Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

The Canon of Scripture?

From a Greek word, meaning “rule” or “measuring stick”

Canonization:a real-world process

1. God has spoken.

2. God has spoken in these last daysthrough His Son.

3. The apostles of Jesus, as His commissioned representatives,spoke with His authority.

Presuppositions

The foundation of the churchMatthew 16:18And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

John 16:12-13I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. 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.

The foundation of the church

Ephesians 2:19-20So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone.

1. God has spoken.

2. God has spoken in these last daysthrough His Son.

3. The apostles of Jesus, as His commissioned representatives,spoke with His authority.

4. Jesus superintended the canonization process as part of His goal of buildingthe church on the foundation ofapostolic teaching.

Presuppositions

Christ oversaw the recognition of the canon

The necessary deduction from such a promise (Matt. 16:18) is that Christ's church would not fail to recognize the authentic witness to Himself when it was written down in books and letters. This assures us that the church would receive the genuine canon. The promise of Christ thus creates the presumption that the books of the orthodox and received canon are authentic.

– Sam Waldron

Christ oversaw the recognition of the canon

Which means…

1. We would expect the church to agree on the canon within short order

2. but we aren't surprised when we find that there was not immediate, unanimous consent.

1. The Roman Catholic ViewThe church authoritatively declares which books are canonical.

A foundational question:Who decides which books are canonical?

Possible answers:

PROBLEM: This reverses the proper order. Instead of the church being grounded on the authority of Scripture, Scripture becomes grounded onthe authority of the church.

A foundational question:Who decides which books are canonical?

Ephesians 2:19-20So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone.

Possible answers:

1. The Roman Catholic ViewThe church authoritatively declares which books are canonical

A foundational question:Who decides which books are canonical?

Possible answers:

3. The Reformed ViewCanonical books of the Bible areself-authenticating and can be recognized (through the testimony of the Holy Spirit by and with the Word) by their many divine excellencies such as their majesty, consent of its parts, light to convert and convince sinners, etc.)

A Self-Authenticating Canon

“The Church did not create the canon,but came to recognize, accept, affirm, and confirm the self-authenticating quality of certain documents that imposed themselves as such upon the church.”

– Bruce Metzger

“It is the simple truth to say that theNew Testament books became canonical because no one could stop them doing so.”

– William Barclay

What makes up the Biblical Canon?• In the Old Testament, the revelation

which was given to Moses and the Prophets was canonical.

– The NT often sums up the OT referring to it as “Moses and the Prophets” or “The Law and the Prophets”

• In the New Testament, Jesus’ teachings are canonical. And since He wrote no books but instead commissioned the apostles as His representatives, their teachings are canonical.

Which old covenant books arenon-canonical?

The Apocrypha

Why is the Apocrypha non-canonical?• Not in the Jewish canon

• Written in the 2nd century BC, long after the Spirit of prophecy had departed from Israel following its final prophets(Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi)

• They do not contain the divine,self-authenticating perfections oftrue Scripture.– For example, they lack the divine quality

of truthfulness.

Truth problems in the Apocrypha• The author of Tobit gets various dates

wrong.

• Judith incorrectly identifies Nebuchadnezzar as the ruler of the Assyrians, not the Babylonians.

• In Tobit, an angel tells a man that burning fish hearts and livers can ward off demons.

• 2 Maccabees teaches that praying for the dead can bring them atonement and deliverance from sin.

• Tobit teaches that salvation can be obtained by financial generosity.

The recognition of the NT canon

• Divine, self-authenticating qualities

• Apostolicity: written by an apostleor the associate of an apostle

• Orthodoxy: conforming to old covenant revelation and to the teaching of other books known to be apostolic

• Catholicity: accepted by a widenumber of churches

What criteria were used to recognizean authoritative book?

The early years of the canon

• In the first few decades of Christianity(early 1st century), much of the teachings of Christianity would have been oral tradition.

• By the end of the 1st century, Christians were receiving teaching both orally and by the written word.

140 AD: Marcion of Sinope

• Taught dualism: the spiritual realm was good while the material world was evil

• Denied the authority of the Old Testament

• Denied that the god of the Old Testament and New Testament were the same being.

