Speculum et Lavacrum

The Canon of Scripture and an Ice Cream Christianity

It is my desire to hit this topic from two angles, and try to do so at the same time. Specifically from a Historical perspective and from a Theological perspective. This topic is not easy as it involves so many details. But I will do my best.

To rehash a little, why is this specific topic important today? As we noted before, liberal scholars today are trying to push back the Gnostic texts in order to create this multiplicity of Christian texts. This then allows for a development of a revised understanding of Christianity, in which the unique claims of orthodox Christianity end up being weakened, therefore making it appear as if the primitive church was purely arbitrary in its choosing of texts and doctrine. Our culture today WANTS a diverse and pluralistic approach to religion, most of all a pluralistic approach to Jesus himself. However if we stand back a bit we realize that this has nothing to do with the truthfulness of Christianity. But as post-moderns, truth is relativised and certainty is unattainable, so, truth is not important. We end up with a “do what makes you fee

l good culture.”

Why else might this be important? Dr. James R. White notes, “There has never been a period of time...in the history of the world where there has been more incredibly false information circulating concerning the history, the nature, and teaching of the Bible.” (Dr. James R. White, How We Got the Bible mp3, 00:46) I would add that this even includes the body of Christ. We'd expect liberals, atheists, agnostics, and skeptics to use the most naturalistic methods in their study of the Bible and view it as nothing more than a piece of ancient literature. But what about other religions that have extra revelation? Such as: Joseph Smith and the Mormons with their BOM, D&C, and POGP, Mary Baker Eddy and the Christian Scientists with their Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures? What about Muhammad and Islam with their Qur'an and Haddith, What about the Masons and their Rituals? What about Charles Taze Russell and the Jehovah's Witnesses with their Watchtower and Awake! Magazines and literature? What about Sung Myung Moon and the Moonies with their Divine Principle? What about L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology with Dianetics? What about the Popes and the Church of Rome with their traditions? What about Witness Lee and the Local Church with their Recovery Version of the Bible with their teachings? And what about Ellen G. White and the Seventh Day Adventists an

d her books? All these religions are competing and claiming to have latter day revelation and they all say that its true. Is the Bible is closed or not?

The Nature of the Bible

The Christianity of the New Testament, is a Christianity that is firmly rooted in History. We have God invading time-space history as a human being. Today, the culture at large if they haven't already, they are trying to divorce Christianity from its historical roots.

I frequently ask people what books they are reading and they normally respond with something along these lines, “you mean besides the Bible?” when I press them further, they usually end up saying something to the extent of, “I only read the Bible, because that's all I need.” There is a sense in which, yes, the Bible is sufficient in itself, but generally, this kind of statement is grossly misconstrued and made out of an ignorance of History and God's working through men in History.

The Bible is comprised of 66 boo

ks, written by about 40 different authors, over a period of about 1,500 years. The dates of each book, some of which are merely educated guesses. Pentateuch 1440 B.C., which is an approximate date of the Exodus and Conquest of Canaan. This assumes a Mosaic authorship of this material. Joshua and Judges, follows a period down to around 1000 B.C. Psalms and Proverbs cover David and periods of time after David and Solomon, so roughly 800 B.C. Certain of the Psalms maybe as late as 500 B.C. Isaiah, around 700 B.C. Jeremiah and Ezekiel, around at the latest 500 B.C. 1^st and 2^nd Kings, 1^st and 2^nd Chronicles, and the Minor Prophets ending around 400 B.C.

Then you have a period of silence between 400 B.C. And the coming of Christ. You have the Gospels and Acts, roughly 70 A.D. Gospels and Acts between 50-70 A.D. The Pauline Corpus, 64 A.D. Give or take a couple years before or after. General Epistles, Hebrews, 66 A.D. Revelation is difficult to date but anywhere between 65 and 95 A.D.

No matter how you take it, the Old Testament was written between a span of 1,100 years and the New Testament over a span of 55 years. Yes, people love to play with these numbers, roughly 80% of scholars today deny Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, even the Pauline authorship of Ephesians and the Pastoral epistles is r

ejected by most today. The assumptions of these scholars always is that you don't have anything supernatural going on here. You've got to explain all of this in naturalistic terms and then put the Bible on the same level as every other religious book. Is there any evidence for these claims, not at all. It's all prepositional.

What about the Canon? Bruce Shelley, notes concerning the Bible,

“The word for the special place these books occupy in Christianity is canon. The term from the Greek language originally meant “a measuring rod” or, as we might say, “a ruler.” It was a standard for judging something straight. So the idea transferred to a list of books that constituted the standard or “rule” of the churches. These were the books read publicly in the congregations because they had a special authority of God upon them. (John 10:33; Luke 24:44).” (Bruce L. Shelley, Church History In Plain Language, pp.58,59)

Who determined what books ended up in this collection?

