James White & Michael Kruger on the Biblical Canon

well good morning I'm hoping that there is a great deal of caffeine coursing through your veins I see a few of you still doing the infusion process even now that's good we only have about an hour in fact the the clocks are counting down from is terrible and I've been looking forward to this greatly some of you may have heard a program I did on my program called the dividing line I don't know about two three years ago I forget how long ago it was dr. Kreuger joined us and we're sorting to be reprising that because the subject of our discussion is the Canon of Scripture and you might say what does that have to do with discipleship I think it's absolutely central because we have a a Bible in front of us I was just looking at the Bibles available in the in the back and I did not find a single one with the Gospel of Thomas in it is anatomies and surprisingly I didn't find any with Judith or Maccabees in it as well and that actually raises issues today and as we go into universities there are gonna be many people especially the devotees of Bart Ehrman who you will well know that are going to challenge our young people well why don't you have those books from the what are called the Old Testament Apocrypha or especially these days why aren't you on the cutting edge and following all those dead Gnostics we've dug up out of the ground thanks to Oxyrhynchus and and naga hamadi and so these are really I think vitally important questions for us to deal with this morning but it will require you to get up and get with us pretty pretty quickly here this morning and it's great to see such a such a good group you have I think one of the leading voices on this subject given the two books and articles so what what how much do you think you've written on this this particular subject now those are two primary books or there are other articles things like that well it's a great question make sure I'm on here mom I can hear you okay great yeah well I've got two primary books for both them one that I think people think about his cannon revisited which was written I think 2012 and thats lays out a theological model for cannon and then I've also got the question of cannon which deals more with historical models but I cover cannon in other places too my book the heresy of orthodoxy has a couple sections on cannon and then my newest book on second century Christianity expulso has a section on cannon I don't I didn't get my copy of this yeah I know I need to get that mail to you sorry we had even talked about that once yeah anyway anyhow I'll text my right now get that sent out to you right away so you're writing these books on a subject that let's just be honest how many sermons are going to even touch upon this subject this coming Lord's Day in solid the evangelical Reformed biblical churches I mean what called you to become an expert on one of the most unpopular subjects yeah well actually when they scheduled this session at 8:30 this morning I was thinking was just me you and me chatting with ourselves I mean who comes out to hear about cannon but yeah I mean actually what you said is exactly right the average church never really talks about or addresses it of the people as a collective whole maybe there'll be a sunday-school class here and there about it but no one really addresses it so you have this disparity between what's being talked about in the church and what people are struggling with in the pew and my experience is that people do struggle with this in the pew because they get bombarded with it from a number of different sources and as you've noted as well in the last probably 20 25 years what's interesting to see is that the Academy is starting to write more for the laymen than they ever used to before Herman himself was a really a pioneer about this he just taught a writing popular level books about things like textual criticism and suddenly now everyone in the pew has all these questions and a lot of pastors don't really know what to do and don't really know what the answers are so that's part of the reason while I'm writing mine exactly now I remember very very clearly I think I've shared the story with you I was forced into this area primarily through dialogues with Roman Catholics those the first that was the first group that I was dealing with and of course their argument is you're biting the hand that feeds you in seminary I had been given the Council of Hippo Carthage type of thing where you know you have this conciliar kind of authority behind the can of Scripture and once you go that direction it's sort of hard to stop and say okay I'll accept that Authority up to this point but then beyond that I'm not going to accept what was being said at the same councils and I went out for a bike ride as you know I'm a rather rabid cyclist and I forget where I was I was on 51st Avenue somewhere when all of a sudden I realized wait a minute the Canon is a theological thing first and foremost if we start from historical perspective we can only go so far we're never gonna get to what we believe the Canon actually is if we start from that perspective I remember turning around and riding home because I was so afraid by the time I got back I'd forget what I thought it so I wrote it down then went back out and finish the ride and lo and behold it years later I'm reading your books going I'm glad I'm not the only one this is this is very very exciting but the key issue I want to make sure that we get to before we get sort of lost in some of the weeds which you can get lost in the issue of the Canon is a theological issue for us first and foremost because of the nature of Scripture and yet if you go other than your books and couple little chapters in mind and if you dig back into Warfield some place he touched on some of this stuff too but if you just put Canon into Amazon what's gonna come back are gonna be books that are going to direct you to well this early church father had this list of this early church father at that list and then you have this development here and you have that development there why does there need to be a different approach I mean you're taking a different approach yeah take a quite a different approach actually than the standard models in fact I became aware of the sort of gap or lacunae and scholarship on this when I was teaching my own Canon classes at seminary so I'm teaching a class on the New Testament Canon years ago and we're talking about the question of how you know and I realized no one ever answered the question you know I'm assigning Metzker or I'm assigning some of the other classic sort of texts on Canon and they're they're what I call sort of data books and they do a great job collecting together a sweeping together a bunch of fact or when books begin to be used as Scripture and how long it took and how it was resolved and they're basically just history books my students kept asking me the question was like okay thanks for the information but but but that isn't answering my question my question isn't sort of when it happened or even how it happened but but but why should we think the results of all that mean anything and so you have to really then back up and say oh wait a second you can't just look at the data you have to have a worldview you have to have a theological system in which you can absorb that data and interpret it and understand what it means and if you do that you need a theology of canon's so I decided that if there wasn't a book out there that did that I might want to write one so that's actually what motivated canon revisited so when you said when you say when you speak of a theological view of Scripture certainly if you if you have the modern view in the Academy of Scripture you're going the