All language subtitles for The God Who Speaks44553

If God could speak, what would he say?

What would he tell us about the world?

What would he tell us about himself?

If God could speak, how would he speak?

Would he tell us everything at once?

Would he have an angel bring
heavenly books to Earth?

If God could speak, would we understand?

Would his language be so far beyond us,

would his intention be impossible to see?

When God speaks, what does he say?

The Bible's a revelation of the character

and the will of God.

It tells us who he is and how we can live

in a relationship with him.

That's the primary thrust,
I think, of the Bible.

It's interesting the Bible starts in Eden

and it ends in Eden, so
it's all about living

in a relationship with him,
and what that looks like.

When we ask the question what the Bible is,

the best way to say it is the Bible

is God's written relation to his people.

Now, God reveals himself
in all kinds of ways,

and he actually speaks in
ways outside the Bible,

in days of old to prophets
and to the people of God,

and so you'd hear the voice of the Lord

and call it the word of the Lord,

but over time, that became inscripturated,

became written down into his word,

and over time we've collected the books

that contain those words
into 66 smaller books

that collectively we call the Bible.

The Bible is a collection
of divinely-inspired texts

that document not only what God
has done throughout history,

but also what that means.

So it interprets what those events mean.

You have a book written by 40-some authors

over 1,500-plus years, and
dozens of different topics

that have absolute unity.

Most of the people didn't
know each other who wrote it,

so it has amazing unity
within great diversity,

which is best accounted for by deity.

But here we have this
grand narrative that is meant

to bring us back into fellowship with him.

To bring us into a harmonious
fellowship with one another,

where we live together,
reflecting his character.

And ultimately, a redeemed humanity

in a new heaven and a new Earth.

Here is the one who made
us, addressing us about how

life should be lived and
how we should approach life.

It's full of wisdom.

It's full of discernment.

It's full of direction and guidance.

In some cases, correction.

And so, I think to get a good
look at who we really are,

as people, the image and
metaphor that's used about

the Bible is that it's a good mirror.

It helps us to see things
as they really are.

I often tell people that one of the ways

that I know that the Bible is true

is the way that it diagnoses my sin.

I'm often reading through
a passage and I'm thinking:

this was written 3,000 years ago,

and yet it perfectly diagnoses the state

of the sin of my heart.

How could human beings
have been able to do that?

And the only way that can
happen is if my creator

is actually the author of the book.

We read books so that
we might understand them.

But when we read the Bible, we
realize that it is describing

who we are and what we are.

It's also unique in that it
provides the only satisfying

answer to the question
of our human existence.

It tells us why we're here
and where we're going.

And why it matters.

You need God, specifically,
in propositional language,

telling us certain facts about
reality, including himself.

You can get some of
those facts from nature,

but you can't get all of them.

You can't get that God is triune,

you can't get the plan of
salvation from the stars.

You can only get it from
special revelations.

So if we're gonna be saved and sanctified,

we need the scriptures.

The study of the word of God, at any level,

is the study of God, himself.

There's some kind of identity
between God and his word,

and yet, to say that the study of the word

as words and propositions on a page,

is not an end in itself, because
it's to drive us to Christ.

To God, himself.

In the upper room, in the
great intercessory prayer,

Jesus prayed for the
sanctification of his disciples,

and he said: sanctify them by thy word.

That's the means by
which we are sanctified.

Then he went on to say: thy word is truth.

So the scriptures should dominate

everything that the church does.

It shouldn't be an aside
to what the church does.

The foundation of what the church should do

should be about advancing
the message of scripture.

Where you find a healthy biblical church,

by definition, you're going
to find a church happily,

faithfully, living under
the authority of that word.

Understanding that the
most historic formula

for the Christian church has been this:

when the scripture speaks, God speaks.

And if you understand that rightly,

then everything else
simply falls into place.

Language is an incredible mystery, really.

What is it that makes human beings

able to communicate in word?

Personally, I think that
is the image of God in us.

Because God speaks right at
the beginning of the Bible.

God spoke the world into existence.

You know, you think about
words and whether or not

their important, and we
realize we can't even have

a conversation without words.

What's really interesting is that we can't

even think to ourselves without words.

We can't explain ourselves
to ourselves without words.

Now, that's either an accident
of evolutionary biology

and development, or it is evidence

to the fact that God made us in his image.

And so, here the Bible tells us that we are

God's creatures, made in his image.

And what distinguishes
us from other creatures?

Well, at least in part the use of words.

And because he's made himself accessible,

through speaking to us
and through the display

of his character in what he's made,

he's made himself accessible,
that means that truth,

also, is accessible.

Now, that includes ordinary
truths like two plus two

is equal to four, but it
also includes the truths

about who God is, that he's everlasting,

that he's all powerful,
that he's supremely good.

So for God to speak is for God to engage

in self-revelation; we only know God

because God has
condescended to speak to us.

So one of the first things we say about God

is that he is a speaking God.

We would not know him,
except that he speaks to us.

And the beautiful thing, really,

what makes life worth living and gives us

the ability to, with hope, with joy,

with tenacity, make it
through the valleys of life,

is the fact that the
eternal god who created us

can be personally known.

He's with us, and according
to one passage of scripture

in Hebrews, chapter 13, if we
will commit our lives to him,

he will never, never
leave us or forsake us.

The Bible is essentially
God's self-revelation,

and God doesn't just reveal himself

in terms of what you must do.

That is the consequence of who he is,

and the way in which he wants
us to understand his world.

If God created us,

then he sets the terms of his revelation.

What we know, when we know
it, how it is revealed,

it's all dependent on him.

But it seems so strange.

An eternal God, tying
himself to human history?

Illustrating his character
in law, prophecy and wisdom?

What happens when he appears?

When he steps down into history and speaks?

You know, the question that
always exists in people's mind

is simply this: what is God like?

And are there many gods,
or is there one God?

Of course, left on our own,
all of these are mysteries.

What you have at Sinai is very remarkable.

You find, for example, that
the people were to stand back.

God says: stand back.

No animal was even to touch the mountain.

If an animal touched the mountain,

it was to be put to death, but not directly

with the human hand; it was
to be shot with an arrow.

Because God says: I'm coming, stand back.

Get out of the way.

What God was revealing
there was his holiness.

So when we think of the 10 commandments,

they were not simply given
for a certain point in time.

They really are, let me
use the word omnitemporal.

By that I mean they exist
as the basic law of God,

throughout all eras.

And God is really saying,
in the 10 commandments,

this is what I'm like.

And so there's no other words

like them in all of scripture.

Jesus speaks in the New Testament, God's,

but nowhere else does God thunder words

to the entire congregation
of the people of God.

These obviously are of
fundamental importance

to God's covenant with these people.

God speaks in an audible
voice to the people,

but then he writes it down
in the 10 commandments

in written form; it was
written the first time

by the very finger of God,
God himself did the writing.

That's hammering home the fact
that this original writing

was the very word of God,
and had the authority

of the same God who
spoke in thunder and fire

at Mount Sinai, but that written
form of the 10 commandments

was the first piece of what we call canon.

That is, it's the body of
things that God set aside,

of his own word, for impermanent form.

There's some things that
God said that he said

to particular people,
and they weren't recorded

in written form for posterity.

That's okay; there are
many things, for instance,

in Jesus's earthly life that he taught.

Not all of those have been written down.

It would be overwhelming
if we had all of those.

But God purposed that
there would be a selection

of those things that would
be there in permanent form.

If God wrote a book,

would it be a history book?

The transcendent being
interacting with creatures

who are separated by sin,
distanced by unbelief.

What would he write about these people?

Would bh paint grand pictures?

Would he hide the embarrassing details?

Is human experience beyond him?

It's been said that the Bible is not a book

that man would write, if he could write,

or could write if he would write.

Every now and then, I'll be in a debate

at a university, and someone will say:

well, the Old Testament
is merely pro-Israeli,

Zionistic propaganda.

It's just the Jewish people were trying

to feel good about who they were.

But that claim falls apart upon closer look

at the content, because look, you've got

one of the greatest kings of Israel, David,

was an adulterer.

Abraham twice lied about
the identity of his wife.

