As we start today, why don't I open us in prayer and then we I'm feeling footless and fancy free today being the winds day and I'm thinking we'll go back and do a little bit of devotional and Matthew before we go back to talking about the canon here. So shall we open us in prayer? Father, as we come before you today We would ask for your great wisdom as we look at the profound mysteries of your word Not merely of what it means as we will do shortly in some small passages but also of its implications as your canonical inspired scripture as that which is the revelation of God himself to humankind The revelation that especially in the New Testament speaks of the truest revelation namely Jesus your own son Divinity incarnate as the one who we desire to worship in all of our days Make this class a small aspect of that worship even as we talk about you and about your word in the next few minutes and The name of Jesus our Savior we pray in If you all would open up to Matthew, I'm especially thinking of Matthew chapter 2 at this stage The last time we talked about Matthew, which I know was just a little over a week ago We we were talking about Matthew that the sermon on the mount We talked about the The be attitudes blessed are the porn spirit and we'd also especially emphasize the last be attitude which receives The greatest emphasis in Matthew's text certainly Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness and we had also moved on to talking about This statement that Jesus makes do not think that I came to abolish the law of the prophets I did not come to abolish but to fulfill and Further when he says for I say to you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees You shall not enter the kingdom of heaven remember we had discussed that and it showed that in light of the rest of what's going on in Matthew chapter 5 Jesus is stating a kingdom ethic. I think is the best way to say it This is an ethic for his people and in particular it internalizes the law If you ever were tempted before to think that the law do not murder simply had to do with staying your hand at the last second When you're not when the knife is actually at someone's throat or if you ever thought that the law forbidding adultery was simply about Preventing cohabitation between married male and female people Or if you ever thought that the idea of Whoever sends away his wife let him give her a certificate of divorce could be just done Anytime you don't well please Jesus says no to all the above because all of them speak Not to the externals of the situation, but to the very internal heart of the people we had talked about this Now the question is then as we go back earlier to Matthew chapter 5 What exactly does Jesus mean when he says do not think I came to abolish the law or the prophets I did not come to abolish but to fulfill That word fulfill is very important in the gospel of Matthew it occurs almost a dozen times and In each of those instances it's it's a very highlighted word. It's very important word that comes out But most of those instances that have to do with fulfill have to do with old testament scripture and how Jesus fulfills old testament scripture and This starts prior to the sermon on the mount way back in the opening passages of Matthew The one I'm specific I'm especially interested is in is the series of passages in Matthew chapter 2 Those of you who have bibles that like mine kind of set off old testament quotations um We'll note that starting in chapter 1 There is a quotation that the that which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet This is verse 23 might be fulfilled saying the whole the virgin shall be with child and they shall bear a sign And they shall call his name a manual which means God with us And that announces this fulfillment theme that we have throughout the book of Matthew It also Let's us know that ever so often Matthew is going to give us an old testament scripture that he's going to specifically apply to Jesus The next scripture that we have applied to Jesus does not and this is probably very important does not use the word fulfill It's it comes on them on the mouths of the chief priests and scribes when herod asks them in chapter 2 verse 5 You know, where is the Messiah to be born and they say to him in Bethlehem of Judea For so it has been written by the prophet and you Bethlehem land of Judah or by no means least among the leaders of Judah
And and it goes on The next time we meet the fulfillment formula is in chapter 2 verse 17 Excuse me chapter 2 verse 15. I need to go back to where Jesus has just been taken Egypt to escape Herod's attempt to slaughter him and Matthew says and there was and was there until the death of Herod that What was spoken by the Lord Through the prophet might be fulfilled fulfilled. There's our word saying out of Egypt did I call my son And one further example Is found in 217 where when Herod slaughters the babies of Bethlehem He says then that which was spoken through Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled saying A voice was heard in Rama weeping in great morning Rachel weeping for her children and she refused to be comforted Because they were no more Now the point is there's a series of Old Testament quotations at the beginning of the book of Matthew now
I remember
Doing apologetics as a college student especially amongst Jewish people And one of the ways that we would go about presenting the gospel is we would say look here are these Old Testament prophecies About the Messiah and look how they are fulfilled in Jesus Okay, it's the first thing we said Another aspect of that was I Josh McDowell you guys ever seen evidence that demands a verdict is a very fine book very fine collection of evidential apologetics Well, he has a small section on this and it's in keeping with others before him and a lot of people who continue this teaching To say that if you look at the prophecies of the Messiah and you calculate the probabilities We heard this argument before you calculate the probabilities of all these prophecies coming true in any one person That the probabilities are absolutely astronomical So therefore the idea that Jesus fulfills all these prophecies You know, he clearly he must be the Messiah Now on the face of things that would seem like a knocked down argument for Jesus being the Messiah How many people after all were born in Bethlehem went to Egypt? We're persecuted by Herod had all the babies in their