Audio only:
Joe responds to the recent conversation between Gavin Ortlund, Javier Perdomo and Cleave to Antiquity about the integrity of the Protestant canon of Scripture.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and today I want to explore the Protestant Bible and whether it has the right number of books because as you may know, Protestant Bibles are seven books shorter than Catholic. Bibles are also shorter than Orthodox Bibles, and there’s a lot of debate about this and it matters a lot to know if we’ve got the right Bible. And I want to look particularly at some of the objections handled by three gentlemen recently over on Dr. Gavin Orland’s channel. It was Dr. Orland along with Javier Pomo and the guy behind Cleaver to Antiquity whose name I think is Matt, but I apologize if I’m getting it wrong. His name turns out to be Ben. So I want to look at first the sort of canonical problem, the canon conundrum as they call it, whether Protestants can solve it, whether Catholics are in the same boat, and then get into some of the historical evidence. So broadly speaking, I’m going to look at this in two halves. First, looking at authority and infallibility. Do Protestants know for sure which books are in the Bible? Do they need infallibility to be able to do that? And then what do the Bible of the early Christians look like? What can we say about the Bible in Jesus’ own day? So let’s do part one first and so here, and we’re talk about they are kind of laying out what they call the canon, what
CLIP:
Canon has to do with which books are in scripture. This is a huge issue. This is a one that I think a lot of people have anxieties about and uncertainties about. So you may be interested in this video if you’re just curious, how was the Christian Bible formed? What did that process look like? And especially if you’ve heard objections to Protestant views of the canon and you’re wondering how to respond to that, do we have a fallible list of infallible books and what does that imply? And then historical questions, is there any historical basis for a Protestant view?
Joe:
But I actually don’t think that they maybe go far enough in explaining why this is a problem. So let me give my perspective as a non Protestant to say why it seems like Protestants have a canon problem and then see if they offer a solution to that or if they’re right that everybody else has the same problem. So first, why do Protestants have a canon problem? What do I even mean by that? What does it mean when we talk about a canon conundrum? Start with the idea of sola scriptura. Now I realize, so script means different things to different people, but historically it meant something like this. The 1689 London Baptist confession, which is maybe the most important historic confession for reformed Baptists like Dr. Orland says that the holy scripture is the only and the word only there matters, the only sufficient certain and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience.
Now, I know Dr. Orland will describe sos script as just saying Scripture is the only infallible source, but it actually means a lot more than that historically. It means not only that scripture alone is infallible, but it’s also sufficient. So all you need is scripture, and it’s also certain, so you don’t have to rely on the church to explain it for you. All of that is very much what solo scripture is intended to do. You want to say on the one side, there is no infallible tradition, there is no infallible pope, there is no infallible church. So you can’t as a Protestant point to those as an infallible authority. They might help you to interpret scripture, but they can’t be a source of authority apart from scripture. So if a doctrine is not found in scripture but is found in tradition or is taught by the church or is taught by the Pope, whatever, then as a Protestant you’d say that’s off limit.
That is not valid, it’s unbiblical. Maybe these guys have a different version of Protestantism that they’re practicing, but historically this is where you are. So you can’t appeal to tradition the church or the Pope to the exclusion of the Bible. Your beliefs have to come from the Bible because it is again, the only sufficient certain and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience. On the flip side, positively, Protestants of this Friday would typically affirm that if you want to know the answer to any issue involving saving knowledge, faith, or obedience, you’re promised to find it in scripture. And a faithful Christian can clearly find all of these answers using what are called the ordinary means. And you don’t have to be learned and learned or an unlearned person into it. You do not have to do a deep dive on early Christianity to find the answer to your problem.
You don’t have to know 17th century reformed theologians. You don’t need to buy a leather bound set of anything to have the answer to your problems. This is critical to this whole system. The London Baptist Confession goes on to say that the whole council of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man, salvation, faith, and life is either expressly set down or necessarily contained in the holy scripture. So whatever it is that you need for salvation, you’re either going to find it in the Bible or you’re going to be able to logically derive it from the Bible and you’ll find other confessions that say various things similar to that. And again, some of them are taught very clearly and explicitly. Others you can derive even if you’re not well-educated using ordinary means to sufficiently understand them. Those are the promises that the London Baptist confession makes.
