Sunday Live at Kootenai Community Church

Canonicity in the Early Church and the Apostolic Writings

If you haven't found a seat yet, please come in and find a place to sit down. We're gonna begin our Sunday school. All right, let's begin with a word of prayer. Our gracious God, we thank you for this place to meet, for the ability to be here, that you've called us together.

And we thank you that you have given us your word and a written revelation of you and your redemptive plan and your grace toward us in Christ. And we pray that you would give us understanding today into how you have preserved that for us.

Help us to understand the issues surrounding canonicity and what gives a book its authority. We pray that you would grant me clarity in my thinking and in the presentation, and grant us all the ability to understand these things and to appreciate them, that we might know your mind and your heart in these issues.

And bless this time of teaching and our time of meditation here upon the subject of your word, we pray in Christ's name.

Amen.

All right, we are in lesson 11, and I'll give you a bit of an overview or review here in just a moment. This, I think the first time I taught through this back 12 years ago or so, we went through lesson 11 in one lesson, and we're now two in, and we're not quite even halfway done with it yet.

And the purpose of going through this a little bit slower this time is not just for the sake of going slower. But last week, we didn't even get through a fraction of what I had intended to get through last week.

But I could tell, I think, from the questions that you were asking and from the thoughtful looks on your faces and the way that you were thinking through some of these issues that I think that thinking through this on a bit of a deeper level is a bit fruitful for you, at least I hope it is.

And I'm kind of picking up that that is the case. So today, we're just going to, we're gonna continue in lesson 11, and I'll just give you the payoff of, or the big idea of what we looked at last week.

Last week, we basically looked at this central idea that the church does not determine what books are canonical, and early Christians did not determine what books are canonical. The church discovers what books are canonical.

What makes a book canonical is the fact that it is authoritative, and it is authoritative not because a group of bishops confers authority on a group of books. A book is authoritative because God wrote it, God spoke it, and because it is inspired, it is therefore authoritative.

It is inerrant, it is infallible, and it therefore belongs in what we call the canon or the group of collection of inspired books that form for us the rule of faith and practice. So what makes a book authoritative is not an external quality that it has, that it's old, or that it was written, or that it encourages the hearts of Christians, or that it was accepted widely.

Those are not criteria that we look for to determine if a book belongs in the canon. What makes a book belong in the canon is the fact that God wrote it. And so we begin, this is the only way of avoiding that sort of circular reasoning that we looked at last week, is to finally get out of that and say, there's somebody who determines what is canonical, and it is the one who wrote it, namely God himself.

So today, are there any questions from what we covered last week or from that statement? If you weren't here last week and didn't catch it, any quick questions regarding that that we can cover before we get into our lesson for today?

We're all up to speed?

Yes.

Yes, we're in lesson 11. So Rick wasn't here last week. Just find a place and start writing it down. We're gonna start with Roman numeral five, canonicity in the early church. Thanks, Rick, appreciate it.

What's that?

Page 37. Page 37, Methel says. Okay, canonicity in the early church. Did the early church recognize New Testament canon? Did the early Christians in the first century recognize a corpus of divinely given revelation other than the Old Testament?

Now, we would assume that Christians in the first century would have recognized the Old Testament as inspired. Jesus affirmed the inspiration of the Old Testament. The apostles all quoted from the Old Testament in their writings.

The apostles would have recognized the authority, inspiration, inerrancy, and infallibility of the Old Testament text following the lead of Jesus. So there's no doubt that early Christians would have recognized the canonicity of the Old Testament, that that was the word of God, a revelation given around that first covenant that God made with the Jews after redeeming them out of the land of Egypt.

But then the question is, did the early Christians expect or did they recognize a corpus, a body of divinely given revelation, inspired documents during the first century? Did they recognize a body of books in the first century?

Apostolic Inspiration and the First-Century Recognition of Scripture

So let me give you a quick review of back what we covered in lesson three. And actually, this is just reviewing what we covered almost all the way up until now. I'm gonna just quickly give you some bullet points to remind you of the table that I've already set for this.

