Who Wrote the Bible?

The Biblical Doctrine of Inspiration

Be not conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Hi, and welcome to Renewed Mind. I'm your host, Romuald Gossein, and today we have with us Dr. James White, who will be discussing with us the very important subject of who wrote the Bible.

First of all, welcome to the show, James. Honored to be with you. Thank you. And so what we would like to find out, first of all, is who was it that wrote the Bible?

Well, when you ask that question, the theological answer is men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. But it is men who first spoke the Word and then wrote down the Word. And so God used a certain means over about 1 ,600 years of history to bring about the individual books that together as a collection we call the Bible.

So God used men. Sometimes it was just a single author of a single book. There are certain books that have no authors listed and could have had multiple authors involved. For example, in compiling history, there would be no problem at all if there was a number of people that were involved over time in the production of a book that records history from different periods of time.

And so God used men, but the conviction of the Jewish people, especially as late as 300 -400 years before the time of Christ, was that God had used special men called prophets and that there was a supernatural superintendence of this process that results in the fact that there is a specific, identifiable group of books that are special in their nature, and those are called Scripture.

And the Jews and the Lord Jesus would say, Thus it stands written. It has been written. God has spoken. These are the Scriptures. The New Testament writers continue in that vein and understand the same thing.

Over what period are we talking about? I mean, some people have this idea that it was just simply a group of people that got together, they had a common agenda, and they wrote down this story.

You know, the funny thing is we have probably over 40 authors writing over a millennium and a half in differing times, with different languages, with different backgrounds, that are all contributing to this one collection of books that we call the Bible.

And they didn't just get together at one time, and very often they had very different, quote-unquote, agendas. But once again, it's important to recognize that while we can see the human element and concede that and confess that, as Peter said, men spoke from God.

The result of their writing comes from God, and they spoke as they were carried, literally, it means to be carried along by the Holy Spirit. And so while they might use different means of expression, even different languages, what the result is, is what God intended that result to be.

Why God Uses Fallible Human Writers

Why would God use fallible man to write down His Word?

He's communicating with fallible people. So what else would He use if His purpose is to bless His people and to make His promises known? He's going to communicate to us in our own language. I suppose that it would be possible for angels to come down and to bring a shiny golden text or something like that.

The problem is as soon as you have angels and shiny golden texts, people start worshiping the angels and shiny golden texts. So just as God worked with His people, sometimes in the nitty-gritty, dirty, grimy reality of sin and rebellion and the people of God not being what the people of God should be, in the same way, He used men as the means by which He communicated His truth to us and changed even them in that process, as well as us, in providing that authoritative Word.

How the Canon Distinguishes Scripture from the Apocrypha and Gnostic Gospels

But then how do we make a distinction between that which is sacred, sacred writings, and that which is just common writings, so that when we look at things such as the Gnostic Gospels or the Apocrypha, how are we able to decipher between what is holy and what is common?

Especially when we start talking about things like Gnostic Gospels, there is such a different worldview. There's a completely different view of God. There's a completely different view of the world. There's a fundamental discontinuity between Gnosticism and Christianity.

But when you're talking about something like the Apocrypha, they make the distinction. The books themselves recognize not only the threefold canon of the Old Testament, the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings, and give evidence that the canon was already closed at that time, the canon being the authoritative list of books, but the Jewish people themselves did not view these as Scripture.

Didn't they just simply call them doubtful books so they weren't sure?

No, not so much doubtful at all. In fact, the phraseology of deuterocanonical or of a second canonical status, that's Christian. The Jewish people simply did not view them as Scripture. They were important books in the sense that they contained the history of the Maccabees and the intertestamental period and things like that.

But when the sacred books were laid up in the second temple, there were copies that were put into the second temple as part of an indication of their holiness, those books were not included. It has long been said that the Jewish people had two canons, that there was a Palestinian canon and an Alexandrian canon, that in Palestine it was a smaller, similar to what Protestants have, well, identical to what Protestants have in their Old Testament, and that the Alexandrian Jews had a wider canon.

There really isn't any evidence of that. The Jewish people before the time of Christ had recognized what the canon was, and the apocrypha was not included in that.

The Nature of Gnosticism and the Gnostic Gospels

So then, James, tell us, what are the Gnostic Gospels?

That phrase is used to describe a body of books written over about 300 years, and they have wide variations from one another. Their authors were very different, came from different perspectives, do not represent any one theology.

But the reason they're called Gnostic is because, at their root, they are derived from Gnosticism. And that, of course, comes from the Greek term for gnosis, or knowledge, and it was a loosely knit series of movements that were united in their rejection of, really, one of the most fundamental biblical revelations, and that is that God is the creator of this physical creation.

