Transcription
Weshuff reveals why Protestants removed books from the Bible. Recently, Wesuff released a video with the Peterson Academy called the historical reliability of the Bible. This is an amazing conversation. You guys should really go check out the full thing over at the Peterson Academy. It is fantastic.
But there's one part that I wanted to get into around this conversation of the biblical cannon. And later in this video, I'll actually show you me asking Wes about this in person from a panel we did several months ago. And later in this video, I have a very inappropriate joke that may get me cancelled. >> Get it. >> That was a joke. That was a joke. I'm sure I get flipped.
So, at about the 50-minute mark, Wes Huff lays out Martin Luther's issues with the Catholic Church, how things escalated, and why Catholics and Protestants have different candidates. >> Some of the strongest interlocutors against the Protestant reformers were actually on their side when it came to what is and isn't scripture. They disagreed about a lot of other things vehemently, but that wasn't necessarily one of them.
Eventually Luther in the Leipig disputation says in all of scripture there is no recollection of purgatory because the book of Mcabes since it is not in the canon is effective only for the faithful but not succeed against the stubborn. Now sometimes this is this kind of section of the the disputation at leipig. So this is when Luther is kind of getting himself in trouble with the church. He's pulled over to Leipig. He's interrogated. Now he actually thinks it's going to be debate. He thinks, you know, in in the spirit of discussion, he's going to be able to plead his case. And he basically stands in front and they say, "Denounce these things as heresy or you're in trouble." And so, he's kind of caught off guard. And so, he's he's kind of questioning some of these things. And part of that is one of the main issues of the 95 thesis, if you're familiar with it, is the issue of indulgences. During this particular time in the church, there's an understanding that your soul when it goes into purgatory, this intermediate period before you can go into glory to burn off minor sins, that you can pay the church in order to have either time for you or family members removed from purgatory.
>> Now, why is this significant? Well, because Luther has an issue with purgatory as a doctrine. Purgatory is not in the New Testament. It's not in the historical Old Testament. It's in one of these uh extra biblical books that the Catholics have in their canon. And so because of that, a fight erupts on, hey, this isn't in there, but yet we're charging people indulgences to have family and friends have their sins forgiven, and therefore there's a dispute on this particular topic. It's very political and very messy at this time because the pope pop the 10th is utilizing this particular doctrine of the church in order to finance the rebuilding of St. Peter's Basilica Row.
>> The funds coming in from indulgences were used to pay for this church. So kind of need the revenue coming in for people having their sins or their family members sins forgiven.
>> Luther is seeing this happening. He's a professor but he's also a priest in Vittenberg. And so he's seeing some of his congregants giving everything they have, their life savings in order.
>> So this says right here, they they put this little slide up, which by the way, shout out to the Peterson Academy, everyone who's a part of this, and the way they use this uh infinity wall with these kind of slides. I'm not sure if these are west slides or this is something they did after the fact, but this all looks amazing. So it says the priest who saw the cost, a professor and pastor Luther watched his own parishioners drain life savings to buy relief for departed loved ones. igniting his outrage. Here is the crux of some of the dispute and what ultimately leads to the Protestant Reformation. Remember, Luther was not trying to leave the church or start a new church. He was trying to reform the church from within the church because he saw some of the onground issues with some of these uh doctrines
>> in order to get family members out of purgatory. and he writes these 95 thesis and he says if the pope has the ability to remove time off of purgatory or get people out of purgatory, why doesn't he just do it?
>> Jesus died on the cross for us. If the pope has this ability, shouldn't he be as the vicor of Christ the one who is able to do and want to do this? And he argues,
>> I mean, that's that's a really good point. Catholics going to be mad in the chat. That's a really good point, though. If the pope is the vicor of Christ, why can't he just whip everybody out of purgatory? Uh, interesting. I'm sure there's a response to that. I'm sure, you know, Trent Horn has a video being queued up to respond to Wes Huff as we speak on some of this. Uh, but, uh, it's a good question. So, that's pretty crazy. You know what else is crazy? We looked at the backend analytics and found out that only 35% of you guys are actually subscribed. So, if you're new here, if you're not new here, if you've been watching for a while, please do me a favor, hit that subscribe button. We're on the road to 900K. We've even been getting reports of some people being subscribed and being unsubscribed. So, do me a solid. Hit that subscribe button. Let's jump back into the video.
>> And he starts to question purgatory. And he says, "The only proof text that we have for purgatory as far as like an overt statement is from books like >> Mcabes."
