Who decided which books belong in the Bible? How many books did they decide? Do we today as Christians have the right ones? Joe Heschmeyer covers these questions and more in today’s episode.
Transcription:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschemeyer. and I want to explore three questions today. Number one, who decided which books belong in the Bible? Number two, how many books did they decide? And number three, do we today as Christians have the right ones? Jessica, over on Patreon, which by the way is in the link below, recommended that I do a response to this video from a group called Bible Animations. It’s very well put together trying to defend the 66 books of the Protestant Bible and argue against the 73 book Bible used by Catholics. So here’s a little teaser for the introduction to the video.
Bible Animations:
So after months of research, this is the true and historical story of how we compiled our 66 book Bible
Joe:
With a promise like that. How could I not want to engage with it, especially because this is, I want to give credit where it’s due. The person who made this did a great job of putting together a really nice looking product and doing his work and trying to figure out where do Protestants get their Bible from. However, unfortunately there are a lot of things that the video gets wrong that are really important and are hopefully helpful to anyone who’s actually trying to find out the truth about this question. So I want to give a little bit of the background to why he’s asking this in the first place.
Bible Animations:
However, my friend had a Trump card, a topic I hadn’t yet explored the truth behind the origin of our 66 book Bible. It’s something I’d never really considered growing up in the faith. I always trusted God’s word to be true, but I never questioned where it came from or how it was compiled. What if there were books we were missing or books that don’t belong in God’s true word? I started to wrestle and was challenged even further when my friend told me that our 66 book Bible is actually seven books short.
Joe:
Okay, so I really like this because he’s asking the right questions and I would highlight three of them. Number one, where did the Bible come from? Number two, how do you know that your Bible has exactly the right number of books? No more, no less. Is it fewer? I never know. Number three, would it be okay for somebody to come along and take books out of the Bible or add books to the Bible? And I know many of you’re saying obviously not, but as we’re going to get into the history, you’re going to see there were people who did exactly that, which is how Protestants ended up with the Bible that they have today. I’m getting ahead of myself though, so I want to give a little bit of a framework of what we’re talking about here. As he said, there are seven books that are missing from the Bibles used by Protestants today.
Those books are Toit, Judith Baruch, Sirach, wisdom One and Second Maccabees. And then in addition to those seven, you also have different versions of Daniel and Esther. The versions used by the early Christians and by Catholics and Orthodox and cops today are longer than the versions used by Protestants. And so for instance, the Protestant version of the Book of Esther doesn’t even mention God. So there are some pretty important differences. Okay, so with that said, I’m going to turn it over to his attempt to explain where does the 66 book Bible come from beginning a distinction that he says he needs to make.
Bible Animations:
I need to make a quick distinction. My friend and I likely have opposing views on what he actually believes the Bible is. Is it an authorized collection of writings or is it a collection of authorized writing? One view says that the church gives the books their authority as scripture, whereas the other view says the books themselves already have the authority. We just need to figure out which ones
Joe:
They are. This is a really common Protestant misconception of the Catholic view, and it is directly condemned by the Catholic church. The Catholic church does not teach. What he’s saying is the Catholic view, and in fact explicitly says the opposite. As far back as the first Vatican Council we’re told that these books, the books of the Bible, the church holds to be sacred and canonical, not because she subsequently approved them by her authority after they’d been composed by unaided human skill. In other words, it isn’t like the church just took the phone book and said, boom, you’re inspired scripture. Now it doesn’t work like that, but rather we’re told it’s not even simply because they contain revelation without error because you could have the phone book may have all the right names and numbers in it that doesn’t make it inspired, but rather we receive these books because they’re written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and they have God as their author, and we’re as such committed to the church.
So the church as we’re going to see still has a really important role to play in identifying authoritatively and without error, which books are and aren’t in the Bible, but it isn’t that the church is giving them their inspiration and that is never been the Catholic claim. So when you hear Protestants make that what they’re doing is giving you a little red flag that they don’t know what they’re talking about on the subject, okay, but now with that said, let’s turn back to what he has got to say because he’s got to look at the New Testament first where we actually agree and then get into the Old Testament. Let’s get into the New Testament. Now,
Bible Animations:
I found myself starting with the New Testament of all places. The reason I started there is because there’s much less debate over the 27 books written in the first century because they all have specific traits and author qualifications that set them apart from other historical documents
Joe:
In one way. I totally agree with what he’s saying here. There’s a lot less dispute about the New Testament, so it is sort of an easier place to start, but we should watch out for a couple reasons. Number one, this is Ahistorical, meaning Christians didn’t start with a New Testament and then discover an Old Testament by working backwards rather the Jews and then the early Christians received the writings that are compiled now in the Old Testament or in the Hebrew Bible in the Jewish case, and it’s into this world in which God had been speaking in many in various ways that Christ arrives and the gospel is first preached. And so beginning with the New Testament and working backwards is a historical and can lead to some faulty conclusions. The second reason I want to give a little bit of warning here is that it can be unfaithful to the historical evidence, and he actually does a better job than most in handling this.
