How We Got the Bible

• The Old Testament developed over a long period and was largely settled by Jesus’ time, whereas the New Testament was written over a short period and formalized in the centuries that followed.
• Historians use four main criteria to describe the canonization of the Bible: apostolicity, catholicity, orthodoxy, and traditional usage.
• Reading other texts is valuable for learning history, but the canonized Bible should be our primary source of spiritual guidance.
• Understanding how the Bible was formed strengthens our faith by showing how carefully Scripture has been preserved, recognized, and passed down through generations.

Church History in Plain Language by Bruce L. Shelley

Pocket History of the Church by D. Jeffrey Bingham

One phrase that I've often heard is that Christianity was born with a Bible and its cradle, which is really unusual. And so from its very beginning, Christians had texts that they considered to be sacred and important, and they knew from those texts what God was doing in the world. And they also used those texts to think about what God is now doing in the world through the figure of Jesus.

Hey friends and welcome back to the Grace Church Podcast. I'm your host Whitney Manus and I'm here with my Co host Scott Mozingo. Everyone say hey Scott. Hey, Whitney. Good to see you. And in the studio today we have a returning alumnus of the podcast.

He knows a lot of really cool things and explains them very well and sometimes gets paid for it. He is a phenomenal tour guide and he has a voice made for podcasting and might put Scott and I out of a job anytime, anytime, anytime. That's right. He is. Doctor Tim Wardle, welcome back. We're glad to have you.

Thanks. Thanks for asking me back. Absolutely. And just for the people who haven't met you yet, will you just do a quick intro of yourself? You are a member here at Grace, so where are you a member, how long you've been a member, and anything else you'd like to tell us about yourself? Yeah.

So my wife Sherry and I moved here 14 years ago and we quickly settled on Grace. We've been attending Grace for 1314 years. I have three daughters. They've all grown up here, and I'm currently an RTS leader, reading through scripture leader here at Pelham, and my day job as I teach at Furman University. I'm a professor of New Testament. And because of that job, I get to travel to the Middle East now and again and take people to Israel and Jordan and other Middle East countries.

And it's a pleasure to both work there and attend. Grace, That's awesome. So Tim, this is spring semester. We're getting close to the end. Just give us a taste. What?

What classes are you teaching right now? I just finished teaching before I drove over here this afternoon, a class called Paul's Life and Thought, So I think we just finished looking at the letter to the Romans. And then I'm also teaching a class called Jerusalem, One City, 3 Face.

So looking at the historical development of the city through the lens of Jews, Christians and Muslims. OK, you also teach a good bit of CS Lewis. I do teach a class on CS Lewis. It's the first year writing seminar, so for incoming first year students, for freshmen, I get to read CS Lewis with them and they get to write about it. Fantastic.

So cool, all the fun stuff. I will throw my roll dens in here, just I feel obligated to. And Tim, you were last on this podcast 2 1/2 years ago and really did an incredible job just summarizing some of the more recent history of Israel in under an hour. And we, we encourage y'all to go back and listen to that if you haven't already.

But at least for today, we'll try to give you an easier topic if we can. Tim gets to pop around our campuses and guests teach just on various topics. And he recently got to teach in RTS about how we came to have the Bible that we read today.

So we really just wanted to have you share some of that on the podcast. But before we dive deeper into that, you, you do just spend a lot of time with Scripture, hopefully in your personal reading, but also for your job as a teacher, as a professor. And I would love to know, just as you spend time in the word, does it ever get wrote or tedious for you? And just if so, like, how do you keep coming back to Scripture with fresh eyes and looking to learn something new when you already do know so much about it?

Yeah, that's a great question. And so, I mean, the honest answer is yes, sometimes it does get wrote and tedious. And so I do have to sometimes take a step back and think this is the word of the word of God that he has for me right now. And to come sit down, open my Bible and think, I am not a professor right now. I'm not AI mean. I am these things.

So I'm not a father right now. I'm not like I am here to hear to hear what what God has to speak to me, what he got to speaking to me through these words on the page. And I have found that I just have to be humble. Really. There are there are lots of times when I have to kind of take my professor hat off when I'm reading because when I read the Bible, sometimes I think, how would I teach this? And that's the wrong question to be asking if I'm not teaching it, if I want to know like what does God have for me?

