Q&A 11:Why were certain books included from the Bible and others excluded?
Vern Peterman · Mar 14, 2010
Questions & Answers, No. 11
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/492615791856

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

To hand out here, this is Q&A number 11. Why were certain books included in the Bible accepted as canon and other books excluded from the Bible rejected as canon? Let me first give a quick definition. The word canon comes from a word that means like a measuring stick or a measuring rod. So it has the idea of a standard. It's come more now to have a significance of what collection is accepted. and which is not. And so that's kind of the background of the word canon and how it's used now is which books are included in the Bible and which books are not. The original meaning of that word was a measure, like a measuring rod.

This question is actually part of a larger set of questions, and we detail it here in the initial part of our answer. The question is part of a larger set of understandings that the Holy Spirit was involved in. One, the inspirational of the original writings of Scripture, so that when Paul was writing books that came to be part of the New Testament, those books were inspired by God. It is true also of the Old Testament authors, as Peter put it, carried along by the Holy Spirit. The next one here is the recognition of what is inspired by the Holy Spirit and what was not. And I think a lot of folks misunderstand.

We don't declare what is canon and what is not. We don't declare what is inspired. We recognize what is inspired. See the difference there? God inspired what he inspired. The question is whether we recognize it. And that's what is at issue. We're not declaring this is inspired and that is not. That's not our place and not our job. Right? What we're doing is looking at the books that are written and saying, okay, we recognize that God inspired this, which is a different kind of question. We don't inspire it. We don't decide which ones are inspired. We recognize what is inspired.

The next thing here is the copying and preservation of scripture, which by the way is a topic that we can cover if you're interested. In other words, how do we get the books that we've got, not just the selection of them, but how were they copied and reproduced and handed down so that we have the writings as they were originally written. And the next one is the explaining and translation of scripture such that those with other language backgrounds could understand what has been inspired, recognized, copied, and preserved in scripture. So there's those four key parts. What this is looking at is recognizing which books are inspired and which are not. So that's going to be our focus. Yet by New Testament times, the canon of the Old Testament had already been well established, basically for several centuries, about four centuries to be exact.

The minority Sadducees, who were very skeptical, only believed in the first five books, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, that's it. They didn't recognize the rest of the Old Testament books. But they're also very skeptical, even though the first five books of the Bible talk about angels, they don't believe in them, or they didn't. They didn't believe in miracles. They didn't believe in the Messiah. They didn't believe that anybody gets resurrected. So they were skeptical even of the books that they said were inspired.

So now, These Sadducees, however, were ended by the destruction of Jerusalem. Basically, the Sadducees almost entirely hung around Jerusalem and didn't go anywhere else. And so when Jerusalem was destroyed and a great many Jews lost their lives, that was the end of the Sadducees.

Josephus, writing toward the end of the first century, about the time that John the Apostle was around and finishing up his last touches on the New Testament, Josephus wrote this. He summarized the view of the Pharisees, which represented the majority view of the Jews. From the time of Artaxerxes, moreover, until our present period, all occurrences have been written down, but they are not regarded as entitled to the like credit with those that precede them, because there was no certain succession of prophets. In other words, when the prophets ended, Scripture in the Old Testament sense quit being written. That was the sense in the Old Testament. And so he says, all the Jews recognized, hey, the line of prophets has ended. Therefore, we're not getting any more scripture.

And so other people wrote other books, but they weren't recognized by the Jews as scripture. Fact has shown what confidence we place in our own writings, for although so many ages have passed away, no one has dared to add to them, nor to take anything from them, nor make any alterations. In all Jews it is implanted, even from their birth, to regard them as being the instructions of God, and to abide steadfastly by them, and, if it be necessary, to die gladly for them. Josephus elsewhere also listed the Old Testament books and gave the names of the Old Testament books.

So it's pretty clear that the Old Testament books were understood, this is what's included, this is what's not. So it's the New Testament that actually has a different set of criteria, and that's mostly what we'll be looking at here. So the recognition of the books of the New Testament is what we're going to step into here. I'm going to be moving now to the second page where you've got essentially a slide format more like what is used in our main service. And the reason is I'll go on the overhead here as well. Okay.

So you have You hear more detail on those four points, the inspiration of scripture, the canonization, the recognition of what is inspired, the transmission, how were things transmitted, copied, preserved, and then the translation of them, and along with that I would say the teaching of them, the explaining of them. It's the canonization that we're going to take a look at today. Here's the apostolic era foundation for the canon of New Testament scripture. The Old Testament had a fixed canon by the apostolic era.

