Welcome everyone to lecture #2 the authenticity and the
formation authenticity of the New Testament Canon.
Let me pray and then we can dive right in.
The Lord be with you. Thank you again, Heavenly
Father, for the gifts of Your Word, the Scriptures as you
speak to us through them. Thank you that we can with
confidence read, mark, learn and intimately digest the scriptures
as the word of God, that they may transform us, that we may
more boldly and clearly and with the love of Christ proclaim them
to a world that needs to hear the saving message of Christ.
So bless us, bless this time, help us to grow in our faith,
help us to grow in our intellect.
Lord, as we worship you with every bit that you have created
us to be, we pray in Jesus name, Amen.
So let's go ahead and start actually right where we left off
last week. Let's go to the first slide,
actually right where we began, which is just a recap defining
the terms. The three most important terms
that we have are the formation, the authenticity, and then what
we mean by an Old or a New Testament Canon.
So to recap, formation is the process of composing,
collecting, and ordering the books of the Canon.
That composition involves what we might call today as
authorship, where there's certainly an individual who is
overseeing the process. But composition might have more
of a of a collaborative function to it as well that we see in the
ancient world. And then the composition of the
formation of our scriptures is not just the authorship of an
individual book, but also the collecting of the books that
become recognized as the Canon and then ordering the books.
So for example, why do all of our Bibles start with the four
gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?
Why do they end with Revelation? Why is Acts kind of squeezed
between the Gospels and the Pauline epistles?
And why are the Catholic epistles kind of put at the very
end, right before we get to Revelation?
There's a logic to the ordering of the books as well, and
there's different orderings depending on which manuscripts
you see. But even with a diversity of
ordering, as you'll see a consistency of the patterns
which shows really a theological intention to the collection and
the ordering of the books. So formation is composition,
collecting and ordering of the books of the Canon.
Authenticity, as we said last week, is we recognize that when
a text is considered, it's considered authentic when the
genuine origin of that text resides in the attributed
author. So Simply put, if the Gospel
according to Saint Matthew is authentic, it has to derive from
a historical person known as Matthew.
Now whether he was the one who actually put pen to papyrus,
which is quite likely that he wasn't, because it's it's quite
likely that he dictated it to a scribe and that he had some
influence in sort of the revising of it as well.
But in terms of it actually deriving from this Apostolic
figure of Matthew, absolutely we have to ask the questions, do
the spade work, and see if we can genuinely attribute this to
its Apostolic attributed author. And then thirdly, the definition
of Canon. This is again borrowing from
Michael Kruger's definition. A Canon, whether Old or New
Testament or a whole Bible Canon, is simply the collection
of scriptural books that God has given his corporate people,
which are distinguished by their divine qualities, their
reception by the collective body, and their Apostolic
connection either by authorship or association.
So there's three or so facets to this definition of a cannon.
It's first of all, it has divine qualities.
So this is not simply a book of a collection of writings of
people who have some interesting things to say about God.
It is actually, it is a divine work.
It is God's speech in written form.
It's not as if they were written down by flawed individuals that
then all of a sudden becomes transformed to be Scripture
sometime after they finish the writing process.
But through and through, the divine qualities are permeated,
are permeating through it because it is.
It is God's speech in written human form.
So that's the first part of that definition.
Secondly, after it's not only does it have divine qualities,
but it's received by a collective body.
It wasn't just buried in the sand and then rediscovered 500
years later, but from one generation to the next, these
texts were passed down and received as the authentic words
of the apostles and their associates, and therefore the
authentic word of God speaking through His apostles.
So it's has its divine qualities, it's reception by the
church and then finally the Apostolic connection.
So not just any person could, you know, appoint himself as a
man of God and saying and say, I'm speaking the words of God.
And that kind of thing actually still happens today really
across the world. And so it's not just it's not a
self appointed apostle going around and saying, let me tell
you the words of God, but it's true Apostolic commissioning by
Jesus to the 12 and to the to their followers as they wrote by
the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the words of Scripture,
which are God's words in human words.
So those three elements to our definition of New Testament
Canon, that they have divine qualities, they're received by
the church, and they're connected to the authoritative
voice of the apostles. That is the, I think, the
fullest, most robust definition we can have of Canon.
The rest of the lecture today, we'll kind of explore those
elements as they came to be recognized historically, from
when the Gospels and the epistles were written all the
way to when a Canon was then finally officially recognized.
Any questions sort of about the groundwork that we've just laid?
OK, we can we can see it kind of play out.
All right. So last week we explored the
concept of covenant for as our grammar of Canon.
Covenant being this relational commitment between God and his
people, where they covenant, they make a promise that cannot
be dissolved, that they are committed one to another in a
special union. So God with his people, Israel
made that covenant and gave them the text of the law through
Moses that was read out loud to the people.
And they assented on Mount Sinai saying, al that the Lord has
commanded us, we will obey. Now that same covenantal
structure as it follows through the whole Old Testament is also
seen in the New Testament. And so if we recall from last
week, the law was revealed on Mount Sinai.
Moses faithfully transcribed it. It had its developments
throughout the generations all the way up into Ezra.
But the core of it, the foundations of it, and really we
can ascribe the, the, the, the whole witness of it is grounded
in what God revealed through Moses.
And that's what we call the law. The law leads to the prophetic
interpretation of the law or the calling of Israel back to obey
the law, to repent and return to the law.
And so you see this canonical structure of law and prophet,
the acts of God in creation and salvation in Genesis and Exodus,
the law of God's commanding the people how to obey God
faithfully, the people rejecting, the law disobeying,
and then the prophets calling them back to to faithful
obedience to their covenant God. There's a somewhat similar
grammar or structure in the New Testament, which we would call
the canonical structure of gospel and apostle.
Just as in Genesis and Exodus you see creation and redemption
in the seven days of creation and then the redemption from
Egypt, so also the New Testament is inaugurated with a new
creation and with a great act of redemption.
If you look at the first words of each of the gospels, Matthew,
the book of Genesis, of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the
son of Abraham, Luke, many have undertaken to draw up an account
of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they
were handed down to us by those who from the beginning were
eyewitnesses and servants of the Word.
Mark the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,
and then most famously, John. In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
So beginning is at the beginning of every gospel, every canonical
gospel. So you have creation and
redemption at the beginning of the law and creation and
redemption at the beginning of the Gospel, Matthew, Mark, Luke
and John. And then just as the the
prophets give a a fuller interpretation and application
and a calling of the the people back to the acts of God in
creation and redemption. Even so the apostle, namely the
epistles of Paul and the Catholic epistles, they they
interpret and give more clarity to what Christ accomplished on
the cross. And so while in the Gospel you
might have depicted A narrative form the substitutionary death
of Christ, Paul will draw out exactly how that substitution
worked by talking of the propitiation that Christ
satisfied in Romans 3. Or Hebrews will talk about the
if the ascension of Jesus is mentioned in Luke, Hebrews will
then unpack the theology of the ascension and what that means
for us as the people of God. And so this sort of four fold
structure of law followed by prophet, gospel, followed by
apostle. Actually, it's this is an
ancient way of understanding the structure of the Canon.
Even before you have the Canon lists, because this is something
you'll hear. There is no New Testament Canon
list. They would tell you until the
4th century that in self is debated.
But most of the time you might hear a critical scholar saying
the New Testament Canon was created by the church in the 4th
century. And so everything else was kind
of up in the air until the 4th century.
