Ep. 181 - Benjamin Laird ”The New Testament” pt. 2

[00:00:00] Welcome to The Deconstructionist Podcast. I'm your host, John Williamson, and welcome to part two of my interview with Dr. Benjamin Laird, where we discuss his brand new book, Creating the Canon, Composition, Controversy, and the Authority of the New Testament. As

[00:00:26] always, if you've enjoyed the music that you've heard on the podcast, it's from our good friend, the talented Clay Kirchenbauer, who, terrible gambler, but very talented musician, who releases music under the name Forrest Clay. You can find the songs that you've heard here as well

[00:00:40] as others anywhere you find your music. Getting back to Dr. Laird, he received his PhD from the University of Aberdeen and is the Associate Professor of Biblical Studies at the John W. Rawlings School of Divinity at Liberty University. He's written a number of books on the New

[00:00:56] Testament, including 40 Questions About the Apostle Paul and 5 Views on the New Testament Canon. So, without further ado, here is part two with Benjamin freakin' Laird. That's really interesting. And one of the things that you bring up in the book too that

[00:01:24] I thought was fascinating, and it sort of kind of helps solve the mystery of some of the instances where you have disciples or apostles, for example, who were sort of known as being illiterate. And yet, so how did they write this work? And you talk about the role

[00:01:42] of secretaries and even perhaps schools who sort of followed a particular apostle in their kind of school of thought. So what role did that play in terms of the actual writing down of some of these accounts? Secretaries played a very important role. I would just

[00:02:01] kind of preface that by stating that we don't need secretaries to kind of make this all possible and kind of save the reputation of the canon, right? Not that you're doing that, but there is this viewpoint out there that these folks in Galilee were just, you know,

[00:02:16] they're illiterate, they're uneducated, they're unsophisticated, and how could they have written anything? You know, Bart Ehrman in his introduction, I think it is, he states in there that, you know, someone like Peter, some of these apostles, they couldn't have composed a paragraph in

[00:02:30] Greek if their life depended on it. I think it's his language there, right? And I think that's very much overstated actually. A lot of scholarship, especially in the last 20-30 years, is showing that up in Galilee, they were actually exposed to Greek culture much

[00:02:43] more than we realized before. And I mean, you can go to somewhere like Sepphoris and you can see Greek inscriptions around and you have the Decapolis off to the east, you have Greek-speaking areas up to the northwest area. So there were a lot of Greeks who came

[00:02:58] or Greek-speaking people who came through there. There's trade routes that, foreign trade routes that go through Galilee. Matthew worked as a tax collector on one of them. So they would have been exposed to Greek and it's not as though they're just up in the

[00:03:10] hills and they're only speaking Aramaic and never heard a word of Greek in their life. So I think they were actually much more familiar with it than we might suspect. And then when

[00:03:20] we go to writings like James, in one of my classes right now, we're working on the Greek text of James, you see a lot of very unique Greek vocabulary there. You know, James in the first chapter he's describing, using all these rare terms to describe the choppy winds

[00:03:33] and the waves and even the flowers, that kind of thing in the field. So this is somebody who could actually, you know, a brother of Jesus who grew up in Galilee, he actually had no problem expressing himself in the Greek language. But a resource you might want to,

[00:03:49] your readers may want to or your listeners, I should say, may want to look into Martin Hengel's work. He has a work on Palestine and the Hellenization of it. And it's just

[00:04:01] very much a surprise to a lot of people that it was actually, the land was much more Hellenized than we might think. And Greek was actually much more prevalent than we often realize.