That's where we see this quote from Josephus here. Jesus' words had authority from the outset because of who he was. This is Jesus, the Son of God, speaking. Whatever he said, that automatically carried canon as long as people saw it being valid, not somebody's misquote or supposed. sayings. The next thing, the apostles functioned as a living canon from the beginning.

That is, if somebody came up with some other false teaching, even a fake letter, which by the way did happen, if somebody came up with that, the apostles would say, I didn't write that. No, that's nonsense. And if you think about it, if you read through the Old Testament, excuse me, the New Testament letters, one of the things that you recognize is the apostles spent quite a bit of time dealing with false teaching and people coming along as supposed fake apostles. Right? They spent a lot of time dealing with that. And so it was a part of their kind of canonical activities.

Here's Peter saying what Paul writes is scripture, right? And here's Paul writing referring to Peter and James, right? The other authors. So there was a kind of a living canon phenomenon going on during the time of the Apostles. Some of the things that the Apostles did or things that took place is the selecting and verifying of content.

And I give you several references there. I'll leave it to you to look through that, but some of it was just a matter of John saying, these are written so that you might believe. Or we have a quote there from Luke, Luke talking about carefully selecting the different accounts and sitting down with the eyewitnesses and writing down things and checking things with eyewitnesses. It's interesting, the Book of Acts, there's one place where Dr. Luke gets a hold of a Roman government document and copies a part of that into the Book of Acts. So there was a very careful selecting and documenting process going on.

Public reading of the scripture. That's referenced several times and one of the more famous ones of those is in the beginning of Revelation as we have here, that's the place where it says, blessed are those who read, and that's written in the singular, and those who hear, and that's written in the plural, the things in this book. There's also the circulation of scripture. where Paul tells the Church of Colossae, half the letter from Laodicea read here, and this letter here from the Colossians have that read in Laodicea. So there's this kind of spreading it around, beginning at an early stage there.

And Revelation chapter 11, get this book to the different churches, right? Revelation 111 rather. Okay, and the determination of what was in the canon and what was not. What is the Word of God and what isn't? Paul wrote to the church at Thessalonica and said, even if someone sends you a letter supposedly from us, be careful. Recognize what's authentic and what is not. And finally, the quoting of New Testament scripture.

Here's 1 Timothy 5.8.

Paul quotes from Luke 10.7 as a for instance. So it's not just the quoting of the Old Testament, and there were hundreds of quotes or allusions of the Old Testament in the New Testament, but there's also New Testament quotes of other parts of the New Testament. So there's those activities. Let's see.

The events which confirmed or required a New Testament canon. Here is Valentinus in 140 AD, this is about 40 and a little bit more years after the death of the Apostle John, indicated wide use of the New Testament books in the church. So at that point in time, these books were already being used. Secondly, Marcion, who was a heretic, about that same time, formed his own canon with an edited version of Luke and some of Paul's letters.

He wanted to eliminate anything that showed Jewish influence. He was anti-Semitic. So he doctored up Luke, and Luke was a doctor, how can you do that? Anyway, he doctored up Luke, and then he clipped out all the books that didn't agree with his doctrine, because anything that sounded like it was favorable to the Jews, he wanted that out of there.

Well, obviously, if you've got this guy with a false canon and a doctored up version of the Book of Luke, then you could say, well, that can't stand. So it called on the rest of the Christians who are trying to stand on what's true and what's right to go and say, no, that's not correct. This is what's true. And this is the valid version of the Book of Luke. There was another point there. Yes, Marilyn? Yeah, let's clarify. Here's the deal.

The book like we have with single-sided thing did never exist during any biblical time. It was only after the death of John, I mean by decades, that they actually had books with binding on one side, okay? Things that were written were written as scrolls or they would have piles of this papyrus that would be stacked up and it didn't have standard sizes to it either at that point in time. So you might have a letter from Peter and it's just a big stack of papers that are all tied together with string in a pile. So when we say books, yeah, it's important to think of essentially the Bible is a book, right? And yet it is composed of a number of different sub books, if you will, that in and of themselves may be a substantial document at no time during Biblical times where any of them these bound on one side kind of volumes those didn't occur until later and Then after a while, then you do find collections of these Bible books, but in a more book like form But yeah, I use the term book in fact Paul's writings were letters and they were called that by Paul right So yeah, that's a point of clarification. At times I've seen some artists will show Paul or Peter or somebody writing in a book or studying a book and it'll be something that most assuredly Paul and Peter never had because they didn't have the bound on one side type form. Thanks for checking on that.

