WHAT BOOKS BELONG IN BIBLE?

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Foreword

HISTORY MAKES APOCRYPHA UNCANONICAL

THE APOCRYPHA SHOULD NOT BE IN BIBLE

THE CANON OF SCRIPTURE

REVISING THE CANON

Foreword

The Bible is a book written by men but the Church holds that it is necessary to believe that it was written somehow by God as well so that it is the word of God to be a Christian.

Books belong in the Bible if they are true to their original versions and if they contain the marks of divine inspiration. For all we know the writers of Bible books could have been altering their scriptures themselves after they wrote them to corrupt the word of God.  They could have received a revelation and then written it down to suit their own thinking.  We have loads of evidence that the Bible is not divinely inspired which means that Bibles are just tricks by men to get censoring the word of God and to keep him quiet if he does want to speak. Men put together Bibles and these men were all into power and followed a dishonest faith.

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HISTORY MAKES APOCRYPHA UNCANONICAL

History says that the Jewish Bible books which the Catholic Church has but which the Protestants and Jews have rejected and which the Eastern Orthodox Church regards just as good reading but not fully scripture should not be in the Bible. A good refutation of the claims the Catholic Church makes for the Apocrypha exists in chapter 3, The Canon, in the book, Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Vol 1.

Catholics have forty-six Old Testament books and Protestants have thirty-nine.

Rome calls the extra books the deuterocanonical books. Deutero comes from the word for second. The Church means that these books were the second or the last to be accepted as from God.

The fact that they bear this name proves that they are not divine. God’s word is supposed to direct what we do and think and how is it supposed to do that if we have problems in finding out what God’s word is? And especially when the Church took longer with them than the rest of the Bible! It is like men deciding what God has said instead of allowing God to speak for himself.

Protestants call the books the pseudographa, meaning false writings. That is exactly what they are.

Some parts of the New Testament were plagiarised from the Apocrypha but the important thing is that none of the Apocryphal books were quoted as having any authority and were never used to establish any doctrine.

Rome added books which the Jews did not recognise as scripture to the Old Testament - books which seem to advocate praying to saints, salvation by works and praying for the dead in the fourth century. The books are, Tobit, Judith, the Additions to Esther, One and Two Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and the Additions to Daniel. These books were not included into the canon of scripture in the strongest way until the Council of Trent got round to it in 1546, on April 8^th, to be exact. Then it finally, and supposedly infallibly, declared what books were in the Bible. It is not a good sign when a cult takes over several centuries to properly and finally decide which books are to be assigned a scriptural status. You can’t have a legitimate authority without fully authorised scriptures. Jesus declared that he was to be our teacher and the Church was, strictly speaking, not, being merely his instrument (Matthew 23). This is impossible unless you are made as sure as possible just what is Jesus’ word from the start. Even if something is the message of Jesus and you depend on human authority to recognise it as such you are following human authority and not Jesus for the basis is not Jesus. Another bad sign is that though the Catholic Church was massive, only five cardinals and about forty bishops made the decision though it was one of such importance they should have waited until they could have got a bigger number together (page 20, But the Bible Does Not Say So). If that could be acceptable, then what is to stop some future pope convening ecumenical councils with just two carefully selected bishops or cardinals in them so that he can get them to make whatever dogmas he wants? It is the word of man not God that the Catholic list of Bible books is indeed the list of books that God wrote.

The Church accepted all the disputed books of the Apocrypha as the word of God except three which were arbitrarily excluded. The omitted works were the Prayer of Manasseh and the First and Second Esdras. But these books had just as much right to be in. The Prayer was a particularly strange omission and and omission that smacks of arbitrariness.

Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria and Augustine were some early Christians who considered the books to be infallible scripture. But many others opposed this stance, notably St Jerome (347-419 AD), Cyril of Jerusalem, Melito, Bishop of Sardis and Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria. The Jews held the council of Jamnia about 90 CE and it rejected the books as scripture. Nobody can claim that they were regarded by the whole Church as infallible from the beginning. Though some of the books seem to have influenced the New Testament in its teachings and wording that does not mean that the earliest Church regarded them as inspired or that Jesus did.

