Transcription
[Music] Thank you so much for joining us on this special edition of the Good Fight Radio Show. On today's show, we have Wesley Huff out of Canada. And we are so excited to talk with him today about a number of topics that for a lot of Christians, they may be thrown off by them. They may have a tough time answering. And we are having Wes on today to share these things because they are so important. So we want to welcome Wesley Huff to the Good Fight Radio Show.
Thanks Chad. Pleasure to be here. Well, you know, I have been excited about being able to do this interview because I came along some of your material a long time ago. You do an excellent job and maybe I'll get some of the guys to grab some of those infographics that you do. And I had seen one you done on Nica, the council in Nica where the books of the Bible were actually chosen by the council there. And so maybe as somebody who is clearly studied on this subject, you could give us kind of an overview because I think Nica has become this boogeyman, uh, for whether you're and you've dealt with, I'm sure, explaining the gospel to Muslims or whether, you know, you're dealing with somebody who really likes The Da Vinci Code, or whatever. You know, the fact is is that Nica really has become this boogeyman. And I'd love for you to give an overview on maybe what Nica really was.
Yeah. The the Council of Nica was an event that took place in 325 AD. And it was a council called specifically to address a theological question about the nature of the Son of God, Jesus, within the Godhead of the Trinity. And so, yeah, like you said, there's a lot of, uh, a lot of different topics that are sort of dropped onto the Council of Nica that I think if we were to go back in time, hop on in our time machine and talk to, you know, any of the individuals at the Council of Nica, they'd be very surprised, uh, maybe a little bit confused as to why their that particular council and their responsibility was then responsible for something like the the divinity of Christ or the canon of scripture or, you know, removing something important from the pages of scripture.
I think at the end of the day, uh, what we can say is that we know what the Council of Nica was about. It was about a particular controversy with a particular individual named Arrius. Arrius was teaching that, uh, that Jesus Christ as the Son of God was part of the Godhead, but that he was created at a point in time. So his famous line is, "There was a time when the Son was not," and that in that way, Jesus was a lesser divine character within the Godhead, and that the Father was a, a greater being, that the Father was the preeminent Yahweh, and Jesus was almost like a lesser Yahweh within the Godhead. And that's what the Council of Nica was about. And there was a lesser issue with the date of Easter, but predominantly it was a conversation about getting the theological, uh, theological language and articulation of who the Son of God is and how we understand what we see within the pages of scripture with the Father being Yahweh, the Son being Yahweh, and the Spirit being Yahweh. And yet, it's fundamental to both Judaism and Christianity that it's monotheistic. There's only one God. And so, how do we understand this and how do we articulate that truth at the same time? That's what the Christological controversies that culminated at the Council of Nica were about.
There's no evidence, there's no talk of any discussion of what books should or shouldn't be scripture or aren't in the canon. In fact, what we do see about scripture in something like the documents of the Council of Nica is that they quote scripture as if it's already accepted and understood as being authoritative and inspired. This is true for any of the ecumenical councils, and the first Council of Nica sort of kicked that off. But there were subsequent councils. There was another Council of Nica. There was a Council of Chalcedon. Um, all of them, what we see is that scripture is employed. It's used, and it's, it's recognized as authoritative. They're not debating whether, you know, we should be quoting this over that because there's some question as to whether, you know, the Gospel of Peter was actually scripture over and above the Gospel of Matthew. That's all myth. Uh, anybody who tells you that that's part of that language and that discussion within Nica, uh, they're either completely misunderstanding what did take place rather at Nica or they're just completely misinformed.
Because when we actually look at what did happen at Nica, it has nothing to do with choosing books. And in fact, individuals within church history, remember, this is in in the early 300s. We can go to the, we can go to the 200s. Uh, we can go to the, the 100s even, um, with some, uh, writings that that were written by early church individuals, um, written, uh, in the, in the latter half of the first century, um, uh, what we refer to as First Clement, or the, the letter, uh, to Rome, or sorry, from Rome. Um, these books, we can analyze the way that they're using what later was officially referred to as the New Testament canon. The way they're quoting it, the way that they're referencing it. And we can see, you know, very early on, there's a fundamental recognition that there are books that were being written by individuals following Jesus's resurrection that hold the authority that Jesus imparted on the apostles, or books that were written like a book like the Gospel of Mark or the Gospel of Luke that weren't written by apostles, but have a clear connection to the apostolic community, uh, Mark through Peter and Luke through Paul, and that these books have that level of authority of inspiration. So there's a, there's a common understanding far before Nica, far before anyone was even born at the Council of Nica, as to what letters, what gospels, what epistles were and weren't scripture. And there were lots of discussions by, uh, individuals like Irenaeus, um, who were condemning other works that, uh, that were starting to have the names of other apostles associated with them, uh, condemning those as false, as ones that couldn't reliably be trans, uh, connected to transmitted from an actual apostle.
