Well, Sawyers, you're coming in on not really a last leg, but we've been doing a study of historical theology in here for a couple months, I guess, now. And we're having to take a break from that starting next week because Sean's class is going to be joining us. So we're going to do a study of the attributes of God, I think. I know how, given the broad range of young people in that, I didn't know how well this would be received, you know. So, certainly everyone needs to know who God is fundamentally in his nature. So, we've been doing this study. Let's see. I didn't blow it up this time. We've been kind of following that Greg Allison book. I usually make that bigger. Historical Theology as an outline. We've been using this working definition to distinguish it between church history as a loci or as its own school of study. Historical theology is specifically the study of the interpretation of scripture and the formulation of doctrine by the church of the past. So it's certainly related to church history, but not exactly the same thing. And the entire time, other than a couple weeks of introduction just on the propriety of this as a study, we've been looking at the canon of scripture as a historical theological study. And we've been, this is all just review, we've been seeking to answer this question that Allison introduces. How's the church come to believe what belongs in the Bible and what doesn't? And I've said every week, maybe this'll be the last week, two qualifiers at the very beginning of that. A, scripture is self-attesting. Our confidence in it doesn't come from the testimony of the church or any other group or person, it comes from, I stole this line from Sam Waldron, the self-authenticating character of its message. So there's nothing outside of the scripture that we rely on to tell us this is what the scripture is, but rather the scripture's own inner self-attestation. And we've been talking about that a lot. And we've been looking at, for the last couple weeks, the development of New Testament canonical lists. In other words, lists that show up in the annals of church history where, for whatever reason, people wrote and said, these books we think are canonical, authoritative, inspired. These we don't think they are, in those very early centuries of church history. And I've kind of given the qualifier at the beginning of that every time. This particular portion, we've tried to spend as much time as we can in the Word of God itself, but this particular portion on the list is just kind of not real sermonic. It's kind of more of a lecture kind of feel, and I just don't know a way around that if we're gonna learn the material, so. My apologies one more time for that. Remember this, still reviewing, that there were two key criteria that emerged that the early church used to determine which writings to include in the canon. I would word that differently, but that's not the point for now. The point is the two criteria. For the New Testament, we dealt with the Old Testament canon on its own. Now we're dealing with the New Testament canon. The first and foremost would be the criteria of apostolicity. Does whatever writing they're evaluating have an apostle for its author? Paul's letters, Matthew, John, et cetera. If not an apostle, if not, does it have an apostle associated with it? He gives the examples of Mark's gospel, which records the account of the apostle Peter, that sort of thing. Luke's connection authoritatively to the Apostle Paul, right? Those kind of things. And secondly, they relied on what he refers to as the criterion of antiquity, meaning has the church historically, from their perspective, recognized the voice of God speaking to his people in this writing? And I've qualified every time and said, when we hear that, we got to remember what they're referring to as antiquity was just like a hundred or two years prior to them, sometimes 50 years prior to them by have people always recognize this to be apostolic. So, you know, that second, this one is absolute reliable, right? If it's apostolic, it's the Word of God. This one is really trying to determine this one, right? Has this been viewed to be apostolic forever? In any event, this is an important qualifier that I've led off with as well every time. Although equipped with these criteria, the church did not set out to determine the canon of scripture as much as to recognize it, and affirm it. Recognize those and affirm those authoritative inspired writings that God intended for inclusion in his word, right? So the church doesn't determine the canon, the church doesn't create the canon, the spirit of God does that. And it's the church's responsibility just to recognize and affirm. Remember, when we've read this every time in this section, 2 Peter 1.20, no prophecy of scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. And the thesis in all this is that the church was just trying, at least originally, was just trying, setting out to trying to recognize which books had been produced by the will of God. So, that's the broader review. Last week, this is what we covered. Any questions on the broader review? I know it's a lot, but it's a lot of material. So, remember