To be joined by Sean's class here in a few weeks. So I'm thinking this might be too heady, boring for them to like be engaged in it. I don't know. Maybe just I'm not saying they lack the capacity, just saying they would lack the desire. I don't know. So we may veer off of this and come back to it. I'm going to try to give that some more thought. But I certainly think young people are more capable than what we tend to think, any event. For now, we're going to plow ahead. Here's our book. So our definition, historical theology, is the study of the interpretation of Scripture and the formulation of doctrine by the church of the past. And we've been looking at the canon of Scripture for a long time now, after our couple-week introduction. And this is the question we've been seeking to answer. How's the church come to believe what belongs in the Bible and what does not belong? And I've begun with this qualifier that Scripture is self-attesting. and that our confidence in scripture doesn't come from the testimony of the church, but from the, quote, self-authenticating character of its message. All right? Old news to everybody, that's good. So we began to answer our question with a little more clarity last week by beginning our assessment of those New Testament canonical lists that we see in the early church. And let me say, let me apologize in advance for this. These next two, maybe three weeks are gonna be a lot more electoral than they are sermonic. It's gonna be a lot more like a classroom lecture than it is a sermon, and I don't know of a way around that if we're gonna cover this material. I've tried to infuse as much scripture and exegesis as possible. so far in this study to try to lessen that classroom feel and that unspiritual feel. I think this is information we all need to know and I don't know a way of getting it to you that doesn't feel just like an academic exercise. But hopefully it'll be an interesting academic exercise at least and make us grow in our appreciation for the providence of God in preserving this for us. All right, we read this introduction by Allison last week. He says, remember, a crucial question arose, which of the writings from the early church should be included in this expanding canon, meaning expanding from the Old Testament, consisting of both the Hebrew Bible, our Old Testament, and the New Testament. says the letters of Paul, written by an apostle clearly invested with divine authority, were easily recognized as belonging to canonical Scripture. But what about the anonymous letter to the Hebrews? Why should Mark and Luke be placed alongside the Gospels written by apostles like Matthew and John? Those are some of the questions. What about the letter of Barnabas and the shepherd of Hermas? Two very early writings that enjoyed widespread circulation in the early church. What about them? Should they have been included? The issue, he says, of the canon of scripture became particularly critical when false teachers and false prophets appeared. That's a very important point. We're going to see a lot of that through this study. This is the way divine providence so often prodded the church. to more accurately formulate its dogma. Marcion. We talked about, for example, we're not going to go over his stuff again, just the briefs, the basics here, was a leader of a heretical movement whose views were obviously wrong. Marcion rejected the entire Old Testament and all parts of the growing New Testament that reflected favorably upon the Old Testament. He was really against the Old Testament, what he called the Old Testament God of wrath and vengeance, remember. But we won't go over all that again. The early church was rightly concerned by Marcion's views and recognized that his restricted canon of scripture fostered his heretical theology. In other words, his delimiting the scripture to those things that lined up with his preconceived doctrinal notions was what allowed him to go along with his teaching and say it was based on the Bible, right? Just throw out anything that's in the Bible that's contrary to it. We all have to fight that urge, don't we? His, quote, canon, remember that means rule or authority, was wrong, obviously, but the question, Allison says, was what writing should be included in the true canon. And remember that this is all review. The church turned to defining the canon of Scripture, two key criteria. emerged to determine which writings to include in the canon. Remember the first, probably the foremost in consideration of the New Testament canon was apostolicity. Does this writing have an apostle for its author? If not, is it associated with an apostle like Mark's gospel or Luke's gospel or et cetera? Second, remember, they relied. Now that one we all would affirm, yeah, that's right. This one, and both of these, he's not necessarily saying they were right or wrong, he's saying this is what they did. The second would be what he calls antiquity, meaning has the church historically recognized that the voice of God is speaking to his people through those writings? In other words, when we say, And I've pointed this out before, but when we say antiquity, and we see this question, we think a 2,000-year assessment. For them, it was like a 100-year assessment. What we call antiquity to them was the recent past. So that is a little different. They could trace those things out in some ways with more precision or with more accuracy. Anywho, this was so important, I really, that's cute, I really hammered this. Although equipped with these criteria, remember this, so important, the