Montanus, for years 170 AD, he was the charismatic prophet. He had two prophetesses working under him who had left their husbands in order to follow him. He said that Jesus was not coming back to Israel but coming back to Asia Minor which just happened to be where he was from so and Essentially Joseph Smith the same thing right only said Jesus is coming back here to the Americas Okay He added and contradicted the canon with additional revelation through prophecy and tongues, which of course happens now, right? and And so he was considered a heretic by at least a couple of John's disciples as well as others Those who wrote of him called him a heretic.

Now, here are events which confirmed or required a New Testament canon. Each one of the New Testament books was quoted by early church authors, including direct or second generation disciples of the Apostle John, late 1st and 2nd century. We have kind of a genealogy of those who were disciples of the Apostle John and those who were disciples of those disciples.

And so it's interesting, we have the names of those people and when they lived, either specifically or in general, and we have writings of various portions of a number of those guys, which gives us quite a bit of information and quite a bit of insight. Yes.

Where are those authors' writings stored? There are what they call church fathers or early church fathers' writings that were copied and collected. Those all printed out. I've seen them printed out in 38 volumes. So we actually have quite a bit. So is there some publisher that sells those?

Oh yeah, and in fact you can download them all on the internet as well these days, the entire set. So is this like a, I don't know, a church body or a Christian body that somebody has taken from themselves or a group has taken from themselves? To collect them, to preserve them, to copy them, to translate them. In some cases we have several different translations of a single author. But yes, all 38 volumes have been printed, translated into English, printed. Yeah. Yeah. What's it called?

They'll just be like writings of the early church fathers and things of that sort. And sometimes you'll see particular authors, you know, a particular collection of a specific author. One of them, for example, is Jerome, was one who, not right after the apostles, but a few centuries later, a couple centuries later, did some translation and compilation work. Eusebius was another one who collected writings of some of these.

But yeah, the writings are available. I would say just about all of them, if not all of them, are available on the internet. And now you can download them for free. You can buy, of course, printed sets, which cost something. There's one or more English translations of all of it. So yeah, it's all available, been well documented, and widely available both in print and over the internet.

Under Emperors Decius and Diocletian, Diocletian was the last emperor who carried out a persecution, continued to 312, the mandatory destruction of Christian scriptures required the definition of which books were included, since undeclared possession brought the death penalty. Let me explain.

What happened later on in the Roman Empire is because a number of these Christians were refusing to essentially declare their loyalty to the Roman Empire by going in and offering a sacrifice to the Emperor, who was a deity, right, in the Roman understanding of things. Christians began to be persecuted and they even were requiring Christians, everybody, to have a certificate that they had gone in and sacrificed to the Roman Emperor. It was called a libelous. Then what they did is, if there was any question about, hey, this person's a Christian, they would come up and knock on the door.

They would usually have an official and then a Roman officer, a Roman soldier at least. come and open the door, and they would say, we understand you have Christian scriptures in your house. If you declare them, because we're going to go in now and check your house. If you declare them, when we find them, they will be destroyed, but you won't be harmed. If you don't declare them, and we go in and find them in your house, then you will be killed and the scriptures will be destroyed anyway.

So now, it then becomes a question, what are you willing to die for? Are you willing to die for something that's not actually canon? So that forced the point of determining what's canon and what isn't. What's in the Bible and what isn't? Because you don't want to go die for something that's not scripture, right? So it forced the question of what's scripture and what is not.

Here's some final indications of the canon. Athanasius, 295 to 373, wrote in 367, listing the present 27 books of the New Testament canon and first used the word canon in reference to the New Testament. The church councils at Hippo and Carthage each, and there were those three, Each confirmed the present list of 27 New Testament books. Okay, what qualifies a book as canon? And this is key because this is, by what do we recognize that a book is inspired? That's really the question we're asking.

And so the first point here is, apostolicity was the book written by an apostle or apostolic associate? What do I mean by apostolic associate? Was Dr. Luke an apostle? No, he was not, right? He was an apostolic associate. One of the terms that's used is each of these apostolic associates had an apostle who was a sponsor of that writing. Example, who would be the sponsor, the apostle who sponsored Dr. Luke's writings? Paul, right. See, Paul would be the sponsor for Dr. Luke's writings. Between the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts, over a quarter of the New Testament was written by Dr. Luke, who was not an apostle, but had as a sponsor, along with him, the Apostle Paul.