It's been almost a year ago that we started this study now. All right, first, Jesus promised inspiration of the Holy Spirit to the apostles.

Do you remember that?

He said, I'll bring to your mind all things that I've said to you. And he promised the aid of the Holy Spirit in giving to the Christians, through inspiration, by the work of the Holy Spirit, an inspired document.

The apostles were to teach with divine authority all that Christ taught, so that what they said was the Lord's command. Peter viewed the scriptures, sorry, Peter said that what Paul wrote was scripture, and Peter viewed the scriptures as inspired by God.

Paul claimed Luke was inspired. Paul puts his own writings on par with scripture. John claims divine inspiration and authority for the book of Revelation. All of Paul's epistles lay claim to divine authority and inspiration.

And Paul expected his epistles to be read in the service just like other scriptures were. So with that sort of overview of what we covered so far, did the apostles, here's a question, did the apostles understand that when they wrote things, that they were writing divine scripture?

Do you think the apostles understood that?

Yes.

Okay, so what would be some of the evidences that we would point to to say that they had every expectation that they believed that they were writing scripture? Holy Spirit conviction, okay, that's a subjective one.

That's right. Okay, Rick? 2 Timothy 3, 16, there Paul's appealing to the Old Testament scriptures, right? Not necessarily his own writings, but what Mike just said is pertinent to this, that Paul expected his writings to be treated almost like they treat, exactly the same way that they treated other scriptures.

To be read in the public worship service, to be obeyed as God's commandment, right? He claimed to have apostolic and divine authority in more than one of his epistles. In 2 Corinthians and in the book of Galatians, he defends his own apostolic credentials.

Peter, did you have something? Yeah, sometimes they said this is the word of the Lord, sometimes this is God's commandment. Okay, so the apostles did themselves recognize that they were the authors, the writers of divine inspiration.

And one thing to remember is that revelation was given in chunks. You look at it throughout the history of Old Testament revelation. Some people think that revelation, Old Testament, sort of trickled into people's usage just a little bit at a time, but that's not how it was at all.

Peace is to give that revelation. So in answer to the question, did Christians in the first century view the apostolic writings as authoritative and inspired scripture, yes or no? Okay, so when then did Christians recognize.

These canonical books in the first century,.

When they received them? When you received a letter from the apostle Paul, do you think anybody said, hey, you know, this is, this book Titus, this is really good stuff. Someday, someday, Christians are gonna recognize this as scripture.

Probably two, 300 years from now, somebody is gonna say that belongs in a collection of these kinds of books because this is that type of quality book. You think anybody thought that way? Or do you think they said, if this comes from the hand of John, if this is written by Peter, if this is written by Paul, it is therefore authoritative.

They are the apostles of the Lord. Their word is God's word, and if they wrote it, and they have written this down, then this is inspired scripture. The evidence from the early church is that in the earliest days, that's exactly how they viewed revelation.

Yes, Bryce? Okay, oh, good question. So we obviously have more than just two letters written to the Corinthian church, right? We have two lost epistles, or epistles that have not been preserved by the providence of God for us today.

So we have two epistles that we know that Paul wrote to the Corinthian church. Were they non-authoritative writings? Paul wrote them as instruction to the Corinthians. Would they have been authoritative?

Okay, so we go back to our doctrine of inspiration. Do we have in our possession everything ever said by an apostle or a prophet? We don't. Does that mean that everything else they said was non-authoritative and non-inherent?

It just means that it has not been preserved for us. So because we don't have them does not mean that they were not authoritative writings, and whether the Corinthians accepted them or embraced them as authoritative in scripture or not is irrelevant.

What we're talking about here is what has been preserved for us. What has been preserved for us is the two epistles that we have to the Corinthian church, but it doesn't mean that what Paul wrote to them previously was not itself inspired or that it was not authoritative.

It just means that it has not been preserved for us. Exactly true, yeah, we really cannot, that's a good point. We cannot make judgments upon what we don't have, right? Because all we can talk about is what we have preserved for us, what is kept for us.

