Gooding, David: 5 - The Canon of Scripture: Old Testament

Collections that we now call the Old Testament and the New Testament. When were those collections completed and closed, as people describe it, so that no books thereafter could be added to those collections? And when was this done, both for the Old Testament and the New? And the final question that we shall be asking, of course, is do all people agree on how many books there should be in the Bible, which books should be included, and which books should be excluded? First, we shall have to ask the question about the Jews themselves, because long before there were Christians, Jews had their Bible. We call it the Old Testament. Incidentally, if you are talking to Jews, don't call it the Old Testament, will you? Because they find that offensive. There's a famous story about Jewish Jew S who got converted to Christianity and had great suspicions that the New Testament, uh, didn't quote the Old Testament. So being a Jewish, she went to a Jewish bookseller, you'll see, and asked him for an Old Testament, and his reply was, how old? They don't call it the Old Testament, of course. They're liable to call it the Tanakh, and why they call it that, we shall find later on. Now, the term that is used when we consider these collections of books that are regarded as Bible and authoritative is the word canon. That word has many slight differences in its meaning according to the context in which it is used. Tonight, I shall not trouble you with the technical, uh, discussion of its meaning. I'm going to use it in the popular sense, the canon of Holy Scripture. That is the list of books that have come to be regarded as inspired and authoritative. Those books that are distinct from all other books, however good those other books are, however spiritual, however religious. The canon of the Bible are the books that are regarded altogether and distinct and different from all others, because these are inspired, these are authoritative, these are the books that settle our beliefs and our doctrines. These are the books that form the rule, if you like, the canon by which our beliefs are to be judged. When our beliefs are not according to these books, then it is our beliefs and traditions that must be changed. So far then, Jews and Christians agree, uh, sorry, uh, we must come now to the Old Testament and deal with it first. We shall then deal with the New Testament, but we have to divide it like that because of historical reasons. We take then first the Old Testament, the canon of the Old Testament. And here I have to tell you two very important things. That among the Jews, traditionally all down the centuries, until more recently, there has been no dispute whatsoever as to which books should be in the, uh, uh, uh, canon of their Bible. All have been agreed until, as I say, recently. Second fact I have to remind you of, that in the centuries of Christendom, beginning in the second century and onwards, there has been a long dispute as to how many books there should be in the canon of the Old Testament. It has, uh, come to s- be known as the question, should the apocryphal books, as they are called, be regarded as part of the Old Testament, or should they not? Now, uh, to, uh, understand, uh, the question, let's first then remind ourselves of what books there are in the Hebrew canon, and then what are in the so-called Christian canon. Here is a list of the groupings of Old Testament books. And among the Hebrews, the books of what we call the Old Testament are divided into three groups. You look at the left-hand column. There is the group that is called the Law, Torah in Hebrew, Torah. It, uh, contains that first group, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Then there is a second group called by the Jews, the Prophets, Nevi'im. That, according to the, uh, Jews, contains what we would have called historical books, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. Among later Jews, they came to be known as the former prophets. But notice that in the Jewish Bible, they belong to the second division that is entitled the prophets. Then come the classical prophets, uh, the later prophets, as they're called, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel. You will notice not Daniel, not in the Hebrew Bible. Daniel is reserved in the third division. Uh, Je- Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, then not Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. They form the second division in the Hebrew covenant. The third division, the Jews refer to as the writings, Kesuvim. Uh, uh, they are, are also sometimes referred to as the Psalms, for the simple reason that in this third group, the Psalms stand as the first member of the group, and the Psalms being a mighty important and very large book, they rightly come at the beginning. So the third group, the writings, the Ketuvim, contains the Psalms, the Proverbs, Job, Song of Solomon, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles. So the three divisions, Torah, Nevi'im, Kethuvim, and the initial letters T, Torah, N, uh, uh, uh, sorry, yes, N, Nevi'im, and K or CH, Kethuvim is why the Jews call what we call the Old Testament, they call it by those three initials, Tanat, you'll see, meaning Torah, Nevi'im, and Ketuvim. So much then for the, uh, Jewish, the Hebrew Bible. You will notice when you take your Bible nowadays, the list of the books in the Old Testament are different in your Bible from what they would be in a Hebrew Bible, even to this day. The books of the Torah, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, they are the same. But then our Bibles don't divide the books of the Old Testament into three groups. That is not a vision, uh, that, uh, our Bibles observe. You will notice that after the first five, uh, the list is in different order. We have Joshua, Judges, Ruth, first and second Samuel, first and second Kings, and then you notice that first and second Chronicles is put there among those other history books, instead of being at the end of the Old Testament as it is among the Hebrews. Chronicles is here, doubtless here because it is a historical book like these that go before it. And similarly, Ezra and Nehemiah and Esther are here, and not in the third division. But as I say, the, the English Bibles don't regard the divisions anyway, but the grouping is