All right.
Think we are ready to get started. Does everybody have notes? I think I got notes to everybody who's here so far
So tonight we are going to be starting our series on on church history, particularly.
I shouldn't even say church history that's going to give you too much of a range to expect of me.
It's the the period of the Church Fathers which is the first 4 or 5 centuries of Christianity.
And the reason I'm doing it. Most of you probably know, but that's what I studied when I was at Marquette.
My graduate work there was Patristics or the Church Fathers that time period.
So it starts right around the close of the New Testament.
Is when that period is considered to begin, and I'm gonna probably try to cover up through about 450.
One, because that's when Council of Calcidan is, and we can talk a little bit about some of that.
But that'll be way down the road tonight. I want to start, and I've said this in emails already.
I want to start by looking at how, how we got the Bible that we have.
I know I grew up in a Christian family. There were Bibles all around my house.
If I flipped it open. And there was the book of Hebrews.
I knew that Hebrews was part of the inspired Word of God, because well, talk on it.
It was between those 2 covers. That was, that is an advantage that we have over the early Ch.
And it's something that I think is very helpful for us to appreciate.
Both. You know what they had and what they didn't have, and how they got to the point of having something pretty much like what we have.
Now let me say also my goal. Tonight I'm going to be talking about some critical scholarship and people making decisions.
And some of those decisions being either wrong-headed or, you know, maybe the right decision for the wrong reason.
At times my goal tonight is not to undermine your confidence.
Scripture. It's not to undermine your confidence either in the content.
Or the text or the individual books that are in Scripture.
My goal is to help you to recognize, first of all, like I said, what an amazing gift it is!
We have this, that this has been preserved and eventually came together between these 2 covers for us, and also to sympathetically think about the position of those Christians, and to realize actually how long that takes so early on
You know, during during the life of the Apostles and during the life of Christ, they had a Bible.
What? What would have been their Bible
The Old Testament. The Hebrew Bible, Ruth knows the scholarly term.
So she came with that. So, although that sounds really simple, right? It's very straightforward.
They had the Old Testament. It's a little, and you know I would we were downstairs in Sunday School.
I'd leave it at that, but it is a little bit more complicated than just saying they had the Old Testament.
The people who lived in Israel for the most part, are going to be following sort of the mainstream.
Judaism of the time, and they're going to have roughly the Hebrew Bible, as Ruth said, and it will be, you know, in Hebrew they have, but most of them don't.
Don't read and speak Hebrew all that. Well, so what they're using is a lot of times, paraphrases and translations into Aramaic that will eventually.
This is probably fifth or sixth century. Those translations actually get, you know, formalized.
And there's commentary on the sides, and all the but they're using those things.
But those aren't the only those aren't the only canons to to use a term that are out there.
There were also, we've all heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
So the Dead Sea scrolls are a collection of scrolls that were buried in caves.
They seem to have been essentially a library library that was used by the community at a place called Comrade, which is where those caves are, and they now the the wonderful thing about the Dead Sea Scrolls and the comrades community they preserved.
They have most of not all of, but they have most of the Hebrew Bible, as we know it, but there are some differences here and there between the text that they had and and the text that we have used for the last at least 1,000 years.
In translating the Old Testament into English or German, or Italian, or whatever else.
So there are some, some differences there, even in the books that are shared.
But what's really interesting is, they have some other kinds of materials that they preserve also, some of which are kind of like Scripture.
I'm not saying they are Scripture, I'm saying that when you, when you open it, it's like, Okay, this is like reading Scripture.
That's what they were writing when they wrote this, and the most prominent example of that is text called the Well.
Now it's called first Enoch. Used to generally just be called the Book of Enoch, but there are some others think it goes all the way up through Fourth I can't remember, for sure.
Some of my friends from Marquette, who specialize in in that material, would be appalled that I couldn't remember exactly how many they were.