We could have been a shopping list that we didn't need. If we needed it, if we needed it, our doctrine of inspiration and preservation says that God would have preserved it for us if we needed it. If he intended that for his whole church, we would have it, but we don't have it.

And I would not assume that we have every letter that Peter ever wrote or everything that John ever wrote or everything that Paul ever wrote. I think they probably wrote all kinds of things. Paul, over his 30, 25 years of ministry, I might have think that he only wrote 13 letters in the 25 years of dealing with churches.

No, it doesn't mean that at all, but God has providentially preserved what we have and what we have preserved is canonical and recognized as authoritative. Peter, do you have a question? No, we will address that, yeah, yep.

Okay, so letter B, is that where we're at? Canonicity, okay. Yeah, it's your letter A. Within the first century, there is evidence that first, Christians were careful to only give authority to that which they knew was authentic.

All right, we shouldn't buy the idea or think that Christians back then, that any book that they had that came across their desk that they thought was from an apostle or that claimed to be from an apostle that they widely accepted or that any book that mentioned Jesus, they would have just accepted it as canonical.

That's not how, that's not their standard. Their standard was what, is it apostolic? And if it's apostolic, it's authoritative. And if it's authoritative, it comes from God. If it comes from God, it's inspired and infallible.

So the standard was apostolic writings, not just any book that mentioned Jesus. So, 2 Thessalonians 2, verse two, Paul mentions a letter that was circulated and it claimed to have come from him, that you not be quickly shaken from your composure or be disturbed either by a spirit or a message or a letter as if from us to the effect that the day of the Lord has come.

There seems to have been a letter circulating that claimed to have been from Paul that the Thessalonians, that had caused the Thessalonians some concern that they had missed the day of the Lord, that the rapture had come and they had missed it.

And Paul said that there's this letter out there as if from us, don't be swayed by that. And then at the end of 2 Thessalonians 3, 17, Paul writes, I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand and this is a distinguishing mark in every letter.

This is the way I write. There was some signature or some mark that Paul wrote on his books which gave it some sort of a seal of authenticity. And the apostle Paul there is affirming that this was a genuine letter that came from him and he is pointing to his signature, whatever he put at the end of it, which was a distinguishing mark of all the letters that he writes.

Because it was a concern in the early church that only what the apostles wrote was accepted as authoritative and inspired and inerrant. Because you had, even in the first century, heretical people, heretics and false teachers, wolves in sheep's clothing, who were claiming to have authority.

This is what plagued the church at Corinth. Men who were supposedly apostles, who claimed apostolic powers, who claimed apostolic authority. And Paul is careful to distinguish his letters from anything else that might have circulated that might have claimed to be from him but genuinely wasn't.

Okay, so we have evidence that Christians were careful only to give authority to that which they knew was authentic.

Yes.

So where is the apostolic authority conferred? You have, I would say that it is conferred in the Gospel of John where Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would bring to their mind all things that he said to them.

There was the expectation that they were going to, I mean the Great Commission certainly is part of that, go into the world and preach the Gospel to all creation. You have it in the book of Acts. You see the 12 of them, the 12 disciples gathered together with Matthias present.

Those 12 men gathered together praying and then they received the gift of the Holy Spirit and stand up and preach. The church is founded. They baptize new believers. That kind of authority as the messengers of Jesus was something that Jesus conferred upon them but also something that they would have assumed from what Jesus would have taught them even after the resurrection.

Unique to them, yeah. The term apostle was not something they just threw around. I should distinguish the term apostle in terms of capital A Apostle and small a Apostle because the word apostle just means sent one, one commissioned or sent.

So if I send my son to the grocery store to do something or send him on my behalf with power of attorney to go do something on my behalf, he becomes my apostle in that sense, a sent one. But in the New Testament, we recognize the distinction between Barnabas who was also called an apostle but he was just a messenger of the church and those who were messengers of the risen Christ given authority that was unique to them by virtue of the fact that they were taught by the Lord, which Paul was for three years in Damascus, and by virtue of the fact that they had personally seen the risen Christ.

