The Canon - Part 2

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It is a joy this evening to take you back to the Scripture to study about the Scripture. Last week, we began what will be a multi-year study of Systematic Theology. We’ve entitled it Anchored because we don’t want to be like the children in the faith, described in Ephesians 4, who were carried about here and there by every wind of doctrine. Instead, we want to be anchored to the truth. We’re looking at the truth of God’s Word as it talks about God’s word. That’s where we have to begin, that’s the foundation, that’s the bedrock of everything. And the question really starts with how do we know what God has said? Why do we select these 66 books as the ones inspired of God?

Now, if you weren’t here last week, let me just tell you that what I’m going to say tonight really builds on that. And so, I encourage you to go back and listen because I hope it will make sense tonight, but it won’t really have the foundation I want it to have without last week.

Let me just briefly review for you just a couple of basic and important facts. When we talk about the canon of Scripture, the meaning of canon, we mean two things. In theological terms, we’re referring to that list of books that is recognized as inspired by God and therefore, as a result, become the rule of what we believe and how we live, of our faith and practice. This is the canon of Scripture.

Now, last time we started by just acknowledging that it is true that the church officially recognized the canon. In the middle of the second century, when critics began to attack the inspiration claims of certain books of the Bible, the leaders of the early church determined a set of criteria for supporting, listen carefully, for supporting the authenticity of those books that had already been universally accepted. It’s not that a council somewhere or a group of Christian leaders got together and with a straw poll decided what books ought to be in the Bible. Instead, those books had already been embraced. The Old Testament, as we learned last week and the New Testament as we’ll learn tonight, they had already been embraced by the church. And what the leaders did in response to attacks on that canon, that understood canon, is they established a set of criteria for supporting and undergirding the authenticity of those books.

Apostolicity is the first and greatest of those criteria. Was it written under the authority or by an apostle - under the authority of an apostle or by an apostle? That was the primary criteria when it came to the New Testament books. Secondly, antiquity. Was it written during the apostolic age? Because that was crucial - had to be attached to the apostles. Orthodoxy - was it doctrinally in agreement with the apostolic faith, particularly concerning Christ? Catholicity, that is, was it universally accepted by the church? Lection - was it widely read and used in the corporate worship of churches? And inspiration - did it have the same qualities as other already accepted inspired writings?

Now, as I noted for you last week, although those criteria are helpful, as a sort of confirmation, in the end, they don’t really answer why the books that we have accepted as inspired of God were in fact accepted when they were written. And so, we left the official church recognition, and we considered the biblical criteria for the canon. What is the biblical explanation for why the Scripture was accepted by God’s people as inspired? And, of course, we last week looked at the Old Testament.

And again, I am just going to touch on a couple of summary arguments. We really went through this in detail, looked at a number of texts, so please go back if you weren’t here. It’s crucial for you to get that foundation. But just to remind you, when you look at the biblical criteria for determining why one of those books, we call the books of the Old Testament, were accepted by God’s people as inspired, the first reason is that God unmistakably and undeniably chose Moses as His mouthpiece to the people. He went back to Exodus 19. And there in Exodus 19, some two million Israelites gather at the foot of Mount Sinai and God comes down. There was no doubt in the mind of the two million people gathered there, that God was on top of the mountain. You remember, there was the cloud. There was the lightning and the thunder. There was the trumpet sound that kept growing louder and louder. There were earthquakes. And then, out of all of that, this loud trumpet sound ceases, and we’re told that God Himself spoke from the mountain, what we call, the Ten Commandments. The people heard the voice of God. They understood that God was there. And then, God calls Moses up and He says, “This is my prophet. This is My man. I will speak with him, and he will relay My message to you.” And so, God undeniably, unquestionably chose Moses. Moses then, because of the witness of two million people that Moses was God’s prophet, Moses was universally accepted as God’s mouthpiece and what he wrote, the Pentateuch, as the very words of God.

Now, in what he wrote, under the inspiration of God, Moses predicted that God would continue to raise up men like himself who would speak on God’s behalf. There would be a line of prophets to whom God would reveal His word.

Now, as Moses predicted that these future prophets like him would come, he laid down, he gave us three primary criteria for discerning a true prophet from the false. The first two are very clear and are laid down exactly. We looked at them last time. In Deuteronomy 18:21-22, we learned that the true prophet’s predictions, the one God is truly speaking through, his predictions always come true. Miss one time and you’re a false prophet. By that standard, there are no prophets today.