[00:04:10] So I don't think that we need to assume that the secretaries were just kind of like, you know, the apostles are speaking Aramaic and they just compose these Greek works for them and because the authors could never have done this. But it was actually a very common practice

[00:04:25] to dictate a text to a scribe. And we have different Romans in the first century and even before that, we know who did this, people like Cicero, right? And Seneca, contemporary of Paul. So these individuals would often dictate their letters, their personal correspondence,

[00:04:42] even something that we might call an epistle today, which is more formal communication to a larger group. All these writings were often dictated to scribes. And so that actually, I think, helps us out quite a bit, especially when it comes to Paul's writings, because

[00:04:58] one of the common tasks of the secretary wasn't just to compose something, but they would often keep duplicate copies, which I mentioned in the book. So someone like the apostle Paul is going to actually have a large collection of these duplicates that he had collected

[00:05:14] over the years of all of his writings. So when Paul's writings are finally, when they're finally edited and begin to circulate, it didn't take someone going all over the Mediterranean world looking for these things, you know, discovering these lost letters of Paul and

[00:05:28] kind of forming them over many decades. I think Paul would have actually had them, or at least his associates, those who traveled with Paul, likely had these duplicates in their possession. And so that forms an initial collection then. So it's actually a pretty

[00:05:40] natural process. But, you know, Secretaries helps us to understand a few of the kind of literary issues as far as the composition goes. But in addition to that, it helps us to understand historically then just how these writings may have come together in the early

[00:05:55] portion of in the early history of this. Yeah. And one of the things I think is really interesting, too, is, you know, we talked a little bit earlier about touching on the Gospels a little bit and how we ended up with

[00:06:09] four, you know, not five, not three, but we ended up with four. And what's interesting to me, what's always been interesting is sort of this debate in terms of when each one was composed. You know, a lot of scholars argue, you know, Mark was obviously the earliest and

[00:06:24] then Luke and Matthew sort of pull from Mark or at least pull from some sort of a document perhaps that contained some of the popular sayings of Jesus. You know, I think they call it Document Q or something like that. And then you've got

[00:06:38] John, who they, you know, most folks say probably composed last. And it's definitely the most poetic and different of the four. So in your research, how did these four sort of come to be? How did we settle on four and why is John so different than the rest?

[00:06:56] Well, yeah, the last question is probably the easier question there. So today and in the early church, the vast majority of people did in fact believe that John was the last gospel written. So there's dispute even today about when John was written.

[00:07:11] The kind of traditional viewpoint is that he wrote near the end of his life. So that would be maybe the 80s or so, maybe even early 90s of the first century. But there are some who continue to hold that John may have written before 70 AD.

[00:07:25] That is before the temple was destroyed. So there was a work written, I think in the last year or two, Jonathan Benear. And he's going to argue that a lot of the books in the New Testament were written earlier than the traditional consensus maybe.

[00:07:38] So there's ongoing dispute about the exact year that John wrote. But most would still agree that he's probably the last of the four to write. And it seems that he was writing to supplement the gospels.

[00:07:50] And we find language like that in the early church, that we have three very parallel accounts about the life of Jesus and his teaching. But then John writes one of the early church fathers tells us he wrote a spiritual gospel.

[00:08:02] Right. So he's going to write not so much a straight historical account, at least that's how they describe it. And actually, I think it's almost as historical or just as historical as the other three,

[00:08:12] because you have all these references to Jesus going to these feasts and very specific language there. Historical accounts. It is a historical narrative. But there is a heavy emphasis on the theology of who Jesus is, right?

[00:08:24] The nature of Jesus with the prologue and and other aspects of that. But John seems to be writing to kind of supplement what's in the first three. And so that's why a vast majority of John's gospel you won't find repeated in the in the first three gospels.

[00:08:39] So that's that's a key there. But as far as, you know, why the early church recognized these four, it has to go back to, as I said a moment ago, to apostolic authority. They recognize that it's it's these four writings is these four writings that could

[00:08:54] actually be traced back to that apostolic community. So none of the four, which it may come as a surprise to us, none of the four actually have the names of the apostles attached to them. They're all actually anonymous.

[00:09:06] But what's interesting is that in the early church, there wasn't any considerable debate about who the authors were. So they're not questioning, you know, who who wrote Mark's gospel. They firmly believed it was Mark and they firmly believe that Luke wrote these.

