I appreciate brother Bowen telling me which way I was supposed to go on this question, because Kenny gave me no guidance at all. He just said, come and answer this question. And of course, the discouraging thing from Brother Bowen is he said, I only have 40 minutes. Kenny said, I had three hours. So we'll condense and see if we can't do what we need to do in the time that we have. I'm excited to be a part of your summer series, and I appreciate very much the invitation to be with you and to study with you. And this topic, I think the topic this evening is a wonderful way to begin. If you're going to talk about what the Bible teaches, you need to have some faith and confidence that you have what God intends for you to have, as far as his revealed Word is concerned.
If you go to Amazon, and probably none of you have gone to the Amazon site in the last five minutes, you'll find that Amazon will be willing to sell you several books which claim to identify the Lost books of the Bible. Those claims sometimes raise doubts in the minds of folks about the certainty of the biblical canon lost books of the Bible. Which lost books of the Bible? And how important are they? Skeptics of the Bible really love that because they make the observation or the argument that the Catholic Church determined the canon and they excluded any books that were not their liking, to the church's liking. And so these lost books of the Bible are these books that probably should be in the Bible, is kind of the premise of the of the sales. But the Catholic Church excluded them because the Catholic Church ruled the Canon with an iron hand. Produced the canon. In fact, back in the 1500s in 1545 and running all the way through 1563, was the Council of Trent. The Council of Trent was essentially the Counter Reformation. It was the Catholic Church's response to the challenges in doctrine and corruption that Protestants were making toward the Catholic Church, they didn't meet for eight years continuously. There were actually three different periods, and in the first period, one of the things that they pronounced as a as a conclusion was that the canon of Old and New Testament books was definitely fixed. And so the Council of Trent in the 16th century announced that they had fixed the canon. I want you to understand that's kind of similar to, maybe the New York Times tomorrow, announcing, as though it was, you know, unknown to anybody, that the Allies won World War Two. Well, they're a little late to the game. Everybody knows that. And it's also the case with the Roman Catholic Church and their pronouncement about the biblical canon, the claims of the Roman Catholic Church regarding the biblical canon lend fuel to the charges that biblical skeptics make. For instance, the Roman Catholic Church claims to be the mother of the Bible. The Roman Catholic Church claims that the church gave the scriptures to the world. If you were to look in a Catholic dictionary, you'd probably find a statement similar to this. This is from one of those dictionaries, "the canon of Holy Scripture is the list made by the Church of the inspired books which make up the Old and New Testament." Furthermore, the Roman Catholic Church numbers the books of the Bible at 73 not 66. What you see on the screen, hopefully. I once preached a whole sermon without realizing that the guy in the sound room had turned off my slides, and he didn't realize that I wasn't intending to use slides till we got to the invitation I said, as you can see, on the invitation slide, and he went because he thought I wasn't using slides. But today, I think we're in good shape. So I want you to notice that in the upper right hand corner, I put a little box there, indicating that this chart is reflecting the canon of the Bible as the Roman Catholic Church sees it. And so they have 73 books, 46 in the Old Testament, instead of 39 and those red circles indicate the seven books that have been added by the Roman Catholic Church to the Old Testament canon. There are some other pieces of literature that are also added to some of the biblical books, but we'll say more about that little bit later on.
So this evening, we want to answer the question Is the Bible, Does the Bible have only 66 books, or are there possibly other books that have been lost, that are inspired, that should be a part of our Bible? If you're like me, you always kind of perk up a little bit when you see something in the news that says the archeologists or some other discoverer has found another manuscript. I always kind of been interested in what they found. And I think there are some people who are convinced that at some point we'll be finding more books, more books than the 66 that currently constitute our English Bibles.