But you’ll sometimes have people talk about the New Testament canon being settled and the Old Testament canon being settled as if the church was settling these two things at different times in different places, but rather the story is more that the entire Bible figuring out which books belong in the Bible, old and New Testament was going on simultaneously. So one in the same author will often tell us these are the books that belong in the Old and the New Testament. So I just mentioned that for the sake of clarity, but there’s still a deeper problem and that deeper problem is this. Okay, so granted modern Catholics and Protestants have the same New Testament. Maybe you could even imagine a world in which every Christian ever had the same New Testament as we’re going to see. That’s not the case, but that would still leave us with the question, well, do they have the right ones?
Do they have the right New Testament? Does a consensus of Christians automatically mean it’s the right answer? And I think this is important because if you’re going to say we can trust a consensus of the early Christians, and if they’re all saying this, then we can just trust that it’s right. Well then why not trust them on the other things? Because earlier in this video he talked about how he and his Catholic friend, he disagrees on baptism, grace and works and apostolic succession, all of which if you go back and look, you’re going to find something like a consensus on the early Christians on the Catholic side of that issue. Now that is obviously a big can of worms. I’m going to just say and leave to one side, but just to ask the question, can you trust the early Christians consensus or not? If you can, then great, you’ve got a New Testament.
If you can’t, we’re in trouble, not just on apostolic succession, baptism, grace and works, but also on the New Testament itself, okay? Now it gets even a little more hairy than that because even though there’s basically universal agreement on those issues that I mentioned on the New Testament canon itself, it’s actually a good deal more questioning and disagreement and trying to figure out the edges of which things belong in the Bible. Now, I want to be really clear here, the core group things like the Gospels were basically universally agreed though there’s no real controversy on those, but there are plenty of books around the border, if you will, where there is a question. So on what basis do we know that are New Testament? Today is right as opposed to for instance, the earliest known New Testament canon, the moratorium fragment or the moratorium canon, which he talks about as he points out. It doesn’t match up with all of the things that we find in modern New Testaments in either a Catholic or a Protestant Bible.
Bible Animations:
However, the canon wasn’t perfect. It was missing six books that we now accept to be canon and included two books which we don’t find in our modern Bibles.
Joe:
So he’s just said that the earliest New Testament attempt gets it imperfect, gets it wrong, has one book in that shouldn’t be the apocalypse of Peter. He’s going to say two books in that shouldn’t be, but we actually have wisdom of Solomon, although it’s an Old Testament book, there’s a bigger question here, whether the moratorium fragment was originally just a list of New Testament books or whether it had old and New Testament because as the name suggests, we just have a portion of it, we’ve got a fragment, but this suggests that wisdom of Solomon is being used by the Christian. I mean, it doesn’t just suggest explicitly says Wisdom of Solomon is being considered by whoever writes some moratorium fragment in the one hundreds. So how do we know modern Protestants have it right? And these guys in the old days had it wrong. He doesn’t really give us any kind of coherent view.
Now you could say eventually the Holy Spirit guides the church into clarity around the issue. That is a perfectly consistent standard. That is the place I end up myself. But if you’re going to see that as we’re going to see you end up with the Catholic Bible and not the Protestant Bible, and he’s going to give you all the pieces you need to see that. But okay, he’s going to nevertheless try to come up with a way where we can figure out which books do and don’t belong in the Bible because of the fourfold test that was allegedly used by the early Christians,
Bible Animations:
There was four main criteria the fathers looked for when searching for God’s word. One, was it authored by an apostle or someone close to an apostle? Two, is it accepted by the body of Christ? Three, does it contain consistent doctrine? And four, does it contain the moral and spiritual values that reflects the Holy Spirit?
