Unpacking Truths
Dive deep into God's word and unpack divine truths for today's life journey. In a world where everyone is seeking, join us as we guide you to find hope and power in God's timeless wisdom. If our discussions spark questions or ideas, reach out to us at UnpackingTruths@LOCChurch.com. Don't forget to Like, Share, and Subscribe, allowing us to continue helping people unpack God's truth for their lives! Hosted by Pastor Kendall Koenig and Pastor Maureen O'Connor of Light of Christ Church in Algonquin, IL.
Unpacking Truths
Understanding Biblical Canon: Historical and Theological Insights
What if the Bible you're familiar with isn't the same as your neighbor's? Discover the surprising differences among the Jewish Hebrew Bible, Protestant Old Testament, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox canons in this eye-opening episode of Unpacking Truths. We'll unravel the history and significance of the Apocrypha or Deuterocanonical books, exploring why they're embraced by some Christian traditions and not others. And, we'll discuss the concept of divine inspiration, both in the writing of these texts and the complex process of determining their authority.
Our journey continues as we trace the origins and development of the New Testament. Learn how Paul's letters, addressing early Christian community issues, gradually became recognized as Holy Scripture. We'll also examine the creation of the Gospels, driven by the need to document Jesus' teachings as His first-generation eyewitnesses began to pass away. Plus, we'll touch on the early church's efforts to distinguish authentic apostolic teachings from speculative accounts, like the Gnostic Gospels, offering a compelling look at the challenges faced by the early Christian community.
Finally, we'll delve into the pivotal milestones in the New Testament's canonization, highlighting the roles of key figures like Athanasius and the significance of his 39th Festal Letter. We'll discuss the controversies surrounding apocryphal and Gnostic gospels, and the importance of a unified and trusted canon for guiding faith and practice. Our conversation wraps up with a reflection on the prayer "Our Father," particularly the line "thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven," encouraging listeners to engage with God's vision of a welcoming and loving kingdom. Join us for this profound and enlightening discussion on the formation of the Bible.
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Welcome everyone to Unpacking Truths, and today's episode is one that was submitted by one of our listeners. It's a very simple but a profound question how did the Bible come together? I'm Pastor Kendall and I'm Pastor Mo. Welcome to Unpacking Truths, where we dive deep into God's timeless truths for our lives today.
Speaker 2:Grab your coffee. Open your hearts and your minds. Come take this journey with us, as we unpack God's truths.
Speaker 1:So we're going to have fun unpacking some of that today, mo, and I understand you have a scripture you want to share with us that we won't find in our Protestant Bibles.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, not many scriptures. When we were talking, Pastor Kendall and I, about some of the Apocrypha stories that have been left out, I'm like we're missing Enoch Noah's great-grandfather, those great stories. I want to hear some giants or the extension of Daniel. There's some good stuff on Bell and the Dragon Bell and the Dragon we're missing that In the Gospel of Judas we're missing the lesser demigods that created the universe, so it's like we're missing some things that are quite interesting.
Speaker 1:Well, or that maybe it's good to be missing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we'll talk about that too, but fun, fun to read.
Speaker 1:So where we're starting with this is just acknowledging that if you say how did the Bible come together, sometimes you've got to ask which Bible. Right, because one of the things I was just struck by if you ask a rabbi, he would say there are. So we're just talking the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible. You asked a Jewish rabbi, they would say there are 24 books in the Bible. If you asked a Protestant, they would say there are 39 books in their Old Testament. If you asked a Roman Catholic and opened their Bible, they would find 46. And if you ask someone in the Eastern Orthodox Church, they would say 49 or 50.
Speaker 1:And so you got this kind of head scratching. You're saying which Bible and when we're saying how the Bible came together. So do you want to just acknowledge? Well, I'll speak to the first part then, if you want to jump in. So when the rabbis talk about it, 24 books their Old Testament, their Hebrew Bible, is equal to. It's the same books in a Protestant Bible. We call it 39. They call it 24 because they count like 1 and 2.