And that's how Paul got his apostolic authority. And of course, that was one of the criteria for selecting Matthias as an apostle.

Yes?

Sorry?

Luke was not an apostle with a capital A Apostle, but he did right, yes, he did right. So when we talk about, we were gonna get to this a little bit later on today, but we're gonna get to this probably next week.

When we talk about apostolic origins or the apostolic authority, there are books in our New Testament that are not written by apostles. Luke is one, Acts is another. Mark was not written by an apostle, and neither was Hebrews, likely.

But the question is not whether they were written by apostles, but also whether they contained apostolic doctrine, apostolic content, whether they comported with apostolic teaching, and whether there were people closely associated with apostles.

So Luke was a traveling companion of the apostle Paul, and most people regard Luke's gospel basically as Paul's gospel. And the same would be said by the book of Acts. Book of Acts written under the auspices or in conjunction with the apostle Paul basically is Luke is his traveling companion.

Mark is regarded as Peter's gospel because it has the earmarks of Peter's authenticity and authority all over it. So those books, and then you have the book of Hebrews is the one that we would question.

What about the book of Hebrews? We don't even know who wrote the book of Hebrews. Could have been a guy named Joey Bagidonis. Well, Joey Bagidonis had to have been closely associated with the apostles, and the early church recognized the apostolic doctrine and the close association of whoever it was that wrote the book of Hebrews gives evidence to being personally associated with the apostles.

So it's not just, it had to be written by an apostle, but it had to have apostolic doctrine, it had to be authentically apostolic in its content, and it had to have been embraced as somebody who at least wrote under the auspices or with an apostle and had apostolic authority by virtue of its content, not just its specific authorship.

So, yeah, Bryce.

Yes.

Yep.

Yeah, it would apply to the book of James as well.

Nathel.

Would the fact that they quoted the Old Testament add to its veracity? Not necessarily, because a lot of writings back then would have quoted and could have quoted from the Old Testament. Yes, Cornell.

Yeah.

Right, yeah, right.

That's a very good point. I thought there was another question.

Was there another one? Rick, did you have a question?

Can I define apostolic? I would say that it relates to the apostles. That would be the 11 people who were left after Judas committed suicide. So the 11 disciples, they were the apostles. They added Matthias, whom I personally believe is a genuine apostle of the early church, and then you had the apostle Paul added to that as one untimely born, he describes.

So when we talk about apostolic, in this context, I'm talking about capital A apostles, those personally commissioned by the Lord Jesus Christ, not just any joblo sent out as a messenger to the churches.

Barnabas would have been an apostle in the lowercase a, apostle sense. But he wasn't a capital A apostle. He wasn't one who had seen the risen Lord who was commissioned by Christ as a mouthpiece and an authority with apostolic authority in the early church.

Okay?

Any other questions?

Okay, letter B.

We have evidence that churches, or no, yeah, letter B in your notes. We have evidence that the churches gave attention to the public reading of scripture in their services, and that would include apostolic writings.

Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 5, 27, I adjure you by the Lord to have this letter read to all the brethren. Colossians 4, 16, when this letter is read among you, have it also read in the church of the Laodiceans, and you, for your part, read my letter that is coming from Laodicea.

The Laodicean letter may be the book of Ephesians. Some people suspect that it is. It may have been another letter that Paul wrote. But regardless, the apostle Paul expected and asked that his letters be read in the public gathering amongst the church when they gathered together.

That is something that was reserved for scripture. So again, we're just making the case that in the first century, there was evidence that they expected revelation and viewed the writings of the apostles as authoritative and inspired scripture.

Third, there's evidence that apostolic books were collected and circulated. Revelation 1, 11, write in a book what you see and send it to the seven churches. So we know that the book of Revelation was circulated amongst at least seven churches.