Joe:
Okay, so just notice his criteria here. All of them depend on the reliability of the early Christians. Now, he thinks these early Christians are wrong on baptismal regeneration, on apostolic succession, on their vision of the church, on a whole number of issues, and I don’t know how you can hold these two things simultaneously. Here’s what I mean, the four alleged criteria he says the church fathers used. Now, whether they really use those or not is a big question mark. You get plenty of Protestant authors making all of these different lists about the things allegedly used, and I rarely see anyone providing even a footnote to try to support these claims, but maybe this is true. It’s not here or there, not the point of what I’m arguing right now. The point of what I’m arguing right now is let’s assume this is right, that the four things the early Christians look to are, number one, did it come from an apostle or someone with the apostles?
Number two, was it accepted by Christians meaning presumably accepted by the church? Number three, is it consistent with what exactly the Preach doctrine, the things they already knew? I mean, this is where starting with the New Testament leads to some weird spots. If you’re beginning with the New Testament, how do you know if a book in the New Testament is consistent with whatever you’re supposed to be harmonizing it with? You’re starting here and then fourth, this thing, he calls the values of the Holy Spirit. But again, how do you know what the Holy Spirit is all about and what he’s teaching and what his values are if it’s not coming from scripture? This seems to be a vague sort of appeal to apostolic tradition that even before we know which books are in the Bible, we’ve already heard the gospel preached. And so the early Christians have a reliable way of knowing not just the gospel, but even which books do and don’t belong in the New Testament, if that is his view, I’d love to hear more articulation of that and how you can harmonize that with something like Solas scriptura because it sounds like he’s saying the only way we can know which books are in scripture reliably is by trusting apostolic tradition and by trusting the consensus of the early church, he never explicitly says that, but without something like tradition or the consensus of the early church, I don’t know how are you going to know from reading a gospel whether it was written by Matthew, mark, Luke, or John.
None of the gospels tell you that. None of them say, I Luke tell you the following, and here’s who I am. I know St. Paul, we traveled together. You don’t find any of that. So how do you know which books belong in the New and Old Testament? Again, look just at the New Testament for now. How do you know which books belong there, if not from the consensus and the witness of the early church? Okay, so then what about the Old Testament? That’s the real focus of what we’re talking about here. So let’s turn to that.
Bible Animations:
Here’s where I want to pause because we haven’t yet discussed the Old Testament canon. The book on which this entire debate is hinged 450 bc. A book was compiled called the ak, the first Hebrew Bible used by the ancient Jews, but there were only 24 books included, and they were split into three sections as follows.
Joe:
So I actually just did an entire hour long video on this, so I’m going to spare some of the details. If you want the deep dive, go to the video, the Bible in Jesus’ Day, how different was it, which I explore how it’s just not true that the Jewish cannon was closed in four 50 bc. In fact, it wasn’t even closed half a millennium later around the time of Christ. But for now, I’m just going to give four quick facts to talk about where we are with the scholarship and why nobody reliable is saying the kind of things he just said. First, the scholarly consensus prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls was that there were basically three different periods that as you heard, the Jewish canon is made up of three sections, law, prophets, writings. And so the view was that the law, the Torah had been settled around 400 bc, but the prophets weren’t settled for another 200 years until 200 BC and the writing section was still up in the air at the time of Christ, which is why you get all these references to the law and the prophets, not the law of the prophets and the writings.
Nobody ever says the law of the prophets and the writings at the time of Christ. But that was all before the Dead Sea Scrolls. Then discovering the Dead Sea Scrolls, we realized things are even more chaotic than that, that in fact there were groups like the Sadducees and the Samaritans who only accepted the Torah. There are groups like the ene, the Dead Sea squirrel community who seemed to have a very different kind of Bible but were still part of the umbrella of Judaism and there were disagreements well after the time of Christ. Well-documented ones about which books do and don’t belong in the Bible. So a second reason, one of the major reasons scholars believe this is because there’s just no evidence of this 24 book Bible that we’re told existed from 450 years prior to the time of Christ. The closest we’re going to get is Josephus, who is a writing after the time of Christ, and B, arguing for a 22 book Bible that has the Torah, 13 prophets and four writings, whereas the modern Jewish Bible has 24 books with eight prophets and 11 writings.
