Historical Development of the Bible (Episode 8)

Music.

Greetings and welcome to the Faith Chapel podcast. My name is Jason and I'm

the pastor of Faith Chapel.

In season one of this podcast, we are looking at the historical development

of the Bible and why it is a trustworthy source of who God is.

The last part of these sessions will be a question and answer time where you

will hear some interactions from the audience about the development of the Bible.

In this episode, we will continue to look at how the Bible came into being by

searching for the reasons why some books were included in the canon of the New

Testament and why some were not.

This is the last episode of season one of this podcast as we conclude discussing

the historical development of the Bible. Thanks for joining us today.

All right, so to kind of land the plane on the Bible and the historical development of it,

We are going to look specifically at the canon and what that means for how we got the Bible.

So the idea of a canon is that it is an authoritative list of,

in the case of the New Testament,

books of what we believe and what the early church believed were revelations

from God and why they held these books so important.

So it's important to note that the Bible isn't made up of an approved list of books.

The Bible is made up of books that are the authoritative word of God.

The canon doesn't make something into scripture. The canon describes what scripture is.

So the books in there were before we had a list of what they were.

The books were already spoken by God and written through humans.

It is not that they compiled this and said, all right, now we have the Bible.

Now we know what is inspired.

They're only revealing this is what we've discovered is inspired.

And so that's an important distinction because it's not the list that makes a book authoritative.

It's the word of God that is behind it. It's coming from the mouth of God.

That's what makes it authoritative.

And so the question is, why do we have a list of authoritative books?

Why do we have a New Testament that is made up of 27 books and no more or no less?

And to find that answer, I begin with some of the issues that were going on

in early Christianity as to why they would compile a list like this so that

people would know what they have studied and determined is the authoritative word of God.

So we're going to begin with a guy named Marcion.

He lived from 85 AD to 160 AD, and he was somebody who had his own list of authoritative books.

He threw out the Old Testament because he thought God was too harsh in the Old

Testament, and he only picked certain parts of the New Testament that he said,

yes, this is what is authoritative.

So in describing what Marcion did, historical theology says this, from the gospel of Luke,

Marcion removed the account of Jesus's birth, as well as any reference to Jesus

acknowledging the creator God to be his father.

From the Pauline corpus, he removed all of the apostles' references.

To the Old Testament prophecies of Christ's coming, his advent,

as well as any reference to the creator God as the father of Jesus.

Moreover, he did not include first and second Timothy and Titus.

So what Marcion did is he, like I said, thought the Old Testament God was a

vengeful, vindictive God that he didn't want anything to do with.

And so he eliminated the Old Testament from his canon.

And then he only picked the gospel of Luke without the birth of Jesus and without

Jesus's references to God as his father.

And then he took most of Paul's letters, except for the three that were mentioned

there, but he removed the references to prophecies and the references to God as Jesus's father.

And so this was a guy who lived very early in the Christian movement.

And yet he decided, this is what I'm gonna follow and this is what I'm not going to follow.

And to combat that, we need an authority of what is in scripture and what is not in scripture.

Should the story of Jesus's birth in Luke be in there?

Should Matthew, Mark, and John be included in that?

But for Marcion, he did not think those things were included.

And so he kind of led a movement away from some of the texts of Scripture that we have today.

And so this shows us that there were people picking and choosing what they would

want to follow and surrender to.

Then the next example we have is what's called the Gospel of Thomas.

And the Gospel of Thomas has a very fascinating portion of scripture that is kind of.

Interesting just based upon what our society is like today.

And so this was a gospel that was written and circulated, and people were,

and these and they were purporting ideas that were different than what we would

find in the Gospels that we have in Scripture today.

So I'll just read through it, and then you'll see what I'm talking about.

So the Gospel of Thomas, which for a time was held by some to belong to the

canon, ends with the following absurd statement, and this is from Wayne Grudem

in Systematic Theology.

In paragraph 114 of the Gospel of Thomas, it says, Simon Peter said to them,

Let Mary go away from us, for women are not worthy of life.

