Tonight in our study in bibliology, we get to what ends up being one of the more difficult subjects of the doctrine of Scripture, and that is the matter or the issue of the canon of Scripture. And when we use the word canon, it comes from a Greek term, kanon, and it simply refers to a rule, a standard or a measuring rod. And so when we talk about the canon of scripture, we're talking about that list of inspired authoritative books which comprise the rule or standard for the faith and the practice of the church. Now, for us, we would affirm that there are 66 canonical books, that there are 39 canonical books in the Old Testament and 27 canonical books in the New Testament. Now in the Old Testament, those 39 books, I would remind you that the division is a little different from a Jewish perspective. Same books, same content, but a different division. Remember that they look at the minor prophets just as one book called the 12. So automatically there you get a major reduction. And then Samuel and Kings and Chronicles are all seen to be, instead of first and second, are all lumped together. And then Ezra Nehemiah forms one book in Hebrew Bible as well. But it's the same number of books. The content is the same. In the New Testament, the 27 canonical books are made up, of course, of our four Gospels. And we need to remember that in the early church, Luke-Acts was almost always a unit in two parts. And so, although very early on we had the order that we presently have, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Luke-Acts often was held together. And then you have the epistles of Paul, and there's a debate over whether Paul wrote Hebrews or not. But you basically have the Pauline epistles, and when I start teaching Hebrews in a few weeks or months or however long off that may be, you'll find out that I don't think Paul wrote Hebrews, but that's irrelevant. And then we have the General Epistles, and then the book of the Revelation, and those comprise our 27 canonical books of the New Testament. Now, when we talk about the canon of Scripture itself, we need to understand how the idea developed, because it's in the development of the canon that we begin to understand better what we're talking about. Most of the time when we refer to which books are canonical, it's simply the first thing that comes up is we have fewer canonical books than the Roman Catholic Church. And if the only thing that comes to our mind when we think of canon is that our Bible is smaller than the Catholic Bible, then we're really missing something. because canonicity is a much more significant, much more important subject than the mere size of your Bible. We need to understand that there was, in a real way, a very, very natural sense to canonicity long before the official canon was ever canonized. there is, as it were, as the canon of scripture develops, there is a very natural sense that the canon in and of itself existed before any church council or any church father or any historian ever said, these are the canonical books. And we need to understand that because it is very, very important. It's important for us historically, but it's also important for us as we come to grips with what we mean by the canon of Scripture. Now, I have in your notes Old Testament canonicity was fairly straightforward. That is probably a little bit of an oversimplification, but really not much. I'd like you to take your Bibles and turn to Deuteronomy chapter 18. And remember, as we continually use the word canon tonight, think of a standard, a measure, a rule. OK, Deuteronomy chapter 18. Like for us to look at a few of these texts from Deuteronomy that end up being very important. Starting in verse 14. Deuteronomy 18, 14. For those nations which you shall dispossess, listen to those who practice witchcraft and diviners. But as for you, I'm sorry, I read that as if it was a command. That's not right. For those nations which you shall dispossess, listen to those who practice witchcraft and diviners. But as for you, the Lord your God has not allowed you to do so. The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your own countrymen, and you shall listen to him. This is according to all that you asked of the Lord your God in Horeb on the day of the assembly, saying, Let me not hear again the voice of the Lord my God. Let me not see this great fire anymore, or I will die. The Lord said to me, They have spoken well. I will raise up a prophet from among their own countrymen like you, and I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him. Now, continuing on, it shall come about that whoever will not listen to my words, which he shall speak in my name, I myself will require it of him. But the prophet who speaks a word presumptuously in my name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or which he speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die. You may say in your heart, how will we know the word which the Lord has not spoken? When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the thing does not come about or come true, that is the thing which the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You shall not be afraid of him." Now, in this text, we have God giving, as it were, a standard by which all revelation should be judged. Now remember, we're talking about canon, which is standard. Here we have God giving his people a standard, and that standard is given so that you can tell what God has said, if what he has said is true, and so God has laid out the standard, and in essence, if you think about it, Moses ends up being the fountainhead of all Old Testament revelation. Everything that comes after Moses is always compared to what? To Moses. Moses, as it were, ends up being somewhat the divinely appointed canon of