Secondly, Deuteronomy 13:1-5, we saw that the true prophet’s message always agrees perfectly with previous revelation. Even if the guy can perform miracles that appear to be the genuine article, if he is teaching something contrary to previous revelation, God says he’s a false prophet because God doesn’t speak out of both sides of His mouth. God speaks and it is forever true. And so, He laid down that criteria.

And then, thirdly, we learned last time that in Exodus 4 and Exodus 8 that God, often, not always, but God often authenticates true prophets by empowering them to work miracles. Now, because there were no more prophets who met the biblical criteria, eventually the Old Testament canon was closed. As I showed you last time, in a number of ways, even Jewish scholarship agrees that by the time you reach 400 BC, what we call the Old Testament, was closed because there were no more prophets.

Now, the prophets of the Old Testament, as we discovered last time, Moses wrote what God commanded him in the scroll. And he put the scroll with the Ark of the Covenant. And Joshua then, a recognized prophet, comes behind him. He adds to the scroll. The writing prophets continue to add to the scrolls. So, in their lifetime, they were recognized as true prophets of God, and they added to the inspired documents of the prophets before them. So, there was no question of canon in the Old Testament because it was established by God through Moses and then through this line of prophets.

I finished last time by reminding you that during the lifetime of our Lord, the identical content - they structured the content a little differently in terms of how they divided the books - but the identical content of the 39 books called the Old Testament, in the Bible that you hold in your hand, the identical content was considered to be the inspired Scripture. And Jesus, our Lord, authenticated it as such. He said not a single word, not a single letter, not the smallest stroke of a letter will pass away till all is established, till all is accomplished. And so, our Lord confirmed the Old Testament canon. That was the final seal of approval on the Old Testament.

Now, that brings us tonight to the next question and that is, what about those books called the Apocrypha? Why do we accept the Hebrew Old Testament and yet not accept, as part of the canon, those 14 books that appear both in the Septuagint, the Bible that Jesus and the apostles often used, and in the Roman Catholic Bible?

So, let’s look then at the Apocrypha, and we have to begin with considering what are we talking about. What is the Apocrypha? Well, the Greek word means, “things that are hidden”. But no one can really tell you. No scholar that I’ve read can really tell you for sure. There are a lot of guesses why the Apocrypha ended up with that title.

Where did these books come from? Well, Jewish authors continued to write after the last true Old Testament prophet, Malachi, died. And what they wrote about Jewish history between the Testaments, such as for example the books of Maccabees, it’s very interesting, compelling reading. But the term apocrypha specifically refers to those fourteen books included in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament. It was translated out of Hebrew because by the time you get to 100 years, 200 years, the most before Christ, most of the Jews no longer spoke Hebrew. They spoke Aramaic after the Babylonian captivity. They couldn’t read Hebrew. And so, it was translated from Hebrew into Greek, which was the sort of English of the day, the universal language of commerce, and that was the Septuagint. And these 14 books, called the Apocrypha, were included in the Septuagint. They were written largely between 200 BC to 100 BC. There were some added after the time of our Lord.

Now, the Apocrypha includes these books, and I’m not going to go through them. You’ll recognize them and you’ve heard of some of them and we’ll see them. The most famous of them would be 1 and 2 Maccabees, which is a history of the Jewish revolts before Christ. Most of the Apocrypha was written originally in Greek and continued to exist in that language alone. A few were first written in Hebrew or Aramaic and then translated into Greek.

Now the question is: Okay, that’s what the Apocrypha is. Why do some argue that it should be included in the canon? There are two primary arguments for why it ought to be included in the canon. The first is, early versions of Scripture included them. The truth is there is only one ancient version that included them, and that is the Septuagint that I just mentioned to you. The other argument that’s used is the church fathers quote these books authoritatively. So, those are the arguments.

I’m going to answer those as we deal with the next part of it, and that is, why we should not include the Apocrypha in the canon. Let me give you a series of arguments for why the Apocrypha has never been received by God’s people as the inspired word of God.