Speaker 1:Kings is just one book that the 12 less quote unquote lesser prophets. They count as just the lesser prophets. So that's one book and we count it as 12.
Speaker 2:They group them together.
Speaker 1:Absolutely so. If a Jewish person opened their Bible with the same number of pages, the same stuff is in the Old Testament of Protestant.
Speaker 2:Bible. Yes, and it has the Torah, which is the first five books of the Bible Genesis, exodus, leviticus, numbers, deuteronomy and then it has wisdom teachings and different stuff like that and poems. Yeah, and we just group it differently but we have the same. We use technically the Hebrew Bible. That is our Old Testament.
Speaker 1:yeah, but the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox have these additional books in that are sometimes called the Apocrypha, or my favorite word. Deuterocanonical.
Speaker 2:Deuterocanonical. Yes, and some of those books are Tobit, judith 1 and 2, maccabees, which is really kind of powerful because that speaks into the revolt right when the Jewish people rose up and actually defeated. So it's kind of cool. So some of the stuff you know, the Wisdom of Solomon, catholic churches and Episcopal churches use those books as well.
Speaker 1:You crazy Episcopalians use that too. Yeah, we do, we do, we like it.
Speaker 2:It's good stuff in there.
Speaker 1:So to start back then the Bibles as we talk about the Bible really contains sort of three sections if you're a Christian, well, protestants. Two sections, old Testament and New Testament, and then Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox also include these books that we would call the Apocrypha, or the. Deuterocanonical. That are not a part of ours. But why don't we talk about how the Old Testament came together, Mo?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, absolutely Well. I think it's important, though, to mention as well that these writings right came about during this era between the Old Testament and the New Testament, that 400 years of silence. Many of these books emerged during that time the Apocrypha.
Speaker 2:The Apocrypha. So it explains kind of what was going on by Jewish writers, right, what was going on between that time. That we say God was silent, it's not that God was necessarily silent as much as there was no new prophetic scripture being written during that time Between the end of what we call the Old Testament and the New Testament.
Speaker 1:Yes, that's the section. Okay, so let's go back to the beginning, the opening. Well, let me start with this line. People often talk about Christians. Believers talk about that. God inspired the writers of Scripture, which I think is a good thing to say. I think that Scripture is God-breathed, inspired by God Absolutely. But I think the thing that we sometimes forget is, I believe God not only inspired the authors in their writing, but God inspired a process of discerning which books should be considered canon, which books should be authoritative for us and which books shouldn't be.
Speaker 2:Well, that's interesting. You say that because then you know, as Lutherans use a different set of books than like, let's say, catholics or even Episcopalians. So whose process was spirit-inspired?
Speaker 1:The Lutheran one. Yeah right, Isn't that obvious?
Speaker 2:That was solidified in the 1500s mind you?
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, because Martin Luther said it, so it's true.
Speaker 2:So well, we'll address that We'll debate that later.
Speaker 1:But the Old Testament came together and I think the other thing to remember is, especially in the New Testament, but also in the Old Testament, the writers of these weren't necessarily saying, ooh, I want to write this so I can get into the Bible. They were writing as God was leading them to write. They were writing as God was leading them to write. In the first five books, a good portion of which comes from Moses, attributed to Moses, he was recounting the law that God had given them, the accounting of how God led them out of Egypt and the Exodus and into the promised land. And it was over time, as those were used, that they said this is scripture, this we need to hold on to. This is treasure, because it wasn't just one person's writing. We hear God speaking through that.
Speaker 2:No, and that was around between, they say many scholars, between 14 and 1500, right yeah, bc, and then a few hundred years, for the next few hundred years after that is the prophets and all the different prophets.
