Five Misconceptions about the Origins of the New Testament

well great to see you guys again thanks for coming back out this is installment three of our little journey through my time with you and I see a few familiar faces back so apparently if you're back that's not a bad sign so and some new faces as well so I had three sessions with you throughout our time together and the first was sort of a big overview of how to think Christianly in a hostile world that was the chaplain here yesterday and then if you were there at the 4:00 p.m. session I talked about apocryphal Gospels Lost Gospels and what makes our Gospels unique and sort of gave an apologia for the canonical for when we had that conversation yesterday we started down the path to talking about this whole realm of study of mine on the origins and development of the New Testament canon and so that's what I want to focus our last session on today is sort of how the Canon was put together and where it came from and why we should think that's a reliable process at all and that's such a massive topic that I've thought about how to sort of boil it down in a way you can understand the day and that I think is profitable for our conversation and so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna lay out the the biggest misconceptions about the origins of the New Testament Canon so this is I'm laying out five of what I see are the biggest misunderstandings that people have about how the New Testament Canon was formed and so this is gonna be I hope about 20 minutes of me laying that out and then I want to leave about 15 minutes for Q&A because I think that's where the interesting conversation can happen so it's gonna be more informal than a sermon obviously not a full lecture really like yesterday it's sort of a and in between excuse me and in between way of speaking now as we get through that let me say that you know some of you're gonna be asking questions about where can I go for more after this and you know grant asked me to maybe leave a book list at some point I'll try to put something like that together but in the meantime let me just point you to my website so if you're interested in more on canon and text and a biblical authority i have a website called cannon fodder if you get the pun and that's canon with one end you haven't figured it out yet the biblical canon has one and the canon like boom canon has two ends right so students always make that mistake in their papers okay right candid with two N's and I'm always marking it up all the time so little forewarning for you there so Kanan with one end cannon fodder is the name of my my website or you could just look up my name Michael J Kruger comm and you'll see it on that side I have lectures videos articles blog posts all kinds of material that you can go deeper into this and certainly if you really want to go deeper into this then there's some books on there that I've written that I think you'll benefit from so that's sort of the where to go when you're done but for our purposes here I have these five sort of misconceptions on Canon I want to lay out for you in our time together now to sort of set the stage for this I want to begin by taking us back about 15 years now 15 years many of you were you know running around his toddler so leaving that aside for the moment going back 15 years there is a very famous book that was published that you know about because you heard about it it was made into a major motion picture called The Da Vinci Code published in about 2003 now this was a fictional book by a novelist by the name of Dan Brown and he in that book explores all kinds of things related to early Christianity and of course one of his biggest claims in the book is that Jesus was married and had kids and all this well I'm not gonna discuss that but what's interesting about that book and if if you caught sort of the residual impact of that book even later as you grew up you realize that book talked a lot about the origins of the New Testament canon I talked about how the books were put together and how the process worked and who made the decisions and when it happened and in how it was done and what books were left out and all these kinds of things it was a very provocative and I will say entertaining book about the origins of Christianity at the same time it was on a historical level you know grossly inaccurate almost on every turn time and time again Dan Brown would make claims about the way that came in formed and how it happened that are just flat-out wrong and just made up and mistaken and what was interesting about that book is the sort of cultural impact it had on the way people think about Canon but also it's what's interesting about that book is the sheer panic that was caused with an evangelical Christianity over it I can tell you of all the scholarly books have been published there I I don't hear hardly a peep from people maybe because I don't read them which may be part of the problem right but in terms of the fictional book that a Vinci Code I cannot tell you how many emails and phone calls and it knocks on my door of people begging for explanations well what how do we refute Dan Brown I'm like I don't have to review daya Brown right Dan Brown is a novelist who just made things up so there's no reason to refute it but you realize people are looking for answers so the Canon questions of big one okay and so what we're dealing with here is this question of how it was put together we're just talking about the New Testament in this session and sort of what took place so much to say on this but let me jump into my five misconceptions for you these might be misconceptions you have or this might be misconceptions you've heard of or some of these you might even didn't even know we're misconceptions I'm gonna walk through five and then I'll take your questions let's start with the first one first misconception is this that Christianity was a purely oral religion that was not interested at all in books or writing things down or anything related to a Canon this is a widespread misconception out there by the way all these misconceptions you can find both on the internet you find anything on the Internet I mean in the scholarly world this was a big one that's circulating all around and the narrative goes something like this that the idea of a Canon is a late after