Defense of the Faith - The Bible: How did we get it? Part 1

I wanted to make one quick correction. Two weeks ago, I was talking about the solar system, and I was referring to the Oort Cloud, O-O-R-T, and I for some reason said angstrom units, and it should be astronomical units, so if you took a note on that, it wasn't in writing. But at any rate, if you did write that down, you need to correct that so that you don't end up embarrassing both yourself and me. An angstrom unit is a very tiny unit of measurement. An astronomical unit, on the other hand, is the distance from the Earth to the sun, 93 million miles.

So it makes quite a difference. So at any rate, Randy will be talking about how we got the documents in the Bible, primarily the New Testament. And one of the things I was just sharing with Randy, there is a fellow, Dr. Nabil Qureshi, who came out of Islam. His family was Muslim missionaries. And at any rate, he's become a believer. And one of the things that he mentioned as significant is exactly what Randy is going to be talking about here, how we got the New Testament documents. And so it's something I think critical in terms of interfacing with Muslims, because they have been given a misunderstanding about the reliability of the New Testament documents. And so this is valuable information.

So anyway, I'll turn it over to Randy. So this morning we're going to take a look at a two-parter, the first of a two-parter, how we got the Bible, how did we get the Bible. And this handout is actually one that is predominantly put together by my dad from the last time we did this series. And he sent it to me and he said, hey, check this out, you're welcome to use it.

Otherwise, if you need to write your own thing or edit it, that's fine. So as I was looking at this document, it's quite frankly, one of the clearest, most concise statements on the topics at hand that I have read. And when I was in seminary, I read a lot of super nerdy things that were highfalutin. This is very approachable and yet still covers all the same topics, just in a more easy to understand format. So, as we go over this, I want to give credit to the fact that my dad wrote this. It's not my writing, but it is incredibly well written. And so, even though I'm not going to read it to you word for word, which would be painful as a lesson format, do take some time afterwards and read this document. I think it's an incredibly valuable piece of writing. And next week, we'll go over the second part, which is also well articulated.

So the four parts of which we've divided it into two lessons are inspiration, canonization, transmission, and translation. So we're going to define the first two. And if you're uncertain about transmissions or translation, next week, transmission has nothing to do with your car, fortunately. But we'll talk about those two next week. The first one that we're going to take a look at here is inspiration.

Inspiration refers to the Holy Spirit's involvement in and with the human authors of Scripture, as they wrote the words on scrolls and papyrus. How many of you are familiar with the idea of inspiration of the Scripture? I think in this class, knowing how long I've seen many of your faces, a majority of you would be pretty familiar with that. One question I want to start with is why is it important that the Holy Spirit inspired the text of the Bible?

So it won't have mistakes? Okay, so it won't have mistakes, that's good. Because one of the tenets of Christian theology is that God is perfect, right? And if that is an accurate and true statement, which I would argue that it is, then the work of the Spirit in inspiring the text of scripture is going to lead to a mistake-free document.

Also, he has a complete understanding of the absolute truth, whereas human beings don't. I'm going to restate your statement, but I'm going to change the word just slightly, and that is that because truth comes from God and its source is God, he can speak it without partiality. But that's an important point, that the Holy Spirit understands truth.

And man's version and understanding of truth is quite limited, right? The first quarter of this class has been about the limitation of man's understanding, right? And how much we take for granted and we have to assume, right? And it's confused, yeah.

So now when we talk about the idea of the Bible being inspired by the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit being, because he's part of the Trinity, being perfect, we have this idea that his communication is important. That doesn't mean that human authors weren't involved. There are multiple views on the work of the Holy Spirit in the authors. Some of them treat the the authors of the text as, for all intents and purposes, a human typewriter.

I think we can see personality in the text, which indicates that that is not the way that that took place, but we'll address that later on as we go through this. Inspiration is not the subjective human response to the written content of recognized scripture or any other writing, but it is superintendence by God of each human author of scripture so that working through the personalities of each author in the context of each author's specific history and culture, God took the initiative to assure that the words that each author wrote conveyed the specific message that God intended.

Is that a long enough single sentence that looks like a paragraph? That's why I'm not reading this whole thing to you. The inspiration is not subjective human response. Why is that first part really important? Inspiration is not subjective human response. Stan? The same thing we said earlier, that it comes from the Holy Spirit, it comes from God. It's the absolute truth. More men can't do that.

