Matt Colby - Reasons to Believe - Class 4 - Development of Bible Canon

Automatically transcribed. Accuracy is good but not perfect, and words are sometimes wrong. Trust the audio over the text.

1. 0:00

   As Christadelphians, we believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God, and we say that quite often. And we quote Second Timothy 3 verse 16. All scripture is given by inspiration of God, but have you ever asked yourself the question when you read Second Timothy 3, verse 16? What is all scripture?

2. 0:22

   And what did Paul mean when he said that? Was you referring to the Bible that we have in front of us right now, or or something else, or some other version of it? And how do we know? And if the Bible that we have in front of us really is fully inspired by God, every single part of it, then wouldn’t we expect that it should in some way stand apart? That it should be unique and special among all of the other literature in the world.

3. 0:49

   That it should prove to us in some way that it truly is inspired by God. That’s the purpose of this last class for today. And the truth is that the Bible is unique for a number of reasons. It’s it’s unique because of its continuity. As you may know, various books in the Bible were written, sometimes over 1000 years apart, by very different authors and different cultures and societies and different geographic parts of the world. And yet there’s this remarkable consistency throughout the whole thing.

4. 1:23

   The Bible is unique in its circulation. Billions of copies have been sold and circulated throughout the course of of human history. And sometimes it might be said, if a book is #1 on the bestseller list, that that book outsold the Bible. And what’s it means if somebody says that is that it outsold the Bible that particular month.

5. 1:48

   Because what notebook has ever done is touch the overall record of sales and distribution for the Bible. The Bible is unique in its number of translations, over 2200 translations into different languages. It’s unique because of its survival. Some of the books we have, especially in the Old Testament, have survived for thousands of years and we have, as we’re going to see at the end of this class, thousands of pieces of manuscript evidence. And the similarity between all of those thousands of of manuscripts is is remarkable, especially when you compare it to all other ancient literature that we have out there. Bible’s unique and the influence that it’s had on on human literature.

6. 2:30

   Somebody once said that if you went to any major city in the world and you were to to destroy all copies of the Bible, that you could then go to the the city library and recreate the entire Bible just from quotes from other pieces of literature that have quoted the Bible. I don’t know if that’s true or not. I suggest it’s probably largely true. And over and above that, the Bible is unique because of the influence that it has had on civilization. It has very much guided the course of human history. Wars have been fought.

7. 3:06

   Millions of lives have been lost. People have made decisions, incredible decisions, terrible decisions based upon what is written in these pages. And so the subject for this last class is the development of the Bible Canon. And that word, Canon, is one we don’t use too often today. It’s spelled Canon. So it’s not the same as, you know, the Canon that used to be used in warfare and in the English, this word Canon, it didn’t come into use until at least a few 100 years after the end of the last of the New Testament books were written.

8. 3:46

   And when it did finally come into the English language, it came into the English language actually specifically to describe the Bible itself and what belongs within the Bible, which books belong within what we call the Bible Canon.

9. 4:01

   And in the English, the word Canon. It comes from the word Cain. Don’t think of a cane that you might walk around with. Think of like a sugar cane or a Reed, because in ancient times a Reed was actually used as an instrument of measurement. But it’s found the root word is found before it was ever in English.

10. 4:21

    It was found in several ancient languages. Also, it’s found in the ancient Hebrew. We see it in the Old Testament. It’s the word Kane. It means a Reed, and it’s in the New Testament. In the Greek, it’s the word Canon, and when it’s used in the Bible, it doesn’t mean the same thing that it means now in the English when we talk about the Bible Canon.

11. 4:39

    But the origins of that meaning are still there, so we won’t turn these passages up for the sake of time. But there’s three different places you’d find this word Canon in the New Testament, and one of them is in Second Corinthians chapter 10, verses 13 to 16. And the Apostle Paul writes about the area of his preaching.

12. 4:57

    He says we’ve not gone beyond the boundaries that God has set for us. The word in the ESV that phrases the area of influence that God has given us, So, So God gave instructions to Paul and he said, this is where I want you to preach and I don’t want you to go outside of these boundaries. And the word that he uses to describe those boundaries is the word Canon.

13. 5:16

    It was like a line or a boundary geographically that had been set. And the other two places in the New Testament, if you’re writing this down, are Galatians 6, verse 16, and Philippians chapter 3 and verse 16. And both of those books use this word to describe the rules by which we live our lives. So the boundaries which God has set for us in our lives, we’re we’re not supposed to do certain things and we’re supposed to do other things.

14. 5:42

    So. So there’s a framework, A boundary within which we’re supposed to live. And the word can own is used to describe these things. So when this word would eventually become used to describe what belonged in the Bible, these were its origins. The word Canon, when we talk about the Bible Canon is describing the boundaries within which we find the inspired word of God. So nothing outside of that boundary, but we want to know what belongs inside of that boundary. And you may know that there are some books that are not in our Bible but that throughout history, for various reasons, certain points in history, somebody thought they belonged in there but they didn’t make it in they didn’t make the cut. And we call those books the Apocrypha or any one of those books.

15. 6:28

    We’ll call it an apocryphal work and the and the word apocryphal means of doubtful authenticity. Now the question is why didn’t they make the cut and and the books that we have in our Bible, why are they there? And I had a friend in high school. His name was John, and he went to a Baptist Church. And we used to talk about things that we believed and the things that we didn’t believe.