church did not set out to determine the canon of scripture as much as to recognize and affirm those authoritative inspired writings that God intended to be included in his word, right? In other words, in keeping with 2 Peter 1.20, No prophecy of scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. No prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but by the will of God as men were carried along by the Holy Spirit. So the church's task that was forced upon them by the heretics who were either trying to add to the canon or delimit the canon of scripture was to recognize which books had indeed been produced by the will of God, right? That's the hope. Now, this is where we got to last week. It was a quick review, right? Kind of. Melissa, she'll tell me the truth. You weren't here. Yeah, you were here. You think that was too repetitive? I was, I did accuse her that last time. Yeah, she was here. Okay. The first list Remember, dates to, I'm just going to go on, I can't dig my way out of this. The first list dates to about A.D. 170, so 2nd century A.D. Remember, it's called the, it wasn't called the Muratorian Canon then. We call it the Muratorian Canon in retrospect. It is named after, remember, the Italian archaeologist, L.A. Muratori. You can see the dates there, who discovered it and published it. And remember what's an important snippet about this is the document is a fragment, meaning we don't have the whole thing. We only have a part of it. And we're going to talk about this one a lot this morning. To me, this is by far not the most accurate list, but when we actually read the source material, to me, it is extremely enlightening as to what the early church was thinking or the apostolic, the second century church was teaching or thinking. So we don't know what the whole thing was. It was a fragment that's going to be important in a minute. So just bear that in mind for now. Here's what we know. It affirmed these as canonical writings, the four Gospels, the book of Acts, Paul's letters, Jude, and interestingly enough, Brandon, the Revelation. Yeah, yeah, it wasn't wholesale or changed it early on. Now, on a bad note, it also included a couple of writings, a couple of, writings that were being passed around at the time. The one was called Wisdom, colloquially. I think now we refer to it as the Wisdom of Solomon, because it falsely gives Solomon as its author. And a book called The Revelation of Peter. You'll see that. So, again, Nothing is inspired except the Bible. Nothing's inerrant, infallible, except the Bible itself. So all throughout the study of church history, you're going to see error. Why? Because men err. Only men who are inspired by the Spirit of God, through whom God intended for the canon to come, are going to be able to speak without error. So here are notable books missing. So I'm just doing it in list form. Then we're going to actually read some source material. And I think that's going to be enlightening to you. It was to me. Now, notice I say potentially missing from the Muratorian canon. Why? because it's a fragment. We don't know what the whole thing said, and I'll give you some proof of that in a minute, because where it jumps in at is with the Gospel of Luke, but with very clear language that indicates that that wasn't its starting point. Anywho, Hebrews, James, 1 and 2 Peter, and 3 John. Well, let me read this. This is important. Because of the fragmentary nature of the Muratorian canon, sorry, my wife's good cooking is coming up my esophagus. Because of the fragmentary nature of the Muratorian canon, we cannot be absolutely certain that some or all of the quote missing in quote writings were not indeed considered canonical, so heavy qualifier. These were works that the Muratorian canon explicitly denounced as non-canonical. This one we've talked about before, but a letter, these two would be called, remember, pseudepigraphical books, meaning they were attributed to false authors. In other words, they were claiming to be letters of Paul, but Paul didn't actually write them. They were written much later. Paul to the Laodiceans, Paul to the Alexandrians, Muratorian canon mentioned those and said, these are not. The Shepherd of Hermas, which was a very, very popular non-canonical writing. I don't know of many lists that would say the Shepherd of Hermas is canonical. I don't remember that, but it was very popular, kind of like we would maybe pass around a John MacArthur commentary or something, right? Very popular, but didn't mean they considered it canonical just because they passed it around. And then, of course, there was a lot of Gnostic writings in those first two or three hundred years that tried to be passed off as scripture. Gospel of Thomas, things like that. And they said, be gone with all that heretical garbage. Now, let me read to you a few excerpts from this, and I want you to feel free to ask questions, but I think, I don't know, this is enlightening to me, not just to see the list, but to hear what they say about it, like really informs us a lot more of how they're thinking. Notice. how it begins, so we see it's fragmentary nature, or fragmented nature. The third book of the Gospel, according to Luke, right? So it's obviously at least mentioned two Gospels before Luke, and we would assume from what it goes on to say that that would be Matthew and Mark. Okay, so reading on. This is not the whole thing, this is just select portions. After the ascension of Christ, so he's talking about Luke, the gospel according to Luke. After the ascension of Christ, Luke the