information on both of these events, the first in Bryn Center, Michigan, April 15th through the 17th, or the second one in Pennsylvania, the 29th through May 1st, only the first one is where Dr.

Hill is speaking. But it's the same conference, Al Fermer Foundation, the Bible's Authority of Sufficiency and Clarity.

Go to alliancenet .org, alliancenet .org, and click on Events at the top of the screen.

That's alliancenet .org, and we hope that you can make at least one of those. And I know that we do have listeners in the

Grand Rapids, Michigan area and have interviewed quite a number of people from Grand Rapids, Michigan, including

Dr. Joel Beeky and Dr. David Murray and other folks that are out there. So hopefully we will have some listeners going to hear you speak, brother.

And before we even get into the main topic at hand, I've got to ask you just out of curiosity, and I don't know if it's going to be possible for you to summarize this briefly, but due to your background in patristics, since we have two people here on the panel who have different eschatological views,

I was wondering what would be the dominant eschatological view that you've discovered from your study of patristics in the early church?

Well, that's a bit of a controverted question, as you probably know.

I was looking at trying to get a sweep of pretty much every eschatological view among Christians in the early centuries.

And I would say that there were two, broadly speaking, two broad views. What we would probably call, or what we call today, premillennialism and what we would call amillennialism.

They didn't necessarily call them that. But probably by the 4th century, well, the 3rd century, there were people who were being called

Kiliath, and that would refer, that's just a Greek word for thousand, thousand years, just like the

Latin, we use millennial, millennialist. And those were the premillennialists.

So there were those two views that I would say, both of which are very early in the

Christian tradition. What I think was one of the discoveries that came out of that research was that the strand of what we might call amillennialism was a lot stronger and deeper than is usually given credit for being.

And what I was looking at particularly is a neglected, almost forgotten about connection within eschatological views between views of the intermediate state of the soul and views of cosmic eschatology, you might say, or millennialism.

So there was a tendency in the early church to link your ideas on those.

Just very briefly, there was an understanding that the soul of the

Christian, the soul of the believer, either goes and resides in a peaceful, subterranean place until the resurrection, and that was associated with the

Kiliastic view, or there was a view that the soul of the

Christian went on to be with Christ in heaven, in the presence of God, there to await the return of Christ and the resurrection of the body, and that was more or less associated with the non -Kiliastic view.

So, how about that? Yeah, just to let you know,

I happen to be an amillennialist and my co -host, Reverend Buzz Taylor, is a post -millennialist, so I just thought

I'd enlighten you as to why I wanted to ask that question. So let's have a real party here now. But one of the subjects we're addressing today, for the first hour, is how do we know the

Bible is God's word, recovering the doctrine of a self -authenticating scripture?

And this seems to be the area of apologetics and polemics where the

Roman Catholic Church thinks they have a clear victory. They think that we are without an answer, without relying on Mother Rome to decide these things for us, or having decided them for us in centuries past.

But a very controversial issue, indeed, that separates the

Church of Rome from historic Protestantism on the canon. But if you could comment on that.

Well, right. Yeah, there's a lot to say, and a lot of what

I'm going to be doing in the lecture is presenting a lot of primary evidence.

I'm just going through what a lot of people thought. But you're right, that's been a particular point of contention, especially since the

Reformation, and one of the big problems with the

Roman view, of course, is that it logically puts the Church over scripture by saying, asserting that we don't know what the books of the

Bible are, what the canon is, unless the Church tells us. And that makes the

Church the final determiner, having a final say. Whereas scripture is always very plain, that it's not the

Church that gives birth to the word of God, but the word of God gives birth to the Church.

The word of God gives birth to the individual Christian and gives birth to the

Church. Scripture is very clear that we're under the authority of scripture, under the authority of God and his word, in a primary way, that always trumps human institutions, even the

Church as an institution. So we have that, we certainly have that issue.

And at the time of the Reformation, Calvin in particular, right at that time, and other

Reformers, of course, following, made a point of the scriptures, that the scriptures, he said, are self -authenticating.

And so that's where the title of the lecture comes from. Self -authenticating, autopistos was the word, a

Greek word, that he borrowed for that. It authenticates itself, it makes itself credible.

And Calvin did not reject the value of the testimony of the

Church. He thought it was extremely valuable. But he said that unless the

Holy Spirit convinces us that it is scripture, that it is the word of God, even the word of the

Church is not sufficient to give us a conviction of that. And of course, when the

Church had accepted the books that we, as Protestants, hold to as the canon of scripture, the

Roman Catholic Church was not in full bloom at that point anyway. Would you agree with that? I would agree with that, yeah.

Because they had gone through quite a de -evolution,

I guess would be the best way to describe it, rather than evolution, but from the days of the patristic era to the 16th century

Reformation, you had a Roman Catholic Church that would probably hardly have been recognized by the

Fathers in the earlier centuries, right? Yeah, I think so. Definitely by the 4th and 5th centuries, we're seeing something that is starting to take shape that may be more recognizable.

But particularly throughout the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd centuries, you don't have anything like a dominant position for Rome, let alone the

Roman Bishop, anything like what we think of as the Roman Catholic Church. Yeah, that's right.

I think one, I mean just another issue, I'll talk a little bit more about the early

Church, but one thing that almost everybody agrees on is that even though most of the books of the

New Testament seem to have been accepted and recognized very quickly, there were some where there were debates, and one question you would have, if it's the

Church that has the infallible authority to decide, you can say, well, why did the

Church have any hesitation at all? Why weren't they all recognized? Did the

Church only become infallible in the 4th century? Whereas I think with the way

Calvin and the Reformers looked at it, I would say the early Church looked at it as well, the books themselves are, they have an inherent and intrinsic authority as the

Word of God, and that is what they have in and of themselves, even if the recognition of that on the part of the

Church is not perfect, is not, you know, it takes place in fits and starts, and there's some wavering on the part of the

Church. We can easily believe that because we know that the Church is not infallible, but if you believe in this infallibility of the

Church, then you'd have to really wonder, I think, why the Church didn't see that, see everything so clearly right away.

Did the canon that we are aware of that was being held to by some of the earlier fathers, like, for instance,

Athanasius, who I believe was a 3rd century father, was he not? 4th century.

Oh, 4th century, okay. Yeah. He, how similar was the canon that he had to the

Protestant canon as opposed to the Roman Catholic canon, which of course would differ on the

Old Testament? Well, Athanasius had exactly the 27 books of our

New Testament, and he would even agree that the so -called apocryphal books were on a different level, that is, the books that we usually call apocryphal.

They call them deuterocanonical. Deuterocanonical, which is probably a better word, actually, for them,

I think. But that issue of the deuterocanonical books, books that are generally thought to have been between the

Old Testament and the New Testament, that discussion has a very long history, and you can find church fathers on both sides of the question on that.

One thing you do have to say, though, is that that set of books, whether we call them apocryphal or deuterocanonical, that set of books never had a definitive shape.

