Canon of Scripture

The Practical Problem That Forced a Canon Discussion

Well, we got down to about, I don't know, Glendale or so, and I went, oh man, left my computer at home and just completely spaced it out. I have my iPad and I could connect it to the projector if I had the right connections, which are also at home.

So totally spaced it. I did this, that entire presentation last night at a Korean Presbyterian church, and so I guess I will have to, in a couple weeks, pick that up, because no way to do it. No way to do it.

Got to have the computer, so that's... Old school. Yeah, well, I can't do the presentation old school. So that was just brilliance on my part. And so yes, I will go old school. And actually, I'm going to blame Brother Paul for this, because he asked me to address another issue, and now I don't have any excuses not to do that.

So I think you were praying for something, and as a result, a veil was placed over my mind, and well, I think you're probably right. Actually, a couple of you in the room probably know why I forgot the computer this morning, and that is, starting at 6 o 'clock tomorrow morning, I'm doing something absolutely insane, and pretty focused on that.

So that's probably why it just went in one ear and out the other. But I'll be getting on my bike at 6 a .m. tomorrow morning on a trainer in my house, and we'll be getting off of it at 6 .30 tomorrow evening or so.

A friend of mine did this a couple weeks ago, and in the process, he burned 6 ,500 calories and rode 250 .2 miles. So I'm not sure if I will get close to that, but I probably will be close to that. And so it is sheer insanity.

A couple of you know I'm raising some funds to go to South Africa doing this crazy thing. So that's probably what caused me to just be an airhead. So hopefully that won't cause me to be an airhead as we discuss the issue of the canon of scripture.

The Canon of Scripture as a Theological Question

As I said, Brother Paul said, Now you could talk about how we got certain books of the Bible and not other books of the Bible, and stuff like that. And I said, Well, it's really not a part of this particular presentation.

They're obviously related subjects, but it's not a part of this particular presentation. So evidently he started praying at that point that something would happen, and it did. So we will take this as an opportunity to address at least some issues along those lines, though certainly there's much more that could be said.

Because when we talk about the issue of the canon, and that's with one end, two ends goes boom. One end is the authoritative listing of books. There are a lot of issues to raise. For example, you have to divide very clearly between the Old and New Testament canons as far as discussion of their history and their development.

Especially because, as Christians, it's fairly easy to say, Well, we have Christ's authority explicitly in regards to the Old Testament canon, and I believe that we do. But then, how do you deal with the New Testament canon?

And then you also have the reality that there are disputes. There is one major dispute within the history of the Church regarding the Old Testament canon, and that has to do with the books that we call apocryphal books, which the Roman Catholics call deuterocanonical books.

But there really isn't, in regards to the New Testament, in a major way, there are some very, very small groups that would have variations in New Testament books. But as far as any major sense, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant, etc., etc., that's not really much of an issue.

The arguments have to do primarily with the Old Testament canon at that point. And so, you have those issues to deal with. But then, beyond all of that, I want to start off by saying the vast majority, until recently anyways, and it's still the vast majority, but the vast majority of books that you would read on this subject, I believe, come at it backwards.

And it's understandable why they do it. But the vast majority of books on the subject of the canon of Scripture start with a historical overview of developments between Malachi and Matthew in regards to the Old Testament canon, or especially in regards to the New Testament.

They'll talk about this early church father said this, and that early church father said that, and you've got all these criteria that you develop. You look at, well, basically the early church talked about apostolicity, was this book connected to an apostle or someone who knew the apostles, antiquity, and you come up with all these criteria and so on and so forth by looking at historical materials, and then sort of develop your perspectives from there.

Well, the problem I have with that is it's a discussion of a theological issue beginning from a historical perspective. The canon, by its very nature, is theological. What are we talking about fundamentally?

We're talking about what God has done in the inspiration of Scripture. And so the whole issue of inspiration, of supernatural activity, I mean, if you're just going to limit it to historical stuff, then you're going to end up with a historical discussion of historical books considered by certain groups to be authoritative.

That's as far as you can go. You can't get anywhere beyond that. And so it leads to either a lack of confidence that we can really know anything about the canon of Scripture, or what it has often led to is a searching for an extra-biblical authority to provide confidence as to what the canon is.

