Audio only:
Joe looks at several ways Protestants try to justify their canon and Scripture, and how these standards contradict their canon.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. How do we know which books belong in the Bible? After all, there are seven Old Testament books that are in Catholic and Orthodox bibles that aren’t in Protestant bibles. So how do we know which Bible is right? One solution I’ve heard goes something like this. We know which books belong in the Old Testament by looking at which books Jesus treated his scripture. In the New Testament,
CLIP:
We submit to the 39 books of the Old Testament because our Lord Jesus affirmed the Old Testament and we submit to the 27 books of the New Testament because our Lord Jesus authorized his apostles to write the New Testament. Jesus determines the canon
Joe:
On his face that seems to make total sense, but there are two problems he might’ve noticed. First, are we really meant to start with the Old Testament and then work backwards? Isn’t that the opposite of the order in which God revealed his scriptures? And second, if we do start with the New Testament, how do we know we’ve got the right New Testament books? I actually want you to leave both of those problems to one side today, and I want to ask a different question. Assume this method is right. Can we know which books belong in the Old Testament by looking at the New Testament evidence? Or to put it another way, is there a principle we can use reading the New Testament evidence that produces a Bible that looks like the Bible used by any Christians today? Now, as we embark on this, I think it’s worth clarifying what standard it is we’re going to use.
For instance, should we consider a book to be divinely inspired if Jesus or if the New Testament authors reference it even indirectly? If so, that’s going to include quite a few books not ordinarily found in Bibles. Or do we need the standard to be something higher? For instance, do they need to quote from a particular book directly for us to consider it canonical or higher? Yet do they need to explicitly invoke it as scripture with the formula like it is written? So for shorthand, I’m going to call those three basic standards, reference, quotation and invocation. This is still a bit of an oversimplification, but I want to give a fair hearing to each of these three standards and then we’ll look at a few other possible standards at the end. Now, on paper, any of those standards makes perfectly good sense to me. I would just ask that if you’re going to choose a standard to avoid two traps, the first is what’s called the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.
If you are starting from a conclusion, for instance, you’re convinced that there are supposed to be exactly 66 books in the Bible and then you invent a postdoc explanation at how you’re going to get to that conclusion, that’s a bit like firing at a barn and then painting the bullseye on afterwards to show what a sharpshooter you are. You’re not actually holding to your conclusions because of the principle that you’re stating. The second trap you want to avoid is that of double standards. When you have a low standard for books you want to accept in the Bible and a higher standard that you want for books you want out of the Bible. So whatever standard you think is right, I would just ask you to see if it works to apply that standard consistently. Now, with that in mind, what would our Bible look like if we use that first standard?
Include every book referenced in the New Testament now, as you might imagine, would be larger, probably much larger. Now, that’s particularly true for you Protestants watching this who have a smaller Bible because it’s actually quite clear that the New Testament authors reference books that are found in Catholic Bibles that aren’t in Protestant Bibles. As Edmund Gallagher points out Nestle, Alan suggests 117 New Testament verses that have a verbal or conceptual paralleled wisdom of Solomon and about 150 New Testament verses that have some parallel in thought or wording with sirach. Now, that doesn’t mean that those similarities are allusions or references. Sometimes different authors just say similar things, but he acknowledges that a good number of them are close enough to be suggestive. Additionally, scholars recognize that the Epistle to the Hebrews contains numerous references to Maccabees as well. And Hebrews 1135, we read that women received their dead by resurrection.
Some were tortured, refusing to accept release that they might rise again to a better life. Now that’s an obvious reference to two Maccabees seven in which a mom encourages her sons to bravely face torture and martyrdom rather than violating the law by saying things like accept death so that in God’s mercy I may get you back with your brothers. The wording there is too obvious to be coincidental as scholars have noticed. Now, first and second Maccabees wisdom in Sirach, all of those are in Catholic Bibles, but they’re not in most Protestant bibles. So you might think, aha, this standard is going to clearly prove the Catholic Bible, but it doesn’t because there are a number of things referenced in the New Testament that are in books that aren’t in anyone’s Bible. For instance, St. Jude mentions the dispute between St. Michael, the archangel and the devil over the body of Moses, but that event isn’t found anywhere in the Old Testament.
It instead seems to come from a now lost section of a book called The Assumption of Moses. Now, this is going to raise another thorny question as well. What constitutes a reference? That question might seem easy, but it’s trickier than it first appears when Peter compares suffering to our faith being tested in the refiners fire. Is that a reference to searac or just a well-known idiom? Scholars don’t agree even remotely how many references there are in the New Testament. There are a lot of similarities, for instance, between the gospel of Matthew and an early Christian document called the Diday, but we don’t actually know which one was written first. So is Matthew referencing the Diday or vice versa? So I don’t think this first standard is going to work. I’m actually quite sympathetic to arguments made by Protestants like Redeem Zoomer that references is both too lowest a standard and to vague, a standard to be useful for knowing which things belong in the Bible. Now he’s going to suggest a second standard instead, direct quotation.