wrong direction oh yeah but you're talking about from a confessional believing scriptural perspective if you start with what Scripture is that's going to impact how you look at how God made sure his people had what he had given supernaturally in inspiration so flush that out what so how does that differ from most normal approaches yeah well I think most normal approaches are gonna look at the issue of Canon and try to attack it from what we might call a neutral perspective they might say well look you can't go in with any view of what the Canon is to start with all you can go in is approach came in from sort of neutral territory and then try to figure out what it means and whether it's valid and so on but the problem with that is if you don't have a sort of theological view of what Canon is you don't really know how to authenticate it in other words what we're gonna argue and what I argue in my books is that if God's Word really is God's Word it really is inspired Scripture that actually affects the way you authenticate those books so you can't actually talk about authenticating those books without considering that fact and so there is a sense in which we're talking about authenticating the Bible within the Christian worldview and people will balk at that and say well you can't do that that's that's not allowed but I would say but everybody has a worldview by which they're doing this ultimately and so we're talking about how to vindicate it within the realm of an old 40 so what's really important you know what what was is really I think revolutionary for most people is to come to recognize that even though in in in seminary when I was taught this you approached the Canon primarily as a fact of history in reality the way I've described it is the Canon is an artifact of Revelation it can only exist because God has expressed divine power in the revelation of a certain amount of things but not everything so in other words God has inspired at least one book of Scripture but he has not inspired every book that has ever been written therefore there is a limitation and the Canon is the result of a recognition that God is free to reveal what he chooses to reveal and that doesn't mean that every book that claims to be from God is from God or anything along those lines and so you've actually brought in the concept of the the scriptural documents documents as documents covin ental documents help us to see how those are related to what we're talking about here yeah well actually I let me back up and just follow up on one of the things you said there which i think is really important and that is this idea of seeing Canon from a divine perspective and that's really another way to say what you've articulated so if you look at it purely from historical perspective it looks like a man-made thing something that the church constructed but what if we asked the question about not so much what books Christians recognize but which books did God give and when you ask it that way now you're asking more of a theological question and theoretically the the books that belong in the Canon other books God gave the church they may take a while to recognize those books but we can still talk about canon as a theological idea in the mind of God and that's actually why I came up with different definitions of Canon in my in my book and so I feel like the way we talk about what Canon means is going to very much affect the way we study it so I have a sort of a trifold definition of Canon but one of those definitions is what I call the ontological definition and it hits exactly what you what you said there which is this idea of of looking at Canon from a divine perspective and they see there's the difference you and me you're really smart and so you use terms like ontological Canon and then everyone forgets it and don't know what it means anyways in my book Scripture alone I had Canon with a little superscript 1 and Canon with a little superscript - yeah that's not simpler than Anto yeah and and the first one is the Canon as it is known to God right he knows exactly what is stay on estas because he is the author of it and then and once you differentiate that from mankind's knowledge of what he has done we can we need to talk about God's purpose in leading his people to understand these things but if you don't make that distinction if you conflate those two together you end up really falling into a lot of different traps and I've used the illustration that you know you and I are both authors who written a number of books but I don't think there was probably someone who was with you every second that you were working on every book that you've written and so who has infallible knowledge of what I've written only me I'm the author I was the one that did the typing I was the one to put it all together and so once I wrote one book the Canon of my books came into existence at that point time I did not have to open a document on my computer which back then would have been on a floppy disk and had dot commands in it and things like that some of you remember that and the rest you're going to what never mind it's just me it just means I was using a hammer and chisel to put these things together but but I did not have to open a file in the computer and type the Canon of James White's books it came into existence when I finished the last word of that book right and in the same way when God begins that process of his self revelation to his people in inscripturated form God has absolutely perfect knowledge of that Canon it does not follow that anybody else has to have knowledge of that at that point in time for that ontological canon to exist then what we can talk about and I never hear people talking about this other than today the question then becomes well if God extends his divine power to inspire Scripture does he have a purpose and is there a consistency between looking at what his purpose is in inspiring Scripture and leading his people to know what that is and obviously I think there are a number of texts of Scripture that addressed that but this is all theological right and it drives me insane when I read people attacking this subject and they they want to deny that these documents are say on estas they are god-breathed they are inspired which is a theological concept but they will only allow you to use historical naturalistic methodology and information to defend the spiritual nature of these books and people fall into it if we fall into the trap it has it's happening this very day in university classrooms all across America our young people are sitting there and they're getting slapped upside the head by a naturalistic professor who is demanding that they give naturalistic evidence for it it's in fact a supernatural reality right and and no surprise that if you start with a naturalistic assumption you know the naturalistic conclusions just goes in a circle and and people don't pick up on that I mean one of the things that different definitions of Canon it end up affecting is the date of canon and this is one of the things I try to bring up in my books I think is interesting is it people often ask me and I'm sure ask you well when when did canon happen like when do we have a can what's the date what's curious is how different the answers are um it's all over the map I mean a lot of scholars will say well is the 4th 5th century that we have a can and then other scholars would say well it's really the end of the 2nd century that we have a Canon and maybe talk to Evan Jellicle is at least reformed ev Angelica's that are thinking the way we're thinking we could say well in principle there was a Canon even in the 1st century right because didn't God give the books then and wouldn't the Canon have existed then even if it took