Truth Unites - The Protestant Canon Defended (With Javier Perdomo and Cleave to Antiquity)

Episode Date: June 25, 2025

Gavin Ortlund discusses the Protestant canon with Javier Perdomo and Ben from Cleave to Antiquity, considering Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox objections, the testimony of church history, and more.Javier's channel: https://www.youtube.com/@javierperd2604Cleave to Antiquity: https://www.youtube.com/@CleavetoAntiquityTruth Unites (https://truthunites.org) exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites, Visiting Professor of Historical Theology at Phoenix Seminary, and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville.SUPPORT:Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunitesFOLLOW:Website: https://truthunites.org/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlundFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/

The Roman Catholics who do have as supposedly infallibly defined canon list, there's differences as to what they actually think that list entails. With the Eastern Orthodox, they differ and they'll give different answers regarding the books of the belonging of the canon. Bottom line, end of the day, I want to follow the canon that we think Jesus and the apostles had. Well, hey, everyone, welcome or welcome back to Truth Unites. I am here with Ben from Cleve to Antiquity and Javier Pardomo, two friends of mine who are involved in Protestant apologetics,

links to their YouTube channels in the video description. So check out the work they're doing. I want to celebrate the things they're doing, and I want you to know about that. And we're going to talk about the Protestant canon. The word canon has to do with which books are in scripture. This is a huge issue. This is the one that I think a lot of people have anxieties about and uncertainties about.

So you may be interested in this video. If you're just curious, how did, how was the Christian Bible formed? What did that process look like? And especially if you've heard objections to Protestant views of the canon, and you're wondering how to respond to that, you know, do we have a fallible list of infallible books and what does that imply? And then historical questions. Is there any historical basis for a Protestant view? And the goal here is to serve people. We're doing this video because we want to meet needs. We want to help those who have questions, help those who have anxieties about this topic.

So this is going to be a lot of fun and we'll dive right in. For you guys, how have you seen this issue come up? and why do you think it's important to address, Javier, you want to start us off on that one? Sure, yeah. I mean, so I think this comes up in almost every single debate or conversation that people have on Soliscriptura, you'll almost immediately land on the canon, right? Because it almost becomes, for the other side, it's almost like an undercutting defeater where it's like, how can you have Solis Scriptura without a canon, right?

It's almost like the way that it gets phrased. And it really throws people for a loop because it ends up being a situation where anytime you want to have a conversation with your Eastern Orthodox, a Roman Catholic friend, especially with a Roman Catholic friend, and you want to try to use scripture. It's very common in the at least pop apologetics scene in our day that any attempt to try to utilize scripture in this way will ultimately get countered with, well, how can you do that if you don't even have an infallible canon? Right. That's the way that I've most often seen it used. I don't know, Ben, if you have a different experience there. No, absolutely. I mean, I was just doing some live call-in debates last night

where we had Roman Catholic gentlemen and Eastern Orthodox gentlemen calling in, and that was one of the main arguments because it was a soul of scriptura stream. And the main argument that was brought up was the canon conundrum. And when I kind of show them the counterpoint to that, well, Roman Catholics, you have infallible scripture, like infallible scriptures as well as infallible tradition. Can you show me your infallible list of infallible traditions? And I see like the gears turning in their head a little bit.

So it's an interesting topic, very important to discuss. And that's kind of what I was doing last night as well. What are some of the common talking points that you guys hear on this? I'll throw out infallible, or excuse me, a fallible list of infallible books and the epistemology that this comes with. So epistemology will get into this a lot. It has to do with how we know things. And so there's a lot of, but how do you know this? A lot of questions that are come along this way.

Basically, how do you know which books are in the Bible? A lot of questions in that direction we want to cover. The other big objection is, of course, church history. And I hear this a lot that, especially it's dismaying how you keep hearing these things. Protestant, the Protestant canon didn't exist until the 16th century. And so a lot of the things we're going to get into here pushing back against that, getting into church history. What are some of the other talking points that you guys hear that we need to be aware of? Yeah, I think most often what I hear is kind of a straw man of what Solar Scriptura actually is.

I was just having some conversations with a very, very genuine Roman Catholic that called into my stream and we were talking about Sola Scriptura. Oftentimes the pushback that I'll get is like, well, how do you know what books belong in the Bible if it's not in the Bible itself and somehow trying to conflate Sola Scriptura to imply that we don't accept any tradition whatsoever? When in fact we do accept tradition, it's just we view tradition as fallible. And I gave him this example of maybe a secular authority that is binding. You can have binding authorities without. them being infallible. And I gave them the example of maybe you're in grade school and there's a rule about, well, no, no hitting in the class, no hitting in school. Otherwise, you might, you know, get in trouble. That's still a binding fallible authority. So authorities do not need to be infallible in order to be binding. That was the point that I was trying to get across there. But I think that really does help to bridge the gap in some of these misunderstandings when it comes to discussing Sola Scribura. Well, you just said, Ben, is a great point. I mean, I always give examples of this of umpires at a baseball game. All right, they're the authority. They call it a ball or a

strike. And if you're the batter and you disagree, it's too bad. The umpire has authority, but they're not infallible. And infallibility and authority are so often conflated, but they're apples and oranges. You know, infallibility is a metaphysical claim. It means cannot err. Authority is a practical claim. It means binding, you must obey. So excommunication at a church being barred from the Lord's supper at your local Protestant parish is a real binding, authoritative decision, but it's not infallible. And I think the more we get that distinction right, the better in these discussions. Well, and sometimes that gets downplayed because they'll say like, oh, well, couldn't someone just go to a different church or go to a different tradition? And one of the key issues that

I see, right, you know, they're just this, Roman Catholic pop apologetics is rife with this. And that is people not considering how their own arguments and their own objections might turn back against their own system and against them. And we see this with when it comes to that issue, right, because they'll say, well, someone could just go to a different church. And I would say, okay, so if I have congregants at, let's say the Lutheran church that I attend, that are former Roman Catholics, right, what happened to them? All right, like you can get excommunicated anywhere and then go somewhere else. This is the case anywhere. And so sometimes they'll then appeal to say, well, but maybe when you excommunicate somebody, if it's not infallible, if you have no

infallible authority, then is that even being bound in heaven as it is being bound on earth? which is also silly because they excommunicate people wrongly all the time, up to and including even people that are later canonized, right? So we can think of someone like St. Joan of Arc, who was excommunicated and was burned at the stake and yet was later on canonized as a saint, and they took back the excommunication, nullified and said, well, you know what? Actually, she was unjustly executed, right, due to the secular vendetta. And so that's just one example, but there's many others that we could produce of people who are unjustly excommunicated from their side. And so it's not as though they even have these infallible excommunications all the time.

And it's not as though that's the case for them. And yet they'll look at us and say, well, it's a problem that you have this. And I think that also then becomes an issue when it comes to the question of what do we mean by binding, right? Because I think there's often a lot of words just don't get defined that are very important in these conversations. because again, there's one definition of binding where it just goes back to being infallible, right?

Like you could not have made a mistake and therefore it's binding on earth and it's binding in heaven and there's no taking it back. They don't have that. But there's another understanding of binding that is something more akin to what Ben was saying, which is, well, this is binding for the institution here on earth and there's very real consequences in the same way that, you know, something like the courts are binding, even the courts and their decisions to throw people in prison or or what have you are fallible. And there's men who are not guilty and who are innocent.

