In this clip, Cy Kellett welcomes Joe Heschmeyer to discuss the question of why there are missing books in the Bible. Joe explains the historical context of these texts and why they were not included in the canon, emphasizing the significance of apostolic authorship and authenticity.
Transcript:
Caller: I grew up in the faith for most of my life, and I always challenged my faith. I was into the apologetics and all that stuff to the point where I couldn’t answer my own questions. I was asking so many. So my question to you guys, if something got on my mind, why are there missing books in the Bible? Is it because it does not fit the agenda of the Catholic Church or they just don’t want us to know everything? I just. I want to know.
Joe Heschmeyer: So when you say, why are there missing books in the Bible, which books do you have in mind?
Caller: The Book of Enoch. I’ve. The Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip. There’s many that have not been included into the 73 original books of the Bible.
Joe Heschmeyer: Yeah, yeah, okay. That’s a great question, Alejandra. And first of all, I, I commend the kind of integrity and intensity with which you’re approaching the question. I think that’s really good. But second, the, the history of those books, speaking broadly here, I might actually leave the Book of Enoch aside, because there’s a separate kind of history there when we’re talking about, like, the, the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, those kind of questions. Those books are largely 2nd century A.D. meaning they’re written like a century after the apostles by people who claim to be the apostles and obviously aren’t. In technical terms, we would say they’re pseudo epigraphical, but in common terms, we’d say they’re forgeries. Like, this is someone pretending, you know, if I wrote a book saying, I, Abraham Lincoln would like to tell you what the Civil War was like, you would say, I don’t accept that book. Not because I don’t want to know more about Lincoln’s life, but because that’s not going to be a reliable way to find out about Lincoln’s life. To find out from someone pretending to be Lincoln who isn’t Lincoln. Well, likewise, someone pretending to be the apostle Thomas or St. Peter or fill in the blank. So we know from looking at the earliest Christians which books they didn’t. Didn’t consider to be inspired and canonical. And one of the things they were looking at is did this really come from an apostle or not? Or did it come from someone who was a companion of the apostles? So, for instance, when in the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Mark and Luke aren’t apostles, but Mark is The translator for St. Peter and Luke is a companion of St. Paul. Now, this is going to be really important for a couple reasons. Number one, this is actually a testament to their Authenticity, like if you’re going to pretend to be someone in the first century, you’re not going to choose Mark, you’re not going to choose Luke, they’re too obscure. But if you actually are Mark, you’re just going to be like, well, I’m Mark. That’s who I am. Second, the gospels, like the four authentic Gospels, are internally anonymous. And so even a skeptic like Bart Ehrman, who’s, you know, an ex Christian, acknowledges that this is one of the proofs that these are the first ones. They don’t say, I, John, tell you this, I, Matthew, tell you that. No, because at the time they’re written, people knew who they were from because it was from someone they knew. And so they didn’t have to kind of blow the horn about their own authority because they actually had that authority. It’s later forgers who have to pretend to be someone they’re not that are constantly overplaying their hand and kind of exaggerating all the I, Thomas saw such and such kind of thing. So, in short, we don’t accept those books because they aren’t really from the people they claim to be from. They are really from the time they claim to be from. They aren’t orthodox, meaning they don’t agree with the actual teachings of Jesus Christ. They don’t agree with what the people who actually were his apostles believed and taught and proclaimed. And so they’re just kind of elad. Elaborate forgery. And moreover, when you read the writings of the early Christians, they overwhelmingly rejected these books and didn’t take them seriously. It’s much more recent history that we’ve, we’ve tried to kind of place these books alongside the, the real books, as if there was a real challenge about which ones were going to be accepted and rejected. But if you read the writings of the earliest early Christians, nobody is saying, I think we should accept the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Peter or Mary Magdalene or any of those, because they were universally or nearly universally regarded as the hoaxes we now know them to be. Does that make sense, Alejandro?
Caller: It makes sense, but to me it’s like who. Who is saying that these are reliable choices or not? And I just want to know, I guess you said how it doesn’t agree with the teachings of Jesus, but in a way that’s kind of in my head saying that the church did reject it because it doesn’t agree with their agenda.
Joe Heschmeyer: Well, so the teachings of Jesus were known before anyone put pen to paper about the New Testament. The teachings of Jesus were known because Jesus walked around and preached, and the apostles went to cities and villages and preached. And so if. If you have heard Jesus preach and then you get a document that totally disagrees with that and someone says it’s from Jesus, you would recognize at an instant that that’s not really from Jesus. It totally contradicts everything you know about Jesus, that, in other words, ordinary people knew what Jesus taught because Jesus was a public person and preached publicly, and they knew what the apostles taught because the apostles were public people who preached publicly. So it’s not just, well, the institutional church says so. It’s like, no, no, no. There were hundreds of witnesses and there were eyewitnesses. And that’s an important check. So when the Gnostics in the second century start circulating these obviously fictitious texts, it wasn’t just, oh, the message is wrong. It’s also, you know, we knew Thomas and he never released anything like this. And the first we hear of it is in the mid-1100s. That’s really good evidence that it’s not really authentic, that it’s not really authoritative. Because when the actual apostles wrote documents, you know what happened? The people received those and made copies and invited other people to come read them. And so if a document doesn’t appear until the mid-1100s, then it definitely isn’t real. Because if it were real, the people in the first century would have been copying it, they would have been talking about it, we would find some kind of evidence of it. So those kind of historical things, it’s not just that we disagree with the content, it’s that the dating and the authorship are also basically universally rejected. And here I want to stress, not just rejected by Catholics, not just rejected by Christians, but even secular scholars will acknowledge that the Gnostic texts are, for the most part, second century or even later, and they’re preaching something wildly, wildly different than anything taught in Judaism or Christianity, like they’re teaching a complicated polytheism. I hope that all that was helpful to you. We do have to move on, but I want to suggest something. Well, first of all, I want to give you Barry Machuda’s book, why Catholic Bibles Are bigger, because I think you’ll enjoy it with these questions that you have.