That's a really, it's kind of a, it's a very simplistic and I
would argue an inaccurate way to describe the formation of the
New Testament Canon because even before you have Canon lists, you
have this grammar, this, this logic of Canon in the earliest
of the church fathers. So Clement of Rome and we'll
talk about the, the gospel of Jesus and the apostles.
Ignatius of Antioch will talk about having in his hands the
prophets and the gospel and the apostles.
A few a few decades later, Irenaeus will talk about the
law, the prophets, the gospels, and the apostles.
Clement of Alexandria as well. We'll talk about law, prophets,
gospel, apostles. And when he draws from texts to
have authoritative teaching for the church, they always appeal
to law, prophet, gospel, apostle.
There's this parallelism between what was revealed to the people
of Israel and then what was revealed in Christ and
distributed, entrusted to his apostles.
And so when you see this structure, it's exactly the
structure that gave birth to our Bibles that we have that have
this ordering. The Torah always comes at the
beginning of a copied Bible, whether it's an ancient
manuscript that has the full Canon or whether it's our modern
Bibles. It Genesis is always the
beginning, and the New Testament is always begun by the Gospel,
by the fourfold Gospel, almost always by Matthew, sometimes by
John, but almost always by Matthew.
And so the Law is introducing the first table or the first
Testament. The Gospel is introducing the
second Testament. Prophets are interpreting and
clarifying the Law and apostles are proclaiming the gospel and
teaching it to the people. That grammar was there from the
outset with Jesus and his apostles.
It was rehearsed and further developed by the 2nd century
fathers. And then once you get to your
full manuscripts of the Bible, it was basically a A.
The skeleton was already there. And then it was just putting in
the books that had been accepted and widely used up until that
point. So it was really quite a, we
might call it A what's called a natural way of the Canon
developing, but it's a supernatural way really, because
such coherence across 1500 years of authorship is really
remarkable in any ancient text. And to see that in our new, in
our New Testament and Old Testament Canon is, is a
beautiful thing to behold. One final thing about how this
develops, within this Gospel apostle structure, we also have
further subdivisions. We have the fourfold Gospel,
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and then we have apostle
subdividing into the Pauline letter collection, the Catholic
Epistles. Acts is considered also a part
of this Apostolic testimony, but it's kind of bridging the gospel
to the apostles. Revelation kind of fills in this
category that is similar to the third category in the Old
Testament, that of the writings. I don't have time to describe in
more detail how that features, but it is again a parallel with
Old Testament. New Testament, the same logic of
their structure and really the coherence of the plan of
creation and redemption as it follows through the Old
Testament and the New Testament, and not in a kind of bifurcation
where we used to have law, now we have gospel.
Now, that's why I put a smaller arrow there because it's not
this, this this kind of quantum leap from one to the other, but
it's more just as the law gave way to the OR was complimented
by the prophets, so the gospel is complemented by the Apostolic
witness and those two together formed this like nuclear bond
that can't be separated. That's really how the Canon of
Olive Scripture developed. We'll look at each of those sub
collections in the next few minutes.
Are there any questions about the logic of Canon?
No, OK. Do feel free to chime in if a
question comes up at any time. OK, let's look first at Gospel,
how the Gospel Canon, the four gospels came together not only
in their collection, not only in their ordering, but also in
their original composition, how they were written.
Do they really derive from Jesus of Nazareth?
And this is what I'd like to argue today, that every detail,
excuse me, in the canonical Gospels derives either directly
or indirectly from Jesus of Nazareth as he was faithfully
remembered and proclaimed by the four Apostolic evangelists
through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and this same Jesus
we confess as Lord. Let's stay on this slide for
another minute or two. Some scholars, in fact, maybe we
can say a, a majority of critical scholars will, will
operate on this principle that you can that there's, there's
two different ways to think and you can't think both of those
ways at the same time. You have to think either as a
critical historian that only listens to evidence and, and,
and makes conclusions based on facts.
And then you have the the person of faith who believes in what he
knows, he or she knows not to be true, but you're taking this
existential step of faith. Good on you for taking that step
of faith. And then you kind of leave that
faith to one side when then when you look at the evidence and
have to adjudicate it one way or the other.
I don't think anybody actually lives that way because we're
always living with presuppositions, with faith
commitments. Everybody here is trusting in
the chairs and the sofas that they're sitting on.
There is this implicit act of faith that we have really with
any, any facet of life that we live or any discussion that we
have or any piece of information that we we interpret or digest.
And so as I come to the text of the Gospels, I can pose
difficult critical questions to the Gospels, but I can also at
the same time have a position of faith seeking, understanding,
knowing that this Jesus with whom I have come into covenant
union by baptism, who I have received by faith from those who
told me this good news. Any reading that I do of the
Gospels, it's going to be in an embodied way that I as a, as a,
as a person bought by Christ, confessing Christ as Lord.
There is no decision that I can make in my life that's not
impacted or or surrounded by this greater commitment I have
to Christ. And so I can have critical
questions. I can engage them and ask
difficult questions about the text, their authenticity,
etcetera. But I don't have to have this
doubt everything until I can show it to be true.
I can have this faith, genuine faith, robust faith, seeking
greater understanding, even to the point of the to the
microscopic level of of what words Jesus spoke, how he said
them and how they were interpreted.
That's what leads me to make this bold claim that I'd like to
make a case for in the following slides.
So historians, critical historians will say that we
cannot recover the real Jesus of history if he's if we're
separated by 2000 years, what we have is a historical events that
possibly happens. And then it was observed by
certain people, and then they recall it through collective
memory, eventually kind of codifying it in a community.
And then that's passed on from generation to generation.
Now, depending on how far the observation is from the
historical event, the farther that distance is, the less
reliable your observation is, and the farther that the
recollection memory is from the observation.
Even more, you have greater levels of uncertainty as to the
reality of the historical event. So that's the problem posed to
how we can trust whether or not Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
actually reflect the Jesus of Nazareth.
Let's go to the next slide and see see 3 arguments.
I'd like to make three sources. I'd like to draw from scholars
whose work I have learned from and I think have made a very
robust case for the reliability of that tradition.
Richard Balcombe in his landmark volume Jesus and the
Eyewitnesses makes a strong case that the Gospels are based on
reliable eyewitness memory of Jesus of Nazareth.
Let's go back to the previous slide.
So if these observers were actually there, and if their
witnesses are corroborating one another, even if they're giving
a different angle of the same event, the more witnesses you
have, the more likelihood that it's a true witness.
When we look at the Gospels, they're filled with named
individuals, with entrusted named individuals who are kind
of the guardians of the tradition.
They're even anonymous witnesses.
There are men, there are women, there are people of a whole set
of abilities or disabilities. There are Greeks, there are
Romans, there are Jews. There are people who don't
believe in Jesus, people who do believe in him, people who are
transformed. A whole set of a diverse set of
witnesses that observed the historical teachings and actions
of Jesus. Now when they distributed that
knowledge through the overseeing of the apostles who themselves
were commissioned by Jesus, that led to greater levels of of
recollection and memory as these stories were told and retold and
eventually coalesced into different patterns of that
memory. Let's skip two more slides.
This is a diagram of how these eyewitness traditions emerged.
So if you had the 12 who had this unique authoritative role
in in guarding the tradition and making sure the story was told
in the right way. And then if you have named
eyewitnesses like Bartimaeus. And then if you have a whole
host of anonymous eyewitnesses like the woman who was healed
from having been bent over by a debilitating disease in Luke 13.
