Books That Didn't Make it Into the New Testament & Why

And this week we're taking a look at another subject. Let me get to the topics here. This thing is jumping ahead on me here. There we go. Books that didn't make it into the New Testament and why. You ever heard of the lost books of the Bible? Ever hear of those? These are some of these books that you hear about.

We'll take a look at some of them and we're going to start off by taking a look at something we actually covered about three months back, and that is how do you figure out which book is in what we call the canon, the group of scriptures that constitute what we have today as the Bible.

So I want to first take a look at that. I think one of the things that you should have in your handout there too is a couple of samples of some of these books. I printed out some shorter ones so you can take a look at them. Some of them are just outright fascinating. So here we go.

The first thing that we looked at, and this is again a slide we had three months ago, but I went ahead and included it here just so we could track this. Because what we're going to do is review it and then take a turn. Because what we looked at before is, here's how you decide what's in the canon and here's what's in the canon. Now we're going to go, here's how you decide what's in the New Testament canon and then look at the things that didn't make it and why.

So a different track. What we're looking at particularly is the second one. canonization is looking at those books that are within the canon and really here's something I like to think about people didn't just sit down and decide this is going to be in the canon and this isn't as if it were a human process what we're really doing is sorting out and saying which books did God include that we are now discovering and recognizing as in the canon. See the difference? It's not human beings deciding, it is us recognizing what God has already inspired. That's the difference, and it's an important difference.

One of the things we pointed out before was that the apostolic era provided a foundation for the New Testament canon. One of the things that was recognized was that Jesus' words had authority from the outset. Certainly beyond that, But Jesus' words had authority, and he, as we read in his very words, gave authority to the apostles. They had an assignment of authority from him. So these apostles, as they were on earth, kind of acted as a living canon. They were the ones who said, this is what is biblical.

This is what is good teaching. This is what is sound. One of the phrases that we frequently run across in the New Testament is THE faith. Where you see that, it is often referring to the set of doctrines and teachings that you find in the New Testament documents. The Apostles also had what we call canonical activities.

They did things that were involved with bringing these books together. They selected and verified contents. Luke starts off writing the Theophilus and he says, Many have put together accounts. And then he tells Theophilus, I went and checked things out, verified things. So that's part of the process.

Another part of it is the public reading of Scripture. Several places in the New Testament talk about that public reading of Scripture. The circulation of it. You take this and have it read somewhere else. And then determining what's in the canon and what's not. the word, not just something inspiring, but what is inspired. And finally, the quoting of scripture. We have an example from Paul in 1 Timothy quoting Luke already, even though the books were just being formulated. Back in the third week, we had a handout that looks like this. If you need to catch up with that, Nancy's got all these things on file. She can get you additional copies.

But this gives a listing of the 27 New Testament books, the approximate date they were written, and the author. Now, here are some things that happened that either confirmed or began requiring a definition of what's in scripture and what isn't. One of them is this fellow Valentinus said that there's a wide use of these New Testament books in the church during his day. One of the other things that happened about the same time, along comes a guy named Marcion, and he says, I don't like all these books, and I don't like all of what's in them.

So his gospel was a gospel of Luke that had everything clipped out of it that was Jewish. He snipped it up, and then he picked Paul's letters, and any of them that sounded Jewish, he threw those out too. So he had a very, what's that? Yeah, well it was pretty slim. but actually there was a series of churches that he founded based on this teaching.

Then there was Montanus who came up with, he had himself and two prophetesses, and they came up with additional revelations. Jesus wasn't going to come back in Israel, he was going to come back in southwestern Turkey, what we call southwestern Turkey now, and various revelations, and so he added to scripture with those revelations.

Along with that, there's all these books that we'll be taking a look at this morning. People started writing lots of extra books. As a matter of fact, by the 9th century, one fellow wrote down, he said, I count 280 extra books that a lot of which pretend to be part of the New Testament. Okay. Each of the New Testament books was quoted by early church authors. We have multiple examples of that, where early church authors would quote them.

But then the next thing that happened, particularly in these two persecutions under Decius and Diocletian, they had a mandatory destruction of scripture. Here's the way they would go about it. By the way, we have some recorded inspections from those times.