In other words, Rome's claim to have canonical authority, the ability to define canon, so on and so forth. I was really forced to think about this back in the early 90s when I first started studying, well, actually late 80s, when I started studying Roman Catholicism, and especially as I was dealing with the arguments that Roman Catholicism presents against Sola Scriptura.

And I remember very clearly one day going out on a ride somewhere about 1994, I think, and all of a sudden it struck me why it was that we were in error in regards to our defense of the canon of Scripture and sufficiency of Scripture and stuff, where we had taken the wrong step in so many of the books that are out there.

And I was so concerned I was going to forget what I had just thought of that I turned around and went straight back to the house and wrote out an outline of it and then got back on the bike and finished the ride.

Inspiration, Authority, and the Canon as an Artifact of God’s Action

So, if any of you have read my little book, Scripture Alone, there are a couple of chapters in the book on the subject of the canon of Scripture. And you'll know that I approach it from a theological perspective.

That is, I define it as an artifact of inspiration. And I use the illustration of my own books, the reality that as soon as I finished writing my first book, a canon of my works came into existence. I did not have to open up a computer file and name it the Canon of the Writings of James White for that to exist.

I knew what I had written, and I was the only one that had infallible knowledge of what I had written. Nobody else knew. Other people would have had a proximate knowledge, maybe a pretty good knowledge, but nobody was with me every single moment that I was writing that first book.

And so, I would have an infallible knowledge of the canon of my books, even if I did not create an external list or let anybody else know. And then, as I wrote the second book, again, I did not have to add it to this external listing, but there was the reality that now I had written two books, and then three books, and then eventually 22, 23, 24 books.

And I, again, have never opened up a file. Now, there are lists someplace. Other people have done it, but I've never opened up a file and said, these are the books that I have written. And yet, there is a canon because the act of authoring a book is something that I do, and I have an infallible knowledge of it.

Of course, infallible, not so much anymore. I mean, if someone were to ask me right now to list them all, I'd probably forget one or two that are no longer in print. That's true, but that's due to age and not having Roxy's memory.

I think Roxy just sort of sucks from all the rest of us, and that's how she does it. And all the rest of us are left going, ah, ah, ah. I think that's sort of how that works. I'm not sure. But anyway, so I use that to point out that when we're talking about the canon, we're talking about something that is descriptive of God's activity in time.

And it took place progressively over approximately 1 ,500 years with, as we've heard before, approximately 40 some odd authors. We don't know exactly. There are a number of anonymous books. There are books that clearly had more than one hand involved in the final state of their production.

And so it's a process that took time, and that would mean that the canon, as God understood it to exist as we would view it in time, and obviously from God's decree, he knew exactly what he was going to inspire from the beginning, but we experienced that decree in time, and so as he was progressively revealing the scriptures, you would have this expansion of the canon.

And who always had infallible knowledge of it? Well, God did. Why? Because God knew what he had inspired and what he had not. Other people were writing books. Other people write books today. I know lots of other authors who have written lots of different books.

And so the canon of my writings must be distinguished from the canon of anyone else's writings. Well, people have been writing books for a long, long time, and so as books were being written, God would know what he had directed to be written as his word and what he had not.

And therefore there would be a distinction, and so the canon would have a purpose in its existence. It would refer to something in reality, in history itself. And so the question then becomes, all right, if the canon absolutely known by God is simply the result of his action of inspiration, then when he finishes that work, and the question, of course, would rise, well, how do you know that he's finished?

Well, you would look at what he has already written, and if it indicates that there is a finality in the last revelation that he's given, then you would take that seriously. You would look at all of what it says and come to conclusions based upon what it says.

But if there is a point of completion for that act of revelation, then the canon becomes closed in the sense of God's act of inspiring scripture has come to an end. And interestingly enough, all the major branches of what is called Christianity by the world agrees that that happened a long time ago.

There really isn't any question about that, and I'm not, of course, including Mormonism or other groups that claim prophets or things like that. But everybody agrees, even Rome agrees, at least formally, that that has finished and there has been no scripture given past the apostolic age.

I think on a functional level, there might be some issues about that that we could get into at some other point in time. But anyway. So then the big question becomes, all right, well, okay, so God knows exactly what he inspired and exactly what he didn't.