So one of the things that
bears the ring of truth

is the thing that we
probably would have excluded,

had the Bible been a
merely human invention.

The sin, the foibles, the failures

of many of the Bible's great figures,

we probably would have left out.

The Bible's appeal to
prophecy and fulfillment,

before and after, all of that depends

on historical progress, on continuity,

on the sequence of time.

So God himself doubtless inhabits eternity,

and is, in some sense,
above space and time.

In that sense, he's transcendent.

That's what we mean by transcendent:

not limited by space and time.

Yet, at the same time, he
discloses himself to us

in space and time, that
is to say, in history.

Now, one of the things to
understand about the Bible

is that it talks about
God's plan through the ages.

And we call it: redemptive history.

And the Bible is intrinsically

connected to that, in two ways.

One is that it gives a lot
of attention to explaining

how God was dealing with the human race,

from creation onwards, the fall into sin,

and then various periods of redemption.

So it talks about redemptive history,

but the second way is that it's given,

progressively, in history.

God didn't have it just drop from heaven,

at one point in time.

There's some people who
practically treat it

as if it was that way;
it is a book from God.

But it's a book where he addresses people

where they are in history,

and he doesn't reveal
everything all at once.

His plan of redemption keeps pace

with his speaking about redemption.

Redemptive history moves forward,

through prophets, priests, and kings,

to an ultimate prophet, priest, and king.

But people need proof.

How can we be confident that
Jesus is the fulfillment?

How do we see it the way his

earliest followers would see it?

When Jesus came and the disciples preached,

there wasn't a New Testament to appeal to.

They were dealing with
promises that were coming

out of the Old Testament,
tied to the great covenants.

The covenant of Abraham,
that God was gonna bless

the world through Abraham's family.

The covenant to David
that there would be a king

and a line of kings that would
represent the way of God,

and then finally, the new covenant,

the idea that God was gonna
write his law on our hearts,

put his spirit within us, and
that we were gonna do that

in the context of having our sins forgiven.

And the story of Jesus
steps into those promises,

made centuries before, and
addresses really the reconnecting

of God to us in what had
been a broken relationship.

You know, the very first
book of the New Testament,

Matthew, opens with the genealogy of Jesus.

And the purpose of that
genealogy is to affirm

that Jesus is the fulfillment

of the whole Old Testament story.

It's crafted very, we could go into detail,

but there's not time,
very carefully crafted,

to show that he fulfills
the whole history of Israel,

the whole story of the Old Testament.

As we look through the New Testament,

I mean, he fulfills everything
in the Old Testament.

He is the revelation of God that fulfills

God's revelation in Moses, and
brings it to its completion.

He is the lamb slain from
the foundation of the world,

the lamb of God who takes
away the sin of the world.

That fulfills all the
old sacrificial system

in the Old Testament.

I would imagine that Jesus
probably knew the whole

Old Testament off by heart,
so that when he, then,

in the synagogue in
Nazareth says, you know,

this is about me.

He is able too say "this is
about me" because he knows

what this is about, and
that the prophecy of Isaiah

was revealing who and
what the messiah truly is.

I would talk about these
prophecies, and a professor

would say: well, I don't
believe this ever happened,

I don't think these prophecies
in the Old Testament

were written down until Jesus was born,

and then they were written out so they

would coincide with his life.

I said: wow.

That's amazing, that sounds pretty good.

Unless you wanna think.

I would say: look, if you say
there's not a 500-year gap,

minimum, from the completion
of the Old Testament

and the time of Christ,
I said, you got a problem

with the Septuagint, the Greek translation

of the Hebrew Old Testament,
documented in history,

that was initiated right
around 250 years before Christ.

Well, first of all, the
Septuagint is the ancient

translation of the Hebrew
scriptures into Greek.

It was probably the first translation made

of the Hebrew scriptures.

It was begun in the third
century before Christ,

with the Pentateuch being translated,

probably in Alexandria, Egypt.

Tradition has it that there
were about 70 translators,

so it was the Bible of
Greek-speaking Judaism,

before Christ came, and because
Greek was the lingua franca

of the Mediterranean world,
when the apostles go out

to preach the gospel, they
naturally preach in Greek,

because their language, Aramaic, probably,

wasn't widely used outside
of first-century Palestine.

If the Old Testament
is composed of 39 books,

written across hundreds of years

from a diversity of authors, how do we know

that these are the books that God intended?

Would Jesus even recognize

the Old Testament we hold in our hands?

The books that were
being discussed as possibly

a part of the Old
Testament canon by the time

we get to the first century
are books like Lamentations,

Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes,
works like that.

And maybe a few other works
that end up showing up

in what we call the apocrypha.

Wisdom, Sirrac, those kinds of works.

But the works that everyone
recognizes were seen

as inspired and a part of the
Jewish scripture at the time

include the Torah, the first five books,

Proverbs, Psalms, your major prophets,

most of your minor prophets, and so,

if we don't know the exact
limits of the Old Testament canon

in the first century, which is possible,

it may be that it was
already decided by then.

That's also conceivable.

That which is being excluded
doesn't really represent

any significant portion of the text

that the New Testament's interacting with.

We all know now that, if
we have Catholic friends,

their Bibles will generally
be bigger than ours

because they contain a number
of books in the Old Testament.

Book of Maccabees, for example,

that Protestant books exclude.

And they're excluded, by
and large, on the grounds

that we don't find them in the Hebrew,

they don't seem to have
the kind of longstanding,

universal acceptance within the church

prior to, say, the Council of Trent,

that one expects from canonical books.

One of the primary reasons
we don't use those books,

or don't view those books as scripture,

is because Jesus and the
apostles did not use those books,

or view those books as scripture.

That's a very basic way of putting it.

If those books, indeed,
were viewed as scripture

and that people were using
them widely as scripture

and they were considered part
of the Old Testament canon,

we would have expected Jesus
and the apostles somewhere,

sometime, at least once, using
at least one of those books

as scripture, and the fact is,

we don't see that even a single time.

They were respected and utilized because

they were regarded as helpful
Jewish sources of material

and information, particularly about

what was called the Maccabean War,

in the case of the
historical apocryphal books,

which is a very traumatic
period in Israel's history,

when she was almost wiped
out by Antiochus Epiphanes,

and had the Jews not won the Maccabean War,

we may not have Judaism today.

It might have been
extinguished from the Earth.

It's true that some of the apocryphal books

are found bound within some
of the biblical manuscripts,

but not all of them,
and not in every codex.

And I don't think that
that necessarily entails

that they must be canonical.

If you look at our Bibles today, we've got,

between the cover's called the Holy Bible,

we've got essays, we've got maps,

we've got indices, we've
got reader resources,

we've got study notes on
the bottom of the page.

There's lots of material
in our modern Bibles

that none of us would consider
canonical or inspired.

It's noteworthy, for
example, that Jesus disagrees

with the Pharisees and
Sadducees over a number

of different issues,
theologically and doctrinally.

They debate all kinds of
things, all throughout

the pages of the gospels,
but one of the things

that's noteworthy is
they never debate about

which books belong in the canon

and which books do not belong in the canon.

Jesus refers to the
scripture, and the Pharisees

seem to understand what
books he's talking about.

Jesus refers to the Old Testament writings,

Sadducees seem to be fairly
content that we all agree

on which books are in
and which books are out.

There's no oddity of them saying:

well, you're quoting from a
book that's not in the canon.

And Jesus never says that
to a Pharisee or a Sadducee,

and there seems to be
every good reason to think

that that issue was relatively
settled in the time of Jesus.

You know, of course, one
of the most favored verses

in all the Bible is
John 1:1, where it says:

in the beginning was the word.

The Greek word is "logos".

We could say: in the beginning was logic.

And why is that word used
and applied to Jesus?

As John later says in verse
14: the word became flesh.

First of all, because the
word had a great meaning,

in those days, and
there's some debate as to

whether or not it's based on
the Greek or other meanings,

but here's the idea: Jesus is the logic

and the intelligibility of God.

The word signifies God's self-disclosure.

The word is God's self-revelation.

It's how God makes himself known.