the Old Testament itself, so that everything that follows, in terms of the revelation given through prophets and so forth, always comes back to that ultimate standard of Moses. Now, God said very clearly that I'm going to put words in their mouth and you'll be able to test them. There will be an objective standard by which you will know whether or not I have spoken. All right. Now back just a few chapters to Deuteronomy, chapter 13. Deuteronomy, chapter 13. Verses one through three. If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder and the sign or the wonder comes true concerning what you spoke to you saying, let us go after other gods whom you have not known and let us serve them. You shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams for the Lord your God is testing you to find out if you love the Lord your God with all of your heart and with all of your soul. later, approximately 800, 700 years later, Isaiah would say, to the law and to the testimony, if they do not speak according to these, it is because there is no light in them. And so we see from these texts, and we could look at many others, that there was a sense of authority. God has authoritatively spoken. There was verification. This is how you know whether these are God's words or not. And there was also, very importantly, an analogia fidei, an analogy of the faith. What's one of the things that would mark a false prophet? Even if he had signs and wonders to, quote, testify to his message, if he ended up speaking anything that was against the Lord God, anything that was, as it were, received from Moses as the fountainhead of the prophets, if there was anything that was contrary, don't believe them. And then God actually says, I'm testing you. I'm testing you to see whether or not you love the Lord your God. And so in the Old Testament, inherently embedded, as it were, in the Old Testament, there was a sense of authority, there was an authoritative standard, there was verification, and there was an analogy of the faith or a standard for doctrine or prophecy. All right? As we continue to deal with the Old Testament, there was also a sense, and I really struggle with how to put it today, there was a sense in the Old Testament itself of unfulfilled completion. Turn to the last book of the Old Testament. You all know the last book of the Old Testament, the only Italian prophet who was in, the Italian prophet Malachi. Actually, Diane Gamble thinks that's really funny, but she's not here. Now, notice what I mean by unfulfilled completion. You get down to the end. Malachi is one of the last prophets. And notice what he says at the very end of his book. Four or five. Behold, I am going to send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord. He will restore the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers so that I will not come and smite the land with a curse. In Jewish history, with the coming of the latter prophets, Malachi being one of them, there was a sense that once those post-exilic latter prophets were done prophesying, the Jewish nation entered into what would be called the years of silence. And there was a recognition that, as it were, that the Old Testament canon was closed, that it was finished. And we're going to see, actually, that there was that concept by the Jews themselves, and the rabbis as well, taught that the canon was closed, that it was finished, as it were. But it was finished, but there was still something that was yet to come. There was a completion to the Old Testament revelation, but there was a lack of fulfillment. And so, as it were, as the Old Testament canon came to an end, there were loose strings. God had said what he needed to say, but with those words, there was also a sense of anticipation that there was another chapter that still needed to be written. But that other chapter was clear. With before the coming day of the Lord, the great and terrible day of the Lord, God was going to do something. God was going to send his prophet Elijah. God was going to send the messenger of the covenant. God was going to send that one who would come and purify the temple and be a refiner's fire. And so even though the Old Testament canon comes to, as it were, a completion, there was still this sense of anticipation that all the things that the prophets had promised was still yet to come. The very nature of the Old Testament is expectation, is it not? Is it not promise? And so we have this unsettled sense of completion that ends up preparing itself for something else. The rabbis taught, and you can find this in apocryphal references, that after the latter prophets, those years of silence, that God sent no more prophets to the people of Israel. Until when? Until the coming of the one who would prepare the way of the Lord, John the Baptist. And so there is this wonderful sense that the Old Testament itself is somewhat self-contained. It's completed, but yet it is anticipating something more. And they knew what that something more was. There's a recognition, even by our Lord, of the recognized Old Testament canon as it was developed and accepted. In fact, if you turn over to Matthew, chapter 23. Matthew, chapter 23, verse 35. Back up to verse 34. Therefore, behold, I'm sending you prophets and wise men and scribes. Some of them you will kill and crucify. Some of them you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from city to city so that upon you may fall the guilt of all the righteous blood shed on earth from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. Now, what's interesting is who is the first martyr mentioned in Scripture? Abel. Abel. Abel's the first martyr. And in fact, Abel is mentioned in what book of the Bible? Genesis. Zechariah, one of the latter prophets, is martyred. And where is his martyrdom recorded? 