Transcription
One question Protestants can't answer. Bold claim, but here's what he never tells you. His answer creates worse problems for Rome than it does for us. Let's go.
>> Today, I wanted to propose a challenge to all my Protestant brothers and sisters. Here's the one question that Protestantism cannot answer. And it's this. How do you identify the Bible?
>> How do you identify the Bible? Genuinely fair question. I'll grant that completely. But watch carefully because the moment he answers it, he walks straight into a trap of his own making.
>> The Bible does not give you a list that altogether make up what we know is the Bible. The Bible doesn't tell us any of this.
>> True. And I'll keep agreeing with him right up until he tells us that Rome is the solution. Because here's what he never addresses. If the church is the infallible authority that gave us the Bible, why did it take Rome 1500 years to officially do it? Are you trying to tell me that they didn't have a recognized cannon before it was officially decreed? The Council of Trent closed the Catholic cannon in 1546 and only as a direct reaction to the Protestant Reformation. That's not a process guided by apostolic tradition. That's damage control.
>> How do you know that the book of Esther belongs in the Bible? How do you know that the book of Hebrews belongs in the Bible? How do you know that the four gospel accounts really were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? How do you know that the writings of Paul really were written by Paul and that they weren't forgeries? How do we know that the other epistles of the other apostles were really written by those apostles? How do you know that the epistle of uh St. Jude belongs in the Bible? St. Jude, he wasn't an apostle. Who wrote the epistle to the Hebrews? We don't know who wrote Hebrews. So, how do we know that Hebrews belongs in the Bible? What about second Peter? There are some people that claim that St. Peter the Apostle didn't didn't write the second Peter.
>> This whole section backfires on him here and I want to be fair and name it clearly. Every authorship uncertainty that he raises, Rome's canon has the exact same problem. Trent declared Hebrews canonical and didn't know who wrote it either. So, this doesn't help his case. But the reality is that the early church didn't operate on a single litmus test. They used multiple criteria. Things like apostolic connection, theological consistency with the established deposit of faith, and early widespread recognition across independent church communities. Different books leaned on different criteria. Mark and Luke are clean. Both wrote under direct apostolic supervision. Jude wasn't one of the 12, but he was the brother of James and the brother of the Lord himself, a category of authority that the early church took seriously and which explains his letter's reception. Now, the book of Hebrews is the hardest case, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Origin said it plainly. Who wrote it? God truly knows. But here's what is certain. Hebrews was cited as authoritative as early as Clement of Rome around 96 AD. It circulated widely across both East and West. Its theological depth and consistency with the apostolic message was immediately recognized. The church didn't accept Hebrews because a council told them to. They accepted it because generation after generation of believers independently recognized the voice of God in it. That's not institutional decree. That's the Holy Spirit doing exactly what Jesus promised, guiding his people into all truth. And that witness spread across centuries and continents before any council ever met is more compelling than anything the Council of Trent produced in the 16th century. See, a lot of Protestants when it comes to like the canon of of just the New Testament, they'll say, "Well, we know that all of the other gospels like the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and, you know, the Gospel of Peter and all of these other writings, we know that they're forgeries. We know that they weren't written by these that they really weren't written by the apostles." But a lot of the same scholars that will tell us, yeah, those writings were written by apostles. They'll also say that second Peter wasn't written by Peter. They'll also say that the epistles of John and Revelation were not really written by John. We all know that the epistle of Jude that, you know, Jude wasn't an apostle. We don't know who wrote Hebrews. So, how do we know that those books belong in the Bible?
>> Okay, so the same critical scholars who reject the Gospel of Thomas also reject second Peter. So, how can Protestants accept one verdict and not the other? The answer is that we don't outsource our canon decisions to critical scholars in the first place. We rely on an appeal to the internal qualities of the books themselves, the testimony of the Holy Spirit, and the corporate reception of the church at large. The criteria the early church used to reject the gospel of Thomas are the same exact criteria they used to accept things like Matthew and John. The rejected gospels failed simultaneously on every metric. Late dating, no geographic proximity to the apostles, no early widespread use and apostolically connected churches, theology inconsistent with the established deposit of faith, and on and on. The forgeries were obvious to the early church because they had the genuine articles to compare them to. You know a counterfeit because you know the real thing. But the biggest nail in the coffin here is the shocking reception of the current books of the New Testament canon versus the rest. This table shows it clearly. We have in this table early Christian authorities and even some heretics listed on the x-axis at the top. And the first chunk of the y-axis are the canonical books of the New Testament. As you'll recognize below it is a list of the major New Testament apocryphal writings. At just a glance, which group has more agreement? The canonical books or the apocryphal ones? Bam. Canonical wins hands down. Not because a church council declared it, but because the best testimonies we have of figures within the early church before the major councils recognize them as canon and not the others.