a while for it to be recognized and you realized there's different perspectives on canons day depending on what definition you start with and this is just another example of how your your worldview your theological grid ends up affecting your historical conclusions because your date looks like it's a neutral historical conclusion but it really isn't it's dependent on the definition you had when you started and the the naturalistic professor who is slapping our students upside the head has presuppositions they just don't allow them to be expressed and fairly in any meaningful fashion and that's why I say you know I realize there are some folks who will say look hey guys this is the discipleship is our is our discussion here what are you all talking about I personally think that okay we can call it on two logical Canon what would you call the church's recognition of the Canon over time how would you determine ology do you use this that was what I call the exclusive definition which is you you you don't well depends what part you mean so the final sort of settling of the Canon is what I call the exclusive definition which is that the church finally reaches the consensus around these books okay and now to I'd put probably in about the fourth century okay so you have you have the divine knowledge of the Canon which is based upon the nature of Scripture as inspired correct then you have the process which is seen in both the Old and New Testaments of the people of God coming to a recognition of what God has gifted the church in Scripture that's a different definite sad if er n't aspect of the definition of Canada I would suggest and I know this sounds radical but I will I will defend this I would suggest long before we're having discussions about end times prophecies or anything else that given the context in which Christian disciples live in Western culture today the understanding of the differentiation between ontological and exclusive or as I simplistically put it in my works can and one and canon two should be more fundamental to us than the discussion of prophetic things and stuff like that why because everything else depends on us having an agreed-upon text from which we are deriving our theology and if we don't have that agreed-upon text you say well we do have an agreed-upon text yes but do you know why we only have the number of books in our Bibles that we have there might be some of you right now there might be some Bibles out there right now or these days on your phone you may download an NRSV and not realize it's an hour NRSV with the and all of a sudden you're doing a search and the Judith comes up and i don't remember judas you know and and so you all of a sudden you're faced with the question of well why does the Roman Catholic Church have a larger cannon or obviously if you're reading anything by Bart Ehrman or his many many disciples today you're gonna have references to not only the Gospel of Thomas but all sorts of works regarding maybe what the EBI Knights believed or whatever else it might be there's all this stuff and the question becomes why why don't I have that why isn't it here the the consistency of having that cannon is central to everything else we do in regards to the preaching of the word I mean can you imagine if we had different cannons yeah in the pew yeah what's in the pulpit it would make any sense well I mean the you know the theme of the conference is discipleship and you're making that link and I'll make another link for you to it and that is as you think about your church it's dealing with Kannon issues and scriptural issues is just a shepherding issue it's really what it is I mean you're gonna have people in your congregations you have them right now even if you don't realize it who are confused and worried and have anxiousness over whether these books they think are God's Word really are God's Word and giving them that right amount of assurance and understanding and and giving answers to their questions is a key part of shepherding them in the Christian life to give them assurance that God's Word is true and so part of the reason we're doing a session like this is so when a congregate comes up to you and says you know why these books are no others you don't just give them my phone number or James's phone number your call call dr. white well no I mean you should have an answer and you don't have to go get a PhD but you have to have some grid some category we could say but look here's some basic things for you of how we got these books and why they are true and so we're hopeful of this session can at least get you down the road a little bit okay so it's it's vitally important to realize the Canon in Christian thought is first and foremost a theological concept that is related to the highest view of inspiration obviously mainline denominations that have a very what I would call crippled view of inspiration are not really they don't have a phone a Shinto even really understand the concept of self attestation or right if you don't believe it's down and sauce yeah what what what you can't really go anywhere with that so we have God knows what the Canon is because he knows what he is revealed there is a process that takes place over time now in that subject it is important I think to differentiate between Canon questions related to the Old Covenant scriptures and the New Covenant scriptures because well for many reasons first of all just a time frame I mean you have you have over a millennium during which the Old Testament Scriptures are being revealed and then you have in the New Testament relatively explosive almost instantaneous and then you have a different audience the Old Covenant scriptures are primarily given to the people of God you don't see any real emphasis upon translation and other languages or getting it out too you know there are promises of that coming but but it's primarily the documents were kept within the covenant community itself and so the transmission of that text is is different but there are fascinating parallels between the timeframes historically of the recognition between the Old Testament Scriptures when you have the last of the prophets speaking and you have the people of Israel recognizing the bath Kol has has ceased the voice of God has ceased there that means they're looking forward to something greater that's coming because the voice of prophecy has ceased you have the laying up of the books in the temple all these things that take place you have a parallel to that timewise with the New Testament but they're also pretty important differences because you have the use of a language that is meant to universalize this revelations to go out to all people and you have this you have the persecution of the church going on they have have this almost promiscuous copying of the text to get it to as many people as as possible and so all these issues come in to answering the questions that are raised we have certain books in the what are called the apocryphal books that are written during the intertestamental period that Roman Catholicism today says are at least deuterocanonical which in and of itself is somewhat when you think about it from our perspective and oxymora I mean how can you have a second canon is there a second level of inspiration type of a type of a thing and then there were other books that were written during that time career that have become quite popular these days as well that have been dug up and and Andry popularized that type of Apocrypha is different from the New Testament Apocrypha and a lot of people are really really confused when they go into a bookstore and they get the lost books of a Danann and all sorts of stuff like that and and it's really understandable how someone if they've not been given