The Problem of Canon

Coming up next on Renewing Your Mind... Why these books and no other books in our New Testament. And much of our theology comes from the New Testament. But opponents of Christianity 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. Digging in the ground for fertilizer near his farm and he made what might be one of the greatest and most unexpected archeological 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. 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, we'll 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 it 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. At first glance, it 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 God. And if you were to read the Gospel of Thomas, you would ask a lot of people, a lot of questions. You would wonder, well, 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 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 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? Or 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. It could be Thomas. It could be all these other books. How do you know anyway? How do you know these heal 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 could we talk about the message of the New Testament if there's no New Testament or at least no coherent boundaries to the New Testament? 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 that 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. And 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 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 many of the 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 started?

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 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 is the name of the author, right? 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 2 Peter. Some scholars look at 2 Peter and say, well, yeah, you think Peter wrote 2 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 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. 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 of 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're probably thinking, wow, 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, 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 are 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, it's just another way of asking whether these are the right books.