Well, duh. That seems pretty obvious, but it's important to start there. Because then the question that has actually taken up most of the thinking of the church over the years can be framed in the proper theological context.

And that is, okay, it's one thing for God to know. How about us? How can we know? That's the whole issue. When there were arguments in the early church about the book of Revelation, Hebrews, 2 Peter, how do we know that they got it right?

And of course, historically, there was never a time, there were never any smoke-filled rooms and backroom dealings. Well, I'll tell you what. I know you really like Revelation. I'm not so much. And I like Hebrews.

So I'll give you a Hebrews and we'll take your Revelation. And some Cuban cigars. Something like that. That never happened. There were never any deals being made. Votes were sort of close. Oh boy, we just made that.

That simply didn't take place. You look in church history and you may find people saying that all over YouTube and stuff like that. But when you actually look into meaningful historical sources that actually use original sources and things like that, you don't find any evidence of that whatsoever.

That's not how it took place. And so, how is it then that we can theologically know the content of the canon? Well, the argument that I've made is I will go through various texts of scripture. Paul, for example, in Romans chapter 15 talks about how these things were written for our example.

He's talking about the Old Testament scriptures and that God has given us this Revelation so that it might be an encouragement to us. So we might know who He is and how He's acted with His people in the past.

This is an encouragement to us. It's a direction to us. And so, we derive from the scriptures themselves. And if we want to argue the case, we can derive a lot of this just simply from the Old Testament scriptures and Isaiah, his word going forth and having a purpose, all the rest of this stuff.

And then Jesus, who rises from the dead, gives us the authority of this Old Testament scripture. You never find Jesus arguing with any of the Jews as to what was and was not scripture because the reality is it was a settled fact in the days of Christ.

In this case, the 22 books, and you go, 22 books? Yeah, well, they use different numbers, 22 or 24. That's actually our Old Testament canon. You go, I counted 39 last I looked. They numbered the books differently.

For example, Lamentations was numbered with Jeremiah. All the minor prophets were a single book. So take all the minor prophets, squish them into one. And you can do that in a couple of different ways to come to 22 or 24, probably because they were trying to match the number of letters, the Hebrew alphabet, something along those lines.

But the Jewish canon is the canon that we as Protestants have. The Jews did not accept the apocryphal books as scripture. Those books actually, a number of the books actually disclaim being scripture.

Some of them even make reference to the three-fold canon of the Old Testament, the Torah, the Nevi 'im, and the Ketuvim, the Tanakh, the law, the prophets, and the writings. And those books were never laid up in the temple.

This was a practice of the Jews where they laid up a copy of the scriptures in the temple itself. Remember, we can go back and read about, you know, Josiah, and they discovered the law and so on and so forth.

Well, in light of that, they would lay up these books and they never laid up the apocryphal books in the temple. But they did the books that we have in our Old Testament. And so there's a tremendous amount of evidence.

And if you really, really, really, really want to go in-depth on this, I mean, really deep, there's an excellent book by a fellow by the name of Roger Beckwith called The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church.

It's detailed, it's scholarly, but there you go. If you want to really dig into it, that's a book that you'd want to deal with. And so we can look at the Old Testament Canon that way, and then what we have to do is go, well, can we see a, can we lay some foundations here as to how God led his people to recognize the scriptures with such finality that Jesus can speak as he spoke in Matthew chapter 22.

And remember the incident in Matthew chapter 22 where the Sadducees come to test Jesus. And they say to, they tell the story of the woman and the seven brothers. And when they get done, Jesus' first words out of Jesus' mouth were so wonderfully politically incorrect.

It was, you're wrong. You are not knowing the scriptures nor the power of God. Have you not read what was written to you? And then he quotes from the statement from the writings of Moses. I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.

He is not the God of the dead, but the living. And he bases his argument upon the tenth verb. I am the God of Abraham, not I was the God of Abraham. So Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are still alive in the presence of God.

And this refutes the Sadducees' argument. And that's what we normally focus upon is, wow, you know, the scriptures must have been accurately transmitted to us for Jesus to argue from the tenth of a verb and so on and so forth.

And that's all true. But in the process, we frequently look over and miss what to me is the most amazing part of what Jesus said. And that is, he said, Have you not read what was spoken to you by God?

