The Bible: How did we get it? Part I

Where are we headed here? Randy has covered kind of the philosophical introduction, and as he stated at the outset, we're not going to spend lots of time on philosophy, but it's certainly valuable to have a perspective on it and to have some insight and understanding as to what am I stepping into when I'm talking to people.

History, we talked last week, how do we know what we know? That was with the idea that we ended up focusing on the bibliographic test, the internal test, and the external test as the basis of classic historiography. We took the approach of what would be valid evidence in a courtroom situation as the test for the historicity of any document, obviously intending to make application to scripture. We're moving on today to the Bible.

How did we get it? Part one. You've had available to you a pamphlet. Let's see if I can grab a copy quickly here. How we got the Bible, and I would suggest that as a good item for you to review so you can see what's in it. I think these are great because they're in a durable form. They have them, you know, slick cover, they're in durable form, they're concise, and yet a fair amount of information and footnotes for you to dig on. So we won't go over it now, but that's a good supplement for you to be aware of and take a look at. We'll be going through how do we get the Bible today and next Sunday. Evidence for Christianity Outside the Bible. The Bible, a collection. Is it just a collection of myths? Have you ever heard anybody say that? Just a bunch of myths?

Yeah, oh yeah. Yeah, we'll address that. Yeah, Tom. Yes, yeah. You'll have stories, myths, different terminology people use and we'll look at, you know, what's the specific definition of those things because a lot of times people will use the word myth and not understand what it means. We'll talk about that.

As we go through this here, we're going to be focusing today and next Sunday on how we get the Bible. And then in the weeks ahead, we're going to insert, and it's not on your original schedule, Randy and I decided to insert the inerrancy of Scripture, and then move on with the resurrection, part one and part two. Christmas, no class, okay? We'll not try to meet on Christmas Day.

And then we'll follow with the archaeology of the Old Testament and New Testament, Da Vinci Code, By the way, the movie is coming out in May, so good to be ready for that. And Dr. Luke, historian or storyteller, so we'll be looking at those. More subjects after that, that kind of gives you what's on the horizon here in the weeks ahead.

Okay, this is kind of a summary of God's revelations to mankind. What we're looking at out of those revelations is this particular one, scripture. It is Scripture's revelation that we're focusing on. How do we get the Bible? But the reality is that God has revealed himself in all these ways, and Scripture addresses each of them.

In the same way that one person communicates to another, we have a speaker and a listener. This is kind of the diagram of how verbal communication takes place between people. In the same way, there is a four-linked chain of revelation from God to us.

And so what we're going to do is take a look at the first two of those here this morning, and then next Sunday take a look at the last two. So let's go ahead and take a look at that. You'll have 06, which is part one, the Bible. How did we get it? should be one of four, okay? 06, the Bible, how do we get it? Part 1, page 104, okay? So we have this chain with four links, and the first two are inspiration and canonization.

Now, why is it important that we talk about inspiration? Why does that matter? Okay, that's the initial source, Nancy says, what else? Why does inspiration matter? And that's an important distinction to make, isn't it? The inspiration is from God, and we'll talk about that here in a minute. Just because you feel inspired or not by something, that's a different thing. That's our subjective response. This is the understanding that God inspired his word, and that's objectively true, independent of our personal and subjective response.

Okay? Yeah, Tom? Okay, and we'll talk about that here in a bit. Let's kind of walk our way through this here. It refers to the Holy Spirit's involvement in and with the human authors of Scripture and they wrote on scrolls and tablets. It is important for us to take a look at this first link because like a chain, it needs all four parts to make sense, right, to work out. Inspiration, as we mentioned, is not just the subjective response. What sort of things do human beings say that they are inspired by? Can you give some examples?

Inspiring music. As a matter of fact, something real interesting, Handel's Messiah, we're getting into the season where that will be performed publicly, a number of atheists say that they find it very inspiring. It's inspiring music. That's not what we're talking about here, is it? What else?

Scenic beauty. People will see a picture or go to a particular place, have a view, and they will say it's Inspiring. Inspiring speech. There are key events and expressions of nature and literature and art that we find inspiring. That's not what this is talking about, because those are all humanly inspiring, aren't they? This is instead talking about God's objective inspiration of Scripture, and it is true whether or not someone subjectively or personally recognizes it. Let's ask this question. If you take the Bible, and I think a lot of our pew racks have one, you take the Bible and hand it to an unbeliever, is he going to recognize the inspiration in it?

No. Hmm, is that a problem? Is that a problem? Yeah? Yeah, why is it a problem? Okay, yeah. Paul's description is that the mind of the unbeliever, the mind of the unbeliever is blinded. They can't see it. So, you know, that's one thing. It's an essential link in the chain. We certainly can talk about it and should, but the reality is unbelievers at the outset may not understand it.