Third, you can read for yourself in the Jewish tolet about the rabbinical debates that take place for centuries after Christ over whether or not books like Esther Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes and Sirach belong in the Jewish canon. And to that last point, I would point out that the Book of Sirach is explicitly cited to as scripture in the Jewish Talmud. So in Baa 92 B, we get it quoted as scripture. Now it’s true eventually the rabbis decide it doesn’t belong in the Jewish canon. It doesn’t belong in the Jewish Bible, but the TaNaK as we know it today is not settled in four 50 bc. It’s not settled at the time of Christ and the scholarly consensus is it settled sometime well after the time of Christ. That’s going to be really important because one of the biggest arguments he makes is that we shouldn’t have these disputed books because they don’t make it into the Jewish Bible, but the Jewish Bible isn’t settled until long after those same rabbis had rejected Christ.
And so relying on them as an ongoing authority over Christians is a historically is just incorrect at the time of Christ. These books as we’re going to see were used as scripture, and one of the reasons we believe that is because the most common thing we see cited to isn’t the Hebrew scriptures at all. It’s the Greek version called the SEP two agent, loosely called the SEP two agent. But I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself because I’m very excited about this. We’re going to get into the SEP two agent, but first I want to kind of jump to where he makes four arguments for why he says Martin Luther was right to remove seven books from the Old Testament.
Bible Animations:
There were four main reasons why they weren’t included in Luther’s Old Testament. One, they weren’t in the original Hebrew Old Testament, meaning they weren’t accepted as scripture by the Jews of Jesus’ time or the early church fathers.
Joe:
So those claims that they weren’t accepted by the Jews of Jesus’ time or by the early church fathers are demonstrably untrue. Now, I’ve already mentioned how his idea about the Ock being settled at the time of Christ is wrong, but you can also see for yourself in the 100 St. Justin Martyr complaining that the Jews of his day don’t use the Sept, which as we’re going to see has those books, and you have in the two hundreds origin talking explicitly about how books like Tobit and Judith and the longer versions of Daniel and Esther are used by Christians and not by Jews in their scriptures. In fact, you don’t even need to look to any of those early church sources. He tells you himself that the first organized Christian attempt to form a Bible in the three hundreds explicitly matches with the Catholic Bible includes all seven of the disputed books and doesn’t match the Protestant Bible
Bible Animations:
393 ad thanks to Christianity. Now being legal in the Roman Empire, the synod of Hippo took place a gathering where early Christians hoped to establish an official biblical canon for the early church to use. Their New Testament was identical to our modern day collection of 27 books, but the Old Testament wasn’t so simple,
Joe:
So he’s going to acknowledge that it matches perfectly the Catholic Bible, but he’s left asking kind of like, well, why is this? Why are they not just using the Jewish schnuck which he thought was settled from the time of Christ? And he comes up with two ideas.
Bible Animations:
What jumped out to me was the seven books I’ve never seen before. Turns out there’s a gap in the Jewish timeline, four centuries in fact, where the history is seemingly missing. Well, these additional books fill that time period and recount accurate historical narrative and teaching from the time they were included in the canon, primarily because of their inclusion in the Sept, the first Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the AK compiled during those centuries of silence.
Joe:
Okay, so he’s going to make two claims there first, that there’s 400 years of divine silence in the Jewish version of history. Now, as we’re going to see that’s not true. The idea that prophecy stops for 400 years is not something that the early Christians taught, and it’s not actually something the early Jews taught either second claim is going to be correct, which is that the Sept has these books, and so he thinks of the ENT as just a translation of the Jewish AK imagining that the Jewish AK was around first and the ENT just translates it and somehow ends up adding seven books by mistake or something. But let’s get into each of those claims. First, the idea of 400 years of divine silence. This is another really common Protestant claim and is really contrary to the New Testament. Jesus says, the law and the prophets were until John, the Old Testament period of revelation continues until John the Baptist.
We have no indication from that that it stopped for 400 years just abruptly and without any roaring or explanation. And in fact, Hebrews one talks about how God spoke in many and various slaves to the prophets and now speaks by the sun. It speaks of a process of divine revelation. This idea of a 400 year interruption with no explanation is completely absent from scripture. We don’t get a whiff of it. In fact, we see the exact opposite. You have for instance, the prophetess Anna who’s in Luke two, who’s in the temple at the time. Jesus is a baby. So no, it’s just not true. That prophecy stopped for 400 years. What you in fact have later, rabbis will claim divine revelation stopped in four 50 bc, but they didn’t say it started up again 400 years later with Christ because they don’t believe in Christ.
They argued that revelation just ended then, and that is a post-Christian view that in no small was an explanation for why they don’t need to listen to Christians or these later books. That is not the case at the time of Christ. Nobody at the time of Jesus is saying anything about 400 years of divine silence, and we see prophe... Read more on Catholic.com