The right books (src: Apologetics Canada)

Video

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Summary

TODO: Summary

Content

Why is the Bible important?

Video clip from Apologetics Canada

Summary points and follow-on topics

Summary points:

• When engaging with skeptics of all different stripes, they will say “OK, that’s great, but all you are relying on is the Bible as your source.”
  • Translations of translations of translations
  • Copies that may have had errors introduced as part of their creation. (Copying manuscripts by hand in antiquity was an extremely labor-intensive and manual process).
  • How do you even know if you have the right books? Your Gospels are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, what but about others? The Gospel of Thomas? How do you know for sure?
• If we can’t trust the Bible, we have no reason to put our hope and trust in Jesus, because we can’t be sure anything is true. It is that big a deal.

Follow-on topics:

• For us as sola scriptura Protestants, it is of critical importance that we have full confidence in the Bible, because it is all we’ve got in our epistemology. We’ve got nothing else to fall back upon.
• We cannot just sweep questions about the origin of the Bible under the rug. Since the Bible is the foundation of our faith, we need to know where it came from and that we can trust it wholeheartedly. If we don’t have that conviction, the very foundations of what we believe are under threat. We cannot afford to be “squishy” on this matter.

Further discussion

Some basic facts about the Bible and its writings

Video clip from Apologetics Canada

Summary points and follow-on topics

Summary points:

• The Bible was put together over 1600 years across 3 continents by close 40 authors in 3 different languages.
• The writers of various parts of the Bible were extremely varied, from Kings to humble fishermen.
• As Christians, our Old Testament is the same 39 books as the Jewish scriptures.
• New Testament books were not chosen by men and voted on, but were recognized as the writings directly penned by those who were eyewitnesses, or those reporting on what eyewitnesses said. They were recognized by early Christians as being the things directly tied to Jesus and His followers, the Apostles.

Follow-on topics:

• It is very important to understand that what makes scripture scripture is not what men think of it, but where it came from. The doctrine we call inspiration holds that scripture proper was inspired by God (2 Timothy 3:16), even if it was written down by men. This is a binary distinction: either something was or was not directly inspired by God. Only the things that were directly inspired by God are scripture.
• This means that humanity did not have any say in what scripture is and is not. Early Christians as a group merely came to recognize what writings were in fact scripture. You could call this process “discovery” if you wish, but the point is that scripture was scripture even before humans came to a consensus on it. It is a property of the writings independent from the views of humanity.

Further discussion

Egypt, early manuscripts, and what it means for our understanding of the canon

Video clip from Apologetics Canada

Summary points and follow-on topics

Summary points:

• Some of the earliest copies of texts we have are not from Israel (like you might expect), but Egypt.
• Because of its dry climate and the fact that the papyrus plant commonly used for writing in antiquity grew almost exclusively in Egypt, Egypt is where many (but not all) of our earliest surviving biblical manuscripts come from.
  • For example, Papyrus P52, widely considered to be the earliest extant New Testament manuscript we have. Some good reading material on the earliest biblical manuscripts: The Earliest New Testament Manuscripts – Bible Archaeology Report.
  • Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, Codex Alexandrinus, and Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus—the four so-called “great uncial codices”—all have somewhat foggy origins, so we can’t necessarily trace them to Egypt. But many of the earliest more fragmentary biblical manuscripts we have are in fact Egyptian papyri.
• It has not been just biblical texts that were found though. Other texts were preserved too—ones that the Early Church condemned as non-canonical.
• So how do we know that the Bible—which originally existed as a collection of independent scrolls and writings—contains the right texts? If there were these other texts floating around, also dated to be pretty early, also found in Egypt, then… well, how do we know?

Follow-on topics:

• The specifics of dating manuscripts and tracing their origins and peculiarities is a fascinating scholarly endeavor. We are blessed to live when we do, when many of the most importance manuscripts have been completely digitized and made available to all. For example, Codex Sinaiticus is available for free online.
• The existence of texts other than the Bible similarly preserved in the sands of Egypt ought not be immediate cause for alarm, as we will discuss in upcoming sections. We ought to be able to calmly deal with questions like these using data and logic, and not overreact to the spurious claims that unbelieving secular scholars sometimes make about this or that “other " text. The truth is on our side in these things, and we need to trust that all of our questions will be answered if we are patient and “do our homework” (so to speak).

Further discussion

Introduction to the concept of pseudepigrapha

Video clip from Apologetics Canada

Summary points and follow-on topics

Summary points:

• Discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts: found in 1945, a shepherd and his companions were digging for fertilizer.
  • These texts should sound familiar from our last video about gnosticism: yes, it is the same set of texts.
• The so-called “Gospel of Thomas” was one of the texts among those discovered at Nag Hammadi.
• Walter Bower – Heresy and Orthodoxy in Earlist Chrsitianity.
  • Introduced thesis that there was no monolithic Orthodoxy, but instead disparate groups all fighting for “their version” of Jesus to prevail, so to speak.
  • Created some controversy. Are the texts we are familiar with in the Bible today really the only texts that are important?
• What of these other texts like the Gospel of Thomas?
• The “motive” for later writers naming texts using the names of the Apostles:
  • Sort of the opposite pattern as plagiarism. Rather than taking your work and putting my name on it, I’m going to take my work and put your name on it. Why? Because it makes it easy to make an appeal to authority argument.
• Gnostics, docetics write texts putting their beliefs upon Jesus’s lips, and then attach these famous names to them, for credibility’s sake.
• But we know they are fakes based on both the contents, and based on how we date these manuscripts.