Before we launch into talking about 73 verses 66, we need to say a few things about inspiration and canonization, because those two concepts are involved in the determination of how many books really belong in the Bible. Inspiration, of course, is the process by which God revealed his word to men for the purpose of their public teaching and for their writing. That's just kind of a working definition of inspiration. But the scriptures claim that inspiration in numerous places. Because I'm trying to go from three hours to 40 minutes, we're not going to look at all of the passages that we could look at, but you're probably familiar with most of the ones that I'm going to suggest. On his last night prior to his betrayal, Jesus spoke with his disciples, and He made several promises regarding the guidance of the Holy Spirit. John 14 and verse 26, "the helper the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you." On that same occasion in chapter 16 and in verse 13, Jesus would say to the same individuals, "when the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all the truth. For He will not speak on His own authority, but whatever He hears, He will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come." And so the apostles were promised the guidance of the Holy Spirit, that the spirit would reveal to them all things, all truth, I should say. Paul in writing to the Corinthians in chapter one of First Corinthians would say the gospel is not human wisdom. The Corinthians seem to be dividing themselves on the basis of who taught them, as though Paul would teach one gospel and Peter would teach another gospel and Cephas another gospel. But Paul says the gospel is not proprietary to men. It's not a human message. It is a divine message, he argues in chapter two. And he also says that that divine message, even the very words that were used to reveal that message, were taught by the Holy Spirit. Verbal inspiration, not the concept of just delivering some idea, and Paul put it in his own words, but that the Holy Spirit, as you can see on the screen, taught the words that were to be used. In Second Peter, chapter one, Peter says in verses 20 and 21, "knowing that first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit," or moved by the Holy Spirit, I believe the New King James Version says. As you note on the charts, I'll be reading primarily from, I think, entirely this evening, from the ESV. If there's a different verse, it'll be indicated on the slide. And then finally, of course, a verse that we're all familiar with, I think, Second Timothy, two verses or three verses, 16 and 17, "All scripture is breathed out by God." A lot of versions say all scripture, or every scripture, is inspired of God, but inspiration talks about something that is breathed in. That's the concept of Inspire. But the text is actually talking not about the destination of Scripture, but its source. It is God breathed. That's the source of Scripture. "All scripture. Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work." And so inspiration is the concept of God revealing His Word through the Holy Spirit, as we saw in John 14 and 16, so that men could reveal the mystery of God in exactly the way that God intended for it to be revealed to be taught. God determined the canon, those books that are authoritative, those books that constitute the revealed will of God. He determined the Canon by inspiration, men only recognized the canon.
Canonization is essentially the process by which men recognized the authority of God that has been invested in certain books. I like the way it is expressed by I've got one more by Edward Young in his old testament introduction. He says canonical books, in other words, are those books which are regarded as divinely inspired. The criterion of a book's canonicity, therefore, is its inspiration. If a book has been inspired of God, it's canonical whether accepted by men as such or not. It is God and not man, who determines whether a book is to belong to the canon. And so he says in a little more eloquent fashion that God determines the canon, and the way he did that was by inspiring individuals, revealing His Word through the Holy Spirit to individuals who wrote it down. And that writing is authoritative. It's part of the canon. Any book is authoritative because it has its source in God. Or as Geisler and Nick say in their general introduction to the Bible, inspiration determines canonicity. And so there's a relationship between inspiration and canonicity. And the relationship is that when we're looking at the canon, what we want to try to talk about is what books are inspired by God, because that's the determining factor in whether or not a book is part of the canon or not.
So in short, God determined the canon, not the Roman Catholic Church, nor even the early church, the early Christians, they didn't determine the canon. God determined the Canon by inspiring various individuals in their writing. What men did was they recognized the distinctive characteristics of inspired literature, and so they recognized the canon, they didn't determine it. I like this comment also. This is again by E E Cairns in his book Christianity through the centuries, and he says "people often err by thinking that the Canon was set by church councils," and that's a very common viewpoint. "Such was not the case for the various church councils that pronounced upon the subject of the canon of the New Testament were merely stating publicly what had been widely accepted by the consciousness of the church for some time." That's why I said the Council of Trent when they made their pronouncement about the canon of the Bible, they're late to the game because the Canon had been determined by early Christians, I shouldn't say determined, but recognized by early Christians centuries before that. Canon was determined by God.