the fact idea probably born in the third or fourth century and someone decided we should have books that catalog our faith but in the earliest generations Christians weren't interested in such things we're told they were interested in just passing down their teachings by word of mouth they didn't like books they didn't weren't interested in books it was all an oral religion anyway they were just interested in sort of proclamation and the whole in Scripture raishin idea is a late idea that's really out of sync with the values of early Christianity now what's lurking behind that misconception is a whole field of study that you may have picked up on your religion classes called forum criticism which is this idea that everything in early Christianity was oral by word of mouth and not looking to the scriptural text now if you believe this misconception you can see how hard it is to think that there would be an early Canon because you're thinking about questions were interested in such things the last thing on their mind was books Christians were too centered in sort of world word-of-mouth passing things down and this idea of having a collection of authoritative books was so foreign so the argument goes now I've responded to this objection in a number of my different writings but just real quickly on this first one this I think misses the boat massively in terms of the nature of really Christianity and in fact I think you already intuitively know how to respond to this think about Christianity's early heritage the heritage of early Christians was a Jewish heritage the earliest Christians were were Jews they would worship the temple and they had an Old Testament already from the beginning Christians were people of the book just by virtue of being Jews who inherited a book a written text beyond that we have records that indicate that Christians wrote and wrote very early some of our earliest Christian writings are in the 40s of the first century particularly James and Galatians Christians are already writing books and these weren't books that were sort of you know thin sort of shallow type writings that show they're really not interested in written things these are the kind of writings that interact with the Old Testament texts and nuanced and sophisticated way showing that Christians were textual they were textually oriented and they were interested in books above and beyond that one of the things that's interesting is that Christians had their own distinctive book technology this is something a lot of people don't know and I've also written about this in other places when Christians started to ride they actually had their own format for doing it everything up to this point in ancient role was on Scrolls okay or what we would call roles where you roll up each end and it's writing only on one side of the page Christians actually from the very beginning wrote on what are called codices or a codex where you have writings on both sides of the page Christians did this early they did this extensively without exception hardly and what you realize is that Christians in some sense had their own book technology that developed along with their religious faith showing that they were very textually oriented what does all that mean what all that means is is that the idea that that Christianity is an oral religion that would have kept it from thinking in canonical categories this doesn't work I would argue that Christians were texturally sort of directed from the very beginning they're already sort of textually attuned they are already fought in categories like books and documents if so then you would expect that a New Testament Canon might emerge quite early in that sort of scenario which in fact I've argued in a number of places that's exactly what happened that's misconception one we mentioned second one and this is a biggie this is maybe one of the most common among seven Jellicle I would imagine even common here at covenant college common even among people I talk in an academic community with and here's the second misconception and that is this that the authors of the New Testament did not think they were writing Scripture the authors of the New Testament did not think they were writing Scripture there's just widespread sort of assumption out there that when the New Testament authors wrote they kind of had no idea what they were doing they were just writing books letters when Paul wrote a letter Romans back he was just writing his advice to the Church of Rome he's just writing a letter like I would write a letter and that when the Gospel writers are writing their Gospels well they're just historical documents like any historical document and so there's the sense that writers wrote unaware of their own authority with no intention that their books would be authoritative documents and then it was only much later that the church looked at those books and decided they should be Scripture so the way the narrative works is Paul wrote Romans or Luke wrote Luke and these books just sat around for a couple hundred years and people used them yeah and liked them but it wasn't too much layer to the church looked at these books and go you know what these books are great in fact they're so great I think we should call these books Scripture what do you think you should call these yeah I think we should yeah all in favor you know it's like a Presbyterian meeting right all in favor raise your hand okay so these are the books that we now regard as Scripture or in you know sort of infused with scriptural authority now that narrative is also widespread it's a big misconception and if you believe that misconception here's what's gonna happen you're gonna you're gonna think the Canon the New Testament Canon is a very late development because if the New Testament writers weren't thinking they were writing with authority then no one would have thought they're writing with authority in the earliest centuries and it wouldn't have been told much much later that someone sort of said we got I think of these books is authoritative but it would have been sort of artificial and have been late and it would been out of sync with what the original authors were intending anyway and so this whole idea of a New Testament the book seems utterly foreign as a result of that idea now I think the evidence against this misconception is vast