a good foundation can run into this stuff and it's like why haven't why didn't you tell me about all this other stuff that existed yeah I mean I think one of the most common questions I get about Canon is about other books I mean people have all kinds of questions about when and how but almost always it's driven by someone hearing about or reading another book could be Old Testament Apocrypha could be New Testament Apocrypha by the way the term Apocrypha just means hidden or hidden books and we applied to both sort of other books that didn't make it in the Old Testament and also other books that didn't make it in the New Testament so on the New Testament half an example of an apocryphal book would be something like the Gospel of Thomas that's further dominant and probably the most well known what happens is people read these books or hear about these books and then they come and say what about those books and so we realized those those sorts of lost books are one of the key entry ways into the whole Canon discussion is what about these and this is where pastors and Christian leaders we need to have an answer what differentiates the books that are in with the books that are out or have any quick sort of elevator speech for that elevators and and you've got to have an elevator speech for that right you can't just hand them a volume that's 300 pages and say we'll read this you got to give them a quick answer and and and that's part of the reason you know we're having this conversation now one of the things I've started doing I'm not sure if you heard about this but one of the things I do once in a while a dividing line is we have story time with Uncle Jimmy and Uncle Jimmy will read Gnostic Gospels oh yeah which I'll be edifying a lot of calls on that one oh yeah oh yeah well and to be honest with you sometimes that's all you've got to do yeah is just actually get it out there and actually read all of it and just watch it like I can't see the expressions of people on a webcast but you can sort of just just hear people going wait a minute they're seriously suggesting that should have been in the new test only things I've learned over the years there's a lot of people have questions about these apocryphal books have actually never read them oh yeah and they don't realise who actually probably ever read the Bible either but they've never read these apocryphal books and so they're like hey what about Thomas for the gospel of Peter or things like this and and one of my question is have you have you read them and realized the differences between the tone the style the feel of the canonical Gospels as opposed to these other Gospels realize there's a qualitative difference between them and another thing I point out too is it's not just a qualitative difference it's also a a sense in which you can see that the apocryphal texts are filling in gaps left by the canonical one um and I give people examples of this I said one of the samples I give is have you ever noticed that in the canonical Gospels you you never actually see Jesus rising from the dead that kind of stuns people they're like what what do you mean I'm like well you never actually have the resurrection happening live on the screen so to speak as you watch the tomb the stone get rolled away from the tomb in Jesus walk out you never actually see that in the canonical Gospels what you see is the women showing up to the tomb after Jesus has already been resurrected and I point out how sort of restrain that is because if you were gonna write a gospel and you wanted the resurrection to be your big crescendo wouldn't you have a sort of screenshot of it happening live but that's not what the canonical Gospels do they just kind of tell you what happened what's interesting is that we have apocryphal gospel to actually fill in the gas yeah and one a good example this is the gospel of Peter and the gospel of Peter actually gives you Jesus coming out of the tomb live right there if you've always wanted to see it you can go read the gospel of Peter the problem is exactly the problem is is that when Jesus comes out of the tomb in the gospel Peter he's not the Jesus you remember because the Jesus that comes out of the tomb in the Gospel of Peters is like a hundred feet tall his his head Reach to the clouds he's what I call Godzilla Jesus coming out of the the tomb well he's not the only that comes that's not the only one that comes out of it okay there's other there's a behind Jesus in the gospel peter is the cross coming out of the tomb which is how it got in there we don't know but they don't usually give you your cross as a going-away present when you get crucified then beyond all this and it doesn't get resurrected as a resurrected well but even put in a more bizarre away and this cross is following Jesus out of the tomb speaking and it talks the cross begins to talk and so I let people read the gospel Peter and say now just have a just have a look at that text and you want to tell me that that is equivalent to John where as early as the canonical for and you've got a lot of work to do to show that yeah I did a debate in I think it was 2005 with John Dominic Crossan now DOM is a brilliant guy okay if I spent the entire decade in the 60s I was born in the decade of the sixties but if I spent the entire decade of the sixties as a monk in a Cell studying the Gospels I might have some weird ideas too so he's a brilliant brilliant guy but he can actually look at that gospel and go I think this might be the most primitive tradition we have about Jesus and I just sit there go really and and so I've been reading these I've read the gospel of Peter and the Gospel of Thomas and and a number of the Gnostic tinged Gospels that were very important the development of Marion theology and in the early church and stuff like that and just letting people read this stuff and then pointing out and to see how deeply tinged this is with a worldview that is completely other than the writings of the New Testament so you know absorption into the one all the various dualistic concepts of proto Gnosticism and stuff like that and then what's missing I think and this is not easy to get people all excited about but there's some been some really great research done over the past 50 200 years demonstrating that the canonical Gospels flow from the context and history of first century Judea the use of the the patronym and we've been able to you know just just the study of the the bone boxes the ossuaries and the names you know people go man there's a lot of Mary's in the New Testament and then we dig up all these bone boxes and guess what it was the most common name of women in that time period and in the air you've got documentary evidence of it and and how they would describe going to certain places and the names of cities and it all fits none of which is found in any of the gnostic gospels they are they are just completely disconnected yeah well it's there theologically disconnected from the first century because they're also chronologically disconnected from the first century what a little factoids you can take home when you think about apocryphal texts Thomas Peter Phillip Mary whatever texts you pick is none of them can be dated to the first century with any reliable consistency and that's just if you talk about your elevator speech there's an elevator speech for you your non-christian friend says what about the Gospel Thomas and you could just simply say well look do you realize the Gospel Thomas is dated second century long after the Apostles have died and all four of our Gospels are dated to the first century in the era of the Apostles which which gospel would you pick if you wanted to get a reliable gospel and the answer is well as far back as you can go and so just