Argument number one: the Apocrypha itself distinguishes itself from the Law and the Prophets or, in other words, the canonical Old Testament. For example, 1 Maccabees 4:45-46: “...So they tore down the altar, and stored the stones in a convenient place on the temple hill until a prophet should come to tell what to do with them.” There was no one, including the author himself, who could speak as a prophet with God’s authority. They were waiting for the prophet who, of course, came in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ. 1 Maccabees 9:27 says... Well, first of all, I’ll give you context. In the time of the Maccabees, there had been no prophet for a long time. And, speaking of a time of great distress, the author writes this, “...such as had not been since the time that prophets ceased to appear among them.” He’s speaking of a long time in the past and he says the prophets ceased to appear among them. So, the Apocrypha itself speaks as though it’s not written by prophets. It’s not to be accepted.

Secondly, the Jews never accepted the apocryphal books as part of the canon of the Old Testament. I mentioned Josephus last week. He was born in the first century. He had and used the Septuagint which included these fourteen books, the Apocrypha. In one of his documents against Apion, Josephus writes this, “We have not tens of thousands of books, discordant and conflicting, but only 22 [that’s the same content as our 39, just divided differently, only 22] containing the record of all time, which have been justly believed to be divine. Now, think about it. He had a Bible. He had the Septuagint that included the Apocrypha, and yet he discounts them from those considered to be divine. He adds this, “From Artaxerxes to our own times, a complete history has been written but has not been deemed worthy of equal credit with the earlier records because of the failure of the exact succession of the prophets.” Now, think about this. The greatest Jewish historian of the first century knew about the books of the Apocrypha, but both he and his contemporaries did not consider them to be equal to, or to bear the same authority to, the Old Testament. Josephus goes on to add that, “No words of God have been added to the Old Testament Scripture”, he says, “since about the year 435 BC.” The rabbis often said that the Holy Spirit, in the function of prophecy, had departed from Israel. The Jewish Talmud says, “After the latter prophets Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi had died, the Holy Spirit departed from Israel.” They mean, in terms of the Spirit of prophecy.

A third argument for why we should not include the Apocrypha in the canon is that neither Jesus, the apostles, nor any New Testament writer ever cites these books. By the Greek scholar Roger Nicole’s count, Jesus and the New Testament authors quote portions of the Old Testament as divinely inspired more than 295 times, but not once do they quote any other writing as authoritative. There are several extra-biblical quotations, but they’re not called the Word of God. For example, Jude 14 and 15 quotes from 1 Enoch. Paul quotes two pagan authors in Acts 17 and in Titus 1, but only for purposes of illustration. But even those citations are not from the Apocrypha. Not once in the New Testament do the authors cite a single statement from the books of the Apocrypha, even though they most often quote from the Septuagint which contained those 14 books.

A fourth argument is that Jesus affirmed the Jewish canon but not the Apocrypha. Read those two texts, Matthew 5:18 and Luke 24:24, and the language he uses describes the Hebrew canon - the 39 books as they appear in our Bible, 22 as they were segmented and added differently in the first century.

A fifth argument is that in Romans 3:2, Paul identified the writings the Jews embraced, our Old Testament, as... What he says in Romans 3:2 is they are the “oracles of God”. They are the oracles of God. In so doing, Paul was implicitly excluding the Apocrypha from those oracles. He was recognizing the Jewish canon and, by virtue of that, excluding everything else.

A sixth argument for why we should not include the Apocrypha in the canon is that church history argues against including these books as part of the canon. The earliest Christian list of Old Testament books comes from a man named Melito, Bishop of Sardis, writing about 170 AD. He lists all of our Old Testament, except Esther, but he doesn’t include a single book from the Apocrypha. The church historian, Eusebius, writing in 325 AD, quotes Origen as including most of the books of our Old Testament, including Esther, but doesn’t mention a single book of the Apocrypha. Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, included all of the books of our Old Testament and our New Testament canon, except Esther. And he mentioned several books from the Apocrypha but here’s what Athanasius said in 397 of the Apocrypha, “These are not indeed included in the canon but appointed by the fathers to be read by those who newly join us and who wish for instruction in the word of godliness.”