I've gone through verse after verse showing this both in the Gospels and the letters of Paul and other letters in the New Testament and one of my books called the question of Canon I won't go into all that here but I do want to read one verse that I think captures what I'm getting at and it's a verse in first Corinthians once you listen what Paul says in this one verse first Corinthians 14 he says this if anyone thinks he's a prophet or spiritual let him recognize that the things which I write to you are the Lord's commandment but if anyone does not recognize this he is not recognized now that little statement tucked away in 1st Corinthians Paul says something remarkable basically says if you consider yourself spiritually minded maybe even you have the gift of prophecy then you'll know that what I'm writing to you is the very commandment of the Lord and by Lord here he means Jesus what Paul is doing here is he's doing what apostles do is they speak for Christ there is mouthpiece they write with his authority so if an apostle that bears the authority of Christ wrote things that are that bear Christ's Authority those books would have been seen from the very start as having the highest level of authority you could have he in fact is equated his own words here not just oral words I might add notice what he says the things which I write to you are the Lord's command Paul spoke for Jesus so did the other apostles and I would argue to all the books of the New Testament contained that Apple stolid teaching what does that mean that means that you didn't have to wait to the fourth century for for you to have the beginnings of a Canon because as soon as Paul wrote these books and people recognized his apostolic Authority those books would have already from the start taken on a certain level of authority in the lives of believers the kind of authority that Paul says if you don't recognize them then you're not recognized that's a form of sort of church discipline it's like if you can't recognize that I speak for Christ and you are on the outs in terms of your connection to Christ that's just one example of many that I think are in the New Testament that show you that when the New Testament was written there was an inherent organic maybe natural sense that these books were not just occasional documents but written with Allah of authority that makes its make sense why they ended up in our Bibles third misconception about the New Testament canon and that is that early Christians disagreed widely over which books belonged in the New Testament early Christians disagreed widely over which books belong in the New Testament there's a narrative that goes with this misconception too and this was all over the da Vinci Code if you read that book and that idea is that well an early Christianity no one really knew what to read and Christians were all over the place and they're reading this and they're reading that and there was a bunch of disagreement and if you're at my lecture yesterday I mentioned the name Walter Bauer who fed this sort of this idea that Christians couldn't get along and you agree on much of anything and it was a sort of this literary free-for-all and it was only till the 4th century or fifth century that the church decided to clamp down on this sort of literary diversity and sort of decide well we know we need to have a Canon D here's what it is and you know love it or hate it or like it or not these are the books and tough luck if you don't write that kind of sort of top-down make the Canon happen and before that we're told Christians just didn't agree they read all kinds of books now I suppose if you're writing a book like The Da Vinci Code or you just want to be a skeptic about Christianity that's a great narrative and it makes it look like your Bibles are the product of a political move in the 4th century and before that no one agreed on much of anything but like I said in my lecture yesterday that only works if you don't look at the storica facts because we look at historical facts that's not actually what we see in fact here's what we do see what we see as early as the 2nd century and by the way that's very early because the last book of the New Testament in the in the 90s right so when you talk about 2nd century you're right on the edge of when the final New Testament book was written as early as the 2nd century we see what we would call a core Canon in place very early and this word core is a word I use in a lot of my writings and I think it's helpful to think of it this way so you have 27 books total in your New Testaments the core is probably what you would call 21 out of or 22 out of the 27 we're already in place by the middle of the 2nd century so what includes the core well four Gospels 13 letters of Paul books like first Peter first John Hebrews Revelation those kinds of books make up effectively the core with some slight variance 21 maybe 22 out of 27 that was in place probably from the early to middle second century in fact so in place was it that there wasn't really any meaningful disagreement about that now what does that tell you what that tells you is a couple things first of all Christians weren't confused mainly about what to read apparently they were quite clear at least on the core about what to read and pretty well convinced that these were the right books the other thing it tells you I think that's interesting is that Christians disagreements focus mainly on just a handful of books I don't know if you've thought much about this but when people do talk about Christians disagreeing it's almost always about books like second Peter second third John Jude maybe James as most of the disagreements centered on books like that and if you just listen to that list of books you realize one of those things that makes those books all have something in common is they're all very small most of our disagreements were about little books interestingly and just a handful of those at best and on one level that there's an inherent sense to that right because little books have less in them and therefore used less often most most of the time and if they use less often than one part of the Empire may not know about the book before another part and there's sort of a natural opportunity for disagreement and that's what took place I mean when's the last time you heard a sermon from