• Created the first New Testament canon

• A heretic• Taught doecetism, the belief

that Jesus only appeared tobe human

The Church’s response to MarcionThe Church already had its roughly defined collection of Christian books which it was beginning to treat as Scripture. Nevertheless, if the idea of a specifically Christian canon was deeply rooted in the Church's own convictions and practice, Marcion played an important part in the practical emergence of one. What none of the great ecclesiastical centers, so far as we know, had done, and what his initiative seems to have provoked them to do, was to delimit their lists of authorized Christian books in a public, official way.

– J.N.D.Kelly

156 AD: Montanism

• Prophecies were accompanied by frenzied “ecstasies” (that resembled madness)

• The basis for their new revelation was that the promised coming of the Holy Spirit had started with the apostles, but was only perfected(and now complete) with new prophets.

• Montanus, along with two women disciples, claimed the ability to deliver new prophetic revelation.

The Church’s response to MontanismThe opposition to Montanism rested on the conviction that the Christian revelation was complete. Nothing new in principle could be added to the apostolic deposit of the faith. The Church, too, was cautious about ecstasies in which the prophet lost the use of his reason and identified himself with God. "I am come neither as an angel, nor as an ambassador, but as God the Father," said Montanus. Against such extravagant claims,the Church insisted on the sufficiency of the apostolic tradition.

– Cyril Richardson

What do we make of the lateness of the Eastern church to accept the full canon?

• They were not under pressure by the Western church to conform, which makes it all the more impressive that the Eastern and Western churches came to same firm commitments on the core of the canon.

• Though their conclusions were different than the Western church’s for a time, they still used the same criteria to examine books, including apostolicity and orthodoxy.

What do we make of the lateness of the Eastern church to accept the full canon?

• Because there was no church council to authoritatively decree what was canonical, it forced the church to wrestle with the text and work out these issues on its own.

• Because there was no church council deciding this, it shows that the canon was established not by the authority of men, but by the self-authenticating authority of the scriptural books themselves.

Should other books have beenincluded in the New Testament?

Walter Bauer

• Early Christianity was a mess, with mass disagreement over Christian theology.

• There was no “Christianity”. There were many different “Christianities” fighting for supremacy.

• Each “Christianity” had its own books.

• Therefore the 27 books we have should not be considered special or privileged. They simply represent the books belonging to the Christian sect that won and became dominant.

The media loves a conspiracy theory

What about the apocryphal gospels?• All of them date to the 2nd century or

later

• None of them were ever serious contenders for canonization.

• Manuscript evidence shows how muchmore popular the canonical books were– We have over 60 NT manuscripts dating

back to the 2nd-3rd century.

– That includes 18 manuscripts of John

– In that same time period, we have 17 manuscripts of all the apocryphal gospels combined (Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Mary, Gospel of Peter, Protevangelium of James, and all others)

• The canonical books were cited far more frequently than the false gospels.

Clementof Alexandria

c.150-215 A.D.

Book cited Number of citations

Matthew 757

Mark 182

Luke 402

John 331

All other apocryphal gospels (combined)

17

What about the apocryphal gospels?

The Gospel of Thomas

• Contains allegedly secret sayings of Christ that He delivered to Thomas.

• The most famous of the apocryphal gospels…

• …but not one that ever had even a remote chance of being considered canonical

• Very infrequently cited… and when it was cited it was only in order to condemn it.

The Gospel of ThomasGospel of Thomas 1:3Jesus said, "If those who lead you say to you, 'See, the kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father.

The Gospel of ThomasGospel of Thomas 1:114Simon Peter said to him, “Let Mary leave us,for women are not worthy of life.”

Jesus said, “I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.”

The Gospel of Peter

Conclusion

• This process was a real-world process. The full recognition of the canon coincided with the growth and maturing of the church itself.

“The Church did not create the canon,but came to recognize, accept, affirm, and confirm the self-authenticating quality of certain documents that imposed themselves as such upon the church.”

– Bruce Metzger

Conclusion• Our presupposition is that God guided

the process of canonization, guaranteeing that His people would recognize His words.

• Ultimately, our faith in the Bible is based on the self-authenticating nature of Scripture itself. History and church councils do not prove that we have God’s word. Nevertheless our faith can be strengthened by seeing how history supports the truth that the New Testament we have is the complete, authoritative and sufficient revelation of Christ to His church.