different. Then comes Job. That was down here in the Hebrew Bible, Job is up here, and the Psalms likewise, and Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon. They that were in the third division of the Hebrew are now here in our English Bible. Then come the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations. You will notice that Lamentations is put immediately after Jeremiah, whereas in the Hebrew Bible it is, uh, not along with Jeremiah. There's Jeremiah in the Hebrew Bible, uh, Lamentations is down here. But in our Bibles, you have, um, Jeremiah followed immediately by Lamentations, and then Ezekiel, and you'll notice that Daniel has been put up here among the prophets. You'll see. Then follow what we call the minor prophets, not because they are less important, but their books are less in volume. There they are, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi. So we notice the different order, the different groupings of books, books, uh, in the Christian Bible as distinct from the Hebrew Bible. But notice this, that the list is the same books, different order, but the same number of books. As to the number and identity of the books, uh, both He- Hebrew Bible and Christian Bible agree thus far. Why the Christian Bible has a different ordering of books is because the Christian Bible was very heavily influenced by an ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament called the Septuagint, that itself had this other order, or an order very much like it. We'll talk about that later on. So far, then, Jews and Christians agree over the number of books and the identity of them, and the Christian Bibles certainly have all the books which are in the Jewish canon. But now here comes what we must face historically, uh, from the second and the third centuries, in Greek-speaking countries particularly, particularly also in Western countries, in Greece and, uh, Rome and in South Africa, uh, there were added other books to the Old Testament in Bibles written out by Christian people. These books are called Apocrypha nowadays, or, uh, in more recent times they have begun to be called Deuterocanonical. This is a barbarous phrase, isn't it? You needn't remember it. Don't try and remember it, you'll see. It simply means books of the canon of the second order, you'll see, meaning they're not so good as the others, and that's pretty true. But anyway, uh, uh, here is just to remind you, if you're not in habit of reading the Apocrypha, these are the books of the Apocrypha. They are the first book of Esdras, the second book of Esdras, Tobit, Judas, the additions to the book of Esther, the Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, or as it is alternatively known, the Wisdom of Jesus, the Son of Sirach, Ben Sirach, as we know him. Then Baruch, the letter of Jeremiah, the prayer of Azariah and the song of the three young men, Susanna, Bell and the Dragon, the prayer of Manasseh, the first book of the Maccabees, the second book of the Maccabees. These are the books that are normally regarded as the, uh, Apocrypha. Let me comment just for a moment on the nature of these books. What do they contain? What are they? Well, they are a very mixed group indeed. Some of them are quite serious history books, particularly the first book of and second book of Maccabees. They are attempts at serious history. They were written, uh, as a result of the great persecutions that were inflicted upon the Jews by the Greek emperor Antiochus Epiphanes. That was a time of desperate trouble, one hundred and sixty seven to one hundred and sixty BC, when the great Gentile emperor desecrated the temple of God at Jerusalem and set up the abomination of desolation in the holy place. That tremendous turn that you will find again in the New Testament has its origin in these times. When Antiochus Epiphanes, I repeat, the Seleucid emperor set up his, uh, pagan worship in the temple of God at Jerusalem. Then the high priest joined with Antiochus Epiphanes, colluded with him, and consented to these things. It was then forbidden to the Jews that, uh, they should circumcise their baby boys. Any mother caught having circumcised her baby boy was taken to the ramparts of the city and thrown over the wall to dash her head to pieces on the rocks below. Possession of the scrolls of scripture was forbidden. Altar was, uh, on an alt- on the altar in the temple, there was a statue to an old, uh, Greek god or Seleucid god, possibly Baal Shamayim. And, uh, uh, in the temple also they offered pigs upon the altar, which is an abomination to the Lord and to the Jews. And there is some talk of temple prostitutes being added to the temple. The Maccabees rose in revolt, both against the, uh, emperor and against the Jewish high priest that had colluded with him. And after valiant struggles gained their independence and were able to cleanse the temple. Eventually, some of their successors, uh, achieved that the state became a completely independent state once more for a few brief decades. Now, at the end of that trouble, the histo- an historian wrote the first book of Maccabees to tell of this epic contest between the Jews faithful to the law of God and to the name of God in their struggle against Epiphanes. And that is a attempt at serious history. Of course, it is partisan. It is written from the point of view of the Maccabees. The second book of Maccabees is likewise a history of those times and takes the history further than, uh, first book of Maccabees. It is full of wonderful things and miracles that, uh, probably didn't happen anyway, and it is itself a synopsis of another work that was written in Greek. So First Book of Maccabees may have been written in Hebrew, but it exists with us in Greek, and the Second Book of Maccabees was written in Greek straight off. These are interesting books, therefore, and important, and they who study prophecy ought to read the books of Maccabees to have the background to the whole question of the abomination of desolation. They are, moreover, the only historical sources, practically the only historical sources we have for that period of history, and therefore they are valuable. Eh, on the other hand, uh, books like, um, Toby, uh, Susanna here, they are religious novels, to put it, uh, no lower. They are religious novels calculated to entertain, uh, the lowly, you'll see. And Belle and