Bible Backgrounds/Church History 2012
Vern Peterman · Jul 15, 2012
Bible Bkgds/Church History, No. 29
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4926321152013

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

Okay, we're looking at now the third week on Church History and God's Word, and this is how we got the Bible, which is actually something we're going to end up looking at for the next couple of weeks after this as well, in the different details of it.

So this is actually, there is a lot of material. It's an introduction. A key point here is Revelation, and by the way, that's not the book of Revelation, this is God revealing himself in scripture, has four parts. The inspiration of scripture, so here's the Apostle Paul, here's Isaiah, here's Moses, they're writing by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. So that's the first part. The next one is the canonization.

Which is, the canonization is not deciding what is scripture, but recognizing what is inspired. You see the difference? It's recognizing what was inspired and what was not. This is inspired, that isn't. Right? It isn't saying, you know, hey, let's call this the Bible and let's say these ones are out. It's not making that kind of a decision. It's a recognition of what's inspired.

The next one is the transmission, how the documents came to be copied and preserved, and that by itself is rather miraculous. For a document that in many parts of the world, in portions of history, was illegal, and I'm talking death penalty to have it, to have as many copies, handmade copies, as we have is phenomenal. Next one is the translation of it. translation into various languages so that the Bible can be understood.

We're going to be looking at this last three parts here as we take a look at how we got the Bible, right? This is the last three components. So we'll look as we do through these periods of time up to 96 AD, the Apostolic Era, The Apostles wrote letters and histories. Which books of the Bible would you say are histories?

Excuse me, the New Testament. Acts is a history. Anything else? Pardon? Of the New Testament. You're correct, it is a history, but of the New Testament are not the Gospels, the four Gospels, histories, right? They're not letters, right? You're correct. They're not letters. It isn't like, hi, I'm this guy and I'm writing to you. Not that.

They are, in fact, histories of Jesus' first coming, his ministry on the earth. And so we have those five books are histories, and then we have the rest of them as letters with, you could say, in a possible exception, the book of Revelation is kind of in a different category, isn't it? So, now, what they wrote, generally speaking, letters and histories. Here is, and there has been rumored earlier this year, an early copy of a portion of the Gospel of Mark claims have been found. I've not seen that really well confirmed, so the earliest one that we have is 125 AD, that's a fragment of the Gospel of John, just a small piece of it. Letters and histories were written on papyrus. Papyrus is where they take this reed and they put them cross-grain and press them together and so you have something that's paper-like.

Papyrus and then the next one is vellum, animal skins. Those are much more expensive. However, they tend to last a little bit longer as well. Clay or stone tablets was another way that things were recorded. And then pieces of pottery, believe it or not, was another way that you would write something down. Occasionally some other things. We actually have a Roman birth certificate written with beeswax on a board. So other variations were also possible. Papyrus is most common. It looks like this.

I saw what seemed to be an endless field of it over in Uganda. I have no idea what they're doing with it. So they would take the reed and break it up and then put it cross-grained so that you have something that'll stay together and not just split up. And it has kind of its own glue built into it so that the two pieces that are cross-grained stick together.

Here's the way it ends up looking, papyrus paper. So they would write with ink. A lot of times the ink was made from some ash or carbon. Here would be a typical writing kit where you'd have some pieces of reed, sometimes feathers, cut with a sharpened end and you'd dip that into this piece at the end that you would have fairly solid and then you put some water on it to wet it when you're going to go write. And you could carry this around as a writing kit to different places and carry it with you.

So the Apostolic Era Foundation for the Canon of New Testament Scripture. The Old Testament had a fixed definition by the time of the New Testament because what was the last Old Testament book? Malachi, and that had been written like four centuries, and nobody was really trying to add anything to it. There were a few books around that the Jews had written, but they all recognized, you know, yeah, these are important historical books, or they're of curious interest, but they're not scripture. Everybody knew Malachi was the last prophet. That's it. So the Old Testament had already had a fixed canon set in place for centuries, several centuries by the time the New Testament came around. Jesus' words had authority from the outset because of who he was.