>> And if we look at Mcabes, he says it's disputed. Not all of us consider it scripture. And so on that basis he says that if effective only for the faithful but not succeed against the stubborn. Now when he publishes his own Bible when he translates it into German in 1534 he includes not only the old testament but he also includes a section of the apocrypha. And he's very specific in the beginning of this. He says
>> his handwriting is fire on here. like all this. I don't know if that's Luther's handwriting or what, but this old English font is nuts.
>> That is books not considered equal to holy scripture, but which are still useful and good to read. And this this continues to be the theme in a long time in the Protestant Reformation. So what Wes is doing right here is he's driving home the point that before the Protestant Reformation, everyone or at least the Catholics more or less viewed these non-cononical books as, hey, these aren't scripture, but they're useful. So there's a quote up there from a cardinal. And then after the Protestant Reformation, after Luther quoteunquote took out books from the Bible, then he's going to introduce the Council of Trent. as the Council of Trent rolls on the scene, you have a uh uh standardizing of the Catholic Old Testament Bible. And that's where you see these other books now viewed as apparently as scripture within the Catholic Old Testament Bible. So now he's going to read a quote from Cardinal Kayen on this specific issue.
>> To Kayatan, these books are not canonical, that is they are not regular for the establishing of the matters of faith. However, they are able to be called canonical, that is regular for the edification of the faithful as able to be received and secured in the cannon of the Bible according to this. Now, what changes? Because this is 1532 and Cardinal Kayatan is pretty comfortable saying these books are not scripture, right? There's these other books, they're debated, they're not scripture. How do we go from that to the Catholic Church eventually publishing 73 books and saying this is it? No discussion. Between 1532 and 1546, we have the Council of Trent.
>> Shout out Trent Horn.
>> The Council of Trent in 1546 kicks off and it is a counterreformation movement.
>> The Protestant movement. It's robust. It's growing throughout the Roman Empire. And churches are seeing this, the official church is seeing this as a threat. And so they call an ecumenical council. It's very slow and small at first, but then it grows and they actually let the Protestants come. They say, "You guys can come and discuss, but we won't let you vote on anything." But one of the first things that is discussed in the Council of Trent in the first year in 1546 is the cannon of scripture. And in it it says this, "But if anyone receive not as sacred and canonical, the said books entire with all their parts, as they have been used to be read in the Catholic Church, and as they are contained in the old Latin Vulgate edition, and knowingly and deliberately condemn the traditions, Afer said, "Let them be anathema."
>> Okay, that's really strong language. Anathema means cut off. So what do you have? You have now the counterreformation at the council of Trent coming down harder and saying well these books that were once upon a time disputed these books are now a part of the canon. Anyone who speaks against him is cut off as anathema. And uh that is how the idea that Luther removed books from the Bible came when really it was going back to hey what was the earliest Jewish cannon of scripture? What do the Jews view as their canon of scripture? what was the canon in Jesus's day and we're going to go off of that, not these other books. And so Wes uh kind of expands on that more here.
>> So though you have councils like the Council of Florence that is previous to this listing 73 books as authoritative, they never attach an anathema on it. What is an anathema? Well, it's a formal statement of saying you believe this or you go to hell. And so at this point in time at the Council of Trent, though it stands in a long line in a history of the 73 books actually being listed, never before has this kind of very strong delineation been assigned to it. 10-15 years ago, the Vatican actually released a bunch of documents that were uh written and put together during the time of the Council of Trent. We have uh writings from uh this kind of lesserk known individual Bonuccio who was there at the council of Trent and he expresses a lot of uncomfortability with this particular statement at Trent. He says the council should not try to resolve questions long disputed among reputable theologians. He basically says like guys this isn't this is a it's a it's a relevant question. It's a relevant debate. It's one that we can discuss. But by placing an anathema on it now you're binding the conscience of people who otherwise don't believe this.
>> Now it's important to note that John W. Olly the Trent what happened at the council who is giving us this quote. Minutuchio made a critical intervention. The council should not try to resolve questions long dispute among white people theologians. That's a Catholic gentleman as well as a Catholic historian. So this is an American academic Catholic historian and Jesuit priest. So that's this is who Wes pulled this quote from. So he's using Catholic sources to drive home the point that the discussion of the cannon is something that's been disputed. Adding anathemus to it at the council of Trent wasn't fair. This is a Catholic source saying this.
>> We have the records in Trent itself of people saying we don't really think that this is the right action to take.
