Sermon – Authority of Scripture Dec 11, 2005

Bible History Ignorance
I recall a time when I was in college and I tried to witness to a Middle-Eastern student who lived in our dorms but went to a different university. I had recently returned from serving nine months as a traveling evangelist where I was trained with all the arguments and Bible verses necessary to lead someone to Christ. When I came to the end of my explanation the student said, “But I don’t accept your Bible as true.” He completely shot down everything I said. I recall thinking, “Well, I guess there is no way to reach those who do not accept the Bible. He is too different from me to be told about salvation.”

The problem was not this student but my lack of understanding of why the Bible is the legitimate source of truth. I accepted it because that was how I was raised, what I had been told, and that was good enough for me. My goal this morning is to answer the question, ”How do we know the Bible is true?” I hope the answer will be more complete than, “Because my mother told me so.”

Old Testament
Let’s begin with the Old Testament. How do we know the 39 Books in the Old Testament are true? There is a quick and easy answer to the OT: Because Jesus said so. The OT we use is the same that OT Jesus referred to as Holy Scripture during His life. (Note the Catholic Apocryphal [Protestant term] or deuterocanonical [Catholic term] books were in the OT of Jesus’ time, though never quoted by Him.) At the beginning of His ministry, Jesus began teaching from the OT.

Luke 4:17-21
The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

18 "The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to release the oppressed,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."

20 Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, 21 and he began by saying to them, "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."

Jesus at one time or another referred to and endorsed all three parts of the OT. Those parts are:

-Books of Moses (aka Torah, first five books, Pentateuch, Law)
-Prophets
-Books of wisdom (Psalms, Proverbs, etc.)

In Luke 16 Jesus refers to both the books of Moses and the Prophets:

Luke 16:29-31
29 "Abraham replied, 'They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.'

30 "'No, father Abraham,' he said, 'but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.'

31 "He said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.'"

In Matthew 22 He cites the Books of Wisdom:

Matt 22:43-44
43 He said to them, "How is it then that David, speaking by the Spirit, calls him 'Lord'? For he says,

44 "'The Lord said to my Lord:
"Sit at my right hand
until I put your enemies
under your feet." '

He is quoting from Psalms 110. Jesus even chided the Jewish leaders for not understanding the OT.

Matt 22:29
29 Jesus replied, "You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God.”

One of His strongest statements is in:

Matt 5:17-18
17 "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.

Simply put, because Jesus accepted and used the OT as Holy Scripture, we can, too. But how do we know the OT was not changed from the time of Jesus until now? God has an answer for even that.

Dead Sea Scrolls
The Jews took the responsibility of protecting the accuracy of the OT very seriously. Whole sects of priests dedicated their lives to accurately copying and preserving Holy Scripture. At the time of Jesus, one of these sects lived in a remote area outside Jericho to keep themselves pure. If there was a misspelling or blot of ink in the margin, they painstakingly copied it exactly as they found it. They preserved the leather and papyrus scrolls in clay jars.

In 1947 a goat wandered away from his Bedouin shepherd. The shepherd went looking for the rascal and discovered the ancient caves. Inside were the jars containing what we now call the Dead Sea Scrolls. Archeologists have been busy since 1947. What they discovered is that the OT we have now is virtually identical, word for word, to the OT Jesus endorsed. I have personally viewed the book of Isaiah from the Dead Sea Scrolls in a museum. It sends chills over me to realize those words were copied at the same time Jesus was reading Isaiah in the temple and saying, "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."


New Testament
The 27 books of the NT were written between about 63 AD and 90 AD. Jesus rose to heaven in 37 AD so why did they wait for 30 to 60 years to record everything into Scripture? Because PDA’s and laptops had not yet been invented. In fact, the literacy rate of Palestinians was around three percent. All news and truth spread orally. Unfortunately, untruth also spread orally. As Christianity quickly spread, so did heresy about what Jesus taught. As long as people were alive who witnessed the actual events, there was no problem because anything written that was false was quickly refuted. In response to the lies beginning to float around, the leaders in the church gathered the letters and documents of the original witnesses and Apostles before they died.

The early church used three standards to determine which books were accurate:

A.R.T.
APOSTOLIC
RECOGNITION
TEACHING

APOSTOLIC
Does this document have roots connected to one of the Apostles? Was it written by an Apostle or by a student or associate of one of the Apostles?

RECOGNITION
In order for a book to be included in the Canon of Scripture, it had to have widespread influence in the churches in Israel, Asia Minor, and Rome and had to have continuous acceptance and use by the church at large.

One historian puts it like this:

None of the non-canonical gospels comes close in date of composition, breadth of distribution, or proportion of acceptance. None of them comes close.

