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This is Undaunted Life of Man's Podcast.
0:51
I'm your host Kyle Thompson.
0:53
Let's get into it.
0:54
All right, guys.
0:55
We've got a special interview for today.
0:56
It is with Benjamin Laird, so he has his PhD from the University of Aberdeen.
1:00
He's an associate professor of biblical studies at the John W. Rawlings School of Divinity
1:05
at Liberty University, and he's authored a bunch of books about New Testament topics
1:09
like the Pauline, Corpus, and early Christianity, 40 questions about the Apostle Paul, five
1:13
views on the New Testament canon, and his latest book, which is the scaffolding for
1:17
today's conversation, creating the canon, composition, controversy, and the authority
1:21
of the New Testament.
1:22
I've been wanting to have a guy on that was a New Testament expert for a while to talk
1:26
about, okay, how did we get the canon?
1:28
Like, how do we get the accepted epistles and why are some epistles not included?
1:31
Should they even be called epistles?
1:32
What about the other writings of Paul?
1:34
How do we know that all this is legit and all this should be in the canon?
1:37
Is there stuff missing?
1:38
And so that's why I had him on.
1:40
So we talk about how we got into this line of work, where his interest for the New Testament
1:43
lies and some of the things that he's going to be working on.
1:46
But in terms of digging into the New Testament, we talk about how would the New Testament
1:50
authors have gone about the task of composing their writings?
1:54
What is this concept of the single, original autograph or what some people would say, hey,
1:57
you don't have the originals.
1:59
Like where do we need to kind of change our thinking in terms of what that looks like
2:03
with ancient texts?
2:05
Also who were the original readers in the original audience that the New Testament writings were
2:08
meant for and how should that change how we read the New Testament?
2:12
But then also we deal with the controversy surrounding Marcian, Constantine, the Council
2:16
of Nicaea.
2:17
A lot of people that, you know, read Dan Brown books think, wait a minute, you know, the
2:20
Council of Nicaea happened and so they just made all this stuff up and got rid of stuff
2:25
that they didn't like and kept stuff in that they did like and they changed all the text
2:28
and there should seemingly be controversy with that.
2:32
But there's really not and Benjamin goes into that process, but then also the likely process
2:35
that led to the formation of the New Testament canon and then specifically the translations
2:41
like how can we go from Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek and all come all the way to modern
2:46
English and not get anything lost in translation.
2:49
We dig into that and then at the end we talk about is there a basis for the canons ongoing
2:53
authority?
2:54
So you need to stick around and make sure that you listen to that part of it as well.
2:57
Guys are really enjoyed my time with the Benjamin's and without further ado, let's get into it.
3:02
Benjamin layered welcome to on Don't the Life of Man's podcast.
3:05
Thanks for the invitation.
3:06
Appreciate it.
3:07
Yeah.
3:08
So we're going to be digging into a new bookie here today, but it seems like most of your
3:11
career as I talked about in the intro has been dedicated to the New Testament.
3:16
So not just the Bible in general, but specifically the New Testament.
3:20
So I guess just to be a soft place to land force here at the beginning, why dedicate,
3:25
you know, your entire education seemingly and your career to studying the New Testament?
3:31
Well I'd like to think that I'll be able to cover some more things that I have a few
3:34
more years ahead of me here that I haven't exhausted everything in life.
3:39
But yeah, up to this point, that has been a focal point.
3:42
Often times in academics, you get kind of started with one subject and that you kind
3:46
of go with that for a while and kind of like if you're digging in a mine, you just kind
3:50
of keep digging there as long as there's some kind of minerals you keep, you know, extracting
3:54
from that.
3:55
So that's kind of been how it's my career path to this part point.
3:58
I've just been kind of focused on the history of really Christianity, New Testament canon,
4:04
that issue and but I definitely have other interests too, which I'm sure I'll get into
4:09
more fully here in the years to come.
4:11
Okay, so what are those interests?
4:12
You can't just throw that out there and not have me ask about it.
4:15
What are the other interests?
4:16
Well I do love the study of the Apostle Paul and so I have done a little bit of work on
4:21
that.
4:22
I actually have a New Testament intro, well I should say an intro on Paul that just recently
4:27
came out and so I've always just had a fascination with his life and his ministry and his writing.
4:35
So Paul has been an interest, anything with early Christian history, right?
4:40
What was the life of the early church like?
4:42
What were some of their practices and beliefs and some of the key developments early Christianity?
4:46
I've always been interested in those historical issues, but I love everything, you know, related
4:51
to scripture.
4:52
It's just that those have been my kind of key focal points as far as academics is concerned.
4:57
So before we dig into the new book, which really does get into the canon, it's actually in
5:02
the title, where do you think that interest has come from?
5:06
Because I've been around a lot of Christians in my entire life.
5:08
I grew up in Oklahoma so people were at least culturally Christian, but you don't always
5:13
find people that look at the Bible as, this may be overstating the case, but it's almost
5:19
like they don't really believe it's the word of God because if they did, they wouldn't
5:22
ignore it so much they wouldn't have a Bible on their desk that they have to blow the dust
5:26
off before they read it.
5:28
But you know, for some people it's like, no, they just keep coming back to the book.
5:32
It's kind of like people that keep coming back to a particular band's music or they keep
5:35
coming back to a particular style of movie or something like that, there's just something
5:40
in them that brings them back to it.
5:42
But I just don't see that thirst or fervor from a lot of Christians, unfortunately.
5:47
Yeah, I mean, there's all these different camps of people, right?
5:51
There's a lot of folks who have, I would say, kind of like the sentimental attachment to
5:54
scripture, they grew up with it, they heard it read.
5:57
I think some people just want to have something of value that's kind of transcendent in their
6:03
life, right?
6:04
So, I mean, our culture is constantly changing what's in one day is going to be out next
6:08
week.
6:09
And I think there are some people who have this kind of intrinsic kind of connection.
6:14
They see there's intrinsic value descriptors and they just have maybe this sentimental
6:19
attachment to it that keeps drawing them back.
6:21
And then for others, I think maybe the spirit is not actively at work in their life.
6:26
And so they kind of view it as ancient history and irrelevant to their life.
6:32
Maybe there's some who deep down, they know that scripture is important, but maybe they
6:35
don't know why they haven't actually had anyone walk them through the key doctrines of the
6:40
faith.
6:41
They don't see how things are connected.
6:42
Right?
6:43
Oftentimes, when we're new to the faith, we know all these stories, right?
6:48
And we know about David and Goliath, we know about Jonah and we know about, you know, Moses
6:52
and all these things.
6:53
But we don't really understand the history of how God's redemptive plan unfolded.
6:58
And for me, when I think about my early Christian years, I think about how it was at that moment
7:03
that I saw that this is actually one story.
7:06
That's when I think I really developed a love for scripture.
7:09
It's not just this disjointed collection of ancient legends and myths, but it's actually
7:13
a story of how God has redeemed sinful humanity.
7:16
So I think once I was able to connect the dots and see that it actually gave me a great
7:22
not only fondness of scripture, but a great desire to study it in much more depth.
7:27
But I think there's, I mean, to get back to your original question, I think there's
7:30
a lot of reasons.
7:31
I think that reasons for the fact that a lot of people don't pay the attention to scripture
7:36
like they need to.
7:37
It could just be from, you know, lack of education when it comes to, I don't mean formal studies.
7:42
I just mean exposure to scripture.
7:44
They don't really know what's in there.
7:45
They know it's important.
7:46
It says holy Bible in the cover, right, at least in a lot of our covers.
7:49
So they know it's important, but they don't know really why.
7:51
And I think maybe in our culture, there's, there actually may be a good segment of our
7:56
culture that's actually, that actually has a thirst to know what it's all about, define
8:00
deeper meaning, right?