How many of you, when you were driving here, passed at least one church before you got to this church? or maybe in some cases six or seven or ten or twelve. There's a lot of churches that are scattered throughout the city, but a lot of those divisions are because of subjective human response to the Bible. And so it's really important that if scripture is inspired by the Holy Spirit, that there is this principle of reliable truth. actually is important for why we would study hermeneutics. Everybody in this class, if you haven't taken a hermeneutics class or listened to the recordings that are available on the church website, I strongly, strongly, strongly recommend that you do so. Hermeneutics, besides being a mouthful of syllables, is the study or the approach to how you study God's Word so that you can have a clear understanding of what the author intended.

How many of you have, through no intent of your own, misunderstood an email? When you misunderstand an email, there are all kinds of interesting things that can happen. It's rarely ever good. Sometimes it's funny, but usually there's some kind of weird division that's happened because this written quickly jotted document, I got screwed up.

Well, if the Holy Spirit is communicating the message, then we know that there's intent, right? There's intentional communication of thought, even though it's through the authors. And that truth being revealed that way means that we can study God's Word. If we're consistent about it, we will understand the author's intent, which is why the hermeneutics class is good. When you take a hermeneutics class, for example, and someone comes to you and says something theological, it's not just your opinion versus their opinion, it's what is the author's intent. So inspiration matters a lot, that the Holy Spirit revealed truth, and there's intent and there's clarity.

Let's take a look at John 17.17, so if you've got your Bibles unlike I do, apparently. So, John 17 is what? Who's talking in John 17? It's predominantly Christ praying and speaking to the Father, right? So, in John 17, 17 Christ says, Sanctify them in truth. Your word is truth. Okay? So, there is inside of the scriptures this idea that God has truth, and God is conveying that truth, and God is passing that truth on with intent because He is the source of truth.

There's another five dollar word there, it's in the fourth paragraph down, it says theocentric. We don't use that word a lot probably in day-to-day conversation, I've never read it on the internet even. Theocentric is the idea that it's centered around God, just in case that's a $5 word. The second sentence in this paragraph, I'm going to read verbatim, it's a short one, but I think it's a very important principle. It also assumes that God is both motivated and capable of conveying the truth. Why is it significant that God would be motivated to convey the truth? What does that say about God's character?

Stan? It means that he's not a deist. He didn't set off someplace and just let it work its way through. Yeah, it doesn't agree with the deism concept. He wants us to know the truth and not guess at it. Yeah. God's character involved creating us in his image for relationship and he was motivated and wanted to convey the truth, and he's also capable of conveying the truth.

Today in our secular universities, there's this principle of postmodernism. In postmodernism is the idea that what a person knows or thinks they know and understands is isolated to themselves or their subgroup. So I will never be able to understand Wayne because Wayne is of a different cultural bias than I am. He lives six houses away from me, but we might as well live six million miles away from one another because I'll never be able to understand Wayne because I'll never understand his intent.

It is contrary to the biblical position and the idea that Christ or that the Holy Spirit conveyed truth in a knowable way so that we could know it. Inspiration is the foundation for this idea that we would be able to know truth revealed by God and that God would want to communicate that to us and that we could understand it. So inspiration is very important. So let's talk about the involvement of the Holy Spirit in the inspiration of text.

What kinds of writing do we have in the text of the Bible? What kinds of writing do we have? We have poems, didactic teaching, history. A lot of the historical elements in the text are actually compiled by for example, Moses. We have prophecy, books of wisdom. So we have different writing, different literature types that are in the text of the scripture, and the Holy Spirit inspired all of those.

So let's ask ourselves, how did the Holy Spirit inspire? It's very easy to associate and correlate the Holy Spirit's involvement in prophecy, right? probably a lot of sense where it's like this is something that man couldn't know. But what about the historical concept? Why is it that the Holy Spirit's involved with the writing of the history? Why does it matter that the Holy Spirit would be involved with the writing of the historical things?

Besides the fact that we know that there's truth. Accuracy. Okay, so there's precision. Stan? You can't be exhausted when it comes to history because the book would be immense. So you have to have an abridged version. So if you have that, then somebody has to point out to you which events are the most significant. This is true, yeah. So the Holy Spirit can orchestrate the documentation of significant events.