They get thrown in prison all the time and later have to be exonerated. And yet no one would stand outside and say, ah, the courts in our country have no authority because they're fallible. Right. And yet this is the kind of reasoning that we're met with all the time. Yeah. Totally. I mean, if you just think of other arenas of life like human government, the category of

fallible but still authoritative, just it. becomes not only visible, but sort of everywhere on the horizon, you know. And so we'll keep hammering away at that. Let's do this. Let's just describe for newcomers, not giving any arguments yet. Let's describe what are the different canons. This gets already really complicated. We don't have to get to all of them. I think the biggest canon that I'm aware of is the Ethiopian Orthodox canon with 81 books. But maybe just for the main options, we can kind of run through. What are the main different Christian canons that exist. Sure. So within, oh, go ahead. Do you want to answer, Javier?

Yeah, actually, for this, if I can at least for the Eastern Orthodox songs, I think that one's interesting. With the Eastern Orthodox, who are different from the Oriental Orthodox, they differ and they'll give different answers regarding the books of the belonging to the canon. So speaking in generalities is a little bit hard when it comes to the Eastern Orthodox as it is in a lot of situations. That being said, for instance, right, we have the Orthodox Church in America, which says that they have the same canon as the Roman Catholic Church that's publicly available on their website. However, the Russian Orthodox Church historically has a position very similar to our own. And there's many places that we can look at in the

Eastern Orthodox tradition where we can actually find significant support for what we'll describe later on, I'm sure, as the two-tier distinction when it comes to the scriptures. There's this category of books in the scriptures that are canonical and ones that are non-canonical. and they have different authorities, which we can get into more later. But just to list a couple of examples here of some of these voices, St. Philaret of Moscow in the longer catechism of the Orthodox Catholic Eastern Church, says that he follows Athanasius, Sir of Jerusalem, and John of Damascus,

and their numbering of the canonical books at 22. He says that the reason why the Book of Wisdom and other Deuter canonical books are omitted is because they don't exist in the Hebrew, and he assigns to these books a secondary rank meant for reading by Catechumon. Another example is Father Michael Pommazonsky in the third edition of his book, Orthodox dogmatic theology, where he directly lays out the distinction between canonical and non-canonical books, and he says that it has, quote, always been maintained in the church. And then one last example, St. Nicodemus the Haggiorites, probably mispronounced that, and Father Agapios, the hermunk in the rudder also comment on and affirm the two-tier distinction. And while they don't like the term apocrypha being applied to the Deuterocanonicals, they still distinguish them from the canonical books,

where they call the two groups the canonical books and the readable books. And there's a bunch of other examples to this effect that we can produce. But all that to say, at least for the Eastern Orthodox, there's a variety of perspectives. Some who would say they would use the word canonical to refer to the same books as the Roman Catholic Church. Some of them would use the word canonical to refer to those. And even more books than the Roman Catholic Church has, some of them which would use it in a nuanced two-tier sort of way that we're going to discuss later, where some of the books in the scriptures are canonical

and fully authoritative for establishing dogma and settling disputes versus these other books that are readable meant for personal edification for catechumen and the like. And so they have those distinctions within their own position. And the Eastern Orthodox also do not have, as hopefully we can tell from these different examples, they don't have an infallibly defined list of books that are canonical and or that make up their Bible even.

So that's a situation for them. Ben, I don't know if you want to describe the Roman Catholic situation and then I have some variety there as well. Sure. I mean, just very briefly, Roman Catholics have 73 books. They would reject the term apocrypha as well. They prefer the term Dutero canon, which is for them just second in acceptance, not that they are of some kind of lesser authority. And then for the Protestants, we have the 66th. book canon. So those are the main differences between the three major groups. Like you said, though, with the Eastern Orthodox, they do not have an infallibly defined Bible canon. That was something that came up last night as well. So kind of an interesting topic to dive into. And also important,

sorry, real quick, for the Roman Catholics. I actually think this will be very important for a discussion later. There actually are broadly speaking two different views among Roman Catholics, and we can actually see the difference even among today's apologists. on the Roman Catholic scene. So there's broadly speaking two options when they look at the decree of the Council of Trent on the canon. Because the decree of the Council of Trent, I will list out the books of the Bible,

so the contents of the Roman Catholic Bible. And then it says, quote, but if anyone received not a sacred and canonical, the said books entire with all their parts, as they have been used to be read in the Catholic Church, and as they are contained in the Olay and Vulgate edition, and knowingly and deliberately condemn the traditions aforesaid, let them be anathema, end quote.

Now, there's different readings, of exactly what that means. So option number one, and I think this is the one that gets taken by most sort of Roman Catholics online that are engaged in these discussions, and that's the idea that this list from Trent, and especially that final section there, is exclusionary in nature and closes the canon. And so what does that mean? That's the idea that there are no books outside of those mentioned by the Council of Trent. That should be considered part of the canon that could ever be added to the canon. The canon is closed at Trent. And so this would be pushed by individuals, such as, for example, William Albrecht on the Roman Catholic position.

Option number two is that this list from Trent is inclusionary in nature and simply tells us a baseline of books, which ought to be considered scripture. However, the possibility remains open that more books could be added to the canon down through the line of, say, for example, the Roman Catholic Church reunites with the Orthodox Church or at least some Orthodox communions. there's a possibility that they could, at a later point in time, include more books, because Trent never explicitly excludes all these extra books. And so this is a position that's held by, for example, Roman Catholic Apologist Michael Lofton, Jimmy Aiken, and Trent Horn seem to actually hold this position, or at least leave room open for it. And so even with the Roman Catholics, who do have a supposedly infallibly defined canon list,

there's differences as to what they actually think that list entails. the image that comes to my mind, I'm always a little afraid of going off script and just talking and saying something really that I'll regret. But the image that comes to my mind is that the emotional quality of this conversation is often at first, what is put upon us is the Protestants are on quicksand and the non-protestants are on standing on a rock. You know, they have this sort of stable position and ours is fluctuating. But then as you actually wade through the particulars point by point, you realize the answer. the ambiguities that are put upon the Protestants are not, the other side is not removed from them. And I think that's one of the things that we'll get into with some of these particular points. Let's start, before we get into church history, let's start with this simple, we've already addressed this a little bit,

but fallible list of infallible books. Can you even have a canon if you don't have an infallible declaration to make it so? Now, I have a whole video on this exact point. Would I, if it's okay to take maybe just a minute and lay out, you know, my main two kind of appeals to help people with this, and then I'll just see how you guys want to add on to this and develop this. So I make a philosophical appeal and then a historical appeal. The more theoretical and then the more concrete concerning what has actually happened. And the philosophical appeal has to do with an infinite regress that there are certain ways of requiring infallibility. for the discernment of and appropriation of infallibility,

that now push the can down the road, and you're going to need an infallible knowledge of that. And so what we can observe here is that every system has a cutoff point where you move from infallibility to fallibility, so there is a fallible reception of the infallible. And that can be the eardrums of Moses at the burning bush, which are fallible ear drums, okay? But he's still hearing God, and that's an infallible.

voice coming from the burning bush. Or this can be the perception of the number of ex-cathedra statements within Roman Catholicism, which is a fallible knowledge that is debated, and yet those are infallible teachings, or the number of infallible councils for various Eastern traditions, which is fallibly discerned. Okay, there's not been an infallible teaching that is universally agreed upon about that. And I developed that and I talk, especially in my videos, I try to say Protestants do believe in the necessity of the church as a witness, but nonetheless that she is subordinate under the scripture in that testimonial role. She's like John the Baptist pointing to Christ.

She is necessary for the discerning of the scripture, but she is not infallible in that act of discernment, and I cashed that out more in those videos. But the other point that I think is more decisive is the historical. And I think we can just observe this idea of an infallible canon list has simply never been until very recent centuries, until early modern era. really, or late medieval. Because in the early church, these councils that deliberated on the canon were local, fallible councils into the medieval era.

