Introduction

Lord, your word is a light to our fetal, a light, a lamp to our fetal, a light to our path. It is through keeping your word that we are warned about the path of sin that we are guided in the path of righteousness. Lord, I pray that in this class during our thirteen weeks together on Monday nights, you would have the sense that you are guiding us through your word to your truth to yourself. I ask, Lord, that the size of this class would not get in the way, getting to know one another and having our questions asked. I ask, Lord, that whether we are engaged in careful reading of your word or in big questions about life, whether engaged in personal edification or training ourselves for the guidance of the church, that we would be pleased to have the sense that we are even in your presence, even while we are about our academic business. Lord, we commit this night and every night to you, we pray through Christ, amen. In a word, what I want to accomplish is to help you master the occasions, to master the backgrounds, master the concerns of the books we study, which are Hebrews your Revelation, and as a bonus, just for you, we are also going to cover the pastoral piousles, that's first and second Timothy, and Titus as well as time permits at the end of the class. That's because the other course that's like this, New Testament survey, generally does not get to the pastoral piousles, if you are taking classes at night, you probably wouldn't get into those books. We'll spend a little bit of time in those books at the end. We want to get a feel for those books and above all to get a sense of the unique contribution that the books, Hebrews, James, Peter, First John, and Revelation make to the Christian faith, to our belief, to our life, to the canon as Christians, more about that, of course, as the course goes by. For those of you who like to know how things run, here we go, toward the bottom of this page. First of all, grading, and you can read that for yourself, basically A means great, B means good, C means okay, D means not okay, so we hope that there are no Ds or Fs, but that's the basic standard, 90% is ordinarily an A, 80% of B and so on. You'll be graded as follows. I'm going to make a small adjustment by request, I already think a sensible request, small adjustment what's on here, you're going to have a test, sort of a one-third of the course or 30% of the course test at the beginning of week five, that'll cover what happens tonight and it'll cover the book of Hebrews, week five starting off class. Then second, there will be a final, and that'll cover the rest of the class, and third, you will have reflection papers. Now there are eight reflection papers, a reflection paper is a one-page essay on the topics that I ask you to think about. There are actually 13 of them listed, and you have to choose any eight, and a couple of weeks there are two options, most weeks there's just one option, write me one page, by one page I mean, for those of you who like it this way, I'll say 400 words is a page if you have a word count. Now, you say what if I really get going, can I go up to 500 words sometime because I just have these wonderful ideas that I can't bear to fail to put on paper? Yes, you can, you can do that once or twice. Then you have to make up for it by writing a short one, and this is for your protection and the protection of my graders who know that they have to grade a lot of papers, but for your protection, I don't want you to think the more I write, the better my grade. These are supposed to be short, this is not supposed to be a time-consuming, life-dominating class, okay? So keep it short, keep it simple, reflect on things. I am not going to collect those as I usually do entirely at the end of class. What I want to do is collect four of them on about week seven or eight, I'll decide in the future, but that way you know how you're doing in the class. Most people say they like to know how they're doing. So we're going to do it that way, we'll say we'll collect four, and then we'll turn it back and you can see how you're doing it to do four more. So that'll be the motif. Now, you may ask, where are those reflection papers to be found? The answer is on page two and three of the course guide, and now I'm skipping a little bit, but let me just talk to you about our course schedule next, and we have night by night. What we're going to do each day is we go through the class, and tonight is introduction to the course and introduction to the social world in New Testament, and maybe test a little bit of introduction to the book of Hebrews. And next week, turn to the next page, the opportunity to do reflection papers begins, and you see there, it has your readings for the week, and it has a topic for your thought. You're supposed to do it before class, so you come to class having thought about something very significant, and ideally it makes the class better for you because you've given some serious thought to it in advance, and they go through week by week. I'm not going to be slave-ish about following this course schedule. I may compress the pastoral pistols that's Timothy and Titus down to two weeks if we just find ourselves slowing down that's fine because of the time needed to have discussion time at the end of class. So if it gets, if we start to get far off, I'll let you know and we'll just start delaying a little bit, but I'm not going to plan on delaying a lot, so we'll keep in touch about that. Back up to page two for a moment, you will notice that you have three books that are required for this course, and let's see, people didn't bring them, that's fine. Good, thank you, darling. Darling has the books. One book is Hebrew's called Equipment, looks like this, and that's the first one you'll read. Then there's one on the book of Revelation, which looks like this, and there's one, can you tell them apart, and there's one on the book of James, that looks like this, so there there are your three books. You're not going to read all every last page of these because I want you to focus on reading the Bible, what you read the Bible well and slowly, what you read Hebrew's to Revelation very carefully, maybe even read them twice and read them slowly. So not a huge amount, I know there's three books and you have to buy them and so on, but not a huge amount of reading in textbooks, and they're not real demanding textbooks, but that's going to be balanced by a hope, careful, careful reading in the Bible. One more thing on this course guide, and that is, for the examination I have a series of questions you might want to use as guides to the kinds of things you are liable to be asked about. These questions will not appear in so many words on the exam, but this is the kind of thing that I think is important, can be a little bit of a guide for you. It's an evening class, let me just ask you a question, how many of you are taking your first class at Covenant Seminary right now? One, two, three, not that many, okay, just only about five of you? Okay, how many of you are taking your first class with me? Anyway, okay, a lot of people are taking their first class with me, that's good. So if you have questions, maybe ask right now, is this anything fabulously unclear right now? These to be clarified? You're in graduate school, so I know you can read this for yourself, yes. One of the exams on the reflection papers, it says here, on the reflection paper, I said, I'll collect them all at the end of the course, I'm going to collect four of them halfway through the course, that's the change, 20% of the grade, okay, stand. On a couple of days, no, that's the same thing. That's probably, you know what that probably is, it's probably a revision of the course guide and then I got a phone call and I, you know, I meant to, and it's still red and the spell checks that it was okay and so, so there you are, okay, so if we combine those two paragraphs together, we'll get the whole line. What you want to do is, you want to write on, you want to write me eight little essays, that's the bottom line. You have 13 chances and you want to take up eight of those 13 chances, and that'll be about just as much less than a third of your grade, okay, yes? I forgot, Susan, Linda, oh, sorry, you're going to read most of it, so, you know, a little more than half, well, you know, you might borrow with a friend or something, you're going to read