What that's going to lead to is a revelation of God's character. That's not only that he preserves the things that are important, but also that the events are going to show the character of God in his faithfulness, his reliability. One of my favorite things to run into with people when I'm having a conversation is the idea that God is love. How many of you talk to somebody and they don't really believe in the gospel, but they believe that God is love?

You run into that once or twice. But so Buddha taught love and Jesus taught love and they get that Muhammad wanted love and then all religions are the same and they just want love. You hear that kind of statement. It's again naive and not biblical. But the thing that's funny is the consequence of love being the only attribute of God is that he has this big gaping void. And so the Holy Spirit preserving the historical record of God's interaction with Israel, for example, shows out what other attributes of God besides love. There's plenty of love. But what else is in there? Justice. Patience. Righteousness. And there's judgment.

Oh no, you ruined their terrible, terrible idea. But this idea that the Holy Spirit is superintending different kinds of writing is really important. So we briefly said that prophecy makes sense, that it has to come from God directly revealing those things. Otherwise, we have no otherwise natural explanation for how that would come to be, or supernatural.

We have historical writings, but what about poetry? I'm, as an artist, I'm gonna not arrogantly say that, but I write music, so I'd like to think of myself as an artist. I can tell you I have not been inspired by the Holy Spirit to write anything like the Psalms. We sing a few, on a few occasions, songs that I've written, but they're not inspired. So why is it that it matters that the Holy Spirit is inspiring poetry or the Psalms?

Stan? I think it's most important there because when you have things like poetry, you're dealing with emotions. Okay, you're going to have emotions. With emotions, you can really get off track really, really easy. So to be inspired to write, you know, theocentric poetry, it has to come from the Holy Spirit. Yeah. So, tying into the emotional impact of poetry or looking at the Psalms, how many of you have ever memorized a psalm? And what is striking about the poetry or the writing in the case of the Psalms or one of the songs of Moses or David? Stan? There's order. But there's visual imagery that gets implanted in your head.

And in poetry, it's very easy to use hyperbole and have it misconstrued, and misrepresent a concept. Because, again, this is where postmodernism comes in. They get all these ideas of, oh, I'm blending this with that, and my idea of that word and definition of that word are different than yours. the spirit's involvement in poetry, and especially it's awesome that we have the Hebrew poetry pattern, everybody's familiar with that, that Hebrew poetry repeats itself.

The ideas rhyme, not the words. It's a lot harder to misunderstanding the intent and the meaning of the poem when the ideas rhyme. So let me ask what should hopefully be a rhetorical question. Do you think it matters that the recording of the Psalms came in a language and a culture where the meaning would be much more locked in. It's amazing how the inspiration and the timing play together.

This thing that's poetry, where it's easy for something to get ramped off, especially in our culture where we tend to reinterpret things. One of my favorite stories of reinterpretation is actually from my wife's college class, where the professor took the name of Christ in the literature that they were reading and said, what if they were using that like a swear word?

Like we do today. It was totally not relevant. Nothing in the context of the writing made it a swear word. But the professor was like, we're going to reinterpret that. You don't get that kind of weirdness when you look at things in their plain sense.

And inspiration says that the Holy Spirit wanted poetry and literature to be carried in a known, meaningful way. Last type of writing, we have the epistles. We have the letters written. Were those haphazard? Were those super ambiguous and hard to understand all the way through? Did the Holy Spirit inspire those things to be clear and articulate? And yes, there are a few tough passages, things like baptism for the dead, but overall the language and the writing and the style conveys an intended meaning and that the inspiration comes carrying things through.

Paul was very logical. In a moment of what I'm going to call a delusion of grandeur, I thought, I'm going to try to rewrite the book of Romans in a software syntax because it's so logical. I got very shortly into it. Mostly I just opened up the empty text document and realized that was an insane move and I didn't have that kind of time on my hands. But Paul is very logical.

In fact, Paul's book of Romans reads a lot like a piece of software. Now, from conversations that I've had with most of you, most of you don't write software. But it has to be logical, or else your code gives you disastrous things, right? Your program won't work. Paul's language, inspired by the Holy Spirit as it was, is very logical and sequential. So we have inspiration by the Holy Spirit, but we don't lose authorship.