Speaker 1:Yeah, few hundred years after that is the prophets and all the different prophets. Yeah, well, even more than that, the former prophets in that time and then the later ones in that, 1,000 to 600. So these writings, these spiritual writings, were being done. And so let's say, just first, for Jewish people and for many Christians, those first five books of the Bible the Pentateuch, the Torah are often attributed to Moses. The challenge is, moses couldn't have written every single part of it because it includes the account of his death, and I don't think he was able to write that, unless he was prophetic, so it could have been foreseen, except he also wrote in there the line and Moses was the humblest of all men on the earth.
Speaker 1:I don't know. And if he wrote that somehow, I think that discounts what he wrote that sounds like something I'd do.
Speaker 2:I'd be like you know what it's going to happen. Anyway, I'm and I'm proclaiming I will die at some point. So I'll just write it in and say you know that I am the humblest of all.
Speaker 1:Well, there you go. I'll try and wait for others to say it about me, which wouldn't be true. So, the Old Testament, these writings were done as they treasured them, as they used them, and again the other thing to remember is— History is in there, laws in there, miracles, promises, story, all of that good stuff.
Speaker 1:But we always think of a Bible as a bound book. But even up until Jesus' day, the Bible, the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, was not a bound book. At that time it was a series of scrolls and so there was this sense that these scrolls were considered sacred. But there was still some debate. Well, should we include this officially in the canon? And the canon is that term of the officially approved Hebrew scripture.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the books that are in the inn and so. Yeah, I mean, well, and I think it's important for us as Christians, we can talk a little bit about like what was the need for this anyway, right, like why did they feel the need, christians, you know? I mean you could also say you know the Jewish people to formulate something. And I think it's important to say that a lot of writings were emerging after Jesus and so they needed something, and not all churches had letters from Paul, right, and some-.
Speaker 1:We're in the New Testament. We'll stay in the Old Testament. Hold on to that.
Speaker 2:Oh, we're sticking in the Old Testament. Okay, so we'll wait then, because, well, it would be the same thing Like what is spirit inspired, what is in alignment with who we are as the people of God called by God? And so I'm not sure actually, I don't know any, I haven't done a lot of research on this, to be all honest, in transparency about if they had the same kind of heresies happening among the Jewish people as we experienced after Christ's death and resurrection, yeah, in the New Testament, but there is this sense of needing boundaries to say where do we really trust that God was speaking and where do we think well, that might be inspiring, but we're not saying that's fully inspired.
Speaker 2:Yeah, divinely. Inspired.
Speaker 1:Divinely inspired and in some ways the Jewish community had to sort of put their boundaries around it after the Christian movement started to sort of say here's where that is Men should never shave their beards.
Speaker 2:Divinely inspired, yes.
Speaker 1:Well, we're getting into specifics, I'm teasing. So the other thing with regard to the Old Testament coming together, there was that time between the last writing, malachi, and the last writing of the Old Testament, the beginning of the new, when those apocrypha were written.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That there was also this whole movement to have it translated from Hebrew into Greek, which was sort of the common or the aristocratic and the learned language of the day, and there was this group of 70 to 72 Jewish scholars who translated it in Alexandria and Egypt and that became known as the Septuagint and that did include some of those apocryphal writings that are not in the Protestant Bible but in the others.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So do we want to shift to the New Testament?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think, so Okay, I think it's safe.
Speaker 1:So the New Testament. I think one of the fascinating things is that I always thought growing up that you know, I tend to think whatever I get, I figure it's in chronological order. So when I read the Gospels I start in the New Testament and I hear Matthew, mark, luke, john. I figure those were the first four books written in the New Testament and they weren't they were written later Paul's letters were the first, so say a word about Paul's letters.
Speaker 2:No, I mean Paul's letters came first and yet, like I was saying before, all the churches didn't necessarily have them right. They had. Some had different letters, some had, and they used it as Holy Scripture, right, Divinely inspired by God to understand what it meant to live out this belief that Jesus was the Messiah who came to save and they're empowered by the Holy Spirit. And so, with this happening and other Spirit, and so with this happening and other letters were emerging as well, kind of answering questions or things that were left open, and so that's why they started to. Really one of the big things they wanted to do was make sure that all the letters that they were using came from apostolic succession, meaning like came from an apostle or an eyewitness to an apostle, right, and so that emerged first. But then what was passed down verbally was the story of who Jesus was, jesus' teachings, and they knew they needed to get that down as well, and so yeah.