hometown slaughtered How many of them were born of a virgin you know Yeah, just how many how many of you know can you put into that category? Well Jesus So therefore he must be the Messiah and you would think that if you just presented that to anybody it would just have I mean it's knock him over right there And I would love to go with that but unfortunately I don't think we can Because Matthew is working with a much deeper understanding of fulfillment than Here's a prophecy about the Messiah. He's going to be in Egypt Therefore when the Messiah comes do the Egypt check excuse me were you did you go to Egypt? Yeah, okay, well you could still be the Messiah then This isn't a list of Messianic well checklist This is something actually quite much more sophisticated and if you want some evidence of that Then let's look at the one of these These sayings especially The one that shows up in Matthew 215 and it says out of Egypt Did I call my son and this was a fulfillment of that prophecy? now Where's that come from? You guys have footnotes probably where's it come from? Hosea 11 let's turn to Hosea 11 just for a second. Okay Beginning of the minor prophets. He'll today a Joel Amos right mark here. So I can get back here quickly Okay, Hosea 11 Hosea 111 in particular, okay Read with me please carefully When Israel I'm sorry who? When Israel was a youth I loved him and out of Egypt I called my Son The more they called him the more they went from them they kept sacrificing to the balls and burning incense to the idols yet It is I who taught Ephraim to walk I took them in my arms, but they did not know that I healed them etc etc Who was the son? Israel in Hosea 11. That's right the son is Israel Now that's very important to recognize now When Matthew then applies the same verse to Jesus as an out of Egypt. I called my son What's going on? Well I mean part of it is one possibility let's say Is that Matthew just ripped the verse wholly out of context because it seemed to fit? Are you are you comfortable with that? No, I'm I'm not comfortable with it either and I don't think that's what happened because I think and this is very important to Understanding the New Testament use of the Old Testament. I think when the New Testament authors usually use the New Testament They are very aware of the context of Any one passage that they're citing They don't usually take them right out of context and just stick them in They're usually are bringing the whole context with it They assume that the early Christian community says oh that's from Hosea You know, that's about Israel. So what is Matthew saying to us here? Well, it's not that hard to figure out what he's saying is that Israel is God's son But all the more so Messiah is God's son because Messiah represents if you would true Israel He represents all of Israel Okay So what's going on in Matthew then when he says out of Egypt? I've called my son is he signaling to you something about Jesus's Makeup that as the Messiah he constitutes true Israel Let's try a second passage here Let's go to 217 Then that which was spoken through Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled a voice was heard in Ramah weeping in great morning Rachel weeping for her children Well now where is this from? Jeremiah what? 31 so you got it in your foot now, right? So let's turn back to Jeremiah for a second Jeremiah 31 15 and what's the context? um The context is about Jeremiah's prophecy That the Lord will come down and take his people and exile, right? So if you go back to the beginning of chapter 31 at that time to close the Lord I will be the God of all the families of Israel nation will be my people The people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness Israel when it went to find its rest And then he goes on and talks about Israel and Israel being brought back from
from They're being outcasts And he eventually comes back to this and it and there is at that point that the people can say a voice is heard in Ramah Lamentation and bitter weeping Rachel is weeping for children So he refuses to be comfort for children because they are no more Thus says the Lord restrain your voice from weeping and your eyes from here for your work She'll be rewarded to clear the Lord and they shall return from the land of the enemy And there is hope for your future to clear the Lord and your children shall return to their own territory I have surely heard Ephraim grieving Thou has chastised me and I was chastised and he goes on to talk about Ephraim Is is Ephraim my dear child in verse 20? Is he a delightful child? Indeed as often as I've spoken against him I certainly still remember him Therefore my heart yearns for him. I will surely have mercy on him So what is this all about Rachel and her child weeping
exile and return Israel is an exile and that that is is something that causes for great weeping and great sorrow and in a similar way right after The Messiah is sent out of Israel Israel in the form of Bethlehem is laid waste in terms of the slaughtering of the infants And there is yet again weeping in Israel until the return and the blessings that come through the Messiah So that's what Matthew is doing when he's saying fulfill there He's not saying that there was a whole series of Messianic proof texts That people knew in the first century and they were just waiting for the guy to come along He's saying instead that if we understand theologically who the Messiah is It's much deeper than you and I realize And the Messiah isn't just a man. He's a man who is God's chosen vessel who represents Israel And that's at least two of the verses there The other fulfillment citations all have similar interests The one that I said is most peculiar actually is the one about out of for you Bethlehem land of Judah Or by no means least among the leaders of Judah That's the one that most directly did refer to the Messiah So much so that the chief priests and scribes are aware of that and they say this is where the Messiah had to come from And yet that's the one that Matthew doesn't put with the word fulfill Why because it's more obvious Fulfill for Matthew is is something more akin to taking the law and the prophets and showing how they point to the Messiah namely Jesus You guys somewhat convinced of that then