the Dragon is another kind of religious novel. Eh, the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men, as the Prayer of Manasseh, are prayers that were made up by well-intentioned people. When, for instance, Daniel tells you that the three young men were put in the flames of fire of Nebuchadnezzar's furnace, eh, well, they prayed, of course. And whoever was the composer of these, he thought it would be a good and helpful thing if he wrote an account of the prayers they prayed. Where on earth he got the account from, other than out of his own head, eh, eh, nobody knows. Of course, he made it up. He thought it would be, uh, uh, good and helpful. And similarly, when Nebuchadnezzar, that old rogue and evil man beyond any Judean king, was taken away by the Assyrians into captivity, and he prayed to God, and God heard his prayer and had mercy and brought him back, someone later thought it would be a good thing to tell the world what exactly he prayed, so he made up a suitable prayer, for monastics. The additions to the book of Esther, what are they? Well, as you know, the book of Esther in the canonical Hebrew is remarkable. It doesn't contain the name of God anywhere in it, you'll see. Though the providence of God and his control of affairs is everywhere evident, but the book itself doesn't contain the name of God. And then when Jews of later centuries read this book, they had a few question marks in their head. I thought the Jewish women weren't supposed to marry Gentiles. How come this woman Esther married to the old pagan emperor, defiant as he already was? That seemed to them to recall, to recall, require a little explanation, so to speak, you see. How did she go to the banquet and eat, uh, Gentile food, which was forbidden by the food laws? Somebody or other set about some improving the book of Esther, and the way they did it was to add great chunks of stuff at the beginning, and then later on they put another chunk in, and later on they put another chunk in, and bit at the end, or bits at the end, you see, and turned the book of Esther into a historical novel like Ben-Hur, that you have read or probably not have read, and if you haven't, don't. Eh, but uh, uh, uh, a good historical novel, you see, that heightened it up, made it more excitable and suitable for the local television and all that kind of thing, uh, but was careful to insert the name of God and such like things. The book of Judas, by contrast, is another story, a made up, of course, fictitious story of a real Jewish heroine, and this was certainly written by the strict Jew. She, when the city was besieged by a pagan enemy, she volunteered to sally forth and go to the tent of the king and say that she had, uh, now, uh, wanted to take refuge with the king. She had given up her people and had come over to the king and was prepared to be the king's wife if need be, you'll see. But she kept him, uh, uh, uh, at a bit of a distance and tantalized the man, you'll see. And, uh, uh, so she gained time, and when, without becoming his wife, she had got his confidence, she lulled him to sleep one night, and when he wasn't thinking about such things, she cut off his head, poor chap, and put it in a bag and skedaddled and went back to the Jewish city, you'll see. Now there's a Jewish heroine for you. She didn't marry any old gentile. You'll see she didn't eat the gentile's food. She always asked the king, even when she was with him, if she could have her own food. She kept all the laws, you'll see, and she delivered Israel. So there was a book written by the, uh, right wing in Israel, if ever there's one, in striking contrast, contrast to the canonical story of Esther. Um, uh, Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach, again, is a serious book of moral teaching. It is written in the same style as the book of Proverbs. Indeed, I no wish to insult you, but indeed, if tonight I had said, now don't open your Bibles, I just want to read a little bit from the Bible, and I had read some words from Ecclesiasticus, it would sound to you so like the book of Proverbs that I think you might have to scratch your head and think and think and think and think and think and say to yourself at last, hey, wait a minute, is this the book of Proverbs, or isn't it, you'll see, it is so like the book of Proverbs in style, a very serious book by a senior, uh, Jew. Uh, Baruch, of course, is, uh, or and historically he was the scribe of Jeremiah, and there is a book that, uh, here that, uh, purports to be written by him. You see, other such things there are then. I shall not stay longer. The Apocrypha is a very mixed collection of books. Uh, that's what they are about. So we come to, to, um, the question, the Jews, what did they do about these things? Well, they never admitted these books at all. Apocryphal books were never regarded as canonical by the Jews. Not all down the centuries before Christ, not after Christ, except that nowadays liberal Jews like Professor Emmanuel Tow, who is the chairman of the publication committee of the Dead Sea Scrolls, he would be prepared to accept them and a good much more else as Bible. But no Orthodox Jew still would accept the apocryphal books and the almost unbroken tradition amongst the Jews that these were not canonical, not to be regarded in that sense as the word of God. But the Christendom, as I say, has been divided. In the early times, uh, in the West particularly, many scholars, Christian scholars, professing Christian scholars, and later on councils like the Council of Trent regarded these books as being part of inspired scripture. The Council of Trent, in fact, pronounced its anathema on anybody who didn't accept these books as inspired scripture. In Greece, the Orthodox Church, I will tell you that no council, no great ecumenical council ever decided the matter, but from the sixteen hundred onwards at least, at their synod, they proclaimed, yes, these books were to be regarded as part of Holy Scripture. The Protestants, if you take Luther, Luther held an ambiguous view. He didn't throw them out. On the other hand, he regarded many of them as profitable reading. England too, at the Reformation, was ambiguous. This book, this helpful book by F. F. Bruce, The Books and the Parchments, reminds us that, uh, at the time of the Reformation and the Count- Council of Reformation, uh, the history of things