CLIP:
Regardless of which translation of the Old Testament they used, it is telling that they almost all of the New Testament quotes of the Old Testament are from the proto cannon and not the deutero cannon. Some people say there’s some vague references to the deutero canonical books, but a vague reference isn’t the same as a quotation. Most of the direct quotations are from the proto cannon.
Joe:
So what would happen if we use this standard instead? If our Old Testament was just those books which got directly quoted in the New Testament, what would it look like here again, it’s actually surprisingly tricky to answer that because many of the things cited in the Old Testament are more paraphrases than verbatim quotations. So the boundary of what constitutes the quotation can be a little murky, but nevertheless, we can say this, it would be an odd looking Bible as the Methodist scholar Bruce Mezger points out, it’s true there are no direct quotations to the seven disputed books that Catholics have and Protestants don’t called the Deutero canon or apocrypha, but neither are there direct quotations to Joshua Judges first or second Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Astor, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solomon Obediah, Zephaniah or Neum. So several books that we are used to seeing in our Bibles would not be there. What would be there instead? Well, for starters, as Wes h has pointed out, actually the only clear quotation in the epistle of Jude is to first Enoch a book we don’t have in our Bible.
CLIP:
The longest and only unambiguous quotation in the biblical epistle of Jude is not from the Old Testament, but rather from the non-biblical book of first Enoch.
Joe:
Now, early Christians actually recognize this quote and some like Tertullian argued that first Enoch should be in our Bible. So maybe you want to say, yeah, this principle’s working. We should include first Enoch, but then we run into a more radical problem. There are several places where St. Paul directly quotes Pagan authors when writing the Titus and Crete, for instance, he quotes from the cre and philosopher Epi amenities calling him perhaps ironically a prophet of their own. In First Corinthians, he quotes verbatim first the prophet Isaiah and then a maxim from IES without telling us which of those he considers to be part of the Bible. And in his famous speech on Mars Hill in Acts 17, Paul actually doesn’t quote scripture at all, but he does quote from a pair of Pagan poets. So if we followed this standard, we would lose several universally accepted books of the Bible and we’d pick up books like one Enoch as well as some Greek poetry.
So it doesn’t seem like we’ve found the right principle yet. Now, some of you watching this are maybe protesting, obviously just because Paul quotes a pagan that doesn’t automatically make it inspired scripture. There needs to be something more like saying it is written that signals that it’s being treated as scripture, but remember, the higher you raise the bar, the more books you’re going to have to take out of your Bible. A lot of the Old Testament books are never invoked in the New Testament with that kind of wording. And strangely, although Paul uses formulas, it is written and it is said seemingly interchangeably in talking about scripture. He also uses the formula it is said when quoting what appears to be an early Christian hymn so that even this doesn’t appear to be an unambiguous formula telling us that a work is or isn’t inspired scripture.
Now, look, this is by no means a thorough examination. I’m just trying to give you enough evidence here to show you that you’re not going to be able to use the words of Jesus or the New Testament authors to assemble together anything like a complete and accurate biblical canon. And that’s true whether you’re talking about invocations or quotations or references or illusions or echoes. These just are not workable methods. The books of the Bible do not tell you precisely which other books belong in the Bible. Now, so far we’ve been looking at it on a case by case book by book basis. But what if you instead looked at it section by section? I want to look briefly at three different attempts to do that, to see whether those work. The first is from redeem zoomer again.
CLIP:
Now, some people will point out, oh, the proto cannon, I mean the New Testament never quotes like Esther, which is in the Protestant cannons. Does that mean we have to get rid of Esther? Well, not really. All that we’re saying is that because the New Testament almost entirely quotes from the Jewish canon of today, then we can trust that as the most accurate canon, and Esther is part of that. So we just sort of accept it with the package.
Joe:
Now, if I’m understanding his argument correctly, he seems to be saying that even though books like Esther aren’t mentioned anywhere in the New Testament, we know that they belong in the Bible because they were part of the well-accepted Jewish cannon of Jesus’ day, and Jesus does quote from that cannon. But in fact, the question of whether Esther belonged in the Bible was a topic that rabbis were still debating in the Talmud well after the time of Christ. It certainly does not appear to have been settled in the first century or before. Now, I’ve spoken before on just how different the Bible was in the time of Jesus, and I’m going to link to a deeper dive on that at the end. But for now, suffice it to say you can’t rely on a first century Jewish consensus to show that books like Esther belong in the Bible because there doesn’t seem to have been a first century Jewish consensus. Similarly, you’ll find Protestants who claim that Jesus and the authors of the New Testament spoke of the law, the prophets, and the writings. Those are the three sections of the Jewish TaNaK today. Even if that were true, it wouldn’t actually mean that Jews today and Jews back then used the exact same books after all, calx and Protestants both speak of the Old Testament, but the books we consider part of the Old Testament don’t match up identically. But there’s a more basic problem as we’re going to see, which is that this simply isn’t true.