2 Chronicles. At the end of 2 Chronicles. Jesus says from the shedding of Abel's blood to the shedding of the blood of Zacharias son of Berechiah. In other words, all of the prophets who have been slain that covers the scope from Genesis to 2 Chronicles. In Hebrew Bible, the last book of the canon is Chronicles. And so our Lord Jesus in this text, in a sense, recognizes, makes reference to, the standard view of what constituted Old Testament canon. Now follow me here. There is inherent in the Old Testament authority, authoritative standard, verification, and an analogy of faith. That ends up being manifest as everything is compared to mosaic revelation. As the Old Testament unfolds, there's a sense in which God is done speaking, i.e., the Old Testament canon's closed, but there's still a sense of anticipation or coming fulfillment. The closure of Old Testament canon goes from Genesis to Chronicles, and our Lord Jesus recognizes that standard or that canon. Now, in A.D. 90, Twenty years after the destruction of Jerusalem, in the city of Jamnia, a number of rabbis gathered together to discuss the 39, or for them, the 24 books of the Old Testament. They believed that at that time, because the Christian movement was very strong, because Jerusalem had been sacked and the Jews had been scattered, they believed that at that time it would be beneficial for the Jewish people, for them to assemble together and make some sort of official pronouncement as to what were their inspired books. Now, in that meeting, what they did is they were seeking to, as it were, codify their own canon. In that meeting, No other books were discussed except for the 39 books of the Old Testament, but the discussion was divided into two categories. The homo-legumina, that is, the agreed-upon books, and the anti-legumina, that is, the disputed books. OK, so no other books were considered except those which are in the Old Testament and were at that time. But they broke into two categories. Now, the disputed list was fairly short. Song of Songs. Can you imagine why the Song of Songs may have been a disputed book? You can't have romance literature in the Bible. It doesn't seem right. Anybody know any of the other disputed books? You had the Song of Songs. Esther was a disputed book. Why? God's name isn't in it. And so it was disputed for that reason. A couple other, few other disputed books. One of my favorite Old Testament books. Job was not disputed. It was a certainty. It was one of the agreed on books. Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes was a disputed book. Now, by disputed, all that meant is that there were some who were not sure whether or not it should be included. OK, why would Ecclesiastes be disputed in the in the course of discussion? Okay, sounds like maybe Solomon's contradicting himself. Sounds kind of earthy, doesn't it? Sort of an earthy book. You can't really tell people to seek after pleasure and be a good Jew, now can you? And so their content was a big problem. Just by the way, Proverbs was a disputed book as well, and some various reasons for that. Are all of the Proverbs Solomon's Proverbs? No. In fact, some of the collections of Proverbs come from extra-biblical literature, ancient Near Eastern literature. In fact, there is probably fairly good evidence that some of those Proverbs that were collected, and in fact you can see it right in the text in Proverbs, it tells you that these are the collections of Hezekiah's people and so forth, Some of those proverbs actually may have their source in ancient Egyptian proverbs. And so that doesn't seem very inspired now, does it? And then, of course, the book of Ezekiel was one of the anti-legomena. Can you imagine why Ezekiel would be? Just because it's so weird, right? Okay. I mean, let's face it. Ezekiel is just a strange book, is it not? They all come down to the conclusion that the 39 books that they said were in before are the 39 books that they ended up with. None of them were excluded. Even those that were debated ended up being included. And if my sermons on Ecclesiastes ever find their way into print, I've thought about dedicating the whole thing to the courageous Jewish fathers who fought to keep Kohelet in the Old Testament canon. What a great thing they did for us. But that's basically the history of the Old Testament canon in a nutshell. It's pretty simple, it's pretty straightforward. There was no big controversy except for the Council itself and even those books that were disputed ended up being included after the Council had wrestled through those things. And that brings us into the New Testament. Now the New Testament is has what I want to call a natural sense to it as well, but it ends up being, in terms of its development, a little more complicated than Old Testament canon. Now, follow this with me, if you will. If we could say that, in a real sense, Moses was the canon, the standard of Old Testament revelation, then the canon for New Testament revelation is Jesus Christ, right? And in fact, he is that other prophet of whom Moses spoke in Deuteronomy 18, 15, that the Lord would raise up. But Jesus isn't just, as it were, the canon, and understand I'm using that word in terms of the standard, wasn't just the canon for New Testament revelation, Jesus ends up becoming the canon for what? For both Old Testament and New Testament. Revelation, and Jesus himself even says this, he doesn't use those words, but what does he say to the disciples in Luke chapter 24 on the road to Emmaus? He basically says to Moses, Psalms, and the prophets, which is another way of saying the whole of the Old Testament, speak about me. Remember that great Bible study, it starts around verse 25. I wish we could actually have heard