James 1, 1, to the 12 tribes who were dispersed abroad, greetings. And we might assume that the book of James, from that is written to a large dispersed group of people, that multiple copies were made very quickly and distributed to all the people that James had addressed his letter to.

First Peter 1, 1, to those who reside as aliens scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, who are chosen. Peter would have expected his letter, addressed to all those various people groups and people scattered into those regions, to be very quickly copied and circulated amongst them because the letter was not just sent to an individual person or to an individual church, but to churches scattered throughout these regions.

So apostolic books were collected and they were circulated, or we could even say that they were copied and circulated. And then letter D, are we there yet? Yes, letter D, Peter possessed, or at least knew of a collection of Paul's letters and he regarded them as scripture.

Second Peter 3, 15 to 16, just as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given him, wrote to you as also in all his letters speaking in them of these things in which are some things hard to understand.

If you think some of Paul's writings are hard to understand, so did the apostle Peter, which the untaught and unstable distort as they do also the rest of the scriptures to their own destruction. Peter is affirming that Paul is an inspired writer.

Now Peter gives credence to Luke as an inspired writer in 1 Timothy chapter five, where he quotes something that Jesus says in Luke's gospel and he quotes that as scripture. Paul was aware of a gospel that Luke had written and he quotes that, the words of the Lord Jesus, and he calls Luke's gospel scripture.

So a question was asked last week, what do you say to somebody who wants to disregard all of Paul's writings and say Paul's writings are not scripture, only the other stuff is scripture, when you take books out of the Bible?

It was a question that was asked last week. Well, who are you going to then affirm, who are you going to affirm as an authority in that case? Would you recognize Peter as authoritative? Well, you would have to, wouldn't you?

Well, Peter confessed that Paul's writings were scripture. And if Paul's writings are scripture, and that means he had authority to write scripture, and if Paul's writings are scripture, then when Paul calls Luke an inspired writer, that gives us Luke and Acts as well.

So now you're back to all of Paul's writings with Luke and Acts on the basis of rejecting them to affirm that Peter is actually an authority. That make sense? All right, so thus, we have evidence from the first century in the writings of the New Testament itself that New Testament books were verified, remember they accepted them only as authoritative, Paul said don't accept anything that doesn't come from me, doesn't bear this mark, that they expected those writings to be verified as genuinely apostolic, they read them, they copied them, they circulated them, and collected them even inside of the first century.

So even before the end of the New Testament was written, Christians had already began to discern which books were authoritative, to regard them as such, to treat them as such, to circulate them and preserve them as authoritative, and began to distribute them amongst the churches.

So that's within the first century, now we're gonna turn and look at canonicity after the apostles, did the early church fathers recognize a canon? Now in one sense, we're doing something that's a bit anachronistic, you know what anachronism is?

Again, anachronism is when you see something that doesn't belong in the time period in which it is sort of set, right? You're watching an Old Western, you see somebody wearing an Apple Watch, and you think that's a bit of anachronism, they didn't have Apple Watches in the Old West.

Okay, so when I talk about canonicity in the first century, or canonicity in the second century and third century, it's somewhat of an anachronism, because we're taking a concept that we recognize today, and we're kind of reading that back a little bit into that time period, but all we're doing is asking, did they recognize a corpus, a group, a body, of inspired and authoritative writings?

That's what we're asking. So we talk about, did the early church fathers of the first century recognize a canon? I'm using a word that we might date to later to really capture a concept that we're asking, did they recognize these authorities in the first century?

And then shortly after the first century, in the time of the post-apostolic early church fathers, which would be the years, say, 100 to the year 300 or 350. So those early church fathers, and we refer to them as the early church fathers, the post-apostolic fathers, they quoted from the New Testament books, the 27 New Testament books, over 86 ,000 times.

Now I said some months ago when we were back talking about the transmission of the New Testament text and the documents that if you were to take all of the manuscripts of the New Testament and all the codices that we've gathered throughout history and you were to burn all of them, that you could still reconstruct almost the entire New Testament just from the writings of the early church fathers from the years 100 to the year 300.