just about half, maybe a touch more than half, so it's recommended, yes, and there are a couple of things on reserve, tell you what I think I want to do, I don't like to drag things out forever, you know, at the beginning, and then you get off to a boring start, so I'll talk to you about what's on reserve, maybe after the break, okay, all right, so we already prayed once, it's like, you know, it's like going through a line, you know, really slow, smorgasbord line or the church, you pray, and you only get your food 45 minutes later, and it seems like you should pray again by the time, but we already prayed once, so let's go ahead and start our class, just like that. Let me just give you a big picture to give the overview of what I want to do in this class. What I would like to do is to help you see what the unique contribution of the books, Hebrews, James, first Peter, first John and Revelation are to the Christian faith and to the Christian life. Now if you look at the books of the New Testament, you look at Christian theology, Christian thought, the way people quote the Bible, the gospels and the letters of Paul have a certain pride of place, they dominate our consciousness as Christians. One scholar put it this way and said simply this, Christianity today is broadly speaking the Christianity of Saint Paul, or of Paul the Apostle. That's true, and I might not even say that that's wrong, but I'd like to broaden our horizons so that we see Hebrews, James, Revelation as books that provide us other perspectives on the faith that we believe and that we live out. That is the broad purpose of the course. Jesus alone shows us the high priestly ministry of Christ. The book of James presents Jesus as the Lord of our ethical life, simply giving commands in a way that Paul's letters never quite do. Peter describes the relationship between Israel and the church and holds out Jesus as an example to believers, the way no particular passage in Paul ever does. The book of John warns us so clearly about the danger of schism or divisions in the church and warns us to be discerning about the spirit of apostasy. The book of Revelation has a splendid vision, the supreme vision of the spiritual warfare and the power of Christ in defeating Satan. Those are things that those books have that may be found here and there elsewhere in the gospels or in the books of Paul, but they develop them with a power, with a clarity, with a depth that is unparalleled. I want us to get an eye for the unique message of each book of the New Testament. Now, that's my goal for the course. Let me say quickly that not everybody would be immediately willing to follow that goal and I have the dot-cam work, so I have a little guide, a sort of a visual that describes the way things really are. The way things really are is, I'm trying to decide if I want to deputize somebody to turn off those lights or run over and get them myself. Phil, can you be deputized? Just turn those off for a minute, so that can be a little more visible. The general epistles, Hebrews to Revelation, could be called something like the best of the rest of the New Testament. Now we say that this isn't the way we want to think and we say this isn't the way we are, but the truth is that most of the church functions with a sort of a cannon within the cannon. The cannon within the cannon are the books we love and read and think about and meditate upon the most and they include the Gospels, the letters of Paul with a possible exception of Philemon, I guess, and maybe Second Timothy. The book of Acts, Genesis, Psalms, Isaiah, the three dots signify simply that you may have other people may have a favorite book, maybe Deuteronomy might be up there, Proverbs might be up there for somebody else. Then there's a sort of a second circle and these are, if this is the red letter edition for Good and the Six, we do have red letter Bibles, don't we? So if these are the red letter books, then we also have runner up type books, blue ribbon books. They are books like Proverbs and Deuteronomy, just mention, maybe the letters of Peter, maybe the first and second Samuel, first and second kings, the historical books of the Old Testament that we read a lot, Jeremiah, Daniel, Hebrews, Revelation, and again there may be a few more, somebody may have first John in there. Then there are other books that are sort of in the outer darkness and there are books like minor, prophets, you know, I mean, almost the last time you heard a sermon on Neha, Obediah. How many people here have ever heard a sermon on Neha? Raise your hand. Okay, I've got two people, three people out of 120. That's not a lot. How many of you have ever heard a sermon on Obediah? Neha, Obediah? Okay, we've got about five or six. And you think about it. Pastor should want to preach sermons on Neha and Obediah because it gives him a chance to say and I preach through that whole book this year, right? You know, these preachers, they get criticized for taking five years on John or four years on Romans. They can say, listen, I knocked off, you know, seven books this year, Neha, Obediah, maybe Jonah one week, you know, and even so hardly ever do we get a message. Leviticus, I didn't quite even get them on here. You know, Haggai, how often do we hear sermons on that? Also from our group, books like Jude and 2nd and 3rd John get very, very little attention. I'll even confess to you they aren't going to get a lot of attention in this class, but we need to do then as a goal is to hear the distinctive contribution that each book of the New Testament makes to our canon and we can probably get a tiny bit more light. The difficulty is then that we ignore these books and they function as something like orphans as wanderers that don't have any special internal unity. And as Christians we tend to divide the New Testament up as gospels and the epistles, epistles of Paul pride of place, and then the rest, again, Paul's letters have a certain pride of place. Why? Well for one thing, he wrote a lot, he wrote 13 books, he wrote very systematic books like Romans and Ephesians, he wrote books that answer a lot of questions that people have like first Corinthians and Philippians or question answering books. Paul seems to have been pre-systematic and so he lends himself to systematic theologians. Those are some reasons why Paul has pride of place. But again we want to hear the distinctive voice of the various books Hebrews to Revelation. So let's see how we can describe those books just a little bit. First of all, we can look at these books Hebrews Revelation as Catholic epistles. Now by Catholic epistles I do not mean books written by Catholics or books that Catholics really like and that Protestants wonder about sometimes. What I mean is a Catholic epistle is one that is written to the entire church. Now to whom was the book of Romans written? It was written to the church at Rome, that's a good precise answer. How about first Corinthians? To whom was that written? It was written to the church at Corinth, Galatians, Ephesians and so forth. That would be Galatians was written to a series of churches in a certain region. But if you look at our books, several of our books that we're looking at in this course do not say they're written to a church in a particular place. If you have your Bible open, it's time to get your fingers busy and you can look at a couple places like James 1-1 and 1 Peter 1, 1-2, Jude 1 and so on. James 1-1 says, James a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the 12 tribes scattered among the nations. Now who's that written for? It's for all Jews who are believers throughout the world, not to any particular group. First Peter just turned a couple of pages back. First Peter says, Peter and Apostle of Jesus Christ, who God's elect strangers in the world, scattered throughout Pontius, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bethinia, who have been chosen according to the four knowledge of God, the Father, to the sanctifying work of the Spirit and so on. So to whom is Peter writing? Well, you don't want to repeat this one, but this is a group of Roman provinces that really cover a vast domain, this is not a particular church in one place. Next, we have 2 Peter, 2 Peter chapter 1, verse 1 reads, Simon Peter is servant and Apostle of Jesus Christ, to those who threw the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ and received a