TEACHING
To be included in the Canon, the contents of the book had to be consistent with the teaching of Christ. There are over 100 other books that could have been considered in the Canon. Here are some of them:

Apocryphal Books
The Acts of Andrew
The Acts and Martyrdom of Andrew
The Acts of Andrew and Matthew
The Acts of Barnabas
The Acts of John
The Acts of John the Theologian
The Acts and Martyrdom of Matthew
The Martyrdom of Matthew
The Acts of Paul
The Acts of Peter
The Acts of Peter and Andrew
The Acts of Peter and Paul
The Acts of Philip
The Acts of Thomas
The Consummation of Thomas
The Revelation of John the Theologian
The Revelation (or Vision) of Paul (from the Ante-Nicene Fathers)
The Revelation of Paul (another version, source is not identified)
The Apocalypse of Peter (from the Ante-Nicene Fathers Vol X.) Note
that an entirely different text of this name is found in the Nag Hammadi
Library.
The Apocalypse of Peter (another translation, from The Apocryphal New
Testament)
The Revelation of Stephen
The Apocalypse of Thomas
The Apocalypse of the Virgin
Apocryphal Gospels
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas: Greek Text A
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas: Greek Text B
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas: Latin Text
A Compilation of the Thomas Texts (c. 5th Century)
An Arabic Infancy Gospel
The Gospel of James
The Gospel of the Nativity of Mary
The Gospel of Mary of Bethany (or Magdalene)
The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew
The Gospel of Nicodemos (The Acts of Pilate)
The Gospel of Bartholomew
The Gospel of Peter
The Gospel of the Lord by Marcion
The Secret Gospel of Mark

None of these met the A.R.T. criteria. For example, many today are saying the Gospel of Thomas should be included because it was written only 50 years after the last of the accepted books. However, let me read to you a section of that book and you tell me if the church leaders decided correctly that its teaching is not consistent with what Jesus taught.

Simon Peter said, 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 too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven. GoT 114

Did the church fathers do well in leaving out this weird teaching? Yes! Aren’t you glad that this didn’t make it into the Bible? It sounds to me like it was written by the author of Alice in Wonderland.

The Council of Nicaea
It was not until 325 AD that the first council of church leaders gathered in Nicaea and officially declared our 27 books of the NT were the correct ones according to the A.R.T. criteria. However, they were really meeting to discuss the subject of the Trinity and the naming of the NT Canon was merely a rubberstamp on the longstanding practice of the church. More than one hundred years before the Council of Nicaea, a historian by the name of Origin said:

The four gospels Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are the only undisputed ones in the whole church of God throughout the whole world.

The reality is we have a great many manuscripts and fragments dating very close to the original writings. In Manchester England, the museum holds the Rylands Papryus, which contains part of the Gospel of John dating to about 40 years after the original. Moving forward in time we find exponentially more manuscripts as the years progress until within just a few hundred years there are over 5,000 manuscripts and fragments of the NT.

Rapid Copying
I’d like to demonstrate why only a handful of very early manuscripts have survived but there are thousands just one or two hundred years later. Remember that the first Christians were mostly non-readers but masters of oral exchange. Pretend we are all Christians of the first centuries. I am going to whisper some words of Jesus to a couple of you and I want you to write down what I say. The rest of you have heard of Christ and you are eager to have your own copy of the words of Jesus accurately written down. So as soon as you can find someone with a copy, I want you to copy those words onto the pieces of paper we are providing. We will start at the front row with my oral delivery and copy backwards to the rear. (Use John 21:17 "Feed my sheep”.) This passage was from John 21:17 but the chapter and verse markers were not part of the Canon but added in print in 1479.

Did you notice the copying began very slowly and it seemed like we would never get to everyone? Then by about the second or third row the number of copies grew very quickly. That multiplication is exactly what happened in the first centuries as Christianity rapidly grew. Each row represents 30 or 40 years and the number of ancient manuscripts quickly grew into the thousands; everybody was eager to have their own copy of the documents that were recognized throughout the Church as authoritative. With more copies, there are more to survive.

All this demonstrates why we have a mountain of historical evidence that the NT was written when and by whom it professes to be written. There are many today who believe Jesus was a myth invented much later by a self-serving church, such as the popular Da Vinci Code book proposes.

The renowned scholar of biblical history F.F. Bruce has observed:
Some writers may toy with the fancy of a 'Christ-myth,' but they do not do so on the ground of historical evidence. The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar. It is not historians who propagate the Christ-myth theories.

Greco-Roman historian Michael Grant, who certainly has no theological axe to grind, indicates that there is more evidence for the existence of Jesus than there is for a large number of famous pagan personages - yet no one would dare to argue their non-existence. Historian Meier [Meier. MarJ, 23] notes that what we know about Alexander the Great could fit on only a few sheets of paper; yet no one doubts that Alexander existed. And we have hundreds of pages on the life of Christ.

Jesus Himself provides the reason people refuse to investigate the facts or having seen the facts, shrug them off:

John 3:19
This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.

Conclusion
Were I to meet my Middle-Eastern student friend again, knowing all we have discussed, I would now say to him, “As far as the Old Testament goes, Jesus endorsed those sacred texts. No unbiased, inquisitive mind willing to research the facts would doubt the historicity of Jesus and the NT events. That only leaves the question of the truthfulness of the promises made in the NT. Again, no truth-seeking, light-loving, rational being can study that great Book and avoid the conclusion that God has spoken to man through Jesus as revealed in the Bible. Read it. Begin reading in the Gospel of John.”

In fact, I carry inexpensive giveaway Bibles in case I should ever meet that man again or anyone like him. I want to make up for my error of ignorance.

Heb 4:12
For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.

When I give away a New Testament it is like pulling the pin on a holy grenade and placing it in their hand. The Word of God speaks for itself and explodes into a revelation of real life. I always mark the Gospel of John for a place to begin and I know eventually they are going to come to words like:

John 7:37-38
"If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. 38 Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him."

John 10:10
“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”

John 6:63-64
“The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life.”

The words in our Bible are historically sound, carefully preserved, divinely guided, and they are LIFE.