16. 6:56

    And when high school was over, we went our separate ways. And a few years later, I was walking down the halls of my college and I ran into John. I had no idea he went to that college. In fact, maybe he didn’t because I never saw him there again. But when I saw him, he said, do you still go to that church that you used to go to?

17. 7:13

    And I said, yes, I do. And I said, do you still go to the church that that you used to go to? And he said, no, I don’t. And I said, oh, how come? And he said, well, did you know that that there are all these apocryphal books that that didn’t make it into the Bible?

18. 7:28

    And and then it turns out that it was just, you know, groups of humans who decided what books belong in the Bible and what books don’t. Then how can we trust that that that this is something special and it was just people who put it together? And you know, at the time I I had, I knew that there were apocryphal works that that weren’t in the Bible. You know, a lot of them are in the Catholic Bible, for example, but they’re not in the Bible that we use. But I had no idea why, why they were or weren’t in our Bible. So I didn’t have an answer for John. It’s one of my regrets.

19. 8:04

    I’ve never seen him again, and I wasn’t able to explain to him how we got the Bible that we have today in our labs this afternoon. But I hope to be able to explain it to you. And as we do that, I hope that you’ll see that it’s a pretty remarkable story. And for the rest of this class, we’re going to split our thoughts into two different parts.

20. 8:27

    And it’s very simple. First, we’re going to talk about the Old Testament, and then we’re going to talk about the New Testament because the story of how we got these two testaments, those stories are very different from each other. So we’re going to start by talking about the Old Testament of our Bible. We sometimes refer to it as the Hebrew Scriptures, and it’s the very same Bible that those of the Jewish faith would use today.

21. 8:45

    So the entire Jewish Bible, of course, comprises what we would call the Old Testament. And in a little bit we’ll talk about when we think it was decided what should go into the Old Testament. But to start with, I’m just going to talk to you a little bit about some of the criteria that were used. So it was an ancient group of rabbis, we believe, that probably decided which books belonged in the Old Testament of the Bible.

22. 9:11

    It was a Jewish people and they had very specific, rigorous criteria by which they would vet every single holy book, or not a holy book as the case may be. They asked a number of questions about every single book that they had to consider, and the first one was this was the book written by a prophet of God.

23. 9:36

    Now now when we use the word prophet, we often think about somebody who is telling the future, and certainly that can be something that a prophet does. But when the Bible talks about a prophet, it means more than that. A prophet is somebody who 4th tells the word of God, somebody who God speaks through.

24. 9:52

    So they could be making prophecies about what’s going to happen in the future, but not necessarily. They’re simply a teacher of God. Was the book written by a true prophet of God? And over and above that, the writer had to be confirmed by special acts of God like miracles, undeniable proof that God was working through this person or perhaps like telling the future the kind of prophecy that we’re familiar with when we use the word prophecy.

25. 10:21

    And you you may remember one of the one of the tests for an Old Testament prophet was that they were supposed to give a prophecy in the short term that came to pass that would have been unlikely to come to pass so that people could see that it did come to pass and that would be the proof.

26. 10:37

    If they gave a short term prophecy and it happened, then people could believe the other things they said as well and maybe other prophecies about what was going to happen a long time in the future. And maybe both of these things were true. They both performed miracles and they gave accurate prophecies that people saw it come true.

27. 10:54

    So the writer had to be a prophet of God that was confirmed by miracles and or special acts of God. But over and above that, that wasn’t enough, although that was the probably some of the most important criteria. Then the question would be asked, does the message of the book tell the truth about God? Because the Jewish people, more so than than any other ancient people in the Jewish religion, more so than any other ancient religion, had a very well defined sense of God. They knew who he was.

28. 11:25

    He’d revealed himself to Moses in the burning Bush, and on the mountain he’d said, this is who I am, This is what I stand for. These are my characteristics. Here are the things I don’t tolerate. Here’s what I love and that remain unchanged generation after generation. And while other ancient religions would mold and adapt to their circumstances, as history went on, the Jewish God would remain unchanged. That was intentional, because God tells us he does not change. And so the Jewish people knew very well who their God was and what he looks like.

29. 12:03

    And so they had to ask the question, does the message of the book tell the truth about God? And besides that, does it come with the life transforming power of God? We might use the word exhortational. It couldn’t just be a historical account. It couldn’t just contain facts. It had to have the ability to change your life in some way.

30. 12:26

    Does the book come with the life transforming power of God? And finally, was the book accepted by the people of God? Because the Jewish nation was so old, it had been around for centuries and centuries by the time that the Old Testament was was put together and we we use the word ratified, which means it was officially decided. This is the Old Testament.

31. 12:49

    These are the books that belong here. The Jewish people had been around so long at that time that it would be common knowledge whether or not the people had historically accepted this book or not. And that would be based on whether it was written by a true prophet of God that had, in the time when he was alive, performed miracles and prophecies.

32. 13:07

    But you know, what’s really interesting is that there came a point in Jewish history where everybody alive at the time and the Jewish nation seem to have agreed that we have any record of that God stopped talking to them. He just stopped. I find that really interesting because if, if this was all sort of fictional, if it was made-up somehow by the Jewish people, don’t you think they’d want to keep telling the world that God is speaking to them?