They were what are called dualists, and a dualist is a person who believes that the spirit is good, and the flesh is evil. So anything that is spiritual is good, anything that is fleshly is evil. And so, many of the Greeks were dualists.

That's one of the reasons, for example, that Paul was mocked on Mars Hill in Acts 17, when he got to the point of talking about the resurrection of the dead. As soon as he talked about the resurrection of the dead, they began to mock and deride.

Why? Because in Greek theology, it was being released from the physical body. The spirit being released from the physical body was the great act of salvation itself. Whereas he was basically saying, no, the physical body will be raised from the dead.

And they're like, you've got to be kidding me, because they were dualists. So the Gnostics viewed the world in this way, and hence, most of the Gnostic groups would identify the creator God as an evil deity, as what's called a demiurge, rather than the true loving God, who would never have anything to do with the physical universe at all.

And Jesus then becomes one of the intermediaries between the true loving God and is one of the in-between beings called the eons. And Paul writes against this in Colossians. John writes against it in 1 John.

By the 2nd century, a man by the name of Marcion, probably the most famous Gnostic heretic of history, his father was an Orthodox bishop. He popularized the idea that Jehovah of the Old Testament was an evil demiurge.

And interestingly enough, he then came up with an alternative canon where he removed any positive references from the New Testament. Of course, he rejected all the Old Testament books because they all talked about that evil God.

And then he came up with an expurgated New Testament that removed all the references to Judaism and things like that that would be in any way positive. And even editing Paul's own writings, taking parts of it and then taking others out.

So that's Gnosticism. And Gnosticism was one of the primary challenges to the Christian faith for many years. In fact, if you were a Christian writer, it was almost required that for the first 200 years you wrote a book against Marcion.

It's just, oh, is that your first book against Marcion? Good, that's great. I mean, I just don't know of anyone here at the church that had more books written against him than Marcion. He must have gotten under a lot of people's skin, let's put it that way.

So the Gnostic Gospels came after, not during the same period of when the narratives were written themselves. And second of all, what. The titles of these Gospels often resemble the titles of some of the apostles.

The names do. For example, the Gospel of Thomas, which is not a distinctly Gnostic Gospel, though you can detect Gnosticism in certain portions of it. It's obviously just a collection of things that were cobbled together.

But yes, they will utilize the names of biblical characters to make it look like it has something to do with the Bible. Some are not. The Gospel of the Egyptians doesn't necessarily sound like a biblical title or anything like that.

Or talking about set and things like that doesn't sound overly biblical. But many of them did try to make connections to biblical characters. And basically what these Gospels do is they try to rewrite the biblical narrative within a completely different worldview.

And so Jesus becomes completely changed. This is ironically where the stories arise of Jesus' childhood, for example, whereas the canonical Gospels are very respectful and silent about what Jesus was like as a 6-year-old or as a 9-year-old.

We have one little incidence at 12 in the temple, which is almost prophetic in nature. The Gnostic Gospels just, we have to know what it would have been like to have been Jesus. And the Gnostic Jesus, of course, isn't really a human being.

In fact, many of the Gnostic sects were docetists, which means, it comes from the Greek term dakain, it seems. And what they did is they said Jesus only seemed to have a physical body. And so either he would just take one on temporarily and then shluff it off or some of the Gnostics would tell stories about Jesus and a disciple walking down the seashore together.

And when the disciple looks back, there's only one set of prints. And it's not because Jesus was carrying the disciple either.

Like a ghost or an apparition.

Exactly. When Jesus walks along a seashore, he doesn't leave footprints because he only seems to have a physical body, dakain. And John warned against them as well in 1 John. So these were early heresies that developed more fully later on in church history.

But what they're trying to do is recast Jesus and very frequently attack Christianity in the process. That is, there is very frequently in the Gnostic Gospels an anti-Orthodox mockery because the Orthodox consider these people to be heretics.

So just as, for example, you have in the Mormon temple ceremonies a mockery of Christian ministers, in the ancient world you would have mockery of Christian ministers within the Gnostic Gospels, the stories they would tell to one another and things like that.

So it really, the fact these things have been dug up thanks to the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library and certain discoveries like that over the past 70, 80 years, they've come back into public consciousness.

But they really don't tell us anything overly new because these conflicts have been going on for a very, very long time. And what they represent is a fundamentally different religion than biblical Christianity.

They do not come from the first century. They do not come from around Jerusalem. They clearly come from the second, third, and fourth centuries. And they represent a fundamental repudiation of the various scriptures that would have been considered normative and authoritative in Jerusalem in the days of Jesus.

They also don't have any concern about the historicity of Jesus. Jesus just sort of starts flitting about. And, you know, he appears here, appears there. Unlike the great concern of the canonical Gospels to say, as Jesus is going into Jericho this happens, and as he's going into this.