>> According to the very best Protestant apologists and scholars, they just they bite the bullet and they have to say their scripture isn't closed. Once you say the canon of scripture is closed, you are now saying that that canon is a definitive rule of faith. And if the canon is a definitive rule of faith, then solar scriptura cannot be true because that canon isn't in the scriptura.
>> Okay? So if solos scriptura means scripture is the only source of any knowledge about anything, you have a problem. But that's solos scriptura. And Protestant theology has always distinguished between the two. Solos scriptura means scripture is the only infallible rule of faith. It doesn't mean history, tradition, and the church community plays zero role in recognizing what scripture is. But that's the key word there, recognizing. As I just demonstrated, the church didn't create the canon. It recognized it. There's a massive difference between those two things. And it would be a mistake to miss that. Cuz if you want to close definitive canon of scripture, you have to appeal to something outside of the scriptura to give it to you. And you would have to appeal to the church. And then the question becomes, which church? Which church is able to close the cannon? church is able to tell us what writings are inspired and what writings are not inspired.
>> Not quite. We did the New Testament. Let's now talk about the Old. Jesus himself confirmed the Old Testament cannon. In Luke 24:44, he identifies scripture as the law of Moses, the prophets, and the Psalms. That's the three-part or tripartite structure of the Hebrew Bible. The structure that never in all of history has included the apocryphal books. In Matthew 23:35, Christ references from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah. That's Genesis to Chronicles, the exact boundaries of the Hebrew cannon today. In the fifth century, as noted by the Babylonian Talmud, and apparently the first century also. So before we even get to church councils, Jesus already told us what the Old Testament is. And so did contemporary first century sources. Josephus documented a Hebrew cannon made up of the same three-part structure, law, prophets, and hymns, precepts. He said it was made up of 22 books enclosed roughly since 500 BC. Same books as the Protestant 39. now just numbered differently. Second Edzus, a first century apocryphal work, confirms both of these things, although counts the books as 24 and again likely an issue of numbering, splitting up or combining of books rather than inclusion or exclusion of books. Ben Sirak, the only apocryphal book that we have Hebrew manuscripts for, recognizes this three-part division. Pho, a first century Greekeaking Alexandrian Jew who used the four-part Septuagen, confirms the same three-part Hebrew structure, law, prophets, and other books. And he never quotes the Apocrypha as scripture. Even Jerome, the man who translated the Vulgate, although centuries later, he explicitly rejected the Apocrypha as non-cononical. He said it was useful for edification, but not for establishing doctrine. Rome later overruled Jerome at Trent in 1546 in response to Protestants. The bottom line is that the three-part Hebrew cannon is attested by Christ himself and contemporary first century sources. A canon that has never contained apocryphal works. Here's the question I want you to throw right back. How do you know the Council of Trent was infallible? You appeal to the church. How do you know the church has that authority? Because the church says so. That's the exact same circular reasoning he's accusing us of. Nobody escapes circularity at the foundations. The question is whose foundation is most historically defensible? And consider this. If church councils are your answer to the canon question, you've created a new problem. Accepting the councils that give you the Gospel of Mark means you also have to accept the seven apocryphal books. You can't pick and choose which council decisions you take. The councils are a package deal. Meanwhile, the Eastern Orthodox cannon still differs from Rome's. If the church definitively closed this question, why are we still having this debate? Here's the bottom line. The Protestant position isn't novel. It's the ancient position. Jesus used the Hebrew cannon. The apostles quoted from it. Jerome defended it. The Apocrypha was disputed through church history by scholars inside Rome itself. The Council of Trent didn't preserve an ancient tradition. It innovated in response to the Protestants appeal to the ancient tradition. Rome didn't give us the Bible. God preserved his word through the recognition of his people across generations through manuscript tradition, apostolic testimony, lurggical use, and the witness of the Holy Spirit in the church. The canon was recognized, not manufactured. One question Protestants can't answer. We just answered it and we handed one back.