it. I wish it would have been recorded because it would have been an absolutely fascinating thing to hear Jesus actually open up and it says, and beginning with Moses. Which means he starts where? In the book of Genesis, beginning with Moses, he shows them how it was necessary for the Christ to come and to suffer, and on the third day to be raised from the dead. And so Jesus does, let's just say it this way, Jesus does an Old Testament survey showing that he is the key to interpreting and understanding the whole of the Old Testament. And that's not the only place that Jesus says that. He tells the Pharisees that you search the scriptures because in them you think you have eternal life, but they speak of me. If you believed Moses, you would believe me because he spoke concerning me. For Jesus, he is not only the interpretive key, but he is, as it were, the revelatory standard for both Old and New Testament. Now, Jesus does something. Understand, when we talk about the revelation of God, we talk about the written word, right? But what do we refer to Jesus as? We refer to him as the living word, right? He is the living word of the Father. He is the revelation of the Father. And so he comes, he's the canonical standard, as it were, for all revelation. And what does he do? He actually, and this is really fascinating I think, he pre-authenticates those who would end up speaking of him and gives them his inherent stamp of authority to do so. And how does he do that? He himself chooses twelve apostles. Those apostles, the apostolate, would be the foundation of the church, Jesus Christ being the chief cornerstone, Ephesians 2.20. But notice what Jesus says very specifically to the apostles in John chapter 14. Now, when does John 14 take place chronologically? I'm not asking for a specific date. On the night in which he was betrayed, right? He's in the upper room, he's speaking to his disciples, and I would be the first one to say all of these texts have application and relevance to all of Jesus' disciples throughout all ages, but their most direct and immediate reference is to the apostles who were receiving those words. Notice John chapter 14. Verse 26, this is what I mean by pre-authenticates. But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, He will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you. Jesus speaking to those apostles who would go out and be ambassadors and representatives and revelatory spokesmen for the Lord Jesus promises that the Holy Spirit would come to them and would teach them and help them remember everything that Jesus had said. He pre-authenticates their testimony to him by promising, by vouchsafing to them the Holy Spirit who will lead them in all truth. Chapter 16. Verse 12. I have many more things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. Now, that probably was an understatement for the apostles at this point in time, right? I mean, you talk about being under incredible stress, wondering what in the world was going to go on. Jesus tells him, I have a lot more to tell you. Does he ever get to it? And the answer is yes. He spends 40 days with them before he ascends into heaven. But notice verse 13. And again, a direct promise to the apostles. When He, the Spirit of Truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth, for He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears He will speak, and He will disclose to you what is to come. He will glorify Me, for He will take of Mine, and He will disclose it to you. All things that the Father has are Mine, therefore I said that He takes of Mine and will disclose it to you." And so Jesus is pre-authenticating His apostles to be Spirit-inspired, Spirit-truth-driven spokesmen, so that what they say about Jesus is nothing less than what He Himself, through His Spirit, will disclose to them. And so the apostles themselves, so Jesus, as it were, pre-authenticates the apostles as a canon, a standard of divine revelation. Now, in this revelation that would be given to the apostles, it is the idea of a deposit, a tradition which is handed over, something that is received. There would be in it not just endless, ramblings and musings by these apostles? But it would be something that would be self-contained. It would be a body of truth that Jesus would give to the apostles, delivering to them through the Spirit so that they in turn could turn that over to the church. And so you have passages, and we'll look at more of these in a minute, but Jude 3, for instance, it talks about the faith which was once and for all delivered to the saints. In other words, a body of truth called the faith, which was once and for all not in bits and pieces and strung out over a thousand years. But was once for all delivered to the saints, how through his holy apostles. And so, as we get to the New Testament, there is a parallel to the way that the Old Testament unfolds, and so the Lord Jesus Himself is the canon of New Testament revelation, which means that He is the canon of all revelation, because New Testament revelation is the fulfillment of Old Testament revelation. Remember the structure, promise and fulfillment, and so Jesus is the ultimate canon, He invests in his apostles the authority to speak concerning him in a way that is according to his revelatory standard, and he promises that the Spirit would guide them in truth, and that they would speak according to the truth, and that what they had to say would be the apostolic deposit, or the apostolic tradition, or the apostolic revelation concerning Jesus Christ. We have that. In the 27 books of the New Testament. Now. There was no church in the first or second century that said. Hey, we've got 27 books, we're done. There was nobody that said, hmm, four gospels, one book of