So certain books would have been accepted and other books not, and not always the same books in that collection.

I would argue that what we seem to have is a virtual unanimity on the books that we recognize in the

Protestant Old Testament canon. What about the order of the books? Well, the order of the books was variable in the early centuries.

Whenever you find a list of books, or even in the earliest great codices that contained all the books, they came in different orders.

I mean, you do have a few constants. The law, the Torah, the first five books are always first.

But after that, you generally have the historical, what we call historical books, but then you might have some of the writing mixed in with some of the, or prophets later, what we call the minor prophets, were considered a unit.

Okay, I'm going to mention a name, okay? Simply because if you're familiar with the book

I'm talking about, it'll help to guide this whole thing. For the questions that I would have in my own mind, but I believe the fellow's name was

Ernest L. Martin. Does that name ring a bell? As far as writing a book called Restoring the

Original Bible, I think was the title of the book. I read it years ago, so I don't remember all the details.

But he contended that there was apostolic authority to the canonization of the

New Testament and that the order of the books that we have today, in the New Testament specifically, did not arrive until like the

Latin Vulgate, giving supremacy to Rome and all that stuff. Have you heard any of this? I don't know if the guy was out to lunch or what.

Well, I'm not familiar with that book, so I would have to say that I can't comment on that.

But I mean, if you could describe his view a little more, I can maybe weigh in on it.

Well, in the Old Testament books, well, first of all, he suggested an original order that the books were contained in, both of the

Old and the New Testament. Of course, the Old Testament, you had like your first and second kings were one book, first and second

Samuel were one book. In fact, I think one of them was like four. I can't remember exactly how he had them broken down.

I don't have that information in front of me. But Joshua and Judges were one book originally, and things like that, where the number of books and the order of the books was changed around.

The number of books, yeah, well, there is variation. I mean, I would say, certainly we have in our copies of Septuagint books, you do tend to have first and second kings in one book, first and second

Samuel in one book. But it varies. What I think you can say is there does not seem to be one standard enumeration or ordering.

Remember that the Codex didn't come into play.

The technology for the Codex, what we think of as a book, was just not there until sometime in the 3rd century when it became big enough.

I mean, Codex started before that. But the technology was such that you couldn't get very much material in a

Codex until it developed to that point. So, to my mind, you can speak of a logical order, or maybe some kind of liturgical order, if you read them in a certain order, that kind of thing.

But when you talk about an order of the books in the Bible, keep in mind that that doesn't really make sense before about the 3rd or 4th century

AD. So there would have been scrolls. It would have had a number of separate scrolls.

Now, obviously you would have had the 12 minor prophets in one scroll.

That kind of thing. So sometimes you'd have two books or more books in one scroll.

But still, you're talking about a number of separate scrolls. So, I could be missing something, but I've never been too convinced by a lot of arguments that lay a lot of emphasis on the right order of the books.

And, of course, the Deuterocanonical or the Apocryphal books that we mentioned earlier, they were not officially declared a part of the canon until after Trent, correct?

I mean, wasn't... It didn't even... Didn't even...

Oh, his name is flying out of my head. The one who compiled the Latin Vulgate.

Josip? No, no. Jerome. Jerome. Jerome, didn't he even protest the inclusion of the

Deuterocanonical or Apocryphal books in the Old Testament canon? Yes, yes, he did.

So, as I said before, there was debate, there was disagreement on the status of those books.

I would say that there was a strong, maybe it was a majority view in the early church that recognized those books were on a different level, a lower level.

They were valuable to read. And you don't have people saying, don't read them. But they were recognized as being on a different level.

They were recognized that way by Judaism in general. They were recognized as not being a part of the canon by Judaism.

That's right. As not being scriptural, as not having authority. They were important historical books.

They were important for the Jewish heritage. So, they were read and they tended then to be transferred or kept alongside the biblical books.

And so I think in the early church, there was a good bit of confusion at times about just what the role of these books ought to be.

So, they were there, but like I said, it's not as though they were a known quantity.

Sometimes in lists or in collections, you might have some of them but not all of them.

One collection would have 4th Maccabees as well as 1st, 2nd, and 3rd.

One would only have 1st and 2nd Maccabees. And some might have the additions to Daniel and others wouldn't.

That kind of thing. So, it's not even a standard thing in the early church.

But as I said, I think that there was some genuine confusion about the status of those books in the early church.

And even though they were then included in the Vulgate over drones, protestations, and I think that set them, that did a lot to set them as kind of a standard.

But even in the time of the Reformation, you have, I believe this is correct, you have even

Roman Catholic writers recognizing indifference, but until Trent, which declares them to be scripture.

So, I think it's interesting that even now, a lot of Catholic sources will label them deuterocanonical, which tells you a lot right there.

We're going to go to a break right now, but before we go to the break, I'd like to ask you a question so during the break you could think about it.

One of the things that, according to the testimony of a very famous Roman Catholic apologist who was a

Presbyterian convert to Rome, one of the things that he identifies as the key issue that made, that was the final straw that broke the camel's back for him, was the question of how an infallible collection of books that we call the

Bible could have been compiled by a fallible church.

And the answer that one very well -known Reformed scholar today gave to this individual was that we have an infallible collection,

I'm sorry, we have a fallible collection of infallible books. And that answer apparently drove this

Presbyterian into the arms of Rome where he has remained for at least 20 years, perhaps longer than 20 years.

And I'm just not mentioning names here because I don't have their very words in front of me, and so on and so on.

I'm kind of quoting off the top of my head here, paraphrasing. But that was the primary issue, and I've heard this come up in debate and so on.

I've arranged personally about 25 theological public and moderated debates between my friend

Dr. James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries, and at least 10 of those debates were with Roman Catholic scholars, apologists, and clerics.

And that issue seems to come up all the time. They think it's the Achilles heel of the

Protestantism. But we're going to be coming right back after these messages with more discussion on this with Dr.

Charles Hill, so don't go away. Paul wrote to the church at Galatia, For am

I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man,

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That's the Thriving Story. Welcome back.

This is Chris Arns. And if you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours is Dr. Charles Hill of the

Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida. And we are discussing a part of the conference that he is speaking at, how firm a foundation the

Bible's authority, sufficiency, and clarity, the branch or the location of the conference that our guest is speaking at is in the

Grand Rapids, Michigan area. And the conference is April 15th through the 17th.

And there are a number of other speakers. There will also be a conference that does not include our guest, but includes other speakers there in the

Philadelphia area, April 29th through May 1st. And for more information on this conference, how firm a foundation the

Bible's authority, sufficiency, and clarity, go to alliancenet .org, alliancenet .org.

And also, our friends at PNR Publishing, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, requested as new sponsors of the

Iron Shepherd's Iron Program. I nearly screwed up the name of my own program there.