So how did Christians determine which books were inspired and which were not. They looked for the marks of inspiration. And I'm going to suggest to you, really, three different questions that I don't know that anybody had a, you know, a list of questions, but these were the things that they were looking for. And the first one was, if they're looking at a book to determine whether it's inspired or not, the question that arises is, was the book written by an apostle or prophet? If a book was written by a man of God, then its inspiration was accepted by the early Christians. We understand, of course, by reading through the New Testament various passages that deal with miraculous spiritual gifts that those gifts served both to reveal and to confirm the revelation that an individual would be given by God. And so if you got an individual who is preaching some message, he can confirm that that message is indeed from God by being empowered by God to perform miracles, obvious signs of divine power and approval. There are passages that describe that very function of miraculous spiritual gifts. One is Hebrews the second chapter and verse four, where the writer of Hebrews says "that God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to His will." Bore witness to the message that was being preached by the apostles and others. Just after the or, I should say, probably, as a part of the Great Commission in Mark 16 and verse 20, we find that the disciples, having been commissioned to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature, they went out and preached everywhere while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by accompanying signs. And so if an individual was claiming to be inspired or guided by the Holy Spirit, he could give evidence of that through these miraculous spiritual gifts. They're listed in first, Corinthians 12 and in other passages. The reason for that, of course, is that there were false prophets that were present. We read about those in Second Peter, chapter two, and so true prophets were provided the means to confirm the source of their message. So if you've got a book that's written by an apostle or a prophet of God who can confirm his message with a miraculous gift, then you can accept that as an inspired piece of literature, miracles were used to let people know who the true prophets were. That's kind of the short way of saying all that.
The second question that would need to be asked, and that is, does the book tell the truth about God? So we've got literature that we know is inspired because it's written by apostles of Jesus Christ, or by men recognized as prophets because of the confirmation of miracles. And so this other literature comes along. Maybe it's anonymous, like the Hebrew letter. And so the book of Hebrews needs to be compared to those things that are already accepted as inspired literature to make sure that there's a harmony, there's no contradictions there. That will become significant, because when we talk about the Old Testament, Apocrypha, oh, 60,70, minutes from now, I'm going to say that that's the problem with some of those books that have been added to the New Testament by the Roman Catholic Church. Does a book contradict anything that's already been revealed by God?
And then the third question, what kind of reception did this letter or book receive from its original readers? That becomes more important when you think about the function of miraculous spiritual gifts and miracles. If those miracles confirm the message, then it's important to know how the people who originally received that book or message, how they received it. Now there were canon lists, lists made by various individuals of what they thought were the Canon books, the canonical books, and those lists were probably necessary, or at least the reason for their existence was the proliferation of religious writings. There were a lot of things being written, beyond just the 27 books that we have in our New Testament, or even the 39 books of the Old Testament. And some of those writings were Orthodox, some of them were heretical. And so these lists were trying to make a distinction between those kinds of literature. But I'll tell you another factor that encouraged the recognition of the canon and the making of lists along that line is the onset of persecution. Into, certainly, into the second century, some would argue, even during the time of Domitian in the end of the first century, the Roman government began to persecute Christians, and there were times in the second and particularly in the third century, even into the beginning of the fourth century, when that persecution was very, very virulent. You could die just for having in your possession a book that was considered part of this Bible. What books are you willing to die for? Tom Sawyer? Its a good book. Its not the Bible. And so the impetus to say which books we really need to be able to possess and defend became an important question. I think the lists appeared for the purpose of clarifying, really what had already been accepted in most cases.