Acts, 13 Pauline epistles, general epistles and the revelation, that must be it. But you know what the early church did? They collected. And they made collections of what they considered to be inspired writings. What's interesting, and this story is bore out in church history a number of times, in the early church, oftentimes one of the first things to happen after arresting church leadership was to burn their, quote, holy books. And there are a number of stories in the early church that when the authorities would come to collect the books, their holy books to be burned, they would give them such things as the Shepherd of Hermes and the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, and they would hide things like Romans and 1st Corinthians and 2nd Corinthians and Galatians and Ephesians. In other words, the early church, even though there had been no council dealing with canonicity had an inherent sense that these books were the rule and standard for the faith and practice of the church, and they needed to be collected, preserved, and protected. And so that's what I mean, that the canon was present before the canon was ever actually officially recognized. Now what happens in the early church is quite a bit different than what happens in the Old Testament. In the early church, around 160 AD, Some things started to emerge. 160 is somewhat of an arbitrary day. The first thing that started to happen was the rise of Gnosticism. Gnosticism was simply the New Age movement in the late 1st, early 2nd century. The seeds of Gnosticism were already planted at the time of the New Testament. They really didn't take root and shoot until the early 2nd century, but the fact is that Gnosticism came into existence with really all of the spiritual force and vigor of a virtual revival movement. And with it came its own literature. When you go to Barnes and Noble or Borders and you go over into the Bible section and you see this area called the Lost Books of the Bible, first of all, that's a bunch of nonsense. There are no books of the Bible that are lost. There are uninspired books that have been found. that are not a part of canonical scripture, and a lot of times those end up falling into the category of some of the Gnostic writings. And the Gnostic writings became very, very popular in the second century. You had, for instance, the Gospel of Thomas, which is probably one of the most famous of the Gnostic writings. And a lot of these Gnostic writings, they fall into different categories, but you have Life of Christ-type Gnostic writings. The Gospel of Thomas was one of those. You also had different... versions of Acts that were Gnostic versions of the Acts of the Apostles. So you had the Acts of Peter, the Acts of Paul. You also had, and this was by far the most popular, you had apocalyptic-type Gnostic writings, and so you had the Assumption of Moses, and you had all these fantastical-type apocalyptic writings, which ends up being one of the reasons why the book of the Revelation kind of had the difficult time later on. But the fact is that there was a huge proliferation of Gnostic writings, and of course, all of a sudden, in the midst of literally a plethora of Gnostic writings, the question comes to the common Christian and to local churches, do we believe this? Is this the Word of God? And so the rise of Gnosticism and the rise of the Gnostic writings would end up causing the church to ask, what is to be received as the Word of God? But perhaps even more significant than Gnosticism as a whole was a fellow by the name of Marcion who came around AD 160. Now Marcion was a Gnostic and here were some of his favorite teachings. The God of the Old Testament is not the same God as the God of the New Testament. Now, that fact alone may make you realize that Marcionites are still alive today. As a result, the idea of the Old Testament, that was a mean God, the New Testament is a nice God. The Old Testament was a God of judgment, the New Testament is a God of love. Sound familiar? And so, Marcion started to collect a canon of his own. And guess what he rejected? The whole Old Testament. He had no use for the Old Testament. On top of that, his New Testament was very, very small. He accepted ten Pauline epistles, rejected everything else, and then, on top of that, heavily edited those ten Pauline epistles, extracting anything that even smacked of Jewishness. Why? That belongs to the Old Testament, Old Testament God, which is not the nice God. And so, Marcion ended up coming up with a canon. Ten edited books by the Apostle Paul. A little later on, a movement known as Montanism comes about, and Montanus was one of the early church heretics. He claimed that he was an inspired instrument of the Holy Spirit. Now, I thought I had heard somewhere one time where Mautinus actually believed that he was the incarnation of the Holy Spirit. Have you ever heard that before, John? I couldn't verify that today, but Mautinus definitely believed that he was the voice of the Spirit to the church in that time. And then, he had attached to his prophetic ministry to prophetesses who both left their husbands and their families to join Montanus as he went around preaching basically his own dreams and visions. And so you could imagine here is this man and he actually gains quite a bit of popularity. And so let's say you know you're living out in Antioch or some other place. And Montanus comes to town, and people flock to hear him, and he stands up, and he says, thus says the Lord, and God told me this, and God told me that, and the prophetesses say that God told them this, that, and the other thing, and so all of a sudden the question gets put before the church once again, and that is, where has God spoken? Are we to listen to the books that we've