The PNR Publishers have asked me to announce the Faithful Shepherd Conference in Harvey Cedars, New Jersey, that they are sponsoring alongside the

Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. That is a pastor's retreat in the beautiful Harvey Cedars, New Jersey, Christian Retreat Center right on the shore there in New Jersey.

I've been to Harvey Cedars. It's absolutely beautiful. And I'm sure it will even be more beautiful in May.

But that's May 9th through the 11th. Dan Doriani and David Paulsen, who both have been guests on Iron Sharpens Iron in the past, they will both be speakers at this retreat.

And once again, go to alliancenet .org for more details, alliancenet .org,

and click on Events at the top of the page. And last but not least, I want to remind all men in ministry leadership the

Iron Sharpens Iron Pastors and Ministry Leader Luncheon is going to be held this month,

Thursday, April 28th, at the absolutely breathtakingly beautiful Thornwald Mansion of Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

It's quite a historic location and has been newly renovated. And this is absolutely free of charge from beginning to end.

We have room for about 30 more pastors. So if you'd like to join us and you're a man in ministry, you don't have to be a pastor, but you have to be a man in some kind of leadership capacity in ministry or with a power church or organization, just email me at chrisarnson at gmail .com.

chrisarnson at gmail .com. You're getting free lunch. You're getting a message by David Wood, who is a world -renowned apologist specializing in Islamic studies.

And he is the founder and director of answeringmuslims .com.

That's answeringmuslims .com. And we also have a word from a very special guest,

Pennsylvania State Representative Stephen Bloom will be speaking at the Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Pastors Luncheon as well.

So that's Thursday, April 28th. And if you'd like to go, if you know pastors or men in ministry leadership that either live in Pennsylvania or are willing to travel to the

Carlisle, Pennsylvania area, have them email me at chrisarnson at gmail .com. chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Well, Dr. Hill, I posed the question before the break that in the minds of some

Roman Catholics, you have an impossible situation. You cannot have an infallible

Bible that has been collected and assembled and put together by fallible men, because the choices they make are wrought with error and sin.

And therefore, the canon that they came up with could not have been a trustworthy canon if they did not have the infallible vicar of Rome, the vicar of Christ on earth, proceeding over this selection of books.

If you could comment on that. Oh boy, there's so much to say.

Okay, I'll try to refrain from sarcasm.

Well, I mean, I think that at least a few things, just right away,

I think the whole way of conceiving of things is completely off -base.

I mean, that whole idea of whether the church that collected and chose or determined has to be fallible or infallible,

I think it misconceives what's going on in the church and in the formation of the canon.

The early church in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, if you had asked them what was going on or what they were doing, people like Irenaeus, they would never have said anything like, well, the church is determining the books of the canon.

They would say, we don't determine, we don't select. We receive.

We recognize. We adopt what

God has given. So it's a complete misconception, I think, to act as though the question was decided by the church, whether fallible or infallible.

They just didn't see it that way. The question

I alluded to, well, I didn't go into this yet, but you mentioned

Calvin's idea or doctrine of the self -authentication of scripture. What I'm going to be going through in the lecture is how that's not

Calvin's idea, really. We get that idea in the early church. It's in Justin Martyr.

It's in Clement of Alexandria, Origin. It's assumed by Irenaeus.

The idea that scripture doesn't need to be proved or approved by anybody, it proves itself.

You can't have anything higher than scripture to appeal to.

If you appeal to any kind of argument, and if you appeal to the church, well, then you're saying it's not just an infallible church.

I mean, you have a church that's a higher authority than scripture. And again, to go back to something

I mentioned a while ago, I think anybody who studies the early church would have to say, well, where was that infallible church in the 2nd century?

Where was that infallible church in the 3rd century? Why would Origin mention that some people disputed certain books?

Couldn't he just say, well, look, there's a bishop in Rome. He says such and such.

Case closed. I mean, why would Eusebius at the beginning of the 4th century say, yes, most of the churches accept these 27 books or whatever, but not all.

Why doesn't he just say, look, there's a pope in Rome. We all know this has all been decided.

Here's another question. How does an infallible church become infallible?

How does it start out not infallible and only become infallible later? I would say that rather than questioning or saying that we have to have an infallible pope or an infallible church, we should be saying, aren't we grateful to have an infallible

Holy Spirit who eventually leads the church to basic consensus?

I mean, I think that the significant thing about the church finally finding consensus is that it's a show of the power of the

Holy Spirit, the testimony of the Holy Spirit. Calvin and the early church fathers emphasized both that the scriptures are their own truth.

They're their own authentication. But of course, we are fallible.

So the only way we really recognize that is through the Holy Spirit's work. We call that the testimony of the

Holy Spirit working in us. So the Spirit's work, just like you can say, well, when a person becomes a

Christian or just when the church, when people in the church know the power of Scripture and God's voice, that's because the

Spirit's been at work in them. It's like Paul says to the

Thessalonians. He says, For we know, brothers, loved by God, that he has chosen you, because our gospel came to you not only in words, but also in power and in the

Holy Spirit and with full conviction. And then he tells them that they received the word of God not as the word of men, but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers.

And that was testimony to the word of God power, the power of the word of God by the

Holy Spirit, such that the Thessalonians received it not as the word of men, but as the word of God.

So a fallible church is still, praise

God, saved and sustained by an infallible Holy Spirit and eventually does find consensus, should have had consensus all the way through, mostly had consensus all the way through, but there were debates and there were disagreements for a while.

You could still say there are people today all the time questioning certain books in the canon.

So I think that Scripture's own testimony is that let

God be truth or every man a liar. The authority of Scripture speaks for itself.

And in fact, there was obviously no Pope in the old covenant, and the

Jews were very much responsible for knowing what God's word was and what the

Old Testament canon contained and so forth. And I remember

I was stunned that a Roman Catholic apologist answered that question by saying that the

Pharisees were God's infallible governors over the canon in the

Old Testament, which is ironic that they would be considered such as they were the ones crying out eventually for the death of Christ.

So it's pretty, I think it's a pretty inadequate answer that they have to that, that they have that same dilemma when it comes to the

Old Testament. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. That's a very good point. Yeah, I think it's become, it's been very unfortunate that the question of the canon has been so often framed in that way.

The whole way it's set up, the whole way it's framed, not only by Roman Catholic apologists, but in a way by scholarship that wants to put the entire question of canon, see it as a question of what the

Church has done. What is canon? Well, canon is the product of the

Church's selection process. I mean, the very way that people look at canon or define canon, they sort of decide the issue from the beginning.

But that's just not the way they looked at it in the early Church. And how would you differentiate, if somebody were to be mocking the way that we are describing how the

Church recognized the canon and accepted it and so on, it was received, not decided upon.

I mean, this may seem like a comical or ridiculous comparison, but how would you respond to the person that might say, well, that sounds just as convincing or as reliable as the

Mormons burning in his bosom, that he recognized that the Book of Mormon was true because of some kind of bizarre physical sensation that they claim that they have.