So it's profound and immensely significant

and actually quite logical
that Christ would be called

the word made flesh, because now, visibly,

before our eyes, we have the
revelation of God, himself.

As much as I love the book of Hebrews,

if I were marooned on a desert island

and could only have one biblical book,

it would be one of the gospels.

Because it's there we meet Jesus.

It's there that the narrative,
the story, the account,

of the actual incarnation of
the son of God takes place.

So he sent his son as the god-man,

just as much man as if he'd never been god,

and just as much god as
if he'd never been man.

So that we could see and
hear in a way that we could

comprehend the truth of
God's very heart and mind.

In order that you might
know that the son of man

has authority on Earth to forgive sins,

I say to you: get up and walk.

He does something that you can see,

and links it to something you can't see.

You can't see forgiveness of sins.

You can see someone being healed.

And if that guy gets up
and walks, his walk talks.

And it says: the son of man has authority

on Earth to forgive sins.

And then the context for that remark is:

but no one can forgive sins but God.

And words are cheap, I
mean, they, I can utter it

and you know, then you're
left with the choice

of whether to believe it or not.

But if I can show it, if I
can compellingly demonstrate

that what I'm claiming
might have, you know,

some avenue to the truth and be reflective

of what's going on, that's a
more powerful way to do it.

So the Bible calls the
miracles that Jesus does

things like signs, or powers.

Those are the words that are
used to describe the miracles.

And the miracles are really
what I call: power-points.

They're audio-visuals to a
truth about who Jesus is,

that shows his power and authority.

I love the beginning of the Gospel of Mark,

where Jesus stands forward and he says:

the time is fulfilled, the
kingdom of God is at hand.

Repent and believe the good news.

Because there had been
400 years, essentially,

of silence in the inter-testamental period.

John the Baptist had stepped forward

and he was pointing the
way, and it was all pregnant

for the appearing of this
one, and the very fact

that Mark begins by Jesus
reaching into the old,

in order to put himself in the present

is so wonderfully helpful.

For him to unroll the Isaiah scroll

and explain, today, this is
fulfilled in your hearing,

speaks of his own messianic
identity and mission.

But also suggests that he
has studied the scriptures.

Someone had taught them to him.

And he saw fit to announce
his own mission and ministry

with a reference to the Bible.

If anyone could have
just announced: it's me.

You don't need to read
that dusty book anymore,

that old scroll, it would have been Jesus.

But he never did that,
because he understood

that his ministry was an
extension and a fulfilling,

but never an abolishing or an eradicating.

I remember when I was in Bible college,

I said to myself: I can
believe in the New Testament,

but it's hard for me to
believe in the Old Testament.

And then I realized something.

I can't believe less than Jesus believed.

And he had absolute confidence
in the Old Testament.

There's no debate about what
his view of scripture was.

He says, you know, his word
is true, thy word is truth.

He said that: not one jot
or tittle will pass away.

To all this will, he got
jot and tittle inspiration,

is what he taught.

He never sets scripture aside.

What he did was to make very clear

that he perfectly fulfilled scripture.

And of course, he went beyond
even the Old Testament law

in the Sermon on the Mount,
saying: you've heard it said.

And he never reverses it,
he never minimizes it.

Instead, he goes even beyond it.

You've heard it said, you
shall not commit adultery.

I will tell you that if
you've lusted in your heart,

you have already committed adultery.

Our popular evangelical understanding

of Jesus and the Pharisees is this.

We think that Jesus's big
message to the Pharisees is:

aw, come on guys, don't be so nitpicky.

You will never once find
Jesus in the gospels

saying to the Pharisees: you
care too much about the law.

Invariably, Jesus will say:
you have added to the law,

and thus contradicted it.

Or he'll say: you guys make
a whole lot about the law,

but you don't really follow it.

Over and over, watch him make that move.

Those are what he says.

And what is that flowing out of?

A rock-solid commitment to
the sole, final authority

and sufficiency of the word of God.

What does Jesus wanna see?

The word of God as the
sole, final authority

for faith and practice
in the life of believers.

And he's saying Pharisees,
for all the bells and whistles

that you attach to your
teaching on the law,

you undermine it.

So, every evidence is that
Jesus knew our Old testament,

the books that we have, that
he affirmed them as holy

scripture, along with the
other Jewish people of his day,

and that from beginning to end,

he interpreted and understood
his own life in that way.

He is the Messiah, he is the fulfillment

of the history of God's
people in the Old Testament.

So, yes, Jesus very much
affirmed the authority

of the Old Testament, so if you deny it,

you have to disagree with Jesus.

The New Testament needed
to be written because

the Old Testament hadn't
completed the story.

That the timeline and the arc
of God's redemptive purposes

reached a point where
everybody, if you like,

was standing on their tiptoes

to see how the thing would finish.

And so, in the way that the
writer to the Hebrews says,

that God, you know, has spoken
in the past in various ways

and by different prophets and
so on, it anticipates the fact

that that story will
then come to completion.

And it's the New Testament
that does that for us.

In the Old Testament, Jesus is anticipated

and in the gospels, Jesus is revealed.

In the acts, he's preached.

In the epistles, he's explained.

So, in other words, everything
is just pointing forward

to that great fulfillment,
which comes in Jesus.

You have to understand, the early Jews

were not looking for a crucified messiah.

They did not expect a crucified messiah.

Even Isaiah 53, the
great Old Testament text

that's thought to refer to this, right?

Early Jews didn't interpret
that as a crucified messiah.

For one thing, my servant,
Israel, was assumed

to be the nation of Israel,
suffering for the sins

of the world, not a particular individual.

On the one hand, they had to
explain this to the world.

On the other hand, they had
to explain this to themselves.

Because they were not expecting this.

This was an unexpected outcome.

And let's be clear, if
crucifixion was the end

of Jesus's story, there is
really no good historical

explanation for why we have the gospels.

Or the rest of the New Testament at all.

There had to be a reversal
of that final judgment.

When you think about where
the New Testament came from,

it came out of Judaism.

Why would these Jewish
believers who thought

they were God's chosen people,

why would they invent a resurrected Jesus?

What motivation would they have for that?

Why would they invent this?

It makes no sense at all.

I mean, if one of them said:

hey, we're gonna start a new religion!

And one of the others said: we are?

Yeah!

Well, what's it gonna get us?

Well, first of all, we're gonna

get kicked out of the synagogue.

And then we're gonna get
beaten, tortured and killed.

You think the other guy's
gonna go: hey, great idea!

Sign me up!

No, he's not gonna say that, right?

There's no motivation for Jews

to invent a resurrected Jesus.

In fact, let me put it this way,

because I hear some
people out there thinking

that the New Testament writers
invented the resurrection.

No, the New Testament
writers did not invent

or create the resurrection.

The resurrection created
the New Testament writers.

There would be no New Testament

unless there was a resurrection.

The resurrection is God's
amen to Christ's atoning work.

It is the signal evidence that
what Jesus has accomplished

has been, if you like,
ratified by the Father.

That what God the Father,
if you like, has planned

that God the Son has procured.

And the resurrection is the
signal to the entire world

that the mission upon
which Jesus has embarked

has actually been accomplished.

So we're not just talking
about a reversal of death.

We're talking about a
whole new kind of life.

That he gets by means of resurrection,

and that's what the
earliest writers about Jesus

were trying to make
clear, is this is not just

a kindness or a mercy of God on Jesus.

No, this is a vindication of who he was

and of his claims and you
need to pay attention now.

The First Corinthians
15, I mean, that is a,

a text that has a robust
resurrection theology,

where Paul says on multiple occasions

that Jesus died and was raised
according to the scriptures,

according to the scriptures,
according to the scriptures.

And he suggests that there
was a real, physical,

bodily resurrection of
Jesus Christ from the dead.

And without that, there
is no Christian faith.

In my view, it is theological insanity.

And an exegetical suicide
to argue that there is

no real resurrection
of Jesus from the dead,

it's something spiritual,
Jesus lives in the heart

of his people; that belief
does not save anybody.

If Jesus's Bible only consisted

of the Old Testament,
why do we need the new?

When was the story written down?

Why was the story written down at all?