There was one voice among the early church fathers who did quote from the Apocrypha authoritatively. His name was Augustine. Augustine and the councils he influenced - the councils of Hippo, Carthage - he includes in his list of canonical books most of the apocryphal books but, and a lot of people love to cite him for that reason, but in his other writings, Augustine makes it clear that he distinguished between the canonicity of the Old Testament and the secondary canonicity of the Apocrypha. Here’s what he wrote. Augustine said, “They are [speaking of the apocryphal books, they are] not found in the canon, which the people of God received, because it is one thing to be able to write as men with the diligence of historians, and another as prophets with divine inspiration. The former pertained to the increase of knowledge. The latter to authority in our faith [or in religion] in which authority the canon is kept.” He distinguished between the two even though he had some sort of authoritative voice from the Apocrypha.

Jerome completed the Latin Vulgate in 404AD and because he included in the Latin Vulgate, the Apocrypha, it would eventually come to be accepted as canonical by the Catholic Church. But even Jerome didn’t believe it was part of the canon. In his famous helmed prologue to the books of Samuel/Kings, he lists exactly the content of our Old Testament books. And Jerome finishes with this quote, “Just as the church reads Judith and Tobias and Maccabees in public worship [those are apocryphal books] but does not receive them into the canonical scriptures, so let it read these two books also [speaking of the books of Solomon, also apocryphal books] let them read these two books also for the edification of the people, not for the establishing of the authority of the doctrines of the church.” Ironically, even Gregory the Great, a pope somewhere around 600 AD, said this about 1 Maccabees. He says, “We address a testimony from books, though not canonical, yet published for the edification of the church.”

Just before the Reformation, just before the time of the Reformation, Cardinal Eminis, in his preface to a document dedicated to Pope Leo X, states that the apocryphal books printed in it were not in the canon [this is right before the Reformation, were not in the canon] but used for edification.” You say, “Well, when did it change?” And the answer is, for 1500 years, the Apocrypha was not accepted as part of the canon. But the Council of Trent, the Catholic response to the Reformation, ignored church history and decreed the Apocrypha to be part of the canon for the very first time on April 8th, 1546. You say, “Well, why would they do that?” And the answer is, expediency. There were several very practical reasons the Catholic Church had to recognize the Apocrypha as being equal to the Scripture.

First of all, they had to defend its use in public worship. The Roman Catholic Church had used the Apocrypha in its worship for hundreds of years and, at the time of the Reformation, to admit that it wasn’t part of Scripture would seem and it would have been a serious error. Many of the priests didn’t understand even some of the things I’ve shared with you and taught those books as if they were equally inspired and authoritative.

Also, they did it to defend their doctrine of purgatory. They needed 2 Maccabees to be canonical because it’s reported there that Judas prayed for the dead and that’s the only place you can find even an inkling of a mention of something that might have some shadow of a resemblance to purgatory. It’s a weak argument, but it’s all the scriptural support they had. And so, Maccabees had to be in the canon and to defend the teaching of justification by faith plus works, and not by faith alone, which seems to be implied in several of the apocryphal books.

Luther, in his 1534 German version of the Bible, included all of these fourteen books in his German version of the Bible, in a section at the end of the canonical Old Testament, and he called them the Apocrypha. Of these books Luther wrote this, “These books are not to be regarded as equal in esteem with the sacred Scriptures, but yet are useful and valuable for reading.” This idea of separating them out from the real Scripture took hold, and even in the King James version of 1611 it was done.

So, just to summarize then what we’ve learned from a brief study of the Apocrypha. It is not inspired, it is not to be included in the canon, it is not authoritative, and it is not to be treated any differently than any other helpful human writings. The true prophet’s word was accepted immediately because he met Moses’ criteria. And that’s the very reason the Apocrypha was not. So, we’ve examined the biblical criteria for accepting the Old Testament and for rejecting the Apocrypha.

Now, that brings us to the New Testament. Several factors created a need not to determine the books that were in the canon, but to confirm the New Testament books that were in the canon - those books that had already been accepted by the churches as canonical and accepted as soon as they were written. Why did this have to happen? Well, there were spurious writings. There were the Gnostic Gospels, which you can always hear about on The Learning Channel around Easter or Christmas. There were attacks on the genuine by heretics like Marcion. There was the need for uniformity in what was read in public worship. And maybe most pressing of all, it was the edict by the Emperor Diocletian in 303 AD that all the sacred books be burned that forced Christians to decide which books had to be defended with their lives, at all costs. So, there needed to be some understanding of the canon.