[00:09:18] Even though Mark and Luke were relatively obscure figures, there was a widespread consensus on them. So there's no dispute in early Christianity about who wrote them. It was widely understood it was Matthew and John who were of the twelve.

[00:09:31] Mark, as I said a minute ago, who was an interpreter is the term they like to use in early church, an interpreter of Peter. So he's just simply recording the eyewitness testimony and recollections of Peter. Then Luke, who's writing on the basis of many eyewitnesses, eyewitness testimony

[00:09:48] formed his writing then. But Luke is a very close associate of Paul. Mark, very close associate of both Peter and Paul. So they all are very much connected to that apostolic community in the first century.

[00:09:59] And then all those other gospels you may hear about, the early church was convinced they could not actually they did not actually derive from a member of the apostolic community, even though their name may have suggested that.

[00:10:11] They would argue that these are later works that were written by unknown figures much later. And they had various arguments for that. Sometimes it was just historical argument based on chronology. And nobody knew about this work until 130, for example.

[00:10:25] And so by definition, it couldn't go back to the apostles. Or maybe there was a certain teaching about Christ that was considered problematic or variants with the apostolic community. So they would, of course, write that off as as being outside the apostolic community then and therefore not authoritative.

[00:10:42] So very quickly, just on historical grounds, they recognize that these four books are the only four books that could actually be traced back to the apostles. And so for that reason, we have a very quick consensus on which four should be recognized.

[00:10:57] If John's gospel goes to the end of the first century, then we can't have the four gospel before that just by definition. But sometime in the second century is when the fourfold gospel really comes together.

[00:11:09] And some would argue it's probably the mid to late second century around the time of Irenaeus. Irenaeus clearly knew of the fourfold gospel. But a lot of folks would argue that even today, there's likely in the first half of the

[00:11:21] second century. So just in the decades after John's gospel is written, perhaps that the church widely recognizes fourfold gospel. And then that's interesting because the fourfold gospel would have actually circulated as one unit. So that's actually helpful for us to understand a little bit about how the

[00:11:36] canvas formed. We don't have four individual works that are floating around. And one person had John, one had Mark. We have some of that. But what we find most of the time is that the four circulated together as one unit.

[00:11:49] So the fact that we have collections of the four gospels shows that there was a very close association of these gospels to one another in the early church. Yeah, that's really interesting. What do you make of like in your research?

[00:12:03] What do you make of this presence of some sort of disagreements within even the gospel? So like, for example, like, you know, the fate of Judas or the birthplace of Jesus. And and, you know, again, if we're going back to the fact that these were derived from

[00:12:19] first person accounts or people that would have traveled with Jesus, like you would think that they would all have the same story when it comes to some of those details. But, you know, we see instances where they don't.

[00:12:32] Yeah, actually, that's a really I mean, that could be a whole other podcast right there looking at, you know, all the so-called discrepancies in the gospels and things like that. At times, I think it just comes from simply not comparing accounts carefully and

[00:12:45] recognizing that they're trying to emphasize different things. Sometimes, you know, we do that if whether it's a historical issue or a theological issue. So, for example, you know, James 2 and Paul's writings, Ephesians 2 especially, sometimes people get tripped up and say, well, you know, James is emphasizing works and

[00:13:03] Paul is denying the importance of works and elevating faith over works. And so we have a contradiction. And I'm not so sure that's the case based on how they use these words and what they're arguing against and what their argument was.

[00:13:15] So at times we just have we just have to look at what the authors are actually suggesting and then or emphasizing. And then when it comes to historical issues, sometimes I think we're almost looking for contradictions. And I think sometimes we don't I think we overstate these apparent

[00:13:32] contradictions and we can have differences in detail without there being a contradiction. So, for example, if you have one gospel that mentions two angels at the tomb and one mentions one angel, it doesn't necessarily mean there's a contradiction. One got it right and one got it wrong.

