Greetings, students. It is good to be back with you, virtually, I suppose. I have heard from many of you regarding your papers. Thank you for submitting them on time. Those of you who have not yet turned in your review of "Christianity and Liberalism" by J. Gresham Machen, you have one week to complete it. Please email it to me. We are also going to introduce something new here. I hope and trust that you have been able to find the PDF button to download the class notes so that you can follow along as if I were presenting them on the board. Additionally, I am going to implement a participation grade. I want you, on the day that I publish a lecture, which would be on Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, to send me an email containing a question. If you send me an email with a question from the lecture that is pertinent, not merely made up, but a genuine question, and it reaches me on the day of the lecture, then I will give you credit for participation. I will attempt to answer them, and I will decide what to do with them. Perhaps I will compile them and create a document that all of you can read, but please send me a question. Okay, today's lecture is called "Judaism, Gnosticism, and Authority." This is a transition lecture between the New Testament and the era of church history. As you can see from what you are going to read for Friday, this is a mixture. We have both 1 Peter, I believe, which is a letter that complements Mark, which you read earlier. It is a letter; if Mark is about the sufferings of Christ, 1 Peter is about the sufferings of the Christian. And they complement each other well. And I believe that Mark's gospel was written with Peter's insight and knowledge. So you will see that with it are some creeds and a story of a martyrdom. We have chosen a different one than what you read in Western Heritage: the martyrdom of Polycarp, a very famous individual who knew the Apostle John, who was martyred in his elderly years, in his 80s. So this is going to prepare us for talking about the creeds and the development of doctrine in the early church era. And so I trust that it will be enjoyable for some of you. Perhaps it is the first time you have actually considered these things and read them. And I hope you find them fascinating. Today we want to talk about some developments in the first century. So from the time of Jesus and the apostles, then kind of moving out of the first century into the second century. The question of authority is always the key question when it comes to truth and doctrine. Who has the right to define what is true? And so Judaism and Gnosticism are two religions that come out of that era that are defined vis-a-vis Christianity to some degree. Judaism is going to be defined as an anti-Christian entity. Gnosticism is going to claim to be Christian but is really a dualistic pagan religion that has adopted, kind of in a synergistic way, adopted Christian terminology and masked its true nature of its paganism. And it became a huge threat in the 2nd century, and the Church Father Irenaeus fought against it quite vigorously. With regard to Judaism, we find in the New Testament that the Jews were the chief persecutors of the Church. In Acts 18, Gallio in Corinth, he is a Roman official of some sort, a proconsul, I believe. He basically sees this difference between the Jews, the synagogue, and Paul and the Christians as a Jewish question. You guys handle it yourself. It's not on the Roman radar yet. So far, Christianity is largely just a subset of Judaism and a Jewish religion to them. We find the New Testament being hostile to the Way, which is basically asserting that Jesus is the Messiah and the way to God. What happens in A.D. 70 changes the nature of the Jewish religion significantly. In A.D. 70, the Romans destroy Jerusalem and the temple. Josephus is our historian who describes the Jewish War. Josephus was fighting with the Jews and then defected, went to the Romans, and then later became the chronicler or the historian of that event. In a sense, he is kind of covering up his own actions to some degree and also patronizing the Romans who were paying for his project. So it is a little hard to know how to trust him, but he is the only historian we have of that event. That event was very significant. Jesus had said in his Olivet Discourse in the week before he was crucified that he would send upon this generation all sorts of prophets and wise men and scribes, and they would persecute them and kill them. This generation of Jews would amass a guilt that is the equivalent of all the guilt, he says, from the beginning of the Old Testament, according to the Jewish canon, of Abel's death to the end, which is in 2 Chronicles, to Zechariah's death. The Jews of the generation of Jesus would amass a huge amount of guilt. And Jesus says as a result of that, there is punishment and persecution. There is going to be basically, it is significant, it comes on this generation, and it is 40 years after the crucifixion of Jesus, a generation length, that we find Jerusalem destroyed. It would not be right to adopt an anti-Semitism regarding the crucifixion of Christ and to say that Christians and so-called Christian nations should be anti-Israel. They are loved for the sake