Theology in the Raw - 816: Where Did the Bible Come From?

Episode Date: September 3, 2020

The Bible didn't just fall from heaven. There was actually a rather complex and sometimes messy journey from writing the biblical books to putting the "Bible" into your hands. In this episode, I discuss the so-called Canonization of the Old and New Testaments, asking questions like: why are these books included in the Bible--no more, and no less? What about the Apocrypha? What about other books like the Didache or the Gospel of Thomas--who decided that those books shouldn't be in the Bible? And what was the criteria for determining (or recognizing?) which books should be in the Bible? And, why does all of this matter? Watch this episode of the podcast on YouTube Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Venmo: @Preston-Sprinkle-1 Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Youtube | Preston Sprinkle Check out his website prestonsprinkle.com If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. What you're going to hear today is the first of a three-part sermon series that I co-taught with my good friend, Roger Valchi, pastor. He's a pastor out in Dublin, California at Valley Christian Center Church or Valley Christian Church. No, I think Valley Christian Center. Um, and, uh, I did this, uh, over the summer through zoom. Actually, no, it wasn't zoom. I recorded the videos, uh, the Senate to them. They doctored them up. Anyway, you don't care about all that. Um, it was a series on the Bible and I, um, this is one of my favorite topics, understanding the complexity, the mystery, the tensions within scripture. I love understanding where the Bible came from, the canonization process. I love wrestling with tensions or

apparent contradictions in the Bible and on and on it goes. So this is the first of three quote unquote sermons that I did. But I thought that the tone, the vibe, the feel of this would fit perfectly with the podcast. So that's why I'm uploading all three to the podcast. This first one is about the canonization of the Bible. Where did the Bible come from? Why 66 books and not 67 books? What about all the other pieces of religious literature that Jews and Christians were reading at that time. Who decided which books were in and out? How did they decide which books were in and out? And on and on it goes. So that's what we're going to talk about in this podcast.

In the next podcast, I'm going to talk about the reliability of the Bible. We're going to do a bit of, we're going to look at history and archaeology, like extra biblical history and archaeology. Does that support the Bible? Does it present problems with the veracity of the Bible? And then in the third episode, I'm going to talk about the evidence of the reliability of the Bible from its internal message. There's something about the message itself that adds credibility to the content of that message. That's going to be the third and final video in this series.

So for the next few podcasts, you're just going to hear from me. And also, this one's going to be okay in terms of audio. The second one, I did do a lot of like PowerPoint visuals. I'm looking at pictures. I'm drawing. I'm looking at texts and so on. So these videos are these podcasts are also videos on my YouTube channel. This one you wouldn't need to really go over to the YouTube unless you wanted to see my face in my basement. But the next one,

you might want to wander over and watch that video because that one does have some visuals that, um, that might be helpful. So anyway, without further ado, please welcome to the show myself talking about the canonization of scripture. Hello friends, my name is Preston Sprinkle and it's so good to be with you, sort of be with you, as much as I can be with you through this camera. I truly wish I could be out there with you all. I've been at your church a few times. The first time was a few years ago when Roger invited me to come out and preach on Sunday morning and give another talk that evening. I hung out with a lot of the leaders at Valley Christian and met several attendees of Valley Christian and just had the most amazing experience. And it was at that time when I got to know Roger and as Roger can verify, we just really hit it off. It was one of those instant

friendships where we're like finishing each other's sentences, just resonating on so many things. And so a few years later, when I started in a nonprofit, I asked Roger to be on the board of that. And I just didn't want to move forward in that ministry by myself. I needed Roger on my board and he's been such a dear friend ever since. And I've kept in touch with several other members at Valley Christians. So thank you so much for having me on. Well, having me to come and talk to you about something that's so dear to my heart, to talk about the Bible. I mean, we Christians, we often talk from the Bible. We should read the Bible and study the Bible. And sometimes we can go a long time without talking about the Bible.