Speaker 1:So just to clarify, as you had said, the first letters, romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, galatians, those letters from Paul. Paul wasn't sitting down and going like I want to write something for this expanded Bible. He was writing a very specific letter to a specific community that either he had founded or, in Romans, he was introducing himself to, and it was to address specific questions. So, as someone has said, it's almost like reading someone else's mail when we're doing that.
Speaker 2:And yet some of the things he wrote had universal principles. Some of the things he wrote right, some were very context-specific to a certain church for a certain reason and a purpose, but because some had big universal principles and understandings of who Jesus was and what he was doing and how this impacts our lives, they were used as Holy Scripture, we see, by the church fathers early on.
Speaker 1:Yes, over time. So, basically, Paul wrote a letter to the Christians in Galatia because they were off track on something and getting too caught up in the law. But after he wrote them that letter, it challenged them, it inspired them, but they thought this was such good stuff. They then started making copies of it and sharing it with other Christian communities. So these letters started getting shared, as you were saying, and as they became shared, other churches said wow, this is great stuff. Oh, we're hearing God's voice in this, so as that common usage. That's how the authority of those letters grew and how they eventually began to see them as Holy Scripture. But they started out just as letters that had the force of the Holy Spirit in the words, but they wouldn't have named them as scripture. They were just letters that grew in authority over time.
Speaker 2:Right, and, as that was happening, though, right. So there are some spaces where it's like, oh, I really wish I knew what happened here or there. And that's also when a lot of these other letters started to emerge, or things like the Gospel of Thomas. Right, these Gnostic Gospels were being written, and so there was this real need to discern what comes out of an apostle of Jesus early on and or secondhand witness, and what is being written to fill a gap, and some, even if and some of it was theologically on par and some of it wasn't it was like way off.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So let's again just do a chronological timeframe for folks. So if Jesus was born about four BC and if his death and resurrection was about 29 AD, 30, 33, 34 years old most of Paul's letters were written between 40 and 55 AD. And then it was is that first generation of eyewitness believers were starting to die out that they had been?
Speaker 2:sharing all of Better write this down.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they had been sharing all these stories about Jesus. But that is when the authors, who we call Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, began saying hold it, we've got to capture these together. We've got to write a coherent, quote unquote biography of Jesus so the next generation could have it, Because they thought Jesus was going to return. So they didn't think we needed to put this all together in sort of written form or full written form until they started going like, OK, his return is going to be later. So the letters first, then the gospels were written, these accounts of Jesus' life.
Speaker 2:To capture those before, those who were either with Jesus and or second eyewitnesses were dead. So it's like let's get this down ASAP, because John had some revelations of the future and the end times, so let's get you know. So it was, yes, that's why it transpired, because it was a necessity. Paul wrote letters because he was trying to. I mean, most of them were written while he was in prison, Otherwise he probably just would have visited some of these parishes, right? And so that's how we have so many letters, so many letters, and yet we didn't you're right have any written account of what it was like to be with Jesus and travel with Jesus and what this meant and his teachings and all that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so the Gospels were probably written between 65 and 90, 95 AD, during that time frame, and most scholars believe Marks was the first, matthew and Luke after that and then John, the last of the Gospels written.
Speaker 2:But John is my favorite. I do love that. It's very cosmic.
Speaker 1:Well, see you really should be a Lutheran, because Martin Luther's favorite was John as well. But then, as you pointed to, then other people. People are often struck that Mark and John don't have anything about Jesus' birth or growing up time.