St Jerome, the Church Father who was famous for producing the Vulgate translation of the Bible and his pretensions to Bible scholarship, did not believe in the inspiration of the Apocrypha. Jerome said the Maccabee books were full of fables for they said that Antiochus Epiphanes died of a broken heart and then it forgets this and says the priests stoned him to death and then it forgets both these and has him dying of a disease that rotted his insides (page 21, But the Bible Does Not Say So). He said that the Church of his day used the books of the Apocrypha as spiritual reading but that they were definitely not scripture (page 21, ibid).

The Jews of Palestine had their Hebrew Old Testament which did not have the books. The Egyptian Jews had the books in their Bible and disagreed with the former that they were uninspired. One would expect the former to be the ones to follow when they lived in God’s holy land which had been given to them and was meant to be a theocracy and resisted the liberalism of their Egyptian brothers.

The Jews of Palestine did not like the books for they were late in composition and all of them were forgeries. They knew and should know better when they lived where the books allegedly came from.

Josephus said the Jewish scriptures were no more than 22 books which left the Apocrypha out in the cold. Philo of Alexandria never quoted the Apocrypha’s books as scripture (page 35, Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Vol 1).

Jesus said in Matthew 23 that he sent prophets to Israel from Abel, son of Adam in Genesis, to Zechariah, who is supposed to be the one who wrote the Bible book. Many take this as a hint that only the books which are the Jewish Bible from Genesis to Zechariah which rules out the Apocrypha are prophetic or scripture. Others disagree. They say in one arrangement of the list of books in the Jewish Bible or the Old Testament Abel was the first martyr mentioned and Zechariah was the last having being spoken of 2 Chronicles 24:21 which was at the end. They say the reference to Zechariah, the last martyr, means the last martyr in the way the Jewish Bible listed the books with at the end so he was the last mentioned in that order of books (page 31, Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Vol 1). If so, then Jesus cannot be taken as excluding the Apocrypha. But it is not so. Jesus hated Jewish tradition intensely because it was made the word of God and it wasn’t and it complicated things and served only as a distraction from the word of God. He wouldn’t have treated the list with any sacredness. It was only a human arrangement. If the Jews had a shorter Bible than they should have had, he would have insisted that they include the missing books, perhaps the Apocrypha ones. But he never criticised their list so he wanted the Apocrypha kept out of the canon.

The oldest Christian list of Old Testament books was that made up after Melito, Bishop of Sardis, did his research and interviewed many Churches in 170 AD. Curiously, he left out some of the books included by the Jews but the Apocrypha was definitely excluded from the canon (page 32, Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Vol 1).

William Webster has an excellent response to Roman Catholic lies and errors about the canon of the Bible called, Why the Roman Catholic Arguments for the Canon are Spurious?, on the Internet.

He rejects the Catholic claim that the Councils of Carthage and Hippo which made the canon made it for the whole Church. This point refutes the Catholic boast that the “Catholic Church made the Bible and if the Bible is infallible so is the Church”. Another reason, not touched on by Webster, is that neither of these Councils were reliable as we will see later and so had no supernatural power to divine the canon. And yet another reason is, that neither council was an infallible or ecumenical council of which there have been twenty-one in the Roman Church so even the Roman Catholic Church holds that Carthage and Hippo could change their decision or a later council could for there was nothing irrevocable about its decrees. Several important Fathers of the Church to name a few, Origen, Melito of Sardis, Athanasius, Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil the Great and Jerome, all believed that Carthage and Hippo were wrong and that these councils had no authority over them or their ecclesiastical jurisdictions.

The New Catholic Encyclopaedia confesses that the canon of scripture was not finally and infallibly and irrevocably set for the whole Church until the Council of Trent and that was April, 1546! It even confesses that Pope Gregory the Great rejected the Apocrypha which Trent added to the Bible.

The Roman claim that the Jews of Alexandria accepted the Apocrypha when they had them in the Septuagint is untrue for that only proves the writings were respected but not necessarily equal to scripture. Manuscripts contain the Third Book of Maccabees which nobody ever considered to be scripture. Trent contradicted Hippo and Carthage as well. It rejected what was called 1 Esdras and accepted as scripture by Hippo and Carthage. Hippo and Carthage were careless too. They declared that Solomon wrote five of the Old Testament books but in fact tradition says he wrote only three. Webster believes that the early Church used the word canonical in two senses, one was in the sense of fully inerrant and infallible scripture and the other was in important writings that are close to scripture and to be read and studied but which are not scripture. This view to me would open up the possibility of perhaps doing what I once thought could be done, regarding only a few books of the Bible as inspired. I once chose Mark and 1 Peter as the only scriptures on the basis that Mark was Peter’s disciple and Peter was the rock of the doctrine of the Church.