Or if you have the man born blind in John 9, or if you have
the Jairus's daughter or the woman with the the 12 years of
bleeding. These are real historical
persons as the Gospels recount them, who would have remembered
this amazing event, this incredible life changing event.
And so they would have told that story.
These folks were living in key centers of ancient Christianity,
whether by Jerusalem or in Galilee.
The the major centers of Jesus ministry, or whether like the
apostles after Pentecost they dispersed and went to Ephesus in
Asia Minor, or to Alexandria in North Africa, or to Antioch in
Syria, or all the way to Rome. These places became hubs, local
centers of where these memories were told and retold.
And so John eventually sets up shop in Ephesus.
Peter eventually sets up shop in Rome.
Matthew probably sets up shop in Antioch after spending a good
deal of time in Jerusalem. And then Mark worked with Peter
in Rome to write the Gospel according to Saint Mark, and
then probably Mooj, and then was martyred in Alexandria.
And so the major centers of ancient Christianity became
these hubs where the the memories of Jesus were told and
retold and then eventually written down.
And that is why we see a remarkable consistency.
Go to the next slide, one more, a remarkable consistency among
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as they're recounting these
memories. Because someone could say, oh,
John, who wrote this gospel, he still lives in Ephesus.
If you don't understand what this means, I know somebody who
knows. Somebody can ask him, what does
he mean when he says that's for example, when Jesus said I am
the Good Shepherd, what exactly did he mean by that?
You could you could ask somebody who knew John who could
interpret that for you and help you figure out the Davidic
kingship motif that John is pointing to in John chapter 10.
Similarly, someone could have witnessed Mark being martyred in
Alexandria and then been drawn to his Gospel and read it afresh
and then figure out, oh, he actually his friends who were
there when he was martyr told us that he penned this down through
the destruction of Peter. When did Peter die?
He died a few years ago in Rome after testifying to Christ.
And so this sort of early Christian mafia where everybody
knew everybody, which then they had at that time in history the
Roman roads and the Mediterranean Sea having been
cleared of pirates, there was quite an amazing network of
travel. One scholar has called it the
Holy Internet. Basically knowledge could pass
from one city to the next in a matter of days because of their
travel networks. I served in the Horn of Africa
for about based there for about 7 years and one of the people
groups that I have to serve among were the Somali.
They call it the Somali Internet.
If you say something in Addis Ababa to a Somali, if someone in
this shoot is going to know about it the next day, and then
someone in London will know about it.
And then if you travel to Minnesota where there's a large
Somali community, someone's going to be like, oh, you're so
and so, yeah, my cousin told me about you.
It's just so this the Somali oral culture is so tightly
connected by plan that if you say something to one person,
it's going to it's going to the rumors going to spread all the
way around. It was very similar in ancient
Christianity, but it wasn't just a rumor.
It was a life changing charisma message of preached message of
salvation where the apostles agreed among among among one
another about the main structure of this gospel and about the the
major events in Jesus's life. And then eyewitnesses inserted
particular stories that are uniquely preserved in Matthew,
Mark, Luke or John. And then the followers of the
followers, that the disciples of the disciples continue to read
these traditions as they were inscribed in texts of the
Gospels. And all the way up until 9080 or
slightly thereafter, the eyewitnesses within this circle
are still alive until they die out.
And even when they die out, they themselves made disciples,
disciples of these eyewitnesses who could tell you a story or an
interpretation of the Gospel that was only a generation or so
removed from Jesus himself. And so that's why when we get to
our earliest church fathers, that we have Irenaeus, who died
in 2000. Sorry, 202, Justin Martyr, who
died around 166, or the Apostolic Fathers, all who died
before 150 AD. You have a reliable witness to
what the Gospels were and how they were written, how they were
passed down, how they should be interpreted and how they should
be read. And The thing is, these earliest
readers of the Gospels, they weren't reading like we kind of
modern secular people would read a text, sort of how do I take my
faith and move it to the side and just read it critically?
How do I find a historical data and judge whether or not it
happened? They read it from the posture of
faith because they were reading as people whose lives have been
transformed by Jesus. And so for them, reading about
something that happened that Jesus had accomplished was also
an act of, of, of challenging them towards stronger faith in
the not only the Jesus that they read in the text, but the Lord
that they worshipped every Sunday.
So it was a, a web of Christian memory receiving the Gospels
and, and, and reading them faithfully.
And you can also have on the other side non Christians,
pagans, Greeks and Romans who encountered these gospels and
were compelled to faith by reading the Gospels who came at
it from a posture of of of skepticism saying how can this
actually be true? 11 ancient Christian philosopher
that I love to read is Justin Martyr.
He started off kind of toying around with Stoicism, then put
then he tried a little bit of Pythagoreanism.
Then he found Platonism and was moved by Plato's account of, of
the one of, of, of the, the source of all things.
But there is an element missing in it.
And then he makes his way to Ephesus and finds a bearded man,
anonymous bearded man, who walking on the shores of the
Mediterranean, tells him about the prophets and tells him about
Jesus. And then his life is
transformed. Then he discovers what he calls
the memoirs of the apostles, namely the Gospels, and his life
is transformed and he he is so compelled by the witness of the
law and the prophets and the gospel and the apostle that
eventually he's willing to give his life in martyrdom for the
cause of the gospel. So not only was it a Christian
web of remembering Jesus and Apostolic web of remembering and
writing about Jesus and then a Christian web of receiving the
gospel texts and faithfully reading them.
There was also a non Christian Pagan world that was encountered
by this gospel and was compelled to belief because of how, yeah,
how compelling the account of Jesus was and how the Christians
could say, well, I know so and so.
Who knew so and so who was an Ephesus who knew John and John
knew Jesus. This is only a few degrees
removed from us today. This Jesus put your faith in
him. So this is the really a
thumbnail sketch of about 150 years of history really deriving
from Jesus of Nazareth, faithfully remembered, reliant
be remembered by eyewitnesses, inscribed by gospel authors,
received, read and passed down by disciples of those authors.
And then eventually we get to the the stage of the church from
from Edessa, from modern day Iraq all the way to modern day
France, this and then across North Africa universally
recognizing these 4 gospels are the ones that preserve for us
the faithful teachings of Jesus. Let's go back two slides before
we get to some questions on this one more before this.
So my doctoral supervisor, Marcus Bach Mule has taken the
ideas of Richard Balcombe and then engaged the question of the
critical scholar who says, OK, you can do spade work
historically and try to make a case for the reliability of the
Gospels, but you're still doing that.
You still have to do that under the premises of secular
historical critical readings. You can't do that from the from
the place of faith. What Bothell would argue is that
the very act of remembering Jesus at the outset was not some
detached historical observation, but it was an act of worship.
To say Jesus rose from the dead is a proclamation of allegiance
to this Jesus. And so if the earliest memories
of Jesus were an act of faith, an act of allegiance to Jesus,
then when we study the earliest memories of Jesus, the, the,
the, the most honest, the, the most robust, the truest way to
study it is to make that same act of faith as we study it.
It's almost like saying, how do you know how to swing a baseball
bat, right? Well, you can say you squash the
bug, you choke up, elbow out like a chicken.
You kind of make sure that the power comes from the ground
through the hips and then you. Swing.
Right, that's how you swing a baseball bat, right?
A detached observer can memorize every single one of those
elements to swinging a baseball bat, but not until you actually
feel the the the shock of a baseball as it hits the bat.