There were, but I can't read most of them. They're in like Slavonic, and stuff like that.
But they had the book of Enoch. We're not clear as to whether they treated that as Scripture, like as authoritative Scripture.
For them or not. It seems like some of the some of the things that they thought about with mainstream Judaism, with the Pharisees, and the Sadducees.
Are at least reflected in the book of Enoch, so they may have treated it as Scripture.
It's it's really not clear. They also preserve a lot of other things.
There are some that were just you'd call them like sectarian documents, rules for living here at this community along the Dead Sea, things that we do, things that we don't do, commentaries on Scripture.
There are lots of commentaries that are there, and then other kinds of legal documents, and they've even got some that are completely unrelated.
There's an excerpt from Plato that is preserved there in translation.
So it was a big library, and there were a lot of things there
The Dead Sea scrolls right the debts among the Dead Sea scrolls.
So they had lots of material in their library at Comrade.
So why do I bring this up? I bring Comrades up?
Because there we have possibly a little bit different under of what even the Old Testament canon was, even within Hebrew.
Speaking territory even within Israel itself. When you get a further afield, when you get out into the diaspora, where the Jews, now the Jews who have gone east to Babylon for the most part, are still working, in Hebrew and Aramaic and they're using those Texts, but those who have
gone down to Egypt and other parts around the Mediterranean world are functioning primarily in Greek, and there using a Greek translation of the Old Testament.
It's most often called the Septuagint.
So, if we, if you look on the handouts that I gave you the the earliest one that's on, there actually is the the Greek translations of the Old Testament starting around 250 BC.
Now we kind of lazily, just lump them all together and call them the Septuagint, which is abbreviated as the Lx acts.
You can see there in the third column. Lxx.
Is the Roman numeral for 70 legendarily there were 7, actually 72 scholars who came together and we're supposed to translate the set.
The behest of one of the Ptolemies down in Egypt, and supposedly 1212.
No wait.
Was 72, divided by 12, 6, right? So 6 scholars from each of the tribes of Israel were sent to do this task.
For Ptolemy, because he wanted the Hebrew Scriptures in a language he could read, and they were put in separate rooms, and everybody translated the entire Old Testament.
Can you imagine, first of all, how long that would have taken each of those guys?
When they brought them all together, miraculously, every word was exactly the same.
This is the legend that gets told. Now, if you've ever been around people translating stuff, you can already tell that's a legend.
The other reason that it seems
Kind of far-fetched to me if we're talking to 5,300 BC. Where are you?
Finding 6 members of each of the 12 tribes right, the the 10 tribes have been gone for an awfully long time, so you wouldn't be able to identify them.
So I think pretty clearly. This is a legend.
What you've actually got is a lot of Greek translations of various portions of the Old Testament.
They vary in quality. Some of them are very close word-for-word translations, I mean not exactly word-for-word, because it wouldn't make sense, but they're very close translations, very formal translations, something like you know, when we read the new American standard
That's what I'm talking about when I say formal translations.
King James is a little bit looser than that.
Actually some of them are almost paraphrases on the living Bible level, and I don't mean the new living translation I mean, go all the way back to the living Bible.
They're more like that. But all of them give us, you know, some sort of a corresponding witness to what we have in the Hebrew, and some of the differences that show up.
It's very interesting. Some of the differences that show up between the Septuagint and what we have as the Hebrew text which I was going to bring in, but I didn't think to bring in my copy of it.
But the the scholarly text that we use for translations, and for, you know, commentary work, and any of that sometimes the Septuagint, the the Dead Sea scrolls additions, and they differ from the main text in the same way.
So there, both. They're agreeing with one another against it.
So scholars will use all this to try to figure out what is the best actual reading, and I'll go a little bit out of order here.
I'm gonna skip way down the chart.
Let's see if you go to next to the last line.
600 and following because it really, it starts right around then.
And it doesn't finalize for a while but that's where we get what we call the Masoretic text.