How do sinful people write

the undefiled words of transcendence?

If memories fade, people exaggerate,

and events get misinterpreted,

if the New Testament is true,

how could we know?

You know, there's a difference between

what happened two days ago,
which was just a benign event,

and what we call
psychologically, an impact event.

An impact event is
something that impacts you

so dramatically, you'll
never forget what happened.

Like, for example, where were you

when the second plane hit the tower?

Right, right now as we record
this, that was 15 years ago.

But I can remember what happened exactly.

I remember who I was talking to,

and what I was saying, and
what he was saying to me.

And the question is: do you think

a resurrection would have
been an impact event?

Do you think if Jesus
really rose from the dead,

that would have had an impact
on the people that saw him,

after he had resurrected?

Yeah, they would have
remembered that til their grave.

So I don't have any doubt
that even if the eyewitnesses

wrote it down 20 years
later or 30 years later,

doesn't matter; they remembered it.

The reason to not just
rely on oral tradition,

and to actually write down a gospel,

like the earliest gospel,
probably the Gospel of Mark,

the reason to do that
is because you're losing

the living voice, you're
losing the eyewitnesses.

So there is this huge
impetus in the second half

of the first century
AD to produce documents

that would allow us to not lose the memory

of what Jesus was like,
what he did, what he said,

and what his earliest
followers were like, as well.

And that's really the
impetus behind the writing

of the New Testament, and
when they got busy with it,

they got busy with it, between
about 49 and about 100,

all 27 documents of the New Testament

seem to have been written.

When we think in terms
of authorship of the Bible,

we have essentially a dual authorship.

So it's true to say that Paul wrote Romans.

It's equally true to say
that God wrote Romans.

And the great wonder of it
is that without any violation

of Paul's personality or his intellect,

God, through the instrumentation
of the Holy Spirit,

both provided Paul and enabled
Paul to write as he wrote.

And that would be true
for all the Bible authors.

When David writes Psalm
23, it's not as if he came in

after a hard day's work and
was about to fall asleep

when a voice spoke to him
out of the gloom and said:

not yet, David, pick up your stylus.

I've got some dictation for you.

And then God said: the Lord, the Lord,

is my, is my, shepherd, shepherd.

I shall lack nothing, I shall lack nothing.

There's no way in God's green Earth

that Psalm 23 was written that way.

It was spoken out of the
fullness of David's experience,

both as a believer and as a shepherd.

And he thought about these
things, turned them over

in his mind, and he picked
up his stylus and he wrote.

Nevertheless, scripture
insists that God so worked

through such forms of
inspiration that the result

was nonetheless, the word of God.

I think, on the other end of that spectrum,

perhaps, we also can't get
too loose between the text

of scripture and the meaning of scripture.

That those words really
are there for a reason,

and they're not dictated,
but that doesn't mean

that we can just kind of loosely paraphrase

or understand the text.

That we do have to respect what

the biblical authors actually wrote.

Of course, the Christian
claim from the start

is that this is a supernatural event.

We don't believe that it
just happened to work out

that human beings wrote down perfect words.

Or that they just tried a lot
and eventually got it right,

or something like this,
no, we believe that God

superintended the whole
process by his Holy Spirit.

And this is why, a common
complaint by non-Christians

and by critics of Christianity
often misses the point.

People would say: well,
you can't believe the Bible

is the word of God, because
it was written by men.

But of course, that presumes
the non-Christian view

of the way it happened.

That's not the Christian claim.

The Christian claim is that,
wasn't just that it was

written by men, our claim
is that it was written

by men who were carried
along by the Holy Spirit.

And it's that second step that's so key.

Behind your doctrine of
scripture is the doctrine of God.

And behind the product of
scripture is the activity of God.

The scripture is the product
of God, the Holy Spirit.

Which is why God, the Holy
Spirit, uses it in conversion

and in sanctification.

So what we believe about the Bible

is based on what we
believe about its source.

And because we believe God to
be the author of the Bible,

we talk about the quality
of the Bible as inspired,

or God-breathed.

Paul's letters were
written somewhere between

about 49 and maybe 63 or 64 AD.

Not a big timeline.

But that's almost half the New Testament.

13 of the documents of the
New Testament are attributed

to Paul, and they are by
consensus the earliest

New Testament documents.

So we don't have any
documents that are, today,

part of the New Testament,
from before about 49.

Even the Atheists admit
that Paul is writing

First Corinthians in about
55 AD, and we can date that

from an archeological
discovery in Delphi in Greece,

and we can date all of
Paul's missionary journeys

from that archeological inscription,

and we're almost certain
that Paul is writing

First Corinthians in either 55 or 56 AD.

I think Collin Hemmer's work,
who is a Roman historian,

I don't even think he was a Christian,

he wrote a book called,
back in the late '80s,

called: Acts in the Setting
of Helenistic History.

In which he makes, in my
view, a very persuasive case

that Acts, the Book of Acts,
had to be written by 62 AD.

In fact, he gives a number
of reasons in the book.

If Acts is 62 AD, that means
Luke has to be prior to Acts.

Because Acts is Luke's second work.

And then if Luke is written,
say, sometime in the 50s,

it appears that Luke, maybe
one of his sources is Mark.

Which means Mark is prior to
Luke, so you're very early now.

You're in the early 50s, maybe 40s.

So the bulk of the New
Testament is said to be written

from the end of the 40s, 49 thereabouts,

all the way up to the last
decade of the first century,

and you're dealing with a period

of about 50 years from start to finish.

I would say that Mark
is our earliest gospel.

That yes, Matthew and Luke
used the vast majority of Mark.

There's 95 percent of Mark
is in Matthew's gospel,

but Matthew was not just copying Mark,

he added another 50 percent to his document

from various other sources.

So he was using a variety of sources

to produce his document.

And under the inspiration
of God, each one wanted

to present a slightly
different portrait of Jesus.

It's not as if, let's say, Matthew says

that Jesus is the king
in the line of David.

He emphasizes that, even in
the beginning of his gospel.

Is that incompatible
with John, who emphasizes

that Jesus is the revelation
of God the Father?

Well, no, they're both true, right?

But they're complementary.

What's hard for people to remember is,

is that when you wrote
a gospel and you did it

on a running scroll of papyrus,
if you wanna think about

it that way, there's a certain length that,

oftentimes, is the maximum
that you can deal with,

and particularly when we
get into Matthew, Luke,

and John, our longer gospels,

they're running up into those limits.

And so that impacts how
much detail they communicate

about the stories that they present.

Still another issue is in recorded speech.

Because some people expect
that recorded speech

will be verbatim accurate.

It will be like a court stenographer

who just takes down every word, exactly.

If we did most preaching classes

and used the Sermon on
the Mount as an example,

most of our church services
would be very short.

Because you can read through
the Sermon on the Mount

in five to seven minutes.

What we know is that Jesus
spoke to people all day.

And you know, when you bring
a crowd out from the city

to come sit in the fields,
and listen to a teacher,

he isn't speaking for just
five to seven minutes.

So there are cases where you
may not be getting always

the exact words of Jesus,
you may be getting a summary

of something that he actually
spent a much longer time

talking about, and you may
be getting snippets of that,

or a summary of that,
that's boiled down into,

you know, into a package-able length,

given everything else that's
going on in the gospel.

We need to stop thinking about the gospels

as if they were like modern photographs.

They're not.

They're like portraits.

And portraits are inherently, interpretive.

They're not just history,
they are interpreted history.

History from a particular
theological and ethical angle.

And this is true of all four gospels.

It's not just true about John,
which is highly theological.

All four gospels provide
us with a theological

interpretation of the
historical figure, Jesus.

And we may be thankful to have four of them

that have differences
of angles of incidence.

And yet recognizably, it's the same person.

Remember, ancient biographies,

their issue was characterization.

Who is this person, as revealed
by his words and deeds?

That's what they're trying to get at.

One of the big challenges
in biblical studies today

is the very subtle suggestion
that, well, it's the

theological teachings of
the Bible that are inspired,

and whether any of those
historical narratives

that the teachings come out
of, whether they ever happened

or not, it really doesn't matter.