There's debate. I was shocked at, you know, the decades leading up to the Council of Trent, even after the Council of Florence, you've got these major heavy-hitting cardinals in the Catholic Church disagreeing about the canon. I was amazed to discover this, that it really wasn't cemented until the anathema is at Trent. but also the Jewish people, and I think this is a powerful point of testimony that the people of God throughout redemptive history generally didn't have infallible operations by which to receive the scriptures.

It was a fallible reception. Think of how the law of Moses was received as such by the Jewish people, and then continuing out through what we call the Old Testament era. And I may say more about Josephus as one testimony to that as well. for now I'm just kind of canvassing the big picture of just, you know, historically, you know, Thomas Aquinas was in a similar position to contemporary traditions that don't have an infallible canon list. And so if this is like this major death knell problem that's going to place you in quicksand, then what are we saying about basically all of redemptive history up until the last several hundred years? So that those are two considerations I'd like to bring to bear upon this. What do you guys want to say about this topic? before we get into church history. Sure. I think with any world view, you're going to have your axioms, right? So if we're going to compare Roman Catholicism, for example, and Protestant theology,

both worldviews will have their axioms. You do not typically, within scripture, God is not reasoning from created to the uncreated. He's self-referencing. He's saying, I am. when he's asked about his divinity, when he's presenting his divinity, rather, he's saying, I am when he presents himself to Moses. So any worldview philosophically is going to have its axioms. Now, you might be able to present historical evidence as maybe a supporting evidence for this

apostolicity of the 66 book canon, which we'll get into in a minute. But if you were to press a, say, Roman Catholic on their worldview, they have infallibility within the scriptures themselves and then infallibility within certain aspects of traditions. So you have the dogmatic pronouncements in the Ecumenical Councils, maybe ex-cathedral statements by popes, the Magisterium in certain aspects. If you were to press them on that and ask them to provide the same level of, I guess, scrutiny that they would apply to maybe the Protestant canon conundrum, they're not able to do that because there is no infallible list of infallible traditions within the Roman Catholic worldview.

you. It's even more slippery when you get into the Eastern Orthodox question because the nature of their infallibility would typically, they would reference the ecumenical councils, at least the first seven, some would claim that there is an eighth. But then when you press them on it, you get into kind of the weeds, you would ask kind of the question, well, what about the ecumenical council is infallible? Is it just the general rule? Is it just, well, Nicaa one is, well, Arias was a bad guy. We don't like that. Is that what you mean by, you know, you're accepting the ecumenical council. No, you're you're talking about the canons, but when you get into the actual canons themselves, there are many that are no longer held today. So I think that kind of a busts up that comparison there. What do you think, Javier? Yeah, I mean, I would agree. I think something like you said, Gavin, that needs to be, I think, really emphasized for people at home is that what we are doing when we're pointing out, hey, by the way, you know, the church up until the Council of Trent or sometimes to try to push it back to the Council of Florence. Let's, whatever, let's say that it was the Council of Florence.

It doesn't matter. The church for over a thousand years didn't have this supposedly infallible list of infallible books. And so if that is a defeater for our position, then you're not just defeating the Protestant position, as it were. You're defeating the Church of the First Millennium, right? Which should be a problem for anyone who calls themselves a Christian. Because often we're met with when we try to point this out and say, hey, by the way,

your own system has this flaw. Every other Christian system has this flaw. The church of the first millennium that you're claiming is you, that you are that church, they have this flaw. And we're just met with, that's a two quo quay, bro. Like, you're not, you're not disproving anybody. You're not debunking anything. And we're trying to point out, no, dude, there's this thing when we're having arguments,

what we call reductio ad absurdum arguments, right? All that means is like being reduced to absurdity. And there's stronger and weaker ways, informal and more. informal ways of making this argument. This is a more informal way of making the argument where we're saying, hey, if the argument that you're trying to launch leads to completely absurd unintended consequences, then we should just count this argument dead in the water. Something has gone wrong somewhere along the way. In fact, maybe we could even join forces and cooperatively be like, how would we answer this argument? And I'm not even against that, but unfortunately, a lot of our Roman Catholicist

Orthodox or ecclesialist friends as we have turned them here on YouTube, they instead of saying, hey, I don't know, I've identified a problem. I need help. I'm sending up a flare. Can we all work on this? They instead will, the analogy I use is something like this. It's almost like if you have a kid who's like more scrawny, right? And it's like almost like the nerdy archetype in a Disney movie or whatever. And a bully shoves them into a closet, walks inside the closet, locks the door behind both of them, and then mocks them for the fact that he allowed himself, we put in the closet. Right. And it's like, it's like, dude, don't you understand? Like, we're both in this closet now. Right. Like, we got to figure out together how we're going to get out of this. And it seems that when they try to push these sort of epistemic regress problems,

when they try to push the, you have a fallible list of infallible books, as though this were actually a problem without realizing that they are now also inside of that epistemic closet, they've shut the door on. That's just, it should be silly to anyone that I think is an outsider looking in at that situation. Yeah, that's a great point. And that, yeah, that is lost upon people sometimes that what we're saying is they are not removed from the problems that they are placing on us. So hopefully people will heed your comments there. And, you know, people will say, oh, well, there was infallibility involved in the canon in the early church in some other way, other than an ex-catheter statement or a council or universal ordinary men.

Magisterium or something like this. But the simple fact of history is anybody who studies the medieval views of the canon will see how much diversity and disagreement there is. There is debate all the way up until Trent, and that's just, I think, undeniable. So maybe we can start to push into that direction a little bit. This claim comes up over and over, and we will hear this. People watching this video will have heard this, that the 66 book, canon of the Protestant traditions, doesn't have historical precedent. It's a theological novelty. It was introduced by Luther or Luther and the other reformers

who were removing books from their place in the canon and so forth. And so what let's do now for the bulk of our time together is just work through church history a bit. What do we want to say in response to this? You know, we've got lots of comments prepared. I don't even know. I honestly don't even know where to begin. Let me just stop talking and see.

Where should we begin here? So I can start us off with just a, brief statement from the new Catholic encyclopedia that I think kind of paints a good picture of the early church and their views on the canon. So this is a Catholic resource. So just to be charitable, I'm going to cite from this. St. Jerome distinguished between canonical books and ecclesiastical books. The latter he judged were circulated by the church as good spiritual reading, but were not recognized as authoritative scripture. The situation remained unclear in the ensuing centuries. For example, John of Damascus, Gregory the Great, who is Pope, Wollifred, Nicholas of Lira,

and Tostado continue to doubt the canonicity of the Dutero-canonical books. So you have a couple of things there. Oftentimes in this discussion, the Council of Rome is brought up. I'm sure you've heard this type of argument. Well, the 73 book canon is present at the Council of Rome. Well, guess who was at that council? Jerome. Guess who doubted the canonicity of the Apocrypha? Jerome. In his writings in the Latin Vulgate, in the prologue of the Latin Vulgate, it says that these books, referring to the Apocrypha may be read for self-edification, but not for the confirmation of ecclesiastical dogma. You see that same opinion parroted throughout church history. You see it in the Glossa Ordinaria. You see it in the writings of Cardinal Cajetan just before the Reformation.

You also see this within the writings of Pope Gregory the Great. And oftentimes when I bring him up, I'll bring up this point. I'll say, well, did he just not know any better? Did Pope Gregory not know any better? Was he uneducated on this topic or something along those lines? But I think it's pretty clear that this was hotly debated up until the time of Trent. Something else that's important to mention as well is that what we see throughout church history are different utilizations of a lot of the key words in the canon discussion.

So, for example, you have different, so nowadays, a lot of Protestants will use the word apocrypha to refer to what our Roman Catholic reference would call Deuter canonical books. books. However, the word apocrypha gets used differently, right, by different fathers throughout church history. And so you have, some fathers who will use the word apocrypha, meaning hidden, to refer to books that are like horrible things, something like, I don't know, the gospel of Thomas, right? Something that like nobody is like, oh, this is super legit. Now, everyone's like, this is super heretical, really bad. And so they'll use that, like, it's hidden, it's, it's inauthentic, it's like heretical. Bam. So there you have one usage of the word apocrypha.