8:02
To actually get to the hardest scripture, but need someone to help them.
8:06
And we all need, you know, someone like Philip, right?
8:09
When we think about the Ethiopian, we need someone like Philip to, you know, point us
8:12
to what this whole thing is about in the first place.
8:14
So I think that we have some good opportunities ahead of us for sure.
8:18
Yeah, I think that's a really good way of putting it because I think there are a lot
8:22
of people that, yeah, it's just stories from their childhood and they don't really actually
8:26
believe that Jonah lived in the belly of the whale.
8:28
Yeah.
8:29
I mean, it's even weird for me.
8:30
It's like, yeah, it seems kind of crazy, but it's like I also believe a Middle Eastern
8:34
Jewish carpenter rose from the dead after being dead for three days.
8:38
And so it's like, you know, you know, I kind of have to suspend belief, at least for a
8:41
little bit, but one of the, the ways that you kind of help people dig into the Bible
8:45
is your new book that we talked about here in the intro.
8:48
It's creating the canon composition controversy and the authority of the New Testament.
8:54
So we're going to dig in because at the beginning of each of your chapters, there's like a
8:58
question right there.
8:59
And I'm like, Hey, I don't like when people give me questions to ask.
9:02
But that game of these questions are pretty good.
9:04
So we're going to use that kind of this as a scaffolding for our discussion today.
9:07
But I guess just in a nutshell, the 30,000 foot view on this book, there's quite a few
9:11
books out there that are kind of, you know, I guess your book's not unique in terms of
9:16
its subject matter.
9:17
There are a lot of books that cover the, the composition of the canon and the authority
9:21
of the New Testament or the Bible over also, what is different about this book?
9:26
And I guess your approach to the subject.
9:27
Well, probably a lot of things I could say that are unique about it.
9:32
One would be the scope.
9:34
I tried to start all the way at composition, right?
9:37
How the writings were actually composed?
9:39
What do we know about authorship and, you know, how someone like Paul would have went
9:42
about this, the subject of putting this all together?
9:45
So I started at the very beginning with composition, not, you know, later centuries and just try
9:49
to focus only on, you know, formation of the canon and try to answer the question, you
9:54
know, who or how did all this come together?
9:57
I definitely get into that, but I don't start there and don't focus entirely on that.
10:00
So I start with composition and then I go to collection, how the letters were collected
10:06
and how the, what we know about the formation then of the canon.
10:10
Then I get to kind of the importance of all this for us today and I get into the question
10:15
of authority, you know, what makes the writings authoritative for us today or are we just to
10:20
accept everything in the Bible just because it's in the Bible or where they put in the
10:24
Bible because it was recognized that they had authority in the first place.
10:28
So I kind of wrestle with a good mix of history and theology, I would say historical and theological
10:34
questions.
10:35
So that's one, I would say the scope is larger than most.
10:38
And then what I also try to do is I try to cover these subjects as simply as I can without
10:44
being simplistic.
10:46
And so I tried to write in, I would say a clear way, we'll let the reader decide how
10:50
well I did it that, but I tried to write in a very accessible, just straightforward way
10:54
that everyday people can understand, but I'm not going to kind of hold back on the issues.
10:59
I'm going to lay it all out there and let the reader kind of make his or her own decisions
11:04
and assessment of this.
11:06
But I wanted to really go into the issues in depth without being, you know, too detailed
11:11
as far as, you know, the technical language and things like that.
11:14
So I would say style, but also scope or kind of key features of this.
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illegal substances, gambling, lying, whatever, many of you have allowed yourselves to be
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12:49
Well, and I know for a lot of guys, you know, I read a lot because that's kind of what I
12:53
have to do for this job.
12:55
But in terms of the actual text of this book, it's just over 200 pages.
12:58
And there are tomes out there, volumes on this subject matter.
13:03
And so for a lot of guys, it's like, okay, look at this as a primer because I remember
13:06
when I was talking to Doug O'Donnell over with Crossway and sorry, not allowed to mention
13:12
other publishers.
13:13
But it's like, you know, he was talking about this subject matter.
13:15
And I kind of gave him like three or four minutes to answer.
13:18
And he just kind of was like, hey, man, what are you doing?
13:20
Like you can't just cover this thing like you could do it in a very, very high level.
13:25
But if you read a book like this, it'll at least introduce you to some of the subject
13:29
matters that you even brought up just there in your answer.
13:32
And then we'll dig in because right now we're going to dig into each part of the book.
13:35
We're going to dig into the chapters and you might be thinking, well, hey, why do I need
13:38
to buy the book?
13:39
You just covered it.
13:40
It's like we're covering a sliver of each chapter.
13:43
And there's so much more there and there's obviously the notes in the back and all that
13:47
kind of stuff.
13:48
So part one of the book, Benjamin, is questions relating to the production of the New Testament
13:53
writings.
13:54
So in the first chapter, you pose again, again, you pose a question at the beginning of each
13:57
of these chapters, it's how would the New Testament authors have gone about the task
14:01
of composing their writings?
14:03
So how did they write this thing?
14:05
There was one quick quote that I wanted to read from this section, and then I'll have
14:08
you kind of flow a little bit on what the section says.
14:10
But here it is.
14:11
"Because illiteracy was rather high in the first century and access to written text was
14:15
often limited, we can safely assume that it was customary for the New Testament writings
14:19
to be publicly read to the original recipients and other audiences shortly after their initial
14:25
composition."
14:26
Now, what some people will say is like, oh, this is oral tradition and it was written
14:30
down hundreds of years later.
14:32
No.
14:33
That's not what you're communicating.
14:34
But back to the question from this chapter, how would the New Testament authors have gone
14:38
about the task of composing their writings, which ended up being the New Testament?
14:41
Yeah.
14:42
Great question.
14:43
And it really depends on who the author is and what time it will be.
14:45
Well, it should be a great question because it's your question.
14:47
I'd like to just give yourself a compliment.
14:50
You wrote that question, okay?
14:51
So you can't compliment me when you're actually complimenting yourself.
14:54
I'll call you out for it.
14:55
Come on.
14:56
Hey, well, yeah.
14:57
You called me out on that one.
14:58
Okay.
14:59
Well, it does depend then on delirious honor, right?
15:01
So a gospel would have been composed a bit differently than, say, an epistle of Paul.
15:05
So I talk about both of these kind of in separate sections there, but Paul, he would have, I
15:10
think, worked with a team of people, and that was very common for Paul.
15:14
When he went to a city, he's not just going there walking down a dusty road by himself,
15:18
unless maybe, you know, here and there, maybe like Athens, right?
15:21
He goes there one time.
15:22
But in most cases, he's going to take a team.
15:25
And when he's there, he's going to work closely with the individuals in that city.
15:30
He's going to live with people like Gaius and Corinth, you know, places like that.
15:34
But he's going to work with a secretary.
15:36
That's going to be important.
15:37
And when we think of secretary, we kind of think of, you know, someone at the desk in
15:41
front of the office of the executive and, you know, making his appointments and things
15:44
like that.
15:45
That's not what we mean by secretary.
15:47
We mean really someone who is like a penman, or maybe another word we could use is aminuensis
15:52
or maybe even stenographer or something like that.
15:55
But in the ancient world, it was very common to have the text dictated to someone.
16:00
And this is not just the case if you were from the lower classes and couldn't, you
16:03
know, compose the text.
16:04
If you were wealthy, this is kind of a luxury that you would do.
16:08
You might have a slave who is very literate, very educated.
16:11
You might dictate a text to them, just like Cicero and Sinikar are known to do.
16:16
But even everyday people, they would often dictate a text to a professional scribe or
16:20
someone who had professional training, at least, who would volunteer to do this.