Where did the Bible come from? What is the Bible? How did it come into my hands? What about translation? And what language was it written in? And who made the copies of the copies of the copies? And can we trust the Bible? And that's kind of the overarching theme that Roger and I have been discussing and we're going to continue to discuss over the next several weeks. I have a copy here of an old Bible of mine. This was given to me, I think, let's see, it must have been about a year after I became a Christian. Somebody bought me this Bible. It didn't look like this.

It actually had kind of a fake plasticky cover on it. And after about five or six years, that fell off and I had to go and cut a piece of leather from a backpack and cover it. And actually, I don't know if you'll see this, I actually had to pump it full of silicone right here to hold the pages together. And I drilled holes in it because, I mean, if you look through here, I mean, this Bible has been with me everywhere. I spent a semester in Israel in fall of 1999. It took the Bible with me to all the different sites, the biblical sites, and took little notes in the margins. I've got, you know, little sticky notes here from like

Bible studies that I led, you know, 25 years ago, like when I first became a Christian. And this Bible is just really special to me. It started to fall apart. That's why I don't actually use it anymore. I lost a few, the first few pages of Genesis and, um, yeah, this part of the Babylon, the tower of Babel stories falling out. And, and so, um, yeah, but I still keep it as kind of a, um, a memoir, I guess, but also just a reminder to myself of how much the Bible has been a central part of my life. I remember when I first became a Christian, I was around 19 years old. I'm 44 now. And when I first became a Christian, I hadn't prior to that time, I hadn't been a student of anything.

I think by that time I had read one book, like just book in general. I went 17 years of my life without reading a whole book cover to cover. Finally, I read a book cover to cover. I'm not a natural reader. I'm not a natural student. But when I became a Christian at the age of 19, I prayed that prayer in James 1 that says, if anybody lacks wisdom, let them ask God and God would grant it to you generously. I'm paraphrasing James 1. And I prayed that prayer and I thought that I was going to wake up the next day really smart. And I woke up the next day and I was really dumb.

I didn't miraculously know any more facts than I did the night before. I was like, oh, this prayer didn't work. I was supposed to wake up with all this wisdom, but almost overnight God did, I would say miraculously build into me this, um, this insatiable desire to want to study the Bible. I would lock myself in the closet for like seven hours and just read and read and read and study and study and study. I would have these old, my mom had an old shoebox full of cassette tapes of sermons. And I would go and I would listen to those sermons over and over and over and look up every passage that the preacher was talking about. And almost overnight, I went from being a person who hated to study, hated to read, to absolutely loving the Bible, almost to a fault. Sometimes I would ignore relationships and ignore eating or working just to study the Bible. That was

25 years ago. And I don't quite lock myself up in the closet and study the Bible for seven hours a day, but I still have a great, great love and passion for the scriptures. So I'm super excited to share with you about the Bible. That's what we're talking about, the Bible and specifically the reliability of the Bible. For this morning, I'm going to talk about where the Bible came from. Where did the Bible come from? Did it just fall out of the sky one day, like in the middle ages, it just kind of dropped out of the sky or after, you know, Jesus got done preaching in the first century, you know, he died and rose again. And then the apostles kind of preached a little bit and all

of a sudden, you know, there's this golden Bible that kind of appeared somewhere, you know, that, well, obviously that's not how it happened. It didn't, the Bible didn't just fall out of the sky. It, you know, there was a bit of a messy process by which the formation of the Bible came to be. And that's what I want to talk about this morning. I want to talk about three things, three things. Number one, the canonization of the Old Testament. Number two, the canonization of the New Testament. And number three, why this matters.

So canonization, when I say canon, I'm not talking about a big gun on a pirate ship, nor am I talking about a camera. The word canon just comes from the Greek word kanon. It means like a measuring stick, a rule or standard. That's what the word kanon means. And that word came to be used to describe the canon or the books of the Bible as the rule or standard by which our belief and practice would be measured by.

