Odd-ball information. That’s what keeps some of us running.
And here’s a key question. Which Bible did Jesus use? Now before you rush in and say the Old Testament, think about this. The predominant “Bible” in Jesus’s day was the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. Most, if not all, quotations from the Hebrew Bible that are found in the New Testament come from the Septuagint.
But the problem does not stop there. The little book of Jude (vv. 14-15), right at the end of the New Testament has a quotation from the now-called apocryphal book, I Enoch. Does this NT quotation establish Enoch as being Scripture, and therefore should it be included in the canon of Scripture? If not, why not?
CHOOSING THE FOUNDATIONAL PRINCIPLE
I’m going to simplify an issue to make it easier for you to make a choice about first principles. First, some background.
Over many articles, I’ve been exploring the issue of ultimate authority. This is intimately connected to the way current theological debate is carried out and the assumptions behind most of the arguments.
Here’s the problem as I see it.
WHAT IS THE CANON?
This is an important question. And confusion over the answer results in some misunderstandings.
Those involved closely in the debate look at the canon from two perspectives. Both are needed.
The first perspective is that of an authority. It can be in either written or oral form. The Ten Commandments written in stone and the words of Moses were an oral and written tradition, and they were authoritative.
The second idea of canon is that it eventually “came to refer to a perpetual fixation or standardization” (McDonald, The Biblical Canon, p. 55).
A little consideration of these two ideas shows that they are not mutually exclusive. Again to quote McDonald, “the primary debate is over when this literature” took on the status as an authoritative-scriptural manner among the Jews and the Christians. In other words, when was a fixed collection of sacred writings formed, “and what writings were included or excluded by the believing communities” (p. 57)?
Recently, I was speaking with a friend, John, who’s a member of this list. The topic: the canon.
I keep asking the question: what is the authority that determines the canon? The question really needs to be split in two: What is the authority that determined the Old Testament canon? What is the authority that determines these 27 books were the New Testament canon?
For those who hold to the authority of Scripture in the Protestant and Reformed tradition, the answer is in the Confessions. Article 5 of the Belgic Confession of Faith, in dealing with the Authority of Scripture, says this:
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