faith as precious as their own, who's you writing to? More Christians, anybody who's received this precious faith, and maybe one more from the book of Jude, which follows 3 John, we see that he begins, Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ, the brother of James, to those who have been called, who are loved by God, the Father and kept by Jesus Christ, to whom does Jude write? He writes to all Christians, so all have been called to all who are loved. We call these Catholic epistles, and the upshot is that they tend not to be as focused on some local internal circumstance. They are something that is of interest to the entire church, not limited to local situations. A second, we could describe these books as pastoral books. By pastoral books, I mean that they are functioning to lead the church into the truth, perhaps in difficult times. Hebrews clearly is a pastoral book. The author is a leader of the church, most likely the church in Rome, around the year 68 AD. He's not able to be with them. He writes them a letter which is the sermon that he would preach if he were there, to tell them how to persevere in times of persecution. The letters of John are full of pastoral language. John says things like, my brothers, my dear brothers, my beloved children, my dear children, he's constantly using terms of endearment with this group of people who are facing a schism a great division in their church that he regards as his children. James looks like a pastoral work in various ways, especially seems to be addressing the danger that many people, many Jewish Christians have of resting too much in head knowledge, and so he warns them or chastises them to bring them back to a lived faith. It has a pastoral feel. Several of the books in this list are showing their opposition to heresy. Jude, second Peter and first John are deeply concerned with a corrosive effect of heresy on the life of the church. A couple of them are sermons. Hebrews says it's a sermon, chapter 13, verse 22, he says, bear with this word of exhortation, which is a word for, phrase for, a sermon, and other books appear to be sermons as well. Maybe first Peter and James have a feel like maybe they were sermons at one point. These books also heart back to the gospels in certain ways. The gospels are filled with references to discipleship, to obeying the words of Christ, to the kingdom. The word kingdom appears in the letters of Paul in the book of Acts, but it goes from appearing well over a hundred times in the gospels, maybe 150 times or so, to about 15 or 20 times in the letters of Paul, all of them put together. And all of a sudden the kingdom and the reign and the power and the glory of Christ come back again in these books. And back again we get the voice simply of Christ, the king, the Lord, who commands his church. So in some ways these books heart back to the gospels. Those are some of the traits of these books. There is a question that I'm not sure how many of you would have, let me just ask you momentarily, how many of you are, how many of you went to a secular university in college? Okay, I see the majority of you did. How many of you are in a secular situation right now, working in a secular workplace or a secular school right now? Okay, a large number again. One of the questions that people ask in a setting like that is, how can we know what is true? I've been told by friends of mine, and by reading it here and there, that baby boomers have their own set of questions, generation, excerpts have their set of questions, generation , excerpts are very interested in the question, what can I trust or who can I trust? Now in a secular university that's also a fundamental question, among the many options, among the many, many ideas of what the truth is, among the many proposals for a trustworthy source, which one is really reliable? And then the Christian walks in and says, here's the Bible, that's the thing, that's the source, trust that, and what happens in the secular university. Well, they don't always pay attention to us, do they? But beyond that, one of the questions that you will get in a secular setting is, so you say the Bible is the word of God, it's true, it's infallible, where did you, you know, what makes you so sure, and the truth is, I answer that question kind of in another class, I spend a lot of time in that in the life of Jesus' class, what makes you so sure that this is actually true and reliable and that the events that are purported to have happened actually occurred? But a second question people ask is, where did you get this book from? I mean, who decided that these books, these 66 books, I couldn't find my own regular Bible, I have my wife's four pound Bible with me today, but for, you know, for the purpose right now, this is great, you know, to wave this great thick, I mean, you could knock somebody out with this thing, you know, where do you get these, where do you get these 66 books and no others? Fair question, and somebody who is fairly knowing, or has maybe taken, you know, religion 101, and those just enough to be dangerous, because they studied with some secular person who was once a Christian back as a Southern Baptist up to the 4th grade, and now hates Christianity, told them that the books that we have, the 27 books of New Testament are not listed anywhere in the New Testament itself. You know, how do you know these books are the ones? And furthermore, they may, they may be really sharp, and they say, you know, these 27 books of the New Testament, that's how many there are, 27 books of New Testament were never really fully agreed upon until maybe the early 5th century. In fact, the first time you get a list of these 27 and no others is in a letter by a man named Athanasius, who was under the suspicion, false suspicion, I'll quickly add, false suspicion of being a heretic from half of his life, and that was in the year 367 AD, it's the first list of these 27 and no others. And the first time a church council lists these 27 and no others with no debate is in the year 397 AD, and that's the council of Carthage, which was not one of the biggest councils of the early church. So people wonder, where do you get these books? And what I'd like to do, because this is probably the one chance many of you will have in this curriculum, is to answer that question. So I said we're going to talk about Hebrews' revelation in the R, but tonight I'd like to talk about where we get these books, because I think it is a foundational question, and there's one upon which many of us are challenged or will be challenged at some point in our lives. If we are doing our job and staying in contact with unbelievers, if you spend all your time with Christians, then you won't have this problem. But I'm hoping that you do not spend all your time with Christians, and that you will need to give an account for why you quote these books as authoritative. I'll even imagine a scenario for a moment with you, if I may. And that you are indeed on a state, university, and a secular campus, and you are even, let's all even go this far and say, you are the speaker and a debate. And it may, if you like, be only 15 people in attendance or it can be 500, depending on the size of your ego. But just imagine that you're the Protestant representative there on that particular day. There is an atheist, and there is a Jew, and there is a Roman Catholic, and there's a liberal Protestant, and then there's you, you're the conservative Protestant. And you're going through your reasoning and maybe talking, you know, with his fellow Christians, and to your surprise, you're finding yourself since you just took this course and you liked it so much. You're finding yourself quoting Revelation and Hebrews and James and first Peter repeatedly. And after a while, the liberal Protestant turns on you because he wasn't expecting these things. He was expecting you to spend all your time in the gospel, John, and the book of Romans and so on. And he says, something like this, you know, George, or Georgina, whatever you are, why do you keep on quoting Hebrews and Jude and Peter and Revelation? You know, these books really don't belong in the New Testament canon. They were not written by eyewitnesses of the ministry of Jesus, and they were doubted for centuries by the early church. What makes you treasured these books? Let's suppose you whips out the thing. The first time the 27 are