It was considered the standard for disciples of a rabbi to go around drilling one another on the words that the rabbi said. Committing it, you know, these guys knew how to read and write, but committing it to memory was considered, that's the way you do it. And so they, and you imagine, here's Matthew and Peter and John and those guys, you know, they're by the Sea of Galilee and they get up in the morning and they're drilling one another on the words and checking each other.

And so it would be something like, if even one word is off, you'd go, ah, wait a minute. And let me give you an example. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of the Americas. Is there something wrong with that? Yeah. I made a small mistake. And all of you heard that, whoop, wait a minute. It would be like that, where they would go around memorizing, and they'd go, I caught you. No, that's not right.

So they check each other. Apostles functioned as a living canon from the beginning. They were called to take the message into the world and instruct all concerning him about what they saw and heard. This guy is an apostle, and that guy isn't. But what this guy says, you'd better listen to it, because these are the designated ones. So they're kind of a living canon when they're alive. Now, here's Jude 3. Now, Jude and James, authors of those two books, were Jesus' half-brothers, that is, born of Mary and born through Joseph.

So, Beloved, while I was making every effort to write to you about our common salvation, I felt the necessity to write to you appealing that you contend earnestly. That's epagonizomai, which is agonizomai is an athletic effort. Epagonizomai is an intense athletic effort. I urge that you put forth an athletic, an intense athletic level kind of effort.

For the faith, definite article, the one faith, and by the way, that the faith is a phrase that starts in Acts chapter 6 and continues into Revelation. The faith, not a bunch of faiths. Yes? Here it seems like the word faith is for a body of work, not for a belief system. It's the same word, b-i-s-t-e-o-n-c. Yes, and the point is, this is the teaching of the apostles. But it's a body of work that you ultimately believe in, right? Right. It's a specific content. Notice that he didn't call it the faiths or the articles of faith.

It is the faith, and that's the way the term was used from Acts chapter 6 on into the book of Revelation. That body of teachings which constitute the apostolic teaching. And then it is once for all, that Greek is hapax, once given perpetually valid. That same word is used a number of different times there in the New Testament, but here, once given, perpetually valid.

The Apostles' canonical activities. The Apostles selected and verified the contents. These are some of the things you see, and I would say Luke 1, 1-4 is one of the most explicit things. Luke writes about very carefully checking and selecting what was included in the Gospel of Luke. But that kind of thing, you see John writes about it both in the Gospel of John and in 1 John. The next one is public reading of scripture. Several different references there.

Revelation 1.3, it says, and this is an interesting thing, blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of this book. So it's a promise of blessing that goes with it. public reading. The next one is circulation of it. Here Paul tells the church at Colossae, send this letter on to this other church and the letter I sent to them, the Laodiceans, you read that in your church.

So get this thing circulated. Let's see. Determination of what was in the canon and what was not. Specifically, the faith, the word. It's interesting, the faith and the word, single definite article, repeatedly. There is a singularity about the teaching of scripture. Do we have a number of letters and books? Yeah. Do we have a number of apostles? Yes. When it comes to the faith, one. The word, one. It's always spoken of in that way. Finally, quoting of New Testament scripture.

1 Timothy 5.18, Paul quotes from Luke 10.7. Isn't that interesting? So, quoting of scripture, and then we have about 260 places where the New Testament quotes the Old. Pardon? The New Testament quotes the Old Testament about 260 times.

Is this the area that they decided by border they would be in in the Bible? Now that's a different question because the ordering of things was actually done later. And we'll talk about that, even the chapters put in later, and then the verses put in even later than that. Now we have into the next section here, events which confirmed or required a New Testament canon. Here's Valentinus 140 AD, indicated wide use of the New Testament books in the church. And then here's Marcion, formed his own canon. Okay, I'm going to pick which books, right? Formed his own canon, an edited version of Luke and some of Paul's letters.