And one of the things we know from Dr. Luke investigating things in terms of written documents of history and archaeology, he was a phenomenal historian. A lot of the details that in past decades have been challenged have in more recent times shown Luke to be an outstanding historian. The next one, spirituality, where the contents of a given book such as a spiritual character so as to entitle it to this rank. Have you got a book that's truly spiritual or is it just some mundane book with a lot of odd stories and accounts?

Anybody here heard of the Gospel of Thomas? Very strange book, and you'll hear people talk like that ought to be included in the Bible. No, it shouldn't. Stupid book. Jesus goes in this Gospel of Thomas, he goes and kills a boy because the boy did something he didn't like. Does that sound like Jesus? No, it doesn't sound so good. In the Gospel of Thomas, it said that a woman can't be saved unless she first becomes a man. Figure that one out. So is that the book you want included? I think not. Real stupid. Anyway, that's the sort of thing where you look at it and you say, this is not a spiritual book. Matter of fact, it's a dumb book. I don't mind saying so. One, universality, or three rather, universality.

Was the book universally received in the church? Is this a book that people widely receive and accept? Yes, that is indeed a valid book. Everybody recognizes it. Or is this something that you only got one odd small group that is receiving this book? Fourthly, inspiration. Did the book give evidence of being divinely inspired? That is, does this, it kind of goes along with spirituality, does this look like something that is consistent with the rest of the books that we know are inspired? Including, of course, the Old Testament. Is it consistent with it? Is it giving us revelation that if we didn't have this book, we would not have?

Okay, why the canon is closed? Why don't we just keep adding books to it? People keep trying to, right? What are some books that people keep trying to add to the Bible? Book of Mormon is one of them. And the Mormons also have the Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price. And what else? Right, Ellen G. White wrote a number of different books. And those, by the way, are also available on the internet.

You don't need to go and buy them, although they are all in print. I used to go to Pacific Press, which was in Mountain View, because I lived in Mountain View just a few blocks from them. It's a Seventh-day Adventist publishing house. And go in and look at all their books and look through it and talk to them and all that.

Very interesting, but it's another attempt to add to scripture. Yeah. Others? Yes, the writings of, yeah. Yeah, if you look at it, there is the Apocrypha, which is some of the books that Josephus referred to. In other words, other people have written things. That's the Old Testament Apocrypha. It was actually added to the canon in the 1500s, just following the death of Martin Luther. So there's the Apocrypha. The Orthodox churches, by that I mean the Greek and Syrian and all that, have another set of Apocryphal books, some of what is in common with the Catholic Apocrypha and some not. But yes, that's another set. Yes?

Sometimes people quote scriptures and it's not Yeah, things that are thought to be from scripture, but are not. What's odd is people will quote things that are thought to be from scripture that are not, and then they will also do the opposite. They will quote things and not recognize that that's from scripture. So I've seen both of those take place.

And that's one reason why we seek to evaluate our hymns by scripture. And one of the things you might even notice from time to time, I'll have scripture passages up on usually the bottom of the slide, especially if a hymn might be understood several different ways, but we want to make sure this is how we're understanding it. So we will use scripture to measure and to reference and to guide our understanding of hymns rather than, you're correct, some people think, well, if it's in the hymn book, it must be inspired. Well, no. Yeah, we need to measure our lyrics by scripture.

There's no question about it. Yeah, Norm? Sometimes just one verse might be Yeah, yeah, that's, you're right. And I noticed once in a while we'll skip one. Yes, sometimes we'll skip one. In some cases, it might even be the first verse. Yeah. Yeah. And that's correct.

You're right, because as we measure things, we might not, this isn't right. We also change words once in a while. Once in a while we do that, although we try to avoid doing that too much, especially if it's familiar, because people get confused or otherwise bothered by it. But the thing is that we do want to measure things by scripture, ultimately. You're right. Hymns are something that are easily accepted as somehow inspired.

In fact, as the Apostle Paul put in Colossians 3.16, may the word of Christ dwell in you richly, right? And in that, he has psalms and hymns and spiritual songs that are teaching. Get that. Teaching. So we're teaching with God's Word, which is one of the reasons why we use discernment in what we sing. Right? Yes? Did we mention the Jehovah's Witnesses? The Jehovah's Witnesses have their own...