And as you continue the follow through and see the ball go all
the way to the outfield, you haven't really learned how to
swing a baseball bat. OK, in the same way you can
study how the early Christians remember Jesus and you can
adjudicate whether it's reliable or not.
You can come to a point of say, OK, it's all it's reliable.
We have a genuine legitimate memory of this historical
figure. But until you actually worship
the Lord as you're remembering him and studying him, you don't
actually know what the Gospels are doing because the gospel
writers themselves were writing it as an act of worship, as an
act of allegiance to Jesus. And so for us as Christians, the
critical reading of the Gospels that asks legitimate historical
questions can be the same reading of the Gospels as those
who are worshipping Jesus within this living memory.
And this memory of Jesus is not just something that people with
pH DS do, but it's something that the global church from
continent to continent is doing in different contexts as we
worship our Lord within the memory of the church.
So this is contextual worship. It's historical reality.
It's not a bifurcation of historical questions on the one
hand and then faith commitments on the other, since the earliest
memories of Jesus were those two things coming together in
worship of Jesus. Even so, our historical
questions of Jesus and the Gospels can be robustly worship
as well. There will be a number of
critical scholars who would vehemently disagree with me, and
I'd love to debate them on that. But this is the case I want to
make as someone who's committed, committed my life to those two
things coming together. And so that's why I wanted to
linger on this just for a little bit this this afternoon, why I
think we can have confidence in the Gospels and read them with
historical lenses at the same time, even more fundamentally,
reading it as an act of worship. Any questions about this massive
topic, go ahead. Can we?
Bump maybe 3 slides forward. Yes, yes, this one.
So is it that it's a two-part question?
So the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of John were written by
the disciples Matthew and John and the Gospel of and Luke and
Mark. Did they know Jesus or they knew
people or they knew people Who? So a really strong case can be
made that Mark had met Jesus personally.
His mother's house was in Jerusalem.
Acts 12, that's where the apostles were gathering.
A scholar by the name of Thomas Odin has made a strong case
based on North African memories several centuries later that
were written down that the upper room where Jesus and his
disciples met was the was the room of Mark's family.
That's that's a definitely a plausible reconstruction.
We can't be 100% sure of it, but just given the fact that Mark
was probably younger than Peter and that his his family network
was connected to North Africa and to Jerusalem, it's quite
likely that he was at the healings.
He certainly knew a whole lot of people who were.
And he had walked in the very spaces where Jesus had performed
these miracles. So the memory was still kind of
reverberating in the architecture of each of those
spaces that Mark himself probably walked through.
And he was tied to Peter. Yeah.
Absolutely. That's the Apostolic.
Connection. That's the most important part,
yeah. And then Luke was.
Tied, yes, so. Luke had a whole set of
eyewitnesses. He was most closely tied to
Paul. Paul as a Pharisee, actually
this is not. This is really underexplored as
a Pharisee probably had heard about Jesus, if not had
witnessed Jesus himself. Having travelled from Tarsus,
probably back and forth to Jerusalem quite a few times,
there's a strong likelihood that he had himself had been in a
crowd when Jesus was there. Even if he hadn't, he had been
in the locations where Jesus had committed, had performed many of
his miracles, and the memory is still reverberating in those in
those geographical regions. Luke connected to Paul and
having probably drawn from several other Apostolic sources,
whether Peter or John or others, Was, was, was, was, was deriving
the stories and the traditions from those same sources.
So what are some of the most contested?
Books of the New Testament, we'll get to that.
That's a really good. Question.
OK, Alfreda, sorry hand up. So maybe this is.
A basic question. Matthew, Mark.
No, wait, sorry that the Gospel was.
Known. To identify yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah. And the fact that Matthew and
Luke have identical passages from yes, uh huh is the argument
that yeah, yeah. These different, yeah.
These are different. The analogy is working even.
Better than I had hoped, OK. So oh, these are OK.
Perfect. OK, so these are awesome.
There's four different ones. OK, so so.
All the men in the room who are liking me are slightly
colorblind. I hear men are more color
blinded women. It's a stereotype, but these all
look the same, right? Unless you look closely, you can
see the difference. Now imagine.
OK, Much different to your eyes. Yeah.
Wow. All right.
OK, well, OK. They're all coasters.
Let me choose two that look much more similar.
OK, All right. I'll tell to two that are like
identical and the other two are identical.
OK, now imagine if I could pass these around for several
centuries or decades and they would never be confused.
And so they're so they're very similar, but they're never
confused. How would you differentiate
between these two, between these four?
If they were very similar, maybe you'd mark them up right, put a
name or two. So I put.
Matthew on this one. Mark on this one, Luke on this
one, John on this one. The Gospels as they were
distributed. Luke was never confused for
John. John was never confused for
Mark. Matthew and Mark, even though
they're so similar in many ways, Mark was never accidentally
called called Matthew and Matthew was never accidentally
called Mark. That tells us that that
signifies to us that very early on when Mark was written, it had
a title saying according to Mark, Matthew had a title
according to Matthew. Luke had a title according to
Luke. John had a title according to
John. And then when, when a, a, a, a
church father like Irenaeus would come across Matthew, he'd
say, oh, I know that's Matthew. He begins with the genealogy.
Oh, I know that's Mark because he begins with the the
inauguration of the Gospel. And that's got to be John.
I know it's John because begins with the beginning, the word.
And every copy I've ever read of this says according to John,
according to Matthew, according to Mark.
And I know Pathias, my buddy Pathias, where was he?
He's in the middle. I know my buddy Pathias, he died
30 years ago, but I heard directly from him that that Mark
was Peter's follower and wrote down Peter's oral proclamation
of Jesus. And so that is how I know that
Mark is always Mark. And it's always been called Mark
because Habeas, who knew Mark's disciple, passed on this
tradition from Mark, who had written what had, what Peter had
been writing or had been speaking.
And so Irenaeus with all four gospels able to differentiate
them because of their names. Their names were consistent
because they were very early on attributed to the to the the
gospel authors. And that's why we have a
consistency across usages of the four gospels by the earliest
patristics and across the manuscript tradition.
That lack of confusion in that utter consistency shows kind of
bespeaks an early date to the the Gospels being attributed to
these authors. One follow up, Alfred, and I'll
go to the next question. Yeah, yeah.
So so to. Me.
That sounds very plausible, but doesn't like the only plausible
reason why. OK, so the four gospels have
elements that are very distinct. Yeah.
The fact that I can different
sheep doesn't mean necessarily there was a label the Gospel
according to Mark or Matthew or John or Luke.
Yep, that differentiation is not necessarily tied to the author.
OK. And so.
I, I struggle with this because it seems like those 4 gospels
are written to specific audiences.
Like so, so Mark was written and he has to like explain what he
just said in Aramaic. So his audience is from the
Greek right? So, so if the way written for
those audiences, it stands to to reason to me that these
different audiences knew the contents of these different
gospels, uh huh. So over time, folks are able to
identify them as different types of as different gospels.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. This because your your
definition of authenticity. Uh huh.
To the authorship. Yeah.
Who was the person yeah that broke this particular scripture?
Yeah, so really. Good question.
In the early Christian reception of Apostolic texts, there was no
room for a pseudonymous text to be accepted as Apostolic.
So if any Christian in their right mind knew that this was
falsely attributed to Mark, they would have discarded it.
There was a Gospel according to Peter that was read in the late
2nd century. Was kind of interesting.