[00:13:46] Or, you know, one had bad eyesight or something or just had bad note taking skills or whatever it is. It could just be what their focus is. So one is focusing on maybe one angel, the other is focusing on two.

[00:13:58] And that may be all there is to it. So it does take a bit of detective work. But also, you know, think about this way. I often mention this to students. If if you were trying to come up with four gospels that were in complete agreement with

[00:14:12] each other, you would really compare notes and make sure there's not any discrepancies. So the fact that we do have differences in detail shows me that, I mean, they are writing from their eyewitness perspective and they're not there's not this

[00:14:25] collaboration between them to try to get all the facts just exactly right or in or I should say consistent with each other. Of course, they want to get it right. But, you know, this this effort to get this, you know, just a very unified presentation of Jesus.

[00:14:42] So we don't see that there's that effort. They're just simply stating their viewpoints independently. Right. And giving that bearing voice to that eyewitness testimony. So I think that actually speaks to their reliability in a different kind of way.

[00:14:58] Sometimes we don't think of it that way, but we don't see this again, this effort to just provide this one consistent word. We have four viewpoints. I think they're actually consistent with each other, but we have four unique voices and portraits of Jesus.

[00:15:12] Also reminds me of the way they describe the gospels. Right. I mean, if you were trying to describe the gospels as these great heroes and kind of deify them or something, you wouldn't say all these negative things that you say about the twelve apostles, especially people like Peter.

[00:15:29] Right. But they're just very it's almost like they're they're raw. They're unashamed of, you know, they're just just the facts only kind of thing. They just present the truth the way they see it. And there's not this effort to kind of clean up a mess.

[00:15:43] They just state the facts as they are. And so that actually is reassuring to me. Yeah, that's that's a really interesting component to it. You know, you probably wouldn't paint yourself in such a negative light in certain

[00:15:55] instances like, yeah, and that's the time that we fell asleep and Jesus was like, come on, guys, you know, get it together. Like you might might omit that if you had the artistic freedom. Yeah. Or if this is a writing that comes later, multiple generations after the apostles

[00:16:10] and you were trying to elevate the importance of, say, the bishop of Rome or Peter or some, why would you refer to him as, you know, you have little faith, you know, that type of thing so that you wouldn't have language like that.

[00:16:22] So that shows just their primitive nature, I think, and their reliability as well. So they they are just simply again stating what they believed to be the truth and just giving a very clear picture of of the events as they recalled them.

[00:16:38] Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned the fact that the Catholic version of the New Testament includes some additional writings. Is there any sense from your research where the two took different paths in terms of what they considered part of, you know, Scripture?

[00:16:56] Yeah, well, with Catholicism, the main difference then would be what we call the Apocrypha, right? We will often refer to the Apocrypha. And when we say that, we're really referring to books before the New Testament era.

[00:17:07] So that would be Jewish writings written between the close of the Old Testament and then the ministry of Jesus. So, you know, works like First and Second Maccabees or Sirach or something like Ertobit, you know, there's a wide number of writings there that are considered

[00:17:22] Apocryphal works. So the church, the Catholic Church has recognized these writings traditionally and that when I say traditionally, it really goes back officially to the 1500s, which is actually much later than people think. But for half a millennia then, or half a millennium, there has been recognition

[00:17:41] of these Apocryphal works. But as far as the New Testament goes, there's a consensus in the 27. So even within, you know, between Catholics, Protestants, there's agreement that, you know, we have the same Gospels, same writings of Paul.

[00:17:56] So there's really no dispute there, even though we have differences of opinion about the Old Testament canon because the Apocrypha would actually go under that. Yeah, that's really interesting. I'll be honest, I was ignorant to that fact until probably a few years ago.

[00:18:14] And a friend of mine gave me a Catholic version of the Bible. Oh, there's some extra content in here that I wasn't aware of. There's quite a few extra books. Yeah, definitely. And many of them are very, very important.