Webster tells us the very interesting fact that only a few made the canon, the rule listing what books God wrote and which belong in the Bible, at Trent and not one of them had sufficient training in the tradition and logic of theology and in the history of the canon to have any ability to decide what should be in the canon. If God cared about the Bible he would have sent a scholar to them to make them think twice. They didn’t have the insights of modern archaeology, historical criticism, textual criticism and so on. All they had was the superstitious and fundamentalist pseudo-scholarship of their times. The farce is evidence as well that Trent had no concern or respect for infallibility and faked it for the Church says that infallibility works only after research of the utmost care. This automatically proves that the Roman Catholic Church has fallen into apostasy. 80% of Catholicism got its infallible sanction at this Council but it only takes one dogmatic error to prove that a council is heretical and has no authority. That puts the Church back where it was before Trent. Its rejection of Protestant heresy, the main reason for convening Trent, be it right or wrong has no infallible backing. When the Bible is so important it is pure blasphemy to say that a small group of men should decide what God has written. Thousands of bishops from all over the world should have been deciding it. And it is even more blasphemous when the men did not research the subject right. Even if tradition and scripture are equal in value scripture has to come first for it is written and is the inspired word of God so tradition though inspired too depends on it to be identified as being from God. The fact that the Church took so long with the scripture canon proves that the Church is a hoax and a shambles.

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THE APOCRYPHA SHOULD NOT BE IN BIBLE

Well the Bible should not be in the Bible but anyway let us proceed. When the Catholic Church found that many of her most important doctrines were not in the Bible instead of rejecting them she decided to resort to fraud to force the Bible to teach them. She put books in the Bible that did not belong in it and claimed her famous infallibility backed her up! The books in question comprise what Protestants call the Apocrypha.

Tobit says that God sent an angel, Raphael, to tell lies. Elsewhere in the Old Testament it is said that God always tells the truth (Numbers 23:19). Rome might say that when the Bible forbids all deception it only means all deception that is immoral. But when God’s motives and schemes are mysteries to us how can we be sure when he is telling the truth? God has to condemn all lies to be believable. God through Paul his prophet forbade all lies in order that Christianity would be credible (Romans 3:7,8).

Tobit says that Tobit was around in 931 BC, the year of the revolt of Jeroboam. Though it says that he lived to be 158 it forgets this and has him still alive during the Assyrian Captivity (722 BC) though there were 209 years between the events!

Some Catholic scholars say that Tobit is just a novel written by God. It is not history. But the book nowhere supports this notion. If it is a novel the gospels could be novels too. The fact that two gospels, Luke and John, say they were written so that we may believe would mean nothing for many fiction and semi-fiction works use this device too. To accept Tobit as an inspired fairy-tale is to leave the Christian faith for Christian faith depends on trust in the gospels. The Catholics argue that the books must be infallible for the Church says so and that if it is infallible the absurdities in it were never meant to be taken as true. But then God wrote a book that is not much use. Now could it have a message for anyone when nobody can tell where it is tongue-in-cheek or not? God is not the author of Tobit.

The Book of Wisdom claims that God did not make death and does not rejoice in the destruction of the living (1:13). His making all things is alleged to prove this. If God makes all things then he made death. But maybe the verse means that death is our fault and not God’s. This is still ridiculous for God does not have to punish that way. Lots of so-called sinners live on. God must like killing when he does it without need.

The Book of Sirach claims that God made wisdom before all things (1). It personifies wisdom as is plain from the very first chapter. It means the abstract attribute not a being called wisdom. The author is unaware that wisdom cannot be created for it is abstract and not a thing. If God creates wisdom then what is moral is only an invention of God. The Church says that Sirach means that God made wisdom timelessly in the sense that God causes wisdom and always existed so the idea of God making wisdom in a moment of time is out. But that is not before! The author does not have the competence to realise the existence of eternity. The idea of timelessness or eternity came about among the pagans.