Chuck and John Wright or Jude was last time you read Jude right last time I read Jude okay so it's these are books we don't use as much what we realized then is that all this talk about disagreements actually kind of evaporates in a vapor when you realize that they only have to do with just four or five books and really the core books were established at a very early time so much so that there really was never any meaningful disagreement about them now if that's true then that means when someone says what's the date of the Canon depends what they mean right if you mean when is everything settled and all the mopping up exercises are done and everybody's 100% finally all they're okay probably fourth century but if you're saying when was there a meaningful core that everybody was already using without much disagreement well then now it's second century right so you have to realize that distinction is a big misconception and that's one that I think is important to address fourth misconception apocryphal books were as popular or more popular than New Testament books this is a favorite and this of course was pretty much near and dear to the the da vinci code line which is in the book The Da Vinci Code there's the author says well there's a T apocryphal Gospels out there and these are all just as popular as the canonical ones and everybody read them and so on and there's this sense that material outside the New Testament was just as popular as the material that made it inside and therefore the only reason that some material made it inside is for probably some political reason which I'll get to in a moment but is that true that these other books were just as popular not at all how do you measure the popularity of a book in ancient world lots of ways to do this let me just mention a couple one is by how often that book was cited or quoted by early patristic writers so we can just measure and count citations how often is say the Gospel Thomas cited versus say the Gospel of Luke or the gospel of Peter versus the Gospel of John or any other apocryphal books out there in when you do that sort of analysis it's not even close I mean we're talking about take clement of alexandria for example quotes the canonical gospels thousands of times in quotes apocryphal gospels probably fifteen times so if you look at citation frequency it's not even close in terms of popularity and usefulness of a book another way to measure popularity is by manuscripts left behind we can count these we can see these we can know how many there are left behind I mentioned this briefly in my lecture yesterday is it when you look at this fact - we can tell what books were copied and what books were read by the the manuscript Rendon's we have and when it comes to the New Testament we have hundreds and hundreds of copies in the early centuries and thousands overall and apocryphal Gospels once again are lacking one of the things that scholars have noticed prickly in places in some of our most populous finds in Egypt is there they're looking at these vast discoveries of manuscripts and they're asking a very obvious question is it where is all the apocryphal writings they're not hearing any meaningful numbers we get canonical writings all over the place where are the apocryphal writings if they're as popular as the is the canonical ones where are they of course the classic skeptic will say well there they were all burned by the by the Orthodox people right or something like this that's not that's not true there's no book burning in these early centuries by anybody in fact only people burning books in the early centuries was the greco-roman government burning the Christian books not-not-not not conservative Christians burning heretical books if you want to talk about heretical book burning that's way way much later you can't come up with that as an answer the fact is they weren't as popular in fact for the gospel Thomas which gets all the press it's hardly ever mentioned by Church Fathers and when it is it's it's it's just fundamentally and widely condemned that's radical last misconception is my favorite this actually has captured quite well in the book The Da Vinci Code - and that is the New Testament was decided by Constantine at the Council of Nicaea so this misconception is that if you want to know where the New Testament really was made it was made at the Council of Nicaea on 325 and Constantine was the guy who did it because we all know that Constantine was that sort of you know nefarious emperor who took over the world and made Christianity official and sort of stamped his his theology and his preferences on everything and he created a can and enforce it on the church and on and on it goes and it's this big political explanation that that's a fun one in fact it's all over the book The DaVinci codes all over the Internet even as Google New Testament Canon and Constantine and you'll find plenty here's the problem is it that's absolutely false in every way the Council of Nicaea which you probably know a good bit about here at covenant college is got nothing to do with the formation of the New Testament Canon it's not even talked about the council in Nicaea was about articulating the relationship between Jesus and God about articulating the divinity of Jesus effectively by the way it wasn't about deciding the divinity of Jesus which is another misconception about Nicaea was about the best way to say it the best way to articulate it over and against other detractors but it had nothing to do with the Canon in Noir Constantin consignee couldn't create the cannon it was already over several hundred years already been in place buying it by then so once again a political sort of conspiracy here that has no merit I think what you'll find in all five of these misconceptions is people believe what they want to believe and if you can give them a thirty second thing to believe that fits what they are with it with what they already want to believe they don't want to go further they don't want to look any deeper they just happy with that because it can it can alleviate them of any concern about whether the new testament it's the right collection of books and they can move on moreover we have a culture that loves conspiracy theories we love the idea that for thousands of years people have thought it was this way and only now with the help