Two things. One is they have their own translation. And they were around for many decades before they had this New World Translation. Which, it's interesting. It has some things that are off the mark. Really bad translations. usually to fit their own doctrine.

What I have found, however, is they haven't gotten rid of all the evidence of things that were written. For example, they say that Jesus was not killed on a cross, like this, but on a pole. But, remember when Thomas He says, I won't believe until I see the prints of the nails. Well, nails in his hands, plural. And it's still in the Jehovah's Witness translation. Plural, nails, not the one like they show in the back of their documents with the idea that one nail nailed Jesus' hands over his head.

And their own translation contradicts that. But you're right, that's another one. The other thing that they do is they say you can't understand the Bible except by the writings of the Watchtower governing body. And so they essentially make the governing body's writings scripture, which is nuts because they contradict each other regularly. But, you're correct.

Now, the other point here is We have this, why the cannon is closed. God has completed the revealing through his son and those he elected to serve as contemporary witnesses. Those who are contemporary witnesses. Secondly, we have several different passages that speak of the finality of the apostolic era revelation. And then thirdly, there are no more apostles since no others qualify biblically.

We have all the biblical requirements to be an apostle. had to have seen Christ and seen him resurrected. They have to be able to perform signs and wonders. They have to be able to suffer patiently. The qualifications of an apostle need to be applied there.

And then also, what about the books that we have that aren't in the New Testament? We mentioned the Gospel of Thomas. We want to look at that. By the way, the numbering system I have in the corner is incorrect, so don't worry about that. You need to look at what's on your slide here. Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Barnabas, Gospel of Peter, Gospel of the Egyptians. And by the way, this is the short list.

By the year, and here's an interesting thing, by the year 800, about 800 fake New Testament books have been written. Okay? Nice little round number to work with. So around the year 800, by that time, about 800 fake New Testament books have been written. So what I have on the screen here is the short list. Okay?

So Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Barnabas, Gospel of Peter, Gospel of the Egyptians, Gospel of the Ebionites, Gospel of Philip, Acts of Peter, Acts of Paul, Acts of Andrew, Preaching of Peter, etc., etc. Many more. Hundreds more. There are four categories of these New Testament books in the early church. The Homo Legumina and the Accepted Books. The Accepted Books, 20 of the New Testament books. These are the ones about which there was never any question. The next ones is the Antilogomena. The seven initially somewhat disputed books, but later accepted by everyone. And that is Hebrews, James, 2nd Peter, 2nd and 3rd John, Jude and Revelation. Let me give you a, for instance, why would there be a question about the apostolicity, apostolicity of the book of Hebrews?

Yeah, because it doesn't have an internal claim as to who wrote it. Let me offer you an explanation, and that is that, you know how we have post-it notes? They would stick the name of the author on the outside and glue it on the outside of the book. If that label came off, who wrote this thing?

So that may be one explanation. Revelation, here is one of the reasons why it was disputed. Initially, Those of the time of the Apostles and of the time immediately afterwards, initially, people took the Book of Revelation literally. As people began to interpret the Book of Revelation allegorically, they objected to the literal character of it.

That is, it said there's a thousand years in which Christ will reign. They didn't like that. So essentially it was the influx of amillennialism that created a lot of the issues, a lot of the problems. Next, the New Testament Apocrypha. Respected books, but not in the New Testament, such as the Didache. The Didache was kind of a handbook of worship, if you will.

So you have that. The Pseudepigrapha. Pseudo means false, right? Pseudepigraphas, these false writings, books rejected by all or nearly so, and pretending to be valid New Testament books. So here are the four categories of books. New Testament books are those in the first two on the left, and the books that were not on the right.

Okay, what qualifies as canon? So this is the ultimate test with these, right? They go through and look at them and say, hey, these don't match up. By the way, feel free to get a handout up here if you like to follow along with this, or we'll have this on slides.

Here is the Homologomena, the accepted books, the initial 20, about which there was never any question. And then here are the seven initially somewhat disputed New Testament books. We talked particularly about Hebrews and Revelation. And then you have here a full page chart in your handout here. This is given by permission of Moody Press, and it shows you just kind of the progression of the different books, the translations and counsels and that sort of thing. So we get an idea of how we got the books that we got, how we ended up with these as the specific New Testament books versus the others. And it might take a while. We won't go through the detail on that, but we certainly make it available to you in the handout. And thanks to Moody Press for giving permission for that.