How is that any more reliable than something that the Mormons claim to authenticate their own

Bible? Well, not their Bible, but what they believe is an inspired work.

Well, that kind of gets into the entire question of whether there's a spiritual work involved, an interior work of the

Spirit, what you might call subjective work of the

Spirit. But I don't think that you can get around the fact that the

Holy Spirit works internally in us and that there is the

Holy Spirit witnessing with our spirit that we are sons of God.

A similar operation, I would say, witnessing with our spirit that Scripture is the

Word of God. So, there's always a subjective element, but that doesn't mean that you have to get around that.

You invent a doctrine of the infallibility of the

Church or the Pope or some council to get around that. So, I mean,

I sometimes use kind of a homely illustration.

I don't want to give all my cards away, but this is...

And this is, of course, not a perfect illustration, but maybe it gets a point across.

Let's say that you are in the airport with your elderly mother and somehow you get separated.

And so you find a security officer and you tell them the situation. They say, OK, we'll just wait here.

I'll come back in a few minutes. So, the person comes back and then after a while leads you down a hallway into a room and you...

Oh, sorry, I forgot part of it. You have to say that the officer first tells you, well, what does your mother look like?

Tell me what she looks like. And you say, well, she's about 5 '4", she's got curly gray hair, she's wearing glasses.

OK, so he goes away, he comes back, takes you to a room and you open the door and there are like 25 women with curly gray hair and glasses and about 5 '4".

But immediately you see your mother, she sees you, and you're reunited. And as you're walking out the door to catch your plane, the officer says, wait a minute, sir,

I just have to ask you, why did you choose this woman to be your mother?

And you say, well, what do you mean? I didn't choose her, this is my mother.

And she says, well, I know, but this woman over here and that other woman, they actually meet the criteria better that you gave me, better than this woman does.

So, by that time you're very frustrated and you just want to leave and get on your plane. Maybe that helps to get something across about the whole idea of recognizing.

Scripture is like, it gives birth to the Church. I should say the

Word of God gives birth to the Church. The Word of God at first can be and was orally preached, but in time it was written down as we know.

But the Word of God gives life, new life to the Church. It's not the other way around.

So, these books that we have in the New Testament were functioning in the

Church all the way through. Some churches, maybe not all at first, some churches were using these books, they were functioning as Scripture all the way through.

So, it's a matter of the Church, you know,

Jesus said that His sheep hear His voice. And what do you mean by that?

I've never heard the audible voice of Jesus. Nobody alive today has. So, that's talking about an internal call, an internal experience of hearing the voice of Jesus in these words of Scripture.

That's unavoidable. But it's a familiar voice. It's a voice that rings true to the believer.

So, it's kind of like, you know, Calvin used this illustration of asking how will we know which books are

Scripture unless the Church tells us. It's kind of like saying, well how do we know black from white unless the

Church tells us? How do we know sweet from bitter unless the Church tells us? Well, the

Church all the way through had its own... These are the books that mediated the

Word of God to them, that mediated life to them. So, they were always around to do that.

They didn't await any kind of declaration of the Church before they had that power.

They simply did. And it seems to me from what you've been saying, and I know that some of my

Arminian or non -Reformed listeners may get upset with me by saying this, but it seems to me that a theologically

Reformed person who has a strong view and understanding of God's sovereign control over all things that even would override the alleged free will of man, this seems to have a lot to do with the certainty with which the

Church may have in their embracing of this canon that we have called the

Bible without having to be paranoid or worried that we're adopting and believing in something that is not

God -breathed. The sovereignty of God over this really is the key factor in how this came about and why we can have certainty and trust in this canon, correct?

Well, sure. That's the

God we believe in. God who is sovereign. So, He's the one in whom we ultimately put the trust.

And God the Spirit, who leads the Church, is also sovereign.

We trust that the books that we have and have found acceptance within the

Church are those books. And as we've been talking about, we've seen the power and effectiveness of these books down through the ages.

They have proved themselves to be what they are. There are just not a lot of rival contenders out there.

You say it's hypothetical, possibly. Well, maybe we didn't get the right one. Well, yes, but most of the problems today, though, isn't it more afraid that we've left something out more than that we've gotten one in that shouldn't have been there but it seems like there's all of a sudden this pressure to accept the

Gospel of Thomas. Well, that's exactly what our second hour is about. Okay, great. Then I'll wait.

Well, you can comment if you'd like, Dr. Hill. Well, right.

I often tell students that one of the best ways, if you have doubts like that or thoughts like that, one of the best ways to convince yourself is to go and read the

Gospel of Thomas. Read these other books. And I think it will be the unusual person who comes away with grave doubts after doing that.

It's just when you look at the way

Scripture does and has authenticated itself and then you look at the other, the also -ran, so to speak, there are some pretty obvious differences.

So, yeah, we can talk more about those in the second hour. That may be more appropriate.

But, yeah, I would just encourage people, if they have the time, the interest, if they have real doubts like that, read the other books.

And read the Apostolic Fathers. I mean, for the most part, they're very edifying. But the

Apostolic Fathers, Clement of Rome and Polycarp and Ignatius and Barnabas and so forth, there's a lot of edifying reading in there.

They're not heretical, at least overtly heretical. There's good reading.

But very, very clearly, most of them are very clear about distinguishing themselves from the

Apostles. They emphasize that they're not Apostles. And then look back to the

Apostolic Age or the Apostolic Days as something of the past.

So there are good reasons why, if we want to talk about reasons, and we can certainly do that, characteristics and qualities of these books, we can do that.

And there are good reasons why they're Apostolic Fathers and they're not

New Testament books. And we have to go to our break right now. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own for our guest,

Dr. Charles Hill, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

chrisarnson at gmail .com. That's C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

Please give us your first name, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside of the

USA. And when we come back from the break, we're going to be in our second hour of discussion.

And this time the topic has shifted to another one of the addresses that Dr.

Hill is presenting at the upcoming conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on The Hidden Gospels, Our Culture's Great Quest to Rewrite the

Story of Jesus. So once again, our email address if you'd like to join us is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away, we're going to be right back with Dr. Charles Hill of Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida.

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Welcome back. This is Chris Sorensen. If you just tuned us in, our guest today is Dr. Charles Hill of Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida.

He's going to be speaking in Grand Rapids, Michigan on the theme that we have been discussing today,

How Firm a Foundation, the Bible's Authority, Sufficiency, and Clarity.

And if you'd like more details on this conference, go to Alliancenet .org.

Alliancenet .org. And click on the Events button at the top of the screen.

This conference is going to be held in two locations. The first in Grand Rapids, where our guest will be one of the speakers,

April 15th through the 17th. And the second will be in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, April 29th through May 1st, which will not include our guest, but will have other theologians, scholars, professors, and authors speaking on the same theme.

And we, for the first hour, were addressing the matters in regard to the self -authenticating scriptures.