It's the text that was put together by the Mazarin.
They were, they were Jewish scholars. There were Mazarites in in Israel, and also in Babylon.
Those were the 2. Centers of scholarship. I guess you'd say for Judaism.
There were a couple of things that they had to do in updating the text.
For one thing, none of the Old Testament was written with the letters that I was taught when I learned to the Old Testament was written using a script that's called Paleo Hebrew, that had been abandoned by by the time of you know, the 6 hundreds for sure i'm not
sure not sure when exactly that transition takes place. But now Hebrew uses what's called a square text.
And if you've seen Hebrew written anywhere, that's almost certainly what you've seen.
The square text it's a Tiberian script from the city of Tiberia, and they also you problem.
A lot of you probably know this Hebrew, at least originally, did not include vowels.
In fact, if you go to Israel right now and get a newspaper, it usually doesn't have vowels, because they just used consonants.
Meaning is carried on. The consonants vowels are just how you pronounce it.
Well, sometimes it gets confused. If you strip out if I were to give you a page of English and strip out the vowels, you could pretty much still read it if I were to give you isolated words, and English, you could pretty much read them.
But there will be words occasionally, where, if you strip out the vowels, you, you've got 2 words that could that could both serve in that it can also get confusing with endings, because Hebrew uses endings to control the meaning of the words and so what the mazarates did because
They wanted to make sure that everything was clear. They had a very high view, the text, and they wanted to make sure everything was right.
So they add vowels to it, and they're systems where they're little dies in different places.
So that's one of the things they did. First, they convert to the their contemporary text, and they add vowels to regularize everything
But sometimes we're not sure they got the vowels from, and so they didn't quite get the word.
What it should have been. And so in those cases, when the Septuagint and the the Dead Sea Scrolls agree with a slight difference, we think maybe they had it right, and the Mazarin's had it wrong.
There's also sometimes suspicion, the Masoretic text was adjusted and nudged a little bit, because if you notice, that's being done in the 6 hundreds, the 7 hundreds, the texts that we use like the the scholarly addition that I have at home is basically a transcription
of a text from 1,009. So just a little over a 1,000 years ago, they were living in a Christian world, and they knew very well that they were competing with Christians, and a lot of these people up hire on the text on my Timeline Tertullian origin people like that said that They're
Kind of changing some stuff, a little bit in their own texts, because it it is too obviously about Christ.
And so they're like, you know, if we just change this just a little, it doesn't look quite as much about price.
So the Old Testament that you have at comrades and the Septuagint in a lot of places speaks more specifically of Christ.
Now is that because of Christians nudging the Septuagint could be, you know exactly why, but these kinds of things are at play
So that was longer on like text stuff in the old Testament that I intended.
I apologize. I got kind of caught up in it, but the point there is that even with the Old Testament it's not a cut and dry thing.
Nobody's able to walk in and say, you know, I want a Hebrew Bible, and somebody hands them a Hebrew body.
Now this be in Wisconsin. Lot of us have either Catholic or Lutheran backgrounds, or at least Castle or Lutheran friends and family, and so there's another thing that we're probably aware of that comes into play here and that's what we call the
Apocrypha Catholics call it the Deutero cannon.
I see a few nods that comes in, because so the the those books were not written in Hebrew, so they're not in the Hebrew Bible.
The let's see what downright 382, and following.
I've made reference to a man named Jerome, who starts out his career in Rome and then moves to Bethlehem.
This is the guy who he didn't actually do all of the translation work.
But he was in charge of the project that produced the Latin Vulgate.
It's a Latin translation, the Bible, so that there would be a Bible for the West.
I guess it was kind of like the the King James Bible or the Lutheran.
The Luther's translation of his day right.
He was trying to get it into the the Vulgate, into the Latin, that all of the people could read and speak.