Just a brief history. When you look at New Testament times, understand this. The New Testament canon was not formed in the second and third centuries as some argue. There wasn’t a vote at the church councils as to, “Let’s decide which books God inspired.” No, they were confirming in those councils what the church had already almost universally agreed to. The church, in fact, immediately accepted certain writings as having equal authority with the Old Testament canon. They immediately accepted the books we called the New Testament as the very words of God, on par with the Law and the Prophets.

For example, 1 Timothy 5. Turn there. 1 Timothy 5:18. Paul is talking here about paying some elders. They earn their living from their ministry. And he says in verse 18... Here’s his scriptural support: “For [notice what he says] the Scripture [this is his technical term for the inspired, canonical Scripture. For the Scripture] says, ‘You shall not muzzle the ox while he is threshing,’ [and here Paul quotes from Deuteronomy 25:4] and ‘The laborer is worthy of his wages.’” This is a quote from Luke 10:7. Notice, Paul quotes the New Testament gospel of Luke, written by his physician, his traveling companion, and he says, “It is graffe”. It is the same as Deuteronomy. This was immediate. There wasn’t a gap. There wasn’t a vote. It was recognized as Scripture.

1 Corinthians 2:13. Paul there says that even the words in which those to whom God revealed his truth, the words in which they wrote, were inspired, “combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words”.

In 1 Corinthians 14:37-38, Paul says... In fact, let’s turn there. 1 Corinthians 14. As Paul finishes up teaching about the abuse of gifts in Corinth, he says this in verse 37: “If anyone thinks he is a prophet or spiritual, let him recognize that the things which I write to you are the Lord’s commandment. But if anyone does not recognize this, he is not recognized.” The churches, Paul says, must acknowledge that the apostles are writing the commands of Christ.

In 1 Corinthians 11:2 and in 2 Thessalonians 2:5.... Turn to 2 Thessalonians 2:5. Let’s look at that one. 2 Thessalonians 2:5. Paul says, “Do you not remember that while I was still with you, I was telling you these things?” In 1 Corinthians 11:2 he makes a similar comment and says, “You are bound by what I taught you.” Churches were bound to obey the apostles’ commands including their written words. And, in fact, in 2 Thessalonians 3:6 and 14, Paul says those who refuse to obey the apostles’ words are to be put out of the church.

But I want you to turn to 2 Peter 3. This is a foundational text. 2 Peter 3:16. Let’s go back to verse 15. He refers to “our beloved brother Paul, who according to the wisdom given him, wrote to you, as also in all his letters [so all of Paul’s letters], speaking in them of these things, in which [in his letters] are some things hard to understand, which the untaught and unstable distort [and notice what Peters says], as they do also the rest of the Scriptures [graffe], to their own destruction.” Do you see what Peter just said? Peter said, “What Paul writes is Scripture. It’s on absolute par with the Old Testament. And there are those who distort what he writes, even as they distort what the Old Testament records.”

Benjamin Warfield writes, “The canon of the New Testament was completed [listen to this] when the last authoritative book was given to any church by the apostles, and that was when John wrote the apocalypse around AD 98. The canon of the New Testament was closed then.”

Now, what about in the times of the early church fathers, in the post-apostolic age? Well, the early church fathers affirmed the New Testament as the Word of God. They called the now completed Scriptures... You ready for this? This is from Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian. They called the Scriptures that we now have, the Law and the Prophets (there’s your Old Testament designation. We saw that last week - very common to describe the Old Testament), with the gospels and the apostles. Again, this phrase is used by Clement of Alexandria and by Tertullian as well. Justin Martyr explained that the gospels, as it’s used here in this expression, included the gospels written “by the Apostles and their companions”. And the apostles referred to the rest of the New Testament written under the auspices of an apostle. Irenaeus, the early church father, shortened this expression to just, “The Law and the Gospel”, the law being the Old Testament, what we call the Old Testament, the gospel being the New Testament.

Now, when you look through the writings of the early church fathers, you will find that they document the books that are in our New Testament, that they had been received by the churches. Now, when I give you numbers like last time, understand that they’re not saying only eight books were recognized by the churches. They mention in their writings eight books as being received and accepted by the churches. So, they’re simply confirming that Clement says there were eight, Ignatius identifies seven books, again, not saying there aren’t more. These are just ones he does identify. Polycarp, the disciple John, identifies 15 letters. Irenaeus, 21 books. The Muratorian Canon, which was a list of all the books believed to be in the canon, included our entire New Testament except for Hebrews, James, and one epistle of John (we’ll talk about that in a minute). Athanasius listed the 27 books in of our New Testament as the only New Testament books from God. That was in 367 AD. And during the basic time frame of the Council of Laodicea, the Council of Hippo, the Council of Carthage, all in the 300s AD, they all confirmed the 27 books of our New Testament.