16:25
Because writing and reading were two very separate tasks in the first century.
16:29
And so you could be very educated, like Paul, be very knowledgeable, but still prefer to
16:35
dictate a text to a scribe.
16:37
And there were many reasons for that that I get into in the book.
16:40
But that would have been one of the key things we know about how the letters would have been
16:44
originally composed.
16:46
We have someone like Paul who is dictating a text to a scribe.
16:50
And then once that was completed, once the scribe had actually composed the entire letter,
16:56
it's going to be read by Paul.
16:57
He's going to look over the finished document and he's actually going to authenticate it.
17:01
And he would do that, just like other authors from the first century, by signing a short
17:05
greeting at the end and then maybe signing his own name.
17:09
And we actually see illusions to this in his own writing.
17:12
He'll talk about, you know, his large letters and Galatians at the Inglations and the fact
17:16
that he's writing with his own hand, he'll mention that too.
17:20
So the letter carrier would have then taken the letter once it was authenticated, once
17:24
the scribe had completed his work.
17:26
Letter carrier is going to take it off to wherever it's going.
17:29
And that letter carrier would then often, you mentioned reading a few minutes ago, that
17:33
letter carrier or maybe an elder in a church would have then read the letter publicly to
17:37
the congregation.
17:38
So this would have been their first exposure to it.
17:41
And then that letter carrier would return back to Paul or whoever the author was and
17:46
what they would often do is give a report.
17:49
And so we find that people like Paul, they needed to have information about how their
17:53
letters were being received.
17:54
We see this especially with the so-called Corinthian correspondence.
17:58
Paul is constantly sending people to Corinth and then they're coming back to him and they
18:02
would come back with reports about what they're confused about, how they received his prior
18:06
instruction, things of that nature, and then he might write a follow-up letter.
18:10
So there's a whole lot of back and forth going on between Paul and these churches.
18:13
There's very much a network that he had between a lot of people and a lot of churches.
18:18
And so there's a lot of people involved.
18:20
There's the scribe or the secretary, the letter carrier.
18:24
He also would have had many people that gave him sources of information as well.
18:29
So someone like Paul, he's not writing privately.
18:33
This is more of a team effort as I kind of discussed in the book.
18:36
And that's just the epistles.
18:38
So I mean, we could get into the gospels too.
18:39
That's kind of a different thing.
18:40
But that's generally how an epistle would have been written.
18:43
It would have required a lot of kind of forethought, a lot of planning.
18:47
These are not just kind of arbitrary, arbitrarily written, just kind of how fast it really puts
18:52
together on the run.
18:54
They required a lot of thought and a lot of care.
18:57
And especially Paul, he's very careful in every word.
19:01
I mean, he would have been a great lawyer.
19:02
I mean, he's just so careful in every word that every word has a certain purpose.
19:07
And there's a design that we can see.
19:10
And again, he's going to write probably a lot more letters than we have.
19:14
We know that he wrote constantly to these churches as a way to instruct them and encourage
19:19
them throughout his lifetime.
19:21
But it's very much an ongoing ministry of Paul, at least once we get into kind of the
19:28
heart of his ministry, some decade or so after his conversion.
19:32
But it would have involved a lot of people.
19:33
That's maybe a surprise that a lot of people have about his ministry there.
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20:07
Yeah, it certainly was a surprise to me as I was reading through the book.
20:11
But all that kind of cascades into what you talk about in the next chapter, which is this
20:15
concept of the original autograph.
20:18
And so you'll hear from a lot of people that, hey, Joe Rogan is a prominent one, hey, we
20:22
don't even have the originals.
20:23
So how can we take any of this seriously?
20:25
We don't know if it's been doctored.
20:27
Now it's a foolish take.
20:28
But I will say it does make a lot of people feel funny to where it's like, wait a minute,
20:32
do I actually have the real thing and specifically there's a quote that brought up some consternation
20:38
from me from your chapter and it's this, does the doctrine of an erancy become more difficult
20:43
to maintain if it is determined that multiple manuscripts were produced that could legitimately
20:48
be described as original autograph?
20:52
So I think first we need to do some definitional work.
20:54
What is an original autograph?
20:56
But then I kept writing an erancy question mark, an erancy question mark in the margins
21:00
of the book, because I was like, wait a minute, like if there's 17 different versions of this
21:05
thing and we say that it's inerrant, but these versions are all different, like the, you know,
21:12
you could be, is it because they're communicating the exact same thing that it could be considered
21:17
in there?
21:18
But yeah, that's just an easy hole for an atheist or an agnostic to kind of poke at, right?
21:23
So talk to me about original autograph.
21:25
Yeah, well, by definition, it would just refer to the manuscript that is the final product
21:30
of the author, what he is going to dispatch originally.
21:34
And usually when we think about that, we think of, you know, one manuscript.
21:37
That's kind of the whole point that I, kind of the, the carrot that I hang out in front
21:41
of people, right?
21:42
It's the assumption that a lot of people have is that we just have one manuscript.
21:47
But what we often don't realize is that these writings would have been very popular from
21:50
the very beginning and that the author would have had a need for multiple copies.
21:56
So I actually use the illustration of Romans, and I think your readers will appreciate
22:00
this illustration.
22:01
It helps me when I think about it this way.
22:03
When Paul writes to the church in Rome, he's writing from the city of Corinth.
22:08
And when he completes this manuscript, right, he's dictating this to a scribe.
22:13
One of the things that scribes would often do is make duplicate copies for their author.
22:17
I mean, you want to be Paul and you get done with this manuscript and you send the one
22:21
copy you have off to the city of Rome, and just hope you'll, you know, you'll see it
22:25
again someday.
22:26
You're going to want a copy of that for your own future reference, right?
22:30
So that this was just a very common thing.
22:32
It's not just something we kind of speculate occurred with biblical authors.
22:36
We know ancients did this as well.
22:38
So they would have a duplicate that would be produced for them, maybe even multiple duplicates,
22:42
but at least one.
22:44
And they're going to hold on to that throughout their career.
22:47
So Paul would have wanted a copy, he's obviously going to send one off to the Romans.
22:51
And then I think that the Corinthians would have wanted a copy too.
22:54
So it actually comes as a surprise to a lot of people that the first people to actually
22:58
hear, not read, but likely hear Romans, would have actually been the Corinthians, not the
23:03
Romans.
23:04
Because that's where Paul was when he writes this.
23:06
And so you have Paul, he's staying in the home of a Corinthian family.
23:11
He's got a letter carrier who's from there.
23:13
I mean, all these different people from Corinth are playing a role in the production of Romans
23:19
in one way or another.
23:20
So I think there's a good chance that the Corinthians would have wanted at least one
23:24
copy, maybe even multiple copies of this.
23:26
So at the end of the compositional process, we have likely duplicates, many duplicates
23:31
being produced and all going kind of different directions.
23:35
And then not only that, but we also have these letters read in churches.
23:39
So we talked about how Paul had a network of churches, churches he founded, churches
23:43
he administered in, that type of thing.
23:45
And so they would have all wanted copies too, and they would have all wanted to hear the
23:50
text read because most people heard the text, not read the text.
23:55
And so from the very beginning, we have a kind of explosion of apostolic writings that
24:00
begin to circulate and be read in the churches.
24:03
And so that actually is helpful for me to understand that, not just so I understand
24:07
the process of composition, I think it's helpful for that reason alone.
24:11
But when we think about this too, our concern about there not being a single manuscript
24:16
tends to come from the fact that we kind of have this assumption that that one manuscript
24:21
is kind of like this artifact.
24:23
And it's just kind of on its own somewhere, maybe it's hidden in a church or a home or
24:29
buried somewhere for decades and decades and decades and it's just, nobody's really paying
24:33
attention to it and then just kind of gets lost to history.