He was anti-Semitic. And so he wanted to pick the letters and edit things in order to abide by his being anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish, right? And so people said, whoa, wait a minute. You've got the wrong book. You've got an edited version of the book. And you're throwing out some things that the apostles actually wrote.

And except for Luke, every one of the authors of scripture is Jewish. So how are you going to be anti-Semitic and have a New Testament? Right? Montanus, 170 AD, added to and contradicted the canon with additional revelation through prophecy and tongues. He was considered a heretic by at least a couple of John's disciples. So we had those issues that started to bring up the question, okay, what's in the canon? What isn't? What's inspired? What is not?

Where is Jesus going to come back? What part of the earth? He's going to come back to Israel, he's going to come back to Jerusalem. Montanus had him coming back to a place in western Turkey. And his two main supporters were two women who had left their husbands to follow him. So something's messed up here, right? Okay.

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. And we kind of gave you that, you know, connection to Polycarp and Papias and some of the other disciples, first or second generation disciples of John. If you quote people's commentaries and quotings of the New Testament, we have less than a dozen verses that are not included in those quotes. If you didn't have copies of the New Testament, you would have copies of quoting of all but, I say less than a dozen verses, just out of those commentaries that people had where they quoted it.

Under Emperors Decius and Diocletian, continuing to 312, the mandatory destruction of Christian scriptures required the definition of which books were included. That is, if you're going to die for the scriptures, you better figure out what's scripture and what's not, right? You don't want to die for something that isn't scripture, right? So that ended up pressing the definition. What's included and what isn't, right? Here is the spread of the church, the witness of vernacular translations. And what we have here, we're going to refer to this map, and you have a copy of it, I believe, in your handout.

The ones during this 96 to 312 period of time, the end of the life of John to the end of the Roman persecution. included the Old Latin and the Syriac and the Sahitic versions. So in other words, instead of just copying the original Greek New Testament, they would then translate them. And these were some of the early translations. Now, from 312 to 590, the next period of time, this is an important copy. It's not the only one, but this is called the Codex Sinaiticus, 4th century. It has the complete New Testament in bound form about 340 AD, found at St. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai.

Pardon? Was that handwritten? Yes. Because there wasn't any printing for a thousand years, right? Yeah, so it's in pretty good shape, you know, considering the age of it. Now, there are at least 5,309 surviving hand-copied Greek manuscripts that contain all or parts of the New Testament. And I would say by this time, probably more. The number is greater, but certainly that number. There are more than 19,000 ancient New Testament manuscripts by the time you include the other languages into which the Bible, the New Testament, was translated. And then the oldest copies of the New Testament known to exist are actually the Syriac and Old Latin versions in terms of completer copies. All total, more than 24,000 handwritten copies of the New Testament have survived in some portion. And by the way, they've discovered some additional ones just this year. Yeah. Well, Syria, right? Yeah, Syriac from Syria, right?

Here's a comparison to other ancient documents in order to understand how rich A document history we have, look at this, here is a list of various ancient authors and when the document was originally written and our earliest copy and so then the time in years from when it was written to the earliest copy and the number of copies.

The New Testament is many, many times unparalleled in terms of the number of copies, how close we have copies to the original. For someone to dispute the reliability of the New Testament, if you're going to say that the New Testament, what we have is not reliably recorded and copied and we just don't have that much of it, all of ancient history will disappear if you're going to say the New Testament is not reliable. Because all the rest of it has nowhere near the number of copies, nor the short length of time between the original document and the copies that we have. Now, in the next period of time, here we find some other translations being made. And all the way from North Africa on into, you know, towards Russia and then on up into Central Europe, yes.

Okay, well, Islam had not yet by 590 had its effect. But we're going to get into that. We're still basically by 590 you've got a decaying Roman Empire and you're getting by 590 the Roman Catholic Church beginning to establish itself as the dominant structure. So and we'll be certainly getting into that.

Here's Jerome 340 to 420. translated the Greek and Hebrew scriptures into Latin, called the Vulgate, including the Apocrypha, that is the additional books outside of what we call the Old and New Testament, about 405, and he actually had some help in the Hebrew from a rabbi in Bethlehem. This replaced the Old Latin version, which was done about 190, so the Vulgate became then the prominent Translation work was done from Bethlehem.