Now think about that phrase. Have you not read what was spoken to you by God? Normally when you say, have you not read, the next verb is going to be something along the lines of what I wrote. You know, you might text somebody today.

And, you know, Kelly will text me all the time. I don't know why we've done that. It's frequently faster to actually call someone. But we'll text. And the funny thing is, she uses voice recognition stuff when she's driving.

Hopefully, anyways. And all of us in the family are making collections of Kelly texts because some of them are really funny. They're really great. And her phone almost has a sense of humor in how to interpret the spoken word.

It really does. And some stuff has come across that was just hilarious. But, you know, you get home and she might say, Well, did you not read what I wrote to you? And our normal response is, I did, but I couldn't understand it.

But read and wrote would go together. But if it was something spoke, it would be, Did you not hear what I spoke to you? But that's not what Jesus says. Jesus says, Have you not read what God spoke to you saying?

So he uses two different terms that would require us to understand that from his perspective, what had been written 1 ,200 to 1 ,400 years earlier, when read in his day, was the same as God speaking those words to those individuals at that time.

So this is a very high view of Scripture, a very high view of the inspiration of Scripture. But what follows from that, obviously, is the reality that Jesus held men accountable to the Scriptures as they existed in that day.

And that means that there had to be some kind of meaningful canonical process that took place that allowed that kind of assertion to be made. If there was a tremendous amount of confusion, the response could have easily been from the Sadducees, Oh, we didn't know!

But no one ever responds to Jesus by saying, Oh, I didn't know that was Scripture. You know, the Council of Jamnia hasn't met yet to discuss Esther, so we're really not sure about the canon. No, that never takes place.

And so there is an understanding that underlies all of Jesus' interactions and uses of Scripture, when he says to the Pharisees, the Scriptures cannot be broken, and so on and so forth, that in that 400-year period, and we know from the writings of the Jews during that time period, that they recognized that the bath kol, the divine voice, had ceased.

That was one of the reasons there was so much messianic fervor, is because it was a given that Malachi was the last of the prophets, that the voice of God had stopped speaking, and therefore, what was the next thing?

What was everything pointing toward? And so they were looking for the Messiah because of that. And so, what happened during that 400 years? Well, there weren't any angels that came down from heaven with golden plates that had a golden index on them that said, here you go, Genesis, Exodus, you know, Malachi.

But that wasn't their order, by the way. Malachi was not the last, by any stretch of the imagination. The Hebrew canon goes from Genesis to 2 Chronicles, and everything else is poured into that, and so the order of the books is completely different than we have it, which is significant, by the way, because when Jesus talks about the blood of Abel to the son of Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, slain at the altar, Abel's in Genesis, and that other story's in 2 Chronicles.

So, he was bookending at least the Hebrew order of the canon at that particular point in time. And if you want to know about Berechiah and all that stuff, look at the extensive discussion of that in Beckwith's discussion of it.

Anyway, something happened, and there weren't any divine counsels. There simply wasn't any human intermediation in the sense of an external authority that comes along and says, this is the canon. And yet, somehow, in that time period, in fact, somehow, really not in the 400 years, but the right books were laid up in the temple 200 years before Christ.

So, it was really in about 200 years. The people of God, not functioning as some judicial body with some external authority outside of Scripture, know what God's Word is. And interestingly enough, when you look at the history between the writing of the New Testament and the first formal listings thereof, the first formal listing that we have of the 27 books of the New Testament as we possess them today, is found in Athanasius' 39th Festal Letter from 367 A .D.

Normally what you hear are councils, like Hippo and Carthage. Well, yeah, but they're actually a little bit past the first full listing we have. And then we have a much earlier list, which unfortunately is fragmentary, which comes from about 185, 190-ish, called the Muratorian Fragment, which has the vast majority of the New Testament.

But it's a fragment, so it's missing the beginning and the end, and there's some discussions as to which books are being referred to and stuff like that. So it's interesting that you have pretty much the same time frames involved in both, and in neither do you have supernatural voices from on high, you don't have angelic visitations, golden plates, visions, or anything else.

You don't have councils getting together, and, well, Gospel of Thomas? Nah. Gospel of John? Okay. That didn't happen either. Those Gnostic Gospels were never taken seriously by anywhere near a majority of the people of God, or even a small minority of the people of God.