They put things in places. The Gnostic Gospels don't care about history.

Even trying to prove him in his ancestry. It's such a key component to who he is as the Messiah.

Irrelevant because his body is irrelevant. I mean, one of the Gnostic Gospels represents Jesus. When the body of Jesus is on the cross, the real Jesus is standing on a nearby hillside laughing at people thinking that they could kill him because they're just killing the body and he's not really the body anyways.

So, there are some Gnostic Gospels that I couldn't even really describe the way they describe Jesus because it is so perverse. And yet today they are all the rage because we live in a day when people want to have a reason to disbelieve.

Yes, and so they're clearly fictitious. And they're not at all interested in the historical Jesus as you mentioned. So, I mean, some people say, you mentioned atheists, I mean, some people say that the Roman Catholic Church had an agenda some 300 -400 years after Christianity where they put the Canon of Scripture together.

The Canon of Scripture and the Church's Role

So, you mentioned before that not everybody had a copy of the New Testament and so was the Catholic Church the one that was responsible in putting the Canon of Scripture together and they somehow fiddled with the book and took out the portions they didn't like and kept the ones that they did like and even turned Jesus into some type of superhero, into some type of God.

Is that true?

Well, it sounds a little bit like the Da Vinci Code at that point but a number of corrections there. Anyone at the time of the process that led to the canonization of the New Testament would have no earthly concept of what Roman Catholic means.

Catholic means universal, Roman means local. Put the two together, it's an oxymoron. So, no one was using that kind of terminology. No one in the Church, even the Bishop of Rome at that time, and by the way, he was not the only one called Pope.

In the 3rd century, Cyprian, the Bishop of Carthage, was called Pope Cyprian. So, that is a much later development, the idea of a centralized episcopacy and all the things related to Rome. So, no one at that time dreamed you could create the canon.

That's something only God does. There was never a time when these books were considered canonical because they were so obviously contradictory to and different from what we have in the New Testament canon.

So, there weren't any smoke-filled rooms where a bunch of monks are sitting around casting lots on whether Matthew gets in or the Gospel of Thomas doesn't. That might make for good movies. It just simply never happened historically.

And in fact, none of the councils, even Hippo and Carthage in 393 and 397, even could dream that they had the authority to create a canon of Scripture, just as the canon had grown in the understanding of God's people in the Old Testament during the 400 years between the writing of Malachi and the coming of Christ.

So, during that same time period, that understanding of what the New Testament canon was had been growing amongst God's people. We find the Muratorian Fragment at the end of the 2nd century reflecting the vast majority of the New Testament that we have today.

And in fact, the first list we have that is identical to what we have today is found by Athanasius in his 39th Festal Letter, and I recall it was around 367 A .D. And again, he didn't think that by writing that list he was somehow with some kind of authority defining these things.

This is just what the Christian people, as the Christian people all around the world, had understood to be the inspired writings. And when you compare what they have with what is found in any of these other books, certainly with the Gnostic Gospels, massive difference.

There were writings, however, that some people at some times considered to be canonical that are not in the New Testament today. But these are Orthodox writings. For example, Clement's Epistle to the Church of Corinth was written in Rome, and we don't know who wrote it.

It doesn't say Clement wrote it, but the tradition says that. It's an eminently Orthodox letter, and it's very, very early. And so, especially in the area in which it was written, there could be people who go, hey, this was from our area, this is in the New Testament as well.

But it wouldn't become something that would be accepted that way all over the Christian world. And so, while there were certain books like that that had popularity in a particular area, they would not be books like the Gospel of Thomas or anything like that, which clearly was always opposed to the Orthodox Christian faith.

The Gospel of Barnabas and Historical Anachronism

What about the Gospel of Barnabas? We often hear about that Gospel. Was that a Gnostic Gospel?

Why is it so important? Well, unfortunately, we just left the realm of history. As soon as you said that, we left the realm of history because there is an epistle of Barnabas that is an ancient work. And in certain areas, there were people who thought the epistle of Barnabas was canonical.

But that's a completely different animal than the Gospel of Barnabas. The Gospel of Barnabas, at the absolute earliest, could not have been written before 1350 A .D. So it's never mentioned anywhere in the early church because it didn't exist.

No one had ever heard of it. It is clearly a Muslim fabrication. It is laughably anachronistic. And what I mean by that is you can detect frauds and fakes when it comes to historical documents because the authors will be, especially at that time period, will think that things that existed in their day existed in the previous day that they're putting their book into.

And so this book tells a story that is not only not even Orthodox Muslim, but it is, from a historical perspective, just completely laughable. You have these massive armies of hundreds of thousands of men clashing in the land of Israel during the days of the Romans.