Jesus said, Lo, I shall lead her, so that I may make her a male,

that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males.

For every woman who makes herself a male will enter the kingdom of heaven.

So the idea there is taking away from how Jesus in the Gospels treated the women.

Luke clearly attests to the women that were following Jesus,

who were tending to some of his needs.

Then we have Paul elevating people like Chloe in the church.

And so this, when you get to it, it just is not flowing with what we know from the rest of Scripture.

So the idea here is that there are bits and pieces of literature that are circulating

about Jesus that are not teaching the true concept of who Jesus is.

And so that needed it to be combated with an authoritative list of the books.

And the idea of the list of books is what the apostles taught in their oral

traditions and what they taught in their earliest writings.

That's what they were always going back to.

And this does not flow with any of that.

Then finally, we have a Christian document here.

And it's called the Didache, and it was written in the late 1st century or early

2nd century, so early in the development of Christianity.

And in this, we have certain prescriptions, certain rules that they are trying

to get their followers to live to.

And so I'll just read a portion of the Didache here.

Although this document was not considered for inclusion in the canon during

the early history of the church,

some today quote it as if it were an authority on the teaching of the early

church on the same level as the New Testament, yet it contradicts or adds to

the commands of the New Testament.

So here we go getting to the Didache.

So it says that Christians are told to let alms, which is what they gift.

Let alms sweat in their hands until they know to whom they are giving.

Then baptism must be done in running water.

Fasting is required on Wednesdays and Fridays, but prohibited on Mondays and Thursdays.

The apostles are prohibited from staying in a city more than two days.

And so here we have a Christian teaching.

This is clearly something that holds Jesus very dear to their hearts,

but it is something that is adding rules or even contradicting some of the things in Scripture.

The one that really sticks out to me is apostles being prohibited from staying

in a city more than two days.

Well, if that's the case, if that is the concept of what God wants,

then Paul broke that because he was in, I believe, Ephesus for 18 months.

And then he was in the city of Corinth, I believe, for a three-year period.

And so these are teachings that are being circulated,

but again, they are not coordinated with what we would expect a work of God

to be with the other works of God.

And so not only outside Christian thinking, like with the Gospel of Thomas,

but also inside Christian thinking, we had some rules and regulations.

This, to me, sounds a lot like what the Pharisees were doing in heaping rule

upon rule on the people of Israel.

And so it's interesting to see what some of the early literature in Christianity does say.

And so this leads us to a quote about what happened with Paul.

So this is from the Archaeological Study Bible.

In his New Testament epistles, Paul frequently warned his readers to be on guard

against false teaching.

These cautions reveal that from an early point,

Christianity was open to distortions and heresies that took many forms through

overemphasis on some and denial of other central Christian teachings.

So the idea here is when humans get involved, things get messaged.

And they wanted to, some of them denied central Christian teachings.

And again, when we say central Christian teachings, we're going back to the

earliest oral traditions of the church and the earliest oral or the earliest

written traditions of the church.

So these can be twisted. These can be contorted.

Even today, we see this happening. And the idea then is, all right,

we need to know for sure what are the authoritative words of God.

And so this began a process of really going into what the books of the Bible,

well, what ends up being the Bible should be, specifically in the New Testament.

So the early church fathers had a selection process through which they were

going to determine if the writings were in front of them were to be included

in the authoritative words of God.

The selection process considered three key criteria for the acceptance of a particular text.

The first concept that they looked at is that writings in the canon had to reflect orthodox teachings.

Texts that were determined to contain teaching incongruent with that of the

earliest Christians were not to be included.

So again, it's this idea that false teaching does happen.

Paul confronts that in his letters multiple times.

And here we see, and the good news of Jesus Christ is so important that we need

to know what is accurate and true to him.

So we have to understand what the earliest Christians taught,

again, in oral tradition and in their written tradition.

So in basic theology, Charles Ryrie writes, to be taken into the canon,

a book had to show internal evidence of its uniqueness as an evidence of inspiration.