The Westminster Confession says similar things. Historic Protestant confessions make these similar claims. Here’s the problem, if that’s right, if the Bible is what I need to figure out all of these things, then it seems really obvious that the most critical thing I need to get straight is well, which are the books of the Bible. And this is particularly an acute problem if it turns out that different groups of Christians have different Bibles with different contents. So I now run into two problems. Number one, we can’t have infallible certainty about which books are and are not in the Bible. And number two, whatever certainty we do have is based principally on things not found in or logically derived from scripture itself at all. You can think about this kind of concretely, so I’ll use this example later on, but think about the gospel of John. The gospel of John has some of the clearest statements about Jesus’s divinity.
It’s important that it’s in the Bible. It gives us a lot of information. You’re not going to find in Matthew, mark, Luke, or anywhere else in the Bible. Does it belong in the Bible? There’s no book in the Bible that quotes it. There’s no book in the Bible that says it is scripture. There’s no book in the Bible that says it is written by an apostle. And even if it did claim to be written by an apostle, that wouldn’t by itself prove that it was written by an apostle. After all, plenty of false gospels claim to be written by apostles. So how do I know if this belongs in my Bible or not? It can’t just be because I agree with its doctrine. It can’t just be because I like reading it. I might like reading any number of books that don’t belong in the Bible.
So on what basis? By what authority do I know? Even 1%. So a lot of times because we’re framing this about infallibility, people will say, oh, well you have an infallible, we just have a pretty sure list. And it doesn’t matter. It’s a 99% certainty versus a hundred percent certainty. That’s not it at all. Or at least that’s not only it. Whatever percent certain you are that the gospel of John belongs in the Bible is coming from somewhere other than the Bible. If you are 80% sure wherever you’re getting that 80% is something like, well, the early Christians believed in it or the early church used it liturgically. Or here are church fathers who quoted and treated as scripture or early Christians tell me it was written by John and so on and so forth. You are doing a lot of work outside the Bible relying upon scholarship or early church or something, and none of that certainty is coming from scripture itself.
So that’s the canon problem that you don’t have a very sure canon, particularly when it turns out that Christians dispute which books are in the canon and a lot of the historic reasons these were traditionally believed to be written by Paul or by an apostle or whatever. You find modern scholars who challenge all of that. How is an ordinary scholarly Christian supposed to know which books do and don’t belong in their Bible? Because remember, that’s the promise. The promise is the unlearned can know everything they need to know from salvation from scripture alone. And you can’t even know what’s in scripture from scripture alone. That seems like a pretty fatal problem. So in response to this, there are several points that the guys in question make and the first one I agree with, which is that the early Christians themselves don’t agree on the canon. Now that’s true, but as we’re going to see, I think that’s going to be a bigger problem than these guys realize.
CLIP:
But the simple fact of history is anybody who studies the medieval views of the canon will see how much diversity and disagreement there is. There is debate all the way up until Trent, and that’s just I think undeniable.
Joe:
There is clearly an overall consensus in favor of a 73 book Bible eventually by the four hundreds or so. But there are outliers, they’re minority views, and the east has much less consensus and certainty about this than the west does. That actually remains true to this day. I would draw from this an obvious point that I don’t see any of these guys making, which is this seems to pretty clearly prove that the early Christians don’t believe in scripture alone. They don’t believe in sola scriptura because look, it’s okay for two Christians to have a slightly different Bible if they share the same creed and they share the same theology. And so if you have a rule of faith as the early Christians call it, then Augustine and Jerome, even though they disagree on exactly which books belong in the Bible, can still be brothers in Christ.
So broadly speaking, the early church is focused less on having the same starting point of scripture and more on having the same end point of orthodoxy, small orthodoxy like we want to be orthodox Catholics in our belief. And so if you’ve got a slightly wrong Bible, you’ve got one too many books or not enough books. That’s only a problem if it leads you into heretical conclusions and otherwise there’s not a big push to make sure everybody’s Bibles match. And this is actually quite striking when you look at the especially early historical evidence as we’re going to see the early Christians focus on the books in people’s Bibles. Were less to make sure all Christians were reading the same book and more saying, what can we use to show you Jesus? So the early Christians in the second century were more interested in which books the Jews thought were inspired and less interested in making sure all of them agreed which books were inspired.
Even when you get movements that try to separate the old and New Testament against each other, when the Christians respond to those kinds of moves and say, no, it’s the same God of the old and the New Testament, they still don’t define exactly which books are and aren’t in the old and New Testament. It’s actually quite striking. Whereas if you read for instance, the Westminster Confession or the London Baptist confession, they typically start with defining which books are in scripture first before they can even move on to the trinity because how do they know what the trinity is? Well, from scriptures, they have to know scripture first. The early Christians don’t operate like that at all, and I think it’s worth probably pointing out like, Hey, this looks like pretty good evidence that they don’t have the same methodology as you do about scripture. They don’t believe in souls scriptura.