we looked at another, who remembers the first big radical movement that kind of compelled the church to, we won't talk about it James, I think that was the one, never mind, remember the first Marcion Bright who rejected all of the Old Testament and severely redacted the New Testament. to the books that agreed with his theology, basically modern easy-believism theology. Nothing new under the sun. Well, remember last time, that was several weeks ago, we saw another heretic, don't use that lightly, but arise. Remember Montanism, after Montanus its founder. And remember one of the big distinctions there was that claim to new revelations. being given by the Holy Spirit. We looked at all the doctrinal nuances of that. You guys weren't here for that one, were you, Rogers? It's crazy, again, like with Marcion, how nothing's new under the sun. Martinism so closely resembles the modern charismatic movement, it's scary. But this was the big, this part right here was the part that prodded this. the Church to respond by underscoring the closed canon of Scripture. It kind of And this was an early, late second century heresy, monotonism. So it was really early on. But it made them realize, hey, we've got to speak to this. These guys can't be just going around saying, we're writing new scripture. God told us this. This is the word of God. Here's new revelation. Because that's going to destroy souls. The church responded to this emphasis, Alison says, on revelation outside of the Bible by underscoring the closed canon of scripture. That's complete. Nothing's being added to that. All right, questions so far? All right, let's just review. We looked at organs or origins canon. That was a mid third century thing. So like, you know, middle 200s. And I had mentioned Eusebius' canon, but we hadn't really gotten into it, so that's what we're going to look at today. Remember the first one was the Muratorian canon, a fragment. Remember all of them were very similar with those, you know, close lumping of those 20 accepted books. Little differences in those, but basically, by and large, no one ever questioned those, the homo-leguminas, it's called. In any event, Eusebius. It's some interesting stuff here. He's a really well-known church historian from that era. He divided his canonical recognition into four categories. One he just called accepted books. Second would be disputed books, yet books he acknowledged to be known by most churches. And then spurious works, which is just false. Like, these just aren't the word of God, period. And a kind of a deeper category of rejection that he referred to as heretical works, works that would damn the soul if believed and adhered to. So, the accepted books, according to him, four Gospels, Acts, 13 letters of Paul, 1 John, 1 Peter, and we'll talk about why the question marks in a minute, but the revelation of John. So that was what he categorized, and we'll read the actual source material translated into English, but in a minute. The disputed books, which he says were, he says, he acknowledged these disputed books were recognized by the majority of churches. He was just saying, as a historian, there were some churches, some Orthodox churches that didn't, you know, in those early couple of centuries that didn't recognize the canonicity or were iffy about the canonicity of these books. James, and we'll talk about the reasons in a minute, It makes sense why they would question it. James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and Jude. These he called spurious works. They're just flat out not inspired. They're not heretical necessarily. They have a value for the same way I've been saying we would use a John MacArthur commentary or something, but it's not the word of God. Acts of Paul, that's pseudepigraphic. Paul didn't write it. Shepherd of Hermas was a very popular book in the early church. The Didache, that's one of the earliest non-apostolic writings, very popular. Letter of Barnabas, Revelation of Peter, and Gospel According to the Hebrews, not to be confused with the book, the Epistle of the Hebrews. And he said, these are absurd works, his words, i.e. heretical. Gospel of Peter, Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Matthias, Acts of Andrew, Acts of John, and one called the Acts of Others. So notice all those are pseudepigraphical, meaning they're attributed to false authorship to apostles and that sort of thing. So in and of itself, can a work be inspired of God if it lies about its authorship internally? No, right? But there's more reasons for that. All right, so Allison has a good summary here. He says, it should be clear that nearly all of the New Testament writings that we consider canonical, authoritative, the rule and standard of the faith, were viewed similarly by the early church. The four Gospels, Acts, 13 letters of Paul, what we just read, several writings that are now considered canonical, he goes on, we just read which ones, with the inclusion of Hebrews, were on the fringe of the early churches canon. So basically you had that grouping of 20, nobody serious, besides heretics even, question, and you had those seven books that were like, a few people here and there, a