We will need to differentiate between subjective experience of inspiration and what Scripture claims for itself. Okay. Here's what it amounts to. God inspired the words of Scripture, and the content, the message of that writing was inspired. Now, does that mean that the roughly 40 authors of Scripture just sat there while God told them what to write? Dictate.

Is that what happened? I see heads shaking. Some heads. Did that ever happen? Yes. And can you give an example? Here's the Revelation of John. What you see in the early verses is a revelation from God to Jesus Christ to an angel to John. So here's a revelation and there's a specific sequence. We even find one place in Revelation where John sees and hears something and the Lord tells him, don't write that. Can you think of other examples where people in Scripture have been told, write this?

Pardon? Moses? Okay. And how did that happen? Okay, alright. The reality is there are numerous places where we can find, as Randy mentioned there, Moses. We've got instances like that. Numerous places in the prophets, the Old Testament prophets. The King James Version has it, thus saith the Lord, repeatedly. So this is the message exactly that the Lord had in mind. Yeah, Tom?

Okay, yeah, very interesting. Yeah, isn't this, isn't this interesting? Yeah, the title over Jesus on the cross was truth. the very same thing that Pilate doubted. What is truth, right? Okay, now, those are examples of explicit things. The Lord says, write this, or as in the case of the Ten Commandments, here. I wrote it, here it is.

Are there other instances where we have something that is not so direct, but we would still call inspired? Pardon? Much of the rest of the scripture, if you think about it, comes in other forms, not God dictating explicitly, and yet we look at the consistent claim of scripture as it's inspired. Tom? Okay. Yeah, you're saying Dr. Luke didn't just go technical on us. Okay. All right. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Inspired by God, though it doesn't appear that God said here, write this. and yet they're a record of what took place. They have historical documents. Old Testament and the New Testament both have that. Good. As we go through different passages of Scripture, is the literary style all the same? No. What's wrong? Why not? God inspired it. How come it's different?

I heard personalities several times here. Joanne, you said? The personalities show up. Good. Can you give me some examples? Yes, each of the four Gospels has a different emphasis. As if each is writing about the life of Christ, But putting an emphasis on different things, writing with a different style, real interesting. By the way, one of the places where that comes to mind to me is, you know, here's the Gospel of John. He writes, believe, about 50 times. I mean, he's really focused on that.

You go to Dr. Luke's writing of the Gospel, and one of the things that he makes note of that the other authors don't is when people only have one child. Isn't that interesting? Several times he does that, and the other gospel authors don't do that, but Dr. Luke notices that. Why do you think that is? Must have been a doctor, right? Yeah, he's noting that, and uniquely, he notes those kinds of details.

Good. What else? Pardon? Yes, written to a different audience. Thank you. If you look at it, Paul writes to the church at Philippi, and we noted before, here's Philippi, a Roman colony, Paul uses things that would be very significant to people of a Roman background, even though he's writing in Greek. So, a different audience. Good. Anything else? Different time period. Yeah, okay. We find accounts in Genesis that record things of a type that are completely different from what we find in the New Testament. We'll find variations because of time period, that's correct.

Good, what else? Language changes, okay. The Old Testament written in Hebrew with the exception of sections in Ezra and Daniel that are in Aramaic related language. The New Testament written in Greek with some Aramaic and Hebrew and Latin kind of leaking through and even some Persian. Yeah, and you started to say something. Genre, okay, good. Poetry, it was one example that you gave. What else? Prophetic writing, okay.

We use the instance in our own day, if you go to a newspaper and you'll look at the sections, we quickly recognize the genre, the type of writing that it is. You may laugh at the front page, but the comics are supposed to be the funny part, okay. We look at a newspaper and fairly quickly learn the different genre in the newspaper and we read it differently. You may laugh at the editorial page, but it's not intended to be funny most of the time.

Pardon? Yes, different cultures. One of the things we went through in Bible backgrounds. If you look at starting in the early chapters of the Bible, and you look at the culture there, by the time we get to the New Testament, different culture. Yeah, good point.

One of the things that's really interesting among the Egyptians, the Egyptians made it a point, you don't mention the name of your enemy. You don't mention the name of your enemy, and when you take over enemy territory, you chisel out the names of your opponent on all the inscriptions. That's why we don't know the name of the Pharaoh in Exodus. Very name-oriented culture, whereas later on, even in the Old Testament, things will be chronicled and catalogued by names, even if they're in the names of opposing It's specific to that culture and dealing with that culture.

