The Problem of Canon

Coming up next on Renewing Your Mind. Well, let me begin by just welcoming you to this series of discussions on the origin of the New Testament canon and its authority.

So glad you could join us and be here for this. This is a topic that's been near and dear to my heart for a number of years both in terms of my writing and research and speaking and talking and certainly a topic I'm convinced has a lot of importance for the church and even for the individual Christian. But I want to begin this first session and really our whole series in a rather unusual spot. I want to begin by talking about Muhammad Ali. Now, I know as we begin a discussion of the New Testament canon and I mentioned Muhammad Ali, I know what's going through your mind. You're thinking to yourself, why in the world are we talking about the boxer Muhammad Ali when we're talking about the origins of the Bible, the origins of the New Testament canon? Well, I'm not talking about the boxer Muhammad Ali. I want to talk to you about the shepherd Muhammad Ali.

In 1945, there was a shepherd by the name of Muhammad Ali who lived outside this little town called Nag Hammadi, Egypt. In one year, he was digging in the ground for fertilizer near his farm and he made what might be one of the greatest and most unexpected archaeological discoveries of the modern world. There Muhammad Ali was that day digging in the ground and his shovel hit something hard and he started to uncover the dirt and peel away the layers and he found this earthenware jar. And he thought for a moment that all his dreams had come true, right? He thought, man, maybe in here is treasure or gold or silver. So he pulls out this jar and is thinking about breaking it open.

It was like some scene out of a movie. And right when he's about to break it open, his brother who was there stops him and says, hey, don't break it open. There might be an evil genie inside who might curse us. And so they have a debate back and forth about this stone jar and finally said, okay, well, open it up. And so they break the jar open and inside they don't find gold. They don't find silver or jewels. In fact, Muhammad Ali was profoundly disappointed because all he found inside this jar were books.

Dusty, old, boring books. In fact, Muhammad Ali ended up selling them some antiquities dealer, not even realizing what he had found. But if he'd only known that day what he had discovered, it would have absolutely changed his life because what he discovered was more valuable than any pile of gold he could ever find. Because what Muhammad Ali found that day, which he didn't know, was what later came to be known as the Gnostic Gospels. He had in fact found 13 books, 13 what we call codices, that held 52 individual stories and 52 individual writings. And these told stories of Jesus that were radically different than the stories that you and I are used to. They told stories about Jesus but they had a very different feel about them, a different tone, a different theology. And at the center of these Gnostic Gospels was one of the most famous books you've heard about it known as the Gospel of Thomas. And if you were to read the Gospel of Thomas you would say, wow, this at first glance sounds like Jesus but then it doesn't sound like Jesus because the Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas actually talks not so much about how we can be saved from our sins but really how we can kind of save ourselves.

And we can save ourselves just through having higher knowledge. The Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas doesn't really talk about his own divinity. He talks really about our divinity and how we can be divine just like just like God. And if you were to read the Gospel of Thomas you would ask a lot of questions. You would wonder what happened to this version of Jesus and why haven't I heard about this version of Jesus and who read this book and what should we do with a book like this and in fact what should we do with all these books that Muhammad Ali found that day. Now if you were to ask those questions you'd be asking the very same question that scholars have been asking for for generations now and that even lay folks ask and that is which books really do belong in our Bibles. And how do I know that books like the Gospel of Thomas don't belong in our Bibles? And I mean after all there's all these other writings there that at least some Christians read and they thought maybe were important books so should we add them to our New Testaments? Should we not add them to our New Testament? Should we think that those are valid versions of the story of Jesus too or what do we do with these books?

That whole phenomenon, that whole problem raised by what Muhammad Ali discovered in 1945 is what I'm calling the problem of Canon okay. The problem of Canon is really the topic of our first session today because the problem of Canon gets at this question of why these books and no other books in our New Testaments. I mean have you ever thought about it and I'm sure you have if you if you flip through the content pages of your New Testament you realize that if you add it all up there's 27 books in our New Testament. Has it ever dawned on you to ask well why not 26 books? Why not 28 books? What about books like the Gospel of Thomas?