I wanna argue, that's absolutely wrong.

It does matter.

The fundamental divide
on the issue of inspiration

is whether it is subjective or objective.

When I was a first year
PhD student in Edinburgh,

Scotland, the very first
debatE that I witnessed

at the University of Edinburgh was a debate

on the topic of the inspiration
of the Old Testament.

And a liberal Old Testament scholar

and an evangelical were
going to have a debate.

And the moderator's first
question to both of them was:

how do you define inspiration?

And Dr. Alls said: well,
I believe that the Bible

is inspired because it inspires me.

Now, that is a classic
subjective definition

of inspiration, in other
words, whatever inspiration is,

doesn't reside in scripture, itself.

It resides in its effect on or in me.

Whereas the Bible claims
an objective inspiration.

Listen again to Paul's words:
all scripture is God-breathed.

It's not something that has
been put into scripture.

It's not something that
scripture does to me.

It is something that is
inherent in scripture

because of where it comes from.

Peter, in particular, draws this contrast

between myths, just
stories, fables, legends,

versus eyewitness accounts.

He says: we saw this.

We didn't make up a story
to make you feel better.

We're not just giving you, you know,

the spirit of Christmas, or
the inspiration of Easter.

I was on the mountain, I saw
Jesus Christ transfigured

in glory; these are things
we saw with our eyes,

we heard with our ears, they happened.

You can count on them, and
that sets the Bible apart

from almost everything
else in the ancient world

and its religious pantheon
of gods and goddesses,

because this good news
is rooted in history.

Something that happened.

And based on a future that
we know, then, will happen.

One of the remarkable
things about the gospels

that we have in our New Testament,

as well as the whole
Bible, is that the Bible

subjects itself to historical verification.

It puts itself at risk of inquiry.

Unlike the gospel of
Thomas, unlike the Koran.

Unlike the Bhagavad Gita or the teachings

of the compassionate Buddha
that are talking-head theology.

The Bible says: Jesus did
this at a certain place.

Here's the guy's name whom he healed.

Or here's the house where he did it at,

like in Mark two, where
you had these four men

who lift parts of the thatched
roof at Peter's house,

and they drop this paralyzed
man right in front of Jesus,

and he heals the man and he walks out.

I've been to Peter's
house, it's in Coppernium,

on the shore of the Sea of Galilee.

You can see the very
place where Jesus stood

when he was lecturing to
this crowd that was packed,

and the actual door that
this man walked out of.

That's historically verifiable stuff.

You don't have that in
these other documents.

A faith rooted in history.

A revelation coming
through human instruments.

A religion spreading through
the entire region and beyond.

But we wonder: who wrote these books?

How did they spread?

Can we be confident they
are the actual words

that God meant for us to have?

The question of authorship is a common one.

If we're gonna rely on these books,

we wanna know who wrote them.

We wanna know when they were
written, and whether we should

listen to the person who's
names are attached to them.

Many people doubt whether
we can know those things.

I don't think those things are
out of the range of knowing.

In fact, we have a tremendously
good amount of evidence

about the authors of these books.

And there's all kinds of ways
we know who wrote these books.

Certainly, the titles attached
to these books are a key part

of that evidence that go
back very, very early.

When we look at the gospels
themselves, for example,

we know those titles were
attached probably by the end

of the first century, if not
the early second century.

There's a second-century
impulse that begins

that says: add the name
of an apostle to a book,

to make sure that we know that
it really is by that person.

Those kinds of things we see
in these apocryphal books.

The Gospel of Thomas, the
Gospel of Phillip, of Mary,

of Judas, all these works
ascribe authorship in the text,

not as a title above it,
but actually in the text.

The New Testament gospels don't do that.

They were originally anonymous, I believe.

The ancient church fathers
were unanimous that Mark

got his gospel from the apostle Peter.

And Mark was a follower of
Paul, an associate of Paul's

to start with, but he got
his gospel from Peter.

If you have this apostolic
authorship impulse,

why isn't the Gospel of Mark ever,

ever called the Gospel of Peter?

It isn't.

So that apostolic authorship
impulse is not something

that's intrinsic to the New Testament.

It's intrinsic to
pseudepigrapha, apocryphal books,

books that came later.

And guys like Bart Erman,
who wrote this book, Forged,

about the books that
were not really written

by the people that we think they were,

he tries to argue for this
apostolic authorship impulse

in the first century.

If that's the case,

why don't we have it
for the gospel of Mark?

Did Jesus change over the first

three hundred years of the church?

The depiction of Jesus?

And when you look at people
who followed the apostles,

Clement, Papias, Irenaeus,
these types of individuals,

Justin Martyr, these folks,
when you look at their writings

you see they're given the same basic data

that the New Testament writers gave.

So you have this chain of custody,

going through the first three
centuries of the church,

before we have, say,
the first full copy of,

say, the New Testament
or the Old Testament.

Early Christianity was basically
an evangelistic movement,

which is distinctive in early Judaism.

The other early Jewish movements
like the Kumran community

or John the Baptizer,
they were not evangelistic

in the sense that they were
going out and getting recruits

that were non-Jews.

This is something pretty
distinctive about early

Christianity is, A, it
was a missionary movement,

and B, it went after Gentiles,
deliberately, by intention.

So, in that kind of environment,
they needed some tools

to do a better job
evangelizing and teaching

in those kinds of environments,

and so the impetus to generate sources

of important material to convince both Jews

and Gentiles about Jesus was paramount.

When it comes to the
New Testament writings,

authors not only had to write a book,

and then people would read that book,

but eventually that book had to be copied

and then transmitted over time.

Obviously this was before
the printing press.

This was before you could
go down to your copy machine

and run off a few copies,
and so if people wanted

their book to be spread far and wide,

if people wanted their book
to be published, so to speak,

that book had to be copied.

I would reckon it would take somebody, oh,

a good three or four hours
to just take dictation

for a document like Romans,
and then on top of that,

you'd have to produce a fair-hand copy.

That's the one that would be given.

So, from the start, there
would be two copies.

The one that the scribe
and the author retained,

and the one that was sent
to whoever the recipients

of the document are.

It is a laborious process.

You know, if it was me, my
hand would have fallen off

about halfway through the job, at best.

They, and they had to be clear.

Because without punctuation
and division of words,

the capital letters had
to be absolutely clear

as to what they are, and somebody

knew where to divide the words, right?

So it's an expensive process.

The longest usable scroll
that was still wieldy,

of some sort, would be no
more than about 35 feet long.

And when taking the
average sized lettering,

what that means is it could
only contain one gospel.

The Gospel of Luke, the Book of Acts,

would be right around 28
feet long by those estimates.

You couldn't put Luke and
another gospel in there.

Just Luke or just Acts.

This is why Luke himself wrote both

of these books as separate volumes.

They almost surely were
written at the same time,

but because of the material that was used,

namely Papyrus scrolls, they couldn't be

bound together as a single book.

The number two manuscript authority

in history is the Iliad by Homer.

More manuscripts are
being discovered of Homer

than any other classical work.

And right now, we have about a thousand,

see, the moment I make this
statement, it's obsolete.

1,820-some manuscripts
of the Iliad by Homer.

But when it comes to this Bible
now, and this is incredible,

it's hard to grasp, I can now document

66,000 manuscripts and
scrolls of the Bible.

66,000.

The manuscripts are divided
between two different groups.

Those that are written in
the original language, Greek,

and those that are written
in other languages,

or translations of the
Greek into other languages.

And those are typically called versions.

The vast majority of these are
not complete New Testaments.

We only have about 60 that are

complete New Testament manuscripts.

But the vast majority of
them also are very large.

The average Greek New Testament manuscript

is more than 450 pages long.

So they're big texts.

And we have well over two million pages

of Greek manuscripts,
hand-written manuscripts,

from before the time of the printing press,

and they come pretty early on.

Starting in the second century,

we have as many as a dozen manuscripts.

The earliest, to date,
is still considered P-52,

which is at Manchester University
in Manchester, England.

P-52 still stands today
as one of our earliest

New Testament manuscripts,
maybe even still the earliest.

Dated around 100 to 125 AD,

and it's a little fragment of John 18.