in the, uh, uh, English world was as follows. In sixteen eleven, the translators of the Authorized Version translated the Apocrypha as part of their work. And in sixteen fifteen uh Archbishop Abbott forbade any stationer to issue the Bible without the Apocrypha on pain of one year's imprisonment. But an edition of the Geneva Bible, published at Amsterdam in sixteen forty omitted the Apocrypha deliberately. This omission was in line with a prevailing tendency in England at this time, where in sixteen forty four Parliament ordered that the canonical books only should be publicly read in church. Then, after the restoration of the Catholic monarchs, the exclusion, uh, was reversed. But it became increasingly popular among the non-conformists. The first English Bible printed in America, seventeen eighty two to three, lacked the Apocrypha. The fashion of printing Bibles without the Apocrypha received an impetus in the nineteenth century from the example of the British and Foreign Bible Society, which in eighteen twenty six decided to print no more Bibles with the Apocrypha. And to quote a very famous authority, going back just a while, at the Westminster Confession of Faith in sixteen forty seven, Article six of the Church of England stated, the books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are not part of the canon of scripture, and therefore are of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved or made use of than other human writings. We'll see, therefore, that opinion has been divided. Now, from the Westminster Confession of the Church of England, under the influence of the Protestant Puritans, and more recent times by the United Bible Society, the Apocrypha has been most definitely excluded from the list of canonical books. Now, why should we bother about all that? Well, because nowadays there has come a, a very noticeable change, certainly in academic circles, and then with the United Bible Society. In academic circles, theology has long since taken a very liberal course. I myself was present when a professor of theology from London University, some thirty or more years ago in my university, informed the public who will come to listen to his lecture that the Bible was like an electric light, very bright at the center. When you go a yard or two from it, it is still fairly bright. Get several yards from it, and it's beginning to get dim. And so it goes on until it becomes a little bit gray, and then it becomes altogether black, and that's like the Bible is. Somewhere at its center, wherever the center is, it is very bright, but it gets dim in certain parts until you couldn't dis- distinguish black from white and truth from error. That is a view commonly held in liberal theological circles now, and because they hold that, they don't see any difference between, say, the New Testament and the Apocrypha, or the Old Testament and the Apocrypha, and think they should all be bundled together. And the United Bible Societies of recent, more recent times, in order to persuade Catholic people who once were forbidden to read scripture, in order to publish Bibles that will be sanctioned by the Catholic Church, have taken to printing two kinds of Bibles. One set of Bibles without the Apocrypha, another set of Bibles with the Apocrypha included therein. Why should we bother about this? So long as people read the Bible, why should we bother about which books are to be regarded as being in the canon of scripture? Well, let me read you some of the issues at stake, you'll see. Here is that very helpful book by, uh, René, uh, Pash, uh, Inspiration and Authority of Scripture. Uh, he says, why did Trent, Council of Trent in fifteen forty six, take so daring a position because he suggests, confronted by the reformers, she lacked arguments to justify her unscriptural deviations. She declared that the apocryphal books supported such doctrines as, now listen, the Apocrypha supports these doctrines, prayers for the dead, the expiatory sacrifice, eventually to become the mass. Alms giving that have expiatory value, also leading to deliverance from death, uh, in Book of Tobit. Invocation and intercession of the saints, Maccabees and Baruch, the worship of angels, purgatory, and the redemption of souls after. That list of doctrines, uh, uh, is to be found in the sundry books of the Apocrypha. And you may therefore immediately perceive that there are very big questions of doctrine at stake, if these apocryphal books are indeed part of God's self-revelation to men, and if they are indeed, uh, written by inspiration of God, then their doctrines are to be received and submitted to. If they are not part of God's self-revelation and are not part of the canon, therefore the divine canon of scripture, these doctrines are to be rejected as being not in conformity with the rest of the New Testament. And of course, there are other issues, uh, that are at stake. While another issue is that if you go to your unconverted friends and persuade them to read the Bible and get them to read the Bible, and you include the Apocrypha in the Bible, presently they're liable to come back at you and say, you don't believe all these silly miracles, do you? That have been recorded in Belle and the Dragon and such things like that. Are really, are these part of God's word? The Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox churches will tell us that it is the church that tells us what books will be in the Bible. The church, they say, gave you the Bible, and it's for the church to tell you what books are in the Bible and what books are not in the Bible. The issue, therefore, is a very serious one and not to be treated lightly. So let's go over the history of this, these things as briefly as we can. First, the evidence for the Old Testament canon. And here we come to solid grounds indeed. First of all, the Jews, as I've earlier said, the Jews of the ancient world never accepted the Apocrypha as being part of their sacred book. You may read Josephus to that effect, if you care. The great Jewish historian tells us explicitly how many books he regarded and the Jews regarded as being in their sacred books, and Josephus makes it clear that the apocryphal books are not among them. The great Jewish philosopher Philo, he likewise regarded, uh, the apocryphal books as not being part of the Old Testament. And that is indeed remarkable