And so I have to consciously kind of say, I'm going to put those questions to the side and I'm going to open this up and I'm going to see what what God has for me today. It's a really helpful practice for me to be reading through the Bible, which is why I've signed up to do RTS for the second time right now because even though I do teach the Bible, I sometimes struggle to daily read the Bible devotionally or, or for myself. And so it's I just need these habits and I need the accountability to do it.

Yeah, and I love that our RTS groups have been, I've just heard so many great things. And it is the the doing it in community and having a little bit of that extra accountability, but just to take it in its entirety is so impactful. So y'all heard it here first. Tim Wardle has to go to RTS too, so there's no excuse for y'all not to do it. OK, let's take a dive into this idea of where we got the Bible. I mean, big topic, lots of things we could talk about.

There are around 40 different authors over the span of 1600 years that it was written in. And so I mean, where would you like to start? Like how we have a physical Bible in front of us today. Our church uses the NLT translation, but where did all of that even begin to start coming together? One phrase that I've often heard is that Christianity was born with a Bible and its cradle, which is really unusual.

And so from its very beginning, Christians had texts that they considered to be sacred and important, and they knew from those texts what God was doing in the world. And they also used those texts to think about what God is now doing in the world through the figure of Jesus. So the biblical authors are describing events that they either saw in person or that they heard about.

And so the Old Testament will be what Christians call the Old Testament, Jews call their Bible because they don't have a New Testament. It's it's a long period of time that the biblic authors are talking about. So if you were to start with Abraham, because that's dateable, at least in my mind.

So 1800 BC before that you've got Adam and Eve, you've got Noah. Those are important stories, but they're hard to date because it's so, so long ago. So starting with if I start with Abraham and Genesis 11 and then moving forward, you're 1800, Abraham about 400, you got Ezra, Nehemiah. And that's kind of the, the range for the Old Testament.

So a long time, right? Yeah, centuries and centuries. People are not writing that whole time, but by the middle of that time here, they're starting to write down their history and. Before that, just oral history. The stories around. Fireplace everyone's. That's right.

It's being passed on orally mostly because, well, early on, writing wasn't really even invented. It wasn't the thing, but even when it was, most people were illiterate. Even in the time of Jesus, most people were illiterate.

And so the way people learned in the ancient world was by hearing. And so they got really good at hearing and remembering and passing on those stories. So when I think of passing on stories, I think of the telephone game and I'm, you know, you're bad at it. Just around a circle in 2 minutes. It's awful, right?

But that's not how the ancient world worked. They were. They're really good at remembering and passing things on because that's what they had. Yeah. Like our attention span is so short and we talked about that whether it's the Internet or social media or, you know, we try to get our podcast into 30 minutes so that people will sit and listen to it. I don't. Know take away your phone and think about how much more time you would have to remember to learn.

And if that was your entertainment, too, like, we have so many entertainment options now, but back then, you, at the end of your day, everyone got together and just hung out. And Grandpa, tell us a story. Yeah.

So at a certain point, and it's hard to know exactly when people started writing down the stories. And so there are multiple authors over a long period of time still. But I think of like maybe the year 1000 with King David, it's the writing started before that, but it's really accelerating time. And in the time of the kings of Israel and then in the time of exile, so like in the five hundreds BC, seems a lot more was written.

And so there's just periods of time where there's writing their stories are happening all along. And so by the time you get to like 403 hundred BC, the books of the Old Testament are written, OK, but it spans, yeah, you like you said, thirteen, 1400 years, multiple authors, but it's the same God who is behind all of it, right? So God is prompting people to write things down. And then when it is written down, then people are copying it.

But most, most of the time they're hearing it and passing it on. But there are written records. So it's being passed on in written form as well. And was there any need to, like, decide what was included at that point? Were there lots of other different stories that we've just kind of left out from the Old Testament specifically? Or was everyone pretty clear?

Like this is just our history, it's obvious what should be in here. You know, that is a great question that's really hard to answer. So I'm reading in RTS right now. We're reading through, we just finished reading through Second Kings and at the end of every King's life, it'll say, and if you want to know more about this king, you can read the Annals of the Kings of Judah or Israel. Like we don't have those books anymore.