What they would do is, if it was reported that you had some Christian scriptures, They would come up to your door, knock on the door, you'd answer the door, and they'd say, okay, it's reported that you have Christian scriptures, you must right now declare what you have. If you declared what you have, and then they go in and get it and pull it out, you're okay. If you don't declare it, and they go and find it, you're dead. Okay?

That was, I mean, it was a radical day and night difference, and that was the rule. So what happened, you had to determine what was scripture and what wasn't, didn't you? You had to have some understanding of what was scripture if you were going to die for it. You had to have an understanding of what was scripture if you were going to declare it. So this forced an understanding of what's inspired scripture and what isn't. These were some of the final indications.

We have Athanasius in 367. He listed the present 27 books. And he also uses this word canon that we've been referring to. It means a measuring stick. It means this is the measure of the New Testament. And we have some church councils after that where the books were lifted. Okay, here's a good question. What qualifies a book as being a part of the canon? The one that we have there is apostolicity. Why would that be important? Why does it matter?

Yes. Remember we said that Jesus' words were automatically of authority and here are the apostles and what were they to do? You'll be my witnesses, right? In Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria. They were given assignment and authority to go out. So that's a key element there. Spirituality. Why is that a valid test of a New Testament book? Why would that matter?

And there were lots of... I'm sorry, you can't hear me. You can't answer too. There were lots of... I think it's like Belle of the Dragon, the geographer, but that's not very spiritual, not God and nothing. Lots of stories, but not spiritual. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Tom? Yeah, I just want you to take an image from the 47th, for example. There's a supposed episode where Yes. Yeah, there are a number of books that got generated this particular period of time. The spiritual character is doubtful. Yeah, Crystal? Pardon? Spirit taught? Okay.

In other words, it's the Holy Spirit's work to take this spiritual truth and apply it to our lives. If this is not inspired, especially if it's not even spiritual, then it doesn't pass. There's no value in including it. It is part of the Lord bringing the truth to us. The Holy Spirit inspired what was written and also works in us to take those truths and apply it to our lives.

Ah, okay. Having true spiritual aspect. In other words, you could have something that's spiritual and is demonic. But in this case, it's spiritual relating to a relationship with the Lord and the spiritual realm, and speaking of that truthfully. Does that make sense? Yeah, Tom?

I think what you're trying to say is that if you find something and it doesn't feel spiritually with all the rings of the spiritual, you can tell yourself that Yeah, ultimately what's going to happen is you're going to have 66 books that are woven as a fabric in revealing spiritual truth to us. If it's not doing that, then it's just an interesting historical book. It may even be moral or something, but it does not have spiritual character if it doesn't end up bringing us into a closer relationship with Jesus Christ if it doesn't reveal spiritual truth that we could not know. Ultimately, what is the Bible?

It is revelation to us of God's thoughts and intents for us. The next one is universality. It was a book universally received in the church. This goes on with the other two. If it's not really apostolic, the church is going to say, why should I study this? If it's not of real spiritual character so that it's up-building and the Holy Spirit is able to use it in our lives, then why have it in there? The last one is obviously the inspiration. Does it give evidence of being divinely inspired? Does it fit the rest of the fabric of what we know to be in Scripture? Is it consistent with the rest of scripture so that from one end to the other, being about 40 authors writing over about 1,500 years time, that we end up with, this is God's plan and God's thoughts?

Okay. Why the canon is closed? God's completed the revealing through His Son and those He elected to serve as His witnesses. He's done with that. He's completed with that process. There's several passages here, Jude 3, Revelation 22, 18, 19, and others that talk about the finality of the Apostolic Revelation. One of the verses we looked at before was Jude 3, remember that? And in Jude 3, he says, I urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all, remember that word hapax? Means once given, perpetually valid. Once for all, delivered to the saints.

And finally, there are no more apostles. There are some that claim to be. I don't know if you ever run across those, but some that claim to be. But there are certain qualifications given here in order to be an apostle. And those that claim to be these days aren't.

Okay, now what about the books that we have that aren't in the New Testament? I've got a brief list here. The fact is that there are just hundreds of books. In the last century, there have been additional books that have shown up. One of them that showed up, I remember when I was in college, was called the Aquarian Gospel of Jesus Christ. People keep cropping up with these things and adding additional things that are supposedly scripture. What are some other books that have been put out there that have been supposed additional revelations?