of their fathers. This is according to Romans chapter 11, which you would have read for today. God always has a special place for the ethnic Jews as a people. They will hold a special place, I believe, in the future. However, this does not remove the guilt of their rejection of Moses and the prophets or of their Messiah. As a result of that rejection, their religion changed. It is arguable how much it changed with respect to defining themselves vis-a-vis Christians and being anti-Christ against Jesus as the Messiah. However, this much is certain: the religion now only has synagogues, whereas before it had synagogues spread around the Mediterranean world and a temple. There is no temple. Now the religion has rabbis, which it had before this time, but there are no active priests because they have no temple with which to offer sacrifices. Judaism becomes largely a religion of Torah, a religion of the tradition of the elders, and it is passed on from generation to generation through rabbis. It is no longer a sacrificial, sacrificing religion. Its nature changes. Therefore, what Jesus encountered in the New Testament is not the same religion that we would find after this era, let alone today in Judaism. Secondly, with regard to Gnosticism, let me just pause. This happens with regard to many religions. After a major controversy or crisis, it is difficult to say that the religion afterwards shares the same characteristics and shape as before. The question would be whether it holds to the essentials and did not change them. But we will find in the Protestant and Catholic era in the 16th century that Roman Catholicism defined itself tightly with a large confession at the Council of Trent, in which it excluded some options that had been open prior to that era. To what degree it changed, we can talk about that at that time period, but it is that kind of situation when a crisis happens and sides are drawn; it is difficult to say the religion did not change in some sense. And so the religion of the Jews changed in the first century. Secondly, with regard to Gnosticism, I have a definition in your notes. It is anti-cosmic dualism. I got that from a book written by a German. The Germans have published all sorts of research books. I had to read this in graduate school. It is by Kurt Rudolph, just titled Gnosis and the Nature and History of Gnosticism. It is filled with all sorts of data. And we know a lot now about the Gnostic cults, the Gnostic religions. It is a broad label applied to all sorts of varying religions, from this kind of Zoroastrian religions from Persia over in that era, as well as some down in Egypt. We found a whole library of scrap materials that are Gnostic, scraps from Gnostic documents in Cairo, the Nag Hammadi library. Before that time period, what we knew of Gnosticism came from the Christians. Irenaeus, in particular, fought against Gnostic religions in his book, Against the Heresies. But with the discoveries at Nag Hammadi, we know a lot more. We find Irenaeus was actually, as I understand, accurate. And that is what I am told. Here are the features of this religion. It is essentially a dualistic religion in which the primary principles of the universe are a good principle and a bad principle. It is not like Christianity, where there is a good God. This dualistic religion is negative towards the material world. Here is what you have: an unknown God, a hierarchy of gods and divine beings. Far, far above is this God who is very unknown. Beneath him are various gods made from principles such as Sophia, meaning wisdom, or Peace, or Faith. Various systems have various gods. Some of them incorporate angels from Jewish legends and myths. Others incorporate Zoroastrian signs. And so they all have, for example, thrones, dominions, and powers, similar to the language that Paul uses in Ephesians and Colossians. At some point, there is a mistake that occurs. This demiurge, to quote Rudolph, is involuntarily brought into being. This demiurge is a lesser God, and he begins to create his own world. So the created world, the material world, is considered an evil act. I believe this is satanic, to cast dispersion on the Creator God, the Creator of heaven and earth, and to portray Him as an evil being. Therefore, the material world is bad. Inside man, however, is a spark of divinity, a spark of God that is good. It is spiritual in nature. Knowledge is the key. In fact, secret knowledge or gnosis is essential. Gnosis simply means knowledge. Secret knowledge is the key to redeem you from your bodily existence and to bring you closer to the divine. It is interesting that in the New Testament, this concept appears to have gone in two radically opposite directions, and yet extremes meet in the middle. On the one hand, those who say the body is bad become ascetic. We find many of these even before the Christian era, in Egypt and other places where the body is considered bad, and people mistreat the body, as if poverty is piety. On the other hand, we find people who say the body is bad and therefore it does not matter what you do to it, and they become licentious, sleeping with prostitutes and not caring about morality because it is irrelevant to true spirituality. The letter of 1 Corinthians seems to address