Therefore, I think we have to say that As much as I would otherwise like to use the probabilistic argument Um We have to step back and say that's not appropriate I mean you kind of had to wonder anyway how those calculations were done, you know um Usually there was some huge number you know in the billions or trillions Um that came out after the end of the of the one in you know several trillion or whatever um That came out the end of the calculation and presumably if you're doing the probabilistic calculations correctly You know you're you're taking the probabilities of someone being born in Bethlehem And then correlating that with the probabilities that somebody born in Bethlehem went to Egypt etc etc So I've always wondered how in the world that they calculate the probabilities that somebody would be born from a virgin If you factor that one and just well how often does that happen, you know um The uniqueness of the virgin birth is is a glory in and of itself And you don't have to try and calculate probabilities about it More importantly if that's your approach to Matthew You're going to miss what he's trying to do there by setting up some associations that you otherwise wouldn't have Now then we come back to Matthew chapter 5 as I've already alluded to now and we say Matthew 517 Do not think that I came to abolish the law of the prophets. I did not come to abolish But to fulfill To bring them to their fullest purpose To take that which was already signaled about the Messiah and to show that in Jesus all promises are yes That we're found in we're found in the Old Testament. Okay One person has compared that in the past to the difference between you know the old manual typewriters I mean the really old ones you know the ones that had the ribbons not the electric ones the ones that you had to push Exactly right otherwise, you know the the the F would be brighter than your Q You know Some of you remember those days most of you don't thankfully And suddenly having in front of you instead the apple i book You know like we have right in the front front row here I mean you take this one thing that's a vague shadow of the glory that's yet to be revealed Yes, I do own an apple too, so I like I like these nice Well, it's fine. You can compare to a Windows machine. I suppose if you have to in any case The the the idea of this of this vague shadow and something even more glorious that came And I think that's what's going on with the fulfillment formulas and Matthew And so we've met another theme and Matthew and it shows us just how glorious our Messiah is All right, did you guys want to interact with that? Usually I don't let you interact with my devotional So I just plunge in and plunge out and pray, but I'll I'll let you interact with already pray
Okay, a definition of the word fulfill. It's a it's a tough one It's I would say it's basically like to bring it to its goal and completion
But in in Matthew that that's what it means more generically in Matthew It means in salvation history bringing the Old Testament redemption of God To its completion and goal It's fulfillment in the Messiah It's good All right Very good then Well, let's get back to our discussion of canon uh, last time I had Started us through our discussion of canon we we basically are close to being finished I had introduced it in terms of both academically What goes on at professional conferences I had also talked about what's being taught in college universities today colleges and universities today namely the idea that orthodoxy and heresy are the viewpoints of the victors and this argument that in point of fact there were other they would say there were other options In Christianity and these were represented by other scriptures that were simply later excluded by the orthodox community And I'd also seen that kind of very contemporary expression of that in the Da Vinci code where he says things like um, there were I think did he say was it 70 gospels or 80 gospels And he says that the whole thing was the whole um, selection of the gospels was left to the time of Constantine right And a historically both of those are just factual errors They're not that many gospels did I don't know if I mentioned to you last time that he claims that some of these gospels have been found at Nagamadi And that's true. There are nostic gospels that are found there although they're very different again than the gospels that you and I have before us At Nagamadi and secondly, um, at Kumron he says Well Sorry Dan There are no gospels at Kumron, okay? All the scrolls are currently published And there are no there are no gospels there. There has been a slight debate coming out of an Italian Group with a very fragmentary document that came from Kumron Where they argued that it was a fragment of the gospel of Mark But I most scholars disagree and I do too that it's just very improbable. That would require retroverting Mark into Hebrew and Mark was undoubtedly written originally in Greek And then um, finding individual words from it because this thing is extremely fragmentary There's just a few lines of characters on one side the whole middle is missing few lines of characters on the other side And so they're trying to correlate Supposedly retroverted Hebrew with all of this and it's just very sketchy and improbable In any case, no other gospels Even if you said that Mark was found at Kumron, which I said it wasn't, okay, but just in case No other gospels are found there. So there's another factual error So this thing is full of factual errors But the general claim still holds out there Okay, at what point were the gospels recognized a scripture And uh, can we trust them all right? Well, I made some general points having to do with the way that the canon developed And it developed basically on analogy with the Old Testament canon It's important to recognize that the Old Testament canon was already intact That the Old Testament canon was predicated on prophecy That God himself performed Through his people in the retelling not just of their history, but also in the prophetic acts of the what we would call the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, etc But that sense of prophecy and of a sequence of prophets ended in the time of Haggai and Malachi