[00:18:26] The First Maccabees, for example, all these works with Maccabees, First, Second Maccabees, there's actually four, but the first two especially and really the first one, it's just very important historically. As far as literary genre, it looks a whole lot like Acts.

[00:18:40] We have a lot of narratives, historical accounts. So, you know, we often refer to the period between the close of the Old Testament and the beginning of John the Baptist ministry as the silent years. Right. You'll often hear people referred to it that way.

[00:18:53] But there was a lot of very important history going on during that period. And First Maccabees, along with, I would say, Josephus, who comes much later. But First Maccabees is just incredibly important for helping us understand some of the

[00:19:06] things that Jewish people were going through in those 400 years, roughly between the close of the Old Testament and then the start of the new. So they're very important works. We shouldn't shy away from them and, you know, kind of treat them as toxic or, you know,

[00:19:18] something like that. But they make quite a contribution to our understanding of that period, for sure. Yeah, it's really interesting. One of the other things I thought was a fascinating point that you make in the book is

[00:19:31] you talk about sort of the evolution of the early church and in terms of sort of the surviving apostles and how, as the church grew, it became more important, you know, and almost necessary for them to commit things to writing because they just couldn't be everywhere.

[00:19:48] You know, the church is growing geographically and, you know, they just couldn't travel everywhere. And as more of the apostles, the original eyewitnesses die off, like even more important to commit your memories to writing. Exactly. Yeah.

[00:20:04] And what may come as a surprise is that the New Testament writings, well, particularly it's not really the case with the Gospels and Acts, but the writings of Paul in particular and even some of the other epistles later epistles in the New Testament,

[00:20:18] they were written because the apostles couldn't be at certain places at certain times. That was really the reason they always preferred direct personal instruction. Polycarp, for example, he writes in the second century and he writes to the church in

[00:20:31] Philippi where Paul had spent a number of days ministering and he writes an epistle to them, of course. But Polycarp writes to them and he says, you know, when he was with you in person, he instructed you and when he was absent, he wrote you letters.

[00:20:46] And that actually helps us quite a bit because it reminds us of the fact that the apostles, especially Paul, he would have loved to have been with each of those groups had he had the opportunity. And that was actually his preference.

[00:20:59] So writing was always just considered a necessary substitute. It was never the preferred means of communication. And we may think of that as kind of the opposite. I mean, you can write something out better by, you know, you can definitely communicate

[00:21:13] things, I would say much more articulately on paper than maybe in person. But they didn't see it that way. They actually saw personal instruction as much more important. That's why if you read throughout Paul's writings, he's constantly referring to the

[00:21:27] fact that he wants to come and visit them and how he longed to be with them again. And he might close the writing by stating, you know, if the Lord wills, I will be with you shortly and that type of thing. That's very, very common in his writing.

[00:21:38] So, yeah, it was just a substitute. Writings were just a substitute for personal presence. And then a second thing, and it kind of sounds almost humorous in a way, but oftentimes it was the sin of a community or their lack of knowledge that would lead to

[00:21:56] Paul writing a letter. So, you know, if the Corinthians had their act together, you know, and everything was going perfectly according to plan, they understood all these doctrines fully, they were in harmony with each other, there was unity and there wasn't any kind of infighting

[00:22:10] or any kind of acceptance of sinful practices or behaviors, then why would Paul have to write 1 Corinthians? Right. So there's an immediate concern for him that would have prompted or many, many, there may have been many concerns that prompted him to write something.

[00:22:25] And so it was a lack of convenience. It was the fact that he couldn't be somewhere at a time, maybe he's imprisoned or just off in another region ministering. He couldn't travel at that moment.

[00:22:36] That led him to write and then he's going to address, you know, oftentimes many issues, blunders and mistakes that were going on in these churches. But we're all, you know, we're definitely blessed for it. It's our gain that Paul was often inconvenienced in the churches.