Paul wrote that. One of the reasons why we in the church are not 100% certain of who wrote the book of Hebrews is it's not written stylistically like Paul. It doesn't read like Paul, it doesn't read like John, and it doesn't read like Peter. But stylistically, Paul was very unique in his style, still maintaining the inspiration and the truth that was revealed by the Holy Spirit. The last sentence of 1, 2, 3, 4 of the fifth paragraph says something that I think is worth highlighting is that Paul even quoted pagan authors on a few occasions.

And I love to think that a pagan author would be quoted and then be put into the list of inspired scripture. just because it just ruffles the feathers of a few people who don't like anything that's not Christian anywhere near things that are supposed to be Christian and then Paul throws that in there just to mess with him. So you can't be legalistic because Paul won't let you. In Titus chapter 112 he actually talks about the pagans in Crete being liars and he's quoting one of the pagan authors. So that's there.

The last paragraph starts with the sentence, as for the authors, this does not imply that everything that each of the authors of scripture ever wrote is to be considered inspired. Why does it matter that we don't just take anything that any author wrote as inspired? For example, we have Jude, the book of Jude, or the book of James, where there's just one single epistle. What's the consequence of saying everything James ever wrote is inspired?

Or even Paul or Peter? Well, that opens up the door to all kinds of things. What if we find some documents from Paul from before the road to Damascus? And we say that's inspired. What was Paul's position on Christianity prior to the road to Damascus? He was breathing death threats. So if we say everything Paul ever wrote is inspired, then we have problems. So we need to be aware of that. That's definitely important. There are places where we don't have text that is written.

In Colossians 4.16, Paul writes to the Colossians and he says, read the letter that I wrote to the Laodiceans. So Laodicea was about 12 miles away from Colossae, so they were within walking distance. Well, Paul wrote a letter to the Laodiceans, but we don't have it.

It's not part of the canon of Scripture. That doesn't mean that it wasn't inspired by the Holy Spirit, it doesn't mean that it wasn't valuable, but it's not part of the canon of Scripture. When we look at the authorship of a letter, that doesn't mean that it's the canon. But we're going to go into how we know that something should be part of the canon in the next section.

When we talk about the inspiration, we need to take a look at two Bible verses. So if you have your Bibles, take a look at 2 Timothy 3, 16 through 17. And this should be a Bible passage that if you've been in the church for any time, you will have heard at least once or twice taught.

All scripture is inspired by God and 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. So inspiring or inspiration is the idea that God breathed something. So all scripture is God breathed by God. It's basically kind of an expanded translation of what's being said here. And the result of it being breathed by God is that it is profitable and that it's useful for correction and reproof and training in righteousness.

Obviously the opposite statement of this is frightening. Some scripture is inspired, and therefore really questionable as a tool for teaching, or reproof, or correction, or training in righteousness. So we need that inspiration, we need the reliability of that. When Paul is writing this, I'm saying that if we were to state this in the opposite, the negative format, the consequence would be disastrous, right? That's why immediately you said this is illogical, it would be dangerous if only some scripture was inspired.

So if we take a look at the time that this was written, so this is towards the end of Paul's life, how much of the New Testament canon had been written? Not all of it. Well, the majority of it, because it's towards the end of Paul's life, and he's the author of most of the epistles that we have. But not all of it. John's going to come and write the book of Revelation, at the very least, towards the end of this. But it wasn't put together. It hadn't been canonized yet, and we're going to get into that as the next section.

But all Scripture definitely includes the Old Testament, which is an important an important observation of the timing of this letter. How many of you have heard people say that the Old Testament doesn't apply to believers? That is a dangerous statement to make. There are things in the Old Testament that apply to believers. Not all things in the Old Testament apply to believers.

We're not under the law, right? Paul tells us that in his writings. But Paul is saying that that is Scripture and it is inspired and it's useful for us. So we need to have awareness and we need to know how to rightly divide God's Word so that we can use it for teaching and reproof and correction and training in righteousness so that we would be equipped for every good work. So, all Scripture, Old Testament and New Testament.

The second verse that we want to take a look at is 2 Peter 1.20. I'm glad you can't see what I'm doing on my screen, because I just totally fat-fingered Peter. 2 Peter 1, 20-21, and he says, But know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation.