It gave a new perspective on Jesus's resurrection.
But then a Bishop approached. So Bishops Sarapian approached
the Bishop of Ross in in Cyprus and said you should stop reading
this because we cannot legitimately connect it back to
Peter. Stop reading this spurious
writing. So there's a really strong
commitment to authenticity that if any of these were questioned,
there would have been a reason for it to be brought to the
light right away. Another thing regarding how we
know that it was how we can connect distinctness to
authorship. Matthew pretty much.
He repeats 90% of of of Mark. And in antiquity when you have a
better version, sort of when 2 point O comes out, 1.0
oftentimes just kind of falls to the side.
It could be you can view 1.0 as rough notes and then 2.0 is much
better. And so whether it's Roman
historians recalling events taking previous versions when
they do a much better job than previous version, previous
version dies out unless previous version has some value to it
that the community that reads the history history thinks is
valuable to remember it by. So Matthew, historically
speaking, should have replaced Mark, and Mark should have been
thrown away as just rough notes that Matthew developed further.
But because Mark was associated with Peter and because Mark as
an Apostolic writer under Peter's authority was giving a
genuinely Petrine exposition of the Gospel, even though you can
get 90% of Mark in Matthew, the early church kept Mark because
they said this is valuable to remember because it derives from
an apostle in a different way than what this thing called
Matthew does. So that is how difference and
consistency really points to Apostolic origins that is worth
worth, worth preserving in their difference.
So the unity and the difference really points us to the
authenticity Dan another argument.
Related to this has to do with the locations, the aspera of the
apostles, the locations where they ended up turned into copy
centers. Yeah, Oh yeah, copy centers.
Were very meticulous in. Copying and recopying these
manuscripts. And they were extremely loyal,
more loyal than Jacob is to the Tigers.
Proud and loyal of their. Work and they had somebody that
they were honoring in their work of copy.
Yeah. And all of this points to a high
degree of certainty. Yeah.
About authorship. Yeah, from the very absolutely.
Time for one more question. Alex, it's Alex, right?
Yes, yes. So my.
Understanding is that. That produced the Gospel of
Mark. Yeah, here.
You're saying that these? People all knew each other.
They were all in kind of communication.
Yeah, with each other. My question is, if they were in
that kind of close contact with one another, yeah.
Why, then do we have, for example, in the Bible, two
different accounts of the circumstances surrounding
Jesus's birth, two different genealogies for Jesus?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK.
So specific question about the genealogy, more broad question
about the differences. And then how do those, how does
that specific question, how does the broad question of
differences relate to the interconnectedness of the Gospel
communities? I'd like to start with the first
premise about there being specific communities that the
Gospel authors are writing to. I actually don't think that
there was that, that the Gospels were at any point exclusively
written to a single community. So I don't think that Matthew
wrote just for Antioch, for example, or Mark just wrote for
Rome. I think he wrote initially
distributing it. They initially distributed it in
their local region, but they wrote with this understanding of
a global mission. And so they were distributed
really quickly after their after their writing.
And so Mark has an early Roman and Alexandrian provenance.
John, though it has an early Ephesian provenance is really
quickly taken up in Alexandria and then also shows up in Rome
pretty early on. And so the, the, the kind of the
cross pollination of of many of these communities, I think was
was very early on, which presses the question your second or your
main question really, what do we do with all of these
differences? I think the differences are
actually really important theologically because they show
us they they, they show us different facets of Jesus's
identity. So when you get to Matthew's
genealogy versus Luke's genealogy, Luke's genealogy is
showing Christ as the second Adam.
Matthew's genealogy is showing Christ as the son of Abraham.
And so you have Abrahamic Israelite stories that are
fulfilled in Jesus and Matthew's genealogy.
And then you have Pan Gentile salvation movement that you see
in Luke's genealogy. And so if they're, you know,
let's let's suppose that there's a setting where Matthew and Luke
were in the same building and they're like, hey, you did it
differently than me. There's a reason why they're why
that difference was preserved. And in fact, when you get to
Irenaeus, mid to late 2nd century, he will say that each
individual gospel is supposed to have its unique contribution.
You don't want to obliterate the differences, you want to respect
the differences because they they there.
There's several metaphors that he uses, but the musical one is
the one he uses the most. If you have unison, you just
have unison. If you have a whole bunch of
sounds, you have cacophony or dissonance.
But harmony is only possible if you have difference that works
together for 1/3 or the greater entity greater than the sum of
its parts. And So what what Irenaeus will
do is he'll say that, well, I'm going to spoil something.
Actually, we probably won't have time to go through the text of
stuff, but if you look at your if you look at your quotes, your
quote here from Irenaeus Books against Heresies, Book 3, he'll
basically say you have in Ezekiel the four, the four
cherubim, the four living creatures.
And then you have in Psalms Psalm 80 verse one, how the Lord
is seated between the cherubim. And so if you have 4 living
creatures and if you have the presence the temple in the the
ark of the covenant presence of God seated between the four
living creatures. Then when you have 4 gospels, 1
represented by a man, 1 represented by an OX1
represented by a lion, 1 represented by an eagle.
These are like the four living creatures, the four cherubim,
that in their difference, they're each holding up the
throne where Christ himself is seated.
It's an aesthetic argument for unity and difference because I,
I, let's go four or five slides down and I'll show why this is
important in the reception of the Gospels.
Keep going, keep going, keep going, going.
I keep going. OK, yeah, we're going to.
This is like keep going. We got to get to the Canon.
There you go. Sorry, there.
OK Martian will say I hate these differences.
This, this is like, so he's writing in 144 AD, he actually
shows up at Rome and tries to tries to bribe the the Bishop of
Rome and they anathematize him at that point.
And so he comes to Rome 144AD and he is kind of a textual
critic and amateur textual critic.
And he's like, oh, any good textual critic will say, I have
copy one, I have copy 2. If one disagrees with the other,
if there's differences, then I have to find which one's earlier
or which one's more reliable and I get rid of the one that's not
reliable. He basically did that with with
with Luke and then with Mark and Matthew, perhaps John, but most
most likely with Luke, with Mark and Matthew.
And he preferred the consistency in his mind of Luke.
And then he chopped up Luke to what he thought might just be
genuine. And also he had some theological
motivation. So for him it was unison.
He couldn't take any difference at all.
And plus he had a theological, an ideology that that influenced
his knife as he was chopping up the manuscript and just saying,
I want 1 little bit of this Luke gospel and that's going to be my
gospel. He called it his El angelion.
Then on the other end of the spectrum, you have Tatian about
17172AD who he he he has he has access to a whole bunch of
Gospels in the late 2nd century. And so he could have drawn from
Thomas and from Gospel of Peter, a Gospel of maybe he didn't
access to Judas, but a whole bunch of other Gospels, but he
had an Apostolic commitment to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
Yet perhaps some scholars surmise that this might have
been for evangelistic purposes. He wanted to piece them all
together into a a continuous narrative.
And So what he does is by by codifying different passages,
like putting a different symbol probably on each of the passages
of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, he finds a way to bring
all of their contributions together into one massive super
gospel because he wanted to to minimize difference without
without obliterating it completely.
Tation does that by creating a super Gospel of Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John. He almost gets there.
Irenaeus is between these two options.
He says we need more than one gospel and we need the harmony
of the gospel. But the best way to do that is
to keep all four and read them. Keep reading them, keep
rereading them, and together when you read their collective
voice, you see the the full picture of Jesus as the apostles
proclaimed him. Long answer to a short question.