Speaker 2:Right. And yet there are infancy gospels, right, that speak into what Jesus was like you know as a child and different things he did and miracles.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and those other gospels were often written because people said like, hey, I want to know more, and so it was like this legendary material started developing. But the early Christian church very early on said like well, that's more speculative than it's real and so that's why the gospel of Thomas and Peter and Mary didn't get included in that core list because they felt like hold it. We don't know that. That goes back to the apostles. That doesn't go back to the earliest eyewitnesses.
Speaker 2:Some of it was absolutely not in alignment with the gospels right and the gospel message and what Jesus said. So, like the gospel of Thomas, for instance, which is 114 sayings and teachings of what Jesus said, like one of them saying 11, 14, it says Simon Peter said to them let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life, jesus said, I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she may become a living spirit resembling you males, for every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven, because there was this idea emerging, that number one. The ideal is male, to be male. So even in death and resurrecting, you need to have a male body to resurrect, to be with God right.
Speaker 1:So all these crazy thoughts that were not in alignment with anything being taught orally regarding people's experience, the apostles' experience and or secondhand witnesses to Jesus, Well, in some ways, that is why this idea of the canon developed, because if you didn't have clear boundaries around, then everyone could start to think well, this is also or this is also true.
Speaker 2:In the Gospel of Thomas, it says yeah, exactly, and so that's where the Christian church began to start saying well, this is also or this is also true In the.
Speaker 1:Gospel of Thomas. It says, yeah, exactly, and so that's where the Christian church began to start saying, hey, these are the boundaries that we need so that we can keep the message of Jesus clear and it doesn't just keep evolving by whoever wants to add on whatever they want to add on.
Speaker 2:Right, it was definitely to combat heresy, right. But at the same time I know one of their kind of markers to kind of gauge was was this person an apostle and or secondhand witness right To the apostles?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. But you know, and folks may be interested to know, that while the letters and the four gospels that we know began to become clear within 100 years like this is the good stuff, this is the real stuff that the Christian church was still debating what's in, what's out until Athanasius, what's in, what's out until Athanasius. And even then and he wrote the 39th Festal Letter he names those 27 books in the New Testament and says here's what it is, here's what's in. The rest of it shouldn't be, but there was still debate going on in the church. So you're talking 250 years after the last of the New Testament writings and they're still debating should this be in or not?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, and it was really needed because during the time of persecution too and they were going around burning sacred texts, right the church fathers those who are looking over these things needed to know what was considered a real sacred text versus what wasn't, because they were almost moved to give their life to be a martyr to protect those texts. So they needed to know, like hey, which ones we're dying for and which one maybe just give it to them, like I mean. So they had to get really clear.
Speaker 1:I would want them to be clear, you know I don't want to give your life for the wrong thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, no, oh. I died for the gospel of Thomas, so you don't want to give?
Speaker 1:your life for the wrong thing. No, no, oh, I died for the gospel of Thomas. So close Wasn't worth it, wasn't worth it, no, no. So it was a process, and so, one of the things you know, when I started learning that and sort of starting to understand that, it raised questions for me like, well, hold it, I always trusted that Galatians was God's word and how do I know. But that's where I had to really take a step back and realize hold it, it wasn't just the Holy Spirit inspiring Paul to write to the Christians in Galatia, it was also these early Christian leaders continuing to pray, continuing to study, to keep coming back and to say this is the true message of Jesus. And this stuff, no, this is chaff, this is not the essential. And so I believe it was the Holy Spirit not just inspiring the writers, but inspiring those leaders to discern this is what you really need, this is the essentials. You can let the other stuff go, maybe it'll help you, maybe not, but don't put your, don't risk your life on stuff that isn't the core.
Speaker 2:Well, and I well once again. So there's this weird gray space there because it's like some people consider, you know, some, you know, like I said, catholics, episcopalians, orthodox they consider certain books to still be sacred, right, very sacred, just as much as all the other books. And so I don't know. I think it's this space of looking at to see what is in alignment with the big picture of who Jesus was. Did it come from apostolic succession and or a second party, and is it universal principles that I mean, I don't know like I think just are in alignment with what we know and what's been shared? But you have to create something that is unison, right, because I think back of Priscilla and Aquila, the husband I always forget the husband and who was the gentleman that was teaching and he was a really great teacher a profound teacher.