But there's another more nuanced usage of the word apocrypha where they'll use apocrypha, meaning hidden, simply to refer to the origins of some of these books, right? And the origins being disputed, the origins being hidden. And so therefore, the books then having a secondary rank to what they call then the canonical books. And that secondary rank means that they are actually read by the catacumen, by those who are looking to come into the church. They are read for personal edification by people. they're even read in the churches for personal edification, but because of their hidden origins, because there's doubtful things about who wrote them, where they came from, their constitution,

they are relegated to this second tier or second category, second rank, where, again, it's only for personal edification compared to the canonical books. And even then, the situation keeps being messy because we have different utilizations of the word canonical. There are times where canonical is utilized simply to mean the books that are read in the churches, And so when we're talking about the books that are being read in the churches being canonical, that would seem to include that tier that I mentioned that's not so bad from the apocrypha. But when it's used more narrowly, the word canonical then refers to the books that are, their origin is not hidden.

We know where these came from. They have full divine authority. They can be used to establish dogma. They can be used to settle doctrinal controversies between people, whereas that other category of books may be read in the churches, those good apocrypha books, but they are just not of that same caliber. You can't use them single-handedly to settle dogma. Surely you can use them as a corroborating voice,

but not single-handedly, and their main purpose is to instruct and morals and such. And so what we would argue is Protestants, and this is something that a lot of people, including a lot of Protestants on our side, don't seem to get, is that historically, both Lutherans and the Reformed and the Anglicans

and, like, everybody practically, was arguing for the, this nuanced two-tier distinction, right? Where we actually have books that are fully canonical in the narrow sense that can settle dogma, books that are due to canonical or they are ecclesiastical or, you know, other words that we can use for this, books that are preserved in the churches. We like these books, but they're not at the same rank. And these would correspond to the Roman Catholic Deuter canonical text.

And then we all have the Apocrypha. These are, again, the books that are, I don't know, the Apocalypse of Peter, the Gospel of Thomas, books that nobody should be reading. they're horrible. And a lot of people don't seem to understand that the strongest form of the Protestant argument and what should be our position, what is the position of a lot of our traditions historically as well as even today, even if we've kind of, the common understanding of this has faltered a bit is that we affirm this historic two-tier distinction that a lot of church

fathers, a lot of medevils, and a lot of even Roman Catholics on the side of the papacy at the time of the Reformation seemed to affirm, at least up until, triumph. Javier, you makes it a great point, and I think we need to acknowledge to your point here how many contemporary Protestants have fallen away from our own traditions on this point, and therefore we give credence to these talking points because we act as though the Dutero Canonicals and other what historically would be called apocryphal texts are the exact same, and we neglect the Duteroa canonical books too much. There's just, I almost want to name the 19th century as like a watershed moment where historic Protestantism starts to morph in certain ways, at least in some circles.

And so we want to acknowledge that. But I think we need to develop this a little more. I want to talk about two things. One is Jerome and another is the two-tier canon and develop that a little bit. Oh, boy, which one should we start with? Absolutely. I mean, I can talk about Jerome a little bit if you want. Go for it.

Dive in. So typically when I bring up Jerome in these types of discussions, one of the first things that a Roman Catholic will tell me is, well, that's just one church father. That's not the opinion of the early church or he just went rogue or maybe he changed his opinion. And that's something that I hear quite a bit, which actually goes against the scholarship. But a point that I made earlier about the Council of Rome, this is typically the council that is brought up or they will point to, this is the early attestation of our 73 book canon, that kind of a thing. What a lot of people don't realize is the only copy of this council that we have extant is the glazing decree. Now, some people might push back and say it's a spurious text, whatever the case may be, but this is the only copy of the canons of this council that we have that list out the 73 book canon. After the canon is listed within this same decree, Pope Galasius mentions a couple of church fathers that we should find to be authoritative. One of those church fathers is someone who is present at the council, guess who? Jerome, who held the two-tier view of scripture. And then another kind of pushback that I'll get in these types of conversations, and says they'll bring up refinement or Jerome's works in against refinesus in which he says,

I submit to the judgment of the churches in which he's talking about the, he's talking about the kind of, what is it, the book of Daniel, the version that they were using at the time. And he's pushing back on that. He's like, okay, I submit to the church's decision on translating it in this way kind of thing. But what he's not talking about is the prolog. He actually addresses that later in the same text. And he says, as far as Refinez's opinion on the prolog, I didn't want to get into that at this time, because I wasn't writing a book, but a preface.

That was his response. And what's interesting enough, the reason I bring that up is because at the bottom of the Galasian decree, after he mentions all of these church fathers that they should find authoritative, Pope Galasius actually says, likewise, Refinus, the most religious man, wrote many books of ecclesiastical works, also some interpreting the scriptures, but since the venerable Jerome noted that he took arbitrary liberties in some of them, basically except only the ones that agree with Jerome. This is what he says there.

I don't know. I find that interesting when I bring that up in those type of topics, they'll say, well, that was just the opinion of Jerome. But if we were to actually look at the only extant copy of the canons of the council of Rome that we have, it doesn't seem to be the case. Now, again, there's some dispute on the nature of this document. Some people will say it's spurious, whatever the case may be. But I think it's an interesting point to bring up. And then also some of those texts that I was citing later on, like the Glossa Ordinaria, actually does cite from Jerome as well as Cardinal Cajitan. I don't want to get too. deep into reading the full citation there, but they do, trust me.

Well, and if I can, if I can add on the Council of Rome point that you mentioned, that some people will point this out that the specific delacian decree is actually potentially spurious. I would actually say that that's actually a very strong case. And so I think you're exactly right that even if we were to say, well, you know what, this isn't spurious. And the points that you've made are actually pretty strong. And they stand, I think, as far as how we even understand.

that canon list to begin with. But also very important for people at home is the very real possibility. And I would argue that it's actually the most plausible answer here, that the canon list from the Council of Rome is spurious. It's a much later addition. And there's a few reasons why I'll try to speed through those, we don't get bogged down. So even Densinger itself, right, which for anyone that knows anything where I'm in Catholic apologetics, Densinger or Densinger's is incredibly important. I wish I had it on hand. It's on my shelf over here somewhere. Right, this collection of authoritative decrees and all these other sorts of things that are Roman Catholic friends, Magisterial documents is what I was looking for, that are Roman Catholic friends rely on.

And Atensinger itself concedes that while according to tradition, all are some of the parts of the document have been attributed to Damasus, Pope Damascis, that is, the text of the Gilesian decree may not be authentic. And it actually acknowledges that while parts one and two of the decree can substantially be traced back to Damasis, this is disputed for part three, and parts four and five are, quote, without doubt, later than damasus, end quote. And while they are attributed to Jalaisian first and Pope Hermizdas, their authenticity is contested. Now, just so we can get an understanding here, why is this contested at all? Well, according to scholar C.H. Turner, one of the most decisive factors here is that the Jalasian decree in Section 3, writing about the Holy Spirit, quotes at some

length, word for word, from Augustine, from a work that Augustine wrote decades after the Council of Rome and Pope Damas's death had taken place. And so Turner goes as far as to say that this section is, quote, of no historical value, end quote. And Turner was more optimistic about the portion containing the canon list due to it showing influence from Jerome, but even then his hopes end up being unfounded. Why is that? Well, there's a phrase in the Gilesian decree that is utilized to describe the book of Jeremiah, where it calls Jeremiah, by its Jewish or by its Hebrew name. Okay.