And if they believe in the infallibility of tradition of the church and there are plenty of early writings that seem to say they do, then the whole debate about scripture is much less important. But okay, so we agree that the early Christians don’t have the same Bible. This also means you can’t just say, Hey, all the early Christians knew which books were in the Bible. It was so obvious. You don’t need an infallible church, you don’t need an infallible tradition, you don’t need a pope, you don’t need any of this because it’s so obvious. It’s like two plus two is four. You don’t need a special gift of the Holy Spirit to figure that out. And many of the ways the reformers spoke about it, John Calvin spoke for instance, of saying that the difference of telling which books did and didn’t belong in scripture was like telling white from black. Ironically, Calvin thought Baruch was in scripture and modern Protestants think it wasn’t so clearly. It’s not like that. Clearly the people who thought this was an easy problem, you could just look at the Bible and figure out which books went in it and didn’t. It’s not going to be that because the early Christians couldn’t agree, the reformers couldn’t agree. Modern Christians don’t agree.
That then leans to an obvious question, are we in the same problem? Do Catholics have the same canon conundrum that Protestants do? Now, I’ve previously pointed out that this argumentative move on behalf of Protestants is something of an informal logical fallacy called the two que fallacy. So I’ll explain what it’s here. This logical fallacy is called the two que fallacy. Now, two que is just Latin for U2. So it’s the U2 fallacy. I was trying to think of a good U2 joke to make there, but I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. Peter Van Vliet in his book on logical fallacies gives the example of a mom telling her daughter not to smoke and the daughter replies, why should I listen to you? You started smoking when you were 16, but if Van Vliet points out, the mother may be inconsistent, she might even be a hypocrite, but that doesn’t invalidate her argument.
Liars, manipulators, and even hypocritical parents can create good arguments. So if the critique is true, it doesn’t matter if the critic is a hypocrite for reasoning, this comes up all the time as Christians, if you call out immorality in the broader culture, people are quick to respond. Well, you’re also a sinner. That may be true, and maybe it’s even morally wrong for me to point out the speck in your eye without addressing the log in my own, but it doesn’t mean there’s not a speck in your eye. So lifewise, if I tell you you’re a Protestant, I say, Hey, your church is burning down, and you say, well, you Catholics, your church is burned down too. That doesn’t put out the fire burning down your church does it basically. Now to be clear, there are times where it is perfectly reasonable to say you are guilty of the same thing I’m guilty of it can point out someone is being hypocritical.
And if you’re forced to choose between two options, and I know the way they present this is just like, oh, Catholics are our opponents, and so if we can just prove Catholics are wrong, that’ll make Protestants right. That’s not how real life works in this context. If the issue here is Protestants don’t know what books are in the Bible with any great degree of certainty and they respond, nobody does. You haven’t saved Christianity, you haven’t defended Protestantism. All you’ve done is brought orthodoxy and Catholicism down with you. If you’re right. Now, as we’re going to see this just isn’t true, but listen to the quicksand analogy that Gavin is going to give where Catholics say, we’re on rock and you’re in quicksand, and rather than showing that Protestantism isn’t in quicksand where it’s just sinking to destruction because it doesn’t know how to solve this problem, he’s just basically going to say, yeah, Catholics are sinking too.
CLIP:
But the image that comes to my mind is that the emotional quality of this conversation is often at first what is put upon us is the Protestants are on quicksand and the non Protestants are on standing on a rock. They have this sort of stable position and ours is fluctuating. But then as you actually wade through the particulars point by point, you realize the ambiguities that are put upon the Protestants are not, the other side is not removed from them.
Joe:
Javier similarly is going to give an analogy about being in the closet. And when someone points out that he’s in the closet, his response is, but his bully’s in there too, which well listen for yourself. It’s a strange analogy.
CLIP:
It’s almost like if you have a kid who’s more scrawny, it is almost like the nerdy archetype in a Disney movie or whatever, and a bully shoves him into a closet, walks inside the closet, locks the door behind both of them, and then mocks ’em for the fact that he allowed himself to be put in the closet. And it’s like, dude, don’t you understand? We’re both in this closet now we got to figure out together how we’re going to get out of this.