Can you think of some? Book of Mormon, yes. Book of Mormon is supposedly accounts of people from from the Middle East, Israel, coming over to the Americas, right? So that's a good example. You think of any others? Additional books that, yeah? The Infancy Gospel? Okay, and what's that about?

Yes, and we'll go over that here just real shortly, yeah. The Gospel of Thomas. is one of those, and we'll be seeing some, or the Pro-Evangelium of James is another one. We'll see some of those. You know, I don't know if he made a claim to have those being scripture per se, but some people look at that as if it's somehow authoritative or at least interesting. Yeah, if you look at it, over time this has been an issue. This isn't just something that happened once and is gone. People keep coming up with things. Here's some additional revelation. And essentially the charismatic movement today says, well, ongoing we've got more revelation. Yeah, Tom? There we go. Mary Baker Eddy. Yes. Science and health. The key to scripture.

You don't understand it until you've got this book, right? There were four categories of books in the early church. This was when things were being formed. Let's look at these four categories carefully. I'm going to go over each of them in a little bit more detail, but just to present them initially. Homologomena.

These are the accepted 20 books of the New Testament. There were seven that had a little period of being questioned, but there were 20 that were included. We'll go over the list of those, and I think you have them in your handout as well. The Antilogomena were seven books that were disputed by some. Hebrews, James, 2nd Peter, 2nd and 3rd John, Jude, and Revelation. And we'll talk about that in just a little bit here.

Yes, between the two you've got 27. And then the New Testament Apocrypha. These were books that didn't pretend to be New Testament books. They were just books that were used for reference purposes. And we'll give you some examples of those in a bit. Here's one of them, the Didache. Another one is the Pseudepigrapha. These are books that are rejected by all, or nearly all, but they pretend to be New Testament documents.

Let's take a look at... Now remembering, here's our test as we're looking through these things. The Homo Legumina here, here's the 20 that were Okay, nobody questions. These are all part of the New Testament. These are the inspired ones. Nobody questioned these.

Here's some other books here. Hebrews, James, 2nd Peter, 2nd and 3rd John, Jude and Revelation. These had some questioning for a period of time. And Hebrews, why would you think there might be some questioning as to whether that's a valid book? Yeah, it's a question, who is the author? The author is not identified. So there was some, you know, is it really an apostle? One of the ways that eventually I'm getting resolved is we look at this, this is consistent with the rest of the New Testament. At the end it mentions Timothy, so it seems to indicate apostolic association, others as well. So it was accepted.

James, second Peter, second and third John and Jude, where shorter books, some of them, those 2 and 3 John and Jude are just one chapter long. Part of the problem with a shorter book is it's a little bit tougher, you don't have the mass of material to test. 2 Peter also has a different kind of, it's got a different theme than 1 Peter. I think that's one of the reasons why it had a little tougher time being accepted is they said, well, the writing is different. Well, it was written about a different subject. And it was also written about a different group of people, if you look at who it's addressed to. So there's some reasons for that.

Revelation had the toughest time, because chapter 20, six times, says what? 1,000 years. Exactly. And later on, what started happening in the early church? Yeah, they started allegorizing things, and they started talking about, well, there really isn't a millennium. And so those who objected to a literal millennium objected to the Book of Revelation. So there's where the objection came from. Yes, you're very right. Even Luther put James and a few other books, Revelation included, in the back in a separate section. He still was not convinced on several of them. And you're right, James is one of them.

Okay, you've got this chart. Be sure to memorize it for the test at the end, okay? I put it on there because it's got lots of detail that you can study later. But the point being that what you'll notice is as you look in each category, as you go on, the spots get filled. That's, I think, the key point. As you look through some of the different councils, the different people who quoted different things, over time these issues got settled. And this gives you the opportunity to not only see that pattern in the big scale, but also to study each individual case if you're prone to do so. It gives a lot of detail in one scope. I won't pretend to even begin going over any of it right now, but I'll let you study that as much as you'd like. The New Testament Apocrypha.

These are respected books, as we mentioned. Didache, for example, is kind of a church manual. The teachings is the idea. These were the sorts of books that are in wide use, but they didn't pretend to be scripture. An example is, Hal and Roger covered Major Bible Themes, and Major Bible Themes is a very good book. It doesn't pretend to be scripture. It's widely used, it's a good reference book, people can study it and get some benefit out of it, but it's not scripture. So books of this category would fall under there. The next and the last one is the Pseudepigrapha, and these are the books we want to take a look at next here.