received? Are we to listen to anybody that claims to be an instrument of the Holy Spirit? How do we know where, when and how God speaks? And so throughout the early church history, within the first three centuries, there were a number of significant things that continued to press the church in terms of where do you believe God has spoken? Where is his inspired word? Now, Eusebius, around A.D. 325, surveys the scene, as it were, and acknowledges, recognizes 27 books that actually match our 27 books of the New Testament. And what he does is he basically surveys the scene and says, these are the 27 books that, as far as I can tell, hold or occupy the place of authority within the churches. Regardless of region, regardless of tradition, these are the 27 books. Now, he divides the 27 books into basically two categories, and you know what those two categories are? The homo-legumina and the anti-legumina, the books that are received without debate and the books which are debated or disputed in some way. Now, guess which books were disputed? Hold off on Revelation for a second. Revelation has a unique problem. 2 Peter was one of the disputed books. James is one of the disputed books. Good old James. What could possibly cause anybody to question whether James was inspired and belonged in the canon? Yeah, sure sounds like that, doesn't it? And so, you know, Martin Luther being the sometimes the outrageous, outspoken German that he was, in his introduction to James, exposition of James, calls James a ripe, strawy epistle without much gospel in it. Or maybe with no gospel in it, I can't remember now. And anyway, Luther didn't like the idea that James was in the canon and thought that they should probably just tear that part out of their Bibles. And so James certainly was one. So here you have 2 Peter. And 2 Peter was disputed because it was not known throughout the whole church. Understand that this ends up being a significant thing. When we say disputed books, let's say you have a large section of the Western Church that says, hey, we really like this book. This has been really helpful to us. And the folks in the East say, we've never heard of that before. You think we're just going to take your word for it? And so that was, in a sense, part of the dispute. So you had James, 2 Peter, any others that you can think of that might have been disputed? 2 and 3 John. Why? Julie's answer was because they already had one. Not exactly. They had one that was fairly long. What can you do with 2nd and 3rd John? You can read it really fast. They're so short. How could books this short be in the canon? Literally, there was the brevity of 2 and 3 John that was a major part of the dispute. Somebody mentioned Hebrews. Now, Eusebius does not mention Hebrews in the Antilogomena or the disputed books, but it would end up being a disputed book later at the Council of Carthage. And can you imagine why the book of Hebrews was disputed? One fundamental reason. No authorship. Authorship ends up being a big thing. So how do we know who wrote it? And the other thing about Hebrews was that I believe it was popular in the West, and the West accepted Pauline authorship. It was relatively unknown in the East. Revelation had some difficulties. In fact, Eusebius makes a little notation about Revelation, about whether or not it should be accepted. And, of course, you could imagine maybe what the problem is with Revelation. It's weird, just like Ezekiel. Right? It's apocalyptic. And, of course, you have a proliferation of apocalyptic writings that are just everywhere. You know, I mean, it was left behind, run amok. I mean, that was one of the things that was just so popular, was the apocalyptic writings. And most of them were so absolutely fantastic that that people knew that they were the wild imaginations of people that weren't all there, and so Revelation comes along and Johannine authorship was not a given. And so there were some books that were disputed. Now, what happens is, let's see, Athanasius, in about 367, sends out, remember, Athanasius is the bishop of... If you can remember where Athanasius was the bishop of... You know, that sounds right to me, Mike. Does that sound right to you, John? Yeah, okay, John says sure. So, alright, I'll go with John and Mike. Anyway, Athanasius was one of the most popular bishops in the fourth century. He sends out an encyclical letter, an Easter letter, and he makes the observation that the 27 received canonical books are as follows, and he gives a list, and this is what he says about them. He calls these 27 books the wellspring of salvation from which he who thirsts must take his fill of these sacred words. And so the 27 books that we know now are the 27 books that were under consideration. And we need to realize that in the Old Testament. the Jews were so isolationist that you didn't have a whole lot of extra-biblical books floating around. You had some, but during the New Testament era it is absolutely amazing where you're talking about hundreds and hundreds and also you're talking about many of them that are very very early and they're not all heretical In fact, the first letter of Clement of Alexandria was written at about A.D. 90. The Didache, which was a manual for church order, was written somewhere around A.D. 100. So you had a lot of these books that were written right at the very end of the apostolic era and right after the apostolic era, and they were very early, they were very sound, but none of these books were ever considered a part of the authoritative standard or rule for the church. I mean, it really is sort of an amazing thing to realize that you had books like the Epistle of Barnabas or the Shepherd of Hermes. The Epistle of Barnabas is a little strange in places, but you had the Letters