The Formation & Authenticity of the New Testament – The Rev. Dr. Jacob Rodriguez

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.

John 10 · chapter mention

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.

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

2 Peter 3 · chapter mention

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.

2 Peter 3:15

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

Acts 15 · chapter mention

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

Deuteronomy 4:2

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.