this kind of so-called spirituality. These extremes are just manifestations of a very Greek spirit as well, which regards the body as bad and the soul as needing to be liberated from it. If you read the book of Acts, you will find that Paul was often criticized for his view of the resurrection, of the bodily resurrection, as if the body is bad. We know that Christianity is a resurrection religion; it affirms the body. However, one religion that the New Testament fought against is doceticism. "Doceo" means "to seem" in Greek. So doceticism teaches that Jesus only appeared to have a body, and therefore he only appeared to die. Interestingly, we have a kind of docetic religion in the world today in Islam. Islam does not affirm that Jesus actually died on the cross. In some respects, Islam is very earthy, but in this regard, it is interesting that its theory is that Jesus did not actually die. I once had a conversation with a sheik. We often say "sheik," but it was a sheik up in Dearborn many years ago. He was very upset with me over the incarnation, that God would become, as you know, born in blood. He was very angry over that concept. I received some propaganda literature from them in the mail. One of them was a tract that said "Crucifixion or Crucifixion." You can see that the Muslims were asserting that Jesus actually did not die. We find the New Testament fighting against this in statements like 1 John 4:2, which says that everyone who confesses that Christ has come, that Jesus has come in the flesh, is from God. So in that context, if you were to find those affirming the body of Jesus, the full humanity of Christ, they are from God. These Gnostic religions, Gnostic teachers, and such ended up writing a lot of books. Some of those we have found in those scraps. And so, in this era, it became very common for false teachers to adopt a pen name from the Bible, such as an apostle. You might have the Acts of Peter, you might have the Gospel of Nicodemus. Some of these have been found today and have caused a great deal of controversy. The Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Judas—you can imagine. I have only dabbled with these; I have not read the entire corpus of literature and so I am not giving you information here based on first-hand research. But here is what I understand has gone on in this time period. By the 2nd century, there were no apostles present on the earth. They had all gone to be with the Lord, except the son of perdition. The apostles were being impersonated, as I described, which is interesting. Even in the apostolic era, this had already happened according to 1 Thessalonians, especially 2 Thessalonians. Paul says, "as if a letter has come from us." Paul had to actually sign his letters. He says, "This is my signature, as it were. This is what I do in all my letters." Apparently, he had poor vision, so he signed his name in large letters after the amanuensis or scribe transcribed what he said orally and then wrote it down. These decoys, to me, are like duck decoys out in the water. So the evil one said, "Okay, if we're going to have a new faith, we're going to have a Bible, and Jesus said the Apostles are going to have the Spirit of Truth and are going to give us all that Jesus intended to say, then it's as if the evil one says, 'Okay, I'm going to impersonate the Apostles and flood the waters with decoys.' Now who can tell which is which? And this is the challenge, the second-century authority challenge. Where do I find the truth? In that era, it became very common for the bishops and the teachers of that time period to hold to an apostolic succession. Irenaeus can point back to being taught by Polycarp and Polycarp by John, I think is how that sequence goes. You can trust me. It's a very dangerous thing to do in one regard because apostles can be mistaken. As we see in Galatians, Paul had to rebuke Peter. They're not always the guide personally or in their own private word. What is the authoritative New Testament, the authoritative faith of Christians, is a common core that comes from the apostles, the original apostles. Let me just talk a little bit about this. The solution to this, actually I'll talk about this a little later, is a permanent public apostolic word. It is a permanent word in that it's written. It is apostolic in that it's not just one apostle. It's the group of them. You have more than one gospel. The New Testament has more than one apostle. They all agree and they create a common tradition, a common written tradition. It is public. It is not secret. The Gnostics have a secret religion. As you become more indoctrinated and initiated into their religion, they will let you in on more of their secrets. I understand that the Masons are a Gnostic religion, having that inner, inner core, and very similar, probably adopting some of these early Gnostic religions. I also understand that the Mormons in the Western United States and even here in Jonesville, that the Mormons, or the Church of the Latter-day Saints, largely adopted Masonic, or the Mason's religion, and that they too have a very, or it looks as if they adopted it, they too have a very secretive inner core to their religion. Christianity is not that way. Christianity has always been dominated