So, and I just, I don't, there's beyond that, there's nothing really that more important to talk about the word, you know, to understand about the word canon. It's just that sometimes you will see the phrase, the canonization or the New Testament canon, and that's just where that came to be. So I want to talk about the Old Testament canon, and that's just where that came to be. So I want to talk about the Old Testament canon, how that came to be, then the New Testament canon, and then why this matters. I will say up front that understanding the Old Testament canon, how the Old Testament came to be is much easier and less messy, I think, than understanding the New Testament canon. So how did the Old Testament come to be? As you know, from Roger's

talk and just from looking at your table of contents in your Bible, you know that there are 39 books in the Old Testament and 27 in the New. So how did these 39 books come to be part of the canon? How come there wasn't 40 books? Were these the only 39 books that were written in that day and age? Were there some books that were disputed within those 39? Those are the things we want to talk about. Well, to understand the formation of the canon, you just have to understand a prophetic activity within the Old Testament. Throughout the Old Testament, you see prophets like Moses and Samuel and Isaiah and Ezekiel and Jeremiah and others. You see prophets that mediated God's word to other people, primarily to Israel. They mediated God's word to Israel. And they started out by

doing that verbally. They would speak God's word to God's people. And as you may know, there were standards by which to determine who's a true prophet and who's a false prophet, because you have lots of people in the Old Testament who are claiming to be prophets, but their message is not a credible message and they are shown to be false prophets. So in the midst of true prophets and false prophets, people had ways to determine who was a false prophet from who was a true prophet. So as true prophets were speaking God's word and speaking God's word and preaching God's message, after a while out with a book, then the veracity, the legitimacy of that book as God's word already came with its stamp of approval on it.

Now, when it comes to the Old Testament, according to the Bible itself, Moses wrote the first five books, Genesis through Deuteronomy. Now there's some debates about that, especially in academic or scholarly circles. I think for what it's worth, a good case can be made that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. We know various other books that were written by prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Habakkuk, Malachi, and others. There's also some books that we don't know the author of, but they also came to be understood as coming from the mouth or shall I say the pen of a prophet. And so those books like Joshua and Judges and Ruth and others also came to be included in the Old Testament canon. It does seem to be the case

that Malachi, this is disputed and we don't know for sure, but it seems like Malachi was the last book written in the Bible, maybe in the early 400s BC. Certainly there were other books written close to that time. First and Second Chronicles was actually written very late. There's debates about the book of Daniel, but around 400 BC, we see the last books of the Old Testament canon written. And not too long after, we see references to this canon in Jewish literature, Jewish literature that was written between the Testaments, Jewish literature that isn't itself inspired or isn't itself canonical, but is referring to what we now call the Old Testament canon. For instance, in 132 BC, there's a statement in a Jewish book called Sirach, or sometimes referred to as Ecclesiasticus in 132 BC. Sirach, or sometimes referred to as Ecclesiasticus in 132 BC.

And Sirach says, and I'll quote, many teachings have been given to us through the law and the prophets. And that idea of law and prophets is one way to refer to the Old Testament canon. We also see in Josephus writing in the first century AD, right around the time of the New Testament, Josephus refers to the holy books or the sacred books. And he even lists those books, which matches our 39 books in the English Old Testament canon. In the Hebrew Old Testament canon, there's actually 22 books, but it's actually the same content. Because in the Hebrew canon, books like 1 and 2 Samuel are just Samuel. It's one book. 1 and 2 Kings is just Kings, one book, and so on.