Because by that point most of the West had stopped speaking. Greek early on Greek was still used by this point, not so much so he doesn't want to include the Apocrypha or the Deuter cannon in the Old Testament doesn't want to include it in the
Bible, because he wants to limit it to what there is in Hebrew
The Deutero canna. Those books come along. They're mostly written in Greek.
There's one that was originally written in Latin, but they come along, and the ones that were in Greek were part of the Septuagint, or had gotten included with the Septuagint.
Did people think of them on quite the same level? That's really hard to say.
But once they're available and people are using them you don't have that much contact with Israel anymore.
I'm speaking of Greek-speaking Jews, right?
So these are probably some of the same people that we see in Acts chapter 6, where we've got the the Hebrew widows and the Hellenistic widows.
Well, they're all Jewish. They're the ones that do speak Hebrew.
They probably speak Greek also, the ones who only speak Greek. That's what the distinction between those 2 groups of widows is.
And if you're part of that group that really only speaks Greek, then you're just you're using the books that you have available.
And over a few centuries people come to think of that as well.
That's that's the Bible, too. And that comes into the west comes into the Greek, speaking well, and by the time that Jerome is translating the the Old Testament well, he's translating the whole Bible, the West thinks of those books as the Bible so they wanted him and
So he does include them. He does provide translations of them with prefaces that say, Yeah, this is kind of a different kind of thing.
You know, it's good to read. There's interesting stuff here, but it's not really the Bible and those prefaces.
They don't necessarily stick around, and all of the well, they're not printing anything yet, but they don't get included all the time.
So that's where the confusion about the status of those books comes in.
I need to go back track.
Okay. So like, I was saying, they did have the Old Testament.
But even for that even, you know, with the lists they really are canon lists.
There's, you know, there's not anything like this where it's all bound together.
You've got for the Old Testament. You've got scrolls it's a it's a pile of scrolls or a collection of scrolls that you pull one out, and you put another one in, and that's what you know the that's what scriptures
Are, and as far as what is considered to be authoritative, you're talking about lists, and people are making lists.
And so the question is, what do they include on those lists?
And so they have to exercise some discernment about that.
The the so I was about to say. The early Christians.
But that's everybody that I'm talking about tonight.
The apostles. They don't limit themselves to the Hebrew Bible.
They? They? There are many, many places, most most times when the New Testament cites the Old Testament.
You can't really tell if it's using the Septuagint or the Hebrew, because the Septuagint and the Hebrew don't disagree.
And so, you know, it's 6 and one over 2 dozen or the other.
But there are a number of places where Paul, I'll just use Paul, because he's the one that that I've seen the most study of in this issue.
But there are many places where Paul follows the Hebrew, I mean he's writing in Greek, but you can tell from his Greek he's following the Hebrew.
He's not following the Septuagint, because they're different here.
There are other places where Paul uses the Septuagint, even though the Septuagint, different from what we have in Hebrew.
So Paul thought, Paul clearly thought that the Septuagint was at least a useful translation for him to use even when he's writing things that are going to end up in Scripture kind of think Paul had to have an inkling you know, when he was writing Romans that this was different from you know
When he wrote a letter home to his sister, or something like that, even if he was putting good stuff, good Christian stuff.
Then his letters home think he was aware that the Holy Spirit was acting, and yet he was perfectly happy to use the Septuagint.
At times he made choices about what he thought was, you know, more useful to him at the time, and the whole New Testament is that way.
They made judicious choices about what text to use
All right. So when we come to the the period of the Church fathers, then I've already told you about Jerome, so I won't rehash that.
But when we come to that, now we get to the New Testament, and there it gets really hard, because with the Old Testament at least, it was all already written.
It was all proven one way or the other, and you know you could just fight about whether or not to use, you know.
Second Maccabees as Scripture, and you know some people would say Yes, and some people would say No, but and you know which text of Isaiah was butter, and all those kinds of but for the New Testament it's a whole lot harder.
Acts. They're able to read Old Testament Scriptures.