So it refers to it as his lamentations, which recurs word for word in Jerome's prologus galliatus, probably mispronounced that. And so why is this important? Well, the Hebrew name that's being used for Jeremiah, okay? And the reference it's made to the book of Jeremiah, which concurs word for word with Jerome's work. Some may say, well, hey, but wasn't Jerome president at the council?

So there you go. This proves that it's actually legitimate. It goes all the way back. And I want to read one quote here from a different scholar, H. H. H. Haworth. And he says this, quote, It is quite true that Jerome in the Prologus Galliatus uses the Hebrew name for the book, but the preface was written a good many years later than the reign of Damasus, when Jerome had entirely adopted his later theory about the Hebrew verity. At the time of the Roman Council of 382, he still held by the Greek Old Testament and had a very slight,

if any, knowledge of Hebrew. And it would not have occurred to him to use a Hebrew name for a Bible book, much less would it have occurred to the fathers of the Roman Council to do so? If therefore the decreedal was influenced by Jerome in this matter, it shows that it was composed till long after the death of Damasus. And the same thing applies for a few other things there, including the mention of John the presbyter when talking about the second and third epistles of John. There's essentially all of these different markers that the Jalassian decree and the part that enumerates the books of the Bible is a much later addition, right, to the actual Council of Rome. In fact, also as a side argument to these sort of textual arguments is the fact, and to be fair, this next one is a so-called

argument from silence, but still, it's important to mention the canon list of the Council of Rome is not mentioned by Jerome himself, and it's not mentioned by any other church historian or writer who wrote between the fourth and the ninth century. And this is in spite of the fact that as we'll document and we'll talk about, the canon gets discussed quite a bit. Right. And so we have all these textual issues quoting word for word from documents that would be written decades later. It's not looking good. Now, that's not even just like a, oh, the Protestant talking point, oh, the misusing of the scholarship. As it turns out, Gary Machuda, who is the number one guy from the Roman Catholic side who wrote the book that they all read on why Catholic Bibles are

bigger, right? All the talking points that I just gave and more are actually. Gary Machuda's talking points for why he doesn't use the Council of Rome and why he doesn't think other apologists should appeal to it either. And yet the Council of Rome gets appeal to all the time by our Roman Catholic friends in this discussion. So I think that's worth bringing up. Yeah. Those are great points on the Council of Rome because you do hear that a lot. And I have to say, I'll say one thing about Jerome and this will take us into the two tier discussion, which is really important. I am regularly aware of, because I kind of frequent a different circle. Most of my life, I was a pastor who was then doing scholarship, so I'd go to academic conferences and write scholarship. And then, you know,

a third arena is like the online apologetics realm. And it isn't interesting how these three are different. With regard to Jerome, it's pretty amazing how different he is perceived in scholarly circles versus in the apologetics. It's a pretty marked difference. It's pretty recognized. So when, if people who are watching this video are kind of wondering what's the big picture here, when we're told that there is no historical precedent for a Protestant canon, there simply is, and Jerome is one very prominent example and a very important example. Now, as soon as we, and that is, again, in the scholarly circles, I don't think that's really disputed. His views are pretty clear.

As soon as you say Jerome, though, people are going to say, oh, well, that's the only one. And so we're not saying it's only Jerome, okay? We're going to get to Hillary. We're going to talk about Eastern voices as well. But Jerome is very clear on this. And what I want to address is how people will say, because one of the arguments you won't see in the medieval reception of Jerome, and you will not see in contemporary scholarship about Jerome, but you will see in the talking points online is that he changed his mind again. People say Jerome later after. So it's like 391, 32.

He writes his preface to Samuel and Kings, where he gives a very clear outline of his view of the canon. his letter 107 is later in the 390s. People say sometime after that, he changed his mind again. And their evidence for that is him citing Deutero canonical books as Scripture, which is what we're about to get to. But just to observe for now, that, you know, I don't think that view is very well established out there. Here's the key problem, and this will take us into the two-tier issue. And if I could just, boy, if people watching this are zoning out, you know, follow us on this one point.

really important. It's the case over and over that Church Fathers will cite a particular book as scripture while simultaneously excluding it from their canon list. That happens over and over and over. And what that tells us is we have to actually ask, what do they mean by scripture and what do they mean by canon? And this is going to get us into the two-tier thing that I know you guys are going to develop, But this is so important because even up to this present moment, I will see this mistake happening over and over, where people are saying, Jerome must have changed his mind a second time because he cites from Syrac, as scripture and other books late in his life. But if that were true, that would mean Athanasius is also changing his mind back and forth throughout his career. Because in his discourse against the Aryans, he's going to cite wisdom and Syrac and a bunch of other scriptures, and that's around 360. and then in his famous 367 letter, he's going to explicitly say these books are not included in the canon.

In Cyril of Jerusalem's cate catechetical lectures, he's going to cite Deuter all canonical books, and in that very same work, give a canon list that excludes them. So if you say Jerome, my point is this, if you say Jerome is flip-flopping and he's changing his mind, you have to say a bunch of the church fathers are flip-flopping and changing their mind. isn't it better to recognize that these church fathers can use the word scripture? I know it's counterintuitive to people today, but they can use the word scripture for the second tier, the subordinate books that they then exclude from their canon list. I don't know. I'm trying to belabor that because I feel like it's a missed a lot.

To add to your point there, it's not only the church fathers, and this is the issue, right? Because oftentimes you hear, especially in Roman Catholic polemics, is they'll emphasize the list. They'll say the list don't matter. What matters is utilization. And so then they'll be, to your point, right, they'll say, aha, look, they're citing it as scripture. Look, they're calling it holy or look, they're calling it divine or what have you. And not only does that run into all the issues you've just described, but I would simply

say, okay, if this methodology works and it actually will lead to accurate conclusions about whether or not these books are considered fully canonical, why don't we compare that to something like, I don't know, Lutheran, Reformed Anglican utilization of these works? because there's no doubts that we have a two-tier canon view. There's no doubt that we see these books as not being fully canonical. And yet, we have evidence all over the place, including from first, second-generation reformers, and long after that, of not only people talking about the two-tier view that I described earlier, but specifically people citing, from our side, citing books like wisdom, books like Judith,

books like Tobit as scripture, harmonizing it with the scriptures. Sometimes you get this picture from our Roman Catholic friends that, oh, man, there's, it's almost, sometimes you hear words like Protestants are hiding this, right? Or they don't want you to know about these books. When we have a long history of citing these books of scripture, Johann Gerhard does this all the time. He loves citing wisdom, especially in his theological commonplace on creation and predestination. He cites it all the time. He cites from Tobit. He cites from Judith. We have other reformers like Johann Quench. who cites from Tobits. In fact, to this very day, if we look at the Lutheran service book, one-year lectionary, because we try to follow the historic Western Christian lectionary, there's actually all sorts of proppers and parts of our lectionary that utilize and rely upon and make references to Deuter canonical, or as we would call them, right, apocryphal works. And so if we were to follow this methodology, then we would come to the conclusion that,