by preaching. It has published its word. And so it speaks openly. Anybody can read their literature. Anybody can hear their message. There is nothing like secret in that regard. Sometimes Paul might say that he speaks certain things among the wise, because some cannot handle this or that. But the core of their message, Jesus Christ crucified, risen from the dead, is public and is based on the public documents of the Jews called the Old Testament. All right, let us talk about the Bible, the canon of the Bible. Canon is actually a Greek word; it simply means a straight reed, such as those found in Egypt or a cattail, you might say. But because it is straight, it becomes something you can measure with. We get, as it were, a yardstick. We have a straight stick, and we can measure with it. And once it measures, it becomes the standard by which you reference things. So you reference the standard as you are measuring. And thus it becomes a rule. It is interesting to note that our 12-inch ruler, or, for example, in a machine shop, a metal rule, is also a means of measuring. And so the rule of faith is the canon. Therefore, the canon of the Bible, in a technical sense, is the official list of biblical books. There are 66 books in the Bible, 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament. The canon, then, is that list. And canonization is the process by which those books were put on the list, or how they were included in that library of books, making the holy anthology of the Bible. Bible simply means book, biblion in Greek. But it is a book that is an anthology of other books. So how did that happen? Well, it is interesting. This is a debate in the New Testament. I want to be candid about this. You will receive a different answer if you were to ask, especially regarding the New Testament, if you were to ask a Protestant or a Catholic. You will get different answers from each side. In the Roman Catholic position, Christ instituted a church, and the church then gave us a book, gave us the New Testament, and gave us the teachings. And so Christ instituted the church. In the Protestant understanding, Christ is part of the Word that came to mankind. According to Luke and Acts, the Word actually began with John the Baptist in the wilderness. The Word came to John, and then the Word is carried by Jesus. There is a telescoping that occurs as John said, "Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand." Jesus picks it up after John's imprisoned. "Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand." He sends out his apostles to preach the kingdom. "Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand." The gospel of the kingdom is then carried all the way to the capital of Jerusalem. The book of Acts, which is Luke's second book, carries the same story, and the theme of the spread of the word is actually the theme of the book. It starts in Jerusalem, goes to Judea, Samaria, and then to the ends of the earth. Just as the first book of Luke ends at the capital of the Jews, the second book of Luke ends at the capital of the Gentile world at Rome, with the spread of the word. And so the word, the message that Jesus came to preach and to announce, is the good news that God is now fulfilling his promises in the person and work of his son Jesus Christ. That gospel was entrusted to John, entrusted to Jesus, and entrusted to his apostles, who published it in the 27 books of the New Testament. Now that is going to be, obviously, the Protestant understanding. The Word came first and creates the Church. So, I fall on the Protestant side, but here is my analogy. My analogy for this is that there has to be somebody who makes a list. At some point, you have to compile a list. Even if you are going to publish today and print the Bible, you have got to have a table of contents. There has to be a list. How do those books get on the list? I was helped by a recently published book by C.E. Hill, a New Testament scholar. The book is entitled Who Chose the Gospels? Probing the Great Gospel Conspiracy. He starts with Irenaeus, who is very clear in the late second century that Irenaeus has the four gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Then he goes decade by decade back in time and finds that there never was, even ending up in the first century, there never was this big council, there never was this big meeting, "Hey guys, we gotta decide." Every era, every decade finds that those books are assumed to be divine, inspired books. And so, you say, "Who chose the Gospels?" It ends up being nobody. There was no big meeting, no big decision-making process. They were recognized when they were given as public apostolic documents and inspired by the Word of Christ. So my analogy for this is that it is kind of like the NFL, the National Football League. When the regular season begins, it has to have a roster. I forget if it is 45 players or something. In the preseason, they actually have, they are allowed to have more players and to try out some new guys. So there is like a period of tryouts. There is no question that the all-star quarterback is going to make the tryouts. I mean, he is going to pass the tryouts. The quality of the athlete recommends himself. So yes, does his name have to be put down on