Sirach 3:2 says that he who honours his father atones for sins contradicting the New Testament dogma of salvation without good works. Almsgiving expiates sin according to Sirach 3:29.

Sirach 4:6 claims that God vindictively hears the prayer of a bitter man who wants revenge on you. This denies the doctrine of a God of unconditional love.

It naively asserts that you will be punished for every sin (7:8).

It denies life after death. It tells us not to be snobbish for what awaits us is worms (7:17). It is saying we are all the same for we have the same end. If we live on and some of us are holier than others then this point loses its force. We can be snobby then because we will not end up all the same. The prospect of losing the body would be all the more reason for pride if it means that we will be invulnerable and happy forever in the spirit.

Sirach 7:35 advises us to visit the sick for we will be loved for it – how selfish!

Cynically, it says that whatever you give to a more powerful person you must consider lost (8:12). And that a judge you insult will not be fair with you (8:14). It should be saying that the judge might, not will, be unfair with you.

It accuses the person who has a painful death of being evil (11:26-28). It says that God repays sinners in this world for their bad deeds not some of their bad deeds so it denies that sin deserves endless punishment and that there is retribution after death.

Sirach 12 condemns the love of enemies which Christ commanded. The reason it gives is that God hates sinners. But all experts agree that even if God hates sinners he forbids us to hate them for we do not know as much about them as God who sees all does. But that would forbid us to find anybody guilty which is the basis of the legal system as Christianity sees it for a God who hates has to let us hate too when we know the facts.

Sirach promises that sin will be punished by death. It tells us to turn away from sin because we can’t praise God when we are dead (17:19-23). If we live on after death and can praise God then this argument is stupid. It implies that death is the end and that there is no resurrection. Sirach 46:12 says that the bones of the judges return to life but that is only poetry. He declared that they come back to life in their children. In 48:14, it is said that Elisha did marvellous things after death. He means that God did wonders through Elisha after his death. If God does wonders though a statue and that statue is destroyed he can still do wonders through it, through its relics and its memory. The verse does not equivocally state that Elisha was alive after death. The author says, “May the twelve prophets return to life! (Sirach 49:10). He is only saying he wants this to happen not that he thinks it will happen.

Sirach 19:7,8 forbids the Catholic practice of confession for it says that telling your faults will probably make an enemy of the person who hears them. That is very cynical.

Sirach 19:25 advocates the prejudice of judging a stranger by his or her clothes and personality.

Sirach 22:10 says that the dead man is at rest and so not to be wept for as much as a live fool contradicting the Romish doctrine of purgatory. The doctrine of purgatory says that if you are there you need the living to help you get out for you can do nothing for yourself there – you are stuck there until you pay for all your sins. If Sirach accepted a purgatory the fool would be entitled to less sorrow for he can avoid it and the dead can’t.

Sirach 25 claims that there is nothing worse than an evil woman. How sexist!

Sirach 30:1 wants men to beat their sons often so that they can rejoice in the results. Selfish! The men would have to pretend to do it for their sons and not for their own happiness.

Sirach 35 commands that rebellious slaves must be put in the stocks to have rubbish thrown at them. It says that slaves must be allowed no rest for they will seek to be free and so they should be forced to work and work and work. Then the book hypocritically boasts that this is treating them as brothers! It says that you need a slave – not true! The Church will say that it is not telling you that you need a slave as in should have a slave but that you need a slave as in living in those times when it was essential for survival. They are trying to make it look as if they had slaves not because they approved of it because they had to in those days. But even if you can only pay a person very little that is enough to make them an employee not a slave. They could have paid something. There was no excuse for slavery.

Sirach 38 says that grief for the dead is bad. Then it says we should forget about them two days after they die. Catholics say it means that we must put them out of our minds if it is too much for us to think of them. It does not for the author knew that this is impossible and that trying to forget only makes things worse. He wanted us to forget all the dead. He doesn’t want us to pray for them or anything.

Sirach 41:3 commits the popular fallacy of thinking that since all die that is a reason not be annoyed that you can die.

According to Sirach 42, a man has the right to lock up his wife to keep her from committing adultery.

Daughters are not to be allowed to be friends with married women or to be trusted with men. The author thinks that women think of nothing only sex.