So the 22 books in the Hebrew Old Testament is the same content, basically, as the 39 books in our English canon. And again, Josephus refers to those books. So by the time the New Testament comes around, this idea of a body of inspired literature that the people of God considered to be scripture was well-established. There were a few books, okay? There were a few books that, you know, had a little harder time making it into the canon. Books like the Song of Songs, sometimes called the Song of Solomon. Some people read this book and thought to themselves,

is that talking about what I think it's talking about? I don't know if God's people should be talking about that stuff. Seems a little racy, right? Because it has some sexual images in that book. So some people said, I'm not sure this should be in the canon, but the overwhelming majority said, no, it is canonical, especially when we understand the beauty of our sexuality in light of the metaphor of Yahweh's love for his people, or in the New Testament, we would say Jesus's love for the church. Ecclesiastes had a hard time, sorry, hard time, a harder time. It's not like loads of people were against the book of Ecclesiastes, but some did raise some eyebrows because Ecclesiastes, if you've read it recently, it can be a little bit pessimistic. And I think once you understand the genre and purpose of

Ecclesiastes, it makes perfect sense. But if you just kind of read bits and pieces here and there, it does seem to be kind of pessimistic. The book of Esther never mentions the word or the name God. And so some people said, I don't know if this should be in the canon. But when you look at it, it's like, man, there's a reason, a really intentional reason why the Jewish author left out the name God in the book, because that was a reflection of the times he was living in. It seems like God isn't here. And I'm going to make that point by even on a literary level, by leaving God's name out to convey in a really creative way, in a sense, the message I'm trying to say that God seems to be silent, but guess what? Even in his apparent silence, he's working in and through his people kind of behind the scenes

as he does through the person of Esther, Mordecai, and others. What about the Apocrypha? Okay. The Apocrypha has to do, is a word used to describe the, you know, seven to 10 different books that some people, some traditions like the Roman Catholic tradition or the Greek Orthodox tradition, they actually include the Apocrypha in their canon. The Apocrypha is just, you know, 7 to 10 books. They're all written during the intertestamental time period. Books like, you know, if you were raised Catholic, you might remember the books of 1 and 2 Maccabees, the Book of Wisdom, the book of Judith or Tobit and others, the letter of Jeremiah. These are books that were

not written by Catholics. Sometimes we think, oh, the Apocrypha, it's a Catholic book. Well, it's adopted by Roman Catholics as part of the canon, but it's actually written by Jews, zealous Jews, religious Jews that are writing a lot of really good things. This is the thing. I think the Apocrypha is really good to read. I just don't think it's inspired by God in the same way that the rest of the canon is. It's not part of scripture. It's not authoritative in the same way that the Bible is, but I think it's really good religious literature in the same way that I might think Francis Chan's Crazy Love is good religious literature, but not inspired or A Purpose Driven Life or pick your popular Christian book today. We're going to say, well, that's not inspired, but it's good to read.

I would have the same view of the Apocrypha. The Apocrypha has a lot of good history. It's not perfect history, but it's good history and has a lot of good religious things in it that help us not only bridge the gap between the Old and New Testament, but also give us a view of good religious things in it that help us not only bridge the gap between the Old and New Testament, but also give us a view of how faithful Jews were living in the midst of some really tough, tough times of persecution between the Testaments. So that's the Old Testament canon. There's, again, not a lot of disputes about what books belong in the canon, what books don't. As far as the Apocrypha goes, Protestants, non-Catholic Christians, non-Orthodox Christians, non-Greek Orthodox Christians, we don't embrace the Apocrypha as canonical, largely because first century Judaism didn't.

because first century Judaism didn't. It's interesting that later Christians, two, three, 400 years after Jesus, some later Christians did think the Apocrypha should be in the canon, but first century Jews never viewed this as part of their scripture. This was not, the Apocrypha was not part of scripture in the sense that a first century Jew would be using that term. And so Protestant Christianity basically follows the Jewish canon of the Old Testament. Okay, so what about the formation of the New Testament canon? Well, what I said about the prophets, you know, speaking God's word and then writing down God's word, that is very similar to what we can say about New Testament apostles. New Testament apostles went around speaking the word of God and it was

received and viewed as the word of God. First Thessalonians 2.13. I'll just read it here. Paul says, First Thessalonians 2.13, and we also thank God continually because when you receive the word of God, which you heard from us, we came in preaching and speaking to you and teaching you. And when we did that, you Thessalonians, Paul says, you accepted it not as a human word, not as a human word, but as actually is the word of God, which is indeed at work in you who believe. When we came speaking to you, it wasn't just advice, wasn't just wisdom, wasn't just inspiring. It was actually inspired by God.