And that when that sequence ended there was a sense in which history continued and people kept writing history But That history was not regarded as being as of the same authoritative level as the history that was written by the prophets Okay, you'll recall all that right But that what happened in the time of the New Testament is with the coming of Jesus the Messiah The one who himself is the great prophet par excellence He reopened this sense of revelation and rightly so But instead of writing things down himself he delegated that to a band of witnesses whom we call the apostles One of the great hallmarks of which is that they witnessed his ministry from beginning to end and especially his resurrection according to book of Acts And therefore they were given a certain special apostolic status and were given the promise That the Holy Spirit would reveal and bring back to their memory all truth
And so prophecy reopened with the New Testament and then closed shortly after the demise of the apostles themselves Now We need to discuss the early church canonical lists and their reasonings What I'd like us to do in your handout you have I think as the next item Usabius an excerpt from usabius's church history Okay, and we're going to do a little exercise here for in a few minutes Let me first point out Then I'm only excerpting from a few key larger documents, okay The Muratorian canon which is probably a second century document coming from the west perhaps from Rome um Is one of the first formulations of what exactly Constituated canonical scripture And what's interesting about it is that it that's what it sets It's tasked to doing It wants to say this is what we accept as canonical this is what we read this is what we don't read This is what we read but we don't hold on the same authority as the other books that we read So the Muratorian canon does that Usabius when he writes his church history attempts to summarize the discussion that had gone on before his time With regard to canon It is only later in Athanasius festival letter where we end up with the exact 27 books that we have as a final decision For Athanasius himself and then in these two synods that that is declared to be the canon of the whole church. So there is a truth that um It wasn't until the fourth century that everything was absolutely settled Okay But that is not to say that the discussion wasn't already happening And it's also not to say that the bulk of what we consider to be the New Testament was recognized as authoritative canonical inspired scripture from its very inception Because indeed that was the case that authoritative scripture was seen as such from its very inception if you want to include for that Remember the passage in second Peter 316 where Peter himself looks back on Paul's writing and refers to it in keeping with the other scriptures the Old Testament scriptures in particular and so he gives Paul's writing scriptural status Or he recognizes as I should say Scriptural status there So this is a discussion that it actually happened a long time had predated Constantine by a long way But only after Constantine was the church in a position to make a church-wide declaration of what they considered to be canonical scripture Now what I'd like you guys to do is break up into a groups of three or four people read through What we have from usavius there from his church history and I'm looking for you to do two things one See what he considers to be definite and authoritative and recognized and secondly Look at the kinds of argumentation that he and others employed In arriving at the conclusion of what is canonical what is not So look at what is you know what was deemed canonical and what was the argumentation for it And I'm going to give you guys about three or four minutes to discuss and groups of three or four so quickly form a group of three or four And to look at usavius together and see what you what you can find as you look at that document Thank you. Well in terms of First of all what books did did he consider to be recognized the gospels acts Paul's letters. That's right. He doesn't list exactly what constitute the epistles of Paul but by this point we've had A number of Important early manuscripts that indicate the Pauline letters that we would consider to be the general letters of Paul all the way from Romans to First and second Thessalonians We're widely distributed the pastoral pistols were not as widely distributed Which is no surprise because they were written to individuals namely Timothy and Titus That's what I mean by the pastoral epistles And they but they were also collected fairly early on actually the main dispute in terms of Paul's letters Has to do with the book of Hebrews because fairly early on it was considered to have been written by Paul even though it doesn't say Paul's name So it's very possible that when he counts the epistles of Paul here's he would also include The book of Hebrews in case okay the epistles of Paul. What else? I mean, yeah, we can read it up here, but First John First Peter And then he has he doesn't it isn't interesting what he does with the revelation here He kind of quibbles he puts it in the first category of recognized books But deep down he really kind of almost wants to put it in the category of books He doesn't like to have in the can it doesn't he? As you notice that all right that's good now then we come to the disputed books Which are nevertheless known to most okay? So people are still discussing these books But the vast majority of the churches are using them The epistle of James that of Jude the second epistle of Peter and the so-called second and third epistles of John Which may be the work of the evangelist or some other with the same name. We're going to come back to that last little comment in about Nine weeks Okay, so way at the end of the class. We're going to come back to that comment but anyway with that's A lot of the canon isn't it that's pretty much the canon that we have today Right there yet It is interesting that he's already breaking them down into recognized and disputed books and this makes us a little uncomfortable that these books are still disputed actually I that adds comfort to me Because it says that the church took this decision extremely seriously And so they're being very careful and they weren't rushing right in and just say well You know, I like this book and so people like thumbs up, you know if the bishop likes this we go with it You know, there had to be a church-wide consensus and that's how um How you say this is thinking okay now when I'm very interested in you guys telling me um counting up books is not so hard But what is some of the argumentation that has to do with other or book is accepted? Or is disputed or is rejected? What would you say?
phraseology And you want to unpack that a bit friend?