>> But the counterreformation is so strongly against the Protestants who very early on said, "Listen, we're going to cut out all the chaff. We're going to stick with the core. Everybody agrees on the 66. There's a lot of noise about everything else. When we look at it, we don't think that there's a relevant argument going back into the chain of custody of antiquity for these other books. Therefore, it's the 66 for us. And so, part of the counterreformation movement very early on, maybe reactionary, maybe that's an overstatement. What they do is then they then push back on the reformers by saying, "You don't think those are scripture, we think they are, and if you don't believe it, you're going to hell."
>> Now, I want to show you something really cool. This question came up at our Bless God Summit. This is a panel with Wes Huff, Gavin Ortland, Glenn Scriber, and Dr. Shawn McDow. Yeah, that's a banger of uh lineup, if you will. And uh if you guys want to be the first to know about the next Bless God Summit, I'm not sure if we're doing it next spring or next fall, uh we'll have the link pinned up where you go to blessummit.com, sign up for the waiting list. But check this out. with the various types of cannons like the oriental orthodox have their own cannon, the Roman Catholics have their own cannon, Eastern Orthodox have their own cannon, we Protestants have our own cannon. How do we know which canon is the accurate one?
>> Honestly, this is such a great question. What we want to do is go back to Jesus and the apostles and say, how did they regard the Old Testament?
>> That's right.
>> Christians today agree on the New Testament. We differ on the Old Testament. And uh we Protestants just think there's some really good reasons for thinking Jesus and the apostles had a shorter Old Testament. Some of those reasons are internal to those books. Others are external. Looking at early Christians like Malito was a second century Christian gives us the earliest list of Old Testament books. It's a shorter cannon. So we looked at those testimonies as well. But so much more to to explore in this that you could spend a lifetime studying this.
>> Really check out his book like what it means to be Protestant because you dive into some of this and I and I and I love I can't recommend it enough.
>> Gavin, correct me if I'm wrong. Catholics and Orthodox have all of the Protestant books
>> in the New Testament.
>> Everybody has 66.
>> They just add additional ones to it.
>> I'd be careful with the terminology of adding, but yes,
>> you will get clipped and end up on Eastern Orthodoxy Catholic YouTube.
>> Fair enough.
>> Like that.
>> Yeah. I I mean, I think you can see we we have a pretty good notion of what the Bible was in Jesus's day. We do. And even when Jesus says that all of the prophets and the the prophets and the law and the psalms point to him, that's a bit of an idiom. If you go and buy a JPS, a Jewish Publication Society Bible today, it's called a Tanakh, the Torah, the Nevim, and the Kabim. The law, the prophets, and the writings. And so when Jesus says things like the law, the prophets, and the psalms are pointing to me, it's using that tripartate system in sort of it's an it's it's a summation of and then we get this kind of paralleled with the list that individuals like um Pho of Alexandria and then later on Josephus give us that gives us a good indication, a strong inference that what the Bible of the Jewish people when Paul says that the oracles of God were entrusted to the Jews, what that looked like, what the New Testament authors were utilizing as inspired scripture is what we have in our 39 books of the Old Testament. There's discussions around that as to what what's going on with some of these other books that come in the 400-year period between when Malachi and Matthew start writing the end of Malachi, the beginning of Matthew, but everybody has the core 66. And so when the Protestant Reformation happens, it's not Luther going, I'm just going to get rid of those other ones. They're having conversations. There's a robust dialogue that's going on in his day of multiple people within the higher-ups of the Roman Catholic magisterium itself who likewise hold to a smaller 66 cannon. It's only in response to what is going on in the reformation that you get the Council of Trent in that time period after Luther where they then not just give a cannon list but they attach an anathema to it in saying if you don't believe this you're in trouble of being uh confined to eternal damnation. But before that there is no such thing as a Roman Catholic Bible.
>> Is it fair to say uh that the the Jewish Bible the Jewish cannon is the same as the Protestant Old Testament canon?
>> It is very fair.
>> Okay.
>> It's the same number of books. It's in a different order.
>> That's what I was going to say. Just the same books, different order. Yeah.
>> And so I guess depending on how you feel about the Jews, that might impact how you feel about it.
>> That was a joke. That was a joke.
>> I'm sure I love flipped.
>> Anyway, hopefully I didn't offend any of you guys, but I do find all this very interesting. And if you want to see the time Wes came on my channel, we had a long form conversation. This about a year ago. We'll have this pinned up somewhere over here. And if you want to sign up to be the very first to hear about the next Bless God Summit, which will sell out. The last one sold out. This next one will sell out. And I don't even know when we're doing it, but make sure you get on the waiting list. We'll have that pinned up down below. All right, we're out of here. Please.