Joe:
And there are two things to take from this. Number one, that’s not a rebuttal. If someone says you’re in the closet and you just say, I’m in the closet with the bully who put me in here. Okay, well, you’re still in the closet. You haven’t resolved, you’ve not beaten the allegations at all. And that’s a problem with this structure of argumentation. Catholics are saying, Hey, Protestants, this is a problem within your system. And the Protestant side isn’t saying no, it’s not a problem. They’re just saying, oh, you also have the problem. But that’s not solving the problem. That’s not actually saying there’s an answer to it. But then the second thing is Catholics don’t, we just do not have the same problem. It’s completely a false equivalence to pretend that we do. Now the usual explanation is, oh, well Catholics don’t have a full list of every ex cathedra statement or every infallible teaching.
Okay, we don’t need one. What is the argument there? Exactly? Again, take a really concrete example. Does the gospel of John belong in the Bible and how certain are you as a Catholic? I can have a hundred percent certainty because the Council of Trent Dogmatically defined it. And even prior to that, you have the clear teaching of tradition. You have the ordinary and universal magisterium, you have the ecumenical council of Florence, you have regional councils from way back. You have repeated usage by the church fathers with the book. And all of this amounts to certain infallible authority. But if I reject the infallibility of tradition and of the church and of councils and dogmatic definitions, well, how certain are you then? So it’s just not true to say that we’re both in the same position that it is just false. And unfortunately this leads to these positions that these guys take. And Gavin surprisingly takes it most vociferously where rather than defending Protestantism, they just tear Christianity’s reliability down. So you can see this from the example of Moses’ eardrums
CLIP:
And the philosophical appeal has to do with an infinite regress that there are certain ways of requiring infallibility for the discernment of an appropriation of infallibility that now push the can down the road and you’re going to need an infallible knowledge of that. And so what we can observe here is that every system has a cutoff point where you move from infallibility to fallibility. So there is a fallible reception of the infallible, and that can be the eardrums of Moses at the burning bush, which are fallible eardrums, but he’s still hearing God, and that’s an infallible voice coming from the burning bush. Or this can be the perception of the number of cathedral statements within Roman Catholicism, which is a fallible knowledge that is debated, and yet those are infallible teachings or the number of infallible councils for various eastern traditions, which is fall discerned, okay? There’s not been an infallible teaching that is universally agreed upon about that.
Joe:
So according to Gavin, even if God reveals something to you directly that is still fallible because maybe you misheard him. And so Moses, when he hears scripture is just as fallible as anybody else. It’s an infinite regress. But if that’s true, then the 10 commandments are fallible. So consider two people, we’ll call them Moses and Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson uses his best fallible wisdom and he comes up with 12 rules for life. He doesn’t claim they’re anything other than a fallible list. Moses gets a list from God himself of 10 commandments. Now by Gavin’s argument, both of these are equally fallible because Moses could have misheard, and that seems like an obvious undermining of scripture, an obvious undermining of revelation itself because these guys are so big on you can’t actually have infallibility. Nobody can really have infallibility, but if you really believe that, then you can’t talk about the inerrancy of scripture.
You can’t talk about any of these things being protected from error if everything is this radically subjective thing, and that is unfortunately what they’re left with because they don’t want to say, we have a fallible set of infallible books and we don’t really know which books do and don’t belong in the Bible and Catholics do because then Catholicism has a clear advantage in preserving Christianity that Protestantism lacks. And rather than saying, here’s a surefire, infallible way to know which books are in the Bible, which they can’t do, they have to just claim falsely that no one can know which books are in the Bible infallibly. So I think that they’ve made the wrong moves and that they’re positioning themselves in a way that unintentionally undermines Christianity itself rather than saving Protestantism in any way because you’ll notice they don’t show you how to get out of the fallibility problem.