33. 13:35

    But there came a point when everybody said the prophets don’t speak to us anymore, God has left us. And that really marks the end of the Old Testament. And you may know that there’s a gap of about 400 years between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament. And we get this sense in those ancient Jewish writings from that time that there was the sense of despair in the nation of Israel.

34. 13:58

    God is is not with us anymore. His power has left us and he doesn’t speak with us. And there are works that are apocryphal for the Old Testament that are basically history books, and one of those is the book of the Maccabees. There’s actually two of them. There’s the 1st and 2nd Maccabees. And Maccabees is a useful book because it tells the history of the Jewish nation in that time period, that 400 years between the close of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament.

35. 14:29

    It’s useful as a historical work, even though it doesn’t belong in the inspired word of God, and it was kept out of that for a very specific reason. Now in the in the Jewish Talmud, which is a writing of the ancient oral traditions of the Jews, you’d find lots of arguments between famous ancient rabbis and those are recorded for us in those oral traditions.

36. 14:50

    And we also find things like this. There’s two versions of the Talmud, the Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud. And in the Babylonian Talmud it says when the last of the prophets died, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, the Holy Spirit took leave of Israel. The people realized that’s it, God is not speaking to us anymore. And here’s a quote from the first of Maccabees. And it’s talking about the fact that they’re appointing a new leader and they’re saying, well, we’re going to make this guy our leader because we don’t have any people who God is speaking through anymore.

37. 15:28

    So he’s the best we have. Therefore, the Jews and their priests are happy to have Simon and his descendants as their leaders and high priests until a true prophet appears.

38. 15:42

    And here’s the historian Josephus who we’ve quoted before. And he starts by talking out in this, talking in this passage about the fact that there’s no longer any succession of the line of prophets that has stopped. He talked about how important the Jews now treat their sacred writings because God has stopped speaking to them. He says it is true our history has been written since Artaxerxes very particularly, but has not been esteemed of the like authority with the former by our forefathers, because there has not been an exact succession of the prophets since that time.

39. 16:14

    So he’s saying we have history books of what happened after the prophets ceased. But we don’t think those are nearly as important as the whole holy books that we have, that were written by those prophets. And how firmly we have given credit to these books of our own nation is evident by what we do.

40. 16:31

    For during so many ages, as have already passed, no one has been so bold as to either add anything to them, to take anything from them, or to make any change in them. But it has become natural to all Jews, immediately and from their very birth, to esteem these books, to contain divine doctrines and to persist in them, and if occasion be willingly to die for them. The word is no new thing for our captives, many of them in number and frequently in time to be seen to endure rats and deaths of all kinds upon the theaters, that they may not be obliged to say one word against our laws and the records that contain them.

41. 17:11

    And Josephus simply records the mindset of the Jewish people in general when he talks about how much they valued those holy sacred writings. Because God wasn’t speaking to them anymore. And all they had were the words of the prophets that had been written in ancient Times Now. And many Jews would die for those books, would endure torture because of them, so that they wouldn’t say one word against them even if it meant their lives.

42. 17:40

    And throughout the history, after the end of the Old Testament, there would be 3 Jewish groups that were charged with preserving and protecting and copying forward those works, those sacred works of the Old Testament. Three groups, and they proceed chronologically through time. The first were known as the Sulfurine. The word means scribes. And the scribes preserved those Old Testament writings from about the year 400 BC all the way through to about the year 200 AD.

43. 18:11

    After the scribes came the Talmudists. And we’ve we’ve coded a number of times from the Talmud, the Talmudists. There’s a bit of an overlap between the Scribes and the Talmudists. The Talmudists were in existence from about 100 AD to about 500 AD, and after the Talmudists were the Masoretis. You may be this word may sound familiar to you because you may know the King James Version of the Bible is based on the Masoretic Text and the Masoretis were in existence from about 500 AD to about 950 AD. And they came up with some ways of interpreting scripture like vowel pointing because you may know the ancient Hebrew language doesn’t have vowels in it.

44. 18:49

    This is a way to sort of include those and they would come up with their own specific rigid system for copying the text. And one cop in common criticism that that is made about the Old Testament is this. The question is asked, why don’t we have any manuscripts that are dated anywhere close to when some of these books were originally written?

45. 19:12

    The oldest Old Testament manuscripts that we have date sometime between 250 and 300 BC, but the oldest books in the Old Testament date hundreds of years before that. And so how can we rely on the manuscript copies that we have when they were these the versions we have written perhaps hundreds of years after the original author wrote on the scroll? An answer is because in ancient times, of course, they didn’t have the printing press, as you know, like we have or like has changed our world today.

46. 19:47

    And the writings that they had were written on what we were known as papyrus scrolls. Papyrus is actually made of reeds. Reeds were stripped down and put it right angles to each other and pressed to make a flat surface. And that’s what they would write on in these ancient times. The problem with papyrus was that it only lasted for about 1 full generation, maybe two at the most, before it disintegrated and couldn’t be read anymore. And so if you wanted to preserve an ancient writing then you had to make a copy of it at least once per generation to keep it going.