24:36
But in fact, what we have is a text that is circulating and manuscripts that are being
24:41
produced very, very quickly.
24:43
And so the fact that we get to say the second, third, fourth century and we start to see
24:47
a lot of copies that have been preserved for us and they're actually very, very similar.
24:52
That's reassuring to me.
24:54
It shows that with all the duplicates that were made and all the reading and churches,
24:59
we actually have a very consistent text.
25:01
There's some differences of course between the manuscripts we have, but they tend to be
25:05
over very minor issues, things like spelling or some of the major differences between
25:10
manuscripts actually have to do with things that are not theological at all, things like
25:14
whether or not you include an article, like the Greek article or not, things that make
25:19
actually no bearing on the text or the meaning of the text at all.
25:24
But it is interesting that not only do we have multiple texts being read or being copied
25:28
right away, but they're being read in multiple places.
25:32
And there's actually great consistency in all the witnesses we find, whether it be texts
25:37
that come from the West or the East or second, third, fourth century, they're all very consistent
25:42
with each other, showing that they all go back to the author back in the first century.
25:49
And so that's interesting because I remember Vodie Bockam here recently talking about these
25:53
people that say, "Oh, these New Testament writings were doctored so that the apostles
25:59
could gain prestige and money and women and all that type of stuff."
26:02
And it's like, "Do you understand how silly that is to say because of what would need
26:06
to happen? Because they would literally need to get all the different transcripts and all
26:10
the different languages and all the different parts of the globe, change them all and then
26:14
put them back and nobody noticed. It sounds good if you're doing univariate analysis,
26:20
but if you're doing multiple stages of analysis, it's like, "Okay, this isn't even plausible,
26:25
much less likely." And so then we get into the next chapter where you're talking about
26:29
the original readers, the exact question is, who exactly were the original readers or the
26:34
original audience to the New Testament writings?
26:37
Now that is just a good question for all of us to ask ourselves when we're reading the
26:42
New Testament, right? Who is this for? Because so many people read the Bible without regard
26:49
for context or audience, like, "Wait a minute, is this something that I'm being told to do
26:54
in modernity or was this something that a particular group of people was being told
26:58
to do at a particular time in history?" And that becomes a problem when people read every
27:03
part of the Bible literally because I will have young Earth people scream at me and send
27:07
me these long emails and say, "Kyle, if you don't read the Genesis accounts of creation
27:13
literally, then you don't believe the Bible, you don't believe in God, you don't believe
27:17
in any of these things." And it's like, "Wait a minute, do you think that Jesus is a vine?"
27:22
Because it literally says that in John 15, "Do you think Jesus is a door that we need
27:27
to knock on?" It's like, where do we take this literalism? Like, where exactly does
27:31
that end? So I'm not trying to pull the, you know, the scab off of the young Earth debate
27:36
right now, but talk to me a little bit about these original audiences and does that extrapolate
27:41
itself out to our consideration today, directly?
27:44
Yeah, Kyle, that was just great. Hermanic's 101 there, a lot of the issues you raised.
27:49
So that was very helpful. But I tell students, you know, when you read an epistle, when you
27:53
read a gospel, always try to pin down what prompted the author to write this in the first
28:00
place, right? If Paul's going to write the Philippians, you know, what actually led
28:04
him to write? What was he concerned about? And if I'm going to say the flip, the epistle
28:09
of the Philippians, I want to get to the end and say, you know, well, how does this apply
28:12
to me? That's not the first question I would come up with. I would want to know what led
28:16
Paul to actually write. What did he try to address in this? What was a concern to him
28:20
in his situation? And when we start to read it that way, I think it actually is much more
28:25
beneficial. And we're going to avoid a lot of the misinterpretations. And we're going
28:31
to focus on what really matters in the text and the author, rather than just what matters
28:34
supposedly to us, right? So I think that's a very, very important point. But when it comes
28:40
to the original audience, you know, we just simply read oftentimes what we'll do is we'll
28:45
just look at the title, you know, say to the Romans, well, case closed, you know, Paul is
28:49
writing to the Romans or he's writing to the Corinthians or he's writing to the Galatians,
28:53
you know, that type of thing. And I'm not disputing the titles. I think they're actually
28:57
accurate, but I'm suggesting that that's not the entire picture. There's actually more
29:01
to it than just that. And so if Paul, like we said a few minutes ago, if he's writing
29:06
from say Corinth, and he's writing to the church in Rome, and he knows that many of the first
29:12
readers of this are actually going to be those in his community, you know, it wouldn't be,
29:17
I would have doubt the fact that Paul would want to address a few things that might actually
29:21
apply to the Corinthians, not just those in Rome. So I think it's helpful to note that
29:27
we have multiple kind of layers to this. We have different tiers almost, we could use
29:32
that term, but we have, I would say, maybe an immediate audience, you know, the primary
29:37
audience. And for, you know, Romans, we could say, well, he's writing primarily to the Romans,
29:41
but he's also writing for the benefit of other early Christian writers, whether they be in
29:46
Corinth or other nearby cities as well. And then you could make a case that he's writing
29:51
for a even broader audience, because he knew that this writing would ultimately be, or
29:56
at least he intended for this letter to be circulated amongst a large body of churches
30:01
and Christians, even of later generations. So I think we can read it with the sense that
30:07
Paul has multiple audiences in view, you know, maybe a primary audience, but then even a
30:11
secondary audience gets a little thorny when you get into the second audience, secondary
30:15
audience, because it's not always apparent who that is. You know, sometimes it's a little
30:20
more clear than other times. And so we have to be careful not to speculate too much about
30:26
the, you know, the specific groups that Paul is speaking to. But I do think that he was
30:30
writing to wide audiences and all of them, all of these letters. I don't think that we
30:35
actually have any private letters in the New Testament at all, even something like Philemon
30:40
or First and Second Timothy or Titus. They're actually written for broad audiences and communities.
30:45
And so it's, it's helpful to know, you know, who that community is, try to identify who
30:49
that community is or was. And then also, as I said, what prompted Paul to write them in
30:54
the first place? Something had to be a concern to him for him to write this. And so, until
30:59
we identify what that is, we're going to have all kinds of trouble when it all kinds of trouble
31:02
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31:32
I also think something that came to mind. I did a debate with a guy in the UK a couple
31:38
years back. He is a Christian anti-gun activist. So literally, he goes around the country getting
31:43
people to destroy their firearms for whatever reason. But he uses Isaiah to for as his justification.
31:50
They beat their swords into plow shares and their spears into pruning hooks. And the
31:54
problem is, is if you put that on a t-shirt or a bumper sticker, it's like, I need to
31:58
make my gun. I need to cut my gun in half. I need to turn it into a pot that I'm going
32:02
to use for a ficus or something like that. But it's like the with the context of that
32:07
text, it's like, no, no, God's going to do that. You're not choosing to do that as, you
32:11
know, I worship a worshipful thing for God. So again, when you take out of consideration,
32:18
who is this message for? That's why I have so many problems. Every time I see a scripture
32:23
that's posted on Instagram or on somebody's t-shirt, I'm like, I need to go back and read
32:27
maybe that entire section because I don't think that's giving me the message that I
32:31
think it does. It looks cool, you know, before a football game, but maybe not for how we
32:36
should live our lives. Did you want to hop back? Yeah, you're right on. So we have to
32:41
not only determine, you know, what the issue is that the author wanted to address. But
32:45
when he's providing instruction, what type of literary genre is this? Is it prophecy?