For no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. So that articulates the statement we made earlier that the prophecy has to come from the Holy Spirit. It's not something that men do. But that means that we don't get to interpret it for our own means and our own benefit. That's what 20 says. And the reason why we don't get to is because 21, that the Holy Spirit moved through the authors to write the prophetic things.

How many of you have ever heard of Hal Lindsey? from the eighties and I think into the nineties I worked at a Christian bookstore in the mid nineties and we would sell a healthy number of his books but the guy was constantly trying to tie modern technology into the prophetic text and say this is what it is this is what it is and he was interpreting it as a matter of his own interpretation, quite often. Not always. So I want to be careful that I'm not saying that everything Hal Lindsay ever said was always a lie, not a universal statement. But often he would tie things together that were relevant to the technology of the time, but as things turned out, Hal was wrong. Hal Lindsay was wrong. I think he had 88 reasons why Christ was coming in 1988. Either we missed the rapture, or he was interpreting it as a matter of his own interpretation. It's obviously important that we understand that the Holy Spirit is involved with the reliability and the quality of the content that is the Scripture. Which leads us to the next section, which is canonization. Canon, C-A-N-O-N, refers to a collection of documents, okay? Not C-A-N-N-O-N, which is for shooting things, right? Okay? I have mistyped those words enough times as an adult. I have to remind myself often, but I want to make sure that we're all understanding what we're talking about.

The first sentence in that section is one I'm going to read out loud, but I think is really important for us to understand the definition of canonization. Canonization refers to the recognition of which documents were inspired and not the authoritative declaration of what was inspired. Does everybody understand what that's saying? How many of you have heard a skeptic say something like, well, who got to choose what was in the Bible? That's a big misstatement of what canonization is. Canonization is an observation or recognition of which documents were inspired and not the declaration of what is inspired.

If I declare that something is inspired, and I declare it by my authority, how much authority do I have? How many of you want to read the Randy Peterman Bible? I can tell you right now, that's a terrible idea, please don't. I don't have the authority. Can anyone think of famous historical figures in the last 200 years?

Joseph Smith made his own version of the Bible with notes saying, this is where this is wrong. And he speaks as authority of his own, and telling people this is canon. And Joseph Smith has some unfortunate disciples that keep visiting my neighbors across the street, so now I have to go bug my neighbors and be like, listen, we need to talk.

I hope you don't have a burning in the bosom, because I can make hotter chili than they made, and we will take care of this. But canonization is the idea that we're recognizing what is inspired, not declaring what is inspired. Who has the authority to declare inspiration? The Inspirer. The Holy Spirit gets to do that. We don't get to get to call that.

Let's talk about the Old Testament canon. So the Old Testament canon is Something that we kind of take for granted in most days when we run if I tell you to Turn to the book of the Psalms. You probably know where that is in your Bible if I tell you Isaiah Probably know where that is in your Bible Why why do we have the Old Testament Canon when when was the Old Testament when were the scriptural writings recognized and Yeah, so before Christ came, it had been kind of recognized these were the inspired books, these were the prophecies that were there, and then Christ refers to almost every single Old Testament book. I think there's two that he doesn't refer to, but don't quote me on that. I'm shooting from the hip on that one. But most of the Old Testament is quoted by Christ, so we have that. That's got a way in on something.

But the Old Testament documents were already put together, and there's this quote at the bottom of page 2 from Josephus, and I want to read that out loud because I think it's actually a very... like I said, I'm not going to read the whole document to you, but this is a really good quote that reflects Jewish culture and tradition about From the time of Artaxerxes, moreover, until our present period, all occurrences have been written down, but they are not regarded as entitled to the like credit with those which precede them, because there was no certain succession of prophets. Fact has shown what confidence we place in our own writings, for although so many ages have passed away, no one has dared to add to them, nor to take anything from them, nor to make alterations. In all Jews it is implanted, even from the birth, to regard them as being the instruction of God, and to abide steadfastly by them, and if it be necessary, to die gladly for them. Okay, so the Jewish tradition of the Old Testament was tightly linked to the traditions of inspiration in the Old Testament case. There's not a bunch of books that are argued about as like, oh, this should have been in the Old Testament, but this sect didn't like them.