listed by Athanasius in the year 367 AD and is Easter letter. The first counsel to say these are the 27 is the counsel of Carthage in 397 AD, and further more. The New Testament church, the Christian church, has usually ignored many of these books. They have a Deutero canonical status. They aren't the books we really use. They weren't voted in until 450 AD. And even now that they are voted in, nobody pays much attention to them anyway. What's your problem? Let's get back to John and to Romans. You are stunned. What your Roman Catholic friend rises to your defense as follows. The Catholic says, Sir, many of your criticisms are indeed valid, but your objections only serve to enhance the Catholic perspective. God ordained the teaching office of the church to guide the church through matters such as these. It would indeed be difficult to prove the canonicity of 2nd Peter in Revelation to an objective audience and everything you say about the slow recognition of the church is true, however, the Lord has guided the church through history. The spirit works slowly, and he has blessed the teaching office, the bishops, and the cardinals of the church are led and inspired by the Lord, and so the voice of Christ, the voice of God continues through this day through the living voice of Christ in the bishops of the church. At which point you are thinking with friends like this, who needs enemies? Would you know how to answer if these two came forward? What would you say? If you were asked why you choose and read these books and no other? What are the typical answers people give and in case you are wondering, you are allowed to answer? This is not rhetorical. What are the typical reasons people give for saying these are our books? What are they? What would they say? What would you say? Or what would, if you don't want to put yourself in the line, what would an ordinary, fairly unlettered Christian say? Tradition. So you would say, fill it out. What do you mean tradition? Okay? Okay? Tradition, that's what we were always taught. That's what we've always believed. So the churches always said, yes. So you would say, one reason why we know that Hebrews counts is because it sounds kind of like Paul's letters or James is kind of like the gospel, so can I put the word coherence? There's a coherence of all 27 books. That's fair. And what else would people, ordinary persons say? Yes? Yes? Okay. God is sovereign. And surely he would guide his church, wouldn't he? I mean, he wouldn't let a book that we need fail to make it to us, right? Okay? What else? Now you're giving good, noble answers. Give me some bad Protestant answers from some naive, unthinking, low quality, but things that people actually say, yes. Okay. Okay, like that's a good, solid, bad answer. That is exactly what I wanted. It means a lot to me. Yeah, that's one people say where the Lord speaks to me through those books, huh? How about that? Right? I just hear the Lord's voice. Yes? Maybe I just stole the other really good, bad answer. Any other good, bad answers? Yes? Okay, that's a good, bad answer. I can understand those books, some of these theologians, who knows what they're talking about, but I can get a grip on these things. What else? Anyone? Yeah? Okay, you can always fall back on that. God said it. That settles it. And that kind of goes back to this. You know, we have them, or if it was good enough for my grandmother, it was good enough for me. If it's good enough for King James, it's good enough for me. That kind of reasoning, right? I mean, that's around. We don't want to embarrass anybody, but there are a lot of people who think that way. Okay, what is the answer? Can we do better than that, I guess? The only thing they go back to, one or two of these that kind of run together in the good, it means a lot to me. The Lord speaks to me through them. Those answers are really so subjective that they almost cut off any discussion. And the other person says, well, I read them and they don't mean a lot to me. So that's the end of that. You really get nowhere that way. The person who says, maybe gets a little bit more and slightly more sophisticated way, that is to say, these are the books the church has always had. That's the way they've always been taught, is really still basing everything on experience in the final analysis. What they're saying is it's the cumulative experience of the church, that is to say generation by generation, not just my subjective experience, but the experience of many, many Christians. And you really, what happens actually is you're falling back into a Catholic position. When you say that's the way the church has always done it, it's back to really wise people chose for us and it doesn't really matter when they chose, but people chose, put it to a different way. If somebody says, I know these books are the 27, they're the inspired word of God, because God blesses me, God saves me, God is edifying me and speaking to me through these books. The hard question that I would put to them, because you'll get it from somebody else if I don't, the hard question I would put to them is, what else have you read from that period of time? You want to say, those books are the ones that identify you, have you ever read the epistle of Barnabas? Have you read the dedicate? Have you read the shepherd of Hermas? Have you read the letters of Ignatius and Clement? All written in the first century AD, how many of you have read the letter of Ignatius to the Corinthians? Okay, we got two people, very good, how many of you have read the shepherd of Hermas? One person, how many of you have read the epistle of Barnabas? One person, are we getting the point here? How can you say these are the 27 because God speaks to me when you've never tried any others? Well for that matter, hasn't God spoken to you through the books of C.S. Lewis or John Stodd or J. A. Packer, how have you been moved and identified by books like that? I hope you even be moved or identified by the books you read here at the seminary, maybe even the books you read in this course. I've taught classes and people have been converted, not by reading the Bible, but by reading the assigned text books. That's actually happened to me several times, not here, but in a Christian college, everybody wasn't a Christian. So surely that happens, what makes it so that C.S. Lewis and John Stodd and J. A. Packer aren't inspired when people are identified. So you see, we need to have better answers than, it means a lot to me, it's always been taught that way, it benefits me, it brings me to faith and statements of that nature. We need better answers and the answers ideally should come from the churches, from the Bible itself. We need to go through down for a little bit and some approaches to where we get the books that we have. Let me say first of all, that some questions that people raise about the 27 books do have some blities, there are real questions, solid questions that deserve answers about where we get our Bible, and especially even the books we're talking about here. For example, we really don't know who wrote some of these books. Hebrews has not a clue as to who wrote it, nobody knows who wrote Hebrews. Somebody may have guessed right, but nobody knows. A second and third John, or first John, second and third John are, and first John really don't say who wrote them. They talk of, you know, he's an elder and there are various clues that lead us to the Apostle John, but he never says, I, John, one of the twelve, the Apostle of Christ, you know, writes to you. There are clues, but it's never explicit. One of the author of Revelation is simply John, doesn't say, maybe there are several John's. Everybody kind of thinks it's the Apostle John who else would dare to say John and have the world know or think the world but know who he was, but he doesn't absolutely spell out who he is. He doesn't say, I, John, one of the twelve and so on. Then some of the books have, shall we say, running the trouble in the early church because they're just so short and they're small, they deal with small things like Jude and second Peter, which really spend almost all their effort on refuting heresy as do second and third John as well. A couple of the books are known to be written by non-apossils. Hebrews chapter two, if you have your Bible, you might want to turn. Hebrews chapter two verse three makes it clear that he was not around