Is it just as valid as say John or Luke or maybe those should be out and Thomas should be in. Now if you think about it for a moment those kinds of questions are very obvious and basic and normal to ask and scholars have realized that that's a bit of a problem for Christianity. In fact it's not just scholars that have noticed that. Critical scholars have especially noticed that and what they've done is they've decided that hey if we want to attack Christianity this is a great spot to do it in right. If we want to challenge the validity of the Bible let's do it here because they don't think Christians actually have an answer to those questions. They don't think that we can know which books belong and which books don't. In fact they would say to us as believers that really your belief in these 27 books as opposed to others is a bit of a blind leap of faith. Well you Christians can believe it if you want but there's no reason to think that you're really right about these books. I mean it's just a shot in the dark and it could be Thomas it could be all these other books.

How do you know anyway? So some scholars have called this the Achilles heel of Christianity. This is our big vulnerability so we're told.

Now on one level they're right and what I mean by this is they're right in this way. If we don't have an answer to the question of how we know or whether we have confidence that these are the right 27 books that does raise a question for Christianity. I mean how can we talk about the message of the New Testament if there's no New Testament or at least no coherent boundaries of the New Testament. How can we talk about the message that we read in our bibles if we can't justify the sort of circumference and the scope of our bibles and if we don't have a New Testament we can't have a New Testament theology and if we don't have a New Testament theology we can't have a gospel message and what you realize is the critics are right in one way. If we don't have some answer to why these books and not other books then it does in some sense become the Achilles heel of the Christian faith and so the whole point of this series together with you is to begin to answer that question.

To be able to answer that problem. Be able to explain why we believe these books and no others. I'm convinced this is a critical issue for the church. I suppose someone might argue well look you know why do we worry about what scholars say. I mean the person in the pew they believe the bible let's just leave the issue alone. Wow I wish it were that easy.

It's not it's not that easy and here's why. One of the things that's happened in recent years is that scholars have begun writing not just for other scholars. I don't know if you've noticed this but scholars have begun writing for people at lay level out in the world so all their many of their books are now becoming popular level books and they're writing more stuff on the internet and on blogs and you realize the issue just won't go away because they're trying to target the average person and Christians need to have a good answer to these questions. Now there's another reason it won't go away though.

It's not just because scholars are writing for lay people now. There's other issues behind the issue of canon and that's really what I want to do with the rest of our first session today is I want to lay out three other issues going on that are feeding this issue of canon. You can sort of look at it like this. These are three factors in play in the scholarly world that are exacerbating the problem right.

They're continuing to make canon an issue and generate discussions of it and so if someone says well by golly it's been what 1500 years since the church supposedly decided these things how could it not be resolved and the answer is the three things I'm getting ready to tell you. Three things keep popping up that keep raising the issue again and again in people's minds. You could sort of think of this as three tributaries feeding a bigger river okay.

If you want to know why your river has such a high level of water well these tributaries that are feeding into it right and they're making it run really fast. That's what's going on. So I want to use this time just to lay out these three factors that sort of fill in why the problem's a problem for the church.

Let's just walk through these three factors one at a time and the first is this. There's been a number of doubts raised over the last few generations about the authorship of New Testament books. A number of doubts raised over the years about the authorship of New Testament books.

Now you and I don't think much about this right. When you read a book and you see a name attached to it you're like me you assume that the name attached to it's the name of the author right. So when you look at the gospel of John and you look at that first page and it says the gospel of John you rightly think well it was written by John the apostle the son of Zebedee he's the author of this but scholars have begun to ask questions about that and they begin to say well how do you know John wrote that? I mean how do you know John wrote John and how do you know Mark wrote Mark and how do you know who these people were? And they've begun to raise questions about how and whether we can be sure about the authorship of New Testament books.

But actually their challenge goes deeper than that. They're not just asking how we know what the authors of these books are. They're actually suggesting that a number of the books in our bibles our New Testaments are actually forgeries. In other words it's not just that we don't know who the author is but they argue we have reasons to think that the authors are people pretending to be someone they're not. So for example when you look at the book of Ephesians that we think Paul wrote scholars say well Paul didn't really write that. Paul didn't write that at all. In fact it was someone pretending to be Paul who wrote Ephesians writing in Paul's name.