few churches here and there, were like, hmm, we're just not sure about that. Now, he explained some of the reasons for that, and I think these are important. Remember those issues that they used to try to determine? Apostolicity, that's the major one, and antiquity. You'll see that in a lot of this. James, here's why some weren't certain of James early on. Didn't last long. Being certain of the, he says, of the author of this letter has been difficult. In other words, the authorship was what people questioned. Was it James the Apostle? Was it James the half-brother of Jesus? Or was it some other James of the early church? Does that matter who wrote it? Well, I mean, yeah, especially if you're in that time period and you're trying to say, hey, you're trying to recognize, is this inspired of God or is it not? It really matters who writes it. Also, it's a Jewish Christian address, threw some people off. They weren't as romantic toward the Jews as we are today, because they were persecuted by them for a long time. Notice, because of the fact that it was addressed to the 12 tribes scattered among the nations flavor, it said that rendered it less attractive to the largely Gentile churches, particularly those largely Gentile churches who had suffered at the hands of the Jews. So you can kind of understand why some people would be reluctant. Second Peter, again, authorship. Although it claimed to be authored by the apostle, so did several other writings, Acts of Peter, the Revelation of Peter, that were clearly not to be placed with the canonical writings. Thus, some churches hesitated to accept it. And one I've told you before, though this wasn't Eusebius' reason given in the source material, but remember there's a distinct difference in the Greek of 1 Peter and 2 Peter. 1 Peter being much more formal, literary, 2 Peter being kind of cornbread. You remember why that is though? Internally, from the scripture itself, Yeah. He had a scribe write the first one. He says, in the prologue to it, he says who he's with that's helping him compose that. In the second one, it would appear he just wrote it himself and he's, you know, he's a blue-collar man. So there's going to be a lot of difference between what a scribe writes for you, even if you're dictating, the way he parses it out and writes the grammar and the way I would write it, right? You know, just all these factors in case you ever run across that. It's important to know why these were ever questioned. Second and third John, basically it's because these were little and obscure. These letters were so brief and seemingly unimportant that the church easily overlooked them, hence antiquity. Citations from these in early writings are very scarce. So remember me saying that you can compose almost the entire New Testament just from the writings of the early church fathers, how much they quote it. So that's one of those antiquity indicators, right? If this is something that you can look back for the previous one or two generations before you, and they've always quoted this as scripture in their writings, well, 2nd and 3rd John, because of their size and a little bit of disputed authorship that we're going to talk about in a second, people just didn't have that familiarity with them. So, anywho. That's one thing going on with them. Determining authorship was also a problem. Both begin with the writer designating himself as the elder, and it says at least some in the early church did take this person to be someone other than John the Apostle. They assumed that. They attributed to some unknown John the Elder, and thus it lacked apostolic authority. And for them, the two letters then failed to pass a key test for inclusion in the canon. Again, this was a minor group, right? Like this wasn't widespread. Eusebius is just saying this is what it was for some. And he's just trying to be honest with that. Jude. Just reading that one's tough, right? Questions about Jude's canonical status arose because of its citations from extra-biblical sources. And this is a stumbling block for many today. Jude 9 quotes the assumption of Moses. Jude 14 cites 1 Enoch. Now some people say, well, that means some things should be included in the Scripture. Of course it doesn't. Paul in Acts 17 quotes two pagan polytheists, right? It doesn't mean he's saying that's the Word of God, he's just taking something from those materials and making an application from it. Same as Jude is doing here. But, what does it show us? About the well intentions of a lot of these early church leaders. Like they wanted to be careful not to endorse and use something that might not be inspired of God. And if they were going to use it, put it in a category that says maybe we can't trust this as much as we would other things. Now, they were wrong here. That's later, you know, recognized. But anywho, I'm just wanting you to know the facts. It does us no good to pretend like these things didn't exist or happen. Hebrews. Basically, is it Pauline or not? A lot of people thought Hebrews was written by Paul early on. A lot of people still think Hebrews is written by Paul through a scribe or something like that, explaining the differences in kind of