So there were things that were written that we don't have, but there are a lot of things are written that we do have, right? So the things that we read in our Old Testament are really pretty much all of the Jewish texts that were written in that time period. Jewish is anyway Israelite or Jewish texts. Sure. After the year of 400 or between like say the year 4 to 300 BC and, and the time of Jesus, like 0 zero. There are a lot of other Jewish texts that are written that are not included in our Bible.

And so part of that is they're not as old, but also a lot of those texts are reflection upon what we now call the Old Testament books. So they're reading those books, they're thinking about it, they're maybe rewriting the story in different way or they're like they're reflecting in different ways. And that was never seen as quite the same level of authority as the books that we now call the Old Testament. OK. Tim, when you think about manuscripts of Old Testament writings, what do we have? A lot.

We have a lot, but not old a lot like not a lot of the old ones. So the earliest ancient texts that we have of the Bible are from the Dead Sea Scrolls. So these are written between the year, say 200 BC and like the year or 50AD.

So they they're pretty well all the Qumran or Dead Sea Scroll texts, they're all pre Christian. Yeah. So there's nothing Christian in them.

But every Old Testament book, there's evidence of every Old Testament book in the Dead Sea Scrolls, except for Esther. That's the only one that was never like no portion of Esther was ever found. But everything else that you can tell that these texts are important because they're preserving them, they're copying them. And that's why the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls is maybe the greatest archaeological discovery. It was so important because before, prior to the discover the Dead Sea Scrolls, so texts from say let's say 100 BC, the earliest Old Testament text that we had were from like the year 1080 roughly, right?

And so you could move 1000 years backwards and you can say, oh, this is what they're reading in the year 100. This is what the text said in the year 1000. And that's really, really close, right?

So you, you get the sense that there's continuity. The scribes are doing their work very faithfully and carefully. Yeah. Can you describe that process for us just a little bit?

So how scribes worked? Yeah. So the scribal process is such that like it, we live in a day and age when we have a printing press, right?

And so if you want to get a copy of a book, you just print 500 copies and you know you're good to go. And they're all going to be exactly the same. When scribes worked, they had to be really careful to see the text that's in front of them and then copy it.

And so they have their ink, they've got a quill, and they are writing, but they have to look up, they have to look down. They have to look up, they look down because they're looking at the text they're looking, they're writing. They're looking at the text they're writing.

And so there are small differences among every text that we have from anything in nature. Well, not just biblical, any ancient text, there going to be small differences. Most of them are just like articles here and there. There's a missing and the isn't there, like some of a few differences are a little more important.

But by and large, scribes are really good at what they did. I always do this assignment with my students. A New Testament, Whitney did this where I gave them a 5 minute assignment where they had to copy something that was on the on the screen. They had to copy it down in front of them and half the class gets it wrong every single time. And it's just to show how difficult scribal work was.

But they're trained at it, they're good at it. And then, so let's say like Scott, you, you write a text and then you, you write it and then I come along and I'm copying what you wrote. And then Whitney comes along and she copies what I wrote, right. And then you can, I mean, if you're lucky, you have all three texts and you can compare them. Sometimes you don't have them.

And so the scribe then just test is like, OK, this is what it was. And you just keep going. But it's, it's copying and copying and copying and copying.

So then for the New Testament, we really got a New Testament. But the New Testament, we have 5000, more than 5000 Greek manuscripts. The New Testament exist just because so much copying went on and then the New Testament translated into so many different languages that there's there's just so many copies of the New Testament, more than any other book in the in the world. We have so many copies of the New Testament because Christians cared about it so much that they were copying it and preserving it.

Wow. So then let's jump back then to the New Testament and just kind of take us through how we arrived at those those books. Sure.

So by the time Jesus is around in the 1st century, so let's say roughly the year 30 AD, when Jesus is teaching, he assumes I'm going to start with the Old Testament, then move to New Testament. He assumes that what we now call the Old Testament, they could call scriptures. They had different terms for it. He just assumed this was a given, that everyone agreed that these are the authoritative words of God.

So in John seven, he will say, as the Scripture says, and then he'll quote, or in Luke 24, after his race from the dead, he is walking with two other disciples on the way to Emmaus, the road to Emmaus. And he begins to explain to them, he says from the law or Luke says from the law, the prophets and the Psalms, everything that was written about himself, but everything's written about Jesus. And in that statement of the law, the prophets and the writings of the Psalms, those are the three sections of the Jewish Bible.