Oh, would you look at that? Lutherans, Johann Gerhard, everybody on the Lutheran side, as well as the reform, that they must all think these books are equally canonical because they're citing them as scripture, they're reading them in church, or they're referencing them in church. And yet that should be clearly a very silly idea, right, a discredited idea, because we're literally, we have all our authors saying, no, we do not hold these books to be equally authoritative. And so I think the fact that you can do that, like you said, with fathers within their own work or they're talking about this two-tier distinction. The fact that you can even do that with Lutherans, Reformed and Anglicans, who are explicitly saying these books are not equally canonical as these others reveals a massive flaw in the

methodology. And I think to your point, Gavin earlier, when you were talking about Cyril of Jerusalem and his catechetical lectures, I think that's such a poignant point to bring up about the early attestation of this kind of two-tier view or maybe the distinctions that they might have about the apocryphal. I'm just going to read a brief citation. I won't go too deep into it. He says, and pray read none of the apocryphal writings for why dost thou who knowest not which are acknowledged among all. So admitting that these things are in dispute. Trouble thyself in vain about those which are disputed. Read the divine scriptures, the 22 books of the Old Testament,

these that have been translated by the 72 interpreters. So a couple of things there. So he warns his catacumans not to dive into the apocrypha because they are disputed. And another point that I gleaned from this is when I discuss with more pop apologists, they'll say, well, you know, layman didn't have any access to the scriptures at all. Well, here he's clearly warning catacumans not to read these texts. So just a small, important note to glean from that piece of text there. But as far as your Jerome changing his mind kind of argument that you hear all the time, this is just clearly not the case. In the actual, if you were to compare the Council of Rome. So you have what, 383 roughly? He publishes the Latin Vulgate in 405 AD that includes

this distinction about the apocrypha. If he, if Rome somehow solidified this idea in the West that all 73 books are to be held with equal veneration, you would think that he would not be including this distinction within the Vulgate that was approved, right, approved by the Pope. So you would think he would to face some kind of ramification against that, but you just don't see it. And even in against Rufinus, he defends his view by saying he's not going to comment on refinus's pushback on the prologue there. But then even as you continue on into history, just before the Reformation, within the Glossoridon area, and this is present, at least within the versions that are floating around of the 1400s, they parrot Jerome's view word for word and said that the authority of

these texts is not adequate to resolve disputes just as blessed. Jerome states, says that almost word for word. And as well as Cardinal Cajitan, he brings this up as well and cites Jerome. So you would have to state that not only did, not only did Jerome change his mind, but that Pope Gregory the Great was not aware that he changed his mind, that the Gloss of Ordinary was not aware that he changed his mind, that Cardinal Cajitan was not aware that he changed his mind. You just kind of set up this kind of bizarre world situation where everyone just kind of plugging their years for the next thousand years, which I just don't think is very plausible. And I think the scholarship agrees with me. Yeah, I 1,000% agree. I think that Jerome changed his mind again thing is

very strange. I mean, it really, it really requires, it is somewhat conspiratorial. It requires that there's just somehow nobody. And not only did the entire next millennium of Jerome reception, which is huge. Jerome has a massive influence on the medieval church. Jerome, he's a very much. Jerome, himself never tells us he changed his mind. He just sort of obliquely did so and expected us to pick up the trail somehow. So I think it's very problematic. Again, the two-tier model is a much better way to resolve this because now, and maybe we can say, because it allows you to look at all the fathers in a more harmonious way, because it's not just Jerome who's going to give you a canon list that is shorter and then cite these other books as scripture. People don't

take our word for it. Again, they're going to just Google what you referenced, Ben, Cyril of Jerusalem, Cate Cate Cic Lectures, Book 4, and just see how dire are his warnings against the apocryphal books, but then how he defines that, because he tells you all the books. And it's what you find most commonly in the east from the Senate of Laudicea, a 22 book canon. It's not the identical to the Protestant canon, because you have Baruch and folded into Jeremiah and you have the book of Susanna is unfolded into Daniel I think you have a longer Daniel

but it's very close because the majority of the Deutero Chronical books are excluded in Cyril go ahead your help here if I can say something about that real quick I think much is made about that about Baruch and or the epistle of Jeremiah and and the other Greek editions to Esther and then I think a lot is made out of these or too much is made out of these

Why? Because these were considered to be parts of greater works, right? Parts of bigger books in Scripture. And so the reason why I think too much is being made of it is because that's an issue not of having a different canon or different books. That's an issue of textual criticism, right? What actually constitutes the book of Daniel? What constitutes the book of Jeremiah? What constitutes these things? And I find that that is one of the main crutches that the other side utilize us to say, ha ha, well, you don't have. have an identical canon to these, when in reality what we're saying is, well, we're disputing whether or not these are actually parts of those books, right? If they're not actually parts of those books, then it's not, I guess it would be almost like the difference between me saying like, you know, if someone asks for their favorite, I don't know, you're like, you're asking like a kid,

like what are your favorite fantasy books? And one kid says, well, I like the Chronicles of Narnia. And another kid says, well, I like the Chronicles of Narnia and I like Harry. Potter. And then you have a third kid who is like, well, I like the Chronicles of Narnia, and I'm just making this up, but they're like, well, but actually, there's this like extra chapter that C.S. Lewis originally wanted to add to one of these books that he technically did it in some additions, but I actually liked the Chronicles of Narnia better with that chapter. Would we then say that kid number one, kid number three have different answers to this question? All right. If they both say, I like the Chronicles of Narnia, but one has an extra chapter or two? Oh, no, they have

completely different series in mind. These are night and day different. No, there's just a difference in a chapter or two, right, in terms of content. And the reason why that also, once again, blows back on the opposition is because they want to appeal to councils like Hippo and Carthage when there's issues there with Estrus, right? The first and second book of Esdras, Esdras A, Estrus B. To make a long story short for people, they can look this up, Catholic Encyclopedia online.

the entry on Esdrus will explain this so they can hear from Roman Catholic source. But even there, there's an issue of naming, right? Where Esdras A and Esdras B in the Septuagint, one of those is Ezra and Nehemiah, and the other is what Jerome would later call third Esdras, which Protestants later after him would call First Esdras, which is a book that is not in Protestant Bibles, and it's also not in Roman Catholic Bibles either. And so if our Roman Catholic interlocutors want to play the game of,

ha ha, well, look, but you're missing a part of these books. And so it's not the same canon, then we would just say, okay, so then you don't have the same canon either, going back to Hippo and Carthage or Augustin or anybody else. And so then we have to ask ourselves the question, are we comfortable when it comes to textual criticism on this point or not? And if we're not comfortable with textual criticism, well, I would just at that point just say, well, too bad. Then I guess no options are live options, right, when it comes to the canon.

But I just think that we need to be realist and we need to look at the data and not try to just score cheap shots going one way or another, especially when that undercuts our own case. It's a great point. I was going to get into that, but I'm glad you mentioned that point, Javier. And the canon from Cyril of Jerusalem, I mentioned the influence of the Senate of Laodicea, that shows up a lot in the east. You find this shorter canon in the east everywhere. It's Athanasius, Gregory of Nazianzianz, John of Damascus, so much. One quick point. and then I ask one final question on church history

about any other testimonies from church history you want to make sure we cover before we move on. And that is I really want to cement and hammer home something that Ben brought up earlier and that's the comment about Jerome submitting to the judgment of the churches. This is really a misused quote. What he's talking about in context

is two different versions of Daniel, both of which have an additional material beyond the Masoretic text. Theodotion Daniel and the LXX. He's not. talking about Deuterocanical versus Masoretic text or anything like that. And so that quote is completely misused, I'm sorry to say, and I think we just need to keep hammering.

Because we'll hear these common talking points. We're trying to dislodge some points that need to be interrogated, I think, is what one of the things we're doing here. So I'm hammering. I'm reiterating that. Anything else on church history, other witnesses or important facets of the historical dimension of this we need to mention for people before we move on? I want to get to Milito in a second myself, but what do you guys want to talk about?

