Welton Understanding the Whole Bible

The King, The Kingdom and the New Covenant
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4835-5326-9
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 455 Seiten

This textbook is the distillation of a nineteen-week class Understanding the Whole Bible From Genesis to Revelation taught by author and theologian Dr Jonathan Welton.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Welton, Jonathan

Leseproben

two UNDERSTANDING THE BIBLE In our modern culture, people generally know the Bible is a book that many people believe is the Word of God. We agree with this assessment. We believe the Bible is God’s Word and it needs to be understood. It needs to be studied and taught as absolute truth. Until the advent of the postmodern movement, these truths were generally accepted by all Christians. However, many today are saying, “There is no such thing as truth,” or, “Truth is debatable.” As this cultural shift has happened, one of the main attacks of postmodernism against biblical Christianity has been against the Scripture itself. People say, “The Bible was just written by men, and if it was written by men, it can be manipulated by certain political systems. It can be used to oppress people.” They ask, “How do we understand the value and integrity of Scripture if we don’t know its origin?” That is really the question. How did we get the Bible? What is its source, how did it come to be in this form, and how do we know we have the right books of the Bible? The Bible is made up of sixty-six books that were chosen from a larger canon of writings, including books like the Gospel of Thomas and other Gnostic Gospels, as well as the books in the Apocrypha and the Pseudepigrapha. If we are going to treat the Bible as the Word of God and source of absolute truth, it is important for us to understand why these particular sixty-six books were chosen above the others and valued as uniquely inspired. Once we understand this, we will also be able to have a proper perspective on the books that didn’t make the biblical canon. THE HISTORY OF THE CANON The Bible Canon is the sixty-six books agreed upon, throughout Church history, as the Word of God. This includes all branches of Christianity—the Greek Orthodox, the Roman Catholic, and the Protestant. All have agreed on this exact list since it was first formed in the fourth century. The Roman Catholic Bible does contain extra books, called the Apocrypha, but Catholics do not consider these books canonized Scripture. They are important historical books that complement the Scripture but are not on the same level with it. One of the Church fathers, Eusebius, wrote a book titled The Church History, which is the earliest history of the Church other than the Book of Acts. Eusebius lived in AD 263–339 and essentially wrote what is considered the Book of Acts continued, picking up the story where Acts ends. In it, he recounts how the books of the Bible were accepted, which ones were debated, and which ones were rejected. Eusebius tells us that in the fourth century Church leaders put the books of Scripture into four categories—accepted books, disputed books, rejected books, and heretical books. The first category included most of our present New Testament books. The disputed category included the books of Jude, Second Peter, Second John, Third John, and James. The only New Testament book included on the rejected list was Revelation, with a note that many also considered it an accepted book (as Eusebius himself did). Finally, the heretical category included pseudepigraphal books, which will be explained in more detail later. The disputed books were all questioned for a reason. Jude was disputed because it quotes from the book of Enoch, which is not accepted as part of the Old Testament canon. Second Peter was debated because the manner of writing in the Greek is very different from that in First Peter. There is scholarly debate regarding whether Second Peter was written by the same Peter who wrote First Peter.2 Second and Third John were also disputed (and still are) because they are introduced as written by “the elder.” Who is the elder? A lot of people have assumed it was John, but it also has been the source of a lot of debate. The Book of James was also disputed. Technically speaking, the Book of James was actually written first and is probably the earliest New Testament book. Despite this, it is debated because James talks about proving our faith by our works. Some people have difficulty understanding how that can stand alongside what the apostle Paul wrote in Romans—that faith is its own evidence, that our faith establishes and completes everything. Even Martin Luther, more than a thousand years after the biblical canon was formed, questioned whether James belonged in the Bible. The debate continues among some today. However, when properly understood, James and Romans actually complement each other very well. The Book of Revelation still is highly debated, and some people say it should not be in the Bible because of its late writing. These people believe the book of Revelation was written around AD 96, which is much later than the rest of the New Testament. Some people also say the books of Matthew, Mark, and Luke must have been written in the AD 90s because their parallel passages on the destruction of Jerusalem (see Matt. 24; Mark 13; Luke 21) are too perfect to be actual prophesies. If these books were written before AD 70, they claim, it means Jesus was prophesying too perfectly, which validates the gift of prophecy. Because some scholars, professors, and colleges do not believe in the supernatural, they re-date these books and claim the authors wrote them after AD 70 to make Jesus look like an incredible prophet. When deciding upon the accepted books of the Bible, the early Christians used two main criteria. The first sprang from the Roman Emperor Diocletian’s (AD 284–305) edict saying Christians must sacrifice to the gods or be put to death. Christians were also commanded to burn all their books. For this reason, the early Church had to decide what books they were willing to die for. What books would they hide and protect even at the cost of their lives? Those were the books that were later put together into the Holy Canon we have today. The sixty-six books of the Bible are the books early Christians were literally willing to lay down their lives to protect. The second criteria was the issue of authorship. Here we find the issue of the pseudepigrapha, or works that were not actually written by the person they claim to be written by. This is why some people question the validity of Second Peter. They think someone other than Peter actually wrote the book, that it just has his name on it but was not actually authored by him. This matters because if it wasn’t actually written by him, then it was written by an imposter and does not hold the same value. All of the books of the New Testament are written by first century apostles (Mark and Luke were not Apostles but wrote their accounts on behalf of Apostles, Mark essentially wrote for Peter and Luke wrote for Paul). If a book claimed to be written by an apostle but actually was not, it is considered pseudepigrapha. It was not valuable enough to include in the canon of the Bible. These are the two main standards the early Christians used to decide what books to include—was it written by an apostle, and was it a book worth dying for? The first official list of the accepted books of the Bible was put together at the Council of Carthage in AD 397. Since the formation of the Bible in AD 397, it has maintained the same basic form of those sixty-six books. It has, of course, been changed through translation. We received the sixty-six books in AD 397, but they have been understood through many different translations through the years. WHY SIXTY-SIX BOOKS? So far, we have seen some of the criteria used to categorize and ultimately accept or reject possible books of the Bible. Now we are going to look specifically at the final number—sixty-six. While we could accept that number as divine providence, apart from human understanding, it is quite possible the early Church leaders used a pattern from the Old Testament to help them arrive at sixty-six books. This is simply a theory, not something we can prove, since none of us knows what the early Church leaders were thinking. Below is a picture of a candelabra, which originated in Exodus 25, where Moses received the description of what to build for the tabernacle and the articles to place in it. Starting in verse 31, it says: Make a lampstand of pure gold. Hammer out its base and shaft, and make its flowerlike cups, buds and blossoms of one piece with them. Six branches are to extend from the sides of the lampstand—three on one side and three on the other. Three cups shaped like almond flowers with buds and blossoms are to be on one branch, three on the next branch, and the same for all six branches extending from the lampstand. And on the lampstand there are to be four cups shaped like almond flowers with buds and blossoms. One bud shall be under the first pair of branches extending from the lampstand, a second bud under the second pair, and a third bud under the third pair—six branches in all. The buds and branches shall all be of one piece with the lampstand, hammered out of pure gold. As the verses explain, the branches of the lampstand (candelabra) have cups, buds, and blossoms. This pattern repeats on each of the branches, so every branch on the left side of the diagram has nine of these items—three cups, three buds, and three blossoms. This equals nine cups, nine buds, and nine blossoms on one side of the candelabra. The same is true of the other side. As well, going down the middle stem, or the lampstand, are four cups, four buds, and four blossoms. So, totaling up the items on the candelabra, from the left side to the right, we have nine, nine, nine (items on the left branches); twelve (items on the lampstand itself); and nine, nine,...