Now, final indications of the canon. Athanasius wrote in 367 listing the present 27 books of the New Testament canon. First used the word canon in reference to the New Testament. A canon is like a measuring rod or reed. Church councils at Hippo and Carthage each confirmed the present list of 27 New Testament books. Now, what qualifies a book as canon? They had four primary criteria.

The first one, was the book written by an apostle or an apostolic associate? Now, let's go through this. Matthew, was he an apostle? Yes, Matthew was an apostle. Mark, was he an apostle? No. But he was associated with who? Peter. And there was a connection, actually, secondarily with Paul and Barnabas. And then we could go through other books. How about James and Jude, Jesus' half-brothers? Pardon? They had a strong association. They had an association with Jesus, and you read in the book of Acts, here is James, an elder at the church in Jerusalem, right? And what is he doing? He's meeting with the other apostles. Then we go through here, spirituality.

Were the contents of a given book of such a spiritual character as to entitle it to its rank? That is, you know, you got some little book and the only content is, you know, hey, get this thing here and send this guy there. And, you know, there's no spiritual content to give us direction. So that would be one of the tests. It's not just some administrative document. It's not just here's the list of the assets in my home or something.

There's spiritual content and spiritual substance to the book. And is it spiritually consistent with the rest of the apostolic writings? Universality was the book universally received in the church. In other words, it wasn't just, you know, this is a New Testament book because this guy over here says so. Nobody else does, but this guy does. So it had to be universally recognized.

And the fourth one was inspiration. Did the book give evidence of being divinely inspired? Does this read like it was written by God's inspiration? That God was revealing himself through this writing? So those were the four criteria as they went through the different books.

You will hear about lost gospels and things of that sort. Nonsense. Nothing's lost. Matter of fact, we're going to go through a bunch of those different ones later. Gospel of Thomas. Ever hear of that one? Wasn't written until the second century. No apostle ever wrote that. No apostle ever even saw it. Right? And whoever wrote it was not an apostle or an apostolic associate. So it didn't qualify, and it isn't lost. You'll take a look at a copy here over the next couple of weeks. And it's a crazy book, right? All right.

Why the canon is closed. God has completed the revealing through his son and those he elected to serve as contemporary witnesses. I was speaking to a couple of Mormons sometime back. I said, Jude 3. It says it was once for all delivered to the saints, once given perpetually valid.

Why do we need the rest of your books? What did they say to you? Nothing, because they didn't have an answer for that. Yeah? It says in Revelation that you aren't supposed to add to the tracture. Yes, and Revelation says that. Well, what's interesting is I bounce that off of them and they say, well, that's adding to Revelation. We're not adding to that book. So that's the way they dodge that one. Okay.

Jude 3, Revelation 22, 18 and 19, that's what you're referring to, 1st Corinthians 4, Hebrews 2, 1-4, etc. all speak of the finality of the apostolic era among other passages. So it's not just, you know, one place, yes, there's just, there's Revelation, another dodge on that is, well, we're not touching the book of Revelation. But in fact, it's spread throughout the New Testament. The claim, the apostles, the apostles and prophets were a foundation When you're building a building, don't you stop building the foundation somewhere? Right? There were a foundation.

The next thing here, there are no more apostles since no others qualify biblically. There were requirements for being an apostle. And so you can't have more apostles after these guys. What were some of the requirements for being an apostle? We won't go through all of them, but just... be with Christ personally. That's why Paul was considered an apostle out of time, because he's always with people.

That's right. And so, one is you had to be personally with Christ. Alright? Yes. And it was continuous, not just off and on. Okay. Yeah, it had to be not just occasional. Right? Yeah. What else? I think there was something to do with miracles and... Yes. It had to have miraculous powers. and also had to experience a great deal of suffering. That was one of the requirements. And not too many people want to volunteer for that, right?