CLIP:
Jesus affirms firms, the divisions of the Hebrew scriptures as the first century Jews divided them, the law, the five books of Moses, the prophets and the writings,
Jewish historians, like Josephus for example, is this tripartite canon we call it, which just means a three-part canon. So sometimes this is referred to as the law, the prophets, and the writings, and this is how Jesus will sometimes speak or Paul will speak like this when we find Jesus speaking of the Hebrew scriptures, he will speak often of a tripartite division. Law prophets, writings usually more shortened to law and prophets, but nobody is asking him, which prophets do you mean?
Joe:
If these claims were true, I think we would find evidence of Jesus speaking often of the law, the prophets and the writings or of St. Paul speaking in the same way. But Dr. Norm Geisler, former head of the Evangelical Theological Society, points out in his book from God to us how we got our Bible, that this simply is not true. Jesus and St. Paul frequently speak of the law and the prophets two sections. Neither Jesus nor anyone else in the New Testament ever mentions a third division called the writings. The closest we get is a single ambiguous reference in Luke 24 to Jesus fulfilling everything spoken about him in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms. But even here, Geisler points out that it’s not clear whether Jesus is singling out the Book of Psalms because of its special messianic significance, or as part of Moses and the prophets, to which he referred earlier in that same chapter. Now, you don’t have to take his word for it or mine. You can open up the Bible and see for yourself, find anywhere in the Bible where Jesus or St. Paul or anybody speaks of the law, the prophets, and the writings as the three parts of the Old Testament. Speaking of three parts, the third and final version of this argument is a clever one that I’ve heard from people like Dr. Nathan Busenitz
CLIP:
And Jesus himself confirms that the canon of the Old Testament does not include the apocryphal books. That bottom line there about Matthew 23 and Luke 11 is really fascinating because Jesus said that the Jews would be held accountable for the blood of the prophets from able to Zechariah Abel’s, the first prophet in the Book of Genesis killed Zechariah, is the last prophet killed in the Book of Second Chronicles. What Jesus is implying is that the canon goes from Genesis to Second Chronicles, which in the first century, Jewish ordering of the canon started with Genesis and ended with Second Chronicles. It did not include the apocrypha.
Joe:
So there are two problems with this idea. The first is historical. For this argument to work first century Jews not only needed to have the same books as later Jews, they need to have the same order of books starting with Genesis and ending with Second Chronicles. But we know this is not true for starters at the time of Jesus, there was no strong sense that the books were arranged in any particular order because the various books of the Bible were individual scrolls not organized as part of a single book. What would it mean to say that one book comes before or after another book when they’re not even on the same scroll? The move from scrolls to books. It actually happens in Christianity first and later spreads into Judaism, and it’s only after that point, well after the time of Christ. Now that we find the rabbis in the Talmud debating which order the various books should go in, and strangely enough, modern Jewish Bibles don’t actually follow the Talmudic order in any way.
So it’s clearly not the case that Jesus was referencing. Some already established, well-known Jewish consensus about the order in which the Old Testament books were to be arranged. But the second problem is just a biblical one. The idea of able to zacharia referring to the first and last death mentioned in the canonical order only makes sense if Jesus is talking about the Zachariah mentioned in Second Chronicles, but he’s not. He tells us, he’s talking about Zachariah, the son of Barakah, that’s the prophet for whom the book of Zachariah is named. That’s a completely different person from the priest mentioned in two Chronicles who’s described as the Son of Jehovah Daya. Now, my goal here isn’t to convince you which books belong in your Old Testament. My goal here is actually today to establish a more basic point, the idea many Christians have that we’re going to be able to solve the question of which books belong in the Old Testament by looking to the words of Jesus or the way books are used in the New Testament or to Jewish consensus at the time of Christ.
It simply doesn’t work. It can give us a general sense, but it can’t solve any of the particular questions we’re trying to sort out. Scripture alone is actually incapable of resolving this critical question because nowhere in the New Testament does anyone try to solve that question for us. So if we want to know which books belong in the Bible, we are going to have to look elsewhere, and that’s where I would argue that we’re either going to conclude that the Holy Spirit has guided his church into recognizing the right books of the Bible or that we’re hopelessly lost at knowing the precise boundaries of the biblical canon. Speaking of the boundaries of the Bible, what did the Bible more Bibles look like at the time of Christ? I alluded to this earlier, but here’s a much deeper dive than I did on that exact question. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.