the Greek of Paul's letters. The Greek of Hebrews, it could be a similar thing with 1 Peter and 2 Peter. We don't know, but anywho, that disputed Pauline authorship caused some people to question it. Because Paul, in most of his writings, would identify himself. If he wrote Hebrews, he didn't identify himself in it. It's more like a sermon than an epistle or something like that. All right. These, Letter of Barnabas, Shepherd of Hermas, all those, you know, we talked about that before. They were, he says, they were on the margins of the early church's canon, but ultimately were not included in the New Testament. So, not in any meaningful way. And he says, I thought this was a good one to transition with, The church eventually recognized that none of these passed the tests of apostolicity and antiquity, and thus they could not be part of the canonical scriptures composing the New Testament, meaning those books right there that we talked about that were spurious. Letter of Barnum, despite their popularity, they failed those two criteria. You can read over that there. The Didache, that's an important one. Shepherd of Hermas, that's an important one to see that they were recognized as non-canonical. Because a lot of doctrine today is kind of based on the Didache, not so much the Shepherd of Hermas, but it was at the time. from what I recall. Not from being there, from reading about it. Yeah. All right. Any questions before we get to the final one? I tried to move fast through that. I hope it wasn't confusing. Just really wanting to get to this point. You know, the four that I'm presenting to you and kind of working through, it's not an exhaustive treatment of it. It's just kind of the the high points, if you will. So that brings us to the Athanasian canon. I hope I wrote that right. The canon, the canonical list that Athanasius put forward in A.D. 367. Allison introduces it like this. He says, the first appearance of a list of the New Testament writings that corresponds exactly with the canon as it is known today, the New Testament canon, was Athanasius's, that's hard to say, 39th Easter letter in AD 367. So this was like, his purpose wasn't, and that's what we need to remember throughout all this, his purpose wasn't to say, here I'm giving you an authoritative list because I have the authority to give it. These things are just showing up in their writings incidental to other purposes. So this letter had another primary purpose, but here's the list that it contained. This is from F.F. Bruce. He kind of elaborates on that. He says, Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, devoted most of his 39th Feastal Letter announcing the date of Easter in AD 367. I still don't understand how they get that, by the way. There was a big debate about it at one time, the quartodeciman controversy. Look that up if you're not familiar with it. It was kind of a schism over how do you determine the date of Easter. That's for free. He devoted most of it to a statement about the canon of scripture and its limits. After his list of Old Testament books, he continues. Now here's the source material. In other words, what exerts from that Easter letter. He says, again, we must not hesitate to name the books of the New Testament. They are as follows. Remember, why were they compelled to do this? It wasn't to expand the canon, but to delimit the canon. Because heretics, schismatics, were trying to expand the canon, largely. Mostly, they were trying to delimit it. He says, we mustn't hesitate to speak to this. And he says, four Gospels, according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. After these, the Acts of the Apostles and the seven so-called little c, Catholic epistles, the universal, the general, that actually would be better translated, general epistles of the apostles. And notice, recognition of James, both first and second Peter, all three little Johns, and the book of Jude. Here, by this time, no equivocation on that, which shows that there was a widespread, almost universal recognition by this time in the fourth century. Next to these, notice he says 14 epistles of the apostle Paul. So there's 13 that we know of, so what's he added to that? Hebrews, right? He's assumed that. First to the Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Thessalonians, and that to the Hebrews. Next are two to Timothy, one to Titus, and the last two Philemon, And then he simply says, moreover, John's apocalypse. In other words, I don't really have a category for this thing, but it's included in it too. And look what he says, I thought this is beautiful. He says, these are the springs. By the way, if you don't know, John's apocalypse means the book of Revelation, right? Because our English word revelation is the same thing as that Greek word apocalypse, right? A revealing, right? Like a pulling back of a cover and making something known. That's what apocalypse means. So we think apocalypse means like doom and gloom in times. Well, that's not what it means. That's not the word, right? Not the word itself. It just means the revealing or a revealing. But for obvious reasons, it's associated. He says, These, the 27 books, are the springs of salvation. I