So now we go, excuse me, the next period, 590 to 1517, almost a thousand years is our next period of time here. Here's Venerable Bede translated the Gospel of John into pre-English. Now we're going to be taking a look at examples of of pre-English and it's almost unreadable from our modern standpoint. I mean you can read it, but understanding is a different matter. Here is something else that happened during that period of time.

You have the translations in the English, German, Old Slavic, etc. Also Cyril and Methodius from Thessalonica took a Greek alphabet-based language and took it up into what we now call Eastern Europe and up into Russia, which is why you see this, you know, Russian and languages that are related to it. As a matter of fact, Elishka says that's where they got their language in the Czech Republic. You'll see things that look sort of Greek and then sort of not. Well, that's why. It's where it came from. These two guys were the ones who were given credit for taking the language and the alphabet up there.

Now, Stephen Langton, the professor at the University of Paris, is credited by most for adding the chapter numbers and divisions in 1227. There are a few who disagree. and credited Cardinal Hugo of St. Cher in the same century, 1263. But that's about the period of time when you start seeing the chapter breaks, and that's why the Apostle Paul, when he quotes like the Old Testament, doesn't give verse reference. He'll say something like, you know, somewhere it says, right, because there wasn't up until this time a way to designate even the chapter. John Wycliffe, during this period of time, was a professor at Oxford.

He translated the Bible from Latin Vulgate. Okay, notice it wasn't from Greek and Hebrew, but from the Vulgate into English. So he went from the Latin, which had also been translated from Hebrew and Greek into Latin, and then into English from the Latin. But that's what he did. He's sometimes called the Morning Star of the Reformation. And by the way, he's also the inventor of bifocals. Isn't that interesting?

Because of the lack of printing technology though, all the copying of that was done by hand. But he was still able to get English language, as English was, translation into people's hands so they could get the Bible in the common people. Finally, about 1445 or 1555, and there's some debate about what exactly was the year, the printing press was introduced in Europe by Johannes Gutenberg. And that changed things because then people could begin no longer hand copying, but you could begin having significant references. You could study Greek and Hebrew grammar and look up things in lexicons and dictionaries and things of that sort. It really changed the landscape. Desiderius Erasmus.

He was the first to assemble and have printed the entire Greek New Testament. By the way, he was in competition with somebody else who was trying to put it together, so he actually did it hastily. But he put together the entire Greek New Testament. Here is a first edition there from 1516. The Greek documents were not the earliest nor the most complete. That is, today we would say, well, you know, we would use this other document to do the copying.

He just grabbed what he could get. As a matter of fact, in one place he was missing a little bit, so he translated the Greek from Latin. So, last verse of Revelation was translated from Latin back into Greek. Here's Martin Luther who came up with a German Bible, and from what I understand, he did a pretty good job. So here's an ancient copy of that.

The verse numbers and breaks were added. Robert Stephanus, the printer in Paris, added the verse numbers to the Greek New Testament in 1551. That's to the Greek New Testament. William Whittingham of Oxford added those verse numbers to the English New Testament in 1557. So you can imagine, here he is going through the Greek New Testament and saying, okay, that breaks here in the Greek and here's the break here in the in the English, and so 1557 is the first time they had verse numbers, and to the Old Testament in 1560.

That's called the Geneva Bible, and I think Craig gave you a scanned copy of the Geneva Bible. We have some additional copies here, Ephesians 1 through 3. I have one page of an original Geneva Bible page, and that's the one page I have. So that's what we scanned. But at any rate, so that's what we've distributed here. Here is an English Bible timeline from the Wycliffe Bible to the King James Revisions. I believe you have that on page four of your handout. And it gives you this idea.

Here you have Wycliffe translation from the Latin Vulgate back here. And then Tyndale coming up from the Greek New Testament, translating the New Testament. The other translations right after that were largely based on Tyndale's work and done by Tyndale's helpers. Tyndale lost his life for translating. They strangled him, then burned him. He lost his life for translating, but then those who had helped him generated some of these subsequent versions that didn't get anywhere near the popularity, especially continuing on into now, as some of the later ones. Yes?