Because the early church fathers quoted so prolifically from the New Testament text that you can, I think it was one quote that I gave you, you could reconstruct the entire New Testament except for 11 verses in the book of Revelation, just from the quotations of the early church fathers.

All right, so these men referred to the writings which we have in our New Testament, they referred to them as authoritative and as scripture. And my early church fathers were talking about Ignatius, who was a leader in the church in Antioch in AD 112, Polycarp of Smyrna, who lived from 70 to 155 AD, and he actually, Polycarp actually sat under and was discipled by the apostle John.

Clement of Rome, who lived in around 100 AD, Origen, who wrote from Alexandria around 230 AD, there's Clement of Alexandria, who was Origen's teacher. So the question is, those early church fathers between the years 100 and 300, did they recognize a corpus, a body of inspired documents, and did they refer to them as scripture?

And all of this is intended, by the way, to counter the notion that we didn't even know what books belonged in the Bible until the year 400, when some council met and said, these are the 27, and that it was some stooge of Constantine or some disciple of Constantine or some pope who conferred that authority on the books.

We're going through all of this to show that no, from the very early stages within the first century itself, as soon as these writings were written and circulated, they were recognized as scripture. The only question is, did everybody recognize them all at once?

And the answer to that is no, because those books were written, and it might take a long time before those books even began to be circulated and recognized as authoritative, simply because people, not that people didn't believe them to be authoritative or apostolic, but people didn't even know sometimes that those books existed.

So the writings of the early church fathers. Yeah, so we're under number six in your notes, and I'm just gonna give you some information. You don't have to, there's nothing to fill in there unless you wanna just jot down some of these details.

The writings of the early church fathers. Tertullian, he wrote in 220 AD, and here's what he said, quote, in the Lord's apostles, we possess our authority, for even they did not of themselves choose to introduce anything, but faithfully delivered to the nations the doctrine which they had received from Christ,.

Close quote.

So there's Tertullian, writing 200 years after the apostles, and what did he say? Actually, 150 years after the lifetime of the apostles, and he said it was in the apostles that we have our authority.

So he's recognizing something there, that the apostles were the mouthpiece of God, and that if it was apostolic in its authorship, or if it was apostolic in its acceptance within the church, because it had apostolic doctrine, it was authentically an apostolic book, and it had apostolic authority, that that is then the authority that we recognize, and not because it's a spiritual book, but because it is apostolic in its origin.

Polycarp, now remember, Polycarp was a disciple of John, the author of the Gospel of John, and the author of 1 John, 2 John, 3 John. Polycarp, who lived 70 to 155 AD, he wrote to the church at Philippi, and he quoted 50 times from 16 New Testament books, including Matthew, Luke, Acts, Romans, 1 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Hebrews.

Now he quoted 50 times from 16 New Testament books. Now should we, are we to assume that because Polycarp, who was a disciple of the apostle John, only quoted from 16 books, that he therefore only recognized 16 books as the authoritative?

Should we assume that? There's no reason we should assume that, right? You know how long it's been since I quoted the book of Philemon? A long time. But the fact that I don't quote from it frequently doesn't mean that I don't recognize it as canonical or authoritative.

It just might mean that Polycarp didn't have occasion to quote from the other books, or it might mean that he didn't even know some of those other books existed at the time. Clement of Rome, in 100 AD, he was a leader in the church of Rome, he wrote to the church at Corinth.

He quoted Psalm 118, verse 18, and Hebrews 12, verse 6, referring to both as the holy word. So there we have, around the year 100, the book of Hebrews being recognized as scripture by Clement of Rome.

He quoted it as the holy word. In the same letter, he refers to Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, because he had a copy with him. He also shows an awareness of one of the gospels, Hebrews, Romans, Acts, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, 1 Timothy, Titus, 1 Peter, and the book of James.

Irenaeus of Lyon, who lived in 125 to 200 AD, he was a student of Polycarp. Now, Polycarp was a student of whom?

John, okay?