Once that manuscript was discovered,

they realized that the dating of John

had to be much earlier
than even that manuscript.

Which ended up putting the dating

well into the first century.

So it's just a small fragment.

It's about the size of a credit card.

But it proves that the Gospel of John

existed before that time.

And for almost 100 years up until then,

there was European scholarship that argued

that the Gospel of John
could not have been written

before 160, and should have
been written at about 170.

When this scrap of papyrus was discovered

in 1934 at Manchester University,

it sent two tons of German
scholarship to the flames.

Here was an ounce of
evidence that proved a pound

of presumption dead wrong.

And that's what Christians
have, is we have lots

and lots of ounces of evidence.

We have to recognize a problem.

The original autographs, written
by the apostles, are gone.

Lost to time.

What we have are the thousands
of copies that survive.

But is that enough?

Can we really rely on the
Bible if we don't even have

the very first copies?

One of the most common
questions I receive is:

what good is a belief in
an errancy if an errancy

only applies to the original autographs,

and we don't have the original autographs,

so how can we believe in an errancy.

But I think that objection
makes a fundament mistake.

It assumes that, when we
talk about the original text

that thinks of it as
only a physical object.

As if we have to have the actual autographs

in order to have access
to the original texts,

and since those physical objects are lost,

therefore we don't have
access to the original texts.

But the text, itself, the
words of God, themselves,

aren't necessarily a physical object

that you can put in a museum.

The words of God can be
preserved in other ways,

beyond just the autographs,
and we think that's happened.

You see, the more manuscripts
or scrolls that you have,

the easier it is to
reconstruct the original,

called the autographa, auto-grapha,

the autographa, the original,

and check out any errors or discrepancies.

And you try through the
bibliographical test

to create what is called a pure text.

What percentage of the
original texts do you know,

for sure, today, what
percentage is a pure text?

The problem is, the way
I like to describe it is

that we have 105 percent of the text.

We have the text as it was,
and then we have the variations

that have been introduced to
the text, and text criticism

is the job of trying to
pare off that 105 percent

down to what we originally had.

And the places where
we're not sure are noted.

I tell people, you actually
have the opportunity

to be a little bit of a textural critic,

because in some places in your Bible,

in the margin note, it will say "or",

or "some manuscripts say"
and that's telling you

those places that are
really the most discussed.

A lot of the people out there
talking about these things

sort of give the impression
that every word is questioned,

and that's just simply not true.

At any level, it's not true.

99 percent of the text is sure.

There are, yes, there are some places

in the Greek text where we
scratch our heads and go:

I don't, hm, I'm not sure which one it is.

They're called C-ratings, in our Bibles.

So things like spellings.

Is it Gadarenes or Gergesenes?

Is it Bethsaida, Bethzatha, or Bethesda?

Is the form of the verb esti or estin?

Is there an N sound on the end?

It doesn't affect the meaning at all,

but we can't really tell.

A lot of that is, that's what
makes up that one percent.

99 percent of the text,
we're very comfortable with.

This is what was originally said,

and just as importantly, that one percent

that we're not sure, doesn't bring

any major Christian doctrine into question.

There is simply is no major,
and I don't even think

any minor, doctrine that's
raising the question.

I mean, not many of us are
gonna go to Heaven or Hell

based on whether it's
Gadarenes or Gergesenes.

Of the hundreds of
thousands of textural variants

that we actually have, the smallest group

are those that are both
meaningful and viable.

It's less than one-fifth of one percent

of all textural variants,
and yet these are the ones

that Christians and
non-Christians always hear about.

The ones that skeptics talk about.

The ones that make the news,
because they're so interesting

and they seem to destroy
the Christian faith,

or uphold the Christian faith.

It's a very small fraction.

Well, you get textural
variants of all kinds.

Perhaps the two most
discussed in relationship

to the gospels is the percopi,
where the woman's caught

in adultery in the middle of John, John,

the last part of seven and eight,

and then the ending to the Gospel of Mark.

The only thing that is
different about that passage

is that it is a longer one.

Most textural variants are a word or two,

whereas this is a whole unit.

In both of those cases, I
would argue pretty strongly

that those units were not part
of the original given by God.

But if you think that they are,
nothing much depends on it.

If you think that they're not,

nothing much depends on it, either.

The message of the Bible
is secure in any case.

When skeptics talk about
how we can't get back

to the original texts, because
we don't have the original

manuscripts, they typically
have never examined

the texts of Greco-Roman literature.

If they're right, that we can't get back

to the New Testament,
then we might as well kiss

the ancient world goodbye,
and the Middle Ages

would still be the dark ages.

We would never have the Renaissance,

because we can't possibly
tell what these ancients said.

If we're gonna be skeptical
about the New Testament,

on average, we should be a thousand times

more skeptical about Greco-Roman writings.

The textural richness of what is found

in the New Testament and
now in the Old Testament

with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls,

is really very remarkable.

It's utterly unique from documentation

from the ancient world.

So God in his providence has been wonderful

in providing so much.

We would be at fault if we criticized him

for not providing infallible
copies with new miracles

every time somebody picked up a pen.

How did the church come to embrace

these New Testament books?

Were they chosen out of a list?

Did a council determine their worth?

As the church grows and
the religion formalizes,

what is the God?

Who gives authority to the Bible?

There's a perception again,
out there in the world today,

whether in popular literature
or on the internet,

that there were votes that
took place in councils,

and that people put, picked these books,

and that there was some shady deal going on

in a smoke-filled room
where one book barely got

in by a vote and some books got out.

And I can tell you all of
that is a misunderstanding

of the way things happened
in the early church.

The fact of the matter
is, when it comes to most

of the books of the New Testament, again,

probably 22, 23 out of
the 27, there was never

any real discussion about them.

There was never any real debate about them.

There was never any sense
that you had to decide

on which books these were.

These were the books that
were simply handed down

to the early church,
in fact, that language,

handed down, we see
used in numerous places,

throughout the second century,
where early church fathers

refer to these books as the
books that were passed down

to them, that were given
to them by the apostles,

that were ones that the
church had always known.

You have these documents
produced in the first century AD.

By the second century
AD, we had a collection

of the four canonical gospels,

and a collection of Paul's letters.

This we know.

In the second century
AD, these were already

considered sacred texts,
and you already have

house churches, where people are saying,

bishops are saying: we're not gonna read

from any text from the lectern,

or at the meeting, except our sacred texts

or the sacred texts of the Old Testament.

There were criteria that the church used to

recognize these, and these
criteria are essentially three:

apostolicity, which means
the book is either written

by an apostle or an
associate of an apostle.

And that's the most important criterion.

Secondly is orthodoxy.

Does the book conform to
what we know to be true

from the other books that
we know to be inspired?

The gospels were the very
first ones, almost surely,

to be accepted.

We don't have any period
when there was a time

when there was any hint
that they were not accepted.

And then the third
criterion is catholicity.

That doesn't mean Roman Catholic,

it means accepted by the
majority of the churches.

Now, there's some that would
be considered orthodox,

like the Epistle of Barnabas.

And that may be a first century document,

late first century document, but the church

recognized early on that
the Epistle of Barnabas

was not written by Barnabas.

Any time the church recognized that a book

was not written by the name that it claims

to be written by,
automatically it got rejected.

When it was discovered that some deacon

had produced the letter to the
Laodecians, the bishop said:

not only are we not
reading these in church,

we're defrocking you for
producing false documents.

And the first person to name the books

that make up our New
Testament was Athenasius,

and he did it in 367 AD
in a letter on Easter,

that was written in that year.

Irenaeus, writing long before Athenasius,

talks about four gospels,
he talks about Acts,

he talks about the Pauline Epistles,

he talks about First John and First Peter,

that's the bulk of your New Testament,

clearly being seen and utilized as inspired

and valuable to the church,

at the end of the second century.

But what's interesting is,
if you go a little earlier,

if you go to the first
part of the second century,

or the middle part of the second century,

and you read what's written there,

what you see are writers
who may have access

to one gospel or two, they
may have access to one,

two, or three of the Pauline Epistles,

but they aren't thinking
of the New Testament

the way we think about
it, because they only had

exposure and access to some of the works.