Now, if you want to study this issue more from a scholarly standpoint, particularly the modern attacks on the New Testament canon, there’s an excellent book I recommend to you. It is written by a man named Michael Kruger. It’s called “The Question of Canon”.

But I want to move on from the church’s recognition because, ultimately, we don’t accept the New Testament letters or the New Testament gospels because the church recognized them. So, the question is, what then is the biblical criteria for identifying the New Testament canon? Church councils did not determine the canon of the New Testament. If they did so, that basically made Scripture dependent on the church for its authority. Alan Cairns writes, “Inspired Scripture has its authority inherent in itself, direct from its divine author. And just as we saw Moses provided evidence of those who would follow him as a conduit for divine revelation, Jesus did exactly the same.” Listen carefully. This is key. Jesus pre-authenticated our New Testament. Obviously, Jesus chose 12 men to be His apostles. He really chose 11 because He knew that Judas was a traitor and a betrayer from the beginning. So, He knew that there were eleven who were truly followers and believers of His. And He set them aside as His apostles.

The word apostle means, “sent one”. It refers to an official representative. In first century parlance, an apostle was the direct representative of the one who sent him and, in that person’s place, he could act authoritatively and in a way that was legally binding. He was his proxy. He went with power of attorney for the person he represented, an authorized messenger and representative. And Jesus chose the apostles to be His proxies. In Mark 3, again it’s repeated in Acts 10:41, and of course in Ephesians 2:20, he talks about the foundation of the church being the apostles. Jesus selected these men to be His official representatives, to be His proxies, to legally, in a legally binding way, represent Him. And Jesus then, after choosing the apostles to be His proxies, He authorized the apostles, His official representatives, to write.

Turn with me to John’s gospel - John’s gospel, in the upper room discourse, John 14, John 14:25. Jesus says, “These things I have spoken to you while abiding with you [Jesus says, I’ve taught you while I’ve been with you]. But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you.” Now, you who are students, I hate to tell you this, but this verse is not a promise that you will remember what you studied on your test or what you didn’t study on your test, which is how some students use it. This verse has nothing to do with us. This is a promise from Jesus to His apostles. He’s saying, “There were certain things I taught you while I was with you, but I’m going to send the Spirit (and verse 26) He is going to teach you the rest of what you need to know. He’s going to teach you all things and He’s going to bring to your remembrance all that I said to you.”

Think about it. The apostle John writes his gospel late in the first century. He’s an old man. Decades have passed since he walked on earth with Jesus. How did he remember all of those things? Well, obviously he was repeating them often throughout his life but, here, Jesus promises the apostles that they will be enabled supernaturally, under the inspiration of the Spirit, to remember what He said.

Turn over to chapter 15:26: “When the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, that is the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify about Me, and you will testify also...” Jesus is saying, “Listen, I’m going to send the Spirit. He’s going to teach you the rest of what you need to know, and you are authorized to speak on My behalf because you’ve been with Me from the beginning.”

Look at chapter 16:12: ”I have many more things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will disclose to you what is to come. He will glorify Me, for He will take of Mine and will disclose it to you. All things that the Father has are Mine; therefore I said that He takes of Mine and will disclose it to you.” Again, folks, this is not an immediate promise to us. It’s only a promise to us through the apostles, through what the Spirit taught them, through the books they wrote and what we learn from them. This is a promise of God to his official representatives.

Look at John 17, John 17:20. Here, Jesus implies what He stated back in that earlier text, that He’s authorizing the apostles to speak on His behalf because He says this in verse 20, ”I do not ask [as He prays] on behalf of these [eleven] alone [Judas is already gone], but for those also who believe in Me through their word...” Jesus is saying, “They are going to speak on My behalf and there’re going to be those who will believe in Me based on their testimony.”