The Sadducees are a minority group, and I do want to point that out. The Sadducees are a minority group from the time of Christ that actually believed only the first five books, the Pentateuch, were inspired scripture. Only Moses. Which is the minority view, but was not held by the rest of the Jewish leadership. Which is why when Christ gets asked about the resurrection, Where does Christ go? The Sadducees are asking him, because they don't believe in the resurrection, because they are too smart for God, right?

And he goes to Genesis, and he talks about Abraham, which is in the Pentateuch, which totally foiled their arguments as Sadducees, and I'm pretty sure didn't make Jesus any new friends in the Sadducee group, even though if they had just studied the text, it would have been clear to them. So we have this principle of Old Testament canonicity that was already established before the New Testament.

There was a great understanding of what was reliable, and as that quote from Josephus says, nobody touched it. And in fact, the scribes worked very carefully when they made copies to check for any errors possible. We can't miss any jots and tittles because This is inspired by God, and it's to be revered and preserved and taken care of.

So when we get to the New Testament canon, that's where things get a little trickier, because that's in a different context, right? It was of a new time, with a new spiritual movement, and so we need to see what it is that articulates those things. So we've got this list here of five criteria here. So the first one here is selecting and verifying of contents. The second one, public reading of scripture, circulation of scripture, determination of what was in the canon and what was not, and then quoting of New Testament scriptures. Those were things that were put together and were articulated within the body there.

The matter of canonicity took final focus when Athanasius wrote in 367 AD listing the present 27 books in the New Testament canon. He was also the first to use the word canon in reference to the New Testament. Let's take a look at this list of four Bold and emboldened words here. I changed the order that my dad originally did and added a word because I like acronyms Because they help me memorize things so this spells Susie in a sort of special way, okay?

But we want to talk about the source the universality the spirituality and the inspiration the source needed to be apostolic authorship and Okay, was the book written by an apostle or apostolic associate, requiring also, of course, that the book was of the apostolic era?

What happens if we start adding to the New Testament canon from writers that come later than the original authors? Stan? That's what we talked about earlier. If you aren't in history, then it's hard to write history accurately. So, original sources. Okay, go ahead, I'm sorry. You weren't there. Yeah, you weren't there. So, original versus secondary sources. Well, the other thing that's important and, sir, I'm sorry, I don't know your name, but you mentioned Joseph Smith. Joseph Smith declared that he had written new documents himself and or had been given the golden plates to translate himself.

If we start adding to the canon of scripture by virtue of adding new things, we can get all kinds of new revelation and new things that get said. And how do we authenticate their source? How do we know that the source is a valid source? Any cult that we have today basically originates from some individual who is interpreting the original scripture.

Mary Baker Eddy, the guy in Scientology, whatever his name was, he'd take sections of scripture and expand upon it. And that's the case even in Islam. Muhammad tried to quote parts of both the Old Testament and the New Testament. But he twisted it and did it in his own way.

So source and apostolic authorship means that... What is an apostle required to do? How do we know that somebody is an apostle? Okay, so they would have been an eyewitness of Christ? That narrows things down significantly from a historical perspective. We don't have a long list of occurrences of Christ showing up with validated sources throughout history. It was through a window of time. And that's why his return is what we're looking forward to.

So, source, apostolic authorship is important. How about universality? Was the book universally received in the church? How many of you have heard of the Gospels of, and then you insert somebody that isn't the four Gospels we have? The Gospel of Thomas being one that in the last decade got a stir for a while. If the book wasn't received across the church, the canonicity of it or the validity of it is heavily in question.

Spirituality. Were the contents of a given book of which a spiritual character has to entitle it to this rank? Is it a spiritually relevant book? What if it's a book written by Paul that talks about growing up? That really doesn't fit into the canonicity, necessarily. He may have had some spiritual observations from his Jewish heritage, but that doesn't necessarily make it part of the canon.

And fourth, but certainly not least, based on what we talked about earlier, is inspiration. Did the book give evidence of being divinely inspired? If inspiration is truth, then we really, really, really need to have truth be part of our criteria in searching these things out.

The last section we've got here, and Brian just rang the bell, so I've got five minutes or less to wrap this up here. The New Testament writing closed. There are several lines of reasoning that lead to the conclusion that the New Testament canon is now closed. The first one, God has completed the revealing through his Son and those he elected to serve as contemporary witnesses.