Whatever exactly they had and they're able to listen to the apostles themselves.
Teach acts. Chapter 2. They dedicated themselves to the Apostles, teaching well, the Apostles were right.
There, or if there was no apostle right there, the they could all sit and talk about.
You know what Peter, said the other day when he was here.
Something along those lines, but eventually they die. They've written letters to various places, but it seems to me like, if I live in Corinth and Paul sends a letter to my assembly in Corinth that that doesn't feel like Scripture exactly that feels like missionary that we know really
Well, who founded our church, writing to us to give us some information somewhere else.
You might feel like oh, that's a letter that Paul wrote, but you don't quite feel like that with a letter that was to you, you know.
That's just a letter that was to you. And so it takes a little time to recognize and develop that.
Now I forgot to ask this at the beginning
But I had wanted to start with this, so I'll throw it in now.
At what point, for example, with first Corinthians, since that's one that I've just been talking about.
At what point does first Corinthians become canonical Scripture
So.
No, I'm not I don't think so. It's okay to give me a pious answer, because I think the pious answer is the right immediately.
First Corinthians became canonical Scripture in either 52, or 53 AD.
As soon as Paul wrote it before, they'd even gotten it in cornet first.
Corinthians was canonical Scripture.
The question that Tom was trying to answer is so. When did the Church recognize that?
Because that's the distinction, really, that we're talking about its canonical Scripture.
When the Holy Spirit inspires, puts his authority behind it.
But it takes a while before we recognize that. And that's why I'm saying, if you live in Corinth, then you get this letter.
It is canonical Scripture, but you don't know that, because it's not like it shows up with, you know, with a stamp on it.
That says, you know canonical Scripture, please file in Bible immediately.
They've been like silent. What we I mean. This is like the second, the second book written.
Maybe so, it takes a while because of that. And it also takes a while because it takes a long time for stuff to get around. Carmen
That's what I think. I think.
I think that Holy Spirit, inspiration process goes beyond just inspiring Paul.
I think that the Holy Spirit acts in the Church.
In the course of the timeline that I've given you to to make it so that we do recognize these Scriptures.
We don't have to do that anymore, but it it the Holy Spirit acted upon, you know.
Let's see who are by Irenaeus Andation and Clement, not Marcian.
The Holy Spirit did not act on Marcian. Okay?
One person knows Marcian, the Holy Spirit acted on these people to cause them to to recognize things now.
Sometimes they also tried to recognize something else. Right like, if you look at Tertullian, who's there about middle of a page 200 to 220, the only thing I've told you about him.
And this is, I should apologize to my friend Tertullian. The only thing I've told you about him here is that he defends first Enoch as cannon.
He believes. Look! It was written by Enoch. Well, no, not really.
But he believed it was written by Enoch, he thought, don't main reason people didn't think it was cannon is because they said, you know.
Look! How could it be written by Enoch? It wouldn't have survived the flood, and he says, Well, Enoch, was not that many generations removed from Noah, so Noah could have known about it and he could have preserved it, what's to say that God didn't re-inspire
Noah to write the whole thing back down after the ark.
So, yet is, and also just as the cherry on top.
Jude quotes it, and I think Jude Scripture.
So that means that first in it should be the rest of the Church said, well, most of the rest of the church sad, I I don't think so.
I don't think this one's Scripture, I mean, it's good.
I like first seen it, but I don't think it's Scripture in Ethiopia.
It. It is still, I think it's I think it's the Ethiopian can't remember the name of it, but one of the Ethiopian orthodox churches accepts it as Scripture.
They have, I believe, the largest canon in all of Christendom.
They accept almost everything as Scripture. I think they have 72 books, although that number might them.
It's possible that that number is actually Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Canon.
So? No, they have more than 72. Then, because I think the Catholics have 72
I oh, we were talking about the Holy Spirit moving in the church.