And now we're moving on to the Gnostic Gospels. And if you'd like to join us with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

chrisarnson at gmail .com. We do have a couple of people waiting for their questions to be asked and answered, but I wanted to get first a little bit more into a description of this subject matter.

The actual address title that you will be speaking on at the conference is Hidden Gospels, Our Culture's Quest to Rewrite the

Story of Jesus. How many, if you are aware, how many of these counterfeit gospels are the primary sources that liberals are pointing to and those who are trying to call into question the reliability of the

New Testament? How many of these gospels are sometimes called apocryphal, not in the same sense as the

Old Testament books that are also due to Quranical books embraced by Rome, but in this case you have books that Rome would agree with us do not belong in the canon.

And of course they would take credit for their infallible magisterium, not including them. But if you could tell us, how many books are we talking about here as far as the primary ones?

When you say the ones that liberals might be relying on, there aren't very many.

There are quite a few that appeared in the early centuries, but in terms of any kind of scholars or liberal theologians relying much upon them as presenting some kind of real alternative to the canonical gospels,

I would say not so much. The one that is kind of the favorite, the darling of many parts of the academy would have to be the

Gospel of Thomas. It's, I think, far and above almost any other non -canonical gospel that is known, that people refer to or think that maybe this was the one that was neglected.

There's the Gospel of Peter, which we only have a large fragment of the last part of it.

But I think most people, they might say, well, that's an evidence of the church being exclusionary and all that, excluding these other gospels.

That's the sort of argument they'd make on most of these gospels. Not the argument that, well, here we have in this gospel some real information, some real information about Jesus, and this should have been in the

Bible. Maybe the Gospel of Thomas. As you probably know, there has been an attempt to do that, the

Jesus seminar, and those folks. So, yeah, that's how

I'd answer that. The Gospel of Thomas is kind of front and center as opposed to the other gospels, other alternative gospels.

And, of course, it is often phrased by the liberal media when they're having a documentary in order to titillate the imagination of people and to make them call into question

Christianity as a religion or at least pastors and leaders within the

Christian faith were supposed to doubt their trustworthiness because the statement or the theme will be posed, why did the church remove these

Gnostic gospels from the canon? That's the way that they posed it, as if there was a conspiracy on the part of the

Catholic Church or others because they were frightened of these things that were in these gospels that would have otherwise been included in the canon, but they somehow were an affront to their misogyny or male chauvinism or any other of a number of things that the liberals will point to as deficiencies in the church, and therefore, out of fear, they were removed and hidden.

If you could explain something about that. Well, yeah, you're right in that that is kind of the, that's the storyline.

I've kind of, the way I look at it, it's sort of, there's a grand myth, a cultural myth out there that's been constructed, and I don't know how it happened exactly, but we have through, you know, kind of a willing cooperation of some academics and the media, we have this sort of cultural myth of Christian beginnings and how we got the

Bible and all that, and it tends to be this very political interpretation that in the beginning was diversity, and, you know, diversity was wonderful, and everybody loved diversity, but eventually some group came along and thought it was the greatest, and everybody else was trash, and they started to,

I have to watch myself here being put a little bit less sarcastically, but it almost comes to those terms that are used by some people.

But eventually one group that tended to be exclusivist succeeded in marginalizing all of its competitors among Christian groups and ended up gaining the ear of Constantine the

Emperor and was able to marginalize all of its competitors and impose its books upon everybody.

So that's a little bit simplified, but not too terribly much, and it does really kind of strike you as a conspiracy theory.

There are many elements where this comes through. Of course, academics would hate to be accused of that sort of thing, but it really does come across that way a lot.

So, yeah, there's so many things to say about that. When you get down to the nitty -gritty and ask about these

Gospels, you could say, well, how many of these other Gospels do we know were written in the first century?

Because almost everybody agrees the four Gospels were written in the first century. There are a few people out there even today saying that they weren't, but that's pretty much been a consensus.

Okay, these are first century Gospels. How many other first century Gospels do we have? And they have to say none.

Now, the Gospel of Thomas, some people think, even though that Gospel is, as we have it, influenced by the canonical

Gospels, the idea they have is that an earlier version of it was not.

An earlier version of it, which nobody has ever seen, an earlier version of it predated our canonical

Gospels and may have been part of a source that was used by them. So there are portions of Thomas that parallel portions of the canonical, the synoptic

Gospels in particular, the sayings of Jesus. So we've had various scholars who've argued that those parallels are actually earlier,

Thomas has an earlier version. That's about the best that they can do, because other parts of Thomas definitely look like they're building upon the canonical

Gospels. And you do have other oddities in Thomas, such as the very last saying, which has to do with Mary, Jesus telling her that he's going to make her a male so that she can participate in salvation.

So there are oddities like that that tend to get skipped over. But besides the

Gospels of Thomas, and only really fragments, fractions of the Gospels of Thomas might be argued for as being first century, you have very little.

Once in a while you'll have a John Donnock, Carson, or somebody argue that the

Gospels of Peter, same way, an early version, might have been first century.

But none of those have really gotten very far. So what you end up with is you have all these

Gospels that are admittedly second century, third century, but for some reason they get this sort of status that they were real rivals to the four.

And it's that we don't have them, and we have the four in the Bibles, is attributed to heavy -handed power struggles, power moves.

Yeah, people love conspiracies, yes. Yeah, yeah. And we do have a,

I'm sorry, did you want to conclude something there? Well, again,

I would just say for most people, just look these Gospels up and have a read, and see if you think, again, if you ask experts, academics, they're not going to say that the

Gospel of Mary or the Gospel of Judas gives us any real information about the historical

Jesus. For them, the point is, why were these, of course to them, they're just about as fictitious as the canonical

Gospels. There's no reason, there's no good reason in their view of things why the

Church would choose one and not the other. Even though four of them were around a lot longer, and so forth.

But seldom is the question even asked, what Jesus do they present?

We have a listener in Suffolk County, Long Island, Christopher wants to know, you were speaking before about the apocryphal books of the

Old Testament being beneficial to read as long as one did not view them with canonicity.

Is there any benefit from reading or studying these so -called Gnostic Gospels that have been attempted to be included in the

New Testament canon? Well, I think so. I mean,

I think it is always good to read more about early

Christianity, about early Church history. So, the more we have,

I mean, I think it's been great that we have, some of these have come to light.

It's great, just from a historical perspective, we now can see something of what the early

Church Fathers were talking about. You know, before we just had, for the most part, we had some of their descriptions of these books or critiques of them, but didn't have the books to look at.

So, I think it's generally a good thing. You know, if you just don't go in with the mindset that there was a big conspiracy and now you're going to restore these great books to prominence, well, you can even go and ask that and see what you come out with.

It's very interesting. You know, not all Gospels are the same.

Not all alternative Gospels were written for the same purposes, you know, by the same types of people.

In the lecture, I'm going to divide them into three classes of alternative Gospels.