Sirach commands that servants be beaten up for disobedience. Then, by implication, wife beating is allowed.

Sirach 45:15 contradicts the Catholic doctrine that the priesthood of Aaron is done away for it says it is as permanent as the heavens.

The Book claims to have been inspired by wisdom and therefore by God (51). The foreword was not written by the author but by his grandson.

Baruch uses the prophecy of Isaiah about one crying in the wilderness for the paths of God to be made straight and every valley to be filled in and applies it to Israel. The New Testament allegation that it applies to John the Baptist is contradicted in this.

Rome has thrown the word of the Devil into the middle of the word of God.

A religion based on scriptures which endorse lies and err has no right to demand our faith. It may fake miracles to grow in popularity. Rome’s own Bible forbids faith in her for this Bible advocates prudence!

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THE CANON OF SCRIPTURE

The word canon means rule or yardstick. The canon of scripture means the writings which have divine authority and which all claims must be measured against.

Judaism and Christianity both were not afraid to add books to the canon which contained books that said that they must not be added to.

God said in the Law that nobody was to add to or to subtract from his Law, the first five books of the Bible. It is significant that this gets more emphasis on the last book of the Law, Deuteronomy (4:2 and 12:32 for instance). That should silence anybody who says that later attempts to add to the Law in the Bible agree with the Law for they are exceptions and exceptions prove the rule. Furthermore, how can they be exceptions when they largely contain material that is less important than the Law? All books from Joshua on are additions to the Law and so are heretical. The Sadducees of Jesus’ time believed that only the Law was inspired scripture.

Isaiah 8:20 said that no trust should be placed in anybody who taught anything that was not in the Law and the Prophets. Yet the Christians came along adding new scriptures to the Law and the Prophets namely the New Testament. Books written after Isaiah were added to the canon by the Jews. We have to take Isaiah literally for anybody with a bit of effort could have added new books to the Bible and founded a sect so Isaiah would certainly not have recognised the New Testament as the word of God for though it said it supported the Law and the Prophets it lied.

The popular consensus that the Sadducees recognised the five books of the Law as inspired by God is said to be unwarranted (page 40, The Canon of Scripture). Josephus was allegedly misunderstood when he said that they only listened to the written laws but that could mean all the laws in the Old Testament and ignored the oral laws which were merely tradition. No doubt they would have disparaged and rejected books that contradicted their theology like Daniel which prophesies a resurrection. Sadducees scoffed at the concept of an afterlife and of angels so they probably did stick only by the Law. Most of them would have. The Prophets looked back on the Law so much that it was really the only scripture that was needed and it itself said it could not be added to. Somebody had to pay attention to this teaching.

The first canon of the Christian Church was worked out by a man who butchered what may have been Luke or similar to it and many of the epistles of Paul to create a heretical canon that was anti-Jewish and anti-flesh. This man was called Marcion and this happened in 140AD. He gave the Church the idea of gathering together a New Testament canon.

All the orthodox canons recognised the four gospels and Acts and all the letters attributed to Paul. Irenaeus in 170 AD said that the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were so stable that that even the heretical Gnostics accepted them and twisted them to back up their peculiar doctrines (page 49, Why Does God?). Irenaeus was exaggerating here for it is known that the Gnostics used any holy book that was going to get converts among those who presupposed the gospels were inspired and they interpreted it in a mystical spiritual or symbolical sense to get hidden meanings from it and they wrote scores of gospels of their own. Besides, it was only a few Gnostic sects, notably the Valentinians, who accepted the same scriptures as the Orthodox Christians. What was unique about Irenaeus was that he was the first to realise that reasons had to be given for why this book and not that was canonical (page 81, The Early Church). The reasons were that the apostles sanctioned the writings and above all that the writings conformed to the doctrine of the Church not to mention that there had to be four gospels for there were four winds! None of the reasons bears plausibility because he was writing too late and there is evidence that the Church was already well into apostasy by then. Altered gospels, for example, Tatian’s Diatessaron were officially accepted in many important regions of the Church before then.

The Muratorian Canon used at Rome about 200 AD had no Third Letter of John, no Hebrews and added the Wisdom of Solomon and the Revelation of Peter to the New Testament canon. These are its differences from the current canon. By fifty years later, Origen following the Church dropped James and Jude and the Wisdom and the Revelation of Peter and the last two letters of John. There was a dispute at the time about whether the Didache and the Letter of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas and the Gospel of the Hebrews and the New Testament books which were left out should be canonised.