[00:22:53] I often think, you know, how much would we know about the resurrection or the doctrine of the Lord's Supper or some of these things if the Corinthians didn't need instruction on these things? So we actually received Paul's own personal instruction on these doctrines and these

[00:23:07] practices just because the church in Corinth needed correction and needed extra guidance. So, yeah, it was often just the fact that writings were substitutes. That's why we have them in our New Testament today. So I wonder what it would be like today.

[00:23:22] Right. Today, we wouldn't have that issue quite as much. But in the first century, it was often much more difficult to communicate. Yeah, we'd have a series of YouTube videos, you know? Yeah.

[00:23:33] But it also makes you wonder, the history nerd in me says, oh, gosh, like what what other things might we have learned if more of these firsthand witnesses had had put a pen to paper and or, you know, whatever, and had left behind more of their thoughts on,

[00:23:51] you know, what they were experiencing? Because obviously Paul is easily, you know, probably the most prolific in terms of of his writings. But you don't really see that, you know, there's a lot of disciples and

[00:24:01] apostles that we just we don't have anything from them, you know, that we're aware of anyway. And it just kind of makes you wonder, you know, what was going on? You know, what were they preaching and what was their instruction at the time?

[00:24:14] Yeah, I mean, primarily their their role was to bear witness to the work of Christ and they served as eyewitnesses to the resurrection and they went out and taught all things. But remember what we said a minute ago, their their primary focus was on personal

[00:24:31] instruction. That's what they always preferred. So I imagine there would have been I imagine that all the disciples, all these 12 apostles were engaged in teaching in one way or another, whether it was in Jerusalem

[00:24:43] early on or some of them are going to leave many years later or sometime later and take the gospel to these other places. But most of their ministry seemed to have been in person. So there's not that many.

[00:24:54] You know, Paul was just very unique because he didn't just go to one place and stay put there. He is going to travel extensively and the longest he was in any place at one time was probably about 10 years. And that was just early on in his Christian life.

[00:25:08] He spends probably a decade in Tarsus after his conversion. And then he's going to spend some time in other places like Antioch before he starts to really travel and kind of bounce around from one place to the next.

[00:25:20] So I would say his life, the course of his life was just a little bit different than the other apostles. But he would have also been gifted in different ways. So we shouldn't expect that all 12 of the apostles were just very gifted in the act of

[00:25:34] writing. I mean, they all would have had just like today. We all have different personalities and backgrounds and skills. And God has called us to do all different things, right? And use our background, our abilities for his purposes.

[00:25:45] And so I don't think it was and I could be wrong, but I doubt that every single one of the apostles was incredibly gifted in the art of writing and or that they even sought

[00:25:56] to write. I think many of them were probably more focused on one local area. And it was oral instruction that was primarily their work. So it's a minority of apostles that actually write.

[00:26:08] So you look at the big picture of the New Testament, you only have four of the 12. Well, if I include Paul, add the number one there to make it 13. We only have four direct apostles, right, that are writing the New Testament writings.

[00:26:21] And we have four that are written by colleagues of the apostles for aid altogether. So only about a third then of those individuals named apostles were actually writing texts, at least texts that have been preserved for us.

[00:26:34] As you said, there may have been some that are not preserved for us, but a small percentage, relatively small percentage then of the of the apostles actually had an ongoing writing ministry and some more than others.

[00:26:45] Right. So the apostle Paul writing, there's actually 13 works that have his name on it in the New Testament. But others, you know, we have Matthew with one gospel and John. John writes quite a bit, of course.

[00:26:55] But outside of those, we don't we don't have too many writings of the apostles then. Yeah. And you just mentioned, you know, sort of the ongoing debate amongst some of the writings that were attributed primarily to Paul, you know, just kind of this ongoing

[00:27:11] debate over whether or not he wrote certain things. So, you know, at the end of the book, you ask the question, you know, so where does the New Testament really derive its authority from?