They don’t show you how to get out of the canon conundrum. They just argue maybe we’re all there, but let’s look then at part two with the historical evidence. They do give some reasons for why they think that we should have the Bible that Protestants use today, and I’m going to give just a few of these things. There’s a lot of really in the weed stuff on the Gian dec cradles and what was and wasn’t said of the Council of Rome, I don’t find that stuff particularly interesting or important. Maybe I’m missing the importance of it, but it doesn’t seem obvious to me like why that would be where anyone would need to go, particularly if you’re a Protestant who believes even the unlearned can know the important saving truths and knowing which books aren’t on in scripture seems to fall in that category. I don’t think we’re going to have to resolve this based on scholarly debates about the authenticity of certain parts of the gian to cradles that doesn’t strike me as the relevant place for the conversation to go. Instead, I think Gavin’s asking a much better question when he asks what Bible Jesus used. So does Jesus use the same closed Protestant cannon used by Protestants and Jews? Today,
CLIP:
The better position is that the materials Jerome is working with in coming to his canon list are the more likely to be apostolic and the canon Jesus used. So why is that? 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:
Now, I have to just point out something that Gavin has said, and he said this in other videos as well, and it’s just literally not true. He claims that Jesus often spoke of a tripartite division, law and prophets and writings, and if you look up how many times Jesus referred to the law of prophets and writings zero times, and that’s a big red flag because his argument is the modern Jewish Bible is divided into three sections called the TaNaK. You got the law, you got the prophets, and you have a third section that today is just called the writings. And according to people like Roger Beckwith, who these guys are heavily reliant upon, all of that was sorted out about 200 years or at least over a hundred years, like second century BC before the time of Christ. And this is really important for the Protestant claim because they can say, oh yeah, everybody just knew which books were in the Bible in Jesus’ day, and that’s why people didn’t have to ask Jesus.
There’s several problems with that. The first of which is if there was this threefold section, law of prophets and writings and the contents were all well known, why do we find zero mentions of it? You find instead a bunch of references to a two-part canon law and prophets. This is even exemplified beautifully at the transfiguration. Moses representing the law, Elijah representing the prophets. These are the two figures, and you see in the book of Revelation pointing to scripture in its two parts, law and prophets testifying. There is one reference to Jesus saying in Luke 24 about things prophesied about him in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms. So you can sort of fudge that and say, well, Psalms, at least we know Jesus realized that there was more than just law and profits. So maybe there were other books as well, but there’s no clear third division there, and scholars recognize this other than a handful of evangelical scholars who are really committed to the idea, there must have been a closed canon.
Scholars of Judaism or of the formation of the canon are pretty clear that no, there very clearly was not a tripartite canon that was closed at the time of Christ Timothy Lin in formation of the Jewish canon. He’s talking about the prologue to Cek, which is one of the other places pointed out here, but he makes a point. This third category of other books is not a closed third division. In fact, it is not one category at all, but an undefined number of categories in the way that it is implied by the formulation of the other books and the rest of the books. It is an open-ended way of referring to books other than the law and prophecies. In other words, at the time of Jesus, you had two clear divisions, you had law books and those were closed. You had five books and you had Jews in that day who said those were the only books of the Bible that counted.
So the Sadducees are the most famous in this category. So every time Jesus interacts with the Sadducees, he only quotes from the Torah, the law, the first five books. Then you have another group that’s a little vaguer of prophets and there are debates about which books are and aren’t in the prophet. So Jesus refers to Daniel as a prophet. He’s not actually in the modern Jewish prophets section, which is already going to tell us this section may be a little more porous just saying there are non prophets doesn’t tell us that everyone agrees on which the prophets are and we know for a fact that they don’t. But prophets is a fairly clear category. You can tell if someone is arisen a prophet. Where things get really tricky is what about everything else? What about the history books? What about the Proverbs? What about Psalms, et cetera.
Those eventually get captured in a set of books called the Vem or just writings, but at this time in Jesus’s day, it’s just this slightly gray area at the boundaries of the canon and people don’t have a clear sense of what is and isn’t in there. And you can see from the way the New Testament even refers to books that it’s not always clear what is and isn’t canonical. Like for instance, Jude quoting from first Enoch, so they should not be a controversial point. You can also look at the Kumaran community, the Dead Sea Scrolls. They don’t match modern Protestant or Jewish Bibles. They have a bunch of books that seem to be very clearly for them, scripture that aren’t in the modern scriptures, and they have other books that are not there, or they lack other books that are in modern Protestant and Christian or Protestant, Catholic and Jewish Bibles.
So it shouldn’t be a very controversial point to say the notion that there’s just a Bible in Jesus’s day is fictitious. It does not exist. James Sanders points out in Torah and canon that a lot of the move, and so you’re going to see something very clear happen in 70, you have the destruction of the temple. And so looking at the end of the one hundreds compared to the beginning of the one hundreds, Judaism looks radically different. Instead of Pharisees and Sadducees and high priests and priests and sanh and a temple, you have the temple destroyed. Christianity now exists alongside Judaism, and you have the rise of rabbinic Judaism, which is a very clearly different thing, and it’s rabbinic Judaism that starts to introduce for the first time this idea you see in people like Josephus, that prophecy actually closed hundreds of years before in the fifth century.