because he read his Bible in Greek. Secondly, we may take the witness of some of the apocryphal books themselves. Look at that first book of the Maccabees. It was written at the time when the Jews were now trying to cleanse their temple. It had been polluted by the, uh, emperor Antiochus Epiphanes. It had to be cleansed. So they came to the altar. What should be done with it? How could you cleanse the altar? They didn't know what to do, and the Maccabees tells us why they didn't know what to do. He says, you see, there is no prophet among us now. Elsewhere, he describes how it's been a long time since there was a prophet. If there were a prophet amongst us, we could go and ask him, and he would give us the direct word of God as to what we are to do. But there isn't any prophet now, says he. So he certainly isn't claiming inspiration by God's Holy Spirit. So they put the altar aside and made a new one until there should come a prophet. He's prepared to think that one day there might come a prophet. There's no prophet then, nor has there been for a long time. Prophecy has ceased. Josephus says the same thing in his history. He says the prophets have long since ceased. Then take the second book of Maccabees. He has a delightful, uh, phrase at the end of his book. He says, you know, I hope you'll take my book kindly, or words to that effect. You know, uh, I- I- I've done the best I can, so wherever I succeeded, uh, take it kindly, and if I've done anything wrong in it and it's done poorly, well, have mercy on me, 'cause I've done my best. He certainly isn't regarding his book as inspired, is he? You never heard a classical prophet saying like that. Isaiah doesn't end his prophecy saying, thus says the Lord, now I put it down as best I could, but if I haven't done it very well, well, have mercy on me. No inspired man of God ever spoke like that whatsoever. Second Maccabees does. On their own testimony, therefore, First and Maccabees, First and Second Maccabees are not books inspired of God. Quite the opposite. But, um, when we have considered the fact that the Jews never regarded these books as part of Holy Scripture, we come to the evidence that must be for us Christians supreme, and that is our blessed Lord Jesus Christ accepted the Jewish canon, not the apostles. They not only accepted books of the Old Testament and attributed them to God, but he referred to the three divisions of the Old Testament. Let me remind you of what he said in Luke chapter, uh, twenty four and verse forty four. Then he said unto them, this is our Lord in resurrection, then he said unto them, These are my words which I spake unto you while I was yet with you, how that all things must need- need be fulfilled, which are written in the law of Moses and in the prophets and the Psalms concerning me. Remember what we saw at the beginning? That the Jewish Old Testament, as we call it, is in three divisions. It is the law, the prophets, and the writings, alternatively called the Psalms, because that third division is headed by the Psalms. Now listen to the Lord Jesus talking to the eleven disciples in the upper room and pointing out to them how that all things in the scripture, that is in Old Testament, that were written about him, they must be fulfilled in me, all that is written in the Moses, that is the law, in the prophets, and in the Psalm. This is our Lord referring to the scripture as it was in his day, and for those of us who are Christians, that will, I am sure, suffice in one sense. And, uh, if you care to now, you can look at me. I have to say one or two more things, you see, uh, b- before I let you go home. But if you say to yourself, well, if the Lord didn't accept the Apocrypha, I have no need to accept it, then why should I bother my head about it, or I needn't think about it anymore? And if that's what you conclude, well, you're free to nap now until about twenty minutes to nine, you see. By which time, if you wake up and I'm still speaking, uh, well, I can't be speaking much more than that, you see. Eh. The question arises, of course, as you immediately see. If the Jewish Old Testament was in these three divisions, yes, but when was each of those divisions closed, so to speak? You see, these books were written in the course of many centuries, weren't they? When was the first division closed and no more books added? And when was the second division closed and no more books added? And when was the third division closed and no more books? Well, the first division was obviously, and everybody agrees, closed very early on in history. Because the authority of scripture, whether a book was to be received as a holy book and an inspired book, was very early settled, of course. When the people stood at the bottom amongst Tiniye and heard the thunders and saw the lightning, and with great terror besought Moses to go and speak to God and not themselves to draw near any further. And Moses went up, and they heard the voice, though they saw no fall. They thereafter soon accepted the Ten Commandments, for instance, the Ten Words, as the words of God. And Exodus twenty four tells how Moses rehearsed in their ears all the words of the law that God had, uh, the covenant that God made with them. And very significantly, he said, and Moses wrote it in a book. He didn't just preach it, he wrote it in a book, says Exodus twenty four. Notice that emphasis on writing. And in Deuteronomy, when Moses rehearses the law at the end of the wilderness journey and sings his song and teaches the song, then he wrote these things in a book. You'll see the written law in the sense of Torah. These books were obviously very early on regarded by all Jews as the inspired word of God. They most frequently disobeyed it, forgot it, uh, and burned it and had to be brought back, but, uh, they regarded it nonetheless as the word of God. However, when was that decided? It used to be thought that the prophets were dis- uh, uh, the prophets division was closed after the time, say, of, uh, of Malachi. But the rest remained open right until the time of Christ and beyond the time of Christ to one or ninety uh, AD, for instance. And it wasn't settled until the Jews, they say, held a council at a place called Jamnia in about the year ninety AD. So when you point out to folks that our Lord, uh, authenticated the three divisions, people are liable to come back at