And so the idea of what we read through in the Gospel of Thomas does not show that it's quite unique,

but it's not evidence of inspiration because it doesn't match the other teachings

where Jesus says, all people come to me.

It's just not true. And therefore that book known by the early church,

This is not a conspiracy that Dan Brown is famous for writing for.

It is literally what they knew.

Like it wasn't something they were hiding from. This is just not falling into

the internal evidence we see in that is not congruent with what we see and what

we know to be the true stories of Jesus.

So that's the first criteria. It had to reflect the texts that were determined

to contain teaching that was congruent with the earliest Christians.

And obviously, the Gospel of Thomas did not fit into that category,

and so it is not in the canon of Scripture.

So the second idea is that the canon sought to include the earliest,

most accurate accounts about Jesus and about the early church by selecting texts

that had been written either by the apostles themselves or by those who were

closely associated with them.

Texts claiming apostolic authorship were critically inspected,

and if the authorship claim was suspect, they were rejected.

And so the idea here is that not only did they have to have congruency with

the earliest Christian teachings, but they also had to be tied to an apostle.

An apostle just means someone who is sent.

So when Jesus at the end of Matthew gives the Great Commission,

he literally gives them the title of apostle by saying, go and make disciples of all nations.

And so that is people being sent by him.

These are the apostles that we need to go back to and know what they taught.

But this leads to an issue because there are some works in the New Testament

that aren't written by those apostles.

And so in particular, the Gospels of Mark and Luke, they are in our canon,

not because they were written by someone who was sent by Jesus,

but because they had somebody,

an apostle, very closely tied to them.

So for Mark, that was Peter.

And for Luke, he was a co-worker of Paul.

And so that's why these are inside the canon of Scripture,

because they are so closely tied to these two apostles that the apostles would

have been able to declare what Jesus said, declare what Jesus did,

and these are the people that wrote their stories down.

And that's what we need in terms

of what the early church needed to make something worthy of the canon,

is that it had to be tied to a disciple.

And we're going to come back to it in a little bit, but it says the authorship

work was critically inspected.

And so there are writings that we will get to that are supposedly tied to one

of the apostles, but the early church had to look at the information.

They didn't just blindly accept every work that was attributed to Paul or Peter or John.

And so that's an important aspect.

They were very stringent on what got into the New Testament canon.

The last criteria is that the texts were popular, if the texts were popular in only one region,

the text was viewed as doubtful, while those that found widespread acceptance,

both in the East and also in Rome, those were the ones that were included in the canon.

The writings chosen for the canon were understood to have universal application.

For instance, although Paul addressed his letters to specific communities,

others quickly acknowledged that his teaching was relevant to them as well.

So we have letters in the New Testament that are addressed to the church at

Corinth, to the church at Philippi, and so on and so forth.

And while they were written specifically to them in that context,

there are things for us in those letters as well as followers of Jesus.

And that's the idea behind this third criteria. Is it widely accepted?

Can people glean things from these texts that are relevant for them and their

context, not just that one specific issue?

And so those were the three criteria that the early church fathers used in order

to determine if a writing was authoritative, if it was divinely inspired.

So we're going to switch gears now and look at the lists that have been compiled

by people in the early church.

So really early on, we didn't have a whole list.

We had just writings of early church fathers and the books that they quoted

from and the books that they related them to.

For example, Clement, who died in 99 AD, so he was a first generation Christian,

he referred to the canonical gospels, the book of Acts.

1 Corinthians, Philippians, Titus, Hebrews, 1 Peter, and perhaps James,

much as he did to the Old Testament.

So Clement put those books on the same level as the Old Testament,

bringing them clarity, bringing them distinction as something to be revered

and honored as coming from God.

And the idea of perhaps James, as is quoted here, so they didn't have chapters

and verses to quote from.

They did not even use quotation marks.

And so it's kind of difficult as you're surveying through these to understand

and comprehend exactly what they're doing.