Now, you should understand a lot of the move for this is to reject the New Testament because his prophecy is closed, then they don’t have to accept either the last books of the Old Testament, what’s called the Deutero cannon or the New Testament itself. And so in Sanders’s words, rabbinic Judaism accepted the tradition that Kuran Juda and Christian Judaism did not accept. Namely that prophecy, a revelation had ceased in the fifth century, B, c, E, and he points out this really becomes a much clearer view only at the end of the one hundreds. So people trying to claim the Bible in Jesus’s day looked a certain way will almost invariably start with Josephus after the rise of Christianity, after the destruction of the temple, after Judaism’s in diaspora, and you have the rise of rabbinic Judaism and then just assume it must have looked the same a hundred years earlier, and that is a completely unsafe assumption.
It just does not follow at all. It’d be like saying, oh, well leave it to Beaver. It looks this way in the 1950s, and so that must be the way people looked and act in 2025. It doesn’t follow. There’s been a massive change and we know there has been. So that’s the first point related to that. Sanders also says that rabbinic Judaism in’s early stages born out of the ashes of the second Jerusalem temple begins to view the TaNaK that law prophets writings as closed. But this is new. This was not the case in Jesus’s day, which is why people trying to claim it’s closed can’t point to anything in Jesus’s day or before, or they just have to say, oh yeah, Jesus talked about the law prophets and writings all the time, even though you can look for yourself and see that he didn’t.
Finally, Albert Berg points out that there is ongoing Jewish debate for centuries. For instance, in the Jewish Talmud, the book of Ekk is quoted three times as explicitly as scripture twice with the invocation. For soda is written that as is written, invocation is only used for scripture and it is explicitly cited as being part of the vem, the writings section, the HAFA in Greek. And so we know that even if someone says they have law prophets in writings, that doesn’t mean they have the exact same ones as someone else who says they have law prophets in writings. Just like when a Catholic and a Protestant both say we have an Old Testament and a New Testament that tells you divisions, that doesn’t tell you contents. So we know for a fact there were rabbinical debates about Song of Songs about Esther, about Ecclesiastes, about Sak, about the book of wisdom. We know for a very long time there were debates about these things within even rabbinic Judaism. So pretending that there’s just a universal uniform thing and everybody knows which books are in the Bible because they all can say law and prophets, you just can’t get to that conclusion very safely. Okay, what about the early Christians? One of the other places, and I’m partial, I love the early Christians, is saying, what are the Christians in the one hundredths the second century have to say?
CLIP:
And then what really cements it for me personally, I try to go into this with an open mind and consider the alternative sides is the earliest canon lists from the second century, like the Brian list, which is often neglected, and then the testimony of Melita Alito of Sardis. And I’ll just say a word about Alito and then I’ll kick it over to you guys for final comments. But what we have with Alito is a second century figure, very highly respected, sometimes regarded as an apostolic father perhaps in the Johanne circle, but basically he gives a very shorter canon. There’s a few wrinkles on almost all these figures. There’s some wrinkles and disputes about the edges. So people dispute about he doesn’t have the book of Esther, and there’s disputes about whether that was an accidental omission. There’s some dispute about his reference to wisdom and whether that’s another name for Proverbs or the Book of Wisdom and things like this you get into, but it’s a much shorter canon that excludes the Deutero Canonicals.
Joe:
So in addition to Milito in the Buros list, Gavin has elsewhere argued for origin. Now, in fairness, these are three of the earliest people to give canon lists as we’re going to see they’re not giving Christian canon lists.
CLIP:
By the way, guess who else Zeus identifies with the 22 book Hebrew Canon Origin 22 book Canon. And this is very important because origin is a very significant early Christian thinker, and you can note the stated rationale being tradition for Origin’s view
Joe:
As Jeffrey Mark Hannaman points out though in the Mediterranean fragment in the development of the cannon, the lists that are given by Mio and by origin are clearly Jewish catalogs. They are not lists, they’re lists of what books Jews consider to be biblical, not what books Christians consider to be canonical. And origin is explicit about this. It’s bizarre to point to origin when origin tells you he’s not giving you a Christian list but a Jewish one. He explains why he points out that books like Toba and Judith are not in the Jewish Bible but are in the Christian Bible and similarly Milito as we’re going to see, explains what he’s doing and why. So origin, I’ll start with him because he’s so clear about it. He explains that he’s endeavoring to make sure that in controversies with Jews, in other words, remember one hundreds, there are still more Jews than there are Christians.