[00:27:21] And so especially in the light of today and the ongoing scholarship and some of the document findings and more of the research we've done over the years, how do we maintain authority on all of the books that were included?

[00:27:39] You know, and what does that look like for the modern day Christian? Yeah, very good. And sometimes I think we view this maybe from a theological, we think theologically we kind of weed out the history and I don't think we need to kind of

[00:27:53] separate the two. I think they actually go hand in hand. But as I said at the very beginning of our time together, the apostles are unique because they were directly commissioned by Christ.

[00:28:04] And so the authority of the apostles didn't come from the fact that they were just the most gifted people in the first century, even the most spiritual, the most righteous. They didn't have the greatest intellectual gifts. They weren't from the upper classes.

[00:28:20] I mean, just from a human perspective, there wasn't anything that we would say, OK, these 12 guys, they should be the authoritative figures. And there's just something different about their nature. Right. But their authority comes from their relationship to Jesus.

[00:28:31] That's why they had authority, because Christ directly commissioned them. It'd be no different than if an ambassador shows up. There's an American ambassador to France or something. And I'm over in Europe on vacation.

[00:28:45] I'm walking the streets of Paris and the two of us go to maybe a government building and they're going to pay much more attention to him, the ambassador of the U.S. The White House sent him and he actually represents the White House.

[00:28:59] They're not going to pay any attention to me. They're not going to give me the time of day. They'll just tell me to go off somewhere else, even though we're both American citizens. And I could say, well, you know, I'm actually just as qualified as this guy here.

[00:29:12] There's no difference between us. We're both Americans, but the other represented the government. And so similarly, we have the apostles. They actually represented Christ, which is something the I mean, if you can go look at, for example, First Clement chapter 42, that's an emphasis there is God sent Jesus.

[00:29:32] You can see this whole train of thought in his mind. God sent Jesus and then Jesus sent out the 12. And so there's this direct link then to Jesus through the apostles. That's where their authority was. So their teaching was authoritative, not because they were just the intellectual

[00:29:45] giants of the first century or because they were they wrote the best works. And, you know, they were like the Mark Twain of the first century and just all their works were classics, you know, that kind of thing, whoever your favorite

[00:29:56] author is, but their works were regarded as authoritative because of that relationship. And so the question for us is, well, if these works have a close relationship to Jesus, well, then we can accept them and recognize them as authoritative.

[00:30:11] So that's why these historical issues are actually very important. The church wrestled with the fact whether or not a work actually could derive from an apostle if it was authentic. For example, Second Peter, does it actually go back to Peter?

[00:30:25] If so, how does it you know, what's the what's the connection there? So they were deeply interested in those issues, because if you can point the work to the apostolic community, then you can actually go back to Christ. So there is that chain there, as we mentioned.

[00:30:39] So that's something I emphasize in the book is the importance of apostolic authority. I think it's something we often miss today, or I think we often diminish its importance, dismiss its importance. And I think part of the reason why is because it's part of the effect of critical

[00:30:53] scholarship over the last century or two, especially. We're often just bombarded with scholars who argue that works could not have been written by apostles, that we have all these inauthentic, you know, synonymous works in the New Testament. And therefore, we think authorship is completely

[00:31:09] irrelevant. And we just say, well, you know, God and His providence has seen fit to include these writings. So whether or not Peter wrote this or if it was written in the year 120, it really doesn't matter. The important thing is God want us to have it.

[00:31:23] And so it's just kind of a way of getting around those thorny historical issues, I would say. But that's not how the early church thought of it. They did wrestle with those early with those historical issues and put a lot of weight on apostolic authority.

[00:31:38] So the book is as best I can and as simply as I can, without being too simplistic, I try to talk about just why apostolic authority is so important and why we might

[00:31:47] want to start to emphasize that a little bit more than maybe we have in the past. Yeah, I love that. And there's something that I also love about the fact that, you know, the individuals who sort of passed on these accounts were not, you know, as

[00:32:03] you said, the Mark Twains. They were the average human and maybe and perhaps that's why they stuck with a facts based approach that oftentimes doesn't paint all the characters in play in the best light. And there's something that's unique and sort of beautiful about that.