These books were basically rejected by all, and they pretended to be New Testament documents. They had titles like the Gospel of Peter, the Apocalypse of John, names like that. And frequently what they would do is kind of paste in some words that sounded like the person that was supposed to have authored it. These kept showing up centuries after the New Testament was completed and still do now. Something else to make note of is fake apostolic books started early. Look at this.

Here's Paul writing to the church at Thessalonica. He says, Now we request you, brethren, with regard to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together with him, that you not be quickly shaken from your composure or be disturbed either by a spirit or a message or a letter as if from us. To the effect that the day of the Lord has come.

What was going on there? What was happening in the church at Thessalonica? What's that? Yeah, there's somebody coming in and telling them something. They were getting disturbed. The Lord's already come? Boy, we missed it or something. Yeah, it was frightening to them.

And so what was happening, apparently some people had sent a letter faking a letter as if it were from Paul, trying to use Paul's authority. Here's the Gospel of Thomas that was mentioned earlier. This is, by the way, one of the most talked about books outside of the New Testament, talked about as if it were something that should be in the New Testament. How many of you have heard of the Jesus Seminar? You've heard of that? Okay, you may have heard of that.

It's a group of guys, they're headquartered out of Santa Rosa, California, where my sister and Nancy's sister live. They're headquartered out of Santa Rosa, and their idea is that the Gospels, as we have them, only have about 75 verses that are genuine. And the rest of it they've concluded, no, somebody else has cooked up. One of their primary areas of focus, outside the New Testament Gospels, is this.

But here's this book, it was written about 140, so could Thomas have written this? No, probably not. This is about a century out of phase. But it's known not to have been accepted in the early church. There were two versions of it, real interestingly. One of them got skewed. It's like somebody grabbed it and said, this is pretty good, but I want to tweak it.

So they made it more what we call Gnostic. Anybody tell us what Gnostic means? What's that all about? Yeah? We got all the secret knowledge. Yeah, secret knowledge is one of the keys of Gnosticism, one of the key descriptors. Can you think of another?

Another part of Gnosticism was spiritual things, heavenly things are good, earthly things are bad. They tend to deny, for example, that Jesus actually physically came because the material things are bad. So since he was good, he just sort of appeared, but didn't really materially come into body. So these are Gnostic ideas, and it's woven into the more Gnostic version of the Gospel of Thomas.

The Gospel of Thomas tells about Jesus at age five making clay out of brook, then turning the clay into five sparrows that are chirping and flying. Then it tells also of making a young boy wither like a tree, Remember, Jesus came up with the fig tree, and the fig tree withered. He does that with a boy. And then, another boy bumps him in the shoulder, and so he just kills him dead. Not with physical action, but just commands him to drop down dead, and he fell down dead. Now, let me ask you this.

Does this sound consistent with the Jesus of the Gospels? Yeah! One thing, as you look at it, the very character of Jesus is distorted substantially by the Gospel of Thomas. But that, for some reason, didn't seem to bother the folks who liked this and were impressed by it. And strangely enough, the folks at the Jesus Seminar don't seem to see what's wrong with it either. But this is one of them that they place a lot on.

What's that? Yeah. Yeah. The Gospel of the Ebionites. Here's another one that's real interesting. You know how Paul wrote against the Judaizers? We've encountered it a little bit here in the book of Philippians as we've been studying. Big time in the book of Galatians, right? And did he give warning to other churches about that? Yes? No? Did other churches get warning about the Judaizers? About the church of Colossae being one of them, okay? It was a risk or a danger at various churches, okay?

But here's a gospel that was basically tailored for the Judaizers. So they had a book. They said, hey, we need one that's really heavy on our view of things. So they came up with this gospel. You could go ahead and be a Christian, but basically they had Jesus narrowed down to just a good Jewish boy. stripped out anything that would leave room for the involvement of the Gentiles. Now, here's one, the Gospel of Peter. This is one I think I gave you copies of here.

Though we have only fragments, this work was believed to have been written 100 to 130. It was referenced by Origen, Eusebius, and Theodorette. Here's interesting, it teaches that Pilate was guiltless for the death of Christ, the Jews deserving all the blame. It says that Jesus, when he was crucified, felt no pain. And that Jesus' brothers and sisters were from Joseph's first marriage.