The differences actually create harmony in the Gospels rather
than a bland unison of their testimony.
So, OK, one more question then we got to go to the epistles.
Yeah, just quickly what you just said made.
Me think of this the way you describe Marcion's editing
process was that he had kind of a theological motivation process
yeah, yeah, I'm curious to what degree the kind of consensus
spokes like in that second row there maybe also had that Yep
what was the question among. The earlier just like just like
who actually saw? Jesus.
Yeah, what is that? OK, let's go back.
Three slides, keep going. OK, there's much more than three
aside, but keep going. One more right there, right
there. OK, one more First Corinthians
15, one through 11. I want you to know, brothers,
the gospel that I preached to you, which how is it, which I
passed down to you and by which you are saved, if you, if you,
if you really have believed it, that Christ died for our sins
according to the Scriptures, that he was buried and that he
rose again on the third day in accordance to the Scriptures.
And that he appeared to, to Cephas, to James and to the 12
last of all he appeared to me. So that's abbreviated version of
First Corinthians 15 one through 11.
That is what we call the karigma, the, the proclamation
of the apostles as four key elements.
Christ, that's Messiah died for our sins according to the
Scriptures, that he that's buried, that he rose again on
the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.
So Messiah, substitutionary death, resurrection on the third
day, accordance with the Scriptures, that was the
uniform, that was the the standard Apostolic message that
was proclaimed by every one of the apostles across the entire
Mediterranean basin and further east and further South that
that's the Apostolic karigma. This is actually the the DNA or
the schema for all four of the canonical Gospels.
This is actually the Canon. If we want to talk about a
religious rule, original definition of Canon.
This is the earliest Canon that we have.
And so if people say Canon came 400 years after the New
Testament, actually Canon came before the New Testament was
even written. This Canon, this rule of faith
of four points of the Apostolic Charisma, it was proclaimed
again across the Mediterranean basin.
And then when the Gospels were written, the Gospels that came
in line with this and accorded with this Canon and were
attributed, were properly attributed to Apostolic figures.
These were the Gospels that stood the test of time.
The Gospels that did not come in line with this Canon and then
also were not associated or be able to be were able to be
verified as Apostolic in their origin.
They were, they were just rejected, maybe entertained for
a little while, but then it was widely shown that they were
rejected because they fell short of this standard.
And so so this is the argument by a scholar named Simon gather
call in his book, The Gospel and the Gospels.
He really makes the case that the ideology, as it were, the
theology really preceded the the the inscripturation of the
gospels. And so since this theology is
the backbone of all four of the gospels, then it's entirely
appropriate if this theology is how we judge which gospels are
genuine after the gospels are written.
So when Martian comes along, he doesn't preach this.
Jesus is not the Messiah of Israel.
The God of Israel is a Pagan God that shouldn't be worshipped.
This was not in accordance with the Scriptures because we need
to reject the Old Testament. So Marcion's gospel was not
Apostolic, and so he had the wrong ideology, the wrong
theology by which to adjudicate what's the true gospel?
Whereas Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Papius, Polycarp, Tertullian,
Clement of Alexandria, they had the Apostolic gospel in their in
their DNA. And so for them to read a
gospel, they could, they could, they had the internal sense
about whether it was genuine. And they could trust the witness
of the apostles as they've been passed down to them because of
the way that the four gospels accorded one with another and
with the Apostolic testimony that preceded all of them.
So good question. OK, Danielle on this and
generally I'm. Wondering how like top down
versus bottom up this was like how much was it like it was
everything was properly accepted or how much was like a specific
church council like picked books.
Yeah, I guess with this for. Example with.
This like widely accepted and then recognized by the Council.
Yeah. Church council first, Yeah.
OK. So the first one widely
accepted, then the church council was like, this is the
craft way to put it was basically the theological, the
ecclesial cherry on top of what was already widely accepted.
And you have several elements to that for why it was widely
accepted. Let's go 11, slide down.
Let's see here. Keep going, keep going.
We won't deal with that or that, sorry, just combined.
OK, So go back to this little complex structure.
OK, so if we have Jesus of Nazareth, the the recollections
of the traditions leading to eventual inscripturation, Mark,
Matthew, Luke, John. This is 1 hypothesis of how the
gospels themselves are related. That could lead to a whole other
lecture. So please don't ask any
questions about that today. Then what happens is these
become the most popular gospels and even the gospel, even the
the non canonical gospels that are written, they they have to
pay homage as it were, to the fact that these 4 gospels are
the ones that everybody knows. And so they're going to base
their new gospel on the authority of what's already been
written and accepted as Apostolic.
So the Gospel of Thomas is basically someone ran out of
someone didn't have many original ideas and said Matthew
and Luke, a lot of people like it.
So I'm going to take 67% of my book is going to be basically
quoting Matthew and Luke, but I'm going to put my own little
spin on it. And then it kind of snowballs in
its own little sphere of influence, but then kind of
fizzled out. You can get a whole so that
there could be a history written out in each of each of these non
comical gospels. But what they're all doing in
common is they're taking the material from the gospels and
saying that's what everybody likes in the 1st place.
And so we're going to riff on what everybody else already
accepts as authoritative. But none of these ever, ever
stood a chance to become a fifth gospel, a exclusive
interpretation of one or four of the gospels.
But then you actually have some like the Epistle of the Apostles
or the Deoteseron, where their whole project is to show you the
reliability of the four. And so if you read the epistle
the apostle, that's basically saying, here's the apostle
Gospel, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
And here's my here's my way to tell you that it's legitimate.
So trust this gospel. And so, so basically there's no
church councils happening in this period.
And even the heretics are using Matthew and Luke.
Even the heretics are writing commentaries on John.
Even the even the heretics are writing like sort of small
biblical interpretive works drawing from Matthew and John at
the same time. And so it's not a political move
of the Orthodox party saying these and only these burn
everything else. It's basically choose your kind
of ancient Christianity, Gnostic, Valentinian, Sethian or
Orthodox. They're all using the same base
text as the ultimate authorities, just some are
interpreting it according to the paradigm of the apostles, and
others are buying into this newfangled esoteric stuff and
trying to write their own gospels in addition to what are
the most authoritative ones. So then in terms of widespread
use, when you get to the end of the 2nd century, Irenaeus is
basically stating the obvious saying we know that these and
only these, these four are the genuine gospels from the
apostles that have been accepted all across hill named Jerusalem,
Libya, Rome and his own Gaul, modern day Leon.
One final thing about that question.
Irenaeus also has this really fun description of the the the
Gauls that the Gallic people among whom he's serving.
He was like, look, even talk to a Gallic person who can't read.
They like, if you have one of these heretics coming from, you
know, from Valentinus in northern Egypt over here to Gaul
and preaching them from one of these false gospels, they'd stop
their ears and run because of how how, how I forgot the phrase
that he used. But basically he's like, they
could tell a true gospel from a false gospel and they couldn't
even read. And so he was probably relating
the the local faithfulness to the Apostolic Gospel that did
not require the erudition of a Bishop like like Irenaeus who
was trained. It was this was from the
grassroots up one more example of grassroots up the amulets
that were made. So these are quasi superstitious
Christians. The amulets that were made never
used never used sayings from the from the gnostic gospels or the
non canonical gospels. If you want power to heal you
don't quote gospel autonomous. If you want power to heal you
put the inkipit of Mark. Okay, so these aren't seminary
educated, always say like Orthodox, you know, really good
Apostolic preachers. These are just everyday
Christians who want healing and so they go wherever they can and
their grandparents use amulets praying to Egyptian gods.