47. 20:22

    So those scrolls in the most ancient of times just didn’t survive. They copied them forward, generation after generation in those three groups I just mentioned, the Sulfurine, the Talmudists, and the Masorettes. Those were the groups that were responsible for preserving and copying forward those books, those scrolls. And this is true not just of the Bible, but if anything from that time period and further back, ancient writings that we have would have had the same process. So we have other ancient writings outside the Bible that also have that same issue, The copies that we have. Perhaps we don’t have that many of them and they don’t date that far back anywhere close to when they were originally written. But when it comes to how the Bible was preserved, this is where it stands apart from any other ancient writing. What I’m going to show you here is known as the rules of the Talmudists.

48. 21:18

    These are the rules by which the Talmudists and the scribes before them. This is these were the rules they adhered to when they were copying a scroll to preserve it for another generation. This is from the NASA hit Sulfurine, which means the tractate of the scribes. A synagogue scroll had to be written on the skins of clean animals prepared by a Jew, fastened together with strings taken from clean animals, lined and spaced so that every skin contains a certain number of columns equal throughout the entire codex. The length of each column could not extend over less than 48 or more than 60 lines, and the breadth had to consist of exactly 30 letters.

49. 22:05

    The whole copy had to 1st be lined of three Words were written without a line. It’s worthless. They had to draw out a straight line before they wrote that next line. If they didn’t do that it to throw the whole thing out and start over. The ink should be black, neither red, green, nor any other color, and be prepared according to a definite recipe.

50. 22:27

    An authentic copy had to be the exemplar from which the transcriber ought not in the least to deviate. So when they copied a scroll, they had to make sure that the scroll they were copying from was certified copied by scribes that followed all of the same rules that we’re reading and the rules of which we’re only about halfway through right now, the ones we’re going to look at, we’re so rigorous that they were 100% confident that by the time the scribe was finished copying the new scroll, they considered it to be exactly the same as the old scroll, but more valuable because this was a fresh copy, which means it was going to last for another generation, and the old scroll, now it’s shelf life, was going to be shorter.

51. 23:09

    This is how confident they were in their transcribing method. Now this is a big one. No word or letter, not even a yod, which is the smallest Hebrew symbol, must be written from memory, the scribe not having looked at the codex before him. Which means that if you’ve ever copied anything out by hand, then probably what you would do is you’d you’d look at the document you were copying from, and maybe you’d look at an entire sentence and you say, OK, there’s the sentence, write down the sentence.

52. 23:40

    The laws of the scribes were they couldn’t look at any more than a single symbol on the page and write it by memory. It was not allowed, not even a word. You couldn’t even look at a whole word and then write that whole word. You had to go letter by letter. So you’d write the letter, look at the next letter, write that letter, look at the next one. It wasn’t enough to go by memory even for an entire word. Now Can you imagine how long that would take? And this was very much a full time job. Somebody was ascribed.

53. 24:10

    This is what they did full time. It would take a very, very long time just to copy out one scroll between every continent. The space of a hair or thread must intervene between every new paragraph or section. The breadth of nine continents must intervene between every book. The space of three lines must intervene.

54. 24:29

    The 5th book of Moses must terminate exactly with the line, but the rest need not do so. So Can you imagine if you got to the end of Deuteronomy and I was just a little short? Imagine the planning it would take to make sure the very last line of Deuteronomy was one full complete line.

55. 24:46

    And if you messed up, throw the whole thing out and start again. Besides this, the copyist had to sit in full Jewish dress, wash his whole body, and not even begin to write the name of God with a pen newly dipped in ink. The idea is a pen newly dipped in ink will smudge very easily. And you never wanted to smudge the name of God. And should a king address him while writing that name, he must take no notice of him.

56. 25:16

    The roles in which these regulations are not observed are condemned to be buried in the ground or burned. If they didn’t comply with all of these rules for everything, they copied whatever they were writing. If they broke those rules or they messed up, throw it out, burn it, destroy it. We do not want that copy to live on. This was how seriously they took the copying of their holy writings.

57. 25:47

    And the rigor with which the Jewish scribes copied out these writings is unparalleled in any other ancient society. Nobody else, no other society that we have any record of, comes anywhere close to having this kind of exact, precise detail put in to the laws by which they had to copy a scroll, And I mentioned earlier, of the Old Testament, we have thousands of manuscript copies of the various books, some of them fragments, some of them entire scrolls in the Old Testament.

58. 26:19

    And remarkably, when you compare them to each other, yes, there are differences, but they’re so slight for the most part that the message has been preserved, despite the fact that some of them are hundreds and even over 1000 years removed from the original source. It’s what you might call miraculous, because no other ancient work can demonstrate anything like that kind of accuracy.

59. 26:42

    Because the Jews believed this was a matter of life and death, it was right in their law. Deuteronomy chapter 4 and verse two, you shall not add to the word of God that I command you, nor take from it that you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God that I command you.

60. 26:57

    Imagine if we had to hand write copies of bestsellers today. Best sellers today sometimes sell in the millions of copies. Imagine if the printing press was never invented and we had to hand rape over 1,000,000 copies of a book. Imagine how different the millionth copy of that book would be from the original if we had to do that.