Irenaeus of Lyon was a student of Polycarp. He wrote five books, called Against Heresies, in 81 AD. He quoted from every New Testament book, except Philemon, 3rd John, James, 2nd Peter, and Hebrews. Now, ought we to assume that because he didn't quote from those books, that he didn't recognize them as authoritative?

We can't assume that, can we? He only accepted Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as inspired testaments to the life of Christ. He accepted Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, coincidentally, those were our four gospels, as the only inspired testaments to the life of Christ.

Now, Irenaeus was a disciple of Polycarp, and Polycarp was a disciple of whom?

John.

Okay, so we're talking about very early recognition amongst those who knew the apostles, very early recognition of apostolic divine authority. Irenaeus had a canon of New Testament books which was almost identical to ours, around 180 AD.

Now, Tertullian, he lived in North Africa around AD 220, he attacked Marcion, remember we talked about Marcion a couple weeks ago, the one who rejected all of the Old Testament, anything Jewish, and just loved Paul's writings?

He attacked Marcion, and he defended all the letters of Paul, he referred to all the New Testament books except James, 2nd and 3rd John, and 2nd Peter. He rejected the Shepherd of Hermes as non-canonical.

So even then, they were recognizing around 200 which books were authoritative and which books were not authoritative, and he actually named some non-authoritative books. So when somebody says, well, the Shepherd of Hermes is one of those lost books of the Bible, the assumption behind that objection is that at some point, the Shepherd of Hermes was accepted widely by the church, and then it was somehow lost out of the Bible and then discovered in the basement of a brothel in Philadelphia or something, and this was one of the lost books that suddenly we have to accept now.

There's horrible assumptions that go into this whole lost books of the Bible type of nonsense. By the way, Irenaeus, or Tertullian, who referred to all the New Testament books except James, 2nd, 3rd John, and 2nd Peter, ought we to assume that because he didn't reference James, 2nd, 3rd John, and 2nd Peter, that he didn't regard them as authoritative?

Should we assume that? Didn't recognize them as canonical? We can't make that assumption. You see, people on the other side, well, they will look at these exceptions where they say, well, that church father, he didn't recognize these books.

He didn't recognize those books or he didn't quote from those books that we can find. There's a difference between those two things, and we have to view church history that way. Origen, who lived in 230 AD, he listed all 27 books, but he admitted that some people had doubts about some of them.

Some people had doubts about some of them. Doubts existed about Hebrews, James, 2nd John, 3rd John, Jude, and 2nd Peter, but Origen himself did not share those doubts. So Origen just recognizes around 230, he lists all 27 books, but he says some of these books, there are some people who have doubts about some of these books.

Now again, they're Hebrews, James, 2nd John, 3rd John, Jude, and 2nd Peter. Why would somebody have doubts about Hebrews, do you think? Right, could have been Joey Bagadonis who wrote the book of Hebrews.

We don't know. They didn't know who wrote the book of Hebrews. There are other early church fathers who believed it to be apostolic, and some early church fathers who viewed it as one of Paul's epistles.

I don't think that Paul wrote it, but I do believe it was apostolic. I think one of the best theories about who wrote it is that it was a message preached by one of the apostles written down by somebody else who heard that message or transcribed by somebody who heard that message.

The book of Hebrews bears all the marks of a given oratory address, a verbal defense of something. And somebody, maybe Apollos, maybe some traveling companion of one of the apostles wrote that down and thought that's a great message to circulate, and so it would bear the marks of an apostle, or maybe it was preached by somebody close to an apostle.

That's another possibility. Why would doubts exist about James? Bryce mentioned this just a few minutes ago. James was not one of the apostles, but he was a leader in the early church and worked alongside John and Peter in the early church in Jerusalem.

How about 2 John, 3 John, Jude, and 2 Peter? The reason there were doubts about those books by some is due to the fact that the authorship of those books was questioned by a few. They were probably not as widely circulated as other books, namely Paul's epistles, and so there might have been doubts by some who were waiting to see can we verify that these books are authoritative, written by an apostle, or commissioned by an apostle.