In dealing with this New Testament Apocrypha, there's respected books, but not in the New Testament. I mentioned the Didache, which was probably written around 70 A.D., sort of a church manual. These kinds of books were in wide general use but made no claim to being scripture. Just as a kind of, for instance, you made reference earlier to hymn books.

We will refer to numbers and we'll keep them in the pews, but just because we do that doesn't mean they're inspired, right? And we made note of that. So they're useful, they're helpful, but they're not scripture. See the distinction there? And the same thing happened in New Testament times. Except that they had to hand copy them all, right? So they were in wide general use, made no claim to being scripture.

A modern book of this comparable style would be Major Bible Themes by Schaefer and Walberg. It's one we've done a study on in here. A good reference book. I had no problem saying, hey, this is a good book for us to study. It doesn't mean it's inspired, but it's helpful.

Ultimately, God's word is our authority, not the book, even if it's useful and written by reliable authors, etc. The Pseudepigrapha, these are books that often had titles that sounded like valid New Testament books, but failed one or more of the tests for canonicity. These were almost all written outside the era of the apostles. And that's one thing that made it fairly easy. No, this was not written by an apostle. Many had doctrines that were not consistent with the accepted New Testament books.

One of the books of the Apocrypha, one of the Maccabees books, is used as a basis, for example, for the indulgences. do something for those who are already dead to help them out in the next life and minimize their purgatory time, etc. Fake apostolic books. Here's a reference in 2 Thessalonians 2, 1-3. Paul writes about a letter as if from us. Somebody faked a letter from Paul, apparently. Here is the Gospel of Thomas. I'll give you a little more detail.

This book written about 140 A.D. was known to, but not accepted by, Origen, Hippolytus, Cyril of Jerusalem, and Irenaeus. There are two versions of this book in circulation, one of which is more Gnostic in character. Gnostic having to do with a group that had its origins earlier but came to prominence after the New Testament time. And the Gnostic character also has this duality. In other words, you've got this physical world and the spiritual world, and the physical world is bad and the spiritual world is good. So you have that.

The Gospel of Thomas tells about Jesus at age five making clay out of brook, then turning the clay into five sparrows. It also tells of Jesus making a young boy wither like a tree, and making another boy fall dead for bumping into his shoulder. Does that sound like Jesus? Not so much. Right? So, I hear this again and again. You'll see it on PBS. Guys will come up and say, oh, the Gospel of Thomas. No, it shouldn't. Not even sort of. This is not Jesus. Right?

This doesn't even sound right. Here's the Gospel of the Ebionites. This book was from Judaizers, that is, those trying to bring in Judaism and the Mosaic law. Distressed keeping the Mosaic law and denied that Christ was deity. So, bad doctrine. Contrary to what the apostles wrote and declared regularly.

Written in the second century, so it's written outside of the time of the apostles, and everybody knew it. This work was referenced by Epiphanes in the fourth century in his Refutation of All Heresies. So, in which he said, this is not a good book. The Gospel of Peter. Sounds like a good name, right? We have only fragments of this work.

It was believed to have been written about 100 to 130 AD. It was referenced by Origen, Eusebius, and Theodorette. It teaches that Pilate was guiltless for the death of Christ. The Jews deserved all the blame. So it sounds anti-Semitic to me, right? that Jesus felt no pain when he was crucified. What's wrong with this picture, right?

And that Jesus' brothers and sisters were from Joseph's first marriage. There began to be a teaching that Mary remained virgin, and therefore people came up with other reasons that Jesus would have other brothers and sisters. either saying that Joseph had another marriage and had children from that other marriage. That's this instance. Another excuse that's brought up is that when it says brothers and sisters, those are really cousins. I don't buy either one. But nonetheless, that's one of the things that shows up and indicates that the book is false. The Apocalypse of Peter, written about 150 AD, more than 80 years after Peter's death. There's no way Peter wrote it, right?

This work goes into extensive and grotesque detail in describing the agonies of hell. Dante's Inferno is influenced by this work. And we have a translation of that in your handout. Your handout on pages six and seven, page and a half. It goes into great description. Now, one of the things that you will find is scripture does not go into great detail about what the punishments of hell are like. The Apocalypse of Peter does go into great detail. Let me take it for instance on page 6 of your handout.