61. 27:19

    And you start to realize how incredible it is that all of those thousands of manuscripts we have when we compare them to each other, both of the Old Testament and the new, how similar they are to each other. So at a certain point, the Old Testament Canon was officially decided. It was ratified. The Jewish leaders and rabbis said, this is it. These are our holy books.

62. 27:41

    And the Jewish Bible was comprised of 24 books. Now you might be thinking, oh, that’s strange because we have 39 books in our Old Testament. We’ll get there. It was comprised of four different, sorry, three different sections. The Hebrew Canon, the Hebrew Scriptures, the Torah, the Law of Moses. Those first five books, the Nabine, which were the prophets, and the Quetzu beam, which means the writings.

63. 28:10

    And this is the Hebrew Bible is this is actually in this exact order if you were to look at a Jewish Bible today. And what you’ll notice is that actually all of the content of the Hebrew Bible is the exact same as our Old Testament, but it’s in a different order. We both start with Genesis, but while our Bible ends with Malachi, the Hebrew Bible ends with Chronicles. Malachi’s in there.

64. 28:31

    It’s just not at the end. And the books are grouped differently too. So you might know that we have two books of Samuel and Kings and Chronicles, but but the Jewish Bible, those are all grouped into one book and we have 12 minor prophets. But in the Jewish Bible, those 12 are all just grouped into one big book called the 12.

65. 28:52

    And that’s why they have 24 books and we have 39. The content is the same, but they’re organized in a different way. And there’s an old theory that says that this Canon of the Old Testament was officially ratified sometime in the 1st century at a a gathering called the Council of Jamnia. And nobody really believes that too much anymore. And I don’t really either.

66. 29:16

    I’ve looked at the evidence for it. It’s pretty weak. It would seem that the Old Testament, the Canon of the Old Testament was actually this put together, finalized sometime before Jesus. I want you to turn with me to Luke chapter 24. And Jesus actually in a way endorses the Old Testament Canaan that must have already been in existence.

67. 29:43

    I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, but have a look at this. Right at the end of the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is speaking to his disciples in verse 44 of Luke chapter 24. And Jesus said to them, these are my words, that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.

68. 30:06

    Did you notice the three categories? Everything written about me in the Law of Moses, the Torah and the Prophets, the Nabim and the Psalms, the Ketsu beam. And he makes reference to the three categories in which the division of the Old Testament was broken up. And even more interesting, I think is just a few pages back.

69. 30:29

    Come with me to Luke, Chapter 11, and I I wonder if, like me, you’ve ever wondered about this verse. It seems strange, something that Jesus says here. I’m going to read verses 50 and 51 of Luke Chapter 11. Jesus is talking to the Pharisees of the time. He says the blood of all the prophets shed from the foundation of the world will be charged against this generation, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah who perished between the altar and the sanctuary.

70. 31:00

    Yes, I tell you, it will be required of this generation. So he’s saying your generation is so wicked that you’re essentially guilty of all of the innocent blood of the prophets that have shed and all of the Holy Scriptures, which would have been the Old Testament that we look at now that he was referring to in that time. So why would he mention Zechariah the prophet? The death of Zechariah the prophet. Now the first one makes sense.

71. 31:28

    He says from the death of Abel. From the blood of Abel. That makes sense. Abel was the first righteous prophet of God to be killed. That was the first murder. But why Zechariah? It’s a very obscure reference. We won’t turn there. But you find it in Second Chronicles chapter 24 and verse 21.

72. 31:48

    Zechariah, the prophet killed in a holy place, and Jesus makes reference to it here. It’s not one of the bigger stories in the Old Testament, but if you were to look to look at the first and second books of Chronicles, you’d find that in the book of Chronicles, this is the very last death of a prophet. And if you were there to then look at the order of the Hebrew Bible of the Old Testament Canon, you’d see that the book of Chronicles is the very last book of the Old Testament. And what Jesus is essentially saying is from the beginning to the end of the Old Testament because Zechariah is the last righteous prophet to be killed at the end of the Hebrew Bible. And by saying that, he’s once again, in a sense, endorsing the full scope of what had must have been put together at this time, the Old Testament Canon of the Bible, now in Nehemiah chapters 8 and 9, Nehemiah will bring the law, the Torah back to Jerusalem, and Ezra the Scribe will read it in front of the people.

73. 32:51

    And we’ll find from writings, ancient historical writings outside of the Bible, that it wasn’t just the Old Testament that Nehemiah gathered. In fact, he built a library. Here’s the Maccabees. Once again it says these same facts are found in the royal records and in the memoirs of Nehemiah, who established a library and collected the writings of David, letters of kings concerning offerings and books about the kings and prophets.

74. 33:16

    Judas also collected the books that had been scattered because of the war, and we still have them. If you ever have need of any of these books, let us know and we will send them in. The sense that we get is that at the very least Nehemiah’s time, right after the exile, when he gathered all these sacred writings in one place.

75. 33:34

    Again, this was the beginning of the Old Testament being officially ratified. And it’s some time, we believe in those 400 years between the Old Testament and the New that the Jewish people decided that these are our holy sacred writings. But I mentioned before that there are apocryphal works too. That didn’t make it in.

