Did NT Writers Know They Were Writing Scripture?
On August 2nd, 1939 mathematician Albert Einstein
wrote a personal letter to then President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Einstein could see the writing on the wall as
he reviewed research being conducted by German scientists. In the letter he warned the United States President
that if German research continued, they would develop a process by which a “nuclear
chain reaction in a large mass of uranium” would result. In other words, an atom bomb.
He did not understand the gravity of his words at that time
but it was those very words that caused the president to immediately demand the
US take action. The next actions
resulted in the Manhattan Project, the development of our own atomic bomb, and
the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 which castrated Japan and Germany
ending World War II.
Albert Einstein’s letter is the way many people believe New
Testament writers wrote the scriptures. Many
people mistakenly believe that when the NT writers wrote, they had no idea they
were writing scripture.
So the assumption is that after Christ died and rose again, people
were so in love with him that they wrote all kinds of letters and stories about
Him and what they remembered of His teaching. Over time these letters would
have been distributed and shared to encourage one another and ended up gaining
popularity. A few generations later the
church convened and decided that these must have been scripture so they met and
canonized them. That’s not the case, but
it’s a major presumption in the secular culture and in the church as well.
Dr. Michael Kruger has written at length about these things
in his books (referenced at end). Kruger
is a professor at Reformed Theological Seminary in North Carolina and specializes
in studies on the collection which makes up the New Testament, called the
cannon.
So why does this matter? Well, what we think about this
issue affects how we date the cannon.
We’ve gone around and around with respect to when certain
books became officially canonized. But if you think that the writers of these
letters/books did not know they were writing scripture, then you wouldn’t
conclude that the original readers thought they were scripture, and probably
not the readers after them either. In fact, it would take a long time before
people recognized, at large, the value of these writings to collectively
determine that they were significant enough to be considered scripture. So first
and second century Christians would be without any guidance in the age of the
New Covenant.
But it also affects the nature of these books and what we
think they are.
If you think they didn’t know they were writing scripture then
you must believe that scriptural status is something given to a book much
later. That it doesn’t start off with a
sacred and holy handling of the text but that it is something which began
casually as an apostle felt like imparting some teaching to another group.
But if it does not begin as scripture then at some point it
must become scripture, and if it becomes scripture then you’re on a dangerous
road of ascribing authority to the church to look at books and ‘make’ them scripture. If the church can determine something to
become scripture, then the church’s authority must be higher than scripture. This is where The Eastern Orthodox Church and
Roman Catholicism run into many of their problems as they have done this very
thing.
But authority does not lie with the church, the church
leaders, or any other human innately. It lies with God and we operate as the
Lord gives us direction to fulfill His will. That consists of fulfilling roles within
the church as pastors and elders (as God has defined them), in roles within
families which mirror the church order, in the commands of scripture to walk in
the Spirit and to obey His law. Against
those things there is no law condemning us (according to Galatians) and
therefore no authority which rises against them.
So then, if the NT writers knew they were writing scripture
how might they have communicated that to the recipients? They might call it the Word of God, they might
call it scripture, and they might say that what they are writing is
authoritative apostolic teaching.
The apostles had authority to speak for Christ and the early
church knew this. So we’re going to look at several scriptures to convey that
they were writing with a consciousness that they were passing along God’s Word
and not just writing a letter.
Paul wrote almost half of the New Testament (NT) amounting
to 13 epistles. If you look at Paul first and get a feel for what he thought
about his own writings then you’ve already covered half of the NT. So what did
Paul say about his own writings?
Galatians is a letter expressing Paul’s disapproval of the
way the Galatian church had abandoned the gospel and adopted fleshly and doctrinally
false beliefs. So he begins his letter
with a sort of resume of sorts laying out his credentials.
1:1 “Paul, an apostle, not from men, nor through
man, but through Jesus Christ.”
What Paul is saying is that, “Not only am I an apostle but I
am an apostle by the will of God. I didn’t receive that status from
another leader or another human institution, I received it directly from the
Lord Jesus.”
He may be referring to his Damascus road experience when
Jesus miraculously saved him and declared to Ananias that he would be his
chosen vessel to preach to the nations. But Paul continues to shed light on his
convictions in verse 11.
1:11 “You’ve abandoned the gospel you received through
me. It is not man’s gospel but I received it through a revelation of
Jesus Christ.” Paul obviously thinks that these Galatians have
abandoned the gospel he preached, and for which he had authority to proclaim
dogmatically, because it had been revealed to him specifically by Jesus for
that very purpose. This gospel was no doubt revealed to him in the three years
following his conversion where he was ministered to by the Lord while he
dwelled in solitude.
But later he writes even more forcefully on this point in 1 Thes 2:13 when he says, “And we also
thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God,
which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as
what it really is, the word of God…”
Paul equates his teachings in person and further explained
in this letter, as God’s own Word which should be obeyed as such. He goes on further to declare that to disobey
it is to disobey the Lord Himself.
1 Thes 4:8 “Therefore, anyone who rejects this
instruction does not reject a human being but God, the very God who gives you
his Holy Spirit.”
So what was Paul’s conception of his own letters? Obviously,
it was pretty high and he knew he was writing with authority, not offering
advice or good ideas or personal strategies, but God’s own Word. This is why we
can never disregard any part of scripture as purely cultural or situational at the time (2 Timothy 3:16-17).