physician, notice, whom Paul had taken along with him as a legal expert, wrote the record down in his own name, in accordance with Paul's opinion. See how they connected its authoritativeness would be through Paul's apostolicity. I think I'm saying that right. You know what I mean, if not. He himself, however, never saw the Lord in the flesh. We don't know who wrote this or where it came from. They just found this. And it's clearly a Christian writing. He himself, however, never saw the Lord in the flesh, and therefore, as far as he could follow the course of events, began to tell it from the nativity of John. Talking about the birth of John. So like, those are huge clues, too. Like, we actually see Like a lot of the things he says here about these writings, particularly Luke's writings, Luke and Acts, we see they must have been pretty much the same back then, right? Like 1900 years ago, somebody saying Luke begins his gospel with John's birth, not Jesus's. And they set it up in such a way that reflects Luke's prologue to that. Think about what that's saying. I mean, that's saying these big portions of this in 1900 years of dissemination are still structurally the same. That's a big deal. You see that? Anywho, I'm just showing you little things here. The fourth gospel is by John, one of his disciples. Notice the fourth gospel, so now we're, that's how I said we're assuming Matthew and Mark were in this list, though we couldn't be dogmatic. When his fellow, watch this, when his fellow disciples and bishops encouraged him, John said, Yeah, this is not from the Bible, this is just their history, their searching out antiquity. They say this is what was passed down or what the witnesses, non-canonical, extra-biblical witnesses said about how this happened. John said to his fellow disciples and bishops, fast along with me three days from today and whatever may be, may he maybe that's a typo, may be revealed to each. Let us relate it to one another. The same night it was revealed, this is what the fragment says, the Muratorian fragment. The same night it was revealed to Andrew, one of the apostles, that John, in his own name, should write down everything and that they should all revise it. In other words, John writes it all down and all the you know, the rest of the, whoever the folks involved in this little meeting, that I witnessed it, they're going to help John make revisions. Now, we don't know if this is what happened. This is what they're saying happened. The Bible doesn't say this is what happened, right? But it does say John wrote the fourth gospel and why he wrote it and stuff like that. Therefore, although different beginnings are taught for the various books of the gospel, meaning what? Matthew starts at a different place than Mark, than Luke, than John. They all start at a different place. He says, or the fragment says, it makes no difference to the faith of believers, since in all of them, everything, look at this, so important, has been declared by one primary, capital S, Spirit. That's the same doctrine of inspiration that we have today, 2,000 years later. You see that? We just take that for granted. 2,000 years of critique and assault and insult and attempts to corrupt by enemies of the gospel and those who would want to assert their own ecclesiastical magisterial authority. And here we go, like second century, they're saying, we're looking for inspiration of the Holy Spirit. and we're recognizing inspiration of the Holy Spirit in these books. I think that these are huge things to me, how God has preserved the essentials throughout the history of the church. It is no wonder, it goes on, and any time if you have a question just ask, it is no wonder then that John should so constantly present the separate details in his letters also, saying of himself, Now, notice this, the quote marks, what we have seen with our eyes and heard with our ears and our hands and have handled these things we have written. Where's that come from? He's playing off the prologue to 1 John, right? Isn't that interesting? What does that tell us? It tells us they've read it and it's remained unchanged. That construction right there has remained unchanged for almost 2,000 years. if this fragment was from 175. You see? I mean, these are big things if you really think about it. I'm trying to remember the exact quote. I will butcher it. But I was taught this, and I don't remember the details, but it stuck with me. that you could take all of the quotations of Scripture from the writings of the early church and you could almost compile a complete New Testament just from their quotations of Scripture in their non-canonical writings. Now that's profound. That is a profound testament to God's preservation of his word and out to give us such firm confidence that it has not been corrupted, that it still stands firm and true and accurate and trustworthy and dependable. That's a huge thing. And that's one example of it, right? Where they quote the prologue of John's, not John's gospel, I'm sorry. First John, thank you. Little John's, the first of the Little John's. Let's see. For in this way he claims to be not only a spectator, but a hearer, and also a writer, in order of the wonderful facts about our Lord. It goes on, the acts of all the apostles have been written in one book. The book we call Acts. Addressing the most excellent Theophilus, that comes from the prologue, Luke includes one by one the things which were done, watch this, in his own presence, As he shows plainly, this is kind of the work they're doing to say, is this accurate