It was a forgery. Another example of this is second Peter. Some scholars look at second Peter and say well yeah you think Peter wrote second Peter but it wasn't really Peter. It was some forger pretending to be Peter and this has become one of the main sort of things scholars want to talk about. It's a bit of a of a dripping faucet right. It just keeps going drip drip drip.

The issue keeps coming up again and again. In fact there's a recent book that came out on this topic by Bart Ehrman. Now if you don't know Bart Ehrman's name you'll hear me mention his name several times before we're done. Bart Ehrman is a professor at UNC Chapel Hill. Actually happens to be my alma mater and he's probably one of the most prolific criticizers of Christianity today and he finds all kinds of reasons not to believe Christianity and the canon happens to be one of his favorite issues. And he wrote a book over the last couple years and this is the title of the book. Listen to the title of this. His book is called Forged.

Writing in the name of God. And then the subtitle is this. Why the Bible's authors are not who we think they are. Now when you hear that title that probably kind of raises some concerns right. You probably think well that title kind of bothers me.

I don't know what to think about that title. The authors are not who we think they are. Well well then who are these people right.

And why should I think that I should listen to them. If they're forgers if they're forgers well then they're liars and if they're liars why those books in my Bible. You can see that a title like that is designed to stir doubts within believers and this is one of the things that's making the canon issue be an issue.

Think about the canon issues just why these books are no others but this is one of the tributaries that's feeding it because as soon as you start asking the question about whether these are the right authors there's just another way of asking whether these are the right books right. But what would you do if you found out that second peter was forged what would you do with it. My hunch is you probably booted out of the canon but then you think to yourself but I don't really have the authority to do that anyway and so this is a weird position to be in. I have a book that's in the canon I don't think should be there.

What do I do with that? And this raises all kinds of doubts. This is one of the factors that keeps coming up again and again. Now the purpose in our first session here is not to answer all these objections. Okay we're going to do that little by little in different ways throughout our time together. And so I know in your mind you're thinking yourself well you know could you solve this now. You know give us the answer right now.

Well we're not going to do that but I want you to understand that this is the this is one of the tributaries feeding that river. If there's doubts about new testament authors there's gonna be doubts about the canon right. They go hand in hand. All right let me mention a second factor that's feeding this discussion of canon. Another thing that's been sort of doing the drum beat here that makes people doubt whether we have the right books. So the first was just the question of who wrote these books authorship. Second thing that's happened that's feeding the debate is the discovery of more and more apocryphal books. Okay the discovery of more and more apocryphal books. Now I use the word apocryphal and that's a word that people get confused by and they maybe think of the books in our bibles that the roman catholic church has and we don't. That's called the apocrypha but that's not how I'm using the word here. The word apocryphal just simply means hidden. And to say that you are talking about apocryphal books or hidden books is just a way of talking about books that kind of look like our new testament books but never made it in our bibles. And the example of that is the book we just talked about a moment ago which is the gospel of thomas right. That's an example of an apocryphal new testament book.

It's a book that sort of looks like new testament books, talks about jesus. You think maybe someone somewhere thought this was scripture but never made it into the final new testament. That's an apocryphal book and here's the thing I want you to realize. We're continuing to find more and more of these and the archaeological excavations that are happening around the world. In fact over the last hundred years we have found a great number of these books particularly in egypt. Archaeological investigations are going on and they uncover new manuscripts and lo and behold they find stories of jesus that no one's ever heard about before. There's an archaeological dig right now going on in egypt that's been going on in the same site for over 100 years.

Just think about that for a moment. It was really in the late 1800s a couple oxford scholars found the lost city of oxyrhynchus in egypt. Now there's a fun word for you. Oxyrhynchus.

You can leave here and take that home and impress your friends about how smart you are. Hey have you heard about oxyrhynchus? Oxyrhynchus is a lost city in egypt and they discovered it in the late 1800s and what they found was the old sort of garbage dump of the city where they threw out old manuscripts.