of modern scholars we realized was all false or something like this and that's just very rare that ever happens okay the fact of the matter is none of these conspiracy theories are valid what you have at the end of the day is a Canon that emerges very naturally and early and early Christianity made up what we can see is a core set of books that were finally solidified in the 4th century okay so I've walked through these five misconceptions was that quick well yeah that's really quick right you're thinking about they there's so much to say about each of those but this is sort of fodder for our discussion and I'm looking at my clock here we've got about you know good good little bit of time left for your Q&A which I want to interact with these five misconceptions other misconceptions you've heard or whatever else is on your minds over these matters so let's open it up for for questions yes yeah about the what second Warren yes the the second miss she's asking about more resources on the second misconception about whether the authors thought they were writing scripture or not actually there's there's not been that much written on this I've written out of myself and so I have to sort of recommend my book here so I wrote a book called the question of Canon for IVP academic came out in 2013 I think chapter three or four is the entire chapter is on that one point so read to your heart's content you can send me an email if you think it's rubbish yep yeah so we didn't hear the question how come the Catholic Church has different books in us and that's a really good question in fact I got that in my lecture yesterday and I get it often so the Catholic Church is you know has what's called the Apocrypha and usually there's that there's a verbal problem here cuz when we hear when I talk about apocryphal Gospels people sometimes think I'm talking about the Old Testament Apocrypha so those are two different things the Old Testament Apocrypha is that the collection of books that the Roman Catholics adopted at the Council of Trent in the 16th century which are not in our Protestant Bibles that's an Old Testament Canon issue not that it's not germane for this discussion but that is a difference between Rome and Protestants why do Protestants not have those books in our Bible a very simple answer because when you look at the Old Testament Canon in the time of Jesus and the time of the Apostles and all the books they sat it from they did not ever consider those extra books of Scripture not a single instance anywhere in the New Testament do they cite those books as Scripture just let that sink in for a moment think how many Old Testament citations we have in the New Testament hundreds thousands if you took talk about allusions I mean it's incredible number and not a single time that Jesus or Paul or Peter or John ever reference these books as Scripture that's exactly why Protestants have a different collection yep did it sorry I'm having trouble hearing here but did the Gospel of Thomas referenced the Old Testament Apocrypha is that your question yeah well I didn't say they weren't cited I said they weren't cited as Scripture so there are there are evidence that early Christians use those books old testament of pocket because there are well-known Jewish books and found them useful but there's no indication that ever used in my Scripture yeah yeah right here yeah great question if you didn't hear this question how does doubts about authorship affect a books place in the candid well Hebrews is the only anonymous book we have in the New Testament now of course we have books that have names attached them that the higher critical scholars doubt I'm not gonna go through those one by one and sort of refute them Hebrews people say well how could here a book in a can that you don't know who the author is we'll see I think when we ask the question that way we're probably asking the question just slightly in a different way than we should be asking it what we want to ask is does this book have a do we have a reason I think this book contains authoritative apostolic teaching that's really the question to ask now if the book is written by an apostle there's your answer the book is not written by apostle you have to have good reason to end a book his position in such a way to get a Thorat aid of apostolic teaching Luke is a good example of this Luke's not an apostle but he says in his prologue we know this from other places to that hey I'm basically an apple stall that guy I'm in the apostolic orbit what I'm giving you effectively is from the eyewitnesses who were there in the beginning curiously Hebrews does the same thing Hebrews in chapter 2 the author says basically I'm not myself an apostle but I got this from the Apostles the eyewitnesses from the beginning so he in one sense positions his book as being an apostolic book for that very reason we also have in Hebrews a reference to Timothy in a reference to other Apostolic people see it's clear that the data Hebrews and everything situates in a place where we can be confident that it contains the kind of apostolic tradition we would want it to contain incidentally this is why some people think Luke's the author of Hebrews sidenote I don't necessarily that but in theory yeah wossamotta new Tizen writings 40 ad in the first century um trying to understand your exact question so do we have like copies of the Old Testaments that what you're asking about or when was the Old Testament written is that well over a very long period of time because the old house was written over a bigger chunk than the new right the new we can we can see is written really from the 40s to the 90s of the first century the Old Testament of course has significant range because from Moses basically up to the sort of period of the Exile so there's a bigger range what we know a lot about sort of the transmission of the Old Testament through the Dead Sea Scrolls discoveries which is a fascinating discussion if you know I told the story yesterday about the discovery of the of the apocryphal Gospels the Gnostic Gospels in a kamati the story of the discovery that Dead Sea Scrolls equally fascinating you'll be curious to know that that both kinds of books were discovered by shepherds now hilarious it's like that's fitting in fact the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered by a