Recognize. And I think that's what goes on in the course of this is that the Holy Spirit is moving people to say, this isn't just a letter.
This is, this is a. This is Scripture, but that but then you have to convince other people.
It has to eventually be accepted. Different people for a long time through this period different people in different places accepted different lists because there was no, you know, there was no authoritative list that was out there.
There was no power structure that could have issued one. It was just going to be general consensus
So what we can say and now I'll get more to the list here, I guess, and I'll try to start wrapping up.
What we can say is that we know that a lot of people used and defended various parts of Scripture and use them very early.
There was a letter that's commonly called First climate.
We'll actually look at that again in a couple of weeks, probably because I think it's very interesting.
It has some very interesting information for us about the development of sort of church governance, so we'll be coming back to it.
But that letter is written right around 96 AD. So around the same time as revelation is probably written, unless you subscribe to a really early date for revelation, most people put it in the 90 s.
So obviously, he's not using revelation.
If he's writing the same year that John is is on Patmos writing revelation.
He's not going to be using that, but he does seem to quote, let's say he quotes first, Corinthians, or he refers to first Corinthians. There.
It's a little hard to tell if he's treating it as Scripture, or if he's just referring to it, I think that he's probably trading it as Scripture.
But the the letter first club is a letter from the church at Rome to the church at Corinth.
Kind of calling them on the carpet about some stuff, and so he reminds them, it's like guys.
40 years ago Paul had to write to you about this stuff.
You know, and he lists out some, and he says, and now you've gotten here.
So it's not a 100% sure. But he also quotes the book of Hebrews.
And what else did I say? He used
Can't find it now.
So, but he uses several different. Have did I put it on this page?
Oh, yeah. First Corinthians, Romans, and Hebrews.
So he uses at least those books from the New Testament, and seems to be quoting them in pretty much the same way that the New Testament quotes the Old Testament, and that he uses the Old Testament.
That's most of what he uses as the Old Testament.
So already. At that point, you're getting some of those things going on, Marcian, we say I'm 140.
He is a if you've heard of Gnostics, he's pretty much like a Gnostic.
He's a got a good God and an evil God, and that's how the universe is ordered.
And so he throws out the entire Old Testament, and he edits Paul.
He doesn't include all of Paul's epistles.
He doesn't accept the Pastorals he also doesn't like Hebrews.
People are gonna be pretty much treating Hebrews as either Pauline or not.
Scripture. That's how they are thinking about this.
And he excludes. He bruised, and then the only gospel he keeps is Luke, which he edits very heavily in order to get rid of anything that would be positive about.
You know the Old Testament God, because he thinks that the Old Testament God is evil, so that's why I say Marcian is.
He's a very different case.
The very early on we get a fourfold gospel.
If you, on the second page mentioned this, Matthew, Mark, and Luke are accepted very early.
John is pretty much accepted, and most places, and by the middle of the second century, late second century time of Irenaeus, Irenaeus in particular, is one who is strongly defending all 4 gospels and defending them partly on the basis that it makes sense that there would
be 4 gospels. He has an argument about the 4 corners of the world, and all this, that you would have 4 gospels, and so don't try to kick any of these 4 Gospels out, and don't try to add anything to any of these gospels, but he certainly defends.
John, partly because he's you know, he didn't actually know John, but his mentor knew John and had been mentored by John Irenaeus.
This is Irenaeus. He was from Smyrna, and and he's Irenaeus of Lyon, because he went to Leon in France as a as a priest, and then became the bishop.
It was a colony. It was a colony of Smyrna.
The the city of Lyon was. So that's why he was going there, because they were all people that were from Smyrna and surrounding Asia Minor.
So like. I say, John takes a little bit longer than the rest of the Gospels.
Most of Paul's letters are accepted relatively early.
Another thing that's accepted relatively early in the West.
Is the Book of Revelation, the Book of Revelation is only accepted early in the West.
It's challenged for a long time in the East.