a roster at a certain point? But it is a foregone conclusion that the four Gospels, the all-star athlete, is going to be on that list because the quality of the literature itself is so inherently glorious and divine that it is recognized by the church instantaneously. This is of God. And so, though there have been a few of the New Testament books that have been disputed, such as Hebrews and 2 Peter, they were eventually accepted on the basis of that inner core, their connections to the apostles. For example, Mark is connected to Peter, and Luke is connected to Paul. The Eastern Church, I believe, accepted Hebrews because they assumed that Paul wrote it. Therefore, the nature of the New Testament being documents from the apostles, from the apostolic era itself, and from that circle of apostles, that is the core of the New Testament. And we find that the criteria for inclusion is apostolic authorship. So let me describe both the Old Testament and the New Testament, explaining how we received these books and how they have come down to us today. We do not have the original documents, as they were written on materials such as papyrus or animal skins, which have perished long ago. How then did they come down to us? Let me describe the Old Testament for you. Here is my analogy for this: there are two epicenters of revelation in the Bible. An epicenter is the center of an earthquake; it is where the shock begins and then ripples out from there. It is the core of that shock, as it were, through the Earth's crust. God has spoken into this world. He has given a significant body of literature in this world, and the two centers of that revelatory action are Moses for the Old Testament and Jesus for the New Testament. If there is one thing the Jews know, God spoke through Moses. If it is not according to Moses, it is not accepted. This is affirmed in their Old Testament. If you look at Isaiah, it says, "To the law and to the testimony. If they do not speak according to this word, it is because there is no light in them." And so Deuteronomy 18 describes the process of how the prophetic tradition began. The Jews did not want to hear God speak directly to them as He did at the mountain, Mount Sinai. It was terrifying. So they asked Moses, "Speak. Have God speak to you, and then you tell us what God says." God affirmed that this was a good idea. So Moses became the proto-prophet. He is the model prophet. In fact, God says, "A prophet like you, I will raise up from your brethren a prophet like you." "Like you" says Moses is the model here of what a prophet is. If you want to, you can get this from Exodus 7, or you can get this definition and more even in Deuteronomy 18. Prophecy is when God puts His words in the mouth of a man. It can be subtle. It can be done without even their knowledge. But when God puts His words in the mouth of a man, and that man then speaks those words, that becomes prophetic. And the Bible claims to be prophetic literature. What the Bible says, God says. The language of the New Testament is "God-breathed." So Moses then is the epicenter, and what follows him is the tradition of the prophets. And so the common way to describe the Old Testament in the New Testament era is to call it the law and the prophets. Now, a question arises regarding the Apocrypha or Deuterocanonical books. These are the disputed books that Protestants reject and Roman Catholics affirm as scripture. They were often quoted by the early church and by the church fathers, and were accepted as profitable literature, often attached to the back of the Greek translation of the Old Testament called the Septuagint. Significantly, these books were not accepted by the Jews in their canon, and this remains true to this day. There is also evidence within the Apocrypha that the Apocrypha itself does not consider itself part of the canon or inspired. Josephus is another witness to this. It is a long and disputed debate, but it is interesting to note that I do not believe it was until the Council of Trent that there was an official statement accepting these books and placing them on the roster as inspired books. As far as textual confidence goes, how do we have confidence that these books, written so long ago, have been accurately transcribed? After all, they were handwritten. This is interesting. Until the last century, the oldest copies of the Old Testament that we had were from around 800 AD, 900 AD, from the Masoretic tradition. And there were not many of them. In fact, I believe there are only two full copies. One, the Jews guard quite exclusively, is the Codex Aleppo. They have been trying to obtain this, and it is a painstakingly slow process, I guess, to create a critical edition of it. The other is the one used for Hebrew Bibles, the one that a typical seminary student would learn Hebrew with, the Codex Leningradensis. I do not know if it is called something different in the post-communist era, but that is another Masoretic text. In 1947, a goat herded a young boy, I believe, discovered in the caves outside the Dead Sea, up in the hills and the mountains there, discovered a canister. I think it was a copper canister, and it contained some very, very ancient scrolls. They are so ancient that you can open them and they crumble. When