Good. One of the things I think is valuable for us to examine is we look at inspiration. Inspiration does not mean pure dictation at every point. It doesn't mean absolute uniformity of genre and literary style. So, really interesting, there is a variety of time, of culture, genre, literary style, all those things spread throughout Scripture, even people who lived in somewhat similar times and you might say in some way had somewhat similar backgrounds.

Paul writes as a logician and a lawyer. John writes like a musician. Paul writes with complex compound words, sometimes two to four compounds built into one word. John, in long sentences, we'll give him the blue ribbon for all of Greek literature for the longest sentence in all of Greek literature, for Ephesians 1, 3-14. John doesn't use a compound word unless he has to, and he writes in fairly simple sentences, and whenever he says something he tends to write with profound consistency. One of the aspects of John's writing is he fairly consistently tells us why he's writing. At the end of the Gospel of John, these things are written that believing you might have life through his name. John describes the purpose of his writing, and that's a pattern of John's character of writing.

It is also inspired, but it is different from some of the other authors. What is amazing is the breadth of scripture. Here we have this fairly substantial book, 40 authors spread out over 15 centuries of time. And yet in that, the consistency of what's in it. Yeah, we are definitely intended to get the message clearly.

Let's take a look on page two at the top. I just have two verses I wanted to touch on. These are probably the key principle verses to be aware of when we talk about inspiration. The first one there is 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17, and the word we have translated inspired It comes out of the Latin source, and inspired means spirit in, whereas the Greek word theopneustos is God breathed, which actually if you put that together has a little different sense. Here is Paul writing, but God breathed it. Here is Daniel writing, God breathed it. David is writing, but God breathed it. See that? Yeah, Tom? Yes, it's on our end to take it in, isn't it?

2 Peter 1, 20 and 21, But you know this first of all, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. So it is the breathing of God into the words that we have written, still writing with the author's personal style. Now this is amazing. We had the words recorded by God breezing out the message and at the same time still retaining the author's personal writing style. We have men moved, and this word there, Pharaoh means carried along. They were carried along, the message was carried along by the Holy Spirit, by His working, the message that is from God Himself.

Let's look at the canonization. That's the middle of page two there. And I think the principal thing for us to catch with canonization, when we talk about canons, we're not talking about those things that go boom and you better get out of their way. We're talking about a canon which has the idea of a measure. It's one and in the middle instead of two. It's the idea of it's a measure, it's a standard. It is a recognition and that's the key word. We are recognizing what God has inspired. That's why inspiration is the first link in the chain.

When we look at the canon of Scripture, it wasn't that some group of guys got down and they said, look, we've got all kinds of squabbling and squawking over which of these books is inspired and we need to just sit down and make some kind of authoritative statement and get this thing settled and everybody's going to listen to us. That's not the picture. As these books were written, and the other books came along that were competitive to the books of Scripture, they came to a place, and it was something that took place over time, they came to a place of saying, you know, we recognize this as inspired, this over here is not. There were a number of books written in subsequent times that were, written so as to appear as if they were written by apostles or other biblical characters.

The Apocalypse of Peter was one that Peter never wrote. You'll have the Gospel of Thomas. I'm quite sure Thomas never wrote that. You'll have books like that with those titles, and the truth is that within the next few centuries after the New Testament era, there were hundreds of them. By around the year 900, they were getting close to 300 of these kind of fake New Testament books. Plenty of them.

But early on, the books that we have in the New Testament were quoted by people who were writing about the Lord Jesus Christ and His work in the church and the bringing about of the church. Now, so as we look at this canon, one of the things that we come to is the Old Testament and the New Testament kind of have different processes of of arriving at, you know, is this in the Old Testament or is this in the New Testament or not? Why would the Old Testament and the New Testament have kind of different processes as to whether or not these are recognized as inspired books? Why aren't they the same? Okay, let's start with this. No, I'm not even getting head shaking here, so I must have really puzzled you. Okay.

How much time have we got between the Old Testament and the New Testament? Yeah, about 400 years, four centuries, okay? Jesus, when He spoke numerous times in the Gospels about the Scripture, what Scripture was He talking about? The Old Testament. He said, you know, the law, the Psalms, the prophets, sometimes just the law and the prophets, There were multiple references to these books that we recognize as the Old Testament.

The Jews would have called them the Tanakh, and still do. Those books had been around for centuries and were well recognized by New Testament times, but at that time when Jesus was speaking of them, none of the New Testament books had been written, right? There was an acceptance of the Old Testament books first, and then the acceptance of the New Testament books was a separate process. Who had to accept the Old Testament books? The Jews, okay. Now, when it came to the New Testament, was it the same situation? No. Why?