Yeah, okay, the style of of usage that's that's right Especially whether it sounds apostolic or not, right? It's kind of yeah, go ahead
Whether whether the content seems to be um distinctly Christian and different from the other things. Yes, okay, other things Yeah, that's right Whether whether the authorship is accepted or not because the the issue has to do with um whether the people are Actually writing them Themselves or not and that's a somewhat acknowledged here in usabius. It's very evident in the moratorium can and I'll read you a section of that in just a moment Okay, other things
referred to by the early fathers Which is especially of concern for usabius because that's what he's doing here is he's correlating for us what the Church was recognizing in light of the history the church up to then It's why it's in his church history. Yeah good
All right Yeah, go ahead try Distance with true orthodoxy very good point That's right or resonance with it one of the two So how do they determine what true orthodoxy was? It's a good question I'm that I wanted to raise right there Let's hold off for just a second on that Because I think I have an answer to that one
Yeah, I'm sorry. I couldn't quite hear you
Yes, the the early church was asking they were asking the question. Is the orthodox or is this outside the bound of orthodoxy?
In that I would agree with Bart Erman I would even to a certain extent agree Impulsively with some of the assumptions that Dan Brown makes in his book the Da Vinci code about The orthodox did make this decision and they made it in keeping with their own theology The question is was their theology right and more importantly Did their theology go back to Jesus and to the early apostles And that's going to be a major test for them here. Okay um The last thing I that I think it goes on under the surface here But I just want to make sure this it's in our minds The very notion of the term recognized And disputed meant that part of the whole decision matrix people were having is Did all the churches understand this or did some of the churches disagree about some of these books? And so this was a a large consensus decision indeed But that should also give us comfort because it wasn't just made by You a handful of men and you know in a smoke filled room right
So that's uh, that's another issue here What I've done at the end of your handout is I've put an appendix on about the moratorium canon And you could go through and there's actually even more evidence in the moratorium canon about some of these issues as to why these decisions were made In the early church to recognize some books as canonical and some is not if if you turn to the the last page page four of this lecture
um It's it's very interesting um Some of the stuff that he says at the end of the last of the second to last paragraph You'll notice that their numbers throughout this those have to do with line numbers in the Latin text and if you start around line number uh 559 to 60 Where it says Paul I'll also wrote out of affection and love one that is a letter to Philemon One to Titus and two to Timothy and these are held sacred in the esteem of the church Catholic They're meaning that the church is a whole that's what the word Catholic means there For the regulation of ecclesiastical discipline There is also current and epistle to the laudiceans. I'm sorry. Is that in your canon? No, but at some point here in the In the late second early third century you have an epistle to laudiceans available And another to the Alexandrians the here's the crucial term forged in Paul's name To further the heresy of martian So they clearly saw in those the teaching of a heretic martian who by the way pitted the god of the old testament against the god of the new testament That's what martian did as in his heresy the god of the old testament was a god of law And was a demigod not the full fledged thing The god of the new testament is the real god who's come in to set things right and to establish grace That's what martian taught all right And that would be very easy to fair it out in some of these books and several others which cannot be received into the church Catholic for it is Not fitting that gall be mixed with honey What which shows that there was already a sense of what is honey what is truly of Paul And also actually what is truly in the gospels and these other books They're should they're comparing them to the stuff that was already recognized to see if they fit Now that's different than excluding them just because we don't like those people It's seeing if they fit with what was known to be apostolic from the very beginning known to be from Paul and known to be in the gospels And that's how the church is thinking about this He goes on to To discuss other books that are read in the church and and such and what I would perhaps encourage you all to do Is on your own time because we don't have time to do it here do the same exercise with yourself or maybe with some of your friends of going through the Myritorian canon as I just had you do with going through usabius looking at what books they accept But also what their rationale is and I think you'll find it Comforting in some respects now if I can move on to Then some closing comments as we finalize this lecture
How to conceive of the canon Hey I think first of all that we have to understand that there was a core of books From their very inception that were understood to be of scripture Okay A core including the works of the apostle Paul and also of the four canonical gospels now let me give you some rationale for that here This is a document that may not show up very clearly for you I'm going to just If all you see is a bunch of Marks that's fine because really it's the overall effect and all the details that I'm after here This is the list of the canonical books going from Matthew all the way to the book of Revelation here The x's indicate that the book was referred to by certain authors and there's a few authors that already state what books They receive as canonical and those are represented by os These are individual authors These have to do with The decisions that were drawn up in canonical form like the meuritorian canon or like