And so there is some ambiguity in trying to really decipher from their writings

what they're trying to do.

But the other ones, all four gospels, the book of Acts, 1 Corinthians,

Philippians, Titus, Hebrews, 1 Peter, those are all that they are confident that he.

On par with the Old Testament. James, based upon the word structure and order,

it looks like he might have quoted it as well, but they just aren't 100% sure.

So again, Clement lived in the first century. He died in 99 AD,

and his writings going to the second and third generations showed that.

These texts were important, that he had elevated them to a status that was very

close to the Old Testament.

Then in the late first century and early second century, we have a guy by the name of Papias.

He was a disciple of John, and he

wrote five books that were entitled The Exposition of the Lord's Sayings.

This book is no longer in existence. The only reason we know about it is because

other early church fathers quoted from this book.

And from their quotations, we can learn that this was a commentary on the words

and deeds of Jesus from all four of the gospels.

And from fragments, it can be gleaned that Papias approved of all four gospels,

the book of Acts and the revelation to John.

So again, he's not writing a list of these are the authoritative books of the

Bible, but the earliest Christian witnesses after the apostles left the scene, they were saying,

these books have value.

These are the books that we need to pay attention to, and they were quoting from those books.

So the first actual list that we have is called the Muratorian canon,

and it dates back to AD 170.

It is named for the Italian archaeologist who discovered and published the document

in 1740, so a long time after it was written.

So this is what Greg Allison in his book, Historical Theology, says about this.

The document is a fragment, so it's not a full document,

and it begins with a concluding discussion of Mark's gospel and continues with

a discussion of the third book of the gospel, that according to Luke.

And when it goes into lists, what it thinks, what it says are important books,

because at this point in time, they weren't trying to make a canon.

They weren't trying to make this authoritative list. But as he's listing important

books, he mentions all four gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the 13 letters of Paul.

He mentions Jude, 1 and 2 John, and the Revelation of John.

He also mentions the Wisdom of Solomon, which is one of the apocryphal books.

And then he mentions the revelation of Peter, which we're going to touch base

upon just a little bit later, but is not part of the canon of Scripture today.

So again, this person, we don't know who it was. It's named after the guy,

the archaeologist who found it, is saying these are the documents that are important.

So while there are some that are not a part of the New Testament canon,

it does give validity to many of the books that we do find in the 27 books of our New Testament.

The list does not include five books here, Hebrews, James,

1 and 2 Peter, and 3 John, but all of the other, so that'd be 22 books of the

New Testament, are mentioned in this list.

So again, this dates back to 170 AD, and it was just a list of important books

that this author felt was important.

All right, so then we move on. The next document that we have is in the mid

third century, so about 80 years after the Muratorian canon.

And we go to a guy by the name of Origen.

His canon, and again, this isn't necessarily a list either.

This is documents that he thinks are important, and he quotes from in this,

because he mentions in his list of important books, there are four gospels,

the four that we have, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the Acts.

13 letters of Paul, James, 1 Peter, 2 Peter is in both the included and the

disputed, and we'll talk about that in a minute.

It has 1 John, Jude, and again, that's got a question mark next to it because

it's not for sure. And then Revelation.

So those are the ones that he assuredly quotes from.

Those are the ones that he really holds in high esteem, and we can see what

he uses in his literature to those that he is writing to.

So the disputed books of what we have today are Hebrews, 2 Peter potentially, and 2 and 3 John.

So the idea here is from having 2 Peter in both of those and the question mark

by Jude is about the idea of, is he really quoting from those books?

So Greg Allison again writes, the placement of 2 Peter is in doubt because of conflicting evidence.

Origen quoted Peter at least six times in his writings, and seems to consider

the letter to be canonical.

But on the other hand, according to a comment by Ouspius, Origen believed that Peter, and quote Peter,

upon whom the church of Christ is built, against which the gates of hell shall

not prevail, has left one epistle undisputed.

Suppose also the second was left by him, for this there is some doubt.