And so by the time with Jesus, by the time in the 1st century, like, I think Jews just agreed that these are the word, these are the texts. These are the books that are important for us, for our faith, for our history, for how to live. And it was, it was not a discussion. Like, do we believe this book? Do we not do this book? Like they all agreed on what it was.

So then after Jesus is raised from the dead and he ascends to heaven, early followers of Jesus are starting to want to do things like record his words, right? And they're, they're reflecting about what he said. And Paul's going around teaching and he's writing letters.

And so in a very brief period of time between 50 and 100 AD, all the books, the New Testament are written, right? So it's very close in time to the time of Jesus. And it's kind of this, this burst of energy almost. Other New Testament, other Christian texts are written after that. 9 New Testament, other Christian books are written after that.

But it's this period of time that later Christians look back. They said these texts that were written now are the ones that we need in addition to the Old Testament. We need these books as well that can teach us about who Jesus is, why God sent Jesus, how we should live as Christians and a whole bunch of other, you know, reasons why they they accepted these texts as important and authoritative. Should I keep going? No, I think that's great. I mean, that's super helpful.

So we've got Old Testament, we have New Testament. Old Testament is a little bit more straightforward and clear. In the New Testament, we have a lot of writing that's happening in a very short amount of time, and then a lot of writing that happens after that. Can you just explain a little bit? I mean, you mentioned that you have Christians who are reading all of these different texts and you mentioned some of the criteria that they're thinking about of why these need to be added into the Bible.

Who were some of those people? Like, how do we, how did they decide? Who gets to decide what goes in the Bible? So for the new, this is easier for the New Testament than the Old Testament to think about these questions.

So for the New Testament, there's nothing called a New Testament that that phrase or that it didn't mean any, that wouldn't mean anything until the end of the 4th century. And so I'll jump to the end and then I'll work backwards, right. So in the years 393 and 397 AD, two different councils got together and said this is the New Testament.

So they decided these 27 books are the 27 books that we are going to read in church. We're going to consider them authoritative. We're not going to add anything to this. We're not going to take away from this, right?

So those are the 27 books. One of the reasons it took so long, right? If you think between the year 50 and the year 393, that's a long time. It's partly because Christianity was an illegal religion for most of that time.

So there was not a time when like Christian bishops or elders or pastors could get together and make these decisions because they would have been in danger of arrest. And so it's only after the Empire becomes Christian, the Roman Empire becomes Christian, that these councils are even possible. So the most famous council is Council of Nicaea and 3:25. That's the earliest Christian council where bishops from all over the world are getting together and discussing things that are important for church doctrine and church life.

And so some of the big issues there were like, how do we talk about Jesus, right, which is an important question, right, because they were they were issue there. There was controversy over was Jesus always existent? That was he created a certain point in time.

And so they had to like wrestle with those issues. And then several decades later, then they get around to saying, OK, like we've been using these, what we now call the new test. We use these texts all along, but now let's actually define it and say, what are the texts that we are going to be using and and call authoritative?

But looking backwards, you can say so two things. You can look at like certain periods of time when certain collections, what we now call the New Testament, seem to be rise to the level of Scripture. And then you can also look at kind of criteria for like how are they choosing?

And so Paul's writing in the 50s and 60s of the 1st 1st century. By the middle of the 2nd century, there's already a collection of Paul's letters that's circulating together, right? So you know that even though Paul wrote a couple letters to Corinth and one to Rome and a couple episodes like he's writing these letters, somehow we don't know how someone went and collected them all. And then they're all circulating together as a collection. By the middle of 2nd century. It's clear that that's happening.

And so that tells you that early Christians think what Paul said is important, right? And they're collecting it, they're preserving it, they're copying. It how'd you be? How'd you like to be the guy or gal hanging on to that collection? Oh gosh. Carry.

Carry it with you. Of course, they probably just thought it was another book that they had. You know, they're just like, oh, that's, that's funny. They're like, hey, don't give it to Johnny, he loses stuff at the time. You can't even remember to keep his lunch with them. That's right.

That's great. Is is interesting to think about how or why someone decided it was important to collect Paul's letters because it was not centralized, right? He's sending letters to different places, sure. And one theory that makes the most sense to me is that after Luke wrote the book of Acts and it details Paul's itinerary and where he went, someone said, I know he wrote a letter to us and we are in Thessalonica.