You say the assist canon or especially the the canons of the church councils, okay? And then there's some other issues in terms of translations and again here the councils all right now um If all you see is a bunch of x's and os that's fine. Let me focus in on the canon ones especially Notice there are some books that are disputed here Or that are not mentioned either because of the fragmentary nature of the canon or just simply because they were still in discussion in the early church um But there's this core that everybody's recognizing Except for Marcyan Marcyan's this first guy here and he was that early church heretic in this Mid-second century basically they date him here at 140 and uh Again the crucial thing to recognize about him is he pitted the god of the New Testament against the god of the Old Testament Now The early church quickly recognized that this was a heresy in part because what was Jesus's Bible? The Old Testament So so Jesus preached the god of the Old Testament All right And moreover if you read Paul carefully you see that he has the same view Marcyan accepted some of the Pauline books except for the pastoral pistols which he may not or may not even have known In part of the gospel of Luke but he he um rewrote the gospel of Luke for himself. He cut some of it out Okay So that's what Marcyan did but notice the important thing here even Marcyan is accepting all the Pauline's letters even though some of them frankly would have Made for a great argument against his case okay And he's accepting at least one of the gospels whereas iranias in writing in refutation of of Marcyan and especially of Other writers that were more clearly nostic Um accepts the canonical gospels and all the writings of Paul basically Okay And if you look through where these x's and o's all appear you'll see as you come straight across This is tation. He just simply retold the four gospels and he didn't talk about Pauline letters. It wasn't his purpose You'll see that there is a core and that core that everybody agreed on from the very inception was The four canonical gospels with the exception of Marcyan who only helped Luke and the major writings of Paul to the general uh general churches Okay, that's the core and That's the honey That became the central um understanding of what constituted orthodox christianity and anything that was it variance with that Simply could not be accepted as canonical because people knew what Jesus taught and they knew what came through the apostles Especially through the apostle Paul Most of the rest of the discussion at in terms of expanding the core came then in terms of Is first peter and second peter was it really written by peter if so yes, then it's apostolic and we need to include it Does it cohere with the core that we know to be true in the form of Paul and the gospels And so if you recognize that historically what happened is you have this core and it's it's getting bigger Within limits it's expanding Within limits All right, so that's point point one there point a on your sheet Coming back here Next point The most debatable book well There's a few different New Testament books that could claim to be the most debated book But perhaps the one that most stands out to me is the one that Yousavius rustles over Namely the book of Revelation Right remember it was in his category of recognized books and then at the end He kind of wanted to take it out of that category Why Well, this has to do with the early church and debates that were going on in the early church in particular There was a teaching known as Killiasm i'm going to walk across here and put this on the Chart here so hopefully even the lights are getting you can read this
Killiasm Sorry, this comes from the Greek word for
For a thousand Killias And it's It means a thousand Okay So Killiasm was the teaching about a thousand years In particular, there was a there was a strand of teaching especially in Asia minor in the first century That argued that The Christian should expect a millennium A thousand year reign of Christ before he comes again to completely finalize the final judgment And of course, where do they get this from? The book of Revelation The churches in Asia minor were very comfortable with that teaching some of the churches elsewhere, especially around Césaria where you say this was Thought that that was wrong and they held what was closer to what today if you know these terms we would call an omelennial position Those were the two main millennial positions in the ancient church And therefore the churches that didn't like this killiest position this millennial position were much more interested in Doing away with it even to the extent that they were uncomfortable with the book of Revelation Okay, and that's just kind of a fact of church history And you Savius was one of the main leaders of the anti-Killias group And therefore It comes as little surprise to us that he's Uncomfortable with the book of Revelation But ultimately even he is forced to acknowledge that the church recognizes it Even if he's uncomfortable with it one of the striking things about that is in the midst of this ongoing theological debate The apostolic status of the Apocalypse of John of the book of Revelation was so Established that ultimately they had to accept his canon Okay, so there's an example of a very debated book and you can understand some of the reasons that underla underlie such a debate Right point number C In terms of possible other contenders there was really only a few If you read through the myritorian canon you'll see a few other books that were possibly There for consideration so he mentions Immediately the need to reject the so-called epistle to allow the scenes from Paul But there is the question about the apocalypse of Peter or the shepherd of Hermus And some would argue for first climate or the book of Barnabas And those also the teaching of the 12 apostles that did decay Those we have we have those books today And they're collected in a as a selection known as the apostolic fathers And these were written shortly after the time of the apostles and there's some wonderful books to read