you and say, but wait a minute, when the Lord Jesus was alive, this third division wasn't yet closed. So what shall we say to that? I cannot, um, rehearse in your ears all the detailed discussion of this. It is still hotly debated. I would commend to you, if you're serious in your study, this excellent tome. You say, wow, what a tome. Why would anybody ever write a tome like that about these matters? Well, because this man actually believes in the inspiration of scripture. I don't know about you, but this man does. He believes the issue is so important. We're talking about what is and what isn't the inspired word of God. There's a man that's so believes it. Look at the volume he's written, with all the masses of historical detail, tracing the historical facts as far as he can trace them. Let's thank God for such men. We who do believe in the inspiration that God breathes scriptures. Thank God for men who prepared to give their time and energy to researching the sources to be able to help the likes of us in these matters. Commend it to you, therefore, if you are interested in it, the Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church by Roger Beckwith. Of course, his findings are disputed, but his argument is that these three, the two and three, were decided and closed at the same time, and he would suggest to you they were closed in the time of the Maccabees. For during the persecutions that we talked about earlier, under Antiochus Epiphanes, many of the books of scripture were destroyed, and people didn't keep them because to keep them, uh, was to risk, uh, uh, death at the hands of the government. When the enemy was thrown out, then there was issued, there was a tremendous attempt to collect again the books that were regarded as sacred scripture, and a letter went out to Jewry in all parts to come because we have a collection of the books. If you want them, come and get your copies. And Beckwith argues, to my mind, very strongly that it was then that not only the second division, but the third division also was, uh, closed, you'll see. And we come back to the point that if that is so, then when our Lord was speaking to his apostles, these three sections, all three of them, were already closed and formed the books that the Jews regarded as the inspired word of God and not the others. Josephus, as we said, that is the view he took. Philo, the Jew who lived in Alexandria in Egypt, that is the view likewise that he took. Our Lord authenticated those books as the, uh, Word of God. We follow his example. How then did some Christian people and some Christian churches, uh, come to accept the apocryphal books. How did that happen? Do you see? Well, let me give you a little bit of history. When you, uh, try to answer that question, you'll have to divide in your thinking the ancient world, the ancient world of Christendom, into two major parts, the eastern part and the western part. In the eastern part, not, uh, some there were who accepted the apocryphal books, but those apocryphal books in the east were never accepted. Just let me read their names. You won't remember them, but just let me read them to you. In AD hundred and seventy, the Bishop of Sardis was a certain Melito. He did not accept the apocryphal books. That's AD hundred and seventy, that's second century. The great and famous Origen, the scholar of Alexandria, much traduced by certain modern evangelicals. Origen, you'll see, who, uh, then came, he originated in Alexandria, then he went to live in Caesarea, and he got to know the Jews, and he learned a bit of Hebrew and understood what the Jewish canon was, and he accepted as canonical only the Jewish canon that our Lord had accepted as canonical. Oregon lived in one hundred and eighty five to two hundred and fifty four. I'm sure you heard of Athanasius. He was Bishop of Alexandria. He is the famous Athanasius connected with the great creed, the Athanasian creed, defining the deity and person of Christ. In a letter written AD three hundred and twenty five, he firmly accepts the Jewish canon and points out that all other books may be read as profitable reading, but they are not to be regarded as the word of God. So not all Christians in those early centuries accepted the apocryphal books. But in the West, let's come to the West for a moment. They had general acceptance, did these apocryphal books, in places like Italy and, uh, North Africa, where there were multitudes of Christians, the apocryphal books, um, came to be accepted. And how did they ever come? I'll do my best to make the explanation simple. The Old Testament among the Jews was not written in book form. A book form with covers and pages like this. A book form. We call this thing in the trade, we call this a codex. That means what you call a book, you see, written like that in covers with leaves. You see, that's a book. The Jewish, uh, scribes always wrote their scriptures not in book form, but in scroll form. Here's a photograph of a copy of Leviticus, you'll see. Come up and read it afterwards, uh, you'll see. Uh-huh. It was written about a BC, and this is a photograph of it, uh, you'll see. It is a Jewish copy of Leviticus, therefore. The script is Paleo-Hebraic, and I can't read it anyway, you'll see. But you see from the length of the thing what it comes from. It's only part of the book of Leviticus, but the Jews wrote them on scrolls, long bits all sewn together, you'll see parchment, very expensive, and at each end there was thing like a rolling pin, and each end was stuck to a rolling pin, and then they rolled it up, you'll see. That is called a scroll. Now, if you look at that kind of thing, a scroll of Leviticus would be quite bulky, but a scroll of Isaiah with these sixty six chapters would be an enormous great length. And normally one big book like Isaiah would take up the whole of a scroll, and it would be a y- yards long, you see. That's how they wrote them. And each major book would be on a s- one scroll, and uh, say the minor prophets, the eleven short ones, would be on another scroll, but they were individual scrolls and would be kept individually as scrolls. So it was in the time of the Lord Jesus. Our Lord was handed the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue of Nazareth, wasn't he? And uh, he unrolled it until he got to the appropriate chapter and read it, and he folded it up, closed