Where did Luther end up here? 1517. 17 was when he went and, you know, nailed the theses and all that. So then, here we have 1611 is the King James Bible, and I've got a Replica copy of that that you're welcome to take a look at but it's got some very strange things in it things like unicorns and Everywhere everywhere you see Israel. They've gone and put up in the notes church So they make the church, you know replace Israel And other oddities we'll take a look at that the King James Bible has been through a whole bunch of revisions and these are the major ones and There are a whole bunch of other minor revisions and strange things that went on.

Actually when they first did the 1611, they split it between two printing houses, and they weren't done identically. So if you want the original 1611, good luck. The other thing is there was another time when the printer was going through the Ten Commandments.

Thou shalt commit adultery. He left out not. And he got heavily fined and reprimanded. uh... for that and uh... irate and so that's a wicked bible yes yeah yeah yeah it uh... it was it was bad he he actually he was so heavily penalized financially for that that though he stayed in business he never recovered financially he was in the poorhouse the rest of the state uh... Yes, and that's the thing.

You'd have the first Bibles. They were very expensive. Of course, now they're millions of dollars if you try to get a hold of one because they're rare. This replica, I think I paid $25 for, but if you actually get a 1611, have a 1611 in your hand, you've got a very valuable piece of printing. But even in the day when they were made, they were very costly.

You imagine all this stuff is hand typeset, and you go and push the printing press down and get that paper and set that aside, and then you have to assemble this. It's a lot of work. You're right. Now, this I think is fascinating, and you have this in your handout. Here is, and a lot of people are completely unaware of this, here's the 1611 King James for God so, and the U's and the V's are switched. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, S-O-N-N-E, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." And again, all the U's and V's are reversed.

Then we go, if you go back, look at this pre-English. at the bottom of the page for John 3.16. God lafaday midden erd swa, dat he seeded his ansanadan sunu, dat non... Well, you get the idea. Somebody came up to you and said, you know, isn't this great? Here's the gospel. You'd go, huh?

Because really only a few of the words in there are understandable from pre-English. It was a very concocted language and still our English today is rather radically different. But most people are unaware that the 1611 King James is as different as it in fact was, from what we call the King James today. Been through many modifications and editing down and that sort of thing. Here is a 1611 King James, this is taken from this replica here, and here's an example of the detail.

Here is from Jeremiah, Look at the top there, restoring, the word S, has the S in it, looks to us like an F, right? But restoring of the church. In Jeremiah? No, it's because of the, and that's throughout the entire Old Testament, they substitute, you know, they look at Israel, they substitute the church, and that's put throughout the entire Old Testament. Everywhere Israel shows up, it's the church. and all the notes and their headings, yes. Ultimately, you look at it, think about, and we're going to go through this as we go through more church history, think about this, where did the English official church come from?

It came from the Catholic Church that Henry VIII split off because he wanted to marry Anne Boleyn. And the Catholic Church said, no, you can't do that. And he says, OK, yes, I am. And England now is a separate church, and I'm in charge of it. And so from that history now, you have a very Catholic church established that's now the Anglican Church. And the Anglican Church was established by Augustine, right? Yes, right.

Yeah, the church replaces Israel thing, that was just well entrenched already. In fact, one of the oldest hymns we have, O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel. They don't mean Israel like we think of. They mean Israel as the church. Here is, for example, some spellings. The chariots, C-H-A-R-E-T-S. Another one here, sanctify. S-A-N-C-T-I-F-I-E. And then another one, where we have J for Jesus and Jerusalem, it's Yesus and Yerusalem. Yes?

Back then, even that recently, were people spelling however they thought the word should be? And that's one thing is uniformity was not there. And think of it, there was no uniformity of how do I spell things. And a part of that was based on, you know, we don't have any dictionaries to make some kind of a standard. So it sounds about like this, right? And so because of that, you would have differences of spelling. Pardon?