But I get apparently he went other places too. Like let's go around and see if he wrote letters to other places too and someone collected them. Which would have been a really cool, unifying thing for the early church. It would have. I mean, it's not like people are, they're not travelling like we are today. You're right.

But people who did travel from city to city for trade and for different things. Not everyone travelled, but. Which like can you put into context like from Thessalonica to Jerusalem, like if you put that over the United States, like about what is that distance for us? OK, so I want to say 1000 miles but I don't know why I think that. I can tell you that in Paul's like 3 missionary journeys in the book of Acts, if you were to add up all the I can use walking most for these sailing songs, but if you're to add U all that, it's the equivalent of going from Boston to San Francisco to Boston to San Francisco and halfway back.

OK. Wow, it's a long ways. Yeah, I might have had one too many lengths in there, but it's like it's like 2 1/2 times across the country. Yeah, and it's a, it's a lot of travel, but also it would have been customary for, especially in such an area of trade in the Mediterranean Sea. People are moving around all the time. They are.

There's the Roman Rd. system is world class. There are shipping lanes that everyone there's, you know, everyone's knows the route from A to B and so, yeah, you could do it. Yeah, for sure.

So you have to your point, Scott, I mean, like as those things are becoming shared and people start to realize, I think we've mentioned as we're going through First Corinthians, Blake had said, like they have to figure out their issues because that's the only church around. And then at some point they realize, oh, there's all these other churches around and we all have to work together and figure this thing out, especially when you're undergoing persecution and try to find friends where you can. So when do you think church churches would have had copies of multiple letters?

When would that have been a reality? Any idea? I don't really know, but I would think end of 1st century being a second century that someone has.

So someone must have said, yes, he wrote a letter to us in Thessalonica, but if he also went to Corinth, maybe what he said to Corinth applies to us too, right? Because they're specific. Like Paul writes to Thessalonica what he says there. He does not writing other people right.

But it didn't take long for Christians to say, well, what Paul said to us, he probably met more broadly for everyone too. Like it's it becomes more universal. Yeah. And you do have the the the notion of many circular letters that were hitting very, yes, very many churches. Yeah, and some of Paul's, like the letter the Galatians is a circular letter because Galatia is a region, not a city.

And so Paul's writing it and probably assuming that it's going to go from church to church in the region of Galatia. Yeah, the Gospels are also kind of mid 2nd century at first. I, I think Mark was the first gospel written. People have different opinions on which gospel is written first. I think Mark was written first, but I, I'm convinced it was not called the gospel according to Mark. It was just called the gospel because it's the only one, right, right.

You don't need to call them the gospel according to Mark, according to Matthew, according until you have more than one, right, until you have to differentiate. I mean, they could have done by colors like the yellow gospel, the blue Gospel, right? But what they did is they named them according to the author, and you don't have to do that until you have more than one.

And so they, they started to call differentiate the Gospels from each other by the early 2nd century, by the mid to late 2nd century, there are lists that are mentioned and they they talk about the Gospel according to Mark, the Gospel according to Matthew. Like so they're collected. There's so all they say Paul and the Gospels are probably seen as authoritative easily by the first, by the 2nd century, not far removed from the time of their writing. And they are kind of, I mean, still to this day, I think many Christians say those are the most important parts of the New Testament.

But it's all important, right? But those seem to have been the ones that were the important, the earliest. They're seen as authoritative the earliest. OK, so we have the councils that have picked out all of our books. How do we get the order that they're currently in? Because it's it's not chronological and we have kind of some different genres.

But how did they decide when do Genesis and Exodus and and so on? Yeah. So for the Old Testament there is this kind of three or tripartite division, the 1st 2 are easy.

So the law, the first five books, that was the oldest part and soon as the most important part for Jews. OK partly it was the most important because it was the oldest. It was also like this is what God is telling us to do and how to live. The prophets is the next section. There's I think 8 prophetic books in the Jewish Bible and some of the books that we would not consider prophetic books are considered prophetic books in the Hebrew Bible.

So Joshua is a prophetic book. The 1st and 2nd kings first like Samuel. Those are prophetic books because there are prophets in them. Right, OK.

And so that was a collection. It was pretty well defined pretty early on to the last section. Is this called the writings? It's not the miscellaneous section, but it's kind of like there's like the other stuff. Yeah, the rest of the story.