the book, says the authorized version. Well, that's a little bit misleading. It wasn't a book, it was a scroll. They rolled it up and gave it back to the attendant here. Now, towards, uh, the end of the, uh, first century and on into the second, the Christians, uh, were hit upon a new idea. They left off writing the scripture on scrolls, individual scrolls. You see, on a scroll, Matthew would be on one scroll, and Luke would have to be on another scroll, and John would be on another scroll, you see. They gave up that idea, and they started to write in our book form, do you see? A book with pages, and that, uh, that I showed you the other night, the early gathering of the epistles of Paul, was written in book form. There are the pages, do you see? That was written about two hundred AD. That wouldn't have been pasted to rolling pins each end. It was a book form like we have, do you see? And, uh, it had a tremendous advantage because you could get now a much larger amount of stuff in book form than you could on a scroll. So you could put the contents of a number of scrolls into a book, do you see? And that is what Christians proceeded to do. They did it with the New Testament, of course, and then they started to do it with the Old Testament as well, you'll see. It had another advantage because they were able to write it on papyrus, and papyrus was much cheaper than vellum, and Christians generally were poor, and it wasn't so expensive to produce the books written on papyrus, you'll see. So they came to write out these books, and particularly in the West, there was this other feature to it. Very few of the Christians in the late second and early third centuries knew any Hebrew anymore. So they couldn't, um, uh, read the Hebrew Bible. So how did they read their Bibles, you say? Why, they took over the early Greek translation of the Old Testament made by Jews in Alexandria from about two hundred and seventy onwards. And this early Greek translation was on scrolls, one book on a scroll, so to speak, all the books of the Old Testament on different scrolls. But in addition to those Greek translations of scripture, there were also Greek books, religious books, containing all sorts of things. Those apocryphal books, of course, were on scrolls. And they were in Greek. And the Christians couldn't read Hebrew anyway by this time, most of them. So when they started copying the books of the Old Testament, now from scroll into book form. They, in the course of doing it, picked up a lot of these other books and included them as well. I hadn't, uh, the ability to read the Hebrew to check whether these other books were in the Hebrew or not. That's how it came to be. And then, of course, when the missionaries went to North Africa and they took the copy of the scripture, they themselves couldn't read Hebrew, so they took the Greek translation. The people in North Africa couldn't read Greek, so they translated it into Latin, and the Latin Bibles therefore came to to contain all these other books. And so, for some centuries, people read their Old Testament in the West, thinking that it should contain these books of the Apocrypha. You'll say those Christians must have been dumb or stupid or unlearned or something or other, whatever happened to them. Well, let me take you, uh, tell you what happened to some of the, uh, New Testament manuscripts. The famous New Testament manuscript, Alexandrinus A, the very famous and beautiful manuscript. It was written in the four hundreds, you'll see. And at the end of the New Testament, now you listen to this, at the end of the New Testament, it has the following. Uh, at the close of the New Testament are appended two letters of Clement. If you haven't heard of him, well, you needn't worry, but I'm just telling you, at the end, it's got, at the end of the New Testament, it got two epistles written by Clement, you'll see. And, uh, they originally blessed also the so-called Psalms of Solomon. At the end of its Old Testament, it doesn't just have the apocryphal books that I've told you about. It has two more books of Maccabees, three and four Maccabees. It's got a hundred and fifty first Psalm. Good measure, that, isn't it? Psalm 151. And after the Psalter, it has fourteen liturgical canticles used in the liturgy, uh, you see, uh, and such like things. You say, why on earth did they add all this in the Bible manuscript? Surely that wouldn't, that wouldn't rival, they more not more respect for inspiration of scripture than to do that. Well, what about your Bible? Has your Bible got anything in it that is additional to the inspired scripture? Have you got some Scofield notes, perhaps? Or some Newbury notes? Mm. Have you got a concordance at the back? Mm. That's interesting, isn't it? People, Christians do that kind of thing for some reason or other, don't they now? Yes, you say, but we know the difference. Oh, good for you. We know which bits in our Bibles are Bible and which bits aren't Bible. Oh, good for you. Hope you keep that distinction very clearly in your head, that even the expository notes are not necessarily true to what Bible teaches, do they? Uh, they have to be used with caution, don't they? But you can distinguish because, well, if you can't, you know scholars who can go back to the Hebrew and Greek originals and tell you which of this stuff in my Bible is the word of God and which are other things that have been added by editors and expositors and I don't know who. But these dear early Christians, not being able to read their Hebrew, they added all this stuff naturally enough, but it alas came to be regarded by people who could no longer read Hebrew as though it were the word of God. That was particularly so in the West. To finish that story, and we're only dealing tonight with Old Testament, we shall have to talk about the New Testament tomorrow. But just to complete that story, I must tell you something tremendous that happened. There was a man called Jerome, Saint Jerome was that name, born in Dalmatia about three hundred and forty six. He then went to Rome, and in the years 381 to four, he was asked by the then Pope to revise the Latin Bible. Latin Bible, it had been translated from Hebrew into Greek, and then from Greek into Latin, and in the Old Testament and the New Testament, translated from Greek into Latin, and the Latin Bible had been copied out many times