Can you imagine this? And for the last hundred plus years they've been doing nothing in oxyrhynchus but uncovering ancient lost books and many of the books that we know about now were lost books that we've discovered at oxyrhynchus and we've discovered in other places too. Every time one of these lost books gets found people start asking the question again. Why these books? Why not these books?

And why the books that we have in our bibles? Now I've already mentioned the gospel. Tom also mentioned a few other examples of these lost books that might intrigue you. One is known as the gospel of Peter. You might think wow was that written by Peter?

Well I can assure you it was not written by Peter. A lot of these lost books took on titles of apostles to give themselves some credibility right? But the gospel of Peter tells the story of the crucifixion of Jesus and the resurrection of Jesus but does it in a very bizarre strange way. Another one of these gospels is known as the gospel of Mary which supposedly is private revelations given to Mary Magdalene by Jesus. We found some manuscripts of the gospel of Mary. In fact three manuscripts of the gospel of Mary over the years. One of these gospels is known as the gospel of Judas.

This is interesting right? You're thinking wow the guy who betrayed Jesus apparently he wrote a gospel and you might think well how'd that happen? Then he died right there afterwards and you raise a good question right?

How did that take place? Well of course it wasn't really written by Judas but it's purportedly his writings and so on. There was even in the last few years a so-called gospel of Jesus's wife. Jesus's wife and this was a gospel that purported to talk about Jesus being married. Now what's interesting about that gospel is it came out later that actually it was a modern forgery.

It was actually forged by a modern individual trying to put off that gospel as an ancient text. Now I could go on and on here's the point. Every time there's an archaeological discovery it raises the issue again doesn't it? And by the way this won't be the last one. There's always going to be more.

What's interesting is every time there's one it's on the news, on the web, on a blog, in the newspaper and people come to me. They come to your pastor and they say what do we do with these books and this is why Christians have to have an answer for this problem. It's interesting over the years how many books have been written on these lost books and they all seem to have these provocative titles.

Maybe a few examples here. A book came out a number of years ago and the title of the book was called The Five Gospels. It's an interesting title right? And you hear that you're thinking well I know about four gospels right? Matthew, Mark, Luke and John but so there's a fifth gospel? What's the fifth gospel?

And you might wonder well it's Thomas in case you're wondering. Gave away the big surprise there right? There's another book that came out not long ago called Lost Christianities. It's an interesting title right? Lost Christianities. Think about the implications of that title. It's telling you that there's other Christianities and implicitly other books that go with those Christianities that have been forgotten and that if only we could uncover those you could know what the real history of Christianity really was.

Fairly provocative and intriguing. Here's one other title that came out in recent years. There's a book that was entitled Forgotten Scriptures.

I love that title. Forgotten Scriptures. So it implies that they're scriptures which is debatable certainly right? And they're forgotten scriptures. So ah here's the scriptures you never knew existed and if only now you read my book then you can know all those scriptures have been forgotten and now we know what Jesus was really like.

You can see where these books are going and all of those generate doubts in God's people, in your mind, in my mind about whether these books that we have in our canon are really the right ones. And that leads us to a third factor. Our final factor we'll talk about in this session at least for why the canon issue keeps sort of growing and this is the third tributary and that's the influence of a scholar by the name of Walter Bauer. So I want to tell you about Walter Bauer a moment. I know that name doesn't mean anything to you Walter Bauer. But Walter Bauer is actually a German scholar who wrote a very famous book in 1934 in Germany.

The name of that book was called Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity. Now when Bauer wrote that book no one paid much attention. In fact when Bauer wrote that book if you thought about the year I just told you 1934 people in Germany weren't thinking about Walter Bauer okay.

In 1934 they were thinking about this guy named Adolf Hitler who had just become the Fuhrer of Germany. So Bauer wrote this book in obscurity and no one really noticed. Okay fast forward a number of years and then in 1971 it was translated in English and suddenly everyone took notice. In fact not only they took notice but Bauer's book was like this bomb going off on the playground of biblical scholarship.

People think wow this is a radical idea. What did Bauer say in this book? Here's the essence of it. Bauer in this book and everyone since has just been parroting back Bauer. Bauer in this book argued very simple thesis which is that the earliest centuries of Christianity in those centuries Christianity was wildly diverse. Wildly diverse. And when he says diverse he doesn't mean ethnically or racially diverse.