You could maybe argue for other classifications, but I'm going to talk about apocryphal

Gospels, amalgamating or harmonizing Gospels, and Jewish -Christian

Gospels. So, there's a difference there that you, between them, if you want to look at them closely.

One thing that I would say all of them have in common is that they're all dependent in some way or another on one or more of the canonical

Gospels. And it kind of stands to reason that the four were all written earlier in the first century.

We don't have any other Gospels. People can speculate about Q, of course, but we don't have any other

Gospel that early. These Gospels became, the four became the best -known ones.

So, it's natural that these others would be takeoffs in some way or another on one or more of the four.

So, the apocryphal Gospels, that's what I'm basically talking about, the

Gnostic Gospels there. And the reason

I talk about, classify them that way is that in order not to be anachronistic, these are

Gospels that by and large actually call themselves apocryphal

Gospels. One of the points I'll make is that so many scholars today will criticize people like us and say you shouldn't call them apocryphal

Gospels because there was no such thing then as canonical, no such thing as apocryphal.

These are later categories that we've imposed upon the 2nd and 3rd century evidence.

But actually, when you go back and look at them, many of these books actually call themselves apocryphal.

The Gospel of Thomas starts out, these are the secret sayings, the apocryphal sayings, of Jesus given to Thomas.

The Gospel of Judas starts out similarly. These are the secret sayings, the apocryphal. The word apocrypha or apocryphon is actually used in them.

There's a book called the Apocryphon of John, the Apocryphon of James. I mean, they advertise themselves that way.

So it's not the imposition of later categories to demean these

Gospels that way. And really, even though people like Irenaeus and others would think that a secret apocryphal

Gospel would be a bad thing, these people who wrote them must have thought it was a good thing. That's interesting, because doesn't even the word itself mean that the history of the document is questionable, as far as its authenticity?

Well, it's one of those words, apocryphal, that's taken on different meanings, depending on the context.

We have an idea of what we mean by apocryphal. Sometimes we talk about apocryphal stories, they're just, you know, we don't know if it's truly sourced right.

I mean, the word just means hidden. It means secreted away. It just means something that's hidden.

And so they call themselves the hidden words of Jesus. Now, again, when you think about it that way, who wouldn't want hidden words of Jesus?

I mean, if you can show me some real hidden words of Jesus. So they thought this was a great advertisement.

So I guess, but what they're doing and what that tells us, I think it's something pretty profound.

If you trade on secret words of Jesus, that means that you know that there are some public ones out there already known.

You know, you have to come up with some secret ones. But the public ones aren't saying what you want them to say, what you'd like them to say.

And that kind of fits with the whole genre of Gnosticism, Gnostic Gospels.

It's sort of things that are left out, things left out of the four

Gospels, or things left out of Paul or these other books. We've got new revelations, secret revelations, and join our club and we'll initiate you and tell you about them.

So there's a group of Gospels that kind of fit that genre. And a lot of them don't read much about the life of Christ in those.

It's Jesus conversing with the Apostles about sort of philosophical things or whatnot.

And you don't have Jesus making atonement for the sins of his people or anything like that.

You do have another group of Gospels, alternatives, that I would call amalgamating or harmonizing, something like the

Gospel of Peter, which doesn't seem to be told from an overtly heretical standpoint.

There may be some docetism in there. Scholars debate that. But it seems just to want to retell the story of Jesus, sort of combine some of the details from the other

Gospels and embellish it with little details and side remarks and things like that.

It just seems to have a different purpose to this Gospel being written.

In some ways, it's kind of like if somebody were to sit down and tell someone the story of Jesus in their own words, they'd probably mix together sentences from one

Gospel and another Gospel. No overt agenda, or maybe there was, but it's not the same as, like, a

Gnostic Gospel. And the third category is what I call Jewish Christian Gospels.

There were two or maybe three of those. Scholars are not even in agreement on that, from the early centuries.

They, too, are a lot like these amalgamating Gospels. They seem to have pulled from more than one of the

Gnostic Gospels and retold the stories of Jesus, but you might say from more of a

Jewish Christian standpoint. We barely have fragments.

We don't have any real fragments. We have quotations from them from some of the Church Fathers. Now, when you were saying that you think that it would be good for people to read these

Gnostic Gospels, I'm assuming that you would use a lot more caution with somebody who is not even a grounded

Christian, as opposed to somebody like yourself, who's a scholar or who has already been thoroughly convinced of the

Biblical truths of the authentic canon. Isn't there danger of the person who's not a believer or who is demonstrating some kind of interest in truth who is asking questions about the

Scripture? They say that they've been reading one of these Gnostic Gospels at the suggestion of a friend.

Aren't the contents of these things likely to confuse people, if not indoctrinate them into some kind of ridiculous or insane teaching?

Yeah, maybe I should have been a little bit more cautious with that. It certainly depends.

It depends on the person and their situation, their mindset, you might say, their background.

I probably have in mind, yes, you might say a grounded Christian, someone who wants to understand more about the historical setting of the early

Church, and see, you might say, why the Church Fathers were so upset with these books.

If you come at them with, let's say, no real historical consciousness about them, as if these really are, they have the very same credentials as the canonical

Gospels, and they have every right to be taken just as seriously.

Yeah, you're right, they could be very confusing. They could be very confusing to people and their faith or their bedding faith.

So that's a good point that you made. Refresh my memory here, wasn't it the

Gospel of Thomas that was the basis for the Da Vinci Code? It might have been, yeah, one of the...

One of, okay. Where Mary Magdalene is presumed to have been...

I'm not sure, I just, so I said refresh my memory, it seems like that was part of where it came from.

Yeah, and apparently a part of the theme of the Da Vinci Code was that Mary Magdalene had some kind of significant role amongst the apostles, being an apostle herself or something like that.

But we're going to be going to our final break right now, and we do have a couple more listeners waiting patiently for their questions to be asked and answered, so we'll get to you as soon as possible.

If you'd like to join us as well, we do have about a half hour left of the program, so our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

chrisarnson at gmail .com. So write us as quickly as you can before the time slips away from us if you have any interest in being a part of our discussion.

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the good old

USA. Don't go away, we're going to be right back with our guest, Dr. Charles Hill, of Reform Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida, right after these messages.

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Welcome back. This is Chris Arms, and if you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours has been

Dr. Charles Hill. Well, he's been through 90 minutes of those two hours with a half hour to go.

And Dr. Charles Hill is on the faculty of Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida. We are speaking about a couple of the subcategories of the theme,

How Firm a Foundation in the Bible's Authority, Sufficiency, and Clarity, which is the theme for a conference that Dr.

Hill is speaking at in Grand Rapids, Michigan, April 15th through the 17th.

And there'll be a follow -up conference that Dr. Hill will not be participating in, but other speakers will be on the panel in Philadelphia April 29th through May 1st.

And if you want more information on this conference, How Firm a Foundation, go to AllianceNet .org.