So Jewish and Roman and heretical groups are the three groups that apologists are focused on. So you have lots of writings responding to Judaism and challenging Jews of the day. So St. Justin Martyr has dialogue with TFO the Jew, and then he has first apology written against the Romans. And so those are the three groups that you have. And you look at any apologetic writing in this period and you can say, are they answering Roman paganism? Are they answering heresies like gnosticism or are they answering Judaism? But if you’re going to answer Judaism and you’re going to try to prove that Jesus is Lord from the Jewish scriptures, you need to know which books your Jewish readers accept as scripture. And so Origen says this in a letter to Africanists. He wants to make sure when he quotes a book that it’s something that is in their version of the scriptures or else he warns that they’re going to laugh at gentile believers for being ignorant.
So he’s not saying, we need to find out what the Jews use and use that as our Bible. He’s saying for apologetic reasons, I need to know what authority the other person accepts so I can make sure to only use that. The Buros list is one of relatively recent discovery, and there’s a huge controversy about the dating. So we don’t actually know if this is from the one hundreds, but it says names of the books among the Hebrews. So again, it is explicitly giving Hebrew names of books in the Jewish Old Testament. So that then leaves Milito. One of the first things to know about Milito is that he was a famous AP apologist in his day, and you see B acknowledges this in book four of church histories, and we know from his writings that he often wrote against the Jews. And so he has books like on the Lord’s Day and on Passover, and he’s clearly working not in response to just heretics or Romans.
In fact, one of the knocks against milito is that he often sounds pretty milito in his own writing explains what he is doing as well. He writes to Onesimus and says, since you have often in your zeal for the word expressed, a wish to have extracts made from the law and the prophets, notice he’s using the Jewish formulation, not a Christian one concerning the Savior and concerning our entire faith and so on. So he’s looking to the law and the prophets to say, where can we find Christian evidence in the Old Testament? In other words, but he needs to know which books are going to be accepted. So he says accordingly, when I went east and came to the place where these things were preached and done, what does he mean by that? He means when he went to the Holy Land, when he went to Israel, he learned accurately the books of the Old Testament.
It actually says the Old Covenant. And that matters because what we think of Old Testament today as a bunch of books, books of the old Covenant in the earlier use meant books of the people who are part of the Old Covenant. So it’s Jewish books, and then he gives a Jewish list. Now look, he is a bishop and a famous apologist, and he’s the bishop of Sardis in Western Turkey, not terribly far from where Istanbul would be today. The idea that someone asked him what books are in the Bible? And he’s like, I have no idea. I need to get on a boat and go to Israel to find out which books Christians have in their Bible should be so obviously wrong that nobody takes it seriously. And yet, even though people have pointed out to Gavin like, Hey, he is not giving a Christian list, these guys, Gavin included, are going to continue to claim, oh, no, no, no, this really is a Christian list because he talks about how these books point to Jesus.
CLIP:
He introduces this as a Christian canon. I keep hearing people saying that, well, yeah, Alito has a shorter canon, but he’s just reporting the Jewish canon. Now it’s true that he’s interacting with Jewish sources, but he’s interacting with them unto the end of stipulating a Christian canon. And from, if I can get this up on the screen, people can see the parts I have emboldened here where he references the law and the prophets concerning the Savior and concerning our entire faith.
Joe:
But look, he’s obviously worried about finding out where these books point to Jesus. And he even says that he took these books and he compiled six books of his own just with extracts. In other words, he went through books that the Jews accepted and found six books worth of material of things pointing to the Messiah. That’s explicitly what he’s doing. So it makes no sense to treat this as a Christian book, as if Christians didn’t know which books were in their own Bible, and two bishops were like, I don’t know, let’s get on a boat and go to the holy land and find out. That doesn’t even hold up to basic logical analysis it would seem. But anyway, Javier makes a similar argument because he says Milito gets the number wrong.
CLIP:
Notice that, and this is me echoing scholar Roger Beckwith, notice that Milito claims that he journeyed East in the quote that we’re talking about to reproduce even the authentic number and ordering of the Old Testament canon, and yet the numbering he provides doesn’t add up to either the 22 book numbering nor the alternative 24 book numbering of the Jews that we were talking about earlier that all these other writers are appealing to. And so instead, he numbers the books as 25, which is unknown in Jewish sources of the day.
