Understanding the Authority and Authenticity of Scripture

In Ehrman's class he knows that if you can undermine the authority of Scripture, then everything else is going to collapse in the Christian system. And so, his way of undermining Scripture...by the way, there are lots of ways to attack the Scriptures, right? And there are lots of new ways today people are doing it, but Ehrman realized that one way is dealing with which books belong and which books don't and whether those books have been reliably transmitted, so issues of what we call text and canon. [00:01:46]

So, what do postmodern people believe? Not just that there are multiple different views out there, postmodern people believe that because there are multiple different views out there, no one view can be right. And that is what I think is behind the lost gospel phenomenon. If they can show in their mind (this is the non-Christian thinking), if they can show in their mind that there is a bunch of different opinions about Jesus out there, a bunch of different gospels about Jesus, then they can conclude, "Well, then no one gospel must be right. No one gospel could be right. It has to be that truth is relative and gospels are relative." [00:05:39]

The Gospel of Thomas is probably the most famous apocryphal gospel out there. And I get that question a lot, you know, "What's wrong with the Gospel of Thomas?" I would have several responses to a person who said that. First of all, I would ask, "Have you ever read the Gospel of Thomas?" Chances are they haven't or even read the whole thing. If they have, they'll realize if they're so in love with the Gospel of Thomas, do they know what the last line in the Gospel of Thomas is? Logion 114 in the Gospel of Thomas says, "Every woman that makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven." [00:08:39]

Yeah, that's a common misconception out there, which is that the twenty-seven books we have in our New Testament were the arbitrary choice of those in power, usually in the fourth century, usually linked to Constantine. And the whole narrative is that, well, Constantine basically picked the books himself and forced them on the church and then banished all others, sort of a "Da Vinci code-esque" narrative. Okay, that all sounds really interesting and good. The problem is that it just doesn't fit with the facts of history. [00:10:31]

If someone thinks the canon was arbitrarily chosen by some committee in the fourth century, they just don't understand the history of the canon, because we have those books received much, much earlier than that. By the middle of the second century, we have a core group of books, say, twenty-two out of twenty-seven books already functioning as Scripture in the early church. In other words, they weren't picked by a committee. They weren't picked by some, you know, smoke-filled room discussion. They were there sort of organically growing up from the beginning. [00:11:03]

Here's one of the ideas out there that the people have is that books become canon. Okay, so imagine...this is what people think what happens in the canon. They think that Paul wrote some letters in the first century. They were just occasional documents giving his friendly advice. And then it wasn't until the second or third century that Christians said, "Wow! Have you read these letters? These are really great. In fact they're so great, I think, we should make these Scripture. What do you think? Okay, all in favor say, 'Aye'." And there is a vote and they sort of make them Scripture. [00:12:14]

What if the authority was there from the beginning? What if it's not so much that the church made them authoritative, but simply recognized them as authoritative? And so, one of things that you said there that I think is so important that I've said repeatedly, which is that we have to remember books aren't just simply recognized by the church or chosen by the church; they're given by God. And if they're given by God through divine inspiration that means these books are authoritative the moment they're given. [00:12:56]

There are scribal variations, okay. We do know that scribes when they copied sometimes made errors, just like anytime you copied a book would make errors. But we have so many copies of the New Testament across the board that have been preserved that we have a lot of confidence in what was originally written and Ehrman takes the posture here of like super-skeptic. If there's any variance at all, therefore, the whole thing is shot. It's kind of like an all or nothing deal. [00:17:23]

God obviously inspired the original authors. But are we really to believe that God promises that no scribe ever at any point in all of human history whenever someone writes down a passage of Scripture they always get it exactly right? I mean, is that really our view? I mean, it would be really kind of insane and ridiculous to think that God would just, you know, take every scribe that ever decided to write the words down and never let them make a mistake ever. No, God delivered His Word through normal historical channels, and normal historical channels do have variants, yes, but He preserves so many manuscripts that we can know what it said in the end. [00:18:22]

Self-authentication is a word that we need to recover more in the church. I've written effectively a whole book on this called Canon Revisited, which is a whole book on why the Bible is self-authenticating. Now, that's a big word. What do we mean by self-authenticating? What it means is the real way you know that God's Word is God's Word is because God demonstrates the validity of His Word through His Word. In other words, the Word bears God's own divine attributes and qualities. [00:23:13]

People need to realize that the Word of God is powerful and if you use it, you read it, you expose yourself to it, you'll soon realize that you're not reading God's Word; God's Word is reading you. It's not so much that you're doing something to God's Word; God's Word is doing something to you. In other words, it's not a dead book; it's a living book. What kind of book could be a living book? Only a book given by God and that's how we know it is God's Word. [00:24:22]

The book of Hebrews is in our Bibles, but the book of Hebrews is anonymous. We don't know the author. It's not in the text anywhere. And so, the early church was divided over this. Some thought Paul may have still been the author and a lot of other people said Paul is probably not the author. My answer is Origen's answer. Origen, who was a third century church father. His answer is, "Only God knows." So, I think I'm going to stick with that answer. I think it's a pretty good one. [00:24:30]