Speaker 2:What's his name?
Speaker 1:We'll put it in the notes below. Yeah, we'll put it in the notes.
Speaker 2:I'm having a brain fart. And so, anyway, he was teaching, he was a great teacher and yet he was missing part of the story of who Jesus was, so Priscilla had to fill him in when he was done speaking. And so it's the same thing when various churches have different letters and or different books, and not all of them, you may be missing the big picture or the big story of what God is doing. Unless you create something that is in unison and that put something together and say this is what we want to give our life for, literally, because you're asking people to give their life, follow you know and live this way, and or literally give their life right to protect these sacred texts.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I guess for me, having not grown up with the Apocrypha and having not grown up with those deuterocanonical books, I feel like I can know the heart of the gospel without them. I'm not saying they're bad, they're not helpful, but to me, the 27 books in the New Testament, I trust that the truth of who Jesus is comes through there and I guess for me part of that becomes is the and just maybe a final thought, which is just kind of one that's out there. But I was really frustrated when I read the Da Vinci Code, because Dan Brown loved to point to this sort of like. Well, the gospel of Thomas.
Speaker 2:a lot of scholars believe it should have been in most scholars that was a Gnostic gospel, that wasn't an actual Apocrypha gospel. That was, yeah right, I'm not talking the Apocrypha.
Speaker 1:I'm talking, you're right, but these other books that were not included in the New Testament that he was making them sound like, well, they, you know, like it was a conspiracy to keep them out.
Speaker 1:It wasn't a conspiracy, it was, I believe, holy Spirit led to say that's going off into some goofy directions, that is not of the core, and those are the ones that I think ended up. I'm glad that Christian church, holy Spirit led, put boundaries around it because there were things that were misleading, that would point people away from Jesus, and so sometimes when people are saying, oh yeah, but there's this other gospel, those other gospels, gospel of Thomas and Peter, they were written much later than the original, as you said, they were not based on eyewitness accounts. It was legendary stuff that was filtered in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, as followers of Christ, though I think it's kind of cool to say pick up the Deuterocanonical books, right, it just means second canon. And other Christians very much think these are divinely inspired and they were considered that until the 1500s at the Council of Trent, when the Protestant Reformation kind of emerged, and so it's kind of cool to read through them and just get a bigger understanding of who God is and what that looked like.
Speaker 1:So I think it can be I guess I'm still a Protestant. I know I love people to just read these 66. And then, if you got time, go to the Apocrypha If you don't start here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely start there.
Speaker 1:So good to be with you.
Speaker 2:Hope this probably raised other questions because we went on a bunch of little tangents here. Hopefully we didn't confuse you more.
Speaker 1:But thanks for joining us. Please, if you think this is helpful for someone else, share it with them. Always like or subscribe. Leave a comment, as that helps this message to go wider and other people to start unpacking the truths of who God is in his word and how we make sense of it for our lives today. Next time on Unpacking Truths.
Speaker 2:As we pray often right the Our Father, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven, and that Isaiah vision is a vision of God's kingdom, of what it means to see the beauty of God's creation in all of diversity and to know that God is so loving beyond our understanding and saying make a space that's welcoming and open and seeks to have a relationship with all of us. Thanks for joining us on this episode of Unpacking Truths. If anything that we discussed sparked any ideas or you have any questions, we would love for you to go to unpackpacking Truths. If anything that we discussed sparked any ideas or you have any questions, we would love for you to go to unpackingtruthscom or you can also email us at unpackingtruths at locchurchcom.
Speaker 1:And don't forget to like, share or subscribe to the podcast, because you doing that allows other people to connect to this content and grow with God as well.
Speaker 2:Until next time, we hope you know that you are loved.