Hebrews 1.2, so let's turn there real quick. In these last days has spoken to us in his Son whom he appointed heir of all things through whom also he made the world. So this idea of last days, that things were winding down. The next bullet point there, gives a list of scriptures that all speak of the finality of apostolic era revelation among other passages.

So Ephesians 2.20, let's turn there.

Ephesians 2.20, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone.

How many foundations do you need to build on a house? Just one. It's that first key layer of what makes the house. We don't have multiple foundations. You wouldn't build a house out of only foundation. That would be pretty bizarre, right? Foundation and a roof. Come over and you can crawl on your belly into my house. So we have this principle of the foundation that was for a time. You could go down the street, though, if you disagree with me.

There's an apostolic church, and they still have an apostle, they declare, of their own authority. I'm going to actually strongly recommend you don't. But this principle of apostleship is very important. There are no more apostles since no other is qualified biblically. If Christ isn't revealing himself, or they didn't get to walk with Christ anymore, we can't make more apostles. How does the Catholic Church, just to cover this principle, how does the Catholic Church explain that the Pope is an apostle? How do they derive that conclusion?

Anybody know? It's because Peter was, again this is in their tradition, I'm not saying this as a doctrine at Holly Hills, in their position, Peter was an apostle and he was the head and foundation of the Church. And since he was the head and foundation of the church, his authority is passed down to those who take his seat. So if someone is sitting in St. Peter's chair, they can do what's called ex cathedra, which is basically to speak forth new scripture with the authority of the apostle of the church. So, definitely hard to prove scripturally, like you can't go and find Paul writing about, like, make sure you find Peter because, you know, he's the Pope. It's not in there. So, we want to be careful of that.

But that's a quick overview of canonicity. There are actually really good long books that have been written about this topic, and of course we're going through it quickly. There's some cross-references there that are on the list there. Introduction to Bibliology by Hampton Keithley at Bible.org. They recently restructured their website. I don't know how recent it was, but it feels recent because for a long time it was one way and then they changed it. And then I had to learn how to use it again.

But if you go to Bible.org, there's a search field and you should be able to type in Introduction to Bibliology and that's a good source there. A general introduction to the Bible by Geisler and Nix. Norm Geisler is a pretty solid theologian and a great apologist, so he's a good source there. Major Bible themes is one that we've actually done as a class here, but it does have a section on canonicity, and it's definitely a valuable resource to have. If you don't have it, check it out. It's good to have just in your library for a quick theological lookup.

All right, so next week we're going to keep going and talk about the next set of things, transmission and translation. Any thoughts or questions, things you wish I hadn't have said in Canonissian Inspiration? When the last apostle passed away, you know, there are dates of tradition where that was kind of done officially and off the top of my head I don't have that. Dad, do you know when the date for the canon that we'd have today is? Oh, that's right. I forgot that I had this chart. It's an awesome chart, too, and I had already commented to my dad what a great resource it was. So here's a list of The New Testament canon, as compiled by different authors...

Are you pointing to a certain date? What do you see in there? You've got to get your glasses. I'm asking the guy who just had eye surgery. Well, there's dates on the councils. And I'm sorry, I should have had that ready to go given the topic. Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not sure which way to go with that one there. Yeah, there were different. different meetings that were had to articulate that. I don't have the answer to that and if I look it up it could be an unknown amount of time. Maybe next week we'll come back and we'll answer that one because I don't want to make up something. That would be a tremendous example of human error. We'll come back around to that one and start next week with that.

This whole thing hinges upon the inspiration. Yeah, that's why they're given in the order that they're given. You have to have inspiration as a starting point. ...was inspired and the points that were put in there connects to the canonization and everything else because they go back to certain things being in certain scriptures that qualified to be in the canon. So inspiration is really the key to everything. Yeah, it's the crux that everything depends on. You've got to have inspiration. If you have inspiration mean something different than the logical results of canonicity are very different, right?

All right, let's close in prayer. There's people waiting. They're staring at me. So we'll close. Heavenly Father, thank you for this time that we have to get together. Lord, I thank you that you inspired the authors of the scriptures by your spirit and that you preserved the canon that we have today. We thank you and we praise you in Jesus' name. Amen.