First of all, the primary authority to which me must recognize here is Jesus Christ. If He is Lord, if He is God, then I think his opinion is the best. Shelley continues to state,

"Since the first Christians were all Jews, Christianity was never without a canon, or as we say, Scripture, Jesus himself clearly accepted the Old Testament as God's word to man. “Scripture cannot be broken,” he said. “Everything written about me in the law of Moses

and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled” (Ibid)

Jesus looked to the Old Testament Scriptures as the very Word of God. He accepted the Cannon that was His at that time there in Palestine. If that's the case, then how did the Old Testament Canon come into existence? Josephus tells us that 200 years before Christ, the Palestinian Canon of 39 books was fixed. No miracles attended this process, but it was obviously guided by God Himself. In fact Flavius Josephus in his work, “Against Apion 1:8” and in the Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin, that God had stopped giving revelation at this point. We don't have any golden indexes wrapped in blue silk that say, “these are the 39 books.” Nor were there any votes taken, yet when the Lord Jesus comes, He never has to correct anyone about what is and is not Scripture. So how did it happen? God simply lead His people.

Most people make a mistake concerning the Canonization of Scripture. They usually take the position that the recognition of Scripture, made it Scripture. The books of the Bible didn't become the Word of God because the church decided the

y were, the book of the Bible are the Word of God intrinsically because of who ultimately wrote it and the church merely recognized them as being so. They did not create the Bible, they merely recognized it. This is an important distinction especially when talking to Roman Catholics.

We have these 39 books coming together over a period of 200 years, by the people of God, nothing miraculous, to the human eye it looks simply like a process of time, and yet, it has the stamp of approval of Jesus Christ. If that is how the Old Testament comes into existence, that is over a period of time, not attended by miracles, but by God's people lead by God to recognize God's Word. Then that tells a lot about how the New Testament would later be formed.

Once we get to the fourth century and we begin to move towards the solidification of the canon with Athanasius, which was a process that we can trace its emergence from the end of the second century. The canonization is something that the early church engaged in very carefully.

In the first lecture I gave, I mentioned four other canon lists, one of which is called the Muratorian fragment. This list demonstrates an important factor. That the majority of the New Testament that we already have, was already recognized by at least 170 A.D. There is some debate about how it should be translated at one point there is the possib

ility that both of the letters of Peter are referred to but we just can't tell. What we do have already, at this period of time, that we have to remember is that these books were being hand copied. They spread fast but it still took time. There's going to be a period of time taken between a book that is in one particular area becoming popular in another area, just between the time it takes to copy books and transport them. But in A.D. 170 we have the 4 Gospels, Acts, the 13 Pauline Letters, which circulated as one body extremely early, as early as the writing of 2^nd Peter. Then there was Jude, 1^st & 2^nd John, and the Revelation. Leaving Hebrews and possibly both letters of Peter, depending upon the translation, as well as James outside the list. Three books not yet listed this early. If we have in view the entire Bible as we have it now, what does this mean? This means that by the end of the 2^nd Century, in this specific location, the entire 39 books of the O.T., The Gospels and Acts is another 15%, The Pauline Corpus 7%. 97% of your Bible is already established. These books are not authoritative because they are placed in a list. These books are authoritative because of who wrote them.

Historically, even though these books were accepted as Scripture, there were two principal events that occurred in the Second Century that pushed the Church to officially define the Canon and to close the Canon.

Marcion-

Bruce Shelley states,

“Given enough time the churches...probably would have drawn up a list of canonical Christian writings. But certain events forced the hand of the churches.

About A.D. 140 a wealthy and much-traveled shipowner from Sinope on the Black Sea came to Rome. His name was Marcion. Although the son of a bishop, Marcion fell under the spell of the gnostic teacher Cerdo, who believed that the God of the Old Testament was different from the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. The God of the Old Testament, he said, was unknowable; the Christian God had been revealed. The Old Testament God was sheer justice; whereas the God of the New Covenant was loving and gracious.

Marcion developed Cerdo's distinction. He held tha

t the Old Testament God was full of wrath and the author of evil. This God, he said was only concerned for the Jewish people. He was prepared to destroy all other people. In contrast, the Christian's God was a God of grace and love for all, who disclosed himself in Jesus Christ, his Son.