The present canon was made in 367 AD by the Eastern Church when it finally got all the disputes about what books belonged in the New Testament solved and St Athanasius wrote a letter to tell inform the world (page 106, The History of Christianity). SOME of the Western Church approved this list at the Council of Hippo in 393 AD and Carthage in 397 AD. Then it became official. The infallible Council of Trent of the Roman Church ratified this list and made some changes.

Perhaps the Muratorian Canon has the most authority for it was the oldest and therefore the most traditional? But we are told that it never claimed to be final or closed. It was a canon but not a closed canon for there were books whose status had to be defined. This is hard to believe for the word canon means rule. Why didn’t they just refer to a list? Why didn’t they say all the books in the list are okay but it will take time to decide if they should be canonised? Why did they leave out the harmless books that others adopted? It was a canon full stop. A canon isn’t very much good if it is an open list. The canon had to have been a closed one and we should assume that.

Christians say, “The books that were disputed were not of great doctrinal importance so their taking time to be accepted does not prove that the Christian Church is false and that it can’t be under the direction of God. The books that were held by many parts of the Church to be scripture and by much of the others as possibly scripture which were later rejected were not important either. The canon of scripture is not made by the Church but only discovered by the Church after much diligent research and only books which were authorised by the apostles and fit the doctrine of the apostles and claim to be the word of God were accepted. The objection of many that the Church arbitrarily chose the books it wanted is unjust.”

In fact, it was arbitrary for the Church could not prove at the time it was making the canon who really wrote the books or even if the books were complete for whole paragraphs could have been dropped out of the books as originally written. And if the disputed New Testament books were not important then it was arbitrary for they could have been done without.

And the Church had other books burned so that there would not be too many serious disagreements. And the Church incinerated them without giving any evidence that it knew what it was doing. And it would have been branches of the Church that were responsible which makes it less likely that they had considered things carefully.

What happened to the books that the Gospel of Luke said existed? The Church soon ended up with few books to make a New Testament canon of. And the epistles of Ignatius though considered to have apostolic teaching and to be correct were not even considered for the canon. Another indication of arbitrariness is that we have no evidence that the Church could prove that the books had an apostolic origin. They even canonised books that had not claimed to be the word of God. Claiming to be the word would come first and being apostolic would come second for even the apostles could not be infallible unless they intended to write what God wanted them to write. This point is conveniently ignored by Christian apologists.

What business has the Church claiming to be the follower of the apostles when by right the apostles should have each put their signature and decree of approval on every book that is in the New Testament? It is reasonable for this to be have been done when they were the heads. If they expressed the word of God and God comes first then they would have had to put their seal on every book and prove that they approved of it. But this proof does not exist so why should we listen to the New Testament?

When the Bible has the spiritually useless book of Ruth and endless repetitive stories and genealogies how can one believe that it is the word of God and that the canon is reliable?

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REVISING THE CANON

It would make more sense to reduce the canon of the Bible.

You could argue that the Law of Moses forbids anybody adding to its teaching so that you can deny that the rest of the Old Testament is the word of God. Then you could have John and the Johannine epistles as the only true gospel. This minimises contradictions. A Bible that needs too many solutions for its conflicts with history and philosophy and itself lacks credibility. It would need a divinely inspired interpretation to be sure that the solutions were valid otherwise you are saying the Bible must be God’s word for it never contradicts itself and it should while all the time you are just believing in what somebody thinks of the Bible.

The Law of Moses was once good enough before, though it was just five books, and it shows that a small canon can be good enough now.

Matthew is the gospel that most explicitly supports the Jewish Christian faith and the authenticity of the Law so you could say that it alone is the New Testament scripture. You could reduce the New Testament to one book.

If you want to cut the Old Testament off altogether you could just have the gospel of Mark and the First Letter of Peter as your canon. Both of these can be interpreted in such a way that the Old Testament can be seen as a mishmash of error and truth but not scripture but which just contains God’s word here and there. Second Peter would be dismissed, along with most modern scholars, as a forgery and because you cannot accept Paul’s full approval for the Old Testament and this epistle says that Paul’s writings were scripture.