That's AllianceNet .org. And which of the

Gnostic Gospels contains teaching about Jesus as a young man, as a boy, which gives you the impression that he could probably be accurately described as a serial killer.

I mean, he was killing other children and even adults for very insignificant reasons that just upset him as a boy and on a whim would be killing these people just because they bothered him or said something in a certain way that annoyed him or what have you.

And it obviously would be a flagrant rejection of the sinlessness of Christ if he was doing these kinds of things as a boy.

But if you could let us know, where do these stories come from? Which of the Gnostic Gospels do they come from?

Off the top of my head, I think that that is probably what's called the

Infancy Gospel of Thomas. There are a few

Gospels so -called like that that have to do with supposedly with the life of Jesus before, essentially before, the accounts in the canonical

Gospels. There's the Protevangelium of James, probably the most popular one that deals with those things.

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas and maybe one or two other later ones. So, yeah, even that short description of them shows you that, again, it's kind of like these

Gnostic Gospels that, in essence, they're trying to say what was left out of the canonical

Gospels or make up something that would satisfy our curiosity about the life of Jesus.

What everybody should know about those is that no scholar says that they have anything really to do with the historical

Jesus. They're all 2nd century or 3rd century or later products of somebody's imagination.

So, again, they're interesting historical documents to show you what some people wanted to say or think or believe about Jesus.

Some people have even said, I know one scholar who thinks the

Protevangelium of James was kind of like children's literature that someone wrote more or less as Christian entertainment.

That's interesting that you say that because Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries was reading from that particular

Gnostic work on his program, not because he believed in the contents as accurate theology, but he was trying to prove a point.

And when I was listening to it, it was just as you were mentioning before that Jesus' sheep will hear his voice from John's Gospel, that famous quote of John that really is teaching election and so on and irresistible grace.

When he was reading these, when Dr. White was reading the contents on this

Gnostic work of James, it was almost as if I was hearing Dr. Seuss. It was not, it really hit me in such a way where I knew instinctively this is not something from the canon of Scripture.

Right, right. Even the type of, you know, literature that it was, the literary style of the writing was so foreign from anything in the

Bible. Yes, yes. Yes, exactly. And that's generally what you find with all of them.

Like I said, some of them are less that way than others just because they're, they seem to be more interested in just kind of retelling the story of Jesus and embellishing it in some ways.

So, you know, who would do these things? Sometimes it definitely was people who had a heretical bent, something they wanted to say that was certainly false doctrine.

Other times, it's hard to read that much into it as more than just badly ill -informed entertainment, you know, ill -advised, ill -advised entertainment of somebody maybe who does not have a very deep understanding of the faith who might come up with something like that.

But again, I think it's what everybody needs to know. There's no, there are no scholars out there suggesting that these kinds of Gospels have anything authentic or anything historical about Jesus in them.

And, like, as if they're, you know, we really should have those instead of the four.

Their point on that, again, as we already touched upon, it might serve an argument that they might like that just says, look, this shows how the

Church was exclusive, exclusionary, and, you know, we want to stand up for equal rights for Gospels.

We do have Harrison, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, who wants to know, was there anything within the discovery of the

Dead Sea Scrolls that was a challenge to your understanding of the canon? The Dead Sea Scrolls, and that has to do with Old Testament Scripture.

Anything that was challenging for my understanding of the canon?

Well, in a mild way. I mean, I think you could say that it's both, the

Dead Sea Scrolls have been both affirming, mostly affirming of the canon.

But, you know, you'd like for them to have found every

Old Testament book there. It's just about every one, but it's not on the top of my head.

I believe Ruth and maybe one or two others have not been found there. You would like for them to have, you know, maybe the scriptural books would have been in one corner and all the other books in another corner.

It apparently was not like that. But yet there are some things that some scholars will say tended to distinguish the scriptural books from the non -scriptural books, just in the way that they were executed and the way that certain books are quoted.

It tends to be with only one or two exceptions. When another work quotes a work, they're quoting a scriptural book, one of the

Old Testament canonical books, with one or two exceptions. So there are things like that.

I mean, by and large I think that Dead Sea Scrolls just enhance our confidence.

They show that the books definitely had an antiquity.

Now we have actual evidence for their being copied and used before the

Christian era. So there are certain textual matters that come up.

Some texts seem more like Septuagint text, some more like the Hebrew Masoretic text.

But in general, I think that Dead Sea Scrolls have been a great find and a boon to the faith.

We have Arnie in Perry County, Pennsylvania, who wants to know, is there anything that, if it were discovered by modern archaeology, that was given the appearance of a part of the

Holy Scriptures, is there anything that would convince you that you should include them in the

Scriptures, even though they have been unknown of from what we understand of history for nearly 2 ,000 years?

Yeah, that's a good question. It's one that people often wonder about.

Yeah, I can say it's hard to imagine that actually happening.

And if something like that, if we entertain the hypothetical,

I think one thing I would say is that I might have my own impression of it, but more important would be the

Church's collective recognition of it or non -recognition of it as authentic.

I would think that you could certainly make the case that the

Canon was recognized and closed long, long ago, and there is an argument for providence there that says, you know, these are the books, obviously, that God wanted

His Church to live by, to have and to live by. So, it would be an uphill,

I'll just say an uphill battle. The way I look at it, even, let's say we discovered another authentic letter, a fragment of a letter of Paul, it wouldn't be a foregone conclusion that that would automatically be scriptural.

And the reason would be, I'm not saying it would or wouldn't, but it wouldn't be an immediate foregone conclusion because we all know that, even

John says that Jesus did many other things that are not recorded in his book, but these things are written that you may believe.

So we know that Jesus said a lot of other things, the prophets spoke a lot of other things, they were inspired, they were true, but they were not, in God's providence, seem fit to be part of the scriptures that this

Church would live by. So, even other inspired words of Paul that may have been inspired to meet the needs of a particular group at a particular time, as I say, in my way of looking at it at least, it would not be a foregone conclusion that it would be added to scripture.

Others may disagree on that one. We have a person with a very historic name,

Aquinas, from Suffolk County, Long Island, who wants to know, aren't there people who wrote part of the canon who quote from sources that are not in our current canon?

Yes. The Apostle Paul does that on a couple of occasions, quotes a pagan writer.

Jude also quotes from 1 Enoch and possibly from another apocryphal work.

So that's true, it's almost every quotation in the

New Testament is a quotation from a canonical book, but not every single one.

And in that case, there are things you can say about each one of those instances, but Paul can obviously quote something that somebody else says and it might be true.

The same thing with Jude. It might be true, but would not be scripture.

So, I think the church has always recognized that many other books can contain things that are true or praiseworthy or edifying in many different ways, but that doesn't make the whole book scripture.

We have B .B. in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania who says, How can you doubt the apocryphal books of the

Old Testament being authentic as a part of the canon if the early church used as their version of the

Old Testament the Septuagint, which includes the Apocrypha or Deuterocanonical books? Yeah, I think that's a good and a relevant question, but the thing is about the

Septuagint, we don't know what everybody's Septuagint contained.