The third example from Paul comes from 1 Cor 14:37, “If anyone
thinks they are a prophet or otherwise gifted by the Spirit, let them
acknowledge that what I am writing to you is the Lord’s command. But if anyone
ignores this, they will themselves be ignored.”
This phrase ‘command
of the Lord’ is a phrase that is used elsewhere and understood to mean the
direct Word from God Himself. It was revealed in the 10 commandments and Paul
is now using the same language in regards to his own writings.
Furthermore, he pronounces a judgement against those who
disregard or ignore it in the very next verse. So he clearly has a high view of
his writings and not because he came up with them but because they are God’s Word.
There are many more examples from Paul in his 13 letters but let’s use
a few others. Let’s go to the gospel accounts.
Matthew begins his gospel with the genealogies which most
people spend all of no time reading because they think it does not apply to
them. But it was extremely important to 1st century Jews who could
trace the lineage of the Messiah from the patriarchs down the line, directly to
Jesus as having descended from the Davidic line. Many Jews then and even today
have come to faith in Christ because of the care with which Matthew took to
preserve this lineage. God knew that the temple and its records would be
destroyed, but this account preserves the important lineage of the Messiah.
Many scholars have also pointed out that this is significant
because it begins where Chronicles ends.
Chronicles is believed to be the last
book (in history) to be written in the Old Testament (not Malachi) and the end
of that book concludes with a genealogy. Matthew begins his gospel with a genealogy
continuing the biblical story. Even secular scholars have noted the significance
of this and that Matthew saw himself as continuing the narrative of scripture.
This undertaking would have carried a holy dread as Matthew was well aware of
the nature and content of the book he was writing.
Luke wasn’t a
disciple though so how do we deal with a text written by someone who didn’t
have that unique qualifier on his resume? We’re not arguing that the apostle held
the pen but that Luke is passing along authoritative apostolic teaching
faithfully. Does Luke believe that he is accomplishing this task as a historian?
He does and in his prologue, he tells us where he got his
information from. Luke 1:1-4, “Many have undertaken to draw up an account
of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed
down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the
word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated
everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for
you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty
of the things you have been taught.”
He’s an apostolic man as a student of the apostles who is
collecting this information from the eye-witnesses. His intent was to record these things so that
the recipient “may know the certainty” of what they’ve been reading. This was
received as apostolic teaching from the beginning and contained the same authority
therein.
Hebrews is
written by an unknown author. So what do we do about that? Does the author know
that they are passing along authoritative teaching and does the writer know
they are conveying God’s Word? This is clear from the opening of the second
chapter when he says, “This salvation, which was first announced by the Lord,
was confirmed to us by those who heard him.”
Once again he is appealing to us that we might understand that
his authority is coming from the face-to-face testimony of the apostles who
knew Jesus directly.
Revelation is the
last book of the New Testament. In the first verse he conveys that he has
received a direct revelation from Jesus. He is so convinced of the authority of
the book that he warns those at the end never to add to or take away from the
words written in that book. That exactly
mirrors the same words used in the old Testament declaring we should never add
or take away from God’s Word.
The apostles even believed that other writers were
writing God’s Word. In 2 Peter 3:15-17, “And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved
brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, 16 as
he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters.
There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant
and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.”
If you’ve ever read Paul’s letters and found some of it
confusing then you may join the ranks of Peter and many others who also read
them and struggled to get to the bottom of them. But more importantly, Paul explicitly refers
to Paul’s letters to be scripture itself as likened to other scriptures.
If Peter, a disciple of Christ, not only received and
accepted Paul as a genuine apostle and that his writings were God’s Word, then
we should have even more confidence that we already do.
Finally, he speaks more generally of the writers of scripture
in the first chapter when he says, “For
no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as
they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” 2 Peter 1:21
But God provided one absolute standard that does not change
from year to year, and for which we are able to be confident in: His Word. It is the standard of truth from which every
other world view borrows.
There are many other ways to prove scripture including their
historicity, archeological validation, prophetic fulfillments, consistency of
the manuscripts, agreement between the authors, doctrinal consistency,
meta-narratives, and internal confirmations from God’s Holy Spirit. Maybe it a future blog topic but for now I
hope that in looking at this one element has blessed you. What the writers of the New Testament
believed, about what they were doing, has hopefully helped you to understand
that they were not casual or oblivious to their task.
They treated it with the utmost care and ensured their recipients
knew to treat it as the precious gem that it was and is to this day.
Be blessed my friends, the Lord is near to you so draw near
to Him! Drink deeply from His Word that He so painstakingly provided for your sanctification
and the church’s reformation.
Soli Deo Gloria
Image Cred: https://www.crossroadsinitiative.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/cavins-jeff-the-inspiration-of-scripture.jpg
10 Facts about the NT
cannon that every Christian should memorize
The Cannon Revisited:
https://www.amazon.com/Canon-Revisited-Establishing-Authority-Testament-dp-1433505002/dp/1433505002/ref=mt_hardcover?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1558009917
The Question of the
Cannon: https://www.amazon.com/Question-Canon-Challenging-Status-Testament-ebook/dp/B00GJY1GOA/ref=sr_1_3?crid=F073DORXO5IC&keywords=michael+kruger+canon+revisited&qid=1558009978&s=gateway&sprefix=michael+kruger+%2Caps%2C203&sr=8-3
Comments
Post a Comment