Everyone knew they were much later, they weren't apostolic, they didn't come from Jerusalem or anywhere around that area. And so, especially when it came to the Gospels, there was just no question about that issue.

But there were arguments about smaller books or later books, and I don't know about you, I think it's really good that there were arguments about a book that talks about seven-headed monsters. I think that's a good thing.

I don't think the early church should have been going around, Hey, you know what? We don't have enough books with seven-headed monsters in it. Can we have some more? Anybody got some more? We'd like to throw them in here, because they're very entertaining and will make for awesome books back in the 1970s, coming down in the future.

That's not what they were doing, thankfully. And there were lots of questions about, well, what was the original message of this? Is this really related to John? And so on and so forth. So you have a process that takes place, and it's not marked by externalized, miraculous events that are observable in the sense of lightning coming down, and there's the twenty-seven books etched into the face of stone or something like that.

That would be nice, but that's simply not what took place. So the question is, does the scripture tell us that God has a purpose in his church, knowing what the scriptures are? And I think that they most clearly do.

Preserving and Recognizing the New Testament Canon

And so, from my perspective, the question becomes, well, if God extended so much power to bring about the existence of these divine writings, where he uses human intermediation, as Peter describes it, men spoke from God as they're carried along by the Holy Spirit.

If there is this extension of divine power in the inspiring of these books, then is there not also going to be an extension of divine power in the preservation and in the recognition by God's people of the authority of these books?

And I think it follows rather logically in line with Jesus' authority in the establishment of the Old Testament canon, that that is exactly what takes place in the New Testament canon, which is why when people say, well, what if we refine all these early manuscripts, and what if we find another mummy mask and discover Paul's actual second epistle to the Corinthians, and that our second Corinthians is actually third Corinthians, or something along those lines.

Shouldn't that mean we have to reprint all of our Bibles and put the new Pauline letter in? And my answer to that would be, no. No. And you go, why not? Well, let's say we found Paul's laundry list. That's not going in.

There's no reason for it. If scripture is given for the edification of God's people and the edification of God's church, I see no reason to think that God would inspire a letter that he then is somehow incapable of giving to his church for 2 ,000 years.

I just don't see any reason to believe that that would be the case. Even if you could actually establish that it was Paul who wrote it and all the other associated issues that would immediately be raised.

So I see a direct correspondence between the extension of the supernatural power and activity of God in bringing scripture into existence and the purpose for which he gives it, which is to edify his people and his church and to let us know how we are to worship him and who he is and so on and so forth.

And so if he could inspire it, but then couldn't actually preserve it long enough for his church to even know about it, I'm sorry, that makes no sense to me. The God who raised Jesus from the dead, the God who predestined the entire crucifixion to do whatever your hand and your will determined beforehand should take place, isn't going to go, oh man, I wanted to give him that letter, but it just fell into that lake and it's never going to be found again.

Does God stub his toe and kick in the dirt and go, oh man, no, I don't think he does. The open theist God does, but that's a whole different ball of wax there. I just don't see that happening. So that gives us a theological foundation upon which to discuss the issue of the canon that transcends the history.

The history is important. I'm not saying we shouldn't look at the history. My concern is the vast majority of the discussion that has taken place, especially in the modern era, is all on the subject of history and never takes into consideration the theological aspect, and yet, on the basis of that history, they then come to theological conclusions.

That's the shell game. You put the thing under the shells and move them around and so on and so forth. That's the shell game of a lot of modern scholarship, is that you'll say, well, we can't really discuss the theology, we can't allow for the idea of inspiration, we can't, you know, we can't...

And even Christian theologians do this. I heard a really well-known Christian theologian two weeks ago say that, well, you know, we establish the authority of Scripture by first starting off with the idea that, not that the Bible's inspired, but that the Gospels give us an accurate historical record of Jesus, and then we derive from that that Jesus had these authorities, and then we've got a basis for...

And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back up the truck. How could any simply reliable historical document be sufficient to establish that Jesus was who Jesus claimed to be?

The best I could do is tell you this guy claimed that. That's not enough to actually prove that. It's amazing. So a lot of people say, well, you know, we just start with the general reliability of these books and we sort of try to reason from there, as if you're going to just sort of create this structure.