And so things we would consider like Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Solomon, like those books are all in there Ester. But then there's also we might call historical books like First and Second Chronicles. Isn't that collection Ezra and Nehemiah is in that collection?

So it's so it's kind of it kind of goes. They were organized chronologically in the Jewish Bible. But when Christians use the same text, right?

So Jewish Bible, Christian Bible, in terms of the Old Testament, it's the same texts, but they're arranged differently, right? So Jews have this three-part, this three-part division. Christians arranged it more like they're still the law, still first, Torah still first. And then you have what are called historical books, kind of sketching the history of ancient Israel. And then you get to some of the more, some of the poetry, some of the writing, and then the prophets as well. They're kind of thrown in at the end.

So it's not chronological. Like if you're reading chronological, you should be like this past week we were reading in Second Kings. And when you get to Hezekiah and 2nd Kings, you should put a pause there and then go and read Isaiah because it's happening at the same time, right?

And so it's easy to miss the way the Christians arrange their Bible, but you have to arrange it somehow, right? And so they just the Christians put all the prophets at the end. But the function of that is Malachi is the last book of the Christian ordering of the of the Old Testament. And Malachi, the last chapter is looking forward to a figure that would come.

So when you open up the pages, the first page of Matthew in the New Testament, it's like, oh, here's the figure who would come, right. So it's it leads in very organically in the New Testament. So the Christians are very intentional on how they arrange their Bible. For sure. Yeah. And that, that's something I've learned over time, that's someone didn't just throw all these together and say good luck, figure it out.

And it is OK to have a chronological Bible and to use it on the regular. Right. I mean, I think about, whenever I think of chronology, I think of the Marvel movies and how, you know, you can find all of these lists where people have taken the movies and putting them in chronological order and that actually can't help you. It does track with the story.

So it's not that one is right over the other, but it's allowed. You know you want to go that way and it can be helpful. Whitney, to your original question to me about how do I keep the Bible alive to me and how do I keep it personal? I mean, one way is maybe reading it one way first time, like I read through the way it is in the Bible and then the next time I might read it chronologically.

So the books might be in a different order, but I start to make connections that I hadn't made before and like, oh, that's why, right? Because this prophet is saying this and this is what's happening. So just to go it's Scott was saying like you can read chronologically. It's different. You know, there's no one way that you have to read the Bible. That's. Right.

So going back to these councils, I'm sure there was like they lasted like 15 minutes, right? Everybody was in super easy agreement. What what is what is that like we having days, long weeks, long months, long discussions. Are there some books that are we're skeptical about? Like take us into that a little bit?

So different councils lasted for different amounts of time. Something like Council Nicaea, I think it lasted months. The Emperor Constantine brings in everyone. He sets them up at his palace and they're they're just talking for a long time. Other councils, I think we're shorter.

So it just kind of depend on what the topics were, how many came, how international since it was like sometimes these councils are more regional so they would come in for a shorter period of time. There is no, there's not a list from the ancient world to say this is the criteria by which we use to decide what was in the Bible and what was not right. That doesn't exist.

But it seemed looking back where there's like 4 different criteria that they probably use to determine like what's authoritative and we should be reading in church and what is just good for us to read. But it's not it doesn't rise to the same level. And so one of them is a they want it to be written by an apostle, someone who is in touch with Jesus.

So the fancy were to be apostolicity, right? So does it go back to an apostle? Another one is Catholicity meaning not Catholic Church, but Catholic in the meaning of its universal.

So it doesn't have universal application because that's what the word Catholic means. And so this is where actually Paul's letters might have had a little trouble because Paul writes to Thessalonica something very specific. Is it universal enough that everyone can read it, or is it just good advice for a Thessalonica?

And so at least by the 2nd century, it seems that early Christians are saying, no, what Paul said at Thessalonica, he actually is really saying to all of us, right? So it's universal in scope. Is it orthodox? That's the third one.

So does that line up with what the Church is teaching? So there were a number of early Christian texts that did not make a New Testament that failed on this count. So early Christians are writing, they're reflecting upon their faith and what they believe, but it didn't seem like it really. And then lined up with what the church thought was really important.