Yeah, I can list a couple of examples, and then I'll let you go, Ben, of real quick for the 22 book numbering and the 24 book numbering and then a few examples. I won't read them out. I'll just give the citation. People can look it up at home. These are all like, I think most or if not all of these are freely available online, including at a substack article that I put together on this point on a subset of the same name. examples, Javier, can you just say, for someone who's totally new to the 22 and 24 numbers, can you say anything to help them follow your comments there? Yeah, so when we talk about 22 book numbering of the Old Testament, when it comes to the

Jewish or the Hebrew numbering, the reason why they numbered the books this way, because you might be saying, wait a second, 22, that doesn't match the Roman Catholic, matches nobody's numbering, what's going on? That's because they were trying to match the letters of the number of letters that there are in the Hebrew alphabet. that. And so because they were trying to do that, they would have different books that they would group together under like one umbrella term. And that's part of where some of the, again, variety and confusion even arises in church history looking at these different lists because it's like,

oh, someone has 22, someone has 24, someone has, you know, whatever, is because they're grouping some of these differently. But the one that's most common when it comes to people who are either looking at the Hebrew or who are relying on Jerome, who's then looking at the Hebrew and so on and so forth, is this 22 book numbering. And so some examples with a 22 book numbering from the patristic age would be Athanasius, Basil de Great, Sirle of Jerusalem, Gregory of Nazianzus,

Hillary of Podier, John of Damascus, Leonius of Jerusalem, epiphanius of Salamis. And there's this work called the dialogue between Timothy the Christian and Akila, the Jew. And there's a bunch of other examples. Those are just a few. From the Middle Ages, we have Adam Scotus, Agabard of Leon,

Embrose of Ottpert, Dennis the Carthusian, Hugh of St. Victor, John of Salisbury. When it comes to the 24 book numbering, which is an alternate, very popular numbering in church history, a patristic example would be Jerome also gives a 24 book numbering. And then in the Middle Ages, we have Bede the venerable, Hamo of Halberstadt, Peter Salensis, Richard of St. Victor, and Pramassius of Hadrametum. Probably butchered some of those. Those are just a few examples. People can find a lot more online in that substance article. People want to look it up. I have all of the super lengthy quotations. But those are just some examples. So we have different numberings there. And then when it comes to the

two-tier canon, just to give a few citations here, people can check out. We've already mentioned St. Athanasius's Festal Letter, 39. We have also refinas, his commentary on the Apostles Creed. He mentions this Cyril of Jerusalem in his fourth catechatechial lecture mentions this Gregory the Great morals on the book of Job. He mentions this in passing about books that are not canonical. We also have then the synopsis scriptura sacra. And people can go and track those down. In the Middle Ages, a few references of people that mention this is Sancti Antonini. We also have Alphonse's Tastati.

And just to give another example here of the very, Dennis the Cartusian also does this. And of the really high Middle Ages, when we're talking about the, Ben has mentioned this a couple of times, there's this dispute about the Glossa Ordinaria, which is an incredibly important commentary on the scriptures from throughout the Middle Ages. There's some dispute as to whether when exactly this gets added to the Glossa Ardenaria, but at, you know, at worst or whatever, at the latest would be high, high middle ages before Martin Luther has nailed his 95 theses, you know,

a couple decades before that. And we see there in that gloss art and aria preface very clearly laid out this distinction that I mentioned earlier between the canonical books and the ecclesiastical or apocryphal or, you know,

second rank books as it were. And so if people want to check some of those out, those are some places to go look. And there's a lot more. You can sit here all day. Absolutely. an excellent substack brother great work on that compiling all of those resources for people to use so that's awesome i just want to give you a shout out for that i use that all the time it's awesome um i want to touch on one thing that you said about gregory the great because as you were talking about it

it kind of came to mind and i thought it was important to touch on we're talking about earlier jerome possibly changing his mind and i brought up gregory the great as an example of how that's an absurd proposition there at the end that the what he says about the apocrypha i'm just going to read a very brief citation. He says, with reference to which particular we're not acting irregularly, if from the books, though not canonical, yet brought out for the edifying of the church, sounds like he's citing Jerome. These books are for use for self-edification. Brought out for the edifying of the church, we bring forward testimony. And then he cites from First Maccabees 646. So I just thought that was an interesting note there. Another thing to toss onto the pile for the Jerome

didn't change his mind argument. Yeah. I wish I hadn't already made the thumbnail for this. We could make it, Jerome didn't change his mind, exclamation point. That's well, you know, they'll get that if they watch. Okay, we're nearing, I'm going to put a link to Javier's substack in the video description as well for those who want to check that out. Lots of great compiling of resources there.

We're nearing the end here. Let's wrap it up. I want to talk about, okay, so we're kind of responding to this claim of no historical precedent, and we're talking about Jerome and others. there is a lot, and Javier just listed off a lot of names people can look into. But ultimately, and at the end of the day, why do we hold to this canon? Do we really have? Earlier, I mentioned the Protestants are, we were made to feel as though this view is on quicksand as opposed to the solid rock. Well, do we have a solid rock we can actually stand on for knowing

the canon? And I think the appeal I would make here, and then I'll see if you guys have any final thoughts, because there's a need in the heart for an existential certainty that people have as they watch this video and wrestle with this topic. We want to direct them. We're basically, I think the answer is simple. We're trying to be faithful to God, and we're trying to follow the canon list that Jesus and the apostles used. That is the simplest answer I would give. And I would say, as you look at the development in church history, you have key influences like Jerome and Augustine, who are pushing in different directions. But basically, I would say the better position is that the materials Jerome is working with in coming to his canon list are the more likely to be

apostolic and the canon Jesus used. So why is that? When we find Jesus speaking of the Hebrew scriptures, he will speak often of a tripartite division, law prophets writings, usually more shortened to law and prophets, but nobody is asking him which prophets do you mean? Okay, there seems to be a working assumption among his listeners in that place. I'm not saying there wasn't outlier views. There is diversity. You can find different views. Nonetheless, among Palestinian Jews in the first century, there seems to have been a awareness of which books Jesus was referring to. I think Josephus is a key testimony in this discussion because he's talking about a closed canon. So he, Josephus, and by the way, if anybody wants to just go look this up,

Don't take my word for it. Just the best thing people can do is search against Apion 1.8 Josephus and just read through it. He gives a tripartite canon of 22 books, the five books of Moses, 13 prophets, four books that he calls of hymns and practical precepts, which we would call like wisdom literature today. There are some disputes about how you classify that. You know, he's probably lumping together like Jeremiah and Lamentations, for example, and so on and so forth. but it's a shorter canon, and importantly for our purposes, he regards it as closed from the time of Artaxerxes, who was a fifth-century figure, which implies the exclusion of the Duderocanicals. And then what really cements it for me personally, because I try to go into this with an open mind and consider the alternative sides,

is the earliest canon lists from the second century, like the Brianas list, which is often neglected, and then the testimony of Milito, Milito of Sardis. and I'll just say a word about Milito and then I'll kick it over to you guys for final comments but what we have with Milito is a second century figure very highly respected sometimes regarded as an apostolic father perhaps in the Johannine circle

but basically he gives a very shorter canon there's a few wrinkles on almost all these figures there's some wrinkles and disputes about the edges so people dispute about he doesn't have the book of Esther and there's disputes about whether that was an accidental omission there's some dispute about his reference to wisdom and whether that's another name for Proverbs or the book of wisdom and things like this to get into.

But it's a much shorter canon that excludes the Dutero canonicals. And, you know, maybe I'll even see if I can flag Zephaniah, my editor to put this passage up on the screen here because what I just want to say is he introduces this as a Christian canon. I keep hearing people saying that, well, yeah, Milito has a shorter canon, but he's just reporting the Jewish canon. Now it's true that he's interacting with Jewish sources, but he's interacting with them unto the end of stipulating a Christian canon.

And if I can get this up on the screen, people can see the parts I've emboldened here where he references the law and the prophets concerning the Savior and concerning our entire faith. That's a Christian canon. The Jews didn't speak of the law and the prophets concerning the Savior, and our faith meaning Christian faith, nor did they call them the Old Testament, as Melito calls these books.