Follow-on topics:

• Faking the origin of manuscripts is not limited to just these false gospels. The formal term for these sorts of works is pseudepigrapha, which are basically works where the claimed author of the text is not the real author. Etymologically, this word originates from the Greek words pseudes (ψευδής) meaning “false,” and epigraphe (ἐπιγραφή) meaning “inscription” or “title”. So they are works that are falsely labeled. You may hear texts of this sort commonly bundled together with another class of text called the apocrypha (as in “apocrypha and pseudepigrapha”). Apocryphal texts are generally considered to be of uncertain authorship or origin, but not necessarily fraudulent. Pseudepigraphal texts, on the other hand, are specifically those that are attributed to an author (often a biblical figure) who did not actually write them.
• Aside from the Gospel of Thomas, another good example is the so-called “Book of Jasher”. A reference to such a book occurs in Joshua 10:13 and in 2 Samuel 1:18. At some point, there must have been a real text bearing this title. However, there was a forgery in the 18th century that masqueraded as a long-lost text.

Further discussion

What happened to the texts after their discovery?

Video clip from Apologetics Canada

Summary points and follow-on topics

Summary points:

• Not all the Nag Hammadi documents survived their initial discovery. Not recognized for what they were by the Bedouin herders who found them (who destroyed some of them out of ignorance as to their true value), we may never know what documents we might have had if only this had not happened.
  • The vagaries of history do this to us. How much have we lost over the millennia not due to weather or catastrophe or the like, but due simply to human destruction?
• The extreme heat and sandstorms that Andy describe give a sense of this inhospitable environment that allowed for the preservation of texts across the centuries and millennia. In a humid climate, texts would rot, but not here.

Follow-on topics:

• Personally, in discussing how easy it is to lose ancient texts to circumstance, I see a degree of divine superintendence in the preservation of all the texts that we need to establish the true text of the Bible. I made mention of the four great uncial codices before—imagine if we did not have those! But we do. And we have plenty of other early manuscript fragments that help us identify what parts of the biblical text are original, and what parts were added later as interpolations, such as the spurious long ending of Mark.
• In fact, ask any conservative Bible-believing textual scholar what he thinks of the biblical text, and he’ll tell you that the text we have is rarely up for debate in theologically significant ways. You may have some spelling variants here or there, but most of the time, alternate readings are not very impactful. Like, the vast majority of them really don’t make much difference in terms of theology.
  • However, when they are important, they are very important.
• The differences between the Textus Receptus (the base text the KJV was translated off of) and modern critical editions of the New Testament are a good example of why all this textual criticism stuff matters. The best manuscripts hadn’t even come to light yet at the time the KJV was translated, so it has some inferior readings in places, that do not match the earliest textual witnesses.
• Praise God that He allowed us to find all we need in order to have confidence in these matters!

Further discussion

Some reasons these texts are obviously not canon: their theology is crazy, the names used in the texts aren’t what they would be if the texts were genuine

Video clip from Apologetics Canada

Summary points and follow-on topics

Summary points:

• One of the best arguments against including these texts is just reading them and letting them speak for themselves. Their wacky ideas often show them as false right from the outset.
• The Gospel of Thomas in not a narrative like the other gospels: it is not about the birth, the life, the teaching, the death of Jesus Christ. Instead, it is just a collection of 114 sayings.
  • And some of these these sayings are WILD. “For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven”.
• In some of the gnostic texts from the Nag Hammadi collection, we find many names that are more in line with Egyptian names during the second and third centuries, rather than being what we’d expect from first century Roman-occupied Palestine.
  • The gospels actually help make this point for us: as one would expect, the names in the gospels that have qualifiers (e.g., “Simon the Zealot” as opposed to just “Simon”) are those that other textual evidence tell us were very common names at that place and time.
  • Only the true gospels pass this common-sense test of authenticity.
• So, we can have confidence in the books we include in the canon. A separate matter (i.e., something different from what we’ve talked about here) is how we know that the text in these books is reliable and hasn’t been substantially tampered with over the centuries. We’ll look at that concept in a separate lesson.

Follow-on topics:

• The “theology smell test” is a perfectly acceptable way to evaluate textual authenticity. Anything that is canon, after all, cannot contradict other things that are also canon.
• You will see that most apocryphal and pseudepigraphal books flunk this test without even considering anything else. I should note that if one of these other texts makes a claim that does not relate to anything other canonical books in the Bible talk about, then this particular test doesn’t help us. So, for example, if one of these other books talked about the life and teachings of some guy that the Bible never mentions, well, it’s not like that contradicts the Bible. But whenever there is overlap, if any one of these texts says something that contradicts the other books of the canon… that is instant disqualification.
  • Some people might argue this is somewhat circular. On first glance, doesn’t James 2 somewhat contradict Paul’s teachings about justification by grace through faith in the book of Romans? So maybe James isn’t part of the canon? (Martin Luther famously did not like the book of James).
  • But the context of these discussions isn’t usually with respect to any of the normal books of the canon, which have lots of manuscript evidence suggesting their inclusion (for example). We normally trot this sort of argument out when someone is arguing for some other decidedly minority text to be taken into consideration. In those circumstances, the burden of proof is on the new text, for sure. And it is usually pretty trivial to show how these other texts openly contradict verses in the Bible we know and trust.
• The analysis of name frequency by geographic distribution and time period is an excellent example of the tools we have available to us as biblical scholars in trying reason about textual authenticity in an objective sort of way. Critics like to pretend like canonization is very hand-wavy and subjective, but things like this can help demonstrate that we don’t have to be loosey-goosey about plenty of things here. The arguments make themselves, for anyone who has an open mind and is in possession of common-sense.

Further discussion

Review Questions

Coming soon!