Lutheranism 101 - Part 3 - The New Testament

While the Old Testament took over a 1000 years to write, the New Testament was written over 50 years or so. The earliest NT books were 1 Thessalonians and Galatians, probably written about 50 A.D. The last book, the book of Revelation was completed by about the year 100 A.D. The rest of the books were probably written somewhere in-between.
The shape of the New Testament Canon has come into sharp dispute recently in the media. This has come as the result of such books as the Da Vinci Code and publication of the different Gnostic gospels. Serious scholars have not put much stock in any of this though. The Da Vinci Code has been lambasted not just by conservative Christian scholars but also by secular scholars who will tell you the history just doesn't add up. The reason many Christians have reacted so strongly to this is that Brown who wrote the fictional book does teach that the history behind the book is true. He has even claimed so on national TV, much to the ridicule of anyone who knows anything about ancient history.
The word Gnostic in Greek means knowledge. The Gnostics thought that they had a secret knowledge of God. There were a number of variations in their beliefs, but basically it came down to believing that there was a material world which was evil and a spiritual world which was good. They looked at Jesus as coming from a higher order of beings who came to earth to reveal truth to a few individuals who have this secret knowledge. They deny that Jesus took on flesh and that he died on the cross for the sins of mankind because this would entangle him to much in the evil material world. They also deny his physical resurrection and look upon it as more of a spiritual thing. Gnostic thought is what is largely behind much of the New Age Movement, hence the importance of the Gnostic Gospels to them. Many of these Gnostic gospels were discovered in the Nag Hammadi Library.
The Gnostic Gospels, contrary to what people such as Ellen Pagels and Crossan says, were never seriously considered to be a part of the Canon. First of all they were not written at the same time as the New Testament. Most of them were written in the century after the completion of the NT. From the beginning they were not read in the churches or considered to be of any authority. They did not fit in with the other books and if you take the time to read them you find they have many strange things in them that totally contradict Scripture.
What is interesting about much of this is that some people think all this stuff about the Gnostic Gospels is new. It is not. For instance there was a discovery just recently of the Gospel of Judas. This was supposed to rock the Christian world. They must have forgotten to tell the Christian world because most of us just went, well good we have been wondering where that thing went. Early Church Fathers in the first four or five centuries had already told us there was a gospel of Judas. We knew it existed and we also knew that the church had rejected it from the beginning. We just didn't have a copy of it anymore. So thanks for finding it guys, go ahead and put it on the shelf right over there so it can begin to gather dust again.
Burgland says this, "The early Christian church did not decided what books were authoritative, but they did recognize the unique nature of the works that we know as the New Testament. In his Easter letter to his congregations in A.D. 367, Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria Egypt, listed the 27 New Testament books as divine and called them springs of salvation. In A.D. 397 at Carthage in North Africa, a church council met, with Augustine in attendance, and confirmed the canon of the New Testament. After that there was little discussion about the Canon."
Most of the New Testament books had an Apostle connected to them and they were publicly read in the church service which meant they were considered to be authoritative. So really the council didn't pick and choose which books were to be in and which were to be out, they just confirmed what the church was already using. In the past pastors never talked much about the Gnostic Gospels because they didn't have to, now because of the New Age Movement and it's false teachers we have to.
There are as I said before 27 books in the New Testamemt. We have the four gospels, Matthew through John. The first three gospels are called the synoptic gospels because they all tell the same story from different points of view. The fourth Gospel John was written much later and tells the story to a second generation of Christians who would not have known Jesus personally. Then we have one book of history, the book of Acts. The last book of the Bible, Revelation, is a book of prophecy. The books in between are called the Epistles and they were written mostly by Paul and then some by James, John and Peter and a few unknowns.
The Bible was written in three languages. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew, except for parts of Daniel which was in Aramaic. The New Testament was written in Greek and maybe a few parts in Aramaic.
We also believe in the three I's. We believe that the Bible is Inspired. Men wrote down the words but the words were actually God's. In other words the Holy Spirit inspired them to write what they wrote. So it is the very Word of God. We also believe that the Bible is Inerrant. It has no mistakes in the original languages. Notice I said original languages. There are mistakes in the translations, because you cannot translate word for word from one language to another. So we believe what the Bible says even if it is hard to deal with. We also believe that the Bible is Infallaible. It can't have any mistakes. The difference between inerrancy and infallible is this. A phone book is supposed to be inerrant. It is not supposed to have any mistakes, but we all know that it does. So a phone book is not infallible. The Bible has no mistakes and it can not have any mistakes because it is the very Word of God. What God says is always right. He is the one who determines the very definition of right. So the Bible can't be wrong.
There are now more translations and paraphrases of the Bible out there then you can shake a stick at. The difference between a translation and a paraphrase is pretty simple. A translation tries to go word for word as much as it can. They strive for exact accuracy between the original language and English. A paraphrase just strives to get the general concept across. It is more loose. Paraphrases are okay for reading, but should never be used for study Bibles. Good examples of translations would be the New International Version, the Revised Standard Version, and the King James Version. Good examples of the paraphrases would be the Living Bible, The Message, and the Contemporary English Version.
Well we could go into the whole history of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library, which is full of false Gnostic Gospels, and the Old Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, but that is for another course later on.
I am not going to give you any questions on this one, because next week we are going to have a test. So I will let you study what we have been talking about.

Pastor Fred