32:50
Is it instruction to a contemporary audience? We have to be able to sort all that out in
32:55
a lot of the prophetic material. You know, we could say, well, we need to follow through
32:58
with that today. But maybe it's more of like in the illustration you gave, maybe it's more
33:02
of a picture of what will come in the age to come, right? The kind of world that God
33:09
will create when he comes back, you know, at post-second coming. So maybe that has to
33:13
do with it. I remember as well, you mentioned the fact that maybe you just need to read
33:18
in more of the immediate context. And I remember a seminary professor told me in class one
33:23
time, actually told the rest of the class, but mentioned that we should never read a
33:27
verse. And that's always stuck with me. You know, we can read a verse and you might think,
33:32
what do you mean? You should never read a verse. But the point is, you should read a
33:35
verse in its larger context, because if you just focus on one little sentence, you can,
33:41
I mean, it's entirely disconnected from context then, and you can make it mean basically anything
33:46
you want it to mean. Just like we find in our digital age, you know, we can focus on
33:52
maybe a sound bite of what a politician said, and then we can make it mean anything we want
33:56
it to mean. But we have to look at the larger context of the conversation and the address
34:01
of the person to know really what was met then. So, you know, I appreciate that the importance
34:06
of looking into those background matters as helpful. It certainly is very, very important.
34:10
But now we're going to get controversial. Okay, now we're going to get into part two of your
34:14
book. And part two is questions relating to the formation of the New Testament canon.
34:19
So we talked about basically, you know, how they were produced. Now we're talking about
34:23
their formation. And this is where people that think they're smart will always bring up Martian
34:28
or Constantine or the Council of Nicaea. And the question in the first chapter of this
34:33
part poses is did theological controversies play a decisive role in the formation of the
34:40
New Testament canon? Because I read the Da Vinci code, and you know how I read it? I read
34:45
it like it was a non I read it like it was a fiction book. That's how I read it because
34:49
it's a fiction book. Now, are there things and places in that book that were real and
34:54
I do exist and actually happened? Yes. But the entire narrative of that story and the
34:59
movie in the subsequent movies is not historical. It's not a documentary. It's an entertainment
35:04
thing. But then people walked away having never heard of Emperor Constantine, never heard
35:08
of the Council of Nicaea, never heard of these different things. And now it's like, Oh, hundreds
35:13
of years later that the dominant force in Rome decided. I like that. Yeah, give me a couple
35:19
of more epistles like that. These aren't cool. So we're going to keep those out of the canon.
35:24
So let's set the record straight Benjamin did theological controversies play not a decisive
35:30
role, but the decisive role in formulating what is in the New Testament canon. And I would
35:35
say absolutely not to that. So you don't have to go very far in my chapter to kind of get
35:40
that for me. But yeah, I would say absolutely not. You know, there's two kind of viewpoints
35:44
on this. And by the way, you said this was the kind of controversial section in my mind
35:48
writing this at least. I thought of this as the least controversial. It's because it's
35:51
easy. Like if you know the history and if you know what actually happened, it's it seems
35:56
like it should be controversial, but it's like, no, this just flat out didn't happen.
36:00
When you look at the witnesses, yeah. So a lot of times we just don't actually examine
36:04
the earliest witnesses we have to the canon. And then we just have all these assumptions
36:08
that we kind of use to formulate our viewpoint on how the can came together. But there are
36:13
kind of two trains of thought, and it's not even a scholarly verse laymen kind of thing.
36:19
But there is a common viewpoint that there has to be something external that threatened
36:23
the church. And when I say church, I mean, you know, the power brokers of the church,
36:29
and you know, the most influential bishops and those who wield the most authority. So
36:33
the common idea is that there was some kind of heresy that was going around that led these
36:38
kind of power brokers to pick certain writings and then canonize them. And then what that
36:45
did was it had an immediate effect of basically, you know, reading any kind of alternative
36:50
teaching. So if you're, you know, holding a viewpoint on Christ that was different than
36:55
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, all of a sudden you're in trouble because you're actually,
36:58
you know, espousing a viewpoint that's actually inconsistent with this new canon now. So they
37:04
came to the realization. This is the argument. They came to the realization that we'll never
37:08
have any kind of agreement on theology, these controversial theological issues, if we don't
37:13
have first of all a canon of scripture. And so they dispute and they have all these theological
37:19
arguments. And then the victors have the responsibility then, or maybe you could say they're given
37:25
the reward and the opportunity to kind of form the Christian canon. So it's, it's really like,
37:31
you know, to the victors go the spoils kind of way of thinking. So the idea is that you have
37:36
all these theological debates, they can't figure out, you know, who's right and who's wrong because
37:39
Christians, Christianity was just so diverse in the early churches, the way a lot of people
37:46
understand it. And finally, it wasn't that they all got together and somebody just won a theological
37:51
argument necessarily, it's that you have people with great power and they're, they were able to
37:56
kind of overcome and defeat all of their rivals. And then they're able to create a canon that is
38:03
typically thought to have taken place, at least, you know, if you read the Da Vinci code or something
38:08
like that, or follow a popular thought, this is often thought to have occurred in the fourth or
38:12
fifth century. So that means, you know, for the first 300 years, Christianity is incredibly
38:16
diverse. And it's not until three, 400 years later that you have certain doctrines that are really,
38:22
that really become universally accepted or close to universally accepted, at least in,
38:26
in a decisive, you know, 27 volume New Testament canon. And up until then, the idea is that Christians
38:31
are just reading everything and anything. And one community would have one text and other
38:36
community would have another set of texts they're reading and there's just no consistency.
38:40
So that's, that's kind of a common idea. But that the idea of a fourth or fifth century council
38:45
determines the canon. That's more of a lay level, lay person kind of idea that you might hear in
38:50
movies or see in movies or, you know, maybe some kind of, you know, TV show on, you know, history
38:55
channel or something like that. Then scholars have a very similar viewpoint. A lot of scholars
39:00
think that in the second century, maybe someone like Marcian played a key role. And that name
39:07
may not be familiar to everyone, but Marcian was a second century heretic. He was basically
39:11
a wealthy businessman. It's not that different today. You know, somebody can make billions of
39:16
dollars and they can run for office, right? And have a little more traction than, you know,
39:21
someone like me who doesn't have that amount of money. You know, I don't have that to fuel my
39:26
own campaign, but, you know, somebody who's very wealthy does. And Marcian, he actually was very
39:31
wealthy because of the shipping industry. He didn't live that far from modern day Istanbul.
39:36
And he was able then to kind of, you know, get his thoughts out there. But he came
39:41
to the conclusion that the God of the Old Testament was this God of evil. He was a wrathful God and
39:47
God of wrath. And it's God that you wanted to stay completely away from because he's going to judge
39:51
you and condemn you. He's not a God of love, right? Or compassion or anything like that.
39:56
So Jesus then kind of intercedes and stands between us and this evil, you know, sinful God.
40:02
You can even say sinful God, I guess, in the Old Testament period. So here, this was a person
40:07
that was very much maligned. He was very much criticized by the majority of the church. But
40:13
he actually is known for adopting a gospel that looked very similar to Luke.
40:18
Scholars debate whether or not he just took a gospel of Luke and kind of tweaked it. Or if he,
40:22
you know, had some similar sources of Luke or something. But it seems that he had a single gospel
40:27
and then also he had a smaller collection of Paul's letters. And so the idea is that when he starts
40:33
to circulate these 11 writings in his communities, because he had his own communities that followed
40:38
him, kind of like the David, David Koresh, I think it was, right, when I was a kid of the
40:42
second century. So he had all these communities that are reading these 11 works. And then the more
40:47
influential bishops are observing this and they say, wait a minute, we can't have Marcian decide
40:52
what people are reading. So that prompted them to create a larger canon. So those are two common
40:58
viewpoints that people have is that it was something external, some kind of threat or controversy
41:04
that led the church to say, okay, we're going to go with these writings. And these are the
41:08
writings we're now going to accept and we're going to treat as authoritative scripture.