like that. Are the springs of salvation so that one who is thirsty may be satisfied with the oracles which are in them. You recognize that language? It's from Isaiah 12.3, right? With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation. He's pulling on that and saying that's, That's this canon that was revealed through Jesus, passed down through the apostles. This is that source that God had promised that would bring salvation to the world, that would fill up the world with the blessing and salvation of God. That shows us a little bit of his understanding of that. In any event, going back to him, he says, in these alone, is the teaching of true religion proclaimed as good news. What's that? Gospel, right? Good news. He says, let no one add to these or take anything from them. And again, that was the heart, that was the need, and that was the intent that led to all this recognition. He says, but for the greater sake of accuracy, I must needs, as I write, add this. There are other books outside of these which are not indeed included in the canon. So they're not authoritative, they're not inspired, they don't meet the criteria, but have been appointed from the time of the fathers to be read to those who are recent converts to our company and wish to be instructed in the word of the true religion. These are, list some out, the so-called teachings of the apostles and the shepherd, I just included those two of their preeminence. So the Didache, shepherd of Hermas, he says, so what's he saying? He's recognizing the antiquity of those, but not the apostolicity. And he's saying, so it doesn't work, right? Even though these were popular, people have been reading them for centuries now, right? They've been handed out to new converts to help them understand things about the faith. Again, John MacArthur commentary, but they're not the word of God. That's what he's saying. They can't be included in the canon. They don't meet that criteria. This is while the former are included in the canon, the latter are read in church. No mention is to be made of the apocryphal works. It's important. I don't know whether we should go into that right now. Maybe not yet. Look what he says about them. Apocryphal means hidden. Yeah. Apocryphal is hidden. Apocalypse is revealed. I think I'm getting that right. Anybody know if I'm right about that? Brand says no. Am I not right about that? Somebody look it up on your phone. I won't wait on you, but I don't want to mislead everybody. I think apocryphal means hidden. In any event, We'll just have to talk about that later. He says, these are the inventions of heretics who write according to their own will, not the will of God, and gratuitously assign and add to them dates so that, offering them as ancient writings, they may have an excuse for leading the simple astray. In other words, he's saying, what, they falsely attribute authorship, they falsely attribute provenance, meaning origin, date, where it comes from to these things, because they're trying to pass, they're trying to deceive those who don't know any better. Those who may be sincere, but just don't understand those things for their own ill-sorted gain. So they're essentially false teachers. That's what he's saying in that. Maybe we'll talk more about that. Did anybody look that up? No. Okay. Nobody's interested. I'll go on. Canonical writings. So here's a list. You can scan it, it's basically your New Testament. So I won't go over those. It's not basically, it is the New Testament exactly as we have it today. He mentioned specifically these, this is important. This is important because of, as a polemic against Roman Catholicism who says they have the authority to determine the canon and we have the canon because they gave it to us. and they would affirm Athanasius as one of their authoritative fathers, but Athanasius said that certain books that Rome now says are canonical weren't canonical. Wisdom of Solomon, Esther, the Editions, Judith, Tobit, those four at least, I think those four are included in the Roman apocryphal books that they eventually outright decreed as canonical. Yeah, please. So apocryphal is an adjective describing something of doubtful origins, truthfulness, something phony or false, and then apocalypse is the noun meaning a massive state of disaster or destruction. Okay, so the English is unknown origins, you're saying the Greek was hidden. And apocalypse in English was what? Okay, so that's the English now, yeah, and I'm going off the... No, that's okay. No, I wanted the English. We need to know both. We need to be able to interact with it. So that's helpful, thanks. So in any event, everybody following along with me why that's a big deal? Because now Rome can't look back and say, we gave you the canon, and then them affirm Athanasius as the church, authoritative church father, when he says, this is not canonical. So that's a big deal. He says, these are absurd works, all those Gnostic gospels and those other things that we saw before, exactly like Eusebius did on that list. All right. A little more tidbit of info. Athanasius's, that's hard for me to say, New Testament canon was officially endorsed by the Council of Hippo