And if you know anything about history, the Romans had a few small cohorts in Palestine. It was not a central area. They didn't put armies there for the fun of it. And when the Jews finally did rebel, 30-some years after the crucifixion of Christ, it took time for Titus and Roman legions to march all that way.

They didn't want to go there, I can assure you. And even Titus and Roman legions would have been a tenth of the size of the armies that this book is talking about were running about all the time in Israel.

There's just so many pieces of evidence that the Gospel of Barnabas is a badly constructed fake that most people place in the 15th century. The only reason you hear about it at all is because it has appeared in some Islamic polemic literature.

I remember seeing a lecture from a Muslim from the United States in Sydney, Australia, telling people that the Gospel of Barnabas had been removed from the canon of Scripture by the Council of Nicaea in A .D. 354.

The Council of Nicaea had nothing to do with the canon of Scripture. It was in 325 and not 354. And the Gospel of Barnabas would have been utterly unknown to anyone at the Council of Nicaea because that was about 1 ,200 years before it was written or so.

So it's just a historical joke to anyone serious. And I know that there are serious Islamic historians who recognize that and would say that, oh, of course, it's ridiculous. But unfortunately with the Internet, silly stuff gets a new life as it does in many instances.

It becomes factual. If it's on YouTube, it must be true. That's just the way it is.

Confidence in the Completeness of the Canon

So then how do we know that the canon of Scripture is complete as it is? How do we know that there isn't a missing 67th book or a book yet to be written?

I think it's important to emphasize that while we do not invest in fallibility in the church and hence do not say that the church's pronouncements on this are the final word, the reason we can have confidence that we have exactly what God would have us to have and that we're not missing anything is because God will expend the exact same effort in accomplishing for His Word its purposes as He did in inspiring it.

What I mean is this. The Scriptures tell us that there is a purpose. They have a purpose in the church. And so if God puts out a certain effort to inspire His Word and there is a purpose in the church, then just as He inspired it, He's also going to make sure that His church knows what books are His and what books are not.

And so as Paul said when he talks about the Old Testament, he said these things were written for our instruction upon whom the end of the ages have come. Well, who decided the canon of the Old Testament?

Well, God's people did at that time. God's people in the same way experienced the leadership of the Spirit in determining the New Testament canon as well. Not a council. It wasn't a vote. It wasn't dice or anything like that.

It was a period of God's operation over time with God's people. And we can have just as much confidence that He has made sure that we have exactly what we need as we have in that He has inspired them in the first place because He is a God of purpose.

And that's really where I ground that. I ground that in the fact that if He has inspired them, then to inspire them and then to leave it doubtful as to what we possess would not make any sense. There is a consistency in light of His purposes that we can trust in regards to the canon of Scripture.

Why Jesus Did Not Write His Own Biography

Some people as well ask the question, well, Jesus was written about. The apostles wrote about Him. Other people wrote about Him. Why didn't He write His own book, His own biography?

Why didn't He write His own biography? Well, why did God choose to allow someone who is not even one of the original 12 to be the primary author of the most important theological works in the New Testament?

Why is one of the other most vital books of the New Testament the book of Hebrews? We don't even know who wrote it. We have debates this day about who wrote it. It's because who writes it isn't the issue.

In fact, what you're touching on there is what I call hyper-red letterism. That is, there are people who figure that if it's in red letters, it's more inspired than that which is in black letters. I've met people like that.

I've met with people to talk about a certain theological conclusion or doctrine. They'll say, don't read me, Paul. If it's not in red letters, don't bother. I call that hyper-red letterism. Is the red letter more inspired than the black letter?

I would say no, it's not. Why God chooses certain people and not others? There are 12 apostles. We don't have 12 different books from the 12 apostles. There were men who walked with Jesus, and we have no scripture that was used at all.

He chose the ones that he chose, the words that they would use, the backgrounds they would bring to it, for his own purposes. I think it would be very difficult for most people to allow a book that had been actually written by Jesus directly to have its place in the canon.

It would have its own canon. It would be above the canon, in essence. But we have to realize, if we actually believe the scriptures, it says everyone who wrote was carried along by the Holy Spirit, and that the Holy Spirit is the author of all of that.

He would be the same spirit who would be the author of anything that Jesus would write as well. That's right. James, thank you for your time.

Good to be with you. We can see that there is absolutely no confusion over who wrote the scriptures. We can see even among the apostles themselves there was no confusion. And still, even throughout church history, we can see that there is no confusion.

We know who wrote the scriptures. We know that God divinely preserved it, and we still know God's message for us. Please stay in tune for the very next episode of Renewed Mind. And until then, God bless.