So Origen, Euspius says that Origen had some doubts about 2 Peter and whether

or not it was from him. But again, look at the list.

We got four Gospels. We got 13 letters of Paul. That's 17 books.

Acts is 18, 19, 20, 21, 22.

Again, 22 books of the New Testament are attested to, and they are quoted from,

and they are held on the same level as the Old Testament.

So that leads us to what Allison says to clear this up.

It should be very clear that nearly all of the New Testament writings that we

consider canonical were viewed similarly by the early church.

Several writings that are now considered canonical were on the fringe of the early church's canon.

So the idea here is simply that there was lots of agreement on 22 of the 27 books.

In the early church, they were quoting from them. They were copying them.

They were sending them around to other people. They were very, very secure.

And these are on par with the Old Testament.

And so it's only a couple that are on the fringe of the early church's canon.

So looking at the ones that are potentially disputed, we have the book of James,

and there is uncertainty in its authorship, which James isn't.

There's James, the brother of John.

There's James, who is the head of the Jerusalem council in the middle of Acts.

And then those are the two main figures that could potentially be the writer here.

But looking at this, which one is it?

Tradition is telling us that it was the half-brother of Jesus.

They shared the same dad, or they shared the same mom, but they had different

dads, Jesuses being God the Father and James then being Joseph.

So that's what early church is saying, and they looked into it,

but there was some uncertainty to that.

Also in the book of James, there was conflict.

The beginning of his gospel, which says to the 12 tribes scattered among the nations.

This made this less attractive to the Gentiles who were because of how it was addressed.

And so that's one of the reasons it was on the fringe of the canon.

The next book is 2 Peter. And the issue here is that several works were attributed to the apostle Peter.

We've already mentioned the Revelation of Peter, but there was also an Acts

of Peter that was also written.

And these had parts of them that were not in congruency with the rest of the teachings.

So like what they experienced in the Gospel of Thomas,

these books showed characteristics that they weren't congruent with the teachings

of Jesus that they knew from the earliest oral tradition and then the earliest written tradition.

And so those were thrown out. And so that made some churches hesitant to accept 2 Peter.

Everyone accepted 1 Peter, but 2 Peter was one that was on the fringe as to

whether or not it should be accepted or not.

2 and 3 John were also on the fringe because, again, who is John the Elder,

and that's how he announces himself in that letter.

Also, they are very short letters, and some of the churches were saying,

can we even glean anything off of this?

Is this just a letter written to that one church and we don't get anything from it?

And so those were some of the issues that were brought up for 2nd and 3rd John.

Jude is one that we've mentioned as pretty secure, but there was also some criticism

of it because it quoted extra biblical books like the Assumption of Moses and 1st Enoch.

These were books that are still in the book of Jude today, and so people were

very skeptical because it was quoting sources that were not in the canon of

the Old Testament or other books of the New Testament.

Then Hebrews, this one was disputed because the author of this does not name himself,

and it was thought to be Paul's, but Paul usually announces himself in the very

first line, Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God or something like that.

To, and then the church he's writing for.

But that's not how the book of Hebrews starts.

So there was some debate as to whether or not Paul did write this letter.

Its author is anonymous still to this day, although there is plenty of scholarship

who believes that Paul is the actual writer of it.

Also, Hebrews is stylistically different from his other letters.

It is just a much different work of literature than what we would normally associate

with him, like he's writing to the church at Corinth or the Galatians, wherever it may be.

And so that one was also on the fringe.

From Practical Christianity, we read, in the West, the canonicity of Hebrews

was debated because of its uncertain authorship.

Did Paul really write it?

And lastly, the revelation of John is also one that was contested,

although in the list that we went through, it was mentioned in every one of those.

And the idea here is that in the East, there was opposition to the revelation

because its authorship was questioned and its millennialism was challenged,

that 1,000-year reign of Christ that's written about it.

They didn't think that that really meshed with what the other New Testament books were teaching.

And so these are the reasons that these books were in question.