the hills were searched over the next 10 years, all sorts of manuscripts were discovered. These are the Dead Sea Scrolls. There is only one inch of rain per year, I understand, in Jericho, in that region, and so it is very dry. These documents have been preserved for over 2,000 years. I believe that in that collection there were, I think, two complete books of Isaiah, copies of the book of Isaiah. And when comparisons were made of a book of Isaiah from before the era of Christ and then the Masoretic text from a thousand years later, if you take Isaiah 53, I think there are only 17 letters different. Most of that is spelling differences. One word is different between the two copies. That is a thousand years of copying, and that word is actually found in the Greek or the Greek translation of that chapter of Isaiah. That is an incredible amount of uniformity of text over such a large period of copying. And so what we find is that what gives us the confidence in the text of the Old Testament is the meticulous nature of Jewish scribes. They were so particular. I have looked at a Hebrew Bible. I know Hebrew to some degree, and I read it off and on. And you can see in the margin that this is the halfway point in the book. At the end of it, they will have counted up all the words in the book. They know how many words there are. From what I understand, if there was a mistake, they would throw that away and you start over. You do not just let it be or say it is good enough. So the meticulous nature under the providence of God, and God having promised that his word, which is living, will abide, he has used the meticulous nature of Jewish scribal activity to preserve the Old Testament. I will tell you about the New Testament in just a bit. Let us go to the New Testament. The New Testament has obviously Jesus as its epicenter of revelation. We saw in a previous lecture that the Upper Room Discourse promised that the Spirit of Truth would guide the Apostles into all truth, would teach them all things, would bring to remembrance the things that Jesus had said, would reveal to them things to come, and would bear witness alongside their witness in the world. Jesus then creates the canon of the Bible for the New Testament Christians by, number one, regarding the Jewish canon as authoritative. He affirmed the law and the prophets and the writings, as we see in the Upper Room or after the resurrection in Luke 24, when he mentions the Psalms with the Law and the Prophets; it seems to be a small witness to that. Jesus' reference to all the murders of the Old Testament from Abel to Zechariah fits the Jewish canon from Genesis to 2 Chronicles. There is no dispute with the Pharisees over the canon of the Bible. Jesus and the Pharisees agreed with the Law and the Prophets and the writings. The Sadducees only accepted the first five books, the Pentateuch. The Samaritans also, in their syncretistic religion, only accept the first five books, but Jesus affirmed Moses and the prophets. And we find that this then becomes the first half of the Christian canon of the Bible: Jesus affirming the Jewish canon. We see Jesus laying the groundwork for the New Testament canon through appointing apostles and promising the spirit of truth to come. And so Jesus then lays that groundwork. We have described that it is apostolic authority that becomes the criteria, not strictly apostolic authorship. Those few who are not apostles themselves are closely connected with the apostles in their group. The pseudepigrapha are documents that are the decoys and they do not align with the scriptures. And having dabbled a bit in them, from what I am told and understand, they do not read like the New Testament either. My dabbling is very limited on that. I need to fix that and become better acquainted with them. The textual confidence with regard to the New Testament is very different from the story of the Old Testament. You might say, well, how do we have confidence that the New Testament is, for example, what Paul wrote or John wrote? In this case, it is the incredible amount of documents that we are dealing with, over 5,000 manuscripts. Now, that would not be 5,000 complete manuscripts of the entire New Testament. But many of them are quite lengthy, such as the letters of Paul, or the Gospels, or perhaps all of the New Testament. Some of these date back to very early times. The John Rylands fragment, I believe, is from AD 135. In that case, you would have a document that people could read, people who knew the apostles could read, people who knew John could read. I think it is a scrap of John's Gospel. If you were to go to the 8th floor of the Graduate Library at the University of Michigan to the Papyrus Library, you would find the largest collection of papyri in North America. The University of Michigan collected this in the early 20th century, and you would find there, and I have seen a page of it, P46. Some argue it is very early. Even if it is not very early, it is at least from the 3rd century. It is a papyrus of Paul's letters. The pages look like a large letter D. The corners have been broken off. It was stitched. Just as a side note, the Christians are the ones who promoted the codex, getting away from the scroll and moving to loose-leaf