for the earthly ministry of Christ, or at least his congregation was and he seems to put himself with him in chapter two, verse three. He says, pick up a little context chapter two, verse two, for if the message spoken by angels was binding and every violation and disobedience received, it's just punishment, how shall we escape if we ignore such a great salvation? Salvation, which was first announced by the Lord, was confirmed to us by those who heard him. Do you see that? Key phrase, it was announced by the Lord, it was confirmed to us by those who heard him, what did he just, what did he just imply? He didn't hear him, somebody else had to confirm to him, what indeed it was all about. So Hebrews written by apparently a second generation Christian, then of course we have Jude and James who appeared have been written by the brothers of Christ, but the brothers of Christ mocked him during his own life. At one point they said to him, hey Jesus is going down to the festival, going down to Passover, going to show the people your stuff, aren't you Jesus, show them your tricks, go ahead. That's in John chapter seven, where his own brothers appeared to taunt him almost. And then of course, I think that's the main thing right there. One of the thing is that indeed it is true that the church did have some debates about some of these books like Hebrews, they were troubled, people were troubled for a long time by the idea that they weren't quite sure who wrote it. A lot of people thought it was Paul and some people argue that it should be accepted because although it's not sure it was Paul, other people say it doesn't really matter, it has the stamp of truth and it's been used by the church. Some people are afraid of revelation because of just the wildness of the imagery and because some people became very enthusiastic, it's called killy asm but enthusiastic about the thousand year reign of Christ and it seems to have been abused by some people early on. So those books were questioned for a while. Well, what shall we say? What can we say about actually answering the question, where do we get these books? First of all, we want to say that the Roman Catholic church is by and large untroubled by this question. They say and they believe that the history of the church is good enough. What the church has said through its bishops over the years is okay. Even if it took 500 years, that's okay because there are a lot of things that take time. I mean, it took a long time for the church to realize that Mary was perpetually a virgin. It took the church a long time to realize, so they would say, that the Pope never makes any mistakes when he speaks from his throne. And so this one took a while, but that's all right, the Lord slowly leads into the truth. Protestants, of course, can't be satisfied with that. They know that this, like many other Catholic statements, it would be nice if it were true. I'll put it that way. I mean, wouldn't it be great if we had bishops and whenever we couldn't decide something we said, listen, think 100 years, think about it and get back to us and when you're done, that church will have the truth. And once all the bishops and the popes get together and they decide something, it's done and we can be done with our disputes. You know, wouldn't it be great if we could be done with, say, debates on baptism, just like that, you know, it would be appealing. The problem is that the facts don't seem to bear out that hope, specifically the Roman Catholic bishops and the popes have said some things that are terrible over the years and that are entirely contrary to the gospel and the truth and the good Christian living and to a sound hope. So we might like it, but we can't have it. So Protestants have to have something more solid and they want something that comes from the Bible. Now, I will tell you that Protestants got off to a kind of a false start. When Protestantism first came onto the scene, immediately Catholics saw that Protestants would have to answer this question and so they put it to Luther. And Luther basically answered the question, where do you get these books this way? The canon is whatever preaches and urges Christ. Whatever urges and preaches Christ is the canon. Now, do you know where that led Luther? I'm sure somebody in this room knows the consequence of that for Luther. He was very critical, the book of James. As James, if you don't know what you will when you read for this class, James does not have any reference to the cross of Christ. It does not have any reference to his death, his resurrection, to his atonement, the justification by faith in Christ. It's not there. Now I still think it belongs, but Luther said, therefore this is an epistle of straw. He made various other disparaging remarks about James and he actually made a couple of disparaging remarks about Jude and Revelation as well because they too did not in his view have a sufficiently forceful or clear presentation of Christ's sacrifice, the atonement and the call to faith through the atonement. He might say that Luther advocated a Christocentric canon as opposed to a theocentric canon. He wanted not just God to be present, but he wanted Christ to be presented in a certain way. Various Lutherans have followed him in this and they've said things like, the canon is whatever witnesses to Christ so as to a illicit faith and they've said that the canon is whatever permits itself, listen to this, whatever permits itself to be preached as the living and heard as the living voice of Christ. Now tell me, what's wrong with that? The canon is whatever permits itself to be preached and heard as the living voice of Christ. Where can that go wrong? Okay, subjectivism, Linda says, keep on going. How can that be subjective? Okay? Okay. We get one message, think of another, and we'll be off and never, never. Okay. The danger of subjectivity, the danger of people hearing their own, getting their own spiritual direction we might say. It's also the danger, do you see this, if the canon is what is preachable and hearable, what happens? Well, you start preaching what you want to hear and the canon would change every generation wouldn't it? Because some things would work better in one generation than another. And of course, at its worst case scenario, what would happen would be that the church would defen itself to what it needs the most and that the preachers and teachers would capitulate themselves, capitulate to that decision. We don't want to hear that anymore. So the, you know, in a sense, canon corrects our death and blind spots, a quote a friend of mine who said, if you want to know what Christ is saying to the church today, look at the parts of your Bible that are not underlined, there's a lot of truth in that. You know, why is it that we have some favorite passages? Well, it may be because it answers our favorite questions, but we need to let God put questions we don't like to us. So it's very dangerous then to have a subjective test or something like, you know, a chrystocentric canon, what we need is a canon that comes from the Bible itself. Now some other people have tried to do that and they've come up with a different approach. I will call it the empirical quest for the canon or the historical quest for canonicity. What happens here is you get people like and maybe the hero of this would be F.F. Bruce, who wrote a wonderful book called the Canon of Scripture, F.F. Bruce, and another book on the Canon of Scripture, a very similar title, I think, is the text and the canon of the scripture. The name is Bruce Metzger and they're both, they're two peas in a pod, they're believing men, actually Bruce died recently, they're believing men who are scholars who look empirically at the history of the church and look at the New Testament and they come up with answers like this. What is canonical is number one, what's apostolic, as I say, it has to be written by an apostle and it's what's ancient, it's written back near the time of the events at hand and it's what the church has always used, a public use of a book, books that were read aloud and worshiped from the beginning, even when Bibles or books were outrageously expensive. Sometimes it would throw in things also like Catholicity and they're with public use, it is to say, it's what the church everywhere has used. So there may be a place, pardon me, where, say the Shepard of Hermes was read and