I think that's yeah. And interestingly, the reverse is true.
For the book of Hebrews, the book of Hebrews is accepted very early on in the East, and is still being challenged in Jerome's day.
He tells us he's writing in the year 4 14 tells, you know who I don't remember.
Who is that he's writing to in this letter? But he mentions that you know most of the Latin speaking churches still don't accept the book of Hebrews, but I think they should
But I think with the Book of Revelation, I think it's a language thing.
People in the East all read Greek people in the West only have revelation in Latin.
Once you translate it into Latin, it's much easier to read.
If you're reading it in greed, revelations.
Greek is really weird.
I think the best scholarly explanation that I've seen is that he is quoting the old quoting the Septuagint of the Old Testament word for word, even if the grammar's wrong, like he wants to draw your attention back to these passages
so badly that he's copying it, and if it breaks the grammar in revelation, that's okay.
For a long time people talked about revelation being written in Holy Ghost, Greek, because it was weird, and it the only way that that Greek was real Greek was that the Holy Spirit had inspired it to be like that I think I prefer the quoting the septuagint
without regard to grammar, explanation. But there are a lot of things like that, and Greek speakers talking about it actually that's not in the the quotation that or the excerpt that I gave you.
But Greek speakers talking about revelation would talk about.
You know, among the reasons that they didn't want to accept it was that it was like, it's the language is just, barbarous.
It doesn't make any sense. It's it's wildly crazy, whereas once, like, I say, once you translate it into Latin, you're not preserving all those weird things you're producing Latin.
That makes sense. And so it was very quickly accepted. It was also challenged on the issue of whether it was actually actually had apostolic authorship.
This John who's writing revelation? The same John who was the beloved disciple who writes the the Gospel that we know as the gospel of John, who writes from their perspective, first John, they weren't sure if he wrote second and third John that might have been somebody
Else they that's part of why, second and third, John, you know, later acceptance.
Second, Peter is the same way. Jude second and third, John.
Those all. It took a little while longer before they were accepted.
The thing to understand, and I'm going to try to wrap up now, because I've run longer than I wanted to.
The thing to recognize is that this isn't like the Book of Revelation.
If that's the last book in the New Testament written is written around 95, 96.
You can't look at somebody in the year, say 100, and expect them to have, you know, the complete New Testament.
It takes a long time for just for things to travel around right, but it takes an even longer time for everybody to generally agree what the Holy Spirit is leading the Church to accept as authoritative Scripture.
They have to, you know, and and we can I think we can understand that if we skip down to the very bottom of my chart, Martin Luther and the Reformers had, which would be a great name for a band, I think but Martin Luther and the other reformers had to go
Through this same process. Right they had. They had been handed a book
But they'd been handed it by an organization that they now realize.
Not sure. I trust these guys. Why should I accept what they say?
And so Martin Luther at the same time as he's questioning the Catholic doctrine of salvation, and recognizing Paul, says something very different from that Martin Luther saying, You know, hold on, now, let's also take a look at the cannon.
You know, let the and eventually, by the end of his life, the Holy Spirit had acted in Martin Luther's life as well, and while he wasn't crazy about stuff like James and Revelation, he didn't like Jude all that much he did accept them as inspired
Canonical, Scripture. He didn't accept the the Deutero cannon, the the Apocrypha on the same level, although he did continue to use it.
He retained whole lot more of that kind of stuff than, say, Calvin did, but they had to question all of these things because they realized, oh, my cannon list is just tradition.
I need to make sure it's real before I, you know, stake my life on it.
So this took, you know, not necessarily 1,500 years to the time of Luther, but just to get to an original and early agreement, this takes 300 years or so.
The first, and I think I have this on the list. Yeah, 367 at Easter.
Athanasius, who's a bishop in Alexandria, Egypt.
He actually puts together the first list that is attempting to to list the New Testament lists, the same books that we would recognize the New Testament.