Folks, your sitting here tonight is living proof of Jesus’ prayer. And it all comes back to His promise that He would authorize His apostles to represent Him on earth, to speak on His behalf. The Spirit would tell them the rest of what they needed and then they would speak and write on behalf of Christ in the world. He authorized them to do so. They are His apostles. That’s why Paul opens all of his epistles saying, “I’m an apostle!” What’s he claiming? He’s saying, “I have been officially picked as a proxy for Jesus Christ. He is speaking through me. I legally represent Him.”

Jesus also pre-authenticated our New Testament by authenticating the apostles by giving them power to work miracles. That’s touched on in several places in Acts 2, but 2 Corinthians 12:12 talks about... Paul says, “The signs of an apostle were given to me” and he speaks of these miraculous abilities. Why? Well, just like with the rest of the prophets, even in the Old Testament, God often gave them miraculous abilities to authenticate, to confirm their message. And certainly, He did this with the apostles.

So, this was the primary test of inspiration during the New Testament age. The teaching of an apostle was received immediately simply because he was an apostle, personally chosen and commissioned by Jesus Christ. Because of Christ’s pre-authentication, the New Testament books were immediately recognized as inspired if they were known without question to be the work of an apostle or someone designated by an apostle. They were placed upon the church by the apostles as having equal authority to the Old Testament Scripture. They circulated in churches during the lifetime of the apostles. They were received as authoritative throughout the majority of the churches. From the beginning, most Christians received even the few disputed books. The discussion about those books eventually led to a universal acceptance by the whole church that has been almost totally unquestioned since that time. What Jesus really did, folks, was He provided us with a list of inspired authors when He chose the Twelve and He authorized them. R. Laird Harris, in his excellent book, writes this, “The Lord Jesus did not, in prophecy, give us a list of the 27 New Testament books. He did, however, give us a list of the inspired authors. Upon them the church of Christ is founded and by them the word was written.”

So, how does that work out practically with the individual books? Well, again, Warfield writes, “In every case, the principle on which a book was accepted, or doubts against it laid aside, was the historical tradition of apostolicity. Was it written by an apostle? Those books the apostles imposed on the church as the rule of faith and practice were accepted.”

Now, let’s work that out just briefly. Most of the New Testament is in the canon because of direct, apostolic authorship. For example, you have Matthew who was an apostle. Obviously, John was an apostle. So, you have his gospel, you have his epistles, and you have Revelation. Peter was an apostle, so you have 1 and 2 Peter. And, in addition, there were two other - the remaining 11 apostles recognized two other men as having a status equal to their own. The first one is James, the half-brother of Christ. He’s mentioned with the apostles in 1 Corinthians 15:7 and in Galatians 1:19. Also, Paul is identified as an apostle. He consistently claimed to be an apostle. If you doubt that, just read the opening verse of all of his letters. He saw the risen Christ and was personally appointed to be an apostle according to Galatians 1:1 and 1 Corinthians 9:1. In addition, Paul didn’t just call himself an apostle, the other apostles recognized him as an apostle. Of course, not initially right after his conversion, but eventually. Galatians 2 records that. And Peter, to sort of cap it off Peter, remember we saw in 2 Peter 3, calls the writings of Paul what? Scripture. So, we can add to our list of New Testament books written by an apostle, James and all of the Pauline epistles, Romans through Philemon.

Now, folks, that leaves only five New Testament books that were not directly written by an apostle of Jesus Christ. What are those books? Well, Mark, Luke, Acts Hebrews, and Jude. So, if they weren’t written by an apostle, why were they accepted? Well, let’s talk about that. It’s because of their relationship to an apostle.

For example, with the Gospel of Mark, we know that it was because of his close association with Peter. Listen to Papius, the early church father: “The elder John used to say, ‘Mark having become Peter’s interpreter wrote accurately all that he remembered.’” So, Mark was accepted because it was essentially Peter’s gospel.

What about Luke and Acts? Well, because of Luke’s close association with Paul. Again, listen to Irenaeus. Irenaeus writes, “Luke was always attached to and inseparable from Paul, and with him performed the work of an evangelist and was entrusted to hand down to us a gospel.” Tertullian referred to Luke as “Paul’s gospel written by Luke”. Origen writes that Luke composed for Gentile converts the gospel commended by Paul. But of course, the best evidence, as we’ve already seen, comes from Paul himself. Because he called, in 1 Timothy 5:17-18, he called the writings of Luke, particularly the Gospel of Luke, Scripture.