But rather than look at the list, you can find those in in good Bible introductions. But rather than look at the list, let's consider instead the usage of New Testament Books. A couple of things we need to remember as we think about the development of the canon. Of course, the New Testament books were written over several decades, perhaps, and communication and travel in those days was slow. That meant that it took longer for Christians who were separated by great distances to become acquainted with the same books. I find it amazing that I can take my phone and I can type in a message and send it to the other side of the world, and it gets there in seconds sometimes. We're spoiled. Because we can communicate rapidly with almost anyone around the world, even in third world countries out in the middle of the bush. But it wasn't that way in the first century. If you want to send a letter from Corinth to Rome, you usually had to have someone carry it, and that could be a journey of weeks, or even in some cases, depending on the distance, months. And so while these kinds of communication and transportation issues wouldn't necessarily affect the initial acceptance of a book, it would perhaps slow widespread familiarity of some books. If a book is written over in the eastern part of the empire, Christians in the western part of the Empire may not see that book for quite some time because of the things we're talking about.
However, even though early Christians couldn't convey information as rapidly as we can or even travel as easily and as rapidly as we can, there does seem to be evidence in the scriptures that inspired writings were circulating early in the history of the church. Let me give you some examples. Paul gives instructions to the Colossians in that letter that they were to share their epistle written to them by the apostle with the Laodiceans, and that the Laodiceans would share their epistle written by Paul with the Colossians. Colossians, chapter four and verse 16, Paul says, "And when this letter has been read among you," speaking of the Colossian letter, "have it also read in the church of the Laodiceans, and see that you also read the letter from Laodicea." If you're wondering about that letter to Laodicea, I'm sure Kenny will answer that question when he gets back. Peter addressed his First Epistle to Christians spread out over five Roman provinces. In the introduction to his first general letter, he writes to those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia, the area that we call Asia Minor now, or it's pretty much the area of Turkey. That's a huge area. This letter was obviously intended to circulate among this large group of Christians. It does seem also that Paul's epistles were circulating as a group had been collected and were circulating in that way. Listen to what Peter says in Second. Peter, three verses, 15 and 16. I don't know if you can read all of this, but he writes, "and count the patience of Our Lord His salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters, when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures." So Peter talks about multiple letters of Paul, and he also equates them with other scriptures. Scripture is used in somewhat of a technical sense to talk about authoritative literature or inspired literature, and Peter says Paul's writings were among that, were in that group. Revelations, clearly a circular letter being sent to seven churches in the province of Asia, and clearly intended to be circulated in that area.
Another thing that we can look at, and we won't have time to do that this evening, this is just kind of a scratching the surface type answer to the question that has been posed, but the quantity and the distribution of biblical manuscripts helps us to give us an outline of the canon, at least as recognized by the early disciples. Which books were copied and how often were they copied? That'll give you an idea of which books Christians, early Christians, considered to be inspired and thus authoritative and worthy of preservation.
Well, I introduced our study by talking about lost books. I want to talk a little bit more about some of these lost books. One of the things we do understand, I hope, is that the Jews, the Jewish nation, the Jews were the long term custodians of the Old Testament scriptures. The Jews only accepted 39 books in the Old Testament. Now, technically in the Old Testament, there were only 22 books in the Hebrew Bible, but that's essentially synonymous with the 39 books that we have in our English Bibles. The other books that have been added by some are listed there on the screen. As you note, there are seven books there, all of them written during the intertestamental period, a period from the time of, say, Malachi and Nehemiah at about 425 BC, to the time of Jesus Christ and the coming of John the Baptist and his preaching. These books were written during that period of time, in addition to the seven books that are listed there, if you look at the last item there, bullet item, there were several additions to some of the 39 books that are in our Bibles that are also included by the Roman Catholic Church. Well, is there good reason for those books to be there? Well, first of all, like I said, the Jews, who were best equipped to know these things, only accepted 39 books, Didn't accept these books that are on the screen. Furthermore, the apocryphal books of the Old Testament contain doctrine that, at times, is unbiblical or even heretical. For instance, in some of those books, the practice of praying for the dead is encouraged, or even salvation by works. The New Testament is very explicit about the fact that we're not saved by our own merit, by our own works. And yet these books preach those kind of doctrines. You remember the second question that Christians needed to look at as they tried to determine whether books were inspired or not. That second question is, does it tell the truth about God? Or, in other words, does it harmonize with other revealed truth? And some of these books clearly do not. Some of the books contain clear historical and/or chronological errors, not copyist errors, but chronological historical errors of the original writer. It's interesting that while the Jesus and the apostles quoted primarily out of the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, that's the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, they never quoted, as inspired, the apocryphal books. Now there are some allusions to a couple of the books, but they're not quoted as inspired, like other quotations, David through the Spirit wrote, or the Spirit says through the prophet, those are clear statements of inspiration when they elude or quote Old Testament books. Apocryphal books, not quoted in that way. It's ironic that while the Council of Trent was pronouncing the fixed canon of the Bible, including these additional apocryphal books, many Roman Catholic scholars during the Reformation period rejected the apocrypha. So it wasn't something that was a broad consensus, necessarily, across the Roman Catholic Church, among the scholars. Furthermore, the reformers at about the same time, we're talking about Luther, Calvin and individuals like them, Zwingli. The Reformers rejected the canonicity of the apocrypha.