So all they know is to write scripture and wear it.
Where do you go to find power Apostolic gospels?
And which gospels did they use? The four canonical gospels?
So even amulets kind of show this grassroots, what's most
widespreadly, what's most widely used in its spread.
It's the Apostolic 4 Gospels. So I almost made this whole
lecture about this and we only have a few minutes left.
One more question Outback and maybe we can see where we can
take that. Go ahead.
Taking this just a question about writing styles.
Yeah, Yeah, in the. 4 gospels, are they?
Distinctive even when. Describing the same events?
Yes, absolutely. Especially John.
In comparison to Matthew, Mark and Luke.
And then even Matthew, Mark and Luke will have their their
distinct way to describe something.
Luke's. So Luke's Greek is really
polished. It's beautiful Greek.
Matthew's Greek will have a lot of semitisms to it, like it will
kind of sound like someone who's been trained in Hebrew
scriptures but also is fluent in Greek.
Mark's Greek is very, it's very rough and kind of he'll say
something very, very pithy kind of way, very in your face.
It's abrupt, not very grammatically beautiful in terms
of what like ancient grammarian would say, but each in their own
way are contributing to the same Apostolic message.
And it's in those little quirks are unique things that each of
the gospels does each of the authors contributes that you get
a lot of deep theology. Even even the fact that let's
see here Mark will say the word immediately too many times and
immediately Jesus did this and immediately and immediately he
is, is, is showing the the in breaking of the Kingdom of God
as it as it contrast with the with the World of Darkness into
which it comes. That immediacy of the coming of
God's Kingdom is displayed passage to passage by Mark's
sort of clunky style. So I would really encourage you
to look at each of the gospels and find those quote UN quote
eccentricities of each of the gospels and actually in those
differences you'll find some really deep theology.
So we have to somehow in 15 minutes talk about the Pauline
corpus. I'm sorry that this I didn't
time this Well, let's, let's see the most important thing I can
kind of can show for your consideration for the Pauline
corpus. We've got Jesus and the Gospels.
Let's go quickly now down a couple of slides.
OK, So while we're finding the slides, I like to think, yes,
the stay on this one. I like to think of the New
Testament Canon by by sub collection.
So just like we saw how the law, the Torah itself is a sub
collection that is then interpreted and proclaimed by
the prophets, Similarly we see the Gospel as a sub collection.
And then we see the letters of Paul as a sub collection.
And then the Catholic Epistles is another kind of sub sub
collection. And you can see each of these as
sort of centers of gravity that are emerging, that are
clustering. And then really it's just a
matter of bringing these clusters together and they form
this nuclear bond of the New Testament Canon.
So you see those clusters coming together in the earliest stages
of Christianity. It's very plausible that Paul
himself collected his own letters.
Does everybody have Gmail or some e-mail service?
OK, what's right below your inbox?
Sent, sent. So.
Your inbox. Your e-mail.
Software is saving every single one of your sent emails unless
you want to delete it so that no one can can can see what you're
writing. The ancient form of the sent box
was when you make a copy, you dictate a copy, you send that
copy, but then you also have your menu insist your scribe
keep a copy for yourself. And then you make a collection
of all the copies of those letters.
And if you're missing a couple, you write again to someone that
you wrote, ask them to send you a copy of the letter that you
wrote and you forgot to make a copy for yourself.
And then by the at the end of your life, you collect all of
these, all of these writings and you, you, you put them together
into one volume. And that's what you bequeath to
your son or to your heir or to a trusted friend.
So letters of Cicero, pre Imperial Republic, Roman
senator, letters of Pliny the Elder and the Younger, the So
you have several correspondences, plenty to
Trajan or plenty to Tacitus. There's a whole, there's several
collections of ancient Roman letters where you see this
towards the end of 1's life process of collecting your
letters. Now when Paul is about to die,
about to be martyred, and he pens his last letter, second
Timothy, he asks Timothy to come and bring him his cloak.
It's probably cold in in his Roman prison where he is, but
then he also says in verse 13, do your best to bring the cloak
that I left. Also the books and above all the
parchments. Now what he refers to there in
parchments is probably copies of his letters that were kept in
parchment form that could then be turned into the the the Roman
codex form so that he could keep them with him at the end of his
life and so that he could pass them on to someone that he
trusted, maybe even Luke. And so we can see the Pauline
letter collection emerge as as a as a collection, not just as
individual letters that happen to be left in different
churches. Also, you see the number 7
showing up, You have 77 churches that he wrote to, Rome, Corinth,
Galatians, Ephesians. So Galatia, OK, Romans, Rome,
Corinth, Galatia, Ephesus, Philippi, Colossae,
Thessalonica. He's got 7 churches that he's
writing to. And then he has his four letters
to individuals, First, Second Timothy, Titus, Philemon.
Then how many letters does John write in Revelation?
How many, how many churches does he write to?
Seven. Ignatius of Antioch, he wrote to
seven churches. So this sevenfold letter
collection was an ancient Christian pattern.
So it's quite likely that Paul intentionally preserved as a
complete witness of how he is going to disciple the church, a
collection of seven churches and the letters.
So a sevenfold letter collection of Paul probably emerged really
early on. Interestingly, even the heretics
like Marcian collected letters of Paul.
So Marcian collected only 10 letters of Paul.
He didn't use the Pastoral Epistles and so Marcy and
because of his theological motivation, he had a truncated A
truncated collection of Paul's letters.
But Even so, even heretics then had their own Pauline letter
collections. Peter arguably is the earliest
to give us an example of collecting Paul's letters in
Second Peter chapter 3. If you ask me about the
authenticity of Second Peter, I'll have to give another
lecture, but just presuppose with me now that Second Peter is
genuine. He mentions the letters plural
of Paul, Second Peter, chapter 3, verse 15.
Just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to
the wisdom given him, and he does in all he does in all of
his letters when he speaks in them of these matters.
So there is a plurality of Pauline letters circulating in
Rome when Peter is about to be martyred.
So an early letter collection that Paul probably had an
influence on if he was writing like any ancient teacher, any
Greco Roman teacher probably had an influence on his own letter
collection. Let's skip go down to the next
slide. And even Hebrews, I'd argue,
would have a role in this. There's a recent case that's
made for the Pauline influence on Hebrews.
This actually is a modern argument for a very, very old
argument that origin of Alexandria and Caesarea made,
which is basically Hebrews is both Pauline and not Pauline.
It sounds like Paul in many ways, but it also doesn't sound
exactly like Paul in many ways. So it's we'll accept it because
of how close it is to Paul, even if only God knows who really
wrote it. That's sort of a summary of
origins argument regarding Hebrews.
But if you look at Paul's speeches in Acts, Acts 13 X 20 X
26, Acts 28, the Greek actually resembles the the the genius of
the letter to the Hebrews. The Greek is genuinely the voice
of Paul as he's speaking publicly and also it's the has
the historians touch of Luke as he's recalling the speeches of
Paul and writing them in rhetorically brilliant Greek.
So what's what one scholar has recently proposed is that
Hebrews is a synagogue speech that Paul gave.
In fact, Luke, acts, Acts 13 actually says a Lagos
paraclesios, a word of exhortation is what Paul gives
to the synagogue in Pacinian Antioch.