Some interesting little things jockeyed around there. I'm just recalling, I don't think I gave you this one after all. There's others that I did. There's the Apocalypse of Peter, that's the one I gave you copies of. Typically, they'll say it's cousins.

It's a little tough to deal with that. The Bible says that Joseph refrained from relationships with Mary until Jesus was born. That strongly implies that it was for a time, and the until means at that point no longer. But yes, their answer would be that these are really cousins. Once in a while you hear this similar thing, that it's some prior marriage or something of that sort.

Okay, here's the Apocalypse of Peter, written about 150, more than 80 years after Peter's death, so it's a little out of generation there. This one is real fascinating, and indeed you do have a copy of it. It starts off with descriptions of the heavenly scene, and then puts a little bit more verbiage into intense, grotesque descriptions of hell. It's interesting, it continued to be used as an outside book, as if it were additional revelation. Dante's Inferno, you've heard of that, was influenced by this work. There's another Old Testament apocryphal book called the Book of Enoch that is similar in going into grotesque, extensive details about describing hell. Okay, here's the Apocalypse of Peter. I won't read through it now. You're free to read through it later.

Yes? Yeah, what happens, there's several things they do to determine date. Obviously, you know, as a starting point, but not the final determining point is If there's something in it that specifically indicates a date, they'll be looking for that. Some of the big impacts would be, for example, if it mentioned a particular emperor or something of that sort. Aside from that, you look at do you have any other outside evidence of others quoting it or referencing it, and what do we know about their dates?

So there's another checkpoint. Another checkpoint is what kind of writing do they use? There's different forms of Greek lettering and we'll take a look at that probably next week. There's different forms of Greek lettering used in different times, even different inks.

If things were included in a book type form, that didn't come about until about the year 100. The idea that we have where you've got a bound book, about the year 100 is the first that they ever came up with those. Prior to that it was individual leaves or scrolls. So what's the form?

Also, what is it written on? There was a tendency earlier to use papyrus, and later on to use more sheepskin for things that were to last for a while. Another thing that can be done is carbon dating of the material itself, and that'll give you an approximate age. What other things was it found with, and do we have something that'll help identify it from that? cases. Sometimes there's other major events like at Pompeii, you know, we have a particular date when everything was covered with ashes, so that kind of sets an ending date on when things could get in there when they dug the ashes up. So there's lots of different things that they'll look at, but they look for a confluence of evidence to point towards a certain date. Make sense? Yeah, okay. Anyway, you've got a copy of this.

This goes into immense detail into descriptions of hell. Descriptions you don't find anywhere in scripture. You don't find this detail in hell anywhere in scripture. This is the hellish description. This is the heavenly description. So the description of hell is far more extensive. Let's see, there were pebbles sharper than swords or any spit, red hot, and women and men in tattered and filthy raiment rolled about.

I mean, it just goes on and on and on with the descriptions. Okay, an epistle to the Laodiceans. Ah, here's a good one. If you look at Colossians 4.16, Paul makes reference to a letter that he wrote to the church at Laodicea. And he says, be sure to have that letter read to you. and your letter read to them. Colossae and Laodicea were like across the valley. They could see each other from one town to the next. So he says, exchange letters.

Well, we don't have a copy of this letter to the church at Laodicea, so somebody said, let's come up with one. Let's make one up. And so this is really sad. This was done late 3rd century, so this is obviously a couple centuries plus out of phase. Here's the letter. You also have a copy of it. And as you look through it, all it is is a bunch of Paul kind of phrases just kind of hacked together.

That's all it is. Paul, an apostle, men, and not through man, but through Jesus Christ to the brethren who are allowed to see him. Grace to you and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. So far, nothing too upsetting or disturbing. Just sounds like one of Paul's letters. And that's basically how the whole thing Verse 11, is God who works in you?

Words like that. There's nothing that you would object to too terribly much in most of them, but it doesn't have Paul's logic, it doesn't have Paul's statements, it's just a bunch of little bits and pieces that are hacked together out of Paul's other writings. So here was one that was put together. Yeah, this one here is just somebody faked it and put together Paul sounding phrases and kind of distributed it as if it were something from Paul and of course people saw that and they said this is garbage and rejected it.