Well, the lost books were never lost. What they were was rejected. And there's a huge difference. And I think it's a little bit disingenuous for people to suggest the Lost books, like somehow we've discovered something that people haven't known about for centuries, and so they're going to give you this grand new information. Fact of the matter is, Christians have known about these books for a long, long time, and not just the Old Testament Apocrypha, but other books that have been written in the New Testament period of time. And those books were not actually lost. They were rejected by early Christians as not being inspired. There were many other religious writings in the first century, and even well beyond that, besides the 27 books of the New Testament, and I've given you some examples here, you might even recognize some of these titles. You've heard of them, or perhaps you've read them. The Epistle of Barnabas, the Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, written toward the end of the first century. There's a second epistle of Clement, although it's questioned about whether he actually wrote it sometime later, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Didache, the teaching of the 12, as it's sometimes known, and on and on, the Epistle to the Laodiceans is a fourth century work. Here somebody decided to cash in on Colossians 4:16 but that's a different epistle. And so there were a lot of these works that were circulating or were known by early Christians, but rejected for variety of reasons. Some of these works made no claim for inspiration. Clement's First Epistle to Rome, for instance, in AD96 he quotes extensively from New Testament books, but he doesn't make any claim for his own writing to be inspired. And so some of these books simply were commentaries or encouragement, but made no claim for inspiration for themselves.
But a lot of the books that people tout as lost books, lost in the sense that they've kind of been pushed to the side of history while we focused on our 27 books of the New Testament, a lot of those books were Gnostic writings. You may be aware that Gnosticism was a false system of thought that arose during the latter part, actually, I would argue, during the middle and even into the latter part of the first century, bloomed in the second century, became a sect of people who believed a lot of different things that are contrary to the New Testament teaching. And so some of those writings of the Gospel of Thomas, for instance, the Gospel of Judas, those are Gnostic writings, and they were rejected by early Christians because they were contrary. They didn't agree with what was clearly inspired literature, the 27 books that we use in our New Testaments. And there's that point one more time, in case you missed it.