and canonical? Is the authorship true? Is it connected to apostolic authority, et cetera? And some of their reasonings says, this shows plainly that Luke was in Paul's presence and Luke witnessed these things firsthand because, look, he omits the passion, meaning the suffering, the death of Peter. And he omits Paul's departure when he was setting out from the city for Spain. So they're saying these are historical things that we all know about, because they happened not that long ago in our life, but Luke doesn't record them in there. Why? Because at some point, he was no longer a witness to these things. And if you look, and I almost posted them, but if you look in the book of Acts, in certain portions of it, The author who's recounting it will use the first person plural pronoun, we. Not they set sail to Troas, we set sail to Troas. And we landed and we were shipwrecked, right, putting the author into it. So Luke was a, you know, they're recognizing that. Luke was a firsthand witness of those things. As for the letters of Paul, they themselves show those who wish to understand from which place and for which cause they were directed. I thought this was interesting. Almost nobody ever doubted Paul's writings, but I thought it was interesting how these were characterized. Watch this. First of all, he wrote to the Corinthians forbidding schisms and heresies. Then to the Galatians, forbidding circumcision. Then to the Romans, he wrote a great length about the order of the scriptures and also insisting that Christ was their primary theme. I thought those were interesting characterizations. And they go through more and more and more, but I thought it might bog you down. But here, moreover, Paul writes, one letter to Philemon, one to Titus, two to Timothy in love and affection, but they've been hallowed, made holy for the honor of the, notice, little c, Catholic church, meaning what? What's the word Catholic mean? Universal, right? So they're referring to the one church universal. That's why we always specify Catholic little c, not the institution big C, capital C Catholic Church, which is really just the Church of Rome turned into its own denomination that claims universal supremacy and exclusivity. That's probably overly simplified definition, but you get the point. It doesn't contain all Christians everywhere of all time. Let's see. There's said to be another letter in Paul's name to the Laodiceans and the Alexandrians. We saw that. Their forged look in accordance with Marcion's heresy. Many others that cannot be received into the Catholic, into the universal church, since it is not fitting that poison should be mixed with honey. I like this language. And when they talk about the Catholic church here, the emphasis was there's the one church that accurately teaches the apostolic faith and schismatics are outside of that. So that's the way they're looking at it. these little groups that create sex, I can't say the word well, S-E-C-T-S, and purport aberrant doctrines and that sort of thing, they're outside of the little C Catholic Church. All right, but the letter of Jude, watch this, and the two superscribe with the name of John, he says, are accepted in the Catholic Church. Wisdom, also written by Solomon's friends in his honor. I'm just wanting to make sure you know that that's not canonical. But look, the Apocalypse of John we also receive. It's what we call the Book of Revelation. Apocalypse is the revealing, that's a Greek word that the that the book of Revelation opens with, the revelation of Jesus Christ in the English, that word revelation is the Greek word apocalypse. That's not the way you say it in Greek, but it's real close to that. I just can't remember how it's spelled. Apocalypse or something like that. But look, the apocalypse of John we also receive and that of Peter. I mean, as good as this list was, it contained error. Now, he's not talking about 1 and 2 Peter. He's talking about a book, a pseudepigraphical book that claimed Peter's authorship, but was not written by Peter. He says, but look, even he recognizes, or he, whoever wrote this, recognizes that some of our people will not have either of those read, I mean, not either of those, the Apocalypse of Peter read in the church. So in other words, he's saying, hey, whoever, whatever group is authorizing this list is saying, we think this is canonical, but not all the churches do. But the shepherd, the shepherd of Hermas, was written by Hermas. Watch this. I think this is why nobody seriously thought this was inspired. But the shepherd was written by Hermas in the city of Rome, notice this, quite recently in our times. That's what that tells us. They're rejecting the shepherd of Hermas. because those things are true about it. It's showing us that they recognized that the canon was closed with the death of the apostles, and that nothing could be added to the canon that was written contemporaneously, written in their own time, right? It says, the Shepherd of Hermas, everybody might like it, we'll go on to read, but it's not canonical because it was written in Rome in our times. Therefore, it may be read indeed like a MacArthur commentary, but cannot be given out to the people in church, either among the prophets, since their number, look, can't be given out to the people disseminated as scripture, like the other letters were, among the prophets, meaning it can't be given out with that same recognition that we would the prophets. Why? Because their number is complete. And this was a writing that came later. You see that recognition in 175 AD? It's