You have the churches composed of Jews and Gentiles, and you have increasingly Gentiles. One of the things we note from the book of Acts is the first roughly a decade of the church was focused on the Jews, and to them almost exclusively. Whereas after that, increasingly Gentiles are involved, and by the end of the first century, by the time the ink is drying on the book of Revelation, by the end of the first century, Gentiles were the major portion of the church, not Jews, and Jerusalem was no longer the center, but Rome was. More Christians were Christians in Rome than were in Jerusalem by the end of the first century.

So we've got two different processes. The Old Testament, we of course have consistent reference by Christ through the Law and the Prophets and even the Book of Psalms, which was kind of the Israeli national hymn book. And one of the things you notice as you read through those accounts, did anybody ever squabble over what was included when they said the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms? No. You find Jesus contending with the scribes and the Pharisees, the Sadducees over numerous issues.

That's not one of them. No squawk over that. Jesus said, you know, you guys have this book here, but that just ought not to be included. He did talk about their traditions, but there was no squawk about the books. Now, I do have to point out one clarification there, and that is the Sadducees were inclined to look to the first five books, as those are the special ones, because Particularly, they looked at some of the books later on in the Old Testament as pointing to a resurrection, and the Sadducees didn't believe it. Now, we get to the New Testament, and then you've got this collection of books. You don't have the situation where you can simply refer to here's Jesus talking about the books, or even the New Testament authors quoting it. You've got the books.

How are you going to look at those and figure out what's to be in the New Testament and what's not? Historically, good. What do you mean by that? Ah, okay. One of the things you're going to do is you're going to look at these and you're going to say, are these apostolic books? If it was up to the apostles to get this stuff down, it's either an apostle wrote this, or somebody associated with an apostle, so that the apostle acts in effect like a sponsor.

And that's true of every one of the New Testament books. That is what some of the fake New Testament books try to copy. I mentioned earlier, like the Apocalypse of Peter. Almost every New Testament personage has some name in there. Paul mentions a letter to the Laodiceans that we don't have a copy of. Somebody came up with that. They invented one. As you start reading through it, it's a little head-scratchy, but somebody tried to fill in the blanks there.

So one of the questions we're going to ask is this apostolic? Is this within the right time period? Are they talking about this time with Jesus and the apostles? Or are we getting into something far distant? Does it appear to be genuinely from that era, or is it something that's been cooked up later on, as we find quite a few examples of? What's another thing that they would be looking at? Yeah, Tom? Yeah, does it have the sense of the Lord is the one who authored this? And what are we going to look for that's going to tell us that? Yeah, what if you came across a book, because you already have established that the Old Testament is inspired, what if you came across a book and it had Satan and God as equal in power?

Hey, wait a minute, this doesn't smell right. you would recognize something's wrong here. So there needs to be, even though you have new revelation, there needs to be some thread of consistency that doesn't put you in violation. What else would you look for?

Any extra biblical information that might be about the supposed author? What testimony do we have here that says that this is indeed something that was written? One of the things we have advantage of, for example, we have writings of several people who were discipled by John himself, John the Apostle. And they would write, you know, John said this, John wrote that. So we have that kind of a testimony in support of that. Here's another thing here.

How did the church receive it? Has the church received this as valuable? In other words, have people recognized it in the church that, you know, this really does have an impact upon my life? Because that's what Scripture is supposed to do, right? I can look at this and trust it as authoritative. It has a genuine impact upon my life as I read it as a believer. I can see that God has revealed truth through this. So it's kind of the church test, the reception test.

Tom? Yeah. Okay. Pardon? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And that's why it would be only one test. Good point. Marilyn's making the point. You'd have to be careful with that because you could say, well, the Mormons feel like it's helpful to them to read this. And that's why you would have to look at this as one aspect of testing the canonicity of a particular book, but not the only. That's the thing I mentioned last week. I sat down with two different sets of Mormon missionaries for hours going over, here's copies of this book and that one.

And in the end, they had absolutely nothing to defend any of it with. In the end, they said, well, I just have this burning in my bosom. And I made the point that you don't know if it's a burning in your bosom or the enchiladas you had for breakfast. But the point is the subjective response by itself, and that's Marilyn's point, is not sufficient of itself.

You need the other aspects to check it out. And one of the things that they can't claim in the Book of Mormon is the historicity, apostolicity aspect of it. Yeah? Right. Yeah, what would happen is you would have things like what you mentioned that would press the point. Because you would have, you know, one of the instances that came up, there was a guy named Marcion in a few decades right after the end of the lifetime of John.