loved, but there were only a few places, whereas the other books were read everywhere and loved and revered everywhere. Sometimes they throw in another category, inspiration, the spirit, but I think that's non-commenturate. The others are objective historical and then they throw in this theological category, inspiration and I think it doesn't fit. Now is that a pretty good list, pretty good list, it's a pretty good list. The problem with it is that each one has a flaw, for example, apostolicity. The truth is, if you looked at the 27 books of their testament and ask how many of them were written by one of the twelve, do you know what the answer is? Eight, eight, thirteen letters by Paul, he might have seen a little bit of the life of Christ but he was not one of the twelve, he said so very plainly, James, Jude, for that matter, Mark and Luke and the Book of Acts, all written by non-apossal. So boy, counting heads doesn't seem to work very well. How about antiquity? Written near the time of the event, that sounds good, but of course there's a problem and that is Luke 1.1 says, many have undertaken to write an account of the things we witnessed, right? So the fact that the book is old doesn't mean it's good, in fact Luke seems to be interested in correcting books or accounts of the life of Christ that have weaknesses. Luke use, well, did a K and Hermes were read publicly sometimes and there were places where revelation and second Peter and Jude weren't and they even deliberately were not used. So that doesn't seem to solve at all. What I want to tell you is that those criteria, apostolicity, antiquity, public use, Catholicity, those are useful but they are not the core of what determines that a book is canonical. So people often choose, and I'll say reform people often use, as the mark of a book being canonical, is itself attestation. Now self attestation is basically the idea that the Bible can't be proven to be the word of God, books of the Bible can't be proven to be the word of God by something outside itself because if it is, then that authority is more final or more ultimate. You see the point? We just use an illustration for a moment. If I'm going to make a difficult point or a rare point or a questionable point in a lecture, what is it likely that I'll do? A quote somebody. Why do I quote someone? Who will I quote? Will I quote my neighbor? Who's a construction worker? Okay. What I want to do is quote an expert, right? I want to quote an expert, and then I'll say, you see, I'm not the only person who believes this. There are these other reputable people who believe this. In fact, if you're writing something in a term paper and you know that there's a good chance you're going to get ripped by the professor as he reads it, what do you do? You run for cover. How do you run for cover? What's it called? It's called give your source, put down a footnote, right? Every time you do that, what you're saying is don't trust me, trust someone who's superior to me. But the Bible can't do that. So there's certainly a point at which it is absolutely right to say the New Testament and the old for that matter has to be self-attesting because it can't appeal to anything beyond itself. But the danger is that if you say simply, well, how do you know that these books are the books of New Testament or are the ones that we should trust as canon, well because it's self-attesting. See, that cuts off conversation or hurry. Again, we're back at his second university. Why should I trust that these are the books that I should trust? Because they say that the books you should trust. I say, fine, I'll go get some cappuccino. You know, that doesn't lead anywhere. And so, we want to look deeper than simply to say, I know these are the books because they say that the books. In fact, self-attestation can also go bad in another way. It can seem like you're saying, I know they're the books because I've heard a little voice inside me, but said they're the books. They say they are, therefore they are. And of course, they do say they are. It's true that the 27 do have things in them like thus says the Lord. And they do have things in them. The apostles do say things like, this is the law I lay down and all the churches. They just stand in their own authority. And they expect their books to be read. And they say things like, blessed is he who reads the words of this book. Revelation chapter 1, verse 3, so they do claim to be, they do claim. It's true that the Bible claims to be authoritative the Word of God. And in a sense, that's our foundation. But in other sense, we have to have more so we can debate or discuss with people who may not want to hear that or may not be convinced by that. And you'll have to come back after the break to find out what we will say to those people. And run over there. Don't give them $50 bills, all right? Don't use a charge card. Give them $7 for the course guide if you need it. And run on back. How many of you have it right? How many of you already have your guide? Okay, a lot of you do. So the rest of you run over. We'll say, we'll try to start back up in 15 to 20 minutes. As you recall in our last episode, we were left with a dangling question. What can we say about where we get the New Testament books beyond the concept of the self-attestation of scripture? All reasoning is finally circular. But you want the biggest circle you can possibly get. The Bible is God's Word. How do you know? Because it says so and it's God's Word and God's Word is true. Therefore, it's God's Word. That's a really small circle. It doesn't leave a lot of room for discussion with non-Christians. But there is room to say, you know, the Bible claims to be the Word of God. And there are 700 pieces of evidence that support that and we can, and anybody can discuss those. See, and they all draw us to a certain conclusion. You want a really big circle allows lots of debate and lots of things that are open for public discussion. So that's, you know, that's what we want to do when we talk about the canon. And I'm only going to do a tiny bit of that because I am not going to hear, get into what other courses will teach you, namely, things about the reliability of the authors of the Bible. I'm not going to go into detail about the fact that in antiquity, people memorize the teachings of their teachers. And that's how you can have Jesus' words kept safe. And I'm not going to get into the general ability of an oral culture to preserve stories that shape their community, generation after generation, even up to a thousand years unchanged, which lead us to believe that the same could be done with the New Testament. So there are lots of things like that we can talk for hours. I'm not going to go into those. What I want to do instead is look at the way that the Bible talks about itself. And the idea that the self at the station of the Scripture is good, but we also need to go a little bit farther. So what we want to do then, we look at the source of the canon, the source of the 27 books in New Testament that we have, is to present the biblical case, but also to draw in as much as we can from other lines of reasoning. For example, just to go back to the ones that we saw earlier, Luther said the canon is what preaches Christ truly. And I want to say there's a lot of truth to that specifically. That idea includes orthodoxy. So for a book to be accepted into the canon, it should cohere or agree with the other books. It should be orthodox. A second, the church is of a canon is what the church has always accepted. That entails antiquity. There are certain books that have always been used. The idea of inspiration is implicit in the idea of the self-attesting character of Scripture. But we need a little bit more than that. We need something deeper. So let's start off with the idea, basic idea that the idea of a canon appears already in the New Testament itself. The idea of canon is biblical, and this fact is found throughout the New Testament. What should it turn with me? The second Peter, 316, there is a crucial verse there that is easy to overlook. Second Peter, 316 because the point that we're interested in right now is a subordinate clause. It's just a little side remark, easy to miss. Second Peter, 316. Now Paul, sorry, Peter starts off this way in verse 15. Bear in mind that our Lord's patience means salvation just as our dear brother Paul also wrote with the wisdom that God gave him. Verse 16. He writes the same way in all his letters speaking of them in, speaking of them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand which ignorant and unstable people distort as they do the other scriptures to their own destruction. Did you hear the key phrase? What's the key phrase? The other scriptures. When he says, as they do the other scriptures, some translations say as they do the rest of scriptures, what did he just say about Paul? He says that what Paul is writing is scripture. And the crucial thing is that it's not even his main point. You see, he's assuming that he and his writers agree, and his readers agree that Paul writes inspired literature. If it was debated, he'd say, you know, he'd defend it and explain it, he'd give three reasons and so forth. But it's just assumed that everything Paul writes is canonical. Now, there's another one I'd like you to turn to and that is found in 1 Timothy 518. 