41:12
And everything else is now going to be removed. You're not to read those anymore. And I would say
41:16
that's that's not how the canon actually formed. So I guess your original question was, it was a
41:21
yes or no question. So I answered why I don't think that's the case. But but yeah, I don't think it
41:27
was either of those. I think there's actually a more natural explanation for it. Well, Benjamin,
41:31
if you answer my questions, yes or no, that's going to lead to a terrible interview. So I appreciate
41:36
you illuminating your point further. They'd be very sure. Yeah, but before we move off of that,
41:41
this is kind of devil's advocate thing coming out. Because even earlier in this conversation,
41:45
you mentioned, hey, Paul had many other letters that are not inside the New Testament canon. And so
41:52
again, knowing that men are fallible, but also knowing that God is sovereign and holding those
41:57
two things in tension. Is it possible? Well, possible is hard because technically anything's
42:03
possible. Is it likely that there is a book missing from the older New Testament canon?
42:12
Is there a letter from Paul that should have been included in our accepted canon? But that
42:18
that hasn't been. Is there another gospel? Because a lot's been made of the gospel of Peter and the
42:23
gospel of, you know, 17 other people. Is it possible that there's something else that wouldn't take away
42:29
from the the overall story of the biblical canon? But that just didn't make it into our
42:37
accepted canon and later on in life, you know, when we're before God is going to be like, you
42:41
idiots, like I gave you all of these and you didn't do what I told you to do. Why isn't it?
42:46
Why is it that's in there? So help me because I know even God's sovereignty, people are like,
42:50
how you're going to hell just for even asking that? But I'm curious.
42:54
Yeah. So, you know, one day, we'll have all of our eschatological answers. And, you know,
43:00
maybe we'll be told, well, it's right there in third thessalonians or something, right? So,
43:04
well, there's an important point here. There's a difference between the recognition of certain
43:10
books and then the composition of certain books. So there are two kind of different things. And I
43:15
actually think that the authors actually had a role in what was preserved. So it's not as though we
43:22
have Paul just right, you know, dozens and dozens and dozens of things. And what we have now is just
43:27
what we were able to kind of put together and find after, you know, hunting these down over many
43:33
decades. So, you know, Paul would have had a collection. I think Paul's a good example of this.
43:37
But to go back to what we said about duplicates, Paul would have had a multiple, I mean, multiple
43:43
letters in this collection that he's going to maintain over the years. And I think it's possible
43:48
that maybe he stored these in the homes of certain Christians. And I mean, he had a large network
43:52
of people he worked with, but he's going to have a have a large collection of writings. And I think
43:58
at the near the end of the of his lifetime, around the time he died, I think what happened was they
44:03
begin to go through all the material. And Paul is going to determine maybe alongside of someone
44:09
like Timothy and Luke, they're going to make a decision as to what they should put in this collection
44:14
that's going to start to circulate. Now, Paul was, I think, very practical like we are. Sometimes,
44:20
you know, if I write a recommendation for a student, right, I do this all the time, I'll have a kind of
44:24
a kind of like a boilerplate kind of, you know, template that I'll use. And what I can do is,
44:30
you know, kind of tweak this a little bit. So I have two students, they both want the exact same
44:34
position but different schools. It's, you know, I can tweak the letter a little bit, personalize a
44:38
little bit, but I'm not going to write the whole thing from scratch. And I think there would have
44:41
been times where Paul actually had a letter that he wrote to one church. He's going to hear that
44:46
another church down the road is dealing with the exact same issue. He could actually kind of take
44:50
that original letter and personalize it, tweak it, supplement it. Maybe there's something that
44:56
they need to hear that the first church didn't, you might add a paragraph and discuss that. Maybe
45:00
there's another comment that he can remove, but he might, you know, actually send out a second letter
45:05
that looked a whole lot like another one. In fact, Ephesians and Colossians is kind of a good
45:09
comparison. We actually see quite a few similarities between the two writings there. So I think that
45:14
actually is a good illustration for that. So I think Paul would have had a lot of copies that
45:20
would have actually overlapped with each other as far as the content had similar instruction and
45:26
things like that. So I think when they're looking at, you know, forming this collection originally
45:31
from these duplicate copies, I think what they did was they they decided on these works that had
45:38
unique content and that was universal for the church. Those were the two kind of primary things.
45:44
So if they looked over writing and maybe Paul wrote, you know, another letter to the Philippians
45:49
and they look at this and say, you know what, this letter actually just, it was just business
45:54
kind of information. You told them, okay, you're going to come on this date and you mentioned
45:58
some items that you want to have kind of ready for you. And, you know, there's not really anything
46:03
practical to that. We don't need to add that in this collection. Or maybe it's the fact that,
46:08
you know, one letter looks a whole lot like another letter. So we don't need to duplicate
46:12
have both of them. We can just go with this one here because it really has everything that's in
46:15
this other one. So I think that's probably what happened. I think there's a chance that I mean,
46:21
we don't know. There's no way to know for sure. But, you know, we have 13 letters that are ascribed
46:26
to Paul in the New Testament. I think there's probably dozens and dozens and dozens of writings
46:31
that he did compose. And so we actually have kind of a small collection of his works that have
46:36
survived. But again, I wouldn't say that this is all just by chance that what we have are just
46:42
the ones that just seem to somehow make it through history. But it's actually very intentional. The
46:48
design of this is actually very intentional. And the selection of writings is very intentional.
46:52
So that tells me that that's why I'm not too concerned about the question of whether or not,
46:57
you know, what if we find another one? Because again, we're not just looking at the survivors
47:01
in our New Testament. We're looking at something Paul and his colleagues would have actually
47:06
determined is there's a lot of thought that went around the precise letters that should be
47:11
included then. Okay, excellent. Well, I appreciate your thoughts on that. Let's go ahead and get into
47:16
the next section, which the question you posed is what was the likely process that led to the
47:22
formation of the New Testament canon? I want to read a short quote from the section. In most cases,
47:27
Greek manuscripts contained either the four gospels, acts, the Pauline epistles, the Catholic
47:32
epistles, or revelation, rather than 27 individual writings circulating independently until a decisive
47:39
event prompted the creation of the canon. The earliest textual witnesses reveal that the vast
47:43
majority of the writings first circulated as part of a particular canonical sub collection.
47:49
So I got to be honest, in my head, Benjamin, I never really thought through this very much.
47:55
In my head, you know, here's a letter from Paul, some, you know, runner would take it to whatever
48:01
city, and I would be read there, and maybe it would get tattered along the way. So this group
48:07
ends up with, you know, a third of a piece of this transcript, and this group ends up with a
48:12
little bit of a thing because that's how we get these little pieces of the New Testament, all these
48:16
different transcripts. But it never really occurred to me that they would get a collection of them,
48:22
like a town or a city or an ecclesia would get a collection of them. And then when did that all
48:29
come together as like, okay, here's the New Testament, like when did people first start getting the
48:34
27 individual writings, letters and gospels and everything else? When did they get that in kind of
48:42
one volume? So take me through that process, because to be frank, I just never thought about it.