huge. I think it's huge. Even though this isn't by far not the best list, quote unquote, it's a very seminal, very important doctrine to help us see their understanding. Or among the apostles at the end of times. What are they referring to that, interestingly enough? They're referring to first century when they say the apostles at the end of times here. Think about it. But it can't be given out to the people in church, either among the prophets or among the apostles at the end of times. So prophets meaning the Old Testament scriptures. We looked at that a few times ago. The apostles, the authors, primary authors of the New Testament scriptures. And so calling, they're calling, the apostolic dispensation, the end of times. Just like Hebrews does, right? God in former times spoke to our fathers through the prophets. In these last days, these final days, the word eschaton is what that word last is there. He has spoken to us in his son, right? You following with me? It's in other words, like they saw the, incarnation, the first coming of Christ, as something much more significant, eschatological, cataclysmic, and final than what we do today. Now, don't get me wrong, that doesn't mean they were preterists in the sense of full preterism that would They didn't, they all, almost to a man, look forward to a physical bodily return of Christ, full glory and consummation. I'm just saying they recognized a lot more promise in the first coming and ministry of Christ than what many of us have come to do today, I think because of the influence of dispensational theology and that sort of thing that's really, taken a lot of passages that were talking about the first coming of Christ and made us assume those were end of days things. Have I confused anybody with that? Hey, Amber. You're coming in last minute. We're talking about some of those early lists of where the different churches and groups in the early church tried to tabulate what was canonical and what was not. And we're dealing with the oldest one that I know of. I think we introduced it last time, the Muratorian Canon. And so we're actually reading excerpts from this. It's a fragment. We don't have the whole thing, but I'm just showing excerpts from the fragment just to to show how they were thinking and how they were reasoning. So, and this was interesting, the Shepherd of Hermas, which was a crazy popular extra canonical writing. I mean, it wasn't scripture, but they, this, whoever wrote the Muratorian Canon said, this can't be considered canonical, i.e. among the prophets or the apostles, because it was written in Rome recently in our times. indicating that they recognized that that canon had already ceased to be written with the death of the apostles in the previous century. So, you know, that's a pretty significant understanding, you know, considering where so many groups go today. So, this will finish this up. I know it's time. Just showing you, I almost dealt with Valentinus, but Valentinus, I can't remember how you pronounce that, Tinus, I think. Because he does, he is more significant than these other folks, I don't even know who they are. But this is from the fragment still, not from Allison's book. This is actually, I've gotten all these excerpts from a book called, called the Canon of Scripture by F.F. Bruce. He was a phenomenal church historian, if you like that sort of thing. One of my favorites. He says, but none of the writings of Arsinoas, maybe, or Valentinus, That guy, Milton, we'll call him, do we receive at all? But we reject all those. All those things that are trying to be passed off by some, by a few small groups, or by these men themselves, we reject those. They have also composed a new book of Psalms for Marcion. These we reject, along with Basilides and the Asian founder of the Cataphragians. So I don't know what any of those things are historically. I'm just trying to show you kind of the approach that they took, right? They not only wanted to, the primary thing, I mean, they wanted to affirm, recognize and affirm, but in a big way, delimit or at least denounce these writings that people were trying to pass off as canonical that were not. Because they saw in those that expanding the canon beyond the proper bounds, the greatest danger of those heresies. So, yeah, we'll end with that. So this recognition of, and I say recognition, not authorization, not development, but this recognition and affirmation of the canon, it would take It would be a centuries-long process. It would be in the 4th century, the 300s, kind of before it came to a universal recognition that was accurate and all that. But just remember, what were they trying to do? We read that in weeks past. They were just trying to be obedient to this admonition right from Jude 3. They're trying to, I've lost it on my paper, contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. And we'll talk about it more, but guys, it's a sobering practical lesson for us that if you study church history, the number one way that God led his people in truth, practically, I mean, not saying apart from the scripture, I'm saying in, you know, in Providence means was by raising up providentially, allowing false teachers to come up with bad doctrine, heresies, get popular, to which the church reacted trying to obey that and said, no, no, this is wrong. Here's the truth. And most of those beautiful, accurate historical creedal formulations that we love so much exist because heresies rose up and the church had to contend with them. All right, well, let's go. Y'all have been patient. The Lord help us.