He was anti-semitic, and so he had a doctored version of the Book of Luke, the Gospel of Luke, and about ten of Paul's letters that he'd kind of stripped out anything Jewish. He just didn't want anything Jewish in there. And so he had his eleven books, and that was his canon.

And so that pressed the point. People said, well, wait a minute, this isn't right. He's got something here. He's tried to define what's scripture and what's not. Another thing that made the point was that the Roman Empire increasingly brought on persecution to the church.

And what they would do is they would come up to the door and they'd have like a local official and you'd have a Roman soldier or two or three or four standing at the door and they would say, we have a special opportunity for you. I'm saying that in jest, but we have an opportunity for you.

You have an opportunity to tell us if you have any scriptures, Christian scriptures, in your house. If you tell us about them, then no penalty. We'll get them, we'll take them, that's it. If you don't tell us, we're going to go into your house anyway, find them, and for your failure to tell us what you have, you will be killed.

So it began to be a question, what's scripture and what's not? No one's going to die for something that they said wasn't scripture. So that, again, pressed the point. The point was pressed by heretics, the point was pressed by the persecutions, and so that brought people to a place of saying, you know, we need to define what's scripture here and what's not. I don't want to die for something that isn't scripture. That's correct. That's correct.

The New Testament prophets until Scripture was completed, had a place of expounding in each local church situation, here is what God is saying as a temporary means of conveying God's truth. And so one question is, I've been listening to these prophets in our church, people with the gift of prophecy who sometimes spoke while apostles were right there in the room. Does that match up with what I see here? in the context of the New Testament Church itself, a test of that. One other thing I might point out, and that is we talked about the three tests last week, the bibliographic test, the internal test, and the external test.

People applied those kinds of things as well. Let me give you a for instance. Paul is writing a letter to Timothy, and he quotes from the Gospel of Luke. You'll find the numerous New Testament authors quoting from the Old Testament. You'll find an interconnection between them. You'll find some commonality of languages.

One of the things that I have noticed, and it's been kind of interesting, the Bible nowhere describes hell in great detail. The extra-biblical books, the fakes, often go into immense detail in hell. And that's been an interesting pattern to note. Some of the extra-biblical books will go on for chapters describing minutia in hell. This person committed this sin, and so he did this, and this, and this, and lots of detail on hell. The books that we see in scripture, Old Testament, New Testament, speak of the truth of hell give us some description but do not go into immense detail. Tom?

Yeah, it's interesting, Dante's Inferno, are you talking about that for example? That is similar to a lot of these extra-biblical books. Lots of detail into what this eternal punishment is like and specifics as to each kind of sin and what happens as a result of it. A real big distinction.

Another point is that a lot of the non-biblical books that claim to be biblical will have either a focus on angels, you know, a big focus on angels, lots of emphasis on angels instead of on Jesus Christ, or they will distort the character of salvation. One, for example, the last verse of the Gospel of Thomas, it has 114 verses, says that if a woman is to be saved, she must first be changed into a man. Now, how's that for the gospel? Do you think that the Apostle Thomas would write that?

I think not. Besides of which, he went to India, not to Egypt. Randy? I think one of the critical details between inspiration and canonization is that I don't think you can make a clear distinction that the Holy Spirit is not absolutely involved in canonization. It's easy to say, okay, well, does Matthew prove that? Right. Yes. Thank you for that.

One of the things that both Daniel and Paul make a point of, Daniel especially in chapter 2, Paul in chapters 1 and 3 of Ephesians, talks about God explicitly revealing truth. Explicitly and deliberately revealing truth. And one of the things that becomes clear is that it was God's intent that that message get to human beings and that that true message be preserved. And so as you look at that and we start going through these chains, essentially what we're doing is we're stepping through the chains link by link, but as Randy pointed out, the reality is God intended that we get the truth. And he will at each stage do what is necessary so that we get the truth. And the second step canonization is exactly in line with that.

It wasn't something that ended up just kind of going more and more dispersed and diverse and more and more confusing. The truth is it got more and more focused all the time. You've got a chart, I believe it's page four. I'll have to stop there and leave it with that. But the chart shows how there was increasing focus in the recognition of what was scripture and what was not. You can kind of track it historically. I've got to close up. We're out of time. Let's pray.

Lord, as we look at these things here, we see your hand in the words that we see in scripture, your hand in the recognition of the selection, which books are included in inspired scripture and which are not. And we thank you for that. Thank you for your sovereignty in these affairs and how marvelously you have interwoven that with human history and culture and personality, all the while intending at the outset to make the message clear. Thank you for that clear message in Jesus' name. Amen.