48:47
Yeah, it's something a lot of people haven't thought too much about, and it comes as a big
48:51
surprise to people just how the scriptures were passed down over the centuries, because we have
48:57
in our mind what a Bible is we think of one book, right? We all have a lot of these on our shelves,
49:02
at least a lot of us do, or they're on our phones or whatever. But we think of a single book of
49:07
66 individual writings. It's almost like one book with 66 chapters. And we just so we just think of
49:12
it as this one kind of object. But what comes as a surprise to a lot of people is that Christians
49:18
throughout most of church history, when they encountered scripture, it was in a in the context
49:23
of a manuscript that had a smaller collection, not the whole. So this is this is an interesting
49:29
thing when it's when we think about the handwritten manuscripts of the New Testament. And this would
49:35
have actually been how many scripts came down to us for the first 1500 years or so, right? Give or
49:39
take a century, but you have Gutenberg, you know, the end of the 1400s. And you still have some
49:44
handwritten manuscripts after that. But it's really not until the 1500s, the 16th century that the
49:49
printing press really is used to, you know, to produce Bibles in these large scales, large quantities
49:55
then. But it's not until the printing press that you actually can just conveniently copy scripture
50:00
as as a whole, you know, Bible. So up until the printing press, it was hand they were handwritten.
50:06
And that meant that in most cases, it's going to be a small collection. So you might go to church
50:11
and there's a, you know, their Bible was was a codex, codex would just be the form of writings
50:17
up until that point, the common form where you have sheets of papyrus or parchment, you stack
50:21
them on top of each other than you find the edges to form what's essentially a book. But most of
50:27
the time you'll have a codex that just has one collection and might have the four gospels,
50:30
you'll it'll have the Pauline epistles, might have ax and might have revelation and might have the
50:35
so-called Catholic epistles. But it's going to be usually one of those collections. So it's only
50:40
on very rare occasions that you have an entire New Testament with all 27. So that's just so
50:46
important because it shows the development of the canon. The canon didn't just kind of, you know,
50:50
come out of nowhere. And one day everybody has a 27 volume New Testament. But the way we think of
50:56
it is actually fairly recent, you know, the way that most people encounter it. It's really lost 500
51:00
years that people have a complete New Testament. But yeah, you start with those smaller building
51:05
blocks. So the New Testament canon, the best way to think of it is it's a collection of collections.
51:09
That's how I always describe it. So it's smaller collections. And if we could count, you know,
51:14
ax and revelation is collections, but they they they transmit on their own, right? There are times
51:21
that acts did circulate with say the Catholic epistles, but it's more of an independent work
51:25
just like revelation. But originally, what you have are smaller codices that don't include the
51:31
entire New Testament or even the entire much less the entire Bible. And so those were the four kind
51:37
of or five comment, depending on how you count it, five common, what you might call sub collections.
51:42
And then over time, you do have some codices that begin to combine these collections.
51:47
And so it was a very natural process. You might have one manuscript that has the four gospels
51:52
and acts. Another might have, for example, acts in the Pauline epistles and the Catholic epistles
51:57
together. Another one might have every collection except it doesn't have revelation at the end.
52:01
So it's it's kind of like, I don't know, getting Mexican food or something like that, where you have,
52:07
you know, five or six basic ingredients. And you might have your tortilla and your cheese and your
52:11
beans and all these in your meat, your beef, and you can kind of make all these different things
52:15
of it. And a lot of times, you know, that's how their bibles looked. It was certain ingredients,
52:20
so to speak, you might have one or you might have two or might have three of those collections.
52:23
So there was a natural there's kind of a loose connection between them because they all circulated,
52:28
you know, in different combinations, but they're, you know, to understand the history of the canon,
52:34
you really have to understand the history of those individual collections.
52:37
Because that's really what the formation of the canon is about, the smaller collections
52:41
coming together to form one larger collection. Okay, well, now I'm hungry. So I'm fasting right
52:46
now. Now I was a Mexican food. Thanks. Thanks a lot. Well, you didn't really cover this in your book,
52:53
but excuse me. Another thing that is a common critique or common controversy that's brought
53:00
up with the New Testament is, look, you don't speak Greek. You don't speak ancient Galilean
53:07
Aramaic. You don't speak Hebrew. You can't read it. You're reading it in English. And look,
53:13
it was translated, you know, into this language, then it was translated into German and then it was
53:18
translated into old English. And now here we have it. And we've got the ESV, the NASB, the NIV,
53:24
the new living translation, the message, whatever the hell that thing is. And we've got all these
53:29
different versions of it. And it's like, look, you can't rely on this because you can't even read
53:36
the originals. So has that been a part of your study? Because I got to say, when I'm reading it
53:42
in English, I always wonder, what if I were a first century Jew reading this in Hebrew?
53:49
Would it feel different? Would it seem different? Because when you hear descriptions of the Greek
53:53
language, it's like, look, it takes English a paragraph to understand the same thing someone would
54:00
understand in a few words in the Greek. Can you talk a little bit about that?
54:05
Yeah, I think I would be kind of overstating things if I said that, you know, English translations
54:12
are impeccable. They're, you know, perfect in every way. If you could have a perfect English
54:17
translation, you would only have one English translation. You wouldn't need to have multiple
54:20
ones. So they're all our best attempts to capture the original, you know, sense of the of the Greek
54:26
there. So, you know, a good translation is going to be readable, but it's also going to be as
54:31
accurate as possible. Those are the two kind of things you shoot for. And sometimes you'll have a
54:36
translation that kind of, it kind of shifts one direction at the expense of the other. But that's
54:41
really the goal of translation is to be readable and accurate together and not, you know, sacrifice
54:45
one for the sake of the other. But there are certain things that are just whether we like to,
54:50
you know, admit or not, there's certain things that are just lost when you go from one trans,
54:54
one language to the next. And so for example, if you're in the, the Greek New Testament,
54:59
you'll often see certain literary devices that are basically impossible to carry over. You'll see
55:04
things like alliteration, you know, where the same Greek letter is, is at the beginning of multiple
55:09
words in a row. And you might think, well, you might not even carry over at all into English.
55:14
There's no way to alliterate that in English when you go to a different language there or
55:18
just different ways, certain parts of speeches are used or certain, you know, idioms that are used,
55:24
certain expressions will often have times where you might have an adjective, for example, in Greek,
55:30
that doesn't really carry over into English. Just yesterday, I was walking my students through,
55:36
you know, James, James chapter one, and we were looking at the passage where it says that God is,
55:41
I mean, we might want to put it in our English translation is something like untemptable. But
55:46
that doesn't really, you know, work in English. So we would say something like he is not tempted,
55:50
and we have to kind of use different parts of speech to communicate the same basic idea. So
55:55
that's kind of a plug for, you know, folks to take actually Greek courses if you can, you know,
56:00
try to learn as much as you can from the original language. And it's going to be of great benefit.
56:04
You know, if our English translations were perfect, we wouldn't need to study the original languages,
56:08
would we? But there is definitely great gain. So I would say, you know, the English were blessed
56:13
with a multitude of translations, and they're valuable. And you can understand any, I'm not
56:19
suggesting that if you go to the English text, you're going to be thoroughly confused and you're
56:22
not gonna be able to understand the gospel. You certainly can. And we're blessed with very good
56:27
translations, but no translation is perfect. And no translation is entirely free from interpretation
56:32
either. So interpret, I should say translation is a science and an art, it's both of them. So,
56:38
so Benjamin, I got some breaking news for you. Most people in America suck at English. And so
56:43
here you are advocating that they try and study Greek. I think we might have some problems there.
56:47
Is there a English translation that you prefer one that you think is, you know, very readable,
56:53
but also very, you know, tied to the original? Yeah, I think there's several, you know,
56:58
the new American standard, the ESV, I think the NIV is good. Oftentimes, New King James is good,
57:04
but it has a slightly, there's some textual issues there, which is another conversation,
57:08
but yeah, I think, I think there's a, there's, you know, half a dozen or so that I would recommend
57:14
that I think you're all excellent. None of them are perfect, however. And I actually think it's good
57:18
to read different translations. So I've kind of got out of the practice of just sticking to one.