But it's a limited number of books And ultimately they were not deemed to have been of the apostolic status. They were in fact orthodox The theology was fine for the most part And so it wasn't a theological decision. It had much more to do with the apostolic status of the authors Okay, so a couple of things to learn from that Dan Brown runs around claiming that you know it was orthodox versus heresy Well orthodoxy wasn't the only decision matrix A lot of it had to do with apostolic status and the other thing that he claims is he claims that there's you know These 70 or 80 gospels out there that there were all these other books that could have been considered that were simply thrown out Well certainly from the point of view of the early church aside from Some very strange nostic sex at the end of the 4th century Started in the 2nd century, but by the 4th century they had developed a number of extra writings From the point of view of the early church there were really only a few possible other candidates So it's not like you should have this feeling about your canon that well it's 27 books, but there could have been 150 It was 27 books and at most there could have been maybe 32 But the church wisely recognized that these other books should not be accepted as canonical So there's another historical fact. I mean, that's just simply a fact Now point D the process of recognition and the locus of the thought It is very important for you to understand in our time How we should speak about the canon Um in in Catholic circles or in orthodox circles They will talk about the church deciding on the canon and ultimately it was the church and the holy spirit working through the church That made the canon the canon And there's some truth to that But I think Protestants have rightly added into that the term recognition That when we're talking about the canon we're talking about What the church recognized as already having canonical authority It's not that uh the letters of Paul gained canonical authority or gained authority or gained an inspired status when the decision was made by the church They already inherently possessed that status. Okay They were already authoritative they were already inspired and it was up to the church to recognize that fact Under the guidance of the Holy Spirit So the locus of authority then isn't in the church councils The locus of authority is in Jesus who reopened revelation and then in the history of redemption designated a certain set of apostles who were going to recall to Others um his truth and those few that the the apostles themselves designated to continue that process All right There's a point E that's not on my Hand out here that is on yours or none of my overhead And that has to do with um The redemptive redemptive history in the New Testament canon all right um
There's two ways to look at the canon And that I've and I've tried to engage in both of these ways here There is the horizontal way In terms of looking from a very human perspective at how these decisions were made and at what point in time they were made Okay And from a very human perspective you look at this and you see this concept of an expanding core increasing over time To a certain limited set of books the few other debatable candidates were eventually ruled out by the church and that's the history of what went on and we can see that as A very sane way to go about and conduct all of this and so from a historical perspective We can take some confidence in our in our canon The other way to view this is from a vertical dimension kind of from the eyes of God if you would And how God worked through this process of understanding and recognizing the canon um and that I would term In in a consonants with the notion of the history of redemption And this gets back to on a vertical level the kind of human point I made earlier about how the the canon reopened You had the sense of Old Testament revelation closed because prophecy had ceased New Testament revelation against opens with Jesus in the apostles From a vertical level we can see that from a horizontal level what we see going on is That that is true and new revelation from God That it comes with the advent of his Messiah and redemption coming to its furthest Measurer in Jesus who died on the cross for our sins and was raised again and and in the people that he designated to bear that message And and in that regard we see the history of redemption folding out into the history of the development of the canon and the canon Then becomes not something added to God's redemptive intent But the continuation of that redemptive intent until it had been fully revealed in all of its glory For future generations to read Okay So that's what I mean by the history of redemption and um And the New Testament canon. Okay, the question then was about Mark chapter 16 And and how if you read in your um New Testament if you have an NIV or a new American standard or any modern translation something later than say the King changed It'll have a little footnote or it may even have brackets around part of the text that says that It's not in the earliest manuscripts Okay And in point of fact it isn't in the earliest manuscripts. It appears to have been later. I Without going into a whole lot of detail here the fact that it's not in the earliest manuscripts seems to me to indicate that um At some stage somebody was unhappy without Mark ended because otherwise it ends very abruptly And so they felt a need to on analogy with some of the other gospels provide some material that provided a you know a sounder ending for them And so this is later in the church therefore I do not deem it to be canonical Okay, so if you're asking how that relates to canon if it wasn't penned by an apostolic author or by his delegate As Matthew or Mark would would have been an apostolic delegate in this context Then I do not hold it to be canonical Okay That's a very short answer to a much more complex question, but we might get back to that at some point No, the gospel of Hebrews that you say theist mentions is a a brief Well, it's a gospel that was titled the gospel of the Hebrews a fairly early work That a number of the church fathers refer to and we don't have a full extent copy of that We have some fragments that are quoted by early church fathers and I've actually given a whole seminar on the gospel of Hebrews at one point And it's relationship to early Jewish Christianity because it's mostly shows up in Jewish Christian circles early on So that's what's going on there It principally seemed to recount most of what we find in our canonical gospels with a few additions and it's those additions that The church fathers pass on in in terms of some little quotations of it So it's different than than the book of Hebrews Yeah, good Could you speak up? I can't quite hear You say this is church history was written shortly after the council