Here's one, the Protevangelium of James. This may be the one you were talking about, Brad. Here's a word, this is a second century word, a lot of detail initially on Mary's birth and then going into the birth of Jesus. The interesting thing about Mary included that she was perpetually virgin, but it doesn't mention immaculate conception, the idea that she was born sinless.

And being born after only six months in the womb, and she walked seven steps at six months of age. Interesting little details. So she was a preemie and still came out just fine, I guess. That's real premature. Anyway, the balance of the book tells a rather fanciful account of Jesus' birth and it talks about Joseph going outside and seeing birds singing and they weren't, and clouds that were and weren't, and strange things like that. It's just very odd stuff.

And finally, it gives a description of Zechariah, John the Baptist's father, and how he was killed, and goes into some detail about that, and how people discovered it afterwards, and his blood turned to stone. And that's the book. That's what you get. That's the whole thing. So, very interesting.

It's like, here's these births, and all very strange and fanciful, and then ending up with odd details on Zechariah's death. One of the things as we look at these, because we could go through just one after another on these things, there's lots and lots and lots of these, but after a while it gets to be more like what you've just seen.

As you look at scripture, real scripture, not fake scripture, as you look at scripture, here's what the Lord has Paul write to Timothy, all scripture is inspired by God and profitable, and that's one of the things that these books lack. They're not profitable. They're certainly not inspired, but they're not profitable. Profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work. And this is why people will bring up the lost books, or, what about this book? How come they didn't include that? Well, as you see of these books here, they're not constructive, they're not helpful.

There are oftentimes things that are very fanciful, sometimes unbelievable, very out of balance. And the spiritual character is not there. They sometimes have magical character, but not spiritual character. And what you also see is that there is not the content that will lead the believer in their walk with the Lord. It just isn't there. It does not fit as a fabric with the rest of Scripture. And one of the things we see with Scripture is that it is part of God's process in making us adequate and equipping us.

These extra books don't do that. The extra books don't get there. So, even today, if you see somebody comes up and they say, hey, I've got this other neat book, or I've got an additional revelation, One of the big areas where it's going to fall apart is this very thing. It's not profitable. It is not inspired, certainly. But it is also not going to be helpful in equipping believers.

Okay. We actually got through a little bit early. Any questions? Yeah, Crystal. on Laodicea. Let me back up to it if I can. Some folks will speculate that this letter to the Ephesians is actually this one. That's speculation. Personally, I question it and one of the reasons would be that Laodicea is close I mean, because they're within eyesight of each other. You can see Colossae from Laodicea and Laodicea from Colossae, and they're right next to each other. Ephesians is quite a ways away. I mean, you can get there, but it's a fair distance.

It would be unlikely that he would somehow make that happen. But, you know. Well, there's one thing that the two Ephesians are, the rock of Jerusalem and the production There are some documents that lack it. I still don't see it as confirming because of the fact that this would make sense if there was another letter and the Lord just, you know, we don't have it. It's real interesting. We don't have that, whatever that other letter is, unless it's this case of it being Ephesians.

I just, I'm doubtful of it because it's, they were not an easily cross-communicated, you know, church in terms of having, you know, easily switching letters. This would be just a quick walk across the valley if it was actually a letter that was allowed to see and it would be no problem for them to quickly exchange letters. It would be natural, okay, because the communities were so closely related. Ephesus is enough distance away that it would make me question, okay, why are we doing this? Again, whether or not that's the case is speculation.

We don't have any copies of the book of Ephesians that are titled The Letter to the Laodiceans. If we had something like that, that might give a little more credence to it, in my thoughts. In the Old Testament, there are probably a half dozen or better books that are listed, given reference, but we don't have the book. So I see it as a pattern that the Lord may at times make reference to something, but he did not have it included for whatever reasons, he determined that we don't need it. So we have not even one copy of those missing books.

And this is one of them. Folks have made that speculation that the Book of Ephesians is actually this letter to Laodicea. I'm personally doubtful of it. To me, that will forever be speculation unless we find something that substantiates it, because there's not There isn't anything outside of scripture other than just speculation to pin that on. Enough? Yeah, okay. Yeah, I personally am disinclined to base something on speculation or claim something that's just a good guess. So, yeah, Tom? Yeah, there's lots of instances where you can imagine people filling in the blanks. You know, if the Lord doesn't want something to be included in scripture, for whatever his reasons are, he can certainly make that happen.