57:24
When I was a kid, I basically read the New King James all the time. That's what was in our church,
57:29
the New King James and then also the NIV, because when I went to church on Sunday,
57:33
they preached out the NIV, but then we had a Wanda clubs on Wednesday night where we memorized
57:36
verses. And that was always out of the New King James. So I got kind of used to those two.
57:41
And for years, I just kind of stuck to those two, but then I found it actually helpful to,
57:45
you know, every time you read through, say the New Testament or something, read a different version.
57:49
Don't just read the same one all the time. Some might dispute that and think that's not a good idea,
57:53
but I found it's actually refreshing because we'll see new details in the text that kind of prompt,
57:58
you know, fresh investigation, but I might read the NASB one time the next time I'm going to read
58:03
the ESV or the CSV or something. I just actually rotate quite a bit then.
58:08
Okay, yeah, say for me, I pretty much exclusively read the ESV, but the pastor of our church
58:14
exclusively preaches out of the NASB every now and then he will, you know, he'll mention
58:20
something in another translation, but that's basically what he sticks to. So I kind of get to
58:24
compare them on Sunday morning. But as we wind up close to your Benjamin, I want to talk about
58:28
part three of the book and part three is questions relating to the authority of the New Testament
58:32
canon. And so the last major question that you pose in your book is, is there a basis for the
58:38
canon's ongoing authority? Because more breaking news, we live in an era of postmodernism,
58:44
where what's true for you isn't necessarily true for me. There's no objective standard to anything.
58:49
Hey, what could these people two in 3000 years ago writing down on like parchment paper or whatever?
58:55
Like, what could these people possibly have on us? It's this chronological snobbery that CS Lewis
59:01
talks about that. Everyone born before I was born was obviously a rub and a moron. But that does
59:07
kind of lend itself to this debate about, okay, why are we relying on this text that was compiled
59:14
thousands of years ago? How does it apply to me? Obviously, because the gospel, it has to apply
59:19
to each and every one of us. But what is specifically the tangible basis for the ongoing authority of
59:24
this canon? Yeah, very good. Well, the original question that you read, which was one of the book,
59:29
I think it's a yes or no answer. So I would just say yes. But I think you went a little more than
59:33
that. Let's go some more and let's go some more. I would say that it's actually a
59:38
Christological issue. Right. So if I were to say, you know, do you believe Christ had authority?
59:42
And I mean, everybody in church would say yes. Well, what we have here with the canon, it's
59:47
interesting. We actually have a link to Christ. That's why the the writings of the New Testament
59:51
are authoritative, ultimately, because they are connected to Jesus himself. You might say, well,
59:55
what in the world? Jesus didn't even actually, you know, create anything. He didn't write anything.
1:00:00
He didn't write any of these books. So what's going on with the connection here? Well,
1:00:04
if you think about it, Christologically, it actually makes a lot of sense. There's a early Christian
1:00:09
writing I could point to it's called first Clement. And this was right. And we think around the end
1:00:14
of the first century, maybe the mid 90s of the first century or so. And it's interesting what
1:00:18
the author, what Clement of Rome states there, I think it's in chapter section 42, something like
1:00:24
that. But he says, you know, God sent Jesus and then Jesus sent out the apostles. And so there's
1:00:30
there's this link that goes between God and Jesus and then the apostles. In fact, Hebrews 3 actually
1:00:36
refers to Jesus as our great high priest. He's our high priest. And the second thing he mentions
1:00:42
there is our apostle. So you might think, well, what is an apostle? Apostle is one who is sent or
1:00:48
commissioned with an authoritative message, right? So Jesus was actually sent from God. He had a
1:00:53
authority because of his nature. But also he came with an authoritative message. He came from God.
1:00:58
That's why he often says, I have been sent for this reason or that reason. So we have Jesus,
1:01:03
who is our great apostle, sent from God, the father. And then Jesus sends out the 12. And he
1:01:09
commissions them. He actually appoints them to serve as his representatives. And then short time
1:01:15
later, after the resurrection, the apostle Paul is included in that as well. And so we have this
1:01:20
team of 12 and Paul sent out by Jesus. And so their instruction then is actually authoritative,
1:01:26
whether it be in written form or if they were teaching a synagogue or in a local church. Whatever
1:01:31
they taught was actually considered authoritative because they represented Jesus. So to reject the
1:01:38
apostles instruction then was to ultimately reject Jesus, which would be to reject God. So
1:01:43
there's this chain there. And then the apostles and Paul, they're going to minister in all these
1:01:48
different churches. They're going to compose writings. Paul, as we said a few minutes ago,
1:01:53
actually kind of at the beginning of our of our session, Paul worked with a great team, a large
1:01:59
team, people like Timothy and Titus and Luke and Mark, all these individuals, many of whom we know
1:02:05
quite well today, but he's going to work with them. And they're also going to take part in his
1:02:09
apostolic ministry then. So it's why we actually have several works in the New Testament that are
1:02:13
not written by one of the 12 or Paul, they're actually written by those who were close colleagues
1:02:18
of Paul or members of the 12 then. But ultimately, the reason why the writings of the New Testament
1:02:24
are what I would say authoritative is because of their connection to the apostles. They were all
1:02:29
written either by those that Jesus send out directly. So he personally commissioned them or
1:02:34
those who worked directly with the apostles in their ministry. And so we have this apostolic
1:02:39
community that is responsible for I would say all 27 books that we have in our New Testament.
1:02:44
And then this apostolic community goes back to Jesus, Jesus goes back to God the Father.
1:02:49
So that's why we have a link. So authority is actually connected to what we'd call apostolicity.
1:02:54
It's connected to these individuals. That's why authorship is actually an important issue
1:03:00
and why the early church argued about whether or not certain books were from apostles or not.
1:03:04
It was always that was always the major debate, the major hang up. So a book like Hebrews, they
1:03:11
did not fully accept it until it became more widely accepted that Paul was the author.
1:03:15
Or maybe second Peter. Once they were convinced that Peter was the author of this,
1:03:20
then they recognized it as being authoritative scripture because all these apostolic writings,
1:03:24
they go to Jesus who goes to God. So it's all very much connected then. So for example,
1:03:30
if you take a second century work that was forged in the name of an apostle and the early
1:03:36
church determined this was not actually written by Peter or this was not actually written by Paul.
1:03:40
Then the chain is broken then. And that's actually something emphasized by early Christians like
1:03:46
Tertullian. When he argues against, he has this five volume, this massive five book work
1:03:52
called against Marcian. And one of the things he emphasizes there, especially in the last two
1:03:56
books is that if you accept books that don't actually go back to the apostles, you're breaking
1:04:01
that chain that goes to Christ, that link that goes to Christ then. So to kind of summarize,
1:04:06
I would say my understanding of authority, it's a Christological understanding. I think that we
1:04:11
can recognize the authority of the books we have today because they ultimately go back to Jesus
1:04:16
indirectly, but they go back to him through his apostles then.
1:04:19
I think that's great. We have covered a lot of ground, but we didn't even really scratch the
1:04:25
surface on creating the canon. There's so much in this book again, guys, is creating the canon
1:04:29
is in the show notes. But that's all for me. Is there anything else you want to get off your chest?
1:04:34
Just appreciate the opportunity to be here and hope the book serves as a great blessing to you
1:04:38
and your readers, or I should say your listeners then. All right, Benjamin Laird. Thank you for
1:04:42
coming on Donald's Life, a man's podcast. Thank you. There you go, guys. I hope you enjoyed my
1:04:47
time with Benjamin Laird. But before we let you go, we are going to do a quick resilience boost.
1:04:51
Add on Donald's Life, our mission is equipping men to push back darkness with content that forges,
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spiritual, mental and physical resilience. So I've got a link to the book creating the canon,
1:04:59
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I'm your host Kyle Thompson. Remember, keep pushing back darkness, keep forging spiritual,
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