76. 33:54

    Here’s a list of most of the major apocryphal books from the Old Testament. It’s not exhaustive. It’s not all of them. This is most of the major ones. So you have First and 2nd Esdriss, the book of Tobit, some additions to the book of Esther, The Wisdom of Solomon and Ecclesiasticus, which were supposedly both written by Solomon Baruch, which was supposedly written by Baruch the servant of Jeremiah Susanna, which is supposed to be Daniel, chapter 13 Bell and the Dragon, which is supposed to be Daniel, chapter 14. The Song of the three Hebrew Children, the prayer of Manasseh, and then First and 2nd Maccabees, which we have actually quoted from a couple of times. Now none of these made their way into the Old Testament, and most of them for roughly the same reasons most of these books abound.

77. 34:40

    And historical and geographical inaccuracies and anachronisms. So an anachronism is when something is written about, but it’s out of place. So if if the book was writing about a certain time period and they mentioned a people that didn’t actually exist until a few 100 years later, that would be an anachronism. It’s an error, usually a time sensitive error that has been made.

78. 35:05

    So most of these books abound. And those types of errors, they teach doctrines which are false and foster practices that are at odds with scripture. Remember we talked about the criteria which would be put against any book that was being considered to be included in the Old Testament sacred writings and they’d ask the question, is it consistent with what we know about God? And if it wasn’t, they wouldn’t include it. They resort to literary types and display an artificiality of subject matter and styling out of keeping with inspired scripture.

79. 35:37

    I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but the Bible doesn’t read like a work of fiction. It reads like a real historical account. In works of fiction, especially from ancient times like this one, we read about idealized heroes who are perfect in every way. We have all kinds of dramatic details that would never really happen in real life and in the Bible.

80. 35:59

    We read about real people, people who were faithful but sometimes committed terrible sins, and we read about the true course of events that we’re kind of familiar with today. When time and chance happeneth to everyone, it reads like a true factual account. But many of these books up here do not. They read like a work of fiction, and so they were kept out and they lack the distinctive elements that give genuine scripture.

81. 36:27

    It’s divine character, like prophetic power and poetic and religious feeling. So all of these books were put through the very rigorous test of anything that was being considered by the Jewish rabbis to be included in the Old Testament. And they didn’t make the cut. They did not make the Old Testament of our Bibles.

82. 36:47

    And the process by which they got there was fanatical. It was rigorous. Now we’re for the sake of time, we need to start talking about the New Testament. Now, I told you we’re going to break this into two parts. We’ve talked about the Old Testament. Let’s talk now about the New Testament. Because the formation of the New Testament Canon in the situation in New Testament times was very different from the Old Testament. God had before the time of Jesus. He had stopped speaking to the people of Israel, and they knew it.

83. 37:15

    There were no prophets anymore. All they had were their scriptures, their sacred writings. But then Jesus came on the scene and John the Baptist before him, and once again God was speaking to his people, even though many of them wouldn’t acknowledge it. And Jesus would send his apostles out into all the world to preach the gospel message.

84. 37:34

    And those early ecclesias, they didn’t have the New Testament that we have today. As time went on, maybe some of them would might have one or two of the gospel accounts. Maybe they have one of the letters of Paul or one of the other apostles, but that would be it. And what they had instead were the Holy Spirit gifts.

85. 37:53

    Just like in the Old Testament when they had men of God performing works to verify that these truly were works of God, in the New Testament people were given the Holy Spirit gifts. They didn’t have our New Testament of the Bible, but they had plenty of evidence in front of their eyes constantly that God was working in and amongst them.

86. 38:14

    But the apostles would die, and with the apostles would go the the ability to pass on those Holy Spirit gifts. And so when the apostles died, those Holy Spirit gifts would die out too. They’d fade after the deaths of the apostles, but the Christian community would continue to spread by leaps and bounds. That’s going to be the subject of our class tomorrow morning. The rapid spread of Christianity, against all odds, at a time when it should fail should have failed and it did not.

87. 38:45

    And there were a number of factors in those early, first, few, 100 years after Jesus that would pressure the early Christian leaders to start to closely define which books belonged in the New Testament. What does the New Testament Canon look like? One of the earliest factors happened around the year 140 AD, when a guy named Marcian who was a Christian but a very different kind of Christian.

88. 39:08

    He came up with his own theology very different from what other Christians believed at the time, Put together his own New Testament, he put together his own Canon, and it was only comprised of a shorter version of the Gospel of Luke. And 10 of the writings of the Apostle Paul and Marcian is called Marcian the heretic because nobody liked what he had to say. But if Marcian the heretic was out there putting out his version of the New Testament, then everybody else had felt the pressure to say, OK, well, if he’s wrong, then what should the New Testament actually look like? So they started to feel pressure to ratify the New Testament Canon, and throughout the 2nd century there was the distribution of many.

89. 39:48

    We call them spurious works, obvious counterfeits of various different books clearly written by impostors, especially in some of the Eastern churches. And now that these counterfeit works were popping up, it became even more important to define which ones were real, because they couldn’t even answer that question sometimes. And missionaries were being sent into foreign countries. And the gospel messages in the sacred works had to be translated into foreign languages. So the question is, which books should we bother putting effort into translating?