Joe:
Now, it seems to me the more obvious answer is that when he says wisdom also Ecclesiastes, that there’s a question about whether he means to give two names for the same book or whether he’s referring to two different books. And so he probably has a 24 book Canon, not a 25 book Canon. But also if Christians have the same Old Testament as the Jews, that argument doesn’t make sense to say, oh, they actually had a 25 book canon compared to the 22 or 24 book Canon. But also we know from Christian writings that they numbered their books radically different than the Jews did. They didn’t have the 12 minor prophets as a single book, for instance, we shouldn’t be anywhere near 22 or 24 books if we’re giving the Christian numbering because the Christian numbering in Protestantism and Catholicism and early Christianity is not in the low twenties at all.
It’s in the thirties depending on how you number certain books. So it seems much more obvious that worst case scenario, he just got one of the numbers wrong or miscounted or omitted a book or accidentally included a book that he thought the Jews had, and they actually didn’t. In fact, we know this for a fact. His origin does the same thing. He accidentally omits the 12 minor prophets. We know the 12 minor prophets were included, but he omits them seemingly by mistake when he’s recording which books are included in the Jewish canon. So it’s no great mystery what’s going on in these early cannons. They’re not giving the Christian list, but nevertheless, this misunderstanding bears some negative fruit. Namely, it gives rise to this idea of a two tiered cannon because Christians in the four hundreds don’t understand what the Christians in the one hundreds were doing. And so really the late three hundreds onward, you have people who think that this distinction between canonical and ecclesiastical books means a two-tiered cannon within the Christian Cannon. It doesn’t. It was referring to the Jewish cannon versus what was accepted by the Ecclesia, the church, all of them were considered scripture to the Christian’s origin is very clear on that. But this is a confusion that sets in hundreds of years later amongst some of the early Christians, and most famously Jerome, but also some of the Eastern fathers.
CLIP:
The situation keeps being messy as we have different utilizations of the word canonical. There are times where canonical is utilized simply to mean the books that are read in the churches. And so when we’re talking about the books that are being read in the churches being canonical, that would seem to include that tier that I mentioned. That’s not so bad from the apocrypha, but when it’s used more narrowly, the word canonical then refers to the books that are, the origin is not hidden. We know where these came from. They have full divine authority. They can be used to establish dogma, they can be used to settle doctrinal controversies between people. Whereas that other category of books may be read in the churches, those good APRA books, but they are just not of that same caliber. You can’t use them single handedly to settle dogma. Surely you can use them as a corroborating voice, but not single handedly. And their main purpose is to instruct and morals and such. And so what we would argue as Protestants, and this is something that a lot of people including a lot of Protestants on our side don’t seem to get, is that historically both Lutherans and the Reformed and the Anglicans and everybody practically was arguing for this nuanced two-tier distinction.
Joe:
Okay? So there’s a few problems with using a two-tiered list. Number one, Trent points out that the Anglican scholar, j and d Kelly had highlighted that most of the church fathers don’t mess around with a two-tiered list at all. The Deutero canonical books are simply scripture in the fullest sense. In contrast, Protestants have typically rejected them, completely not said their scripture, but not as scripture as other books. So for instance, the Westminster Confession says these books are no part of the canon of scripture and therefore are of no authority in the church of God. So you’re not preserving Protestantism by trying to argue for a two-tiered canon. You’ll find some interesting Lutheran theologians on this. I want to give a partial caveat there, but the Lutheran view on the canon is so complicated. It is not the majority position within Protestantism. Let’s leave it there.
And maybe that could be a discussion for another day. But then finally, a two-tiered system is simply not true. And here you can go back to St. Paul. He says, all scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for proof, for correction. And so if this book is scripture, you can’t say, yeah, it’s scripture, but you can’t use it for doctrine. It either is scripture or isn’t. The tutored model doesn’t work. That’s a lot, and I appreciate you bearing with me for all of that. But I would say I think Protestants have a real problem with knowing which books are and aren’t in the Bible and trying to turn to a two-tiered canon to try to solve it makes your problem worse and not better. So if you want the Bible that was received by the yearly Christians, who knew what Jesus in the Apostles taught, go with the Bible that the church still has and trust that God is guiding that whole process. And you don’t have to re-litigate the nuances of church history to figure out which books you can trust and which ones you can’t. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.