papers that are stitched together. The paper being papyri, they are stitched together. So here you have it stitched on one side, which is straight. The corners are broken off, making a D shape. The text, however, with large margins, is preserved in the middle. I have been able to read from Paul's letters from that early, early copy. This is very unique in ancient literature. The largest number of ancient books, the largest number of copies we have of an ancient book, I believe, is Homer's Iliad, with about 600 copies. Compared to 5,000, the rate of variance is about 5% from text to text. 5% of the text can vary. The New Testament is a very tight text; I think it can be about 99% common text, but I forget the exact data. I have it written down in another place. Perhaps my notes have it here, and I could pull it up. I should have had that information, but it is very, very, very tight. Many of the differences in the New Testament can be easily ascribed to scribal mistakes, such as dittography. I see this in students' papers where you repeat the same word or skip a line because the same word is found in this line and that line. It is not as tight a text as the Old Testament, with the Jewish meticulous nature. It has more variants, but the variants are due to transcribing it quickly. Christianity was on the move, and so to transcribe it quickly, many copies were made, and they were made quickly. Because we have so many copies, we can trace the geographical distribution of these texts, estimate their ages, and begin to describe how a mistake likely started here. At the end of the day, the eclectic text has a high degree of accuracy. No major doctrine of the New Testament is threatened by this. My analogy is that I used to wash windows for six years. After washing a window, you can always find a mistake—a little bug spot that you did not scrape off or a little smudge—but the window is clean. You can see outside. The text of the New Testament is clean. You can see Jesus through it and be saved. Now, these are external criteria that help us affirm that the Bible is, in fact, the Word of God. If the Bible is the Word of God, these things should be so. They are like necessary conditions. But they are not sufficient conditions. At the end of the day, you are left with some degree of rationalizing or making an argument and a case for it. But you are left at the end of the day without that closure. Not all the data has been seen. Not all has been witnessed. This is the same thing that we saw with Job. Job and his friends were never going to be able to ascertain the reason for Job's sufferings from collecting data or from thinking. Neither empiricism nor rationalism gives ultimate answers. Because we are made in the image of the infinite personal God, we should not try to imitate his infinite side, as if we can know all things. Until we know all things, we cannot say we know. But we can talk to him. We can interact with him personally. Through revelation, we can get answers that we can trust and rest upon and know this is the truth. It is that spiritual receptivity, the capacity or potential for that in the human being made in the image of God to talk and have conversation with God, that lays the groundwork for confidence that I know this is the Word of God. That spiritual receptivity is best tested in the realm of obedience. It is more a matter of the heart than of the head. Jesus said in John 7, verse 17, it was a verse that helped me a lot when I was struggling with doubts. If anyone, it does not matter who, if anyone is willing to do his will, that is God's will, he will know of the teaching. Here is an interesting if-then statement. The will then becomes the groundwork for knowing. If anyone is willing to do God's will, if you really, really want to obey God, you will know of the teaching, whether it is of God or whether I speak from myself. And so, Jesus affirms that through a willing heart, which I believe is a gift from the sovereign God, I can know that this Bible is the word of God. To change the analogy or to make an analogy, as one of his sheep, I know his voice. And as John 10 says in a parable, I will not follow the voice of a stranger. And so I believe this is how the Gospels were recognized. Christians had the spiritual receptivity. They recognized the voice of their Savior in the four Gospels as the Apostles wrote under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth. And Paul's letters, and John and Peter, the New Testament was amassed, recognizing this is divine literature. This is of God. I hope this has been helpful. Again, as we said at the beginning of the course, you are not required to have any personal response to this. It is the nature of this material, though, that it is readily available to have a personal response and to think through it. But as far as the data goes here, the main tension of this lecture is how we ascertain which book is authoritative. Because there were decoys. The Gnostics had created decoys. How do we know the canon of the Bible, but especially the canon of the New Testament? And so I hope this has been helpful. Please email me a question for a participation grade. And Lord willing, I will get a lecture for you for this Friday as well. All right, goodbye.