that fact alone is noteworthy and so you know take your pick of apocryphal texts they're all late dated second century or later and everyone smiles some scholar will get the gumption up to try to put it in the first century all day Dawson is a good example of this were you like we'll try again what's curious is even the critical scholars even Bart Ehrman doesn't buy that even he knows that Thomas is not a first century gospel right nor any of these others and that's just a little one data point I think it's really important I let me let me make a not a suggestion but almost a and beyond a recommendation I I would say almost a demand of you one of the books you need to have not only on your shelf but actually to read it and to absorb it and to think about it and maybe even review once in a while and I have recommended this for a number of years now is the heresy of Orthodoxy you really need to track that book down you need to read it because these issues are vitally important there's there's good people the graphical information in it it addresses so many of these issues and it's honestly there are great books to be reading from from the Puritans but the Puritans weren't struggling with what we are facing today they were there was a different kind of unbelief in their day but Oxyrhynchus hadn't been discovered naga hamadi hadn't been as the the Gnostics were still safely buried at this particular point in time shall we say they've been dug up and their corpses are now being propped up in university classrooms all across Western culture and so to be functionally literate in the objections that are being placed against our faith you know when you want to quote the Bible and the first thing in the mind of the person you're talking to is you don't even know what books are in that Bible in fact you might want to be might be one of those closed-minded Christians is never read the enlightened Gospel of Thomas and that kind of thing I'm simply saying to to if we want to be Christians who are going to speak to our culture then while the best books to give you a foundation to go that direction is the heresy of orthodoxy I mean it really really does give you and is it an easy read no I wouldn't call it an easy read but I think one of the the reason it's not an easy read is because we don't talk about these things in the context of the church yeah any book that uses the word Oxyrhynchus too much is not gonna be an easy read but it is a cool yeah it is a cool word you keep saying it even if you don't know what it means at least you can impress your friends and look like you know what you're talking about a quick word on the book heresy of Orthodoxy thanks for the plug James I appreciate that very much the book you know I didn't get you knew I know I said now I'm really feeling bad you're plugging my old books I don't even have feeling bad over here the heresy of Orthodoxy actually deals with a really interesting angle on early Christianity and it's one I'm sure you've picked up on but when we tried to write a book about and that is if you wanted to summarize the classic critical scholars take on what's going on on early Christianity just one word captures the whole thing and that is this word diversity what modern scholars like to say about early Christianity is it was wildly diverse not not not ethnically diverse not culturally diverse I'm talking about theologically diverse you know philosophically diverse they want to say that there is all these different Christianity's floating around in the early centuries and so what scholars will say is that in the second century and in the third century there was no such thing as Christianity it was just Christianity's plural all having their own view of Jesus and their own view of God their own view of salvation all fighting it out to figure out which is gonna be the winner and here's the trick each of those different Christianity's has their own books now once you realize that's what's going on by modern scholars and when they look at the Canon that you and I read the day our 27 book scholars are like why do you think those are anything special those are the books of the theological winners if some other group had won you wouldn't be reading the Gospel of John you'd be reading the Gospel of Philip if some other group had won it wouldn't be reading mark you'd probably reading the gospel of Mary and you wouldn't even know the difference that is the argument that's being made and it's all built on diversity now our culture is fascinating with diversity oh I mean I mean cannot get enough of it and what they've done is it basically taken the theme of adversity you read it back into early Christianity and the answer is because there's all the different views you can never know which one's the right views so there is no right view it's a very postmodern way of thinking and that's why I wrote the book about the deal with that problem well and it's also an extremely effective way to get rid of the idea that there is one gospel by which the church is to proclaim God's truth by which man is going to be judged as long as there are many different Gospels then you don't have to worry about it and that's the that's the great offensive thing that's what that was what was offensive about Judaism within the context the Roman Roman One God what who do you think you are yeah I mean we need to be pluralistic we need to be inclusive there's nothing new we're just being repai ghen eyes dwith a with different sets of God's in in Western culture today but yes please very I cannot recommend highly enough reading that book if you have any questions about it I can I can give you dr. Kroger's number and you can just go from go from there actually I'm sure there's there's some well you put and I thank you for this you put your New Testament documents early New Testament documents class online at RTS it's both audio and video and if they show the video online to I didn't know the vid well when you did the when you did the manuscript stuff it's sort of hat you sort of how you have a have the videos up so there is a video component to it there's folks you know I I have people come up to me all the time and say you know I see that that's valuable and I see it that's important in it and it would be valuable in my discipleship as a Christian but you know I just can't afford to you know pack up and go off to seminary someplace well anymore so much of this information is available RTS makes classes available you've got dr. Kreuger dr. Anderson that are that are putting stuff out there and it's just a matter of doing a little digging and that the technology is currently available to us to be able to I mean the amount of information on this subject available to this generation on one hand can be a curse you know because you're having to deal with the Gnostics that have been dug up out of the dirt but it's also extremely positive when it's placed within the proper context we have more information about about the manuscripts and things like that and we've ever had before looking at the time going here let's try to make sure we cover just a couple things before we run out of time I mentioned earlier the difference between Old Testament and New Testament issues obviously there remains an apologetic issue with Roman Catholicism because they have defined as Dogma the Canada the Canon status of the apocryphal books you were you mentioned to me a number of years ago that you were rather surprised when you wrote your book that some of the major pushback didn't come from where you expected it to come from what where did it come from yes what I wrote Canton revisited my major conversation partner in my head at least was critical scholars critical scholarship what they've said about the candidate