The technical term is that it does it line up with the regular fide or the rule of faith. This is, it's kind of a circular argument because the church is teaching what the texts are saying and then they're, they're judging the text by what the church is saying. So it's kind of like it's, but it's, you could say it's a census. Like it's, it's a, it's a synergy. Like it's, it's a useful thing. Like the texts are saying this, we're preaching this.

And so the texting texting a line of what we're saying, but we're getting what we're saying from the texts. So is it Orthodox? Does it line up with what? That's right.

So Orthodoxy, Catholicity, apostolicity and the other one doesn't have a good city at the end, but I know and it's probably the most important category and it's just called like basically what what are people reading in church? Traditional usage is sometimes what people say. So they're probably reading things that an apostle wrote that is Orthodox, that is Catholic and orientation.

And so that really, they probably just went, they didn't go out and say, oh, we haven't heard of this book before, but let's read it and see if we think it's important now that what they're doing is they're saying what they're already reading in church. Is it helpful for us? And since it's stood the test of several centuries, this is the stuff that we need to keep reading.

So is that idea where Canon or like a measuring stick comes from? Yeah. So you talk about an you can talk about an Old Testament Canon, a New Testament Canon, which just means like these texts have to measure up. They have to meet a standard, but they have to measure up to a certain standard. And then if it does meet that standard, then it's in. If it doesn't meet the standard, it's out.

Got it right. One one other thing, the word inspiration is also an important one does not seem to have been a criteria that they used. And the reason is because so many texts were thought to be inspired that it couldn't weed out much because all early Christian authors that talk about inspiration or that they, you know, they had that the Holy Spirit was helping them write or guiding them.

And so all the texts that made in the New Testament are thought to be inspired. Sure, right? It would not have been considered if it wasn't thought to be inspired.

But in and of itself, I can't weed out things because early Christians thought that God was inspiring lots of people. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, your recent newsletter was inspired. That's right. If you say so, we'll let you be the judge.

So. So this sounds like the most intense work conference ever and the longest one ever potentially. So if something does not meet those criteria and was not entered into the club, we still have a lot of those around. We have them available to us. Would you like encourage us to still read those? Like is there still benefit for us or just like stick to your Bible?

What you got? That's that's the best stuff. I mean, if you're, if you are modus, your reason for reading is to say, I want to know what God has for me, then the Bible is a great thing to read, right.

But if you want to know more about the world in which the Bible was written, if you want to know more like what are other people thinking, what kind of history is happening, then I think it's really, really useful to read some of these other texts. And so some of them would be Jewish texts that are written between the Old and New Testament. So First Enoch was a hugely influential book. Jude mentions it.

And so like, you know that some of the Testament authors, they know what first, they're familiar with Jubilees, the Testament of Moses, the wisdom of salmon. There's a bunch of texts that are written that are you really, really useful for understanding Judaism in the time of Jesus, but they're not in your Bible because they didn't quite meet the criteria of the Old for Old or New Testament. They're also a bunch of Christian texts that are written after the New Testament and some of them probably in the same time.

Like First Climate is really old. The Epistle of Barnabas is really old. So there's a whole collection called the Apostolic Fathers. It's really early to mid 2nd century Christian texts. Really useful for reading if you want to know what Christians are saying and doing and thinking really early on. There's a bunch of texts too that Christians said no, you probably shouldn't read these.

So an example that hits some of the criteria but not the others. So the Gospel of Peter was a gospel that was written 2nd century text. So when an early Christian went to his Bishop, Bishop Serapian and Antioch and said, I just I found this Gospel Peter, can I read it? And the Bishop said it's by Peter. Sure. And then we're told like a couple months later Serapian reads the Gospel Peter and he sends a note to the guy saying don't read it.

Yeah. Because although it claims to be by Peter, it's not by Peter and it does not meet the standard of orthodoxy. It is not teaching what we're teaching in church.

So there were certain things that ruled out of bounds. Even if Apostle was said to have written, in this case E Peter didn't write it, but it carried the name of Peter OK. And so real quick, the a lot of the intertestamental books are included in the Catholic Bible.

So yes. What we know is the the. Apocrypha. So some of them are. Not all of them are, but some of them are. There's a collection of what?

Like it's 10:00-ish, I forget the exact #10 to 12 books that are in the Catholic Bible, not in the Protestant Bible. Reason for that most likely is the Old Testament is written in Hebrew and about the year 200 ish BC it was translated into Greek. So now there's two versions of the Old Testament. We call it the Old Testament, right? There's a Hebrew version and a Greek version. And then all the intertestamental books, like the, some of the apocryphal books, they're written in Greek.