And again, this shows us that they were super critical of what they would allow

into Scripture. They were taking them through those three criteria and looking

at, all right, does this fit? Is this here?

Does it belong in this canon, this list?

So from Andreas Kostenberger in The Cradle of the Cross and the Crown writes this,

It follows from these observations that most New Testament documents were recognized as authoritative,

even scripture, as early as the end of the first or at least by the end of the

second century of the Christian era.

The four gospels, the book of Acts, the letters of Paul, 1 Peter,

and 1 John were universally recognized, With the exception of 3 John,

the early church fathers cited all New Testament books as Scripture.

Toward the end of the 2nd century, the major contours of the New Testament had clearly emerged,

setting the framework for the subsequent final resolution of the canonical status

of several remaining smaller or disputed books.

And so that just is a summary of what we've just mentioned.

Like this is the majority of them were agreed upon.

22 of them in multiple lists were all verified and quoted as scripture.

And it was just left to the next few years as to what Christians were going

to do with those fringe books.

That leads us to A.D. 367 and a guy by the name of Athanasius.

So Athanasius was a bishop of Alexandria in Egypt, and he had the responsibility

to determine Easter every year.

That was his role as the bishop of Alexandria.

So to communicate his decision, Athanasius wrote letters to the churches.

It was in his Easter letter of A.D.

367 that he took the task of spelling out the canon of Scripture.

His introduction underscored the seriousness of his task.

He wrote, In proceeding to make mention of these things, I shall adopt,

to commend my undertaking.

The pattern of Luke the Evangelist, saying on my own account,

For as much as I am, as some have taken in hand, to reduce into order for themselves

the books termed apocryphal, and to mix them up with the divinely inspired scriptures,

concerning which we have been fully persuaded, as they who from the beginning

were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, delivered to the fathers.

It seemed good to me also,

having been urged thereto by true brothers and having learned from the beginning

to set before you the books included in the canon and handed down and accredited as divine.

So Athanasius took upon himself because he was influenced by people in his day

and the church fathers that came before him.

Two, we need this list.

These heresies were growing about who Jesus was.

Some were denying that Jesus came in the body at all, and because the body is

sinful and broken in their opinion, and so how could God form himself to sinful humanity in that way?

And so they said that Jesus only came in the appearance of human beings.

And so heresies like this, the heresies that stem from Marcion and only accepting

very limited amounts of the New Testament canon,

that these had to be fought, these had to be warded off by what is true to the gospels,

the divinely inspired scriptures.

And so he took it upon himself with all of history behind him,

with the letters of the church fathers before him,

assigning the list that we have today of the 27 books of the New Testament.

And in the subsequent years, in the next 30 years or so, three church councils solidified this list.

There was the Synods of Hippo in 393,

then the Council of Carthage in 397, and later the Fourth Council of Carthage

in 419, all endorsed this list.

So hundreds of years of research, hundreds of years of searching what the apostles

taught, what the first writings of the apostles were,

hundreds of years of looking at church history.

Those who were the disciples of John that we mentioned earlier,

Papias, and what he wrote and what Origen wrote, and all throughout the history

of the church, all of that came down to this 27 books.

And it was, it is, again, I just want to reiterate that because these made our

New Testament doesn't make them divinely inspired.

Because they made the list, because they made the cut, making the cut does not

make them divinely authoritative.

What makes them divinely authoritative is that God spoke to the writers and

gave them these words to say.

It's not humans that created this document.

It is God who inspired them and the whole history of the church that stayed

on track with the earliest apostles' teachings.

They all came down to these 27 books, and that's how we got these documents.

That's a lot of information do you

have any comments any questions anything regarding

what we discussed today or anything throughout this time i'm really glad to

learn some of this because i i do remember reading god paul being very specific

about you know you've you've been You've been taught this or told this or told that,

and we're telling you what we told you from the beginning is the truth.

And I was always curious as to what was it they were being told.

And this gives me an idea. Yeah.