and altered and edited until it was a jumble of a thing. And the Pope asked Jerome, please, would he revise this Latin and bring it into good order? And he had a go and produced a revision, uh, do you see, of part of it. Then, circumstances changing, he went to live in Bethlehem, did Jerome. And there he met rabbis, and there he learned Hebrew. And comparing his Latin translations with the Hebrew, he saw that the Latin translations didn't agree with the Hebrew. And Jerome's reaction was to say, well, let's throw the old extra bits out. They're not according to the Hebrew, they are not part of Holy Scripture. And that's what he wanted to do. But there was another good, uh, scholar, well, a scholar anyway, called Augustine, the famous Saint Augustine. He lived in, in, uh, uh, North Africa, of course. Now, he read Latin, that's what they spoke in North Africa. His knowledge of Greek was a bit thin, I think, but certainly his knowledge of Hebrew was non-existent. And when he found out what Jerome was doing, Jerome was translating direct from the Hebrew, and when he found all these extra bits, he was for throwing it out, you see. And Saint Augustine lifted up his hands in holy horror and said, Jerome, you can't do that. Why can't I? You can read the letters that flowed between them. They got rather hot, you'll say. And Saint Augustine said, look here, my boy, uh, you can't take books and material that's been regarded by the church as a Bible and now say it isn't the Bible. But Jerome said, but these books don't agree with the Hebrew canon. Never mind, said Augustine, I believe that they're equally inspired as the Hebrew. And so there raged this, uh, uh, uh, disagreement between them. And another reason Augustine had, he said, you know, Jerome, it's all right for you, you know Hebrew. We don't know Hebrew. And when our parishioners come to us and say, should this be in the Bible or not, and what does the Hebrew say, we can't tell them, and that embarrasses us very much because we can't tell the people what the truth is. So Jerome, you mustn't do make these changes. But Jerome persisted and made them, of course. So there was the great argument down the centuries for the Roman Catholic Church. It lasted until the Council of Trent decided the matter. It said the the Apocryphal books were to be regarded as divinely inspired and pronounced it anathema on anybody who rejected them. At the same time, it made concessions to Jerome. Those extra bits of Esther. You'll see the additions to the book of Esther that had been put into Esther at the beginning and then later on and then later on another batch to make it run as a long story. They were taken out of Esther, and they stand at the end of the Old Testament where they no longer make any sense. Pick up any Vulgate you like and read it, and you will find the additions to Esther at the end. They don't make any sense. They'd only make sense if they were put back in their particular positions in the book of Esther. You'll say, but the Council of Trent had them taken out, and they put, were put at the end of the Vulgate. That is how it came to be, that Europe, reading its Bible first in the medieval times in Latin, came to accept these apocryphal books as the inspired word of God. It has been the task of scholarship from Jerome onward to show that that idea that they were part of the inspired word of God was grossly mistaken, and in my view remains mistaken to this present day. Now, it's been a long and detailed session, hasn't it? And doubtless many of the details, you will forget them, or perhaps have forgotten them already. Never mind about that. My purpose is to try and point out to you first that there is this disagreement as to what the canon of the Old Testament should contain. Two, to give you some broad principles of guidance as to how to settle the matter. Preeminent in that is, one, the Jews have never accepted the Apocrypha as the word of God, but supremely our Lord accepted the Jewish canon and not the Apocrypha. And thirdly, I suggested to you why it should concern you. Not only because of the old disputes, but for the present mood, when in many countries the word of God is being circulated now, and the people encouraged to read it who were forbidden to read it for centuries, it's been circulated, plus the Apocrypha. So that if you want to witness to a Catholic, and you tell him that, like the dying thief, if he puts his trust in Christ, then the moment he departs this life, he will be with Christ in glory. And the Catholic says, oh, but the Bible teaches purgatory. And you say, no, it doesn't. And he say, yes, it does. Where does it teach purgatory, you say? He'll quote you Second Maccabees as being part of the Bible, and he'll say to you, why have you taken it out? And what right have you to say it isn't in the Bible? And what will you say then? So it is of practical importance, isn't it? And if tonight I've wearied you with hard work and much detail, it is simply to impress upon us that in our witness and stand for the Lord and our concern for his inspired word and our concern for the salvation of multitudes of men and women who have been taught that the Apocrypha and its doctrines are part of God's word. In our concern for these things, we do well to inform ourselves of the facts, hard as that might be, to study them and get them under our control to the end that we might be the more effective witnesses for our blessed Lord. Shall we pray? Our Father, now we thank thee for thy holy word. And above all tonight, as we have considered these complicated things, we thank thee for the testimony of our Lord, the Word made flesh. We thank thee, Lord, for the preservation of the books of Holy Scripture. We thank thee for all those scholars, ancient and modern, that have given themselves to care for these things. We thank thee, Lord, for the inner witness of thy Holy Spirit as to which books are and which books are not the inspired word of God. In our gratitude for thy great salvation and the treasure of thy word, help those of us whom thou dost call to be diligent in understanding the major facts in these matters, that our doctrine may remain uncorrupted, and that our witness to those who need to hear the gospel in its purity may be uncompromised. Bless then our study, we pray. We ask it through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.