Interpretation is very flexible and fluid. You could interpret Paul as opposing the Old Testament except for bits that contained true prophecy and canonise his epistles alone. Or you could just have the Old Testament and Paul’s letters. It is certain that since we know the doctrine in these letters is Paul’s his writings are supreme in the New Testament because it emerged from an authorised apostolic authority and Jesus made the apostles the foundation of the Church. We do not have the same assurance of apostolic authority and accuracy for any other book of the Bible therefore we can drop them. The Church said from the start that the books have to be from an apostle to be taken as scripture so Paul’s writings are what the attention should be paid to and should be the yardstick against which the rest of the New Testament is judged for its apostolic origin is less certain according to all faithful Christians and doubtful and impossible or indeterminate according to the rest.

Any book claiming a miraculous origin such as the nineteenth century, Gospel of Holy Twelve, would have more right to be included in the canon than any New Testament book for the gospels and acts and epistles were all written the ordinary way. This book claimed to have been dictated from Heaven. I see no reason why you could not consider Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon to be the only extant reliable scripture and scrap the New Testament entirely. The Book of Mormon claimed to have been translated from golden plates given to Smith by an angel of the Lord.

Encourage Christians to study these matters and create new canons for anything that cuts off books off the traditional list is a step towards improved rationality and confusion among the superstitious factions of the Church can only be a good thing.

The amount of disagreements among the Christians are infinite. If Jesus had been the Son of God and as concerned for God’s word as he said – the New Testament says he even died for this concern to make the scriptures come true or as he put it to fulfil them he would have left behind a theological manual to resolve all these problems. He was the one claiming a hotline to God so he should have done this. As Jesus has left nothing but division and schism and hateful argumentation behind him, it is clear that this implies we are not to add to the Old Testament at all for one of the key themes of that Testament’s God is keeping his chosen people together. Jesus was a false prophet and not what he claimed to be. You may say that you could say the same of any Old Testament prophet. But these never claimed like Jesus that they could know what they wanted. They were just men who occasionally got communications from God. Believing in Jesus creates more mysteries, one of which we met a few lines ago, than it solves so commonsense says it is better not to bother.

CONCLUSION

The Books that have been put in the Bible have been put there for political reasons and not because they belong there. Under close examination, it can be seen that the choice of what was put in was arbitrary at times. A list is just a list and nobody should be compelled by the Church to accept its list.

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FURTHER READING

A Summary of Christian Doctrine, Louis Berkhof, The Banner of Truth Trust, London, 1971

A Test of Time, David Rohl, Century, London, 1995

Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible, John W Haley, Whitaker House, Pennsylvania, Undated

An Act of God, Graham Philips, Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1998

Answers to Tough Questions, Josh McDowell and Don Stewart, Scripture Press Bucks, 1988

Attack on the Bible, John R Rice, Sword of the Lord, Murfreesboro, 1965

Belief and Make-Believe, GA Wells, Open Court, La Salle, Illinois, 1991

Biblical Exegesis and Church Doctrine, Raymond E Brown, Paulist Press, New York, 1985

But the Bible Does Not Say So, Rev Roberto Nisbet, Church Book Room Press, London, 1966

Catholicism and Christianity, Cecil John Cadoux, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1928

Catholicism and Fundamentalism, Karl Keating, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1988

Conspiracies and the Cross, Timothy Paul Jones, FrontLine, Florida, 2008

Creation and Evolution, Dr Alan Hayward, Triangle, London, 1994

Does the Bible Contradict Itself? Radio Bible Class, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1986

Encyclopaedia of Bible Difficulties, Gleason W Archer, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1982

Essentials, David L Edwards and John Stott, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1990

Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Vol 1, Josh McDowell, Alpha, Scripture Press Foundation, Bucks, 1995

Free Inquiry, Fall 1998, Vol 18, No 4, Council for Secular Humanism, Amherst, New York

God and the Human Condition, F J Sheed, Sheed & Ward, London, 1967

God Cannot Lie, David Alsobrook, Diasozo Trust, Kent, 1989

God, Science and Evolution, Prof E H Andrews, Evangelical Press, Herts, 1985

God’s Word, Final Infallible and Forever, Floyd C McElveen, Gospel Truth Ministries, Grand Rapids, 1985