Yeah, yeah, look nice with this letter or at the school I went, we did it this way, right? Yeah, it would vary quite a bit depending on who the person was and what their background was. Now getting 1648 to the present, the first Bible printed in America, interestingly enough, was an Algonquian Indian Bible used by John Eliot to evangelize the American Indians in the 1600s, over a century before the American Revolution. So that's the first Bible printed in America.

Yes. I don't know because they're centuries apart. It might be. I have no idea. Yeah, yeah. I have no idea. I've never seen a connection, but it is possible. Well, that's the thing. Spelling varied a bit. Now, here is the 1782 Aitken Bible. It was the first English Bible printed in America, and that was after the American Revolution. So that was the first English Bible. Now, one of the questions, because this had the Apocrypha in it, 1611 King James had the Apocrypha in it. Why not have the Apocrypha in it? Well, we give four reasons here.

The Jews never received these books and they were rejected by both Jews and all Christians up to about 480. So originally they were not accepted as anything other than just these are interesting or perhaps historical books. They have many errors of time, history, geography, as well as contradictions to the rest of the Bible. Christ and the Apostles in the New Testament quote 260 times from 35 out of 39 Old Testament books. They never quote from the Apocrypha. Yes? I'd have to look those up. I don't know them offhand.

Josephus in 90 AD listed all the 39 Old Testament books, and I have to qualify that. Ruth was included in the book of Judges, and Lamentations was included in the book of Jeremiah, and also the breakup into 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, that sort of thing was not included. So when I say all 39 books, that's with those combinations assumed.

He did not include the Apocrypha. The Roman Catholic Church only added them at the Council of Trent, that's mid-1546 AD, that's when the Catholic Church added the Apocrypha, to defend against the Protestants' attack on Purgatory. If you actually look at the reference, though, it doesn't support their teaching of Purgatory. The Apocrypha was written from between the Testaments into New Testament times.

So, you know, about 200 BC into the end of the first century AD. So that's one of those things were written. But it has, for example, accounts of things about Daniel, right? But the problem is It was written centuries after Daniel, so it doesn't fit. It's bogus.

And we will go into the Apocrypha and some of the other so-called lost books, because they're not lost, we've got them. Okay, we will be going through, we went through this and here's today how we got the Bible. Our next one will be books that didn't make it into the New Testament and why. Things like the Assumption of Moses, the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Thomas, things like that. So we'll be looking at some of these books. There are actually hundreds of them by the year 800.

And then the next one, the copying of the Old and New Testaments. How did we get what we have now? Go through and copy this, and then I got a copy of a copy, and then I got a copy of a copy of a copy, and you know, How do we get what we have now? So, and how do we arrive at this is the New Testament? So, we have that. History of groups, movements, and organizations will be kind of the next one.

And I find that fascinating because right now we've got something on the order of about 30,000 Christian denominations. Lots and lots, and just lots and lots of breakup. For example, there are some 200 Catholic churches. There are a whole bunch of Orthodox churches. If you talk about Methodists, there are hundreds of breakoffs from Methodism.

Baptists, yeah. You've got lots of different Baptists. You've got your Seventh-day Baptists. There's actually Seventh-day Baptists like the Seventh-day Adventists. They've got one they call Baptocostals. And then there's a friend of ours who said you've got 1A, 2A, and AAA Baptists. So you've got Baptists, and you've got Baptists, and then you've got Baptists.

So anyway, we'll talk about all these different groups, and how they got split off and separated into the groups that they are, and when that took place, and the politics behind it, and all that. So we'll get into that. I think that to me is fascinating. It explains a lot of what we see going on.

The Methodists, when the Methodists broke off, they taught loss of salvation. So when the Nazarenes broke off from the Methodists, they taught what? Loss of salvation, right? And so then you have from there, you know, other groups breaking off. And then you got the Wesleyans, right? and their break off from the Methodists and the Wesleyans also teach loss of salvation.