for generations have a section in there on different canonical models and have a section and there are Roman Catholicism okay fair enough but I deal with all kinds of different things and their existentialism Bardeen ISM evidentialism and so you know the main conversation partner in my head was critical scholars but then after a cannon revisited came out what I was struck by and I did tell you this I think in the dividing line or at least in a private conversation that all the initial pushback I got was from Roman Catholics very upset about my book which maybe he's a good sign I don't know but they're reading it yeah yeah at least they're reading it and they were upset about and they were very vigorously pushing back against that number of things I said I was struck by that and then it dawned on me something that I hadn't noticed before and that is Roman Catholics that I was at least engaging with were effectively making the same arguments that Bart Ehrman was making and this was very curious to me so what Bart Ehrman says about early Christianity is it's way too chaotic way too disorganized way too diverse for you to know which books are in the Canon that's Bart Ehrman's argument and then I listened to my Catholic friends and they're like the early church was way too or disorganized way too chaotic way too diverse for you to know which books are in the Canon and I'm like what that's exactly the same argument that Bart Ehrman makes but here's the difference they've reached different conclusions as a result of it Bart says but therefore Christianity doesn't make any sense and you can't have any surety assurance of books at all and the Roman Catholics say no all that chaos can be cleaned up by the church that can make an authoritative declaration to tell you which books are really in and which books are out and I was like wow that is interesting so and some of the dialogues I've had with some of these Roman Catholics I've said to them do you realize that you're in effect to make your case for the Roman Catholic view of can and actually using Bart Ehrman's arguments against guys like me to make your view this is really peculiar aren't we trying to get to the same place here at least in principle to the authority of these books and I think it actually made an impact on some of them I think they were aware wow I never really realized that and so part of what I've done in my writings is to show that that early phase of Christianity wasn't nearly as chaotic disorganized and diverse as Emin and Roman Catholics have said therefore you don't need an official formal declaration from the church to know well when we talk about the Old Testament and I'll try to be brief on this back in nineteen I think it was 1993 I did a debate at Boston College with a fellow that you've probably heard about named jerry Mattox and well he was the first ordained PCA minister to convert to Roman Catholicism he was girders student aide and he was all the dissertation at Westminster when he converted along with Scott Hahn to Roman Catholicism and we did a debate at Boston College and we did we did two nights we did one on justification and one on the Apocrypha and we even started jokingly said beforehand we said well we hope when we do the Apocrypha debate that we can be heard over the snoring because we figured that was going to be a snooze fest well interestingly enough that was the most pitched of the two because it went directly to the issue of authority in the Canon well to my chagrin we were we were initially supposed to do a radio program afterwards and W easy in Boston then we were told the Protestant side was told it'd been cancelled so that following Monday we're out driving around we turn on the radio and here's Jerry Maddox on the radio program they're going they're wondering where I am so we go racing back to the house we jump on the phone and I call in and we start having a conversation and one of the things I learned about Jerry is he never stops baiting I don't know what it's like to be married to him he has 14 children so I'm not really sure what all that means but but he never stops debating he was straight back in the mode from from a few days earlier out of the blue I had never thought of this question before but he was pressing the idea that you just made and that is without Rome's authority you have no way of knowing there's there's no way to even use Scripture now you and I both know that long before the Council of Carthage the early church writers are quoting scripture right left and center as the final word in theological controversy the church has already been dealing with sub alien ISM and modalism and Arianism and everything else before there has been this quote/unquote official Canon so that argument really doesn't work but here was the question that I asked Jerry that resulted in something called dead air which means everything just goes silent to the point where the the the the lady who is running the program is like so let's take a commercial break now and and and then we came back and it was still pretty much silent here was the question that I asked Jerry I said how in your in your perspective how did the believing Jewish person know that Isaiah and second chronicles were Scripture fifty years before Christ ever thought about that how would a a believing Jewish person person following the one true God of Israel how did they know that Isaiah and second Chronicles were Scripture fifty years before Christ now Jerry knew this is a tough question for a Roman Catholic you don't have the Magisterium to answer that question at that point in time Jesus plainly held men accountable to what was in Scripture have you not read what God spoke to you saying and then he quotes from Scripture there is no argumentation between Jesus and his Jewish opponents even the Sadducees regarding what is and what is not Scripture and he didn't come up with this I did everyone when Catholics later come up with he can't go Jewish Magisterium because he knows the Jewish Magisterium never accepted what Trent accepted as canonical scripture so then you'd have a contradiction between two allegedly infallible sources the only answer I ever came out that was ever given to me which he did not come up with was through the use of the Urim and the Thummim the the the on the breastplate of the high priests where you could cast lots before the Lord so you could go you go to the temple and you could cast lots is Isaiah scripture go and it's a ground scripture go and that that would be how you do it it is a it's it's a next to impossible question to answer given the presupposition that you need oh yeah this external categorical statement of some type of infallible source because that's not how God did it with the Old Testament yeah and then we have Jesus who then functions on the basis of what the Salta whatever the process was that God used Jesus felt it was good enough because he could hold men accountable to the scriptures and that question is one that even after what is that now 25 25 years really oh that's scary that was a long time ago even after all this time remains absolutely valid and I still haven't gotten a better answer yeah I think I've heard that issue raised I raised it a little bit my cannon revisited book against Roman Catholicism but what's interesting is what critical scholars will say if you say well who decided which books were where cannon in the Old Testament time or first century Jews even say well they didn't haven't they didn't know either right that's what they would say they would say oh is a total free-for-all nobody knew what books for canon I'm a little surprised when Catholics haven't gone that route but the problem is that run into the evidence you just said right which is Jesus is