And so when the same apostles started to write down these words, the written words of the apostles were also viewed as inspired by God. 2 Peter 3, 15 to 16 says, you know, Peter says, bear in mind that our Lord's patience means salvation. Just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him and he writes, Paul writes it the same way in all his letters, speaking in them. You see the conflation between writing and speaking and speaking and writing, speaking in them. You see the conflation between writing and speaking and speaking and writing, speaking in them, in his letters, these matters, his letters, Paul's letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and the unstable distort, watch this, as they do the other scriptures to their own destruction.

So just think about the logic there. Peter says you have this category of the scriptures, part of which is Paul's letters and people distort these scriptures, Paul's letters, just as they do the other scriptures, probably, probably referring to the old Testament, what we would call the old Testament.

So, and there's other texts we can cite, but certain letters and books written by certain people in the first century were viewed as scripture. By the end of the first century, we see the last book written, the book of Revelation in around AD 90. That's the last book written in the canon. However, however, it's not like John who wrote the book of Revelation got some audible from heaven. You know, he just finishes his last words, you know, Maranatha, please Lord come or I forget how he ends the book of Revelation, Lord come. And it's not like God says, okay, John, that's it. Wrap. Give it a wrap. That's it. Put that, you know, go ahead and take your book and go ahead and slide it in the slot. That's number 27. And now we have our complete canon. And then now Christians everywhere can walk around

with their New Testament canon. Like that's not how I wish it were the case. Maybe it wasn't, it was a bit more messy than that. If John finishes his book in around AD 90, we don't really see a consensus on which books belong in the New Testament canon until the late fourth century AD. The first time we actually see a list of New Testament books, 27, no more, no less, comes in 367 in a letter by a Christian leader by the name of Athanasius. Athanasius is well known for being a staunch defender of the deity of Christ. And Athanasius also wrote a letter where he lists the 27 books in our New Testament, no more, no less. So what happens between the closing of the... Well, what happens between the last book written in AD 90 and

300 years later when we now see Christians coming to agreement on what books are belonging in the New Testament? Well, it's a bit of a messy process. I'll just be honest with you. I'll just be honest with you. But there are two views, two extreme views I want to avoid, two extreme views on the canonization of the New Testament. One extreme would be, and I hear this sometimes, especially by atheists who are trying to tear down Christianity or discredit the Bible. They present things in a way that makes it sound like they're a bunch of power-driven leaders in the church who just wanted power and they sort of arbitrarily selected which books they wanted in the New Testament canon because those books supported their power. It was one big power grab by,

you know, priests and leaders in the Christian church. Well, that's not, first of all, that's not historically true. And secondly, it doesn't make sense because, well, you've read the New Testament. Let me ask you a question. Does the New Testament seem to be pro people in power or kind of pro servant and slave and underdog and marginalized? Like, I mean, if it's true that people in power selected the 27 books to be in the New Testament, I think they did a really bad job at selecting books that actually undercut their power. So it doesn't really make sense that it was just simply an arbitrary selection of people in power. The other view that I would want to avoid when we look at the canonization of the New Testament is to think that again, John just got some audible from heaven the second he finished his book and said, all right, John, go put this in the canon. And then everybody else kind of said, yay, we have a canon, 27 books. And then there

was no dispute about that. Like that's historically inaccurate. Here's how we should understand that the gap of time between the writing of the book of Revelation and the church agreement on which books belong in the New Testament. First of all, there was a, I'll say, unanimously accepted canon within the canon. So of the 27 books of the New Testament, 21 of those books were immediately, widely, as far as we can tell, unanimously accepted by the Christian church as not just being inspiring, but being inspired that these books were scripture, that these books constituted the authoritative measure by which we should believe and live. These books, this canon within the canon are the four gospels, the book of Acts, 13 letters of Paul, the book of Hebrews,