shepherd looking for lost sheep yeah you think you made that up I didn't that's actually what happened they were looking for lost sheep and found the Dead Sea Scrolls you had a second question though yeah so that's a great way to ask the question did when Paul wrote for example an this is maybe another way to rephrase your question that he foresee this Canon that he was gonna be a part of well certainly not in the total final makeup it's not like Paul had in his head why no there's gonna be 27 books and I'm one of them or what no that's not they didn't it could not have foreseen that but that's a different question than asking whether the earliest Christians would have received Paul's letter as a written text that board the authority of Christ and guided the church I think undoubtedly that's true now you call that Scripture well it doesn't really matter whether you call it Scripture it's functioning like Scripture it says authoritative in Scripture in fact there's indication there early Christianity that these New Testament books had an authority that in some ways was even superseding the old so if the old was scripture the new whatever you wanted to call it and eventually of course it was called Scripture it was as authoritative if not even more why because it was Christ teaching in if you were a Christian that there's no higher authority than authority of Christ great question time for a couple more go ahead first bring this 14 37 and 38 ya know it's a great question you should have been in my lecture yesterday so I actually talked about this book it's called the infancy Gospel of Thomas oh you did okay yeah it was from that so yeah so yeah so you recall then I told that story about the Jesus making sort of birds out of clay and then they fly away yeah that was in the MT Gospel Thomas which is a late apocryphal legendary story of Jesus as a kid probably third century production and by the way we have numerous infancy Gospels and people sort of you know hypothesizing what Jesus would've been like as a kid and there's the protoevangelium of james it just for the most famous and then there's others as well sure well because we me by suggest so do I think you should do your devotions in the Gospel of Thomas no right should you as a kated believer be aware of the kind of stuff out there and read these things sure I think I'd be great I don't think you have to to be a faithful Christian you know how people go through life love Jesus be a faithful Christian and having never read the gospel of Peter or what have you but you you all are obviously here at this lecture so you're intellectually engaged in this yeah I would encourage you to read those books you know in my writings I take the readers through a lot of these books so they can see the differences and learn about them okay we have time for one more last question I think 1135 grant is that what we're at okay so we're up to it yep okay good last question so the question was what do we know about Q right and who wrote Q this is a fascinating rule of study I covered this extensively in my seminary class when Gospels so you don't know what you as Q is a is a scholarly idea of an early source behind the Gospels okay particularly that explains how Matthew and Luke got their material they supposedly used this earlier source we call Q it's from the German word quelle a which means source so that's what we call it Q what's interesting though about Q is it's purely hypothetical it's just a reconstructed idea of what the early source might be based on what you have in Matthew what you have in Luke and what's not in mark and so scholars have kind of gone crazy with this reconstruction I joke with my students that they can check you out from the library if they're interested that's true you go to a library and look up Q and you can check it out the Q gospel and they act like it's real and that you have it and that you can reconstruct it and even have like a Q community that wrote it now and they've reconstructed that and they've kind of gone to all down those paths and at the end of the day I'm just remind people it doesn't actually exist we haven't found it it's a it's a theory I think it has an interesting aspects to it it may it may tap into some real things that took place in early Christianity in terms of sources but there's we don't know what it looked like and therefore I think any reconstructions that are really heavily based on Q probably are limited in what we can be sure about okay I think we're having to stop there yeah you know you don't get to ask questions sorry yeah yeah go ahead yes yeah absolutely so the question was we didn't hear it how soon did these books that Paul wrote for example get copied it was that much later or earlier I think I think immediately let me explain in the ancient world when you'd write a letter I know this sounds strange you usually use the scribe to write it people often did not write their own letters and Paul used scribes before you sent the letter off you'd make your own copy of it that was actually par for the course so what that meant is is it before the letter was sent your ascribe and make a second copy that you would keep for your own collection so you actually would keep a collection of your own letters it's not that different than the way email works actually so when you send out an email and you wonder what you wrote to your buddy and you look on it again you're like well you just check you're out you're you're sent file and see what you wrote you have your own copy of your own email well it's kinda like that in ancient world and so when was the first copy of say Romans made probably by Paul's own scribe soon after you read it in fact I think this is why we have the Canon of Paul's letters we do I think the 13 letters up although we have were probably the 13 letters that Paul had in his own collection okay we'll stop there I'll be up here for more Q&A afterwards if you want to talk and love to meet you so thanks for being here

Channel: Covenant College

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Keywords: Covenant College, Presbyterian College, Christian University, Chattanooga, Atlanta, Macon, Nashville, Knoxville, Birmingham, Huntsville

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Length: 35min 57sec (2157 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 27 2019