interacting with the Pharisees and the Sadducees they seem to be agreed on one thing at least and that's what books are in the Bible even though they'd parently disagree about everything else that's one thing that they have common ground on right yeah I I I'm not sure if you interacted with it I don't remember but the Old Testament Canon New Testament church by Beckwith as classic is just a tremendous it's not fun to read okay let me let me warn you ahead of time it's it's as as enjoyable as chewing on aluminum foil but it is it is important I think to have on a list and one of the things that he brings up is the idea of laying up the books in the temple which books were laid up which books made the hands unclean there's a lot of evidence like that that unfortunately again is I hope it's a part of the classes at RTS but I understand that in a lot you know in my experience in teaching in seminaries there's so much we asked our ministers to be so many more things than scripture does that we have to cut back on a lot of the stuff that would be extremely helpful I think I think Old Testament canons another gap honestly I mean there was a gap in New Testament canon I'm trying to fill it with some of the things I've written but I think there's a gap in Old Testament canon outputs Beckwith's book is very out of day I think it was 1987 if I'm remembering correctly when it was watching some of this yeah really well it's a long long time for a book to be out of print or out of date and so I think there's room for a new evangelical hopefully reform work on Old Testament Canon maybe someone in this room will will write it someday I've thought about trying to to take a bite out of that but I think it's it's too big for me so I'm not gonna do it oh it's it's a huge there's a huge amount of literature there but yeah it's extremely important but there is a difference between that because you have a limited you have a limited scope to well this does raise a very important issue in looking at the clock I do wanna I do want to raise this this issue let's let's go to this let's talk a little bit about the relationship between and this is right down your your alley between Canon and text because there is a lot of confusion on this particular subject they are related subjects when I say text let's use let's use one of the most famous examples it's called the pre capilla del rey it's the story of the woman taken in adultery John 753 3 8 11 if you look at any modern translation or even the King James with modern notes in or something like that then you know that this is one of the two largest textual variants in the New Testament both the two largest textual variants of twelve verses each it's long writing of mark mark sixteen nine through twenty and then John seven fifty three through eight eleven and this text is not found in the earliest manuscripts of the Gospel of John it really the earliest we can date it within a manuscript it's known before this as a story in in some of the early church fathers but the the earliest manuscript we can date it to is one of the most unreliable of the early manuscripts that's codex Bezeq and abridge incest codex D and so the question then becomes okay I'm asked all the time well would you preach John seven fifty three through eight eleven and that now raises the interface between Canon and textual critisism and a lot of people conflate the two so that if you recognize that there are variations that need to be examined that there are difficult variants in the New Testament I'm going to be looking at a variant that has changed the this what seems to be the most accepted reading in one portion of New Testament has changed just in the past ten years and most people don't even know it they look at that and they go well if that's the case then we can't have certainty and cannon issues because there's not perfect certainty in textual issues because the interface between the two is difficult to express and explain now you've done work the highly scholarly work in both areas how do you flesh that out and help people understand what the relationship actually yeah what's interesting is that the early church seemed to make a distinction between those two things and what I mean by that is certainly we believe the canonical books hold the the text that God has delivered but if you had a book of John without the per copy of adulterous woman and you had one with it it's not as if the early church was saying well you know they just said John's canonical they weren't necessarily telling you which text was the right tax and so I think it's important to distinguish between the two things because if you don't you end up trying to say that there has to be an authoritative church approved text and then you end up coming down some of these other places a lot of people yes and I'm not just talking about King James only yes there is a strong ecclesiastical text movement I just a debate a debate book that Douglas Wilson on this very issue I'm not sure if you've seen it but I I press Doug on this subject to tell me okay which what is the infallible inerrant text and he actually answered my question it's the 1555 Stefano's Wow I have a 1555 Stefano's so I had it all the time didn't even realize it so but that but not only in the United States but when I was teaching in Vinton burg in May last year a number of the young men there we're talking to me about the exact same thing taking place there there is a struttin especially amongst reform people I think I've mentioned this to you that I really see this happening and that's exactly what you are forced to yeah there must be one absolutely standardized text word-for-word that was quote-unquote being canonized but that how does how does that relate to when when the Church recognizes cannon were they recognizing one particular text and how does that is there a difference between what I call cannon 1 and cannon to the ontological and and and the specific ontological e could you argue that God knows exactly what he gave and therefore in that sense he knows exactly what the original wording was well there's no doubt God has in his own mind what he gave and knows what the original wording is and so we our goal of course in textual criticism to get back to that as much as possible and we get very very close as we know texts critically but I think the distinguished ring Texan can is still has to be maintained otherwise you end up going down this route you just described let me mention something else though in the intersection of text in canon and that is i think the world of textual criticism has a lot of initiating things about it that inform the way the books were canonized and i brought this up a number of places though the study of early manuscripts can tell us a lot about how christians use books valued books organize books collected books i think particularly of the use of the codex is interesting example of this these are the nomen of sacra ascribable abbreviations that show a sense that scribes took the text seriously and used it as the sacred document so I think textual critisism Canon go together in the discipline but they have to be distinguished in terms of the authoritative Canon is one thing but determining authoritative text is a different thing it's a different method if you will that's really hard for a lot of people to grasp I think so what the difference between those those two concepts are and I think that that does open the door for movements that unfortunately I think are more divisive than they are overly overly helpful but we can't avoid it because if I were to just ask well if we were to ask this this group here you know who has such a such a translation that used to work but now we have everything electronically to where you've got