They hadn't, some of the
works hadn't circulated

across the church yet.

When you look at the state of the canon

in the early church, there's two important

facts to get right about it.

One is to recognize that very early,

there was a core collection of books

that the church recognized
almost out of the gate.

What that means is, by the second century,

we've got 22, maybe 23 out of
the 27 books, already there.

That's one thing to recognize,
but there's a second thing

to recognize, and that is that there were

some books that were disputed.

We have some books that,
you know, we can call

the books around the edges,
or the peripheral books.

The smaller books that there
was some more controversy about

and these would be books like Second Peter,

and James, and Jude, and
Second and Third John.

And there was some controversy
about some of these books.

There was some discussion about them.

The kind of books that typically

were disputed were little books.

And this is noteworthy.

Small books, for obvious reasons,

were not as impactful in
the literature of the day.

They weren't read as often,
they weren't as widely known.

They were cited less, so
that they weren't familiar

across different geographical regions,

so it would take more time
to recognize these books,

and you can understand why they

might be disputed more than others.

And here's what's interesting.

Despite occasional
challenges here and there,

once the church had reached a
consensus on these 27 books,

that consensus has been
wide and longstanding.

And I think that's an encouraging

truth for us as Christians.

We can look at the church through the ages

with a great deal of
unanimity around these books.

Not absolute unanimity, where
there's never an objection

from any quarter, but a predominant unity,

which I think is evidence of
the Spirit's work in the church

to receive these 27 books
and just these 27 books.

Why don't we include
some of these other books,

like the Gospel of
Thomas or Philip or Mary?

Or Third Corinthians, or Paul's
letter to the Laodiceans?

Or the Acts of Paul or
the Revelation of John?

There's a second Revelation of John,

besides the one that's
in the New Testament,

or the Revelation of Peter.

Why don't we include these
books in the New Testament?

There's a fundamental reason
why none of those are included,

and that is: they are not
first century documents.

So they could not have
been written by an apostle,

or an associate of an apostle.

That right there excludes
all of these documents.

What makes Thomas such an interesting work,

we think it's a second
century work of some kind,

is that it seems to have
one element of sources

feeding into it that do come from Jesus,

and another set of materials

that is coming from somewhere else.

It's what I call a hybrid gospel.

And that's why it didn't
make it into the canon,

is because what is
represented by the hybrid

is not a representation
of the kind of orthodox

Christianity the other gospels reflect.

Most scholars think that
the Gospel of Thomas,

while it contains some
really early material,

was not assembled until
the second century, AD.

And the reason they assume
that is because it seems

to know all four canonical gospels.

Well, where could a person have been

to have had access to all four

canonical gospels, together at one time?

That surely didn't happen
before the second century AD.

The Gospel of Thomas
has, in its last logion,

or last saying, something that
scholars are embarrassed by,

those who want it to go
into our New Testament,

they're embarrassed, or they really

should be embarrassed by it.

Peter starts out bey saying,

let Mary, namely Mary
Magdalene, go out from us,

because women are not worthy of the life.

And then Jesus responds and he says:

look, I'm gonna change her into a male

so she'll look like you guys,

so that she can make it into
heaven just like you guys.

Because any woman who makes herself

into a male is gonna get saved.

That, really?

Is that how we should view this?

Let me tell you how the canon

of the New Testament was not produced.

It was not produced by
the Emperor Constantine,

the supposed bad guy, getting
a bunch of people together

and saying: you need to
get your act together.

Tell me, what are the sacred texts?

You all decide right here
at the Council of Nicea,

and we're done.

The Da Vinci Code myth,

about how the New Testament
was created is just that.

It's a myth; it's not historical fiction.

It's hysterical fiction.

One main misconception is
that the Council of Nicea

was where they chose the books
of the New Testament canon,

and in my field, I hear that all the time.

That no one knew what books to read,

and then finally, with Constantine's help,

we got it figured out at Nicea.

That is patently false.

There is no evidence at all
that the New Testament canon

was a topic of conversation at Nicea,

and so there's no reason
to think Nicea really has

anything to do with what
books we're reading now.

The council at Nicea was
about how to best articulate

the divinity of Jesus and
the humanity of Jesus,

so when we did articulate it, we made sense

and got it right and reflected
the true reasons of scripture

and didn't contradict ourselves.

When it comes to the question of the canon

of the New Testament or what books belong

in the New Testament,
there are two broad views

within Christendom.

One is that it's an
authoritative list of books.

The other is that it's a
list of authoritative books.

If it's an authoritative list
of books, then that means

there is some authority
over the New Testament,

that it establishes what
the New Testament is.

That's the Catholic view,
that's the Greek Orthodox view.

If it's a list of authoritative books,

then there is no authority
over the New Testament

that establishes the New
Testament as our final authority.

Instead, it's the final authority.

You know, I think the very
first thing to recognize

about the authority of scripture
is that the word "author"

is right there in the center
of the word "authority".

So the foundation for the
authority of scripture

can never be scripture, and
it can never be the church,

even as the believing
community receiving scripture.

It goes back by the
very word to the author.

The ultimate author of
scripture being God, himself.

The Bible has authority in the sense

that it is the word of God.

And therefore, the authority is not so much

in the black and white
letters that we are seeing

in that book, but in the God
who has communicated with us.

If you remember when Jesus
was being tempted by Satan

in the wilderness, in the
very first temptation,

Satan says: look, Jesus,
I know you're hungry.

You've been out here fasting
for 40 days and 40 nights,

and I know that you have the power to turn

those stones into bread
and to sate your hunger.

And Jesus responds to
Satan by quoting Moses,

from Deuteronomy: man shall
not live by bread alone.

But by what?

Every word that proceeds
from the mouth of God.

And I think that when Paul says:

all scripture, God breathed.

Just listen to that:

every word that comes
from the mouth of God.

I think Paul has Jesus
and Moses in his mind,

when he says that.

So there you see Moses
view of biblical authority,

Jesus's view of biblical authority,

Paul's view of biblical authority,

in three Greek words.

If the Bible is reliable, the questions

to the canon answered, the
means of inspiration understood,

how do we interpret it?

Are there true interpretations,

or is there just a sea of opinions?

Is the Bible a book locked in mystery,

only opened to the religious elite,

or can an ordinary person sit down

and know what the living
God has to say to them?

Before the Reformation came,

a church service would
have been very pedantic.

It would have been ritualistic,

and unfortunately, often, not understood.

You must understand that
in Catholic theology,

the idea is that the ritual
itself, the Mass itself,

has validity, and therefore
people don't even have

to understand what is going on.

That's why the Mass was done in Latin.

It didn't matter if you understood it.

As long as you were
there, as long as you were

participating, as long as somehow you were

spiritually connected,
you did not need to know

what the words were that were being spoken.

The Catholic church's
attitude to the scriptures

in the run up to the 16th century

and during the 16th century
is quite intriguing.

Certainly the intellectual
hierarchy of the church

regarded the scriptures as important.

One of the reasons they
weren't keen on laypeople

reading the scriptures
was they regarded them

as important and had a
concern that the scriptures

would be abused if they fell
into the hands of laypeople.

On the other hand, however,
the Catholic church,

at I believe, a demotic
level, at a grassroots level,

did not have a high view of the scriptures.

The scriptures did not
feature highly in the piety

of your typical parish priest.

Didn't feature highly in
the liturgical practices

of the church.

There were, of course,
very low literacy rates

in Europe at that time,
so no book functioned

particularly significantly in
the life of ordinary people.

One of the chief things that
Reformers wanted to recover

about the Bible was the
sense of its clarity.

Its perspicuity.

It really wasn't a debate that
the Bible was authoritative.

Everyone in Christendom
understood that it was inspired

and it was infallible,
or they would have used

some term similar to that,
but it was often the clarity.

Do we have to rely on priests,

on a magisterium, on church tradition?

Now, we don't throw out those things.

We don't come to the
scripture by ourselves.

We do want to stand on
the shoulders of giants

to understand it, but of
course, God wouldn't be God

and he wouldn't be good if
he didn't communicate with us

in a way that we could understand,

since language is his idea anyways.