No, I think that's amazing when you really get down to it and you see those writings from the early church as you clearly, uh, stated there. Yeah, I think, uh, Irenaeus was so clear about the number four being the four gospels when you read from him. But there are these other books. And when I turn on even the History Channel or, you know, maybe BBC's got some documentary going on, I'm told over and over again that there was equal footing and that, you know, what they, they were just debating. There were really 20 different gospels and they were debating over and over again, hey, what about the Gospel of Peter? Did Peter write that? Or hey, what, this is what the early church and it was so just convoluted in the early church that as Walter Bauer would say, right, that we just don't know, they didn't know, and these guys just, just won. They just won out. So if I was looking at these books, the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Judas, how would I know those actually aren't supposed to be in our Bibles today?
Yeah, it's a great question. And you mentioned Walter Bauer there. Walter Bauer was a New Testament scholar, um, who published a writing called Heresy and Orthodoxy in Earliest Christianities. He published that in 1934 in Germany, and it kind of went undercover for a long time, uh, until it was published in English in 1971, where, uh, it kind of got into the broader context of New Testament scholarship, particularly within North America. And what Walter Bauer claimed there was what is referred to as the Christianities theory, that as you said, Doug, there are these other groups, there's the Ebionites, there's the Docetics, there's the Gnostics, and they all claim to be Christians. And that's true, they did. And they all claim to have a connection to Jesus, and they have other gospels that refer to Jesus in very different ways than say, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John do. That's reality. Those other gospels exist. And so the Christianity's theory that Walter Bauer promoted, the Bauer thesis, as it's sometimes called, is that all of these documents have a level of credibility, that there were all these different groups with their own books. And the only reason you, uh, believe that it's Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and, uh, articulate historical orthodox Christianity is because the group that won out then espoused that particular narrative and theological vein. And so within this theory, kind of equal footing to at least to some degree is given to all of the other writings.
Now, what we can do simply, um, even just connecting to the historical canon, is, uh, simply evaluate things and say, okay, well, I myself am a trained historian. That's part of what I do in my doctoral research. And if I was a historian of anything, say I want to be a historian of Abraham Lincoln, so what, what sources am I going to go to to try to derive the truthfulness of what actually happened in Lincoln's life? Well, I'm not going to go to something like, uh, Abraham Lincoln: Zombie Hunter, you know, the low-budget film that came out in, I can't remember when it was, 2015 or something. Yeah. Um, that's not a reliable independent source for Abraham Lincoln's life, right? I'm going to go to, or I'm going to strive to go to people who knew Lincoln, who reported things that were happening around Lincoln's life, to credible, accurate eyewitness testimony of the events and the times and the places. And so that's just what good historians do for anything. I do that for Lincoln, and I do that for Jesus. And so when I want to know, okay, who is this Jesus of Nazareth guy? Well, I'm going to go to the earliest sources I possibly could. And when we actually evaluate that evidence, what we find is that the biographies, the, the stories of Jesus's life that come at the earliest are what we refer to as the gospel biographies, you, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And the letters that we refer to as the 27 books of the New Testament, those are the earliest source material for the life and the times of Jesus and his immediate followers by his immediate followers in a lot of instances.
And so if we're talking about say, um, the Gospel of Peter, well, that's coming around at the middle to the, the, the middle of the second century to the middle of the third century. You know, we're talking about decades and and centuries afterwards. Um, likewise, the Gospel of Thomas, same sort of timeline. Uh, somewhere in the, the middle of the second century to the, the middle of the, the third century. Um, and that's true for all of these other documents, whether we're talking about, you know, the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, um, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. All of these come at a later point in time when we know that the names attached to their titles, Thomas, Philip, Peter, Mary, are dead. And so there's no accurate historical connection between the title of the individual that supposedly is recording these events or is the source for these events and the actual content information. It's not independent. In fact, when those documents do get accurate historical facts, right, they're almost completely dependent on the four-fold gospel canon of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Um, there's a lot of dependency going on for some of these gospel stories, and, uh, there's clear embellishment in them. They clearly articulate theological perspectives that come at a later point in time that we can pinpoint to decades and centuries after Christ. Uh, particular philosophical theories like Gnosticism that became very popular in the second and third centuries, um, we know came into fruition in the way that they're articulated say in the Gospel of Philip or the Gospel of, um, Gospel of Mary. We know that the what they espoused coming off the lips of Jesus and the apostles that developed in the second and third centuries. So because the content can be traced no earlier than the second century, well, obviously it's not coming from the first century. Um, so there are lots of different markers that we can look at as to why these are historically accurate or not. But at the end of the day, when we're dealing with just straight historical facts, the only documents that get us into an early picture from either someone who knew Jesus or someone who knew someone who knew Jesus are what we refer to as the 27 books of our New Testament. There's really little to no debate about that. Some people like to push the Gospel of Thomas, uh, into the first century. I have a blog, blog post on my my website. Um, I think it's titled something like, uh, why the, why I dated the Gospel of Thomas late. Um, and I articulate the reasons why I, I don't think that that's even reasonable. Some scholars try to do that, but they're in, they're in a, a strong minority for the reasons that I articulate in that article. The earliest source material you find in your biblical New Testament.
Well, I think that's absolutely just vital. And I think there's even early church fathers that would talk about these gospels that the ink was still wet, uh, because they were so modern, uh, to them, and, you know, the apostles had already passed on.