Well, let's conclude this evening by just making some observations. The biblical canon, first of all, was not determined by men. Roman Catholic Church didn't determine it. The early church didn't determine it. And by determine it, I mean the early church didn't make books canonical. Books are canonical, that is, they are authoritative. That's what a canon is. Canon is a Greek word that means a standard, a rod that became a standard. We talk about a measuring stick, like a yardstick. That's a cannon of sorts. It's an authoritative standard for measuring lengths, distance. But the early church did not pronounce books authoritative. God determined the Canon by inspiring various individuals to write things, and that inspiration is what actually determines canonization. So when you talk about the canon, you're talking about all the books that are clearly inspired of God. We also mentioned that the Jews, who were the original recipients of the Old Testament books, only recognized 39 books as inspired, 22 in the Hebrew Bible. That is an interesting discussion. It's really outside the purview of the time that we have allotted this evening to talk about the differences in the Old Testament canon as accepted by the Roman Catholic Church, and that of say, what's sometimes called the Protestant canon, the 39 books that we have in our Bibles. But I would just say that the Jews who understood the concept of inspiration and to whom these books were originally delivered, they recognized only 39 books. Most of the New Testament books were quickly recognized, and they were quoted extensively by The Apostolic fathers as inspired literature. Do not let that point escape you. We are 2000 years nearly removed from the writing of some of these books, but Clement was only removed perhaps 20 years or 30 years from the writing of some of the books that he quotes. The Apostolic Fathers, those who were of the same generation or younger contemporaries of the apostles and other prophets, they were in a much better position to know who wrote this book, under what circumstances it was written, whether or not it was inspired or not. Many of these early Christian writers quoted portions of the New Testament books in their writings, treating them as inspired and authoritative, thus canonical. We talk about these early writers as Apostolic Fathers, or if they were a little bit later in time, Church Fathers and they are very valuable, because they tell us what people who are much closer to the time of the writing of the New Testament documents, what those people thought about those books. They were in a much better position to know.
I'm going to leave you with two quotes, and then I'll stop for this evening. The first one is also from Geisler and Nix from their general introduction to the Bible, and they write, "As a result, the first 100 years of the existence of the 27 books of the New Testament reveal that virtually every one of them was quoted as authoritative and recognized as canonical by men who were themselves, the younger contemporaries of the apostolic age." So if you read that in 375, I'm not sure that's the correct date, but I'm going to use it as an example, 375, the Muritorian Canon was delivered, and it contains 19 or 20 books and not 27 someone says, Well You mean to tell me that the Canon took 400 years in order to be identified recognized? No, all 27 books of the New Testament were already being quoted as canonical by those who lived in the first century after their writing. That's what Geisler and Nix are saying. And there's something else that I think we need to pay attention to. I haven't emphasized this a great deal, but this is a quotation that I think is important for us to note, again, Geisler and Nix, but they say, "it seems highly unlikely that God would inspire a book in the first century that is necessary for faith and practice and then allow it to be lost for nearly 2000 years." From a providential and historical standpoint, the Canon has been closed for nearly 2000 years.
If you talk to a Muslim about the Quran, Muslims will tell you that the Quran has been perfectly preserved. There are absolutely no errors in it whatsoever. And the reason is God, whom they will refer to as Allah, that Allah has preserved that book. And Allah is the all powerful God. Now they would equate Allah with the God that we believe delivered to pentateuch in the other Old Testament scriptures. But then, when they talk to you about the Bible, unless, of course, they want to use the Bible to make one of their points. When they talk to you about the Bible, if there's a discrepancy between the Bible and the Quran, they will tell you that the Bible has been corrupted. Now you should be thinking of a question, and that question is, if God can keep the Quran perfectly, preserve it perfectly because it's his book, then tell me why the same God can't perfectly preserve his other book, the Bible. Well, I guess that depends on whether you worship a god with whose name begins with a big G or a little g. Do we believe that God has the power, the God who created the universe and continues its existence that that God could deliver His Word in a way that was free of error, initially, that's what we talk about when we talk about inspiration, and that that same God could ensure, through providential means, through the effort of men, that he could preserve that word so that no portion of it was lost? I guess that just depends on what you believe about God. Personally, I believe the God who created this universe can do that, and that's what Geisler and Nix is saying. They're saying that the same God who delivered this revelation in the first century should be able, by his providential care, to make sure that we have everything we need in order to serve him acceptably. All the books, no lost books. We've already talked about lost books. They're rejected books, books that God didn't reveal. Well, I hope that in some small way, perhaps, by the things that we talked about this evening, that you can have a greater confidence if, in fact, there was any need, you can have a greater confidence in your Bible, the 66 books of your Bible. That this is God's book. All of it. And there's nothing else out waiting in the wings to be discovered. And I think we're done. Thank you so much for your kind attention this evening.