And since he saw fit to
communicate and make himself known

in language, he wants to be understood.

And the doctrine of the
clarity of scripture

asserts that if God wants to be understood,

he is able to be understood.

Now, there are areas of the Bible

that are harder for us to grapple with.

You know, Peter says the
same of Paul's writings.

He says, you know, some of the stuff

that he writes is not just real obvious.

Well, that's very helpful to me.

I'm glad he felt that way.

We studied Daniel recently, and Daniel,

you know, half, the second half of Daniel

was a great encouragement to
me to realize that Daniel,

when he was on the receiving end of some

of these revelations
actually fell on the floor

and then went to bed for two weeks

because he was so overwhelmed by it,

and he couldn't really figure it all out.

Now, that would be
alarming if we were dealing

with main things and plain things,

but there are certain things
that are even secrets to God,

as Deuteronomy 29:29 tells us.

You know, the things that
have been revealed are there,

and with some work, with some hard work,

with some dependence
upon the spirit of God,

with some help from those who
are brighter than ourselves,

we'll be able to get to this.

Because the Bible actually is clear.

Well, there are many, many
wrong approaches to scripture.

Many individual examples.

For example, people sometimes
cite Philippians four,

I can do all things through
Christ who strengthens me.

Which warrants them to do
anything they really want to do.

Or a pastor can use it: we would like you

to teach such and such
a Sunday school class.

Oh, I can't do that.

Oh, you can't say "can't";
you can do all things

through Christ who strengthens you.

And the fact is: no you can't.

I can't sing.

And you know, I just can't sing.

That's not a gift that God gave me.

And I can't say, I mean, silly example,

but I can't do all things through
Christ who strengthens me.

But the "all things" is pointing back

to what Paul just said, and Paul just said:

I am content in all circumstances.

Good times and bad.

Persecutions and not.

In having money and not having money.

I can do all these things,
is what it really says.

I can do all these things through
Christ who strengthens me.

So Paul's not just carte blanche saying:

Christians can do anything they want.

But Christians can learn to be
content in all circumstances.

We can't make one part
of scripture say something

that contradicts the rest of scripture.

Therefore, if we are having
difficulty with this section,

then perhaps we don't know the totality

of scripture well enough
to be able to place

this properly and then to
interpret it accurately.

We can say, dogmatically,
God loves the world.

We can say that without
fear of being contradicted.

We may not know everything
that we could know,

should know, would like to know

about the word "God", or
even the word "loves",

or even the word "world", but nevertheless,

the proposition "God loves
the world" is a faithful

interpretation of John three
and many other passages.

We have to make clear
the difference between

meaning and significance.

Sometimes people have
tried to point out, well,

look, you can hear 10 different sermons

about Jesus's encounter
with the woman at the well,

and one preacher will make
the text about evangelism

and another one about apologetics,

and another about confronting sin,

another about how to befriend strangers,

and someone will say: look, no
one can agree on the meaning.

Well, no, the issue there
is really significance.

The text of scripture will
never be fully exhausted,

and any good preacher is
going to find ways to apply it

in a number of different avenues.

But the meaning, nevertheless, is fixed.

That the meaning of the text
is what the author intended

to communicate by that text,
which, dealing with scripture,

uniquely, means there is both the intention

of the human author and
sometimes even superseding that

in ways they may not have fully understood,

is the intention of the divine author.

We work on the basis of evidence,

not on the basis of
speculation or weird ideas

or philosophy, and whenever you argue

with somebody who is not a believer,

they almost always bring in non-evidence.

Well, God would not have done this.

Or this is really what I think happened.

It's just all speculation.

Let's look at what the evidence says.

Our faith is rooted in history.

And consequently, we
need to use the evidence

and never be afraid of it.

Half the battle of dealing
with the trustworthiness

or reliability of the Bible is to know:

what are the subjects of the Bible.

And the subjects of the Bible
are really pretty simple.

History, theology, and ethics.

The three major subjects
of the Bible are history,

because we have a historical God

who intervenes in human history.

It's about theology, the character of God,

and the character of his people.

And it's about ethics.

How should we behave in
response to all of that?

It's very sad in our
culture that we've seen

the body of Christ called,
charged, and mandated

to proclaim and even defend the faith,

but in many quarters,
the church has denied,

questioned the faith.

We're not to spin it, nuance it, change it,

undermine it, we're called to proclaim it.

The church of Jesus Christ always faces

a tremendous temptation,
and that is to deviate

from the word of God.

And when we do that, what happens?

First of all, we may get wrong doctrine,

because we no longer see
the clarity of the deity

of Jesus Christ and the
issues of salvation.

The other thing that's going to happen,

almost immediately, is there is going to be

a devaluation of moral teaching.

And pretty soon we begin to
reason based on our own notions,

based on our own desires,
and the word of God is there,

but it is not believed, it is not preached,

and it is not lived.

Often, a contemporary drifting
church is very comfortable.

What is preached may sound very orthodox.

But it doesn't challenge anybody.

It doesn't call them back to the gospel,

where they are drifting.

This saying is attributed to Martin Luther.

So many pungent sayings are.

I'm not sure if it comes from him or not,

but it's a true saying.

If you preach the gospel, at every point,

except where the gospel
is being challenged,

you're not preaching the gospel at all.

If you preach the gospel to a church,

at every point except the
place where they need it,

or the place they need to be called back

to obedience to God, you're
not preaching the gospel.

At all.

If you can get people to doubt the Bible,

then you will get them,
sooner or later, to deny.

But you have to doubt
first, before you can deny.

Then as they deny, then you're
going to get them to disobey.

And that's worked so well
since the Garden of Eden,

he hasn't had to change his tactics.

He still uses it.

God made us for himself.

He has made us for his own glory.

He communicates with us,
telling us how we ought to live.

Through his word, he has given
us an entire library there,

to fit into quite a lot
of the various words

in which we think, and
all that is authoritative.

So we don't go to the Bible
wanting to judge the scriptures.

We go to the Bible with
a sense of submission.

Wanting to hear what the
living God has to say to us.

And that's crucial.

I have a good friend who
is famous for saying:

I love the word of God.

He loves it, and he does,
he truly loves the Bible.

We're talking about it one day, and I said:

I have a question for you.

You love the Bible, don't you?

You love the word of God, don't you?

Yes I do.

I said: do you love its author?

And do you know that there's a difference?

And he just went blank.

It had never occurred to him that there

was something beyond Bible study.

I've read from Genesis
to Revelation in the Bible.

And not once does anyone
ever have an encounter

with the true and living
God and come away and say:

it was kind of boring and irrelevant.

He said: people encounter God and die.

They encounter God and they
are paralyzed with fear.

They encounter God and
they're overwhelmed with joy.

They encounter God and they
cry because all their hopes

are realized, but nobody
ever encounters God and says:

that was boring and irrelevant.

Well, when people say that
about the Bible, it just says

to me they've not encountered
the God of the Bible.

If you think the Bible is boring,

then either you don't
realize what you need,

or you've never met the God
that the Bible talks about.

And very frankly, I do think
that there are a lot of people

that are preachers by profession
that have never met God.

Or they'd never say his word
is boring and irrelevant.

I love the way Psalm 119 unfolds.

It's the longest chapter in the Bible,

and it's all about the word.

And you see there what the word produces.

It produces delight.

It produces desire for God.

It produces obedience.

So, sometimes it's helpful to
look at a text like Psalm 119

and say: what does it
look like and feel like?

What's the experience of
the person, of the heart,

of the soul that's been
captivated by the word of God?

And you see there they're singing the word,

they're storing up the word,
they're treasuring God's word.

They have the greatest
sense of delight in it.

They are pained when
people don't follow it.

It's their greatest longing to obey it.

They see God's character and
smile, and that's what we want.

That's why having the right
view of scripture matters.

Because without it, we're going to come to

not only wrong conclusions
about God and the gospel

and ourselves, but we won't think rightly,

we won't feel rightly, we won't be the sort

of human beings that God made us to be,

if we don't take him at his
word, and understand all

that he means for us to know about himself.