of NYC or around the time of the council of NYC at the beginning of the fourth century Right why weren't the these early rokes that were possible contenders that seemed to have largely orthodox theology not ultimately accepted um, and it is in part the apostolic status of them um, for instance the epistle of Barnabas Was not recognized as actually having come from the hand of Barnabas and so therefore wasn't received with apostolic status First Clement itself Clement is very careful to to indicate that he is not among the apostles I mean he he doesn't specifically refer to himself in that regard, but he speaks of the apostles as it's a wholly different group from himself And although it's a wonderful um, work to read He doesn't claim that same authority and so I think wisely the church said Okay, this isn't this isn't like from Paul or Peter And that regard and if you go through most of the other works that I'm referring to um, they were either anonymous such as the shepherd of Hermos Or the did a K the teaching of the 12 apostles which was recognized not to actually come from the 12 apostles But to be a later writing edifying But a later writing by an anonymous author so so those those kind of things led to some doubt as to whether they should be deemed canonical Even though they're edifying to read you know like reading Augustin would be edifying to read to
The the woman caught an adultery in the in John the similar issue that you have at the end of mark Yeah, the in the same issue that you have at the end of mark 16 Not in the earliest manuscripts actually it's even more complex with that one because Later church fathers will refer to it as a separate work from what's actually known in John and so I think it's even less likely That was original to John so I would not consider it canonical. It's very edifying. I love reading it But I wouldn't preach on it for instance Because I don't mean it to be of inspired status in the record Yeah The epistle of Barnabas is did I say the gospel of Barnabas isn't The epistle of Barnabas is the early work that was considered by the early church. I'm not sure about a work entitled the gospel of Barnabas I'll have to look that up. I'm not sure of a work of that name Sorry Okay, good. Yes The the question is yes the Catholic Bible has books that are not in the Protestant Bible but none of those are New Testament books the New Testament canon was decided and then the the Orthodox church meaning The church in the theological tradition that Developed through what we would consider the real church throughout history has never varied from that canon The disputes have all had to do with the so-called apocrypha Of the Old Testament and these are books that were written in the inter-testamental period after Malachi up until the time of the opening of the New Testament canon Such as 1st and 2nd Mac of these and some other books there Even there was a lot of dispute early on in the Catholic Church even Jerome who translated Everything into the Latin Volgate which became the the Latin Bible that was used by the Catholic Church Wanted to set them off separate from the what he considered to be the the full recognized Old Testament And everybody knew that that the Jewish people were not accepting those as recognized either so I think it was a wise decision of The Protestant church to revisit that and say that the apocrypha the Old Testament apocrypha isn't Isn't acceptable but the New Testament canon has not been seriously debated since the 4th century Well, there is an issue with regard to the recognition of the Book of Hebrews Because it is difficult to know who wrote it There was a large view in the early church that was written by Paul and that frankly probably on a historical level Did help it be received by some churches into canonical form Even though I don't think it was written by Paul so I will you know, I miss some tension there in that regard But it's it's status as As being consistent with the theological teaching of that expand of that core Was so recognized early on that it was it was widely deemed on that merit alone to be canonical so even An author such as origin. There's an early church father um in the 3rd century Even he Who would argue against the Pauline authorship of the book of Hebrews argued that it should be considered Inspired in authoritative along with the rest of the canonical New Testament And that was even before um, you know, these discussions were getting to to ahead and being finalized so Okay, yes Yes, yes Oh, yeah, the apostolic fathers you can buy it in the bookstore I mean, I'm having people read selections from it for other class that I do on early early church And stuff so yeah, you can buy this and it's edifying reading it's not canonical It's not inspired, but it's it's it's very edifying reading No, I can I talk about the pro-restrian manuscripts. I'm looking and I'm saying I've got one minute And I just can't even start with that We at some point in the future I might slip that into a lecture somewhere But we need at least 15 or 20 minutes to really cover it So it's a great question Can we talk about the pro-restrian manuscripts and what is known as textual criticism? I just really better not launch into that now Uh Okay Um, right The what he's what he was talking about is the Nagamadi Gospels Most of which again are very different from how we would conceive of a gospel And especially the gospel of Thomas is just a say a series of sayings that supposedly go back to Jesus Okay, just a series of saying so there is no biography of Jesus connected with it So when he's talking about lacking a life context, that's what he's talking about there Um, and you know, I actually bring in the gospel of Thomas in some subsequent meetings So you guys can look at it you can read it you can decide whether you yourselves would Want to call it cannon There's some very interesting comments in there especially about women Okay, well, okay, we didn't get to launch into our discussion of New Testament backgrounds Which I intended on this time, but that's all right We got a very good discussion in about cannon Thank you for your attention and next time we will talk about The backgrounds of the New Testament that will of course tie in very well with the first 150 pages in Bruce And so uh, you know, hopefully that'll help you perceive what's going on there a little bit more. Thank you I'll see you on Friday