It's very interesting here, we have hundreds of copies of handwritten copies of the book of Ephesians and no copies of the letter to Laodicea. That to me is, this is God's guidance, not just accident. It's amazing when you look at the New Testament books, it's like the Lord said, I want to make it abundantly clear. We've got in Greek alone over 5,000 handwritten Greek manuscripts, when you include the Latin, You add another 8,000 for Latin manuscripts of the New Testament, handwritten. By the time you add them all up for the various languages, 24,000 plus. So a massive amount of copies, not one copy of the Letter to Laodicea, if indeed the speculation is not the case. It is as if the Lord made it abundantly clear, this is what I have in mind. and what was not to be distributed we just have nothing of, or we have these spurious productions which are so evidently not scripture that there's no question.

I think it's neat. To me it just shows the Lord's hand. Throughout the course of history the church, as we've seen, sometimes got into crazy things, and yet we see them preserving the scriptures in massive quantity in numerous languages and with abundant confirmation that this is inspired. And that's just marvelous to see. Other questions? Yeah, Hal. Yes? Right.

Very few. Very few. What we talked about was, for example, the Gospel of Peter. All we have is a few shreds. If it was scripture, the recognition is, man, I've got something. And so there's abundant copying of those from early on, copying and quoting.

One of the things we mentioned a week or two ago was if you didn't have the New Testament documents at all, you could just from quotes and commentary by the early church put together the entire New Testament except for 11 verses, just from quotes. So you could assemble almost all but those 11 verses just by looking at other quotes of early church fathers of scripture. You can't do that with these other documents. These other documents may make occasional reference to them, a lot of times indicating why they don't accept them.

But I think that's just one of the things to me that shows God's putting his finger on, this is inspired, because we have lots of copies of them. As opposed to these others, people say, why should I copy that? I don't care about it. Furthermore, why should I die for it? Because if it was a matter of what's scripture and what isn't, and deciding what am I going to die for, why should I die for the Gospel of Thomas? Why should I die for the Apocalypse of Peter?

And so they didn't. They just said, here I got this stuff, have it. They had no problem saying, here I got this stuff, take it, I don't care. But, yeah, Josiah? Frequently it was, they would specifically mention it as a fake. Let's take it for instance.

Somebody comes into Holly Hills and they start speaking from second hesitations, okay? Or third hesitations, I don't care, okay? What's going to happen is you're pretty quickly going to see Hal and Mike and I say, whoa. And we're not going to say, hey, that's a book. We're going to say, hey, that's a book we don't want read here as scripture. We're going to make note of it.

And they did the same thing. They looked at it and they said, I'm warning you folks, this is not scripture. And so often those references were of that kind. There may have sometimes been other more incidental neutral references and that did happen. But oftentimes they're brought up because they're being warned about them. Other questions? You must be either fully informed or absolutely baffled.

Okay, we're going to go, let me advance ahead here. Going to go this next week into copying the Old and New Testaments. How did we get what we have now? One of the reasons we want to go into this, and Hal and I have talked at length over this one because it's a question that comes up frequently.

What do I do with these marginal readings? I look at my Bible and it says, well, other ancient documents have this. What do I do with that? Is that something I should pay attention to or ignore it or what? What do I do if I look in this Bible and it says about Mark 16, 9 through 20, and says, you know, the most reliable ancient documents don't have this? What do you do with that? Anyway, you catch my drift? We've talked about the great number of New Testament documents, now what do you do if you've got variations between them?

How do I handle that? So anyway, we want to address that next week, and we don't want to just kind of give you a bunch of detail, but we also want to leave you with some tools that you can use to figure out, should I do anything with this marginal reading or not? And if so, what? Okay? So we want to make it practical, not just a bunch of academic detail. Okay? Make sense? All right. I'm looking forward to it.

Anyway, let's pray. Lord, thank you that you, through your sovereignty through church history, have made it clear what is inspired and what is indeed not. And we're thankful for your purpose in your word that we might know the Savior, our Lord Jesus, and we might grow in the grace of Him. We thank you that you provided us what we need to grow Until that time we go home to see you face to face. Thank you for it in Jesus name, Amen.