1 Timothy 518. Turn back, O 20 or 30 pages in your Bible. 1 Timothy 518, which is talking about how pastors should be paid. How many of you in this room are pastors right now? Just raise, ask for a raise in the hand. Here you got maybe about three people who are pastors in here. 1 Timothy 518. For the scripture says about paying those who preach and teach, do not muzzle the ox while it is treading out the grain. And the worker deserves his wages. Now, if you have a Bible with marginal references, where does don't muzzle the ox while it's treading the grain come from? Comes to the Old Testament and hear people witness. Whispering comes from Deuteronomy. All right. Where does the worker deserves his wages come from? Comes from Luke. Now, what did he call that at the beginning of the verse? He called it the scripture says. Therefore, when Paul writes 1 Timothy in the date is almost certainly at the very end of Paul's life, around the year 67, 67, 67, 68 A.D., he is already quoting Luke as scripture. So back to the original objection. You know, these books weren't recognized until the year 300 or 400 A.D. Not so. They are recognized immediately in an offhand way. It's assumed that these things are the scripture. That which is written on the par in fact with the Old Testament scriptures. 1 Corinthians 1437. I already quoted to you once tonight. Paul says, this is the rule I lay down in all the churches. A rule about church order. Some books, the New Testament also, anathematized or cursed teaching that does not cohere where they're teaching. Turn with me to Galatians 1 verses 8 and 9. Galatians 1, 8 and 9. This is what Paul says. Even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach a gospel other than the one we preach to you, let him be eternally condemned, as we have already said. So now I say again, if anybody's preaching to a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned. Now, when he says this, he is assuming that his words are the standard. Anything else leads to damnation is in fact damnable and damned. And those who preach are in that condition. So he is assuming, Paul is assuming, this is already in the year 47, 48, 50 AD, one of his early letters, that his writing is the canon, that is to say the test of the truth. We also have first John chapter four, which has warnings about the spirit of the Antichrist that has already come into the world. And when you call somebody Antichrist, we think today, oh, you know, the beast and the dragon and the mark 66 and things like that. But John says, no, the spirit of the Antichrist is already in the world and he's saying, anybody who denies our message is, in the most literal sense, antichrist. If you deny that Christ came to flesh and he gave an atoning sacrifice, the other things that John teaches, you are Antichrist. You see, if you have a question, ask it now, you see that the act of saying those sorts of things, if you disagree with me, it's damnable and it's Antichrist is assuming that what they say is authoritative. It is canon. The word canon means the rule of faith in life. They know that what they're writing is the rule. You see that? So the concept of canon does not come 400 years later. They know, they know. Think also of the way in which Jesus spoke. When Jesus gave his commands, for example, on the Sermon amount, so very often he said, truly, I say to you, or in the Gospel of John, truly, truly, I say to you, about 35 times, he says that, truly, truly, I say to you. He also says, you have heard that it was said, but I say to you, now what's he doing when he does that? He is equating his words with the Old Testament, absolutely. He's saying just as much. In fact, we might even say, you've misconstrued the Old Testament. I'll tell you what it really means. I'm the definitive interpreter in my word stands. Again, back to the question, when you want to make a point, if you're not full of authority, where do you go? Well, you go to some other scholar expert, but Jesus doesn't do that. He never says, and you know I'm telling you the truth because there was this teacher I had who said so. Or there's this really great book I read last week and it said so too. He never says that. Now, he does indeed quote scripture occasionally to prove that what he's saying is consistent with the rest of the Bible, but it confirms what he has to say, or corroborates, it doesn't demonstrate. It's on his source of authority. It proves his authority. Furthermore, the very idea that Jesus chose apostles, why did Jesus choose apostles? To be with him, as he says in Matthew 10 and Matthew 28, what were the acts chapter one? They were called to be my witnesses. They are there to testify to the word in the work of Christ. The idea being that the church needs to have someone who will remember what Jesus says and understand what he did and understand what it all signifies. We would say then that Christ established a formal authority structure to be the standard and the source for all future preaching. I just quoted a book to you. I'm going to hold the book up when I said that. Jesus' style was a formal authority structure to be a source and standard for all future preaching in the gospel comes from a book I'm using right now called Redemptive History and the New Testament Scriptures. You will notice that it's real skinny and it's a good thing because it's real heavy. But if you can make it through 30 pages of this, his description of where we get the New Testament is by far the best I have ever read and now I'm in a quote authorities. And everybody else here on the faculty at Covenant Seminary thinks this is the book of books to get. If you want to investigate the can from a biblical perspective, Redemptive History and the New Testament Scriptures is available in our bookstore and it's by a man named Herman Ritterboss and if you have a name like Herman you have to have really good writing skills and he does. Actually, he's Dutch and Herman is a good name over in Holland, so he's okay. The apostles were chosen, Acts 10.41 says, Acts 10.41 were chosen to be eyewitnesses. One of the proofs of that is that when the 12th apostle Jude came to an end, who did they choose? Or what was the criteria? What were the criteria for their replacement? Had to be there from the beginning, had to be an eyewitness, had to not only have seen it but have been with them to interpret. You hear what I'm saying? It's not just seeing it, but understanding it. The two things go together. Let me just illustrate that for a moment. You remember back in high school? Maybe I'll, I'll, I know this class is 50, 50, but I'll do it from a male perspective and a beautiful girl comes up to you and makes it very clear that if you would ask she would, she would go out with you on this weekend. You think, you know, she's way out of my league. At least that's, that was my experience in high school. I don't know the rest of you, but it was always calculating leagues and who was in my league and out of my league and so forth. And you're thinking, this girl's way out of my league but she is obviously interested in me. Well, you can take that a couple of ways. You can say, maybe I have a higher social standing than I thought. Or it could be, you might not know this, that she just broke up with her boyfriend because she's really teched and she's just going out with you to make him mad and get his attention. So you have to not just have the event that she's flirting with you. You also need the interpretation of the event. She's not really interested, you know? She just wants to provoke her boyfriend, that's all. So you need the interpretation, not just the event. That's what the apostles had. Jesus then called and trained 12 to see, to hear, to remember, to teach, to understand. And what they got as a consequence is called a very different meaning of the word is called the tradition, a number of times in the testament. Now, by tradition here, I don't want you to think of tradition in the sense we're using earlier, the Catholic church's tradition, like what we always do. You know, we have these 27 books because we've always had these 27 books. And we baptize babies because we've always baptized babies. Or whatever it is that you do because you've always done it. You know, you can pick your own tradition and fill it in. That's not what I mean. What I mean by tradition is the distilled, fixed essence