What about Jude? Jude was accepted because of his association with James. And he mentions that in Jude 1 and because, of course, the fact he was the believing half-brother of Christ.

That leaves only one New Testament book, and that’s the book of Hebrews. It was accepted because most saw it as having been written in close association with Paul’s. Origen writes, “Who wrote the epistle, in truth, God knows.” But in the same context, Origen writes this: “Not without reason have the Ancients handed it down as Paul’s.” Clement argues that the epistle to the Hebrew is Paul’s. And he argues that Paul wrote Hebrews in Hebrew, to the Jews, and Luke translated into Greek, for the Gentiles.

So, here’s why we accept those five books that weren’t directly written by an apostle. They were... The books of our New Testament are accepted as the canon because they were either written by one of Jesus’ officially picked proxies writing legally on His behalf or by someone who wrote under their authority - these men.

By the way, if you want to study this issue more thoroughly - the biblical criteria for the New Testament canon - I heartily recommend to you R. Laird Harris’s book, The Inspiration and Canonicity of the Scripture. It was Christian book of the year back in 1969. Very, very insightful.

Now, the last thing I want us to do, very briefly, is look at the closed canon. How do we know the canon is closed? How do you know there’ll be no more writings added to the canon? Well, there’s several arguments.

First of all, the age of authenticated Old Testament prophets ended. That’s very clear. And there are no more New Testament apostles. Secondly, church history affirms the close of the canon. By the 2nd century, the 66 books of our Bible were affirmed as the only true Scripture and were officially sanctioned by the church councils that followed. Thirdly, Scripture clearly implies the close of the canon. I wish I had time to take you to these texts, but I’m out of time. Hebrews 1. Hebrews 1 says, “God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son...” The clear implication is that God’s revelation to us in His Son is, as Wayne Grudem puts it, “the culmination of His speaking to mankind and it’s His greatest and final revelation to mankind in the period of redemptive history”. There is a finality in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. It is God’s last word to us in and through His Son.

Where is the authorized record of God’s revelation in His Son? In the men that Jesus Himself handpicked and in their companions. Jude 3 refers to the sum of what all Christians believe as “the faith which was once for all”. This is something done for all time, never to be repeated. The faith was delivered. By the time Jude wrote that faith had already been delivered by God to His people. And, of course, Revelation ends, in Revelation 22:18-19, with a warning about adding to the Scripture. It’s not the first time, but it’s not a coincidence that this warning comes at the end of the last book written by the last living apostle, the apostle John, in the 90s AD. It is a strong warning added to the literal end of the apostle’s writings.

So, what are the practical applications of a closed canon? Very quickly. God has completed everything He wanted to tell us. That leads us to a confidence, folks, in the sufficiency of Scripture. God has spoken and He has given us His final word. Secondly, there have been no additional writings from God. This helps us, by the way, identify the cults and other Christian aberrations, because invariably they claim some updated message from God. Thirdly, we should not expect any additional revelation of any kind - modern day prophets, for example, which is very common and popular. Number four, and these are somewhat overlapping but I want to share them separately, we should not expect God to speak to us outside of Scripture. Listen, don’t listen for the voice of God. Don’t read Jesus Calling. Jesus calls in this book. We should not seek subjective impressions from God. That’s another way to try to have God speak to you. God has spoken and that means, folks, we only have to master one book. God’s revelation is not a moving target. It’s recorded in letters and words and phrases and sentences and paragraphs and in 66 books bound into one book. Everything God will ever say to you in this life is found between the covers of this book, what Martin Luther called, “the external word”. It’s not something subjective inside of you. It’s a book you can read and understand and know this is the Word of God to you. We need to become men and women of the Word.

Let’s pray together.

Father, how can we thank You for giving us a certain Word, by confirming it in the ways You did - both the Old Testament, through Moses and his writings and the line of prophets, through our Lord confirming the Old Testament canon, and then our Lord pre-authenticating the New by giving us a list of its inspired authors. Father, thank You. We don’t have to worry. We don’t have to wonder. We don’t have to question, “Is this Your Word?” Help us, instead, to love it, to study it, to meditate on it, to teach it to our children, to treasure it, to understand it, to live it, to defend it, and to pass it on to the next generation until our Lord comes. For it’s in His name we pray, Amen!