Those are the types of topics in our modern day right. That's not what Bauer is talking about. When he says that early Christianity was wildly diverse he means theologically diverse.

Here's what Bauer argued. Bauer argued that in early Christianity there was massive theological disagreement. Everybody had their own view of everything. Christians disagreed about all kinds of stuff. Christians disagreed about whether creation was good or evil. They didn't always agree. The question of how many gods were there? They didn't always agree. The question of whether the god of the Old Testament was good or evil?

They didn't always agree. The question of who was Jesus? Was he God? Was he man?

Was he a mix? They didn't agree. What it took to be saved? How did salvation happen? They didn't agree.

What were you saved from? Well Christians didn't agree said Bauer. And they all disagreed and were fighting it out over the mantle who could claim to be authentic Christianity.

So here's the point. Bauer says that when you look in the earliest centuries there was really no such thing as Christianity. There's this Christianities plural. All these different groups claiming to be Christian fighting out for the real banner of being the authentic Christian faith.

And then here's the kicker. Each one of these groups had their own books, their own collection of books. So says Bauer, you think the canon you have now is special? No, no, no. It's just the books of the theological victors, the theological winners. If another group had won, you'd be reading a whole other set of books and you wouldn't even know the difference. Another group had won, you may not be reading Luke. You might be reading the Gospel of Philip. You may not be reading John. You might be reading the Gospel of Thomas.

And you wouldn't even know anything different. In other words, the canon you have is just a big historical accident. Now, what have we done in this first session?

I've laid out for you three different tributaries. Now, in one sense, you're going to take away from this first session a bit of angst, and that's intentional. You're probably thinking, you gave us all the problems and none of the solutions, right? But here's what I want you to realize.

I want you to feel the problem of canon. Canon is a challenge the church has to answer, and I lay out those three tributaries for you to know that it's not going to go away. And if we don't have an answer, then we cannot say we have a coherent New Testament. If we don't have a coherent New Testament, then we don't have a coherent New Testament message. If we don't have a New Testament message, then we don't have a Gospel message.

What's at stake then? The very Gospel we preach, teach, and believe. My prayer is that these sessions would help you and all listening to recover some level of awareness of the issue, an assurance of the truth of God's Word and the rightness of these books in our canon, and an ability to articulate that to a world who really needs to hear, a world that's in doubt, starting with other believers and to all who will listen about why these books are the right books in our New Testaments. There is a concentrated effort to undermine our confidence in the Bible, and unfortunately, those efforts have gained a widespread audience today. I know that I've heard some of the skeptical challenges that Dr. Michael Krueger talked about today on Renewing Your Mind.

Perhaps you have as well and would like to be better prepared to respond to those challenges. That's why I highly recommend Dr. Krueger's series to you for further study. There are six messages on one DVD, and we'll send it to you for your donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries. You can reach us by phone at 800-435-4343, or you can make your request and give your gift online at renewingyourmind.org. By the way, Dr. Krueger is president of Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina, and is well known for his work on the New Testament canon. We'll be featuring other lessons from his series this week here on Renewing Your Mind.

But again, if you'd like to order the entire series, just call us at 800-435-4343, and for your gift of any amount, we'll be glad to send it your way. We do hope that this daily outreach of Ligonier Ministries is a source of encouragement to you. Our goal is to help you grow in your knowledge of God's holiness through the study of His Word. One of the many ways to listen is to sign up to receive a link to each day's program in your email inbox.

You can do that by going to renewingyourmind.org. Well, tomorrow Dr. Krueger responds to some of the other challenges to the reliability of Scripture. People will make statements such as, there was no canon in Christianity until the fifth century. I see this in the scholarly world. I even heard a famous pastor say this long ago. Believe it or not, in a church, an evangelical church, was telling his congregation there was no canon until the fifth century. I'm thinking to myself, that's not quite accurate, depending on what you mean by canon. I hope you'll make plans to join us Tuesday for Renewing Your Mind.