A lot of the misinformation that they were given back then, we are being tried to be fed today.

The devil just doesn't stop. He just doesn't stop trying.

They had a lot to go through and we used to prove.

They were constantly searching for the truth. And it's only through their persistence,

their perseverance, their continual searching for the truth that has kept the

New Testament together, has kept it pure.

I think that I haven't given credit enough to those souls that were faithful then to Christ's work,

no matter what was around them,

no matter what influences were there.

They held to the truth. and there's a huge takeaway for today because they struggled

as much with identifying and sticking to the truth in their time as we do today finding

the truth today is just.

It's a monumental task to decide who's telling the truth and who's not telling the truth.

And you hear a story, it's five different ways from five different people,

and they were struggling with them.

And it shows it's imperative on us to really struggle to find it,

to narrow it down, to find the consistency,

to apply those three tests, not just to the canon, but to everything else.

Yeah, it's fascinating that the, in my mind, the studiousness that they had

to have had is just absolutely incredible.

I find it daunting to turn around in my chair in my office and pick another book off.

But these guys, they were reading handwritten notes. And we all know that some

handwriting is worse than others. And they had to keep all of these in loose-leaf paper.

I can't even imagine all that they went through to try to keep this in order

and to be so diligent to what Jesus actually taught.

It's really remarkable.

I don't believe in worshiping the saints that have gone before,

but I do believe in being grateful.

For their faithfulness and for their perseverance.

That's something to be honored.

I mean, even with the internet, and I know what Tom was saying with the idea

of it's so hard to know what's true right now.

But we have so much information at our fingertips that weeding through that

is really difficult, like you were saying.

The amount of focus and energy that I think it would have taken to do what they

did is worthy of, like you were saying,

being very grateful for them wanting to find the truth, for them putting in

the legwork and actually reading previous generations',

understanding of Scripture and what Jesus said and did, it really, really blows the mind.

Well, it's what you do today.

Like you said, there's a lot of information out in a lot of different books,

and you read a lot of different books.

And you have to rely on the Spirit to help you as well as what you've read before

and trust against things that are new to you and are reading.

So, I mean, it's a pastor's work as well, and it should be our work,

each one of us, to look at the scriptures and look at the new information,

being careful to say, this is a different perspective than I've seen it before,

and it brings me knowledge that way.

Or, this is out to lunch.

This does not match the spirit. Yeah.

And that's our responsibility.

And we can take our keys from these earlier Christians, because that's what they did.

And I fully believe what you say is true.

That's our responsibility to sift out the chaff for the week and to really rely on the Spirit.

I really appreciate that. And to get to a point where we have the truth that we can figure out.

There are some things that we do have to take on faith, but there is certainly truth out there.

And the idea of the

Da Vinci Code and Dan Brown and what he brought into bringing skeptical concepts

to the world about can we trust the church and what that looks like.

They knew about these books. They looked at these books and they took them through

those three criteria and they're like, it doesn't match what we know.

The earliest apostles were teaching.

And that's what you're presenting these facts, these...

These solidly known facts prior to, then you can appreciate the movie and the

books and say, this is a nice story,

but it doesn't have any real basis in reality.

I don't have to be afraid that what I believe in is a fantasy.

The fantasy is what's written here, not what's written in mine.

That's a very good point. because we have a genre today called realistic fiction

in novels, and it's just something that we can take for what they are.

Some of the stories that I read to my kids are specifically realistic fiction,

that they really like action and adventure, and it talks about Greek deities

and even getting into Harry Potter, how it's set in the modern world.

Those are stories that we can appreciate and say, man, that author has a lot of creativity.

But we know that they are not what we trust in.

Thank you again for joining us in our discussion of the historical development of the Bible.

If you are interested in learning more about Faith Chapel and its ministries,

please visit gofaithchapel.org.

Season two will begin next week.

We will look at the reasons why the Bible is authoritative in our lives.

And later in season two, we will discover what the Bible says about some of

the issues we are facing in society today. Have a great day.

Music.