And I saw the murderers and those who conspired with them cast into a certain straight place, full of evil snakes, and smitten by those beasts, and thus turning to and fro in that punishment. And worms, as it were clouds of darkness, afflicted them. And the souls of the murdered stood and looked upon the punishments of those murdered, and said, O God, thy judgment is just." You see, all kinds of detail. about people who are in hell, and all the punishments that they go through.

So, anyway, that's one that you have a sample of. And so, that's what this is. Here's the epistle to Laodiceans. Now, see, in Colossians 4.16, Paul makes reference to a letter from himself that went to the church at Laodicea. Well, guess what?

We don't have it, right? So somebody said, well, then I'll make one up. Since we have no such letter from Paul, that leaves room for someone to create one, which was done in the late 3rd century. So more than two centuries after Paul was dead, somebody wrote a fake letter and began to try to circulate that.

And people looking at that said, uh-uh, that doesn't get included. You also have that in the back of your handout, on page seven, I think it is. It's about a half page English translation. And what it looks like is a bunch of little phrases and words that sound like Paul. Collected up, and that's the fake letter to the Laodiceans. So here's another one, the Protevangelium of James. There's a second century work, so long after James was dead. James died in the early 60s AD, about the time Paul was in prison, was when James was killed. So this is way too late.

It talks about Mary's birth, infancy, and life, including that she was perpetually virgin, being born after only six months in the womb, and walked seven steps at six months of age. Sound good? Ready to go for that one? Probably not, right? The balance of the book tells a rather fanciful account of Jesus' birth mixed with some material taken directly from Matthew's and Luke's account, followed by a description of the death of Zechariah in which his spilled blood turns to stone. How do you like that one? Ready to go for that one? Stick it in the Bible? Probably not. The people who saw that back in the early centuries said that this is not biblical and they dumped it. They said it's not canon.

2 Timothy 3.16 and 17 says, All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work. Questions? Thoughts? Exasperations? Exasperations is the fact that people get so far out, they just think of all these crazy things. And you know what, they keep coming up with additional works.

Try to discern what's in it. Yeah, one of them that was fairly popular when I was first out of high school was the Aquarian Gospel of Jesus Christ. It was basically a mixture of a bunch of Eastern religion kind of stuff, and we're getting somebody faked it centuries later. Because not a lot is written of Christ's early years, again, what do they do? They try to fill it in with something fake.

So they have people going, they have Jesus going to India and spending time with the gurus in India and coming back with Hindu ideas and similar nonsense. I think Jesus stuck around Nazareth and the reason that we know that is when he did go to Nazareth, what did the people say? Hey, we know you. If he was going to India all that time, They would have had no recognition of who he was. Instead, they said, we know your brothers and sisters and all that.

Yes, but the Bible says this, that Joseph kept her a virgin until after Jesus' birth, which fits with the Jewish additions to the law, because according to Judaism, a man was not to have relations with his wife. either during her menstruation, which was according to the law, or during her pregnancy. So he just followed the law and the traditions that were built around it. So that fits the idea that there were other, you know, cousins or another marriage or something like that. Those are things that show up in the books that were written later, just like we've seen here, but not in the Bible, not in the Gospels.

Yeah, Russ? You said something earlier that was interesting, that Dr. Walter Martin, the old Bible Engineer, whether it had been beliefs or competences He said he was on this radio broadcast with a bunch of people listening, and he was debating the atheists. He said, you know Walter, you use circular reasoning.

I have a question about this thing in the Bible. Why do you have to stick to this one book? There's this commercial break, and he's thinking, How do I fix it? Yeah. And he said that he saw in his mind that whoever told him this was written by all these different people over hundreds of years. And this is interesting how it flows. And even though it's many books, it has. Yeah.

The four points we mentioned earlier that are key to how we got the scriptures, including why they were selected and how they were copied, those are important things to understand. I told earlier about how I had someone close to me who challenged my faith and was skeptical of it, and rather persistent in that. And so it's put me on a decades-long search, if you will, for, you know, what is the basis for these things? And what I find is that there is an abundant basis for the validity of scripture, and that all four of those areas of question have some very good answers. And my study of it has not been liked, and it's included, you know, talking with some of these atheists, you know, face-to-face over the years, and those were skeptical.

And still coming to the conclusion, no, this is a very well-founded faith. This is not a leap of faith. This is not a shot in the dark. It's not at all a belief against the facts, but it is very well supported by the facts. And we have every good reason to stand on it. It's true and sure. Other thoughts, questions? I have some and some are unrelated. Do the Muslims except any of them. Do they accept part of the Old Testament?