you've got 14 different translations on your phone on your iPad on your computer whatever it might be and even when you ask people what one translation well you know I like this one but sometimes I use this one that's a real modern issue that the church is facing I mean english-speaking people in the past have pretty much not had to worry about this because you pretty much were limited in the number of translations that you had available to you and hence were limited as far as the textual choices had already been made for you we're no longer in that situation and there's there's positives to that but there's also negatives to that it sort of opens a door I think to movements and and people sort of sniping off some some of the sheep going hey I've got a I've got a theory here you know let's go this direction would you would you say in the church let's try to you know we're both churchmen we're both involved in our local churches I reach regularly and these issues I think are important when I preached through Hebrews my poor congregation had to suffer through the fact that there are some key textual variants in the book of Hebrews that actually impact a meaningful exegesis of the text and from my perspective if I ignore them I am NOT doing my people any I'm not helping them in that there are some people would say never do that I think my personal opinion is Christ sheep will hear Christ's voice you can trust him to keep his people and we should call them to a to a higher level rather than trying to you know there's there's a balance here there's no there's no question that you shouldn't stand up there seeing how many times you can use both the terms ontological and Oxyrhynchus in the same serve yeah okay that is proper the better right but anyway but at the same time you have to be really careful how you present this if you're if you have not given your peopie of a real foundation because it can be very troubling for someone for example to to look at the textual variant in Hebrews 10 were quoting from the Greek Septuagint it says a body you have prepared for me but when you look at the act in the Hebrew Masoretic text is talking about boring out the ear has nothing to do with a body at all and yet the point of the citation is the body from the Greeks antigen that can be very troubling to folks yeah I think most people come across text critical issues when they go to their Bibles either you know it's a long any numeric or something else when is that big line in the text it says the earliest manuscripts do not have these verses and then they come running in a panic you know to their past or saying you know what what how do I explain this what do I do with this this is why I think you do have to in sermons not not lecturing but at some point in sermons help people understand how the Bible came together how it was formed what its history is like I think our average congregant out there has a paper-thin level understanding of how we got the Bible they believe the Bible and they trust it to their credit they trust it but it only takes one person to poke a hole through that thin sheet of paper very quickly and say well what about this and they have no answers and I think as ministers and as Christian leaders our job is to sort of sort of inoculate our congregations against those things and so we have to talk about textual criticism we have to talk about Canon in some way so that they can hear it from us rather than hearing it from Bart Ehrman and I'd rather us be the one that explains it to them so they don't have sort of a naive sort of overly simplistic view of the way the Bible came and then when they hear about textual variants they don't go into a panic right and I think this is one of the places there's there's there's been a little bit of a failing in the evangelical church I think you know we've not really explained people where the Bible comes from and as a result they're very vulnerable I think one of the good examples of this was the whole DaVinci Code thing that happened in what 2006 I can't keep these dates Drake 2005-2006 if some of you probably remember that where the davinci code book came out and it was like a tsunami hit the church in panic and I was amazed as like how is it possible that a fictional book that scholastically you know messed up has no real academic credibility is causing this kind of trouble in the church and the only conclusion is is that we weren't preparing our people well I think The Da Vinci Code what was embarrassing about it wasn't how bad the DaVinci Code was although it was really bad it was a little bit embarrassing which is how unprepared Christians were and I'm thinking to ourselves we've got to do better than that I think part of the reason for this session part of the reason for what we're talking here's we want to encourage all of you out there that you know let's do better as a church informing our people about these things in appropriate ways so they're not unprepared when these challenges come well especially when are our modern translations all have these little these little notes right there in the origin and it's almost like we're afraid of them you know it's almost like you cover them up I don't want to see that unless OOP there's another one oh let's see yeah we need to look at that recognize they're there recognize what the background is so in in the last couple of minutes we have here I want to just reiterate what I think is the most important aspect that people need to understand when we talk about the Canon of Scripture is that you must understand the relationship it's a theological concept and you must understand the relationship between Canon and inspiration because it is something that comes from God as I've described it it is an artifact of Revelation it comes into existence naturally because God has supernaturally revealed these books of Scripture but since not every book man has ever written is scripture there is of necessity a Canon a limitation and the issue for us is to recognize that is absolutely perfectly known to God does God have a reason and a purpose in blessing his people to make sure that we know what he's given to us I would say that's just as obvious as if as the fact of Revelation itself and therefore when we see the process over time we should not invest the authority of Scripture in the process that's a natural result of what God is doing we tend to think well scriptures Authority can be no greater than the authority we invest in the historical process and then you can't you can't come up with inspiration from that we cannot come up with a high view of Scripture from that that to me is I think if people can grab hold of that that is the greatest inoculation I can think of yeah I mean to put in a different way don't let your assurance about cannon just be sort of data-driven right if I can get enough facts good enough information to convince myself it happened at this time and in this place in this way therefore I can trust it well it's got to be bigger than that you've got to have some something standing behind you the theological grid that's God gave these books yes it took time for them to be received yes there was starts and stops but when the dust settled were convinced under God's providence that these are the right books that the church was to have I think it's really really very very important and with that not only the sound system but the clock has expired I hope you found this discussion to be useful to you dr. Kreuger thank you very very much appreciate

Channel: G3 Conference

Views: 75,453

Rating: 4.8235722 out of 5

Keywords: James White, Michael Kruger, Bible, Canon, G3, G3 Conference

Id: LVVRfu1eLSU

Length: 60min 7sec (3607 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 27 2018