of Clement, you had a number of writings that were very early, and yet even those writings in and of themselves recognized that it was the apostles' writings that were a standard, the standard of faith and conduct for the churches. Again, if you just ponder this for a minute, it is a pretty amazing thing to realize that when the churches realized that they needed to recognize on some official level which books were inspired and belonged in the standard of belief and practice for the churches, that these other books were not generally considered, but the 27 books that we have now were the ones that were under consideration, just a matter of whether they were agreed upon or if there was any level of dispute. Now, let's see here. In A.D. 397 at the Council of Carthage, the canonical books of the New Testament were officially recognized and at that point, innocence became codified via council of the church. Now again, let me just reiterate, it would be a huge mistake for us to think that the canon did not exist until AD 397. The canon existed as soon as the books were in circulation. The canon was recognized in a number of different ways. sometimes forced by the hand of heretics, but was recognized long before the Church ever had a council regarding canonicity. Now, let's talk about the nature of canonicity. We begin, first of all, with the Roman Church's position. Every once in a while you'll meet a savvy Catholic who will say, well, when Luther published his Bible, the Apocrypha was attached to it. And that's true, but it was attached to it with the preface that says, these books are not considered inspired nor canonical, but are considered helpful for the general reading public. Now, the Roman Church during the Council of Trent did something that was up to that point unheard of. Anybody have an idea when the Council of Trent was held? later, later. What's that? Yeah, roughly the 1550s, 1560s, it spanned a tremendous amount of time, and it was the Catholics' counter-reformation to what was going on with the Protestants. And in Session 4 of the Council at Trent, they talked about canonicity. And for the first time in the Church's history, there was a recognition of the Apocrypha, certain Apocryphal books, as being in the canon of scripture. The early church had never recognized any of these apocryphal books. Throughout the medieval period, these apocryphal books were not recognized as canonical, and yet at the council at Trent, there were seven books added to the Old Testament, Tobias, Judith, Baruch, Ecclesiasticus, Wisdom, 1st and 2nd Maccabees, and then there were certain additions made to the book of Esther and the book of Daniel. If you read the apocryphal edition to the book of Daniel, it's called Bell and the Dragon, and it reads as if it's a comic book. And so, these were the editions, and the Council at Trent codified. Now, understand, there's a lot more apocryphal books. There are literally hundreds of apocryphal books, but these seven were added to the canon. Now, they are called deutero-canonical books. Deutero-canonical, meaning a second canon. But they're still recognized as inspired. Now, of course, the Protestant churches rejected those canonical books, and in fact, the fascinating thing is that there was actually no reason up until Trent to actually come right out and renounce those books as inspired, because nobody thought they were. It was only after the affirmation of the council at Trent that the Protestant church was in a sense forced to say these are not canonical, they're not deutero-canonical, they're not treto-canonical, they're not canonical in any way, shape or form. They may have great history, in fact I would recommend, read 1st and 2nd Maccabees sometime. It's very fascinating history about the Maccabean period, and now, of course, one of the reasons why these books were not considered inspired by the Jews or by the early Christians is because they had doctrine in them that was absolutely abominable. Communication with the dead, purgatory, and so forth, and then we start to see why maybe some of those doctrines begin to emerge in Romanism. When we get to the issue of the nature of canonicity The real issue is whether this is a matter of conferral or recognition. That's what the issue comes down to. Is it the church conferring canonical status on books, or is it the church recognizing the canonical status of books? Greg Bonson puts it like this, he says, the canon is not the product of the Christian church. The church has not authority to control, create, or define the word of God. Rather, the canon controls, creates, and defines the church of Christ. To put the debate another way, is our Bible a collection of authoritative books, or is it an authoritative collection of books? The Roman church says that canonicity is a matter of an authoritative collection of books that make up the canon because we say so. The Protestant perspective is that it is a collection of authoritative books, and we are simply recognizing the authority of Scripture. Now, when we deal with this, we need to realize, obviously, that canonicity and special revelation are not coextensive. There is much that qualified as special revelation that was never canonized. Remember what John says at the end of his gospel, John 21, 25, anybody remember? Right before that, Jesus did many other things which are not written in here. In fact, if I were to write them all down, it's debatable whether there'd be enough space in the libraries to hold all of them. Every word of Jesus was special revelation, but not every word of Jesus was recorded. Every word of the prophets was special revelation, but not all the prophets were writing prophets. And so special revelation and canonicity are not coextensive. We need to remember