Because he believed that the God of the Old Testament loved the Jews exclusively, Marcion rejected the entire Old Testament and also those New Covenant writings that he thought favored Jewish readers—for example Matthew, Mark, Acts, and Hebrews. He also rejected other Christian writings that appeared to him to compromise his own views, including the Pastoral Letters (1^st and 2^nd Timothy and Titus). So he was left with only a mutilated version of Luke's Gospel (omitting the nativity stories) and then letters of Paul. The Apostle to the Gentiles, it seems, was the only apostle who did not corrupt the gospel of Jesus.”

And if Marcion forced the Church to list a canon, Montanus forced the church to close the canon.

Montanus-

Montanus' teachings came about from a secularization of the church. The lines of distinction between the world and the church were blurring. So, sometime between 156 A.D. And 172 A.D. Montanus appeared in Asia Minor. He came with a demand for a higher standard and a greater discipline and a sharper separation of the church from the world. If he had stopped there, he would have done nothing but good. However, he and his two prophetesses, Prisca and Maximilla, went about prophesying in the name of the Spirit, and foretelling the speedy second coming of Christ. This in itself was not new. However, in contrast, these spoke in a state as though their personalities were suspended while the Spirit spoke through them. Montanus was convinced that he and his prophetess were the God-given instruments of revelation. With that Montanus' super-spirituality went too far. Montanus started insisting that opposition to the new prophecy was blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, and this caused churches to split. So the church had to act. Montanus' doctrine suggested that the Old Testament period was past, and that the New Testament period centered on Jesus, had ended. Montanus claimed the right to move past Christ and the Apostles, thus the Spirit could override important elements of the Gospel. Montanus denied that God's decisive and normative revelation had occurred in Jesus. Because of all of this, the church had to define all Christian worship, teaching, and life center in Christ and the apostolic witnesses. Free utterance of the Spirit would not guarantee that. The best way to make the original apostolic writings as uniquely authoritative. Therefore creating a standard by which doctrine and practice could be judged.

The church was basically forced to define its standard, and it developed four rules for determining the eligibility of a text. I am combining two.

Four Rules

First and Second were: Apistolicity/Antiquity, was the text written by an apostle or someone affiliated with an apostle? And how old are they?

As I mentioned last week, there were other works that the early church considered as orthodox and even read them in the church. The Shepherd of Hermas, the Didache(also called The Teaching of the Apostles), and 1^st & 2^nd Clement. These were not canonized because they were not written by an apostle or anyone affiliated by an apostle. Also, when you have the Muratorian Canon list, which is the second earliest canon list we have in the second century. It talks about the Shepherd of Hermas and it says this thing is orthodox, go ahead and read it. Just don't read it in church because its of recent vintage. So, even though these texts don't pass the other two, they weren't added because they weren't old enough.

Third was: Catholicity, was it a text that was widely accepted by the churches? The gnostic texts absolutely fail this test.

Fourth was: Orthodoxy, does the text comport with the teachings that we already see in the Scriptures? The gnostic texts also obviously fail this rule as well.

What about the claim that a bunch of men got together and voted on what would be in the New Testament and what books wouldn't? And if a book received a certain percentage of the vote it was in, even if it was by a hair. This is simply untrue. They were recognized over a period of time.

The Apocrypha

What about the Apocrypha? The Apocrypha is a collection of books that is found in the Roman Catholic canon, in the Old Testament. These are a set of books that were written during the inter-testamental period. That is, between 400 B.C. And the time of Christ. They are predominately historical with a bit of theology mixed in. The apocryphal books were not recognized as being authoritative by the Palestinian Jews at any time. None of the New Testament writers ever quote from these books beginning with, “it is written” or “the Scriptures say”. However, they were accepted in North Africa. Primarily because of the influence of the LXX which had the Apocryphal books in it. None of the Jews in North Africa spoke Hebrew any longer. Thus, this is why Augustine of Hippo accepted them as Scripture. However, Jerome, the translator of the Latin Vulgate didn't. Jerome traveled to Bethlehem and learned Hebrew. When he did he realized that that the apocryphal books had never been in the Palestinian canon. When he looked into the historical reasons why not, he came to the conclusion that they shouldn't have either. However, when doing his translation, was forced to translate the apocrypha and add them to the Scriptures at the end. The apocrypha, however remained questionable until many years later during the Protestant Reformation when all of the Reformers are completely rejecting these books. In response to the Protestant Reformation, and the Protestant canon of Scripture, which was the same canon that was found in Palestine. The Roman Catholics convened the Council of Trent, and makes a direct decree, that the apocrypha is Scripture.

This area also touches on the Reliability of the New Testament as we saw three weeks ago, and exactly how God preserved His Word.

I am indebted greatly for the information contained in the body of this text to Dr. James R. White's works, "Scripture Alone" and the lecture, "How Did We Get the Bible?", also Dr. Daniel Wallace and Dr. Darrell Bock's D.T.S. radio interviews.