90. 40:18

    We’ve got to define which books truly are holy, which ones are inspired by God. And finally, the nail in the coffin I think was in 303 AD when the Roman Emperor Diocletian made an edict that all Christian sacred books must be burned and destroyed, and many Christians died protecting their books. But the question became who wants to die for a book that might be religious but maybe not sacred? You’d really want to start to define which books truly were inspired by God, because you might have to die for that work. And so as the first few centuries rolled over, there became there was a lot of pressure put on the New Testament leaders to define, or the Christian leaders of that time to define which books belonged in the New Testament. And the test for canonicity in the New Testament is very simple.

91. 41:11

    They simply ask the question, was the book either written by an apostle or did it have direct Apostolic approval? That was it. And it’s very similar to the Old Testament criteria that the book had to be written by a confirmed prophet of God. You see, God hadn’t spoken to them for 400 years. And then came Jesus, who God spoke through the only one speaking with the authority of God. And now he was gone.

92. 41:37

    And his apostles went throughout the world, and they were speaking with the authority of Jesus. So they were the only people through whom God was speaking, but they were performing miracles wherever they went, converting people all over the world. It’s the only way to explain how Christianity succeeded in the world in which it succeeded, which we’ll talk about tomorrow morning. And so it was a simple question.

93. 42:02

    Was this book either written by an apostle or directly and and indisputably confirmed, endorsed by an apostle? And in 367 AD, the first list of the New Testament that looks exactly like our New Testament today, with the 27 books that we have, was published by a man named Athanasius. And shortly after that, two other men, Jerome and Augustine, who are commonly referred to as Saint Jerome and Saint Augustine published their lists which were exactly the same as his list and they were just endorsing Athanasius list.

94. 42:40

    And a couple of decades later, in 393 AD, the New Testament Canon was officially ratified. It was known as the Synod of Hippo. Now, there are a lot of apocryphal works in the New Testament as well. And just to give you an idea of what was happening in these early years of the Christian community, here’s a quote from Justin Martyr sometime around 155 AD we quoted from him before. He’s one of the earliest Christian apologist. He’s describing what life was like in the Christian community at that time.

95. 43:12

    He said on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gathered together to one place. And the memoirs of the apostles, or the writings of the prophets are read as long as time permits. And then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs and exhorts to the imitation of these good things.

96. 43:30

    Which sounds pretty familiar, doesn’t it? It’s a lot like our Sunday mornings here. They’d read from the word of God, and then they give an exhortation about it. And as early as 155 AD, they had a collection of holy writings from both the prophets and the apostles. You’re familiar with those passages of the New Testament that our faith is based on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets.

97. 43:52

    That’s a significant fact. The book either had to be written by a prophet or an apostle to be within the Canon of the Bible. So here are here’s a list, again not exhaustive, but most of the major apocryphal works of the New Testament. We have the Didaki, which means the teaching of the 12, the Acts of Paul and Thekla, the Epistle of Pseudo Barnabas, the Epistle to the Corinthians, the 2nd Epistle of Climate, the Shepherd of Hermes, the Gospel According to the Hebrews, the Seven Epistles of Ignatius, the Epistle of Polycorp to the Philippians, the Apocalypse of Peter and the Epistle to the Laodiceans.

98. 44:27

    And none of these works ever enjoyed more than temporary recognition, maybe in one or two ecclesias at a time. There was never a time when the whole Christian community said yes. We believe this book belongs here. They all only enjoyed maybe at at most we would call it semi canonical status. But the success that some of them did enjoy for a period of time was usually due to the fact that they would append themselves, attach themselves to actual legitimate writings from the New Testament. They attach themselves to books that were inspired, that did belong in the New Testament.

99. 45:05

    But the fact remains that no major church, council or Canon ever included any of these books as inspired parts of the New Testament. So some examples of that. You may notice that in Colossians chapter 4 and verse 16, Paul says that he’d written a letter to the Laodiceans. We don’t have that letter. We don’t have the letter to the Laodiceans. But you see up here the Epistle to the Laodiceans. At some point in time, somebody thought, oh, here’s an opportunity, we’re missing this letter. I’ll write it.

100. 45:36

     And they wrote the fictional letter to the Laodiceans. It was very early on recognized as a counterfeit. Nobody had ever seen it before. All the New Testament works had all been written around the same time, back when the apostles were alive. First Corinthians chapter 5 and verse 9. The Apostle Paul says that he had written an earlier letter to the Corinthians, which would be 1/3 letter to the Corinthians. Now we only have two of the letters to the Corinthians, which means there was a third one that we don’t have today. But somebody took the opportunity to later on write a fake epistle to the Corinthians to fill in that gap. And you can see why some of these might have been accepted by some people who are like, oh, it’s been found. We found that third letter, and it would have been accepted maybe by some people in some place until it was eventually tossed out.

101. 46:23

     And in the Old Testament we find too that that there are works that are mentioned that were written often by faithful people. Nevertheless, they were not preserved and they’re not in our Bible today, even though they were written by faithful people because they’ve been lost to history. First Chronicles chapter 29 and 29 mentions the Chronicles of Nathan the prophet and Gad the Seer, and we don’t have those we know about Nathan the prophet.

