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How do we know that the books in the Protestant bible are the only books inspired by God?

wts07073
Sep 15, 2017
2 min read

Question from the audience on open line progam on 9 September 2017? How do we know that the books in the Protestant bible are the only books inspired by God? Answer from Dr Michael Rydelnik? Ah .. the question then would be about the books that we have in the bible versus the Catholic bible which has the Apocrypha as well. You know, the question of which books should be in the bible was not settled until the sixteenth century, kind of interesting. In a sense, it was settled right away. The books of the Hebrew bible were received and accepted and believed to be God's word by Jewish leaders and not in the year ninetieth as some people say but almost immediately as they were received, they were recognized as scripture. And you can look at the literature that developed in between the close of the old testament and the beginning of the new, it's called intertestamental literature, where Jewish people talk about wanting to have a prophet to rise again and give more scripture, but apparently prophecy had ceased and they didn't  know but they anticipated this restoration and then we get the new testament and those books were received virtually immediately, not like certain movies and books like Da vinci code say that it was only in the fourth century that Constantin decided to include the New Testament books at the Council of Nicea. That is a completed fabrication and I always tell people, that's fiction. The question of Canon didn't even come up at the Council of Nicea but almost immediately, the books of the New Testament were recognized as scripture. And the apocrypha was not. When you come to the sixteenth century when you have the Protestant Reformation,  where we're having the five hundred anniversary this year. In the Protestant Reformation, there was a movement to separate from certain traditions that have grown up in the Church. One of those would be Purgatory.  In 1546, the Catholic church held another council, the Council of Trent, and they wanted to counter information, they wanted an answer to the Reformation.  And the only place where they could find some of the doctrines taught in the church  was in the Apocrypha. Previous to this, the Apocrypha was thought of as good intertestamental religious literature but not of scripture. And so what happened was then they say, Ah, we're going to call this a secondary level of scripture, a quasi-scripture, we're going to include it in the bible and so the sixteenth century, they included it and it was sort of an after thought, not because it was ever accepted as scripture before that but just so they could defend some of the doctrine that were being taught. And so, most people except for this tradition, most Christians don't accept the Apocrypha as scripture, just the Hebrew bible and the new testament as we have it.

 
 
 

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