Now, that doesn't mean that from that day on it was accepted by everybody.
No, it was accepted by the people who had to recognize Athanasius as authority, or who thought that this guy's on the ball.
If he says second Peters in the Bible, then second Peters in the Bible, and it, you know.
But I he's important because he's the first one who has the same list that we have now come to.
Even later than that I mentioned Jerome talking about how Hebrews wasn't accepted everywhere.
Revelations not accepted everywhere. I've given you the last page of your handout.
You don't need to look at it right now, because I need to finish.
But that is a an excerpt from Eusebius's Ecclesiastical history, and he's describing in his own time.
He's writing around 325. He's describing in his own time what is accepted? Where?
What's still considered kind of questionable. Various places, and then he also lists at the end of it.
Some Gospels, like gospel of Peter, Gospel of Thomas, and several others, that he said, These are these shouldn't even be considered dubious like this isn't even debatable.
These are clearly forgeries by evil men who are being led by Satan.
Nobody should even give these any credence at all. So those are the ones that are totally cast out.
But he does, you know. It's interesting to see what he's saying about, you know which books are acceptable, and that's that's 325.
Jerome, then's writing in 4 14, and there are still questions that have to be ironed out.
The core is there, but on the margins there's still a lot of work to do.
And so the things, the things that they were able to, or we willing to, or confident in building doctrine about.
We're a little more limited. Than they would be for us.
A little more limited than we may think about, particularly that late, you know, 325 is the Council of Nicaea.
If you're familiar with that, and we would probably assume by the time we're at a organizational scale where we can have something like the Council of Nicea, where we bring together church leaders from all over the Roman world to make some decisions about some very important problems you would think that something basic like what
the Bible is what's in the New Testament would be settled.
It's not settled yet. Those church leaders were gathering.
And they were making decisions about condemning heretics who denied the divinity of Christ because they knew that.
But they weren't. They weren't yet fully settled on.
What was the New Testament? So it takes a long time.
I'm almost afraid to ask if there are any questions, so I'm not going to.
I'll tell you. You can look through the charts, feel free to grab me afterwards, or something.
If you have specific kinds of questions, I also have. If anybody is actually interested in it.
I have another excerpt from Eusebius is ecclesiastical history, where he he's reporting on somebody maybe a 100 years earlier.
Who's talking about the the issues with and the reasons for accepting and the problems people have with the Book of Revelation.
Found it interesting, but you know kind of a nerd for these things.
So it's not surprising I would find it interesting if anybody wants it.
I think I've got one copy here. I can leave you with that.
Or I can email you copy of it if you ask for it, and
Eusebius is writing in Greek. Eusebius is from Caesarea, and and that is still Greek speaking world for for a long, long time.
So you Seebius is definitely writing in Greek, most.
Let's see, most of these people
Most of these people are writing in Greek. Jerome can write in whatever he wants to, because that's his gift.
Tertullian is actually, he's significant as the first Latin theologian. Augustine's writing in Latin. Martin Luther is not in our time period, but he's writing in Latin and German
He could read Greek, though, thank goodness, yeah, I thought so.
It was a professor of Scripture. He needed to be able to read Greek
All right. I will, closing prayer then, and then we can have move on to the next part
Father, we thank you for
For the the inspiration of Scripture.
We thank you that you have sought to communicate with us in that way, father, we thank you that through all these centuries of of controversy and turmoil and disagreement and confusion that eventually
Your word came through that, and that it has been preserved for us.
It has been separated from the the dross for us, so that we're able to so conveniently turn to it.
Father, we thank you for the work of your Holy Spirit in so many people, through so many years, to accomplish that, and also to preserve it through 2,000 years of history, that we still have that available to us, father, we pray that that we would take advantage of that, gift that we would study it that we would
learn it, that we would learn from the example of those who have gone before us, but that we would learn from your word in Christ's name we pray Amen.