What they do is of course their book is the Quran and they also have another book called the Hadith. So they have books that are outside of that. They call ourselves and the Jews the people of the book. Very interesting. What the Muslims will do is look at their own scriptures as the primary writing, and to the extent that the Bible can be brought, at least in their view, in support of their faith, then they will make reference to it. But ultimately they look at the Koran and the Hadith. And they look at the scripture like we look at the Bible scripture?

Yeah, now they do something with the Koran that we do not. And that is that they look at the book itself as being very holy and it must be carefully handled and things of that sort. I am, for example, left-handed. And that is forbidden to go and handle the Quran, you know, just with this left-hand thing. So if I were to hand them a copy of the Quran with my left hand, which I'd be inclined to do, because I'm left-handed, that to them would be a horrific insult. They have a reverence for the physical book that's not characteristic of what most Christians do with the Bible. We don't we don't look at the physical book with the same high reverences.

Was it written by Paul Ponder? Yes, supposedly, although there's some question about that, even about his ability to read. So, yeah, I mean, and This is one thing, if you look at it, here's Muhammad who died 632, so he was much later than any of the biblical writings, right? He did have exposure to Jews, remember the Jews that were taken to Babylon? The Jews that were taken to Babylon and during the Babylonian exile, some of them, a lot of them remained there, and so he had exposure to Jews that way, and he had exposure to a certain odd sect of Christians as well. And so that was his exposure to, you know, the Old and New Testaments. And so that's why he called both the Jews and the Christians the people of the book, is that they would have reference to the Bible and certainly the Jews of the Old Testament.

Yeah. Do they have a... I mean, they have such big reverence for their book. For instance, well, Jack, for instance, is a good example. If you look at Jack's book, his Bible, It's from one end to the other. Jacks used it to make reference. Yeah, he writes in it. And I do the same thing. I'm just nearly as thorough as Jacks.

But would they find that to be almost heresy? Yeah, our handling of the physical Bible is not at all what they do. They look at the book as to be handled very carefully in this sort of, you know, like am I just grabbing it and handing a Koran with their left hand, which would be abhorrent. They have things in it that have some relationship to the Bible.

They, for example, talk about Mary and Jesus, who is called Issach, right? And so there's reference to that. There's reference to Abraham only. Remember where the Bible in Genesis talks about Isaac being offered up by Abraham? Their account is it's not Isaac, it's Ishmael.

I was just curious as to whether or not they had a reference to it. marginal notes? I don't know for a fact that they would not, but I would say they would generally be inclined not because of the high reverence for the physical book. That would be my impression, not that I specifically know, but I would suspect because they're, whereas we would have no problem making lots of marginal notes and having footnotes and all, they tend to shy away from any of that. to be almost reverent toward the book because we want to have our notes next to the scripture or whatever might be and things of that nature. Yeah, well they in fact have a different sense of what that reverence looks like is I guess one of the ways you could express it.

Thank you. Yeah. Other thoughts, questions? I have a question for you. I haven't picked out next week's question, but one of the things we could cover, if you would like, is the copying and how things were preserved. Is that something you're interested in pursuing?

We could go over that because it is an amazing thing. I told you about how the Romans went and systematically tried to eradicate the Bible. Once Constantine turned the tables, and certainly we would have criticisms of what he did and what he determined, One of the things he did order was that 50 copies of the scriptures be made in compensation for the numbers that were destroyed. So very interesting. And to get 50 copies to be made, it means that you have to have some to copy. Right. So not all of them were destroyed. Anyway, we'll look at the other way.

In the New Testament, we have close to 25,000 copies, handwritten copies, of all or portions of the New Testament, including the various languages. If you say only the Greek ones, then you're looking at still upwards of 5,000 handwritten copies. massive number, and especially compared to the numbers of any documents.

It's an impressive, impressive set of facts and evidence. So we'll touch on that next week and go from there. Let's pray because I can start to see people beginning to press their nose up against the window here. Lord, we thank you for just what you have laid out. We thank you for the surety that we have regarding your word. You have inspired Every word of it, we thank you that between its copying and its transmission and collection, that we have indeed what you intended for us to have. And that's a joyous thing, that's a wonderful thing, because we can know the truth. We thank you for that and we just pray for the rest of our time together this morning. In Jesus' name, Amen.