I don't think that works. And what happens is historians will then say, well, you know, so we're really not sure. And then once they're really not sure, then the theological conclusion is, well, we can't create a real theology from the current canon because it might be wrong.

I mean, Hebrews might not belong in there, and, you know, maybe some of those Gnostic books, you know, they do belong in there, and maybe some stuff is missing, so we don't really know. And so what the conclusion they end up coming to has big theological ramifications, but theology wasn't allowed in until you get to the conclusion.

And that's what I mean by this shell game. You know, it's Bart Ehrman. You know, Bart Ehrman, he refuses. Believe me, we tried. He refuses to debate the theological aspects of his teachings because, well, I'm an agnostic.

I'm not making any theological claims. And yet all of his conclusions are massively theological, and he knows it. Well, I can't believe that this is the inspired word of God because there's textual variation, and God would never have allowed that.

Well, that sounds like theology to me, Bart. And he just won't deal with it. Well, that's what you've got in a whole lot of liberal theology as well. And so let me recommend those two little chapters in my book, but let me highly recommend two books that have come out recently by Dr. Michael Kruger.

K-R-U-G-E-R. Dr. Michael Kruger. The Canon Revisited and Rethinking the Canon, I think. The second one, for some reason the name just doesn't stick with me really well. But two new books by Michael Kruger.

They're both available online, Amazon, etc., etc. Dr. Kruger is the president of the Charlotte campus of Reformed Theological Seminary. When I lectured there, I'm going to be teaching there next January.

I'm looking forward to that. I just hope they don't have a snowmageddon again. Last time I flew into Charlotte, I got stuck there forever. Ever. So, anyway. But I really realized that I was earning my gray beard, white beard, when I sat in Dr. Kruger's office talking to him and to Dr. James Anderson, who I've known for years.

He teaches apologetics. He's going to be taking off for a few weeks, and I'll be filling in for him in January. And I came to the sudden, stark, soul-crushing realization that I was the oldest man in the room.

Dr. Kruger is actually younger than I am. And I was like, okay, alright. But when I first read the Canon Revisited, I was like, finally. Someone saying exactly what I've been saying all along in much deeper terms, much more expansive terms.

And he has a blog as well where he has, for example, simplified some of his books into some blog articles. If you want something a little shorter to read, it's called Canon Fodder. C-A-N-O-N Fodder.

We've all got to come up with some funny little name for our blog. But it's called Canon Fodder. So he's putting out some really, really good material. And it's from a presuppositional, reformed, high-theology, conservative perspective.

And yet he's written some other books on the text of the New Testament. We're talking high-end scholarship here, Oxford-level scholarship here. And so he doesn't ignore the historical stuff, but he gets it right.

He starts with the theology and then puts the history in the proper context. And so those two relatively new books, I think the first one was about three or four years old, and the other one only came out last year, would be very useful.

Yes, sir? Question of Canon. Sounds like it. Sounds like it, yeah. Yeah. See, I said last year, and I'm already a year off. But, yeah, those two books by Michael Kruger I would highly, highly recommend to you on that subject.

Closing Application and Prayer

Okay? So there you go. That's not what I had planned last evening to say this morning. But you've got to roll with the punches, especially when you leave your computer at home. So I'm not going to be here the next two weeks.

I will be in Florida. I have two debates, two dialogues, I'm sorry, next Saturday. On Islam, a debate on baptism the following Monday. Pretty much speaking every single day, sometimes with hours of driving in between locations.

It's going to be a long nine days, but your prayers are appreciated. But we'll get back to where we were, wherever that was, in the New Testament reliability presentation once I get back. So my apologies for being a space cadet this morning, but hopefully it was useful anyways.

And Paul's going, yep, that's exactly what my plan was. So gotcha, gotcha, all the way along. So, all right, let's close our time with a word of prayer. Father, we thank you for this time. We thank you for the opportunity of considering your truth and your word.

We do thank you for your sovereign action in not only the inspiring of your word, but the preservation of your word, the collection of your word, your gift to the church. We thank you for that. As we open that word now in the service, we ask that you would be honored and glorified in all things.

We pray in Christ's name. Amen.