of the apostolic proclamation of Christ, the distilled, fixed essence of the apostolic proclamation of Christ, not a social tradition, but rather a body of teaching that has been carefully phrased, carefully preserved, even memorized, and passed down to reliable people who will guard it just the same. Now, what I want to do is show you some other passages in the Bible that have this idea. Would you turn with me? We're not gonna spend a lot of time in Jude, but we'll do that one second. Maybe let's do first Thessalonians chapter two, first, and we'll do Romans once, and then we'll do Jude in just a moment. Let's do first Thessalonians chapter two, first of all. First Thessalonians two. The idea here is that there is a body of teaching that is to be preserved, taught, and guarded, and received by the church. First Thessalonians chapter two. My fingers are moving slower this time, verse 13. We thank God continually because when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, did you hear what he just did? He just said that he was the oracle for the word of God. When you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as it actually is, the word of God, which is at work in you who believe? So his word is the word of God, then down in verse 15, just skipping a tiny bit, I'll go ahead and read 14, just see how the context is. For you brothers became imitators of God's churches in Judea, which are in Christ Jesus, you suffered from your own country and the same things, those churches suffered from the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus Christ and the prophets and also drove us out. They displeased God and are hostile to all men. Now I've lost what I'm looking for. Hostile all men in their effort to keep us from speaking to the Gentiles so they would be saved. Now I've lost what I'm looking for. Why do I have verse 15? Can anybody help me? Okay, there you go, that's what I wanted, thank you. Who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and also drove us out, that's it, thank you. So he's putting Jesus and the prophets and us all at the same level, thank you for helping me out on that one. So he has this sense of his own authority. Romans 6, verse 17, is another one that talks about the tradition and the idea of handing things down. Now in the NIV we have a little bit of a translation of skewers this one, he says, thanks be to God that although you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching. Now that phrase form of teaching is that same word tradition. You wholeheartedly obeyed the tradition to which you were entrusted. Did you hear that? 6, 17 of Romans. You wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching, the tradition to which you were entrusted. You were entrusted to it, it's like a living thing. And then maybe another one that you know a little bit better over in 1 Corinthians chapter 11, 1 Corinthians 11, verse 2, I praise you for remembering me and everything and for holding to the teachings just as I pass them down to you or pass them on to you. Even the little thing about the Lord's Supper, you know, he says in verse 23, same chapter, Paul says, for I receive from the Lord what I also pass on to you. That's all the same idea. There's this body of doctrine given by Jesus to the apostles and then should be carefully guarded and handed on to you. And it's authoritative, it's not just something or other. It's actually the content of the faith. One more from Jude chapter 3 as another indicator that this is not just in Paul, but it's found elsewhere. And if you like to have more verifications of this, you can also find this in 1 Timothy 6, verse 20. And in 1 Corinthians chapter 15, verses 1 to 8, other places where you'd find it, but just one more. Dear friends, Jude writes, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt I had to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all and trusted to the saints, if you have it being handed down. Now, what I want to say to you then is this, that this business of handing down the words of Christ and handing down a summary of what Jesus did is miracles and the doctrine that he taught. What the all the apostles agreed upon, that teaching had been around from Pentecost onward. That teaching, that oral teaching that was guarded to which you're entrusted, all that kind of language, that was the foundation of the church. That gave birth to the church. The church recognized the written works, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, the books of Romans, Hebrews, James, Peter. They recognized them instantaneously as can as the written record of what they had already believed and had not just believed, but again, it had been entrusted to them, they were guarding it, it had been established as the definitive content of the faith. And that is why, if you look back in history, contrary to that Catholic I was talking about earlier and the liberal Protestant, the truth is that if you look at the way in which the gospels, the letters of Paul and Acts and some of the other books, First Peter, First John, were received, they were always received instantaneously as can, let me put it to you this way. The first manuscript, the earliest manuscript and every manuscript that's ever been found, the earliest copies, 200 AD, 250, 225 AD, and onward, always have all four gospels and no other gospel. There is no copy in existence of the New Testament, handwritten copies from the first centuries that have another gospel like the gospel of Peter, which is one that exists and was floating around and people rejected. You don't have Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and the gospel of Peter. Anywhere, those four always and only those four. Letters of Paul, always, all 13 and nothing else, always, Acts, always in there, never excluded. First Peter, first John, yes, it's true that some people don't have second and third John and so forth. Yes, it's true that sometimes Hebrews put last with a little asterisk because they don't know who wrote it and that's cared some people, all right? That's true in some early copies. But the bulk of the New Testament was instantaneously always everywhere except that because it's the written record of the teaching by which they had already been saved. It's a written record of what they had always heard, always been taught. So there wasn't any debate about it. They knew. That is why some people say, especially Catholics will say, the church chooses or creates the canon or they'll say the canon is the product of the church. And I would say that is exactly backwards. The truth is the church is the product of the canon. The canon, now I'm using the word canon to mean the rule of the faith. That rule existed in oral form for some decades until the New Testament was written. And then when it was written people said, this is it. Now we have a written record. And as the apostles start to die in the first generation and start to leave, now we don't have the living voice. We don't have people who are there anymore. That's true they're gone, but now we have their record. The church is the product of the canon. Or we could put it this way. What they had always been carefully taught was used to judge the books that came by to them. Did these books that come by do these books indeed teach what we've always heard? Let me just stop right there and see if anybody has a question or a comment, sorry, that they would like to raise. Question or comment? Yes.