They're not written in Hebrew. So some of them are just added to the Septuagint. They become part of that. And so as people later on are reading the Greek version of the Old Testament, not the Hebrew version, they are seeing these texts in there.

And so like, oh, these are, these are part of the Bible as well. And so up until the Reformation, those, some of those books like First and 2nd Maccabees and Tobit and Judith and a number of others, they're seen as biblical books. But then in the Reformation, some of the Protestants went, they learned Hebrew, they went back and run. They're like, oh, but these books are not in the Hebrew Bible. They're not in what Jews are reading.

So we probably shouldn't read them either. And so then Protestants kind of remove those from their Bible. So they're in the Catholic Bible, but not in the. Protestants.

So it really has more to do with language, which is the Greek language and the you mentioned Septuagint, that is the Greek version of the Old Testament, yes. So there's some extra credit reading if if you want to put it that way, but you know, the Bible is the Bible and that's definitely where to start. That's definitely where we want to be getting just our daily reading, our daily mana from. Do you want to say it that way?

But last kind of question, just to see if we can bring this home. I mean, I, I kind of love to ask this question a little bluntly, like why, why do we Care now? You know, if, if y'all love history, I know you are in this and, and loving every minute of it.

But for someone who is like, OK, I, I'll read my Bible, I'm good. I don't know that I really need all the history, all the background. Thanks though.

But I do think that having some of this context is valuable for us. So how does just having this information, some of this history, how do you think it impacts our faith now and to start our current spiritual formation? So one way to answer that is, is to say that it's helpful for me to know that the books that I am reading, that I call the Bible, that I am told it's the word of God. That this is something that it's not just for me that Christians for 2000 years have also agreed with this. And they have said these are the texts that are important.

They are the things that put us most directly in touch with Jesus, most directly in touch with what God did in sending Jesus to the world. And so I want to be able to learn and grow in my faith and knowing more about God and what God is doing in the world. These are the texts that I need to read. And it didn't just drop from the sky 50 years ago. Like this is a long history here, right?

And so that for part of it, or that's for part for me, that's part of it is to say that there's a long history here and that much smarter Christians than I made decisions a long time ago. And I can just trust that they made the right decisions. I also find it helpful to think that we have so many copies of the New Testament.

There's just just so much evidence that early Christians thought this is important. They copied and copied and copied that. I think we can be pretty confident that what we have in our Bible today is what Matthew intended for us to have, or Mark intended for having what the biblical writers were trying to say. Yeah, I think growing up, depending on your tradition or background, you were handed a Bible and told this is the word of God. And we believe it. And on one hand, like that is important and that's super true.

But it is super valuable to ask why do we, why do we trust it? You know, let me let me just check how do we get what we have? And so I think that's important. And then just exactly what you said that this is Bible is not just for me. It's so easy to come to Scripture with my life and say God has given this to me and it's all about me and my life. God has also written it to thousands of believers that through the Holy Spirit we are connected to, we are a part of, and we will see in the end, you know, we will be reunited with Christ together.

And so it just it, it's helping me expand my imagination beyond sitting down with my Bible and God, please fix my work problem that I have today, you know, and it becomes part of this deep, rich history that is for me and includes me, but was not necessarily to me initially. And that's just, that's incredible to think about. Yeah, no, it is. It's it's helpful to be, we talked about not just being upstate Christians or great church Christians. We talked about being world Christians and understanding what's happening around the world.

It's also important to be historical Christians and understand where you know these thousands of years of believers, how God has cared for, protected His Word, passed down His word. Yeah, it's we're standing in a long line of of faith and that is that is an important heritage. Yeah, absolutely.

Well, 10, thank you so much for just being with us today and and walking us through all that. And you're just, you're teaching as a gift to our church and, and we're grateful for your time for sure. Any parting words, Tim? You should join RTS. My parting words. There you go, the best promo you can ever get. Thank you all for listening.

If you have any questions or you want to learn more in this kind of category of church history, definitely let us know. And we can, I'm sure, dig up some more voices and some more perspectives. I'm sure we could have Tim back.

So please give us your feedback and we'll see you guys next time on the Grace Church Podcast.