You know what the author of Hebrews in Hebrews 13 calls his
letter, He calls it a Lagos paraclesios.
He's like, this is a word of exhortation.
So there's a strong case to be made that Paul's influence is
running through Hebrews and that.
It was inscribed, it was, it was transcribed by a faithful
follower of Paul. And that's why it's packaged
together with Paul's letters from very, very early on, our
earliest manuscript that has nearly the entirety of Paul's
letter collection, Papyrus 46, it has Hebrew sandwich between
Romans and 1st Corinthians. So it's a, it's a, it's a codex
that decreases in size of the letters.
So you start with Romans and then the last one is First
Thessalonians. And then you have several
missing pages. So scholars are like, why?
What's in the last bit of that codex?
But anyway, if you if you decrease in size in the letters
of Paul, you start with Romans and you end with Philemon.
You put Hebrews between Romans and 1st Corinthians only if you
think it's of the same kind as the rest of those letters.
So I think Hebrews canonicity is because of its proximity to
Paul, whether it was Paul himself writing it or whether it
was in an oral form of his teaching given in a Jewish
context, perhaps a synagogue context that was transcribed by
a faithful follower. So I think Hebrews closely is
connected to the Pauline collection, which very early on
was another center of gravity that came to be that came to, to
to be paired together with the fourfold Gospel.
So you had the fourfold gospel, the Pauline letter collection.
Those were two centers of gravity that came together
really by the mid 2nd century. OK, 2-3 more minutes if we can
zip through this. So that's Hebrews, keep going.
OK, the Catholic epistles again, it's the number seven shows up,
James first, second Peter first, second, third, John, Jude.
I don't think it's a coincidence that these letters that were
recognized eventually as Apostolic and as canonical, that
they #7 paralleling the, the, the sevenfold letter collection
of Paul. And they are not written to
specific churches, but to the Church Catholic.
They they include Apostolic figures like John, Jude, Peter,
and James, which is basically giving us in letter form the
Apostolic collective that we have at the Jerusalem Council in
Acts chapter 15. And so later on in, in church
history by the 3rd and then eventually the 4th century when
you had in the 4th century specifically full manuscripts of
the whole New Testament. These are not just miscellaneous
epistles that are kind of shoved at the end, but they're a
collective sevenfold group that is placed next to Acts in the
manuscript form to show these 7 epistles are not just kind of
catch all. They are giving us a
complimentary witness to the Apostolic testimony we have in
Acts. It's complimenting Paul's
exposition of that same Apostolic witness.
And so Gospels, Pauline collection, Catholic epistles,
Acts, you can see these pieces coming together as they're
handed down, as they're read and reread in every Sunday in
corporate worship. And then eventually, let's go to
the last slide, one more slide down, one more slide down.
Revelation comes in having been written by John who has
Apostolic pedigree. Revelation comes in and
completes the whole narrative art from Gospel to the very end
of the Apostolic witness in Revelation.
Not only that, but obviously it complements the very beginning
of the whole biblical Canon in Genesis.
So these are theological coherences that are not just
what we as moderns read. But when any ancient Christian
would see this, the Christian could easily recognize the
coherence that Revelation would bring as a capstone even as it's
ending the the whole Bible with this testimony.
If anyone removes the books words from this book, his name,
let it be removed from the Lamb's book of life.
And so that kind of covenant curse that resembles the
covenant curse of Deuteronomy 4 verse 2, where Moses says if
anyone takes away or adds 2 words of this Torah of this law,
may his, may he be a cut off from the covenant.
So you have this covenantal ending to the whole Canon of
Scripture with revelation as the capstone, as it's received, as
it's as it's given its authority through the figure of John who
is sent by Jesus and given that revelation.
Now, to give you the full picture, one more slide 2 slides
down. Let's get to this.
Yeah, this symbol here. Now the case that I made for the
Gospels I think was really strong in early Christianity as
well as the 13 epistles and Hebrews as well.
These were ones that very early on these arguments were being
made and were very universally accepted.
When we get to several of the of the Catholic epistles,
especially second Peter, Second and third John, Jude, these were
never considered. They were never anathematised
and never considered inauthentic.
They were however considered disputed at some time.
If we have 3 categories we have recognised, disputed and then
spurious or inauthentic. None of these were ever
recognized and and declared to be spurious.
End of story. They were at worst disputed and
there were Christians at various parts of, of the ancient
Christian world who basically said, hang on a second, we don't
have this in our library or I haven't seen this one yet.
Let's look into it before we before we can have the
confidence that we have with these other books.
And so through that process, because of the vigilance to
protect the Apostolic Carrigma that undergirds these
acknowledged books, there was a process for these to eventually
pass the test. But then once that happens in
the 4th century, you have this unanimity among Greek and Latin,
and then also Coptic and eventually Ethiopic canons,
where this core of the New Testaments, or what we would
call our full New Testament then is recognized.
The only witness that doesn't continue with that unanimity is
the Syriac Peshitta, which because of the uncertainty of
these continued to to make its copies without these witnesses.
But that's but there are other Syriac Syriac voices who would
include these in their Canon. So these to my mind, are really
the exception to prove the rule or the exception to show the
vigilance by which Christians judge whether or not a text was
to be received as genuinely Apostolic.
And it showed that they had the mechanism to question the
mechanism to test and see if it's true.
But then also the unanimity once the once the recognition had
been made that after that point it was never really disputed
again. That is a rapid fire history of
the New Testament as it came together.
These other gospels and Apocrypha, those kind of
balloons or spawned or kind of rapidly multiplied.
But the thing about it is at best they were kind of esoteric
unique books that some sectors of the Christian world like to
read, but they never really came close to becoming either a
separate collection. You know, you don't have any
ancient collection of, of, of apocryphal gospels.
You know, there's not like a a book that has, you know, the,
the the non canonical gospels as a separate Canon to be read in
public. It's usually maybe two or three
packaged together, but that are kind of stuffed away in some
monks cloister in in in ancient Egypt or maybe something that
pops up in someone's quotation from another part of the ancient
world. But those were never actually a
separate corpus that occupied any kind of religious
affiliation similar to what these corpora had.
So we do have diversity. We do have a slightly longer
process of recognition for this set of New Testament texts, but
really the paradigm that was followed was what happened to
the Gospels and the Pauline epistles and Hebrews and James,
first Peter and John. This is really the the Apostolic
process of recognition of canonical Scripture that was
relatively uncontested on that even even heretics would ascend
to because of the widespread recognition of these deriving
from the apostles. Which brings us today to our New
Testament Canon. We can trust it.
It's Apostolic. It derives from a long tradition
of passing down I Athanasius, I think, gets it down really well
when he quotes from Luke. If you look to your, to your
hand out here #3 Athanasius Festal.
Letter 39, Section 3. I shall adopt to command my
undertaking the pattern of Luke the Evangelist.
For as much as some have taken in hand to reduce in order for
themselves the books termed apocryphal, and to mix them up
with the divinely inspired Scripture, concerning which we
have been fully persuaded, as they who from the beginning were
eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word, delivered to the
Father's. It seemed good to me, having
been urged hereto by true brethren, and having learned
from the beginning to set before you the books included in the
Canon and handed down and accredited as divine.
So handed down, accredited as divine, these books delivered to
the Fathers. That pattern is what gave birth
to and finally solidified what we have as the New Testament
Canon. Thanks for your attention in a
very long winded lecture.