first Peter and first John. Okay. Do I need to say it again? Well, you can probably just stop and rewind and go listen to that again. We're still getting used to doing Sunday morning preaching when you can kind of stop and fast forward and speed up my voice. Maybe don't speed up my voice. It would sound like Mickey Mouse. So, okay, you have a canon within the canon, 21 New Testament books that nobody disputes. I think that's really important, especially if some people think it was just completely arbitrary, one big mess, a big pile of books and people just kind of picked and choose what they wanted to. That's not true. So, which books were disputed? James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and the book of Revelation. Why are these books disputed? James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and the book of Revelation.

Why are these books disputed? Well, I mean, there's various reasons for each one. And when I say disputed, it's not like the jury was completely out. I'm just saying certain branches of Christianity disputed, didn't reject, but raised questions about these books. For instance, the book of James. There's a verse in James chapter two, which seems to contradict Romans 3, 28. Paul, you know, in Romans emphasizes justification by faith alone. And James comes along and says, no, we're justified by works as well. And it's like, whoa, whoa, hold on. Like, is this a contradiction? And because Paul was viewed as so authoritative, people looked at James with some skepticism.

But if you've done any research into that apparent contradiction, I emphasize apparent, I think the context of James, if you study James and who he's writing to in the context of James 2 and what he says throughout the whole chapter, you see that he is giving not a contradiction. He's not contradicting Paul. He's simply giving the other side of the same coin of faith and works. The book of Revelation was disputed by some in the Eastern church in the third century, largely because of the nature of the literature. You have wild images and scenes, and it seems like it was written by somebody on an acid trip, right? I mean, you're looking at all

these dragons and monsters and stuff. And some people said, gosh, should this be in the canon? This doesn't feel like the other 21 books. But then when you look at the content of Revelation, you understand apocalyptic literature, which we already have back in Ezekiel, in Isaiah, in the book of Daniel, especially. This is not foreign to the Bible. People realize, no, this does square with what we know about the rest of the Bible. There's also other books that I'll say almost made it in the canon. I heard somebody say, you Christian, you came this close to doing your devotions in the Shepherd of Hermes this morning. I'm like, whoa, what does that mean? Well, there came this close to doing your devotions in the Shepherd of Hermes this morning. I'm like, whoa, what does that mean?

Well, there was this book called the Shepherd of Hermes, and it was widely read in the early church. And some people, not all, not a lot, but some people regarded the Shepherd of Hermes as canonical. The Apocalypse of Peter, the Didache, the Gospel of Thomas. Maybe you've heard about some of these books. Some branches of Christianity accepted these books in the canon. But again, over time, the majority said, you know what? I don't think these books should be part of scripture. And there's several criteria that the early church came up with to determine which books were in, which books were out. So three of the, or is that God four or five points that they would

reference, but the three main ones are number one, to be part of scripture, it had to, it had to, it has to have apostolic authorship, or if it's not written directly by an apostle, it has to be written by an associate. So most of the books in the New Testament were written by apostles. But you have books like Luke and Acts that are written by Luke's non-apostle, but Luke was a companion of Paul. And so he kind of is in the apostolic circle. Same thing with Mark. Mark is not an apostle, but he's also a companion of Peter. And so Peter kind of verifies the message of Mark. So was the book written by an apostle or did it come from apostolic circles? Was it written, number two, was it written during the apostolic era, namely what we now call the

first century? Because if a book's written in the second, third, or fourth century, it's too far now removed from the apostolic circles. And this is why books like the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Thomas is one of the most well-known books that people reference that's outside the canon. Well, the Gospel of Thomas is at the very earliest second century. Some people put it in the third century and wasn't, has no sort of apostolic, any scent of apostolic authorship on it. Also, people, number three, would say this disputed book, the Apocalypse of Peter, the Didache, you know, First Clement is another one of these books. Does it align with the undisputed 21 books of the canon within the canon? Remember, we do have an immediate measure by which to