The copies of the Septuagint that we have do not contain all the same of the so -called apocryphal books.

Do we have any that go back to the 1st century church? Do we have any copies of it that are that old?

My first no, that is, we don't have any Christian copies.

I'm trying to think if there are any in the Dead Sea Scrolls that are from what we usually call the

Apocrypha. There may be something about, there may be one or two.

I don't know off the top of my head on that. So it would be a hard case to make that the

Septuagint that the Apostles used had the Apocrypha in it if we don't have that, if we don't have an example of that from artifacts.

We don't have an artifact or an archaeological discovery of that. Right, right.

What's the term for archaeology when you're referring to books? I'm not sure if it's the same thing.

Is there a term for that? I don't know. Well, I don't know.

I just say artifacts, archaeological artifacts maybe. Yeah, we don't have any of those.

The, you know, when Jude, let's take Jude, well, before that, there are,

I think, surprisingly few evidences of any New Testament use of any of the

Apocrypha, what we call the Apocrypha, those Greek books, generally in Greek, between the

Old and New Testament. The first Enoch doesn't even really qualify, the book that Jude quotes, doesn't qualify as the

Apocrypha. It's not in the Apocrypha. It was not in the major collections of Septuagint works.

And we do have the fact that the

Jews didn't accept those Apocryphal books as scripture. We have a list by Josephus from the first century, which even though he doesn't give names of every single book, he gives a number of books and categories of books, and the

Apocrypha don't fit in there. We have a fourth Ezra catalog in there.

We have a number of others. We have, from the second century, we have Melito of Sardis giving a list of Old Testament books.

The Apocrypha are not in there. We have Origen reporting on the Hebrew canon.

The Apocrypha are not in there. Origen himself spoke out in favor of using a couple of the

Apocryphal books that were connected to some of the Old Testament canonical books.

But that's the point, going back to what we were saying before.

There is no standard collection of these other books. There were a number of other books outside the canon, on the coattails of the canon of the

Old Testament. They were also read, sometimes quoted, sometimes quoted as Scripture, but not a consistency of that.

And again, we have pretty much the unified witness of the

Jews of the time that these were not Scripture. You know, I've heard Roman Catholics say that Martin Luther and the

Reformers took out the Deuterocanonical books or the Apocryphal books from the canon.

Obviously, that's just totally ahistorical, since Jerome didn't even want to include them in the

Vulgate. But they will say that that was done because that is where we have proof of the teaching of purgatory.

And there is some reference to people praying for the dead after a battle or something like that.

I can't remember the exact reference. But the reference doesn't even go into, by any stretch of the imagination, any full -blown concept of what purgatory is about, does it?

Do you know the reference I'm speaking of? Yeah, yeah, I do.

Yeah, I think one of them is in one of the Maccabean books. But yeah,

I think you're right. There's not a full -blown, developed doctrine of purgatory, even in those.

But if that's, you know, it's a pretty, well,

I don't want to say that. You can go back to the early church and see that not all these books were accepted.

And there are many church fathers who tell us definitely that these books are not

Scripture. What you find, again, is that there is some confusion or disagreement.

Some church fathers treat some of those books as they would Scripture. But again, it's not a consistent thing.

And on the other side, you have people who definitely are excluding them. So what everybody agreed upon were the

Hebrew Bible, basically the books of the Hebrew Bible that are in the Protestant canon. And the others had a shifting status.

You know, there's a part of me that wishes Belle and the Dragon was in the canon, just because I think it's a cool name.

Right. But anyway, before we run out of time, if you could summarize what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners on this issue before we leave the program today.

Hmm. Well, I think what would be central for me is simply to encourage people to spend time in the

Scriptures. Let the Scriptures be your delight and ruminate on them day and night.

And I think that you'll find that these words are the words of life.

And you'll find yourself in confession, along with the

Church of the Ages, that these are the words of God given to His Church for us to live by.

And they give us the life -giving message of Jesus Christ in a way that nothing else does, and in a way that comes from Jesus -authorized representatives.

So I would just say, encourage everybody to spend more time drinking in the

Word. Yeah. Well, I know that the Reformed Theological Seminary's website is rts, for ReformedTheologicalSeminary .edu,

rts .edu. Is there any other contact information you care to share with our listeners regarding your own ministry?

Well, those who might be interested in reading some more academic work might go to my academia .edu

webpage, academia .edu. Some of my papers are there.

But maybe I would recommend for some of your listeners who are interested in the topic of the canon, particularly the four

Gospels, I did write a book called Who Chose the Gospels? Probing the

Great Gospel Conspiracy. It came out in 2010, and I think it's fairly readable.

So I would recommend people, who are not the people who might want to know more about the

New Testament canon. Oh yeah, definitely. I'd love to have you back on the program to discuss some of your other works that you have, and I think it would be of great benefit to our listeners.

Really appreciated you being on the program, brother, and I look forward to future return visits.

Well, thank you very much. And I want our listeners to be reminded that Dr. Hill will be at the

Howe -Firma Foundation conference. Howe -Firma Foundation, The Bible's Authority, Sufficiency and Clarity.

And he will be speaking for this conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan, April 15th through the 17th.

And there will be another conference with the same theme that other theologians and scholars and speakers will be speaking at.

That will be in the Philadelphia area April 29th through May 1st. And you can go to AllianceNet .org

for more details on that. AllianceNet .org. Once again, the

Faithful Shepherd Conference that our friends at PNR Publishing have asked us to promote. That's Presbyterian and Reform Publishing.

In conjunction with the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, they're running a pastor's retreat at Harvey Cedars Retreat Center in New Jersey on the shore of New Jersey.

That's going to be held May 9th through 11th. The Faithful Shepherd Conference features

Dan Doriani and David Powelson, two wonderful speakers who have both been guests on Iron Sharpens Iron.

And you can also go to AllianceNet .org for information on that event,

May 9th through 11th in Harvey Cedars, New Jersey. Click on the Events button at the top of the page.

And last but not least, don't forget that if you are a man in leadership or know of a pastor or man in leadership who is either in the

Carlisle, Pennsylvania area or willing to travel there, tell them about the Iron Sharpens Iron radio free pastor's luncheon.

And that's absolutely free of charge. The pastors will be leaving the luncheon when they go home with a sack full of books, probably about 50 pounds worth of books at least, that have been donated by major publishers all over the country.

Publishers like P &R Publishing and Baker and B &H and many of the other prominent publishing houses in this country.

Books have been specifically selected for men in ministry. So shoot me an email at chrisorensen at gmail .com

chrisorensen at gmail .com and we hope that you all have a wonderful and safe and blessed weekend and I hope you always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater

Savior than you are a sinner. We look forward to hearing from you next week on Iron Sharpens Iron radio.