Hard Sayings, Derek Kidner, InterVarsity Press, London, 1972

How and Why Catholic and Protestant Bibles Differ, Carolyn Osiek, RSCJ and Donald Senior, CP, The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota, 1983

How to Interpret the Bible, Fergus Cleary SJ, Ligouri Publications, Missouri, 1981

In Defence of the Faith, Dave Hunt, Harvest House, Eugene Oregon, 1996

Inspiration in the Bible, Fr Karl Rahner, Herder and Herder, New York, 1966

Jehovah of the Watch-tower, Walter Martin and Norman Klann, Bethany House Publishers, Minnesota, 1974

Let’s Weigh the Evidence, Which Bible is the Real Word of God? Barry Burton, Chick Publications, Chino, California, 1983

Know What You Believe, Paul E Little, Scripture Union, London, 1973

Know Why You Believe, Paul E Little, Scripture Union, London, 1971

New Age Bible Versions, GA Riplinger, Bible & Literature Foundation, Tennessee, 1993

New Evangelicalism An Enemy of Fundamentalism, Curtis Hutson, Sword of the Lord, Murfreesboro, 1984

None of These Diseases, SI McMillen MD, Lakeland, London 1966

Our Perfect Book the Bible, John R Rice, Sword of the Lord, Murfreesboro, 1958

Proof the Bible is True, Rev JMA Willans BD, Dip.Theol. Vermont Press, Larne, 1982

Radio Replies Vol 3, Radio Replies Press, Minnesota, 1942

Reason and Belief, Bland Blanschard, London, George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1974

Remarks on the New King James Version and Revised Authorised Version, DK Madden, 35 Regent Street, Sandy Bay, Tasmania, 7005, 1991

Return to Sodom and Gomorrah, Charles Pellegrino, The Softback Preview, New York, 1995

Science and the Bible, Henry Morris, Moody Press, Bucks, 1988

Science Held Hostage What’s Wrong With Creation Science and Evolutionism, Howard J Van Till/Davis A.Young/Clarence Menninga, IVP, Downer’s Grove, Illinois, 1988

Science Speaks, Peter W Stoner and Robert C Newman, Moody Press, Chicago, 1976

Set My Exiles Free, John Power, Logos Books, MH Gill & Son Ltd, Dublin, 1967

Testament, The Bible and History, John Romer, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1988

The Authority of the Bible, Ambassador College, Pasadena, California, 1980

The Bible Fact or Fantasy, John Drane, Lion, Oxford, 1989

The Bible is the Word of God, Jimmy Thomas, Guardian of Truth, Kentucky

The Bible or Evolution? William Jennings Bryan, Sword of the Lord, Murfreesboro, Tennessee

The Bible, Questions People Ask, A Redemptorist Pastoral Publication, Liguori Publications, Missouri, 1980

The Bible, The Biography, Karen Armstrong, Atlantic Books, London, 2007

The Canon of Scripture, FF Bruce, Chapter House, Glasgow, 1988

The Church of Rome and the Word of God, Rev Eric C Last, Protestant Truth Society, London, Undated

The Early Church, Henry Chadwick, Pelican, Middlesex, 1987

The History of Christianity, Lion, Herts, 1982

The King James Version Defended, Edward F Hills, The Christian Research Press, Iowa, 1973

The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, Edited by Raymond E Brown, Joseph A Fitzmyer, Roland E Murphy, Geoffrey Chapman, New York 1990

The Theology of Inspiration, John Scullion SJ, Mercier, Cork, 1970

The Unauthorised Version, Robin Lane Fox, Penguin, Middlesex, 1992

Verbal Inspiration of the Bible, John R Rice Sword of the Lord, Murfreesboro, 1943

What is the Bible? Henri Daniel-Rops, Angelus Books, Guild Press, New York, 1958

Which Version Now? Bob Sheehan, Carey Publications, 5 Fairford Close, Haywards Heath, Sussex RH16 3EF

Who is a Fundamentalist? Dr Curtis Hutson, Sword of the Lord, Murfreesboro, 1982

Why Does God..? Domenico Grasso SJ, St Pauls , Bucks, 1970

Why People Believe Weird Things, Michael Shermer, Freeman, New York, 1997

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