that. And in fact, it's not even apostolic writing that is coextensive with the canon. Because Paul wrote two letters to the Corinthians that we don't know where they are. Paul makes reference to the letter that he wrote to the Laodiceans, the end of Colossians, Colossians chapter 4. Have you ever read Paul's epistle to the Laodiceans? No? So, apostolic writing is not merely coextensive with canonicity. In other words, just because it came from an apostle's pen doesn't automatically mean, because in God's providence, those books never made it in, those books never survived. You can ask yourself why all day long, and the fact is that we may never have a really good answer. Maybe they were too situational to be applicable to the church at large. Maybe there was something in them that God did not want preserved for his church. All of that is speculation. But the fact is that simply because an apostle wrote it doesn't necessarily mean that it ended up in the canon. Canonicity is simply The process whereby the church has recognized that which is already canonical. That which is inspired, authoritative, infallible rule or standard for the church. That's what we're talking about. We are talking about simply the recognition of that which the church has received as infallible and authoritative as a standard or a rule for our faith and practice. That's what we're talking about. Now, here's the critical issue, and this is where I'll probably have to stop tonight before we get to the really good stuff next week. The critical issue. In general, canonicity has not held nearly the place of importance that inerrancy has held for us, at least over the last century. In fact, you could say that In some ways, canonicity has been taken for granted. You can ask John. There are dozens of books that deal with inspiration, infallibility, and inerrancy, and I can count on one hand the number of significant books written on the canon of Scripture. There's a sense in which we have taken it for granted, and as a result of us taking canonicity for granted, I think that we've ended up doing ourselves a great disservice Because in some people's estimation, our understanding of canonicity ends up being evangelicalism's weakest link in our bibliology. Roman Catholic Church has a very well thought out and sophisticated, albeit flawed, perspective on canonicity. We basically just assume. We take for granted. The 39 books of the Old Testament and the 27 books of the New Testament. And in fact, out of curiosity, if you were to take, let's say, just a round number, 100 evangelical churchgoers and just say to them, what is the canon? Out of those 100, how many would even know what you were talking about? You think the majority of them would know what you were talking about? Probably not. So then move to the next question. What's the criteria for canonicity? Out of that hundred, how many do you think would actually be able to articulate, even in the most basic, simplest form, what's the criteria for canonicity? Is criteria for canonicity a significant question for us? It is an incredibly significant question for us, because what it is, is it gets right down to the question as to what books belong in here and what books don't. Now, if you're willing just to say the 66 books and that's it, and the reason I know that those are the ones that belong is because I believe the Bible and everything in the Bible and right there's table of contents. And I believe the table of contents by faith. Well, you know what? At the end of the day, that's not quite good enough, is it? I'm not saying that we should rethink the table of contents, but we need to understand why a book is canonical and why the Shepherd of Hermes isn't canonical. And sometimes what we've ended up doing is we've ended up giving overly simplistic answers for the criteria for canonicity and in essence what we do is we end up creating a canon outside of the canon to determine canonicity. Now you think about that last sentence for the whole next week. We create a canon outside of the canon to determine canonicity. And next week we'll talk about what determines canonicity. Let's pray and then I'll take some questions. Father, we thank you that your word is forever settled in heaven and that you have vowed that you would magnify your word even above your name. We thank you, our Father, that scripture cannot be broken. We thank you that not one jot or tittle of your word will pass away until all things are complete. And Father, we ask that you would give us a deepening confidence in the canonical scripture, which is nothing less than your divinely inspired word to us. In Jesus' name, amen. Alright, any questions or anything before... let's see, we've got like 30 seconds, that I won't answer next week, inevitably. Ecclesiasticus? Now, that's a different book than Ecclesiastes. Right. Well, the Jews didn't accept it, and so I think that for the Protestants, they never entertained accepting books that weren't already received. The Catholics received it because you have some allusions to it in the New Testament, which doesn't necessarily make something canonical, and there is some helpful stuff in there, but as to why they chose the seven books that they did, I don't really know. That could be. I don't know enough about their own process to know if that was the motivating factor or not. Was Jude disputed? Maybe at Carthage. I don't believe it was listed in Eusebius' list of disputed books. But it wouldn't surprise me because By the way, the book of Jude actually is the book of Judas. We changed the name because Judas just kind of had a bad ring to it after a while. All right. Well, I'm sure that you all will just go through the next week with eager anticipation for next Wednesday. So you're dismissed.