Cy Kellett talks with Joe Heschmeyer about the canon of scripture.
Transcript:
Joe Heschmeyer: So if you were to try to say, oh no, I think it is the 66 book Protestant Bible, an easy test would be to say, well, find me one of those. Find me an actual 66 book Bible somewhere before the Reformation. Find me some community that describes using that Bible. You have a handful of people who argue for that Bible, but it doesn’t seem to have ever been the Bible anyone used as their actual Bible.
Cy Kellett: Apparently there’s all this discussion about the canon of Scripture on social media that this has become a big issue. So I just want to ask you a basic question about the canon of Scripture. What’s the best argument for the Catholic Bible?
Joe Heschmeyer: Yeah, the best argument is that whenever you’re trying to establish which books belong in the Bible, the route to a good answer is always going to run through the early church. If you say, I accept these books because I believe the Gospels were written by either apostles in the case of Matthew and John, or the companions of apostles in the case of Mark and Luke, or if you say I accept these books in the New Testament because these are the ones accepted by the earliest Christians, or these are the ones that agree with the teaching of the apostles or whatever standard you’re going to use there. When you stop and think, well, how do I know whether that standard has been met or not? The answer is basically always the same because I can count on the general reliability of the earliest Christians. How do we know Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? Not from anything inside the book. They never tell us that. Rather, this is the unanimous testimony of the early Christians who are aware of who wrote Matthew, Mark, Luke and John because they have access to information we don’t have access to independent of them. So any Bible we are going to have is going to be heavily reliant upon the early Christians. And occasionally those early Christians would disagree with than each other about which books belonged in the Bible and which ones didn’t? This sometimes gets exaggerated. People act as if the canon of Scripture was all over the place. It was a total free for all. Nobody had any kind of agreement. That’s not true. There was a generally agreed upon number of books and then there were a number of books that were largely but not universally accepted and then a handful of books that were even more on the fringe and maybe a couple different groups accepted them. And in those cases we’re not dealing with books that are just openly heretical. Like we’re not talking about the Gnostic Gospels or anything like this. Those ones were easy to reject. A good example of a writing that people didn’t know whether to accept or reject is the first letter of St. Clement. Now, first Clement, most scholars date it to 96 AD. Some put it even earlier, around 68. Either way, Clement knows the apostles. He was conversant with them. He seems to be the same Clement who is greeted by St. Paul. And so he writes a letter addressing a controversy in Corinth. And Corinth keeps it and treats it as scripture for a long time. And if you think about it, it kind of makes sense. If Mark, who is a companion of Peter or Luke, who’s a companion of Paul, can write things and have them be accepted as scripture, then it makes sense that Clement can also write things and have them be accepted as scripture. Particularly when Clement has also become, by this point, seemingly he’s become the bishop of Rome. So we find the local church in Corinth. So all that is to say you’ve got this general core of books that are agreed upon and then you’ve got a slightly fuzzy boundary. And St. Augustine gives us the clearest principle to know what to do in those boundary cases. This is from his work on Christian Doctrine, Book 2, Chapter 8. He says now in regard to the canonical Scriptures in he must follow the judgment of the greater number of Catholic churches. And among these, of course, a high place must be given to such as have been thought worthy to be the seat of an apostle and to receive epistles. Accordingly, among the canonical Scriptures, he will judge according to the following standard, to prefer those that are received by all the Catholic churches to those which some do not receive. And so Augustine carefully lays out this general series of principles. And then he shows his work and comes to the conclusion that there are 73 books that belong in the Bible. This is the same conclusion that the third council of Carthage, a regional North African council that he’s present at, come to. This is a conclusion which the Pope comes to. This is the conclusion followed by the Latin Vulgate, which was the standard Bible throughout the west in Christianity for more than a thousand years. And so you have this very clear standard Christian Bible all throughout the church, particularly throughout the Western church. Now you will find people who disagreed with that, who thought some other Bible would have been the right one. But even among those who take a minority view, they don’t actually all agree on what that view should be. So if you were to try to say, oh, no, I think it is the 66 book Protestant Bible, an easy test would be to say, well, find me one of those. Find me an actual 66 book Bible. Some were before the Reformation. Find me some community that describes using that Bible. You have a handful of people who argue for that Bible but it doesn’t seem to have ever been the Bible anyone used as their actual Bible. It was not the way any church judged doctrine or the liturgical rule of life for the church. So all of that is to say if we trust that the Holy Spirit leads the church into understanding divine revelation, which we should, then we should accept the 73 book Bible. And if we can’t trust that God is going to guide us into knowing which books belong in the Bible, then we’re in much deeper problem than just knowing the number of books of the Bible. Wow.
Cy Kellett: All right, I’ll tell you what. Call with your questions. 888-318-7884. I’m going to take a quick break because I’m noticing actually lines just filled up so we’ll get straight to calls. Joe Heschmeyer, our guest. You can ask him anything.