[00:32:20] Yeah, exactly. Like we said, they're just very clear. They just state the facts as they are. You don't get the sense that these have been really cleaned up and polished. So the apostles are representatives, but they're not the focal point.

[00:32:33] Right. So there's no attempt to make Peter this enormous. It's not hagiography, as we might as the church historians might say. They're just representatives. They're just witnesses to the one that it's really all about.

[00:32:45] Right. I mean, even so much so that they don't even put their own names on them. Right. And the Apostle Paul, I should say, Apostle John, he doesn't even mention his own name. He's just the apostle that Jesus loved. That's all he is. Right.

[00:32:57] And Matthew and Mark and Luke, they don't even refer to themselves by name. At times they're in the text, but they don't draw attention to themselves as even the authors at all. So that shows us the focal point was never on these men.

[00:33:09] It was about Jesus all the way throughout. Yeah, I love that. I love that fact. So before we go, what you know, absolutely brilliant book. I absolutely recommend it to everybody. Creating the Canon, Composition, Controversy and the Authority of the New Testament.

[00:33:25] Go check it out. What is your hope for this book? What is kind of the hope for the lasting impression for the reader? Well, I think maybe a couple of things. I hope that it clears up some confusion about maybe some of the misperceptions people

[00:33:39] have about the canon formation. So I hope that it serves as a very clear and accessible guide just to some of those key questions that we have about how the canon came together. So I try to just lay out all the evidence without going too deep into things.

[00:33:55] You know, it's it's it provides a sufficient amount of detail, I would say, without becoming just too much. Right. So I hope that it's accessible work. And I believe that will give us a broad picture of how the canon was formed from not

[00:34:10] just in the second or third century, but starting with composition, how the writings would have actually been produced and composed and then later formed into a particular canon, how the writings would have actually been collected later on. And then, you know, why are they authoritative for us today?

[00:34:26] So I'm trying to give people a big picture of all that, looking at those different phases of canonicity. But in addition to that, I would I would say I hope it just stirs up a lot of discussion

[00:34:37] on canon. Right. So I raise a lot of to treat a lot of subjects that I think really need more attention and maybe have been overlooked or misunderstood. So I'm just hoping that the book will actually prompt some fresh discussion that will

[00:34:52] be the and that'll be the case, hopefully, among scholars, but also along lay people in churches and Bible studies, things like that. People can begin to have some fresh conversations about this work of writings that have come down to us over the many centuries.

[00:35:07] Yeah, I think it's absolutely I think you absolutely accomplished that. I think it's very accessible and easy to to break down some very complicated aspects of the formation of this text that a lot of us have spent our lives reading.

[00:35:22] So I think you've you've done an excellent job. So I appreciate very much appreciate you coming on to talk about it and spending some of your day with me. Oh, Ben, been my pleasure. I really appreciate the invitation. All right. Thanks so much. No.

[00:35:44] Tell me what made us think we could keep others away in the name of some so-called safety. So for a little bit of power and control and we left. Oh, and those were clouds. Oh, church, what have we done? No. When will we ever see?

[00:36:46] And to treat the same that nobody is actually free. Oh, sure. We started to pave the way to our irrelevancy Cause we've driven the other away Cause we sold our soul For a little bit of power and control And we left a hole

[00:37:47] And those we're called to love I guess they're not enough Oh church, what have we done? But there is hope Somewhere to go Someone to feed Someone to lead Someone to close And who are we If not redeemed Bringers of peace and justice Sweet and holy love

[00:38:30] Oh church, what have we done? No church, what have we done? May we sell our souls To be rid of all the power and control May we lose ourselves For those we're called to love Oh church, let that be us