102. 46:46

     He was a true faithful prophet of God. He wrote a book and we don’t have it today. God didn’t decide to preserve it so that we would have it in our Bible today, even though he was a faithful man of God. First Kings chapter 4 and verse 32 says that Solomon wrote 3000 Proverbs and 1005 songs. And how many songs of Solomon do we have today? Only one.

103. 47:10

     What happened to the other 1004? I’d suggest we also don’t have all of the 3000 Proverbs that Solomon wrote either. And you see, there have been a lot of faithful people throughout that ancient history of the Jews. They did right things and they may have been completely sound and what they wrote and worth reading, but they’ve been lost to us because the Canon of Scripture was very precisely copied down to us through the generations in a very specific way. Now we started out by saying that if we truly believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God, then it should in some way prove that to us.

104. 47:48

     It should separate itself by its very characteristics from all other writings that we have. Because we don’t believe that anything else is the inspired word of God except for the books that we find here. And just come with me to Psalm chapter 12. I’m going to read verse six. In the first half of verse 7, Psalm chapter 12, starting at verse 6, the words of the Lord are pure words, like silver, refined in a furnace, on the ground, purified 7 times.

105. 48:21

     You, O Lord, will keep them. Now, if we believe those words, if we believe that God himself has preserved this message for over the course of several thousand years for us here so that he can speak to us today in his legitimate, genuine voice,

106. 48:41

     then once again, don’t you think that these books, that this Bible should somehow, over and above all other works, prove that it’s special? And we’ve talked about how the Old Testament in the New Testament was formed. We’ve talked about how incredible it was, the the rigorous procedures of the scribes as they copied out the Old Testament. We’ve talked about all the books that were kicked out of the Bible because they didn’t belong, because it was considered to be a matter of life and death. Whether or not a book truly was truly did belong within the Canaan of the Bible.

107. 49:15

     And when historians are looking at manuscript evidence for any kind of ancient historical writing or event, there’s two main questions they ask. And the first one is this. What is the gap in time between the oldest manuscript that we have for this particular writing and when it was originally written, when that author originally lived?

108. 49:37

     And to give you an example of what that might look like with some other historical works that we use for sources for our ancient history, here’s some examples. I apologize for the font size. It’s smaller than I like to to have it normally, but I had to fit these all on the screen.

109. 49:51

     Pliny the Younger, the Roman governor, who also wrote some history that we used today. So we so we know what happened in Asia around the time that he lived. Pliny the Younger, about 750 years from the oldest manuscript we have to when Pliny actually lived. Caesar, Julius Caesar and his work the Gallic Wars, about 1000 years. Plato about 1200 years.

110. 50:19

     Aristotle about 1400 years, Sophocles about 1400 years, Euripides about 1500 years. These are the average time gaps, the kind of thing we see when we’re looking at works that are this old. And then we get to the Old and the New Testaments and the Old Testament just about 150 years, and the New Testament no more than 50 and perhaps less.

111. 50:51

     The oldest manuscript copies we have from the New Testament were perhaps written when some of the last of the apostles, maybe John, was even still alive. There is no other ancient historical work that even comes close when it comes to the time gap between when it was originally written in the oldest manuscript copies that we have. And the Bible, statistically, in this way sets sets itself apart from any other ancient work.

112. 51:16

     Now, the other major question that historians will ask is how many manuscript copies do we have of this particular work? Because they like to be able to take those copies and put them side by side and compare them to each other because they’re often quite different from each other. So this list is similar to the last one, but not all. The names aren’t exactly the same for Plato. Seven.

113. 51:41

     Now these numbers include both manuscript fragments and manuscript copies of entire scrolls. Thucydides is considered to be one of the most accurate ancient historians. 7 Pliny the Younger, 7. Herodotus, 8. Euripides, 9. Caesar with his Gallic Wars 10. Tacitus 20. Aristotle, 49. Josephus, somewhere around 127, Sophocles 193. And then we come to the Old Testament somewhere around 10,010 thousand, and then we come to the New Testament and at last count when I checked, 24,970. And to put this in even more perspective, if you were to compare the Bible, let’s say the New Testament, to the writing that had the second most amount of manuscript copies outside the Bible, it wouldn’t be a historical work. It would actually be a fictional work. Homer’s the Iliad at 643, in second place, after the Old and New Testaments.

114. 52:50

     Just by the way, In case you’re curious, of those 24,970 just under 5700 are in the original Greek, about 10,000 in Latin, and the rest in various other languages.

115. 53:03

     Did God preserve his words? Has he shown that to us? Has he set these words apart from any other thing that we could read, that we could find, that we could get our hands on, that we could delve into? And the answer is absolutely, He has, in just about every way that counts.

116. 53:21

     The Bible that we have in front of us has set itself apart from any other human work that has ever been written because we believe that it was more than that, that it truly was inspired by God. And if it was inspired by God, that means that when you read it, you’re having a conversation with God because he’s speaking to you through his word, and you’re speaking to him when you pray.

117. 53:43

     And if God truly is speaking to us through this word, well, then I imagine we should listen, shouldn’t we? And that should be only the first step, recognizing that this truly is the word of God. If we acknowledge that he exists, that Jesus truly was the Son of God, that he was raised from the dead, then that means that God can and will raise us from the dead. And if this truly is God’s message to us, well, then truly this book is more important than anything else in this life.