He says these are the books of the Old Testament. Well, that's not how Jewish people refer to their scriptures. It's not old for them. They don't believe in the New Testament. So Melito is giving a Christian canon on the basis of his interfacing with Jewish sources and other materials. And that's very significant because we're talking about second century here. So bottom line, end of the day, I want to follow the canon that we think Jesus and the apostles had.

the earliest testimonies, I think, push in that direction. So that's my kind of summative kind of appeal, I guess. Any final comments from you guys on that? Other things you want to say on this topic? Yeah, on Melito, just to bolster further what you're saying, not only does Melito speak as though this is a Christian canon, but the, you know, because the book that this canon list is found in, his extracts, you know, is lost.

We have like fragments of these. And so where we're pulling this list from is from Eusebius, who cites Milito. And it's not just Melito who seems to be introducing a Christian list. It's Eusebius himself who's citing Melito, where we get this list from. And he is, his goal stated in his book several times over in his church history where we find this, is to provide a catalog of the Christian writings that make up the Old Testament and the New. So right before he gives Milito's list, he says this about Melito, quote, but in the extracts made by him,

the same writer gives at the beginning of the introduction a catalog of the acknowledged books of the Old Testament, which it is necessary to quote at this point. And then, you know, he gives his list. Well, why is that important? Because when he talks about a catalog of the acknowledged books of the Old Testament, this word that he's utilizing for acknowledged,

where we could translate it recognized, accepted, comes up a couple of other times in his writings. So actually, prior to this, in book three of his church history, he says this, book three chapter three quote but in the course of my history actually be careful to show in addition to the official succession what ecclesiastical writers have from time to time made use of any of the disputed works and what they have said in regard to the canonical and accepted same word accepted writings as well as in regard to those which are not of this class and quote later after the quote after them leader quote

in book five chapter eight this comes up again he says speaking about eraneus he says since in the beginning of this work, we promise to give, when needful, the words of the ancient presbyters and writers of the church, in which they have declared those traditions which came down to them concerning the canonical books. And since Aaronius is one of them, and then he goes on from there. And so he says several times that part of the goal in his church history is to give the list of canonical, accepted, acknowledged books to explain to you how it is and to demonstrate how it is that these early presbyters and writers utilize, the disputed books. And additionally, one final thing that I'll give as well from the text itself from Milito

that really serves to help debunk this idea that, no, Melito citing you simply a Jewish canon for polemical purposes in this book. Notice that, and this is me echoing scholar Roger Beckwith, notice that Melito claims that he journeyed east in the quote that we're talking about to reproduce even the authentic number and ordering of the Old Testament canon. And yet the numbering he provides doesn't add up to either the 22 book numbering nor the alternative 24 book numbering of the Jews that we were talking about earlier that all these other writers are appealing to. And so instead he numbers the books as 25, which is unknown in Jewish sources of the day. He achieves this number by reckoning Samuel and Kings as together four books and chronicles as two in the manner of some subterient manuscripts and by omitting or not mentioning lamentations and Esther.

So in other words, even the way that Melito goes about grouping or separating different books stands as another point of demarcation and this continuity from the Jewish sources. So if he had been acquainted with, for example, the 22 book numbering, he would not have mentioned Ruth separately from judges because that's those two books that they put together for the sake of the Jewish 22 book numbering. If he had been acquainted, let's say, with the 24 book, alternative numbering, he would have separated both Ruth and Lamentations into their own separate books. And additionally, something else that he does, he divides Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, each into two books.

According to Roger Beckwith, not only this does not match the Jewish sources of the day, but, quote, nearly all the features of Melito's list can be seen in later Syrian lists, as well as in other Christian sources. So not only is Melito's own word against this thesis, not only is the word of Eusebius who's citing Melito against this thesis, but even the contents of the list themselves. stand against this thesis. And so it's kind of funny too because even the circumstances, him traveling east when there was a vibrant community of Jews in his own city, Sardis, where actually, according to Beckwith, by this point in history, the Jews actually had a much better idea, more unified idea of the canon than the Christians did at this point in time, according to Beckwith, right, when it comes to the entirety of the canon. And so even if you take that into account, right, why is he traveling east when he has a Jewish community in town.

And yet people respond to that by saying, well, he's a bishop. Wouldn't he know what books they read in the churches? And that's when we would flag, I guess, to bring this whole conversation back to where we're talking about the two-tier canon, we would say, yeah, he knows what books are right in the churches. But if what's in dispute is which of those books are canonical with full authority and which books are of that second tier, then it makes sense that he would want to consult with one of the older mother churches of Christendom in the land.

from which the gospel had come from. And so that's all I would say with Milito. I think all the comments you guys have added on this have been great. So, yeah, Ben, anything you want to add? I think you covered it beautifully, brother. Great. Well, as a final sign-off comment, I'll say, I think when you get really in the weeds

on these really technical things about the canon, some people are feeling what's really driving them is more of an existential need of their, they're just looking for certainty. You know, earlier we used this image of a solid, rock versus quicksand. And existentially, we can all relate to that. We all know what it's like to feel unstable.

And I think what I have learned to, I've always said this and I've learned to reiterate this more and more is ultimately we want to direct people to Jesus and His Gospel as that solid rock. And so I'm not saying that as a way to sideline these important technical questions. This is sort of an additional matter, but it's more of a pastoral note at the end of a technical discussion. Say, where your heart is really going to find certainty is not by being a good. smarter than the next guy or reading the next book, important as study is, it's going to be

in Jesus himself. And sometimes in these complicated theological discussions, what hearts are really aching for is just a solid rock to stand on. And I think what I would want to encourage people to is that that comes through communion with Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit. And so that's a note that is not intended to minimize the technical things, but just in addition to that, as a pastoral note alongside that, that's something I love to emphasize at the end. Any final sign-off comments? By the way, everyone, check out both of their band and Javier's YouTube channels. They do great Protestant apologetics.

Any final sign-off comments? Anything you want to say about upcoming videos coming out on your channel? I do a lot of different live stream debates. So if anybody has any disagreement on these particular topics, I would invite you to have a cordial conversation with me on my channel. I put the link to jump into the stream, always in the description there. So feel free to have a conversation with me. I don't bite, I promise. Come on over. We'll have a good conversation.

I want to second that Ben does phenomenal job, a phenomenal job in these debates. So if you or, hey, one of your Roman Catholic friends, when I hop on and talk to him, he's like super cordial with people, great discussions going on over there. I'm hoping to join him soon and to have him maybe on my channel soon to have some of these live Q&A and debate sort of things. But yeah, I guess I would just second what you said, Gavin. And I think people need to find their rest in Christ. I think that even when struggling with these technical questions and doing all this research, I think people still need to slow down and take account of their life and ask,

am I attending my local church regularly? Am I reading the scriptures? Am I praying? Am I seeking after Christ? Am I seeking the truth here? Actually surrounded with prayer, surrounded with fasting, and actually attending to the spiritual disciplines, fighting sin. I think it's very easy.

And I says even from personal experience, I think it's easy when we're slacking on reading scripture, or we're slacking in prayer, or we're battling with sin. And yet we want to plug in that hole with, no, no, no, no, no. But my anxiety is totally coming from these academic questions. Right.

And I think both of those are extremely important. But as it turns out, without the spiritual discipline and the focus on really resting in Christ, then we don't actually have the ability to pursue that second thing, right? And that is actually finding the truth, waiting through this stuff. So that would just be my appeal to people. Great appeal and wonderful encouragement to give people that God can give you peace in the midst of the anxiety that many do feel on these important questions.

And so that doesn't short circuit around the study, but it's a part of the process. So that's a happy news. All right. Thank you both. Thanks everybody for watching this video. Stay tuned for more. Check out both of Ben and Javier's channels.

They're doing great stuff on Protestant Apologetics. And we'll see you in the next video.