measure other things. And when you compare these other books to the 21 clearly canonical books, some of them don't match up. The Shepherd of Hermes, it has some statements that are pretty anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish. And people said, well, this doesn't really resonate with the message of the books that everybody accepts or the gospel of Thomas or yeah, gospel of Thomas has a picture of Jesus that is very different than what we see in the fourfold canonical gospels that everybody accepts. Okay. So in summary of the new Testament, 21 disputed, undisputed books, um, over six books were disputed by some other books were also considered canonical by some,

but the early church did develop a thoughtful criteria to determine which books were in and which books were out. So no, wasn't a bunch of power mongering priests just selecting books to keep them in power. And no, it didn't just fall out of the sky. It was a messy process, but I do believe it was a divinely ordained. And I think God oversaw the process by which humans were led by God, guided by God to select or recognize, we should say, which books God wanted in his canon, but God didn't. He allowed some of the messy process to take place over a few hundred years. So why does this matter? Let me give you three reasons why this matters.

Number one, if we're going to live by this book, I think it would be good for Christians to understand the origin of this book. If we're going to say this is God's word mediated through human writers, and I'm going to read it maybe daily, I'm going to study it. I'm going to, you know, if this book tells me to do something and somebody else, the government tells me to do something else, I'm going to follow the book. I might even die because I'm following what this book says. If that's our posture, and I think it is, should be, then I want to know where this book came. If that's our posture, and I think it is, should be, then I want to know where this book came from. I want to know a little more about this. So when I come across a website that says a bunch of power mongering priests who told you

that this is authoritative, I need to be able to say, no, that's actually not historically accurate. That's not, I don't, that doesn't, I shouldn't rattle my faith. Number two, the Bible has always been a central part of the Christian faith. The Bible has always been a central part of the Christian faith. I am not saying, please hear me. I'm not saying that the Bible is like a fourth member of the Trinity. I am not saying that we should idolize the Bible itself. The Bible is the messenger. It's mediating God's word to us, but the authority is in God, not just in the paper here.

The fact that I'm missing the first two pages of Genesis here, that's not sacrilegious because this book is a medium, mediating God's message to us. We worship God. We don't worship the Bible. And yet the Bible is and always has been a central part of Christianity all the way down to the messy process by which humans recognize which books should be in and which books shouldn't be in. A lot of blood, sweat, tears, energy, debates, disputes, and discussions happen in

the first few hundred years to determine or recognize which books should be in the New Testament, largely because it was so crucial that we figure out where the boundaries are on scripture. Number three, trusting the Bible takes faith, but it's not blind faith. It's not blind faith. We shouldn't be scared of the historical process of canonization. We shouldn't be scared of science. We don't have to worry about the historical context that the Bible was written in. It's okay to peel back the curtain and take a peek into the origin of the very book we say we are living by. And yes, there is an element of faith to say, I believe this is God's word, but it's not blind faith.

It is faith rooted in history, logic, and science. I'm sure you have more questions. I think we're going to do our best to answer as many of your questions as we can throughout this series. I think we're planning even a whole Sunday where we're just going to devote best to answer as many of your questions as we can throughout this series. I think we're planning even a whole Sunday where we're just going to devote it to some of the main questions on this really important topic. But until then, I just want to say, let's read our Bibles. Let's live by the scriptures. Let's pray that God would give us the courage in these tumultuous times to orient our life around the inspired message of God revealed through these pages of scripture. I'm so excited to continue this study

with you. I want to close this in prayer and then we'll see you next time. Father, I pray over us all that you would ignite in our hearts a renewed passion. Maybe for some of us, it's a renewed passion to want to study your word and to live by what it says. In Christ's name, amen. Thank you.