in AD 393. So that's an ecumenical church council, which means all the representatives from all the churches all the churches, I'm sure it wasn't all the churches, but as many as they could get, you know, come together to try to make these decisions and things on very important matters. It was one of those things. It was officially recognized, so now you have a little C Catholic affirmation, recognition. Two other important church meetings endorsed the same list. The Third Council of Carthage, and the Fourth Council of Carthage in 397 and 419 respectively. So the point they're trying to get us at is this wasn't just a fluke thing where there was political activism to recognize this canon universally, but it fell away. At one point, an ecumenical council was what? Aryan. Right? Athanasius opposed it. I think it was him. That's where that phrase, Athanasius contra mundum, comes from. Athanasius against the world, right? Like, almost, you know, Arianism almost took over, you know, almost destroyed the church, but the Holy Spirit didn't allow that to happen. Well, what they're saying is, like, this wasn't just a flute thing. They're trying to show us, like, three successive, you know, generational councils all affirmed and recognized this canon. That shows a very clear, linear thinking of the church universal at the time. And then they say, the church, both Catholic and Protestant, has recognized this canon ever since. We qualify that statement by saying that they're talking about the New Testament canon. So even when Rome says in Eastern Orthodoxy, which by the way, they don't agree on the canon, Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism, their canons are different. But when they say now that those books we call apocryphal are in the canon, they're talking about the Old Testament canon or a different category. They're not saying they're New Testament writings. Like we know they come from the intertestamental period, right before Jesus' advent to the earth. So that statement has to be qualified by that. It's talking about the New Testament canon. And I don't know. Part of me thinks when we come back in the fall, that it might be worth visiting that issue, the issue of the Apocrypha. before we move on to theology proper. What do y'all think about that? Any interest in doing that, or would you rather just move on to where we can be more biblical and sermonic and less academic again? You can think about it and let me know. Give me some feedback. Because that is an important issue, whether those books are canonical or not. All right, let's finish with this. Something to remember? Well, let me see. Any questions? We have time. They're not even out. The hordes aren't even out yet. That's the fastest I've ever went through that. Went through anything, I think. No questions? Scholar? Questions? I'm just kidding. All right. Did that cause any, like, crisis of conscience for anybody? Like seeing that history and those disputations about some of that? No? Or nobody will answer? Let's go, Josh, okay. Remember this. Isaiah 40 and eight, and I think it's great. I think I think God's work of providence is a form of general revelation. What do I mean by that? Well, we would say God's revealed himself two ways. General revelation, creation, conscience, things that aren't clear but in some way testify to who he is to the world. And special revelation, of course, through the written word, through the revealed spoken later written word, fully and finally in Jesus Christ in the incarnation recorded in the New Testament. That's special revelation. But I think, and I'm not alone in this, I think God's hand of providence reveals in a general sense, not in a special sense that we would say it equates with scripture, but that we can learn things about him as we observe his hand of providence. And I think one of the most beautiful ways is when we study historical theology and we see how in spite of all the attacks, in spite of the popularity of heresy at certain times, all the efforts to undermine the canon or to undermine proper theology or to distort the gospel, to corrupt it, and guys, there's a lot of it. studying this historical theology is just eye-opening, to me at least. And through it all, 2,000 years later, here we sit with an accurate translation of the whole canon of scripture in our own native tongue. I can pick it up and get to it on my phone. How does that happen? But through the providence of God. The core tenets of the Christian faith have never been ultimately corrupted by heretics and schismatics. There have been times where it looked really, really, really scary and bad. Ask Athanasius. But in the end, the Spirit of God guided His people out of that, collectively at least, by and large, and along the path of orthodoxy. I think that's just a beautiful thing. That bolsters my faith to see how God does it. And this is a little out of context, It's more the promises, what God says is going to happen in its immediate context. But, you know, that's synonymous in ways. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. Amen. Amen. No questions? Comments? Criticisms? Critiques? All right, Travis, you dismiss this in prayer, bro.