So you find these patterns and oh, okay, that makes sense. Right? So anyway, we'll go into a lot of those. Questions, comments? Yeah? In general, I think that's one of the reasons why the Apocrypha was not accepted. And that is because a lot of the apocrypha, not all of it, a lot of it was falsely attributed. Yeah, for example, I made reference to, you know, here's some accounts that claim to be written by Daniel, right? Written centuries after Daniel's dead.

This is bogus. So it's phony. Which is why you would say, you know, this isn't a canonical book. That's right. And when somebody writes a fake book, you know, they're trying to get it accepted as something else. They don't put their own name in it. So we don't know. In almost every case, rare exceptions, we don't know who actually wrote the bogus book because they're trying to pass it off as somebody else's. Yes. Right.

One of the things that you see with the book of Hebrews, some very interesting things. I've looked at this question. There's some people just jump and say it was written by Paul. I would say almost certainly not, just because of choice of word patterns. Several things about Hebrews that are significant and worth looking at. One is it writes about Timothy getting out of prison. So here's somebody who was associated with Paul in some way. So there's that indicator, because Timothy operated by assignment from Paul.

One other thing is the book of Hebrews uniquely uses lots of shipping, nautical terms. So here's somebody who is very familiar. For example, things like not going past the harbor. Don't miss the harbor. But he used that as a spiritual term. Don't miss things doctrinally by going past where you're supposed to land. So lots of nautical terms, and that's unique to the book of Hebrews. So here's somebody who either spent a lot of time on a ship. Didn't Paul spend a lot of time on a ship?

Somebody spent a lot of time on a ship or lived in a harbor city. One other thing, and that is that the Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint it's called, has certain families by spelling and things of that sort, and Hebrews and Ephesians and the Book of Revelation, which was written around Ephesus, right? So here's Ephesians, Hebrews, and Revelation come from a family of Old Testament translated into Greek that was from Ephesus. So the author of Hebrews was very likely someone who spent time with Paul, he writes about Timothy, he writes about harbor and shipping terms, and he quotes from a version of the Greek Old Testament from Ephesus.

There's a connection there. I think it's not certain. I think a very good likelihood is that this guy was Barnabas, which also explains why the style of writing is not like Paul's, but it would seem to have connections with Paul, yes. And that's possible, too. I mean, there are other possibilities, but I think it's somebody associated with Paul, and that's in evidence, and it's also somebody who spent a fair amount of time in Ephesus. Possibly even writing it from Ephesus.

Yes? Yes, and would not Barnabas, being a Levite, Be a good candidate? Yeah. Very well versed in the Levitical system. Even someone who was aware that Jesus' genealogy was still available for inspection in Jerusalem. Because Jesus' descendancy from Judah, present tense, is evident. is right now evident. So I think there's some, that tends to lean me again in favor of Barnabas as the author.

We don't really know. Yeah? The question I had on your chart on page 4 when you're going through all these different changes, you can definitely see, starting around 1525, there's a huge influx of work being done on the scriptures. Yes. I would imagine, the literacy of the world was becoming a lot more pronounced during that time.

Yes, because all of a sudden, instead of having to hand copy grammars and dictionaries and things of that sort, you could actually get your hands on one. Even the Catholic congregation couldn't read scriptures anyway, so they were told what they were writing. Yeah, obviously, initially you're looking at people who are educated, who are doing this, you know, where they have enough money that they can get their hands on a copy of these, as Marilyn pointed out, rather expensive references, and then can put the time, you know, and read this and then make a translation. Even at that, then you'd have something that people could more easily read to a group among those who are less literate. Tom? Yes, the Catholic approach to scripture is different because of their involvement, their traditions, etc. So yeah, you're correct.

We need to wrap it up here and if you have more questions, that's fine. See me afterwards and let's pray. Lord, we thank you. As we look at the inspiration of scripture, but also the copying and distribution and transmission and translation of it, all these things, we can see your hand in evidence. And we thank you for that evidence. And we thank you for our ability to read now rather easily and without great expense your precious and holy word. And we thank you for this time we've been able to look at these things. We pray in Jesus name. Amen.